Diners, Drive-Ins, and Death: A Comfort Food Mystery

by Christine Wenger

  “It was a nice service,” Toxic Waste said. “Very nice.”

  “Thank you,” ACB smiled. “And your gifts to him—the shirt and the chef’s hat—were very thoughtful. I want to thank you and the rest of the Rubbers for coming.”

  “How long will you and the Rubbers be camping, Toxic?” I just couldn’t call him William . . . or even Billy. He was definitely a Toxic Waste.

  “I think we’ll stay for a couple of days. We’re actually all thinking about attending the Miss Salmon Contest.”

  “I want to advise you not to leave town without a green light from me,” Ty said.

  “What the hell? You got to be kidding,” Toxic said. “The Rubbers have a lot of things to do.”

  “I don’t kid about murder, and I’m not talking about the Rubbers, just you.”

  Icicles dripped from each of Ty’s words.

  “How long?” Toxic asked.

  “As long as it takes. I’ll let you know.”

  “Is this because my fiancée left me for Nick?” he asked. “Or because of the screaming matches that I had with him? He started it!”

  I felt like I was at recess on the grammar-school playground, and Toxic was whining to Sister Mary Mary.

  “We’ll talk in my office. Four o’clock,” Ty said flatly.

  Toxic Waste looked like he had swallowed some toxic waste. He was turning purple. “Is that all?”

  “We’ll talk at four,” Ty said.

  Toxic Waste left the restaurant as if his black jeans were on fire.

  ACB chuckled. “You’re really clearing out my breakfast guests, aren’t you, Ty? Oh, well. More for me.”

  The buffet was ready, so ACB led us there first. Other tables followed.

  It was a nice buffet with scrambled eggs, eggs Benedict, a beautifully arranged meat-and-cheese tray, a basket full of warm rolls, home fries, sausage, bacon, ham, relishes, and an extensive array of pastries. There were baked beans, macaroni and potato salads, chef’s salad, and other items too numerous to mention.

  “My new cook is fabulous,” she said. “I hope he doesn’t quit.”

  “He’s not a local guy, is he, Antoinette Chloe?” I asked.

  “He just graduated from Paul Smith’s at Lake Placid. I asked the placement office to put an ad on their bulletin board or on their computer—whatever they do. Fingers answered my ad, and I hired him immediately.”

  “What a great idea,” I said.

  “I know.”

  The three of us ate, talked, drank more coffee, and people-watched. Finally, Antoinette Chloe stood up and clanked her spoon on her coffee cup.

  “Again, I’d like to thank you all for coming, for your cards, your kind expressions of sympathy, and for your support. Please don’t hesitate to visit Brown’s Four Corners in the future. We have a fabulous new cook, as you can tell. Thanks again!”

  The crowd started to clear out. Some lingered over their coffee, but almost everyone shuffled out. I could hear the Rubbers rev up their motorcycles.

  And then there were three.

  I stretched. “I’d better get moving and see what’s happening at the point.”

  I started to stand, but Ty put a hand on my arm. “Now that we’re all alone, I’d like to talk to you both.”

  Crap. This sounded like something I wouldn’t want to hear.

  ACB was concentrating on reattaching the blackbird to her fascinator and wasn’t paying much attention to Ty.

  Ty snapped his fingers loudly. “Antoinette Chloe, please listen.”

  “Oh, sure. What’s up, Ty?”

  “We found a fake fingernail in the collar of Nick’s shirt.” He pointed to ACB’s pinkie finger. “It would fit exactly here. We think that Nick might have been taken by gunpoint or knifepoint from his toolshed to the land where we found him—your land, Antoinette Chloe.”

  “He must have been scared, poor Nicky.”

  “Uh-huh. And we found a fake animal—a little yellow rabbit—on your land, too, not far from the body.”

  “Oh, good! That’s probably the bunny that fell off one of my favorite fascinators.”

  “Antoinette Chloe, don’t talk,” I said, knowing where this was leading.

  Ty sighed. “And we found the murder weapon, a filleting knife, wrapped in a fascinator, just like the kind you wear, not far from Nick’s body.”

  “It has to be my Easter fascinator! The one I’ve been looking for. That’s the one with the robins and bunnies frolicking on the grass. I was going to make it into a fall tableau with autumn leaves and salmon jumping, and wear it to the Miss Salmon pageant, but you found it with a knife wrapped in it? The knife used to kill Nick?”

  I wanted to put my hand over her mouth, but it would’ve ruined her Wild Irish Rose lipstick. “Would you listen to me? Don’t talk to Ty without a lawyer.”

  Ty shrugged. “I’m not the enemy, but that’s the hat, Antoinette Chloe—robins and bunnies on pink grass. I knew that it was yours.”

  “Any prints on the knife?” I asked, holding my breath, praying that ACB’s weren’t there.

  “It was wiped clean. But there was something else nearby—a silver earring with a little motorcycle hanging from it.”

  “I was wondering where that went!” she said, completely oblivious. “I wanted to wear them today to the cemetery, but I could only find one.”

  “Antoinette Chloe. Shut up!” I said tactfully.

  “Why?”

  “Because everything Ty is mentioning is all your stuff! And it was all found at the scene where Nick was found.”

  “I know. I’m lucky he found it.” She laughed, then sobered. Finally the situation hit her. “Oh! Oh, merciful heavens, no!” She turned to Ty. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “I’m afraid so, Antoinette Chloe.” He shook his head. “Please stand and put your hands against the wall. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right—”

  “Ty, no!”

  “Trixie, please stand back.”

  “C’mon, Ty. Antoinette Chloe? Really, Ty? Really?”

  “It’s okay, Trixie. It’s okay,” ACB said. “Ty will figure this all out, and you’ll help him. Okay?”

  He handcuffed my friend, and it was like nails on a chalkboard when those metal teeth clicked into place. Then he patted her down. Tears ran down my cheeks. She looked so sad, so tired, so unlike Antoinette Chloe.

  “Are they comfortable, Antoinette Chloe?” Ty asked.

  She sniffed, then nodded. “How could you think that I’d kill my Nicky?”

  “The clues lead straight to you,” he said. “I’m really sorry, but there’s the Easter hat, the motorcycle earring, the fake nail, the bunny . . . it’s all yours.”

  “Ty Brisco!” My anger was bubbling like molten lava, and finally I blew. “You call those clues? It’s a trail that a first-grader could follow. It’s like Antoinette Chloe tossed everything out her car window, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Maybe she’s a sloppy criminal,” he added.

  “I’m just sloppy,” Antoinette Chloe. “I’m not a criminal.”

  I remembered walking by her room in my house. The door was open, and I had peeked in. Okay, ACB was a slob when it came to her room. No, maybe she wasn’t a slob. With everything going on, she just didn’t have time to put anything away. I wondered how she could find anything in that room.

  “Trixie, what about the Miss Salmon pageant? I’m the mistress of ceremonies. I bought an evening muumuu.”

  “Don’t worry, Antoinette Chloe. I’ll bail you out in time.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  “We have to get going now,” Ty said.

  “One more thing. Trixie, will you tell Fingers to just . . . carry on? Oh, and the payroll is due tomorrow, and . . . Oh, I can’t think.”

  “I’ll take
care of everything,” I said, with more confidence than I actually felt.

  “I can always count on you,” ACB said.

  I followed as he escorted ACB to a sheriff’s car. Vern McCoy got out from behind the wheel and opened the back door.

  “Sorry, Antoinette Chloe. We had to do it,” Vern said.

  “I understand, Vern.” ACB then yelled back to me. “Trixie, call Janice Malloy for me.”

  “Who?” I yelled back.

  “Janice Malloy. She’s a lawyer. I graduated from high school with her.”

  After Vern drove away, Ty turned to me. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I’d rather walk!”

  “Get in my SUV, please,” he said through gritted teeth. He meant business, and I wasn’t in the mood to argue anymore or walk to my house.

  “Give me ten minutes. I want to talk to her cook.”

  I didn’t need ten minutes. Five was more than enough. Fingers knew where the time cards were, where her payroll books were kept, and even where she hid her blank checks. No computers for ACB.

  He gathered up everything and put it in a box for me.

  She sure must trust Fingers . . . er . . . Phil Gallman.

  I walked slowly to my ride home. Getting into Ty’s car, I put the box at my feet and didn’t say a word.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” he said unoriginally.

  “They aren’t worth that much,” I shot back.

  Ty sighed. “Nick had an insurance policy, just like Chad Dodson claimed. In fact, the policy was taken out through Chad’s bank or some kind of insurance holdings his family has. Anyway, Nick’s policy is worth almost a million bucks.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We’ve been searching his house for a while now, remember?” he said. “All his important papers—important to Nick anyway—were in a metal file cabinet on the floor of his bedroom closet.”

  “And who’s the beneficiary?”

  “Your friend Antoinette Chloe Brown.”

  Chapter 8

  Ty cleared his throat. “And I believe that’s what we in the business call—you know, the job that you said a first-grader could do—we call that motivation.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Ty. ACB didn’t even know that she was the beneficiary or that Nick even had a policy. Chad Dodson was the one who knew that. And he had inside information. He even knew that Nick signed his house over to her, for crying out loud.”

  “How could Antoinette Chloe not know that little tidbit?”

  “It’s not as if she had to do anything. Nick paid the premiums. Obviously he wanted to surprise her,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, I don’t know if she was surprised,” he said. “I wonder if she was acting.”

  Ugh. Sometimes, Ty got me so crazy, I wanted to pull his cowboy hat down past his ears. “ACB doesn’t know how to act. What you see is what you get with her.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “And did it ever occur to you that someone was trying to frame her by littering all her stuff on her land?”

  “Of course it did.”

  “So, where do I find Janice Malloy?”

  “Over at Malloy’s Hardware Store and Gift Emporium. Her law office is above the store that she runs with her husband, Gary. She’s an excellent criminal lawyer.”

  “Will ACB get her one phone call?” I asked.

  “We’ll give her as many as she needs.”

  “Good.”

  “Trixie, this isn’t Auburn or Attica. We have two holding cells—one for men, one for women. The last woman we had there was an out-of-towner who got lost and ended up here in Sandy Harbor during a blizzard. She stayed in the cell because all the hotels were full with other stranded motorists. She thought it was quite the adventure staying overnight in a jail and couldn’t wait to go home and tell her pals.”

  “I’m hoping that ACB will think of this as an adventure, too.”

  We sat in silence for a few miles; then I asked, “How can I get her out?”

  “You can’t. Not until after she’s arraigned and if bail is set. That’ll be tomorrow morning.”

  “Who will be presiding over her case at court?”

  “Judge Martin Butler, the town justice of Sandy Harbor. I’ll catch him before he goes out fishing tomorrow.”

  “Where’s his office?” I’d make sure that I was there when ACB was arraigned.

  “At the Happy Harbor Bar and Grill. It’s in between the bottle-and-can-return place and the Laundromat, Bubbly Clean, on Fifth Street. He owns the bar, and court is held there when the bar is closed on Mondays and before eleven on weekdays.”

  Does anyone have just one job in Sandy Harbor? The one lawyer in town owns and operates a hardware store and gift shop. The town justice owns and operates the bar and has court right there. It’s just like the Wild West!

  “What time will ACB be arraigned?”

  “Nine o’clock,” he said. “Are you going to be there?”

  “Of course. My friend needs my support.”

  “You can visit ACB tonight, you know. That’s not a problem,” Ty said. “In fact, I’ll be there.”

  “I will see you at the jail, then. And please be nice to ACB.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Geez, darlin’, what kind of a cop do you think I am? Better yet, what kind of a cowboy do you think I am?”

  “Sorry, Ty. That was really silly of me to say. I apologize. I know that you waited to arrest Antoinette Chloe after the cemetery and after everyone left the breakfast. That was very nice of you.”

  He smiled, but I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. “This is your stop,” he said, pulling into a space in the parking lot near my house.

  I climbed down from the giant SUV. “Thanks for the ride. See you later.”

  “Later.”

  I looked around my property. It looked like a tent town. The Rubbers had finished setting up camp, and there were twelve royal blue potty stations and showers lining the woods by the parking lot.

  Chad Dodson’s zillion-dollar motor home was gleaming, though his front bumper was perilously close to touching one of the potties.

  He was sitting outside on a director’s chair, and it looked like he had a bottle of champagne chilling on a table at his side. He was sipping out of a flute.

  He raised his flute in a salute to me. “Care to join me, Trixie?”

  I didn’t really want to, but I needed to talk to him if I had any hope of exonerating my friend. He opened another director’s chair, poured me a glass of champagne, and handed it to me.

  “Thanks.”

  I took a sip and knew that this was the expensive stuff. It was smooth, so smooth—except for the bubbles that tickled the back of my throat.

  “Nice stuff,” I said, sitting down.

  He smiled his dazzling smile, and pointed his thumb at his chest. “Nothing but the best for this guy.”

  Ugh. What a show-off.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “Chad, about Nick’s insurance policy . . . how did you know that Antoinette Chloe was the beneficiary?”

  He shifted on his chair. “I guessed.”

  “Really? You didn’t have inside information?”

  His smile faded. “Why are you questioning me about this, Trixie? Did that cop send you?”

  I wanted to kick the legs of his chair and send him sprawling on the parking lot. Instead I put on a smile as phony as his.

  “No. Ty didn’t send me. Matter of fact, my friend Antoinette Chloe was just arrested, and I want to get to the bottom of this mess.”

  He leaned forward and chuckled. “She was arrested?”

  Jerk!

  “Why are you laughing? I don’t think it’s funny. The real criminal should be behind bars, not her,” I said, read
y to send him to the nearest Walmart, a good hundred miles away, to park his rig.

  “Maybe they do have the real criminal. And if she killed him, she won’t get a dime of the insurance policy,” Chad sneered.

  Chad Dodson was way too pompous for Sandy Harbor. Actually, he was way too pompous for anywhere.

  “I don’t know why you’re so concerned about insurance. You won’t get a dime either,” I said. “Unless you’re listed as the secondary beneficiary after Antoinette Chloe is bumped out of the running, like if she was found guilty of the policyholder’s death!”

  I was mostly thinking out loud, but I caught a slight smile from Chad that he hid it by taking a sip of his drink.

  He is the secondary beneficiary of Nick’s insurance policy!

  That’s why the leading questions at breakfast. Maybe Ty put ACB into protective custody because he thought there’d be an attempt to kill her!

  Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to bail her out. Though I think ACB would rather die than miss her chance at being the emcee of the Miss Salmon pageant, with its dancing-salmon routine.

  I might as well keep talking to Chad in the meantime to see if I could get him to spill any more information. I held out my flute for a refill of champagne, not realizing that I’d sipped the whole glass dry.

  “Chad, why would a rich guy like you worry about a mere million dollars’ worth of insurance?”

  “A million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, especially during these times.”

  “You didn’t need Nick’s money for the past several months. What happened?”

  “The market.” He took another sip. “And Nick wasn’t worth anything until he was dead.”

  “How nice of you to say.”

  He shrugged. “Nick and I didn’t part as friends. I’m sure Deputy Brisco knows that already.”

  “What happened between you two?” Liquor loosens the lips, and his were flapping.

  He drained his glass. “We met at a restaurant I used to frequent in Boston. Nick was working there, and he made the most delicious meals. Just delicious. His pasta primavera and veal Parmesan were to die for. I hired him to cater a Christmas party one year at the family mansion, and everyone raved. Eventually, we talked about a partnering up to build our own restaurant. I’d be the face person, and he’d be the talent.”