Nikoli was quiet for a moment, then spoke, “You’re right, you don’t really know him.” He could see Celestial flinch when he said it, as if awaiting some lecture. “I don’t know him all that well either. It’s possible that there wasn't a murder here, we really don’t know anything yet.”
“I think we’d learn better together on this one. Coordinate our efforts, pool information, and all that.” Nikoli looked over the tablet for a moment, trying to shift his focus on literally anything else in the room aside from whatever Celestial’s expression would be. “I am technically allowed to break into people’s homes,” he paused to refocus his thoughts, took a breath, and continued, “Plus you really aren’t going to stop being involved in this case, are you?”
When he finally got the courage to look back at Celestial, she seemed to be forcing back laughter, whether it was meant to be mean-spirited or awkward, he didn’t want to guess. “...You might be right on that, Detective. I can be incredibly stubborn...as you know.” Celestial finally voiced, breaking the warm silence with a shy smile. “What’s our next move, then?”
Chapter 10
Celestial was shocked to find Jody’s Diner completely empty when she came in on Sunday morning. Sunday’s were prime business hours for places like Jody’s, especially since the brunch craze really began. Even though she knew Jody’s business had been hit hard by Tammy’s death, actually seeing the deserted restaurant in person made it all the more real. Celestial sat herself at the counter, waiting for a waiter to come out and take her order, and looked up to see Tommy watching her from the kitchen. Apparently bashful at being noticed, Tommy blushed and averted his eyes. A clanking emanated from the kitchen before Tommy emerged from the swinging door and walked toward Celestial.
“Hey there, Celestial,” Tommy greeted her, “happy to see you.”
Celestial expected Tommy to take her order; with so little business, it was more than plausible for him to be working the whole restaurant alone for a bit. Instead, though, Tommy sat down next to her.
“Oh, Tommy, I don’t want to keep you from your work,” Celestial stated, concerned. She hadn’t necessarily planned on talking to Tommy at Jody’s Diner. Her confidence in Jody was unflappable, and Celestial’s visit that day was to support her friend.
Tommy smirked and replied, “Oh, yeah, because it’s so busy.” He sarcastically gestured to the barren diner, and Celestial could easily imagine a tumbleweed cartoonishly rolling across the floor.
“I suppose you have a point,” Celestial replied sadly. The reality of Jody’s situation set in.
Tommy’s face fell. “Look, I know you’re trying to help Jody. I’m not sure what to believe about everything that’s going on, but I’m really happy she’s got you on her side. She deserves better than this.”
“You’re right, Tommy,” Celestial commented. “Jody needs help.” She looked straight into Tommy’s eyes, “I know with every fiber of my being that Jody would never hurt anyone. She’s completely innocent.”
Tommy sighed and broke eye contact, shifting his gaze to his fidgeting hands on the counter. “I agree. Jody’s a great person, and I’m devastated about the trouble I’ve caused her by working here. She gave me a great opportunity, and look what came of it.”
“I’m sure Jody doesn’t feel that way,” Celestial placed an encouraging hand on Tommy’s. He looked back up at her and a slight smile graced his lips. Noticing Tommy slightly dropping his guard, Celestial tenderly prodded. She might as well use this as an opportunity to find out more about Tommy. She was certain Jody was innocent, but with Tommy, she wasn’t so sure. “Is that all that’s bothering you, Tommy?”
The smile disappeared from Tommy’s face as fast as it had come, and he returned his gaze to his hands. He was silent for a while, and Celestial worried she might have moved too quickly. Just as she was about to change the subject, certain Tommy wasn’t going to respond, he started speaking again. His eyes were trained attentively on the counter; he was determined not to look up while he spoke.
“Yeah, I guess so. I’ve been thinking a lot about Tammy, how much she’d changed over the past few years.”
“Changed?” Celestial asked, “Changed how?”
“She wasn’t always the bully everyone saw the day she died.” Tommy let out a long exhale, considering how much to divulge about his ex-girlfriend to this woman who was little more than a stranger to him. He continued, “When Tammy and I first met, she was so sweet. I’d swear, in those first few years, I truly loved her. I don’t know what happened, but something clicked around the time she turned 23. Almost overnight, Tammy became a different person. I tried to stay with her, to hold on to the earlier, sweeter Tammy I knew before. That didn’t work long, though; she just wasn’t the kind of woman I could love anymore.”
With this, Tommy lifted his hands to cover his face, hiding the tears welling up in his eyes. “She started getting abusive, telling me everything to do, how to live my life. I wasn’t so much her boyfriend anymore, just a prop to make her life look better. I finally had to leave when she started hitting me. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Celestial felt for the boy; it couldn’t be easy to fall out of love like Tommy had. Regardless of whether Tammy had truly changed or Tommy had been blind to her mean spirit and abuse in their early years, the loss he experienced was real. That kind of pain could make the nicest of people do something reckless, and Celestial wondered what Tommy might be capable of.
Despite the hands covering his eyes, Tommy spoke back up as if he could hear what Celestial had been thinking. “I know the whole thing looks suspicious, don’t think I’m blind to that. I mean, I served her, her last meal, for God’s sake. Please believe me, though; I never wanted to hurt Tammy.”
“What did you expect from her, Tommy?” Celestial asked.
“I just wanted to move on,” he replied. “To forget the whole thing, but she wouldn’t leave me alone. Tammy seemed to think she had the last word when it came to our relationship. What I wanted was irrelevant to her.”
Tommy was absolutely right; an ex-boyfriend would already be a prime suspect, but the fact that he was the chef who prepared Tammy’s last meal made him impossible to overlook. But Celestial perceived an earnestness in Tommy’s voice. If he did kill Tammy, Celestial though, then Tommy is an incredible actor.
Chapter 11
Celestial knew that Rita would be working the counter at her shop, A Touch of Magic, so Celestial decided to stop by.
“My darling,” said Rita in that swooping, dramatic fortune-teller-act voice as soon as Celestial stepped in. “So lovely to see you. Please, do come in. And mind the crystals, if you please.”
Celestial side-stepped the crystal display to which Rita pointed and approached the counter, where Rita was crouched, straightening a locked glass-case display of some very old-looking necklaces on navy velvet display busts. Celestial wondered if the necklaces were magic--even cursed. She knew from experience that this shop had all sorts of interesting and dangerous curios in it.
A Touch of Magic was the local supernatural shop, one that somehow also managed to successfully sell to mundanes: there were gris-gris bags and love potions for the town’s supernatural population, and incense cones and chintzy themed Tarot decks for those who weren’t in the know. Under normal circumstances, a shop like this might have posed a problem for a supernatural population trying to fly under the radar, but Rita, though mundane herself, was the consummate saleswoman, and had always proved herself perfectly capable of managing the tightrope act of working two separate customer bases. Part of this was the fact that she so clearly looked the part, always dressing in drapey jewel tones with herb- and Zodiac-inspired patterns that made her come across as witchy in the most toothless and cliché sense of the word, which appealed to mundanes without causing them to become suspicious. The rest of her success was due to her considerable powers of misdirection, deftly dodging probing questions from those who shouldn’t be asking them, and always sending
would-be buyers out of her shop several dollars lighter and laden with harmless tchotchkes.
Rita was a friend of the coven’s and always insisted that A Touch of Magic was at the coven’s service. It was Rita’s dual-purpose goal to keep the coven supplied with all their magical item needs, and to spread positive energy and associations with witchcraft among those who didn’t yet know enough to believe in it.
One thing Rita was particularly good at supplying to the coven was information. Situated as she was at the intersection between the supernatural and mundane worlds, she had a tendency to catch the best gossip of both. Somehow she never seemed gossipy herself. Over all the time Celestial had known Rita, she could never remember Rita prodding anyone with questions for more salacious information. Celestial supposed that Rita just came across as a good listener, so people opened up to her.
“I’m afraid I’m none the wiser than you about what happened to Miss Thorton,” said Rita before Celestial even had the chance to ask. “But I have been hearing a great deal of the young lady all day, none of it good.”
“Same here,” Celestial said. “She seems to have made a pretty consistent reputation for herself.”
“One that makes the job of finding her killer rather difficult, I’m afraid.” Rita straightened, locked the glass display case, and replaced the ring of keys somewhere inside her giant draping sleeve.
Just as Rita said this, the front door opened and someone came in. Celestial didn’t register the person’s entrance, not until she heard a sharp, loud, familiar voice saying, “You’re talking about that Tammy girl’s death?”
Celestial turned her head and saw Elaina Chavez, the unpleasant woman she’d met in Jody’s diner. Her dyed blond hair was pulled into a tight, high bun, and she was dressed impeccably in a tailored skirt suit.
If Elaina recognized Celestial from their earlier encounter, she didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, with a shark-like smile, she continued. “You know, my restaurant Jardín Rico has been busier than ever since that poor girl died at Jody Stillwell’s diner. I hate to profit off of tragedy, but then again, the people in this town need to be fed, and none of them are too eager to go to Jody’s place when they know they might be ordering up their last meal.”
Rita frowned and cut Celestial a look. Celestial stuck out her jaw stubbornly. “There hasn’t been a direct link between Jody’s restaurant and Tammy’s death,” Celestial said.
“Oh no? I think if you eat someplace and then wind up at the hospital complaining of food poisoning that then leads to your death, that’s a pretty compelling link,” said Elaina. “And, if the two-hour lunchtime wait for a table at my restaurant today is anything to go by, I’d say that the people of this town agree with me on that one.”
“Jody and her diner are both innocent until proven guilty,” Celestial objected. “And it’s irresponsible and slanderous to go around spreading unverified misinformation about another restaurant just because they’re your competition. Dozens of other people ate at Jody’s place that night and didn’t become ill. And they also got a perfect score from the health department.”
“I don’t mind waiting until that deathtrap of a restaurant is proven guilty,” Elaina said with a laugh. “Even if the police haven’t found a definite link yet, they will find one. You probably won’t even have to wait long.” Then, still laughing, and giving a dismissive little glance around the shop as though deciding that whatever she’d come in for wasn’t worth her trouble anymore, Elaina turned and walked out of the shop, letting the door swing shut heavily behind her.
“Sorry about her,” Rita said when the sound of Elaina’s laughter had disappeared. “She comes in sometimes. Not for anything real, of course. She’s a Zodiac and cursed doll kinda character.”
“Do you know her well?” Celestial asked.
“No, not very. Just that she’s a Scorpio sun. Which, I mean, should tell you all you need to know right there.”
Celestial thought back on what Elaina had said, her confidence in asserting that the investigation would find a link between Jody’s diner and Tammy’s death. It seemed pretty possible that Elaina knew more than she was saying.
Chapter 12
“You ready for this?”
The medical examiner’s assistant stood behind an empty gurney, looking tired and sounding even worse. She held out a file to Nikoli as he approached her.
“That depends on what’s in the file,” Nikoli said cautiously, accepting it and paging through.
It had taken a while of police work to become accustomed to navigating these files. The paperwork was always considerably more padded than his pragmatic police officer’s mind wanted it to be, and back in the early days he used to get frustrated with all the excess of information--organ weights, fluid viscosities, that sort of thing--that he had to wade through to get to the most important parts.
These days, with so much on-the-job experience under his belt, the process tended to go a little more quickly. Within seconds, Nikoli was looking over the section in which the medical examiner had listed out Tammy Thorton’s stomach contents at her time of death.
“There aren’t even parsnips on this list,” he said slowly. “Everyone at the diner said she’d been served honey-glazed parsnips.”
“Everyone at the diner was wrong,” the examiner’s assistant answered. “What Miss Thorton actually ate was honey-glazed water hemlock.”
Nikoli whistled low. “No wonder she wound up dead. Is this an easy mistake to make?”
“You tell me.” The examiner’s assistant drew her phone out of her lab coat pocket, tapped at it, then held its screen out toward Nikoli.
“What am I looking at… water hemlock root, or parsnips?”
“Exactly,” she said. “This is a hemlock root, but it looks more less like a parsnip. To someone not in the know, maybe. Farther than that, it’s not my job to speculate.” She tucked her phone away.
A chef should be in the know, Nikoli couldn’t help thinking. If Tommy had served these as parsnips, was there any way he might have done so unknowingly? And was there any way it had all happened without Jody’s knowledge?
Even if both of them had somehow not realized what they were serving, this information definitely put them both in the limelight as number one suspects. Right now, Nikoli figured the evidence was stacked up against them more or less equally.
He thanked the examiner’s assistant for her help, then used the fax machine in the ME’s office to send the files over to the station. No matter what, he knew Celestial would want to be brought up to speed on what he had learned, so on his drive back to the station he gave her a phone call.
She picked up immediately. One of the benefits, he supposed, of the fact that they were now avowedly working the case together. Rather than just conducting separate but parallel investigations, like they normally did.
“Did you learn anything?” she asked in lieu of greeting.
He explained what the report had revealed. Celestial listened politely, not breaking in to interrupt. Nikoli pictured her making her thoughtful face, chewing lightly at her lower lip. When he had finished talking, she took a long, slow breath before replying.
“So it’s not looking great for Jody, is what you’re saying.”
“Or for Tommy,” Nikoli agreed. “It would take a lot for a jury to believe that two seasoned restaurant workers couldn’t tell the difference between common, harmless parsnips and one of the most poisonous plants on the continent.”
“Have you considered Elaina Chavez as a suspect?”
Nikoli couldn’t place the name. Since he was driving, he didn’t have access to his notebook, either. “Refresh my memory.”
“The owner of Jardín Rico.”
“No, we haven’t looked into her yet. Why? Should we?”
“I’d say she ought to be a person of interest, at the very least. She considers Jody her number one rival for town-wide restaurant domination--which is evidently something she takes very seriously.”
“That’s your angle here?” Nikoli asked, unable to stop himself from smiling. “You think someone would seriously commit murder to discredit a competitor like that?”
“Hey, it’s just a theory. You and I both know that people commit murder for all kinds of strange reasons. And I just now saw Elaina Chavez herself at A Touch of Magic, crowing about how well her restaurant’s business is doing ever since people started to suspect Jody’s diner has something to do with Tammy’s death. If that had been her plan, it certainly worked.”
“I don’t know, Celestial,” Nikoli said dubiously.
“No, no, hear me out. This woman works in a restaurant, which by your own logic means she most likely knows about water hemlock, and how much they look like parsnips. And how to tell between the two. And she could have easily gotten access to the kitchen and replaced the parsnip with the water hemlock, not even caring who she hurt as long as it was someone. Enough to discredit Jody’s place.”
“Celestial,” Nikoli said again, not wanting to turn her down outright, particularly after they’d agreed to work together. Still, his time was valuable, and he had his superiors to answer to. Superiors who would be wanting him to spend time on more fruitful lines of inquiry. “It’s a long shot.”
Her voice gained that stubborn edge it sometimes got. “You didn’t hear her, Nikoli. She told me, with utmost confidence, that a link would turn up implicating Jody and her diner in the crime. Next thing I know, you call and confirm it.”
“It doesn’t make her a murderer.”
“Maybe not, but it is suspicious. You’ve got to admit that.”
Yes, maybe it was suspicious. And his time working in this town had given Nikoli enough experience to know better than to write off Celestial’s theories out of hand. She had a way of reading people that Nikoli envied, that would have even made her an excellent cop if she’d had any interest in it. It was time he started seeing that intuition as the investigative asset it was. “All right,” Nikoli said with a sigh. “You have a point there. I promise you I’ll look into it.”
Brooms and Brains (A Hocus Pocus Cozy Witch Mystery Series Book 5) Page 4