Pistols & Pies (Sweet Bites Book 2) (Sweet Bites Mysteries)

by Heather Justesen

  I looked at the picture clipped to the form—it was five tiers and had at least sixty full-blown sugar roses on it. I could already feel my checking account getting fatter—until I saw the note that the bride only wanted to spend two hundred dollars. I snorted. “In her dreams for that price. The flowers are going to cost nearly that much if she wants a full-scale replica.” I shifted the form to the stacker for me to take care of later. “I’ll call her in a bit.”

  “I told her I thought that was shooting low, but she didn’t want to listen to me,” Honey said.

  “So, tell me everything you know about Eric Hogan,” I said to Marge. We sat at one of the bistro tables while Honey helped another customer who came in for cookies.

  Marge had a memory like an elephant—a really, really old elephant. I swear she never forgot a face or a family connection. She could probably list every member of every family from the area going back five generations and how they were connected to every other family. It seemed the Hogans went way back to the beginnings of Silver Springs—possibly to the time of the Vikings.

  Eric was an only child and in addition to being city councilman, he was an accountant specializing in audits. He traveled to other states all the time, which is how he met his wife. I supposed marrying an accountant was somewhat more acceptable than marrying, say, a sewer cleaner. More boring, probably, but there had to be accountants out there who were interesting in real life. Eric hadn’t been one of them.

  Marge gave me the full rundown of his teen years, his failed relationships and his marriage to Sandra with her three children—two of whom were grown and out of the house. It had been a whirlwind affair with a short engagement. The woman hadn’t been divorced from her first husband for two years yet and she was already a widow. Poor lady.

  “So, anything you think could be helpful?” I asked.

  “You could always check on his client list. No one likes an audit,” Marge pointed out. “Though at least he doesn’t work for the IRS, so it wouldn’t be a tax fraud issue. Also, his decisions on the city council weren’t always popular, so you could see what he helped pass that someone might be unhappy about.”

  “His wife did mention he had an issue with Gary Roper,” I said, scribbling like mad to keep up with Marge’s agile mind.

  Marge nodded. “You should start there, and with the step-son, of course. His mom probably sugar coated it, but he’s a real trial for her. He and Eric hated each other, and he’s been in trouble for riding that skateboard all over town where he shouldn’t be instead of sticking to the skate park. You mark my words: the boy is destined to spend time in jail one way or another.”

  I thought of Lenny and how he’d grown up. Would Marge have said the same thing? Of course, if she had, it would have been true—when he was a teen—but that was beside the point. “Thanks for the feedback. I’ll keep it in mind.” My fingers were cramping from writing notes and I wondered if I should start carrying around a voice recorder like Detective Tingey. The thought made me smile.

  “Get me out of here.”

  It was Lenny’s voice on the line. We’d been keeping in regular contact since I left Chicago, and I knew my former assistant pastry chef had been looking for a new job since I left. He hadn’t liked the kitchen manager any more than I did.

  “Bad day at work?” I asked.

  “If I have to put up with that woman’s snark one more time, I’m going to go postal and then I’m going to end up back in jail. Kat is going to leave me for someone who doesn’t have temper problems and my life will be ruined. Please tell me you magically thought of somewhere else that might be hiring.” His voice had turned to a whine, a sign that he was uber stressed.

  “You mean besides me?” I was only half serious, though, because there was no way I could afford to pay him what he had been making before, even if business was much better than I had anticipated this early on.

  “Are you serious?” His voice brightened. “Because you know Kat can work from anywhere. She doesn’t have to do her painting in Chicago.” Kat was his live-in girlfriend of three years, the sweetest mouse of a girl and his polar opposite.

  I stopped at the desperation in his voice. “You’re kidding me, right? I mean, I know Kat could live somewhere else if she wanted, but you’re such a city boy. You’d die living in Cowboy Springs.” It was his favorite nickname for my little town. Words could not express how much I would love having him work for me again, but the thought of being responsible for him making a living terrified me. A few months ago I wasn’t sure if I would be able to support myself.

  “Prescott is nearby, and Phoenix is only an hour away, right? So it’s not like I couldn’t get to a place with streets that have garbage and bums and where you can’t smell anything but the fumes of cars—like the world is supposed to be.” He had a twisted idea of life, I know, but I couldn’t help loving him.

  “You better have a talk with Kat. I’m not exactly swimming in the money here, so I wouldn’t be able to keep you on full time, or pay you anything like what you’re making now.” He had been learning steadily while he worked with me and was getting very good at the art portion of our job, but I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the customer service end of things. “And you’d have to work the shop sometimes and deal with clients.”

  “I can do that. You know I can.”

  Yes, he was good enough with people, once they got past his unconventional exterior. I wondered if it would be more of a liability in Silver Springs than it was in a five-star restaurant in Chicago. “I can’t say that I’m having any luck with employees here, that’s for sure.”

  His whine had turned to wheedling, like a little kid asking for a big favor. “And I know all about cakes, so I won’t help people make stupid choices like a filling that needs refrigeration in a fondant cake.”

  I chuckled—it was one of the most classic stupid things that Karen had done during her tenure as kitchen manager. You don’t refrigerate fondant once you put it on the cake—not unless you want condensation marks all over it. “I couldn’t hire you full time. Not right away,” I reminded him.

  “That’s fine, maybe I’ll pick up a second job. Hey, maybe someone there could use a good computer hacker.”

  Though I knew he was joking, it made me shudder. His previous time in the slammer hadn’t been computer related, but I knew some of the things he did walked the line of legality. He’d crossed that line for me during my previous investigation and I hated to think of what would happen if he got caught. “I think you best save your hacking skills for me and not spread them around. At least your illicit ones.”

  People hacked systems all the time just to see if they could do it, then told the website administrators about the problem. He’d made a habit of this, claiming he was doing them a good turn—it’s not like he did anything malicious when he was in their system, after all. He claimed he was honing his talents, but his heart was in cake decorating, so it’s not like he’d use his computer skills professionally.

  “If you think you might need that set of skills in the future.” He sounded hopeful. Since he didn’t know about my new investigation, he must be smelling things in the air.

  “Look, you talk to Kat. I’ll check my books and we’ll see what I can do.” He would be a huge advantage in the shop—and might be able to keep away the creepy gas station attendant who always came in for coffee, a muffin and to hit on me.

  “Deal. So what else is going on out there?”

  “You mean besides me finding another body?” I asked as casually as possible. “Not too much.”

  “Another one? Girl, you’re like a magnet. Tell me everything.”

  I smiled as I settled in to give him the whole rundown.

  The thermostat said eighty-five degrees as I walked through the park toward the skateboarding area that evening. It had been busy at the shop, and I still had receipts to total and dough to prep for the next day, but I was glad for an excuse to get out while the sun was still up, and talking to Micha
el was as good an excuse as any.

  There were six boys on the cement course, and I recognized him right off. Michael looked a lot like his mom with the same sandy hair hanging down to his chin. He was getting in his beard and hadn’t shaved for at least a few days, but it grew in unevenly across his jaw. He had earrings, an eyebrow ring and when he opened his mouth to laugh when one of the guys biffed it, there was a flash of silver which must have been a tongue piercing. I wondered if he really wanted to get all those holes, or if he just did it to be cool. Or maybe he’d done it to make Eric mad. Eric was conservative and traditional all the way.

  Holding a bag of leftover cookies, I watched the boys for several minutes. The others seemed to be impressed with Michael’s skills, but though they called to each other, I could tell he wasn’t really part of their group. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was sure they hung out in the same place, not together.

  One of the guys looked over at me, a black kid with a wiry frame and fingers long enough to rival those of a professional basketball player. “Hey, aren’t you the cake lady?” He nudged his friend, and the others glanced my way.

  Michael frowned, but picked up his board and headed toward me. “Mom said you’d stop by.”

  “I brought you guys leftovers. Anyone interested in cookies?” I held up the bag. One of the kids snatched it before I even finished my sentence and took off, playing cat and mouse with his friends before stopping at a nearby table to divvy up the booty. “I guess they want it,” I said to Michael.

  “Yeah. Who wouldn’t?” He turned his head to the guys. “Hey, you losers better save me some!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” a male voice floated back to us, but I wasn’t sure which guy it came from. Michael seemed to think it was good enough, though, because he followed me to a table under the shade.

  “I hear Detective Tingey’s giving you a hard time,” I said when he settled in across from me. I tried to act casual as I covertly adjusted the tape recorder I had turned on after I got out of my car. I decided he wouldn’t respond as calmly if I was taking notes and I wanted to be able to remember what he said later.

  “Yeah, stupid cops, always looking to pin things on an easy target.” The words sounded parroted, as if he’d said them a lot of times, or as if he’d heard them a lot.

  From his friends or his ‘unconventional’ father? I made a mental note to look into his father more. “I know how that feels. Tingey thought I might have been the killer when the bridesmaid died at a wedding I worked at last spring.”

  “You? Really? Miss white bread, I work at a bakery, straight from bonnie old England?”

  I chuckled. “Don’t call me white bread. I know what that means, and I’m more interesting than that. Besides, my mom’s parents are Guatemalan, and I can speak Spanish.” That was a bit of a stretch. I had learned some Spanish growing up, but since I only remember meeting my mother’s mother once in my whole life, she wasn’t really responsible for my slightly better than terrible Spanish skills. The staff in the hotel kitchen, on the other hand—they could take a lot of credit for my spotty and somewhat creative vocabulary. Chances were this kid wouldn’t know better, though.

  “I’m just sayin’.” He shrugged as if he wasn’t embarrassed by my comeback, but the tips of his ears turned pink.

  “Yeah. I know what you’re sayin’. Don’t take things for granted, though. There’s more to people than you think. Take you for instance.” I leaned forward slightly on the table, hoping the recorder in my pocket was picking up all of this.

  He lifted a palm toward me. “Let’s leave me out of it.”

  “Let’s not, since you’re the reason I’m here. Your mom thinks you’re innocent—of this murder, at least. I hear you and Eric weren’t exactly buddies, though.”

  “You sound like that cop. So I hated Eric. He was a creep.” He went on to use several colorful words that I hadn’t heard since leaving the hotel job. “I hated him, yeah. Big deal. He always thought everything had to be done a certain way—his way. A guy couldn’t even have a personality around him. It was like living with the Borg.”

  That reference surprised me because he didn’t look like a sci-fi geek—especially one who watched reruns from the 80s. But what did I know? “So tell me where you were the day he died.”

  “I was here.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Man, I was supposed to be at the big shindig. I told my mom I would be. It was Eric’s big day.” He emphasized the words to show just how little he cared. “But he got on my case that morning and I just couldn’t stand it, so I came here, hung with the guys all afternoon.”

  “These guys?”

  “No, just some guys. People come and go, you know? We don’t all hang together all the time.” Michael shrugged. “I hang with whoever, you know? I don’t care who they are.”

  I wondered how much of this was real and how much a façade. Lenny had been all façade when I met him. “You remind me of a guy I know back in Chicago.”

  “Yeah, is he amazingly popular and incredibly handsome too?” He smiled as if he thought he was being charming.

  “No, not much. But he has a girl who really cares about him, a career he loves and he’s straightened his life out. First he had to spend some time in county lockup to figure out he wasn’t headed where he wanted to be. He’s brilliant, and one of the best pastry chefs I’ve ever worked with—or he will be someday, when he’s soaked up everything he can learn.” I really wanted to have him working for me again. He was more than just an employee and I’d missed having him around.

  Michael sneered. “He’s a baker? What kind of job is that, anyway? I mean, it’s all good for you if you like it, I guess. But it’s kind of wussy, don’t you think?”

  I shook my head at him. Some kids never got it. “You care what other people think about you?” I already knew the answer, and that it would be a lie.

  “No, I do what I want. Who cares about the rest?”

  “So if you had something you loved—something you were really good at, that made other people happy and gave you a reason to get out of bed—besides to hang at the skate park, wouldn’t you want to do it?”

  He scuffed his oversized, untied shoe on the cement beside the table. “There’s nothing like that for me, man. Not everyone has a vocation, or whatever you call it. Some of us are just happy to be free.”

  “True enough. If that makes you really happy, why not? But I’m just sayin’, don’t let what other people think determine what’s good enough for you. If you like it—and it’s legal,” I thought I better add that caveat, “do it, even if it seems wussy. We all have to learn that sometimes. Even wussy girls.”

  His expression was dismissive, but he didn’t take his searching gaze off me, so maybe I reached him after all. Or not. “Whatever, lady. So what are you doing here, anyway? Just come to check my alibi? ‘Cuz the cops have already talked to me.”

  That didn’t surprise me since I’d been tied up at the shop while Tingey had been free to run his investigation. “Nah, I thought I’d see if I could figure you out. And I wondered if you had any ideas besides the one your mom’s pushing.”

  One of the guys loped over with the goodie bag, which was clearly weighted down by a couple of cookies, at least. Looked like Michael got gyped, but if he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him.

  “Thanks, dude, I’ll be back out there in a minute.” Michael looked back at me. “Maybe I have an idea or two. The detective, he could be in on it. Maybe my brother Daron or the Easter bunny. Seems to me that anyone with half a brain would have wanted the weasel dead. Heck, the way he went on about always wanting fresh food with no preservatives probably made you want to puke.”

  He wasn’t going to be helpful now, so I leaned back on my bench and matched his tone. “Yeah? You have any idea where I can find the Easter Bunny? Cuz I’d really like to know what he’s got against an auditor. You think maybe he got in trouble with the league of stupid holiday animals?”

  Michael chuckled. “You
’re all right, you know that? Look, I know Mom’s putting a lot of pressure on you to figure out what really happened. I didn’t do it, but I don’t know who did—I wasn’t around.”

  That was obviously all I was going to get out of him. Time to wrap up. “You remember Eric having an argument with anyone in particular? Anyone who was mad?”

  “Besides Roper? Yeah, lots of people. People he audited, people who didn’t like his politics, the contractor from the building, some of the other city councilmen. People who worked in the city offices. I’m not saying he hacked all of them off enough that they would want him dead, but he’s not exactly the kind of person people get along with. I have no idea why my mom ever got together with him. Or why they married. Or why she stayed.”

  That comment piqued my curiosity. She seemed plenty distraught in the store, but maybe that was due to the suspicion hanging over her son rather than sorrow at losing her husband. “Was he mean to your mom?”

  “Nah, he never raised his voice and he never said anything mean. He just used that tone that says ‘I’m very disappointed in you and I hope you learn to do things right next time.’ Man, I hate that. Even though I didn’t care what he thought, I still hated it. She seemed to think he was all that and a bag of chips, but I don’t know why. My dad is way cooler than Eric was.”

  He stood from the bench, stepping on the end of his skateboard so it popped up where he could reach the other end. “Look, I don’t know nothing about any of it. I’m glad the jerk’s gone, even though my mom is crying about it, but I wouldn’t have killed him. I’m outta here in less than a year. It wasn’t worth making a fuss about. Find someone who had something real to lose.”

  I watched him dig into the bag of cookies and pull three out, eating each of them in two bites as he joined the other guys on the cement. I wondered for a minute if he had a point. Maybe there was a more obvious suspect we were overlooking.