His eyes locked with mine.
Trapped. I didn’t want to fake another phone call. Now there was no way around interacting with Max.
He headed toward me, and I did an ambling, slow walk toward him. I’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else. I planned to be the head cheerleader if Zoey decided to cut him out of her life.
When he’d gotten within ten feet, he shoved both his hands deep into the front pockets of his jeans. He was coming over to talk, not fight.
Guilt set in. I kept hating on him and all he wanted to do was make amends.
“Guess this is awkward,” he said, stopping at a conversational distance of a couple feet away. Zoey was a good thirty feet from us with her eyes closed and her palm on her forehead. “I think it’s a customer call. They’re all idiots. Someone once called her for help getting their equipment to turn on in the middle of an electrical blackout.”
Huh. It was hard to believe that there were people in the world less tech savvy than me.
“You guys getting things worked out?” I asked. I already knew the answer but needed something to say.
Max shrugged. “We’re getting there.”
Optimistic or delusional? I wasn’t sure which. I was pretty positive that the only way Zoey would trust him again was if he locked himself in a cell and gave her the only key.
“Max, I was wanting to ask you, how come you told Brad that Zoey and I were looking into who killed Cam?”
“Brad?”
I hesitated a beat. “You know… Brad. Kinda built. Around your height. Muscular.” I would have added devastatingly gorgeous but thought that description might be lost on Max. When Max expression still didn’t register recognition, I added, “Cop.”
“Oh! Brad! The guy that hangs around the café.”
I searched my memory for any times that Brad and Max had been at the café at the same time and couldn’t think of any.
“I thought that it would get the cops to back off Zoey,” Max continued.
“How do you mean?”
“You investigated the murder of some woman so that people wouldn’t think you did it, right?”
That wasn’t quite accurate. I’d investigated in order to prove my innocence. But, investigating hadn’t done much to keep people from thinking I’d done it. Even with the murderer arrested, some people were still afraid of me.
“What’s that got to do with Brad?” I asked.
“You investigated the murder because you were innocent. Now Zoey’s investigating this murder because she’s innocent. I wanted the cops to make that connection so that they’d leave her alone. I love her. I’d do anything for her.”
Okay. That made sense. But I still wasn’t satisfied. Instead, I was mad. Maybe because Zoey was mad. I wasn’t sure.
I played it cool. I pretended I liked him. “Thank you for hooking me up with that hair salon. I love what she did with my hair.” Meant every word.
“It looks great. I’m glad I could help. Any friend of Zoey’s… you know how that goes.”
“Susie at the salon is really good. How’d you find her? She’s a bit off the beaten path.”
Max turned his attention toward Zoey and distractedly answered, “Overhead some ladies in the checkout lane at the grocery store talking about her. They were talking about how much they loved her work, then one of them started going on and on about the haircut and beard trim Susie had given her husband.”
All the truth bells and whistles were ringing in my head at what Max had said, and it took the oomph and ire right out of me.
I scuffed at the nearly frozen ground with the tip of my sneaker. I’d been sure that Max had set me up for a distraction by encouraging me to get my hair done by Dan’s ex, but I guess I’d been wrong. I’d also thought he had been behind the complaint that had triggered the health inspection, but that had turned out to be Dorothy and more of her wicked witch act.
I’d been wrong both times. Of course, I’d been wrong about Dan for eleven years. It was time I faced it. My people radar was something I couldn’t trust. I had no reliable sense of a person’s trustworthiness.
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. “I’ll be in the car.” It was cold, and I was deflated. On top of that, things seemed to be winding down between Zoey and Max. She had clicked off her phone by the time I’d made it to the car. Talking to Max again, he waved his hands around a bit, but Zoey didn’t engage. She was in the car a minute later and a second after that, we were driving. Zoey said nothing, and I said nothing with her.
“I want pizza,” I finally said. A terrible day needed carbs and fat. Best emotional band-aid ever.
Zoey nodded. “I know just the place.”
Chapter 23
We’d gotten the biggest, greasiest pizza Zamboni’s Pizzeria had had to offer. I carried it perched on one shoulder like a waiter’s tray while Zoey carried a bag of garlic knots and other yummies. We wouldn’t make it through one-tenth of the food we’d bought, but good ol’ fashioned gluttony was sometimes good for the soul.
We rounded the corner of the front of Zoey’s building, and I said a silent prayer of thanks that Max wasn’t standing out front.
Up in Zoey’s apartment, we set the food on the floor and sat around it powwow style.
“I don’t know what to think about all this,” Zoey said. “First he treats me like I’m dead, the next I can’t get rid of him.”
“Do you want to get rid of him?”
Zoey shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”
I picked up an ooey-gooey slice of pizza with cheese that stretched the whole length from the pizza to my mouth. I knew it was rude to talk while chewing, but I figured we were past formal niceties. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you knew, things would change one way or the other. You two would be together again or, hopefully, he’d be gone.”
“You really think it could be that easy?” Zoey asked, popping the more charred pepperoni slices into her mouth.
“When it comes to love, I don’t think anything’s that easy.”
“But what do you think of him? Do you like him?”
This was big. Zoey valued my feelings about Max. A part of me wanted to say nice things that would lead to them getting back together with a lifetime of happiness to come. Another part of me felt like that was a lie sold in checkout lanes sporting shelves of romance novellas. Within our day-to-day marriage, Dan and I had been pretty good together. It rolled my stomach to admit that to myself, but it was true. We liked some of the same TV shows and would watch them together, and he’d take out the trash when I told him to. We kept up a functional home and life with minimal drama. I simply hadn’t known that he’d had a whole other life without me—and, by his design, that I had no other life without him. But as far as our daily life together, we’d been good. Great even sometimes. Yet every single day of that life we shared had required effort to make it good. Maintaining a relationship was work. There was no magical happily ever after.
Try as I might, I couldn’t see Max surviving the relationship grind that it took to maintain a good one… day after day, month after month, year after year. I suspected that Max was addicted to chaos, instability, and the state of wanting something rather than having something. I didn’t want Zoey to get back together with Max, but telling her that wouldn’t do either. If I said that I didn’t like him but they got back together anyway and all was fine, I would forever be that person who had not believed in their happily ever after. It would taint our friendship. Yet if I told her I liked him and he was terrible to her, I’d be the friend who gave her terrible advice and I’d be stuck carrying the guilt of seeing her hurt when maybe my being truthful about my opinion of Max might have made a difference.
Answering that question was a lose-lose for me.
“Agatha doesn’t like him.” Yep. That’s right. I threw Agatha under the bus. Me—I was in the free and clear. “She’s had a lot of years to figure people out.”
“She doesn’t like him?”
“Nope.”
“Did she say why?”
I was back to feeling guilty and wanted to hedge on my answer, but couldn’t. “She said he’s manipulative.” I didn’t tell her that I’d thought I’d been wearing the stink of his manipulation for days. But had he manipulated me at all? Even once? I couldn’t put my finger on any proof substantial enough to say yes.
“Do you think he’s manipulative?”
Ugh. Oh boy. Here we go. No more hiding behind Agatha. “Yes, I think he is. I overheard him talking to the parents of a boy he wanted to recruit as a sport’s agent. He was working them pretty good.”
Zoey’s gaze studied me. “But you don’t like him for other reasons, too, right?”
I took a deep breath. “I can’t figure it out. Can’t pin it down. It’s little things that don’t add up to anything on their own. He said that he’d thought Cam was a pretty nice guy. He’s the only person who had something good to say about him. That doesn’t add up. Nobody else has said anything nice about him.”
Zoey’s brows creased and her gaze grew unfocused like she was thinking. “I saw Max on the Bouche surveillance video. He was having an argument with Cam.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” Zoey got up off the floor without even having to use her arms. A few minutes later we were watching video of Cam serving Max at Bouche. Cam dropped off a plate of food and walked away. Max tried to stop him and had to get out of his chair to go after him. There were words between them, but neither looked as though they were yelling. The incident wrapped up with Cam getting Max a new plate of food.
“That didn’t look like much,” I said. “I think that might be the best service we’ve seen Cam give since he changed.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Still, it was terrible service compared to most waiters.”
We went back to the floor and our pizza. We ate, and I contemplated. “If I’d had a waiter like that, I don’t think that I’d have had good things to say about him afterward.”
“Yeah, but Cam’s dead. What if the waiter was dead?”
“Oh, that’s a good point. I’d probably say something nice if the waiter was dead.”
Once again, Max was off the hook of suspicion.
“Can you stay away from the café for a while longer?”
I texted Sam. Melanie had arrived and all was well. The café was quiet and, between them, they were taking turns studying and waiting on customers.
“I’m good,” I said.
“Let’s go talk to Marla. I want to know what Cam’s fiancé has to say about him.”
Chapter 24
Marla turned out to be Marla Reinholdt. As with everything else, Zoey found her information online. Social media was a godsend to stalkers everywhere.
We tracked her down at her second job, which was working the convenience store at the Dime & Dart gas station. I thought that the name was a bit suggestive and wondered how many people darted between filling up and paying for their gas.
I grabbed a Snickers and we stood in line behind two other people at the checkout counter. One of them was a guy dressed like he belonged on the cover of Yuppies-R-Us and the other man was a walking skeleton dressed in clothes that looked as though they might have fit at one time.
The two in front of us did their transactions and headed out. I put the Snickers on the counter. The woman at the register had dark brown hair that fell past her shoulder and a cute little button nose. Her face was round, and her mouth was small but her lips were plump and looked to be naturally ruddy. She was chewing gum. The rest of her was small enough to work as a jockey riding horses. Her name tag read “Marla.”
“A dollar twenty-five,” she said, ringing up the candy bar. She had a pleasant smile, and she did not look as though she’d been crying or had even been depressed.
The rest of the convenience store was empty, but there was no telling how long it would stay that way, so I got right to the point. I fished out a five from my coat pocket, handed it over and asked, “Did you know Cam by any chance?”
Marla stopped chewing her gum. For the first time she looked me square in the eyes. Unblinking, she said, “No.”
I hadn’t expected that answer. I’d only asked “Did you know Cam?” as an icebreaker. I was sure we had the right person. She matched the pictures we’d found online, some of them containing both Cam and Marla. There had even been a few messages of condolence from other users about her loss of Cam. We had the right person.
Zoey scooted in next to me at the counter. The opening between sales items on either side wasn’t large, so we had to scrunch together a little. Zoey held up her phone showing a picture of Marla and Cam together.
“Oh, that was just one time,” Marla said.
Zoey did a finger swipe and rolled through several pictures of Marla and Cam.
Marla’s lips thinned and her eyes narrowed. She was more than a little bit annoyed. “What’s this about? What do you want? I got rights, you know. You don’t got no business bein’ in my place of work harassing me.”
“I know,” I said quickly. I was guesstimating that we were five seconds of annoyance away from her picking up the phone and calling the police. She definitely did not sound like a bereft fiancé, so I took a stab in the dark. “I need to know what Cam did to you that was bad.”
Her expression seemed to soften into resigned irritated acceptance. She crossed her arms over her chest. “He is dead, isn’t he? He can’t do nothin’ now. Do you know that jerk dumped me?”
“I hadn’t. I’d thought you were still together at the time of his death.”
She scoffed. “You mean, time of his murder. And I don’t know who done it to him, but I’m sure he had it coming.”
“What did he do?” Zoey asked.
“What didn’t he do is more like it. If he saw an angle to mess with someone, to get some leverage on them, he would. Then he’d use it. He wouldn’t just sit on some piece of information, he’d figure out how to make it work for him.”
“Was he doing that to you?” I asked. I wanted to know if she had a reason to kill him.
“Nooo, but I’d seen him do it a bunch of times to others. He’d brag about it, too.”
“He’d brag about it to others or to just you?” Zoey asked.
“Just me. But he was mean. Real mean. When we got together, I’d thought he was a nice guy. Then after we’d spent some time together and he started telling me some of the stuff he was doin’…” She shook her head, letting our imaginations finish the sentence. “Honestly, I wanted to break it off a few months ago but I was scared.”
“You were afraid he’d hurt you?”
“Yeah, not physical like, but, you know, I was afraid he’d find some way to mess with my life. I need this job. I need both my jobs. I’m workin’ toward getting somewhere in life. I want to buy a house. I want to be more than, you know, a cashier at a gas station. I’ve got more to offer than this.”
My heart went out to her. She was singing my song. What’s more, my gut was telling me that she didn’t kill Cam.
“Marla,” I said, “this is Zoey, and the police think that she might have killed Cam… but she didn’t.”
Marla looked at Zoey. There was a pause for recognition, then her eyes got big. “You’re that lady who beat Cam up!” Her smile got huge. “I want to shake your hand!” And she did. “You’re like my hero!”
“But I didn’t kill Cam,” Zoey stressed again.
“Ahhh, I wouldn’t have held it against you if you had.” Guilt or embarrassment flitted across her face. “I slept a whole lot better the night after I heard Cam was dead.” Her cheeks reddened. “I’d just seen him mess with so many people. He soured on me so fast. As soon as it started looking like he’d be able to buy that old man's shop, he didn’t want anything to do with me. He was going to be a business owner, and I was suddenly riffraff. But I kept thinkin’, now that he don’t like me, he’s gonna mess with me next.”
“I’m glad that’s no
t going to happen to you,” I said. I stopped short of saying that I was glad that Cam was dead. I was feeling on the fence about it, but I still couldn’t say that I was glad. “Can you give us any information about the people he messed with who you think could have decided to mess back?”
Marla dragged the tip of her finger in a zigzag design over the countertop. She was quiet a moment, but she finally spoke. “He ruined that old man’s business so that he could buy it at a bargain. I woulda thought that Mr. Hubert woulda been upset about that, but I heard that he was retiring and that he was looking forward to it.” Her eyes stayed downcast on the counter as she continued her invisible drawing. “He was blackmailing Steph.”
It was sooo hard for me to keep my mouth shut and not jump in with a flurry of questions. But I did keep it shut. I wanted to know if she had anyone else’s name to throw on the fire heap.
“He had something on John, the owner of Madame X, but I don’t think he’d done anything about it yet. He had a bar tab he’d run up and didn’t want to pay it.” She thought a while more. “There are a lot of others, like knickknack stuff, odds and ends of things he done. He messed up people getting jobs. He put sugar in somebody’s tank. He got a boy to beat up someone else’s boy at school.” She lifted her gaze to meet ours. “None of this is new, though. Most of it happened a while back. He usually didn’t go so far as to make anyone start asking questions. He was real proud about that, knowing where that line was.”
“What about Steph?” Zoey asked. “You said that Cam had been blackmailing her. Do you know what for?”
Marla pursed her lips. “To Cam, secrets were like money. He liked to brag about how much he had, but he didn’t like to share.” She shrugged. “So I know he was blackmailing her, but I don’t know what for.”
We thanked Marla. I pocketed my snickers, and we headed out to the parking lot. I looked at Zoey. “Back to Steph?”
A Berry Murderous Kitten_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery Page 12