"He didn't even eat at our place that day. What's his story?"
"Al became the manager when Carl, the owner, moved to Florida to retire. I don't know much about Al. He keeps to himself."
"If it's not the milkshake, then what's he mad about?"
Mom shrugged her shoulders, but I could tell by her expression she was determined to find out.
Howard's Housewares wasn't too far, but I didn't pester Mom with any more questions. I knew she needed the time to think. I enjoyed the drive for a change. No hills.
The City of San Fernando was a quaint city and one of the oldest in Southern California. The entire "valley" is known as the San Fernando Valley and was named after it. It started as farmland like Fletcher Canyon and got built up. Except the City of San Fernando, although still small by Los Angeles standards, was four times the size of our town and more densely populated. I turned down Pico Street and scanned for the address. I spotted the Howard's Housewares sign and pulled into a meter just a few doors down.
This part of Pico wasn't as busy as the other parts closer to the Jack-in-the-Box and the doctor's office Mom used to take me to when I was little.
I slipped a few quarters into the meter and followed Mom. She loved shopping at housewares stores, so the worst case scenario would be we picked up a couple of extra muffin pans or kitchen gadgets while we snooped around.
Mom pulled the handle to the front door. Locked. They couldn't be closed. It wasn't even four in the afternoon yet.
Mom pointed to the small sign in the window with the store hours. They were supposed to be open until nine. The sun was at our backs and made it difficult to see inside the store. Mom cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the store front.
"I don't see anybody," Mom said. She jiggled the door again and sighed. "Let's go around back."
"Mom," I said giving her a hard look. "We're not breaking in."
"There may be another entrance, that's all," she said heading down the sidewalk.
"I think it's just an alley back there."
But Mom continued around the corner, and not wanting her to be in the alley alone, I rushed after her.
"Hi!" Mom called out to a lanky, young man smoking in the alley.
"Hey," he called back taking another drag off his cigarette.
As we got closer, it struck me that this young man didn't even look old enough to smoke.
"Do you work at the housewares store?" Mom asked.
"No," he said. "They're two doors down, but they've been closed the last few days."
"Do you know why?" Mom asked.
"Nah," he said. "Although nobody in this plaza gets much business."
"You worked here a long time?" Mom asked.
"Almost six months," he said.
"Have you seen the owner of the housewares place lately?"
"You mean Howard or that angry guy?" the kid asked.
"Either one," Mom said.
"Are they in some kind of trouble or something?" he asked.
Mom's eyes widened. She didn't even hide her excitement. "Why? What have you heard?"
The kid flicked his cigarette to the ground and looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then he bent over to talk to Mom. "The angry guy was here last week, and Howard and him got into a huge fight. I couldn't hear much, but the angry yelled that Howard would be in a lot of trouble."
"Was it a huge fight?" Mom asked.
"Broken plates and everything!" the kid said, reaching into his pocket and grabbing his pack of cigarettes and a lighter. "Want one?" he said offering us a cigarette.
We both shook our heads no. "You shouldn't smoke," Mom said. "It'll stunt your growth."
The kid laughed as he lit his cigarette. "You promise?"
"Have you seen Howard since the fight?" I asked.
"Nah," he said. "I came back to work yesterday, and the place was closed. Same thing today. My manager said, she hadn't seen Howard since the fight either."
"Was the angry guy kind of fat and red-faced?" I asked.
"Yeah, that's sounds like him," the kid said. "So what kind of trouble are they in? Do they owe you guys money?"
"Yup," Mom lied.
"Howard's a nice guy," the kid said. "You should go after the angry guy for the dough."
"We were hoping Howard could tell us where Brent was," Mom lied again.
"That's his name, Brent. Never could remember." The kid took another drag off his cigarette before tossing it on the ground and squashing it out with his foot. "Break's over. Good luck."
"Hey!" Mom called out after him. "Do you know where we can find Howard?"
The kid shook his head no and went inside. It couldn't be a coincidence that close to the time Brent staggered into The Lucky Dragon was also around the time Howard had stopped showing up to work. We needed to find Howard and figure out what happened.
Mom asked around to some of the other stores on the block whether anyone knew where Howard lived or had seen him, but we didn't have any luck. When we got back to the van, it smelled of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, which made me hungry.
"Do you think our leftovers went bad sitting in the car?" I asked.
"Nah, it's fine. You can have mine, too. I'm still full."
I pulled out of our spot and headed for home. "Do you think Howard killed him?"
"It sure sounds like he did. We need to talk to Howard, and we have to settle this situation with Al."
"He doesn't seem like he wants to talk."
"I'll have to call around again. I'm surprised nobody mentioned anything to me this morning."
"Maybe they didn't know. You said Al keeps to himself.
"True," Mom sighed and stared out the window. "The good news is Al made a big scene outside of the restaurant when it was crowded. That kind of stuff makes people want to talk."
"It'll be weird not going to The Lucky Dragon for a whole week."
"You know what? Instead of calling for gossip, I'll invite people over to the house for lunch."
"Do you think they'll come?" I asked, thinking about the food poisoning.
"They will when I invite Nancy and her sister over," Mom said.
I smiled. "And we’ll find out if Nancy knows where Howard lives at the same time."
"Something like that," Mom said.
When Mom mentioned having a few women over for lunch, I hadn't expected 18 people.
Wenling had arrived early to help us set up. "I missed going to Disneyland for this," she said as she helped me lug our smaller wooden table from the dining room through the kitchen and out the side door into the garage.
"You hate Disneyland," Mom said.
"This isn't much better," Wenling grumbled.
Moriarty, our cat, scurried out of the kitchen annoyed by our noise. I finally got the table into the garage and replaced it with one of the folding banquet tables Mom and I used for catering.
Our dining room wasn't large, but it was an open dining room off the living room. So all it took was clearing away some of furniture to make room for the table. Wenling went into the kitchen to help Mom with the last minute preparations for the food while I set the table with our good silverware and white linens.
Mom wanted to treat this just like one of our higher-end catering gigs to remind everyone that her cooking was good and to butter them up for the gossip on Al, and possibly the whereabouts of Howard. I got the sense that Mom thought the two things were related. She'd said it was just a hunch, but Mom's intuition had a strong track record.
I'd worried no one would attend with all the food-poisoning rumors and the last-minute notice, but eighteen people confirmed when Mom had only planned on inviting a dozen.
The doorbell rang, and the first flurry of guests arrived, among them Barbara Turing, Margaret Sanders, and my cousin Celia. They didn’t know it, but they were invited to help us turn the tide of the town gossip. All three of them knew first-hand about the first two murders that Mom had solved.
"I telecommuted from home
for the first half of the day to have lunch here," Barbara Turing said as she sat down in the living room for appetizers while we waited for the rest of the guests.
"No yoga classes or taxidermy clients today," Margaret said, "so it was easy for me to get away."
"I wanted to hear all the gossip about the guy everyone says you killed," Celia added while grabbing a canapé off the tray.
"Yeah," Wenling added.
A part of me wondered if our allies might prove to be less than effective in our propaganda campaign.
Before Mom could chime in, the door bell rang and other guests arrived.
Most of the women I only knew by sight. I’m horrible with names, but everyone seemed to know everyone else. Mom had expressly stated that it was a lunch and not to bring anything. Our town is a "bring a covered dish" town. Only the more "well to do" parties asked guests to come without even a side dish. which made the invitation all the more coveted.
"Ding dong," Nancy Cryer said as she came up the walk holding two heavy boxes. Mom and I were just inside the living room welcoming a few guests with the door open. A young woman who I’d never seen was with her. "Brought my sis to meet the gang, and we brought the wine!"
"Oh!" Mom said as the pair entered the house.
"Don’t worry," Nancy said. "There’s plenty. We brought red and white."
Glancing around the living room, I could see raised eyebrows. Fletcher Canyon isn’t a wine with lunch on a weekday place—let alone wine from a box.
Mom set the wine on a side table, and I rushed into the kitchen to get glasses. "Now, it’s a party!" Nancy said as I handed her a cup.
Mom marveled at how the box had its own little spigot and vacuum-sealed bag. "That will keep it from oxidizing," Mom said. "Very clever."
Half of the women took a glass of wine. The rest had lemonade or tea. Mom, Wenling, and I were part of the group that passed on the boxed fun. Both Mom and Wenling had a mild allergy to alcohol common in the Asian community; it made their faces red long before the fun part of drinking ever started. I'd inherited my Dad’s high tolerance for alcohol, but I still declined. If we got the information we needed on Howard’s whereabouts, I’d have to drive the van later. And I was a poor enough driver sober.
Mom’s lunch menu won the women over: Two choices of salad, Cobb and Mediterranean. Two choices of sandwich: Mom’s signature chicken salad on croissant and a roasted vegetable and hummus sandwich on pita. And two main hot dishes: Pepper seared salmon and pot roast. Everyone dug into the food and made casual small talk.
"So who here thinks my food killed all those people?" Mom asked.
The group quieted. Barbara Turing was the first to speak. "I never believed those rumors for a second. You saved my company when Rick Heller died. And your food had nothing to do with it. He fell out a window."
"And everybody knows your food had nothing to do with my father," Margaret said.
"That’s not what Jess was saying at the church meeting yesterday," Celia said taking a jab at her.
Heads turned to Jess. Both Barbara and Margaret were two of the wealthiest women in town, and the two women who’d most recently used Mom’s service.
Jess’s dark, over-groomed eyebrows raised in an expression of faux innocence. I could see why my cousin didn’t like her. "You misunderstood," Jess condescended.
"You said you knew there had to be something strange regarding all these deaths when Jo catered."
"Well," Jess stammered. "It is strange, isn’t it?"
"Not when you factor in that I hired Jo specifically because she solved who killed Margaret’s father," Barbara Turing said.
"Well now see," Jess said. "I didn’t know that. It makes so much sense now. Don’t you think so, Kim?"
Kim I’d only just met, but she went to church with Jess and Celia. It was evident that Kim and Jess were close friends. They sat next to each other and had the same style of heavy makeup. "Now it makes so much sense. Otherwise, it just looks so odd. Especially when you consider how that man got sick."
Kim's tone made me angry. I turned to Sheila. "Sheila, you were at The Lucky Dragon the day of the judging. He walked in funny, and he got sick within a minute of eating. Food poisoning doesn’t happen that fast, does it?"
"Of course it doesn’t, honey," Sheila said. "And you don’t have to work in a restaurant to know it, neither. Remember when Charlie left that potato salad out at the church picnic? Half the town got sick, but nobody died, and it took near to the next day before we all realized what happened. That man was sick in three minutes. I thought he was drunk."
"So did I," Mrs. Thompson piped in. Mrs. Thompson was a quiet lady, and when she joined in on the gossip, that meant things were getting somewhere.
"I heard, and I can’t tell you where," Wenling said, "that the police say he wasn’t drunk. He died of a concussion."
"Well he did hit that sidewalk pretty hard. He went down like a sack of potatoes," Sheila said.
"But that doesn’t explain why he seemed drunk when he walked in," Mrs. Thompson said.
"Maybe he was drunk on love," Nancy said bursting into sloppy, red-wine tears.
Katie patted her sister on the shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. "We found receipts in his clothes and desk. It looks like Brent was having an affair."
The entire table leaned forward. The gossip had officially usurped the food as the big hit of the party.
"What makes you think it was an affair?" Jess asked.
"We’ve been having problems, and I made him move into the spare bedroom," Nancy said. "The receipts were for the Moonlight Motel."
Many of the women’s gazes dropped down to their plates at the mention of the Moonlight Motel. That establishment had been in the news for less than reputable reasons. It’s the kind of place that people rent by the hour.
Nancy gulped down the rest of her glass of wine, and reached for her sister’s glass and downed its contents as well. Then she got up, walked to the box, and filled up her glass again. She’d stopped using her wine glass and had switched over to her much larger water goblet.
"Don’t worry," Nancy said as the women stared at her drinking. "My sister drove us."
Although my worries about Nancy getting home okay were quelled by the news, I worried that our plans about finding the whereabouts of Howard might be foiled by Nancy’s drinking.
"Maybe he was having a business meeting," I said hoping to steer the conversation toward Brent’s business dealings.
"Not unless you’re talking about funny business." Nancy cried. "Funny business," she muttered to herself. "What a strange phrase! It isn’t funny at all."
The gossipy tone of our lunch shifted with that statement into a more morose place. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I’d silenced it for the party. I rarely took calls during mealtimes, but since the mood had turned on our party, I excused myself and went to the restroom to check it. I wished I hadn't.
One might think if one person wanted to rush another person in divorce proceedings, it would warrant an actual telephone call, but no. Robert texted: Just sign the papers. This is ridiculous.
I shook with rage. How dare he! I wanted to call him and give him a piece of my mind, but every time I’d tried to do that with him I just wound up getting upset and breaking down into tears. Confrontation wasn’t one of my strong suits. Besides, yelling in the bathroom during a lunch with eighteen of the biggest gossips in Fletcher Canyon wouldn't be my best move. So I turned off my cell phone and ignored the ticking time bomb of Robert's self-centered nature.
Barbara Turing helped Katie wrangle her drunk sister to the car. They were the last three to leave. Mom and Wenling seemed in high spirits, but my mood had turned less than positive. The last handful of guests had lingered for coffee and wine longer than I had anticipated. We hadn’t gotten information on where Howard might be, and it was nearly five in the evening.
"What a party!" Wenling said as the three of us went to the dining room to clean up.
"It
was a hit!" Mom said, stacking the dirty dishes and heading into the kitchen. Wenling and I gathered up the leftovers and followed Mom.
"And everybody misses The Lucky Dragon. The diner can't handle all the extra business. Fletcher is a two-restaurant town. Did you hear how they messed up Jess’s takeout order?" Wenling said, her glee uncontainable.
Mom nodded. "I think it’s part of the reason why they were happy to come to lunch today," mom said.
"No place good to eat. The meatloaf is the only good thing. Their spaghetti. So soggy," Wenling gossiped.
"I think all diner spaghetti is bad," I chimed in, but Wenling continued her happy disparaging of her competition’s greasy food and the success of the lunch. In her defense, the manager had just yelled at us, and Wenling never said a bad word about the diner in public.
"But we never found out why Al yelled at us the other day, and we don’t even know Howard’s last name," I said.
"We’ll figure it out," Mom said.
"How?" I asked, surprised at how cranky my voice sounded. Hearing from Robert had tanked my good mood.
"Why don’t you ask googles about Howard," Mom suggested. "And if you don’t find anything, I’ll just call Nancy and ask her."
"We could’ve done that in the first place," I said, packing up some leftovers. "We had this entire party for nothing."
"What’s wrong?" Mom said, ignoring my rudeness.
I didn’t want to talk about Robert, and I realized I was acting like a bratty teenager. "Sorry, Mom. I just," I paused trying to think of a valid reason for acting like a jerk. My brain came up empty. "Let me look up what I can find on Howard," I said, putting the leftovers into the fridge. I started for my room before stopping again. "Sorry Mom."
"Don’t worry about it, kid," Mom said, and she and Wenling went back to talking about the party. Mom’s quick forgiveness and the realization that Mom and Wenling would clean up the entire party themselves plagued me with guilt.
But I couldn’t trust my sour mood enough to be around people. Why did I take out my feelings on Mom? It’s like the world gets "Polite Christy" and the people closest to me get "Cranky Christy." That needed to stop and so did my mopey thinking.
Milkshakes and Murder Page 6