Pasta, Pinot & Murder

by Jamie Lee Scott

The shrimp smelled divine, so I nodded. It appeared this argument was over, but I wasn’t sure, so I braced myself. I sat the coffee cups on the counter, then pulled down two plates for the shrimp. I placed them next to the microwave and Peter doled out even portions onto the plates.

  “It’s going to be hard to concentrate on work tonight.” I picked up my plate and carried it to the dining room table.

  Peter followed behind me. “Then save it for tomorrow. Take a Xanax and go to bed.”

  We sat quietly, stirring the pasta on spoons and stuffing our faces. We were about halfway through the shrimp when I said to Peter, “You know the police haven’t been able to contact Bruce.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “The sheriff called Hattie to see if she had Paula’s number. Apparently she’s not listed.”

  “Did she have it?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t in a state to respond, so I looked it up in her phone and gave it to him. I knew it was in there because I added all of her contacts on her phone for her.” He sounded smug.

  “Please, your mother is one of the most tech savvy people I know. She’s up on all of the electronics. I doubt you put the contacts in her phone.”

  Peter put his fork down. “She wasn’t always so savvy, you know. Twenty years ago, I put the contacts in her phone, and told her she needed to get with the times.”

  “How long has Paula worked for Bruce?” I asked.

  He picked up his fork again and stuffed more pasta and shrimp in his mouth. He didn’t respond with words, just tilted his head, as if to say, “I don’t know.”

  “I hope this gets resolved fast. Tommy is coming home this weekend, and she doesn’t need this kind of turmoil and grief. She already wants to move back home. If she thinks there’s any problems, she’ll find an excuse.” Tommy had a gorgeous dorm room at UC Davis, and lots of friends, but she came home every weekend. And every weekend, she looked for an excuse not to go back.

  “That’s true. Hopefully, we can resolve this before she comes home. But she’s got to learn to live on her own. She was self-sufficient growing up, but maybe because she was at the winery so much, she wasn’t as independent as we thought she was.”

  We thought we’d done everything right with Tommy. She was an honors student, participated in three sports, and worked at the winery from the time she was fourteen. By the time she was six years old, she could already work in the kitchen at home and did the dishes every night after dinner, not to mention she had her weekly chores. But she never was one to go to slumber parties. When she was younger, she tried a few times, but always ended up crying and coming home before the end of the night.

  I remembered driving those horrible curving roads at eleven o’clock at night with tears in my eyes, because my little girl had called me crying.

  “Remember how she’d get homesick and couldn’t even attend slumber parties?” I asked.

  Peter smiled. I reached across the table and wiped some butter from his chin.

  He swallowed. “She’s a big girl now. She can spend the night away from home.”

  We’d had this conversation so many times that it made me tired. I changed the subject back to Alice. “Do you know if she had a surveillance company?”

  “What you mean surveillance?”

  “Like a security company. Did she have a security company watching the house?”

  Peter nodded his head as he finished the food in his mouth. “She has that stupid sign at the end of the driveway. The one that says the house is protected by security. But it’s not. They have that system at the gate, and they have a few cameras around the property, but it’s all internal. If the house gets broken into, there aren’t any police coming.”

  “Really?”

  “Seriously, you’re surprised? This is Alice were talking about. I can remember her saying, ‘What good does it do to have a surveillance company when they’ll never get out here before the criminals are gone? They could back a moving truck up to the house and load all of the furniture into it before the police would ever arrive.’”

  It made sense that Alice would feel this way. Even though she had more money than God, she was tight. She didn’t pay for services that were a waste of money. Many times over the years, I’d heard her tell Hattie to get rid of this service or that service, “It’s a waste of money,” she’d say.

  “So the sign is a fake, but the video is real?”

  “Yep,” Peter said as he picked up our plates and took them to the dishwasher.

  I stood and followed him into the kitchen, opened the fridge and grabbed the half-and-half for the coffee. I poured a generous amount in each cup, then filled them with fresh brewed coffee. “Sweetener or not?” I asked, knowing he drank his coffee a hundred different ways.

  Peter shook his head. I grabbed both cups and headed back into the dining room.

  “The sheriff said Alice’s office was ransacked. Do you think they may have been looking for the video?”

  Peter took a tentative sip of coffee. “That’s a possibility. But they won’t find it in the office.”

  “What you mean they won’t find it in the office?” I asked.

  “About five years ago, someone deliberately erased a video, so Alice put it somewhere that no one would look for it. There was something on that video that she desperately wanted, and was furious that it was gone. It was something to vindicate her, but I can’t remember what it was.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Interesting. “Then where is it?”

  “How the heck should I know?”

  Even more curious, I asked, “And what exactly did Alice need to be vindicated for?”

  Peter shrugged and smiled, saying nothing.

  If he wasn’t so darned handsome with two days of scruff on his face, I’d have been mad at him for holding out.

  Chapter Eight

  Peter and I had a second cup of coffee, then I decided not to work late into the night. It was a good thing, because at seven in the morning I heard a banging on my door. I jumped up out of bed and scurried to the door, still in my pajamas. I looked down at myself just before opening the door and wondered how scary I looked. I always put my hair in a ponytail at the top of my head when I slept, and in the mornings I looked as frazzled as if I put my finger in a light socket. My pajamas of choice the previous night had been a plain white button up shirt top and long blue pajama pants with bunnies on them. I opened the door to find Hattie standing on my porch. Suddenly I didn’t care what I look like. She’d seen me at my worst, many times.

  Clad in yoga pants, a zip up hoodie, and wearing sunglasses, Hattie pushed her way into my kitchen.

  “Coffee and cheese biscuits, please,” Hattie said. “I brought the biscuits, you just make the coffee.” She lifted a box with the logo from her bed-and-breakfast on it.

  Not that she had to lift the box. I smelled the divine biscuits when she walked in the door.

  I followed Hattie into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. As I measured out the coffee grounds, I said, “What’s with the sunglasses?” Even though I knew.

  It took everything in me not to snicker out loud. And at the same time, I pitied her employees. I knew she had a meeting with her vineyard foreman, and he was a bear to begin with. Now, consider putting two rank bears together in the same room, and one had a hangover. I’d stay as far from the winery as possible.

  Hattie slipped the sunglasses partway down her nose, and I realized it wasn’t just the hangover that had her covering her eyes. Both eyes looked as if she’d been stung by a bee and were swollen nearly shut. She’d been crying last night. In all probability, she’d cried most of the evening after finding out about Alice. I wondered if she’d cried quite a bit more right before going to bed. That’s what my eyes looked like when I’d cried hard and then went to bed. Lying on the bed wasn’t good for the circulation.

  “How’s your head feel?”

  Hattie whispered, “Do you have to talk so loud?” By
the movement of her one eyebrow, I think she tried to wink. But it was hard to tell. She pushed her sunglasses back up on her nose.

  “In the future, if you plan to drink like that, make sure you take two aspirin, two vitamin B complex or B12, and a full bottle of water before you go to bed.”

  “Really? Because I get drunk so often?” Hattie snapped.

  This hangover was going to get the best of her.

  “Did John call you last night?”

  Hattie picked up her cell phone and looked at it. “I didn’t even think about that. I was asleep. My phone apparently blew up yesterday. I haven’t answered any of the messages or read the texts.”

  “Are you planning to?”

  She put her phone on the kitchen bar. “I haven’t decided. I’m seriously considering ignoring the text messages and deleting the voicemails. Unless they're from John. He might have questions relating to the investigation.”

  I didn’t think it was prudent to start my line of questioning with the argument that Hattie and Alice had had the previous day, so I asked, “Did Bruce and Alice have a good relationship?”

  Hattie picked her cell phone up and walked over to the table. She sat down, placing the phone in the pocket of her hoodie. “They were married for a long time. There were ups and downs. When you’re married that many years, sometimes you hate each other, sometimes you like each other, and sometimes you want to kill each other.”

  I knew Hattie liked her coffee black, so I poured half-and-half in my cup first, then poured the coffee and brought it over to the table. I walked back to the bar and grabbed the biscuits. Untying the box and opening the lid, I grabbed a biscuit and sat down.

  “Maybe saying they wanted to kill each other isn’t a good thing to mention to the cops if they come to question you.”

  Hattie’s face cracked into a slight grin. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “So, their marriage wasn’t any different than anyone else’s?” I asked, then took a bite of the fresh cheese biscuit.

  “Yeah, but lately Alice was acting weird. The fight we had? It was over the Whine and Roses benefit. She wanted to cancel it.”

  This took me by surprise. The Whine and Roses benefit was Alice’s pride and joy. I couldn’t believe she had wanted to cancel this year’s event.

  “Why?”

  Hattie sipped her coffee, but didn’t say anything. This was her way of telling me that it was none of my business.

  “Then why did you make me go to the meeting? Why did you put me through that?”

  “How the heck was I supposed to know she was going to be dead when you got there?” Hattie put her hand to her forehead.

  “Want some aspirin?”

  Hattie slowly shook her head.

  “I’m not talking about finding Alice dead. Why were you putting me through the aggravation of the meeting?”

  Hattie moved her sunglasses from her eyes to the top of her head. “I thought if you kept the appointment, she’d change her mind. I thought she’d get excited again.”

  “Why couldn’t you just let sleeping dogs lie? This benefit is a pain in the butt. Every year, I pray that you guys will decide to end it.”

  If Hattie’s eyes could have opened enough, she would’ve glared at me. “That benefit, pain in the butt or not, brings in a lot of money. There are children’s charities that depend on that money.” She sighed. “I know it’s a pain, but who knew it would grow in such a way? Now it’s got to be an ongoing thing, or people suffer.”

  “Then pass it on to someone else to run. Especially now…”

  I could see the hurt in her face, even through the swollen eyes. “I can’t.”

  “But now that Alice is gone, you can easily pass it to someone else.”

  I saw a hiccup that may have been Hattie trying not to cry. “No. Whine and Roses is all I have left of her. It will be her memorial. I can’t ever let it go.”

  This was an argument I was going to lose, so I decided to drop the subject. I hated seeing Hattie upset, and I knew this was going to hurt her heart for a very long time.

  “I need to talk to John and see when they’re going to release her…” she hesitated, “…body. I’ll help Bruce with all of the arrangements.” She wiped her eyes.

  “If you need anything, be sure to ask. I’ll be happy to help however I can.”

  She nodded and dabbed her eyes again.

  I wasn’t sure if this was the right time, but I wanted to confirm a few things about Alice’s estate. “Last night, Peter said that the sign Alice’s house for the security company was a fake. Is that true?”

  Hattie cracked a slight smile, one that came from memories. “That Alice, so like her. The sign was fake. They only have security at the vineyard and the winery.” A little snooty, she said, “They have actual security guards working there.”

  So did Hattie, so I wondered why she said it with such disdain. Then I thought maybe Alice had hired the security guards after Hattie had hired them for her businesses.

  “But the security camera at the gate and the one at front of the house, they work, right?” Not that I didn’t believe what Peter told me the night before, but he wasn’t around as much as he used to be. Maybe things had changed.

  “Sure, those cameras are real.”

  My watch buzzed on my arm, and I could see I had a message from Jacob. “Oh crap, I forgot to call Jacob last night.”

  Hattie cocked her head. “Who’s Jacob?”

  I stood and walked into the bedroom to grab my cell phone. I called over my shoulder, “You met him yesterday, he’s my new assistant.”

  I heard Hattie say, “Oh, the cutie.”

  I came back into the dining room, texting Jacob. I apologized for not contacting him the previous night, and let him know we could get started as soon as he arrived.

  He sent me a text back that said he could be at my studio in fifteen minutes.

  “I’ve got to get ready for work, Hattie. Do you want more coffee?”

  “I can get my own. I’m going to finish this, though, and probably be on my way. It’s going to be a long day. I tried to get a hold of Bruce last night, but he’s not answering his phone.”

  As if worlds had just collided, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, and I usually didn’t answer unknown numbers, but considering the situation, I did. On the other end of the line, was Bruce’s assistant, Paula.

  Her voice was oddly chipper when she told me she had the check ready for me.

  “I thought you said you didn’t want to bother Bruce,” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t have to. I found it in my notes and made sure the check was cut. It’s from an account that I sign on, so you’re good to go,” Paula said.

  I found it odd that she’d have it in her notes, but not have the check written. She’d worked for Bruce a long time, if I remembered correctly. It wouldn’t be like him to accept a subpar performance from his assistant. Her words didn’t ring true to me.

  “That’s great. Do you mind if I come over right now? I’m going to have a long day ahead of me, and I’d like to get this taken care of, considering the circumstances.”

  “Absolutely. I’m so sorry I didn’t have it for you yesterday.” I could almost taste the honey from her words. “I’ll be here all day. Until five or six, anyway.”

  I took a quick shower, and changed into black skinny jeans and a white T-shirt. Hattie had left by the time I got out of the shower. When I thought of her losing her best friend, my heart hurt. And as much as I joked about her hangover, I wished she didn’t have one. I’d have to scold Saylor for giving her those martinis. Peter hadn’t been harsh enough the night before. Of course, I thought he was too hard on her at the time, but seeing Hattie now made me side with him.

  Jacob was just closing his car door when I arrived at the studio. As I got out of my car, I saw Hattie drive past in the golf cart.

  Instead of leaving Jacob sitting there, because I wasn’t letting him in my studio alone just yet, I deci
ded I needed company for the drive into Pear.

  “Good morning. Get in the car; we’re going to drive into town real quick.”

  Jacob got in the car and we discussed the previous day’s business on the way into town.

  I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot and parked right by the door. “Want to go in with me? I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Thanks, I’m good,” he said and lowered the passenger seat back a bit.

  Really? A nap? Already? It wasn’t even nine yet.

  Paula was standing at her desk with the check in her hand when I entered the building. “I’m so sorry. I just heard about Alice.”

  She didn’t look all that sorry. But she did look frazzled.

  Her tone was definitely different from her tone on the phone.

  I took the check from her and asked, “When did you find out?”

  “The police were just here. I thought you sounded strange on the phone. I guess I didn’t notice because I was in such a good mood when I called you.” She couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with her hands.

  “I did think it was strange that you were so chipper. But then again, I had no idea whether the police had contacted you or not.”

  “Apparently, they weren’t able to reach me yesterday or last night. And no one has been able to get in touch with Bruce. I guess I forgot to tell you that he doesn’t take his cell phone with him when he takes these little trips. He has another cell phone that he takes, one that isn’t for business. I don’t think very many people have the number.”

  The look on my face must have said a lot, without me saying anything.

  “Oh, I know it sounds strange. But he doesn’t want to be bothered with business when he takes his vacations. Alice has the number, I think. If she hadn’t been the victim, she would’ve been able to get a hold of him.”

  “Would the number have been on her cell phone?” I asked before remembering the police hadn’t been able to find Alice’s phone.

  “I don’t know.” The snippiness in her voice wasn’t masked well. “I didn’t look through Alice’s cell phone. I didn’t work for Alice.”

  “How did you feel about Alice?” I asked. Her smug attitude had me thinking she didn’t much like her.