Shadow of a Spout

by Amanda Cooper

  “What are you doing in my office?” a voice behind her said.

  She whirled to find Bertie Handler standing in the door and staring at her in an accusatory manner, his expression dark and very unlike the meek demeanor she had noted the night before. “I came looking for you, Mr. Handler.”

  His face reddened as he noted where her hand rested, on the pile of papers. “If that’s the case, then why are you snooping through my papers? You should get out.”

  Chapter 15

  He may have intended to sound menacing, but just came off as peevish.

  “I wasn’t snooping. I came in here looking for you, but I saw how the place looked, like . . . like someone had rifled through all your stuff. Have you had a break-in?” she asked, assuming an air of innocence.

  “No, this is how it always looks. I’m not big on organization,” he admitted, bustling over and pulling the lawsuit paper out of the stack. He glanced at it and threw it down with a sniff.

  “What’s that?” she said, looking down at it as if for the first time.

  “Something that isn’t your business and doesn’t matter now anyway.” He took a deep breath, and his expression changed more to the one she recognized, conciliatory and mild. “I’m sorry, I’m just so . . .” He shook his head. “It’s been an awful couple of days. I’m so uptight, and the police are crawling all over my inn.” His gray eyes watered and he slumped down in the chair by the computer and put his head in his hands. “I just don’t know how I’m going to go on.”

  She perched gingerly on the edge of the desk and said, “I know it seems like it’s going to do you in, but just tough it out, Mr. Handler.”

  “What do you know about toughing it out?” he said miserably.

  “I know, trust me.”

  “You’re so young. You know nothing!” He stared at the lawsuit paper. “At least I don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he said, pushing the legal page aside.

  “A lawsuit,” she commented, reading it. The law firm name was Green and LaPacho, attorneys-at-law. She frowned; something wasn’t right. The letterhead looked odd, not very professional, and the firm name . . . “How was this delivered to you?”

  “It was left in an envelope on the check-in desk. Why?”

  Sophie didn’t answer. As far as she knew, notice of a legal complaint had to be delivered by a process server. And it all seemed to have happened suspiciously quickly. Legal matters took a while. “Why would Zunia Pettigrew sue you?” Sophie asked.

  “For lies! She made things up and then had the nerve to sue me.”

  He seemed on edge, and she already knew he was worried about losing the ITCS convention. “I thought you two were friends?”

  “We were. I never had any trouble with Zunia, but suddenly . . .” He paused, then said, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. Suddenly she accuses me of e-mailing Mrs. Sommer to snitch on her and Walter’s affair! As if I’d do that. Why would I?”

  Why indeed. “She was mistaken, I suppose. How did it come out? Was Mrs. Sommer actually told by e-mail? Was there an affair?” She already knew that was the case from what Nora Sommer had told Nana, but she was interested in what he’d say.

  Bertie looked over at her with a sly smile. “Oh, sure, there was an affair. With Walter there was always an affair; I’ve known him long enough to know that.” His smile died. “But I told Zunia, I didn’t say—or send—a word to Nora. Why would I stir up that hornet’s nest? The only person worse to deal with than Zunia is Nora, though at least she’s always fair. In the end, Zunia believed me and was going to withdraw the lawsuit. She told me so that . . . that night.”

  “But you still had an argument with her, before you came to terms,” Sophie said, hazarding a guess.

  His gray eyes narrowed. “How did you know that?”

  She didn’t until that moment, and stayed silent.

  “Did someone . . . ?” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Zunia started it, not me.”

  “Was it a bad argument?”

  “Not in the scope of Zunia Pettigrew arguments.”

  “Mr. Handler, everyone agrees that she was an unpleasant woman. Why did so many folks go along with whatever she wanted?”

  “You had to know Zunia,” he said, on a sigh. “Every single time I have tried to be reasonable with her when she’s asking something impossible she turns it around and becomes the injured party. I don’t know how she does it, but it happens every time. She could be sweet as pie, but that was when she was most dangerous, so you just learned to go along with what she wanted.”

  “To avoid a quarrel,” she said, nodding in sympathy. “I had a cook like that at my restaurant once. He always made every disagreement a personal vendetta, like people were out to get him.” She vividly remembered Paolo, who hated that she was female, younger than him, and had her own restaurant. For a time she had wallowed in guilt on that score because she knew she had gotten her own restaurant at such a young age in part because of her father’s business connections and her mother’s social ones. But then she had steeled her nerve and decided that didn’t matter. The food mattered. But back to Paolo . . . “He was a nightmare. It got so that the other cooks were circumventing my orders just to placate him.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Fired him,” she said. It had taken every ounce of guts she had, but she did it through the howling maelstrom of his invective. He wasn’t willing to go and actually had a knife in his hand—not that he was threatening her; he was threatening to cut himself—so she had the police remove him from the premises. She didn’t have so much trouble being taken seriously in her own restaurant after that.

  “You can’t fire a customer,” Bertie said.

  “True, but was it worth continuous aggravation?”

  “I only had to deal with her once a year,” he said, with a shrug, and turned to his computer, rapidly typing, then turned to sort through a stack of papers to the left of his desk.

  Perhaps that was true, Sophie thought, but Zunia was threatening his livelihood by recommending that the ITCS move the convention. This was getting ridiculous. When she added up those she knew of who had a reason to kill Zunia, there were far too many: Bertie Handler, who was afraid Zunia would take the convention away from the inn; Nora, the spurned wife of Zunia’s lover; Walter’s ex-lover Rhiannon, who had been replaced, presumably, in Walter’s affections by the dead woman. Who else? A whole nest of Pettigrews: the soon-to-be-deserted husband, Orlando; the miserable stepdaughter, Emma; the abandoned wife, Dahlia.

  How was she ever going to cross anyone off the list of suspects? Taking a deep breath, she reminded herself it wasn’t her job. This was a homicide and the police were dealing with it. She trusted that they were dedicated and would get the right result in the end, especially now that Laverne’s nephew was on the job.

  However . . . in the meantime, Nana was suffering. She would never let anyone know but Sophie could tell this was wearing on her, and no one—aside from Laverne—would care about her well-being the way Sophie did. Poor Nana was worrying that because of Thelma Mae Earnshaw’s unfortunate jest, the killer had taken the opportunity to point the finger of blame directly at Rose Freemont and use her teapot . . .

  Use her teapot!

  Sophie leaned against the office doorjamb and pondered. It all started at the tea after the convention meeting. Whoever killed Zunia had to have been at the tea after the meeting, and so privy to the discussion about Nana being dangerous. She supposed an outsider could have heard about it, but how likely was that? Sophie had known all along that the culprit must be among the ITCS convention goers, but that kind of proved it.

  Bertie Handler hadn’t been in the room, as far as Sophie knew. He may have heard about the conflict between Zunia and Nana later, but it was far-fetched to think that he would have based a murder method on a secondhand story about a lethally dangerou
s elderly woman.

  Her eye caught on the “legal” paper. In fact it was almost as far-fetched as Zunia Pettigrew’s lawsuit. There was no lawsuit and no such law firm, Sophie was sure of that now. It was too much of a coincidence that the names “Green” and “LaPacha” had one thing in common: They were both types of tea. For some reason of her own Zunia wanted Bertie—and maybe others—to think she was suing him.

  Why would you do that rather than actually file a lawsuit? She could think of several reasons, the most important being there was really no grounds to file it, and another was to placate someone else in her life, like her husband or her lover. She must have needed to assume the mantle of righteous indignation against the “rumor” that she and Walter were having an affair.

  And another thing . . . Surely Bertie wouldn’t steal a guest’s item to kill someone with it since the police would know that of all people in the inn, he had access to every room. She eyed the innkeeper, who was staring at a split screen image on the computer. It looked like video from security cameras, and she could see the cooks moving around in the kitchen downstairs, as well as the back door propped open in another quarter of the screen and someone exiting the coffee shop into the lobby. Bertie seemed a million miles away, though, not watching it so much as staring blankly at it. “Mr. Handler, where were you that evening, anyway, the evening of Zunia’s death?”

  His cheeks flushed, and his watery eyes widened. “There was a terrible thunderstorm. I d-don’t like thunder and lightning. I went down to the basement to wait it out.”

  “All evening?”

  “Well, no, but until after the b-body was discovered. I was downstairs when the alarm went off.” He sounded nervous now and fidgeted with his chair, using the lever to lower it, then rising to get it to come up again.

  “Do you keep the office locked?”

  “Of course!” He sat and pulled up to the computer again. “I lock it right and tight at the end of the day—usually by eight or so—and all calls coming in to the check-in desk are patched through to my suite of rooms, on the other side of the stairway,” he said, flapping his hand in the direction of the little hallway where the door to the basement was. “It’s exhausting. I’m never really off duty.”

  Except when he was hiding downstairs from storms. Was that the truth, or a handy alibi for being incommunicado at the relevant time?

  “Do you keep your cell phone on you when you’re downstairs?”

  “When I remember. Look, I have to get back to work and figure out what to do about some guests that are supposed to be coming in this evening. This awful m-murder has thrown everything out of whack. It’ll be the death of me yet!”

  “Sorry to keep you,” she said, pushing away from the desk. If he was telling the truth and he wasn’t the murderer, then the killer must have gotten the teapot out of Nana’s room using a master key. In that case it had to have been sometime while the office was unlocked and the key available. The housekeeper finished by dinner, at which time she presumably handed the key back to Bertie. “Talk to you later,” she said.

  He gave kind of a tired wave, and put his head in his hands, covering his eyes.

  She hesitated, but then said, “Mr. Handler, one more thing.”

  He looked up.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how whoever killed Mrs. Pettigrew got the teapot out of my grandmother’s room. How do you think that happened?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “How am I supposed to know? The police asked me the same question, but those kinds of people are ingenious, right? I mean, if someone is going to kill someone . . .” He let it trail off.

  As he spoke she eyed the pegboard with sets of keys hanging from the pegs. “Are those all the inn keys?”

  He followed her gaze and shifted in his chair. “Sure.”

  “Are they all accounted for?”

  “Of course!” He straightened and narrowed his eyes. “What are you suggesting, young lady? Are you saying I have been remiss? I assure you—”

  Someone rang the bell at the desk and he jumped up and trotted past her. She waited a moment, but he appeared to be busy from the steady hum of voices she heard outside the door. She nipped over to the board on the wall and examined the keys for a moment.

  The inn was old and old-fashioned, so even apart from the room keys a number of other keys were used, all different types, probably for locks that had been replaced over the years. At least the keys were labeled: boiler room; storage—main floor; storage—second floor; storage—basement; kitchen-basement; dining room; convention room . . . and voilà. Housekeeping master key. On an impulse she slipped it off the peg and shoved it into her shorts pocket then left the office, sliding past Bertie at the check-in desk.

  A tall, slim older woman, one of the ladies from the ITCS convention, was renewing her room for the night. “I only need it one more night, but given the trouble, I think I ought to get it free.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but it’s not really my fault your convention is running on another day, and—”

  “It most certainly is your fault, or the fault of the inn. You clearly have no standards and let the worst people in. For a good customer, given your slapdash ways and the housekeeper’s terrible sloppy job with my room yesterday, you ought, at the very least, to give me a discount.”

  Housekeeper! Why wasn’t Melissa there right that moment using the key? Sophie wondered. Maybe she was late. Really late! It was noon. Or maybe her schedule was not as set in stone as she had implied. Interesting thought.

  “As far as our guests, the only people with rooms here right now are ITCS attendees,” he said, his tone snippy. “Melissa does the best she can with the rooms, but she’s only here until about dinner and then another girl is supposed to come in for the evening, but half the time she doesn’t show up. I can’t help what goes wrong after that.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the combative woman shot back. “I wanted fresh towels the first night, and there was no one to get them! I even rang the desk.”

  “I’m so sorry, but that must have been during the storm, and you know it’s dangerous to answer the phone with a lightning storm going on. I was . . . I was indisposed.”

  “Do you mean you were not even at the desk?”

  His gaze flitted to Sophie, and he just shrugged. “I’m so sorry for your inconvenience. I’ll give you a ten percent discount on the entire bill as compensation. Now let’s get you set up for one more night.”

  Sophie, who was pretending to leaf through the postcards on a rack at the far end of the check-in desk, felt for him. As a restaurateur, she occasionally had diners requesting items be taken off their bill when they had eaten the whole thing or most of it, claiming it wasn’t what they were expecting or wasn’t up to snuff. She had learned to keep her cool and in most cases obliged; it wasn’t worth the bad rap they would give the restaurant otherwise, especially with social media being as prevalent a way of communicating as it was today. It hadn’t been easy at first, but she had become philosophical about it. Most people were good patrons and didn’t rip her off.

  Melissa, the housekeeper, breezed through the door from the basement, chattering to a young fellow who was following her. “I’ll show you the routine and Bertie can sign you up as relief.”

  The woman toddled away from the desk, happy with her discount. Melissa waved to Sophie then said to her boss, “Bertie, this is Domenico Dominguez,” she said, hitching her thumb over her shoulder at the small, nervous-looking dark-haired fellow, who was dressed in jeans and a clean T-shirt. “He comes highly recommended, so I said he could try out for the evening housekeeper job. He’s going to shadow me today.”

  “What happened to Brittany?” he asked, looking the fellow over with skepticism. “Wasn’t she supposed to be working today? Isn’t today your day off? What’s going on?” His tone teetered on the verge of hysteria.

  “S
he never shows up when I ask her to. Do you see her here today? No. Did you see her yesterday? Last evening? No again. Night before last? Same thing,” she snapped. “Left me doing everything, including vacuuming the halls and dusting, and I’m tired of it. I finally phoned her house this morning and her mom told me she’s taken off, gone to California, or something. That’s why I’m here. Didn’t you wonder who was coming in?”

  “Oh, Lord, why am I being tested?” Bertie wailed.

  “It’s okay, Bertie,” Melissa said, her voice confident and the snappish tone gone. “Dom, here, is a great guy. He has two jobs and he’s never late to either of them. You know Pete at the Pizza Stop . . . Dom does night cleaning for him, and he can fit this in before it. You can call Pete for a reference, if you want, but I’ve already spoken to him.”

  “Okay, but I need to get his particulars and we have to fill out an employee information form and a W-four,” Bertie fussed.

  They all went into the office and Sophie’s stomach tightened. Would Bertie notice that the key was gone? Well, of course he would, because Melissa would go to get the key and ask where it was. She’d have to confess what she’d done or this was going to get ugly. She heard them talking and a file drawer slam.

  She retreated to the alcove, where some chairs and a big palm hid her from view, but there was no roar of anger, no exclamation of puzzlement. The threesome came back out chatting, though she couldn’t make out their voices. Melissa had a clipboard with some paperwork on it, and Bertie followed the two toward the coffee shop. Sophie seized the moment. She looked around, but there was no one else in sight, so she skipped across the lobby, slipped into the office, hung the key back up and hopped back out toward the stairs.

  “Okay, when you’re done we’ll go through it all,” Bertie was saying. “Can you bring me a coffee when you and Dom are finished with your lunch and you’ve explained the routine to him? I hope he works out better than Brittany.”