Fat-Free and Fatal (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  Was she thinking that Dan had loved Sheila more than her? I remembered the way she had run to Dan the night before, her arms outstretched. She was in love with Dan. Suddenly, I was sure of it. Alice had a motive. I stared at her heart-shaped face for a moment, my head buzzing with adrenaline. I barely heard her as she began to speak again.

  “—terrible the way Sheila hit those kids,” she was saying indignantly as I tuned in. She turned to Meg. “Remember when we visited Sheila to set up the class? She hit the little one so hard she fell over.”

  Meg nodded, her green eyes round in her pale face.

  “Parents shouldn’t do that to their kids,” Barbara muttered.

  I stared down at what was left of my salad.

  “They shouldn’t, but they do,” I muttered back, thinking of what Wayne had told me about the beatings Vesta used to give him. He still had scars on his back from the belt she had used. And worse scars on his psyche, I was sure. My hands automatically bunched into fists as I thought about her.

  “You’ve got my sympathy, kiddo,” Barbara told me, patting my shoulder. “It can’t be any picnic living with that witch.”

  I looked up. Meg and Alice were staring at me, wide-eyed with apparent curiosity. Of course they weren’t psychic like Barbara.

  “Kate’s boyfriend’s mother is living with them,” Barbara explained. “She beat on Wayne—”

  “So, did either of you see anything suspicious last night?” I asked Meg and Alice, changing the subject abruptly.

  Alice pointedly shifted her gaze to Barbara. Damn. I guess the sight of Barbara kneeling next to a recently killed corpse might have seemed suspicious.

  “I didn’t kill Sheila,” Barbara stated for the record, returning Alice’s gaze. “But I know it looks like I might have.” Alice’s face began to soften. “And I’m scared,” Barbara added. “That’s why we’re trying to figure this thing out.” She waited a beat, then asked, “Won’t you guys help us?”

  Alice and Meg both nodded solemnly. Barbara could be persuasive. There was no doubt about it. My insides knotted up. She had persuaded me too, persuaded me that she hadn’t killed Sheila. Was it true?

  Of course it was true, I chided myself. I ate my whole-wheat roll and listened absently as Barbara asked questions to which Meg and Alice seemed to have no good answers. The reason Barbara was so persuasive, I reassured myself, was that she was telling the truth.

  “I just didn’t notice anything else,” Alice summed up. “Did you, Meg?”

  Meg shook her head.

  Barbara sighed. “Are you guys going to hold a class next Monday?” she asked.

  Meg and Alice looked at each other. I guessed that they hadn’t talked about the possibility of further classes yet.

  “I know it sounds weird,” Barbara continued. “But I think it would be a good idea to hold the second cooking class as originally scheduled. Assuming this whole thing isn’t over with by then.” She paused for a moment, her eyes half-closed in thought. “Maybe we could learn something important if everyone who was there the first night would come again on Monday.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Alice quietly. She tapped her fingers on the table. “Maybe if we pretended we already knew who did it, like in the movies—”

  “Wait a minute, you guys—” I began.

  But Alice kept talking, her voice rising with enthusiasm. “We’d have to set it up now, make sure everyone would come.” She turned to Meg. “How about it?” she asked.

  “Um,” said Meg, her voice as thin as she was. “I don’t know.” She sniffed. “I mean, I don’t even have the sign-up sheet anymore. I think the police took it.”

  I saw the blush that started in Barbara’s neck and rose through her cheeks. I sighed in relief. If she was this obviously guilty over taking the sign-up sheet, I would have to have noticed a larger sign of guilt if she had really killed Sheila.

  “I think I can get everyone’s phone numbers,” Barbara said, her voice too high.

  “Really?” asked Alice. She looked at Barbara, her head tilted quizzically.

  “I have a friend with connections to the police,” Barbara explained.

  I raised an eyebrow at her myself.

  “Felix,” she specified.

  Damn. I had forgotten about Felix, Barbara’s reporter boyfriend. He was going to be ravenous for information once he found out about the murder.

  Meg and Alice were looking at each other again. “Okay?” asked Alice.

  Meg nodded slowly. “Okay,” she agreed.

  “We’ll do it,” Alice announced. She grinned widely, reminding me suddenly of Barbara, and raised a glass of Calistoga water.

  “I propose a toast,” she said. “To success.”

  Meg and Alice had to leave soon after the toast. I dropped them off in front of their building, then turned to Barbara before driving back into traffic.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered sadly. “I didn’t get anything psychic on either of them.” She rubbed her forehead roughly. “Just more garble.”

  I pulled out into traffic, thinking about Alice and her relationship with Dan, grateful that Barbara’s psychic powers were down for the moment. I didn’t want to share my current thoughts with Barbara. She didn’t need any more reasons to suspect Alice of murder.

  We were already across the Golden Gate Bridge when I remembered our five o’clock appointment with Paula Pierce. I’d just have time to do a couple hours of work; then we’d have to return to the city.

  My box of paperwork was still waiting for me when we got to Barbara’s apartment. Too bad no one had stolen it. I picked it up off the blue futon and carried it into her kitchen to work at the black-lacquered table there. Barbara withdrew to her bedroom to make more phone calls. Ten minutes later I had written enough checks to keep my major creditors happy for a week, and was starting on the minor ones. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  I turned, expecting to see Barbara, but saw instead a small, slender man with a luxurious mustache and soulful eyes. He was Barbara’s boyfriend, Felix. And he wasn’t smiling. I tensed up, waiting for his harangue. It wasn’t long in coming.

  “So, you and Barbara find a stiff, and don’t bother to tell me,” he snarled. “Me, a friggin’ crime reporter! Not a word. No way, José—”

  Barbara cut him off mid-sentence with a kiss. I began packing up.

  “No howdy-hi?” she asked Felix with a Cheshire cat grin.

  He glared at her. “You!” he shouted. “Benedict Arnold Chu! My own sweetie and you don’t even tell me about the murder! Holy Moly, Barbara, I’m a reporter. I’m your old man…”

  I threw the rest of my paperwork into the box in a hurry, dropping an eraser on the way. It fell between Felix’s sock-and-sandal-clad feet. I fumbled for it, knocking against Felix’s big toe in the process.

  “Yow!” he yelped.

  I straightened up and looked into his eyes curiously. I had barely touched him. What was the matter? He fell into a chair, howling.

  I looked at Barbara. “Gout,” she mouthed.

  I took the coward’s way out. I picked up my box and ran.

  Vesta was waiting for me at the door when I got home.

  “There’s a call for you on your machine,” she said, smiling.

  I smiled back tentatively. Maybe she was trying to be nice. Everyone deserves a second chance. Right?

  Vesta followed me to the answering machine. I pushed the replay button.

  “Are you the one who killed her, bitch?” a husky voice exploded from the machine. “Huh? Because, if you are, I’m gonna get you!” The voice lowered to a whisper. “That’s a promise,” it said. Then all I heard was the dial tone.

  SIX

  VESTA CACKLED GAILY behind me. I turned to her, wondering for one wild, heart-thumping moment if she was the one responsible for the message. No, not Vesta, I decided. I turned back to the answering machine, then took three long deep breaths. Who had left the message? I rewound the tape,
then played it again.

  “Are you the one who killed her, bitch?” it began. I turned it off before I got to the part where the voice promised to “get me” if I was the one.

  Was that Dan Snyder’s voice? I tried to recall the sound of his voice from the night before, but all I could remember was the way he’d looked, big and burly in his Hawaiian shirt, his eyes squinting angrily. It had to be him, I told myself. Or maybe his friend Zach.

  “Where’d you get the blouse?” came Vesta’s voice from behind me.

  I flinched, startled. I had almost forgotten her.

  “Doesn’t look like your regular stuff,” she added.

  I looked down and recognized the lavender silk blouse I had borrowed from Barbara. “My friend lent—” I began.

  “Didja steal the blouse when you murdered the lady?” Vesta asked conversationally.

  I swiveled my head around to look into her dark, malevolent eyes.

  “I didn’t murder anyone,” I said firmly.

  Vesta put a hand to her mouth and giggled. Then she asked me if I had stolen the blouse to impress my new lover.

  I left my house within five minutes of having arrived. With my box of paperwork in my arms, I headed toward Barbara’s again. If Felix was still there, so be it. I could handle his harangue better than Vesta’s Alice-in-Wonderland questions. Malice-in-Wonderland, I corrected myself.

  But Felix was nowhere in sight when Barbara opened her apartment door.

  “I told him to take off,” she explained with a sigh.

  Then her eyes flashed with indignation. “He was driving me bananas with his questions. Jeez-Louise, Kate, he’s a vampire! He wanted to know everything. What the body looked like, what I felt like, who I thought did it…”

  She ranted for a full five minutes. I didn’t blame her. I had been at the receiving end of Felix’s inquisitions before. She hadn’t. And he was her boyfriend. That had to be worse.

  “Sic him on Iris,” I suggested once Barbara ran out of words.

  “Maybe I’ll just do that, kiddo,” she said, smiling.

  She wrapped her arms around me and laughter vibrated through both of our bodies as we hugged. Then she let go and motioned me into her apartment. I took a seat on one of the blue futons and looked up at her.

  “I got a call on my answering machine…” I said slowly, hating to spoil the mood. “I think it was Dan Snyder—”

  “He called me too,” Barbara interrupted cheerfully. She sat down next to me. “He thinks the two of us killed his wife.”

  “He what?” I yelped.

  She reached over and patted my hand. “He’s in pain, Kate,” she said earnestly. “He wants to blame someone. And we’re it. He has this theory that we were in it together. Someone must have told him that we found Sheila’s body.”

  “Aren’t you scared?” I demanded, fastening my eyes on Barbara’s lovely, serene face.

  “I don’t think he’s really dangerous,” she said with an easy wave of her hand.

  And that was that. I wanted to call the police. She didn’t. I wanted to quit investigating. She didn’t. I wanted to move to Alaska. She didn’t. She had some paperwork to do. She advised me to do the same.

  It was good advice. After an hour of meaningful interaction with the Jest Gifts payroll account, I wasn’t in a gibbering panic anymore. So what if this maniac thought we killed his wife? What was he going to do about it? Now I was only frightened. Very frightened.

  Barbara tapped me on the shoulder as I was reaching for my accounts payable file. My rear end levitated a full inch above my chair, then landed again with a whump. “It’s time to visit Paula Pierce,” she said and dragged me down the stairs to the apartment parking lot before I could formulate an objection. She offered to drive. I refused the offer. Barbara’s driving style—eyes on her passenger instead of the road—scared me almost as much as Dan Snyder.

  We were on the Golden Gate Bridge when Barbara drew a sheet of newsprint from her purse and unfolded it to its full three-foot length. This was the “paperwork” she had been working on for the last hour, a chart of murder suspects that included columns with the scrawled headings of “opportunity,” “motive” and “psychological profile.” She read pieces of it all the way into San Francisco, occasionally flashing the sheet between my eyes and the windshield when she wanted me to see something important. She had read almost to the bottom of the chart when we reached Paula’s office in the Mission District.

  As I circled the block looking for a parking space, Barbara told me her conclusions. Boiled down, her chart seemed to prove that anyone could have done it. Alice, Meg, Ken, Leo, Iris, Gary, or Paula. Or the family members. Or Dan’s friend Zach. According to Barbara’s chart, they all had opportunity. They all had motives. Lots of motives.

  I prayed to the goddess of parking spaces as Barbara expounded. I was instantly rewarded. A Honda pulled out of a legal parking space in front of me. I slid into the space thankfully.

  “Well?” prompted Barbara as we got out of the Toyota. She looked into my face eagerly.

  “You’ve got a great imagination, that’s for sure,” I told her, smiling to take the sting from my words. “I especially liked the theory about Sheila really being Iris and/or Leo’s illegitimate daughter.”

  Barbara frowned for a moment, then grinned as we crossed the street at the light.

  “We’ll do it, Kate!” she shouted over the noise of traffic. She waved her fist in the air jubilantly. “We’ll find the murderer. It’s only a matter of time.”

  The sound of my groan was lost in the street noise.

  Paula’s law office was up a flight of red-carpeted stairs, above a bakery. The black-and-gold lettering on the glass door read “Pierce and Nakhuda Law offices, Specializing in Women’s Law.”

  Barbara opened the door and the two of us walked in. The offices were furnished more luxuriously than one might expect to find over a bakery. Plush cream-colored carpeting, two camel-colored sofas, and rosewood shelves filled with law books gave the room a professional look. The young Hispanic woman behind the rosewood reception desk detracted somewhat from the businesslike image. Not that she wasn’t well dressed. Her open cotton blouse looked fine. It was the baby nursing at her breast that didn’t match the rest of the room.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, smiling politely.

  “Kate Jasper and Barbara Chu,” I said briskly. “Here to see Paula Pierce.”

  She shifted the baby to her other breast, picked up the telephone with her spare hand and murmured a few words, then asked us to take a seat. I sat down on a sofa as ordered. Barbara didn’t.

  “What an absolutely adorable baby,” she cooed, walking closer to the desk.

  From where I sat, the baby didn’t look extraordinarily adorable, just a small lavender bundle with a few dark hairs on its head. I would have bet Barbara was trying to make points before she launched into the questions she really wanted answered.

  “Have you been with Ms. Pierce long?” she asked.

  The young mother shrugged gently, not enough to disturb the baby. Barbara moved quickly to her next question.

  “What exactly is ‘women’s law’?” she asked.

  “Oh, lots of stuff,” the young woman answered. “They do divorce, custody battles, employment discrimination, wrongful termination, child-support collection—stuff like that.” She shrugged her shoulders again.

  “How do you like Ms. Pierce?” Barbara pressed on.

  A genuine smile lit up the young woman’s face. “She’s wonderful!” she said enthusiastically. “I wouldn’t have custody of my baby now if it weren’t for her—”

  A door opened to her side and the wonderful attorney in question walked through. Paula Pierce looked much as she had the night before, stocky in today’s gray business suit, her cropped salt-and-pepper hair as uncompromising as ever. The circles under her eyes might have been a little darker, her mouth a little tighter, but other than that, she looked unaffected by Sheila Snyder’s deat
h. She jerked her hand, motioning us through her door.

  “Please, come in,” she said brusquely.

  As we entered Paula’s office, I looked back over my shoulder at the young woman nursing her baby. I wanted to hear the end of her story.

  “I have twenty minutes,” Paula announced.

  I closed the door regretfully and sat with Barbara on yet another camel-colored sofa. Paula Pierce took a chair behind her rosewood desk and looked at us expectantly. I could hear the sound of traffic through her open window, even smell the paired scents of yeast and sugar drifting up from the bakery below.

  “Well?” Paula prodded impatiently.

  “We wanted to get your thoughts on the murder,” Barbara said, smiling.

  Paula didn’t return the smile. “I don’t have any more knowledge concerning last night’s events than you do yourselves,” she stated categorically.

  “But you might,” I argued, appealing to her sense of fairness. “You don’t really know unless we compare notes.”

  “Perhaps,” she answered, her eyes thoughtful. “But I’ve already told the police everything I consider relevant.”

  I thought for a moment. The woman was a cause attorney. What would it take to move her? “The police think Barbara was the murderer,” I said.

  Bingo. Paula sat upright in her chair, her face now filled with concern.

  “Have the police harassed you?” she asked Barbara.

  Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “Not really,” she said softly, looking down at her lap. “But I’m scared. They don’t like me. They don’t know what to make of an assertive Asian woman. I don’t fit their stereotypes.” I knew that Barbara wasn’t just making this up from whole cloth. I had seen it in people’s eyes before, the confusion and affront over this rowdy Chinese-American woman. She had more in common with Bette Midler, even Madonna, than Susie Wong.

  Barbara raised her eyes to Paula’s. “Will you help me find the real murderer?”

  Paula nodded. She was hooked.