Right from the Gecko

by Cynthia Baxter

  I didn’t give myself a chance to wonder how on earth I was ever going to cope with caring for a pussycat, given the fact that at the moment I was living in a hotel. Not when I had much more pressing matters to deal with. I realized I’d better move fast.

  I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a bowl off a shelf and filled it with water, then opened one cabinet door after another until I located Marnie’s cache of cat food. I pulled the lid off a can of a tuna and shrimp combo that seemed like something a cat living on a tropical island would like, then dumped it into a second bowl while my famished feline friend watched eagerly. He immediately got busy filling up his empty tummy. Once I was sure he was all set, I went back to work.

  I decided to start in the living room, which I’d already identified as Marnie’s home office. I figured it was the most likely place to find clues about what was going on in her life. I headed directly for the papers on her makeshift desk, most of which were stuffed into manila folders. Each folder was labeled with a topic that I assumed she had been researching for a possible story. Hawaii Power & Light. Governor Wickham. FloraTech. There were at least eight or ten others.

  Inside, she had tucked away handwritten notes, typed notes, lists, names and phone numbers, and even clippings from other newspapers on the same subject. While she didn’t appear to have followed any particular system in organizing the research materials she’d amassed, I suspected that she knew precisely what was in each and every folder.

  There were also loose pages, some held together with paper clips and some stapled together, lying among the folders. They appeared to be drafts of articles she was working on. They were filled with mentions of names and places I didn’t recognize.

  Marnie was a busy woman, I thought. But the revelation that she’d been working on a dozen different stories filled me with dismay. The possibility of ever reading through all her files and identifying anything that looked suspicious or pointed to any clues about her murder was looking less and less likely.

  Still, this time around I had help. Maybe I could get my own recently recruited sidekick, Nick, to put some time into weeding through Marnie’s endless collection of papers. He might be well on his way to becoming a lawyer, but something told me that kind of task was probably still very familiar to him from his private-eye days. After glancing at the doorway to make sure Amy wasn’t watching me, I stuck the files in my tote bag.

  When I’d exhausted my search of Marnie’s desk without finding anything else that seemed worth appropriating, I headed into her bedroom. The clock was ticking and my heart was pounding.

  “I’d hate to get our lawyers involved…” I heard Amy threatening.

  I scanned the room quickly, wondering where to look. I darted over to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and peered inside. Nothing but practical cotton underwear and a few other pieces of no-nonsense lingerie. The other drawers didn’t yield anything interesting either.

  I checked her closet, but there was nothing but clothes. Then I noticed that the small table next to her bed had a drawer. I opened it, bracing myself against the possibility of finding a gun or something similarly shocking.

  What I found in there was shocking, all right. But it wasn’t anything that was fired by gunpowder.

  It was a photograph of a naked man sprawled across Marnie’s bed. A naked man with a big grin on his face, a leering look in his eyes, and an extraordinarily large penis.

  Ace.

  Whoa! I thought. So it wasn’t his big blue eyes that Marnie found so irresistible!

  But there was something I found even more intriguing than this potential exhibit at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum.

  Tucked underneath was a business card from Ace’s Auto Artists. On the bottom was printed his name, Ashton “Ace” Atwood, and what was no doubt his business phone number. And handwritten on back, no doubt by Marnie, were the words, Home: 254 Hukelani Street, Wailuku.

  Ace’s home address. I jammed it into my pocket, wondering how the police had managed to miss these two gems. I supposed they were just so certain Marnie’s killer had been the man she’d been seen leaving the Purple Mango with that they figured their investigation should center on learning his identity.

  I rifled through the drawer, curious about what other wonders I might find in there. I found a few photographs—some of Marnie and a couple of her with Ace. I took those too, figuring they might come in handy.

  Encouraged by what I’d found so far, I slipped back into the tiny kitchen. As soon as I did, my eyes lit on the short, squat refrigerator.

  You can tell a lot about people by what they keep in their refrigerators.

  But before I could get my paws on it, Amy appeared behind me, posing in the doorway with one hand on her hip. Not surprisingly, she still tightly grasped her cell phone in the other.

  “Are you almost done in here?” she asked. She sounded exasperated, as if having one of her company’s tenants get murdered was really messing up her to-do list.

  “Almost,” I told her. “Let me check the fridge. If there’s anything in there that could spoil, it might be getting smelly.” Anxious to drive the point home, I added, “Like an open can of cat food.”

  The look of alarm that my comment elicited told me she was already thinking about the next tenants—and the apartment’s rentability. Real estate agents were famous for telling current residents to bake bread or cinnamon cookies when showing their house or apartment in order to make it more appealing to prospective buyers or renters. They rarely recommended using the smells of rotting fruit and moldering cheese and—heaven forbid—over-the-hill cat food wafting from the refrigerator as an effective means of adding ambience.

  “Be my guest,” Amy offered. And just in case some of that rotting and moldering and other unspeakable processes had already gotten under way, she removed herself from the kitchen instead of keeping an eye on what I was doing.

  As I opened the door, I was surprised to see that the Queen of Chaos’s kitchen was surprisingly orderly. Or maybe it was just that food was of so little consequence to her that a well-stocked refrigerator simply wasn’t a priority. Her refrigerator told me she was one of those people who tended to eat on the go, grabbing whatever she could while darting around the island, nosing out news. Personally, I found that method worked pretty well for me too.

  The painfully bare shelves of the small refrigerator contained nothing besides three cartons of yogurt, a half-empty quart of skim milk, and an unopened package of American cheese, with each slice individually wrapped. I also found wilted salad makings in the vegetable drawer and a few pieces of fruit that were well on their way to becoming mulch.

  My surprise over Marnie’s relatively healthy approach to eating aside, I was extremely disappointed. I didn’t know what I thought I’d find, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t about to appear on the La Yogurt label.

  I could hear Amy out in the hall, talking on her cell phone again, helping the wheels of business turn. I figured it was only a question of time before she lost patience and bodily dragged me out of there. I slammed the door shut, still discouraged over having learned little besides the fact that Marnie’s meal-planning techniques pretty closely adhered to the food pyramid.

  On impulse, I opened the freezer door. I didn’t really expect to see it crammed with Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, Phish Food, and Cherry Garcia, like mine was. So I was shocked to see that the only thing stored inside, aside from three ice cube trays and some rather large chunks of free-form ice, was a pint of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream.

  I reached for it, curious about whether Marnie had had a chance to dig into it before her dreadful demise. Somehow, the idea of someone stashing away a treat for later, then never having “later” come to pass, was extremely sad.

  As I picked it up, I was surprised at how light it was. In fact, it practically felt empty.

  When I pulled off the lid, I discovered that it was empty. At least, empty of ice cream.

  Inside t
he cardboard carton was a sandwich-size Ziploc bag. And inside that was what looked like an 81/2-by-11-inch piece of paper, folded in quarters.

  Marnie’s shopping list? I wondered. Not exactly the most sensible place for her to store it, at least not if she wanted to remember to bring it with her the next time she went to the supermarket.

  Maybe it’s a list of the top ten reasons ice cream is bad for you, I thought. After glancing around guiltily, I stuck it in my pocket, figuring I’d find out later.

  My sneakiness couldn’t have been better timed. I’d barely tucked it away when Amy reappeared, cell phone still in hand.

  “Jessica? Are you almost done?” she asked archly. “We have a plumbing problem in three-A, and I’d like to get up there right now and check it out.”

  “I’m done,” I told her, even though I wasn’t sure whether or not I actually was. “I’m going to need a lot more boxes than I was figuring on,” I added with a sad smile.

  She nodded understandingly. But before she could make a sympathetic comment, her cell phone trilled its annoying tune once again.

  “Go ahead and take that call,” I told her, as if there had ever been any question about her doing exactly that. “I’ll come back later with some cartons.”

  “But you’re taking that animal with you, right?”

  “Definitely,” I assured her. I wasn’t about to leave poor Moose here for a moment longer than necessary. Especially since Amy clearly had a personal vendetta against him.

  She turned away, already engrossed in her call as I slipped out, clutching Marnie’s cat in one arm. With the other I patted my pockets, just to make sure the booty I was secreting away was still safe and sound.

  I drove almost a mile with Moose in my lap before pulling over alongside the highway and taking out the Ziploc bag I’d found hidden in Marnie’s freezer. My heart pounded as I unfolded the single sheet of paper. For all I knew, it would turn out to be nothing more than a badly written pornographic poem from her extraordinarily well-endowed lover.

  It wasn’t. It was a handwritten list of names, each one followed by an address and phone number. Most of them had check marks after them, followed by either YES or NO.

  In the upper left corner were two big letters: FT.

  They could have stood for a lot of things. FT could have been someone’s initials. They could have meant future, as in things to do in the future. Or they could have been part of some code Marnie had developed for efficient note-taking. That certainly seemed like something a reporter would do.

  FT could have also stood for FloraTech. After all, the new biotech firm that had just opened its headquarters on Maui was a story Marnie had been working on. It was also the subject of the one question she had asked at the governor’s press conference the day she was murdered.

  I scanned the list, struggling a little with Marnie’s handwriting. I read one name after another, not surprised that I didn’t recognize any of them.

  I froze when I came across one I did recognize.

  Alice Feeley. The woman who had found Marnie’s body on the beach shortly after she was murdered.

  Unlike most of the other names, there was no check mark next to it. It was also one of the few listings without the words YES or NO written next to it.

  I folded up the paper, slipped it back into the plastic bag, and carefully slid it into my small flowered backpack. As I did, the name Alice Feeley echoed through my brain as if I were standing at the bottom of a canyon.

  Richard Carrera had claimed she was “harmless.” And the police didn’t seem to suspect her at all.

  Yet she had clearly been of interest to Marnie. And that automatically made her of interest to me.

  Chapter 9

  “Most cats when they are Out want to be In, and vice versa, and often simultaneously.”

  —Dr. Louis J. Camuti

  Moose didn’t exactly make a grand entrance into his new home. In fact, I smuggled him into the Royal Banyan Hotel in my tote bag along with Marnie’s files. I even tried draping a towel over him as we made our way across the expansive lobby, but he insisted on sticking his head out indignantly—not that I blamed him. At least the bag was deep enough that he couldn’t give us away by peeking over the side. He and I rode up in the elevator with three giggling teenage girls and a Japanese couple, but if they were curious about why my beach bag kept meowing, they were too polite to ask.

  “Okay, Moose,” I announced when we’d reached the room and I’d locked the door behind us. “This is your new home, at least for a little while.”

  Fortunately, the room had already been cleaned, so I didn’t have to worry about anyone coming in and finding my unauthorized guest. At least, not yet. I let him out to do some exploring while I set up the kitty litter box Amy had graciously allowed me to remove from Marnie’s apartment. Once again, the argument about possible smells had worked wonders. I also put out bowls of food and water along with all the cat toys I’d rescued from Palm Breezes Court.

  “That should do it, Moosie-pie,” I told him, picking him up and petting his soft fur once I was sure he had everything he needed. He looked at me and blinked, as if to say, Not bad. I suppose I could hang here a while. When I put him down, he leaped onto the king-size bed and curled up right smack in the middle. As far as I could tell, he was having no trouble adjusting to his new digs.

  Satisfied that he was settled in, I trotted back down to the veterinary conference, anxious to squeeze in the session on obesity in cats and dogs.

  I was genuinely interested in the topic, and I really did try to concentrate on the speaker. I wasn’t surprised that he started out by saying an estimated twenty-five to thirty percent of dogs are obese, as are a whopping forty percent of cats. Obesity was a problem I’d been seeing more and more in my own practice, the result of pets getting too much food and not enough exercise. And its negative effects ranged from hyper-tension to diabetes to locomotion ailments like spinal problems and hip dysplasia.

  But I found it difficult to focus on the talk. Instead, I chewed my complimentary plastic pen, which was printed with the name of a popular flea collar, and ruminated about Marnie Burton.

  All the bits and pieces of information I’d picked up about the young reporter and the people who knew her kept whirling around inside my head like bits of confetti on a windy day. The more I learned about other people’s perceptions of her, the more convinced I was that her murder had been the result of something more than a chance encounter with a stranger in a bar, no matter what Detective Paleka chose to believe.

  Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility that Ace had been the person Marnie had last been seen with, coming out of the Purple Mango.

  As far as I was concerned, Ace Atwood remained a bit of a puzzle. I understood why he was reluctant to admit to their relationship now, since it was bound to place him high on the cops’ list of suspects. But I still hadn’t figured out why he would he have acted so oddly before her murder. Holly had told me herself that just a few weeks earlier, he’d acted as if he barely knew Marnie, even though Marnie had specifically invited her along to show him off to her. Then there was Marnie’s comment about Ace’s preference for quiet, out-of-the-way places. That was another peculiar behavior that indicated he was being secretive about their relationship.

  But in addition, there were so many other aspects of the victim’s life that raised questions. Like her job. Just about everyone I spoke to who had dealt with her in her capacity as a newspaper reporter seemed put off by her intensity. Bryce Bolt had characterized her as “wacky.” He’d also accused her of kissing up to their boss. He was clearly disdainful of her. Yet that was hardly a reason to kill a fellow employee.

  The same went for Holly Gruen, Bryce’s predecessor. From what I’d heard and seen, her relationship with Marnie had been complicated, at least from her end. Aside from that, she was shrouded in mystery herself—especially when it came to why she had left the paper, an unexpected move that had forced her to live on th
e edge financially. She didn’t impress me as someone who was impulsive, yet for some reason she had suddenly decided that the situation at the Dispatch was intolerable. Still, the fact that she had behaved a little oddly, and maybe even been mildly obsessed with Marnie, didn’t mean she had killed her.

  The newspaper’s editor, Richard Carrera, saw Marnie Burton’s driven approach to her job as a plus. Yet even he seemed surprised by how extreme her dogged determination was. But there was something else about our conversation that stuck with me: his strange reaction when I’d mentioned the tape. He claimed to know nothing about it, yet his eagerness to hear what I knew led me to conclude he was lying.

  And those were the people who had worked with her. What about the people on the other side of the table—the people she wrote about? Marnie’s coworkers in the newsroom had characterized her as someone who always had her eye out for scandal—and who, as a result, tended to see it in even the most unlikely places. It made sense that this inclination of hers would make her a lot of enemies. They may have even included Alice Feeley, who, it turned out, had been linked to Marnie even before she found her body on the beach.

  That thought led me to the other work-related notes I’d found at her apartment—specifically, the stack of file folders. Marnie had been poking her nose into all kinds of nooks and crannies. One of the crannies had obviously been FloraTech. At the governor’s press conference, I’d seen for myself that it was a topic that really riled her. For all I knew, John Irwin, the governor’s aide, had gotten tired of her buzzing around his head like an annoying mosquito that needed to be swatted….

  Now you’re really going off the deep end, I told myself.

  Glancing down at my notepad, I saw that I’d made a list of every one of the people I’d spoken to so far. Ace Atwood, Bryce Bolt, Holly Gruen, Richard Carrera, John Irwin. For all I knew, any one of them could have killed Marnie. And any one of them could have broken into my hotel room to steal the tape she’d left behind.