Fadiman closed his eyes, shook his head, and backed away as if he were washing his hands of this discussion.
“You’d better not be expecting me to contribute to that payoff,” Oliver said. “I don’t have that sort of money.”
“Of course you don’t, Oliver,” Jefferson said, “otherwise you wouldn’t be selling your father’s beloved company to me even though he hated the idea.”
“Wait a minute,” Phyllis said. “Ed McKenna didn’t want you to buy his company?”
“Not at all. The deal was struck between Oliver and myself. But we had enough leverage to make Ed go along with it, although it would have been better if he hadn’t found out until the deal was done.”
“Talking too much,” Fadiman said through gritted teeth.
“Will you be quiet,” Jefferson said. “You know how I do business. Straight ahead.”
“And damn the torpedoes,” Sam said.
Jefferson jerked his head in a curt nod. “Exactly. No bullshit, if you’ll pardon my language. I want McKenna Electronics, and I don’t want anything to interfere with the acquisition.” He held out his hand. “So if you’ll give those documents, Mrs. Newsom, I’ll be glad to write you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“You said twenty thousand a minute ago.”
Jefferson made a face and shook his head. “Five thousand here, five thousand there, what does it matter? You want fifty? I’ll give you fifty.” His voice hardened. “But I want those papers.”
Phyllis’s brain was working as fast as it possibly could. “Ed McKenna found out about the deal you and Oliver were working on and brought the documents he discovered with him when he came down here.”
“That’s right. Who knew the old geezer would be capable of hacking into Oliver’s e-mail account and swiping the file with the merger agreement in it? Who knew he would even suspect such a thing?”
“He wouldn’t have,” Oliver said. A pained expression suddenly appeared on his face. He slapped himself on the forehead.
Sam glanced over at Phyllis and said, “People actually do that when they think of somethin’?”
Oliver ignored them. “Son of a—Oscar! It had to be Oscar. Dad could barely retrieve his own e-mail. I had to show him how to get the program back up after the screen saver came on, for God’s sake! But Oscar could have done it. He found out about the deal and ran straight to Dad with it.”
“I thought he couldn’t stand your father,” Jefferson said.
“Oh, he hated Dad for booting him out of being co-CEO with me,” Oliver said. “But he could have thought that stabbing me in the back would get him back in Dad’s good graces and out of the research department. I’m sure Dad came down here to try to think of some way to ruin the whole thing for us, just the way Oscar intended.”
Roger Fadiman couldn’t stand it anymore. He said, “Will you just stop talking? All you’re doing is telling these people that you both had reason to want Ed McKenna dead!”
“They’re not cops,” Jefferson said with a negligent shrug of his shoulders, “and anything they tell the cops will be nothing but hearsay. Our hands are clean, Roger, and for good reason: I had nothing to do with Ed McKenna’s death.” He looked calmly over at Oliver. “I’m not sure everyone here can say the same thing.”
Oliver’s face reddened. “That’s slander!”
“Not really,” Fadiman said. “This isn’t a public forum. No one heard what Charles just said except us. Also, he made no specific claims or accusations—”
“Shut up, you … you lawyer.” Oliver turned to Phyllis. “I can’t offer to pay you off, but I can promise you this: Turn those papers over to me and I’ll see to it that my brother and sister and I won’t file any sort of lawsuit against the bed-and-breakfast over my father’s death.”
“There’s no grounds for a lawsuit anyway,” Phyllis insisted. “No one who’s connected with Oak Knoll had anything to do with what happened to poor Mr. McKenna.”
“You don’t know that,” Oliver pointed out. “The police are still investigating his death. What if that cook is to blame? She had more opportunity to poison Dad than anyone else.”
Phyllis knew that wasn’t strictly true. Quite a few people in the bed-and-breakfast had had just as much opportunity as Consuela to slip the poison into those leftover crab cakes. But admitting as much wouldn’t do anything to help her position, so she kept quiet about that.
“We can ruin your cousin’s business,” Oliver went on. “We can drag things out in court until she’s bankrupt.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Charles Jefferson said with oily glee. “I’m not sure but what the bed-and-breakfast is in a stronger position financially than McKenna Electronics is. You might be cutting your own throat if you get involved in a lengthy, expensive lawsuit, Oliver.” He looked at Phyllis again. “My offer is still on the table, Mrs. Newsom. Fifty thousand dollars for the documents.”
“What does it matter which one of you has them,” Phyllis asked, “as long as they’re not made public?”
“It really doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Jefferson replied with a shrug. “But considering the lack of security on Oliver’s part that put us in this precarious position to start with, I’d prefer to have the papers in my possession, just so I’ll be sure that they don’t leak out.” He thought for a moment and added, “For that matter, here’s an alternative proposal: Take the documents out of your purse right now and throw them in the bay. I’ll still pay you the fifty thousand dollars.”
“But you’d want to examine them first, to make sure of what they were.”
“Of course. A pig in a poke, and all that.”
Oliver said, “I don’t care anymore. I’m sick of the whole thing.”
“You’ll care when your company goes under without Jefferson-Bartell to bail you out,” Jefferson predicted.
“You’re not bailing us out. You’re taking advantage of our bad luck to gobble us up. You’re nothing but a damned shark!”
“I’ve been called worse,” Jefferson said with a smile. “A shark is a very efficient killing machine.”
He and Oliver both turned toward Phyllis and waited to see what she would do.
After a moment she said, “You don’t believe I’d be foolish enough to bring the documents here with me, do you?”
“Where are they?” Jefferson asked in a soft, apparently casual manner.
Phyllis shook her head. “A very safe place, with someone who’ll go straight to the police if anything suspicious happens to me.”
“Ooh, you saw that in a movie, didn’t you?” Jefferson asked.
Sam said, “Mister, I sure don’t like your attitude.”
“Well, I don’t care for that beachcomber look of yours, either.” Jefferson ignored the angry glare on Sam’s face and went on, “All right, we’re getting nowhere here. You know where I stand on all this, Mrs. Newsom. I’ve made my position very plain. I’m going to put my trust in you. You have no reason to try to damage my business, so I’m going to assume that you won’t. If you cooperate, you should come out ahead in the long run. That’s all I have to say.” He jerked his head at Fadiman. “Let’s go, Roger.”
As they turned to walk away, Phyllis thought that she ought to just let them go. Somehow, she had managed to bluff her way through this and find out quite a bit of potentially valuable information in the process.
But she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “You’re forgetting one thing, Mr. Jefferson.”
He stopped and looked back at her, wearing an apparently amused smile. His eyes were chilly and unamused, though, as he asked, “What have I forgotten?”
“The police took Mr. McKenna’s computer. What if the documents were on there? The police may already have them.”
“I suppose that’s possible. Ed always struck me as being aggressively old-fashioned, though. A printout sort of fellow, if you will. Anyway, if Oliver’s right and his fool of a brother is the one who tipped off Ed, Oscar probably just
gave him the printouts of the e-mails, not the files themselves.”
“You’d risk fifty thousand dollars on that chance?”
“I’ve risked more than that on longer odds. That fifty grand was just to increase the odds on my side.”
Having never earned more than a teacher’s salary, Phyllis couldn’t understand that cavalier attitude toward money. She supposed that to a man who dealt regularly in millions, fifty thousand dollars really didn’t amount to much.
Jefferson and Fadiman walked toward the shore. Oliver McKenna lingered on the pier for a minute, saying, “Do the right thing, Mrs. Newsom. It’s not going to help you to ruin everything for me. And I can promise you, it’ll be better for your cousin if you don’t make an enemy of me.”
“Just don’t blame me if the police find out about the deal anyway … or already know about it.”
“For everyone’s sake, let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”
He stalked off then, too, casting occasional hostile glances back over his shoulder at Phyllis and Sam almost until he reached the shore.
“Folks around here sure are fond of makin’ veiled threats,” Sam said. “And some of ’em aren’t so veiled, at that.” He looked at Phyllis and shook his head in admiration. “You were runnin’ a bluff that whole time, just standin’ there and lettin’ those two compete to see who could spill his guts the fastest.”
“The possibility that a retired schoolteacher might be outsmarting them would never even occur to men like that,” Phyllis said. “We know now that Oliver was trying to go behind his father’s back to let Jefferson-Bartell take over their company. But Mr. McKenna found out about it and might have tried to stop it.”
“Meanin’ that Oliver is Suspect Number One now. That makes a lot more sense than thinkin’ that his murder was tied in somehow with the hanky-panky Leo Blaine had goin’ on.”
Phyllis nodded. “The problem is that Oliver would have had to come down here from San Antonio, get into the house, poison the crab cakes, and get back out again without anyone knowing about it. Either that, or pay someone to do it for him.”
Sam nodded. “Either way sounds a mite far-fetched, all right. If he couldn’t raise twenty thousand dollars, I wouldn’t think he could afford to hire a killer. He doesn’t seem to have enough spine to do the deed himself. Not impossible, but it just doesn’t seem likely to me.”
“But Leo was already right there in the house.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know for sure that McKenna knew about those naughty pictures of Bianca. Dang, it just goes around and around, doesn’t it? In some ways it looks like Oliver’s guilty, and in other ways it seems like Leo ought to be the killer.”
“I’d rather see either of them turn out to be guilty than Consuela or Tom or one of their girls.”
“Yeah, me, too. Can’t forget Jefferson, either. He’s just about the slimiest one o’ the bunch.”
Phyllis nodded as she pushed her hair back again. “I guess we might as well go back to Oak Knoll. We’re not going to accomplish anything else out here.”
“Not without a rod an’ reel,” Sam said with a smile.
Phyllis asked Sam to drive on down into Rockport and stop at the Wal-Mart there. Even with everything else that was going on, she hadn’t forgotten that the Just Desserts competition was coming up, and it had occurred to her as she and Sam were walking in from the long pier that it was actually less than forty-eight hours until the judging. She needed to make up her mind what she was going to bake. She had already downloaded the entry form off the Internet, filled it in, and would send it back as soon as she decided on her entry. She also needed to remind Carolyn that today was the deadline.
Ever since the previous Christmas, she’d had a cookie recipe in mind that she wanted to try. It was one she had considered for the Christmas cookie contest sponsored by the local newspaper, but in the end she had decided to go with something more festive that tied in with the holiday itself. That decision had worked out all right, since her recipe had received an honorable mention in the paper. Carolyn’s recipe had won, but that didn’t really bother Phyllis. Not nearly as much as the murder that had taken place next door …
She put those bad memories out of her mind and turned her thoughts back to the cookies she was considering making for this contest. Oatmeal Delights … the name just popped into her head. It described the cookies very well. They were oatmeal cookies with pecans, coconut, and vanilla chips. She had made them several times at home and everyone liked them. Since she knew they were good, she wouldn’t have to experiment with them before the contest, as she sometimes did with the recipes she entered.
With that in mind, she needed to gather up the ingredients. And, of course, once she was in Wal-Mart she thought of other things she needed, so for the next half hour she and Sam walked around the sprawling store, Sam traipsing along just behind her like a dutiful husband. That thought made Phyllis’s face flush warmly, and she was glad that he couldn’t see how pink she must be. By the time she brought the basket to a stop again, she had told herself to stop being silly and was back to normal.
“Why don’t you go look at the books or something?” she suggested. “There’s no reason for you to have to tag along with me.”
“I like taggin’ along with you,” he said with a smile. “Anyway, I got myself a whole sack of paperback Westerns the other day at that big used bookstore on the edge of town. I’ve got plenty to read.”
“Well, all right. I just don’t want you to get bored.”
“Not much chance of that,” Sam said, and darned if she didn’t blush again. “What’s all this stuff for, anyway? Your entry in the dessert contest?”
“That’s right. I’ve decided to make those oatmeal cookies you liked so much the last time we had them.”
“The ones with the vanilla chips in ’em?” A grin spread across Sam’s face. “Oh, man, those are good. Carolyn won’t stand a chance.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. She nearly always manages to find a way to top me. But I don’t even know what her entry is going to be. She might bake a cake or a pie.”
“Maybe so, but whatever it is, it won’t be as good as those cookies of yours.”
Hearing that pleased her, too, although she might not have admitted it … even to herself.
By the time they got back to the bed-and-breakfast, Ed McKenna’s death had crept into her thoughts again, but she was no closer to figuring out who had killed him than she was before. Today’s revelations had increased the number of suspects, but none of them stood out above the others.
She was puzzled, too, by the fact that Leo Blaine hadn’t seemed to know anything about a connection between Jefferson-Bartell and McKenna Electronics. Since Leo was a vice president of the company, shouldn’t he have known about the impending takeover deal?
Unless for some reason Jefferson didn’t trust him and had been keeping the deal a secret from him for a reason.
Everything just got murkier and murkier, like the sea after it had been stirred up by a storm.
Consuela was already back, Phyllis noted as she saw the woman’s car parked behind the house next to the garage and the toolshed. Since the front of the house was right on the street, the people who were staying there, both the full-time residents and the guests, all parked in a large area in back, paved with gravel and crushed seashells. Phyllis had been surprised when she first saw the crushed shells mixed in with the gravel until she thought about it and realized just how plentiful that material was around here. The bottoms of the bays were covered in many places with shells. All you had to do was scoop them up.
The entrance to the parking area was a lane from the next street inland. Sam drove along it and parked next to Consuela’s car. They got out and carried the bags from Wal-Mart into the house through the back door.
Consuela had what smelled like chili simmering on the stove in a big pot as they came into the kitchen. Not surprisingly, she still looked upset, but she wasn’t letting that inter
fere with her work. The chili smelled delicious. Phyllis smiled and told Consuela as much.
That brought a tiny smile to Consuela’s face as well. “It’s one of my favorite dishes—tamale soup—it’s like a dressed-up chili,” she said. “The guests always like it.” Her expression grew more solemn. “Not that I expect them to eat tonight. They still don’t trust me, except for Mr. and Mrs. Thompson.” The look on her face hardened even more. “And I don’t care if that Mr. Blaine ever eats any of my cooking again. If anybody deserved to be poisoned, it was him, not Mr. McKenna.”
Phyllis figured it would be a good time to change the subject. “I hope you don’t mind sharing the kitchen tomorrow. I have to bake some cookies.”
“For the Just Desserts contest?” Consuela’s expression brightened a little again. “Of course not. I’m looking forward to it. To tell you the truth, I thought about entering my coconut cake.”
“Oh, you ought to,” Phyllis urged. “You fixed it the first night we were here, and it was delicious.”
“No, that’s all right. Nobody would want to eat it.” Consuela gave a bitter laugh. “After what happened to Mr. McKenna, everybody would think it might be poisoned.”
“I’m sure no one would believe that,” Phyllis said.
But she wasn’t sure at all. With the cloud of suspicion hanging over Consuela, it would only be human nature for people to wonder.
“No, I won’t be entering any contests. There’ll already be your cookies and Mrs. Wilbarger’s pie from Oak Knoll—”
Consuela stopped short, her eyes widening. “Dios mio,” she went on. “She told me not to tell—”
“It’s all right, Consuela,” Phyllis assured her. “We didn’t hear a thing, did we, Sam?”
“Not a thing,” Sam said, lazily closing one eye in a conspiratorial wink.
Inside, though, Phyllis was glad. With Carolyn baking a pie, that meant the two of them would be competing in different categories. She could honestly root for Carolyn to win for a change.
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