She was relieved to see that four copies of Stitch ’n Bitch had arrived. This was the second time already this year she’d had to reorder this “book with attitude,” and last time it had gone on back order.
She helped Nikki shelve the books, then went to call Jill at work.
“I wonder if you can do me a favor as soon as you get off.”
“Probably. What’s up?”
“I need to go to Vera’s Coffee House in Uptown, on Lyndale. I’m looking for the young man who was at John Nye’s house the day he was killed. I have his name and a description, and Goddy says he hangs out at Vera’s—but he also said I should go there with a female companion.”
“All right. I’ll have to go home and change out of these clothes. I’ll pick you up at six, okay?”
“Thanks, Jill.” She hung up and ignored the inquiring glances of her employees the rest of the day.
Jill turned up at six wearing chinos, walking boots, and a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt that advertised Buzzard Billy’s Armadillo Bar-N-Grillo. She had also pulled her hair back into a tight braid down her back and wiped her face clean of makeup.
Betsy looked at her own more dressy outfit of new gray sandals, light wool slacks, and a sweater, also gray. Her purse was gray, her jewelry gold.
“Should I change?” she asked.
“No, you look great.”
“But you . . . uh.”
“Didn’t you know I’d play the butch?” Jill held up her left hand to show that she’d replaced her wedding band with a ring shaped like a horseshoe.
Betsy began to giggle, and she giggled off and on all the way into town. Jill called on all her reserves of ice to maintain her cool expression, but her eyes twinkled and one corner of her mouth twitched. Neither trusted herself to say a word, and Betsy had her giggles under control by the time Jill turned off Lake onto Lyndale.
Vera’s was a modest place, one story of redbrick with two big plate-glass windows. Right inside was a dilapidated couch marking the entryway. The room had a collection of tan Formica tables and brown wooden chairs. A young man sat in a corner with his laptop open and operating. A counter at the back featured a chill box with a selection of salads and sandwiches. A big menu was written on a collection of wood-framed blackboards on the wall behind it. Betsy selected a chicken salad and sparkling water; Jill ordered a sandwich on a hard roll and a double latte. They saw an open door on the side and went to look out.
Beside the building was a wooden ground-level deck open to the air. About a dozen mostly young men sat at long wooden tables down the middle and at smaller tables around the edges. An iron fence with ivy growing over it guarded the deck from the stares of passersby on the sidewalk. Two trees growing up against the rough brick wall of the neighboring store would offer shade from the summer sun, and strings of lights criss-crossed overhead, to make evening out here attractive. It looked inviting, and ordinary enough until one noticed that the men were talking only to other men, and the few women exclusively to other women.
“I see what Goddy meant,” said Betsy. Jill went through the door and held it with an elbow for Betsy.
They received only perfunctory glances as they took a table in the far corner. Jill deliberately slouched in her chair, Betsy deliberately didn’t. There were four other females sitting at a single table kitty-corner from them, dressed alike in jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have dressed so differently,” said Betsy in an undertone.
“We can dress any way we please,” said Jill curtly. Betsy stared at her. “Sorry, just getting into character.” She took a slug of her latte.
Betsy smiled and shook her head. She looked around at the other tables. “Goddy said the guy we’re looking for is a little twerp—”
“Twink,” interrupted Jill.
“‘Twink’?”
“That’s the current slang for a very young gay man. Not to be confused with ‘tweaker,’ one who uses drugs to, um, enhance performance.”
“Do I want to know where you learned these things?” asked Betsy, amused.
“Probably disappoint if not bore you.”
“The problem is, there are at least three twinks here. Ours is named Beni Greenleaf, and he has a home perm.”
Jill looked around the space, looked at Betsy, and murmured with a grin, “That cuts it down to two, I think.”
Betsy took a bite of her salad—it was delicious, with chunks of apple, and flavored with dill—and said, “Only one really bad home perm, though.” A young man—a boy, really; he looked barely fifteen—was sitting with a group of five men at the long table. After a minute’s observation, it was clear the other four were two couples and the boy was a hanger-on. The other four were eating, and he wasn’t. Also, he was looking lonesome and unhappy. He wore very tight-fitting white jeans and a red tank top, and now that the sun was setting he looked cold, too. The boy’s dirty-blond hair was mostly frizzy, except here and there a strand was straight.
“What do you think?” asked Betsy.
“I think I’ll go see.” Jill rose and stalked—there was no other word for it—across the deck to bend suddenly and say something to the boy. He looked startled, then smiled and shook his head. He nodded toward a table up against the iron fence where two young men were sitting.
Jill straightened to look for several moments at the pair, then said thanks—Betsy could read her lips—and went to the table.
If it had been Beni and an older man, Jill wouldn’t have been able to pry them apart. But they were a duo, not a couple, and when Jill handed the one with the tight curls a bill, he nodded and went back into the coffeehouse.
Jill came back to Betsy and sat down. “That doesn’t look like a home perm,” said Betsy.
“Evidently he had it fixed professionally. He says he’s Beni Greenleaf.”
“Is he coming back?” Betsy asked.
“I hope so, or I’m out a twenty. If you want him to stay after he finds out who you are, put another twenty on the table.”
“Did you promise him that?” asked Betsy, opening her purse.
“No.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Just that you wanted to talk to him and would buy him supper if he’d agree. He said sure, so now we wait and see.”
The young man came back a few minutes later carrying a paper plate and a paper bowl, with napkins hanging out of a jeans pocket. His tank top had a very rude boast printed on it. He put his food on the table and sat down.
“Are you Beni Greenleaf?” asked Betsy.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he said, and took a huge bite of his sandwich. After chewing awhile, he washed it down with a gulp of soup. “Who are you?”
“My name is Betsy Devonshire, and I’m a friend of Godwin DuLac.”
He nodded several times, then froze. “Uh oh.” Betsy was afraid he was going to get up and leave, but he only took another big bite. His eyes flickered from Betsy to Jill to the twenty on the table and back again.
Jill shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “No hag fags, no badges.”
“Oh. Okay. How did you know to look here for me?”
“Godwin told me,” said Betsy.
“How’s Goddy doin’?” asked the boy.
“He’s just fine,” said Betsy.
“So they let him go, huh?”
“No, not yet. I suppose the police talked to you already?”
“Oh, yeah. But I told ’em it wasn’t me. Good thing they believed me, huh? Or I’d be the one in the orange jumpsuit.” He seemed pretty snotty about it.
“Goddy didn’t do it,” said Betsy. “So to help him, I’m looking for the one who did.”
His eyes widened in alarm. “Now just one freakin’ minute!”
Jill said, “Tell us all about it, so we can think you didn’t do it, either.”
He studied her face, then nodded. “Sure,” he said, but grudgingly, and picked up a fat pinch of potato chips that took a few seconds t
o work into his mouth.
Betsy said, “First, I want to talk to you about your relationship with John Nye.”
He swallowed and said, “What relationship? We met in person twice, once here and once at his house. I thought we were getting along fine, but it’s bing, bang, boom, here’s cab fare, go home.”
“What do you think made him change his mind?”
“How should I know? Maybe he didn’t like—” He suddenly realized he didn’t know how to finish that sentence without offense. “Me,” he concluded lamely.
“How did you meet?” asked Betsy.
“On the Internet. I’m surfing at a cyber café and he’s putting out a line and I bit. We e-mail back and forth for awhile, he seems hot but nice, so we set up a meet here. He still seems nice, old but not a geezer, got some bucks, not a muscle Mary, not a gym bunny. He’s clean, I’m clean.” Beni shrugged. “So he goes, ‘Why not come out to my place,’ and I’m like, ‘Great.’”
“How long were you out there?”
He frowned at her, then a sly smile appeared.
“Looking for the gory details, huh?”
“Not for all the tea in China,” Betsy assured him. “I want to know how long you were out there, what you talked about other than the obvious, and why you didn’t stay the night.”
“I was out there from sometime around six till probably eight thirty, nine. Then I go to the toilet and when I come out, he’s holding my clothes in his hands and he says, ‘That’s it, I’m sending you home.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ and he goes, ‘None of your business, get dressed. I already called a cab.’”
“Did he get a phone call?” asked Betsy.
“I didn’t hear it if he did, but—” He shrugged and tugged an earlobe. “Can’t hear the ring when the water’s running.”
“How much did he pay you?”
He feigned a look of shock very badly. “What?”
“He gave you money before you left. How much was it?”
He put on a sulky face. “Two hundred.”
“Was that agreed on ahead of time?”
His look of shock was genuine now. “No, of course not! I’m not one of those!”
“Did you murder him?”
“No!” He couldn’t look any more shocked than he did already, but now it was overlaid with fear.
“Where did you go after you left John’s house?”
“I went to a friend’s house.”
“The friend have a name?”
He nodded. “Miguel Alvarado.” He gave a phone number. “That’s his cell, he’s moved out since I stayed there, I don’t know where he’s staying now.”
“Did you spend the night?”
“Sure. I brought a bottle so we had a little party.” He grinned. “I think that’s what got him tossed out, it kind of turned into a big party.”
“Any arrests?” asked Jill.
He cocked a suspicious eye at her, but she did her trick of absorbing his look while giving nothing back and after a moment he shrugged. “No, though the cops did come by. My friend told them I was a co-host, so they took my name.”
“All right, thank you for talking with me,” said Betsy. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Yeah, yeah, well, thanks for the soup and sandwich.” He reached for the twenty and tucked it, not without effort, into a jeans pocket, picked up his plate and bowl and walked away, trying for some kind of attitude.
Jill smiled at Betsy and shook her head. “You did all right, kid. Can we go home now?”
Twenty-one
BETSY worked in her shop all the next day, finding pleasure and relief in just doing the everyday shop-owner things. She dealt happily with difficult customers, put disarranged stock back in place without complaint, checked sales slips for errors, and talked with her employees and the Monday Bunch volunteers.
Late in the afternoon, Mrs. Phelps came in with a knitting problem. She was a middle-aged woman, tall and commanding, who had come to knitting late in life. She was doing her first sweater with a Norwegian pattern, in six colors.
“I’m tired of all those bobbins in the back,” she complained. “They clatter around, they twist around one another, and they make an uncomfortable pile in my lap. Any other suggestions?”
Betsy took the almost-finished sweater—Mrs. Phelps had started at the bottom and the many-colored part was the yoke at the top—and said, “You’re always going to have a problem when you’re doing multicolored patterns. If you don’t use bobbins, then the yarn will tangle. What I don’t like is a pattern like this, that uses three stitches of one color here, and again over here, then doesn’t use it again until up around the neckline. This one does it with several colors, so you’ll wind up with these long lines of yarn across the underside, that will snag the fingers of the person putting them on.”
“I always look my patterns over so I don’t wind up with lots of colors of yarn,” said Nikki, unhelpfully. “Because what can you do?”
“Well,” said Betsy, “here’s something Carolyn Potts taught me at CATS when it was here a few years ago. When you’re knitting, catch up the yarn behind.” She put a strand of yarn down the back of Mrs. Phelps’s sweater. “Like this.” She showed how to knit the yarn into the back of the piece so that it didn’t show on the front. “Just tack it down like that as you go along.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Mrs. Phelps. “You learn something new every day.”
Betsy pulled the loose piece of yarn out. Mrs. Phelps was so pleased, she bought another multicolored pattern, this time of a sleeveless argyle sweater, and the yarn needed to knit it.
An hour later, the shop closed. They went through the closing-up routine, washing out the coffee urn, unplugging the tea kettle, turning out lights, taking eighty dollars in start-up money out of the register for tomorrow. Betsy sent Nikki with the day’s earnings to the bank, and went upstairs to give Sophie her evening scoop of diet cat food, then sink onto her couch and not think about anything for awhile.
That lasted until her stomach growled hungrily. She went into the kitchen—and saw the message light on her phone blinking. She picked it up, dialed star and two numbers, then punched in her code number. “First message,” said the recorded voice, and then Goddy’s: “Hi, Betsy, hope you’re not there to answer this because you’re out running down a hot clue! How are things? Call me tomorrow during working hours, okay? Or better, come to see me. Oh, and could you bring me some money? Twenty will do. I need commissary things. Thanks.”
She turned to her refrigerator and wrote herself a note, then punched seven to erase the message. “Next message, sent . . . today,” said the hesitating recording, searching among options, “at . . . four . . twenty . . . pee-emm.”
“Hello, Betsy,” said Charlie’s cheerful voice. “I want to know if I can have another go at Johnny’s hard drive. I hope he kept his bank records on there, and also information on his stock portfolio. What I’m finding at his house doesn’t correspond with what his bank is telling me. By the way, I found something in his safe deposit box that you’ll be interested in. If I’m not at Hower House, you can leave a message there for me.”
Betsy erased that one, too, then found the number for the bed and breakfast and dialed it. The manager cheerfully took a message for Charles Nye. He was even cheerful about not knowing when Charlie would be back.
Betsy opened her last can of soup and sliced a tomato onto a plate for her supper.
Then she called Susan Lavery at home. “How’s it going?” she asked.
“These people are the most careless people in the world!” Susan crowed. “You would not believe how much stuff they leave on their computers with no protection at all from prying eyes like mine. It’s the senior partners who are the worst; when forced to use a password, about three-quarters of the time it’s ‘password,’ and the other quarter it’s their first or last name. They seem to have the notion that when information is in electronic form instead of on paper, it’s invisible.” She snickered.
<
br /> “Susan, for heaven’s sake, be careful! If you go wading through other peoples’ computers, someone is going to notice!”
“Not these people. And what will they do if they find out?” she asked in her signature dry drawl. “Fire me? I gave my two weeks’ notice this morning.”
“Quitting can still net you references; being fired won’t,” warned Betsy.
“Are you kidding? I now know where so many bodies are buried, they’ll give me sparkling references—or else.”
That turned Betsy’s fear into curiosity instantly. “What bodies? Have you got something I can use?”
“Well . . . not exactly. Not yet, anyway. But something’s rotten in the financial department, I think. Mr. D’Agnosto has been careless about his record keeping—or crooked, and I think it’s the latter. He’s also copied a lot of information from the accounting department’s files.”
“D’Agnosto, why does that sound familiar?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t take you to his office, only David Shaker’s and Walter Kedge’s.”
“Oh, right, he was talking to Mr. Kedge, remember? Mr. Kedge’s secretary said so.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I saw him come out while I was waiting. Tall man, used to be a redhead, he’s freckled all over.”
“That’s our boy. He ought to have a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder, I think he’s some kind of pirate.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s keeping two sets of books, maybe. Or he’s found some way to cook the originals.”
“Pirates don’t go in for bookkeeping, they just swarm onto your ship with knives and take things.”
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