A Case of Sour Grapes: A Cass Elliot Companion Novel (Cass Elliot Crime Series Book 3)

by Gae-Lynn Woods

  Nicole nodded.

  “None were left intact?”

  She cocked her head to the side and looked at me. “We have a gun safe in the house. He stuck three banjos in it a couple of weeks ago.”

  I put my napkin on the table. “May I have a look at those banjos?”

  BUSY BOY INDEED

  A BANJO MAY LOOK like a tambourine on a stick, but they’re heavy little boogers in case you’re wondering. I had a theory about the break-ins at all the houses Bret’s women frequented, and I thought it would be easy to prove. Shaver convinced Nicole to let me take the banjos back to Forney County, and I gave him a receipt.

  On the drive home, I explained my theory to Cass and she agreed that what I was thinking was plausible, but doubtful. It would require some phone work, but that was doable.

  We got to Lost and Found at nine o’clock and I was surprised to see the lights still on. We headed inside, me lugging two banjos and my briefcase, and Cass carrying one plus a Nordstrom’s shopping bag. I was even more surprised to find Kay, Babby, Cindy, Blue, and Yvette working in the conference room in relative peace. A beautiful smell was wafting from the kitchen and my stomach growled.

  Cass looked at me. “Seriously? We just finished lunch.”

  “You might’ve had lunch,” I grumbled, kicking off the Louboutin’s and flexing my toes. I slipped on a pair of comfy old tennis shoes I keep under my desk and switched items from the briefcase to my purse. “But Ned Shaver took advantage every time I was talking and scarfed the fried rice. No wonder he’s so chubby.”

  Three white boards blocked the room’s windows and two of them were full of Cindy’s scratchings. She’d rewritten, sloppily, my timeline of Bret’s marriages and divorces, and found two more ex-wives. Both living in Texas. He’d married them while he was married to Blue and Nicole and was still married to one, which made three concurrent marriages. Busy boy indeed.

  She’d also created a timeline of the break-ins and murders, which was revealing.

  “How’d it go?” Kay asked.

  “Interesting,” I said. “Nicole Ivy wants to meet Blue.”

  Everyone looked at Blue. “Do I need a bodyguard?”

  Cass chuckled. “That might not be a bad idea. Nicole’s personality really swings.”

  “Her lawyer is bringing her down tomorrow to officially identify the body, since she was his spouse first, and Nicole insists on talking to Blue.”

  Blue shrugged. “Fine by me. I’d like to meet her, too.”

  Cass and I put the banjos in a corner of the conference room and joined the women at the table. “She’s not the empty-headed bimbo I thought she’d be,” I said. “Given that she’s a lawyer I should’ve expected some smarts, but her emotions do get the better of her.”

  “What kind of law does she practice?” Yvette asked.

  “Hollywood stuff.”

  “That explains the mood swings.”

  I wondered about that but decided to ignore her. “When we told Nicole that Bret - she calls him Baxter - was dead, she thought he was playing a joke on her.”

  Blue frowned. “Why would her husband do that to her?”

  “She seemed to think he liked to play practical jokes.”

  “And once she realized you were serious?” Babby asked.

  “She broke down,” I said.

  “Then kicked us out,” Cass added.

  “But she called before we left town and we met her and her lawyer and had a chat.”

  “What’s his name?” Yvette asked.

  “Ned Shaver. Do you know him?”

  She talked as she tapped on her phone. “No, but I’ll have someone put a résumé together so we know who we’re dealing with.”

  “They gave me the impression they worked together, Cass. Did you get that idea, too?”

  “Yes. I thought it was weird at first, having a criminal attorney as part of a firm that practices entertainment law, but given what actors and actresses get up to, it makes sense.”

  “Did she have an alibi for Bret’s murder?” Kay asked.

  “She was at a party the firm hosted,” Cass answered. She pulled out her phone. “Give me your email address and I’ll send the guest list to you to verify.”

  Kay did, and then asked, “If she didn’t do it, did she have any idea who had motive?”

  “Not that she could think of immediately,” Cass said. “But her lawyer said they’d talk about it on the drive down tomorrow. Nicole was a little tipsy when we left her.”

  “She did mention a kid,” I said.

  “Bret had a child?” Blue asked.

  “She didn’t know about one if he did, but a Hispanic kid came to their house this spring looking for BB Ivy.”

  Collectively, eyebrows went up.

  “Bret told her he didn’t know who the kid was, but Nicole wondered if this child was a product of a union between Bret and a Hispanic woman. He was in his late teens or early twenties.”

  “What an amazing liar Bret was.” Blue pushed back from the table. “I’m starving. Do you mind if I bring our food in here?”

  No one objected, and Cindy rose to help her.

  “Where does this leave us?” Babby asked as the two women left the room.

  “I don’t know where we are on the murder,” I said. “But I think I know why the instruments were smashed. If I’m right, maybe we can learn something about Bret’s death from the people who trashed them.”

  THE IDEA

  THE SHADOWS ON THE courthouse lawn came to life for the briefest of moments, then settled again into the still evening. A trio of men huddled under the sheltering arms of an ancient live oak and peered around its massive trunk to watch the only office with lights on this late.

  “Did you see that?” Big Billy whispered.

  “How many were there?” asked the shorter man.

  “Two.”

  “No, three,” said Sugar. “The other chick had one, too.”

  “Guitars?”

  “Banjos, I think.” Sugar pulled at his nose. “You think they’re BBs?”

  “Who else?” Billy answered. They watched the glowing windows and saw movement behind the blinds. “What now?”

  Sugar released his nose. “I have an idea.”

  THE THEORY

  IT TOOK ABOUT TWENTY minutes to run through my theory. During that time, everyone else was eating these gorgeous little puff pastries filled with cheese and prosciutto. Blue stepped from the conference room once and returned with a selection of grapes, cheese, salami, and crusty loaves. Two bottles of wine were on the table, one white and one a blood red, disappearing quickly. Why is it that I pick my time to talk when there’s wonderful food around? Thankfully, there were plenty of questions and I managed to sneak a few bites.

  My theory went something like this: I believed the tapes from Poison Ivy and the Dismembered Bunnies’ last recording session had surfaced, and Bret had them. Maybe he took them from the studio before it burned, maybe the Bunnies’ manager had them. If Bret was angry enough to smash Sonny’s guitar, he would’ve had no qualms about taking the tapes. Why bother? Maybe he was pissed off about Sonny’s disappearance. Or, maybe he believed there was something of value on them.

  When Kay asked what that might have been, I answered, “Decent recordings that could be turned into an album is the logical answer, but there might’ve been something else. A recording of their joint song writing, of them working through bad takes, of a fight, or perhaps of something damning to Sonny or his family.”

  Everyone scoffed at this except Cass, but I held fast.

  “I think the Dismembered Bunnies found out Bret has the tapes and believe he hid them in one of his instruments,” I said.

  “Why would he do that?” Blue asked.

  “I don’t know. But Kado told us the destruction of the instruments was methodical. Remember? Someone took them apart carefully, except for the banjos. I think they did that to see what was in them, and then smashed everything to make it look like a
break-in gone bad or maybe a revenge thing.”

  “Fine, Maxine,” Cindy said. “Open the cases. What are we looking for?”

  “Cassette tapes. The studio would transfer the recording session to a cassette, mastered or unmastered, and give it to the band.”

  “The recording studio would have a copy of those sessions?” Cindy asked.

  Clever girl. “Yes, and we could probably get them from the studio if it hadn’t burned.”

  We seven women spent half an hour shaking those three banjos and feeling the cases to see if anything resembling recording tapes was secreted away in them. No dice. However, I wasn’t willing to give up until we’d found someone who could take the banjos apart to be sure nothing was inside the tambourine part.

  The worst part about the empty banjos was that Cindy scoffed harder. I ignored her and explained my plan of action for Tuesday morning. Since the winery’s credit card contained recent UPS and FedEx charges in amounts that were for something bigger than a breadbox, and Bret’s call history showed he’d made recent contact with his ex-wives, I thought he might be shipping guitars and banjos to them for safekeeping. Heads nodded, but without enthusiasm. To keep from losing momentum, I carried on with my theory. I also believed Santiago ‘Sonny’ Arellano was alive and well and living in Mexico, and he’d taken the reigns of his family’s drug business. The recent sightings of him made this plausible.

  “So what?” Cindy asked, licking garlic oil from her fingers.

  “If there’s something harmful to his family on those tapes, Sonny might want them back now that he’s the big cheese.”

  “What could be so harmful?”

  “What if Sonny really didn’t want to be involved in the drug business when he was younger and more idealistic? What if he said something on those tapes that could undermine his leadership now, cause a rift in his family, or allow someone to challenge his authority?”

  Cindy digested this. “If he’d been reluctant to be involved in his youth but suddenly saw the light regarding the family business, somebody might think he was a snitch?”

  I have to hand it to her, I hadn’t made it that far in my thinking. I didn’t tell Cindy that, of course. “Exactly. Or maybe he gave up family hideouts, drug processing locations, key members of the cartel, that kind of thing. But there had to be a trigger to cause Sugar Murphy and Big Billy Garcia to chase Bret and break into these houses.”

  “We have no proof they broke into Annie or Daphne’s houses,” Cass pointed out. “Or into Nicole Ivy’s, for that matter.”

  “No, we don’t,” I agreed. “And other things were taken during the break-ins, but that was a diversion. What they were really after were the instruments.”

  “They weren’t really after the instruments either, precious,” Babby said. “They smashed them up instead of stealing them.”

  “From what I can tell from the insurance inventory, about twenty are missing,” Blue said. “Murphy and Garcia might’ve stolen them.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But Bret was cautious. He had to be to pull off all his marriages. I think the trigger was the article about the winery.” Nobody replied, so I continued. “Think about it. An article comes out last autumn about the winery, including photos of the owners. Bret Ivey was very good at keeping a low profile. There are almost no photos of him online in any of his incarnations. And his DMV photo,” I pointed up at the white board, “is awful, as most of them are. He’s done an excellent job of hiding his identity by using multiple names. That article is the first time he’s truly surfaced since the early eighties and it contains a decent photo of him. Not brilliant, but you get an idea of his features. I believe Sonny saw or heard about that article and got in contact with Sugar and Big Billy. He’s using them to find the tapes.”

  “Say you’re right, Maxine,” Yvette said. Her shoes were off, her legs tucked beneath her on the chair, and she held a glass of wine in one hand. No doubt, if Uncle Charlie was going to cheat, he’d picked a looker in Yvette. She was over the top on the attitude scale, but her looks more than made up for that shortcoming. “Sonny Arellano is a big fish. A whale. If there’s something controversial on the tapes and he believes Bret has them, why not take Bret out?”

  “Because they haven’t found the tapes yet.” I turned to Blue, who was following the conversation with wide eyes. I pointed up at the DMV photos of Sugar Murphy and Big Billy Garcia. “Have you seen these men before?”

  Blue got up and studied them. “Yes, they were at the winery for lunch a few weeks ago. Maybe as long as a month ago.”

  “How many people come in and out of your restaurant in a month, Blue?” Yvette asked. “How could you remember these two?”

  “That one, Murphy, he has a tattoo on his neck. Look.” I knew what she was talking about. I’d seen tattoos on various parts of the band members’ bodies on the album cover. “I couldn’t tell what it was at the time because he was wearing a collared shirt. But it’s a bunny head.”

  “Good enough for me,” Yvette said.

  Cass assumed that fierce expression indicating thought. “How does the kid come into this?”

  I knew I could count on her. “When Nicole told us the kid asked for BB Ivy, we thought he could be Bret’s biological child. Given his Hispanic appearance, that’s unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. Instead, what if he’s Sonny’s child?”

  BAD IDEAS

  “THIS IS A BAD idea,” Big Billy told the shorter man. “His ideas are always bad.”

  They were waiting on the courthouse lawn for Sugar’s signal.

  “They’re women,” the shorter man answered. “It’ll work.”

  Billy eyed the window. “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t hit it?”

  “I can hit it, easy. But his ideas, man, they always go wrong.”

  “You got anything better?”

  Billy shrugged.

  “I’ll see you at the truck. Make sure you get all three of them. I’m getting tired of this.”

  BLACKMAIL?

  CASS ACTUALLY CONSIDERED MY comment. “You think Sonny’s been looking for BB Ivy for a long time?”

  “Maybe, or maybe this is recent,” I answered. “If he’s a big drug guy, he can’t travel to the US, so he’d send his son. But there’s something he wants from Bret.”

  Cass turned to Blue. “Maxine told me Bret started acting strange about a year ago. He bought the Corvette, stayed away longer, had poor excuses for his absences.”

  Blue nodded.

  “Did anything during this time impact the winery?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Cass pursed her lips. “New vendors. New contracts. Firing people you’ve done business with for a long time for trivial reasons. Infusions of cash.”

  Blue reached for her wine, her expression thoughtful. “An infusion of cash. That’s not how he put it, but Bret suddenly wanted to make some changes to the winery. New tanks, new sound system, expand the acreage we use for vines.”

  “That was unusual?”

  Blue nodded. “We’d been debating where to go with the winery for a while. Leave it the same size, which was comfortable, or grow it, which would take some investment and a lot of commitment. The business was cash poor and I didn’t want to take out any more debt than we already had.” She blushed. “Bret got mad because I wouldn’t put more of my money in the business. I thought if we were going to grow, we should do it organically. It would be slower, but we’d do it without heavy loan repayments.”

  “The tanks in the barrel room look new to me,” Cass said.

  “He came home one day, this was before he bought the Corvette, and said he’d placed an order for the tanks and was starting work on the land where he wanted to plant new vines. He’d even hired an architect to draw up plans for expanding the dining room.”

  “Where’d the cash come from?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. He was absolutely infuriating,” Blue said. Her face was flushed now. “He said he’d ca
shed in some of his own investments because he believed in the future of the business, even if I didn’t.” She took a deep breath and seemed to gather herself. “His changes have made a difference, but I don’t know how we paid for them, and that makes me nervous.”

  “No new loans?”

  “No, and some of our existing loans were repaid.”

  Cass looked at me. “Blackmail?”

  “Over the tapes,” I answered.

  That was when the lights went out.

  __________

  BECAUSE IT’S A PRETTY common occurrence for the power to drop in East Texas, nobody was worried. Cass got up and headed for the kitchen and the agency’s fuse box. We’d both spent so much time in these offices when we were kids that moving through them in the dark was easy. She was back in a flash.

  “Get away from the windows and somebody dial 911. There’s a man in the alley. Who’s got a gun?”

  Babby hurried to her purse and returned with a 9mm and a spare magazine.

  Cass checked the load. “Lock the kitchen door behind me.”

  “No you don’t, Cass,” Kay said. We’d all moved into the main office area and were huddled in the center of the room. “Not without one of us.”

  “This is what I do, Kay. Dial 911 and tell them your power supply has been cut and I’m in pursuit. Send backup. Suspect is a white male, slender, close to six feet tall, in dark clothes. He’s wearing a dark cap. I’ve got my phone. Call now.”

  And she was gone.

  THE SHADOWS

  IT’S A HELPLESS FEELING knowing it’s nearly midnight and your best friend is roaming the streets in pursuit of someone who might want to hurt you both, and you can do nothing to help her.

  Except exactly what she tells you to do.

  So I did. As I snatched up the phone on Kay’s desk and dialed, the conference room window exploded. A chorus of screams sounded and my heart jumped into overdrive. Despite the fear, I surprised myself by dropping the phone and squatting to duck walk into the conference room.