A Berry Home Catastrophe

by A. R. Winters

  “Oh! Oh yeah…” he said with some enthusiasm, but then quickly amended, “Ohhhh… Oh, yeah…” in a commiserating tone. “You’re that broad that keeps killin’ people.”

  My shoulders slumped. I felt like Andy. No wonder the kid didn’t have any self-confidence. With someone like Guy around to tell you such wonderful things about yourself, how could anyone feel good?

  “Mister…” I realized I didn’t know the man’s last name. “Guy,” I said, “I promise, I haven’t killed anyone.” I didn’t know if that was technically true, but it was the stance I was going with. “In fact, as a fellow business owner, I’m here in hopes of… of… doing some spring cleaning of my reputation.”

  “Oh, yeah?” His brows arched, turning his forehead into a sea of cresting skin waves. “How so?”

  If this trained killer had killed Hank, then I was setting Zoey and myself up for potential failure with our attempt to solve the mystery of Hank’s death. But Guy had been trained to kill with firearms or his own two hands, and from what little I’d seen of his personality so far, he was undoubtedly a direct man. He was also a very physical man. If he’d wanted Hank dead, I didn’t think that poison would be the route he’d take. He would have beaten Hank to death with his fists or clubbed him to death with a hand weight. At the very least, he would have been present to personally throw Hank out that window or off a roof. Poison didn’t fit his personality.

  “Guy, it’s like you said. People think of my café and then they think of me—that lady who kills people.”

  Guy grinned and nodded, kind of like it was an association he didn’t consider a drawback.

  “I’d rather them not think of me that way.”

  Guy’s grin fell flat. “Why not? Brings in tourists.”

  “I don’t want to build a business model reliant on tourists. I want a steady collection of customers who I can get to know so that I can provide them with those things that will keep them coming back day after day and week after week.”

  Guy frowned and nodded, a contemplative frown rather than an upset one. “I see what you’re sayin’. What you need me for… or, you know, my business?”

  “Guy, I think we’re in the same boat. Hank was a regular of yours.”

  Guy’s brows scrunched together. He didn’t seem to appreciate the inferred connection I was making between his business and Hank’s death.

  “Hank came here almost every day,” I said. “He was only at The Berry Home once.”

  Guy stood up straight and crossed heavily muscled arms over his chest. “Yeah, exactly. He was here almost every day and never died. He goes to your place one time—once”—he held up a finger—“and he dies. What does that tell you? ‘Cause it tells me my place is safe and yours isn’t.”

  That was a solid argument, but he didn’t have all the information.

  “Guy,” I said, “there’s more to Hank’s death than what’s been said right now. More is going to come out. I can’t say what, but when it does… it’s going to be Results Gym that people are looking funny at. Not my place.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going to come out? My place didn’t have anything to do with Hank killin’ himself.” Guy’s voice was growing louder. The thought that his gym could be tied in some way to Hank’s death wasn’t sitting well with him.

  Welcome to my world!

  I lowered my voice and spoke in nearly a whisper. “Guy, Hank didn’t kill himself.”

  Guy turned his head to look at Hank’s memorial before refocusing on me and then repeated the pattern several times. A slew of curse words any sailor could be proud of came out a moment later.

  “Okay,” he said, refocusing on me and Zoey. “What’s your game plan? What’s your goal?”

  “Find Hank’s killer,” Zoey said.

  “And you think that you’re going to find Hank’s killer here?”

  Zoey and I nodded our heads in unison.

  Guy turned his head to stare at the partition that separated us from the gym. He looked at it like he could see through it. The sounds of weights clanging together accompanied by the indistinct murmur of voices reached our ears.

  Guy looked back at us. “Okay, what d’you need? Let’s get this done. I ain’t having my gym turned into no house of horrors.”

  Guy was more than helpful. He took us to his personal office, sat us down in front of one of his computers, and turned Zoey loose on his closed-circuit surveillance. Zoey hadn’t been able to access any of his surveillance video because it wasn’t connected to the internet.

  “You guys want anything to eat or drink?” Guy asked. “I can send the kid over to Yancy’s to get you something. My treat.”

  “No,” Zoey and I answered at the same time and then looked at each other.

  “Hmph.” Guy shoved his hands deep into his jeans pockets. “Looks like my place ain’t the only one on the butcher’s block.”

  I guessed that was one way to say it.

  He left us alone after that, and Zoey worked her magic going through the footage with more high-speed efficiency than I’d be able to muster after even a year of practice.

  As for me, I pulled my handy-dandy notepad out of Zoey’s tote bag. I flipped it open to the nearest blank page and started taking notes. Guy kept a huge backlog of video, which I guess made sense. It could protect him from possible negligence lawsuits if anyone claimed they had a latent injury from malfunctioning equipment months earlier.

  As Zoey flew through the video at high speed, she’d stop once in a while and I would write down a description of the person she had paused the video playback on. First, we took note of everyone who had been in the gym on the morning that Hank had died. Once we did that, we searched the days and weeks prior to Hank’s death, moving backward in time. I put stars by the description of each person who turned out to be a regular at the gym. I circled the star if their time spent at the gym overlapped with Hank’s time at the gym. As for random people popping in to work out, I put a big X next to their name. It was super unlikely that a random person had killed Hank. Chances were that it had been someone he knew.

  Zoey stopped the backward search at two months prior to Hank’s death. “What’s the list look like?” she asked.

  “Pretty good. We only have six people who were gym regulars and who frequented the gym at the same time Hank did.”

  “What about Guy?” Zoey asked. “Think he could have done it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t think poison would be his style.”

  “Me neither.”

  I stuck my head out of Guy’s office, spotted Andy and waved him down. “Mind getting Guy for us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Andy said and headed off.

  Again with the ma’am! I wondered if I had some gray hairs creeping into my red. I hadn’t noticed any, but then again, I didn’t pay as much attention to my grooming as I once did. With the early mornings I had at the café, I got up, showered, dressed, and put my hair up in a ponytail. If I didn’t have a booger on my nose when I looked in the mirror, then I was good to go.

  “What’d you find? Anything useful?” Guy asked when I came into his office.

  “Can you tell us who these people are?” I asked as I handed over my notebook. “The ones with circled stars next to their name.” Those constituted a very short list.

  “Yeah, sure.” He pulled a pencil I hadn’t noticed from behind his ear and wrote as he talked. As he read, he squinted so hard that his eyes became mere slits. “The pretty blonde is Hot Hannah.” He paused, looked up, then shrugged. “A nickname. We don’t actually call her that to her face.” He refocused on the notebook. “Muscular tall guy with a rash on his back is Vic, and it ain’t a rash. It’s bacne.” The look on my face must have been blank because Guy took pity on me and translated his slang. “Back acne. The guy’s a ‘roid user.”

  “Steroids?” I asked, wanting to be sure I was understanding him.

  “Yeah.”

  I remembered the rumors a
bout Hank that Joel had told me. One of them had been that Hank had been a steroid user. He’d been in such great shape. “Did Hank use steroids?”

  Guy did a hem-haw side nod while he considered the question. “Hard to say with some folks. Some people are genetically geared to look and stay fit. So, yeah, he had the body of a juicer—a steroid user—but I never heard him talk about it and he was a mellow guy. Sure, he was always drinking his supplements, but ain’t everybody nowadays, so that don’t necessarily mean nothin’. But Vic on the other hand”—he tapped the end of his pencil against the paper—“major ‘roid rage. I tell ‘im to keep a lid on the temper in my gym, though. Bottom line, as long as he ain’t peddling the stuff to my other customers or making my gym a place people don’t wanna be, then I don’t care what he does to his body.”

  It wasn’t a sure no, but I would count Guy’s answer on the “no” side of whether or not Hank had been a steroid user. If true, it would support that a lot of what was being said about Hank was pure rumor and speculation.

  Guy squinted at the page again. “Mmm, ‘energetic cheerleader guy’…” Guy lifted his gaze to look at me.

  I smiled apologetically.

  “Nope, that nails him,” Guy said. “He’s our resident trainer, Clive. Sometimes he brings more energy to a workout than his clients do.”

  “So he gets paid to help people figure out how to work out?”

  “Yep, that’s what I’m sayin’.”

  I looked at Zoey and then back at Guy. “We saw a lot of people going to Hank. They’d even interrupt his workout, and he’d always stop what he was doing and help them. The cheerleader guy, um, Clive, he’d be there nearby, but people wouldn’t even look at him.”

  “Explains some of the dirty looks Clive threw him,” Zoey said.

  “They’d just been glances,” I said.

  “Naw, the trainer dude was ticked.”

  “Yep,” Guy said. “Happened all the time. People would look at Hank and would assume he was the exercise expert ‘cause of how he looked.”

  “But Clive is pretty big,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he’s not shredded, and he loves his power squats.”

  I had no idea what Guy had just said. It must have shown in my expression because he went on to explain.

  “Shredded means a person who is muscular with very little body fat, so the muscles are all contoured and pop. Hank was shredded. Clive, not so much. As for power squats, they’re an exercise that builds up the thigh. Hank was very focused on body symmetry, uniformly developing his muscles all over his body. But Clive, again, not so much. Clive likes bulk, the bigger the better. He thinks having a single huge muscle group makes him hot stuff.” He shrugged. “Not everyone agrees. He’s got some muscle groups that are overdeveloped but some that are underdeveloped, so he was bigger than Hank but didn’t look as good as Hank.”

  Some of the things that Guy was saying about Clive was making me think of Vic. Vic had huge muscles and used steroids. Like Vic, having big muscles was super important to Clive. “Does Clive use steroids?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Guy said.

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. It’s a military thing. Was, anyway. I haven’t asked Clive if he uses, and he hasn’t told me he uses. But yeah, I suspect he does.”

  That meant that two of the core gym users were steroid users. Yet they had a gym member in their midst that had as good a body as they did—if not better—who might not have used steroids at all.

  “Were Clive and Vic jealous of Hank looking the way he did?” I asked.

  “I heard some grumbling.”

  Zoey tapped the computer screen with the tip of her perfectly manicured nail. “There was that moment between Hank and Vic.”

  It had looked like an argument, but it had been hard to tell without the context of knowing what they’d been saying.

  “Maybe they’d been arguing about steroids? Or maybe jealous about the way Hank looked?”

  I returned my attention to Guy. He was studying the notepad again. “Slender brunette with waist-length hair. You have a star next to her name, but it’s not circled.”

  That meant that “slender brunette with waist-length hair” wasn’t a regular whose workouts almost always overlapped with Hank’s. The star meant that she’d been there a lot, but not every day.

  “That’s Vic’s wife, Ellen,” Guy said.

  “Oh!” Definitely worth noting.

  “Except that she and Vic are on the rocks.”

  “Getting a divorce?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “They okay with it?” Zoey chimed in, asking a question that I felt foolish not to have thought of.

  Guy shrugged. “Anybody ever okay with getting a divorce?” Sounded like Guy might have been speaking from experience. “You two need anything else?”

  “It cool if we talk to your customers?” Zoey asked.

  “Yeah, knock yourselves out.”

  My mind raced. I knew that there were some questions I wanted to ask. “Oh!” I exclaimed as my brain latched onto one of them. “You mentioned a supplement that Hank took. Did he take it often?”

  “Pfft,” Guy exclaimed by blowing air between his teeth and his lower lip. “All the time. I think it’s part of why people were so hung up on believing he took steroids. Always carrying a cup around with him, and no matter what he had in it, I can almost guarantee that he had a scoop of that nutrition powder of his mixed in with it.”

  Bells went off in my head. My throat felt tight as I asked my next question. So much hinged on it. “Did Hank keep his nutrition powder here?”

  “Yeah, in his locker.”

  I felt like doing a face-palm. Hank’s locker! Why hadn’t I even considered the possibility that the man would have a locker? Of course we hadn’t seen it on any of the videos. People wouldn’t want cameras in there. It would be a total invasion of privacy.

  “We’re gonna need to see that locker,” Zoey said.

  14

  “Ladies on the floor!” Guy hollered as he pushed his way through the locker room door marked for men. Zoey and I hung back, but Zoey’s toe wedged into the hinged end of it and kept it wide open. Inside, Guy looked down the length of the locker room and then back at us. “It’s all clear.”

  Zoey and I went in and the door swung shut on its own behind us.

  Results Gym was a much bigger place than I had imagined it to be when we’d pulled up outside. The small line of shops that it had renovated to turn into one building didn’t look that spacious, but the building was much deeper than I’d realized. The long locker room was a testament to that. It had bathroom stalls, three sinks, and even had an open shower area at the end. In addition to all of those amenities, it had a dressing area that included benches and stacked lockers, most still in good shape, that took up every inch of available wall space. With a few dents and dings, some were starting to show their age. But everything was spotlessly clean, which made up for any wear and tear there might have been on the equipment.

  I noticed that about half of the lockers had padlocks dangling from their grip-slide handles.

  “Which one was Hank’s?” I asked.

  “It’s down here,” Guy said, and then led the way.

  “What about bolt cutters?” Zoey asked. I guessed that she was thinking the same thing I was. If Hank’s locker had a lock on it, we wouldn’t be able to access the contents inside.

  “Naw, don’t need them,” Guy said. He stopped in front of a locker on the top tier. Sure enough, it sported a big, heavy padlock with a large blue dial face. My eyes went wide when Guy flipped the padlock upside down and looked at its underside. He squinted and leaned down to take a closer look. Giving up, he stood up and asked, “Can one of you girls read the back of this?”

  Woohoo! Score for me! I was back to being a “girl” instead of a “ma’am.” I didn’t care about the feminist red flags one bit: being called a girl made me feel younger than being c
alled ma’am. It made me smile despite the tension surrounding being able to access the contents of Hank’s locker. We weren’t in it yet, and I was nervous about what we would find inside. My worst fear was that it would be nothing and that the killer had already disposed of any evidence.

  I was standing closer to Guy, so I silently volunteered myself to see what might be written on the back of Hank’s padlock. Holding the thing up so that its underside was exposed to me, I could see the thin scratches that had been made in its shiny silver back. They were numbers. I had to angle the padlock from side to side to get the light to catch across the grooved marks. They read, “23-58-07.”

  I let the padlock drop so that I could work its dial. I twirled it right, then left, and then right again, aligning the small arrow with each number that had been etched into the padlock’s back. With the last number reached, I pulled down, and the lock opened.

  I straightened and looked at Zoey. I imagined my expression was grim. If Hank had been poisoned by someone at the gym, then he had given them an express pass to do it.

  “Who else knew about that?” Zoey asked.

  Guy shrugged. “Don’t know. Everybody? It was one of them common knowledge things people don’t bother to mention no more.”

  “Common knowledge to just the regulars or anybody?”

  Guy shrugged again. “Don’t know.”

  “No cameras in here?” Zoey asked.

  “Naw. Privacy issues.”

  That meant it could have been anybody. But it didn’t mean that it was most likely anybody. My gut told me that someone at this gym wanted Hank dead, and they were willing to do something about it.

  I turned my attention back to the locker. I slid the open padlock off the handle that doubled as a lock stop, then I gripped the handle and lifted. Hank’s locker door unlatched with a metallic clang, and then the door swung open. Inside the locker was a hairbrush, deodorant, a razor, shaving gel, a couple of towels hanging from hooks, and a large canister of Hank’s Power Greens.