Dead Men Don't Crochet

by Hechtman, Betty

  “I’m not sure,” he said. Then he sighed. “Yes.”

  When I’d been upstairs with everyone else, my adrenalin had kicked in and I’d thought only of what The Average Joe’s Guide had said about being observant. That had helped me to keep a distance and pay attention to details instead of getting emotionally involved. But now, as the reality of Drew’s death began to sink in, I thought I was going to be sick. Barry must have noticed I’d gone green. He held my arm for support and told me to take some deep breaths, and he gave me a piece of peppermint gum. I chewed for a moment and with each deep breath felt a little more stable.

  “It was murder, wasn’t it?” I said.

  ‘Not your problem,” Barry answered. I told him about the blood on the back of Drew’s head. “Also not your problem.”

  Barry’s cell phone rang, and he turned and walked away a few steps. He was flipping it shut when he came back.

  “I have to step down—again. I can’t be the lead detective if my girlfriend was in the room with the victim.”

  “It wasn’t just me. There were lots of people up there. I didn’t touch him.” I pointed vaguely in Adele’s direction. She was still wearing the hat. “Adele’s the one who put him on the floor and tried to do CPR.”

  He was shaking his head and probably rolling his eyes behind the sunglasses over the last part. “Yeah, but I’m not dating them, so you’re the only one who counts—or counts me out.”

  “But I’m not a suspect or a person of interest. I was just an innocent bystander,” I said as he turned to go.

  “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “Tonight?” I repeated.

  Barry had a smug set to his mouth. “I bought some dog toys for Cosmo, and I was going to bring them by.” Before I could make any comment about possibly having plans that interfered, he went back into full-out work mode, gestured to his partner Darren Keltner and pointed toward the car.

  I should have figured who’d replace Barry as lead detective. He and Darren were leaning against their car when she pulled up. The first thing I saw was the white blond hair as Detective Heather Gilmore got out of the Crown Vic with her partner Rick Allen. He was no trouble; she was nothing but.

  The four detectives had a conversation. Well, Darren and Rick listened while Detective Heather and Barry talked. Barry gestured toward the crowd, probably explaining something. Then Detective Heather looked my way. There was a certain déjà vu to all this, but this time there was no way she could try to pin the death on me.

  Like I said, Detective Heather and I had issues. Well, one issue. She wanted Barry. Who could miss the way she flicked her hair and touched his arm as they talked? He had always claimed not to be interested. I was curious about why he wasn’t and had asked him about it shortly after we’d started seeing each other again following a brief breakup. She was blond, younger than I was, had a better body and was in the same line of work as he.

  “She’s not my type. We had coffee once, twice, ah, a few times,” he’d stammered. “And it didn’t work out.”

  I’d gone into shock mode when I realized he’d actually gone out with her. He’d always claimed not to notice she was interested. “What? You went out with her? When? How?”

  “Remember when we broke up? I was a free guy then. You kept saying how you thought she had the hots for me, so I thought I’d see what was up.”

  “What about Jeffrey?” I’d demanded, trying not to look pouty-faced. He was so protective of Jeffrey, at first not even letting me meet him because we weren’t in some permanent sort of relationship.

  “He never met her,” Barry had said as his lips curved into a grin. He knew he’d gotten to me and was enjoying my upset. “It never got that far. She isn’t like you.” He tousled my hair and touched my cheek. “You are my comic relief, the person who shows me a life away from work,” he had said, wrapping me in his arms. “And you’re nice to cuddle with, and,” he added, licking his lips, “there’s always your cooking.”

  He was right, there. I never used anything-helper or packaged cake mixes. I was one hundred percent from scratch. And I knew I was a good cook. The extra padding on my hips was a testament to it.

  He’d said something about Detective Heather needing a cookbook to boil an egg. I’d wanted to ask how he knew. It sounded way past a cup of coffee to have gotten that kind of information. But I had decided it was better to just leave it be.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” Detective Heather said when she finally walked up to me. Barry and Darren had left, and Rick Allen was talking to some uniforms.

  “I was just in the room with Drew Brooks. There were all those people, too.” I waved my hand over the crowd. “I’m not a suspect or a person of interest.”

  “That’s for me to decide and you to find out,” she said, taking out her notebook and pen. “I might just as well start questioning you now. Let’s start with the personal stuff, like your age and your weight. I know your name.” She made sure her pen was working. “Aren’t you like fifty-something?”

  “Forty-eight,” I corrected.

  “And your weight?”

  “What do you need that for?”

  “For identification purposes,” Detective Heather answered.

  “What? So you can tell me apart from all the other Molly Pinks running around Tarzana?”

  Begrudgingly, she said maybe she didn’t need that information after all. But she did need to know what I was doing there and what I’d seen. I tried to say I was there like everybody else to see the Hearston Estate items mentioned on the window banner, but she stopped me.

  “I saw you and your group here the other day. As I remember there was some kind of problem. Didn’t somebody say something about not getting away with something?” She turned away from me and checked through the crowd until she found Sheila. “She was the one making the threat, wasn’t she?”

  “I’m sure she had nothing to do with what happened to Drew Brooks. You should really be much more concerned about that tall bald man with the Harrods shopping bag.” I told her how he’d been in there the other day, and again just now. “And he was sure steamed about something,” I said.

  She scribbled in her notebook. “And his name is?”

  “Oh, I don’t exactly know,” I said with a shrug.

  Then she asked me to point him out.

  ‘He’s not exactly here,” I said, a little uncomfortable.

  “And maybe he doesn’t exactly exist,” she said.

  “Of course he does. I’m surprised you didn’t see him the other day. Go ahead and ask my friends. They saw him. They’ll vouch for me.”

  Detective Heather didn’t appear convinced. “Your friends would probably say they saw a bald green Martian in the store to back you up.”

  “Wow, you think they’re that loyal?” I said, surprised. There was something in Detective Heather’s voice. Was she jealous of my friends, too? “To put your mind at ease, just ask them when I’m not around.”

  “How about I just see what they say on their own.” She held her pen poised. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  I told her everything starting with the scream. She listened with an impassive expression as I told her how we’d found Drew and how Adele had tried doing CPR. She asked if I’d give my fingerprints and a hair sample. As soon as I was done, I was escorted to the edge of the parking lot, and the officer waited as I climbed under the tape and walked away. I’d have to catch up with Dinah later.

  Kimberely Wang Diaz zoomed up to me since apparently I was the first one let go.

  “I remember you,” she said, sounding too enthused. “Aren’t you the one they call the crime scene groupie?”

  CHAPTER 5

  “MOTHER, TELL ME THAT’S NOT YOU.” IT WAS MY son Peter calling my cell phone. Peter was a William Morris television agent who took his image very seriously and got upset when anyone in the family, which basically meant me and his younger brother Samuel, did anything he thought reflected poorly on h
im. He claimed he’d had the TV in his office on mute and by the time he turned it up, the story was over.

  If you’re watching Channel 3, it is,” I said, relieved he had the sound off and had missed the “crime scene groupie” comment. It was ridiculous to have that label just because I happened to show up at a few crime scenes in the past. By now I’d walked down the street to the bookstore parking lot and gotten in my car.

  “Mother,” he said, stretching it out to two syllables of disapproval. I explained what had happened and assured him I was fine, even if I was still feeling a little fuzzy headed over it all.

  He gave me a minilecture about “that’s what happens when you start dating cops.” Peter wasn’t happy about Barry and used any opportunity to try to knock him out of the picture. At first, I thought it was the idea of my dating that bothered him, but when he tried to fix me up with Mason Fields, a lawyer he was working with on a reality show, I began to think it was more about who.

  “Mother, you’re not a suspect, are you?”

  Finally something I could answer in a way that would make him happy. “Of course not,” I said, trying to sound peppier than I felt. The whole experience was finally getting to me.

  “Maybe you should talk it over with Mason. Just in case,” Peter said. Mason and I had a little flirting thing going, and I did like him. He had a sense of humor about being a lawyer, he was fun and he seemed to like me. But I wasn’t quite up to juggling men, and so far I hadn’t taken him up on his offers of dinner. I told Peter I’d keep it in mind and clicked off.

  Then I called Dinah’s cell to see what had happened to her. I got her voice mail and left a message to call me ASAP. It was about then that it struck me: I’d gotten in my car as if I were going to go somewhere, but I was on my way to work and the bookstore was in front of me. Chalk it up to being unnerved by the morning’s occurrence.

  Adele called in to say she had to go home and change since her clothes had gotten messed up when she was working on Drew. When she finally came in, she spent most of the day in the bookstore’s café telling everyone how she’d tried to save Drew Brooks. I was glad she wasn’t wearing Gloria Hearston’s hat.

  Luckily it was a slow day because I was definitely not my usual self. I’d be okay for a few minutes, but then I’d get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as I relived walking into Drew’s office and seeing him. Along with the eerie flashbacks, one thought kept surfacing: What had really happened?

  I left Shedd & Royal in the late afternoon and drove home, still not having heard from Dinah. By some quirk of timing Barry and I arrived at my driveway at the same time. He pulled his Tahoe in behind the greenmobile. The sun was fading, turning the sky a soft apricot as we walked into my yard together. For once I didn’t care that Barry had just dropped over.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, putting his arm around my shoulders.

  “I’ve had better days.” It felt nice to have some support, and if anybody could understand how I felt it was Barry. He dealt with crime scenes all the time.

  “You couldn’t get your mind off seeing Brooks, right?” When I nodded, Barry squeezed my shoulders. “The best thing you can do is concentrate on something else.” He glanced around the yard. “Think about how beautiful those flowers are,” he said, pointing at the orange and yellow pansies filling the planters that ran along the patio. “Think about your friends, your crochet stuff—me,” he said, as his lips curved into a grin.

  “Actually there was something I kept thinking about,” I said. His expression warmed—he obviously assumed it had to do with him. It did, just not the way he thought. “I bet you know all kinds of inside information about what happened to Drew Brooks,” I said.

  “You call that thinking about something else?” He shook his head with dismay. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you just liked me for my information,” he teased, putting the bag of dog toys down on the patio table. I suspected he had just picked them up on his way here as opposed to having purchased them this morning, when he’d mentioned needing to drop them off.

  “I just wondered what happened after I left. Well, you left, too, but you must have found out how Drew Brooks died and who Detective Heather thinks did it.” I opened the kitchen door, and Cosmo ran out the door and tried to decide who to greet first. Clearly the dog knew which side his toast was buttered on because he rushed up to me, putting his floppy paws on my knees.

  Barry appeared hurt. “Have you forgotten who your daddy is?” he said, holding up a rawhide chew. Cosmo was a regular dog diplomat. After a quick hello lick to me, he ran over to Barry and grabbed the chew. Blondie came out to see what was going on. Barry offered her a chew and she snatched it and ran back into the house.

  Before we went inside Morgan drifted into the kitchen, Barry did a double take, then his expression dropped.

  “How long is Princess Sad Face staying?” he said in a low voice.

  He was right about the sad face part. Morgan always seemed to have a certain melancholy air about her. Today she was dressed in pink tights and leotard with a sweatshirt tied around her waist. When I did that it was to keep a sweatshirt handy. Morgan told me she did it to camouflage her hips—if you could call those tiny things hips. She went to dance class every day and worked at a kid’s gym and at an after-school program. Also, she went to auditions for music videos and stage productions. She had one coming up in the next couple of days.

  “Just for a couple of weeks,” I said, watching her open the refrigerator and take out three slices of apple on a plate and a bottle of sparkling spring water.

  Barry didn’t seem happy with the information. Her presence was a definite obstacle to his plans to show up spontaneously on my doorstep and then morph it into a whole other kind of encounter.

  “What happened to that whole thing about your freedom and wanting to live alone and have ice cream for dinner if you wanted?” he asked.

  “I still can, as long as I don’t make her eat any,” I said. “So, are you going to tell me about Drew Brooks, or not?”

  “Not. I don’t know anything. It’s not my case, remember?”

  “But you do know how he died—he drowned in the soup, didn’t he?” I mentioned seeing the blood on the back of his head. “I bet somebody hit him on the head and he fell in the soup.”

  “I’m not talking, and besides, until there’s an autopsy nobody knows for sure.”

  “Okay, then, if it was your case, who would you investigate first?”

  Barry groaned and shook his head. “Hey, Sherlock, I see where you’re going and keep out of it. Have you ever heard the term obstruction of justice? If Heather thinks you’re getting into things—” He grabbed my hand and pretended to handcuff it.

  “I was just curious, that’s all.”

  He rolled his eyes in response and carried the dog things inside.

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I WENT INTO THE bookstore office I was surprised to find Mrs. Shedd sitting at her desk. Our paths crossed only occasionally since she mostly came in before the bookstore opened or after it closed. She was in her late sixties, but her blond hair, cut to frame her face and strategically cover certain spots, made her look at least twenty years younger. The actual color was chemically enhanced, but the thick, shiny texture was all good genes.

  Everyone called her Mrs. Shedd. I only recently found out her first name was Pamela. I had never met Mr. Royal. Whenever she mentioned him, Mrs. Shedd gave the impression that he was on an extended trip. It was obvious he was her silent partner—very silent, like dead or nonexistent.

  A mug of coffee sat next to her along with a little pile of cherry-almond cookies. The newspaper was open on the desk. Even upside down, I could tell what article she was reading. It was the same one I’d already read about the Drew episode. Since it was a local murder, it was a big story on the third page. The article mostly described what I’d seen first-hand. The cause of death was still unknown pending the autopsy results, but the police were still investigating. There wasn�
��t a lot of personal information about Drew other than that he was divorced with no children. What a surprise.

  There was an accompanying picture that showed the crowd corralled in the parking lot, waiting to be questioned. Thankfully, the photographer had been more interested in catching how many people were there rather than who they were, and nobody’s face, including mine, was recognizable.

  “Talk about freaky,” I said, pointing at the article. “It was quite a scene.”

  “You were there?” Mrs. Shedd asked, perking up with interest. When I nodded, she wanted details, and I told her the whole story of Sheila and her scarves.

  “This didn’t have anything to do with the projects you’re doing at the bookstore?” Mrs. Shedd said, seeming concerned.