Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery)

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “Does Rodger know about the letters?” Sadie asked once they had sat down and stirred their drinks with the tiny straws.

  Leann shook her head and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Was the private investigator trying to figure out who was sending the letters?”

  “Yeah,” Leann said with a hint of embarrassment in her voice.

  “And determine if Rodger was having an affair?”

  Leann nodded and looked at the cup she was holding in both hands.

  “Why did you suspect it was Wendy sending them?”

  “One of the first letters said that the only woman he’d ever really loved was Wendy and that he’d go back to her eventually. None of the other letters gave any indication about the identity of who was sending them, but I knew Wendy was crazy enough to do something like that.” She looked up, perhaps to see if Sadie was offended by the accusation, but Sadie just smiled, noting that it was getting easier to hear people tell her hard things.

  “Your PI never found out it was her?”

  “Not conclusively, no, but he did learn that Rodger and Wendy were talking on the phone nearly every day.” There was a catch in her voice, but something was off about it; it seemed theatrical somehow. Rodger had met Wendy through his talent agency. Maybe he’d met Leann the same way. Then again, maybe it was Sadie’s own cynicism that had her considering such a possibility. It was a reminder, however, for her not to take the things this woman said at face value. There may very well be an agenda that Sadie knew nothing about.

  “You didn’t know they were talking?” Sadie asked.

  Leann looked at her in surprise. “You did?”

  Sadie carefully chose what information to give her, hoping it would bring her more information in exchange. “I talked to Rodger about it at lunch yesterday, but he said he knew Wendy was mentally ill and struggled in winter months, so he talked to her when she called because she had no one else. But he didn’t tell you that?” If they were innocent phone calls, why not talk to Leann about it over a glass of wine at the end of the day?

  Leann took a sip of her drink. “Wendy is a bit of a sore subject between us.”

  “Why?”

  Leann tapped her fingernails against her cup. “Are you married?”

  “I was, once,” Sadie said.

  “Well, maybe you can’t understand then, but I’ve never been married before, and I thought when Rodger and I got married that it would be him and me—that’s it. Instead, he’s got this ex-wife who takes his money every month, is in all these photos throughout our house, and is known by his friends and some of his associates. People talk about her all the time. She was so over-the-top and engaging, so wacky and weird, that she made an impression. I am constantly told ‘Wendy’ stories when I’m with Rodger’s friends.”

  Sadie tried not to squirm amid the similarities of her own situation, with Pete’s wife having such a presence in their relationship right now.

  Leann continued, “And, because of her taking Rodger to the cleaners, I had to sign a prenup, which didn’t seem like a big deal before we were married. But once I learned he was talking to her on the phone every day . . . If things don’t work out with Rodger and me, I get nothing and Wendy keeps getting all that alimony.” She took another sip of her drink and what seemed to be a calming breath. “So, yeah, Rodger telling me that he talked to her on the phone almost every day wasn’t something that would have gone over very well.” Leann looked down at the table, possibly so Sadie wouldn’t notice that, despite her wiping at her eyes, there weren’t any tears. She took a breath and looked up. “That he was talking to her and didn’t tell me is even worse.”

  “Sounds like things have been hard for you guys,” Sadie said, wondering why Leann had previously said that she and Rodger had a good marriage. “When did the letters start arriving?”

  “December,” Leann said. “Right before Christmas. In fact, the first one looked like a Christmas card except it was pink. Anyway, inside it told me that I better enjoy the holiday because Rodger would surely have left me by that time next year. It was terrible.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sadie said with complete sincerity. “Why didn’t you tell Rodger about it?”

  “Would you tell your husband and give him a chance to cover his tracks?”

  I would if I didn’t think it was true, Sadie thought. But obviously there was enough insecurity in Leann’s marriage that she didn’t have such confidence. “When did you hire the private investigator?”

  “After the third letter. They came every couple of weeks so it would have been the end of January, I think. I had to get some confirmation or I was going to lose my mind.”

  “So you were getting the letters and then the PI you hired confirmed that Rodger was talking to Wendy on the phone every day.”

  “At the office,” Leann emphasized. “Not on his cell phone, where I might have seen the number.”

  “Did you know she was the one calling him?”

  “Most of the time she was,” Leann said. “But my PI got copies of the office phone bills and Rodger was calling her sometimes, too.”

  Sadie kept her surprise to herself. She only had access to the numbers Wendy had called, and Rodger had made the contact sound so one-sided that she hadn’t even considered he might have initiated additional phone conversations. If he was, then it cast doubt on the explanation he’d given Sadie about simply trying to pacify Wendy during a difficult time.

  “Did your PI discover proof that Rodger was being unfaithful?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Was Leann disappointed about that? Sadie wondered. And how jealous was she? If she was jealous enough to hire a PI for months, was she jealous enough to put a stop to the contact between Rodger and Wendy once and for all? Leann wouldn’t care if the body stayed in the apartment for a month, and with Sadie’s new theory that Lin Yang was the fire-starter, Leann could have killed Wendy somehow and then staged the robbery the police were assuming had happened at the time of the fire.

  And yet, the main frustration Leann had communicated so far was the fact that Wendy’s alimony had forced Leann to have to sign a prenup. That was only an issue if Rodger and Leann divorced, right? Something wasn’t matching up, Sadie just didn’t know what.

  “What did you think when the phone calls and the letters stopped?”

  “I was just so relieved,” Leann said, stirring her coffee again.

  “How did you find out about Wendy’s death?” Sadie asked after considering and rejecting half a dozen other ways to ask the question.

  “The police contacted Rodger. I hadn’t received any letters after we returned from our anniversary cruise so when we found out she’d died during the time we were gone, it pretty much confirmed my suspicions that she was the one writing them.”

  “Is that where Rodger was the last part of May?” Sadie asked. He’d only told her he’d been out of town.

  Leann nodded. “We take an anniversary trip every year. This year he surprised me with two weeks in the Mediterranean. We had a good time, and I felt like we were getting things back to where they’d been before the letters, you know?”

  There were still a few more holes Sadie needed to fill. “So you never met Wendy?”

  Leann shook her head.

  “Did you know where she lived?”

  “My PI found out her exact address. Before then I only knew she was in one of Steve’s buildings,” Leann said, shrugging one slender shoulder.

  Steve? As in Stephen Pilings, the landlord? Sadie felt her proverbial antennae flip up, then noticed Leann’s expression turning hesitant, suspicious. Had Sadie not schooled her expression as well as she should have?

  “I really need to get back,” Leann said, taking a final sip of her drink. “I hope I’ve been able to help.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Sadie said, though she realized that she had told Leann very little about her conversation with Rodger yesterday, which made her wonder if there was another reason
for Leann to have agreed to talk to her. Fortify her position, perhaps? “I just have a couple of more questions, then I won’t bother you again.”

  Leann gave a tolerant smile.

  “The letters weren’t mailed from Wendy’s zip code, right?”

  “No,” Leann said. “They were sent from Chinatown.”

  “Wendy’s son lives in Chinatown—did you know that?”

  Leann nodded easily, unsurprised to hear that Ji existed.

  “You know about him?”

  “Yes,” Leann said, obviously unsure why this was important but sensing that it was.

  “How?”

  “My PI found out about him. We figured he was mailing the letters for his mother, or maybe that she was visiting him and mailing the letters when she was in that part of town. Is it important?”

  “Well, Rodger told me yesterday that he only learned about Wendy’s son from the police after her body was found.”

  It was just a flicker—a small and inconsequential flash behind her eyes—and it was gone too quickly for Sadie to interpret it properly. “Right,” Leann said with a nod that was more animated than anything else in the conversation. “He was really surprised by it since he had no idea. Is that all? I really do need to get back.”

  She was totally covering for Rodger. He’d known about Ji before the police told him but pretended that he didn’t. Why would he do that? Leann was watching her, and Sadie had an image of Leann calling Rodger as soon as they parted company to tell her version of this conversation. She would likely leave out several details—or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe knowing that Sadie knew about the PI would spur Leann to explain herself before the police got wind of it or before Rodger learned about the letters another way.

  “One last question,” Sadie asked quickly. “If you had your PI following Rodger because you were afraid that he and Wendy were having an affair, then, when all contact with her stopped over a month ago and Wendy was found dead two weeks ago, why did the PI follow Rodger yesterday?”

  Leann’s left eye twitched ever so slightly. “I feel better when I know who Rodger’s spending time with, that’s all.”

  Earlier Leann had said that she and Rodger had a good marriage. But they couldn’t talk about his ex-wife, Leann had started getting letters weeks before Rodger’s phone calls with Wendy had begun and didn’t tell him, and she liked keeping a PI on the payroll to keep tabs on her husband? That wasn’t anywhere near a “good” marriage in Sadie’s opinion.

  She took a drink of her steamer as she pondered why else Leann would keep paying a PI month after month. It would be expensive—and Leann had been frustrated that Rodger was still paying alimony to Wendy—and seemingly unnecessary since Leann claimed that the PI hadn’t found any evidence of Rodger being unfaithful.

  A couple of years back, Sadie had owned her own private investigation firm. Part of why she hadn’t stuck with the business was that the majority of the work she was hired to do consisted of background checks that required hours on the computer and tedious amounts of paperwork. The next most common job she was hired for involved following spouses suspected of cheating. She had hated standing in the shadows and taking pictures of people coming and going from hotel rooms—that hadn’t been why she’d wanted to become a PI.

  Working those cases, however, had required her to learn a few things about prenuptial agreements and how they worked. They weren’t what most people thought they were—one rich person protecting his or her assets—and they were often complex agreements with a sliding scale of settlements based on when and why the marriage fell apart.

  “I really need to get back to the shop,” Leann said. “The tourist traffic is going to start picking up soon.”

  “Right,” Sadie said with a nod. “Can I ask you one more question?”

  Leann let out a dramatic breath and gave a polite, if not tight, smile.

  “I’ve heard that some prenuptial agreements have a stipulation that has certain settlements based on the behavior of the partners and, in California, don’t both parties need to have legal representation when the agreement is entered into?”

  The hardening of Leann’s expression told Sadie she was on the right track.

  “I can’t help but wonder,” Sadie continued, “if your attorney made sure there was some language regarding what would happen if Rodger cheated on you, if your marriage fell apart through no fault of your own. What kind of settlement do you get if you can prove he committed adultery?”

  Leann stood abruptly, all of her pretenses gone in an instant. “I need to get back to work.”

  Sadie barely had time to stand herself before Leann breezed out of the coffee shop. Sadie opted not to follow her and instead sat back down and watched through the window as Leann disappeared from view.

  The only conclusion Sadie could draw from the final question asked but not answered was that Leann stood to get some kind of settlement if Rodger was the unfaithful party in their relationship. Not only was Leann willing to pay someone to find out if that were true, she was pretty eager to get the information. Someone wanted out of that relationship, and Sadie didn’t think it was Rodger Penrose.

  Sadie hoped that by calling Leann out, she had bought herself some time before Leann would tell Rodger they’d talked. She wanted to follow up on the new questions she now had about Rodger and what he had told her at lunch yesterday. She hoped she could figure it all out; she needed all the time she could get right now.

  Chapter 31

  Sadie took a few more sips of her steamer, which was now optimally cooled, and then checked her phone. It was nearly 11:00, but Ji still hadn’t texted her back—never mind that Pete hadn’t contacted her either. Should she go back to Choy’s and meet up with Ji there? But then she’d learned some things from Leann that she wanted to follow up on, too—like the fact that Leann knew Stephen Pilings, so Rodger probably knew the landlord, too. And Rodger might have known about Ji sooner than he claimed, which begged the question of why he would hide that knowledge. No, not hide—lie about. Very different word.

  Pete might have the answers she needed, assuming he’d spent the day researching the things she’d asked him to, but she’d have to call him to find out and that could potentially undermine her “I’m confident enough to give you the distance you need” demeanor that was killing her to maintain.

  She didn’t know what to do about Pete or Ji, but she had to do something, so she opened up an Internet browser on her phone and looked up Stephen Pilings. She found a Facebook page and, after a few false starts, came across a property management company based in San Francisco. She opened up the “Properties” tab on the website, and the third photo down was Wendy’s building on 22nd Street and Mission. Rodger had admitted to financially helping Wendy get into that building. Was it too much of a stretch to assume he might have asked a favor from a friend with an available apartment, too?

  There was no bio for Stephen Pilings on the website, though his name was listed as owner. Once again, if she were in her hotel room with access to the sites she used to do background searches she could review all kinds of public records and start to build a profile of both him and Rodger Penrose. She could go to the hotel and do it now, but that would take her away from the other lead she wanted to follow: Lin Yang setting Wendy on fire.

  Thinking that made her head spin all over again. Had Lin Yang really done that or was Sadie grasping at straws? What possible reason could motivate anyone to do something so horrendous? If she accused Lin Yang of setting the fire and she was wrong, her chances of a relationship with Ji were over. If she were right, though, would her chances be any better? Beyond that, was a relationship with her nephew the ultimate prize or was truth the goal she should be reaching for?

  She leaned back in the metal chair and put her phone on the table. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her temples, trying to ward off the headache that was knocking at the base of her skull. What should she do now? Where was another fortune cookie when she needed
it?

  “Are you finished?”

  Sadie opened her eyes to see a young woman poised to pick up Leann’s cup, which was likely still half full. “Yes, thank you.”

  She stood up as the girl took both cups. She adjusted her purse over her shoulder and thought of the silver bag in Leann’s shop. Whatever enthusiasm she’d had for it half an hour ago was gone. There was no room in her brain for something so frivolous now.

  She was almost out the door, still unsure of whether she would go to Choy’s or to her hotel, when her phone alerted her to a text message. She’d never moved faster to get her phone out of her purse to see who the text was from: Ji or Pete?

  Ji: I’m here now. What do you need to talk to me about?

  Was this a sign that she should keep her focus on Ji and Lin Yang for the time being? She got another text.

  Ji: There’s something I need to talk with you about too. When can you be here? If you could beat the lunch rush, I’d appreciate it. We get hit hard after 12.

  Just like that, the decision was made. A block later, Sadie stepped away from the sidewalk so as not to disrupt the flow of foot traffic. If she wasn’t going to be pursuing the possible connection between Stephen Pilings and Rodger Penrose right now, she needed to share the information she had with Pete so that he could. It was silly to let her emotions get in the way of sharing information about the case. It would also be a relief to know that while she was busy with one unsavory task, progress would be made on another one.

  I think Rodger P and landlord know each other. Can you follow up? Rodger P’s wife, Leann, hired PI that followed me because she suspects infidelity. On my way to talk to Ji. Also Choy’s has synthetic kerosene & Lin Yang was at apt days before fire.

  She read it through again and then sent the text, wondering if Pete would call her in response, as he had at other times during this trip. Just in case, she debated in her mind how she should act if he did call. Professional or aloof? If he brought up the issues between them, should she discuss them or insist they focus on the case for now? She started walking and was waiting at a crosswalk when the response arrived.