A Berry Cunning Conman_A Laugh-Out-Loud Cozy Mystery

by A. R. Winters

  Morgan sank down and pressed himself back as far as the booth’s bench seat would let him. He was already seated as far away from the booth’s entrance as he could be, putting the maximum amount of table possible between him and the enraged Hulk-wannabe.

  Calista didn’t look scared at all. She looked irritated and mad, that is until the Hulk dude grabbed the table by both sides and started twisting and pulling. Then she looked alarmed.

  “Oh my God…” I murmured, then, “Oh my God!”

  The Hulk had ripped the table free from its moorings and tossed it to the side like it was nothing. The dinner plates and drinking glasses scattered and broke.

  Calista stood up and positioned herself between the raging Hulk and her cowering date. She had one hand on the Hulk’s chest and another one behind her to act as a stopper against Morgan. She was trying to talk to the Hulk, but it wasn’t doing any good. But when the big guy bent to retrieve a steak knife that had fallen to the floor, her answer was swift and harsh. She slapped the big guy across the face so hard that my brain filled in the sound of the resounding smack. She then yanked the knife free from his hand and threw it on the floor.

  The giant of a man towered over her, leaning forward with his fists bunched at his sides, but it didn’t faze Calista at all. She stood her ground fearlessly. Her arm shot out to the side with her finger pointing the way out.

  The two stood still, staring each other down, an impasse, but then the big guy turned and left.

  Zoey clicked her phone off.

  “Wow,” I said. It felt like such an inadequate thing to say.

  “I don’t know who that guy is,” Zoey said. “You have any idea?”

  “No,” I said, but Calista sure did. The way she faced the big guy down, she knew exactly who he was.

  “Did Calista mention anything about that fight when you and Joel talked to her?”

  “No, nothing. And that guy”—I pointed a finger at Zoey’s now sleeping phone—“that guy looked ready to kill Morgan.”

  “And if he did kill Morgan,” Zoey said, “that means Calista knows the killer—”

  “And could be protecting him,” I finished for her.

  Zoey nodded. “We need to go talk to Calista.”

  “I agree.”

  And we weren’t going to wait for Joel to go with us.

  Not owning a car was a big pain in my tushie most of the time, but sometimes I was glad someone else was at the wheel. I was still not used to navigating rural Kentucky’s country roads. In Chicago, getting around the city had been all about direction. East. West. North. South. Those directions would get you to where you wanted to go. But in Kentucky, it was all about landmarks. And when people gave you directions, they didn’t say turn East or West on such and such road. They said turn left or right.

  I didn’t know how anyone managed to get anywhere.

  Thankfully, Zoey didn’t seem to have my navigational hang-ups, and we pulled into Ms. Calista Jones’ driveway in record time. Zoey parked her car catty-corner to the house and barn, and we walked to the home’s side door. Zoey opened the screen door, knocked on the solid wood door behind it, and then let the screen door shut back into place.

  Calista answered a moment later. She was back to wearing country housewife garb instead of the fashion-forward outfit that she’d worn out to eat with Morgan.

  Calista’s brows crinkled the tiniest bit, no doubt wondering why she was getting yet another visit. Then her eyes took in the space behind Zoey and me in the direction of the car.

  “Hi Mrs. Jones,” I said. “Joel wasn’t able to make it today because he had an emergency come up at work.” I figured that was who she’d been looking for when she looked in the direction of the car. I then did a Vanna White-wave to my side. “This is my friend Zoey. She’s working with me and Joel.” I hoped that throwing Joel’s name into the mix would help to soften Calista to our unannounced and uninvited visit.

  “Oh,” she said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice. Her expression hardened into something akin to let’s-get-this-over-with, and she stepped outside her house and let the screen door swing shut behind her. She then crossed her arms over her ample chest.

  I noticed that we weren’t getting an invitation inside her home this time, but I was glad that she was at least willing to talk to us.

  “I’ve got some chicken frying on the stove. If you’ve got questions, you best ask them fast.”

  Zoey fiddled with her phone and then held it up for Calista to see. “Can you tell us who this man is?”

  As Calista watched the surveillance feed captured during her dinner with Morgan—and their subsequent attack by what had to be Hulk Hogan’s cousin—her mouth tightened so much that her lips completely disappeared.

  “Not an ounce of privacy left in this world,” she said when Zoey stopped the video and put her phone away in a hidden pocket beneath her baby doll tunic.

  I wasn’t sure what made Calista think that privacy would even be on the menu when going out to dinner in a public restaurant.

  “We need to talk to the man in that video,” I told Calista.

  “No, you don’t. He didn’t have nothing to do with what happened to Morgan.”

  I couldn’t yet say that Calista was trying to protect the man on that video, but her response was definitely an attempt at minimizing his involvement.

  I decided to push. “Mrs. Jones, we need to talk to him. We can get his name from you now, or we can call the police and let them get it from you.” It was a bluff. No way was I going to call the police, especially not after what had happened last night. With my luck, I’d get arrested for trespassing.

  Actually, I supposed Calista might have a valid argument for that.

  I started to rethink our decision to come out here without Joel. He was so good with people. But if Calista called me on my bluff and refused to name her and Morgan’s restaurant attacker, Joel could always come back out without us and sweet talk his way into the information.

  Calista threw a hand up into the air. “Well, he ain’t no count anyway. If you want to talk to him, talk to him. That there is Bobby Randalls. He and I dated a spell, and he got more serious about me than I got about him.” She crossed her arms again and half-mumbled, “The damn fool don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”

  Zoey pulled out her phone, and I saw her make a note of Bobby’s name. “Do you know where we could find him?” she asked Calista.

  Calista shook her head and looked out into space. “He don’t have nothing to do with this. He’s dumb, he’s ignorant, and a hothead, but if he’d meant to kill Morgan he would have done it right there in the restaurant. He wouldn’t’ve cared who’d seen him.”

  I remembered the knife that Bobby had pulled in the restaurant. It looked like Bobby had been ready to kill Morgan right then and there but Calista’s hard face slap had stolen some of his determination—at least in that moment.

  “It’d be a big help to talk to him,” I said. “If he didn’t do it, I’m sure we’ll figure that out really fast, and then we’ll be able to leave both him and you alone.” The promise of leaving them both alone was the carrot on the end of my stick.

  Calista took a deep breath and blew it out. “He’s a good man. He’s just got rocks in his head is all. You can probably find him at the lumber yard, the one out toward the falls.” I guestimated that she was referring to Camden Falls, the waterfall for which the town was named—or vice versa. “That’s where he works.” She glanced at her watch. “You best hurry, though. His day will be ending soon, and I’m not tellin’ you where he lives.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” I said followed by a “thank you” from Zoey, too.

  We hotfooted it to the car. Zoey slipped in behind the wheel, and I buckled myself into the passenger side.

  “Do you know where she’s talking about?” I asked.

  “Not exactly, but I’ve got a general idea. We’ll start seeing signs when we get close.”

  C
hapter 25

  “There it is,” I said as I spotted a wooden sign twenty feet back from the road. It read “Hannigan’s Mill & Lumber Yard.” The sign was weathered and the letters were faded, barely readable, but the huge fenced lumberyard behind it gave the sign some of its missing clarity.

  Zoey slowed and turned onto the dirt lane that led through a wide gate and then pulled into a gravel parking lot. The lot held around twenty vehicles, at least half of them trucks.

  True to what Calista had said, people were leaving. It was quitting time.

  Zoey and I got out of her car, and I intercepted the nearest person—a slender-built man in his mid-twenties with pitch black hair, a warm tan, and pale blue eyes. He wasn’t the man who we’d seen accost Calista and Morgan on the surveillance video, but I was hoping that he’d be able to point us in the direction of where we could find him.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “We were looking for Bobby Randalls. Do you know where we can find him?”

  “He’s probably over near the stacks if he hasn’t left yet,” he said, then pointed in the direction of what I assumed were “the stacks.” In the distance I could see wooden pallets with what looked like five feet worth of cut lumber stacked on top. Then the loaded pallets were stacked on top of each other, making enormous towers of wood.

  We headed off in that direction, keeping an eye out for anyone who could have been the man we’d seen on the video.

  Zoey gave me a nudge with her elbow and pointed.

  I followed the line of her finger and spotted the man she was pointing at. He was big—really big. He was heading toward the parking lot by a different route than Zoey and I had taken, and we changed course to intercept him.

  “Hi Bobby,” I said when we got close enough. I didn’t ask him if he was Bobby Randalls because I didn’t want him to say that he wasn’t. I let him assume that I knew for sure who he was.

  “Hi,” he said. His puzzled gaze searched my and Zoey’s faces, as if trying to place who we were. He was dressed in a lightweight leather jacket, a blue button-up, jeans, and scuffed leather boots with a thick tread. He smelled like wood, in a good way. His face was weathered, and his hazel eyes had deep creases at their corners. I gauged him at being close to sixty, but he was an extremely muscular and fit almost-sixty.

  “We’d like to talk to you about what happened at Tandoori Nights,” Zoey said.

  “Hey now!” Bobby said, “I talked to the manager and worked it all out. She said no charges would be pressed, and I’m paying them back for the damage I done. If you’ve got issues, you need to go take them up with her.”

  “We don’t care about the restaurant itself,” I assured him. “Our question is about Morgan Bleur.”

  Bobby took a beat before saying anything, then asked, “You two cops?”

  Zoey and I looked at each other. I was pretty sure that impersonating an officer was against the law, but it was sooo tempting. Thankfully Zoey stepped in to save the day.

  “We are private investigators hired by the police department to assist in the investigation of Morgan Bleur’s death.”

  “You mean murder,” Bobby corrected. Distrust showed in his narrowed eyes, and the heavy creases at their corners made the expression more ominous.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Murder. We want to know if you aided Calista in murdering Morgan or if she did it on her own.”

  “Now you look here. Don’t go playing your little tricks with me. Calista didn’t murder Morgan and neither did I. Now I hated the guy. I did. And I was happy when I heard some of his wrong doings caught up with him. He was a grifter. I seen it from the start. Me and Calista were fine until he came along. We were better than fine. We were doing good. I was going to ask her to marry me! Then he showed up, throwing her all kinds of attention. But it weren’t nothin’. It was meaningless. But he was young and handsome, and she ate it up.”

  “You wanted to kill him,” Zoey said.

  “Yeah, I wanted to kill him. I want to kill a lot of people. My boss can stand right at the head of that line. Then there’s the waiter who messed up my order so bad that I had to send my dinner back three times. Or the jerk-off who nearly took the nose off my truck. And Dorothy Hibbert, she ruined my life.”

  I got cold shivers at the mention of my ex-aunt-in-law.

  “A few years back, my wife fell on ice and blacked her eye real bad, and that nosy, good-for-nothing hag told everyone I done it to her. Then when my wife died of pneumonia, she went around telling everyone it was a cover-up for me beating her to death. I never laid an ill-hand on my wife in the whole time we were married, but that Hibbert woman had half the town believing I’d done my wife in.”

  “Bobby, I am so sorry to hear about your wife. We won’t take up any more of your time,” I said.

  Bobby seemed as surprised by this fast shift as Zoey did.

  “What are you doing?” Zoey asked as soon as Bobby was out of earshot. “He was getting worked up. We could have pushed him some more. He might’ve cracked.”

  “He didn’t kill Morgan,” I said.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because my ex-aunt-in-law Dorothy would’ve already been dead. If he’s not going to kill her, he’s not going to kill anybody.”

  Chapter 26

  “Where to next?” Zoey asked once we’d made it back to her car. We were still sitting in the lumber yard’s parking lot, and most of the vehicles around us had already left.

  I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, thinking. “Derek told me something.” I really, really needed to start keeping a notebook if I was going to continue getting involved in these types of capers.

  I opened my eyes and snapped my fingers. “He told me that Morgan’s neighbor had major problems with him, said they’d been fighting for months.”

  “I still think we should follow up some more on Bobby. That guy’s got rage issues.”

  “Yeah, but anybody with rage issues that doesn’t kill Dorothy has got to be okay.” Zoey didn’t look convinced by my logic. I couldn’t blame her. “How about we go hunt down Morgan’s neighbor and then circle back to Bobby if we don’t get anywhere?”

  Zoey started the car. “Sounds good to me. I know where Morgan had lived. We can be there in about thirty-five. It’s on the other side of town.”

  It never ceased to amaze me how long it could take to get from one spot to another in such a small town like Camden Falls. Everything was so spread out. But the drives were infinitely more pleasant than in Chicago. Here they were downright peaceful.

  I sat back and closed my eyes. I was pretty sure I dozed off a time or two because the radio turned into Det. Gregson interrogating me and I jerked awake with a start.

  Eventually we turned down a little road named Stinking Ridge. I was nervous about what that would portend, but the air in the car stayed fresh and pleasant. A few minutes later we drove past a house that was pristine and well-kept on the outside.

  “This was Morgan’s place,” Zoey said.

  I shifted my gaze to the house next door to it. The winter-dead grass looked like it hadn’t been cut from two years ago, the lawn was a graveyard to old cars and motorcycles, and the house had big paint chips flaking off, exposing the weathered, damaged wood beneath.

  If Morgan had wanted to bring any of his potential investors home with him for some additional schmoozing, I guessed that the state of his neighbor’s home could be a huge embarrassment and even an impediment to being taken seriously as an investor who knew what he was doing. After all, if he was really as good at investing money as he claimed to be, why would he be willing to live next door to such an eyesore of a place?

  Zoey parked her car in the neighbor’s yard on an unoccupied patch of grass. We got out and weaved a path through the yard debris to Neville’s front door. It wasn’t so much a front door as it was a screen door leading into a walled in front porch.

  Not wanting to step foot into the home without an invitation, I knocked on the closed screen door.
The jiggling bang of the wooden screen door against the wooden door frame made more noise than my actual knocking.

  After a minute of waiting, Zoey gave it a try and pounded the screen door’s frame with the side of her fist.

  “Hold on already,” a voice much closer than it should have been said. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  The sound of creaking wood and chest wracking coughing followed, then the scuffle of feet. Derek came into view on the other side of the screen door a second later. He looked slightly less dead than he had when I’d seen him last time, but his cough had been wet and awful.

  “Derek, what are you doing here?”

  Derek blinked a bunch of times like he was having trouble getting his eyes to focus or was unaccustomed to the light. “Sleeping.”

  That wasn’t helpful.

  “I mean, what are you doing at Neville’s?” I asked.

  “Sleeping. He let me crash on his porch swing… and he’s got my medicine.”

  Medicine! My heart soared. Derek was getting help!

  Then my heart sank as I looked around me. We were at a drug dealer’s house, and drugs—the illegal kind—made Derek feel temporarily better. That was the “medicine” that Derek was referring to.

  “Is Neville here?” Zoey asked.

  “Yeah…”

  I wasn’t convinced that Derek wasn’t sleepwalking.

  “Can we talk to Neville?” Zoey asked.

  “Yeah…” He continued to stand where he was, his eyes mostly closed, his lifted elbow resting against the inside of the doorframe, and his head propped against his hand.

  “Derek,” I said, “please go get Neville. Tell him there are people here to talk to him.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Now, Derek. Go.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but this time his answer was accompanied by actual movement. He turned around and did a sleepy shuffle toward the house’s front door. When he got there, instead of going inside, Derek knocked and waited.