by Jan Dunlap
The truth was that I’d had plenty of time while I’d waited for my new tires to mull over the events of the last few days since I’d found Sonny doing his scarecrow imitation at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Despite being the person who discovered Sonny’s dead body, I’d assumed my involvement would end after the police had interviewed me at the scene of the crime on Sunday, since I had no connection to him aside from a casual acquaintance and no idea of what had been going on in his life.
Yet circumstances around me seemed to keep pointing back to Sonny’s demise, and, being a naturally curious person, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was stumbling across random pieces of information that might eventually lead to solving the mystery of his death.
Not that I was making a list of those pieces, exactly. Like every birder I know, I already had plenty of lists to keep me busy: my birding state list, individual county lists, my life list, my vacation bird list, my backyard list, my birds-seen-while-eating-Luce’s-food list, my birds at gas stations list, my … you get the idea.
It just seemed like so many incidents or conversations lately were conspiring to keep me thinking about Sonny Delite.
For instance: one of my best friends was involved with a woman who’d received a phone call from the deceased shortly before his death. Why couldn’t Rick be dating some nice woman who’d never heard of Sonny Delite, let alone one who had lived in Henderson during Sonny’s big media splash and was on his phone list? But no, he had to be falling in love with a possible murder suspect who knew what hemlock looked like and might have blamed Sonny for her brother’s unemployment and her own sacrifice of a job she loved.
Second example: My new faculty pal had a direct connection to Sonny’s recent project, and not in a good way, either. Boo’s dad needed Sonny to support the rental of his land by the energy farm company, and that clearly hadn’t happened. Worse, Sonny may have been the consultant who lied in the attempt to get the contract into his own relative’s hands, and Boo hated liars. Oh, and did I mention that the man was very possibly a former professional wrestler and big and strong enough to carry three Sonny Delites into the woods if he so chose?
Third example: My tires were slashed in the school parking lot the night before I planned to go to Morris. True, that could have been a total coincidence, but after my discussion with Paul Brand, I wasn’t so sure, and the only reason I could think of for someone wanting to ground me was that I was planning to go to Morris the next day. Morris—where Sonny had been involved in a high-stakes energy controversy.
Fourth example: Rick, my birding buddy, who also happened to be a police officer and involved with a possible murder suspect, had to back out of my trip to Morris thanks to a freak accident, leaving me with the possible Bonecrusher as my co-pilot.
The same Bonecrusher who just a day earlier told me to be careful of driving to Morris, but now wanted to go with me.
“Are those homemade biscuits I smell?” Rick asked as he awkwardly slid into his chair at our dining room table.
“They’re baby biscuits,” Luce told him, removing the cloth napkin that she’d tucked over the basket of biscuits to keep them warm, “made from Sara Schiller’s bag of flour.”
“You cooked Sara’s baby?” Rick made a show of inhaling the mouth-watering scent that floated out of the basket. “I may have to turn you in for child neglect to Gina.”
He palmed two of the biscuits and dropped them on his plate. “After dinner, of course.”
“I brought Sara’s baby home last night since she skipped out after leaving it with me,” I explained to Rick, “and Luce thought it was hers to use.”
“You have done well,” he intoned to my wife. “I will bring you a fatted cow tomorrow.”
That was another thing that had bothered me while I waited for the tires to be replaced on the car: even Sara Schiller had inadvertently dropped me another piece of the Sonny story. Gina and her brother—the one who’d been an unemployed construction worker in Henderson when the utility project fell through—were from Morris, which was the same area where Boo Metternick was from. As Sara had noted, Morris was a small town, but the Twin Cities were anything but, so what were the odds that these three people who all had a link—and a negative one, at that—to Sonny Delite would have been in Savage this last weekend, just a half-hour drive from the place where Sonny was poisoned?
Okay. I admit it. Math has never been my strong suit, so I really didn’t know what the odds were. I just knew it was odd.
Really odd.
“So what time are you planning to leave in the morning?” Luce asked me as she lifted a delicately browned chicken breast from a heatproof casserole dish and placed it on her plate. It was glazed with a honey mustard sauce.
I loved honey mustard sauce.
“Is this a new recipe?” I asked my wife.
“New to us. I got it from Chef Tom at Millie’s on Sunday morning before Sonny’s widow showed up and made a scene with Red.”
That was another weird event to add to my list: the almost girl fight at Millie’s and the odd chemistry between Red and Prudence Delite. Were the women friends or enemies? Prudence had taken a swing at Red, and Red had restrained her, assuring all of us there that Prudence didn’t mean anything by it and was just overcome with grief. Yet I’d seen Prudence continue to stare at Red the rest of the time we were there. There wasn’t grief in that glare, either. It had been desperation.
And then she’d let everyone know that she blamed Sonny’s death on Red because Red had made a big public deal about Sonny’s latest advocacy involvement. Prudence claimed that in doing so, Red had thrown Sonny to his enemies … enemies who must have been likewise lunching at Millie’s.
Pretty darn convenient for the enemies, I’d say.
You get lunch and your intended victim handed to you on a platter.
You want coleslaw or American fries with that murder plot?
But Sonny wasn’t killed over lunch, I reminded myself. He died after an early morning cup of tea.
Memo to me: morning tea can be fatal. Especially if it’s handed to you by your enemy. What’s that old saying?
Oh, yeah.
‘When in doubt, throw it out.’
Either that, or get an official taster like those kings in the Middle Ages. I guess they knew what they were doing when they added tasters to their workforce.
“I think someone might try to poison me today,” says the king to his taster-employee. “You try it first.”
Talk about sub-par job security, but I guess it was a living.
For a while, at least.
Maybe.
If you were lucky.
Geez. And I thought I had lousy job benefits. The coffee in the faculty lounge was bad, but it hadn’t poisoned anyone.
That I knew of.
Yet.
“I need to tell you something,” said Rick, beginning to drum his fingertips on the table.
“You’re drumming,” I said, picking up my fork and knife to slice into the succulent chicken breast I’d just laid on my own plate. “This is not going to be good, is it? You always start drumming when you’re tense or upset. Nice polo shirt, by the way.” I hoped I could distract him. “Is it new?”
“Yes, and that’s what I have to tell you.”
“You bought a new shirt?”
“No. I mean, yes.” His fingers stopped drumming and he looked up at the ceiling, sighing. “I’m out of uniform for a reason, Bob.”
“You’re off duty?” I guessed.
“I’m on unpaid leave.”
“How bad is the sprain?” Luce asked him.
He looked at Luce, his face filled with misery.
“I’m a possible suspect in the murder of Sonny Delite.”
Chapter Fourteen
“You want to run that by me again?” I asked, my silverware poised in the air.
“You’re kidding, right?” Luce added.
Rick slowly shook his head slowly in an unmistakable “No.”
>
“I wish I were kidding,” he moaned. “This is a nightmare.”
“Then you better wake up, Stud, and tell us what’s going on, because I don’t have a clue how you could be implicated in Sonny’s death. You’re one of the good guys.” I laid my knife and fork back down on the table so I wouldn’t be tempted to stab him with either one in order to get the whole story out of him faster.
Then I realized I did have a clue. Several, in fact.
Yes, me, the clueless Mr. White.
“It’s because you’re involved with Gina,” I guessed. “And the phone call came while you were at her home. Somebody on this case thinks you went crazy because some guy called your new girlfriend at two o’clock in the morning, so you tracked him down and killed him?”
I shook my head. “You may have a big mouth, Rick, but you’re not a jealous homicidal maniac.”
“Tell it to the judge, Bob,” he said, then grimly added, “if it comes to that.”
“It’s not going to,” I assured him.
“How can you say that? I don’t have an alibi, Bob. No one can testify to my whereabouts from 3:00 a.m. to when I showed up at the Arboretum looking for you.”
“So that means you’re a suspect?” Luce asked. “Because you were alone on Sunday morning?”
Rick shook his head again. “No. I’m a suspect because I’ve been telling everyone at work how crazy I am about Gina.”
He picked up his own fork and stabbed it into his chicken.
“And because the real reason Gina left Henderson wasn’t her brother’s lack of employment,” he told us. “She said she was forced to leave by the school board there, because she got involved with the utilities fiasco… and Sonny Delite.”
“Involved?”
Rick looked up from his plate. “She didn’t know he was married, and he never bothered to tell her. Henderson is a small town, and people talked. She quit her job, moved to Minneapolis and started over. She didn’t even know it was Sonny calling her on Sunday morning until she checked her messages later in the day.”
“After he was dead,” Luce pointed out.
“But there’s no way to prove that,” Rick countered. “When the detective questioned her after school yesterday, he had proof from Sonny’s phone log that he had called Gina early Sunday, and only Gina’s word that she hadn’t taken the call. She can’t prove with her phone when she actually checked her messages.”
His face got even gloomier.
“Gina’s honest, Bob. She told the detective I’d been with her that night when the call came in, and she told him all about her past history with Sonny.”
He stabbed the chicken again.
“She even told him about the message Sonny left. ‘Meet me behind the Arboretum’s Learning Center at 6:00 a.m., Gina. It’s important.’ She’d already deleted it from her phone, or she would have played it for him, but of course that doesn’t make her look any better at the moment. She’s doing the right thing, being completely upfront about all this. It’s the only chance she has to get out of this mess.”
But Gina’s being upfront was putting Rick right in the line of fire … along with his big mouth.
“Come on, Rick,” I said. “Your own boss thinks you might be involved in a murder? What kind of working relationship is that?”
Both Rick and Luce stared at me in disbelief.
“Hello? Who worries about his job every time he finds a body in the woods?” Luce pointedly asked me.
“Does the name Mr. Lenzen ring a bell?” Rick added.
I held up my hands in surrender. “Forget I said that. My mistake. Obviously you can have a working relationship with someone who thinks you’re capable of murder—I’m living proof of that. Although I wonder sometimes if what I have with Mr. Lenzen is less of a relationship and more a strained tolerance. But you’ve always had the respect of your captain, Rick. He can’t possibly think you’re a viable suspect.”
“I don’t think he really does,” Rick agreed, “but he’s got to play by the rules. And, of course, it probably doesn’t help that I told at least three of the guys that I’d do anything for Gina. Anything at all.”
I groaned.
“At the time, I was thinking along the lines of a tattoo, or maybe raking up the leaves in her yard,” Rick admitted, a trace of sheepishness in his voice. He fingered the stud in his ear, courtesy of the last girlfriend to whom he was hopelessly devoted … for about eighteen months, if I was remembering correctly.
“I guess I’m just a fool for love,” he conceded. “What can I say?”
“I think you just said it,” I replied, “though I probably wouldn’t qualify it with the ‘for love’ part. ‘Just a fool’ works for me.”
“The police don’t have any stronger leads?” Luce asked.
“Not for lack of trying,” Rick replied, poking idly at the food on his plate. “So far, they’ve interviewed half of the attendees at the Arboretum conference, along with the employees of the Arb working at it, plus every customer they could track down who was at Millie’s on Saturday afternoon. That’s one of the biggest holes in their investigation at the moment—they can only identify those customers who paid by check or credit card. Anyone who paid cash is unaccounted for, and since a lot of Millie’s customers pay with cash, the only person who could pick out those diners is Red.”
“And she’s got memory issues from her fall,” I pointed out.
Rick nodded. “Let’s face it—I’m an easy pick for a suspect. I could have the motive and the opportunity. Plus, I knew Sonny, and I’m a cop, so why wouldn’t he take a cup of tea from me during an early morning bird walk? If I was investigating this case, I’d sure take a close look at me.”
“Well, that sucks,” I said.
“You bet it does,” Rick agreed.
Silence fell around the dinner table, and I concentrated on cutting up the chicken on my plate and putting a forkful into my mouth.
Yet again, Sonny’s death was demanding my attention. I was beginning to wonder if this was what it felt like to be haunted—every time I had a conversation with someone, Sonny seemed to have a connection to it.
It wasn’t even Halloween yet, and I had a ghost knocking on my door.
Trick or treat, right?
This was a lot worse than Mr. Lenzen showing up in my office, though, and even less of a treat, seeing as one of my best friends was now under suspicion for the death of the ghost in question.
On the plus side, though, I knew just what to suggest to Rick for his costume for the faculty Halloween party: he could come in the orange jail jumpsuit he’d be wearing after his arrest for the murder of Sonny Delite.
“Wait a minute,” I said, swallowing my bite of chicken. “I heard that Gina was arrested for Sonny’s murder.”
“When did you hear that?” Rick asked, curious, but not especially alarmed.
“What, no theatrics?” I asked, surprised by his calm inquiry. “Here I was convinced that you would go postal, or at least be really upset. If this is how you react to your lady love getting arrested, you should definitely rethink the tattoo idea, Stud.”
Rick held up a slice of chicken on his fork.
“When did you hear it?” he repeated.
“After school,” I answered. “Mr. Lenzen told me that Gina left school in the back of a squad car. Since it wasn’t your squad car, I assumed that—”
He shook his head. “No arrest, Bob. One of the guys gave her a ride down to the station at my request. I met her there, and we both signed statements. I drove her home afterward.”
“But she’s been suspended,” I pointed out.
“You drove her home?” Luce asked. “You’re on crutches. You asked me to bring you over here so you wouldn’t have to get behind the wheel. Why were you driving Gina?”
“Ah, Luce, that’s so sweet,” Rick told my wife. “You’re really worried about me. I know!” he perked up. “How about I stay here tonight, and you can bring me a glass of warm milk when you tuck
me into bed? I might need a story, too, you know. And a goodnight kiss. Yeah, I think that would really make me feel much better.”
I threw part of a biscuit at him.
“In your dreams, Stud. What about Gina’s suspension?”
Rick turned his attention back to me. “That’s Lenzen’s modus operandi,” he said. “When in doubt, kick ’em out. At least temporarily.”
“So Mr. Lenzen equates suspicion with spoiled food,” I observed.
Both Rick and Luce gave me funny looks.
“An earlier train of my thought,” I explained. “When you have reason to question, or doubt, what it is you’re eating or drinking, you should throw it out. When Mr. Lenzen questions a teacher’s integrity, he throws them out of school via suspension.”
“And?” Luce motioned for me to continue.
“That’s all,” I said. “No ‘and.’ Just commenting.”
Although something about what I had said lodged in my head. I had an overwhelming feeling that doubting what you eat or drink was somehow important to figuring out why Sonny had been murdered. Before I could piece the thought together with another, however, Rick started talking again.
“Gina told me that Lenzen tried to assure her that her suspension was for her own good, to keep her out of any uncomfortable situations at school that might arise because of the investigation into Sonny’s death. He also told her as soon as the case was resolved, he expected her back at work.” He slathered butter on one of his biscuits and popped it in his mouth.
“I think she really thinks he has her best interests at heart,” he continued. “She’s not crazy about attention, and the embarrassment in Henderson was pretty tough on her.”
I could imagine. In a small town, scandals marked you for life, even if you were the unwitting victim. From what I’d seen of Gina, though, I would have guessed that if anyone could survive a reputation blow, it would have been our Family and Consumer Science teacher. Gina was tough, and she believed in taking responsibility so much that she demanded it of her students.
Besides, according to Rick, Gina hadn’t known that Sonny was married, so why had she felt she had to take the fall?