You Better Knot Die
( Crochet Mysteries - 5 )
Betty Hechtman
Her crochet group, The Tarzana Hookers, is working overtime for the holidays-but Molly Pink is having trouble finding time to crochet so much as a snowflake. The bookstore where she works is adding a yarn department, and planning a huge launch party where the mysterious author of a popular series will reveal his or her true identity.
But before the author appears, another person disappears. The husband of Molly's neighbor is missing. When a suicide note arrives, it appears the husband has jumped off the Catalina Ferry- but Molly smells something fishy. Despite the protestations of her detective boyfriend, Molly's soon hooked on unraveling another mystery. She better watch out-or her sleuthing may get her on someone's naughty list...
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Betty Hechtman
HOOKED ON MURDER
DEAD MEN DON’T CROCHET
BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
A STITCH IN CRIME
YOU BETTER KNOT DIE
Acknowledgments
Sandy Harding is a wonderful editor, and I am so grateful to be working with her. A big thank you to Jessica Faust for helping make my dream come true. Thank you to Natalee Rosenstein for making Berkley Prime Crime such a great place to be. Once again the Berkley art department has given me a wonderful cover. Megan Swartz has been a great help with publicity.
I have to thank my team of experts for answering questions about all kinds of odd things. Financial information came from Steve Palley and Rich Scheiner. Howard Marx, M.D. took care of the medical questions. Los Angeles Police Officer and writer Kathy Bennett advised me on police procedures. Ken Sobel was my gambling consultant. With her crochet skill and eye for detail, Linda Hopkins was a great help with the crochet patterns.
A special thank you to Roberta Martia for all her support and crochet advice. Another special thank you to Judy Libby for her legal expertise and years of friendship going back to our college newspaper days.
Rene Biedermann, Connie Cabon, Alice Chiredjian, Terry Cohen, Clara Feeney, Pamela Feuer, Sonia Flaum, Lily Gillis, Winnie Hineson, Linda Hopkins, Reva Mallon and Elayne Moschin are part of the Thursday crochet and knit group. Thanks for the friendship, support, sharing of patterns and knowledge, and fun. Paula Tesler keeps us stretching our yarn horizons.
Burl, Max and Samantha, you guys are the best. What else can I say?
CHAPTER 1
“PINK, YOU’VE GOT A PROBLEM,” ADELE ABRAMS said as she slowed her car in front of my house. I had been crocheting a snowflake—or trying to—while she drove, and it took me a moment to look up. But when I did—
Lots of strange things have gone on at my house, but the scene that greeted me beat anything I’d seen before. My mouth fell open and I dropped the silver hook and white thread I was holding.
I don’t know what was the most shocking. Was it the line of police cruisers along the curb, the uniform stringing yellow crime scene tape across my front porch or the group of uniforms conferring on my front lawn? My house, a crime scene?
“What did you do this time?” Adele asked as she pulled to the curb in front of all the cruisers. Neighbors were drifting into the street and the kid who lived a few houses down had his video camera pointed at all the action.
I took a moment to glare at Adele. We had just spent two days together, which was about a day and a half too much. Adele and I worked together at Shedd & Royal Books and More and we were both part of the crochet group, the Tarzana Hookers, who met at the bookstore. I wouldn’t call us friends exactly, more like family. You pick your friends—you get stuck with family. Instead of answering, I just shot her a withering look.
A black Crown Victoria roared into my driveway. The car had barely squeaked to a stop when the door flew open and a tall man in a suit jumped out. Before I could call out his name, Barry sprinted across the lawn, breaking through the yellow tape strung across the porch. He had some kind of tool in his hand. I heard the splintering of my front door and a moment later it flew open. I was out of the car by now, though I didn’t get far. One of the uniforms stopped me and didn’t seem to care when I said it was my house.
Adele was out of her side of the car in a flash, almost catching her jacket on the door. The jacket was part of what she called a more-subdued look. I wasn’t sure what was subdued about it. She’d taken an electric blue ready-made boxystyle blazer and added kelly green and fuchsia crocheted trim around the neck, down the front and at the cuffs. “Pink, you dropped your snowflake.” When I turned, she was holding out the ball of white thread, my steel hook and what appeared to be a tangle of the fine yarn. She glanced around. “Maybe I better stay here with you.” I shook my head and gestured back toward the car. I didn’t know what was going on, but I did know I didn’t want to have Adele in the middle of it. She hung her head as I got my suitcase out of the trunk. “Pink, I’ve been your backup before. C’mon, let me be part of the action.” When I pointed toward the car again, she went into a full pout, but she finally got back into the new Matrix station wagon and drove off.
Adele and I were just returning from our trip to San Diego, which Adele kept referring to as a yarn emergency. Since our crochet group, the Tarzana Hookers, had become so connected with the bookstore where I worked, one of the co-owners, Mrs. Shedd, had recently added a yarn department to the store. It was still a work-in-progress because Mrs. Shedd wanted the yarn we sold to be special and high-end rather than what was sold at the big craft stores. When she heard about a yarn store closing in San Diego and selling off their stock, Mrs. Shedd had sent us down there at the last minute.
It was just the high-end unusual stuff we were looking for, and we had packed the back of Adele’s wagon solid with yarn. The rest was being UPSed up to us. Adding the new yarn section was good and bad. Good that we were getting all this wonderful yarn, and bad because everything at the bookstore was already on overdrive due to the upcoming holidays and our big launch event. Now we had more work than ever.
“Did you find the body?” one of the uniforms asked when Barry returned a few moments later.
Body?
I tried again to talk to the uniform, but he was impassive. That was when Barry saw me. When he’s working, he usually has a neutral expression, but now his whole face relaxed and his breath came out in a gush as he crossed the space between us. Then his expression changed from relief to a mixture of surprise and annoyance.
Homicide Detective Barry Greenberg was my boyfriend. I thought boyfriend was a stupid title for a man in his fifties but had given up on finding a better one and finally gone with it.
“Molly, where were you?” Barry said, looking at the suitcase next to me.
“What body?” I said, ignoring his question. “What’s going on?”
“It’s okay, we’ll get to that in a minute,” he said. “You can’t just disappear like that. So where were you?”
“Didn’t you get my message?” I said. He shook his head. “I’m sure I left you a message.” I stopped for a moment. I had left him a message, hadn’t I? There had been so much to do when the trip came up and I had been in a hurry. “I know I meant to leave you a message.” I thought when I explained my sudden trip was work related he’d understand. His work schedule was such that he often disappeared for days, sometimes with barely a word. I guess not. He just got more agitated as he asked why I hadn’t returned any of his calls.
Cell phones are great as long as they’re charged. I pulled out mine, which was completely dead. “Sorry. In my haste to leave, I forgot the charger. Now what about the body?”
By now all the cops were listening to our interchange. Barry refused to give out any details until I explained the details of m
y San Diego trip. He snorted when I mentioned it was a yarn emergency.
“Hey, Greenberg, we want to know about the body,” an officer who seemed to be in charge finally said, getting impatient.
“It’s bodies and they’re in the attic,” Barry said, reaching out to catch me as my legs went rubbery with the news. Still I pulled away and stumbled toward my house. As soon as I walked in the door, the smell of death was unmistakable. I covered my nose and went back outside.
It took a while to get everything sorted out. The gist was that the cops had been at my neighbor’s taking a report. Emily Perkins had called them, concerned that her husband Bradley had gone missing.
Coincidentally the gas meter reader was making his rounds and while reading my meter had noticed a bad smell coming from the bathroom window I’d left open a crack. Seeing the cops, he’d mentioned the smell. Well, woman with missing husband and dead smell coming from next door . . . The cops taking the report called out the cavalry. Barry heard the call and address and he hadn’t been able to get in touch with me for a couple of days so he jumped to conclusions.
And the real source of the stink: I had a backyard full of orange trees that attracted all kinds of rodents who had started making side trips into my attic. I’d had all the entrances sealed up and some traps had been left for any stragglers. There had been three. As soon as the pest control people came by and removed the bodies, the smell disappeared.
I pulled off the last of the yellow tape that was still flapping on my front porch post as I finally dragged my suitcase inside. Barry was already on the phone calling the door contractor the cops used to repair mistakenly knocked down doors. In the meantime, he’d do a temporary fix. I had no doubt he’d be able to do it. Barry could fix anything, and besides, this wasn’t the first time my door had been knocked in by mistake.
“You couldn’t have used your key?” I said, looking at the light coming in through the broken door panel.
Barry made an uncomfortable face. “I guess I forgot about the key.” He sighed as he checked out the battered door. When he turned back toward me, his face was full of emotion and he took me in his arms. “I heard body at your house and I lost it.” He hugged me tighter. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
“You and me both,” I said. I apologized for not leaving him a message. “It’s just that I’ve been so busy. The holidays are always busy at the bookstore. We stay open later and there are more customers. And now we’re adding the yarn department. And there’s the launch party to plan for. It’s the Super Bowl of book events. I mean, how lucky can Shedd and Royal get? The Blood and Yarn series is the hottest of the hot.” I caught a blank look on Barry’s face. “You don’t know about it, do you?” I barely waited for Barry to shake his head before continuing. “The books follow the life of a supersexy vampire who uses crochet to control his blood-lust issues. The latest, Caught Under the Mistletoe, comes out next week. The trucks are delivering the books at midnight to bookstores all over, but only Shedd and Royal will have the author, A. J. Kowalski. But here’s the really exciting part: A. J. Kowalski is just a pseudonym and nobody knows who the author really is. It turns out he or she lives in Tarzana and has decided to reveal their true identity and sign books at the launch party. Do you realize what that means?” Barry nodded.
“I think it means you ought to take a breath or maybe two,” he said. “You’re starting to hyperventilate.” He glanced back toward the living room as though looking for something, then his eyes grew concerned. “Where are the dogs?”
“And cats,” I said, correcting him, referring to the newest residents. I explained that since my younger son, Samuel, owner of the cats, was on the road playing backup and I’d been in a hurry, I’d just boarded all of them. I took a few more breaths to make sure my breathing was back to normal. “So, how long has Bradley Perkins been missing?” I asked and felt his body stiffen.
“Look, babe, I know you like playing the amateur sleuth, but stay out of it.”
“Play?” I said with a darkening expression. “I wouldn’t call it play; I’ve solved a few murders.”
Barry stepped back, shaking his head. “Here we go again. Okay, babe, you’re not going to listen to me, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m sure the officers who took the report are dealing with whatever needs to be done. Besides, with all you have to do, why take on anything else? I’d like to have dibs on any spare moments.”
I didn’t say anything in response. He knew what my silence meant. He sighed and said he had to get back to work. It isn’t that I really planned to get involved. I just didn’t want to say something I might end up not meaning. My phone was ringing as he went back to his Crown Victoria.
“Mother,” my son Peter said. Only he could put so much disapproval in one word. My older son is a television agent, very ambitious and very concerned about his image. “What’s going on?” Before I could answer, Peter told me that something had shown up on YouTube that featured me and a lot of cops. Apparently he had some kind of alert set up that notified him if anything came up about any of his clients or me. I explained quickly, but when I got to the part about Bradley Perkins being missing, I heard Peter’s breathing change.
“Mother, you’re not going to get involved, are you?” When he got dead air as an answer, he groaned. In the past, some of my sleuthing efforts had ended up on the news, causing him all sorts of embarrassment.
“Barry said the same thing,” I said, finally. My son groaned again. Peter didn’t like Barry. At first I had thought it was just the idea of my dating he objected to, but when Peter kept trying to push me together with an attorney he’d been dealing with, I realized Barry in particular was the problem. I don’t know why I kept trying to smooth things over. It wasn’t like Barry was going to be Peter’s stepfather or anything.
When I got off the phone, I gave myself a few minutes to recover and then went back outside. The street was quiet and there was no hint of all the action that had been going on a short time earlier. The video camera kid was leaning against the wrought iron mailbox across the street. He looked up when I came out. He was at the end of his teens, and someday all his parts would probably fit together, but for now his features were too big for his face and his body was long and gangly. His black hair was tousled and deliberately cut to be uneven. When he saw me look toward the Perkins’ house, he shook his head.
“Not home,” he called. “She left right after the cops.” I walked across the street to where he was standing. Though his family had lived down the block for years, I really didn’t know them. I introduced myself and he stuck out his hand. “Ryder Lowenstein.” I asked if he’d posted something on YouTube and he seemed pleased at the question. “Pretty cool, huh? I sent it to the channel three news, too, though since there wasn’t a real body, I don’t think they’re going to use it.”
“So what do you know about Bradley Perkins’ disappearance?” I asked, glancing toward the neighboring yard. In the daylight the Santa’s sleigh and reindeer was almost invisible. The lawn decoration was really just an outline with colored lights. Icicle lights ran across the front of the roof and then hung down to the ground next to several boxes with more lights. Someone had obviously been in the midst of putting them up. Some pots of crimson poinsettias were on the front porch. The holiday decorations seemed at odds with the thick green lawn and palm tree in the front yard. But this was the San Fernando Valley and winter was when everything was the most green and lush.
At one time the houses along the two-block stretch had all been similar, kind of like brothers and sisters. They were ranch-style with mullioned windows and pastel wood siding, but over time, between remodeling and additions, the houses were now barely even cousins. The Perkins’ house had been given what I called a Mediterranean makeover. It had the trademark terra-cotta tile roof, flesh-colored stucco and an entrance porch that was too tall and too grand to be proportionate to the rest of the single-story house. The rectangular-divided pane windows had been replaced with tall arched ones
.
“Not much. I tried interviewing the cops, but they blew me off. Something about not having press credentials.” Ryder shrugged. “But right after Mrs. Perkins left, a black sedan pulled up,” Ryder said. “A man and woman both dressed in suits went to the door. I don’t think they were cops, but they looked official. They hung around for a few minutes, looking in the windows and stuff, but finally left.” He looked up and down the street as if checking for any action and then turned back to me.
“Who was the cop in the suit?” Ryder asked. When I didn’t respond right away, he pushed the question. “He hung around too long for it to be official.”
Yikes, now I had a neighborhood busybody kid to answer to. I just used the boyfriend word, though for a moment I considered trying relationship partner.
“Boyfriend?” Ryder snickered.
“I couldn’t agree more that it’s a silly title, but what else can I call him?” Ryder nodded with understanding.
“It must be tough when you’re old and dating. I suppose you’re hoping he’ll want to upgrade you to fiancée.”
“Thanks for making me feel like I’m a hundred,” I said with a tiny groan. “And no, I’m not looking for an upgrade in title.” I made a move to go, but Ryder kept up with the questions. No doubt he was practicing his interviewing skills. The next thing I knew I was telling him how I’d been married to Charlie for twenty-five years when he died. And now I was enjoying being free. “Or as free as you can be with two sons, one living with you and the other constantly questioning every decision you make. And a mother who’s a backup singer—scratch that, was a backup singer, and now is back with her singing group, The She La Las, and enjoying a second chance at a career. A mother who also might show up at any time. And that’s not counting the two dogs and the two cats. It doesn’t matter that one of the dogs officially belongs to the cop in the suit and just resides at my house or that the two cats really belong to my son.” I looked Ryder in the eye. “And you know who really takes care of all of them.”
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