I parked alongside the curb and let myself in the front door. I was the last to arrive, but I focused on the fact that I’d made it on time. Everyone else, however, had gotten there early. I could see Miguel and Billy through the open French doors sitting at the patio table, Billy with a bottle of beer and Miguel swirling a glass of red wine. Their backs were to me and they looked deep in conversation.
I dropped my purse onto the hall table and headed straight for the makeshift bar someone had set up. There were stemless wineglasses, two bottles of red, two bottles of white, and a little galvanized bucket filled with ice and bottles of beer. “You made it,” my dad said, coming up behind me and busing my cheek as I poured myself a glass of Chardonnay.
“Did you ever doubt me?”
“I wondered if you’d be late,” he said, leaving off the part about that being a pet peeve of his.
“Never, Dad.”
He scoffed at that, because I’d been late plenty in my life, and as kids, Billy and I had made a habit of it. But I was a lot older now and understood the importance of arriving at a place when you were expected.
“Did you get what you needed?” he asked. I raised a questioning eyebrow at him and he clarified with, “Interviewing the guy at the hospital.”
No secrets in the Culpepper family. “Oh. Well, it wasn’t an interview exactly,” I said. “More like a, I don’t know, a conversation.”
The way he pressed his lips together told me that he didn’t quite buy my clarification. He rephrased. “So did your conversation yield the desired results?”
When had my dad gotten so sassy? “If what you mean by desired results,” I said, using air quotes, “is did I get to the truth, then no, I did not.”
“Did you get any closer to the truth?” Emmaline asked, coming up next to me, holding her own glass of wine, her engagement ring sparkling in the light as she moved her hand.
I grabbed her hand and gazed at it. “God, I love looking at this thing on your hand.”
She smiled as she pulled her hand free and fluttered her fingers at me. “I do, too.”
She had the natural look going on with her hair lately, the fragile tiny Z waves zinging all around her head. “Are you doing a weave for the wedding, relaxing it, or keeping it natural?” I asked. I liked it every single way Em styled it. When she’d been in her teens and twenties, she’d often gone for colorful braids in purple or turquoise. She’d stayed with black braids once she’d entered law enforcement, but had been doing fewer and fewer of them in recent years.
“I’m thinking natural, but depends on the wedding dress, I think.”
“Any ideas about dress style?”
“Ivy, we have some shopping trips ahead of us. Get ready.”
“Name the day, I’ll be there.”
“I want Miguel and Olaya to do the catering,” she said. “Do you think they will?”
Miguel and Olaya had worked together in a lot of ways. Olaya regularly made some of the breads for Baptista’s Cantina and Grill, and they’d catered the local Art Car banquet, as well as a funeral not so long ago. They complemented each other perfectly. Miguel would do anything for Billy and Emmaline, and Olaya would do anything for me. “I know they will,” I said, and I did.
My dad had already joined Miguel and Billy on the patio. Em and I headed out there, too, me carrying one of the bottles of red to refill Miguel’s glass and Em handing Billy a new bottle of beer. As I bent to kiss Miguel, Billy set his bottle down and grabbed Em around her hips, gently pulling her onto his lap. She swatted at him. “Billy. Your dad,” she said, stifling her giggles.
My dad waved his hand. “Don’t mind me.”
Emmaline pried herself free of Billy and moved to her own chair. We settled into a comfortable conversation about the wedding plans, Billy and Emmaline waiting to adopt a rescue dog from the humane society, a newly approved city park that my dad was working on, my new schedule at the bread shop, Miguel’s hiring of a new chef... everything except Ben Nader’s accident and the death of Sandra Mays. Finally, Billy brought it up. “So, did you find out anything from the guy in the hospital?”
All eyes turned to face me, as if I suddenly had the complete answer to stop global warming and turn climate change on its heels. I gave the abbreviated version of my chat with Ben Nader, ending with how abruptly he’d terminated it. “So, what about Esmerelda Adriá?” I felt horrible—guilty, even—suggesting Esmé as a possible suspect, and I had absolutely no motive, but something was sketchy about her connection to Ben Nader.
“Other than the Bread for Life women being part of the show, just like you and Olaya, we have no connections or reason to link any of them to Ben.”
“Except there is a link,” I said. Emmaline was not going to like that I’d neglected to relay the tie between Ben Nader and Esmé Adriá through Crosby House when I’d first discovered it through Meg. “Remember how you mentioned that Ben volunteered at Crosby House? It kind of lit a fire under me about . . . giving back . . . so I volunteered, too.” I paused, feeling sheepish. “And found out that Esmé is a current resident there.”
Em stared at me. “What?”
I threw my hands up. “I know. I’m sorry. I guess . . . I just . . . there’s something broken about her. I don’t want her to be involved, but now . . .” I relayed my search for her when she went MIA and the conversation we’d had at the Shrimp Shack earlier that afternoon. “Neither one of them mentioned that they knew each other—”
“Or knew of each other,” Billy said. “Seeing each other at Crosby House doesn’t mean they actually know each other.”
“Except that Esmé caught him in her room at Crosby House,” I said. “When I asked Ben about it just now, he said he didn’t know her, but I’m not sure I buy that. There’s something fishy going on.”
“Here’s what I can’t figure out,” Em said. I sighed, relieved she wasn’t going to chastise me for holding out on her about the Crosby House connection. Her posture shifted as she sat up straighter, going into sheriff mode. “The guy seems well liked, and so far, there aren’t any skeletons in his closet. Not one. He lost his son and daughter-in-law. He’s raising his grandson. He’s been with the same job for years. He volunteers and gives back to the community. Happily married, by all accounts. Even if there’s a double connection between him and this Esmerelda, so what? What’s the motive? And that’s what it comes down to. Who has a motive?”
“Do you have a list of possible suspects?” Billy asked. Being around Emmaline meant he’d picked up law enforcement lingo and spouted it like he was talking to his subcontractors about the latest house they were building.
Emmaline answered. “Like I said, the guy doesn’t seem to have enemies. We’re looking closely at the usual: wife, who has an alibi, although the grandson is the alibi and he was playing video games, so . . .”
“Not solid, then,” Billy said.
“But there’s no obvious motive, either. Like I said, by all accounts, a solid marriage. No affairs that we know of. We even looked into an affair between Ben and Sandra, but nothing. Old family friends through their kids and a strictly professional relationship. Tammy and Ben Nader have been together since college.
“Sandra Mays is a suspect for the hit-and-run, but of course she’s dead now, which poses its own set of problems. Are the two incidents—his accident and her death—related? If they are, then it seems possible, if not probable, that the same person who hit Ben also killed Sandra. But what’s the connection between the two? What do they know that someone was willing to kill for, and does that mean Ben is still in danger?”
That was a very good question.
“But they might not be connected,” Billy said. “Did this Sandra woman have a reason to want to run down this Nader guy?”
“According to Ben, she was upset that he wasn’t willing to hit the big-time with her,” I said, “but is that reason enough to try to kill him? And she seemed genuinely upset when she saw that it was him lying in the middle of the
street.”
“So she wanted to leave Santa Sofia and he didn’t,” my dad said, “but she didn’t need a cameraman to hold her hand with a new job, did she?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“And she’d already landed the Mack Hebron collaboration,” Miguel said. “He’s a pretty big name. The fact that Ben didn’t want to uproot his life didn’t actually affect her.”
My thoughts exactly. “So why would she bother being upset with Ben if he didn’t want to move on past the pilot episode?”
“She wouldn’t,” Miguel said. “Not enough to exact revenge.”
Em set her wineglass down on the table. “From what I hear, there wasn’t much love lost between Sandra Mays and Mack Hebron.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Nothing she did seemed to faze him, except when she started taping without him. He was pissed about that, but he took her to task, made her restart the taping, and it was like it never happened. But her? He got on her nerves big-time. It was like she was trying to prove herself worthy of the new position she had. Or there was some personal issue between them. Ben told me Sandra and Mack had a thing once in New York. A dalliance.”
Emmaline angled her head as she considered what I’d said. “Mack Hebron doesn’t have an alibi for the hit-and-run or for Sandra’s estimated time of death. He was at a ball game in San Francisco, but the time of death is midnight to three a.m. Plenty of time for him to have gotten back here to meet her on the roof.”
“But how would either of them have known about the roof as a meeting place?” I asked. “Ben said he’d mentioned it to his wife, but no one else.”
“Tammy and Sandra were old friends?” Billy asked. “Could Tammy have told her about it after Ben mentioned it?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “They had a falling-out going back ten years or so.” Unless Tammy was a damn good liar and her story wasn’t entirely true.
“Why even meet up on top of the roof?” Miguel asked. “And why in the middle of the night? If Sandra was the one who arranged it, why not choose an all-night restaurant, or some spot at the beach, or at the local studio? It only makes sense if someone like, say, Ben, arranged it because that was a spot that he knew and used to go to. Sandra would have balked, but she would have gone.”
That was an excellent point. The one conundrum with the theory, of course, was that Ben had been in a coma. “But Ben is the only person who couldn’t have arranged the meeting with Sandra.”
“Ben’s wife knew,” my dad said. “They’ve been married a long time. Could she have arranged it as his proxy?” Leave it to my dad to home in on the intimacies married couples shared.
Emmaline shook her head. “Of course we don’t know for sure, but presumably the meeting was arranged after Ben was already in a coma, so any connection to the meeting and Ben is difficult to make. Barring an affair, why would Tammy Nader have wanted to meet Sandra at all, let alone on the top of a dark roof in the middle of the night?”
We all fell silent, considering this. Just because we didn’t know why, didn’t mean there wasn’t a reason and that it hadn’t actually happened in just that way. Maybe Sandra and Ben had had an affair and Em just hadn’t been able to suss it out yet. Or maybe Tammy had wanted Ben to have the same aspirations Sandra did and they’d been working on convincing him together. Of course that scenario seemed to lay blame for Ben’s accident and Sandra’s death on Tammy Nader, but the motive didn’t actually work. Why would she run down her husband when she needed him alive and well to pursue the next level of his career? And why kill Sandra when that next level depended on her success?
“Let’s look at them as two separate events,” I said.
“Yes,” Em agreed. “They’re too muddied when we try to link them.”
Miguel disappeared inside the house, returning a few seconds later with the white wine bottle and a few more beers. He handed my dad and Billy each a bottle, refilled my glass with the white, then topped off Em’s red first, then his own. He sat back down, moving his chair closer to mine and taking my hand.
“I keep coming back to Sandra Mays for Ben’s accident,” I said. “They had history. What if she really did begrudge Ben for not having the aspirations she did? She was pretty on edge. People have killed for less.” That was something we all knew too well.
Em picked up the idea. “Okay, so hypothetical. Let’s say Sandra left the bread shop during the break, got into the car she’d had at the ready—”
“So premeditation,” Billy interjected.
Em nodded. “Right. Then she donned some sort of disguise so she wasn’t recognizable—”
“Of course.” I snapped my fingers with the realization. “She’s a local celebrity, so she would have had to do that.” I thought back to when I’d seen Sandra return to discover Ben’s body laid out on the ground. I didn’t recall her looking disheveled—or anything less than perfectly coiffed and put together as she always was—but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. After so many years in front of the camera, she was a pro.
Em continued with her theory. “And then she mowed him down, ditched the car, and returned to deliver a stellar performance as the shocked and distraught friend of the victim.”
If Sandra wanted Ben to go with her to bigger and better things, but he refused, she might have taken that as him messing with her career. Was that motive enough for her to have tried to run him down? Had Sandra Mays exacted attempted murder as a vendetta?
“That’s one cold-hearted woman, if it’s true,” Miguel said.
“No sign of the car?” my dad asked.
“None. We’ve checked the makes and models of cars owned by the Naders, Sandra Mays, Mack Hebron, all the immediate people he worked with. No matches.”
Solving crimes, I’d discovered over the past year, came down to a lot of theorizing. Eventually, if you tracked down enough information and gathered enough clues, you landed on a theory that ended up being the truth.
I spent the rest of the evening wondering if we had landed on part of the truth. Had Sandra been behind Ben’s accident?
Chapter 22
Sunday night proved sleepless for me. My brain circled round and round a list of suspects. Finally, I hauled myself out of bed, grabbed a sheet of paper, and jotted it all down to get it out of my head. I divided the list into two headings: one for Ben Nader and the other for Sandra Mays. I listed suspects and their possible motives. It was a short list.
BEN NADER SANDRA MAYS
Suspect Motive Suspect Motive
Tammy Was Ben having an affair? Tammy Same—affair?
Sandra Retaliation for different career goals Ben No, he was in the hospital
Esmé What is the connection between them? Esmé No motive!
Mack Hebron No motive! Mack Hebron Their volatile relationship?
I sat back to study what I’d written. No wonder my mind was mush. Nothing about the situation made any sense. If the two incidents were connected, Tammy was the only one with a possible motive for both, but that was only assuming there’d been an affair that didn’t actually appear to have happened—or if there was something else we hadn’t uncovered yet.
I came back to Sandra. It would have been risky for her to stash a car, don a disguise, and pray that no one recognized her or got any information on the vehicle when the street was filled with people. It was pure luck that it had played out that way, but I just didn’t think Sandra Mays would take the chance and potentially ruin her entire career.
Esmé might have a motive to try to silence Ben, but as of now, I had no idea what it could be. He’d been in her room at Crosby House. Had he been telling the truth that it was to measure for paint, or was there something else? But Esmé had no connection to Sandra.
And then there was Mack Hebron. No obvious motive for the attempted murder of Ben, but plenty of potential motive for Sandra. Was it possible that Mack may have overheard something about the ladder to the roof when Miguel and I had first discovered it with Ben?
Unless this whole thing had to do with Tammy exacting revenge on Ben and Sandra for having an affair—or to do with their opposing aspirations, which was a stretch—then, as we’d done the night before at dinner, I had to look at the two incidents as separate. I felt like I had a bunch of loose ends that led nowhere and I didn’t know how to weave any of it together. And it was making my head hurt.
I went back to bed, my mind clear of the clutter. With my thoughts down on paper, I was able to shut down and rest. Still, morning came too soon. Working in my volunteer hours at Crosby House took some finagling of my schedule, but it was a priority, not only because I was committed to helping the women there in any way I could, starting with the keyhole gardens, but also because I knew it was central to the investigation into what had happened to Ben and Sandra.
Olaya had recently started closing the bread shop on Mondays, so today was part of my weekend. Miguel closed Baptista’s on Mondays, too. That didn’t mean either Olaya or Miguel was not actually working, though. Olaya was probably trying out variations to her tried-and-true bread recipes, while Miguel was most likely tending to the ever simmering batch of mole that he used in the same way a sourdough starter operated. He had created the base when he’d reopened the restaurant. Since then, he kept it at a continual low simmer, adding a combination of chilis, nuts, chocolate, and spices to it as he built in layers and layers of flavor and complexity.
He might be out and about, though. He surfed occasionally, but more often than not, he took his bike and rode for an hour or two. Cycling was his favorite form of physical activity and something he loved to do in the mornings when the air was cool and the world felt fresh against his face.
We’d arranged to meet for lunch at the Shrimp Shack, which never took a day off. After being there Friday afternoon, I’d been craving their shrimp poppers . . . or their shrimp and grits . . . or their grilled shrimp kebobs. Basically, I needed some shrimp and I wasn’t going to be too picky.
I arrived at Crosby House ready to pull whatever weeds may have managed to grow in the short time the keyhole gardens had been in place, to encourage more composting—because I figured it would take the women at the facility a while to get into the swing of things—and to suss out what I could about Esmé and Ben.
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