Definitely Dead (An Empty Nest Mystery)

by Lois Winston

  However, I dismissed the idea of Charlene as a murderer as quickly as it had entered my mind. If nothing else, I doubted she’d have had the physical strength to bash in Sid’s brains. Charlene was half his size.

  Instead, I turned my attention to her granddaughter. Tiffany seemed rather indignant over the way Sid had shafted Charlene. Enough to kill him? Tiffany was one buff, tough babe. Definitely a kid who spent more time working out than hitting the books, which would explain why she lifted papers off the Internet. From the looks of her biceps, she certainly had the strength to whack Sid over the head before piercing his aorta. I wondered if Charlene was missing any kitchen cutlery.

  I watched as Tiffany hung on Blake’s every word. Was she weighing her options? Figuring out how much we knew? Wondering what we weren’t divulging? Or was her intense interest in my husband for reasons that had little to do with murder and lots to do with Blake’s sexy good looks?

  I’m not sure which possibility bothered me more. Either way, despite her myriad tattoos and piercings, Tiffany was too much a femme fatale for my liking.

  Charlene stood. “Sounds to me like Sidney Mandelbaum tried to scam one person too many. Did I mention he started talking about a real estate deal during our first dinner?”

  “No,” I said. “What sort of real estate deal?”

  “One where he was getting in on the ground floor and asked if I was interested. I told him absolutely not. I don’t invest my money in anything other than blue chip stocks.”

  “Do you believe he was trying to lure you into an investment scam?”

  “You tell me.”

  When my jaw dropped over the implication that I was somehow involved in Sid’s dirty deeds, she waved her hand to dismiss any defense of my good name. Then she brushed her hands together, as if ridding herself of any Sidney taint that still clung to her. “I appreciate your coming to warn me,” she said. “I certainly won’t be letting those two imposters into my home. However, I’m surprised the police haven’t contacted me.”

  “They will,” I said. “I gave Detective Menendez a list of all the women Sid met through Relatively Speaking.”

  Charlene’s very thin, penciled brows arched toward her hairline. “All? Exactly how many other women were taken to the cleaners by that would-be gigolo?”

  I cringed at the unspoken insinuation. “Mrs. Koltchefsky, I can assure you I’m not running a gigolo service. I operate an honest business. Sidney Mandelbaum always paid his fees to me on time. I had no reason to suspect he was trying to con you or anyone else. And as far as I know, he didn’t behave that way with any of his other dates.” Although I was beginning to have serious doubts in that regard.

  She didn’t comment but nodded as she ushered us to the front door. As we were about to leave, she stopped me with a hand to my arm, “A word of advice, Mrs. Elliott?”

  “Yes?”

  “You seem like a decent young woman. Perhaps you should consider a different line of work.”

  I didn’t need to look at Blake to know what he was thinking.

  “Don’t say it,” I told him after we settled ourselves in the car.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” He started the engine. “But she’s right.”

  I glared at him. “I told you not to say it.”

  Blake opened his mouth to speak but was cut short by a pounding on the driver’s side window. Tiffany stood beside the car, motioning with her hand for him to roll down the window.

  “Thanks for not saying anything to Gram about you-know-what,” she said after Blake depressed the window button.

  “You’re an adult,” he said. “What happens in my classroom is between you and me, no one else.”

  She nudged her chin toward me. “She knows.”

  This kid was getting under my skin. I decided to disarm her with a smile. Since she didn’t know me, she wouldn’t know the difference between a beatifically innocent smile and the smirk which crossed my lips whenever I fibbed. It usually took people several lies on my part to figure that out about me. Or so I’d always thought until my conversation with Sylvia Schuster.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.” I patted Blake’s thigh. “And we really do need to get going. Nice meeting you, Tiffany.”

  “Wait!” She leaned into the car. “How about I do an extra credit project to erase that F?”

  Bull’s eye. Blake was a sucker for students who wanted to do extra work. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  She cocked her head and smiled in far too seductive a way to suit me. “What’s it worth to you if I find this guy’s killer?”

  “I think we need to leave that to the police,” said Blake. “This isn’t some game.”

  Tiffany inched her face closer to Blake’s and lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Then why are you playing it?”

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  Tiffany’s eyes glittered like a little kid who’d just gotten away with filching the last of the Oreos from the cookie jar and managed to lay the rap on her kid sister. She answered my question but kept her attention focused on Blake. “I’m cool around computers. I bet I can dig up all sorts of stuff on this dude.”

  “I’m sure the police have equally savvy computer investigators,” said Blake. “If you’re serious about erasing the F, I’ll assign you another paper.”

  Tiffany sighed. “Won’t be as much fun.”

  Or as productive, I thought. At least once a week I read stories in the newspapers about hackers entering government and industry computers. These kids seemed to have skills the professionals lacked. Putting aside both my dislike and suspicions of Tiffany’s motives, I asked, “What harm could it do? Why not see what she can find?”

  Blake stared at Tiffany. “Because whatever she’s thinking of doing is probably illegal.”

  She backed up a step and raised her arms. “No way. You think I’d risk going to jail for some dude who suckered Gram? I’d rather live with the F.”

  Blake wavered. “Promise?”

  She leaned back into the car and crossed her heart with her index finger. “Swear.”

  I stared at her. Hard. Why did I get the feeling she had the fingers of her other hand crossed behind her back?

  “I don’t know,” said Blake, wavering back in the other direction. “A man is dead. Even if you don’t do anything illegal, you could wind up in serious trouble.”

  “So could you,” said Tiffany.

  Blake cocked his head in my direction. “My wife is already involved. I don’t want anyone else getting dragged into this mess.” He shook his head. “No. If you want to erase the F, write me a paper on television censorship in the nineteen fifties.”

  “Sounds boring as tofu.”

  “Then live with the F,” said Blake.

  “I can’t. I need to keep my GPA up to maintain my scholarships.” When Blake didn’t budge, she sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Fine. How many words?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “What! The other paper was only twenty-five hundred.”

  “Which took you all of five minutes to download, splice together, and print.”

  “Fine. Five thousand words,” she grumbled, turning to leave.

  Blake called her back. “Tiffany?”

  She stopped but kept her back to him. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t bother trying to find some obscure paper on the Internet. I’ve read them all.”

  She threw her hands onto her hips and spun around, a smirk on her vermillion lips. “You really are a hard-ass hunk, aren’t you?”

  Without saying a word, I nestled against Blake’s shoulder and placed my hand on the back of his neck as I stared at her. I wanted to make sure Tiffany got the message that he was my hard-ass hunk. And totally off limits to her.

  “You surprised me,” said Blake a moment later as we pulled away from Charlene Koltchefsky’s home, her granddaughter standing in the street, staring after us. “Encouraging her
like that.”

  “She might’ve been able to help us.”

  “But you don’t trust her.”

  “With good reason. Been there. Done that.” My husband spent too much of his career fending off the advances of aggressive coeds.

  Blake chuckled as he stroked my thigh. “You do realize you have nothing to worry about, don’t you?”

  I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Hmm.” Unknown to Tiffany, she already had two strikes against her if she had designs on my husband. Along with hating cheats of any kind—academic or marital—Blake never could shake his childhood fear of needles. I needn’t worry that he and Tiffany would walk off into the sunset with matching pierced tongues. And Tiffany didn’t strike me as a woman who’d give up her human pincushion obsession for the love of a good man.

  “Not that I want to tempt fate,” I said, “but if Tiffany has computer talents that could help solve the mystery of Not-Sid’s death, shouldn’t we see what she can dig up?”

  “No, we should not,” said Blake. “We’re not dragging some innocent kid into this mess. It’s bad enough I have to worry about you receiving visits from thugs posing as Feds.”

  “Talk about jumping to conclusions,” I said. “You don’t know they’re thugs.”

  Blake gave me The Look. “What else would they be? Encyclopedia salesmen? Besides, if Tiffany were that good a hacker, how come I caught her?”

  “She didn’t hack your computer. She copped a few papers off the Internet and cobbled them together. You caught her because you have a photographic memory and have read every word ever written on the subject.”

  Blake frowned. “Doesn’t matter. She was just trying to wheedle her way out of that F. Anyway, whose computer would she hack to find info on Sid? We already know he’s not who he said he was. Without knowing his real name, how could she find out anything that you or I couldn’t find? It doesn’t take a hacker to do a Google search.”

  Blake had a point, and Tiffany had an ulterior motive that I suspected had more to do with having the hots for her hard-ass hunk of a professor than erasing an F. However, she struck me as the devious type, totally untrustworthy but capable of ferreting out all sorts of secrets. “If she can help solve the mystery of Not-Sid, I think we should take advantage of that help,” I said.

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t believe you’re sticking up for a coed with the hots for me.”

  “I’m willing to put up with her if she can help us.” For a limited amount of time. And never, under any circumstances, would I leave Lolita alone with my husband—no matter how much I trusted Blake.

  Not that it mattered since Blake had made up his mind. If I wanted Tiffany’s help, I’d have to do it behind his back.

  SEVEN

  “Where to now?” asked Blake, diverting the conversation away from Tiffany. “It’s getting late.”

  I took the hint and consulted my list of Not-Sid’s dates. “Kitty Pichinko lives in Plainfield. We can squeeze a visit in with her before we have to pick up Mr. Klingerhoff.”

  Blake muttered something under his breath at the mention of Mr. Klingerhoff, probably due to our destination later in the afternoon, but it was Kitty Pichinko’s hometown that raised an eyebrow and put a scowl on his face. “Plainfield?”

  “Not all of Plainfield has turned into gang-infested slums,” I said. “There are still some nice neighborhoods.” I rattled off the address as Blake punched it into the GPS. A minute later we headed west on Route 22.

  Kitty Pichinko was one of several women I had introduced Not-Sid to a couple of weeks ago at a VFW seniors mixer in Cranford. Not-Sid always zeroed in immediately on the women with large casabas. Kitty Pichinko, although not much to look at, given her frizzy dishwater hair, crooked nose, and stocky stature, had the requisite casaba cup size. Not-Sid rarely looked past the melons.

  Kitty lived in a neighborhood where fifty and sixty-year-old ranchers, split levels, and cape cods shared acreage with a sprawling two-story brick garden apartment complex of the same era. Although in need of some TLC, the neighborhood didn’t qualify for slum status by a long shot. “She’s in Building Three, apartment B,” I said.

  Blake pulled around to the parking lot at the back of Building Three. After hoofing it to the front of the building, we found Kitty Pickinko lugging a full bag of groceries up her front steps. “Mrs. Pichinko, let me help you with that,” I offered, coming up behind her.

  She turned to stare at me. Puzzlement clouded her features. “Do I know you?”

  “Gracie Elliott. We met several weeks ago at the VFW mixer. I introduced you to Sidney Mandelbaum.”

  Recognition dawned. “Oh, yes.” She handed me her groceries. “Thank you, dear.”

  I passed the bag to Blake as I introduced him. “May we speak with you for a few minutes?”

  “I have to get my groceries into the fridge, but you’re welcome to come in.” She fitted her key into the outer door. Once the lock disengaged, Blake held the door open for us to enter.

  We stepped into a foyer in dire need of new carpeting, a fresh coat of paint, and brighter wattage light bulbs. With only a few minor tweaks, the description might also apply to the drab Kitty Pichinko who wore a threadbare ivory cardigan over a faded coral polyester pantsuit that couldn’t possibly have been fashionable even back in the seventies.

  Two doors, one marked A, the other B, stood on either side of a central staircase that I assumed led to apartments C and D. Kitty turned right and slid her key into the first of three locks on door B. After disengaging each of the deadbolts, she pushed open the door.

  The eye-watering, nose-dripping odor of mothballs smacked me full force. I tried not to gag as Kitty ushered us through a spotless but spartan living room, so devoid of personal items that it looked more like a circa nineteen-sixties hotel lobby, into an immaculate but starkly impersonal kitchen. The complete opposite of Charlene Koltchefsky’s “more is better” decorating style, Kitty Pichinko apparently subscribed to the Mies van der Rohe philosophy of “less is more.” Or more aptly in Kitty’s world, perhaps the reigning decorating anthem was “least is best.”

  I glanced at Blake. Behind Kitty’s back, he rolled his equally watery eyes and mouthed, “Make it quick.”

  Meanwhile, Kitty appeared immune to the stench. Maybe the mothballs had burned out her olfactory glands and tear ducts decades ago.

  As she unloaded her groceries and began placing them in her refrigerator, I explained the reason for our visit.

  “Oh, my!” she said when I mentioned that Not-Sid had died. “And he seemed like such a healthy gentleman. I suppose you never know when your time will come, do you? My dear Charlie went like that. Here one moment, gone the next.”

  “In Sid’s case, his time came well before it should have, Mrs. Pichinko. Sid was murdered.”

  Kitty dropped the grapefruit she’d been about to place in the fruit bin. Her jaw dropped, and the color fled from her face. Blake took hold of her elbow and guided her into one of the circa nineteen-fifties chrome and yellow vinyl kitchen chairs while I bent to retrieve the errant grapefruit from under the table. After closing the refrigerator door, I grabbed a glass from the drain board, filled it with tap water, and placed it in Kitty’s hands. She stared at it for a moment before taking a tentative sip.

  “How did it happen?” she finally asked.

  I gave her the Cliff Notes version, sparing her the gruesome details.

  “The streets are no longer safe,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t dare go out alone after dark anymore.” She heaved a huge sigh. “I’d move tomorrow, but with the economy the way it’s been…well, who knows how long I’ll even have Social Security and Medicare with the way things are going?”

  As delicately as I could, I explained how I didn’t believe Sid was the victim of random violence. “I’m trying to find out if his dates may have some information that might lead to the identity of his killer.”

  Kitty’s eyes narrowed. “Why on earth would you think I
’d know anything about that man’s killer?”

  Blake placed a comforting hand on her age-spotted forearm and offered her an expression filled with the kind of comfort and understanding that makes women of all ages want to swoon at his feet.

  Gracie bad cop. Blake good cop. Whatever worked.

  “What my wife means, Mrs. Pichinko, is that perhaps Sid might have said something to you at some point that could be a clue. Perhaps he mentioned something about business associates, relatives, neighbors? Someone he’d had problems with recently?”

  Kitty took another sip of water, clenching the glass so tightly that I feared it might shatter in her hands. “What about the police? Will they question me?”

  “Yes,” I said, “they have a list of all Sid’s dates.”

  What little color remained in Kitty’s face quickly drained away. She slammed the glass onto the table, sloshing water over the lip and onto the yellow gingham oilcloth table covering. “I don’t want to get involved with the police. You tell them I don’t know anything.”

  “I realize the police can be intimidating, Mrs. Pichinko, but they have to do their job. I’m afraid I can’t keep them from questioning you.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I thought if I spoke with you and the other women, you might feel more comfortable discussing Sid with me. I’m hoping you’ll remember something that could prove helpful in the investigation. Do you remember any of your conversations with him?”

  She shook her head.

  “He didn’t speak about anything personal when you went out with him?”

  “He hardly spoke at all. And we never went out. He came over. We had tea. He left. I never heard from him again.”

  Odd. Not-Sid pulled a disappearing act on Sylvia Schuster and zipped in and out of Kitty Pichinko’s life in about a nanosecond. Yet he took Charlene Koltchefsky on several dates where he either scammed or tried to scam her out of the cost of dinner. Maybe Not-Sid suffered from multiple personality disorder.