Tomb With a View pmm-6

by Casey Daniels

  The sight and smell of food reminded me that I hadn’t eaten a thing that day. Empty calories be damned! I made a grab for the burger.

  “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you.” Ray shook his head in warning. “I know what they put in those things.”

  I set the burger down, then let my hand hover above the fries. When he didn’t offer another warning, I popped one fry into my mouth and grabbed a few more. I waited until I swallowed before I said, “So here’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to figure out what happened to Marjorie. And so far I’m not getting anywhere and I’d really like to solve her murder because . . .” Big Daddy Burgers wasn’t exactly the kind of place I wanted to discuss my relationship with Quinn, and Ray wasn’t a person I wanted to do it with, either. He reminded me of my grandfather, and Grandpa wouldn’t have understood. Not about Quinn. I was beginning to realize that when it came to me and Quinn, even I didn’t understand.

  I twitched the thought aside. It was then that I noticed I had ketchup stains on the sleeves of my new black tunic shirt. It was cotton, sure, but it was dry clean only, and I promised myself I could pout about it later. For now, I couldn’t afford to waste time. “Every time I try to think through what happened to Marjorie,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I’ve been wondering . . . you know, about that night you stopped at her place. The two of you were fighting.”

  “Were we?” Ray didn’t blink. In fact, except for the fidgety tap of his fingers against the purple tabletop, he didn’t move a muscle. His face was suddenly as pale as if he’d already swallowed a couple Big Daddy burgers before someone bothered to tell him what they were made out of.

  Oh yeah, I knew Ray was a lousy liar. I recognized all the signs. He looked exactly like my dad always did back in the day when he swore up and down that he didn’t have anything to do with the Medicare fraud that landed him in federal prison.

  I was so not in the mood to try and convince Ray that there was nothing to be gained from keeping anything from me. “Come on, Ray,” I whined. “I know you might not want to gossip about it since Marjorie’s dead, but it might be important.”

  “I don’t see how it could be.” There was a paper napkin on the table and he folded it with careful creases, then unfolded it again. “Marjorie and I, we hardly knew each other.”

  This time, I didn’t need the lie-o-meter to see the writing on the wall. All I had to do was think back to that night. I propped my elbows on the table, the better to stare Ray down. “Hardly knew each other, huh? Is that why the minute you walked into her place, she was all over you like white on rice?”

  Ray’s cheeks got red. “You noticed that, huh?”

  “I noticed that Marjorie seemed a whole lot more interested in you than you were in her.”

  “Yeah. Well . . .” He ran a thumb and forefinger up and down his throat. “Marjorie . . . well, I don’t exactly know how to say this . . . Marjorie, she thought—”

  “That you were a hot hunk?”

  When he realized he didn’t have to actually come right out and say it himself, Ray let go a sigh of relief. Now the tips of his ears were red, too. “Something like that,” he admitted. “She’s been after me practically since the day my Vanessa went into hospice. Once word of my wife’s death went around to the other volunteers and Marjorie found out I was available . . .” Yeah, his cheeks and his ears were red. The rest of Ray’s face turned an unflattering color that reminded me of olives. He fiddled with the straw in his diet cola.

  “Marjorie was a pompous windbag, and I’m sorry she’s dead, but really, there’s nothing more to say about her and . . .” He glanced at his watch and slid toward the end of the bench, making it clear that it was time for me to get a move on. “You probably have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

  Was I imagining it? I thought he looked disappointed when I stayed right where I was and said, “What I can’t figure out is if the reason you stopped in at Marjorie’s has anything to do with her death.”

  “No! Of course not. Not at all.” All that color drained out of his face and left him as white as the napkin in his trembling fingers. “Marjorie and I, we were . . .” He creased the napkin again. “Well, this is a little hard to explain. And it’s embarrassing, too.”

  He expected me to give in and tell him if that was the case, not to bother explaining. When I didn’t, Ray swallowed hard and said, “A few months ago, Marjorie came to see me one day when I was working on a mailing project for the cemetery. I was in the copy room, sticking labels on envelopes. I knew she thought I was . . .” Another flush of color darkened his face. “Well, what you said. About me being a hot hunk. I knew she felt that way about me and I hope you know me well enough to realize I never thought of her like that. Not at all. Marjorie was a heck of a dedicated volunteer and an intelligent woman, but she wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  Sure I was looking for the truth, but I hated watching him suffer. “She wanted you, but you didn’t want anything to do with her.”

  He nodded. “I’d been avoiding her. Until that day in the copy room when she planted herself in the doorway and cut off my escape route. That’s when she told me . . .” Ray leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Marjorie came to me and told me that she had a get-rich-quick scheme. It was a sure bet, she said. Can’t miss. She told me she’d do me a favor and let me in on it.”

  Marjorie and money. The two words didn’t jibe, not with her personality, and certainly not with a wardrobe that included those cheap, ugly shoes of hers. Maybe she was about to corner the market on filmy head scarves?

  I batted the thought aside and asked Ray, “And did she? I mean, did she tell you about the get-rich-quick scheme?”

  He sat back and chucked the napkin down on the table. “She didn’t say any more than that. Not that day, anyway. But she promised she would. And I was stupid enough to believe her. It’s not that I’m some kind of shallow jerk, Pepper. I don’t want you to think that. I don’t buy lottery tickets and I don’t bet on the horses. I don’t even play poker. And I don’t light up like a Christmas tree anytime somebody just mentions money to me. It’s just that Vanessa was sick for a long, long time and the bills really piled up. If I didn’t have those medical bills to pay, believe me, I wouldn’t be working here four times a week.”

  He didn’t need to convince me it would take an act of desperation to don the purple apron.

  This was all interesting, but I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. Ray was as jumpy as if he were one of those burgers sizzling away on the hottest part of the grill. “Why was Marjorie being so generous?” I asked. “She liked you and you’d been avoiding her. I can’t believe she didn’t get the message. So why was she willing to let you in on the scheme?”

  “Don’t you get it, kid? It was her way of getting her claws into me.” His shoulders drooped. “And I was so desperate, I let it happen.”

  It was pretty pathetic (not to mention totally disturbing), but I couldn’t afford to get distracted by that. It was my turn to lean forward, the better to pin Ray with a look. “So this get-rich-quick scheme of hers, what was it? And do you think it had anything to do with Marjorie’s death?”

  My hopes had been riding high that I could find some answers. They thudded to the ground when he shrugged. “Wish I knew. You see, Marjorie wasn’t the kind of woman who was going to make this thing easy. That day in the copy room, she told me about this scheme, and she said she didn’t have all the details yet, but she would soon. She promised she’d tell me as soon as she knew more.”

  “And did she?”

  “She called a week or so later. She told me we had to talk. I wanted to do it right there, right on the phone. But she said she needed a couple more hours to get all her ducks in a row. She told me we could talk that night over dinner. That I could pick her up at seven, and that she’d already gone ahead and made reservations at one of those places in Tremont.”

  I knew the area. Old neighborhood,
new bars and restaurants and clubs. A few of them were local hangouts, but some of the others were of the candlelight-dinner variety, pricey, and with reputations for excellent food and ambiance galore. Something told me Marjorie wouldn’t have gone out of her way to plan dinner at one of the shot-and-a-beer bars. Something else told me I knew where Ray’s story was going.

  He confirmed my worst suspicions when he said, “That night at dinner, she put me off. She told me she still didn’t have all the details. After that it was always the same thing. She’d tell me she had more information for me, and that she’d tell me all about it if I’d just take her to a movie, or to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, or if I showed up to act as her date for a party or something like that.” Ray’s shoulders rose and fell.

  “I should have told her to get lost. I would have, too, but she was always dropping little tidbits about this moneymaking scheme, telling me it was can’t-miss, and that she even had a financial planner check into it and he assured her it was a sure thing. I needed the money so bad, it got to the point where I just couldn’t wait to talk to her again. I kept hanging on, and I kept hoping. I kept telling myself that maybe this time, Marjorie would stop stringing me along. Maybe this time, she’d finally tell me everything I wanted to know. Gosh, Pepper . . .” He gave me a hangdog look.

  “Listening to me now, you must think I’m an idiot. I know I think I’m an idiot. I should have seen what she was up to, but all I kept thinking about was that pile of bills, and the calls that were coming in from the hospital and the doctors and the collection agencies. I was holding out hope that, eventually, Marjorie would come clean and tell me what was up.”

  “But let me guess, she never did, right?”

  He didn’t confirm or deny, just went right on. “When I stopped at her house . . . well, I’d never done that before. I mean, I’d been there to pick her up for dinner or a concert of whatever, but I’d never just stopped in to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize with Marjorie! But what happened that afternoon, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You see, I knew Marjorie’s nephew was getting married. She’d mentioned it more than a couple times, and I’d always just pretty much ignored her or changed the subject. I didn’t want to go to that wedding with her. I knew if I did, she’d parade me around in front of people and show me off and act like there was more to our relationship than there ever was. I know it might not sound like it, but I have my pride. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Then that day—the day before she died—I got a copy of the wedding invitation in the mail. The one for Marjorie’s nephew, Nick. It was from Marjorie, of course, and she’d written across it with red magic marker: It’s black tie, don’t forget to rent a tux.” Ray slammed his fist on the table.

  “That’s when it hit me. She was treating me like a trained monkey, and I’d had enough of it. That’s why I went to see her that night, and I was so relieved to walk in and see you there, I can’t even tell you. The thought of being alone with Marjorie . . .” He shivered inside his purple shirt, and he didn’t meet my eyes. “When we excused ourselves and went into her den, that’s when I told her I wasn’t going to take it anymore, that she had to tell me right then and there what this moneymaking scheme was all about. That if she didn’t, she could find another patsy to put up with her nonsense.”

  “And did she?”

  “That’s the real kicker.” Ray scrubbed a finger behind his ear. “That’s when she told me it was all a mistake. She told me the whole thing fell through, that there was no surefire moneymaking plan because she’d done some digging and she found out it was all a scam. Can you believe it? Marjorie had the nerve to tell me she never should have mentioned the whole moneymaking scheme to me in the first place.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “Which means you’d been pimping yourself out and you weren’t going to get anything for it.”

  “That’s not exactly the way I’d put it,” he admitted, “but I guess it’s true. What a sucker I was! And I’ll tell you something else, Pepper, I’m not sure she was telling the God’s honest truth, not even then.”

  My drumming stopped. “Because . . .”

  “Because Marjorie had that invitation. Not the invitation to her nephew’s wedding, the framed one, the one for James A. Garfield’s inauguration. I’m sure she showed it to you. Marjorie never missed a trick. Everybody who walked in the door, they had to see all that presidential crap of hers. She told me about that inauguration invitation about a month ago, said she saw it in an on-line auction and that she wanted it bad, but there was no way she could afford it. But there it was, hanging on her living room wall, right?”

  Right. I turned this thought over in my head. “So you think she really did have some magic way of suddenly making money?”

  Ray started with the tap, tap, tap against the table again. “It’s the only thing that explains it,” he said. “I think she was holding out on me. And all that time . . .” Disgusted with himself, he shook his head. “The worst part of the whole thing is that I just started dating someone, a really nice woman, you know?”

  I did, I just couldn’t get past the whole unnatural thing about old people dating.

  Thank goodness, before I had a chance to consider it for long, Ray went right on. “A couple times, I’ve had to make excuses to this other woman about why I couldn’t see her. You know, because Marjorie had me going here or there with her. I was too embarrassed to just tell my new lady friend the truth. Now . . .” This time when he sighed, it was with relief. “Well, now at least I don’t ever have to lie to her again. So you see, kid . . .” Ray looked at his watch again, and this time when he slid out of the booth, I knew it was because he had to get back behind the grill. “That whole thing about me and Marjorie fighting, well, it was just me standing up for myself finally. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with her dying.”

  “Of course not.” It was an incredibly corny comeback, but I didn’t have time to question him further, and besides, my head was suddenly spinning with possibilities. After I downed the rest of the fries, I headed to my car, thinking about everything he’d told me and wondering about that get-rich-quick scheme of Marjorie’s. Could the money have anything to do with her murder?

  Or was there more to Ray than the sweet, old guy he pretended to be?

  Like a man who was tired of being Marjorie’s love monkey and who’d had it up to his eyeballs? Sure he was angry at having her string him along. Angry enough to meet her at the memorial and give her the heave-ho off the balcony?

  And then there was that new woman in Ray’s life who he’d mentioned. Could she have been jealous? Was it possible she didn’t want to share him with Marjorie?

  Could there be enough passion in an old-people romance to account for murder?

  8

  My gut told me Ray didn’t kill Marjorie, but my gut had been wrong before. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the murderers without a scorecard.

  Still, even though I was sure Ray was lying about something (and even though I couldn’t figure out what that something was), I just couldn’t imagine a nice old guy like him tossing Marjorie over that balcony. Believe me, I was in the right place to try to picture it. The following Monday, I was standing in the rotunda of the memorial doing my best to look like the expert-in-residence. The why is no mystery: without Marjorie there to be the Garfield know-it-all, Ella needed someone to handle the day-to-day duties over at the memorial. Naturally—at least to Ella’s way of thinking—she turned to me.

  Back in the day, I wouldn’t have minded. At least not too much, anyway. But then, back in the day, James A. Garfield wasn’t exactly a tourist magnet. The memorial had a couple visitors now and then, but for the most part, the place was quiet and empty. Quiet and empty I could deal with. In fact, it would have suited me just fine. Then maybe I would have had a chance to sort through what I knew about my case. But it’s funny, isn’t it? And not in a ha-ha sort of way. Murder adds notoriety to a place, and the memorial was no exception. What w
ith the publicity Marjorie’s murder had generated in the media—local, national, and sensational tabloid—it was no wonder that there was a line waiting to get inside the memorial even before I unlocked the door.

  “So this is where it happened, right?” A woman twice my age and half my height had the nerve to step into my path. “Where was the body? Was she beaten and battered? Was there . . .” The woman shuddered. “Was there a lot of blood?”

  “No hablo inglés,” I told her, and left her to figure out why if that were the case, I was wearing the standard-issue khakis and the yellow polo shirt with GARDEN VIEW embroidered over my heart. Before she could question me, I backed away from her and sidestepped a group of teenagers who were wondering if the memorial was haunted. If they only knew!

  I slipped into the office, but even there I found no peace. There was a man standing near the desk with his back to the doorway. He was middle-sized and average height, and even when he turned around, I couldn’t see his face clearly. That was because he was wearing a baseball cap tugged low over his eyes. Something told me I wasn’t missing anything. He was fifty, maybe, and as bland as an outfit right off the rack at WalMart.

  As much as I didn’t feel like it, I put on my cemetery employee face. “May I help you?”

  “Pepper!” The man’s cheeks were pale and doughy. His chin was weak, his hands were plump. He fingered the unpatterned gold tie he wore with a blue shirt and faded black pants, and even though his eyes were shaded by the brim of his ball cap, I could feel his stare. Everywhere it touched me, I felt a chill. “I saw you,” he said, and I swear, he must have run up every single one of the couple dozen steps that led to the monument’s front doors. He was breathing that hard. “On TV.”

  I’d hoped Cemetery Survivor had been forgotten by everyone who’d ever bothered to watch the reality show based on the cemetery restoration we’d done earlier in the summer. It was that bad. Still, it was kind of a kick to be recognized. I sidled past him and slipped behind the desk, and no, I didn’t feel like it. I mean, I was stuck in the memorial and I had all those ghoulish people out in the rotunda who kept asking me about Marjorie, and I had a murder to solve. I gave the man a smile, anyway. “You want an autograph or something?”