Murder at the PTA (2010) bk-1

by Laura Alden

  She had a pen and order pad at the ready and scribbled away. “Cheese only?” She looked up, grinning. “Kids?”

  “A daughter who turns up her nose at any dinner without meat, and a son who is sliding toward vegetarianism.”

  “Usually the other way around, isn’t it?” She spun around, tucked the order onto a circular rack, then turned back to me. “I mean, aren’t girls usually the ones who do the veggie thing?” She plopped her arms on the counter. “I tried to be a vegan once, back when I was little.” This from a girl who looked as if she might be seventeen. “But then it was Thanksgiving, and how can you have Thanksgiving without turkey?”

  “Plus it’d be hard to be vegan in a place like this.” Clever Beth, manipulating the conversation. “How long have you been working here?”

  “Joe hired me two summers ago, right when he opened.”

  “That’s Joe Sabatini?”

  She giggled. “Want to know a secret?” She looked left and right and motioned me close. “Joe’s last name isn’t Sabatini,” she whispered. “It’s Pigg.”

  “Pig?”

  “With two gs. P-i-g-g.” Her giggle went loud, and she clapped her hands over her mouth. “Isn’t that too funny?” she said through her fingers. “I could be working at Pigg Pizza.” Her shoulders heaved with the effort of not laughing out loud. “At Pizza for Piggs!”

  “So where did the Sabatini come from?”

  “The Pigg’s Pizza Parlor.” Tears of laughter squeaked out of her eyes. “Oh, geez. Sabatini is some sports person. Like baseball?”

  Even I’d heard of that Sabatini. “Gabriela. She plays tennis.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Joe’s a big fan, I guess. He’s from South Dakota, came here to go to Wisconsin.” She shrugged. “All that school and money, and he ended up in dumpy Rynwood running a pizza place. Makes you wonder if college is worth it.”

  I walked out with dinner. Joe wasn’t Italian, and he was from South Dakota. Okay, he could still have mob ties, but the likelihood had plummeted from “maybe” to “oh, please.”

  And now I’d eliminated everyone Marina had mentioned as a suspect, which didn’t make sense. The bad guy wanted her to quit blogging, but if he wasn’t called out in WisconSINs, why would he care? Because Marina was poking around? What kind of sense did that make? None.

  I drove to pick up Jenna and Oliver, pushing other ideas around in my head. Nothing jelled, nothing came together, nothing clicked. As a detective, I made a pretty good children’s bookstore owner.

  The change in the evening’s meal plan from stew to pizza was a success with the kids—so successful, in fact, that I didn’t hear a single complaint when I said we needed to take Spot for a family walk. There was, however, a bit of jockeying over who carried the plastic bag. “We’ll put a schedule on the calendar,” I said. “Since I’m doing dog duty while you two are at your father’s, I’ll take one turn a week, no more. Yesterday was my turn. Tonight is Jenna’s.”

  The “But, Mom” whines instantly quelled when I said, “You two wanted this dog, not me. If you can’t handle the responsibility of a dog, he’s going back to the shelter.”

  It would have taken a court order to force me to return Spot, but they didn’t know that. He’d spent Saturday cowering in the laundry room, but by Sunday morning he’d turned into a real dog. He played catch with Jenna. He lay quietly on Oliver’s bed while stuffed animals were piled on top of him. He warmed my feet while I worked on the computer late at night. He’d even forged an early truce with the cat, who had taken one look at the interloper, hissed, and inflated to twice his normal size. A tail-wagging Spot just gazed at George, happy, tolerant, and unthreatening. George won the stare-down. Cats always did, but Spot didn’t care. Now that he had a family, he was a Happy Dog.

  The sidewalk was unevenly lit by streetlights, but there was enough ambient light to let us walk without squinting at our feet. Oliver held the leash and ran to the corner. “C’mon, Spot!”

  “He’s not such a bad dog,” Jenna said.

  “Maybe even a good dog?”

  “Maybe.” But she was cheerful, not cautious, or—much worse—sarcastic.

  If I’d been the optimistic sort, I would have cheered the occasion as evidence of a lessening of Bailey’s influence. But I was more the wait-and-see type.

  “What would you think,” I said, “if I asked someone over to have dinner with us?”

  “Like Mrs. Neff? Sure. She’s fun.”

  “No, more like Mr. Garrett.”

  “Who’s that?” Jenna, who had been skipping, stopped dead.

  “He’s a friend of mine.”

  We stood in the dappled shadows cast by streetlights and barren maple trees. “A boyfriend?” she asked.

  “I knew him when I was a little girl.”

  She studied me with eyes that knew too much. “Does Gramma Emmerling like him?”

  “We can call your grandmother and ask. But I’m not sure if she’ll remember him. He moved away after kindergarten.”

  “So you haven’t seen him since you were, like, five?”

  “He’s the new owner of the hardware. He just moved here a few weeks ago.”

  “Doesn’t he have a family of his own?”

  I gave her Evan’s vital statistics, and somewhere in the details about his younger daughter, Jenna relaxed. “I guess it’d be okay if he came over.” She started walking again. “Can you make meat loaf and baked potatoes?”

  I took her hand. “Steak sauce on the meat loaf?”

  Her hand, which didn’t feel much smaller than my own, squeezed back. “And ketchup on the baked potatoes!”

  “Oh, eww.”

  She giggled and dropped my hand as she raced to catch up to her brother. “I know something you don’t know,” she called ahead.

  “Tell me,” he said, beginning the inane rhyme they’d developed last summer. “Tell me in a tree, show me a bee, tell me for free, show me and I’ll go hee hee hee!” He gave a loud and artificial laugh.

  But for once I didn’t shush him. Part of the rhyme had finally shaken something loose in my head.

  Show me.

  Show me the money.

  I smiled. Finally, I knew how to start looking for Agnes’s killer.

  Chapter 15

  Hal Hopkins of Hopkins Surveying stared at me from the other side of his desk, then repeated the question I’d just asked. “Where did the money for the school addition come from?” His desk was so coated with folders, large papers folded awkwardly small, and large rolls of paper that there wasn’t even space for coffee. Hopkins held a mug in his left hand and fidgeted with his cell phone with the right. “Why do you want to know?”

  Good question. I’d have to stop by the library’s video section and study Jessica Fletcher’s techniques. Meanwhile, I summoned my inner bureaucrat. “As a member of the PTA,” I said, “I consider it my duty to tie up loose ends. Agnes didn’t tell us anything about the donor, and before we can make any recommendations on whether or not to proceed with the renovation, we should make every attempt to discover the money’s origins.”

  “Oh.” Hal blew the steam off his mug and his wire-rimmed glasses steamed up. From behind the fog, he said, “I guess that makes sense.”

  Good. I didn’t have time to watch all those DVDs, anyway.

  Hal noisily slurped some coffee. Clearly, his mother hadn’t raised him very well. I made a mental note to work on table manners tonight.

  “Wish I could help,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about the money.”

  Though I hadn’t expected to have the answer spill from the lips of the first person I questioned, I had harbored a tiny spark of hope. Which had just been extinguished by a great wave of reality. It had been luck enough that the only surveyor in town had done the addition’s construction staking. Why had I expected more?

  I held out one of my seldom-used business cards. He looked for a place to put his cell phone, but he couldn’t find one. When he put down his mug in
stead, it started sliding down the slippery slope of folders. He grabbed the coffee, and I placed the card on a folder. “If you think of anything else,” I said.

  “Sure. You bet.”

  I was sure the card would disappear within a day into the desk’s maw, never again to see the light of day. I thanked him for his time and turned to go.

  “Hey.” He gestured at me with his cell phone. “Have you talked to the architect? Browne and Browne?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Bick Lewis is the project manager,” Hal said. “He’s sharp. He might know.”

  I didn’t want to drive to Chicago, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone named Bick.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Mrs. Kennedy?”

  I looked up from a stack of invoices with which I was playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a past-due statement by its toe. “What’s up, Paoze?”

  “Have the police found my bicycle?”

  Between Marina’s death threats and Evan and Spot and the store’s upcoming Halloween party, I’d completely forgotten about the bike. “I haven’t heard.” Prevarication, thy name is Beth. I shuffled the bills, picked one at random, and put it on top. Done. “But there’s no reason why we can’t ask. Get your coat.”

  Once again, Paoze hung back as we walked up the police station’s front steps. And, once again, Cindy was working on the flower beds. She was cleaning leaves from behind the shrubbery, and a basket of deadheaded mums spoke of earlier work.

  I stopped. “Hi, Cindy.”

  She sat up and brushed at her face with the back of her wrist. “Hey, Beth. Paoze. You’re not here to ask about Agnes’s killer, are you? Because they haven’t found him yet.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Have you heard anything else? Suspects? Bad alibis? Anything?”

  Dust flew as she slapped her hands on her knees. “No, and you know what’s driving me nuts? I wasn’t even here that night. I missed the whole thing, thanks to my niece.”

  “Chrissie?”

  Cindy nodded. “Her husband was out of town on business a couple days, so I volunteered to babysit her kids while she was working, and she got mandated to stay an extra shift. I didn’t get home until the next morning.”

  She talked on, but I wasn’t paying attention. Ten down, one to go. I had to find more suspects. There was no way Erica had killed Agnes—no way whatsoever.

  Five minutes later, we were in Gus’s office, sitting in our appointed seats. “Sorry, son,” Gus said. “We’re doing what we can, but it’s pretty easy to hide a bike.”

  Paoze nodded. “Thank you, sir.” His voice was as expressionless as his face.

  Gus’s response was what both Paoze and I had expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear. “Paoze, I need to talk to Gus a minute. Why don’t you head back to the store?”

  Once the door closed softly behind him, I fixed Gus with a stern eye. “You know who took his bike, don’t you? You said as much last time we were here.”

  “Knowing is different than proving.”

  “What does proving have to do with anything? It’s just a cheap bike. Talk to the kid’s parents and get it back.” I waited a beat, but Gus stayed silent. “All Paoze wants is his bike. He doesn’t want anyone to get in trouble.” Silence. “This isn’t the big city; this is Rynwood,” I said in exasperation. “Why is this a problem?”

  “It isn’t just the theft of a bike.”

  “What?” Maybe it was time for Gus to get out of police work. Maybe he and Winnie could sell her garage sale finds on eBay, or maybe he could tutor kids in Latin. “What else could it be? Bike’s here, bike’s gone. Bike’s stolen. What else could . . .” A teeny-weeny lightbulb went off in my slow brain. “Oh,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  We sat in silence, contemplating the ugliness of racism. The Hmong immigrants hadn’t been welcomed with open arms by all of Wisconsin. I didn’t bother asking how Gus had determined who stole the bike. Any small-town cop worthy of the name knew the usual suspects and would have traced down the miscreants long ago.

  The fact that Paoze’s bike hadn’t been returned meant the parents weren’t cooperating. “Not my kid,” the mother would have said. “He was in his room that afternoon doing his homework.”

  Or the father would have done the talking. “Son, did you steal that bike? You wouldn’t take anything from one of those kids, would you?” He’d have ruffled his boy’s blond hair.

  In Gus’s office, dust motes spun in lazy circles. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “that you’ll tell me who took the bike.”

  “You suppose correctly.”

  My involuntary sigh made him smile. “But,” he said, “I’ll give you a little unsolicited advice. There’s a Robert Laird over on Crowley Drive, that short road behind the elementary school, who’s the same age as your Oliver.”

  Robert of the spaghetti worms?

  “He has a couple of older brothers,” Gus went on, “and let’s just say I doubt either one cares about making the honor roll.”

  Jenna and Bailey; now Oliver and Robert. I suddenly saw it all—Robert and Oliver stealing lawn ornaments and putting them in front of the school; Robert and Oliver bashing mailboxes with baseball bats; Robert and Oliver driving down the road with a backseat full of empty beer cans, the radio turned to volume eleven, seat belts flopping loose, a gravel truck pulling in front of them . . .

  I shook the images away. “What about the parents?”

  Gus looked grim. “The ex-husband? He lives on the other side of town and picks up the boys maybe once in three visitations, hangs around long enough to mess up their heads. The mother has had a series of live-in boyfriends who get younger and younger. No one disciplines those kids. Maybe a slap every once in a while.”

  Inviting Evan over for dinner suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. Not that he was my boyfriend, of course, but still . . .

  “If I were going to pick a friend for my son,” Gus said, “it wouldn’t be one of the Laird boys.”

  I wanted to say that maybe Robert was different. That maybe Oliver would be a good influence on a troubled child, that maybe Oliver’s kindness and compassion would bring out the best in young Robert, that Robert would graduate from high school, be the first in his family to go to college, marry happily and raise a large, loving family whose only thoughts were to do good in the world.

  But this wasn’t a fairy tale, and none of that was likely.

  The next day I left Lois in charge. It had taken a promise of time off between Thanksgiving and New Year’s to get Marcia to come in and help. I’d tried Paoze and Sara first, but Paoze had an exam in Shakespearean drama and Sara’s organic chemistry lab was something she couldn’t skip. “Sorry, Mrs. K,” she said, “but I’m not getting this section on ring systems, and if I miss this lab, I’m toast.”

  The expressway extended ahead in a long curve. It was a sight that, for me, inspired meditative thoughts. When driving long distances, I rarely played the radio or listened to CDs. Today’s meditation was “Come Up with a Brilliant Observation That Will Lead to the Conviction of Agnes’s Killer.”

  I spent fifty miles coming up dry. Clearly, it was time to lower my expectations. Maybe by the time I got to Chicago, I’d have figured how to manage Marcia better.

  Fifteen miles later, I switched to calculating the odds of both of my children choosing unfortunate friendships in the same year.

  Ten miles after that, I turned on the radio.

  “Good morning.” The receptionist at Browne and Browne smiled at me. The office was high rent, with colors and decor and lighting courtesy of expensive interior decorators. The complex shadows cast by the skylight and black stainless steel light fixtures didn’t come cheap.

  “How may I help you?” she asked. I approached the counter. Made of glass block and lit from within by deep green lights, it spoke softly of cleverness and luxury and a dose of magic. The woman, roughly my own age but model skinny
and with dangerously long fingernails, tilted her head slightly to one side.

  “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Bick Lewis.” I gave her my name.

  She lifted the phone receiver from a base that had as many buttons and flashing lights as an aircraft cockpit. “You’re welcome to have a seat.”

  I thanked her and ambled over to the waiting area, my shoes making a slight squishing noise on the hard floor. I eyed the copies of Structural Engineer and Architectural Digest, glanced at the leather and metal chairs, a sure trap for the unwary, and elected to stand.

  “Hello, hello.”

  Yesterday I’d heard the same voice through a hundred and fifty miles of phone wire and had envisioned a well-rounded sixtyish man with oxford shoes, white shirt, and a red paisley tie to match the suspenders that hid beneath a black suit coat. The reality was a little different.

  “Beth Kennedy, right?” A thin man, maybe thirty years old, pumped my hand. “Good to meet you, good to meet you.”

  The top of his head was in my direct line of vision. I looked down to see into his face.

  “Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice.”

  “No problem.” He whisked me through a low-ceilinged hallway lined with photos of what I assumed were buildings designed by Browne and Co. A few I recognized—a Chicago skyscraper, a Madison library—but the palatial residences were just blurs on my vision.

  “Here we are, here we are.” Bick ushered me inside an office. As I gingerly sat in a twin of the lobby chairs, Bick spun around a leather monstrosity and plopped down. Inside the huge chair he looked like a small child in his father’s office.

  “D’you mind?” He held up a pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

  “You’re allowed to smoke in here?”

  He grinned. “Partners get privileges. Yes, yes, I know. How does an undersized, pipe-smoking punk make partner of one of the largest architectural firms east of the Mississippi? Well, it ain’t my innovative designs.” He started stuffing his pipe with tobacco. “And it ain’t my engineering expertise.”