Apple Pies and Alibis

by Christy Murphy

  “If this person is trying to set me up for murder, I need to be on guard. I promise not to hold any grudges. I know what it’s like to be suspect in a murder when you didn’t do it.”

  Mom nodded. “In my mind the main suspects are Madison Winters and Henry Ruiz. Although, there’s a possibility that anyone who was in the conference room—like Ivan, for instance—would’ve been close enough to get there in time.”

  “Both Madison and Henry are out of the office today,” Barbara said.

  “Interesting,” Mom said.

  “What can I do to help?” Barbara asked.

  “Can we get a key to the office downstairs?” Mom asked.

  “The landlord changed the locks. We still have some computers down there, and we have to wait for the police to escort us in to get them,” Barbara answered.

  “I see,” Mom said.

  “Mom, we’re not breaking into that office,” I said, putting my foot down. I could almost picture Mom having me scale the walls of the building with suction cups if I let this get too far.

  Barbara agreed that we shouldn’t try to break into the office either, so Mom set her sights on interviewing the employees about the murder. Someone had not only pushed Rick Heller out of the window, they’d known enough to tamper with the safety lock to do it.

  In Mom’s mind, that put Henry Ruiz at the top of the suspect list. He seemed more handy than Madison. But neither of them were in the office, so Mom and I stopped to visit with Ivan on the way out.

  Mom asked him where Madison and Rick were just before and after the alarm. She didn’t even come up with a story to explain why she asked. She just asked and he answered.

  “They were right next to me,” Ivan told Mom.

  “Did you see anyone go into Rick’s office during the party or maybe even the day before?” Mom asked.

  “People almost never go into Rick’s office. It made him whopping mad. That’s why it was such a big deal when Barbara went in there without knocking,” Ivan said.

  “Maybe someone sneaked in through the adjoining door in the conference room?” Mom asked.

  Ivan laughed. “Rick kept that locked. He’s never let anyone use that door ever since we moved into this building.”

  My heart sank hearing that the conference room door was locked. That meant no one had time to push him out the window. Unless Barbara had lied to us about being out of the office when the alarm went off.

  “He had to let people in there sometime,” Mom said.

  “Rarely,” Ivan said.

  “Who got to go in?” Mom asked.

  “Well, Barbara. She’s the boss after all. And Madison—no one can stop her from anything—and of course, Henry.”

  “Why did you say ‘of course Henry’?” Mom asked.

  “They’re in the same department. I bet he’s glad Rick’s gone.”

  Mom leaned forward to get closer to him. “Why?” Mom asked.

  Ivan looked around. “I think Rick took credit for a lot of Henry’s ideas. Henry pretends not to care, but I think he really does. Who wouldn’t?”

  “That’s true,” Mom said.

  “I gotta get back to work,” Ivan said. “Those personal apple pies were great by the way.”

  Mom and I talked to more of the employees under the guise of having a regular Friday lunch and searching for Mom’s missing pocket knife. Every single employee that had been in the conference room backed up what Ivan said.

  We needed to talk to Madison and Henry.

  But neither of them were there that day, which Mom and I found suspicious.

  I printed out all of the emails for Rick Heller, Madison Winters, and Henry Ruiz and went with Mom to the Lucky Dragon to enlist Wenling’s help.

  We’d been at it for two hours when Mom let out an excited yelp. “I got something! It’s from Henry to Rick dated last Wednesday at six at night after we left.”

  Wenling put down her papers and folded her arms. “How come I never find anything? You keep the good papers for you.”

  “If I knew which one was good, why would we have to look?” Mom argued. Wenling and Mom squabbled for a few moments, and Mom agreed to switch stacks with Wenling.

  “Mom, what’s the email say?” I asked, trying to remain patient. The truth was we were all cranky and tired. Reading someone else’s work emails isn’t all that exciting.

  “It says, ‘I know it’s you, and as soon as I figure out how you’re doing it, watch out.’”

  Wenling pushed her new stack of emails away. “No wonder you gave me the good stack now. You already know who killed him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Mom said. “We’ll need to talk to Henry first. There still could be more.”

  “Scoot,” Wenling said, motioning for Mom to slide out of the booth so Wenling could get up. “I’m going to check on the kitchen.”

  I wanted to ask Mom if she thought that Henry had figured out that Rick was the mole, and somehow that led to Henry killing Rick. But before I could ask her, Mom was texting Barbara to find out if Henry had showed up today.

  “He’s there. I told her to make sure he doesn’t leave,” Mom said to me, jumping out of the booth. “We have to hurry.”

  My stomach dropped. Mom wanted to interrogate a possible killer. Here we go again.

  6

  Confrontations and Confusion

  “Mom,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot for Turing Tech yet again. “Couldn’t we just show the email to the police? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  “But then we’d have to out Barbara’s motive. They haven’t asked us anything about Rick selling secrets. If we told them, they’d still think it was Barbara. After all, why would an employee kill his boss over selling secrets? Why not just report him?”

  “Why would he?” I agreed. She’d made a darn good point.

  “That’s why we need to talk to him.”

  Mom opened the door and hopped out of the van. I double checked the emergency brake and climbed out and caught up with Mom. “He’s not going to tell us,” I said.

  “Let me try,” she said.

  “If he’s a killer, don’t you think it could be dangerous?”

  Mom laughed and headed for the building. “There’s only one window in their new office, and it’s too small for us to be pushed out of.”

  I don’t even know why I ever try to win an argument with Mom. Minutes later Mom and I approached Henry Ruiz, who was sitting at one of the long tables.

  “Rumor has it we might have catered lunches on a regular basis. More ribs and apple pies?” he said upon seeing us.

  “What about the apple margaritas?” I asked.

  He held up both his hands in surrender and shook his head no. “I haven’t lived down all those Morrissey songs,” he said.

  He seemed like such a nice guy to have pushed a man out of a seventeenth-story window.

  “I need you to tell me about Rick,” Mom said. “You knew he was up to something.”

  I expected Henry to look frightened or nervous, but he looked normal. “You know what’s interesting?” he said. Mom and I leaned in to listen. “Just like the other days he wasn’t in the office, the fire alarm hasn’t gone off all day.”

  Mom and I traded surprised looks. “You think Rick was setting off the fire alarm?” I asked.

  “He’d almost had me convinced it was a smoker in another office, but the alarm hasn’t gone off all day today.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom asked.

  “I can’t prove it. It could be some kind of malfunction on the seventeenth floor. But I still think it was him.”

  “But you suspected him of other things,” Mom prodded.

  “Listen, I don’t know if he was the person stealing Tina’s lunch. I know she thought so for a while, but I think that it might have been one of the new people.”

  This wasn’t what I thought would happen at all, but Mom didn’t seem upset. She paused to think for a second and then said to Henry, “You wouldn’t happen to know the
dates that the fire alarms went off, would you?”

  “I sure do,” he said, grabbing his phone. “But why would you need it?”

  I panicked, but Mom remained calm. “I’m just being nosy,” she said. “I thought I’d ask the office management about it while I was there. But it’s none of my business really.”

  “I tried that. They don’t return my calls.”

  “I’m going to pretend like I want to rent an office,” Mom said.

  “I should’ve thought of that. Here,” Henry said, “I’ll send you my document. I’ve got dates, times, everything. Let me know what you find out.”

  Henry airdropped the document to Mom’s phone, and then showed her how to airdrop it to mine. The process fascinated Mom. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could send people through the air?” Mom marveled.

  My brain remembered what happened when Rick Heller went through the air. “I think that’ll be a while,” I said.

  Satisfied she had the document, Mom returned her attention to Henry. “You were the one who figured out Rick fell, weren’t you?”

  “The window was open way farther than it should have been when I went in there. Madison was right behind me. She said she knew he hadn’t left his office. So I went to the window just in case.”

  Henry got quiet.

  “I better get back to work. It looks like I might be getting promoted temporarily. As soon as Barbara’s in the clear, and the future is more certain, we’re going to go ahead and look for another CTO. All this paperwork and meetings. Such a drag.”

  “Thanks,” Mom said. “I’ll be sure to make more pies if we get the steady gig.”

  “You don’t have to make mine a mini one. I could eat a full-sized one on my own,” he said and patted his stomach.

  I sighed. Henry was way too forthcoming with information to have been the killer. Besides, no one would push somebody out of a window just because they kept setting off a fire alarm. I figured Mom and I could go to the police to show them that the window safety had to be faulty. Although, it didn’t look good for Barbara to have the dead man yelling, “Don’t push me!” and only having her word that she’d left the room before the fire alarm went off.

  Mom and I headed for the door when Mom turned back. “Henry,” she asked. “Do you have a theory about how Rick was setting off the fire alarm? Do you think he was smoking?”

  “Nah. We did the office challenge a year ago, and he quit.”

  “He could be cheating,” Mom said.

  “You can smell a smoker a mile away. I think he triggered the alarm just off the service elevator. He always took it even though he’s not supposed to. Imagine being such a jerk that you’d evacuate the entire building just to get out of work.”

  “Or maybe he did it another way,” Mom said. “Can I borrow a screwdriver?”

  Henry gave Mom a puzzled look, but he reached into his bottom drawer and gave Mom his screwdriver. “You need to give it back. I don’t have a spare anymore.”

  “I’m not going far,” Mom said as she rushed over to the window. I trailed after her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Henry had followed us. Mom ignored my question, and started tampering with the safety on the window.

  “Whoa!” Rick said. “You don’t want to mess with that. We don’t want you to fall out the window.”

  “It’s okay,” Mom said. And for some reason Henry let her keep going and watched over her shoulder with great interest.

  I glanced around the cramped office. Everyone was staring at us. My face heated with embarrassment. Mom monkeyed with the safety and almost dropped the screwdriver out the window.

  “There,” she said and pushed the window open wide. Mom looked around. Nothing seemed to be happening. “Hmm,” she said and pushed the window open so wide that it looked like she might fall out.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  “Jo!” Henry yelled at the same time and grabbed Mom by the waist.

  “I’m fine,” Mom said. “I wasn’t going to fall out.” Mom said. Henry let go. Mom sighed and retightened the safety. She turned back to Henry and handed him the screwdriver. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Anytime,” Henry said.

  Mom headed for the exit, walking faster than normal. I hustled to catch up to her. When we were safe in the elevator Mom turned to me and laughed. “How embarrassing! They must think I’m some crazy old lady.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I thought that opening the window really wide might set the fire alarm off.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The elevator dinged open. Mom sighed. “I don’t think Henry did it.”

  “That just leaves Madison,” I said. “She hasn’t been back to work since it happened.”

  “She has an alibi,” Mom said. “She was in the conference room until the alarm went off, and when she went into the office, she was with Henry. Almost everyone has alibis.”

  “Except Barbara,” I said. Could it be that Barbara really did it? She could have lied about the fire alarm and only acted surprised about the raincoat.

  “And Rick Heller,” Mom said, her voice low as if she were saying it to herself and deep in thought. I decided to stay quiet and let Mom think.

  Mom set down her stack of emails and got up from the kitchen table. “Want a refill, kid?”

  “Thanks,” I said, looking up from my stack, “but I might need to hit the hard stuff soon.”

  Mom got up and refilled our cups. Then she went into the cupboard and grabbed a bag of chocolates and brought them to the table. I unwrapped the silver tinfoil and savored the chocolate. There’s something about the size and shape of the little treats that make them the perfect bite. Of course, once I had one I needed about a million more bites, but still.

  I dumped a ton of vanilla creamer in my coffee, grabbed another chocolate, and avoided all thoughts of carbs and calories. “Don’t you think it’s weird that Madison Winters hasn’t been in the office since the accident?” I asked.

  “It is,” Mom said, but I could tell whatever she was cooking up in her mind about the crime didn’t have much to do with Madison.

  Moriarty trotted into the kitchen heading for his bowl, but he stopped when he saw the glint of my chocolate wrapper.

  “No,” I said to him. Despite the fact that he didn’t eat chocolate, Moriarty loved to steal these candies from me. I almost believed he just didn’t want me to have them, but Mom said he was attracted to the shiny wrapper.

  Moriarty strolled closer to the table, pretending to not be interested in the chocolates at all.

  “I know what you’re up to,” I said to him. He ignored me. He hadn’t even lived with us for a month yet, but I loved him despite his ambivalence toward me. Mom had installed a kitty door at the bottom of our kitchen door that led to the backyard. She kept the litter box out there.

  Moriarty danced around Mom’s ankles, rubbing against her and purring. Mom tapped her thigh, and the little tuxedo cat leapt from the floor to her lap, where he made himself comfortable.

  I returned to my stack of emails. Madison Winters was still on my mind. Her absence in the office bugged me, and the way she and Rick ignored each other at the office party bothered me too. “Maybe Madison feels guilty,” I said out loud to Mom. “The two of them were acting weird at the party.”

  “She is the only one we haven’t talked to,” she said, but she sounded distracted.

  I looked up from my emails. “You don’t think it was her.”

  Mom’s attention focused on one of the emails. “Very good, kid,” she said to me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your detective skills. They’re getting sharper,” she said. “Madison and Rick had an office fling. That could be what you’re picking up on.”

  Mom handed me the email. It was from Rick to Madison. It read: We have to talk. I knew exactly what that meant. “A breakup. This is definitely a post-breakup message,” I said, remembering my ex’s text. I had
n’t gotten back to him. How long had it been? The party was Friday. Now it was Monday.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a gentle shake of the table. “Moriarty!” I scolded. He’s not supposed to be on the kitchen table, and he knows it. But before I could grab him, he snatched one of the candies, launched off the table, dashed across the kitchen floor, jumped up onto the kitchen sink, and squeezed his head through a gap he’d made between the screen and the window.

  “Moriarty!” I scolded again as I rushed over to the window to see the damage. Mom remained at the table. “Mom, look what he did to our screen. He bent it,” I said, pushing it back into place. We’d probably need to get a new one. “He knows he has the kitty door over there,” I said. “Why wouldn’t he just go through his door?”

  I looked out the window and spotted our little chocolate thief climbing a tree with his stolen treasure in his mouth. The tree! “He hides the things he steals in your avocado tree.” I noticed the post that Mom and Solomon had used for the window was still in the ground. They’d returned the window.

  Mom was quiet. I turned back to her at the table. She was deep in thought.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  Mom smiled up at me. “He used the window because he was being sneaky,” Mom said.

  “What?”

  “Moriarty used the window instead of the door because he was being sneaky,” Mom clarified, but I knew she wasn’t just talking about our cat. “Get the flashlights, kid. We need to go back to the scene of the crime!”

  “Mom, we’re not breaking into the office. I told you that.”

  “Not the office,” Mom said. “We’re going to the parking lot.”

  I parked in the exact space that I had parked the day Rick Heller died. The parking lot had lights on the front side of the building, but the back lot was dark. It creeped me out. Mom obviously wanted to find some sort of clue, but I doubted the police missed anything.

  We got out of the van with our flashlights. The flashlights made this whole amateur detective thing a little over the top for me. My brain recalled a Nancy Drew cover. I felt ridiculous.