Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 01 - Death by Chocolate

by Sally Berneathy

  “I thought you had something you wanted to talk to me about, something besides harassing me about doing my job.”

  “I do, but I’m not going to tell you until you tell me why you want to have those aspirins analyzed.”

  “Not going to tell me? I believe that’s withholding evidence. You could get in a lot of trouble for that.”

  “Yeah, like you could get in trouble for taking evidence from the scene of the crime without proper judicial authorization.” I’ve found if you throw in enough multi-syllabic words when you don’t know what you’re talking about, people usually assume you do.

  Trent didn’t. “Your friend voluntarily gave me the aspirin.”

  “She didn’t say you could have it analyzed.”

  “She didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  “So you admit you’re going to have it analyzed.”

  With a sigh, he pulled the tablets from his shirt pocket and held them in the palm of his hand. “Do these look like the pills in that bottle you have at work?”

  I peered closely. “Well, they’re small, white and round. I admit, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at aspirins.”

  With the tip of one wide, blunt finger, he flipped over one tablet. “It doesn’t say aspirin on either side, and it’s scored to break in half.”

  “Who knew when I was spending all that time in college studying the Pythagorean theorem and the influence of Puritanism on early American literature, I should have been studying the proper appearance of aspirin?”

  Trent closed his fingers over the pills and stuck them back into his pocket. “The chances are very slim that these are aspirin,” he snapped. “Now, if you don’t have anything to tell me about this case, I need to get back in there.”

  “No way would Paula take drugs!” I protested.

  “Is that all you wanted to tell me?”

  “No.” I sighed and pointed to the vacant house across the street, explaining about the hole in the hedge. I halfway expected him to tell me I was being silly, but he didn’t.

  Instead he peered intently at the house for a moment then said, “Show me.”

  We went over, and I indicated the flattened grass and the hole. “Somebody was smoking here,” I added, poking in the grass with one foot. “I found a tiny bit of filter. I don’t see it now, but it really was there.”

  Again he didn’t dismiss my dubious findings. I was wearing shoes today instead of being barefoot as I’d been when he’d seen me yesterday…dirty sneakers, but shoes nevertheless. Maybe shoes gave me more credibility.

  “You might want to get your foot out of the evidence,” he said, squatting down for a closer look.

  Okay, he wasn’t impressed with the shoes.

  He rose and went up on the porch to try the door. It was locked. He walked slowly along the side of the house, inspecting every window. When we got to the back yard, I mentioned the broken twigs and leaves around the gate. I knew he’d find them, but I just wanted him to know that I’d noticed, too. Credibility.

  As I watched him climb the steps to the porch, I thought about Henry’s reaction to that same spot, but didn’t think it was a good idea to tell Detective Trent that I had a visiting cat who was a psychic.

  He came down again with no change of expression. Obviously he wasn’t as sensitive as the cat. Big surprise.

  “Do you have the name of the owner?”

  “Sure, I have his name, address, and phone number at home. You think this ties to Zach being missing? You think somebody kidnapped him?” I held my breath waiting for him to say no, hoping he’d say no.

  He leaned against one of the porch posts, folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “Why would anyone kidnap the kid?” he asked. I should have known he’d answer my question with another question.

  “How would I know? Isn’t that your job, to find out?”

  “What do you know about the boy’s father?”

  “Nothing.” I leaned against another post and folded my arms, too, but I’m sure I didn’t look nearly as intimidating as he did.

  “This woman is your best friend, you live next door to her and work with her all day but you don’t know anything about the father of her child?”

  “Paula’s not talkative.”

  “You ever seen her mistreat the kid?”

  I jerked away from the post and stood upright at that absurd question. “Of course not! She adores him! And you’ve seen what a gentle person she is.”

  “A lot of people have problems with anger control, even people who seem to be very gentle when they’re out in public.”

  “Well, Paula’s not one of them. Like you said, I’m her best friend, I live next door to her and I work with her every day. I’d know something like that. What about your Lester Mackey who had her phone number in his apartment? What’d you ever find out about him?”

  “Nothing. He’s still missing. The case is still open.”

  Another chill zig-zagged down my spine. “Did he—does he live close?”

  Trent’s head tilted slightly to one side as he studied me intently, considering his answer. Didn’t the man ever do anything spontaneously? He was worse than Fred. “Yes,” he finally said.

  “You want to define close or is his residence a secret?”

  “Why do you want to know? Did you suddenly recover some buried memories of good old Lester?”

  “I can’t recover memories of something I didn’t know in the first place. I’m thinking maybe the guy’s some freako who’s been watching Paula and Zach and decided to kidnap the kid. Don’t you think you ought to check that out?”

  “I will if we don’t find the boy soon. Odds are he’s just wandered off. It happens when mothers leave the door open and don’t pay close enough attention to their kids.”

  “Paula’s not like that,” I protested.

  “Then what is she like?”

  I decided to leave out the part about her keeping her house locked up tighter than a maximum security prison and focus on other things. “She loves her son. She goes out of her way to take care of him. She just…” Okay, better not tell him she’d had a bad night after his visit yesterday. “She had a hard day at work today and a headache and fell asleep. It could happen to anybody.”

  “She said she doesn’t date, and you confirmed that. What about other friends? Anybody who comes to visit?”

  “Paula keeps to herself. She’s…introverted.” That sounded much better than saying she was a paranoid recluse. “Fred and I are her only friends as far as I know.”

  “How well do you know this Fred?”

  “Very well! What are you insinuating?”

  Before he could answer, we heard shouting from the street. Trent charged around the house to the front with me close behind.

  To the accompaniment of cheers and applause from their fellow officers, one cop strode up the walk with Zach on his shoulders while another climbed out of the cruiser carrying the missing orange truck.

  The screen door slammed open, and Paula rushed out to claim her son.

  Trent and I ran across the street to join the happy crowd.

  Paula laughed while tears streamed down her face as she held her son tightly. It was the first time I’d ever seen her cry. Zach waved his arms and chortled, apparently delighted with all the attention. “Where did you find him?” she asked.

  “In the park playing with his truck. Having a good time, weren’t you, big guy?”

  Zach spotted me. “Anlinny!” He struggled to break free of his mother’s hold, but she wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “Hi, Hot Shot. Been visiting, have we?”

  “Paak! Pees man!”

  “Yeah, you went to the park and managed to get the attention of a whole bunch of pees men.”

  The officer who’d carried him up the walk laughed. “That’s what he said as soon as he saw us, didn’t you big guy? Kind of nice to meet somebody who’s happy to see us.”

  “They’ve been teaching them at his nursery school that pol
icemen are their friends. Thank you all for finding him. Thank you so much! I just made coffee and I have plenty of Lindsay’s wonderful cookies. Please come in and have some.”

  “That’s real nice of you, but we gotta go,” the officer said, shifting from one foot to the other in a proud but slightly embarrassed way as he hitched up his gun belt with that attendant leather-creaking noise.

  And again Paula lost it. Her eyes widened, the pupils shrinking. Her face went seven shades paler. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she held Zach so tight he squirmed and pushed against her arms.

  What the hell? Surely she wasn’t afraid the officer was going to shoot her.

  Come to think of it, Creighton’s gun belt creaking had the same effect on her yesterday. She definitely didn’t do well around police officers…which, added to her death at the age of two and subsequent reincarnation in Pleasant Grove over twenty years later, didn’t speak well for her innocence.

  “Seeing the boy back with his mother is enough thanks for us,” the officer went on, apparently oblivious to Paula’s strange reaction. “You might want to make sure your door’s always locked from now on. I don’t want to scare you, but it’s possible somebody took your son to that park.”

  “Somebody?” Paula repeated, her lips barely moving. “Who? Why?”

  “Maybe Zach got out to the sidewalk, saw some older kid walking past, said park, and the kid took him. That’s a best-case scenario. You don’t want to hear any of the worst-case-scenarios. Just keep a close eye on him and make sure you don’t leave your door open. He’s a live wire, aren’t you big guy? I’ve got one his age at home, and he keeps my wife hopping. You can’t turn your head for a second.”

  Paula nodded, as if her throat had closed from terror at the possibilities of which the officer hinted.

  “Finish up here, Donald,” Trent instructed Creighton. “I need to get something from Ms. Powell.”

  “You do?” I asked.

  “I do.” He took my arm and turned me toward my house.

  “Why, Detective Trent, I had no idea you could be so impetuous,” I teased.

  He dropped my arm and glared at me, and I regretted my smart mouth. I hadn’t really minded his holding my arm.

  “I want to get the name and address of the people who own that vacant house over there.”

  “What for? Zach’s safe. Everything’s over, isn’t it?”

  “Lester Mackey’s still missing. That boy didn’t get to the park by himself. You don’t have any older kids wandering around, and somebody’s been watching your friend from that house. This thing is far from over.”

  I didn’t want to accept what he was saying, but I knew he was right.

  Chapter Seven

  “Nice place,” Trent said when he walked into my house.

  He didn’t strike me as the type to say something nice just to be polite. So I gave the man another point for having good taste.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I like it.”

  Henry strolled over to wind around the detective’s legs in that no-bones way of his. As I headed upstairs to get James Edwards’ address, I turned back to see how Trent was dealing with Henry. The way a man deals with a cat says a lot about him.

  He’d squatted to the cat’s level and was stroking his back. I could hear Henry purring.

  All right, that made a total of three points, but he was still way in the hole because of the way he’d treated Paula. Besides, he was a cop and cops wrote speeding tickets. An automatic one hundred point deficit.

  When I came back downstairs he was inspecting the antique Singer treadle sewing machine that I used to hold my nineteen-inch television set. I’m sure I don’t have to mention that Rick got the big screen in the game room. No big deal. I don’t even have a game room. He got that, too.

  “It originally belonged to my great-grandmother,” I said. “The sewing machine, not the television.”

  To my surprise, he smiled. It wasn’t the sunrise-in-the-desert kind of smile like Rick had, but a slow, easy smile that crinkled the corners of eyes and made them sparkle. “I like antiques,” he said. “They seem to hold something from everybody who owns them so it’s sort of like you have a piece of furniture with a past.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “My grandmother used to sew on this when I was a little girl. I rescued it from my parents’ attic. The embroidered scarf was hers, too. She died a couple of years ago. I miss her. That drop-leaf table with the Tiffany lamp on it belonged to her, too.” Suddenly I felt a little silly, talking about my furniture and my grandmother to Detective Adam Trent. “Here’s that address you wanted.” I walked closer and handed him a piece of paper.

  “Thanks.” He accepted the paper, glanced at what I’d written, then stuck it in his shirt pocket but made no move to leave. “Your friend, Paula, doesn’t share your love of antiques. All her furniture’s new.”

  Should have known he’d come back to that. Deduct all those points I’d just given him.

  I shrugged. “Antiques have to start somewhere. That sewing machine was new when my great-grandmother was young. Zach’s grandkids will probably think that coffee table of Paula’s is really cool fifty years from now.”

  Trent lifted one eyebrow. “Her coffee table?”

  “Okay, maybe not the coffee table.” The boring piece of furniture probably wouldn’t last fifty years and certainly wouldn’t inspire somebody to call it cool if it did. I searched my mind for another topic of conversation, anything to get away from Paula’s lack of history. “You want a Coke?”

  Oh, that was a great diversion! Offer him a drink, make him comfortable and give him a reason to hang around so he’d have plenty of time to quiz me about Paula.

  On the other hand, I still needed to get Lester Mackey’s address from him, and it wouldn’t hurt to find out exactly what Trent knew about Paula…especially if it happened to be something I didn’t know.

  “You got anything that’s not diet?” he asked. “I can’t drink that diet stuff.”

  “Nothing diet, nothing caffeine-free. Just the hard stuff.”

  I went to the kitchen and got cold cans for both of us. It was only when I handed him his that I thought to ask if he wanted a glass with ice. I consume most everything straight from the can. Pouring a Coke into a glass wasn’t something I ordinarily did.

  “I like it straight out of the can,” he said.

  “Me, too. Ice dilutes it, makes it watery.”

  “And flat.”

  We looked at each other in shock.

  Oh, God. I’d just had a bonding experience with a cop.

  “Did you want something besides trashing my friend?” I asked, moving away to sit on the sofa.

  He joined me on the opposite end, seemingly unperturbed by my attempted rudeness. They probably teach that at the academy, Stoicism 101. “Yeah,” he said. “I want some information about your friend.”

  “I already told you. She’s kind, honest, a good mother.”

  “Don’t know much more about her than I do, huh?”

  I shrugged and sipped my Coke.

  “Did you know Paula Walters isn’t even her real name? She stole the identity of someone who died thirty years ago.”

  “Of course I know that.” I’d only known it for twenty-four hours, but he hadn’t asked how long I’d known.

  “Then you probably know why she did it.”

  I tried to think of an answer that would sound innocent but couldn’t come up with one. “Maybe she has an abusive ex-husband, and she’s afraid of him.” When creativity fails, I sometimes have to rely on the truth.

  “Could be. He could have found her and taken the kid today, but it’s not likely he’d have left him at the park for us to find.”

  “Besides, she said he’s dead.”

  “She said her name’s Paula Walters, too.”

  We sipped our Cokes in silence for a few moments, then I decided to grill him. Worst he could do was refuse to answer, and I’ve always been amazed how much people will
tell you if you only ask. “Where do you figure Lester Mackey comes in?”

  “We don’t know at this point. Could be he found out her true identity and he’s blackmailing her for whatever it is in her past that she’s hiding from.”

  Ouch. I hadn’t thought about that. “So why did you start investigating his disappearance so soon, before the twenty-four or forty-eight or whatever that hour thing is?”

  His lips compressed slightly. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “How come I’m supposed to answer all your questions but you won’t answer any of mine?”

  “Because I’m the cop and those are the rules.”

  “Your rules, not mine. I don’t play by other people’s rules.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Do you have any of those aspirins that came from that bottle at work?”

  “Why? Is your shirt pocket having another headache?”

  “No, the pain’s a lot lower and on the back side of my body.”

  I got up to go find the aspirin I’d brought home. I didn’t want him to see me grin at that remark. He really was kind of cute. For a cop.

  My recycled bottle that held aspirin was so old, the label was long gone. I handed it to Trent, and he dumped a couple of tablets into his palm.

  I didn’t have to ask what he was looking for.

  He found it. These tablets were larger than Paula’s, weren’t scored, and had the word aspirin carved into one side.

  He handed the bottle back to me, keeping the two in his palm. “These come from the same community bottle at your shop?”

  “Yes.”

  He put my aspirins in a jacket pocket.

  “Damn it,” I said, “I don’t know what those tablets are, Paula would never take drugs! Maybe somebody came in when the door was unlocked and put something else in her bottle.”

  “She’d already taken the pills before she left the door unlocked.”

  I glared at him. It was the only response I could come up with.

  He stood. “Thanks for the Coke.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said automatically, then wished my mother hadn’t trained me so well in manners. He wasn’t welcome. I regretted being nice to someone who was going to cause problems for my friend.