Pete shook his head.
“How about a few minutes before that? Do you remember seeing or hearing anything?”
After a few seconds of him staring at that scratch, I got another head shake. “No, nothing until I circled around toward shore and saw a few lights on, a couple of cars on the road. You know … what you’d expect at that hour.”
“You headed toward shore?” That wasn’t what Steve had told me. His disclosure of his interview with Pete definitely hadn’t been a full one.
“Just to see if … you know … if he was in the water and was maybe swimming for it.”
“And did you see him in the water?”
Narrowing his eyes, Pete’s jaw set like he wanted to punch a hole in the freshly painted wall. “If I had, don’t you think I would have said something about it?”
I politely smiled. “Of course.” Again, honest emotion, but I was more inclined to believe Steve’s read of Pete Lackey—a man who’d had a very bad night and hadn’t wanted to get into trouble with the law.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, getting up from my seat. “You’ve been very helpful.” Mainly in confirming that Steve had told me the truth about the boys not having any additional information. Other than that I’d gleaned little that I didn’t already know. In fact, after tailing Pete Lackey like the bad junior detective Steve thought me to be, I almost felt like I should apologize for wasting his time twice in the same week.
And I might have if Pete hadn’t been so rude. It certainly would have saved us both a lot of grief if he’d been honest with me in the first place.
At least I’d had the opportunity to see how he’d been spending his evenings.
Peeking into a pantry on my way to the door I saw a thing of functional beauty with white wire rollouts that would dwarf Joyce’s new pride and joy at their Morton Road house. “Your wife would love this pantry.”
“Maybe.” He surveyed the kitchen like a field general who’d only recently come to realize that he was facing a losing battle.
Following his gaze it struck me how beautifully the robin’s egg blue walls coordinated with the blue tones in the granite, how much workspace the center island and countertops would afford someone who loved to cook, and the top of the line appliances. This kitchen had definitely been reinvented with Joyce in mind.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Lackey, you should tell her what you’ve been doing.” He probably should have told her months ago. “From what she said when I interviewed her, she has no idea.”
“I wanted to surprise her with it for our anniversary.”
“You can still surprise her. Maybe when things settle down you can talk to her, tell her …”
He rolled his eyes, a sardonic smile pulling at his lips. “I’m not good at that stuff. Never have been. Besides, she’s barely speaking to me. Hasn’t since …”
I sure wasn’t the right person to dispense relationship advice, but he looked so lost, I felt obligated to at least point him in the right direction. “Go home, Mr. Lackey. Joyce needs to know that you still care because you obviously do …” Whether he could say it in words or not. “And once your wife has one look at what you’ve done here, she’ll see it as clearly as I can.” At least I hoped she would.
“Yeah, soon,” he said, looking unconvinced. He grabbed the leather tool belt hanging on a hook in the pantry. “I have a few things I need to get done first.”
He sounded just like my ex during the last year of our marriage. Funny how I’d given him a pass every time he invented an excuse to spend his evening at the restaurant instead of with me. I’d seen the lies, the lame excuses, and still I believed in us—that we were simply going through what my grandmother always referred to as a rough patch whenever Marietta separated from one of her husbands.
As usual, I should have believed my eyes, whether I’d wanted to or not.
After the door shut behind me and I was heading toward my car, I saw Arnold Brubaker waving me over.
“Hi, Mr. Brubaker,” I said, walking toward him.
Leaning on his cane with one hand and holding pruning shears in the other, he smiled, ignoring his bulldog barking at us from the loveseat in front of his picture window. “You’re back.” He narrowed his beady eyes at my car. “Your mother wouldn’t happen to be with you, would she?”
“Sorry, no. I just needed to speak with Mr. Lackey. My mom … uh … fell in love with his house the other day, so I wanted to make an inquiry about it.”
His eyes widened, making him look a little less mole-like. “Ah, so she’s thinking of moving back to town?”
She’d been entertaining lots of cockamamie ideas the past few weeks, none of which I wanted to discuss with this member of her local fan club. “She doesn’t have any definite plans at the moment.”
“Well, give her my regards.” He leaned over and snipped several foot-long gerbera daisies. “And tell her these are from Arnold.”
“I’ll do that,” I said with a glance toward the window where his dog was protesting my every move.
He snipped a dark purple daisy. “And this one’s for you. Goes with your outfit.” He winked. “I’ve got an eye for fashion.”
He was also a black socks with sandals guy, but he had to be at least eighty so I figured he’d earned the right to define fashion however he pleased.
“Thank you. These are lovely. I’ll go home and put them in water.” I was tired and hungry, and with his dog’s incessant barking, I wanted to do that as soon as possible.
Arnold Brubaker slipped the handle of his garden sheers through a belt loop. “I need to get a move on, too. My boy in there is overdue for his walk. Creatures of habit us old dudes. We like our routines.”
I had no doubt of that, just as I was certain there wasn’t a thing that went on in this neighborhood that escaped his notice.
Driving down Bay Vista, I rounded the turn and looked out to the sparkling waters of Merritt Bay—a bay with a shoreline dotted with houses, some of which Pete Lackey had described as having their lights on. If even one of those houses was populated with an observant oldster like Arnold Brubaker I might find myself an excellent witness to what really happened the early morning of Russell Falco’s death.
Chapter Seventeen
“Where do you want to sit?” Steve asked as we stood in the foyer at Tolliver’s Funeral Home.
We’d arrived at two forty-five, fifteen minutes before Russell Falco’s service was supposed to start, and almost every chair in the one hundred twenty seat chapel had been filled. Fortunately, Lucille was supposed to have saved us a couple of seats.
I scanned the crowd and spotted Joyce Lackey in the back row, sitting between two other tearful middle-aged women. From the sniffling going on in the room, Russell’s friends were well-represented. “Do you see Lucille?”
“You mean the crazy woman in the biker jacket waving at us?”
I peeked around Steve. “Where’d she get the jacket?”
“You’re asking me? Come on,” he said, leading the way down the aisle to the fifth row from the front, where Hector and Lucille were sitting.
Hector smiled at me as he stepped out from the aisle seat to give us access to the two blue chairs he bookended with Lucille. “You look nice, mi querida.”
I could have looked better in the black wool pantsuit I’d squeezed myself into if I’d lost more than a couple of pounds since wearing it to a funeral last month.
He winked, the old flirt, lightening the somber mood that Mrs. Fleming was fueling with her dirge on the organ. “Smell good, too.”
“Thanks, but that’s not me.” I wasn’t wearing any perfume. As I stepped by him I picked up a distinctively familiar musky scent and looked back to see Beverly Carver easing herself into a seat next to her daughter, Heather, two rows from us.
Not that it should have surprised me in the slightest, Steve stood in the aisle by Mrs. Carver’s side, chatting with her and her daughter.
Lucille gave me a left elb
ow jab the instant I sat down. “Maybe that old flame isn’t quite out between him and Heather.”
“He’s just being friendly.” He was quite adept at playing Good Cop everywhere he went and seemed particularly skilled around former girlfriends. As long as he didn’t make a move to frisk her, I didn’t care. Much.
I turned to Lucille to get a better look at the black leather biker jacket with the winged shoulder patches that she was wearing over a charcoal gray dress. “What’s with the jacket?”
She tugged on the collar, striking a pose like an aging fashion model. “Isn’t it great?”
No. With her sensible shoes and platinum bob, there was no way Lucille could pull off the biker moll look. Instead she looked like a grandma who wasn’t born to ride.
“My nephew let me borrow it,” she said. “It’s a little stinky, but I thought it was fitting for Russell seeing that he used to be so into bikes.”
Whatever. “Nice touch.”
She beamed. “I thought so. That way I’ll fit right in with the boys from the club that are gonna provide Russell an escort to the cemetery.” She waved back at the six burly guys in black leather filling the row in front of Joyce. “I plan on keeping tabs on everyone who goes there to say one last goodbye. Mark my words—one of them offed the dude.”
I didn’t have Lucille’s confidence, but who was I to say anything to discourage her? Especially if she could provide another set of eyes and ears on the events of the afternoon.
Steve sat down between me and Hector and whispered, “So what’s up with the jacket?”
“You don’t want to know.” I planted a smile on my face. “How’s Heather?”
He patted my knee. “Fine.”
“I bet.”
I stared across the aisle at Heather, envying her perfect upswept, blonde-streaked hairdo, her slender hips, the healthy glow in her sun-kissed skin that didn’t freckle, and regretted that I hadn’t worn control top pantyhose to keep from feeling like an overstuffed sausage.
“You’re staring,” Steve said.
I noticed that I wasn’t the only one when I shifted my gaze to Kelsey, sitting in the middle of the row behind Heather. But Kelsey’s focus was on Beverly, looking as if she wanted to take her high heel and pound the older woman like an ant at a picnic.
She knows.
That’s why Kelsey’s words didn’t ring true when she told me about who Russell was leaving her to see last Friday. She knew it was Beverly Carver.
“I’m just interested in who’s here,” I said. “It’s quite a turnout.”
“Sure.”
A hush came over the crowd as Reverend Fleming stepped to the podium positioned behind Russell’s gleaming oak casket.
After a few words of welcome, the reverend aimed a beatific smile at Mitzi Walther in the front row. “What words of comfort can one offer when a young man is taken from us too soon?”
That launched a new round of sniffling and nose blowing from most of the women in the standing-room-only chapel.
I glanced over at Kelsey sitting statue still as she watched Beverly dabbing her eyes with a tissue. I wasn’t close enough to get a good read on Kelsey, but from the steel in her gaze I knew she wouldn’t be joining the sniffling chorus. Given how emotional she’d become in her shop on Wednesday, this wasn’t what I’d expected to see from her today. Then again, I hadn’t expected her to know about Beverly’s relationship with Russell either.
Almost an hour later, Reverend Fleming announced to the crowd that we’d close with one of Russell’s favorite songs.
As the organist played Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, a stoic Mitzi and the Falco brothers filed out of the chapel followed by the cousins and close friends occupying the next two rows.
Appropriate song choice, I thought, as Beverly Carver and Heather fell into step seconds later. As they passed, Heather shot an enticing smile at Steve that promised a good time to follow, while of course snubbing me.
“Whoa,” I muttered, watching Kelsey file into the center aisle with murder in her eyes as she watched Beverly.
Steve stood. “It’s nothing.”
“I wasn’t referring to your ex. Did you see the way Kelsey was looking at Mrs. Carver?”
I followed Steve into the center aisle where he took me by the elbow. With a squeeze he whispered, “Leave it alone.”
Yep, he definitely saw it.
I looked back at Lucille still in her seat. “You staying?”
She waved a pen and notebook at me. “I’ll keep watch in here until it’s time to head out to the cemetery. You stake out the foyer and watch people as they leave.”
Sounded like a plan. If there was even the remotest chance that a killer had attended today’s service and needed to have one last goodbye with Russell, I wanted eyes on anything that looked off. But I also didn’t want to lose sight of Kelsey.
Groaning, Steve steered me toward the exit, where I had a clear view of the receiving line forming in the narrow foyer, and at the front of that rapidly growing queue stood Joyce Lackey and directly behind her, Beverly Carver.
Uh-oh.
I pulled free of Steve’s grasp and headed their direction.
“The back of the line starts here,” he stated, sounding like he was taking his self-appointed security role seriously.
Pretending that I’d forgotten to sign the guest book, I lingered in the area like Lucille doing the daily dish with her Gray Lady pals.
“I’m so … so terribly sorry for your loss,” I heard Joyce say as she choked back tears.
Mitzi Walther extended her hand as if she were an automaton. “Thank you, dear. And you are … ?”
“Joyce Lackey. Russell had been doing such beautiful work at my house and—”
“You’re the one!” Mitzi’s gaze drew so sharp she looked like she could slice the woman in front of her into bite-sized pieces. “Russ said you were trouble and now my boy’s dead. You expect me to think that you didn’t have a hand in all this?”
“Mom,” Andy said gently, standing by his mother’s side while Nate stared down at his feet and looked like he’d rather be anywhere than here.
“But I didn’t,” Joyce sputtered. “I wouldn’t do anything …”
I could only see a fraction of her face, but I believed her.
Lucille might be on the right track with her Fatal Attraction theory, but Joyce wasn’t our femme fatale. Besides, I never could get past the idea of her sacrificing one of her precious carving knives on Russell’s tires.
“How dare you show your face here!” Mitzi pointed at the front door. “Get out!”
With a gasp, Joyce started shaking with sobs, looking as desolate as when I first saw her outside the police station. “I’m s-sorry.”
If ever someone needed an emotional rescue it was Joyce. With the hope that I’d find a volunteer shoulder for her to cry on, I searched the line for Steve. Instead I found Kelsey’s watchful eyes locked on Joyce and saw a flicker of a smirk that disappeared a split second before her gaze landed on me. Immediately it dulled as if she’d borrowed the carefully constructed mask I always saw on Marietta whenever I asked her questions about my father.
What the heck?
As I stood there feeling as conspicuous as a potted palm in the middle of the room while my brain raced to make sense out of what I had just observed, Joyce ricocheted off of me like a bumper car.
“I’m … so … s-sorry,” she stammered between shallow bites of oxygen.
Steve took her arm before she crumpled to the floor. “Joyce, allow me to see you home.” He gave me a sideways glance. “We’re done here.”
Fine. I couldn’t imagine any other outbursts in the foyer. Not unless Heather decided to get into an old grudge match with me, and with everything I’d witnessed in the last hour, that wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
I followed Steve and Joyce out the door and down the funeral home steps, rain falling in a steady mist from the blanket of gray clouds that had been hoverin
g overhead most of the morning.
“Hey! Wait up!”
Turning, I saw Lucille waving a piece of paper at me from the top of the steps. No point in both of us standing out in the rain, so I climbed the stairs, figuring that she had seen something in the chapel she wanted to report.
“The boys and me are gonna take off soon.” She looked up at the gloomy skies. “Damn, I’m gonna get wet. And I thought this jacket was already stinky.”
It was. “Anyone do anything that caught your eye in the chapel?”
She looked at the sheet of paper in her hand. “Fourteen gals laid flowers on his casket. Nine came up and said their goodbyes without flowers, and one … she just gave him a piece of her mind.”
My ears perked up. “Could you make out what she said?”
“Honey, anyone in the building should have been able to hear her loud and clear.”
“And?”
Lucille gave her head a shake. “She was a pisser. Wouldn’t want her mad at me, that’s for sure. Anyway, it sounded like she used to be head over heels for the guy. Even went somewhere and got a boob job for him, then she comes home and finds out that he’s left her for …” She checked her notes. “… some chickadee named Chelsea, or as she put it, ‘Effing Chelsea!’ Then, after she dropped a couple more F-bombs, she showed him what he’d missed.” Lucille demonstrated by pulling open her leather jacket by the lapels and sending some of her nephew’s stink in my direction.
“She flashed a casket?”
“Nice rack, too.” Lucille handed me the piece of paper with a list of over twenty names. “Not that I think she’s our girl. Not this one’s style, but I made a column for her anyway.” She pointed. “There she is, under Flasher.”
A flasher in the chapel and Mitzi Walther reaching her flashpoint in the foyer, while Kelsey looked like she had murder on her mind. This afternoon was getting stranger by the minute.
“That should keep you busy,” Lucille said.
“Yeah, I’ll get right on it.” Not.
“Good. I’ll let you know if anything goes down at the cemetery, but right now I gotta get back in there and pay my respects before it’s time to roll.”
Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles Page 18