A Gift for Murder

by Capri Montgomery

  Megan sat down on one of the oak wood chairs softened by a navy blue cushy seat pillow. Symphony sat with her back to the front door, slanted a smidge across from her in the only other chair currently in the main café room.

  Megan was not expecting a visitor while she swept the dust off the floor and out the open door. But Symphony did not excuse herself for barging into someone else’s property. Of course, Megan was curious as to why the dutiful brunet sat in front of her with brown eyes wide and staring her over as if she was expecting her to find her innocent of something. Her curiosity did not offer her the idea to kick the women out of her café. Megan took a shallow breath to assuage her frustration. She felt the need of putting on Uninvited by Alanis Morissette because that is what she thought in the purest you shouldn’t be here now kind of way.

  The café would not be open for probably at least two, or three weeks, at the way setting up and getting approval to open was working out. She was not stressing over setting up because she was ready. She wasn’t in a hurry because she was still waiting on all of the city codes to be sorted out as being correctly done. And while she knew that curiosity killed the cat, even though the cat had nine lives she knew she was not a cat so curiosity could end the only life she had. She was still curious. She wanted to know something about the murder.

  “I really do not understand why some cops just assume the worst of everybody.” Symphony had a hint of anger in her tone. Symphony probably thought it was her fault since the detectives spent more time with her than he did with anybody else, before he started with everybody else. Megan could read between the lines just fine.

  “I really cannot tell you; honestly, he talked with me like he did everybody else. I don’t even know who the man was that got killed.” Of course she had seen the body structure with the body supine and one arm slightly elevated. The body’s position was discernable only because the top part of the cover, for some strange reason, fell open. That really did not make sense because she always thought that the bodies went into just a bag. She realized that fiction and reality were not the same and every country, every state, every city and every law went in the direction ordered, not in the way the outside viewer wanted to see it done.

  “The man murdered was just a janitor. His name was Sterling Russet. It hurts that he’s dead. I wasn’t his girl, not now anyway. It’s just… I once upon a time dated him. That doesn’t mean that I killed him because he was cheating with his boss.”

  Megan processed Symphony’s words. To think Heather Bishop, the owner of the spa was sleeping with the janitor was questionable. Heather liked men with money over broke men. It was said that she was always out at the charity events trying to meet powerful and wealthy men. Megan only knew about that because whenever she went grocery shopping somebody was always talking about Ms. Bishop, the woman who was married twice, made her money off the divorce settlement in one of her husband’s settlement and off her dead husband’s insurance in the other one. It seemed the dead husband never changed his insurance policy to cut Heather out as the primary beneficiary, at least not on time anyway.

  “That detective is nicer to you; we all see that. What’s up with that?”

  “He seems normal to me so I really do not know what is going on for you. But I think if you answer the questions that the detective puts to you that you will be able to clear yourself of any doubts to your not guilty factor.”

  Symphony rolled her eyes in contempt. “I answered all of their questions. What questions did you answer?” The terse tone of her voice told Megan and this one and was looking for an argument. The woman was tiny by way of height standing no more than four feet and eleven inches. She was very rough in the sound of her voice. With big sloping breasts and hands that look as if they could rip away flesh in any fight if she got angry enough. Megan shook her head of the woman and held up her hand palm facing Symphony trying to stay the woman’s temper. She was happy that her front door was still wide open.

  “I answered the questions asked as did everybody else. I would imagine that Regal Detective Holmes asked everybody important questions to solve the crime, and if you felt as if he was looking at you because you used to date the man, and broke up with him, or he broke up with you, for another woman, then I can understand why he’s looking at you harder. I do not have any information on the murder, when it happened, how it happened, and why happened so those are questions I can’t even answer for myself. If you have questions as to why you were asked certain questions that, too, is not my place to answer. If you have questions ask the detective. Now, if you would please leave now; I need to finish my work.”

  Symphony squinted her eyes at Megan as if she was looking for another argument to throw at her. The battle axe in front of her couldn’t win a fight with her no matter how much she thought she could. Megan had spent the majority of her life having to defend herself from people who were vicious to her just because of the skills and talents that she had, even when she wasn’t trying to make people realize what she was capable of doing. Honestly, there were a lot of things that she was able to do that she wished nobody knew she could.

  “You should just go and get back to your job, whatever it is you do, and if you have a problem with how the detective is handling the investigation, you should ask him to listen to you and explain to you. I must get back with my work. Leave.”

  Symphony rolled her eyes at her again as she clacked her tongue against her teeth. The anger in her eyes told Megan that this woman had some problems, a lot more than just the fact that the detective was asking her questions she did not wish to answer. It is not as if she could tell the detective what to ask. She wasn’t his partner or his boss. She couldn’t tell him what to check into on the other women who were in the spa at the time of the murder. He had already said once that he didn’t need her help as this is his job. It was her understanding that Detective Holmes did not ask for anybody’s help. He was the Lone Ranger on this. He did not have a partner next to him and he was clearly capable of gaining enough respect from officers to have them follow his lead.

  “I don’t have to leave here! You can’t make me leave here.”

  Megan was getting ready to tell the woman off for her rudeness and her lack of ability to understand the law. Her café was not even yet open for people who weren’t there to clean or just there to run the café or to actually help work on the café. She had every right in the world to kick somebody out of her private place right now.

  She was getting ready to actually get into the law side of the equation to let Symphony know that she had every right to ask her to leave, and if she did not leave she would call the police to the café so they could drag her out of her café, but she did not have to open her mouth. A more protective and definitely more authoritative voice broke the staunch smell of hostility in the room.

  “She has a right to ask you to leave, and she has asked you to leave. Now you need to leave. If you do not leave I will have you arrested and taken out of here.”

  Detective Holmes held his shoulders firmly back with every level of authority effortlessly flowing over them. Megan did not know what he was doing there but she was not going to complain that he was.

  She watched as Symphony picked up her bag and tossed a look over to her as if telling her she would be sorry for this before she walked out the open door. Merck took hold of the platinum steel door handle, closing the door tight and turning the lock on the door; that told Megan he was not leaving anytime soon.

  “What was that about?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I had the door open to sweep the dirt and box dust out of here. She walked in and stayed put so since I needed to sit I had to get her a chair hoping she wouldn’t be so comfortable and be ready to go. I kept the wooden chair with the pillow for me but she just sat down and didn‘t seem to want to leave. I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

  He nodded. “She’s mad with you. How long have you known her?”

  Megan shook her head. “Actually I don’
t know her. She’s mad at you and the way you questioned her. She seems to think I can tell you to back off or something.”

  Merck eyed her up and down before his eyes reconnected with hers. “So she thinks you and I are a couple?”

  “Is that what you were trying to make her think?” Given the way Symphony was talking to her about Merck as if she was the woman to make him stop looking at her as a suspect it would seem the female in topic did think she and he might be friends, or closer than that.

  “Nah; but I don’t care if she and everybody else thinks we are. Smart man, beautiful woman…sounds good to me.”

  “Hey.” Megan glared at him. “You are not the only smart one here.”

  He laughed loud and hard. When he settled his laughing streak he reclaimed being serious.

  “Actually your smarts are what brought me here. I need to know what the women said to you while you were all sitting in the back room together. Or more like what did they say to each other, and how they were responding with each other.”

  Megan nodded and smiled at him softly. “I can tell you that nobody really talked to me or each other really. Other than a brief moment when some did say something to somebody else; they were complaining about something. Though what I did notice is that none of them really seem to like each other very much. Usually if you put so many women in a room together somebody’s going to sit with somebody else and dish everything in the world to them. In a spa you would think they’d at least talk about the treatments they loved and would do again. Maybe they would not talk about everything in the world but I would think they would find something other than silence. I have never spent time in a hair salon but I have heard that they were watching soaps or dishing with each other across the room. The spa isn’t a hair salon but I guess I just thought…maybe it would be a little friendlier. I didn’t see friendly there before the murder victim was noticed and the coops were called. What I did hear from one of the ladies who worked there was that Heather Bishop had been cranky and it had been hard on them this week because apparently, while they were not expecting a new shipment, they were expecting the typical inspectors any business like this had to sit through. From my understanding from my trying to get my café, Sweet Sensations, ready the come whenever they want, however they want, and they look at everything that is within the place. For me it would be a café but for her it’s a spa so same thing of inspectors snooping around to keep patrons physically safe was on the horizon for the spa. That means somebody was going to have to go down to the basement and look at everything they’re holding, especially things that people buy in the spa, or have used on them in whatever treatments they came in there for. It’s about having safety not just for the workers, but for the customers too. They would need to focus on anything anybody could possibly interact with. So I’m thinking as they moved the body from the freezer, and it had to be the big freezer down in the bottom basement room, because they kept talking about the big freezer and some food that had to be brought, and how the frozen fruit would fit there. Anyway, they, whoever did the murder and the move of the body had to move the body because they couldn’t leave the body in the freezer. What does not make sense to me is why the steam room? That room would still be bad for keeping the business open. Have customer walk into steam room for their fifteen to thirty minutes one morning and they couldn’t miss the dead body on one of the benches.”

  “Bench,” Merck nodded at her. “There was only one bench in there. If one of the women went in with him reclining on it they would have to sit on top of the dead body if they wanted to stay in there.”

  Megan twisted her lips to the left. Merck enlightened her to the makeup of the steam room in the spa. The room was smaller than she thought it might be.

  “I think that it would be worse if the body was found in the freezer as the inspector, whenever he or she came, would inspect everything, including the freezer. I would imagine that having the dead body in the steam room could actually come up as something off a little less murder oriented. It could be that they could say he wasn’t supposed to be in there, he was on medicine or something, and should not have been in the hot room all by himself. That would not make the spa owner responsible. That excuse may not have hurt Heather and she may have more of the possibility of getting a clear review of her staff too. On the other end of that, the problem comes more to the fact that if someone finds out from the medical examiner that he was knocked out with chloroform and then pushed down in the freezer points a lot of fingers. Somebody didn’t have to hold a cloth over the man’s nose with it on there. A large enough dose in something they had him drink could knock him out. Push body in freezer, close it and go. And of course, removing his clothes had to be done because he was dead and naked the steam room.” Merck shrugged.

  Megan nodded her understanding of how it could happen but that also meant whoever did this could be super strong, super smart or two rolled into one crime. It also meant somebody who had access to the spa could have been a patron or a worker. Taking the man’s clothes off could have been done after the body was moved, or before the man was killed.

  “I think we need to do another search of the spa, the garbage cans behind it and in it anywhere because if somebody took the man’s clothes off they would have to store the clothes somewhere and I don’t think that the murderer would take the clothes home with her because they would know as they were going to be a suspect. Whoever did this had to know they would be searched. They wouldn’t want to risk taking evidence home. If they did take it home looking like a suspect would turn into looking guilty of murder. Also, there is a woman there named Willa Heist who is a nurse at the small clinic and the drug used to knock Sterling out could have come from there.”

  “I do know that the woman sitting right next to the woman on the other side of me was talking about the fact that she loved that man and she couldn’t believe he was dead. I’m sure neither one of them knew that I could hear them but I could hear them. The women right next to me on the right was Symphony Frost, on the right of her was Linda Pixer and the woman on the other side of her, I know her specifically as Georgia Schaefer. I know of her because she, like most of the women there at that spa, thought that they were better than everybody even if they weren’t. When I saw her at the market one day she told me that she was the best option for any man that was still single, visual and in need of a woman. I got the feeling that she was afraid that somebody was going to be interested in me that she would want, but now I’m thinking maybe she was that nasty to me because she found out that I won the prize to come to the spa and so she was trying to tell me the ‘don’t flirt with my man’ command. She must have thought I magically knew about her and Sterling and that the two of them were together. I didn’t know. But from her words I was able to figure out that they were together. And I can definitely say I’m not interested in dating anybody in that spa, so she didn’t have to worry about me. Maybe she should have worried more about the other ladies.” Megan could always tell when a woman was trying to stake her claim on a man she, herself, didn’t want. She had seen a lot over the years. She had seen how they would shun the single woman but friend the married woman, and how messy they would be to the single woman and how respectful they could be to the married women. She would hate to break it to them; it was clear nobody wanted their man except for themselves, their best friend and in some cases their sister. She had seen it done when best friends slept with best friend’s husband even when both were married to a man already. Or the sister of the woman decided she should’ve been married to a man so she decided to sleep with her sister’s husband even though she had a husband and family of her own. The prejudice ranting was crazy.

  Megan was more of a homebody and she was not a socializing woman. She really didn’t care if people avoided her simply because she was not married and she was single on top of that. People seemed to want to think that every woman in the world must want their man just because they wanted him.

  Merck leaned forward a
nd looked deeply into her eyes. “You are a beautiful woman so I know women that see you can think that you can outsmart their ability to catch a man. Don’t take it too badly, because your beauty is a good thing. Your brain is definitely a good thing. If women are jealous of you they don’t count. Don’t worry if they stay away from you. You are better off without them. Let them sulk away worrying about you having everything naturally a real man would want to win, claim and keep on the forever. Le them stress themselves into the grave trying to make sure they can keep the man they are with stuck on only them.”

  Megan tossed up her hands and shook her head. In some way she knew she was fretting about stupid people’s words and actions but something since this murder had knocked her back to childhood bully hell.

  “I don’t want their boyfriends or their husbands. I don’t need to get anything from them and I do not need to give anything to them. It may sound weird but I really prefer being away from all the drama. And honestly after everything over all of these years I really like being alone. I am fascinated, though that they are so nasty and then want my help to solve the murder or talk you out of asking them questions. Somebody steal your cat, your purse, your car or somebody killed somebody in your area I don’t want to have to spend the rest of my life sorting that stuff out.” she shook her head. “I think I’ll always have to solve all of that stuff. No matter how much I wish I just didn’t recognize things or understand things, I always do. I do not want to solve this murder, Merck. You do not have to hate me because you think that that is what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to solve the case. I really don’t want to do it.”

  Merck smiled at her and shook his head at her at the same time. “I know you don’t want to solve this crime. I know that the history of you in everything in Forest Springs and it tells me you’re not going to stop until you actually solve it. You just can’t help yourself no matter how much you wish you could. I am not holding out against you. I promise I am not holding out against you. But I am telling you this, stay out of this case to stay safe. How he died really was by way of a premeditated angry kill. No weapon in sight. I’m going to have figure out exactly where, when, and whose hands facilitated it. He could have been killed elsewhere in the spa and tossed in the freezer for time to sort out what to do next. You already knew that, though. Who had the drug that knocked him out? Where did they get it, and when did they get it? Right now, everything that I’m seeing it could be any of them. So I’m worried about you because I do not need you to get yourself killed solving the crime you were not asked to solve in the first place. Anything happens, anything goes wrong, or anything scares you, call me.” He snuck his card into the pocket on her top and then patted it to let her know that he was serious that she should call him if her brain was telling her to go in one direction that way he could meet her in that direction, and they could solve this crime together. You would stay alive and unharmed that way.”