“Do you have any evidence Helen was the target?” Charley said.
Ewing shifted in his chair. “I’m only speculating. The police have made an arrest. As for the break-in, we’ll probably never know who it was. The detective told us these burglaries are rarely solved. You’re probably right about the Ortiz kid. He killed his mother and then broke into Helen’s condo looking for something valuable he could fence on the street.”
“Helen,” I said. “Charley is a private investigator. Maybe you should hire him to look into the problems you’ve been having.”
Helen stared at a black footprint that had been tracked onto her beige living room carpet. Her facial muscles were slack from too much trauma and too little sleep.
“I can’t afford that, Tucker. I could barely come up with the money to hire you.”
“Maybe Charley and I could combine our efforts, sort of a marketing-slash-investigating service. You know, two for the price of one.”
Ewing closed the magazine he’d been reading. “I think that’s a good idea, Helen.”
She picked up the Ortizes’ sympathy card from the table and ran her thumb over the stamp to make sure it was secure. “All right. If that’s what you all want.”
Charley pulled a small black notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ll need some info on your ex, like addresses and telephone numbers.”
She gestured toward the black fingerprint powder. “Can it wait until later this afternoon? My address book is in the bedroom. I want to vacuum before this powder ruins the carpet.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I said.
“Kathy is alone at Nectar. Can you stop by the store and make sure everything is okay? Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I stared at Helen in disbelief. “Nectar is open for business?”
Ewing cleared his throat. “The watch commander called after Helen went home last night. She said they were done collecting evidence and promised to have the place cleaned up in time to open this morning.”
Past experience told me police departments didn’t clean up crime scenes. That was the responsibility of the family or the business owner. I wondered what strings Ewing had pulled to get that kind of service.
“That’s Beverly Hills PD for you,” Charley said. “I’m surprised she didn’t ask her publicist to hold a press conference.”
A Cheshire cat smile stretched across Ewing’s lips. It was obvious he enjoyed Charley’s snide comment, but he wasn’t about to say so.
“Helen, maybe you should have waited a day or two before opening the store,” I said. “Just to catch your breath.”
She flashed a wan smile. “I couldn’t do that. My customers are counting on me. Plus, I have to make chocolates for the symposium. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
My watch read eleven a.m. I had enough time to stop by Nectar and still make my three o’clock appointment with Elizabeth Bennet, but being a business doctor and now a hand holder was becoming a bona fide juggling act.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll make sure everything is okay.”
Before we left, Helen gave me a package for Eugene, six of his favorite Mango-Tango chocolate squares. She said a study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine had found that chocolate lowered blood pressure. She thought Eugene could use a little stress reducer. Maybe I’d down a few of those babies myself.
Charley and I walked to my car, dodging puddles filled with earthworms stranded aboveground after the rain. None of them looked as if they were strong swimmers. I guess learning the backstroke wasn’t a high priority in worm world.
“Thanks for taking this job, Charley. I appreciate it.”
“Like I told you this morning, I’m pretty busy at the moment, so I may need some help from you and the kid. Computer searches. That sort of thing.”
“You can count on us, Charley. Do you really think Roberto Ortiz broke into Helen’s condo?”
He shrugged. “It’s just one theory. We might get lucky if they find fingerprints and match them to a suspect, but Ewing is right: these types of burglaries are rarely solved.”
“How come?”
“For one thing, this wasn’t done by a pro. They don’t ransack a place. That’s usually done by somebody acting on impulse, like a hype looking for his next fix. He cruises by a residence, checks the door to see if it’s open or if the lock can be easily defeated. He’s in a hurry because he doesn’t know who lives there or when they’ll be home. He breaks in and tears the place apart, looking for anything he can fence on the street. Then he moves to another neighborhood.”
“Do you think Lupe’s murder and Helen’s burglary are one crime or two?”
“I don’t want to speculate. I just don’t have enough information.”
When we reached the car, I opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. “So what do you want me to do?”
Charley watched as I buckled my seat belt. “Nothing at the moment. I’ll check out the ex and that Rossi character later this afternoon. For now, I’m going to hang around here and talk to the neighbors. See if anybody saw anything unusual last night. I can also contact a buddy of mine who used to work for the Beverly Hills PD. He might be able to call in a few favors and find out what evidence they have against Roberto Ortiz.”
“I’ll ask Eugene to do an Internet search to see if he can find out any more about that quetzal feather.”
“What for?”
“It might be a clue. I mean, how did a feather of a rare bird found only in the jungles of Central America end up in a chocolate store in Beverly Hills?”
Charley was silent for a moment. “Okay. He can look up stuff on the computer, but that’s it. I don’t want him pulling a Philip Marlowe on me, thinking he can solve the case himself.”
His concerns were justified. A few months back, Eugene had invented an alter ego and set off on his own to interview suspects in one of Charley’s cases. The information he collected had been helpful, but he could have ended up in a body bag. Charley didn’t want any more close calls. Neither did I.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll make sure he understands.”
Charley ambled back toward Helen’s condo to interview her neighbors, and I headed to Nectar.
Chapter 7
“I can’t believe Helen’s being victimized again,” Eugene said. “How is she holding up?”
“I’m on my way to Nectar right now. I’ll tell you more when I get back to the office. In the meantime, Helen hired Charley to look into a few problems she’s having. We’re going to help him with some research. Can you look up more information on the quetzal?”
“It’s a clue, isn’t it? I knew it. Have no fear. Bix Waverly is on the job.”
Bix Waverly was the pretext name Eugene had used in that unauthorized investigation he undertook for Charley. In private investigator parlance, a pretext is a lie you tell people in order to get information you probably wouldn’t get under normal circumstances. It’s a tricky and sometimes dangerous game to play. I remembered Charley’s admonition.
“All I want you to do is download anything you find on the bird. No phone calls. No interviews. No nothing. Got it?”
He huffed out some air. “Honestly, Tucker, was that little lecture really necessary? I’ve worked for Charley for almost six months now. I know what I’m doing.”
I could only hope that was true.
When I got to Nectar, I parked in the alley and went inside. The retail store was packed with customers, more so than usual. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe murder and chocolate did mix.
The decor in the shop was done in the rich autumnal colors of gold, cinnabar, carnelian, and bronze. On the wall was a framed drawing of chocolate molds reproduced from the pages of a 1907 Parisian catalog for professional chocolate makers. There was also an oil painting of a cacao plant growing in the jungles of Central America and a reprint of an 1885 poster Helen had purchased at the chocolate museum in Brule. It was a c
opy of an original advertisement from her great-grandfather’s chocolate shop, which had once been located in the Grand Place in Brussels. Helen had done a masterful job of combining elements of European and Central American cultures to create a place that made you want to kick off your shoes and stay awhile.
Kathy seemed overwhelmed by the crowd of customers, so I grabbed an apron and got behind the counter. Before Nectar, I hadn’t been much of a chocolate eater, but Helen was educating me. I now knew that the cacao tree rarely survived outside an area twenty degrees north and twenty degrees south of the equator, and its large pods sprouted from the trunk of the tree as well as from its branches. I’d learned that white chocolate wasn’t chocolate at all. Real chocolate had both cocoa butter and cacao solids. White chocolate contained no cacao particles, which was why it didn’t taste or look like the real thing. Helen used only the finest chocolate in her recipes, claiming it required less sugar. She also used a higher percent of cacao, at least 65 or more. You didn’t have to be an expert to taste the difference between grocery store chocolate and Helen’s rich, dense, somewhat bitter, and decidedly orgasmic creations. I hadn’t become a chocoholic yet, but I was moving in that direction.
Just as we were gaining control over the crowd of customers, a woman in a blond wig and a pink Chanel suit stormed through the front door. She looked to be in her seventies, but it was hard to tell because of all the work she’d had done by some plastic surgeon who didn’t know when to say no. She used her Fendi handbag as a battering ram and shoved her way to the front of the line. Her rudeness prompted a chorus of angry outcries from her fellow customers.
“I’m late for a doctor’s appointment,” she said with a haughty edge to her voice. “Give me six apricot truffles and six bourbon balls. I want them in the gold box with a red ribbon. And give me a gift card.”
In her rush to be served, the woman pushed aside a stocky man wearing a navy blue suit. His white shirt was starched to perfection and stood in stark contrast to his dark skin. He was probably in his sixties but he seemed older, almost prehistoric, like a pre-Columbian stone god in the jungles of Belize. The man seemed unfazed by the brouhaha. His expression was placid, almost meditative. He held up his hand to address the crowd, exposing fingers stained brown by nicotine.
“Pardon,” he said, trilling the “r” like a Latin lover. “A woman in a hurry is a dangerous thing. Wouldn’t you agree? To save us all, I will allow this lady to take my place in line.”
As Kathy hurried to put the woman’s chocolates in a box, the man strolled to the back of the store. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him studying the pictures on the wall and waiting patiently.
A moment later, a black SUV pulled up to the curb in front of the store. A mountain of a man, dressed head to toe in black, exited the driver’s seat and walked around to open the rear door. Everything about him screamed bodyguard.
A young woman stumbled out of the car wearing a skimpy getup that made her look like a contestant in a new reality show called America’s Top Tart. Cradled in her arms was a white rat with a pink nose that matched his pink-jeweled collar and leash. As she walked through the front door, she tripped on her four-inch platform shoes. The bodyguard caught her just before she did a triple-header into the glass display case.
When the young woman was upright again, she pushed her way through the crowd to the counter and threw her scrawny arms across the top, knocking over a basket of chocolate bark. The rat must have sensed trouble, because he jumped over her shoulder and scurried down her back as far as the leash would allow.
“I hear somebody got creamed in your back room last night.” Her words were slurred by booze, drugs, both, neither. “You should call this place Death by Chocolate.” She giggled at her joke.
She didn’t look like a member of the newspaper-reading public, so she must have heard the scoop about Lupe Ortiz’s death someplace else, maybe by word of mouth. I imagined the store becoming a stop on some macabre tour of famous crime scenes. It was troubling that Nectar’s profile had been raised by a murder in the bathroom, but there was nothing I could do about it at the moment.
Kathy seemed flustered by the appearance of the morning’s second unruly patron. She picked up the spilled bark and set it on the back counter. “I’m with a customer right now. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“A minute?” The young woman’s voice squawked as if she had just been startled awake from a bad dream. “Don’t you know who I am?”
Maybe Kathy didn’t recognize her, but I did. She was Alexis Raines, a pop princess for the bubblegum crowd who’d ruined her career by growing into adulthood, physically if not emotionally. In the past year, she’d had a succession of DUI arrests and unflattering mug shots plastered across the front page of every tabloid newspaper and celebrity magazine in the country.
The woman with the Fendi bag whipped around. “Excuse me, young lady. Can’t you see I was here first?”
That’s when she saw the rat. She screamed and raised the Fendi above her head, as if she was a trendy cavewoman about to bag dinner. I knew if I didn’t do something fast, the rat was going to end his life as a pancake. I rushed from behind the counter in time to catch the blow from the purse just as the bodyguard pulled Alexis to safety.
The Fendi woman gaped at me, stretching the surgery scars near her ears to a pearly white. Her gaze cut to the bodyguard looming over Alexis. Without so much as an apology, she grabbed the box of chocolates Kathy had packed for her and left the store.
“Christ on a cracker,” Alexis said, cuddling the rat in her arms. “You saved Aldo’s life. I owe you.”
“No big deal—”
“I mean it. You deserve a reward.”
“How about buying chocolates for a hundred of your closest friends, and we’ll call it even.”
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s all.”
“It’s not enough. I’m going to send you tickets to my next concert. Front-row seats.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell Alexis if she didn’t get her act together, there would be no next concert. There may not even be a tomorrow. While Kathy and I filled her order, Alexis lurched up to the newspaper article mounted on the wall. She turned and scanned the room.
“Hey, what happened to all the stuff in the picture?”
It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about. The display shelves.
“The owner took them down to make room for more tables.”
“Why don’t you put it over there?”
As Alexis swung her arm toward one of the glass cases to illustrate her point, she nearly upset a jar of cacao nibs. I grabbed the jar before it went flying across the room. The crowd of customers stood frozen, as if they were watching a train wreck.
“Thanks,” I said to her. “I’ll mention your decorating ideas to the owner.”
Alexis liked the look of the molinillo in the picture and wanted to know what it was. I told her it was used for frothing chocolate. She wanted to buy it. I told her it wasn’t for sale. She expressed interest in the heart box and the chocolate pot, too, but I demurred. Her negotiating skills were lucid and surprisingly sophisticated, which made me wonder if all that stumbling and slurring was just an act.
Two hundred dollars’ worth of chocolates later, the bodyguard carried the bags and Alexis out to the SUV and drove away. Raines was a disaster waiting to happen, but if she came back and brought all of her celebrity friends, she could guarantee Nectar’s success.
When Kathy and I were finished waiting on all the customers, the man in the back of the room stepped up to the counter.
“Thanks for waiting,” I said to him. “You’re a real gentleman.”
He smiled like a contented lizard sunning himself on a desert stone. “I did not know that buying chocolates today would earn me the praise of a beautiful woman.”
“I’m sorry for what happened. It’s usually not this crazy. I hope you’ll come back.”
“It is
a long drive for me, but worth the trip. I tell my wife that cacao is good for my health, but she says my guilty pleasures will kill me one day. Too bad that young woman has no one to warn her of her fate.”
“Money and immaturity are always a bad combination.”
The man selected six chocolates. It wasn’t many for the length of time it took him to pick them out. The last he chose was my all-time favorite. Helen called them Forget-Me-Nots, because once you sampled one, you weren’t ever likely to forget. A delicate flower was stenciled on a thin crust of dark chocolate that covered a chocolate ganache so rich and sensual it made you want to say, “It was good for me, baby. Was it good for you?”
“If you work here,” the man said, “you must share my passion for cacao.”
I handed him the box. “I love Helen’s chocolates, but I don’t work in the store. I’m just filling in today. I’m a consultant, sort of a business doctor.”
He nodded. “This Helen is a wise woman to seek help. I myself own a small business. I am always looking for new ways to make money so I can continue to indulge those guilty pleasures of mine.”
I reached under the counter and handed him a card from my purse. “I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses. If you ever want to discuss your options, call me at any of these numbers.”
“Perhaps I will.” He gave me a placid salute and made his way toward the door.
It was getting late. I didn’t want to miss my appointment with Elizabeth Bennet, so I hung up my apron and headed for the door. I was just backing out of the alley when I was startled by a knock on the passenger-side window. I turned and saw Detective O’Brien staring at me through the glass. He didn’t look happy.
Chapter 8
I got out of the car and stood facing O’Brien over the roof of the Boxster. The sun at his back made his red hair look like a burning bush. I hoped I wasn’t about to meet my destiny.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Looking for Lupe Ortiz’s cell phone. It’s missing. Too bad the crime scene was closed without consulting me. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a problem.”
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