Murder with a Cherry on Top

by Cynthia Baxter

  I started out my call to Blue Ribbon Wholesale Bakers with what had become my usual opening. But as soon as I said the words “Sweet Things,” the woman who’d answered interrupted.

  “But Sweet Things is already a customer of ours,” she said.

  My jaw dropped so far my chin hit my phone.

  “Just give me a minute to call up that account. . . .” she went on cheerfully. “Our computers are so darned slow today. . . . Ah, here it is. Ashley Winthrop is the usual buyer. But you said you’re taking over for her?”

  Something like that, I thought. “Yes, that’s right,” I said aloud.

  “In that case, this should be a breeze,” the woman went on. “I’ve got the usual order right here in front of me. We’ve got six dozen chocolate chip cookies—that’s three dozen to be picked up on Saturday mornings and three dozen on Wednesdays. Then there’s four dozen brownies, also split up into two batches. Then we’ve got carrot cake. . . .”

  Sirens were going off in my head by that point.

  Chocolate chip cookies, brownies, carrot cake . . . all the usual suspects in the bakery biz.

  And the exact same pastries I’d seen in the photo that had been taken at Sweet Things mere weeks before Ashley was murdered.

  Which meant my hunch had been correct.

  Sweet Things’ inventory had come from a wholesale bakery. It wasn’t a baking co-op, the way she pretended.

  Which meant that Ashley’s “suppliers,” Lindsey and Brandy and Allison and all the other women on the list, hadn’t been supplying her with baked goods. They’d been in an entirely different business altogether.

  * * *

  “Emma, I need your help.”

  I sailed into Lickety Splits ten minutes later with my laptop under my arm. Fortunately, it was still early enough in the day that there weren’t many ice cream aficionados out and about. Surprisingly, most people don’t consider it a breakfast staple. That was something I knew I’d have to work on.

  “Sure,” Emma said, drying her hands on a towel and coming out from behind the counter. “What’s up, Kate?”

  “I’m trying to find Ashley Winthrop’s Web site for Sweet Things. But not Sweet Things, the bakery. I want to see if there’s a second Web site that’s related, but not exactly the same. Maybe even something with the same name. If you know what I mean.”

  I could tell by her expression that she had no idea what I was talking about. I could also tell that she was more than willing to take on whatever challenge it was that I was offering her.

  “Let me fiddle around with your computer,” she offered, taking it from me. She sat down at one of the round marble tables and instantly became engrossed in the screen as her fingers clicked away, making it sound as if a troupe of flamenco dancers had just come into the shop.

  I, meanwhile, began putting on an apron. Someone with this much nervous energy, I figured, should put it to good use. And I couldn’t think of a more worthwhile task than creating some new, never-seen-before flavor of ice cream.

  But I’d barely had a chance to think about what that new flavor might be before Emma said, “Kate? You might want to take a look at this.”

  I scurried over, my curiosity about what she’d found sending my entire body into overdrive. Then I looked at the screen.

  And immediately did a double take.

  Staring back at me was a face that looked strangely familiar. Familiar, yet different, somehow. . . .

  The woman on the screen was looking out through heavy-lidded eyes. Those lids were not only smeared with shiny blue eye shadow, they were also studded with what looked like tiny blue rhinestones. Her eyelashes, as thick as Taylor Swift’s bangs, were clearly false.

  Her mouth was even shinier than her eyelids. Her slightly open lips were a deep, wet-looking shade of red, made larger by the unnatural but blatantly suggestive way she was puckering them.

  Even her hair was different. It was shiny, long, and very, very big. It was puffed up around her like the rays of the sun, curving from the red satin pillow behind her head.

  It only took me a second or two to see through the makeup and the pouty lips and the eighties hair and realize who it was.

  Lindsey Mather.

  But this Lindsey Mather bore little resemblance to the one I’d met. It wasn’t only the lack of sweatpants or red-rimmed eyes or screaming toddlers on each hip, either.

  This was a Web site that featured sweet things, all right. And Lindsey was one of them.

  Any doubts I may have had about what I was seeing were banished by the swirly lettering above Lindsey’s head. Lettering that spelled out “Sweet Things in the Valley.”

  “Oh, my heavens!” I said breathlessly. “Ashley was running an escort service!”

  “I think that’s being polite,” Emma said. “Let’s see what else we can find on this Web site.”

  She moved on to another page, one that was dedicated to photos of Lindsey—the alluring version, not the sweatpants version. It featured half a dozen pictures of her in which she posed in suggestive positions: draped across a couch, peering seductively over one shoulder, gazing up at the viewer through those five-pound fake eyelashes that were stuck onto her lids. In one of them she wore a clingy, low-cut evening gown, carefully arranged to show a lot of leg, complete with stiletto heels. A couple of the pictures showed off other, nonleg parts of her.

  And then I saw it. Lindsey’s code name, or whatever you’d call the name she was using on the Sweet Things in the Valley Web site.

  “Cheesecake.”

  Bingo.

  I was right. Ashley’s bakery was a front. What she had really been running was an escort service—from the look of her Web site, one in which the escorts did a lot more than escort.

  “Okay, so it looks like this ‘sweet thing’ has the nickname Cheesecake,” Emma said seriously as she kept clicking away and I kept studying the images on the screen. By that point, I wasn’t the least bit surprised that Brandy was identified as Licorice Twist.

  As her code name suggested, she owned an entire wardrobe of black leather garments. Bustiers with so many straps I couldn’t imagine how she ever figured out how to put them on. Teensy-weensy miniskirts studded with silver spikes. Tight black leather pants that—well, let’s just say the way they were designed would make it really easy to go to the bathroom.

  And from the props and poses featured in the photographs, it appeared that her specialty was services that were on the kinky side.

  Allison was next as Blackberry Tart. There was no sign of the buttoned-up law student here. Instead, she appeared to specialize in novelty looks. In one, she was dressed like a college cheerleader, her skintight sweater decorated with a big U for some unnamed university. Her skirt was short enough that even a modest leap into the air would have been treacherous for a real-life cheerleader.

  In another shot, she was dressed up like a shepherdess. I found it hard to believe there could possibly be much demand for that kind of thing these days, but then again, I was hardly an expert. Besides, for all I knew, her outfit could have been a way of communicating some other special interest that was completely alien to me.

  My head continued to buzz the whole time. I looked at the images of the other women pictured on the Web site, as well. They all had tons of makeup plastered on their faces. Shiny hair that swooped and swirled. Sexy clothes that communicated a bit about their specialty.

  And most of all, an expression that made it pretty clear that it wasn’t cookies these ladies were heating up in their ovens.

  “So Ashley Winthrop’s bakery on Hudson Street was just a cover,” Emma said with a sigh. “Whoever would have thought something like that was going on in a little town like Wolfert’s Roost?”

  “I’m as surprised as you are,” I replied. “It looks like the bakery served as a money laundering operation, too. After all, Ashley’s shop was a completely legitimate business, one that the IRS and the vice squad and whoever else might be interested in her couldn’t questio
n. It also provided her with the means to buy herself nice things.”

  “Exactly,” Emma said. Grinning, she added, “Her whole setup was pretty sweet. Get it? Sweet?”

  I groaned to show that I appreciated my niece’s humor. But I wasn’t exactly in the mood for laughing. Not when I was still reeling from what I’d just learned about Ashley’s business.

  Sweet things, indeed.

  Chapter 16

  At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, an ice cream seller named Ernest A. Hamwi, a Syrian, had a booth that sold a kind of wafer called Zalabia next to one of the fifty booths at the fair that sold ice cream. Hamwi came up with the idea of curling the wafers and making them cone-shaped, and then suggested they be used instead of his neighboring vendor’s plates. The idea caught on, and twenty years later, more than 245 million ice cream cones had been sold in the United States.

  —Expo2015.org/magazine

  That evening, while Emma ran Lickety Splits and Grams read in her bedroom, I settled myself into the comfortable, overstuffed chair, wanting to be alone.

  Wanting to simply think.

  My plan was to sort through all the information I’d gathered and replay the conversations I’d had with everyone who’d been involved in Ashley’s life.

  I figured that maybe, just maybe, if I thought hard enough I could figure it all out. I was clearly missing something, and for all I knew, the final pieces of the puzzle that I’d almost managed to put together were right in front of me.

  So I plopped Chloe into my lap and began distractedly stroking her silky fur. Even though her ecstatic purring was soothing, I let out a deep sigh.

  I feel like I’m so close to figuring out who killed Ashley, I thought, nearly overwhelmed with frustration. She appeared to be a successful businesswoman with nothing more serious to worry about than keeping her display cases stocked with pastries and her ’Vette filled up with premium gas. Yet I’d learned that her life was full of danger and intrigue. An illicit business, suitcases stuffed with cash to pay for fancy cars and her son’s care, a long list of ladies who were part of her erotic empire . . .

  It made total sense that Ashley’s secret doings had led to her murder.

  But then there were the two men she’d been involved with. He slimy ex-husband, Billy, wanted to squeeze even more money out of her than he already was. And her boyfriend, Tad, might have had some sort of financial dealings with her as well as an unusually tempestuous relationship—both of which could lead to serious trouble.

  The list of people who might have wanted Ashley dead was certainly long.

  And as I mulled over everything I’d learned in the past two weeks, I kept hearing Billy’s voice in my head. Follow the money, he’d said. At the time, I hadn’t understood what good advice that was likely to be.

  I let out another deep sigh, this one so deep and so loud that Chloe stopped purring. Instead, she looked up at me quizzically.

  I decided that what I needed to do was to go back to the beginning. After all, now that I knew what I knew, maybe I’d be able to see things differently.

  I had to question the people I’d already talked to—people whom I would now have to consider suspects, rather than merely as sources of information.

  I ticked them off my mental list. Tad Patrick would be the easiest to get in touch with again. In fact, he himself had provided me with the opening I’d need. His suggestion that Lickety Splits and Greenleaf do some kind of tie-in, with me supplying his restaurant with over-the-top ice cream desserts, made it a cinch for me to drop by sometime during the off hours.

  In the case of Billy Duffy, I figured I’d pay him a surprise visit, too. And I’d already thought up an excuse. I’d claim that when I’d dropped off my gift of an ice cream cake, I delivered it on a cake plate that I intended to get back. My plan was to show up on his doorstep unannounced, asking for the plate and playing dumb when he told me that the cake had been sitting on a disposable disk, as of course it had been.

  But it was too late to make either of those visits today.

  Which left me with my main group of suspects: the women who’d worked for Ashley.

  Now that I knew the true nature of the “sweet things” that had been the real focus of Ashley’s business, I was a lot more nervous about approaching the women who had worked for her. After all, they had way more to hide than their secret recipes.

  But if one of those women really was Ashley’s killer, they’d be even more reluctant to talk to me. Which meant there was only one way to get them to talk to me again.

  I’d have to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

  I whipped out my cell phone and my list, figuring I’d start at the top. That meant extending an irresistible offer to Lindsey Mather. She was actually one of the easy ones. After all, if anyone needed a freebie, it was the mother of three little kids with an unemployed husband. Especially now that she no longer had the cash that she’d previously been getting from moonlighting.

  I called the number she’d given me, listened to the chirpy recorded message about leaving a voice mail message, and turned on the charm.

  “Hi, Lindsey!” I said brightly. “This is Kate McKay from the Lickety Splits Ice Cream Shoppe. I’ve come up with a great idea. How about me throwing a birthday party for your daughter at absolutely no cost to you? I figure it’d be a great promotional vehicle for my new store. I’d get a professional photographer to take pictures of the event and I’d try to get coverage in the local newspaper. . . . I’d put the whole thing on Facebook, too, and basically use Violet’s party as a way to spread the word that Lickety Splits is the perfect place for kids to celebrate their birthday. I hope you’ll think it’s a win-win situation, too. Call me back as soon as you can, because I’ve got a few other people to try if for some reason you’re not interested. Bye!”

  One down, I thought.

  Next, I called Allison. A lawyer in training, I decided, needed something better than free ice cream, if such a thing even existed.

  “Hi, Allison!” I told her voice mail. “This is Kate McKay from Lickety Splits. You know, the new ice cream shop in Wolfert’s Roost? I’m calling you because I could use some legal help. You see, I just relocated to this area recently, so I don’t know any lawyers, but I realize I need somebody to go over my lease as soon as possible. It seems the landlord is suddenly claiming I’m responsible for a few things like electrical repairs that I don’t believe I’m supposed to pay for. I know you’re not a full-fledged lawyer yet, but I’d be willing to pay you if you’d just swing by sometime soon to take a look at this one section in the lease. . . .”

  I went down the list, making more offers. I just hoped that I was as good as the Godfather had been in making them impossible to refuse.

  * * *

  By the time I got to Lickety Splits, it was almost closing time. I was glad I’d gotten there before Emma had started to close up the shop. Expecting her to do it all by herself was a lot to ask, especially since she’d already put in a long day.

  “At last, a chance to catch my breath!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been scooping all day. It’s hard work! At this rate, I’m going to have shoulders like an Olympic weight lifter by the Fourth of July.”

  She seemed more than a little relieved to turn the OPEN sign over so that it now read CLOSED.

  The two of us got busy, putting everything away for the night and making Lickety Splits spic and span. We put the tubs of ice cream into the back freezer, wiped down the tables and every other surface, and swept up crumpled paper napkins and bits of broken cone out from under the tables.

  We were just about finished when Emma casually asked, “So how’s the investigation going, Kate?”

  I guess the look on my face was enough of an answer.

  Emma reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Kate. You’ll figure it out.”

  I was wishing I had as much confidence in my investigative abilities as my niece did when my cell phone rang. When I glanced at it, I s
aw an unfamiliar phone number flashing on the screen. Still, it had a local area code. My heartbeat quickened as I wondered if maybe, just maybe, one of the women I’d called earlier that evening was calling me back.

  “Lickety Splits Ice Cream Shoppe,” I answered in my usual crisp, professional voice. “Kate speaking.”

  “Hi, Kate!” a familiar voice greeted me. “It’s Lindsey Mather. I got your message—and I’m positively thrilled! Thank you so, so much!”

  “You’re welcome,” I told her, “but you really are doing me a favor. I don’t know if I mentioned that I have a background in public relations, and this is exactly the kind of thing I used to do as my job. Doing a birthday party for Violet, getting press coverage and plastering it all over social media . . . It’s going to be a great way to get tons of publicity for Lickety Splits.”

  And I had to admit that all that was true, even though publicizing my shop hadn’t been my main intention. This really was turning out to be a win-win situation.

  “It sounds like there are a million details to work out, so we should probably get together soon,” Lindsey replied. “In fact, if it’s okay with you, I thought maybe I’d stop over at the store tonight. I could be there in fifteen minutes.” Quickly she added, “I know it’s late, and maybe you’re even closing up soon, but my husband is here and can babysit. These days, I don’t get many chances to get out of the house.”

  I pictured her with those two little boys clinging to her like baby orangutans. I understood her point perfectly.

  Besides, I was just as anxious to talk to her as she seemed to be to talk to me.

  “Sure,” I told her. “The shop is actually closed as of about fifteen minutes ago, but that just means we’ll be free to talk without interruption.” The better to pump you for information, my dear, I thought.

  “Fabulous,” Lindsey said. “See you soon. And, Kate? Thanks again. I can’t tell you how excited I am!”

  * * *

  I was excited, too. Of all the women who’d worked for Ashley, Lindsey seemed to be the least guarded. Not that I believed that she was even close to the innocent, girl-next-door type she appeared to be. Not now, when I knew that it wasn’t actual cheesecake that she’d used to sweeten Ashley’s clients’ days.