Stick a Fork In It

by Robin Allen

  I, too, felt like assaulting an electronic device. I had been grateful for Miles’s incompetence when I had a murder to investigate, but a suicide note now made the delays a waste of my brain power. “You still have eight days,” I said. “It’ll take me a little while to check the hot water today. Maybe they’ll get the ventilation working by the time I’m done.”

  “Yeah.”

  I picked up Troy’s hard hat and walked a familiar course across the kitchen and through the silver doors. One look at the dining room and I knew it was a good thing my murder theory had been disproved.

  twenty-four

  The space had been transformed. Gone was the litter of tools, machines, and building materials, replaced by construction workers on their knees and applying sealant to the stained brown floor. It was beginning to look like a restaurant rather than a concept. Throw out a few tables and chairs, and June 11 looked quite possible.

  I stepped behind the bar and had the memory of serving Troy a beer Monday morning, fresh from his gurney race victory. He had monkeyed around with my badge and been so excited about choosing a name for the restaurant. He was going to order a guillotine. Morbid and creepy, but doggone it, he didn’t act like a guy who planned to kill himself in a few hours. Without a flashlight.

  I couldn’t refute his suicide note, though. Unless…

  Unless the killer planted the note!

  Todd said that papers had been moved around on the desk. It had to have been done by me when I was snooping. I hadn’t seen anything that looked like a suicide note, so someone must have put it there after I left. Which meant I didn’t have to look any further than Todd, Danny, Ginger, and Miles. They had all seen his handwriting, and Troy was drunk before he died, which meant that forging it precisely wouldn’t be critical.

  Ginger was the most obvious suspect because she had the desk to herself when she shut me out of the office. And, clever girl, writing something that she wasn’t supposed to know about.

  Danny wanted to give the note to the police to settle things once and for all. Maybe the police had started to look at it as a murder, and Danny wanted to hand them proof it was suicide.

  Todd didn’t want to give it to the police because it would affect the insurance payout. Wouldn’t that go to Ginger anyway? Perhaps the real reason is that he wrote the note as his own insurance policy in case the police started investigating him. He purposely wrote something Ginger shouldn’t see as an excuse not to turn it over to the police unless absolutely necessary.

  And what was Suzi Grimm’s part in all of this? Todd met with her on Tuesday—two days before he “found” the note—so had he and Danny consulted her about something else?

  Miles had access to the entire job site any time he wanted and was alone in the restaurant the day before while his guys stained the floors. He could easily have left the note, but why kill Troy?

  That was the question for all of them. And why plant the note now? Either the police really were investigating a murder or…oh, no! They suspected that I was. And I had asked Todd if he killed his brother.

  I started across the dining room toward the main entrance to call Jamie but stopped when I heard someone whistle. I looked around and saw Rudy by cell block B waving me toward the gift chamber door. He didn’t want me to dirty up the floor while they were sealing it, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to get to the bathrooms. Good thing I hadn’t arrived at eight o’clock like I had planned or they might have gotten their permit.

  I made it halfway through the small room when I noticed the “gifts.” Since they had settled on a name only three days before, there were one or two representatives of what they planned to stock, each resting in a cubbyhole or on a shelf. Plush German shepherd, Rottweiler, and pit bull dog toys; black-and-white striped T-shirts variously printed with inmate, d.o.c., and prisoner in fluorescent orange; ball-and-chain keychains; handcuffs and different styles of metal badges; several types and sizes of shot glasses; toy guns; and, curiously, golf balls.

  I pushed through a door marked Final Exit and into the parking lot, then walked toward the only shady spot near the back fence and called Jamie.

  “There’s good news and bad news,” I said when he answered.

  “Is it a high school and they’re serving cafeteria food?” he asked.

  “Negative, but it’s something the general population would enjoy.”

  “What’s the bad news?” he asked.

  “Troy left a suicide note, but you’ll think that’s the good news.”

  “No murder means you don’t have anything to investigate, and that means I don’t have to worry about you.”

  “I think the note is a fake.”

  Jamie sighed extravagantly.

  “Hear me out,” I said.

  Two workers unlocked a separate fenced area on the other side of me and began loading cinder blocks into a wheelbarrow. They wouldn’t care about my conversation, but I moved to the unshaded front gate anyway as I explained my reasoning to Jamie.

  “The papers on the desk could have been moved again later by someone else,” he said.

  “They looked pretty much the way I left them on Tuesday.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “Well, I was having to deal with Ginger catching me in the act, so my full powers of observation weren’t on the desk. And I didn’t know it would be important. I’m ninety-five percent sure the papers look the same.”

  “The note could still be real.”

  “I know, but the missing flashlight is real, too.” My phone beeped with a call from Olive, which I ignored.

  “What’s your next step, Miss Marple?”

  “I’m wondering why the killer decided to fake the note now. I’m thinking they’re spooked because the police reconsidered their original conclusion and are looking at murder. Can you find out?”

  “My contact wouldn’t have sent me the photos if they thought it was a homicide.”

  “Okay, so what’s putting pressure on the killer?”

  “I assume you’re still looking at Troy’s inner circle,” Jamie said. “Maybe they’ve started to suspect each other.”

  “Good thinking,” I said. I glanced at the locked gate and remembered something from my first day there. “Do you remember a waiter from Markham’s named Philip Anthony?”

  “No, but you said he was one of the protesters on Monday.”

  Olive called again and I ignored her again. “Can you find him for me?”

  “Do you think he killed Troy?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that. If he and his buddies did time in jail because of Troy, they might want revenge, but that’s kind of thin. Regardless, maybe he knows something.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  “Philip with one L,” I said. “I also need to know if Troy requested COD with their other suppliers. I saw paperwork from Lone Star Supply and Waterloo Linen on the desk.”

  “Would you like fries with that?”

  “Yes, I know you have your own work to do, but they’re going to pass the inspection at some point, and Olive is going to put me back on full duty. I don’t know how much time I have to get this figured out.”

  “Is it a monastery and they’re going to make people take a vow of silence when they walk through the door?”

  “Like where monks live?” I said. “Not even close.”

  As soon as I hung up with Jamie, Olive called a third time. “House of Joust,” I answered. “Lance speaking.”

  “Fast-track me on Pizza Pig,” she said.

  Shoot a biscuit! I forgot all about that inspection. “I thought since I’m filling in for Gavin, you would assign that to someone else.”

  “I would have said so, Markham.”

  It’s true, she would have. Micromanagers don’t let their employee
s make their own decisions. “I can do it right now.”

  “Let’s hope they waited around for you,” she said, then hung up.

  My trek to the kitchen to tell someone that the inspection was delayed again would have been shorter and shadier through the restaurant, but I couldn’t walk on the sealed floor, and the gift chamber door had locked itself behind me, so I circled the building. The two workers I had seen loading the wheelbarrow stood near the snack truck, drinking sodas and helping to slide the awnings down and prepare the truck for travel. Surely Miles would have given them a more important assignment—like meeting their impossible deadline for completing construction—but Miles still wasn’t there.

  I heard frantic yelling and turned around to see the snack truck back into a concrete pylon, which had been painted bright yellow to bring attention to it so something like that wouldn’t happen. The two guys who had tried to prevent the accident went behind the truck to check out the damage, further delaying their return to work.

  x x x

  I had to take the Jeep off-road twice, but I made it to Lunch and Larder in seventeen minutes. That was one of those times where my thoughts didn’t make sense. I didn’t expect Pizza Pig to be there, but I also didn’t expect them to be gone. Yes, I was three hours late for our noon appointment, but they should have waited. Nothing should be more important to them than getting their permit—not buying raw ingredients or scouting for good lunch spots or getting their truck painted pink. They cannot legally sell food without a permit and they should have waited.

  I went back to my Jeep, reflecting on the irony that even though I had seen Capital Punishment almost every day for the past four days, they were in the exact same permit-less position as Pizza Pig, which I had never seen.

  Westbound traffic was as vile as eastbound traffic that afternoon, and I decided to delay my trip to the Palatine. I left a message for Jamie asking if he had made any progress on either of my requests, then left a message for Olive about Pizza Pig, then made a phone call I had been dreading but could put off no longer.

  twenty-five

  “Poppy who?” Nina said.

  “Markham. Mitch’s daughter. Your stepdaughter.”

  “Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “How many people do you know named Poppy who would call your cell phone?” She had apparently also deleted my number from her phonebook again.

  “Just you.”

  The only reason I didn’t point out the inanity of her response was because it was time to ask for that favor. Except I couldn’t call it a favor or have it in any way resemble a favor. “I’m calling to reschedule our shopping trip,” I said.

  She hesitated. “When would you like to go?”

  “I know it’s last-minute, but my afternoon freed up.”

  “Why do we have to switch sides?” she asked. I didn’t answer because I knew she wasn’t talking to me. “I’m at my tennis clinic right now.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I believe you mentioned it at dinner.”

  “But the sun is going to be in my eyes,” she whined to someone.

  “There’s a chichi clothing boutique at the club, isn’t there?”

  “Will I have to switch the racquet to my left hand?”

  “I can be there in half an hour.”

  “Okay,” Nina said.

  “Looking forward to it.” I hung up before I found out what she okayed.

  Inside of twenty minutes, I pulled up to the valet at the Silver Niche on Barton Springs, a private country club for members age fifty-five and older, with a conservative dress code and a minimum guest age. That age had been recently lowered to twenty-five when several members complained that the age of thirty-five barred their girlfriends from joining them for dinner and spa treatments. The dress code for women had necessarily been relaxed as well, which is why the valet attendant sneered at but did not question my jeans. Everyone calls it by its acronym, the SNOBS club.

  Nina must have okayed our shopping trip because she had arranged for a guest pass to be waiting at the check-in desk. A runway model named Lola escorted me outside, past the Ilie Nastase and Vitas Gerulaitis tennis courts, and left me at the Evonne Goolagong court, where Nina, CiCi Chesterton, and two other women stood by the net listening to Ginger Sharpe explain the scoring system.

  Nina glanced at me, then excused herself and came over to the bleachers. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said.

  “You are?”

  “My brain was starting to fizzle with all that talk of fifteen-loves and love-all.” She sat down and patted her dry neck with a hand towel. “This isn’t the Newlywed Game. Why can’t they keep the scoring simple, like in bridge?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, more interested in Ginger’s state of mind than Nina’s state of confusion. Troy had died four days ago and Ginger was giving tennis lessons to a group of overindulged, out-of-shape seniors wearing full makeup in 90-degree heat.

  “Let’s get you out of those dreary black clothes,” Nina said. “You’re what, a size ten, twelve?”

  “I’m a six. What about your tennis clinic?”

  “It’s almost over.”

  Shopping for clothes at the club had been a pretense to get close to Ginger, and I had never intended to actually go through with it. “You know,” I said, “I hadn’t planned to go shopping when I left the house today and I’m not wearing any underwear.”

  Nina gaped at me as if I had said exactly that.

  Ginger looked at her watch, then dismissed the remaining three ladies. She went to the opposite bleachers, unzipped a tennis bag, then pulled out her cell phone.

  I waved to CiCi, who didn’t recognize me but returned my wave in case I was someone important. “I’m wearing a bra,” I continued, “but not undies, so I can still try on dresses and tops.”

  Nina turned her Botoxed brow toward the approaching trio of women. “I just remembered I’m having a massage in thirty minutes,” she said. “Why don’t we reschedule for when you’re, ah…” She didn’t want to say the reason out loud in front of her cronies.

  “Wearing undies?” I asked, louder than I needed to.

  She stood. “We’ll go to the Palatine. Can you find your way out?”

  “I can find my way anywhere.”

  As soon as Nina flew off with her friends, I walked across Evonne Goolagong. “Ginger?” I said.

  “The clinic just ended,” she said.

  “I’m not here for a lesson.”

  She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “You’re the inspector from the restaurant.”

  She sounded combative, so I changed the subject to talk about her. “I didn’t realize you were a tennis pro here. When did you start playing?”

  “About a year after I married Troy.” Now she sounded angry. “I have an MBA, but no one wants to hire a military wife who moves every few years. So I worked retail and took up tennis.”

  “And now you’re teaching my stepmother, Nina Markham.”

  Ginger looked as if she had caught a whiff of rotten tuna, then recovered and said, “She’s doing very well.”

  “It’s okay. I’m pretty sure the only reason she’s taking lessons is so she can buy tennis outfits. She’ll quit in a couple of weeks.”

  Ginger laughed. “She wouldn’t be the first.”

  Now that I had chipped away some of the frost, I said, “Since we’re both here, do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  “So Todd can get the permit?”

  We weren’t in the restaurant, and as far as I was concerned, I was a private citizen, but I would never misrepresent the badge or risk my job. It didn’t hurt that she made that assumption, however, and I didn’t correct her. “It should happen soon,” I said. “How well do you know the manager, Danny MacAdams?”<
br />
  “Not well. We all went to high school together, but we weren’t friends back then. After Troy hired him, we had dinner with him and his wife a few times, but after construction started, we stopped seeing them socially.” She looked toward the club house. “They’re not really our kind of people.”

  Not SNOBS kind of people, she meant. “Did Troy have a problem with Danny?”

  “Not so much Danny as Danny’s brother-in-law.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Miles Archer,” she said. “He’s married to Danny’s sister.”

  Whoa! “Was Troy upset with him about the construction delays?”

  “That was part of it. Miles complained to Danny all the time about Troy not wearing his hard hat and making so many changes and playing around with his guys.”

  “Do you know why Troy never wore his hard hat?” It was an innocent question, or so I thought, but Ginger’s stare made me backpedal. “I figured maybe all those years of wearing a football helmet turned him off to putting big plastic things on his head.”

  “Troy had a brain tumor,” she said. “He claimed the hat irritated it.”

  Double whoa! “I didn’t know. How awful for all of you.”

  “Very few people knew about it.”

  “I’m really sorry about Troy,” I said.

  She pressed her lips together and looked down, assuming a posture of sorrow that looked practiced. “Thank you.”

  “I only spent a few hours around him, but I can’t believe he would take his own life.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  Her face hardened. “He was playing around as usual, drunk as usual, and things got out of control. As usual.”

  Yes, except he didn’t take a flashlight upstairs with him and someone faked a suicide note. “You know I was the one who found him.”

  “It looked like an accident to you, right?”

  Because you staged it to look like one? “I couldn’t really say. I thought it was you at first.”

  “Me-ee?”

  “Your car was the only one in the parking lot when I got there.”