I put the question back on him. “Do you think she could have had anything to do with his death?” Button lunged again. Gerald’s footing slipped, and his whole torso slammed against the car. He found new leverage, though, by looping his hand through the open window and holding onto the frame of the car while he continued the conversation through the front windshield. “She’s a character, but she’s a good neighbor. Keeps a beautiful yard. I’m sure she had nothing to do with it.”
I saw Zoey’s hand move for the windshield wiper control and slapped her hand away.
The dog lunged again, once more body slamming Gerald against the car.
“Do you need any help?” I asked. I was growing concerned. One more good jerk from Button, and I was sure that his arm was going to be ripped right off.
“Do you recall anyone else here the morning that Mike died?” Zoey asked, not giving Gerald a chance to answer if he needed help. Button lunged again and this time Gerald lost his hold on the car and was pulled spread-eagle onto the hood of the car. I put my hands over my mouth to keep from yelping with concern, but Zoey yelled, “Anyone at all?”
Gerald answered a garbled “Nooo!” or “Awww!” before he disappeared off the front of the car. I wasn’t sure which.
Zoey turned to me. “I call that inconclusive.”
She started the car, put it in reverse, and maneuvered away. The last I saw of Gerald was of him being dragged across the road in short lurches of two or three feet at a time.
“Where to next?” Zoey asked once we’d gotten out of view of Gerald.
I said the first name that came to mind. “Betty. Let’s go talk to Betty.”
The drive took fifteen minutes, and I kept replaying Tina’s words in my head.
“What?” Zoey asked, prompting me to share what was on my mind.
“When we talked to Tina, she said that she’d seen those two beauticians over at Mike’s.”
“Two of ‘em? What, you thinking Susie and Betty?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think Betty rented from Mike,” Zoey said.
“I hadn’t either. I mean, I think she wanted us to make that assumption, but I don’t recall her actually ever saying that she didn’t rent from Mike.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Don’t know. Pride?” I remembered times when Dan and I had attended swanky parties alongside powerful business moguls. Without outright lying about it, Dan would phrase things in such a way as to make it sound like our—his—company had been doing two or three times better than it actually was.
“Could be. We already know that she’d been spreading nasty rumors about Susie’s abilities. She’d been doing everything she could to scare Susie’s clients off and steal them for herself.”
“Yeah… So I guess that tells us that not everything that comes out of her mouth is trustworthy.”
“But Tina said something about someone else, too. She mentioned someone who she specifically said did not rent from Mike. Gina… Janice…”
“Grace!” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Yeah, Grace,” Zoey said as she parked in front of Betty’s salon, Betty’s Beauties. “So, if Grace didn’t have business with Mike…”
“Then that meant she was visiting Mike for personal reasons,” I said.
“Bingo.”
We got out of the car. I could see Betty working inside her salon. She could practically see the whole other side of the street from inside her shop. It was the perfect vantage point.
I turned around and looked at the shops on the other side of the street, wondering if they had as good a view of Betty’s place as she had of theirs. I’d have to walk that side of the street and even pop inside the various businesses, but I already knew that most of the shops didn’t look out through a huge wall of glass the way that Betty’s did. Her vantage point was better than anyone else’s to keep tabs on the rest of the world.
Betty’s door jingled from an overhead bell when we pushed inside. Betty was with a client, and I had to walk several feet into the shop and lean to the side before I could tell whether or not her other two hairdressers were there with her. They weren’t.
“Well, what are you two sweethearts doin’ back here?” Betty asked as she pinned a curl in place at the nape of her client’s neck. As before, she was the consummate southern beauty queen with a warm welcoming smile and an approachable friendliness that made me genuinely want to grab a seat, put my feet up and flip casually through some magazines. Something about her made me forget the troubles of the rest of the world. “You gonna finally let me give you a trim? Julia here is gonna be going under the blower in just a few minutes and I can fit you in then.”
Wanting to keep things as casual as possible, rather than giving an air of confrontation, I took a seat in front of one of the low coffee tables, and Zoey sat down next to me. “Betty, do you own your shop?”
“Well of course I do, honey. It’s got my name on it.”
The gears in my head turned and strained. I was sure that Betty was playing with words, a flawless misdirection on her part. She owned her business, but I was asking if she owned the physical location of her shop. “So you own this building?”
“Oh goodness, no,” Betty said laughing. “That would lock me into this location. It’s much better to be able to relocate to the most advantageous and popular shopping spots. Foot traffic. You simply cannot beat the free advertising that being in a high foot traffic area will give you. I’m sure you know that with your prime spot there on Main Street, though.” She gave me a wink. “Can you tell a difference in your clientele flow during the hours with the highest foot traffic?”
I’d give her foot traffic—my sneaker right into her mouth. She was so likable, so easy to talk to, that I wanted to answer her question, but another part of me had figured her out. She was trying to guide the conversation to what she wanted to talk about… and away from what she didn’t want to talk about.
Ignoring her question, I asked, “Who owns this building?”
Betty’s eyes got wide and she asked in a conspiratorial tone, “Kylie Berry, are you thinking of adding to your property holdings? Are you thinking of snapping up Mike’s old properties?”
Again, she was directing the conversation. It was so hard for me to keep a steady hand on the proverbial rudder and to keep moving forward in the direction I wanted to go. “So Mike did own this property?”
“Well of course he did, silly,” Betty said with a Tinkerbell laugh. “He owned just about everything on this street.”
The way she said it made me feel as though it had been my fault for not knowing the truth from the very beginning. Betty was not only directing the conversation, but she was trying to direct my perceptions as well. The woman was good.
“And you paid him rent?” Zoey asked.
“Same as everyone else, darlin’,” Betty answered, but now her voice had gained an edge. “What’s this about?”
“Where are your two other hairdressers?” Zoey asked.
“At a conference showcasing new hair care products in Cincinnati. Want me to give you their phone numbers?” Sarcasm dripped from her tone. “Now, I am with a client, so that is the end of your questions—”
It was my turn to press. “You were here all day last Monday?”
Betty stopped fussing with her client’s hair, turned to face us, and threw her hands out wide in exasperation. “Ugh. Still trying to save your precious Susie? The woman’s a killer, plain and simple. Accept it and move on!” She pointed at a small, simple, all white desk-top table on the other side of the shop. “There. There,” she said, wagging her finger. “There’s my appointment book. We—all three of us—had appointments all day long last Monday. You don’t believe me? Look for yourself.” With another exasperated sound, she turned her back on us and put her hands on her client’s shoulders. “Julia, I am sooo sorry. I am alll yours. Let’s get you beautiful.”
It was clear that Betty was cutting us off without
another word. Without saying anything, Zoey and I went to her appointment book and flipped it back to the previous Monday, the day that Mike had died. As promised, it listed non-stop appointments from as early as eight AM that morning to after six that evening. It was a lot of information to take in, and I pulled out my phone and took a couple of pictures of it to look through more closely later.
Back outside on the sidewalk, I turned to Zoey. “Did you see that? Did you see how she tried to talk around what we wanted to know?”
“I did, but I hope she didn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“I really liked those finger sandwiches she gave us last time. Think if we got back in and make nice that she’ll give us some more?”
I scowled in answer.
“No, huh? Okay, let’s go hit up some of the shops up the street. Maybe they saw something.”
Chapter 27
What is this place?” I asked as Zoey parked in a nearly deserted parking lot, one big enough to accommodate the needs of a super-sized Walmart. There wasn't another car around for a hundred feet in any direction.
“It’s the gift shop,” Zoey said.
“This is the gift shop?” There was no way. The building attached to the parking lot looked like a contemporary re-imagining of a castle. It was huge and even had tall, spear-like spires. “What’s it made out of? Is that a stone façade?” The building’s stone bricks were enormous. They were fe-fi-fo-fum giant sized stone bricks. I’d seen buildings in Chicago made out of stone bricks far less impressive, buildings I hadn’t been allowed inside of because I was nowhere near posh enough to make it past the doorman.
“Nope, they’re real.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “How… just how?”
“Come on,” Zoey said, getting out of the car.
Huge, arched, bronze letters spelled out “Camden Falls Artisan Center” across the building’s front. We’d come here to find Grace after the shops up the street from Betty’s salon had been a bust for information. Well, that wasn’t completely true. The shops had been full of people with plenty to say about Mike’s murder, or rather who they thought had committed the murder. At the convenience store, wagers were being placed on how much prison time Susie would have to do. And at the nail salon—where they either didn’t speak English or pretended not to speak English—Susie’s name was thrown around accompanied by gales of laughter.
The one thing we had learned was that everybody on Brunt Street, with the exception of Betty who believed that Tina had done it, thought that Susie was guilty of murdering Mike Pratt. Nobody had any information that pointed to the contrary, and worse yet, nobody had been interested in considering any other possibility.
Things were not looking good for Susie.
“How is this even possible?” I said, still in awe of what the sleepy little town of Camden Falls called a “gift shop.” I walked slowly next to Zoey, taking my time to drink in all the sights. The building was fronted by a very deep and curving outer courtyard. Placed throughout were a myriad of human-sized steel sculptures. There was a horse riding a Harley, a big whiskered cat was using a mouse as a yo-yo, and an old hound dog playing a banjo. The craftsmanship was undeniable, and the laminated price tags were downright scary.
“I dunno,” Zoey said with a shrug. “This place was here before I got here.” That wasn’t saying much. Zoey had only lived in Camden Falls for about a year. “Everything in it was made by Kentucky artists. That’s all I know.”
“Unbelievable.” I had to reach for the building’s door handle three times while I stared at a sculpture of a family of ladybugs traveling across the arched, steel rendering of a log. The mommy and daddy ladybugs had hobo knapsacks on sticks over their shoulders, and each of their little ones carried smaller ones too.
With my eyes still on the sculpture, taking in every detail I could, I barreled straight into a wall of chest and bounced backward.
“I’m sorry!” I said, the words out of my mouth before my eyes had a chance to see who I was saying them to. When I did see, the only thing more out of me was a squeak—that is until Zoey ran into the back of me and sent me bouncing off that wall of man chest all over again.
I released a choked screech and jumped back so hard and so fast that the man in front of me might as well have been on fire.
“What gives?” Zoey asked, annoyance and concern laced into her voice in equal measures.
I coughed and then cleared my throat before trying to speak. “This is, uh, this is Dan,” I said.
Zoey looked him up and down. “Want me to hurt him? I could run him over with my car.”
It was a tempting offer, but there was too much risk of our attempt at vehicular homicide being witnessed by some innocent bystander—“Dan? Dan where are you?” my ex-aunt Dorothy’s voice called from a distance—or by some not-so-innocent bystander.
“Any chance you could get two for one?” I asked Zoey under my breath.
Zoey shrugged. “There’s always a first time.”
That made me wonder and worry that maybe there had been a time that she’d done a one-for-one vehicular homicide. It registered as yet another note-to-self to never get on Zoey’s bad side.
“Always with the murdering,” Dan crooned. “What is it with my exes? First you and now Susie.”
I narrowed my eyes and squeezed my nails into the palms of my hands. “I was found innocent and Susie will be too, but I’m sure that one of your three-thousand or so other conquests won’t fail to disappoint.”
Dan seemed charmed rather than off-put by my flaring temper.
“Kylie, sweetheart, how have you been?” He leaned in to kiss my cheek, and like a dullard who was thinking too slowly, I didn’t pull away in time. His scratchy cheek brushed mine, I caught a whiff of his scent and—despite everything I’d been through and all that I knew about him—he made my toes curl. “You look amazing,” he said into my ear, and darn it all but I leaned into him. It was only Zoey’s hand on the back of my neck that tore me from his spell. Dan and I had our issues, but our time together in the bedroom had never been one of them. I supposed that had something to do with the things he’d learned during his many, many, many forays into extracurricular activity… with other women. Forays I most definitely had been kept in the dark about.
As to his “amazing” comment, I was wearing my red princess-style coat and a plain white V-neck t- over top of the jeans I used to wear when cleaning our one-time home. Yet his compliment sounded sincere. We’d been together for eight and a half years. I’d known him well enough to know when he was lying, and at least as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t lying.
I decided to accept that flattery, but not the man doling it out—even if he did look like a quarterback who had never left his prime.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I grew up here. You knew that when you moved here from Chicago. Don’t act like you didn’t have hopes of seeing me again.” His hand ran down the length of my arm. “I’m just glad I didn’t disappoint.”
I opened my mouth to say something—something cutting, something mean, something that would make it unnecessary for him to ever have a vasectomy—but my ex-aunt Dorothy’s voice calling him in the background stole all my thoughts.
Dan looked over his shoulder and then back at me. His smugness dropped away, leaving me unnerved to be looking up at the man I’d fallen in love with all those years ago. He gave me a wink. “I’ve got’cha. You go that way.” He side-nodded toward the set of doors on the opposite end of the wide entryway and then turned his back on us and threw his arms wide. In a booming voice that I was sure could have been heard by half the absurdly large “gift shop,” he said, “Aunt Dorothy! Where have you been all my life?”
Taking full advantage of Dan’s diversion, Zoey and I zipped to the far door and dashed through. Ex-aunt Dorothy’s eyes were disturbingly only for Dan as she made her way to him, but that left Zoey and me in the free and clear as Dan and his aunt left the
building, a shopping bag dangling from her arm.
“So that’s Dan?” Zoey said, her eyes twinkling. “He’s different than in his pictures online. I get it now.”
I slapped her arm. “You get nothing.” I knew she was teasing, but her words held truth. Dan was charisma incarnate. It was part of why he’d been able to keep me dazzled so long by all the parts he’d wanted me to see and blinded to all the parts of himself he hadn’t wanted me to see. “Let’s find Grace.”
Zoey and I wandered our way through the large, sprawling building. We drifted from section to section. It even had a café on one end. Thankfully, the whole place had an open floor plan and that made spotting the center’s employees relatively fast and easy work. They were all dressed in khakis and lime green shirts with name tags. It didn’t take long to spot Grace. She was tall, slender, and like so many others of Mike’s conquests, she had thick black hair. Hers fell in long layers down her back. She looked to be in her mid-twenties and was pretty enough to be a personality on a local morning talk show on TV.
Zoey and I watched her answer questions about a set of handcrafted lutes and then swooped in as soon as the curious customer headed on their way. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when we got up close. Grace’s makeup was flawless, but peeking through from underneath were dark circles under her eyes and a slight tremor in her hands. She didn’t look tired. She looked exhausted.
I don’t know what I had planned to ask her, but everything changed when I saw her up close. “Can we buy you a cup of tea or coffee in the café?” Grace’s eyes glanced around us, I assumed in search of her boss. I touched her hand to refocus her on me. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that I needed to be able to sit because of sciatica and that we asked you to sit with us so that we could learn more about the center.”
That seemed to do the trick, and even earned us a faint smile and a small nod.
A Berry Clever Corpse Page 17