Murder from Scratch

by Leslie Karst

  Marta was the director of the chorus Eric sang with, which I had joined the previous summer as an alto. She and I had bonded over our love of cycling, and even though I no longer sang with the chorus, we still rode together several times a month. It was always a good workout, as Marta—a dynamo of a gal from Naples—was fiercely competitive, which tended to bring out the same quality in me.

  “Look out the window, cara mia. It is a glorious day for the ciclismo!”

  I wasn’t eager to leave the confines of my warm bed, but curiosity won out, so I crossed to the window and peeked through the curtains. She was right, as I’d known she would be. Marta was always right. Although the forecast had been for a big storm to roll in today, I was greeted by an electric-blue sky dotted with cotton ball clouds, and had to shade my still-dilated pupils from the bright sunlight streaming into the room.

  I dropped the curtains back into place. Maybe an invigorating ride would help chase away thoughts of Rachel and Max, whose faces continued to haunt my thoughts even this morning. “Okay,” I said. “I’m game. What’s the plan?”

  “Eight thirty, at the clock tower on Mission. We can head up to the university.”

  “Sounds good, but make it nine. I need some caffeine first.”

  * * *

  Bombing back down High Street after our ride up to the UCSC campus, Marta and I took the middle of the pavement to prevent any cars from attempting a dangerous pass on the narrow road, then slowed for the right onto Storey. Three minutes later we were back where we’d started, under the Town Clock that stands as guardian at the top of the Pacific Garden Mall.

  “Good workout,” Marta said, pulling her phone from the pocket of her cycling jersey to check our time on Strava. “Over two minutes faster than last time.” She enlarged the map with her fingers, nodding. “I thought so. We improved along the road at the top, coming up to Science Hill. But I am sure next time we can cut even more time off the climb, yes?”

  “Right.” I was still catching my breath from the hair-raising descent, where I’d done my best to keep up with the fearless Napolitana careening full-throttle down the hill, fingers not even touching her brake levers. “Maybe if I have about six more cups of coffee before we go, that could happen.”

  She slipped the phone back into her pocket and clipped into her right pedal. “I should go. I have to get home and call my mother before it’s too late in Italy. Perhaps later this week we can go riding again?”

  “Sure, weather permitting.”

  Marta sniffed. She considered my refusal to ride in the rain a serious character flaw. “You buy a bicycle that is named for the Paris-Roubaix,” she’d once chided me, referring to the famous one-day bike race nicknamed the “Hell of the North” due to the rough cobblestone roads and brutal weather that often accompany it. “Yet you will not ride your preciosa Roubaix if there is even the slight wetness outdoors,” she’d finished with a derisive shake of the head.

  Whatever. I went on bike rides not simply to stay in shape, but also for enjoyment. And slogging through puddles, dodging detritus in the gutter, and worrying about being hit by cars to due poor visibility was definitely not my kind of fun.

  After Marta took off for home, I pedaled leisurely down Pacific Avenue, taking advantage of the green “contraflow” bike lane that had been added a few years back. The shop- and restaurant-lined street was just coming to life, with vendors sweeping the sidewalk and setting out tables of sale merchandise to entice customers inside. Cruising by the alcove in front of an empty storefront, I waved at the Great Morgani, a local icon who—dressed in an outrageous black-and-white-striped costume from which at least fifty pointed cones protruded—was regaling the early-morning shoppers with his lively accordion music.

  My plan was to head home to finish up work on the Gauguin scheduling, but first I had to drop Jackie’s cell phone off at the police department. Carrying my bike up the cement stairs leading to the station, I wheeled it into the lobby and leaned it against the wall.

  “Uh, no bicycles allowed inside,” the woman at the reception window called out.

  No one else was in the lobby, so I was able to come straight up to speak with her without waiting in line. “I don’t have a lock, so I can’t leave it outside. But I’ll just be here a sec.”

  She frowned, but didn’t order me and my bike outside, so that was a small victory.

  “I just have something I need to drop off for Detective Vargas,” I said. I pulled Jackie’s cell phone from the back pocket of my cycling jersey and set it on the counter. “It’s the phone that belonged to Jackie Olivieri, the woman who was found dead in her home a couple weeks ago. He asked me and Jackie’s daughter to look for it, and we found it on, uh … the other day. But you were closed over the weekend, so I had to wait till today to bring it in. I don’t suppose he’s in right now.”

  “No, he’s not.” She eyed the phone for a moment, then picked up a pen to maneuver it into a plastic evidence bag.

  “It was buried under the cushions of Jackie’s sofa,” I said in an attempt to justify not having protected the device from contamination. “I’m sure she just lost it there, so I doubt it had any useful fingerprints or anything on it.”

  The woman ignored my remark as she wrote something on a sticker and affixed it to the bag.

  “Oh, and you should write down the phone’s password for Detective Vargas. It’s Jean Arthur, no caps or spaces.” At her blank look, I wrote it down for her. “She was a movie star from the thirties and forties. And make sure he reads the last text, the one from Rachel, because I think it might be important.”

  She stopped writing to stare at me. Tampering with the evidence by using the phone, her expression said, as well as contaminating it? With a soft exhalation, she finished writing what I’d said, jotted down my name and phone number, and slipped the paper into the bag with the phone. “Anything else?” she asked.

  “No, that’s all. Thanks.”

  “No, thank you,” she said, finally cracking the hint of a smile. “But next time bring a bike lock.”

  * * *

  Evelyn was at the stove when I got home, stirring a pan of scrambled eggs with a wooden spoon. “Late night last night?” I asked, setting my helmet on the Formica kitchen table.

  “Yeah. I didn’t fall asleep till about three, I think. But I only just woke up, so it’s all good. I got plenty of sleep.”

  She touched the eggs to gauge their doneness, then turned off the burner and scraped them onto the plate she’d set out on the counter. At the sound of her toast popping up, she buttered the two slices and brought her breakfast to the table. “How was your ride?” she asked.

  “Good.” I pulled off my cycling shoes, which must have been making quite the racket. “But that Marta is a demon. She says she prefers riding with women because they’re less competitive, but I sometimes think it’s really because she has a better chance of beating me up the hills than she would with a guy.”

  I padded across the linoleum floor, poured myself coffee from the pot Evelyn had brewed, and took the cup to the fridge. “I was wondering if you might want to hang out tonight,” I said. “Since Gauguin’s closed, I thought maybe we could get a pizza delivered and watch a movie, as a sort of pre-birthday celebration.”

  “Oh, that’s super sweet,” Evelyn said with a smile. “But I actually already have plans for tonight with Molly and Anne, since they can’t come tomorrow. It’ll just be me and Lucy for my real birthday dinner at Gauguin.”

  “That’s okay. It’s good you’ll get to hang out with them tonight, then. And I could probably use an evening off, anyway. I’ve been going gangbusters the past few nights and I’m pretty beat.” I poured a glug of half-and-half into my cup, then pulled out a chair to join Evelyn at the table, taking care not to bonk Buster on the nose. “I think I’ll just stay in and watch something on Netflix. And maybe go ahead and order that pizza all for myself. One with linguica sausage. And extra cheese.”

  “Now you’re making
me wish I could stay home with you,” Evelyn said with a laugh. I took a sip of coffee and then, noticing I still had on my cycling gloves, peeled them off and tossed them into my helmet. “So I need to tell you what I found out last night.”

  “You got into Max’s house?” Evelyn set down the egg-laden fork she’d just raised to her lips.

  “I did. And your Mom’s laptop was in fact there.”

  “Ohmygod.” She blinked a few times, then shook her head.

  “And not only that,” I went on, “but there was a file on the computer desktop with photos proving Max had been voiding tickets at Tamarind. So we now know that not only did your mom have the dirt on him, but she was keeping proof of it. He must have known about the photos, which was why he was so desperate to get her laptop.”

  “So that’s it, then,” Evelyn said softly. “He’s the one who did it. To keep her from blabbing.”

  “Maybe. But there’s also that text Rachel sent to your mom that night, asking to see her. Which potentially places Rachel at the house the night she died.”

  “You’re right. It could be either of them.” Evelyn slumped over her half-eaten eggs. “So we’re back to square one.”

  “Well, I’d say we’ve gotten to at least square two, having narrowed it down to Max and Rachel. Oh, and I dropped your mom’s phone off at the police station just now, so maybe after Detective Vargas sees that text from Rachel he’ll finally believe us about the murder and do some real investigating of his own.”

  “Did you give them her computer, too?” Evelyn asked.

  “No. I left it at Max’s house.”

  “Really? But—”

  “I don’t see that I had much of a choice,” I interrupted, perhaps a bit too impatiently. “It was totally illegal what I did, breaking into his house like that. So first of all, no way do I want to get arrested for criminal trespass, and second, the evidence would probably be inadmissible in any case if they confiscated it based on my actions.”

  “Right.” Evelyn frowned and pushed her plate to the center of the table. “But we can’t just sit around and do nothing. One of those two murdered Mom, I’m sure of it.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And I sure don’t relish the idea of waiting to see which one acts again first, since whoever did it likely knows we’re on to them.”

  Chapter 25

  Maria Callas was feigning a lightheartedness and nonchalance she did not feel. Or rather her character, Violetta, was. The Violetta for whom my Aunt Letta had been named and who, like my aunt, ended up in her grave far too young.

  I was stretched out on the sofa listening to La Traviata, and Callas’s fluid coloratura, as she sang of the pleasures of being free from love, struck me as simultaneously exultant and sad:

  Sempre libera degg’io

  Folleggiare di gioia in gioia …

  “Ever free and aimless, I frolic from joy to joy,” Verdi’s famed courtesan insisted to the world. But it was a facade. What Violetta truly craved was the simplicity and consistency of one steadfast love—that of the provincial, bourgeois Alfredo.

  And I could relate. Not to the bit about wanting a provincial lover, but to the part about lying to yourself. Or at least not knowing your desires as well as you’d thought you did. And now I had only myself to blame for spending the evening alone, ordering out for lukewarm pizza and listening to tragic heroines sing of passion and despair.

  I’d put on the opera CD and poured myself a bourbon-rocks in the hopes of dispelling both my melancholy at the thought of Eric and Gayle spending “our” night together and my frustration at having finally narrowed the list of Jackie’s possible killers down to two, only to hit a dead end.

  But it wasn’t working on either count.

  The storm had finally arrived late this afternoon, and each time a tree branch knocked against the living room windows, I jumped, my thoughts returning to Max and Rachel. One of those two had killed Jackie and later attacked me, I was now sure. And whichever one it was would no doubt be eager to finish the job once they suspected I was truly on to them.

  The CD came to an end, and I abandoned the comfort of the couch to slip in disk two and refresh my glass. Maybe having another drink would allow me to wallow in a pool of good, old-fashioned self-pity about Eric and at least temporarily forget my fears of being the killer’s victim number two. I would then eat my pizza, watch a few episodes of Chef’s Table, and collapse into bed by nine o’clock.

  As I was dropping a trio of ice cubes into the glass, my cell buzzed from the kitchen table. I was in no mood for conversation but walked over to see who it might be. M VARGAS, the screen read.

  Grabbing the phone, I swiped right to pick up the call. “Detective Vargas.”

  “Hi, Sally,” he replied. “And yes, it’s Martin.”

  “Right. Martin. Sorry. It may take a while to get used to that. But isn’t it a little late for you to be working? It’s after six.”

  “No rest for those of us fighting the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Uh-huh, that’s how I always think of you. As the Man of Steel—minus the steel, that is.” I poured a large splash of bourbon over my rocks and took a drink. “I gather you got the cell phone I dropped off?”

  “I did. So where’d you find it?”

  “Evelyn found it. Under the cushions of the living room sofa.”

  I heard him sigh, no doubt in part at the thought of us having contaminated the evidence by handling it. But he was also likely frustrated that his people hadn’t found the phone when it had been in such an obvious spot.

  “It was hidden down there pretty deep,” I said in their defense, and by way of distracting him from the other issue. “The only reason Evelyn found it was because of her own superpowers. You know, of heightened touch.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, we figured it must have fallen out of her mom’s back pocket or something and slipped down there the night she died.” I cleared my throat. “So, uh, what did you think of that text from Rachel? You gonna talk to her?”

  “I already did, and she has an alibi for the night Jackie died. She was at the rehearsal of her girlfriend’s band until eleven, and then the four of them went out for drinks till well after midnight. I spoke with the members of the band, and her story checks out.”

  “Ah, that’s good,” I said. Though in truth, I was a little disappointed, as I’d wanted it to be Rachel. Which was unfair, since this was based largely on the cook’s surly behavior toward me—not the best reason to suspect her of murder.

  “When I asked why she’d sent that text,” Vargas was going on, “she told me that even though she was still angry at Jackie—who apparently had fired her from The Curry Leaf—she wanted to give her a heads-up that she was going to be opening her own place, using some of the recipes the two of them had developed together.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that makes sense. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “No problem,” he replied. “But there’s actually another reason I’m calling. The lab report came in this afternoon for that substance you found on the bathroom counter.”

  “That Evelyn found, you mean.”

  “Noted. Anyway, the results are pretty interesting. It came back positive for Ambien and Percocet—”

  “Like the bottles found next to her body,” I cut in. “But why would there have been powder of those on the counter? They were in pill form.”

  “Good question,” Vargas said. “But an even better one is, why would there also be cocaine mixed in with the other two? Because the lab results came back positive for that as well, which is what I suspected all the powder would be.”

  “Whoa. That’s weird.”

  “Maybe not. I’m thinking it actually supports our finding of suicide, that Jackie Olivieri simply took all the drugs she had available to her to, you know, do it.”

  “I don’t know …” I thought a moment. “But what about that note using Evelyn’s ful
l name, when her mom never called her that?”

  “Who can say? Maybe being as out of it as she was, she just wrote the full name without thinking.”

  But knowing what I did, I wasn’t convinced. Should I tell him about Jackie’s computer being at Max’s house? It was absolutely the right thing to do, even if it would get me in a load of hot water. But maybe there was another way to get him interested in Max.

  “I found out something else that might be important to the case,” I said. “Al, the owner of Tamarind, told me he just learned his dining room manager, Max, has been embezzling from the restaurant by voiding checks and pocketing the money.”

  “I’m not sure exactly how that would relate to Jackie’s death,” Vargas said.

  “It’s relevant because if Jackie knew about it and threatened to tell Al, it would provide a strong motive for Max to want her dead.”

  “If she knew,” he repeated. “But we don’t know that, do we?”

  I chose not to answer this rhetorical question, on the grounds that it could incriminate me. “Well, couldn’t you get a warrant to search his house based on his theft?” I asked instead.

  The detective snorted. “Doubtful,” he said. “But I will talk to the Tamarind owner and see what evidence he has that this Max character has been stealing from the restaurant. In the meantime, I want a promise from you not to try and do something stupid like going over to Max’s house yourself.”

  “How could you possibly think that of me?” I asked with a laugh.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “No snooping around there on your own. I don’t want you fouling up our investigation, and I don’t want to see you end up in the ER again, either, like last time.”

  “That so was not my fault!”

  “Uh-huh.” He made no attempt to hide his sarcasm. “So you promise?”

  “Yessir. I promise.”

  “Good.”

  He ended the call, and I returned to the living room with my cocktail. Boisterous male voices were now booming from the speakers—the pack of matadors hired to entertain the party guests in act two—so I skipped the CD forward several tracks to something more sedate.