Chapter Seven
“I hope you all saved some room for dessert,” Gram said as I cleared the dishes from the dining room table.
Marietta ran a hand over her flat stomach. “Oh, Mama, I couldn’t eat another bite. Truly.”
Sure. She’d barely eaten a thing all day—atypical behavior for a Digby approaching critical mass, in her case because her checking account balance was looking dangerously similar to mine, but she had yet to broach that subject with the fiancé sitting next to her.
Gram passed me her dinner plate. “Pity. I was hoping to get your opinion on the butter pecan cookies I was thinking about entering in the fair.”
My mother’s lips formed a perfect oval. “Ooooh, mah favorite. Well … maybe just one. Just to offer mah opinion.”
“Good. I want you all to pretend that you’re on the panel of judges and give me your honest feedback.” Gram sighed. “I’m sure the competition is gonna be tougher than ever this year.”
I saw an opportunity and jumped in with both my size eights. “Where do you think your stiffest competition will come from? Joyce Lackey or Beverly Carver?”
Picking up Steve’s plate, I ignored the back off look he gave me.
Gram reached for her wine glass. “Joyce without question. She’s won the blue ribbon three years in a row, but they’ll both be tough.”
I nodded like she was telling me something I didn’t already know. “I have it on good authority that Joyce was trying out some recipes on Russell Falco while he did some work at her house last week. You’d better watch out, Gram. She’s definitely going for a fourth blue ribbon.”
Steve pushed back his chair and leveled his gaze on me as he pulled the stack of plates from my grasp. “Let me help you with those.”
My mother sucked in a breath. “Russell, the man who turned up at Cedars Cove yesterday?”
“Guess he won’t be serving as one of this year’s judges,” Mr. Ferris quipped as he refilled his wine glass.
Marietta swatted his arm with the back of her hand. “Let’s have a little respect for the dead, if you please.”
Gram frowned at me. “Are you sure about Russell working over at the Lackeys’? That really doesn’t sound like something Pete would agree to.”
Thank you, Gram! “That’s what I thought.”
Shaking his head, Steve headed for the kitchen.
“Stevie,” Gram said, calling out to him. “You know Pete better than the rest of us. Doesn’t that seem out of character to you?”
“I really couldn’t say, Eleanor. I see people doing crazy things almost every day.” He crooked an index finger at me. “Charmaine, you’re needed in the kitchen.”
To avoid Steve’s glare I headed straight to the freezer. “So what sounds good? French vanilla or mocha almond fudge ice cream with the cookies?”
Bracing himself against the refrigerator with one hand, he leaned over me, his breath warm in my ear. “You know what would sound good?”
“Does it involve finger-painting one another with mocha almond fudge?” Because that sounded really good to me.
“Damn it, Char! Now’s not the time to be cute.”
I thought it was the perfect time, particularly after he’d been dodging me most of the day. “I can’t help it if you think I’m cute.”
He reached over me, grabbed the carton of French vanilla, and then slammed the freezer door shut. “You’re pushing it, and I want you to stop. Now.”
“But I have information that could be important in the investigation into Russell’s death, and I need to talk to you about it.”
“I told you before, there is no investigation. Hell, there hasn’t even been an autopsy.”
“But there will be soon, and when the results go to Frankie and she makes this a criminal case, you’ll want to speak with Joyce and Pete Lackey. Beverly Carver, too!”
Steve slapped the brick of ice cream onto the tile countertop. “If … if … this becomes a criminal case, I’ll launch a thorough investigation. In the meantime, I’ll take your suggestions under advisement.”
“Oh yeah?” I stared into what felt like an impenetrable block of bittersweet chocolate. “Then here’s my best advice. You’d better put Beverly at the top of your witness list because she was sleeping with Russell Falco and might be the last person who saw him alive.”
Steve’s gaze softened as he looked over my shoulder. “There’s no proof of that, Eleanor, so I wouldn’t repeat anything you heard.”
I turned to see Gram’s pupils magnified to twice their normal size behind her trifocals. Shit.
“Beverly and Russell were … lovers?” she asked as she crossed in front of me and pulled out five glass bowls from the cupboard. Her face blanched. “You don’t think she had anything to do with his death, do you?”
Steve shook his head. “Char and I were just talking a little shop and one of us was letting her imagination run away with her.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Sorry,” he said with a disarming smile. “It was the wrong place and time to speculate about what might have happened to Russell.”
I pushed him aside to grab the platter of cookies Gram had left on the counter. “Yeah, we’ll save our shop talk for later.”
She shifted her gaze from me to him and back again to me. “Are you two fighting?”
Sort of. “Nope.”
“Uh-huh.” Gram looked unconvinced. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it and bring in that ice cream before it melts.”
Steve’s lips curled into a satisfied smile the instant she stepped foot into the dining room. “You heard the woman. Stop it.”
“You can be a real jerk sometimes.”
“Keep it up, Chow Mein, and there will be no mocha almond fudge for you later during our shop talk.”
“Maybe I don’t want any.”
Steve headed for the dining room. “Yeah, you do.”
Yeah, I did. Dammit.
* * *
The next morning, I staggered up the chipped marble staircase of the Chimacam County Courthouse, my head pounding from a mocha almond fudge sugar coma hangover.
I stepped onto the gold and black tile of the third floor landing and waved at the Sheriff’s deputy eyeballing me from his desk opposite the stairs.
The county’s human security system acknowledged me with a curt nod. He then shot a glance at the ancient brass clock mounted above the front door, one of the many historical artifacts in the four-story, red brick building that dated back to the late eighteen hundreds.
I was ten minutes late, not because of the hangover. I couldn’t zip up the cotton twill slacks I had thought I’d be wearing. Not good since they were supposed to be my fat pants. I had to finally settle on a pair of stretchy black yoga pants and a pink cotton knit tunic I found last summer on the sale rack. I threw on a chunky silver and onyx necklace so that I wouldn’t look like I was heading off to my morning exercise class and left the house swearing that I’d atone for all the ice cream and cookies I’d scarfed down in the last twenty-four hours.
Of course, that was before I stopped at Duke’s for a coffee to go and had to sample one of the chocolate chip cookies my great-aunt Alice planned to enter in the county fair.
Really, could I say no to the woman who taught me how to bake my first sour cream apple pie? Especially when she thought she had the perfect recipe to beat Joyce Lackey in the drop cookie division?
I’d concede the point that a smarter person would have known when it was time to say when and go back on the diet wagon. But then I would have missed out on one of the best chocolate chip cookies I’d ever tasted.
However, all wasn’t lost for my atonement plans this Monday. With the sun burning through the morning haze over the bay, it was shaping up to be a warm and clear September day—tailor-made for a walk during my lunch hour. Maybe even meander down to the harbor to see if anyone had seen Russell on his boat Friday night. Yes, that sounded like a great atonement plan to me.
I entered the fir
st door on the right and headed down the threadbare hallway to find out if Frankie had read my preliminary report on Russell.
One of the junior assistant prosecuting attorneys, a skinny twenty-something in a cheap wool suit, slowed as he passed me in the hallway. “We’re out of coffee. I just used the last of it.”
Like I wasn’t already well aware of the pecking order around here. Not only was I being told that he resented having to make a pot of coffee, but I needed to get my ass to the store.
I forced a smile. “I’ll take care of it.” And good morning to you too, Brett.
I mentally added making a coffee run to my to-do list and then stopped outside Frankie’s office, where her legal eagle assistant, Patsy Faraday, glanced up from her post. “You’re late,” she said with her fingers poised over her computer keyboard.
“I know. I had a small emergency this morning.” Which stretched the truth, but starting the week by not being able to fit into my fat pants constituted an emergency in my book.
Considering that plus-sized Patsy had also recently forked her way through a divorce, she should have been the one person I could confide in about my fat pants dilemma.
She leaned back in her chair, the little pucker of contempt at the corner of her fleshy mouth serving as a clear reminder that Patsy wouldn’t shed a tear if I didn’t make it through my thirty-day probation period. I let the sharing moment pass and hoped that she wouldn’t rat me out to Frankie.
Patsy’s steady gaze went to the mass of loose curls I hadn’t bothered to restrain before I left the house. “I see.”
Swell. I had more important things to worry about this morning than a bad hair day, and the investigation into Russell Falco’s death was at the top of the list with Junior’s coffee emergency a distant second.
I peeked through the open door of the office she protected like a guard dog and saw Frankie Rickard waving me in with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear.
“I understand, Herb,” she said, pointing across her desk at a Georgian high back chair. “I should have more information for you tomorrow afternoon.”
She rolled her eyes while I took a seat and tried to act like I couldn’t hear Herb raising his voice to the Chimacam County Coroner.
Seconds later, she hung up the phone and finger-combed a wayward auburn-gray lock back into her upswept hairdo. “The mayor isn’t happy about a body washing up on shore. Says it’s bad for business.”
Frankie leaned back in her chair and tapped the blue file folder on her desk with an unvarnished index finger.
Blue was the color used in the office to distinguish coroner’s cases from the criminal cases that would be assigned to Ben Santiago’s team. I didn’t have to look to know what name I’d see on the folder tab: Russell Falco.
She pursed her peony pink mouth, accentuating the puckers around it. “At least it was Fred Wixey and not a tourist who found him. Not that it would make the mayor feel any better when he’s promoting next week’s county fair.”
I’d served Mayor Herb Carlton at least a dozen bacon cheeseburgers earlier this summer, while I was waitressing at Duke’s. He was a glad-hander of the first order, always flashing a toothy grin, constantly trading jabs with Duke followed by a hearty slap to the back. A former president of the Chimacam County Chamber of Commerce, Herb knew his stuff when it came to business, but I suspected his phone call to Frankie had been prompted by the pall that would be cast over his peaceful senior citizen mecca if Russell’s cause of death were determined to be anything other than accidental. It would surely be a front page headline in the Port Merritt Gazette while coming as equally bad news for Herb’s political future as a keeper of that peace.
Frankie picked up the blue folder “Are you heading back to your desk?”
My heart leapt with eager anticipation. “Unless you have something else you want me to do.” Like an interview with Joyce and Pete Lackey, or pop on down to the harbor and chat with Russell’s brothers?
“No, not right now.”
Dang.
She handed me the folder. “Would you please take this to Karla?”
Karla Tate had been Frankie’s senior legal assistant for over a decade and served as the primary death investigation coordinator for the county coroner’s office. After a blue folder was created, it didn’t pass Go without first hitting Karla’s desk, so it came as no surprise that I was being asked to be the delivery girl, especially since it had been my job for the last four weeks to shadow Karla so that I could act as her backup.
Because we’d had only two deaths of a suspicious nature in those four weeks and only one of those had become a coroner’s case, I’d heard a lot of “we’ll cover this later when we have an actual case.”
With Russell’s folder in my hot little hands, I had a feeling later was right around the corner.
Frankie pushed her wireframe bifocals up the bridge of her nose, tension tugging at the fine lines edging her eyes. “Thanks for putting in a little overtime over the weekend.”
I knew she meant the report and not my extracurricular activities, so I nodded and headed for the door.
“Oh, and Char, just a reminder in case you get a call from the newspaper or if anyone at Duke’s tries to pump you for information about this—we don’t talk about any cases outside of this office.” She leveled a gaze at me that was worthy of a headmistress setting the ground rules on the first day of school.
Clearly, Russell’s death would be at the top of everyone’s minds at Gossip Central today, and she and I both knew I’d be a primary target for Lucille, which meant that I’d better buy my lunch elsewhere if I didn’t want to be grilled like a cheese panini. “Yes, ma’am.”
Patsy handed me a white envelope as I passed in front of her.
“One of the deputy prosecutors needs this subpoena to be delivered today.”
Process server, delivery girl, coffee procurer—each one on the list of my level one assistant responsibilities, but at least it got me out of the office a couple of times a week.
And as a bonus, since the address on the envelope looked to be several blocks from the courthouse, I figured it gave me an early opportunity to burn some calories if I hoofed it. “No problem.” And I could pick up some coffee on the way back.
After heading down the hall to the break room to make sure the coffee was brewing, I rounded the bend that led to the office bullpen that I shared with five legal assistants.
Karla Tate, a two pack a day smoker with a rheumy cough, who sat between a window partially blocked by tall black file cabinets and an old fax machine, looked up at me over her computer monitor. “Mornin’.”
“Morning.” I placed Russell’s folder in her inbox. “From Frankie.”
“I figured that would make its way to me today.” Karla’s gaze softened behind her horn-rimmed glasses. “Such a shame about Russell. My daughter dated him back in high school. Worried about her the entire time, too.”
Her daughter, Maggie, a few years ahead of me in school, had been a wild child, heavy into the Seattle grunge scene. Last I’d heard she was married to a Port Townsend dentist and had three kids.
“I’ll have to tell her about this,” Karla added. “I’m sure she’ll want to come to the service.”
And no doubt join the many girlfriends there from Russell’s past.
Karla opened the folder, scanned the first page of my preliminary report, and a smile creased her face. “Fred found him around nine-ish?”
I shrugged. “He doesn’t wear a watch.”
“I see.”
She turned the page. “You confirmed with Steve that no shoes and no cell phone were found on Russell or on the boat, huh?”
“Right.” I didn’t need Steve to confirm that they weren’t on the boat, not that I wanted to admit that little fact to any of my coworkers.
“Okay.” Karla closed the file and set it on the edge of her tidy desk. “It looks like we wait for Dr. Zuniga’s findings and go from there.”
I knew the
drill. If the autopsy results supported my suspicions that Russell Falco’s death was no accident, it would become a coroner’s case and Steve would proceed with an investigation. In the meantime, everyone waited.
Drill or no drill, waiting wasn’t my best thing.
Neither was dealing with an office full of cranky lawyers going through caffeine withdrawal, which I estimated would start in about an hour. So, after I went to my desk and checked for messages, I dashed out the door, subpoena in hand and petty cash in my tote bag for a can of coffee.
After four blocks with the crisp morning breeze at my back, I glanced up 3rd and spotted Steve’s police cruiser parked in his usual spot in the Port Merritt PD parking lot. Pretty much as I had expected since I knew he wasn’t scheduled to testify in court today.
What I didn’t expect to see was the woman exiting the front door – Joyce Lackey, her body shaking with sobs.
“Hi, Joyce. What a small world,” I said, trying to keep the mood light as I approached. “My grandmother and I were just talking about you.”
She swiped at the tears cascading down her cheeks. “S-Sorry … I … can’t … talk right now.” Her breath hitched as she stumbled toward the parking lot.
Supporting her at the elbow before she crumpled to the sidewalk, I spotted a bench seat across the street in the shade of a tall cedar tree. “Of course you can’t. You need to sit down,” I said, leading her to the bench.
I gave her a minute to blow her nose and gather herself together. “Would you like some water?” I’d have to run back to the police station to fetch her some and probably arouse Steve’s suspicions if she said yes, so it came as a huge relief when Joyce shook her head.
“I’m okay … really.” She dabbed at the fresh tears spilling over her sparse lashes. “I just need a minute.”
I patted her hand. “Of course. Russell’s death must have come as quite a shock,” I said, watching for her reaction.
She nodded and blew her nose again.
“Were you close?” As close as Beverly Carver led me to believe?
“We were friends—g-good friends.”
That led to a fresh round of tears, and I needed her to focus on the reason she’d come to see Steve today, so I decided to cut to the chase and come clean. “Joyce, I work at the coroner’s office, and it would help us understand what happened if you could tell me everything you remember about the last time you saw Russell.”
Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles Page 7