Who wanted the show stopped badly enough to kill Gary and send such an elaborate—but effective—threat?
At that point, I noticed Bixby squinting at the area behind me. I turned around to see Brad coming down the stairs.
I whisked him away before Bixby could.
“Have you heard?” I asked.
“About the dresses? Yes.”
“Not just about the dresses. About the chicken.” I clued him in on Kathleen’s missing hen.
“At least it wasn’t a person.”
“But it’s clearly someone wanting to stop the show. Tell me, who in the cast and crew would want that? Who was unhappy? Might someone have wanted out of their contract?”
“Audrey, that’s . . . I don’t have time to talk about this. Apparently it’s now my job to help Easton recover and try to salvage the filming schedule.”
“Who, Brad? Who would benefit most from getting out from under the terms of their contract?”
Brad looked up to the ceiling beams before gesturing toward an unoccupied table. We sat and he picked at a scratch in the wood with his fingernail.
“Brad, if you’re in such a hurry, why are you stalling?”
“Well, that’s just it. People in this business spend half their time trying to get a contract, and the other half trying to get out of it. When you’re not working, it seems like it’s almost impossible to break in. But once people know you . . . opportunities arise, and . . .”
“Who, Brad?”
“Frankly, me.” He looked up at me through those long lashes of his, probably trying to gauge my reaction before he went on. “See, before I got the job on Fix My Wedding, I’d submitted a proposal to the network.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It was a long shot, so I didn’t mention it to anybody. And like I thought, squat, zippo, bubkes. Not even so much as a ‘Go away, kid. You bother me.’”
“And then?”
“And then I’m working on Fix My Wedding not more than a couple of months and all of a sudden, they answer me. Could I produce the pilot? So I dig out my contract, and there’s this lovely non-compete clause.”
“What was the show about?”
“See, that’s the thing. It’s not exactly in direct competition with Fix My Wedding. You know that medieval encampment they have every year out in the hills?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Well they’re growing. Not only that, but there’s a bit of a conflict between the serious recreationists and the Renaissance fairs all over the country. And conflict is good.”
“In reality television,” I said. “Personally, I could use a little less conflict.”
“I know.” He patted my hand. “Trust me. I know. But anyway, the idea was to focus on the crazy world of medieval re-creations. I was going to call it Mid-Evil. Get it?”
I groaned.
“Well, it was only a working title. But it didn’t matter. I was informed that I have an airtight contract. I’m afraid that means I probably had more motive than anybody.”
“Did you tell this to Bixby?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Brad—”
“A few others on the crew knew about it, too. I thought it would be better if he heard it from me.”
So Bixby had yet another reason to be suspicious of Brad.
I looked up as a uniformed officer walked in the front door carrying a plastic bag. I wondered if he’d been recruited for the great chicken hunt, but then I noticed that the patch on his shirt said he was from two towns over. Had Bixby called in reinforcements?
He looked around at the bedlam the restaurant had become. Cast and crew assembled, some still in their pajamas. The three older ladies had resumed their card game. Kathleen was sobbing. Nevena, the seamstress, sat at her corner table, arms crossed, sending an angry glare in Easton’s direction. Easton was off the gurney and glued to his phone. The paramedic who had attended him was eating a scone.
“Is there a Chief Bixby around?” the officer asked.
Bixby walked over and shook the man’s hand. “Thanks, you’re saving my life, man. Well, possibly my job. Over here.” And the officer followed him into the next room.
Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I got up and followed. I watched from the doorway as Bixby led the visiting officer over to the bar where one of the wedding dresses was draped on top, covered with bright red spots.
Even from my distant vantage point, something didn’t seem right. Blood oxidizes. Considering how much time had passed, those spots should have been brown.
“Are you sure that’s even blood?” I asked.
“That’s what we’re about to find out,” the officer said.
I watched from the doorway as he pulled on latex gloves and drew a couple of small tubes from the plastic bag, shook them up, then dabbed a bit of the liquid inside onto a spot on the dress. He shook his head. Then ran a similar test on the note. “Not blood.”
Bixby blew out a relieved sigh, and I let out the breath I was holding. “Can I see the spots?” I asked.
“Don’t touch,” Bixby said, as he let me get nearer to the dress and the note.
He turned to talk to the officer. “Thanks for bringing the test kits. I would have felt like a fool asking for a DNA test on something that’s not even blood.”
I leaned down over the note and sniffed.
“Audrey!” Bixby whirled and grabbed my arm. Hard, I might add.
“I didn’t touch it!”
“Well, don’t go sniffing it. We don’t know what that is. It could be toxic.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I think what you’re going to be looking for is an empty ketchup bottle. Kathleen cans her own. Lots of cinnamon. I’m pretty sure this is hers.”
A commotion in the other room drew our attention. Lafferty had Dennis Pinkleman’s arm twisted behind him. The rookie officer pushed the obsessed fan into the restaurant, pressed his head down until the young man was bent over a table—which I’m happy to report, did not collapse—and then handcuffed him.
“But I didn’t do anything.” Dennis’s eyes were panicked and sweat rushed down his red face.
Lafferty beamed with pride. “Found him camping in the woods out back.”
“There’s no law against camping,” he said.
Lafferty pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. “And these were nearby.”
The bag contained two broken eggshells. Not supermarket eggs, but the brown and speckled kind that Kathleen’s hens produced.
“It’s just a couple of eggs. I was hungry. What’s the big deal?”
“Killer!” Kathleen lunged at Pinkleman. Bixby grabbed at her waist and swung her back.
“No,” Lafferty said. “The chicken’s out there, too. Alive. Partway up the slope.” He held up his hands, which were bleeding. “I would have brought her back in, too, but she pecked me half to death.”
Anger drained from Kathleen’s face, then relief flooded in its place. She ran out the side door calling to her beloved Beth.
* * *
“That guy doesn’t know how to stay out of trouble,” I told Nick, as I happened to score the last scone on the plate. After looking to make sure Henry Easton wasn’t around to comment on my size.
“You don’t think Pinkleman could be the killer?” Nick whisked out a full box of scones. He started stacking them on the empty plate using gloved hands.
I poured myself a cup of coffee to go with the scone. “What would his motive be?”
“Obsession,” he said. “Makes people do crazy things. I looked him up on the Fix My Wedding message board.”
“And?”
“Some crazy stuff there.”
“From Pinkleman?”
Nick rolled his eyes. “From all of them. But Pinkleman is involved in all of i
t. Every thread, every inane topic, every controversy, he’s there expressing his opinion. Posts from all hours of the day and night. Some in all caps with multiple exclamation points.”
“So, we know he’s an excitable guy. Nothing illegal in that.”
“It does suggest a certain lack of balance.”
“What does Pinkleman have to say about Gary?”
“There were a few times he was perturbed with Gary for snarky remarks he made to Gigi.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Gigi was the queen of snark. He barely said a word back. At least on the show.”
“That’s what the other fans said. They really took Pinkleman to task for it. He stood his ground. Said a perfect gentleman would never contradict a lady publicly like that.”
“What do you think?”
“If I disagreed with a lady, I probably would have chosen a less public venue than an Internet message board.”
“No.” I chuckled. “Although that’s good to know. But I was curious about what you thought of Pinkleman’s state of mind. What does your gut tell you?”
“Well, the response online got pretty heated. A flame war, I think they call it. At one point, the other fan left the board, saying Pinkleman was a sad, lonely human being—that all he had in his life was the message board.”
“That can’t have gone over well.”
“I believe Pinkleman’s words were, ‘I hope someone peels you like a potato, crinkle cuts your sorry hide, and dips you in hot oil.’”
“Unbalanced,” I said.
“And when someone’s that far gone, you can never tell what they’re capable of.”
* * *
Back at the Rose in Bloom, stems and leaves were flying. I walked in as Opie and Melanie were in the middle of an animated discussion.
“Something small,” Opie said. “And it doesn’t need to be where anyone can see it.”
“If nobody sees it, what’s the point?” Melanie picked up her completed arrangement and carried it back to the cooler.
“What are we talking about?” I asked.
“Tattoos,” Opie said. “Melanie’s thinking about getting one.”
“I was thinking about a small rose,” Melanie said. “But not sure it’s worth it if I put it somewhere nobody is going to see anyway.”
“But you know it’s there,” Opie said. “A little secret you can hide from the rest of the world. It’s strangely liberating.”
“It looks strangely painful.” Melanie cleared the stem cuttings from her work space. “And what if ten years from now I decide I don’t want one?”
I left them to their debate and joined Liv and Amber Lee.
“The prodigal has returned,” Liv said.
“Sorry I’m a little late. Nick called me this morning and asked me to rush over to the Ashbury.”
“Did it have to do with the wedding, the flowers, your love life, or the murder investigation?”
“The wedding and possibly the murder investigation. Someone destroyed the wedding dresses. Doused them with what looked like blood.”
Amber Lee swung her head from concentrating on the flowers she was working on. “That’s a little Stephen King, isn’t it?”
“More than a little,” I said. “With a dash of The Godfather. Henry Easton sure took it hard. They had to call in paramedics. Until we figured out it was only ketchup.”
“Are they going to cancel the show?” Liv asked.
“No. No sign of that.”
We worked in relative silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the satisfying clipping noises of pruning shears and the scritching of Darnell’s broom as he swept up the growing mounds of foliage on the floor.
“Are we ready for another tape?” Amber Lee asked.
“We’re almost rounding the final stretch.” Liv pulled out another videotape and popped it into the VCR.
Soon the melodramatic news theme was playing and Gary appeared on the screen. This time he was exposing a clerk who had bilked thousands of dollars from a local volunteer fire department.
“He’s playing with her,” Shelby said, as the interview began.
Liv paused the tape.
“Playing with her?” I asked.
Shelby nodded. “We saw it on a few other interviews. Gary will ask a few innocuous questions, put the interviewee at ease, and then pow! he goes in for the kill. You should have seen him with the Balkan baby mill.”
“What on earth is a baby mill?” I asked.
“Great story,” Shelby said.
Liv shuddered. “Terrible story.”
“But great how he exposed it,” Shelby added.
“Some sleazeball nonprofit group,” Amber Lee said. “They were luring young, unwed, pregnant Balkan women to the U.S. with promises of good-paying jobs and help raising their babies.”
Liv huffed. “Unwed, undereducated, and desperate.”
“I take it the jobs weren’t here when they got here,” I said.
Amber Lee shook her head. “They helped the girls apply for visitor visas. The girls then delivered their babies in the U.S., making the children automatic U.S. citizens. ‘Fourteenth amendment babies,’ Gary called them.”
“Section One”—Opie cleared her throat—“and I quote, ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’”
“So the kids were citizens,” I said.
“But the mothers weren’t,” Darnell added.
“Everything seemed on the up-and-up for the girls,” Amber Lee said, “until the visitor visas expired and the girls were facing deportation. The nonprofit then pressured the young women to give up their babies for adoption. ‘Why take them back to the Balkans? Don’t you want your child to grow up as a U.S. citizen?’”
“Most surrendered their rights,” Liv said. “Records were spotty and had a habit of disappearing, and the nonprofits closed and reopened in different places under different names. Could be dozens of children. Might be hundreds.”
“And Gary stopped this?” My admiration for the man was growing.
“With the help of an unnamed whistle-blower,” Liv said. “One of the mothers. He showed only her silhouette on the screen and used a translator, but it must have been scary for her. Gary kept going after the organization. Took down more than one corrupt official who was taking bribes to speed along the paperwork.”
“Ruthless,” Amber Lee said. “Definitely not the same sweet, flamboyant dude on Fix My Wedding.”
Liv pressed play again.
Chapter 14
Before heading into the shop Thursday morning, I stopped at the municipal building that housed the police headquarters.
Mrs. June shook her head. “They took that Pinkleman kid right back to the county detention center. He must like it there.”
“Any idea what they are holding him on?”
She shuffled some papers around on her desk, then glanced around the empty room, her tell that this was information she wasn’t necessarily supposed to share. Not that she wouldn’t—at least to me. “Right now, only a destruction of property charge, but that doesn’t mean there’s not more coming.”
“Like the murder?”
Mrs. June scrunched her face. “That, I can’t say. There’s not much to tie Pinkleman to Gary’s murder. Not evidence, at least. A couple of chicken eggshells at his campsite. And the bird. And the chief’s fit to be tied thinking about how he’s going to take that to the DA.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d at least have to provide evidence that the eggs came from the Ashbury’s chicken, and that’s a lot of lab time to prosecute a hungry camper for stealing a couple of eggs—which is all Pinkleman admits to.”
“He was camping in the woods?�
��
“Apparently. Although nothing more elaborate than a sleeping bag and a small campfire. There’s a burn restriction in the whole county because of the drought, so he’s lucky the entire hillside didn’t go up. I guess Bixby could charge him on that, but I’m not sure I want to remind him.”
I tilted my head. I didn’t really have to ask. Once Mrs. June gets started, she doesn’t stop until she’s said all she’s going to say.
“Pinkleman just seems like such a sad, lonely person. He’s a young guy. He should be out having fun, learning how to make his way in the world. From the way he talks, the show was his whole life, and now it seems like that’s being taken away from him. I figure a few nights in jail might do the kid some good. Shake him back to reality a little.”
I bit my lip, thinking of the threat that he, as Gigi’s Guy, made to the last person who said something similar. “He seems to be carried away with Gigi in particular. Maybe even romantically.”
“And you think that could give him motive to kill Gary? That he really thought he might have a chance with her? She’s old enough to be his mother. Not that she’s not a knockout in her forties. But is he that delusional, to think that he could eliminate mean old Gary and she’d rush into his arms?”
“It doesn’t take much motive for an unbalanced person. Maybe it’s simpler. What if he thought Gary was mistreating, or even outshining, Gigi?”
Mrs. June’s eyes grew larger. “Or if he somehow found out about the secret marriage . . . But that was before word got out.”
“Yes, but if he was camping in the woods behind the Ashbury, he might have seen Gary and Gigi go into their RV the night before Gary was killed. I know Pinkleman said he slept in his car that night, but we only have his word on that.”
* * *
I leaned against a stool in the back room of the Rose in Bloom and looked at the checklist Liv had created to keep track of the arrangements. “Oh, wow. We’re almost done with the reception flowers.”
Normally we would not have made them this far ahead, but with the size of the order, it was a necessity. Since we were working with unopened and barely opened flowers, we might have to make some last-minute adjustments—maybe swap out a bloom or two that was too far along, or manually open some that were not far enough—but it was better than waiting until the last minute.
For Whom the Bluebell Tolls Page 15
