by Holly Plum
When Mari finally made it to her family's restaurant ten minutes later, she found the rest of the staff already seated in the back office waiting for her. She gave Chrissy a half-hearted smile as she took her seat near the ovens. The only member of the family who wasn’t present, as far as she could tell, was her Abuela.
Mr. Ramirez paced in front of them with his hands clasped behind his back. Alex and David looked nervously at each other, neither of them quite knowing what to expect. David looked over at Mari and ran a single finger along his throat.
“I’ve come to the limit of my patience,” Mr. Ramirez announced. “At first I thought it might have just been an innocent mistake. Twenty dollars gone. It’s happened before, right? But then it happened the next day again. And the day after that, and the day after that.”
Chrissy glanced at Mari. She seemed to sense that she was in the crosshairs, or perhaps she was just nervous. Mari turned away, not able to look her in the eyes. Meanwhile, her father continued his rant.
“I’ve had enough,” he said. “I’ve given y'all every opportunity to confess. If you had come to me after the first time it happened and told me, I wouldn’t be making a big deal about it.” Mari scoffed involuntarily, and Mr. Ramirez threw her a sharp look. “If any of you really needed the money we could have worked out some kind of arrangement. But stealing ...”
He turned and looked directly at Chrissy.
Chrissy became conscious that the rest of the room had fixed their gaze on her. At about the same time, tears flooded her eyes as she pointed at herself in disbelief. “Me?” she said.
Mr. Ramirez gave her a solemn nod. “I'm sorry Chrissy, but you closed the register every day any money went missing. I have to let you go.”
It was lucky there were no customers in the building, or they would have heard Chrissy’s outburst.
“I have never stolen a penny from you,” she shouted, rising out of her chair with a sudden fury. Alex and David jumped up at the same time, and for a moment it looked like she might attack Mr. Ramirez. Instead, she merely stood there, clutching her sides.
"Now wait a minute, dad," Mari stepped in.
"Not now, Mari." Mr. Ramirez refused to look at her.
“After all the years I’ve worked here,” Chrissy went on, “this is how you repay me.”
“You want to talk about repayment?” he shot back. “You can start by repaying the hundreds of dollars you’ve stolen.”
Chrissy began to choke out a response, but the words got caught in her throat. This final accusation, evidently, had been too much. She sniffled as she shook her head in disbelief.
"What?" Mari added.
“Detective Price can escort you out,” Mr. Ramirez said quietly.
Chrissy and Mari both looked up at the mention of the name. Mari had been so absorbed watching the exchange between Chrissy and her father that she hadn’t even noticed the arrival of the detective. Chrissy’s expression changed. She looked even more frustrated.
“Am—am I going to jail?” Chrissy asked.
Detective Price shook his head. “Not unless Mr. Ramirez can prove what he is accusing you of.”
“This is all ridiculous.” Chrissy stamped her foot. “I haven't even done anything."
“It could have been a lot worse,” Mr. Ramirez mentioned. “Go on, get out of here.”
“Dad, don’t you think that’s a little harsh?” Mari asked.
“Not now,” he muttered in reply.
Chrissy grunted as she left, and Tabasco followed her out hoping for a goodbye scratch behind the ears.
"By the way," Detective Price stated, "I'm not here about the missing money." He held up a piece of paper. "I'm here with that warrant to search your kitchen."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hours later after the detective had left, silence fell over the restaurant. Alex and David stood in the kitchen drinking coffee, and Mr. Ramirez had locked himself in his office and refused to come out. Outside it had started raining so hard that Mari could hardly see The Lucky Noodle across the street.
Mari was seated in a booth facing the window trying to put together the pieces of the mystery that had so far eluded her. Twice already she had texted Jemina and asked her to come to the restaurant for lunch, but Jemina hadn’t answered. It looked like she was going to have to figure this out on her own. Time was ticking away.
As far as Mari could tell, she was dealing with two unrelated issues. The mystery of the missing money and the question of who had killed Dale Roberts. She didn’t think Chrissy had stolen the money, and she felt her father’s attempt to pin the blame on her without any evidence was irresponsible.
As for the murder itself, she had some clues to sift through, and none of them fit together. First, there was the fact that Jemina claimed the epi-pen had shown up on her desk the day after the murder. Jemina could have been lying. It was certainly suspicious that she had withheld that crucial piece of evidence from the police for so long. But Mari trusted her. She had no real reason to trust her, except the fact that they were old childhood friends.
Andre had been acting suspiciously even before the murder, but Mari now knew why. He had been hiding his true identity from the boss he relentlessly flattered. Although not very well since Dale had figured it out before he died. Andre was a thief and a liar, but a murderer? Again, Mari had only her own intuition to go on, and she didn't see why Andre would risk everything and kill his competitor.
That left Yvette. Yvette had known where Dale's epi-pen was hidden and had sent Mari to find it. Yvette had exploded in anger when she and Jemina attempted to investigate the incident, even going so far as to threaten them both. Yvette was the most likely suspect. She had the most likely motive. She obviously hated her boss but why kill him when she had every hope of wringing a settlement out of him? It made no sense.
While Mari sat there with her head in her hands trying to make sense of it all, her mother and Alex came walking out of the kitchen.
“I’m just saying,” Mrs. Ramirez said, “I think she’s been spending a little too much time with that sewing group. We haven’t even really talked since she started going, and customers are starting to complain about the quality of the tortillas. I just can’t make them like she can.”
“Abuela is old, Mom,” Alex responded. “She doesn’t have a lot of friends her own age, and I think it’s great that she’s finally gotten involved in something.”
Mari hadn’t been thinking much about her grandmother and the fake sewing group. But now that her mother brought it up, a new suspicion crept up on her. Almost as if by instinct she rose from the booth and grabbed Tabasco's leash.
“Where are you headed?” Mrs. Ramirez asked.
“I’ll be out for a bit,” Mari said vaguely. “There’s one thing I need to know, and then I’ll be sure.”
Her mother and brother looked at each other and shrugged as Mari and Tabasco walked out of the door and into the pouring rain.
***
Mari and Tabasco drove through the slick streets of town until they reached the senior center. Just as she had done before, Mari walked through a series of hallways until she found the common room.
The fog against the windows made the main living space look cozy. A bald man with a walrus mustache sat in a leather armchair in front of a television set. A fire blazed in the hearth to the side of the room, and a few women were gathered around it knitting and talking quietly. One elderly woman, festively dressed in a red and green striped sweater, was playing a board game with a girl who might have been her granddaughter. And at a table in the center of the room, Renata and Mari’s grandmother were playing poker with four other women.
Taking a deep breath, Mari strode up to the table hanging tight to Tabasco's leash. “Mind if I join you?” she asked.
“Sure,” Renata replied. Mari had met the woman only once before, and she had been nothing but friendly. “We’ll deal you into the next game.”
Abuela looked at Mari with eyes as wide as s
nickerdoodles.
"Hello, Abuela," Mari said quietly.
"Mari." Her grandmother had a hard time making eye contact.
Before very long Mari had been dealt a hand. Tabasco sat quietly at her feet. While she was staring down at her cards trying to decide on her next move, a silver-haired old woman with a mole on her chin turned to Renata.
“It’s a nasty business, what’s been going on with that murder,” the silver-haired woman said. “Have you heard the latest?”
“No, Bertha, I haven’t,” Renata replied, her ears pricking up visibly at the mention of the incident. It was front page news all over town.
“It’s bad,” Bertha commented, shivering theatrically. “Dreadful, really. They’re saying the young man was murdered by one of his employees.”
“Where did you hear that?” Mari asked. She always had to fight the urge to correct others when they started spouting misinformation.
“I heard it from my daughter when she came in this morning,” Bertha answered. “It's common knowledge, young lady.”
“It’s a bad business all around,” Renata added. “When I was growing up nobody ever got murdered in this town, and you could sleep with your doors unlocked at night. The world isn’t safe like it used to be. Not anymore.”
Mari winced. She wanted to remind Renata that the world hadn’t been the coziest of places fifty plus years ago either. But Mari concentrated on her grandmother.
“Anyway,” Bertha continued, “he was a bad man. Completely crooked. By all accounts, he deserved what he got.”
Renata nodded solemnly as she revealed her hand—three aces and two kings—and took the pot.
After the poker game was over, Mari turned to her grandmother and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Abuela let out a reluctant sigh but followed Mari to a corner of the room where they could see the rain falling on the fence-posts and hedges outside.
"Well, now you know my secret," Abuela said.
“Are we going to talk about the fact that you’ve been stealing money from the registers to fund your poker games?” Mari stated.
Her Abuela nodded. “I had a feeling you would figure it out,” she said in Spanish. “And in a way I am glad. I have succumbed to sin, and I cannot stop.”
“You could have just quit the club, Abuela."
“I wanted to play,” she said simply. “I like having friends. But I needed money if I wanted to participate, and your father wasn’t going to give me that kind of money.”
“You could have at least asked him,” Mari said. “He just fired Chrissy for something you did.”
“I’ve known your father for too long,” she explained. "He would never have given me a cent."
“In the meantime, our best server lost her job.” Mari frowned. "Who knows if she'll even come back now?"
Her grandmother listened with a growing sense of unease. “I’ll tell your father it was me,” she said finally. “But you have to promise not to tell him about my poker group. It’s supposed to be a secret. I know I can trust you with a secret, but I can't trust my son.”
“I won’t say a word,” Mari promised.
“Thank you,” Abuela said and hugged her.
They were interrupted by a buzzing sound in Mari's purse. Tabasco let out a soft bark as Mari scrambled to answer it.
“Hey, what’s up?” Mari answered.
“You’ll probably be seeing this on the news before long,” she replied, “but they’ve figured out who killed Dale Roberts.”
Mari turned away from her grandmother and pushed the phone closer to her ear. “Who was it?”
“Your friend Jemina," her mother replied. "She’s just been taken down to the station. Detective Price found out she was hiding Dale’s epi-pen and he arrested her immediately.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back in the dining room of Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant, Mari read through the files Jemina had taken from Dale’s office. She hoped one of them might put her on the path to the true killer. At the top of the pile was a list of all the businesses and properties Dale owned and the ones he had been planning to buy.
“There are several properties I recognize,” she said to Tabasco. Somehow talking to her dog felt like the appropriate way to work through her frustrations. “Apparently he wanted to buy the grocery store on fifth, Hazel’s furniture store, Bubba’s Pizzeria, and even the senior center. What would he even have done with an old folk's home?”
Tabasco barked in reply. Just then the door of the restaurant opened and, to Mari’s surprise, her Abuela walked in.
“That’s the last time I go out today,” she grumbled. “I don’t even want to go home. If it means going back out in the cold, I would rather sleep in the office.”
“How did you get here so quickly?” Mari asked, watching a red Cadillac speed off through the foggy windows.
“Renata gave me a ride,” she replied, shaking her wet jacket and hanging it on the rack.
Mari remembered seeing the same red Cadillac on the day of the party.
“Hey, before you go anywhere,” she said, “would you happen to know anything about Dale Roberts wanting to buy the senior center?”
The way her grandmother’s eyes reddened, one might have thought Mari had insulted her late husband.
“Yes, he was going to buy it,” she said with a vicious snarl. “He wanted to build a golf course there, of all things. He had already given all the seniors eviction notices. They had three weeks to find new accommodations. We live in a small town. Where are they going to go?”
“How did your friends take it?” Mari asked with a sense of urgency.
“Not very well,” her Abuela said. “Renata was furious. She had nowhere else to go. But now that Dale is gone, there’s a chance the center will stay open. Unless …”
Her voice faded. Mari tugged at her shirt sleeve earnestly. “Unless what? You have to tell me.”
“Unless June Roberts decides to finish what her brother started.”
Without another word, Mari grabbed Tabasco, grabbed her coat, and headed out the door.
***
All the way to the hospital, Mari cursed her bad luck in having to stop a killer on one of the coldest days in a long time. If she tried to drive too fast, she would end up in the ditch with all of the other poor stranded souls who had never driven through slush before. As it was, she got stuck behind a line of cars and crawled along at a sluggish pace for about fifteen minutes until the traffic finally cleared up.
Five minutes later she raced through the eerily serene and quiet lobby of the hospital.
“I need to see June Roberts,” she said to the woman stationed at reception. It was the same woman as before. She looked as if she never slept. “Is she in the same room?”
“No, she’s been moved to 4B,” the woman replied. “But you might not want to go in there right now. She already has a visitor. Her grandmother just barely came in before you. You might want to give her some privacy.”
"That woman is not her grandmother." Mari was gone before she could even finish speaking the sentence. She found the first elevator in the hallway, pressed the button, and waited impatiently as it descended, floor by floor.
When Mari finally reached room 4B, she pressed her face to the window on the door. Inside she saw two figures. One of them, June, was asleep in her bed mumbling quietly to herself. She was wearing a thin blue hospital gown and hugging her arms as if trying to keep warm.
The other was Renata.
She was standing at the foot of the bed wearing a red scarf, a purple sweater, and blue jeans. To the outward eye, she must have seemed the definition of grandmotherly comfort as she held out a balloon, a bouquet of a dozen roses, and a box of assorted chocolates.
The moment Mari saw the chocolates, she threw open the door.
June sat up in bed and looked at them both alarmingly while Renata frowned in frustration.
“June,” Mari said, “don’t eat those chocolates.
” Pointing one finger at Renata, she said, “You don’t have to do this. You can’t undo what you did to Dale, but you don’t have to make the same mistake twice.”
Renata threw down the chocolates on the foot of the bed looking disappointed. June eyed them with suspicion as if they were serpents placed there on purpose to destroy her.
“After my husband Roger died,” Renata explained, “I had nothing left. I couldn’t afford to go on living in the house he had bought with his retirement. The senior center was the only place in town that was willing to take me.”
Renata eased herself onto the windowsill, and a familiar flicker of anger appeared on her face. Mari had seen the same expression on her grandmother’s face just moments ago.
“I still remember so vividly the day Dale Roberts came to the center and handed me my eviction notice. Most men would have had a proxy do it for them, but that wasn’t his style. He wanted to do it in person. He wanted to see the looks on our faces when we found out we were being evicted so he could build his golf course. He had no regard for the feelings of others, and when he knocked over Roger’s urn by accident, he couldn’t stop laughing about it. He acted like it was the funniest thing in the world.”
“I’m sorry, Renata,” Mari replied. “He had no right to treat you that way.”
“I decided to take matters into my own hands,” Renata said. “When he first came into my room that day, I had offered him some of my peanut brittle. Of course, he told me to put it away immediately. He said a single peanut could kill him and explained how he kept an epi-pen in his desk drawer."
"What is going on here?" June rubbed her forehead.
“I thought he must be exaggerating," Renata carried on. "But after he left it gave me an idea. On the day of your party, I stayed behind after dropping off your grandmother and snuck peanut powder into the food while you were outside with your dog and your mother was on the phone. Then it was a cinch to sneak into Dale's office, steal the epi-pen, and leave it on a random desk. Of course, I didn't know Dale's sister would come and take over."