Maple Frosted Murder (Donut Hole 2)

by Susan Gillard

  Heather pulled her car into an empty space in front of Stan’s shop and sat for a moment thinking. Only one car occupied a space anywhere nearby, and even that car could have belonged to someone patronizing the laundromat. The lights were off, except for one light in the back somewhere. The sign on the front of the door was still turned to “closed.”

  Oh, well. At least she had tried.

  Just as she was about to put the car in reverse, she saw someone moving around in the back of Stan’s shop. She grabbed her purse and jumped out of the car, almost forgetting to lock up. She rushed to the door and pounded on it, then grasped the silver handle and rattled it.

  The guy in the back of the store looked up. She tried to make eye contact with him as she rattled the door again. He came toward the front of the store, stopped a couple yards from the door, and shouted, “We’re closed!”

  “I need to talk to you,” she shouted back through the glass. “I don’t want to buy any donuts. I just want to talk to you.”

  The guy—she could now see that he was young, probably early 20’s—hesitated a moment, sizing her up, then reluctantly twisted the lock on the door. He opened it a crack, stuck his face in the opening, and said, “What do you want?”

  “I just want to talk to you,” she said. “Look, I know that Stan’s dead. I’m Heather Janke. I—”

  “You own that other donut shop,” Mr. Young Guy said, and she nodded. “Okay, come on in,” he said, swinging the door wide and stepping back for her to enter.

  She did, and he closed and locked the door. “Let’s talk in the back,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to think we’re open.”

  She followed him back into the kitchen, where he offered her a cheap metal folding chair that was pushed up against the wall in a corner. “I can get another chair from the front if you want,” he said.

  “This is fine,” she said, sitting down and placing her purse on the floor next to her. “Okay, so you know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Ben,” he said. “I’m Ben. I’m—well, I was—Stan’s assistant.” Ben looked around as if trying to figure out a place to sit, then ended up lounging against a counter.

  “Did you like working for him?”

  Ben hesitated. “Look, you seem like a nice person, but—I’m still not sure why you want to talk to me.”

  She met his gaze with what she hoped looked like an honest, open expression. “I’m trying to figure out who killed him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the police think I might have done it.”

  Ben’s body tensed. “Did you?”

  “No. But they think I might have had a reason to. Stan and I never really got along. Lately, he made some very public accusations against me, that I was trying to steal business away from him. And I think he was also spreading rumors around town that the health department had cited me for unsanitary practices. Which they didn’t. You can look it up.”

  As she was talking, Ben had once again relaxed. Now, he leaned toward her. “You weren’t the only one he accused of stuff,” he said.

  “What did he accuse you of?” she asked.

  “He acted like it was all my fault that business was going down. Like it was my fault the product quality was slipping. But what else was I supposed to do when he never wanted to spend any money? How was I supposed to produce top-quality donuts when he wouldn’t buy enough of the ingredients we needed?”

  “Good question,” she said. “So you didn’t get along either.”

  “Not hardly. I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but I—well, you can imagine how I felt about him.”

  “I can indeed.” She crooked a small smile at him as her gaze roamed the kitchen area, finally landing on the deep freeze over in one corner. “Was that where he—where you—found him?”

  “Yep. Crumpled up on top of the packages of sausage links.”

  “So you called the police right away?”

  “Yeah, I called 9-1-1. Then I waited for them outside. I didn’t want to be in here with—well, you know.”

  “Do you have any idea who killed him?”

  Ben snorted. “Could have been any of a number of people. He managed to alienate just about everybody.”

  “But do you have any ideas who might have done something about it?”

  “I’m not trying to accuse anybody,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if his wife offed him. They hated each other. You mentioned public arguments? They had their share.”

  “I’ve never met his wife.”

  “I have. A few times, when she would come to the shop. Not that she ever talked to me. She mainly ignored me. Like because I was hired help, I was beneath her notice.”

  ***

  Heather drove slowly toward Donut Delights, pondering what she had learned so far.

  Stan and his wife hated each other and had had several public arguments. Stan and his employee, Ben, didn’t get along. Ben probably hated him too, though he was too polite to say it. Stan had falsely—at least, to hear Ben tell it—accused him of running his donut shop into the ground. Rob Gingrich, Stan’s accountant, was obviously angry with Stan for accusing him of embezzling money from Stan’s not-so-profitable business.

  That made three people who didn’t get along with Stan. Maybe they even hated him, or, at the very least, were angry with him. Any one of them could have killed him.

  Did poor Stan get along with anybody? she wondered, surprised at the twinge of sympathy.

  An idea pinged in her brain, and she swerved the car into the parking lot of the police station. As long as she was nearby, she might as well stop in and see if Detective Shepherd was in. Maybe he could tell her more about the manner of death.

  She pushed through the glass door into the lobby of the station. The uniformed officer sitting at the desk looked up, stared at her for a moment, then said, “May I help you, ma’am?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Is Detective Shepherd in?”

  The officer tore his eyes from her and picked up the phone. Heather gathered her long, curly red hair up off her neck into a ponytail, then let it drop. Sometimes, having long hair got to be a pain. But at least it kept her head warm in the winter.

  “Shepherd’s not in,” the officer said. “At least he didn’t answer his phone.”

  “Okay, thanks,” she said. “I’ll just call him.”

  She smiled at the officer, who looked like he was wondering why she had Shepherd’s number, and left the police station.

  ***

  When she drove past her shop on the way around the corner to her usual parking spot in the back, however, she recognized a familiar car. Apparently Shepherd was at Donut Delights. Well, that would save her a phone call.

  She entered through the back into the kitchen, as she always did, stowed her purse in her office, and headed for the dining area, where customers sat in wrought-iron chairs at the same kind of tables. The floors were a dark gold wood, the walls distressed brick. In the middle of each table sat a very Paris-looking flower arrangement in a china coffee cup.

  Detective Ryan Shepherd sat at one of the tables at the edge of the room, a plate with a Southern Pecan Pie donut on the table in front of him next to a coffee cup. She joined him and gestured to the donut. “I guess you liked it the other day?”

  “It’s good,” he said. “Actually, it’s great.”

  “So what did you need to talk to me about?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing? Then why are you here?”

  “Can’t a guy get a good donut and a cup of coffee—which is also good, I might add—without having his motives questioned?”

  “Uh, I guess so. You really didn’t have anything to talk to me about?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “I have something to ask you about.”

  Unable to speak around his mouthful of donut, he gestured at her to continue.

  “The manner of death,” she said, making sure to lower her voice so
that customers at nearby tables couldn’t hear her. “You said it was blunt force trauma.”

  “Yes.”

  “With what?”

  “Probably the rolling pin we found in the alley with blood and one hair on it.”

  “So it was a crime of opportunity.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What do you mean? You think someone came to the donut shop and planned to hit him over the head with a rolling pin?”

  “No. I think someone came to the shop hating him and wanting to kill him. Then when the opportunity presented itself, and Mr. Dombrowski obligingly leaned into the deep freezer, the killer snatched up a rolling pin and conked him in the back of the head. Which caused him to collapse over the edge of the freezer. Then all the killer had to do was lift up his feet, dump him in, shut the lid, and drop the rolling pin in the alley on his or her way out.”

  “Why do you think he was leaning into the deep freezer when the killer hit him? Or that he conveniently collapsed on the edge?”

  “Blood spatters,” he said. “On the inner lid of the freezer. And droplets of blood on the inside bottom of the freezer, beneath where the body was lying, and which would not have resulted from the position of the head once he was in the freezer.” Shepherd paused and took another bite of his donut. “Mmmm. Delicious.”

  Heather couldn’t help grimacing. “You talk about blood spatters, and then you just eat your donut. Eeww.”

  “You get used to it,” he said. “If you’re a homicide detective, and you don’t learn to eat under, shall we say, less-than-proper circumstances, you don’t get to eat much.”

  She shook her head to dispel the lingering yuck. “So it could have been a man or a woman. Even a small-built person could have whacked him, then helped him into the freezer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad that doesn’t eliminate anybody.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “But we have some suspects. And I’m sure you do, too.”

  “Whom do you suspect?” she asked.

  “Can’t tell you. Whom do you suspect?”

  “Can’t tell you. But I’ll let you know if I find out anything I think you might not be aware of.”

  “I’d rather you just tell me everything. Actually, I’d rather you didn’t investigate at all. But I suppose there’s no chance of that?”

  “Nope,” she said. “None.”

  Chapter 5

  That afternoon, Heather handed the last customer of the day a bag containing two White Christmas donuts. “Merry Christmas,” she said, smiling.

  “Merry Christmas.” Her customer smiled back.

  Heather waited until the woman had left the shop, then crossed the dining area to lock the front door and turn the sign to Closed. “All right, people,” she called out in a cheery voice. “Let’s get everything cleaned up. It’s time to party!”

  Maricela and Angelica turned in unison to look at her. Jung paused, the cash register tray in his hands. “What party?” he asked.

  “Our party,” she said. “Come on, I’ll help clean.”

  With four people wiping, scrubbing, counting, sweeping, and washing, it didn’t take them long to clean the shop to a level that even the health department would approve of. Heather darted out to her car to retrieve three brightly colored gift bags with tissue paper sticking out of the top.

  “You didn’t have to bring us anything,” Angelica protested.

  “Of course I did,” she said. “We’re family. Over here, everybody.”

  They all sat down around one of the larger tables. Her employees watched her expectantly as she placed a gift bag in front of each one, leaning around the evergreen-with-red-candle-and-berries centerpiece in the middle of the table.

  “Before you open these,” she said, “I want to say something.”

  She cleared her throat, met each of their gazes, and began again. “Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about Stan, and his death, and the way he ran his store. You all know that he didn’t treat his employees very well.”

  Somber nods followed her words.

  “Well, I want to make sure I’m not like that. I want not only to pay you a good salary, but to show you appreciation. I want you to know how much you mean to me. I said it a minute ago, and I’ll say it again—we’re family.” She paused, looking at each of their dear faces, and saw tears in Maricela’s eyes.

  “Go ahead, open your gifts before I cry,” Heather said hurriedly, waving a hand in front of her face.

  Maricela reached for her bag, then hesitated. “You’re not like that,” she said, looking straight at Heather. “Gift or no gift.”

  Heather smiled as they all dug into their bags. She watched as they each pulled out a gift card and flipped open the little folder it came in. When Maricela and Jung saw the amounts, they were speechless. But Angelica burst into tears, got up, and hurried around the table to hug her.

  “This means to me a lot,” she sobbed, holding tightly to Heather. Suddenly, she let Heather go and reached for a napkin to wipe her eyes, and another one to blow her nose. She mumbled something Heather didn’t catch.

  “What did you say?” Heather asked.

  Angelica smiled through her tears and gestured to Maricela, who said, “She says, ‘I wish I didn’t always ugly cry.’”

  They all laughed, then, and Jung and Maricela thanked her for their gifts as well. “You’re welcome,” Heather said, then spread her hands flat on the table top. “Okay. I don’t want to keep you any longer.”

  Jung and Maricela exchanged a glance, and Jung said, “Stay there a minute, please.”

  Heather watched as he walked around behind the front counter and ducked down behind it. She could no longer see him, but she could hear rustling. In a moment, he stood up with a gift bag, which he held proudly in front of him as he crossed the dining area toward her.

  “What’s this?” Heather asked. “Well, okay, duh, it’s a gift, but—you—you didn’t…” She fumbled to a stop.

  “You always give to everyone else,” Maricela said. “Why shouldn’t we give to you?”

  “Because—oh, I don’t mean this to sound bad—but because you’re my employees. I’m the boss. You shouldn’t have to do anything for me.”

  “It doesn’t sound bad at all,” Maricela said. “Donut Delights is your shop. You run it. We’re your employees. Just don’t forget that we’re also your friends.”

  “You gave me a job when I was in desperate need of one,” Angelica said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “You’ve been worth every cent I’ve paid you, and then some,” Heather said. “All of you have. I couldn’t pay you enough for your friendship.”

  “You not make me ugly cry again,” Angelica said, and they all laughed. “You open your gift.”

  Heather lifted out the tissue paper and set it on the table next to the gift bag. She reached her hand inside and felt her fingers close around something hard and metal. She lifted out a simple yet elegant silver picture frame, and as she looked at the picture contained in it, she burst out laughing.

  Maricela, Angelica, and Jung were all in the picture, leaning close together, their arms around each other, smiling for the camera. Each of them wore reindeer antlers and a bright red Rudolph nose. “Thank you,” Heather said. “This is going on my desk. Thank you so much.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Maricela said.

  Heather reached back into the bag and located a small envelope. Opening it, she found a gift card to Hillside’s most upscale spa. “It because you always take care of us,” Angelica said. “Now you let someone else take care of you.”

  “You guys are amazing, and I love you all,” Heather said, standing up. “Group hug!”

  They all met on her side of the table, formed a circle, and squeezed each other tight.

  ***

  Heather didn’t check her cell phone until she was in the car on her way home. She listened to her one message and found t
hat it was from Ryan Shepherd.

  “Hi, Heather, this is Ryan Shepherd,” he said. “I was just wondering…did you come by the station earlier today, because—” There was a pause, and she could hear him mumbling something muffled and irritated in the background, as if he was covering the phone with his hand. “Anyway, someone said—” A loud burst of laughter and shouting interrupted him.