A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  Through it all, I managed to take three cat naps. Literal cat naps. On the floor of the kitchen with Sage sleeping on top of me. By the time I got through the morning crowd—I’ll be generous and call it a “crowd”—I felt grimier than I looked. Despite all of that, I let Joel drag me off to deliver cupcakes to Mrs. Edith Green.

  We picked her brain about Morgan, she got misty-eyed, and then showed us a check that she’d already written out to him. It was for $55,000. This while we sat in her modest home with her husband’s ashes in an urn on the table next to her, a car at least ten years old sitting in her driveway, and carpet that was threadbare in a couple of places.

  I was glad that Morgan was on a cold slab in the morgue. It meant that Mrs. Green’s life savings were now out of his reach.

  Heading in through the back door of the café’s kitchen, I stopped. The first thing I noticed was the absence of burned chili smell. The second thing I noticed was how clean everything was. The third thing I noticed was a man in over-large shabby clothes sweeping the floor at the far side of the kitchen. He was wearing one of my aprons.

  “Henry?” I said, my voice full of disbelief. He was a homeless man I’d met a couple of weeks ago. I accidentally saw more of him than I’d ever meant to when I walked in on him washing himself in a public park bathroom. He’d been using the bathroom as his home.

  The man stopped sweeping, looked up and spotted me. “Henry?”

  I felt like doing a face palm. Henry was the name I’d made up for him when talking about him later, but I actually had no idea what his name was. “Uh, sorry, sorry, um…”

  “Jonathan,” he offered. “Patty hired me.” He was a little taller than me, had white, shoulder-length hair and a trimmed white beard, with a forehead that extended halfway to his crown.

  Patty had hired him? Patty! I was going to have a talk with that woman. Sure, she said she’d talk to some people and try to find me someone to help out. I had not given her carte blanche to actually hire someone. And for me to walk into my café to find him working here without even an introduction first—that was not okay.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he continued, “but I noticed that one of your pots of chili had burned on the bottom. I ladled most of that pot’s chili to a new stock pot and threw out what was left at the bottom. Took some scrubbing to get the burned parts off, but I did it. And then I added some cut potatoes to that chili, let them cook a while, then took them out and threw them away. I heard that could suck the burned taste out of a stew. Thought I’d give it a try for your chili. Oh, and I added a little sugar, too, to cover up that last bit of bitterness.”

  Huh…

  I glanced around the kitchen again. It really did look great. Really great. Fantastic, even. Henry—I mean, Jonathan—had done all of it. Without me telling him what to do. He’d recognized what had needed to be done and then… he’d done it.

  Giving my would-be newest employee a lot of side eye, I went over to the stockpot that was a size smaller than the other two pots of chili. It had to be the one that contained the transferred, once-scorched chili.

  I bent over the pot and sniffed. Then I sniffed again. I switched over and sniffed another pot for comparison and then went back to the first. It smelled… smoky, but not unpleasant.

  I got a clean spoon and took a bite. I then got another clean spoon and took a bite from one of the other pots. The once-burned chili did taste different, but it also tasted good! I would be able to take it off of the Oops Board and instead charge full price for it!

  “Wow, Jonathan,” I said, “this is great! Thank you!”

  I sized him up anew. He was clean. He was conscientious, observant, a self-starter, and definitely not lazy. If I found those qualities in someone who was not homeless, I’d hire them in a heartbeat.

  But a person didn’t generally end up homeless because their life was sunshine and roses. No, they tended to have baggage and sometimes even some demons. That was the big concern. Would he bring his baggage and demons into my struggling café?

  I leaned forward a tad and studied his eyes. I tried not to be overly obvious about it but there was no mistaking what I was doing. To his credit, Jonathan didn’t shy away. Instead he opened his eyes wide and leaned forward.

  “No drugs here,” he said. “The body’s a temple, man. Gotta protect it.”

  I was glad he’d said that. To be honest, unless someone had tattooed “druggie” across the whites of his eyes, I wouldn’t have had a clue if he was on anything or not.

  That was one hurdle jumped. Time to jump the next. Butterflies did swirling loops in my stomach, spurred on by fatigue and out of control nerves.

  “Jonathan, when would you be available to work?”

  I had—as in, had—Brenda, but she was only available in the early mornings and, at the moment, wasn’t available at all. Her sick grandmother took priority. I understood and supported that.

  I had Patty… when the voices in her head said it was okay for her to come in to do some of her baking magic. And even then, she only baked pastries. She didn’t do anything else.

  I had Melanie and Sam, but they took care of the café floor and the customers. They didn’t have much to do with the kitchen. On top of that, they were juggling their work schedules with their college classes and studying. There was going to come a time when they couldn’t be here. I’d only been lucky so far that they’d been available as much as they had.

  I needed somebody, but I needed somebody who could be here when I was here. And given how much I seemed to get pulled out of the café to chase down one killer or another, I needed somebody who could be here even when I wasn’t.

  Somebody who had the instincts needed to keep the café running.

  Somebody I could trust.

  Maybe… just maybe… Jonathan could be that person.

  Jonathan stood up straighter. He squared his shoulders and lifted his bearded chin. His slender frame seemed bigger. He looked like a man in charge of his destiny. “I can be here anytime you want,” he said. “Rain, sleet or snow. If volcanoes are going off and brimstone is falling from the sky, if rivers of locusts are cutting swaths through the land and raindrops have turned into marshmallows, I can be here. I’m your man.”

  That was the most ridiculous answer I’d ever heard in my life, but its sentiment filled my eyes with tears.

  I stuck out my hand in an offer to shake, and my newest employee took it.

  “Jonathan, you’re hired.” Could I afford him? I didn’t know. But I’d eat ramen for days before giving up an employee who showed that much dedication.

  I headed out to the Oops Board and erased the burned chili from it. I then wrote “Sweet Smoky Chili” under the listing of regular chili on the full priced board. Then I got brave. No, brazen. I priced the Sweet Smoky Chili for a full dollar more than the regular chili!

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. There was a message from Zoey. “Meet me out back. Got a lead on some drug dealers.”

  I groaned.

  Didn’t these people know I had a café to keep afloat!

  Still, I was smiling from ear to ear as I headed for the back door.

  Chapter 17

  I slid into the passenger seat of Zoey’s car. The engine was running, and Dave Matthews Band was playing “American Baby” over the stereo. Zoey was dressed in cutoff jeans, a white midriff shirt and a long-sleeve blue flannel shirt with the cuffs rolled up. Her raven black hair was loose and wild except for a thick braid down both sides of her head, and her eyes sported a pallet of fierce, deepening shades of orange with the smallest cat-eye liner I’d ever seen her wear.

  None of that shocked me, though. What did shock me was seeing the very flat flip-flops on her feet.

  “There a beach someplace near that I don’t know about?” I asked. It was a sunny day, even if still a bit cool.

  “Naw,” she said. “I just like dressing against expectations. Keeps people actively seeing you.”

  Fireworks
went off inside my head. I’d never in my life thought of that before, but she was right.

  I looked at the café. The café that everyone had been seeing day in and day out for years, much longer than I’d been here. People did like what was comfortable, what they knew, but if I wanted new customers, maybe it would require a new image.

  Spring was coming. Flowers would be in bloom. Trees would be in bloom. People would be getting outside to enjoy the weather. It would be the perfect time to launch with a fresh look.

  Of course, I wasn’t ready for more customers than what I was currently getting. There were only so many times that I could make an impression as a bad eatery before people stopped coming altogether. But with Jonathan on board, maybe I would soon be ready to up my game. Patty had already put me on the map as the go-to place for delicious baked goods—when she had happened to be there. And I was on my way to becoming a better cook.

  With Jonathan’s help in the kitchen, I could take the café from a sometimes okay place to eat to that of a reliably good place to eat.

  “Zoey, you’re a genius,” I said.

  “I know.” She gave me a wink.

  “So what’s this lead you’ve got? Who are we going to go see?”

  “Remember Derek?”

  I nodded my head. Derek was a man we’d recently met when investigating the death of a friend’s landlord. Derek had a serious problem with drugs. He’d even stolen drugs from a friend of his, landing that friend in dire jeopardy with a local drug lord.

  “I know where he is,” Zoey said.

  “That’s brilliant,” I said half to myself and half to her. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  “Now you’re getting the picture,” she said, giving me another wink. She put her car into gear.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Living under a bridge,” she said. “A railroad crossing.”

  Suddenly all the high flying glee I was feeling left me. While his life was messed up with a myriad of bad decisions and terrible addiction, the Derek I had met had been a kind and gentle soul.

  It was a quiet ride as we drove down streets that I had never seen before. The town shifted from middle income homes with well-kept lawns in front of cozy cottages to homes with lawns big enough to land planes and had what seemed like miles of rail wood fences. Interspersed between them all were pockets of homes overgrown by plants, some with broken down cars covering the lawn, places barely bigger than a single room. These were the homes of people who barely had enough to get by from one day to the next, and it hurt my soul that we were on our way to see someone who was struggling even more than them.

  “I don’t think I could find my way back if I had to,” I said after the fifth turn. The new road was only wide enough for one vehicle at a time, even though we’d passed several cars going the opposite direction. Zoey and the passersby had slowed to a crawl to get past each other, and the road itself was riddled with blind curves and blind hills. Every time we reached the crest of one, I was white-knuckled holding onto the car door. I was terrified we were going to have a head-on collision with a car racing the opposite direction.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when we turned off of that road onto what I’d like to call a dirt road but which was really a hard packed dirt path. The field around us was straggly grass that had wintered badly, grass with tall dead weeds.

  “We’re here,” Zoey said.

  I looked around. The field looked flat, and I didn’t see a bridge anywhere. There was, however, a raised bed of gravel on top of which I could see the tarnished gleam of railroad tracks.

  “I thought you said he was living under a bridge,” I said.

  “He is.” Zoey reached behind her seat and pulled out a grocery bag of goods, then got out of the car. I got out, too, and she used her key fob to remote lock its doors.

  She started marching through the tall, dead weeds, and I followed. That’s when the sharp drop of the field became visible. It fell away into a deep V. At the bottom of the V was another single lane road. This one was paved, but it looked like it hadn’t had any upkeep for years. “This way.”

  I followed Zoey to the edge. There was a path worn into the side of the hill that made the trip down smooth but still steep. As we went down, it became evident just how wide the train overpass was. There were support columns on either side of the road and cement slap slanting upward beyond them. The overpass itself was almost four times as wide as the tiny road that it allowed for.

  “Derek,” Zoey called when we reached the bottom.

  Nobody answered.

  “Derek,” Zoey called again.

  Again, nothing.

  “Are you sure he’s here?” I had no idea how Zoey had found out about this place or how she’d learned that Derek had been camping out here, but whatever her source was, maybe it was out of date. Scarier yet, maybe her source had set her up and we were about to be ambushed.

  The sound of a pebble tumbling reached my ears, but I still saw no one. I thought of the self-defense lessons that Brad had promised me, self-defense lessons that I hadn’t gotten yet. I also thought about Zoey’s scream lessons, but who would even hear us out here?

  Then I thought about Derek. Alone. Cold. Desperate. He needed help. I could relate to that, and suddenly I wasn’t ready to leave yet.

  “Derek,” I called. “It’s Kylie and Zoey. Zoey brought a bag of goods from the store.” I could see beef jerky peeking out. There was bottled water, too. She had hand wipes, toilet paper. She had a lot of odds and ends, things a person quickly missed when they didn’t have anything.

  Still only silence met us.

  “We need your help Derek. Please…” I said. Desperation was sinking in, but it was a desperation to know that we’d helped him.

  Another pebble fell, then there was a cascade of pebbles. Finally, Derek emerged from behind a pillar. Compared to the man I’d met before that day in the park, Derek looked like he’d already been to the grave and had decided to come back.

  “Ohhh, Derek,” I whispered.

  “You brought food?” Derek asked. He looked like a skeleton someone had slapped some skin on. “D’you… d’you have anything else?”

  Zoey’s hand disappeared into her pocket and then reappeared a moment later. She handed the small packet over to Derek.

  “Derek, let us help you,” I said, but my words didn’t reach him.

  “This the only thing you got?” he asked. His eyes were sunken and disappointed. His pale skin looked gray.

  “It’s dark chocolate,” Zoey said. “Not laced with anything, but it’ll help take the edge off. And it’ll give you a bit of energy, make you feel better. Try it.”

  “Derek, will you let us take you to the hospital? Please…?”

  “We need information,” Zoey said. “We can help you if you want.”

  Derek sat on the steeply slanting concrete and looked at us blankly. “What do you need help with?” The words came out fine, but I got the impression that he was having to reach for them.

  Zoey continued. “There was a guy killed recently. Morgan Bleur.”

  “I didn’t do that,” Derek said. “I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody. Ain’t hurt nobody but myself.”

  “Do you know who did hurt him?” Zoey asked.

  Derek stared ahead of him as if in a daze for so long that I wasn’t sure he’d heard Zoey, then he spoke. “I know someone who knows lots of other people. I can ask.” His gaze shifted to the bag of groceries Zoey held. “They’ve got lots of ears. I can ask them.”

  Zoey turned around and made as though to head for the car.

  Derek hugged his too-thin legs to his chest and rocked. “You come back. I’ll have answers.”

  “Not made up answers,” Zoey warned, turning back slowly.

  “No, not one. None at all. Honest answers. All of it.”

  “What is it we want to know?” Zoey asked.

  “You wanna know who killed that guy in a bad way,” Derek said.r />
  “Can we take you to the hospital, Derek?” I took a step forward as I said it, but Derek jerked away, held his arm up as if to guard me off and looked ready to flee.

  “You come back!” he yelled. “You come back! I’ll have answers!”

  “Come on,” Zoey whispered. She put the bag of goods from the grocery store on the ground and started up the hill.

  “We can’t leave him,” I said in a whispered hiss that wouldn’t keep the sound from anybody’s ears.

  Zoey stopped in her climb and turned back to look at me. “And we can’t help him. He’s not ready.”

  I looked at Derek. He was looking at me out of the corner of his eyes, as if looking at me directly would be too much like challenging me.

  “Derek,” I said, “please don’t make me leave you here.”

  But he turned his back to me altogether. He was telling me what he wanted. All that was left was for me to listen.

  “We’ll be back, Derek, okay? We’ll bring more stuff—more food—when we come.” And if I could get Zoey to blackmail a doctor into it, we’d bring one of those, too.

  When we got back in Zoey’s car, my eyes were red. I wanted to be angry at Zoey but knew that I had nothing to be angry at her about. We’d found Derek and he was going to help us get some answers. The rest—whether or not we’d be able to help Derek—that was up to Derek.

  “What next?” I asked.

  Zoey was sitting back in her seat, staring straight ahead of her. I could tell that she wasn’t any happier about leaving Derek behind than I was.

  “My place,” she said. “Wine, food, and watching surveillance video of the shoe store where Morgan worked, Sole Support.”

  I thought about Jonathan back at the café and the spotless kitchen that he’d created. I thought about the oodles of chili and baked potatoes ready for any customers that came in. I thought about Melanie and Sam running the floor, keeping customers happy. Everything was taken care of… everything but me.