Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries)

by Heather Haven

  “What, Mom?” I asked, turning my head toward her, as she still stared upward.

  “I was thinking about the first time I ever laid eyes on your father. I knew then and there I wanted to marry him. They say that’s not the way it happens, but it did with me. I don’t know why I thought of that now but I did.”

  My eyebrows arched in surprise. “You’re kidding. I never knew that.”

  “Oh, yes. It was his last year in college, my first. It was November. I was with a friend, and we were shopping at the Stanford Track House on campus for Christmas presents.” She looked at me, and her face glowed with remembrance.

  “We had just stepped outside the building when I saw him. He was coming around the track with several other young men. He and another boy were out in front, when the boy tripped and fell down. Roberto stopped running and helped him up. I remember thinking at the time what a kind thing that was to do and how it was going to cost him the race.” She played with the wedding ring on her finger before continuing.

  “I somehow found myself standing next to the track fence watching him, from maybe three feet away, when he looked over, and we locked eyes. I’ll never forget that crooked smile and those dark, intense blue eyes.” She turned and looked at me, “You have the same eyes, Liana. Every time I look at you, I see my Roberto in your eyes.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “It’s a bittersweet joy for me.”

  I couldn’t speak, for fear of crying. She leaned back into the cushion again and went on, “He waved at me and helped his friend off the field. I thought I might never see him again. Later on that day, I found him waiting for me outside my English class. Roberto had somehow gotten my name and my complete class schedule in less than two hours. He was a born detective.”

  “I never heard that story before,” I said in wonder.

  “I never told it to anyone before. It was always very…personal. Besides, everyone likes to hear the story of how he proposed to me less than two months later on New Year’s Eve.”

  I studied my mother’s face for a moment, while Lila stared up toward the ceiling. “Dad was the big love of your life, wasn’t he, Mom?” Lila didn’t answer but closed her eyes. “That’s really nice, Mom, really nice. I hope I have something like that some day.”

  “You will, sweetheart. He’s out there waiting for you. Just don’t let what happened with Nicholas get in the way.”

  I watched Lila’s face cloud over. Her body stiffened, and she sat upright.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “I remember who was with me that day. Yvette! She was with me every step of the way with Roberto. Now that I think of it, I met her the same day, too, just a few hours before your father. Maybe that’s why I so stupidly fell into every trap she set. I didn’t want to see her as she really was. What a fool I’ve been.” She let out a deep sigh and put her hands over her face.

  “I wouldn’t be so hard on myself, if I were you, Mom. I mean, when you think of it, you had a little bit more of Dad with you, as long as you and she were friends. It’s only natural not to want to let go of something like that when you love someone as much as you loved him.”

  Mom dropped her hands and looked at me. “When did you get so smart?” She asked.

  “Sometime within the last minute or so but don’t worry. It’ll probably go away just as fast as it came.”

  Lila laughed. She leaned back again and fixed her eyes on a small crack in the ceiling. “I’ve decided to donate your father’s jeep to charity. It’s wasted sitting in the garage, and from what Mateo tells me, the SPCA could use the money.”

  I swallowed hard. “That’s good, Mom. Dad would have liked that.”

  “I know,” she murmured and then asked, “How’s that stupid cat of yours, by the way, what’s his name?”

  “His name is Tugger, as you well know,” I replied, but with no recriminations. I put my head back on the pillows. “And he’s just fine. He’s already 11-weeks old, you know, and got altered yesterday. I brought him home from the vet today.” I let out a mock sigh. “They grow up so fast.”

  “So that means he’s carrying a slightly lighter load, huh?” asked Lila wickedly, grinning from ear to ear.

  I raised my head and looked at her with wide eyes. “Why, Mother May I! You made a little joke...and an off-color one at that. When did this start?”

  Lila raised her head and looked at me. “Maybe you’re just starting to get my jokes.” We both giggled.

  “He’s actually quite cute and very personable. Tugger, I mean,” Lila said.

  “Well, I didn’t think you meant John. He’s gained four pounds.”

  “John?”

  “No, Tugger.”

  “Well, John’s cute, too, and pretty personable. Anything I should know?”

  “Nope. Tugger’s in for the long haul, Mom. The jury’s not in yet on John.”

  “Well, you could do worse than either one of them.”

  “And have,” I replied. We laughed long and loud this time. Then we closed our eyes again, lapsing into a well-earned silence.

  It had been a good day.

  ≈

  A Wedding to Die For

  Book Two

  In

  The Alvarez Family

  Murder Mystery Series

  Heather Haven

  A Wedding to Die For © 2010 by Heather Haven

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Wives of Bath Press

  223 Vincent Drive

  Mountain View, CA 94041

  http:// www.thewivesofbath.com

  Cover Art © 2013 by Heather Haven/Jeff Monaghan

  Edited by Baird Nuckolls

  Layout and book production by

  Heather Haven and Baird Nuckolls

  Print ISBN-

  eBook ISBN-13:

  First eBook edition May 1, 2011

  Testimonials

  “Heather Haven makes a stellar debut in Murder is a Family Business.” Highly recommended. Sheldon Siegel. New York Times Best Selling Author Of Perfect Alibi.

  “The writing was clever and I couldn’t stop laughing. This is the perfect beach book.” Laura from The 100 Romances Project

  “Ms. Haven has found a new fan.” Dishin’ It Out, Ginger Simpson

  “Wonderful! Charming! Fun.” Dr. Cynthia Lea Clark, Psy.D

  “It is a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. I look forward to the next book in this series.” Candy Bezner, Single Titles

  "Wonderfully fresh and funny!" - Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters and The Four Ms. Bradwells

  ~

  The Alvarez Family Murder Mystery Series:

  Murder is a Family Business – Book One

  A Wedding to Die For – Book Two

  Death Runs in the Family – Book Three

  DEAD….If Only – Book Four

  Acknowledgements

  To our wonderful neighbor, Mexico, and all its inhabitants. You are truly a gem of a nation.

  Dedication

  I would like to dedicate this book to my Cafe Bee writing buddies, to Ellen Sussman and my fellow participants in her writing classes, especially Baird Nuckolls, friend and writing/business partner, to my supportive husband, Norman Meister, to families everywhere, and to my mother, Mary Lee, who is more like daughter, Lee, than Lila, just in case anyone asks.

  A Wedding to Die For

  Chapter One

  I Love to Cry at Weddings

  Mira McFadden was getting married. And I was the thirty-four-year-old divorcee who had intro
duced her—my best friend—to one of my brother’s best friends, who also happens to be my mother’s godson. When Cupid’s wings start flapping, take cover. When the groom gets arrested for murder, call me, Lee Alvarez, private investigator.

  This all started three months ago. Carlos Garcia, groom and suspect, ran into Mira and me in a Chinese restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf, we having ordered too much lobster moo goo gai pan and chicken lettuce rolls, and he looking as if he could use a good meal. I asked him to join us. It was as simple as that.

  For the record, it never occurred to me for one minute these two might fall in love. It also never crossed my mind they would wind up getting engaged, let alone plan a big-in-your-face wedding. Christ, it was just lunch.

  Who would have thought this Latino playboy, whom I have known since he was gnawing on pacifiers, would become besotted by a shy, soft-spoken female three years his senior, whose idea of a good time consisted of analyzing the contents of a mound of rocks found in the back yard? Not me, for one.

  True, she was drop-dead gorgeous, with one of the sweetest, most generous natures in the world. The daughter of two tall Irish-Americans, she had honey-red hair, turquoise eyes, and a glorious ivory complexion covering her nearly six-foot high frame. Even at my own five foot eight, when standing next to her, I looked like I was parked in a hole. We were a study in contrasts, we two best buds—me with wavy, brunette hair, dark blue eyes, and a slightly olive complexion, more exotic than not, and Mira looking like a larger than life water nymph.

  Her beauty aside, Mira was also one of the planet’s major klutzes. It wasn’t at all unusual for her to trip over her own feet in the middle of a room, hurtling her elongated frame to the floor, taking several objects or people with her.

  There is even a photo op of just such an event where, on her eighteenth birthday, she fell into her five-tiered birthday cake in front of two thousand people at a fashion show. It was right around the time her father, head of the McFadden Fashion Empire, got rid of the illusion his little girl would become a top model. Yes, she had the physical attributes, as well as being heir to the throne, but when destiny covers you in buttercream icing at the end of a runway, and the occasion has been frozen in time by every major newspaper, it’s probably better to make other plans. Mira enrolled at Stanford University, obtaining a PhD in geophysics. Good girl.

  A few years later, enter Carlos, “one of the ten most eligible bachelors in Latin America,” as the San Francisco Chronicle liked to say. A scant two months later, early May to be exact, he threw away his little black book and begged Mira on bended knee to be his bride. I was there. I saw the bending and the begging. Between his hot looks, gentle humor, devotion to her, and ability to sing any love song in Spanish, she would have been a fool to let him get away. In fact, in her excitement to say yes, Mira knocked a chocolate vodka martini onto his pristine, white linen lap. He didn’t even care. That’s love.

  This was all happening while I was on a demanding 24/7 undercover assignment, buoying up my own sagging relationship with the man in my life, Detective John Savarese, and raising Rum Tum Tugger, an adolescent feline, better known as My Son, The Cat. Not that raising a cat is all that tough, but I was feeling stretched pretty thin. All I needed was a wedding.

  Between being maid of honor, sister of the groom’s best man, and daughter of the godmother of the groom, I became enmeshed in the upcoming nuptials like nobody’s business. Everything except the romance seemed to revolve around me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Cupid has a lot to answer for.

  Then Mira came down with the flu during the wedding preparations. High on love, she kept running, jumping, and leaping until she collapsed with pneumonia. She was going to be fine but needed complete bed rest for the next two or three weeks. This made it all pretty intense, as her dream wedding was being thrown together at the last minute due to a sudden cancellation at Stanford Memorial Church, “Mem Chu,” for one of the Saturdays mid-June. It was now pushing the end of May. Usually there’s a two-year wait for such openings at what some people call “the closest thing you can get to a cathedral this side of Manhattan’s East River.”

  My stubborn friend had had her heart set on being married in this spectacular church ever since she saw it our freshman year. Postponing the festivities was out of the question. If Mira had to wobble down the aisle in three weeks’ time filled to the gills with antibiotics, then wobble she would.

  Carlos was to graduate from the MBA Program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business one week before the nuptials. Directly after the wedding, he had to head back to

  San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, bride in tow, to take over running the four-thousand acre cattle ranch, Los Pocitos de Oros, being temporarily managed by his adoptive mother, Virginia Garcia, who’s also my mother’s best friend.

  So in less time than it takes to grow out your nails, a formal wedding with two hundred guests from the varying worlds of fashion, politics, theatre, and society was being thrown together. I hold moo goo gai pan personally responsible.

  One recent Saturday morning, I sat at the ancestral dining room table across from my beautiful, ice-blonde, and very put together mother, Lila Hamilton Alvarez. As for me, I was puffy-eyed, exhausted, and looking like something my cat had left in his litter pan.

  “We should have hired somebody to stuff these stupid things, Mom,” I groaned, filling envelopes with yea or nay response cards and a sheet of driving instructions to the upcoming shindig. “There must be a million of them.”

  “There are only two hundred, Liana, but I want Mira Louise to know we did this ourselves, and we didn’t hire anybody.” Mom has a habit of stressing certain words in every sentence she utters, like the word ‘ourselves,’ which makes me crazy.

  “After all,” she continued, stressing away. “We’re all she has. Her mother is dead, and her father is nowhere to be seen, as usual.”

  “Mr. McFadden did design and build the gowns for the bride and attendants, Mom,” I said but paused, realizing I had imitated her vocal pattern. I mentally slapped myself across the face and went on, “And I think he’s still planning on giving her away.”

  “At least,” Mom countered, “he hasn’t reneged on that yet.”

  “True. Maybe this time he’ll be there for her. We can only hope.”

  “Mateo is standing by, just in case,” she sniffed.

  She was referring to my wonderful ‘Tio,’ and more of a grandfather to me than an uncle. He’s filled in for Mira’s father on more than one occasion ever since I brought her home years ago. His is a large heart, with room for us all.

  I sat for a moment, sifting through sad thoughts about my friend’s childhood. There had been the early divorce, followed by the shuffling between two warring parents, the death of her mother when she was thirteen, and then living with an uncaring, narcissistic father. Mira’s family experience was so different from mine. Now that my dad was gone, my family was even closer, especially with our having to run the family business, Discretionary Inquiries, a Silicon Valley based software investigation service.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We are all she has. Don’t pay any attention to me, Mom. I’m just tired.”

  For the past few weeks, I’d been driving back to my pretend day job around midnight. That was after the last workaholic cleared the building but before the scheduled four a.m. trash pick-up. I’d ransack through our client’s latest piles of garbage in the hopes of finding some evidence of which employee was stealing top-secret encoding. A couple of hours later, I’d drag myself home, shower off bits of pizza and Po’ Boys, and get a little sleep.

  At five a.m., the alarm would go off, and it was time to start my day all over again. I could have slept an extra forty-five minutes each day by eliminating my daily ballet barre, but that will never happen. Dance centers me. Even though I’ve had to face that I am, at best, a mediocre dancer and could never make a living at it, I still need ballet in my life. It’s the necessary food for my soul, m
y own pizza and Po’ Boy.

  Born Liana but known as “Lee” to everyone in the world, save a mother who would rather eat broken glass than utter a nickname, slang word, or abbreviation. I am half-Latina, half WASP, and one-hundred percent private investigator for Discretionary Inquiries, Inc. That’s the family-run business left to my mother, brother, and me by my dad, Roberto Alvarez, a Mexican immigrant who made good and died unexpectedly and too young of an aneurysm a little over two years ago. I mourn his loss every day. The family now consists of Lila Hamilton Alvarez, mother; Richard Alvarez, brother; Mateo, “Tío,” Alvarez, uncle; and yours truly.

  When Mom’s not around, we refer to Discretionary Inquiries as D.I. It’s one classy operation. That’s probably because Lila Alvarez, the driving force behind it, is one classy lady. She believes what really separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to accessorize.

  If D.I. were a car, it would be a Rolls Royce. I own a Chevy, so I needn’t go on. I always get the job done, but I get it done a little differently than anyone else. It’s a blessing; it’s a curse.

  With the help of about twenty employees, we deal with the theft of intellectual property, hardware, and software programming in Silicon Valley, often worth millions of dollars. Computer thievery is frowned upon here, especially by the injured company, so this type of skullduggery usually winds up on our doorstep. I am proud to say that D.I. has a recovery/prosecution rate of over ninety-four percent. We Are Smokin’ should be our motto, but I’m sure Lila Hamilton Alvarez would never put that on a business card.