Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles

by Wendy Delaney

  “I don’t know.” But according to Beverly Carver and the lack of bottles and cans in his boat, I believed the answer to that question was no.

  I downed the last bit of egg and set my plate in the plastic tub of dirty dishes by the sink. “Thanks for lunch.”

  I headed for the door and stopped when a couple in their early sixties pushed open the door. I didn’t recognize the woman at first, but the man with the thick head of salt and pepper hair I’d have known anywhere. “Dr. Zuniga.”

  Dr. Henry Zuniga’s friendly face crinkled into a roadmap of fine lines. “We meet again, Charmaine Digby. You know my wife, Madelyn.”

  “Of course. Nice to see you again.” I’d only met Dr. Zuniga and his surgical assistant wife once before, after an autopsy last month. Since it was obvious why they had come back to Port Merritt, I hoped my “nice to see you” remark didn’t sound weird.

  She nodded pleasantly. “I’ve always heard Duke’s has the best burgers in town and thought we’d grab some lunch since we have over an hour before the two-thirty ferry.”

  “Someone’s hungry,” Dr. Zuniga said with a wink.

  I didn’t want to think about how she’d been working up an appetite, but at the same time, since they’d completed the autopsy this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

  “I don’t want to keep you from your lunch, but I wonder if I could speak with you for a moment.” Or five.

  He smiled at his wife. “Why don’t you get us a table. I’ll be along in a minute.”

  Madelyn Zuniga directed her steady gaze at me. “No problem,” she said, but I got the message. Whatever you have to say, make it fast.

  Dr. Zuniga held the door for me and we stepped outside into the warm September sunshine.

  “I’ve been assisting on the Russell Falco death investigation. There appears to be some circumstantial evidence to suggest that he could be a victim of …” I hesitated to say murder, especially if the doctor was going to tell me that it looked like Russell may have fallen off his boat and drowned in a drunken stupor. “… possible foul play.”

  Dr. Zuniga knit his thick brows. “Really. I didn’t see anything to support that. The head contusion could have happened when Mr. Falco fell overboard.”

  “So you didn’t see anything that looked particularly … suspicious?”

  “A little bruising below his right eye—from the color I’d estimate someone landed a pretty good punch five to seven days ago.”

  Russell had been in a fight? Something that had escalated into his tires being slashed? This tidbit of news made me wish I’d taken a good look at Pete’s hands for cuts and bruises.

  “Other than that,” Dr. Zuniga continued, “nothing that wasn’t typical with an accidental drowning. Frankie will get my report tomorrow, but that’s how I’m calling it.”

  Then this wouldn’t become a coroner’s case and I’d soon be transferring the contents of Russell’s blue folder into a manila one.

  Before that file joined me in the nether regions of the third floor to spend the rest of its days tucked away and forgotten in a metal filing cabinet, I needed to ask one more question. “Dr. Zuniga, was Russell Falco intoxicated at the time of his death?”

  “His blood and urine went to the state crime lab. Frankie should have the results in six weeks, maybe longer. Depends on how backed up they are.”

  Six weeks. Criminy! All the cop shows on TV would have that answer by the time they got back from the next commercial break.

  Dr. Zuniga smiled as if he could read my mind. “Patience is a virtue, Charmaine.”

  “Yeah.” So was forgiveness, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if I simply filed that folder once Frankie signed off on the death certificate. Not with everything Joyce and Beverly had told me about Friday night.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said, shaking the hand he offered. Thanks for a few morsels of information that didn’t tell me much.

  After hightailing it back to the courthouse I promptly filled Karla in on what I’d learned.

  “Okay, then,” she announced the second I paused to take a breath. “It looks like we’ll be able to release the body to the family, but beyond that, we’ll sit tight until we get the final report from the crime lab.”

  Sitting tight required patience and as Dr. Zuniga would attest, I was fresh out. “What about in the meantime?”

  Karla squinted at me. “What about it? You said it yourself—accidental drowning.”

  “Russell Falco’s tires got slashed on Monday, close to the same time he got punched in the face, and then the guy drowns less than a week later. You don’t find that a little suspicious?”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “If Dr. Zuniga didn’t find anything to point to this being anything other than an accidental death, it doesn’t matter who was having a beef with him or what I think.”

  “Even if Pete Lackey made threats against him?”

  Karla leaned back in her desk chair, her gaze fixed on mine. “Is this gossip you picked up from Lucille or do you know this for a fact?”

  Neither, but one of the women who was there Friday night certainly believed that her husband offed her would-be lover.

  “Joyce practically admitted it to me yesterday morning.”

  “Practically isn’t a word Frankie has much use for.”

  “Then maybe I should interview Joyce to see if she’d be willing to give me a few more details.”

  Karla shifted her focus back to her computer monitor. “Find out what she knows and send me your report before noon tomorrow. I don’t want Frankie signing off on that death certificate if we have a witness that heard threats made against Russell.”

  Neither did I.

  After making a fresh pot of coffee, I pulled the Jag out of the parking lot and headed south on Main. Since I wanted to speak with Joyce alone, I took a right on 5th Street to drive by Pete’s Plumbing with the hope of seeing his blue and white truck. To my relief it was parked right outside his front door. Unfortunately, Joyce and Pete were standing in front of the Toyota sedan parked next to it.

  What the heck? When I saw him at the deli counter yesterday, Pete Lackey was acting like a guy whose wife had left him. And now the wife who told me that she knew he had killed Russell was paying him a little visit?

  This made no sense unless she was up to something. What that might be I didn’t have a clue, but I sure needed to discover one so I turned into the parking lot of a CPA’s office on the opposite corner. Crawling out of the Jag, I sought cover behind a sour-smelling garbage bin and watched Joyce hand her husband a plastic-wrapped plate.

  Pete pulled back the plastic, picked up what looked like a cookie and consumed it in two bites.

  A minute later, after giving her husband a peck on the lips, Joyce got into the Toyota and drove away while Pete headed into his plumbing supply store carrying the plate of cookies.

  What?

  A woman who was afraid that her husband had murdered her handyman/boyfriend wouldn’t bake him cookies, and she certainly wouldn’t go out of her way to deliver them to his office. Unless she had a very good reason like needing to experiment with a new recipe—one that included some fast-acting, husband-be-gone secret ingredient.

  Since Joyce obviously wasn’t home, I decided to question the other member of the Lackey household. The sooner the better if there was a chance I could be right about what was in those cookies.

  I grabbed my tote from the passenger seat and headed across the street.

  Pete was sitting at a cluttered desk next to a street-facing window when I walked in. He frowned at me for a split second before saying, “May I help you?”

  “I hope so.”

  He pushed back his chair and stepped up to the service counter.

  I smiled across the counter at him. “Small world, huh? Who knew yesterday that we’d be chatting again today?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I pointed at the plate of cookies near the cash register. “Those look good. Did Joyce make them?�
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  He nodded and pushed the plate toward me. “Help yourself.”

  I had no appetite for anything that might have come from Joyce’s kitchen. Although on the offhand chance there really could be a lethal dose of something other than artery-clogging butter in the cookies, I’d be stupid to not take one as evidence.

  “Maybe one for later.” I pulled a strip of clingy plastic wrap from the plate and rolled it around the chocolate thumbprint cookie.

  I tucked the cookie into a side pocket of my tote and then showed him my deputy coroner badge. “We’re investigating the death of Russell Falco. May I have a few moments of your time?”

  “I have nothing to add to what I already told the detective.”

  So Steve had already talked to him. What else was new?

  I smiled. “This is for the coroner’s report.”

  “Come on back,” he grumbled.

  He sat at his desk and I took a seat in the creaky vinyl chair he’d pulled over from another desk.

  Since the computer monitor at that desk was displaying a screen saver of family photos, I looked around for a dad-type. “I don’t want to take somebody’s chair if they need it.” With any luck, he’d be just a scream away in the back room if I needed him.

  “He’s out on a call.”

  Swell.

  “ If you don’t mind, I’ve got a business to run here so—”

  “Of course.” I pulled out my notebook and moved the chair a little closer to his desk to get a better angle on him. “I understand you had some words with Russell Falco Friday night around nine.”

  Tight-lipped, he glanced out the window. “You could call it that,” Pete said in a calm tone at odds with every muscle in his face.

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t seem to get the message earlier that I didn’t like him hanging around my wife, so I gave him a reminder.”

  “What do you mean by reminder?”

  Pete leaned toward me, gripping the armrests of his chair. “I told him plain and simple,” he said, dialing up the volume, “to stay the hell away from her.”

  True. Plus he was confirming what Beverly Carver had already told me. I made a note for my report.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing much. I said my piece and he left.”

  “What about later that evening? Did you see Mr. Falco?”

  Shifting in his seat, he shook his head. “He knew better than to come back.”

  “So you didn’t see him around one in the morning?”

  He jutted his chin at me. “I was in bed.”

  Maybe he had been, but he reminded me of a seventeen-year-old Steve at his dad’s funeral—anger and defiance masking the pain he didn’t want anyone to see.

  “All night?”

  “All night.”

  I didn’t believe him any more than I believed Steve every time I heard him say, “I’m okay.”

  “And where was Mrs. Lackey around one in the morning?”

  “Right next to me.”

  Another lie.

  “All night?”

  “Yes!” Pete Lackey bit out through clenched teeth.

  Sure.

  He stood, his hands balled into fists as he stared down at me. “And now I need to get back to work.”

  “Of course.” I stood and rolled the chair back to the desk behind me. “Just one more thing. May I see your hands?”

  “What?”

  “I need to see your hands,” I said, trying to do my best impression of Criminal Prosecutor Ben Santiago. After having observed him interview hostile witnesses at least a dozen times over the last month, I knew I had to appear firm, uncompromising. “Front and back please.”

  Okay, I added the please since I figured good manners couldn’t hurt my cause, especially when there was no judge in the room to compel this irate husband’s cooperation.

  Huffing his displeasure, Pete sounded like a venting pressure cooker as he held out his hands.

  Not the cleanest pair of hands I’d ever seen, but I didn’t notice any cuts or bruises to indicate that he’d been in a fight. “Turn them over please.”

  Without wavering he provided me a palms up view.

  I pointed at a thin inch-long slice on his right index finger that looked to be in the process of healing. “How’d you get that?”

  “Box cutter.”

  I didn’t have any reason to doubt him so I decided to try a more direct approach. “Did you throw a punch at Russell Falco in the last week?”

  “Nope.” His lips stretched into a humorless smile—the first one I’d seen on his craggy face. “Not that I didn’t want to.”

  True again.

  “I understand. Then would you know anything about Mr. Falco’s tires being slashed?”

  Pete shook his head. “All I can tell you is that it wasn’t me.”

  I believed him. Heck. If he didn’t slash Russell’s tires, who did?

  “Are we done?”

  “Yes, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to …”

  Turning his back to me, he walked to the door and opened it.

  Clearly he’d wanted me out of his place of business since the moment I’d arrived. Since I’d just treated him like a suspect, it was understandable that he’d dispense with the social niceties, but that didn’t mean that I should do the same. The odds were probably pretty good that I’d be speaking with him again once Russell Falco’s death investigation became official.

  I pulled out a business card from my tote and extended it to him. “If you think of anything else that might be useful to our investigation …”

  Without another word he shut the door in my face.

  So much for the niceties. At least Pete Lackey had been cooperative enough for me to learn that his name wasn’t the only one on Russell Falco’s enemy list.

  Now to find out what I could glean from the missus.

  Chapter Ten

  “Charmaine, what a surprise,” Joyce Lackey said as I gazed up at her from her front porch. A stiff smile finally registered on her face, making her look as pleased to see me as her husband had been thirty minutes earlier.

  “I’m sorry for the imposition, but I was going over my notes from yesterday and had a couple more questions.”

  She blinked. “Questions?”

  To avoid another door slam I tried to channel my inner Emily Post and appeal to Joyce’s need to maintain appearances. “Would now be a good time?”

  After a moment of hesitation her features visibly relaxed and she waved me in as if she had turned her good hostess switch on. “Of course. Do come in.”

  Joyce shut the door behind me and I followed her into a compact kitchen with robin’s egg blue walls and white appliances.

  “Please,” she said, pointing to a hardback oak chair at the table set for two with gingham placemats in the same blue as the kitchen curtains.

  She picked up a white enamel tea kettle from the stove. “Would you like some tea?”

  Not particularly, but since she didn’t wait for my response and started filling the kettle, I figured that I should just go with the flow. “Sure, thanks.”

  I pulled out my notebook and a pen and then set my tote on the floor, a couple of feet away from a six-foot-tall oak bookshelf filled with cookbooks on the bottom two shelves and romance novels at the top. “Nice. Is this the new bookshelf?”

  Joyce nodded, her eyes glittering with tears. “Russell finished it Thursday.”

  And she didn’t waste any time putting it to good use.

  Since she’d be busy in the kitchen for the next few minutes, I pushed out of my chair and took the opportunity to check out the walk-in pantry adjacent to the kitchen.

  Two white wire racks had been filled with glass jars of fruit and preserves, I assumed from the apple and plum trees I saw bordering her flower garden. Cans of soup had been sorted alphabetically on one shelf while sacks of flour and a tall tin of baking powder dominated another. Condiments of every variety lin
ed one shelf. Bars of baking chocolate, a small bag of coconut, a commercial size jar of peanut butter, and plastic canisters filled with walnuts, almonds, and pecans lined another. It was like she’d cleaned out the Red Apple Market of a few of its aisles and set up her own home store.

  “Wow!” I turned to face Joyce when I realized she was standing behind me. “This has to be the most well-stocked pantry I’ve ever seen.”

  She beamed and reached past me to turn a small jar of Jamaican ginger so that the label faced front. “I do love having what I need right at hand.”

  Did that also apply to the men in her life? With her husband working such long hours, had she been enjoying having an abundance of Falco charm in her pantry?

  “Russell certainly did good work,” I said to steer our conversation the direction I wanted to go.

  Her eyes glistened like melting ice. “Yes … he did.”

  Once again I saw genuine sadness, but my mother always looked sad at the end of every summer vacation I spent with her. It never meant she wasn’t itching to jump into her next role and get on with her life. In Joyce’s case, since she had been willing to accuse her husband of murder, I wondered if that meant a life without Pete.

  She turned at the sound of the whistling kettle and I followed her into her kitchen. I noticed that there was no evidence of her baking those thumbprint cookies, no baking sheets or mixing bowls in her polished aluminum sink—not even a lingering scent of chocolate. Instead her spotless kitchen smelled lemony, like she’d wiped it down with disinfecting cleanser.

  And I thought Steve was a neat freak. This chick made him look like a slacker.

  The white cabinets appeared to have been recently painted. “I like the white with the blue and yellow gingham. It creates a very clean and homey look,” I said, assuming that had been her kitchen decor goal.

  Her lips curled with satisfaction while she filled a rose patterned, bone china tea pot. “I hope to replace all the cabinets next year, but in the meantime a fresh coat of paint helps brighten things up in here.”

  She angled a glance at me as she set two cups with saucers on a wooden serving tray. “But I don’t think you came here to talk remodeling projects.”