Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 02 - Murder, Lies & Chocolate

by Sally Berneathy

  “And they agreed?”

  “Without hesitation. They remember you and thought you were a lovely person. That’s Mrs. Murray’s word, not mine.”

  Suddenly I felt a little silly. “What are we going to talk about if I can’t ask her about the pirate gold in the basement?”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t ask her. I just said I didn’t mention it. I think this is a good place to start figuring out what Rick wants with your house. I’d suggest cookies as a conversation starter.”

  “For the Murrays or you?”

  “All of us.” He hung up.

  Fortunately I had a few chocolate chip cookies from the day before. I hoped the Murrays weren’t allergic to nuts or gluten.

  ***

  We drove across town to Summerdale Retirement Village in Fred’s pristine white 1968 Mercedes. Although he doesn’t like to let anyone ride in his special car, he hates even more to ride in mine which is generally messy and has me for a driver. He claims my driving gives him a heart attack. He only rode with me one time, and he survived just fine, though he did crawl out and cross himself as soon as I stopped.

  “You drive too slow,” I told him, just to keep things even. “I find it extremely stressful. I could have a heart attack.”

  “I’m going exactly the speed limit.”

  “Thank you for making my point.”

  The grounds of Summerdale were green and well-tended with lots of trees and open areas around the one-story tidy beige buildings trimmed in white. Fred drove without hesitation through the winding streets of the complex to Building 14, Unit C. I think somewhere in his past he had a GPS chip implanted in his brain, though I’m sure he reprogrammed it to delete that annoying recalculating woman.

  Unit C was small but bright and immaculate, and Mr. and Mrs. Murray were just as I remembered them. She was short with snow white hair curling gently around a pink-cheeked, cheerful face. He was taller than she though not a lot and had twinkling blue eyes behind thick glasses and a full head of the same white hair as his wife. I suppose age is the great equalizer of hair color.

  We shook hands all around, and I introduced Fred.

  “Can I get you something to drink? I just made a fresh pot of coffee and a pitcher of iced tea.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’d love a glass of tea, and Fred would like some coffee. I brought you some cookies.”

  “Why, thank you! Did you ever open that chocolate bakery you were talking about?”

  Nothing wrong with her memory.

  “I did.” I started to mention the name of my place but didn’t want to open the conversation with the fact that her grandson died at my restaurant.

  “Good for you. I’ll be right back with those drinks.”

  “Have a seat,” Mr. Murray invited.

  Fred and I sat on the muted rose sofa, and Mr. Murray took one of the matching chairs. The room had a feeling of serenity, or maybe it was just the occupants of the room. I could see no resemblance between the Murrays and Rodney Bradford. He must have taken after his father’s side of the family.

  “You’re not the same young man we met before,” Murray said, studying Fred through the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “No, this is my neighbor. You met my ex-husband, Rick.”

  Murray arched a shaggy white eyebrow. “Ex? Good decision. I didn’t much like that guy. Seemed sneaky.”

  I laughed. “You’re perceptive. He is sneaky.”

  Mrs. Murray returned from the kitchen with a tray holding a plate with the cookies on it, three cups of coffee and one Coke. She set the tray on the coffee table and smiled at me. “I remembered you liked Coca-Cola so I brought one instead of iced tea. I can change it if you’d like.”

  “No, Coke is great. Thank you.” Definitely no senility happening there.

  She handed her husband a cup of coffee and a cookie then settled in the other arm chair with her own drink and snack.

  “So you’re living in our old house,” she said. “Oh my, this cookie is delicious! You need to tell me where your bakery is so I can come there. Isn’t this the best cookie you’ve ever eaten, Harold?”

  “Good, but not better than yours, sweet-pea.” He grinned and winked at me.

  Cathy rolled her eyes, but she smiled.

  “Yes,” I said, wanting to avoid the subject of the name of my restaurant as long as possible, “I’m living in your old house, and I just love it.”

  “She’s divorcing that sneaky guy,” Harold supplied.

  “Good. I like this one much better.”

  “Oh, no, Fred’s not…he’s my friend, my neighbor. You lived next door to him for about a year.”

  “Of course! You’re the one with the closed curtains.”

  “I am. I don’t go outside often.”

  “You should. You’re much too pale. Sunshine’s good for you. Harold and I go bicycling and play golf, and in the winter we go to Texas for a few months.”

  “Chasing the sunshine,” Harold said. “Feels good on these old bones.”

  A moment of silence ensued. The proprieties had been observed. It was time to get down to the reason for our visit.

  “Did you have a key for that big padlock on the coal chute door?” I asked.

  “Why, yes, I’m sure we did. We put that lock on when we moved in. Somebody could have come inside that way. Didn’t we give you that key with the others when we closed on the house?”

  “I’m sure you did. Rick didn’t pass it on to me, but that’s okay. I have no need to unlock it. Haven’t had any coal deliveries in a while.”

  Harold and Cathy both laughed but looked a little puzzled at the turn the conversation had taken.

  Fred set his cup on the coffee table. He had a look about him that said he was going to say something momentous. “We were very sorry to hear about your grandson.”

  The loudest silence I ever heard filled every inch of that cheerful little room.

  Cathy looked at Harold.

  Harold looked at Cathy.

  They appeared to be upset, but not grief-stricken.

  “How did you hear about our grandson?” Cathy asked quietly.

  I clutched my Coke tightly. “I’m so sorry! He was killed outside my restaurant.”

  The Murrays exchanged looks again.

  “George isn’t dead,” Harold said.

  “George? Who’s George? I’m talking about Rodney.”

  “Who’s Rodney?”

  We all sat and looked at each other for a few long moments.

  “Could your grandson have been using an assumed name?” Fred asked.

  Cathy shifted in her chair, looked at her hands in her lap, then finally lifted her chin. “Our grandson used a lot of assumed names, but now he only has a name and number. He’s in prison and will be for another eight years. Well, maybe less with good behavior, and he is a good boy.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Rodney Bradford just got out of prison. Are you sure your grandson is still there?” I regretted the callous words the minute they came out of my mouth, especially when I saw the uncomfortable way Harold and Cathy looked.

  “We’re sure,” Harold said softly.

  “George’s life didn’t turn out the way we hoped it would, but he’s still our grandson. We love him. We stay in touch with him. Why would you think this other man was our grandson?”

  I shrugged. “He told me he was. He said he wanted to buy my house because he used to visit his grandparents there when he was a boy.”

  Cathy looked puzzled. “We lived in that house for forty years, raised our family there. George did come to visit sometimes, but nobody named Rodney Bradford.”

  “Do you have a picture of George?” Fred asked.

  Cathy lifted a framed photograph from the lamp table beside her. Fred stood and took it from her then sat back down and held it so we could both look at it.

  A small boy stood between smiling parents. I had no idea whether he resembled Rodney Bradford. At that age, it could have b
een a picture of any little kid, even Fred, assuming he’d ever been that young.

  “Do you have a more recent picture?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Cathy said. “After he started getting in trouble, he didn’t want his picture taken. That’s him when he was nine, and our son, John, with his wife, Tina. That was taken just before John died in an automobile accident. The boy never stood a chance with just Tina to raise him.”

  “She wasn’t a bad person,” Harold said.

  Cathy nodded. “That’s true. She was a good person, but she wasn’t strong. John was the strong one, the care-giver. He was always bringing home stray dogs and cats and birds. He wanted to take care of the world.”

  “He wanted to take care of Tina.”

  Cathy nodded again. “John saw so much potential in her, he just wanted to help her. They dated in high school. That’s when she got on drugs the first time. John had her in and out of rehab more than once. If he’d lived, I think she would have made it.”

  “She would have made it,” Harold agreed.

  “But she married that awful man before John’s body was cold in the ground, and he got her back into drugs.”

  That awful man. We’d finally found someone the genial, forgiving Murrays didn’t like.

  “We tried to help her with George.” Harold shook his head, his expression morose. “Anything we did, they undid. She and that man didn’t want to be bothered with George. They let him run wild, do whatever he wanted as long as they didn’t have to sober up and take some responsibility. George was in trouble every time you turned around.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Fred asked.

  “All kinds,” Cathy said. “Fights at school—”

  “When he bothered to go to school,” Harold added darkly.

  “He dropped out when he was fifteen and joined one of those gangs, the Crickets or Coffins or something like that. Tina died of a drug overdose a few years later. George was nineteen then, and he seemed to straighten up for a while, like he suddenly realized where he was headed.”

  “That didn’t last long,” Harold muttered.

  “No, it didn’t. We were able to get him out of scrapes when he was a teenager, but after he turned twenty-one, it was a lot harder. We hired a lawyer this last time, but he’d been in so much trouble already, the best we could do was get him a lighter sentence.”

  “What was he convicted of?” Fred asked.

  “Possession of drugs with the intent to sell them.” Cathy sat stiffly erect and spoke the words with concise precision, as if she’d memorized them from a foreign language without fully comprehending their meaning.

  I felt kind of bad that we’d forced these nice people to relive so much sadness.

  Fred obviously didn’t. “If you had to pay for George’s defense, apparently he wasn’t very successful as a drug dealer.”

  Cathy dropped her gaze to the floor. “I think he sampled his own wares too often.”

  “So he never had a large sum of money in his possession?” Fred asked. I would have never asked that question. It seemed rude. Good thing Fred was there to do it for me.

  Cathy smiled sadly and reached for her husband’s hand. “If George had ever come into any money, he’d have offered to pay us back for all the money we spent on him over the years. He’s a good boy.”

  “A good boy,” Harold echoed. “Weak, but he has a good heart. He always wanted to do the right thing. He just couldn’t quite get there.”

  We took our leave of the Murrays, promising to stay in touch, and they promised to visit Death by Chocolate often. I suspected they would. They really liked my cookies.

  We settled into Fred’s car and drove away from quiet Summerdale.

  “I like them,” I said. “They seem content and at peace with the world. Getting old doesn’t sound so bad if I can do it like the Murrays.”

  Fred snorted. “Not likely. You’re much too pushy and abrasive to ever be peaceful and content with your life.”

  I wanted to argue with that assessment, but I couldn’t. “That’s so sweet that they still think their convict grandson is a nice boy,” I said instead.

  “They’re naïve.”

  “Same difference. What do you make of all this? Think Rodney Bradford is really their grandson George?”

  For a few minutes Fred focused on the road ahead, deftly but slowly navigating through the traffic as if that was his only concern, but I knew the bits and bytes in the computer that passed for his brain were spinning at warp speed. “Maybe,” he finally said. “The two of them could have somehow switched identities so George got released instead of Rodney. That would be quite a trick, but stranger things have happened in the prison system. When I get home I’ll look up his mug shot, and we’ll see who’s who.”

  “If Rodney turns out to be George, it could be that he buried some drug money in his grandparents’ basement, and that’s why he wanted my house, to get it back.” I twisted in my seat, turning to face him, excited at finding something that made sense. “And that would explain why his wife…widow…wants my house! He told her about the money. I’ll bet she’s the one who killed him!”

  He frowned. “Why would she kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he really did beat her, and she just decided to get rid of him so she wouldn’t have to share the money with a wife-beater.”

  “Then why didn’t she wait until they got the money before killing him?”

  I sat back against the plush white leather. “I don’t know. Okay, forget that idea. Can you come up with something better?”

  A car pulled from a side street right in front of Fred. He slowed with no change of expression and without uttering a single swear word. “I don’t have enough data to form an opinion at this time. However, you could be right about George burying money in your basement. I think we need to dig up the floor in your furnace room.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. I turned toward Fred and studied his implacable profile, looking for any trace of a smile, any hint he was kidding. There was none. “You want to dig a hole in my basement?”

  “I can’t think of another way to find out if there’s something of value buried there. If we were looking for gold or some other form of metal or if we knew that what we’re looking for was buried in a metal box, we could use a detector. But we don’t have any idea what we’re looking for, so the only reasonable solution is to dig up the floor in your furnace room.”

  “Oh yeah, sure, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution.”

  “Good.”

  Sometimes Fred fails to recognize sarcasm. Or he ignores it.

  “When do you want to undertake this excavation?” I asked, hoping for a date in the distant future.

  “When do you want to figure out if you’ve got a mouse or a human intruder and why everybody wants your house?”

  I wasn’t crazy about spending another night worrying if I had an intruder, two-legged or four-legged, in the basement. “Tonight?” On the other hand, I wasn’t crazy about spending an hour or two in the basement doing manual labor. “Or in a week or so.”

  Fred stared at the road ahead, turned a corner and finally nodded. “We can get started tonight. This may take a while. You should probably make more cookies. Digging is hard work.”

  ***

  I changed into old jeans and a tee-shirt in preparation for braving the coal dust and had just taken a pan of freshly-baked cookies from the oven when I heard a knock on my back door.

  I knew it had to be Fred, but it was getting dark outside and my life had been a little scary the last couple of days. For a moment I stood in the middle of the kitchen balancing the cookie sheet, wavering between hanging onto that hot pan as a weapon or setting it on the counter and picking up my rolling pin.

  Henry dozed under the table, his body inside a paper bag with his head sticking out. I bought him a nice kitty bed, but he prefers boxes, sacks, drawers, and, of course, my bed. He opened one blue eye, regarded me quizzically,
closed that eye and gave a soft snore. If he wasn’t snarling and threatening to attack my caller, there was no danger.

  I set the cookies on the counter and opened the back door.

  Fred, wearing coveralls, stood on the stoop. He had a shovel in each hand and a canvas bag hanging over one arm.

  “You scared me. Why did you come to the back door?” I asked, though I had no hope of getting a reasonable reply.

  “Why would I go to the front door when you’re in the kitchen?”

  Actually, that did sound reasonable.

  “Come on in.” I stepped back so he could enter with his tools.

  “George Murray and Rodney Bradford are not the same person, but they were cellmates.”

  “Hack into the state prison records tonight?”

  He ignored my question. “Can’t be a coincidence. Maybe George hid money in this house and told Bradford about it. Cellmates can become close friends in the restrictive arena of prison.”

  The possibility of hidden treasure in my basement suddenly became real. “If we find money, do we have to give it back?”

  Fred thought for a moment. “Probably.” He turned and headed for the basement door but paused at the pan of cookies. “Chopped hazelnuts?”

  “Yes.”

  Henry reached out a paw and lazily swiped at Fred’s leg. Fred ignored him and continued to the basement.

  I locked the back door and followed Fred.

  We made our way down to the suddenly-popular furnace room, and I flipped on the light. From his bag Fred produced a very bright light on a folding tripod which lit up the room like the midday sun in August. It was even brighter than Trent’s super flashlight. If there was so much as a needle hidden in that room, we’d find it.

  “First,” he said, “we remove the bricks from that area in the corner.”

  Trent had seemed interested in that area too, and I’d thought it looked more disturbed than the rest of the floor when I did my inspection. Perhaps we were onto something.

  Fred dipped into his bag and brought out two pairs of leather gloves and two tools that looked sort of like spatulas. I put on gloves and took a spatula. “What do you call this thing?” I asked.

  “Spatula.”