Death Bakes a Pecan Pie

by Livia J. Washburn

  “You’re going to attend?” Melissa asked.

  “Yes, I decided to go ahead and enter a pie in the contest. Just not a pecan pie.”

  “I’ll see you there, then, once I’m sure Julie’s all right.”

  “You’re coming to the festival?”

  “There’s no location shooting today,” Melissa said, “and I think it’d be a good idea if we took another look at the crime scene, don’t you, partner?”

  Chapter 18

  Sam drove his pickup again and took Ronnie with him, while Carolyn and Eve went with Phyllis in the Lincoln. The big car had enough room for all five of them, but it would have been more crowded.

  “I can’t believe I missed everything exciting this morning!” Ronnie had said before they left the house. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep in.”

  “We have enough trouble gettin’ you up for school,” Sam had told her. “Figured there wasn’t any point in fightin’ that battle on a Saturday, as long as you were up in time to go to the festival.”

  “I suppose I can’t argue with that. And you didn’t solve the case yet, right?” she asked Phyllis.

  “Far from it.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to miss that.” Ronnie snagged one of the remaining muffins as she went through the kitchen to leave with Sam.

  Now, as she drove toward the park, Phyllis said, “Ronnie thinks it’s just a given that I’m going to figure out who the killer is.”

  “Of course she does,” Carolyn said from the passenger seat. “You always do.”

  “One of these days there’s going to be a case that’s too tough for me to solve.”

  In the back seat, Eve said, “I doubt that. Since I missed the discussion, too, why don’t you tell me about it on the way over there? That might help you get your thoughts in order.”

  It couldn’t hurt, Phyllis knew, so as she battled the traffic on South Main to get to the park, she went through as much as she could remember about what had been said earlier in the living room.

  “I just don’t believe Jason or Deanne could be guilty of such a thing,” Eve said when Phyllis was finished.

  “Why?” Carolyn asked. “Because they’re writers?”

  “We tend to live vicariously.”

  Carolyn turned in the seat to look at her and said, “Ha! You’ve never experienced anything vicariously in your life, Eve Turner. You’ve always had to get right in there and go for it yourself.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but I think most writers, if they had a grudge against somebody, they’d just kill them off in a book or something. Or at least base an unflattering character on them.”

  Carolyn cocked an eyebrow. “Is that what you do?”

  Eve ignored that question and asked Phyllis, “Why would Jason or Deanne have a reason to want Lawrence Fremont dead?”

  “You saw the way he lit into them about the script yesterday,” Phyllis said. “He’s been doing that all along, hasn’t he?”

  “I suppose so, but would they kill him just because he criticized their work? If that was true, a lot of critics would be dead! Anyway, it was mostly Jason he was unhappy with, and Jason’s no murderer. You might as well accuse a . . . a sad little puppy!”

  “He is pretty pathetic,” Carolyn said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if his wife is cheating on him.”

  Phyllis said, “Teddy Demming was trying to comfort him yesterday.”

  “Who?” Carolyn asked.

  “That production assistant with the long dark hair and the Brooklyn accent.”

  “Oh, her,” Carolyn said. “I remember seeing her.”

  “You saw her with Jason, Phyllis?” Eve asked.

  “Just briefly. She seemed to be trying to cheer him up. It must not have worked, though, since he went off and got drunk.” Phyllis made the turn onto the road leading to the park. “And even if there is something going on between them, I can’t see any way that connects with Fremont’s murder.”

  “What about Fremont and Deanne Wilkes?” Carolyn asked Eve. “Could there be something between them?”

  “I’ve never heard anything about it if there is,” Eve said. “It’s possible, though.”

  “It’s Hollywood,” Carolyn said in a disgusted tone. “Until I see proof otherwise, I’m just going to assume that they’re all sleeping with each other.”

  Phyllis surveyed the parking situation ahead of her, which was considerably different today. The delay in getting here while she had talked with Julie, Melissa, and D’Angelo had given the festival time to get crowded.

  “I think we’re going to have to walk some,” she told her friends. Cars were already parked along both sides of the road.

  “I was afraid of that, so I wore good shoes for it,” Carolyn said.

  Phyllis found an empty spot and carefully maneuvered the Lincoln into it. One of these days she was going to have to get a new car, she told herself, one with all those new-fangled accessories like a back-up camera and parking assist . . . although she wasn’t sure she completely trusted such technology.

  They got out and started walking toward the park, with Eve carrying the spicy caramel apple pie. “Don’t let it out of your sight,” Carolyn warned her. “The killer could try to strike again. Maybe it was a lunatic who murdered Mr. Fremont. He could come back and try to take out the whole park today.”

  “I wouldn’t talk too much about that,” Phyllis cautioned. “You might cause a panic.”

  “A good panic comes in handy sometimes,” Carolyn said.

  With Carolyn being one of the festival’s organizers, they didn’t have to join the line of people with bags of canned food waiting to get in. Earlier in the week, Phyllis, Sam, and Carolyn had loaded the back of Sam’s pickup with cases of canned food and taken it to the food pantry, so they had more than done their part. Carolyn led them to a checkpoint where volunteers were admitted. Orange plastic fence had been stretched around the part to control the crowds, but there were several entrance points. Sam and Ronnie knew to come to this one when they arrived. They might, in fact, already be here.

  Tables were set up in front of the caretaker’s cottage for the entries in the pie contest. Phyllis added hers to the array of delicious-looking pies and filled out an entry form. The woman supervising everything wished her good luck and added, “The judging will be at two o’clock.”

  “We’ll be here,” Phyllis promised.

  As they walked away, Eve asked, “How many judges do they have?”

  “Three,” Carolyn replied. “A member of the city council, the director of the Chamber of Commerce, and somebody from the Lion’s Club, I’m not sure who.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of leftover pie, isn’t there? I mean, with all those different ones to taste, they can’t eat big slices. My goodness, I’d get so full I’d burst!”

  “After the contest, the pies will be sold, with the proceeds going to the food pantry,” Carolyn explained. “You knew that, didn’t you, Phyllis?”

  “Of course. I knew they’d be going to a fundraiser. The more money for the pantry, the better.”

  “There are Sam and Ronnie,” Eve said.

  The two of them were coming from the direction of the parking lot. Ronnie said something to Sam, then veered off along one of the other concrete paths. Phyllis knew the girl wanted to go around the festival and look for some of her friends.

  Sam joined them, grinned, and said, “Sort of a madhouse here today, isn’t it?”

  “There’s already a really good crowd,” Phyllis said, “and it’ll just get busier as the day goes on, I imagine.”

  The food vendors all had customers lined up. Potential buyers browsed through the arts and crafts displays where most of the items were also for sale. Children thronged the playground area. People were everywhere Phyllis looked, all the way down to the lake’s edge. The picnic areas on the far side of the water were packed as well. The smells of charcoal and roasting meat drifted across the lake. The noise level was high but not overpoweri
ng. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. No doubt some members of the crowd had come to the park today because they knew a murder had taken place there the day before, but it wasn’t casting a pall over the celebration, at least so far.

  However, a considerable crowd was gathered around the log cabin with the dogtrot where Lawrence Fremont’s body had been found. Phyllis couldn’t see into the dogtrot from where they were. She said, “They didn’t go ahead and put the scarecrow in there, did they?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “We can go take a look. That’s probably where Miz Keller will head once she gets here. She said she wanted the two of you to study it.”

  “I know what she said. I’m just not sure I feel like doing that.” Phyllis sighed. “On the other hand, I promised we’d try to help Julie, so I guess I can’t really avoid it forever.”

  “We’re coming with you,” Carolyn declared.

  “I appreciate that. The more friends around, the better.”

  The four of them had to walk toward the lake to reach one of the paths that would take them in the right direction. They could have cut across the park, but at their age it was better to walk on a nice flat surface. As they neared the cabin, Phyllis tried to peer through gaps in the crowd, but they were almost there before she could see that not only was there no scarecrow, but the hay bales had been removed as well. The dogtrot was empty now, except for people who were walking through it or standing around talking.

  “Not much to see here,” Carolyn commented. “I can’t say I’m disappointed by that, either.”

  Phyllis looked through the dogtrot and up the slight hill toward the road. The motor homes used by the movie company weren’t parked up there today, and neither were the equipment trucks or the SUVs. All of them would have been in sight from this point the day before, although anyone looking in that direction might not have been able to see the motor homes except for their upper parts, because of the slope.

  “We’ve talked about who had a reason to want Lawrence Fremont dead,” she mused, “but we haven’t talked about the way he was dressed up in that scarecrow outfit, or how the body got down here. I wonder what sort of theory the police have about that.”

  “One thing seems pretty obvious to me,” Sam said. “Fremont wasn’t a big fella, but Miz Cordell couldn’t have picked up his body and hauled it all the way from that motor home on the other side of the road. It’d take a good-sized man to do that.”

  “Like Alan Sammons or Earl Thorpe,” Phyllis said.

  Carolyn asked, “What about Jason Wilkes?”

  “When it comes to bein’ physically fit, he seemed one step above puddin’ to me,” Sam said. “I think his wife would come closer to bein’ able to do that.”

  “What’s the significance of him being dressed as a scarecrow to start with?” Phyllis asked. “Was the killer trying to send a message? That doesn’t fit with Julie, either.”

  Carolyn said, “They’re just flailing around and they happened to land on her. The district attorney probably ordered Chief Whitmire to make an arrest whether they had any evidence or not.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing the chief would do.”

  “You know what a publicity hog the DA is. Putting a movie star on trial for murder would get him a lot of press. Maybe he’s planning on running for Congress, or even state attorney general.”

  That was entirely possible, given the ambition that the man had displayed in the past, Phyllis thought, but she still didn’t believe the police would have arrested Julie Cordell unless there was some legitimate reason to believe she was guilty. The hidden relationship with Becca Peterson wasn’t the strongest motive Phyllis had ever come across . . . but it wasn’t the weakest, either.

  “There you are,” a voice said. They turned to see that Melissa Keller had come up to them. “I figured I’d find you here, Phyllis. Have you come up with anything?”

  “Not yet. But we haven’t been here long.”

  Melissa looked into the empty dogtrot and said, “Man, they cleaned it out, didn’t they? What do you think happened to everything?”

  “The bales Mr. Fremont’s body was sitting on would have been impounded as evidence. The others are probably being used as decorations in places around the park.”

  “I guess whoever was in charge of decorations figured it would be in bad taste to put out the prop scarecrow.”

  Carolyn said, “That’s the decision I would have made if it had been up to me.”

  Melissa stiffened abruptly and said in an angry voice, “It’s that cop.”

  Phyllis turned to look where Melissa was looking and saw that she was right.

  Detective Isabel Largo was making her way through the crowd toward the log cabin, and from the intent expression on her face, she wasn’t just visiting the festival. She was looking for something . . . or someone.

  Chapter 19

  It quickly became obvious who Isabel Largo was looking for. She walked up to the group beside the cabin, crossed her arms, and glared at Phyllis.

  “I thought we weren’t going to be at cross-purposes on this case, Mrs. Newsom,” she said. “But who should show up almost before Ms. Cordell was booked other than Jimmy D’Angelo.”

  “Julie has a right to an attorney,” Phyllis said. “She doesn’t know any here in Weatherford.”

  “So you don’t deny that you got D’Angelo involved?”

  “Why would I deny that?”

  “If I’d known we were going to wind up on opposite sides, I wouldn’t have given you as much information as I did. I wouldn’t have shared anything with you.”

  Melissa said, “Wait a minute. You consulted Phyllis, too?”

  Largo ignored that and went on to Phyllis, “The smartest thing for you to do is stay out of this. There’s going to be a lot of publicity, and it won’t reflect well on you that you’re trying to get an outsider off on a murder charge, especially an outsider from Hollywood.”

  Sam said, “Why would folks in Weatherford care about that? The victim was from Hollywood, too. No offense, Detective, but I’ve got a hunch the whole town’s stockin’ up on popcorn right about now, figurin’ it’s gonna be quite a show.”

  “You don’t have any real evidence against Julie Cordell,” Phyllis said. “You have a possible motive, and a rather flimsy one at that. Nothing else.”

  “That’s not exactly true. We know the poison that killed Lawrence Fremont was delivered in a piece of pecan pie that you brought to the park. The pie was found in Fremont’s stomach. A piece of crust was found in the motor home he was using, so that places the murder weapon on the scene with him.”

  That bit about the piece of crust was new information. Phyllis didn’t know whether Largo had let it slip intentionally, or was just carried away by her irritation. The detective wasn’t finished, though.

  “We also found traces of pecan pie in the pocket of Julie Cordell’s jeans,” Largo went on. “That’s proof she had the murder weapon in her possession.”

  Melissa said, “Now hold on just a minute. There’s no way in the world somebody could stick a slice of pie in a pants pocket like that! There wouldn’t be room for it.”

  “She got the pie on her hand when she took it to Fremont’s motor home, and then later she stuck her hand in her pocket, after she’d poisoned him. That’s how the traces of it got in there.” Largo’s voice was cold and hostile as she replied.

  “Were there also traces of cyanide in Julie’s pocket?” Phyllis asked.

  Largo just glared some more and didn’t answer.

  “That’s what I thought,” Phyllis said. “So all the evidence really proves is that Julie handled a slice of pie sometime during the day. You can’t be sure it was the same slice that had the poison in it.”

  “The lab’s still working on that,” Largo snapped.

  “If the lab finds cyanide, you might have a case. You’d still need testimony from someone who saw Julie take the pie into the motor home.”

  “Ma
ybe we do,” Largo said evasively.

  Phyllis didn’t believe that. She said, “What’s your theory about the scarecrow? Why dress Fremont’s body that way? How do you think Julie got the body from a motor home all the way up there”—she pointed toward the road—“to the dogtrot down here? She’s not big enough to have carried a corpse that far, even though Fremont wasn’t a large man.”

  Before Largo could answer—not that Phyllis believed Largo even had a good answer for any of those questions—Melissa said, “You should be talking to Earl Thorpe.”

  Phyllis and Largo both frowned at her. “Thorpe?” Largo repeated. “The assistant director?”

  “That’s right.” Melissa sighed. “I got to thinking about what we talked about earlier, Phyllis, how Earl might have figured he was going to take over the picture permanently. After I got Julie back to her hotel room, I went down to the lobby to come over here. Before I walked out, though, I saw Earl and Alan talking in the parking lot. Earl looked upset, and I swear, I thought he was going to take a swing at Alan. They argued for a few minutes, and then Earl stomped off somewhere. I went out and asked Alan what was wrong, and he said Earl was mad because Clive Walker agreed to take over the picture. So you were right. Earl had his sights set on it.”

  “That doesn’t mean he killed Fremont,” Largo said. “All that could have happened whether he had anything to do with Fremont’s death or not.”

  Melissa shrugged. “Maybe. But if you want to avoid looking like a fool, Detective, you might want to start thinking about digging deeper, instead of being so sure you’ve got it all figured out.”

  Largo bit back whatever response she was about to make, then turned on her heel and stalked away.

  “Well, she’s a mite unhappy,” Sam drawled.

  “She probably knows her case against Julie is weak,” Phyllis said, “but she’s going to defend it anyway. I have to admit, the business about them finding traces of pie in Julie’s clothes is troubling.”

  Melissa said, “All that proves is that she ate a piece of pie!”