Chopping Spree

by Diane Mott Davidson

  For the first time in the meeting, no one was reaching for pastries. The members sat without moving, concentrating on appearing neutral, although frowns and pursed lips indicated creeping discomfort. You need help, girl, their expressions said. Jack, for his part, looked downright disgusted. Maybe he’d been seduced by Pam, too, and had bought her lunch at Duccio’s.

  “OK,” Page snarled, “I probably do shop too much. But I need to. My husband used to buy me nice things, and now he takes me for granted. I have to buy stuff for myself. Meanwhile, my slutty sister has a new boyfriend, or she had one, anyway, and she got him to give her discounts, big ones, on all kinds of stuff.” Her voice turned shrill. “Another one of her boyfriends sweet-talked the dean at… his former college, so my sister could get into a special scholarship program to go to night school for her degree. Free! This new guy gave her furs and jewelry from… vendors or reps or whatever they’re called. And then he bought her a round-trip ticket to Hawaii for next Christmas, because he knew the travel agent here in the… well, here.” Her voice ramped up a few more notches. “This boyfriend even got Pam a fifty percent discount on… a piece of jewelry. Not to buy, but… to rent. And he leased it for her!” Page screamed, “And then this same guy…fired my husband, so we suddenly had no income! I was so furious I couldn’t sleep! Couldn’t eat! Couldn’t drive!” She leaped to her feet. “That son of a bitch ruined our lives!”

  Page ran out of the room.

  Silence fell over the group.

  George said, “Next?”

  I wanted to follow Page, but my inner voice warned me to stay put. At this juncture, she’d be in no mood to chat. So I listened sympathetically to two more people talk, or as they called it, “share.” One man was a bargain-hunter with six storage sheds full of stuff he never used. He said the seller always represented his mother, who’d withheld love from him as a child. By ruthlessly bargaining, he tried to outsmart the seller, so he could “get love for free.” Except he never got the affection he needed, just lots of fishing rods and motorcycle parts. The final speaker, a very large woman with a pointed chin, announced that she was a codependent spender. She fingered her plastic dark glasses and tried to straighten her very crooked curly-haired wig. She said she had a compulsion to spend money on others. By giving people huge gifts, she was hoping they would love her. The previous year, she’d won fifty thousand dollars in the lottery, now all gone on presents for which she had not received a single thank-you note. Now she had to work a crummy job that caused her no end of stress.

  I squinted at her thoughtfully as the group broke up. “Why, Rhonda!” I whispered to myself, then hightailed it out of there.

  In the mall, shoppers scurried or moseyed past, many of them with that hungry, pinched look that said they were rushing for a bite to eat. Monday morning, I’d bemoaned the fact that I never had time for lunch out with Marla; now I was so stuffed with pastries and water that the idea of a midday meal made my very full stomach holler in protest.

  I pulled off the crocheted hat and found a chair. I needed to sit and think. Just down the staircase, the window of Westside Music displayed a painted banner: Open Late! With a start, I recalled that Arch’s birthday was tomorrow. Tom had bought him a new lacrosse stick, helmet, and official-size goal, which he planned to put up in our backyard, snow be damned. He’d also promised to look for another guitar, since the much-desired one was dented, and not done being inspected by the cops. Still, I knew Arch well enough to be sure of this: The gift he would most cherish would be to have Julian at his party. So it was in the free-Julian department that I needed to continue to bend my efforts.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and reflected on the shopaholics’ meeting. Page Stockham had confessed to a sister problem, a problem that appeared to have been very much aggravated by the presence of discount-supplying Barry Dean. My mind circled back to one of its many questions. Had Tom spurred the investigators to find out exactly where Page—and Ellie too, for that matter—had been after the two women split from Marla? Would the desires to a) have revenge on the man who evicted her husband’s profitable store, and b) deprive a sibling of her ride on the gravy train, be sufficient motive to kill Barry?

  There was one person I had not been able to talk to, but who, in light of the shopaholics’ meeting, I now desperately needed to see. I headed toward Prince & Grogan. With Julian facing formal charges the next morning, I might have to buy a hundred dollars’ worth of nighties from Barry Dean’s onetime girlfriend. But wait—there was one detail of Page’s story that I needed to check out first. I turned and quickly headed toward the mall management office.

  Heather the receptionist looked quite a bit cheerier than when I’d seen her earlier in the week. She’d had her hair colored with bright pink streaks and cut in a new, spiky do. New fluorescent pink nail polish and lipstick matched her hair. She looked like an ad for pink lemonade, which she happened to be drinking from a plastic cup. When I entered the office, she set down the lemonade by her half-eaten personal pizza, which, I shuddered to see, was topped with ham and pineapple.

  “The caterer!” Heather exclaimed, then clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oops! Did I forget to call you?”

  For a horrid, sinking moment, I thought Rob Eakin, the interim mall manager, might have changed his mind about the canceled prospective tenants’ lunch, originally scheduled for that day. If so, and Heather Featherbrain had forgotten to notify me, then all my worry about success would be something I’d laugh about as my business went under. You simply do not fail to show up to cater an affair.

  “First of all,” she said, handing me a check, “here’s a new payment for your gratuity. Rob Eakin cut another check, since the cops are keeping everything. Plus, I found what you were looking for,” Heather continued brightly. She sucked noisily on her straw. “Barry did leave you something.”

  “Oh, Heather.” I groaned, thinking of Julian’s haggard face behind the jail glass. “Why didn’t you call me? For crying out loud, this is about a murder case!”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but we’ve been busy,” she cried. “It’s been nuts around here, with the crews working day and night, and Rob trying to stave off the potential tenants. Plus, somebody just called here to ask for a comment about our old construction manager turning up dead. It’s like, this mess never stops.”

  “Just give me whatever it is, would you please? Then I need to ask you something about Barry.”

  “Not again!” she protested as she wedged past her desk and nabbed a manila envelope that was cantilevered off a filing cabinet. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do!”

  I didn’t remark about her seeming to have time for so-called Hawaiian pizza and pink lemonade or for getting her hair done. Instead, I eyed the envelope that had a scrawled Goldy——Dog File across it.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked.

  “Barry had a file labeled ‘Catering.’ The cops went through it but didn’t take stuff from it, it looks like.” She was peering at the envelope in my hand with undisguised curiosity. “Your contracts were in the file, plus that manila envelope. What’s a dog file?”

  “I have no idea, and I doubt I’ll find out anytime soon.” I tucked the envelope under my arm. “Look, I’m sorry to be crabby but—”

  “It’s all right,” she said, suddenly contrite. Maybe all this new cheer of hers was just her way of denying what had happened to her boss.

  “A friend of ours is in jail—”

  “I heard. Your assistant.”

  “My assistant did not kill Barry,” I said emphatically. “And I’m trying to find out who did.” When she wrinkled her nose, I persisted. “Will you help me?”

  She took a sip of lemonade. She said, “I’ll try,” without much enthusiasm.

  “What I need to know now,” I told Heather earnestly, “is about discounts and gifts that Barry received. Say, from stores. Reps. Vendors. Stuff that might, you know, make people jealous.”

  Heather’s forehead wrinkled. S
he didn’t seem to be thinking so much as trying to find a way to say something unsavory. When I cleared my throat impatiently, she eased back into her chair. “We’re supposed to have a no-gift policy….”

  “Supposed to?”

  She took a bite of pizza and avoided my eyes. After a moment, she said, “Before Barry took over, the only discount we got was at the mall’s fast food places. But when the expansion started, stores were really wild to get in here.” Her hand went to her throat, where she fingered a thin gold chain. “Barry, uh, did take gifts. He gave a lot of them away, though,” she added hastily. “I mean, he didn’t need a woman’s diamond Rolex or a monthly getaway trip to some exotic place like Maui.”

  I gripped the lumpy envelope. “Heather, this is terribly important. I have to know the truth. I need to know about specific things he received.” In fact, that was what I’d been mulling over since Page’s outburst at the meeting: Is this true? Or is jealous Page imagining or exaggerating gifts Barry gave Pam?

  “All right, all right!” Heather cried, blushing. “Barry… gave me this chain, a free gift from Barton’s Jewelry! And he gave my dad a case of Glenlivet. My mom asked for a Vuitton bag and he surprised her with it. That’s it, I promise! We didn’t take any other gifts from Barry and I don’t know where he got the stuff. So… are you going to turn me in?”

  I exhaled and remembered that someone with evidence about Barry’s headaches had hired a lawyer to offer that evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Would that prosecution have been for receiving gifts without paying gift or income taxes? “What did Barry give Pam Disharoon? Do you know?”

  Heather’s eyes widened. “Nobody knows that for sure. But lots of people wanted to.”

  “Like?”

  “That private eye,” she replied, with a dramatic wave of one hand. No question, this girl had seen too many TV crime shows. “The cops. And some tall blond woman who said she was from the IRS, but I didn’t believe her for a second. She looked a lot like Pam, too. Maybe she was her cousin.”

  “Do you know exactly what Barry gave Pam?” If it was big, I thought, if it was really, really, really big, then maybe someone had been so angry, jealous, or something, that he or she had felt justified in killing Barry Dean.

  Heather shrugged and popped a piece of ham into her mouth. “Barry showed me some of the jewelry. That diamond Rolex I told you about, a diamond bracelet, some emerald earrings. I asked him if he was giving pieces to Ellie, too. He said, ‘Of course! Only her taste is so conservative. And anyway, she’s already got lots of jewelry.’”

  “What else did Barry give Pam?”

  “He… let her have his Audi, I think. His car got wrecked, and the Audi was in the shop, so he ended up with two problem vehicles, plus he didn’t drive his BMW, usually. He only wanted one new car, the Saab, plus the Beemer racing car. Oh, and he gave Pam tickets for luxury trips, although I’m not sure they had a chance to have sexual relations anywhere but in that new car of his. Barry thought he was being followed on the weekends. Looking back, you know, I figured it was that investigator—you know, the one Ellie McNeely hired—who was following Barry.”

  “Barry and Pam had sex in the new Saab?” Was that before or after he drove me out for a latte? Blech! Anyway, I wasn’t sure Heather was telling the truth. She was at that age when imagined sexual details made any story more fun. Come to think of it, I suppose that was any age.

  “I’m not kidding!” she protested. “Barry told me about it, along with all the juicy details. I should have sued him for sexual harassment. ‘Ever done it in a car, Heather?’ he used to ask me, after lunch. He was laughing. His clothes were all rumpled; he’d gone out with the emerald earrings and come back empty-handed, so I just knew he and Pam had done it. He said, ‘The car is just the best place. You’ve got leather smells and risk, and then every time you drive it, you can think back to what you did in it a few hours ago.’ I mean, is that sexual harassment or what?” She punctuated her question by taking another bite of pizza.

  So much for Rufus Investigations being able to tell Ellie definitively what was going on. Whatever had been going on between Pam and Barry, it had not been a “mental affair,” it had been the genuine article. No wonder he’d missed all those dates with Ellie. I felt a pang of sympathy for my old church friend. “Did Barry give Pam anything else?”

  Heather folded up the pizza box and pushed it into her trash can. “Double discount coupons at all the stores, part of a promotion campaign to get mall workers to shop at the mall. He also gave her at least one mink jacket that I know of. I haven’t the faintest clue how he got that. Oh, and he sent her lots of flowers. Denver Floral wanted to lease here really bad.” She arched an eyebrow. “Mrs. McNeely probably got really upset when she found out about what he was doing for Pam, huh? What he was doing to Pam. I mean, that he was doing Pam.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I thanked Heather and left. Two minutes later, I locked myself into a bathroom stall and opened the envelope. I wasn’t tampering with evidence, I reasoned, because Barry had left this for me. Besides, Barry had always been interested in what dishes I’d be serving. Maybe it was just menus.

  It was not menus. The manila envelope contained two newspaper clippings, a business-envelope-size piece of opened mail, and three cardboard boxes from the same high-end line of women’s cosmetics.

  First I studied the slightly tattered envelope. My name was scrawled above a typed address:

  Lucas Holden

  General Delivery

  Prescott, Arizona 86301-9999

  The envelope also bore a post-office-stamped pointy finger. I’d always thought those inked pointed forefingers looked vaguely accusatory. The reason given for the return, Addressee Unknown/Return to Sender, included a penned date-of-rejection, from a month before. The return address was the Westside Mall office. Inside I found Lucas Holden’s paycheck, five thousand and change, plus a handwritten note:

  Lucas, here’s your last check. I sent it to the place you said you were going. Please come back. I know we can work things out.

  B. Dean

  I put the letter on top of the toilet paper dispenser. So, I figured, that was at least one thing Barry had wanted me to figure out: what had happened to Lucas. Maybe Barry hadn’t been sure; maybe he thought Lucas was on the road, or just plain sulking. But I had found out what had happened to Lucas, hadn’t I? The ex-construction worker had died in a motel. Being extra cautious, though, why would Barry not have called the cops and reported Lucas as a missing person?

  I knew the answer as soon as my mind posed the question. Barry’s own words—Nothing clears a mall like a security threat—would surely have applied to a construction manager who’d quit in a huff and then turned up missing. So Barry wanted me, the amateur sleuth, to locate Lucas, because he couldn’t afford any bad publicity. No doubt, the charming Mr. Dean couldn’t have imagined the way I would find Lucas, any more than he would imagine the way I would stumble over his own corpse.

  Unfortunately, the other items in the manila envelope were much more baffling. First was a clipped editorial from the February twenty-sixth issue of the Mountain Journal. The title, Does Furman County Really Need Forty More Stores?, was hysterically answered in the first paragraph: No way. But if Barry had been truly interested in my keeping this editorial, why had he clipped it off mid-point? The page’s other side was a pastiche of ads, and included an ‘81 Mercedes At a Great Price, a lot out by the Elk Preserve where the owner would Build to Suit, a sale on delivered topsoil from We Got Dirt, and a heartfelt ad for homemade dog biscuits from Caring for Canines, which implied that if you really loved your pet, you wouldn’t feed him those nasty treats from the grocery store.

  Frowning, I reread the editorial that was missing part of its text. It was the standard stuff about the mall addition ruining the environment, encouraging big corporations to usurp state jobs, funneling profits out of state, and, horrors, contributing to the mindless growth of materialism! Maybe
it was to avoid this kind of rap that Westside had offered their mall for shopaholics’ meetings. But why would Barry want me to have a slice of Mountain Journal polemic?

  The second clipping was another cropped article, this one entitled Teen Held in Shopliftings. Of course I knew all about Teddy Fury, so I skimmed it. But I still puzzled over this clipping, because again Barry had trimmed a portion of the text, this time vertically. Had he had eye problems? The back of this sheet held more ads similar to the others. I sighed. The more evidence I collected regarding Barry’s murder, the more bewildering things became.

  The last three items, the fancy cosmetics boxes, were indeed all makeup. First I opened the slender rectangular box and pulled out a pale green, marbleized plastic compact, a cream foundation designated as Honeycream. I opened it; the compact looked as if it had been slightly used. Yuck. The next box held new red lipstick; the third was a roll-up cream blush. I checked all three for secret compartments, tiny written messages, you name it. There was nothing. No question about it—this made a lot of sense, as in none. I went back to the compact mirror, where my exhausted face squinted back. Barry wasn’t the only one who had thought I needed a new look.

  I stuffed all the items back in the envelope, which I slid deep into my tote. Tom would have some ideas, I reasoned. He might even know what a dog file was.

  I was confused. I was tired. So, I was not in the best of moods when I plodded into the luxurious lingerie department of Prince & Grogan. Pam was there, holding up a lacy teddy, and shaking it from side to side, while a potential customer, a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with silver hair, gaped. I edged over and heard her croon, “Incredibly slinky and soft against the skin,” and “Oh, you’ll thank me! And so will she!” and “This one’s our top seller. The highest quality, of course. You have to spend money to get the best, but you know that.”