JUSTICE Is SERVED (Food Truck 7)

by Chloe Kendrick

  “Did they indicate anything about being in trouble or needing help?” I asked, wondering again about the message on the tablecloth and what it was supposed to mean.

  “They were fine when I left. My ride wanted to leave early, because she’d only worn a sleeveless dress and wanted to get home. I had to go because I had come with her.”

  “So they were there last,” I said, which answered my first question. “And they didn’t indicate any need for help?”

  “Not unless you consider bad manner to be an emergency, no.”

  I thanked her, and the butler returned to let me out of the house. I had the number for the two maiden aunts, but I hesitated to use it. The pair were likely to be home, and I could get answers. Yet at the same time, the more people who knew I was looking into this, the higher the chance that Detective Green would come after me for investigating. While it sounded harmless enough to look into the request for help, I strongly suspected that the message and the murder had to be related.

  I remembered where Land was at the moment and steeled myself to call the other aunts. By all accounts, the women were somewhat eccentric, and so I hesitated to rely on them for a coherent account of what had happened or any type of clue that they might have seen. They would just have to serve as background information, if that. They were not going to be the star witnesses in saving Land from a jail term.

  They were home and welcomed me over. I thanked them and headed back towards Capital City. The two aunts lived in an older neighborhood, one that had once been refined but was now mostly known for crime and drugs. I was guessing that the pair had started young here and kept the house despite the changing neighborhood.

  I was right. The home looked clean and respectable, even though the home next to theirs had been marked condemned. One of the sisters came out to greet me as I got out of the car. I was a bit glad, because this was a rougher part of town. On a normal day, I would have brought Land, but that wasn’t possible.

  The sister escorted me into the house, which was nearly as refined as Eunice’s home, despite the neighborhood. It was odd how the homes of these elderly women were so similar even though Eunice had looked down on the pair.

  “Won’t you come in?” she said as she shuffled down the hall, leaving me to close the door. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Thank you.” I sat down in a room similar to Eunice’s parlor with older tables and overstuffed furniture. I didn’t worry as much here about the impression I made, because the woman plopped down in the chair and acted as though she might fall asleep.

  “I’m sorry, dear. I’m just tired. My sister’s been ill, and I’ve been tending to her.” She did look tired at closer glance. She had dark circles under her eyes and a grayish complexion.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

  The woman flushed before speaking again. I wondered what had bothered her with my statement, which seemed to be a relatively harmless platitude. “Well, dear, it’s actually one of your hot dogs that made her ill.”

  My mouth dropped open. In all our time in business, we’d never had one complaint about food poisoning – until this wedding where one man had died of poisoning and now another was saying that she’d been made ill by our food. It was hard to believe.

  “What happened?” I asked, really wanting to hear this story. I was shocked, but it had a ring of truth to it that made me worry.

  “We’d finished eating, and Marie, that’s my sister, she complained of feeling ill. I felt fine, but as the night wore on, she grew sicker and sicker. I could tell that she wasn’t feeling well. She wasn’t like herself at all. Her color went bad, and her lips had an odd shade of blue to them.”

  I sat up straight, thinking back to the corpse I’d found in the bathroom. He’d had a bad color and blue lips as well. I was concerned now. Had someone just put poisoned hot dogs out for the guests at the wedding? In that case, it was of no use trying to discern a motive, since the only ones who would suffer would be the unlucky souls who picked those hot dogs. I tried to think of anyone who would benefit from a scheme like that, but I couldn’t. It’s seemed too surreal to comprehend, random poisoning.

  Yet that would explain how the poisoner was able to administer the poison. He or she just didn’t care who it went to – as long as someone suffered. I must have looked concerned or upset, because the woman cleared her throat twice.

  “Are you okay, dear? You look flushed.” She leaned towards me as we spoke.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I replied. “What happened then?”

  “I had driven us to the wedding so I took my sister to the hospital. They pumped her stomach there and kept her overnight.” She looked pleased with herself for some reason.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I was still shocked by this news.

  The woman shrugged. “We did tell the nurses at the hospital, but – well, we’d eaten so many hot dogs that the nurses put the problem down to quantity and not a food poisoning issue.”

  I remembered what Eunice had said about the women eating too much, and now I understood why. Without a tox screen, there’d be no way to tell if the food had been poisoned, and even if the evidence was still available, Land had indicated that cyanide dissipates quickly. I wondered if it would disappear from the food as well as the body, but the answer really was moot without evidence.

  “So when did you leave the wedding? Was it towards the beginning or the end of the reception?” I asked, wondering if the sick woman had written on the tablecloth before she’d left. Had the word “help” been a cry for medical assistance? I wondered.

  “It was probably about seven pm or so. Most of the event was over, but there were still a number of people there.”

  “Was Eunice gone by then?” I asked. The timing was too close for me to make a decisive call on who was there last, and therefore able to write on the tablecloth without being seen.

  “I think not, dear. She was flitting around the entire area, so I can’t say for sure, but I was pretty certain that she was still in the area. Is that important?”

  I wondered now what had really happened with the tablecloth. Eunice had made it sound as if she’d left earlier, but these women were telling me that they’d left earlier than their tablemate. Eunice would certainly have made a fuss if someone had written on the tablecloth with mustard, or so I thought. I was struggling to learn what had happened. It had seemed so easy, but now it was becoming a convoluted mess.

  I decided to level with them. Worst case scenario was that they’d tell someone, but I doubted that many people took them seriously. The nurses at the hospital seemed to have made up their minds without listening to the women.

  “Someone made a huge mess on the tablecloth,” I said. “Mustard all over the place. I was just wondering if you saw who did it.”

  “Mustard?” the woman asked. “How odd. Marie, my sister, she didn’t eat any hot dogs with mustard – nor did I.” I listened to a litany of the various types of hot dogs they had eaten during the reception, and Eunice was right. They had eaten quite a few different types. Yet they hadn’t had mustard, and Eunice had eaten hers plain. That meant neither party had mustard on their dogs.

  I wondered again who had written the word “help.” Now it was looking as though none of the people at the table had written it. So I was back to trying to figure out who out of the 100 guests had ruined the tablecloth.

  Chapter 7

  When I returned home, there was a message from Gina on the machine. I listened carefully to it twice, trying to catch if there was anything else in her voice. She seemed fine, which meant that she likely hadn’t heard from her aunts, but at the same time, she seemed more reserved than she usually did.

  “Maeve, it’s Gina. I need to talk to you about something. Call me when you have some time, okay?”

  I wondered about her message. While it would sound okay to most people, her typical messages asked me about any deaths around me and any murder investigations. Pe
rhaps being at the center of such an investigation had put her off the jokes.

  Since I wanted to ask about Land’s invitation – and since I’d had so little luck with the mustard, I decided to call her back immediately.

  It rang several times, and I got ready to leave a message when she answered. “Maeve, is that you?”

  Of course she knew it was me, because my number would have come up on the phone. “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “I need to talk to you. Can you come over?” she asked. I was starting to wonder what was up.

  “Sure, right now?” I asked, wanting to see if this was related to Land being in jail. I hoped that I’d learn enough to get him out, though so far, I had not learned anything worth a dime.

  She agreed, and I headed over to their apartment. I knew the place well, because the apartment had been Gina’s before the marriage. It only took me a few minutes to get there; traffic was light.

  Gina was waiting at the door for me. Her normally perky self had been replaced by a sad woman who looked defeated. Maybe I wouldn’t be so fast to rush into marriage.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked.

  “I just found out something, and I need to tell you first. It’s about Land,” she said, looking like she might cry.

  “He’s in jail,” I said, hoping that this was the worst of the news.

  “No, it’s not that. There’s more. Trent has been worried about his two aunts, the ones who sat at Table 15. They’ve been more and more odd in the past few months. Before we knew that Land was your boyfriend, Trent wanted Land to keep an eye on them at the wedding. So we hired Land.”

  I nodded. This wasn’t as bad as I thought. “What is so odd about them that they needed to be watched?”

  “It’s been bad. They do odd things. They make comments. They go to the hospital all the time. We wanted to make sure that they didn’t do something at the wedding to embarrass themselves or anyone else.”

  I told her my story about how the sisters had told me that they’d gone to the hospital the evening of the wedding. “Do you think that’s true?” I asked, wondering if I’d been taken in by the women.

  “Probably, but I would think that the nurses are right. They likely just ate too much and got sick. No one was out to poison them. But the tablecloth is just like something they would do. I knew you’d been looking into that. Trent and I decided to come clean about it and offer to pay for the tablecloth.”

  “That was it. What about the business arrangement with Land?” I asked. “How did you hear about him?”

  I was curious about this. As far as I knew, Land had only worked as a part-owner and operator of a food truck. Nothing more. Now I was being told that he was doing some freelance sleuthing on the side – without me, no less!

  She took a deep breath. She turned her face to the wall. “Land apparently knew David, and David recommended him to us. I don’t know any details, but that’s why the police arrested him. Land had access to the food. He knew about the event far in advance, so he could plan – and he knew David and possibly had a motive to kill him.”

  “What motive would that be?” I asked. If it wasn’t my virtue at stake, which only had cropped up on the evening of the wedding apparently, then Land would have had no motive to poison David – and certainly no time in which to prepare for the deed.

  “This is what I didn’t want to tell you. The police are going on the theory that David and you were having an affair.” Gina flushed up to her ears as she said the last words.

  My flush nearly eclipsed hers. “What?” I asked, sure that I’d heard her wrong. That wasn’t possible. Detective Green thought that I would prefer David to Land? I was stunned to hear this.

  “It’s true. Look, I don’t believe it for a minute, but I heard that detective talking to Trent, and he told me that she implied that Land’s motive was you cheating on him with David.”

  I froze, trying to think of the potential headlines. I’d been worrying about the damage to the business, but now I’d be labeled a cheater, making it much more personal than before. I could advertise or have a sale to bring back business. Life offered no marketing to make you sound like a faithful girlfriend. Once the word was out, no matter how silly the gossip might be, that rumor was spread too far and too wide to ever be brought back.

  Of course, there was no way for me to contact Land and tell him that this was false. I had to just hope that he knew it. I did make a mental note to tell Sabine that about this, so she could pass the message along.

  ‘What else did Trent say? I’m kind of confused about this.” I was somewhat embarrassed to be admitting to Gina that I didn’t know these facts about the event and that I didn’t know about Land’s deal with Trent.

  “That was the gist of it,” she replied. “You didn’t know that Land had been hired to watch the aunts, did you?”

  I shook my head. “He hadn’t mentioned a word about it to me.”

  “Well, he can take outside work, can’t he?” I could definitely tell that Gina was one of my business school classmates. Her answers were focused on employee law, not our relationship.

  “Sure, there’s no problem there. I know he’s done things with the police before. So that’s not an issue.” I thought back to the times when Land had helped Detective Danvers in a stake-out. Would Danvers help Land out in this matter, or would he be more likely to cover his own butt and not put in a good word for Land?

  From what I knew about Danvers, I suspected the latter. He was more likely to be fretting about Land’s role in previous cases and how Land’s arrest might affect their outcomes than to be worried about the guy who helped him out.

  “And this wouldn’t have been a conflict-of-interest, since he could both watch Trent’s aunts and serve food. So that’s not a problem.” Gina shrugged as if her worries ended with that pronouncement. Mine had just begun.

  “I’m not worried about that,” I explained to her. “I’m more worried about this whole David connection. I didn’t know Land knew him or that he’d gotten Land this job.”

  Gina nodded. “I thought you might want to know, so I reached out to Christie to see if she knew anything. She said that Land and David had worked on some project about five years ago. Land had been doing some freelance investigatory work for David’s firm, and he’s interviewed David several times. David kept his card. It wasn’t like they were good friends. Christie had never met Land through David, and only heard him mention Land when Trent wanted to hire someone.”

  “So it’s a weak connection, at best,” I said, feeling a little more mollified about the revelation. It would be hard for Green to prove that David and Land had been in contact since there would be no phone records and their respective significant others would indicate that they’d never met up.

  Although I could see the elaborate case that Green was building, I still felt that I was missing something. Even though she’d created the narrative, the facts didn’t seem to fit that narrative. There was no real connection between the two men. Nothing could be proved there.

  “So did Trent know why the police think that I was having an affair with David?” I still couldn’t get my mind around that lie.

  “Apparently David made it pretty clear that you and he had been intimate at the wedding.”

  “What?” My mind tried to get acclimated to that idea. The best man had indicated that we’d been intimate at the wedding. How could that have happened when I was elbow deep in hot dogs and condiments? I was usually such a mess by the end of a work shift that I didn’t even want to be around me.

  “Trent said that David lied all the time about this kind of thing, but he told a few of the ushers that he’d ‘nailed’ you earlier in the day.” She air-quoted “nailed” so that I would know it wasn’t her word.

  I knew that men like this existed; they liked to brag about their conquests to appear more manly to their friends. I’d just never been the object of such a campaign before.

  I had an idea. “Can’t the police d
o some sort of test to see if the victim has had sex?” If David had been lying then the test should come back negative and ruin the whole motive for the police.

  “That’s what made the police ask those questions to begin with. Apparently David had been intimate with someone in the last twelve hours of his life. Christie swears that it wasn’t her, so that made the police wonder who it could have been.”

  I groaned. This was a trap that I didn’t see an answer for. I couldn’t prove a negative. How could I possibly show that it wasn’t me who had slept with David? He’d said I had, and I said I hadn’t. He’d had sex, and I couldn’t prove that I hadn’t.

  Gina cleared her throat. “There’s one way to find out the truth. We’ll need to find out who had sex with David in the last few hours of his life. It can’t be that hard to do, right?”

  At that moment, I appreciated Gina so much. Not only had she taken me at my word, she’d offered to help with her use of the word “we.” That’s a friend.

  I took her hand and squeezed it to show her my appreciation. “We need to start with the groomsmen, right? They were the ones who heard David say that, so we need to find out exactly what was said and start asking questions of them. Rick seemed to act as though Jason had been the one who was tell stories about David.”

  Gina smiled. “We’re having a little get together tonight for the wedding party. It was supposed to be the day after the wedding, but we pushed it back for obvious reasons.”

  I agreed to come and make some appetizers for the party. I had no idea how that was going to work, since I had no recipes for appetizers, but I’d have to make do somehow.

  In the meantime, I had a visit to make. I had a few questions for Sabine Mendoza, which I thought that she could answer for me since Land was unavailable.

  Chapter 8

  After my first meeting with Sabine six months ago, I’d learned that Sabine had found an apartment in the same complex as Land. That made things easy for family visits, but harder for him to keep us separated before we’d finally met.