The Moonshine Shack Murder

by Diane Kelly

  Without preamble, she said, “There’s a problem at your shop.”

  Panic seized me. Could there be another body on the doorstep of the Moonshine Shack? I croaked again, this time from terror. “What is it?”

  “Nothing a squeegee and some glass cleaner can’t handle.”

  While she probably intended her words to be comforting, the crime scene team had likely used the same tools to clean up after Cormac’s murder, along with a mop bucket. For all I knew, she could be telling me there was, in fact, another person cut to pieces in front of my shop. “I’ll be right there.”

  Forgoing a shower and makeup, I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, and leaped into a fresh pair of overalls and Firefly shine T-shirt. I opened a can of wet food for Smoky and dumped it into his bowl, not taking the time to loosen it with a fork like usual.

  Kiki cracked the door to her bedroom and peeked out, her two cats peeking out around her ankles. “Something wrong?”

  “Ace called. She said something happened at my shop.”

  Kiki’s eyes went wide and so did her door. “What was it?”

  “She didn’t specify.” I grabbed my purse and dug out my keys. “She only said it was something that could be handled with glass cleaner and a squeegee.”

  Kiki’s wide eyes went squinty now. “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  I didn’t argue. For one thing, Kiki was stubborn and I knew it would do no good. For another, I could use the moral support and possibly the help, too. All the moonshine in the world couldn’t buy a friend like Kiki.

  Kiki slipped out of her pajamas and into yoga pants and a T-shirt with the swiftness and grace of a Tony Award–winning Broadway star facing a quick costume change. Smoky stood directly in front of the door, letting us know that wherever we were going, he was going, too, breakfast be darned. Rather than try to maneuver around him and risk a nip on the ankle or a swipe of claws on my calf, I scooped him into his carrier. Cat in hand, I hustled out the door and down to my van, sliding his carrier into its spot between the seats. Kiki was swept along in my wake.

  I ignored the speed limits on my drive to the shop. The roads were still clear this early in the morning, and I figured if a cop pulled us over, I could play the Ace card and tell the officer I was on my way to meet the detective. Surely that would earn me immunity on any traffic infraction. Kiki held on for dear life as I took a corner too fast and my van leaned precariously to the left, the tires squealing.

  I parked in back of my store, hopped out, and grabbed Smoky’s carrier, scrambling to get inside. Kiki rushed in after me. After disarming the alarm at the back door in the stockroom, I set the carrier down, freed its feline inmate, and rushed into the salesroom.

  The morning sun bathed the space in an odd, pink glow. I looked to the front of my shop. The window glass was rendered nearly opaque by illegible scrawls and scribbles.

  Kiki stepped up beside me, her mouth gaping. “What the bloody heck is that?”

  Smoky strode up to stand between us, his tail swishing. He, too, could tell something was wrong here.

  Through the small, still-clean spaces, I could see two uniformed police officers standing out front alongside Ace.

  Kiki said, “I’ll get the cleaning supplies while you talk to the cops.”

  I unlocked the front door and walked out to meet Ace on the sidewalk. Flanking her were Officer Barboza and his younger partner.

  Officer Barboza pointed to the windows. “Somebody doesn’t like you much.”

  I turned around and gasped. From this side, the scribbling was legible. The foulest and ugliest of words were scrawled across the glass in a shimmery shade of pink lipstick, like glamorous graffiti. I spat out the name of the culprit as if it were a bug in my mouth. “Ashlynn.” I turned to Ace. “Did you see her at Bar Celona last night?”

  She shook her head. “By the time I got there, she was gone.”

  “Her shift ended?”

  “No,” Ace said. “She’d been fired. The owner found eighty dollars up her sleeve.”

  “Up to her old tricks, huh?” Just as I’d suspected.

  “She’d gotten away with it before. I suppose she figured she could do it again.”

  I gestured at the window. “This is her lipstick.”

  “I figured as much,” she said. “That woman has serious anger management issues and no self-control. I’m heading to her apartment to arrest her once I leave here.”

  Hope welled up in me. “For Cormac’s murder?”

  “Just this vandalism for now. But I’ll see what else I can wheedle out of her. Maybe she’ll slip up and admit something.”

  I shifted my focus from the woman to the windows. It was hard enough to wipe lipstick off skin. It would be a bear to clean it off the glass. I let out a loud sigh.

  “You can get started on the cleaning,” Ace said as she turned and headed to her Impala at the curb. “We’ve already taken all the photos we need.”

  With that, she climbed into her car, backed out of the space, and drove off. The two officers followed suit, loading into their squad car and heading out.

  Kiki exited my shop, cleaning rags and glass cleaner in one hand, a bucket of soapy water and a squeegee in the other. She ran her eyes over the windows. “Looks like you got a visit from the potty-mouth fairy last night.”

  “It was Ashlynn,” I said. “It had to be. That’s her shade of lipstick.”

  Kiki stepped closer. “It’s pretty. Has a nice iridescence to it.” She turned to me. “Any idea what kind it is?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ve been wanting to find out.”

  We set about cleaning the windows. After some trial and error, we realized the best process was for me to wipe off as much as I could with the spray cleaner and a rag, and Kiki to follow after me with the soapy squeegee to remove any remaining smudges. Inside the window, Smoky chased my hand and the squeegee as if it were some sort of game, jumping up to put his paws on the interior of the glass. At least one of us is finding this fun.

  We were still at it an hour later when Detective Pearce pulled her Impala sideways across three open spaces at the curb and lowered her window.

  I stepped up to her car. “Did you get her?”

  She held up an evidence bag with a black rectangular lipstick tube inside. “I got her. She’s in lockup at the station as we speak. I told her we found her DNA in the lipstick on your window. She believed me, broke down in tears, and confessed. She still doesn’t know about the security cameras at Limericks. She thinks you knew her sleeve trick because you saw her steal some cash when you tried to deliver the moonshine order to Cormac. She figured you didn’t tell him that you saw her steal because you were angry with him for not accepting the order.” Her eyes flashed with mischief. “We’re going to let her keep thinking that for now, okay?”

  “Sure. Any chance she confessed to Cormac’s murder?”

  “Not yet,” the detective said. “I’m working on it.”

  I gestured to the bag in her hand. “Mind telling me what kind of lipstick that is?”

  “Nice shade, isn’t it?”

  “Very nice. I think it could work for me.”

  She ran her gaze over my face, assessing. “I think it could, too.” She manipulated the bag so she could read the bottom of the tube. “The brand is Chantecaille. The shade is called Honeypot.”

  I whipped out my phone and worked my fingers. “Whoa. That lipstick retails for forty-eight dollars a tube.”

  Ace scoffed. “No wonder she was skimming from the till.” With that, she lifted her hand from the steering wheel in a goodbye gesture, took her foot off the brake, and eased away from the curb. With any luck, she’d be back in touch with me soon with some good news.

  Chapter Tw
enty-Two

  My hopes that Ace would contact me with good news were soon dashed. In fact, when she contacted me Friday afternoon, she had only bad news to give me.

  Despite a lengthy and heated interrogation, Ashlynn continued to insist she had nothing to do with Cormac’s murder. Her act of vandalism at the Moonshine Shack gave the police the right to search her car and apartment, but they’d found nothing linking her to his death. Was it too much to ask that she’d kept a diary in which she’d confessed to ending the life of her boss and boyfriend?

  What’s more, Ace had learned precious little in her interview with Gage Tilley. “He told me that Cormac had ordered such a large quantity of moonshine for two reasons. The first was that he planned to start hosting a Monday Moonshine night every week. He’d hoped to draw some of your customers away, cut into your profits, maybe put you out of business.”

  That rat! I wondered if Cormac had gotten the idea from the lasses’ night I’d proposed to him. I found myself wishing that Mack Clayton had gotten some traction with his proposed boycott of Limericks and the price-fixing scheme, after all. I’d previously thought the idea had seemed overly harsh and vengeful, but I’d been naïve, hadn’t I? “What was the second reason?”

  “An upcoming motorcycle rally. Tilley said that Cormac told him to leave the other five cases of moonshine outside, by the back door of Limericks. Cormac said he needed to set them aside to make sure he’d have enough on hand for the event. He planned to store them off-site somewhere. Cormac said the rally was going to involve a poker run. The bikers stop at five locations, get a card at each stop, and build a hand. Best hand at the end of the night wins some sort of prize. Anyway, Cormac said he was making arrangements with the rally organizer for Limericks to be the final stop of the poker run. He expected a large group of bikers to gather at the bar.”

  “Were you able to verify that information?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “I ran a search of Cormac’s e-mails and texts, but nothing popped up when I searched for ‘rally’ or ‘poker.’ The words ‘motorcycle’ and ‘biker’ got me nothing, too.”

  “Do you think Cormac was lying to Tilley?”

  “Hard to say,” she said. “Could be Cormac was in touch with the organizer by phone, or maybe even in person. I don’t see why he’d lie about it. That said, I’ve looked online. There’s a number of rallies coming up throughout Tennessee and Georgia but none in the immediate vicinity. I don’t know how far these folks travel for these poker runs, but my assumption is that they’d want their final stop to be somewhere near the rally’s base location since that’s where they’d have their accommodations.”

  In other words, Cormac’s story had some loose ends remaining to be tied up. “Maybe he got crosswise with someone from the rally.”

  “It’s possible,” she said, “but I’ve spoken with Ashlynn, Isabella, and Miranda since I talked with Tilley, and none of them were aware that Cormac was working on a biker rally event. Seems like Cormac would have mentioned it, or that they would have overheard something.”

  “He might not have said anything if the details hadn’t been nailed down yet,” I suggested, “and if he’d had discussions on his phone in his office with his door closed, they might not be aware what was going on.”

  “Unfortunately,” Ace said, “ifs aren’t evidence. They’re conjecture. What I need are some cold, hard clues.”

  “There’s nothing useful on his phone? Maybe a contact?”

  “Nope. None of his contacts are associated with a motorcycle organization, and there were no recent calls to or from anyone involved in a rally.”

  I remembered Cormac’s slander complaint against Heath Delaney with the Board of Professional Responsibility, how Cormac had listed Gage Tilley as a witness. I raised the matter with the detective. “What did Gage Tilley say about the slander case?”

  “Not much,” she replied. “He said Cormac hadn’t mentioned filing a complaint and that he knew nothing whatsoever about the situation. He had no idea who Heath Delaney was, or that Cormac had even had a new dishwasher installed.”

  I mulled this information over. Heath Delaney was likely right when he said the slander complaint was nothing more than a nuisance case. Cormac had probably filed it as an act of retribution against the attorney, or in the hopes Heath would cough up some money for a settlement. Maybe Cormac had named Gage Tilley as a witness as a bluff. A third party like Gage Tilley who was not employed by Cormac would make a stronger witness, and thus a bigger threat, than someone on Cormac’s staff.

  “Did Tilley say why he was at Limericks the night Cormac was killed? If he made a large delivery earlier in the week and collected a cash payment on delivery, what reason would he have had to return to the pub so soon?”

  “Tilley told me nature called. He said the only places open that late at night where he could use the facilities were bars or gas stations, and you know how gas station facilities can be. When he stopped at Limericks to use the men’s room, he took advantage of the opportunity to check in with Cormac. Cormac invited him back to his office and offered him a drink. Tilley said he declined because he was on duty and driving the company truck, and it was against policy. They shot the breeze for a minute or two, but he’d had a long day and begged off to return to his hotel. He said he didn’t notice anyone suspicious in the bar or hanging around outside when he left.”

  “Did he seem credible?”

  “Hard to say. He seemed a little nervous, but that’s normal. Most people get a bit jittery when being interviewed by police.”

  It was understandable, especially given that the case involved a major crime rather than some petty offense. Heck, I’d been nervous, too, during my initial interrogations by Officer Barboza and Ace.

  Before I could respond, she added, “My mind keeps going back to the missing Backwoods Bootleggers moonshine. Those bottles have to be somewhere, and my intuition tells me if we find the Backwoods bottles, we’ll find our killer.”

  But where in the world could those bottles be?

  A customer entered the Moonshine Shack, and I concluded the conversation. I only wished we’d been able to reach some conclusions where Cormac O’Keefe’s murder was concerned.

  * * *

  * * *

  The remainder of Friday was uneventful, and Saturday proved to be equally routine. Nobody came into my shop to confront me about wrongfully fingering them for a murder, and nobody cast aspersions on my character via messages in lipstick inscribed on my shop’s windows.

  The open sign illuminated in the window of the Tipperary Tavern at five o’clock each afternoon, and Miranda was proving to be an industrious and responsible business owner. She came over to show me some promotional napkins she’d ordered for the full moon moonshine nights. They featured a big white moon and the name of her tavern, along with the words Full Moon Celebration Featuring Firefly Moonshine! She gave me a broad smile. “Remember the text that came in when you were at the bar? This was the shipment it referred to. I was pricing custom-printed napkins to see if I could afford them. I tried to hide the message so you’d be surprised.”

  I was surprised, all right. Of course, at the time, I’d been suspicious. “They’re perfect!” I told her.

  She said she’d check a calendar and get back to me with the dates on which there’d be a full moon. “I’ll need lots of your shine.”

  “You got it!”

  A trio of bikers visited the pub shortly after opening on Saturday, staying inside for about an hour. Around eight o’clock, I spotted a group of boys enter the Tipperary Tavern. All wore shirts embossed with the letters for the Mu Sigma fraternity. None appeared to be Tristan, Dane, or any of the other three boys who’d come into my store the night Cormac had been killed. The frat boys remained in the pub when Kiki and I turned out the lights outside the Moonshine Shack and closed up for the night. Kiki’s boyfriend picked her up at the cur
b so they could catch a late movie. She waved from the passenger seat as they drove off.

  After leaving the shop, Smoky and I aimed for the cabin. It was already late evening and fully dark, and there wasn’t time to wash, dry, and fold all of my laundry before bedtime tonight. Even if there had been sufficient time to handle the laundry, the thought of being in my secluded cabin alone at night with Cormac O’Keefe’s killer still on the loose held little appeal. The sounds of the washer and dryer might mask the sounds of an intruder. Nonetheless, I had no choice but to make a quick run by the cabin to round up some fresh clothing. My undergarment situation had become dire. I’d put on my last clean pair of undies and socks this morning. I’d come back to the cabin in the morning to do my laundry.

  My mouth spread in a wide yawn as I drove past the Bridge Liquor Outlet on the outskirts of the riverfront area, my eyes closing as my mouth opened. The store was named for its proximity to the Market Street Bridge, also known as the John Ross Bridge, a quaint blue drawbridge that connected downtown Chattanooga to the Northshore commercial area. If my yawn had been any longer, I might have missed the Backwoods Bootleggers box truck easing its way between the liquor store and the pizza place next door. It has to be Gage Tilley’s truck, doesn’t it? After all, he was the moonshine company’s sales rep for the area. He was likely making a delivery.

  An uneasy feeling niggled at me. Maybe it was only because I was about to drive alone up the dark and curvy mountainside road to my secluded cabin. Or maybe there was something my subconscious wasn’t telling me, something about Gage Tilley. But what?

  “Let’s see what he’s up to,” I told Smoky as I turned in to the adjacent pizza restaurant. Smoky rose from his haunches inside his cage, a rare expression of interest in my conversation. Or perhaps he was experiencing some sort of feline intuition and sensed the night was about to get more interesting.

  Fortunately, there was an open parking space between a minivan and a crew-cab pickup truck with a camper shell on the back. My glow-in-the-dark van would be obscured from view when Gage left the liquor store.