by Mary Leo
“He was a thief and a wife beater, but I didn’t whack him.”
She stared at me for a moment. Her hair arranged in its usual clown style, red lipstick radiant from the sunlight that streamed through the bank of windows behind me.
She said, “I just pulled some Amaretto cookies out of the oven about five minutes ago. They’re still warm. How about I fix you a nice plate with a glass of cold milk? You seem a little stressed this morning.”
I stamped my foot. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
She slid the hot bread off of the pan and onto a cooling rack. The entire room smelled delicious and any other time I would have sat right down and took her up on her cookie offer, but at the moment I was busy solving a crime.
“How could I not hear you? Everyone on the property probably heard you. Why don’t you sit down? You’re making me nervous.” She pulled out a wooden bar stool.
“I’m going to call Nick Zeleski in two minutes if you don’t talk to me.” I straddled the stool and pulled out my cell phone ready to dial up Nick, or at least Lisa. I didn’t actually know Nick’s number.
“Let me put the anise cookies in the oven, and then we can talk.”
I agreed but it was a tentative agreement. I still held onto my phone.
After she slid two trays of cookies into the large oven, she poured a couple tall glasses of milk, and assembled a plate of various cookies, amaretto being one of them, and sat down next to me. Her flour covered arms pressed flat on the high table.
I reluctantly snitched a cookie off the dish, not wanting them to go to waste.
“You’re right about the codicil,” she said. “I’d heard about it, but never knew exactly what it said, so yeah, I pinched it. My future was at stake, and your mom never liked to tell me nothing. I had a right to know the truth. It was no secret that you went and fetched her paperwork that morning, and as soon as I saw you clutching that folder, I knew exactly what you were carrying. Only problem was, you wouldn’t just hand it over no matter how much I might of asked.”
She had a point.
“You left me no choice but to swipe it. And you made it so damn easy. Who puts something that important in a place with a loudspeaker? We all know the song your mom’s jewelry box plays.”
I ate two more cookies amazed that getting a confession out of Hetty could be so easy.
“So Aunt Babe was right all along.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Just because I snitched the codicil doesn’t mean I killed the prick.”
I put the yummy cookie I was about to triumphantly devour back on the plate, and spoke with loud bravado, not wanting to repeat myself. “Why not? You love this place, and love this bakery. You had motive. After all the years of lies you’d told Aunt Babe you sure as hell didn’t want Dickey spilling the truth that you were simply jealous that he was two-timing even you. Although, moving that millstone must have been quite the challenge.”
I waited for a full confession, just like crime shows on TV where the villain comes clean in the end. I especially wanted to hear how she moved the millstone.
“Are you not listening to me? I had nothing to do with that murder.” She leaned in closer to me. “Here’s how it went down, and this is God’s honest truth. I swear.”
“On what?”
“Come again.”
“What do you swear on?”
“I don’t swear. Your Aunt Babe has the potty mouth, not me.”
I didn’t want this to happen again. I took a deep breath and spoke as succinctly as I could. “If you’re going to swear that you’re telling me the truth, I need you to swear on something that matters to you.”
“Humph,” she scoffed. “You always want more than anybody wants to give.”
“Then I won’t believe anything you say.” I began dialing Lisa’s number.
She reached over and grabbed the phone. “Okay, okay. Don’t go calling any cops. I swear on this bakery that I didn’t kill the bastard. I’d thought about it plenty of times. Even thought about how I’d do it, while the bastard was sleeping. I hate confrontations. But when I left him in the barn, he was still upright.”
“You met him in the barn?”
“Didn’t everybody?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then you didn’t know what a big stink that codicil caused with the family.”
She noticed the flour on her arms and proceeded to brush it away. It billowed around her then fell to the table in a fine white layer.
“It shouldn’t have. Dickey told me he didn’t care about this orchard. That he just wanted to marry Jade and start a new life.”
“And you believed him?” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“Had no reason not to.”
She leaned in closer to me. “How about because he’s gangster?”
“Okay, so that was all a lie, but still—”
“Look, all I did was barrow the codicil. Nothing else.”
“Did somebody steal it from you?”
“No.”
“Then how did it end up in Peter Doyle’s mouth?
“I don’t know. I gave it to Jimmy.”
Her words sent a rush of heat through me and I sat up stick straight. “You gave it to Jimmy? Why?”
“Because he wanted it.”
“But how did he know you had it?”
“I showed it to him almost as soon as I took it. I wanted to make sure I understood what I’d read.”
“And how did Jimmy react to it?”
“He didn’t.”
“Could you be more specific?”
A bell rang. Hetty stood. Something needed to come out of the oven. “I don’t see what this has . . . ”
I threw her my-daughter-of-a-mobster look, not quite as bad as her evil eye, but I’d been told that it could be intimidating under the right circumstances. I was hoping this was one of those circumstances.
“. . . okay. Don’t be giving me no evil eye. You know I haveta be careful what I say out loud if I don’t want to end up like Dickey. No place is safe until the killer either disappears or we forget about all of this.”
“Neither of which is going to happen so you may as well spill it.”
She walked over to the large oven, grabbed two industrial sized oven mitts, opened the oven and proceeded to pull out several trays of golden rolls, then slid them onto a tall cooling rack. The smell of the warm bread was intoxicating and if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d just heard that sweet cousin Jimmy was looking more and more like a murderer I would have sat right down and eaten an entire tray of rolls, along with a stick of real butter. I was in desperate need of warm comfort.
She pulled the mitts off, let out a loud sigh and said, “He folded it up, slipped it into his pocket and told me that I never saw it.”
Red Mob flag.
My stomach clenched tight. Suddenly the smell of warm bread was nauseating. When one of these Wise Guys told someone they “never saw it” that meant the problem would be taken care of, no matter what the cost.
Rounding up Hetty as the killer was one thing, but rounding up and proving that Jimmy was the killer was in a totally different category. He would not go down easy, plus, I would need much more evidence if I was going to present this to the family. They would have to be convinced before they turned one of their very own over to the police, no matter how slack the “family” strings were.
Case in point, Uncle Sal:
It had been easy to kick Uncle Sal off the property three years ago for that little episode of pimping when suddenly three different women started hanging around the tasting room and leaving with some of our regular male customers. Besides, Sal wasn’t technically an uncle, more of an uncle of a cousin of an aunt who wasn’t a true aunt, but just a friend of Uncle Ray’s sister’s husband.
We had a family meeting and decided not to turn him into the Feds. He was having a problem getting the business off the ground anyway. The women were full-figured ladies, which wasn’t going over as
well as he had expected, so instead we bought him and his girls plane tickets to New York City.
Sal became a high profile talent agent for full-figured models. I didn’t want to know if it was legit or not. Once they were off the property, they were no longer my concern.
But Jimmy was direct family, and if he had killed both Dickey and Peter Doyle, and probably Carla, he would have to be turned in, something the entire family had agreed upon when we first moved onto the land.
My only problem was getting hard evidence and only one person could help with that, and she was waiting for me to spring her from the Santa Rosa jail.
I wondered if normal people ever had these problems.
An hour later, after two tablespoons of our Italian blend olive oil—my sensitive tummy really needed it—and a handful of cured Lucques olives from France, crunchy but delicate with a hint of almonds and avocados, I headed up the freeway to pick up my mom. Those overworked prison guards had to be as tired of her by now as she was tired of them.
Santa Rosa was a forty-minute drive, give or take five or ten minutes depending on traffic. Of course, that didn’t take Benny’s phone call into consideration. Luckily, I had already strapped my Bluetooth earpiece around my ear before I stepped in the truck so I didn’t have to go digging for it in my purse when my phone did its doorbell ring.
It was Uncle Benny.
“Your mom’s been booked for Dickey’s murder,” he calmly said into my ear.
My speed picked up along with my heart rate, and my trusty little GPS that I’d activated through a connection in my now basically redundant cigarette lighter, estimated my time of arrival to be in exactly twenty-four minutes.
“On what grounds?” I asked, hoping against all that was even remotely good in the world this booking had no real basis and Benny could work his magic to spring her.
“The bullet in Dickey’s head came from your mom’s revolver.” Of course it did. Lisa already said it would. I tried to breathe through my nose, slowly, but my chest was locked down at the moment. The most I could do was take in a short burst of air and try not to drive into the nearest ditch.
“Are you still there?” Benny asked after what seemed like forever.
“I’m here,” I said in some deep voice I didn’t recognize. “Go on.”
“I cannot seem to get a straight answer out of anyone about how them cops came across her gun. Your mom never pulls that thing out. Where did the police find it? Do you know? As I recall, they did not have a warrant to search the house.”
“Umm,” I hesitated, so not wanting to tell him what happened.
“Are you there? Damn cell phones. I hate these things.”
I had no choice but to tell the truth. “I’m here. They didn’t need to search the house. It’s a long story, but long story-short, it fell out of a futso.”
I could hear him suck in a breath. “How did . . . in the barn?”
“Well, no, actually. Out in Mom’s parking lot.”
A moment of silence.
“You want to tell me how that happened?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Is your mother’s life important to you?”
“Do fish need water?” I didn’t know why that phrase came to mind, but I guessed because he was being ridiculous.
“Just tell me how this happened.”
I told him the sordid details and all the while I could hear him sucking on his cigar. When I finished he said, “Just tell your mom I’ll do everything I can to have her out in time for her weekly Sunday afternoon card game.”
As if that was somehow important. “I wouldn’t want her to miss that,” I shot back, knowing I sounded like a total bitch.
“Mia, it is the routines of life that keeps your mom happy. You of all people should know that by now.”
“You’re right.” But this changed everything. My mom’s life was truly at stake.
“You need to reassure her that everything is going to be fine.”
Like anyone had that kind of power over my mom. “Me? Why me? Can’t you do the reassuring? Seems as if you’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”
That didn’t come out the way I’d hoped.
“Yeah, so what? Your mother needed comforting when she found out Dickey got it, so I spent a little time with her in the house right after we found him while you and Lisa were busy entertaining Leonardo and his cop friend. One thing led to another and now me and your mother are, shall we say, officially an item. But right now I have to concentrate on the paperwork to get her out of there, and you have to be a good daughter and convince her that this rap will never stick.”
That explained his absence from the porch the night Dickey was killed. At least I knew he wasn’t in the barn moving the body. He was in the house moving my mom.
“Do you know who did it?” I asked him.
“I am working on it, but I have to admit, going legit has its limitations.”
This was not the news I wanted to hear. I was probably closer to tracking down the killer than he was.
How did this happen?
“But why did my mom take Leo and Nick out to the barn that night if she knew Dickey was in there?” Something that had always bugged me.
“What, you think I am crazy? I did not divulge the details of Dickey’s whack to your mom. She was in no state to hear it. I merely told her that he had met with an unfortunate end. It was all she needed to know at the time.”
This was good news. “But she lied about the worker cutting his hand on the millstone. Why would she do that?”
“Sweetheart, your mom has been around the block. Give her some adlib credit, will you?”
“So my mom didn’t lie, she improvised?”
“Yeah, that is what she does. She improvises.”
And to finally understand the way my mother’s mind works?
Priceless.
“Okay. I’ll talk to her, but can I see her so soon after she’s been booked?”
“Yes. I got a special circumstance approval from the shift supervisor for you just a little while ago.”
“How did you know I’d agree to this? Wouldn’t it be easier if you just bailed her out?”
“It’s going to take a few hours for the family to raise bail. Besides, you know how to handle your mom better than I do.”
“You owe me,” I told him. “Big time.”
“Sure, hon. Whatever you want.”
“A different family.”
“That I cannot do.”
“Then, don’t make offers you can’t keep.”
“I will try to remember that next time.”
He chuckled and hung up.
I hit number two on my phone and Lisa picked up on the first ring. “My mom’s been booked. She’s in jail for Dickey’s murder. The bullet in his head was from her gun just like you said, but please don’t tell me Nick already told you ‘cause I won’t be able to handle that you didn’t tell me as soon as you found out. I mean, my nerves are pretty much shot right now and knowing that my best friend—”
She interrupted me. “Mia, of course I didn’t know. He wouldn’t tell me something like that, and if he did, I’d have called you the minute I knew. So stop fretting and slow down.”
I backed my lead foot off the gas. I had been doing almost ninety. “But how did you know I was driving?”
“I didn’t. I was talking about slowing down your emotions.”
“Oh,” I said now that the speedometer read sixty-five. “That too.” I eased my death grip on the steering wheel.
“I haven’t heard from Nick since last night. When did this happen?” She sounded sleepy.
“I don’t know. Benny just told me. I was on my way to Santa Rosa to pick up my mom, and now it’s just for a visit. This could get ugly.”
“Look at it this way. You’ll finally be able to talk to her alone.”
She made my mom’s incarceration seem like an advantage.
“Do you always look at the brigh
t side of things?”
“Only when my best friend is running on empty. You probably hardly slept last night, and I know you’re not eating, which describes the life of a teenager, but not a thirty-year-old woman. You’re going to self-destruct if you don’t slow down.”
“I’ll slow down when I’m on that plane to Maui.”
“We’re still going? I thought now that your mom—”
“Nothing, short of my own death, can keep me from going.”
“You made my skin prickle. Don’t say that kind of shit out loud. Not while there’s a killer running around in the family nest.”
I let out a heavy sigh. She was so right.
“One more thing to add to the family tree, whoever killed Dickey had it all planned.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. After catching Liz last night this sleuthing thing is getting easier. Thugs always seem to screw-up. We just have to find the screw-ups. Wait. I just realized your phone is working. Since when?”
“Since my mom picked up a new one this morning. There’s a real saint under all that bluster. They were able to save my SIM card so everything’s cool.”
When she said “cool,” I thought of Jimmy and an idea saturated my thoughts. “Hey, what are you doing later this afternoon? I’m thinking we should pay Jimmy a visit. Clues are adding up in his favor, especially since my conversation with Hetty.”
“Don’t jump to any conclusions until you talk to your mom. There’s no telling what she might say now that she’s facing a life sentence. Maybe Benny did it, or Ray. Did you ever think of that?”
“Benny was still in witness protection when Carla was murdered, and Ray was living in New Jersey running his fake plumbing business. As for killing Dickey we would have never found the body if either one of them did it. Those guys traveled in higher circles. No, either Jimmy did it himself or he’s connected to the person who did. I really need you to come with me when I talk to him.”
“Can’t,” Lisa said. “I have a signing in an hour, but it shouldn’t last more than a few hours. I can meet you afterwards.”
