Dogs, Lies, and Alibis: A Humorous Cozy Mystery (A Workings Stiffs Mystery Book 5)

by Wendy Delaney

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “I saw a picture of her once.” Pretty recently. “She looked nice.”

  “Yeah, she was nice.”

  “I got the impression that Jessica and Colt were going to get married.”

  “I guess. But they broke up and she moved out.”

  “I bet she missed Fozzie after she left. Did she ever come back to see him?” Or Colt?

  “I don’t think so.” Lily patted Fozzie’s back while he watered a thicket of weeds at the base of a stop sign. “I sure would have.”

  I didn’t doubt that for a minute. “Speaking of Jessica, I’m going to see her later and ask if she’d like to adopt Fozzie.”

  Lily shifted her gaze to me. “Where’s she live?”

  I hadn’t recognized the address Seth provided. “I’m not sure. Maybe on the other side of town.”

  “I could probably ride my bike there after school and walk Fozzie.”

  “Maybe. I’d certainly be happy to let her know about your dog-walking offer.”

  “Did you hear that, Fozzie?” Lily said as the dog led her across the street. “We’ll be able to see each other all the time.”

  I didn’t want the kid to get her hopes up too high and decided that it was time to change the subject. “I wanted to ask about something Mrs. Melnicke told me while I was waiting for you to get home. She said she heard a guy banging on Colt’s door Saturday night. I guess it was pretty loud. Did you hear it?”

  Lily nodded. “He was really loud. He probably scared Fozzie.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “Uh-huh. My mom wanted me to stay away from the window because she thought there might be a fight or something, but I knew Colt wasn’t home.”

  “Because his car wasn’t parked outside?”

  “No, it was there. I saw him leave with that other guy.”

  My heart started pounding and not because of the brisk pace Fozzie was setting. “What other guy?”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “I dunno. Somebody with a ponytail.”

  “You’d never seen him before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did they seem like friends?”

  “I guess.”

  I wasn’t getting the impression she could pick him out in a lineup, so I thought we might have better luck with his car. “Did you see what he was driving?”

  “Some old car. Kinda like Colt’s, only different.”

  “Different how? Like different color?”

  “Yeah, it was black. With a little cat on the front.”

  “Like a stuffed animal in the front window?”

  She gave me a look like I was the lamest adult she’d ever had to deal with. “It was metal. You know, one of those car things.”

  A car thing. I had no idea what that meant, so it was time to go back to the loud dude looking for Colt.

  “How about the guy knocking on the door? You said you saw who it was.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lily said, slowing down to let Fozzie sniff the fire hydrant near the corner on Main Street.

  “So, you recognized the man?”

  “Sure. He was the one that helped Jessica move.”

  * * *

  It was no wonder that I hadn’t recognized Seth Lukin’s Pembroke Lane address. When I was growing up in Port Merritt, most of the houses within a four-block radius of Broward Park had been stately, World War I–era homes. Now, much of the property adjacent to the park had given way to upscale bay view townhomes.

  For the discriminating renters willing to sacrifice proximity to the park for affordability, half of the dozen houses down the hill between 9th and 10th Street had been carved up into chic apartments. For the far less discriminating who couldn’t afford chic, twin little cracker boxes had been crammed a half block to the south, where Malcolm Pembroke’s family home had stood for over one hundred years.

  When I was married and living in San Francisco, Gram had told me that Malcolm Pembroke’s development company had been transforming this neighborhood, but I hadn’t realized that he had pushed a narrow lane through to an assisted living facility on the other side of 10th Street and named it after himself. And that wasn’t all, which I found out when I pulled into a visitor parking spot near the Pembroke Village sign marking the apartment complex.

  “You could do worse,” I said, cracking the windows for Fozzie. “You won’t have a yard to play in, but the dog park isn’t far away.” I patted him on the head. “Let’s just hope the new boyfriend likes dogs.” And wasn’t home so that I could talk to Jessica alone.

  When I got out of my car, I took note of the two cars parked closer to the buildings. I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen either one at the feed store, so that boded well for Seth still being at work.

  Unfortunately, after I located his apartment on the second floor and knocked several times, it seemed no one was home.

  I heard a baby crying nearby and followed the sound to the unit next door to see what the neighbor could tell me.

  After I knocked, the volume of the crying escalated, and I steeled myself for an irate greeting. But when the door swung open, to my shock, the woman seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

  “Hey, long time no see,” she said, patting the back of the baby on her hip.

  I had no idea who she was, but the plump, dark-haired mom definitely looked familiar. Put some blond in her long hair and get rid of the baby weight, and I’d have the vague notion that I went to high school with her.

  I turned up the wattage of my smile. “How’re you doing?”

  Ignoring the wailing going on in her ears, she chuckled. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Port Merritt High? Maybe a year or two after me?”

  “Very good. Alicia—Brandt then, Reboulet now.”

  “Charmaine,” I said in case she needed the reminder.

  “I know. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Neither have you.”

  What liars we were. Between the two of us we’d gained at least eighty pounds since graduation day.

  “What brings you here?” she asked, trying to interest her little boy in his pacifier, but he pushed it away and collapsed against her shoulder.

  “Actually, some business next door.” That I didn’t want to get into. “Do you know when Jessica typically gets home?”

  “Probably close to five most days.”

  Which would give me almost an hour to kill.

  “Do you want to come in and wait?”

  With a baby screaming in my ear? “No, I actually have someone waiting for me in my car.” Who needed to be fed before he started gnawing on the seats of my car. “Let me ask you about the neighborhood, though. It’s changed so much in the last few years.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Seems quiet.” I smiled at the kid Alicia was bouncing on her hip. “With one very little exception.”

  “Yeah, and the trouble with Colt Ziegler.” She sharpened her gaze. “You remember him, right?”

  My mouth went dry. “I sure do.”

  “I guess he’d been hanging around on the grounds, stalking Jessica.”

  Whoa. That was a serious accusation that I hadn’t expected to hear. “Stalking her?”

  “That’s what Seth called it.” Alicia shrugged, swinging her little boy side to side. “I don’t get a lot of sleep while this one’s teething, so it’s hard not to hear what’s going on.”

  “Do you know if Jessica called the police?”

  Alicia shook her head. “I got the impression that Seth was handling the situation. You know—he wanted to do the guy thing and convince Colt to stay away from her.”

  No wonder I had gotten a weird vibe when I asked Seth if he’d been having any problems with Colt. Because this definitely qualified as a big problem.

  And if Seth had handled it in a physical way on Sunday, his problems were far from over.

  Chapter Twelve

  I HADN’T PLANNED on ambushing Jessica Tuohy the second she
stepped out of her car, but once Fozzie started barking at her like he wanted his mom, he left me no other choice.

  “Jessica?” I said, struggling to keep a squirming dog from leaping into her arms. “Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  Her eyes widened as she stared down at Fozzie. “What is this?”

  “I’m Charmaine Digby with—”

  “I know. Seth told me that you’d probably want to talk to me, but what’s he doing here?” she asked, backing out of Fozzie’s reach.

  This mother and child reunion sure wasn’t starting as well as I had hoped. “Fozzie needs a home, and I thought—”

  “Well, it can’t be here. There’s no way that Seth would…” Censoring herself, she cast a worried glance to the street. “We can’t have pets here, and you should go.”

  Given everything I’d heard today, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the cold reception Fozzie and I were getting. But I had no intention of leaving—not until Jessica Tuohy answered some questions.

  I aimed a polite smile at her. “Sorry, I can’t just leave. Not when the prosecutor has specifically asked that I speak with you about your relationship with Colt Ziegler.”

  Yes, I was piling it on as high as the corned beef in Duke’s Reubens, and I didn’t care. I needed to find out what this chick knew, and if a little embellishment was what it took, I was happy to oblige.

  By the bleak look in her baby blues, I knew I had her.

  “Would you like to talk here or somewhere else?” I tried to think of a place nearby, where I could let Fozzie out of the car. “Broward Park, maybe?”

  “Fine,” she bit out between clenched teeth. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll meet you there.”

  Whimpering while he watched her walk away, Fozzie turned to me.

  I ran my hand over his back. “Sorry, pal. I wish that had gone better.” At the same time, given what I had learned about Seth’s actions of the last few days, I was relieved to put some space between Fozzie and Seth’s fists.

  When Jessica found me at the park fifteen minutes later, she hugged Fozzie and echoed my apology. “I’ve missed you, baby.”

  He nuzzled her hand, and I noticed it had an intricate ring tattoo.

  “Interesting tattoo,” I said, sitting next to her on one of the benches away from where several squealing preschoolers were playing on a jungle gym.

  She buried her fingers in Fozzie’s ruff. “Seemed like a good idea at the time, but a lot of things do when you’re drunk.”

  I wasn’t as interested in her regrets as much as I was who she met after she decided to work on her sobriety. “If you don’t mind talking about it, I understand that you met Colt in rehab.”

  She shot me a sideways glance while Fozzie settled at her feet. “You must have chatted with his mother ‘cause not too many people know about that.”

  Nodding, I kept my mouth shut about my information coming from his sister.

  “Yeah, we met in rehab,” she said softly. “He was such a sweet guy, really impossible not to like.”

  “So, you hit it off.”

  Watching the kids play, she smiled and a tear trickled down her cheek. “It was great. He was great, for a while.”

  “Did he start using again?”

  “No, nothing like that. After I moved in, he just got…clingy.”

  “Would you say that he was the jealous type?”

  “He sure didn’t like me hanging out with my friends, so I guess.”

  “Would one of those friends be Seth?”

  She shook her head, bleached blond tendrils fluttering in the soft breeze. “If Colt could have just accepted that one of his friends could be nice to me without wanting something…”

  She and I both knew Seth didn’t truly fit that description. “What about Colt’s other friends?”

  “He pretty much divorced everyone he didn’t think was going to support his sobriety, so I never met anyone outside of his family.”

  “You never saw him with a guy in a ponytail? Might drive a black car like Colt’s Camaro?”

  She turned to me. “No, why?”

  “Just asking to get a sense of what was going on in his life.”

  “That’s easy to sum up. Nothing was going on in his life,” she stated, her blue eyes sparking. “A big fat zero.”

  Softly whimpering as if to protest her increase in volume, Fozzie sat up.

  She stroked one of his pointed ears. “He didn’t seem to want to do anything besides spy on me and hang out with his buddy here.”

  I knew about the recent spy behavior from Alicia, but I wanted to hear about it from the person directly involved. “Spying on you when?”

  “It started when I moved out.”

  “And moved in with Seth.”

  Jessica stared down at Fozzie. “I know that Colt thought that I wanted the quiet little life that he wanted, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to get out.”

  “I understand that he gave you a diamond engagement ring.”

  I waited for her to correct me.

  She didn’t. Instead, Jessica nodded solemnly.

  “Was he pressuring you to get married?”

  “He just assumed I’d want to say yes.” She teared up again. “That’s when I knew I had to go before it got any more complicated.”

  “When was this?”

  “Valentine’s Day.”

  A tough day to leave a guy. “Did he know about Seth?”

  She hung her head. “He’d had his suspicions—even hassled Seth at work about it, but nothing was really going on between us.”

  I didn’t buy her qualified denial. She moved in with the guy on Valentine’s Day. “Did the hassling ever get physical?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her profile was shrouded in shadow from a nearby Douglas fir tree, but I didn’t need a Technicolor view to see she was lying.

  “How about with Seth?” I asked, leaning a little closer. “Any physical confrontations?”

  “Nothing serious.”

  “Define serious.”

  Jessica shrank away from me. “He just wanted Colt to leave me alone.”

  “Seth told him that directly?”

  “More than once unfortunately, but…”

  “But what?”

  She bit her lip. “Nothing.”

  I understood her hesitation to get her man of the moment in trouble, but that didn’t help Georgie. “Colt came around Saturday night, didn’t he?”

  “Seth didn’t have anything to do with his death,” she stated in a clipped tone.

  That wasn’t what I’d asked. “But he was seen pounding on Colt’s door that night, so something must have happened.”

  She stiffened.

  “Seth went over to talk to him, right?”

  “It’s not what you think. Seth wouldn’t hurt him.”

  She didn’t believe that any more than I did.

  “What were you doing on Sunday?” I asked with the hope that she would stop with the defensive posturing and just talk to me.

  “Nothing much. We went for a drive.”

  It rained all day. Not exactly great driving weather, but okay. I didn’t care about that answer as much as I did the next one. “Did you see Colt when you were out and about? Maybe near the country club?”

  She shook her head. “No. We weren’t anywhere near there.”

  “How about after the two of you got home?”

  “I never saw him at all on Sunday.”

  Maybe, but that didn’t account for Seth.

  “Jessica,” I said, waiting for her to make eye contact with me. “Someone hit Colt Sunday night, hard enough to kill him.”

  “It couldn’t have been Seth. He was with me the entire night.”

  The fear etched across her face told me that her attempt to provide her boyfriend an alibi was wishful thinking at best.

  “Okay, do you know anyone else who might want to hurt Colt?”

  Worrying her lips, she lowered her gaze. “I
can’t imagine anyone doing that to him.”

  Jessica’s cell phone started ringing, and she pushed away from the bench. “I need to get going.”

  Fozzie sprung to his feet and she leaned over to give him a squeezy hug.

  “One last thing before you go,” I said, tightening my grip on the leash so that the dog couldn’t bolt after her. “Did Colt have a second job?”

  She blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Beside working at the feed store, did he have some other source of income?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Where’d he get the money for the ring?”

  Jessica shrugged. “I have no idea, but it was really pretty so I know it was expensive.”

  She said it with such conviction I didn’t doubt her. “Did you happen to see a receipt?”

  “No, it was just the way he told me that I was worth every penny.” She started to walk away and then turned to give me one of the saddest smiles I’d ever seen. “I told you he could be sweet.”

  Sometimes sweet and sometimes a stalker? That made Colt Ziegler seem like he had an angel and a devil perched on his shoulders.

  It also made me wonder which was whispering in his ear when someone decided that he should die.

  * * *

  After one last hour of knocking on doors at the Madrone Arms that yielded nothing other than a good riddance comment about Colt’s barking dog, I called it a day and texted Steve from the parking lot.

  Dinner?

  He responded a few minutes later with a suggestion that we meet at Eddie’s Place in an hour. Since my cupboards were almost as bare as Colt’s, I was happy to take him up on his offer. And also see if my pals Roxanne and Eddie Fiske wanted a dog to add to their growing family.

  I had thought about taking the dog in question with me to Eddie’s, but after I fed Fozzie and took him on his fourth walk of the day, he was sleeping so soundly I didn’t have the heart to wake him. Instead, I took a picture of him curled up like a little bear cub next to my balcony sliding door.

  “Cute,” I said with satisfaction.

  He opened one eye and then rolled over and started snoring.