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

by Wendy Delaney

  All that may have been true, but I could tell that she was holding something back.

  Since this was the only lead I had that might support Lucille’s Fatal Attraction theory, I needed Mrs. Doolittle to fight through her hesitation and give me a description I could use.

  “Curvy like me?” I asked, turning so she could get a good look.

  She pressed her thin lips together. “Sort of but shorter.” She wrinkled her nose in a little wince as if the truth were causing her pain. “More like …”

  Come on. Say it.

  “… I’d have to say …”

  Yes, you have to say it.

  “… she looked more like Joyce from next door.”

  Holy cannoli!

  “Not that I’m saying it was her. It happened so fast.”

  Not so fast on the backpedaling. “But it looked like her.”

  Mrs. Doolittle lowered her gaze and nodded.

  “Would it be fair to say that you thought it was Joyce when you first saw her?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she said, her shoulders slumped in resignation.

  “Did you tell anyone about this?”

  “I mentioned it to Beverly the next morning, but I didn’t name names. Just said that her peeping Tom was a woman.”

  “What did Mrs. Carver say when you told her that she and her guest had an audience?”

  “Not much. She shook her head and said, ‘Pathetic, really pathetic.’ I didn’t think that much about her reaction at the time …” Angela Doolittle glanced back at the yard next door. “But after all the commotion last Friday and that ugly scene between Pete and that Falco boy, well … let’s just say that Beverly probably had a good idea who it was.”

  And would probably join me in casting Joyce Lackey as the obsessed jilted lover in our local production of Fatal Attraction.

  Did that mean that Joyce was Russell’s killer? Nope, but all the signals I kept getting from the Lackeys screamed that they had something to hide—something big.

  Mrs. Doolittle wiped her hands on her baggy polyester slacks. “Such a horrible night. I’ve never heard such language come out of Pete. Joyce either. Usually she’s so quiet, but let me tell you—that woman can slam a door!”

  “Could you make out what they were saying?”

  She shook her head, her glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. “Just a few words here and there after he followed her into the house. Not that I was trying to eavesdrop, mind you, but their windows were open and Pete was so angry that he wasn’t exactly whispering. I felt like I should sort of keep tabs on things and sat on my patio for a while, until things calmed down.”

  Not even close to the blissful domestic scene that the Lackeys had painted for me. “And what time was that?”

  “Let’s see, it got really quiet after that door slam. I guess that’s when I saw Pete heading for the gazebo. I didn’t want him thinking I’d been spying on them, so I went back inside and watched the news. So eleven-fifteen maybe.”

  “And things stayed pretty quiet? No more door slams?”

  She shrugged. “I must’ve fallen asleep in my chair. But no. I didn’t hear anything else until one-thirty, when I let Sammy out to do his business …”

  I looked back at the basset hound staring at us from Mrs. Doolittle’s dining room window.

  “… and heard Pete starting his boat.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Pete Lackey has a boat?”

  She angled a little frown at me. “He’s had a boat for years.”

  I looked past her at the Lackeys’ back yard. Just like the other two times I’d been here, there was no boat in sight. “Where’s he keep it?”

  “On a trailer in his garage—just like where my Wayne kept it before I sold it to Pete four summers ago to get it out of my garage.”

  “And you’re sure it was Pete starting this boat?”

  “Charmaine, I heard Wayne come and go in that old wooden boat for most of our marriage. I know the sound of that engine.”

  Much like when Joyce Lackey told me, “He killed Russell. I know he did,” I knew at that instant she was telling me the truth.

  Now I had less than four hours to convince Frankie of that fact before she signed off on Russell Falco’s death certificate.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Well, ladies,” Frankie said, looking up from the report on her desk. “I don’t see that there’s anything here that warrants any more of this office’s resources.”

  I turned to Karla sitting in the chair next to me. She shook her head as if to give me a silent warning to keep my mouth shut.

  The heck with that. “What about the boat? Pete Lackey was on the water around the same time as Russell!”

  Frankie met my gaze. “The police already questioned him about that. Doesn’t appear to be much there other than a pissed off husband.”

  The police? I clenched my hands into fists, wishing I could get them on the detective who had done the questioning.

  “COD will remain Undetermined pending the toxicology results from the lab.” She tucked my twelve-page report into Russell’s blue folder and handed it to me for filing.

  “That’s it?” I had slashed tires, a peeping Tom, flimsy alibis, and a witness who placed Pete Lackey on the water around the same time as Russell Falco, but I was being told that our next move was to circle our wagons and maintain an Undetermined holding pattern for the next six weeks.

  “That’s it. Now we wait and see if anything else develops in that time.” Frankie smiled. “But don’t be discouraged. Your report made for very interesting reading.”

  Interesting reading! My boss might as well have said “good girl” and patted me on the head.

  Clamping my mouth shut so I wouldn’t say something I’d regret, I followed Karla to the door.

  “Charmaine,” Frankie said, stopping me in my tracks. “One more thing before I forget.”

  I couldn’t imagine that she could have anything else to say to me unless Steve had been right when he predicted that someone would register a complaint about me.

  Reluctantly, I turned to face the music.

  “Congratulations on making it through your first thirty days. You’re no longer on probation.” She gave me a little nod. “Keep up the good work.”

  I stared into Rox’s big brown eyes when she tossed a coaster in front of me an hour later. “What have you got back there that would be immediately mood-altering?”

  Rox leaned against the bar. “Having a bad day?”

  I nodded. Despite hearing that I’d get to keep my job a while longer, everything about today had left me feeling powerless and ineffectual. Add in the fact that Steve had already interviewed Pete Lackey only to dismiss him as a suspect and I was reminded of when my ex informed me he was going to be on TV in a top chef competition. No discussion beforehand, no oh by the way, they loved me in the audition, no nothing—just a little bomb of a surprise he had dropped on me, a precursor to him announcing that he wanted a divorce. Not that Steve owed me full disclosure, but he could have given me a hint when I talked to him this morning.

  “Would a chocolate martini make you feel better?”

  It would go straight to my hips with no guarantee of a side trip to my happy place and I didn’t much care. “Wouldn’t make me feel any worse.”

  As she reached for the vodka and a silver shaker, I closed my eyes and tried to lose myself in my favorite feel good Hootie and the Blowfish song blasting through the speaker above my head.

  I heard the barstool next to me scrape the hardwood floor.

  “Fair warning. She’s in a bad mood,” Rox said.

  I shot Steve a sidelong glance. “Yeah, you’ve been warned.”

  He propped his elbows on the bar. “Very considerate. Are you here to eat, drink, or meditate?”

  “Possibly all of the above. We’ll see how my evening develops. What about you?” Have anything you want to tell me? “What brings you here?”

  “Saw your car in the
lot on my way back from a call.”

  Rox delivered my drink in a long-stemmed martini glass. “Madam’s cocktail made with love and something eighty proof which should make you feel better very soon.” She pointed to Steve. “Want a beer?”

  “Iced tea. Not off-duty yet.” He picked up my glass and sniffed it. “What is it?”

  “A chocolate martini,” Rox and I said in unison.

  He pushed it toward me. “A chick drink.”

  I painted a happy smile on my face as I reached for my glass. “Damned straight and I’m not sharing.”

  Rox delivered his iced tea and then looked back over her shoulder as she left to fill a pitcher for a trio of bowlers. “Be nice.”

  “When am I not nice?” he protested as he scooped up both of our drinks and headed toward the far corner of the bar.

  I slid off my stool and trotted after him. “Hey! Can’t a girl sit quietly and enjoy her drink around here?”

  He set our drinks on a table for two and then pulled out a chair for me. “Have a seat so that you can let that enjoyment begin.”

  I slumped in my seat and stared across the table at him. “Why do I have the feeling that’s going to be an impossibility?”

  He stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankle. “I’m not stopping you. Have at it. Then when you’re ready, talk to me.”

  We locked gazes as I sipped my drink and felt like a death row inmate who had just been served her last meal—in my case, a liquefied eighty proof candy bar. “Stop looking at me like you’re waiting for my confession.”

  His dark eyes sparked with amusement. “Do you have something you’d like to confess?”

  “Nope. But I’d like to know why you never mentioned that Pete Lackey had a boat or that you talked to him about being on the water the night Russell Falco died.”

  He reached for his iced tea. “I’ve told you before. It’s not my job to keep you informed.”

  “But you informed my boss—”

  “As a professional courtesy.”

  “But I didn’t rate that same courtesy.”

  “Sorry, Chow Mein,” he said without looking the least bit sorry.

  Exasperating man. “Try to pretend that I do, if you ever want to have fun with ice cream again.”

  “Are you threatening an officer of the law?”

  “Yes, and if you intend to have another dinner at my grandmother’s house, you’ll help me understand this one thing. If a witness heard Pete leaving in his boat around one-thirty, why wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that he might have had something to do with Russell’s death?”

  “You might think that …”

  Yes, I would and still did.

  “… if you hadn’t talked to the teenagers joyriding in their dad’s boat that night. They had him to answer to when they got back to the marina, but after the news started making the rounds at school about the body being found, the boys came in with their dad to tell me they’d seen a small fishing boat circling the Lucky Charm.”

  “That’s it? Just circling Russell’s boat?”

  Steve nodded. “And then leaving in the direction he’d come from—the south end. Based on the description of the boat and what happened earlier that night, I talked to Pete Lackey about it yesterday. He said he’d been sitting outside—cooling off as he put it—when Falco started his engines around one and headed back for the marina. But after ten or fifteen minutes, he noticed that Falco’s boat didn’t seem to be moving, so he decided to launch his fishing boat and check it out.”

  “And?” I asked, breathless with anticipation.

  “And like the boys said, Pete circled the Lucky Charm, which by that time was adrift about a half mile from Cedars Cove. Only what they didn’t know was that he was looking for Russell in the water because no one was on the boat.”

  “And you believed him when he said that?”

  Folding his arms, Steve leveled his gaze at me. “It matched the boys’ story, so what do you think?”

  “Fine. I was just asking.” Because if Pete Lackey didn’t kill Russell, unless a rogue wave swept the guy overboard, I was out of ideas as to how a perfectly healthy man could have washed up on shore.

  “My turn to ask a question. No one from your office contacted me about this becoming a coroner’s case, so I assume Frankie accepted Zuniga’s findings?”

  “For now, but the cause of death will remain Undetermined until toxicology comes back.”

  “Then that’s that.”

  Didn’t mean that it was right, I thought as I sipped my chocolate martini.

  “And where Russell Falco is concerned, your job is done, Deputy,” Steve stated, narrowing his eyes as they locked onto mine.

  “Uh-huh. Is your job done?”

  “You know how it works. No coroner’s case, no investigation.”

  “Don’t you think this is weird though?”

  “It’s weird. I’ll give you that.”

  It was too weird. “A guy gets in his boat to head back to the marina—and what—fifteen minutes later, he’s dead in the water?”

  Steve arched an eyebrow.

  “No pun intended,” I added.

  “According to our witnesses, yeah.”

  “And both these boys and Pete Lackey see this boat drifting in the bay like some sort of ghost ship and nobody reports it?”

  “Nobody wanted to get into trouble.”

  Which explained the fiction the Lackeys had been spinning yesterday but little else. “What do you think happened?”

  Sucking down half his drink, Steve shrugged.

  That narrowed it down. “Engine trouble?”

  “Both engines started right up at the dock when I tried ‘em, so no.”

  Then why would Russell have turned them off? “A little crabbing as long as he was in the area?” He wouldn’t have been the first person in these parts to quietly drop a crab trap out of season.

  “The water would have been too deep that far out.”

  “He had to have a reason to stop there.”

  “It could have been any one of many reasons,” he said, focusing on his iced tea glass as if he wished it contained the answer.

  That didn’t mean Steve was being one hundred percent forthcoming, but I’d seen nothing to suggest that anything he’d told me tonight had been a lie. “This is really weird.”

  “I think we’ve established that by now.”

  “Okay, then level with me. Given all that, in your professional opinion do you think that Russell Falco had some sort of accident that night and just … drowned?”

  Steve pulled out his cell phone and read a text message. “I have to get back to work.”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  Pushing away from the table, he stood directly in front of me. “I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest this was anything other than an accident. Is that a good enough answer for you?”

  He couldn’t have made it more clear and, as a bonus, he was telling the truth.

  Dang.

  * * *

  Thoughts of Steve, Pete and Joyce Lackey, and those kids on that boat kept me tossing and turning most of the night. Of course, the andouille sausage calzone that I had chased down with a second chocolate martini probably helped to fuel my insomnia, not to mention the churning funk in my gut tag-teaming with my cramps.

  After dragging myself into the upstairs bathroom for a steamy shower, I dressed in my yoga pants and a deep purple knit tunic that made me look like a giant eggplant, but at least it didn’t hurt me anywhere but in the pride department.

  “No more andouille sausage, no more chocolate martinis, no more pizza, no more cookies,” I muttered while I searched my tote bag for my roll of antacids. “You can do it.” If I ever wanted to trade in my stretchy yoga pants for a pair of skinny jeans, I had to make some changes, starting today.

  Unfurling the wrapper on the antacid roll I found in the bottom of my tote, I groaned when I discovered nothing but paper.

  No pr
oblem. I headed for the kitchen, where my grandmother used to treat my tummy aches with a half teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in water and gently chide me for my foolish choices.

  Obviously not that much had changed in the last thirty years.

  I opened the kitchen cupboard and reached for the golden box of baking soda and took the cure. As long as I was self-medicating, I grabbed the last two bottles of my mother’s stash of French sparkling water from the refrigerator, downed one on the spot and drank the other one on the way to Duke’s to see if one of my favorite fishermen could help me solve a mystery.

  Alice squinted at me through her wire-rimmed trifocals when I arrived seven minutes later. “You look like hell.”

  “I feel fine,” I said, squelching a belch. Pulling a white apron from a hook, I joined my great-aunt at her butcher block table to help roll out pie crust dough. “I just didn’t put as much makeup on this morning.” At least that much was true.

  She pursed her lips. “Sure. Like you’re the only one around here who can tell when someone’s lying.”

  Carrying one of his glaze pans to the sink by the doughnut fryer, Duke scowled. “What’s going on with you? This is two days in a row you’re in here at this hour.”

  I aimed my best smile at him. “I like it here.”

  He shook his head. “You’re like a stray cat. We need to stop feeding you.”

  Since the notion of facing anything the least bit greasy made this cat want to cough up more than a hairball, I wouldn’t fight him on that point. “Fine. I’m not here to eat. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  Exchanging glances with his wife, Duke pulled up a stool between Alice and me. “Okay, but make it snappy. I have things to do.”

  Alice swatted him, dusting his chest in white flour. “We all have things to do. Right now, your thing is to sit there and behave.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “Go ahead, honey, how can we help?”

  Duke gave me the hurry up sign while Alice wasn’t looking.