by Lois Winston
“You took a chance going there,” Rafe admonished me. “Travis said he made that late night phone call and tried to scare you, but you didn’t give up on the case. So he made up his mind to kill you.”
I shrugged and leaned back in the chair. In spite of what I’d said earlier, I was dying for a cup of coffee. Or even better, a mojito.
“Yeah, well, I had to get inside the mansion to get information. I had the feeling that Travis might be involved in Sanjay’s death, but I didn’t understand his motive.” I paused. “Until he broke into my condo and explained about the book deal. Then I realized why Sanjay had to go. If Sanjay were dead, Travis could destroy any notes Sanjay had made and go ahead with plans for his own book. Sanjay’s death would probably boost sales. It would make the book topical. Publishers love that.”
“Like Lenore Cooper’s book.”
“You saw the infomercial, too. Funny, I didn’t think you were the type to watch those.”
“I’m an insomniac.”
“Really? We should get together sometime at three a.m.” I flushed. Where did that come from? Time for a quick save. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
Rafe looked at me, his mouth quirked. “Sorry to hear that.” He riffled through some papers. “We’ll do another interview tomorrow but I think I have enough for now. The DA will have a really strong case unless Travis tries to go for an insanity plea.”
“I thought that only worked one percent of the time?”
Rafe looked impressed. “Less than one percent. I see you’ve done your homework.”
“I try.” My stomach growled and I quickly jammed my hand in my lap. “Sorry. I missed lunch.”
“We can remedy that,” Rafe told me. “There’s the best Tex-Mex restaurant just a few blocks away. Tico’s.” He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. My heart was thudding at the thought of going to dinner with him. “Your roommate isn’t a suspect anymore, so there’s no reason we can’t have dinner together.”
“I’m glad.” The understatement of the year. Rafe was still staring at me, an expectant look on his face.
“Isn’t there something you want to ask me,” he said finally.
“Oh!” I snapped my fingers. “How could I be such an idiot. “Tell me about Miriam Dobosh. Was she really the one who hit me over the head? Why did she do it?”
“Yes, we brought her in and she confessed. She did it because of this.” Rafe reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the audience evaluation form, the one that had slammed Sanjay’s seminar. “She wrote it herself. She wanted Sanjay to realize he had some enemies out there–enemies that only she could deal with. Miriam hoped to convince him that she should stay at the helm of the organization.”
“He was thinking of dumping her for a newer, younger assistant.”
Rafe nodded. “That’s what she told us. So she wrote this really negative eval and tossed it in the pile with the favorable ones. Of course she had no idea Sanjay would be murdered that very night and the note would point right to her as a suspect. It could be a key piece of evidence.”
“If anyone ever discovered it.”
“Exactly. She had to make sure that didn’t happen. So she went back to the Seabreeze to rescue it, and saw you sitting on the front porch going through the audience evals with the innkeeper.”
“Ted Rollins.” I remembered the creepy feeling that someone was watching me that night.
“She figured you’d lifted the eval, which was evidence by the way.” He tried to look stern but something about those flashing dark eyes and chiseled features made it hard to pull off. “So she decided to break into your apartment and find it. She’ll be charged with B and E and aggravated assault.” He looked at me. “At least you didn’t take the original.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I would never do that. I made a copy.”
Rafe grinned. “I’d hate to have to arrest you for evidence tampering. Of course, you shouldn’t have touched the note at all, once you suspected it might be evidence. “
“So maybe I did a little tampering,” I confessed. I thought for a minute. “And the sushi container? What really happened to it. It wasn’t in the dumpster, was it?”
“Nope. Travis admitted that he slipped back into Sanjay’s room that night to retrieve it. Apparently Sanjay didn’t eat much of it, but it was enough to kill him. Travis grabbed the container and the left-overs and flushed them.”
“Pretty clever.”
“Diabolical.” Rafe grinned.
“What happens now?”
Rafe picked up his cell and pager and reached for his jacket. “We go out to dinner. Unless you’d like to hang around here shooting the breeze with me.”
~*~
“I’d rather go to dinner.” I stood up, suddenly feeling a little shy and wondering why. “I still have some questions, but we can talk over dinner, right?”
“Of course,” he said guiding me out the door. “I have some questions for you, too.”
“You do?” We were walking down the hall, heading for the double glass doors that opened onto State Street. It was a beautiful evening, the sun setting in a blaze of gold and orange and the air soft and balmy. The air was filled with the dizzying scent of magnolia blossoms. I could hardly believe Travis was in jail, Lark was off the hook, and I was having dinner with Rafe Martino.
“I guess I only have one question, “Rafe said, glancing me.
“Ask me anything.” He surprised me by taking my hand as we headed towards the restaurant. His grip was warm and firm and it felt right. Very right.
“Tell me about Ted Rollins. You two live next door to each other, but you don’t have something going on with him, do you?”
“With Ted Rollins? Good lord, no. He’s just a friend. Like a brother.”
Rafe gave my hand a squeeze and edged a little closer to me on the sidewalk. “Just a friend? Oh Maggie,” he said feelingly. “That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear.”
~*~
Dr. Maggie’s adventures continue in Reel Murder, Book Two in the Talk Radio Mystery series.
Florida’s newest talk show radio psychologist Maggie Walsh has no sooner gotten involved with a local movie production than the leading lady turns up dead. Now Maggie has to find the killer before the credits roll-or it might be her final performance.
~*~
Want to know what happens next? Click here to buy Reel Murder.
About The Author
Mary Kennedy is a former radio copywriter and the author of over forty novels. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice and lives on the East Coast with her husband and eight neurotic cats. Both husband and cats have resisted all her attempts to psychoanalyze them, but she remains optimistic.
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Books By Mary Kennedy
Talk Radio Mystery Series
Dead Air
Reel Murder
Stay Tuned For Murder
Dream Club Mystery Series
Nightmares Can Be Murder
Dream A Little Scream
A Premonition of Murder
Hollywood Nights Series
Golden Girl
Movie Star
Confessions
Nonfiction
Dream Interpretation: A Psychologist’s Guide
A Dead Red Cadillac
A Dead Red Mystery, Book One
By RP Dahlke
Twice divorced New York model Lalla Bains now runs her dad’s crop-dusting business in Modesto, California where she’s hoping to dodge the inevitable fortieth birthday party. But when
her trophy red ‘58 Cadillac is found tailfins up in a nearby lake, the police ask why a widowed piano teacher, who couldn’t possibly see beyond the hood ornament, was found strapped in the driver’s seat. Reeling from an interrogation with local homicide, Lalla is determined to extricate herself as a suspect in this strange murder case. Unfortunately, drug running pilots, a cross-dressing convict, a crazy Chihuahua, and the dead woman’s hunky nephew throw enough roadblocks to keep Lalla neck deep in an investigation that links her family to a twenty-year-old murder only she can solve.
ONE
“Can you hear me, Miss Bains?”
“Yeah, I can hear you.” I was lying on the ground, my shoulder hurt like hell, and when I tried to get up, my leg buckled under from the pain. I looked up at my Ag-Cat, its fat nose cone planted deep into a row of tomatoes, like some giant burrowing beast.
I groaned at the conflicting emotions—I didn’t make it as far as that restricted airstrip I was hoping to land on; I’m alive, but when my dad sees this, he’s going to kill me.
Then I passed out.
The voice intruded again. “Do you know where you are?”
“On your nice private airstrip? Took you long enough to make up your mind. So, shoot me or wait till Noah Bains sees this, and he’ll do it for you.”
The guy chuckled. “You’re going to be okay. You’re on your way to the hospital, Miss Bains, but we’ll see that your dad is called the minute we get there.”
I was in an ambulance. The speaker was an EMT, and we were bouncing along a road, sirens and all.
“Can you cut the siren?” I asked. “It’s giving me a headache.” Then I passed out from the pain in my shoulder and leg, oblivious to the sound of sirens and the memory of rude airstrip owners.
~*~
My dad came in to stand by my bed and quietly pulled the sheet down over the white cast on my foot.
“Hi, Dad. Did you get the Ag-Cat pulled out of those tomatoes yet?”
“This morning. How’re you doing?” He took a peek at the card on the bouquet of daylilies, snorted, and then moved them over to set down my book, West with the Night by Beryl Markham. At sixteen I wanted to be just like her. Subtlety not being his best suit, Dad thought it would help me recover quickly.
I wiggled my toes in the cast. “Doctor says I have to take this home with me, but the shoulder won’t need surgery. So, how bad is she?”
“Fixable. It was nothing you could’ve foreseen. Cylinder’s cracked. Must’ve opened up during your flight home.”
It was as near as Noah Bains was ever going to get to saying it wasn’t my fault. I breathed a sigh of relief. As a pilot, I always do my own pre-check on my plane, and I’d missed it.
“Caleb and Roxanne were here earlier, but you were still asleep.”
I nodded, picking at the sheet. “That airfield I almost got to land on yesterday, you know that guy?”
“Machado? Why do you ask?”
“He wasn’t very friendly, considering that I was coming in on a wing and a prayer.”
“The hell you say!” His mouth tightened and his bushy gray eyebrows lowered. “What was he thinking?”
“I have no idea. It was marked private strip. But I was kind of running out of airspace while he considered whether he should let me land or not. Is he still in the industry?”
Dad quietly pulled on his lower lip, then said, “Kind of a spoiled kid, as I remember. I think he took over when his dad retired. I don’t keep up with who’s doing what, since that’s your end of it now, but I’ll have a word with him.”
“Don’t. Please. We don’t need to make enemies with anyone in the business. When I get on my feet again, I’ll go out there, thank him for offering to let me land on his airstrip.”
My dad tipped a gray eyebrow at the irony. He knew I could handle John Machado. I’d handled worse characters since becoming a pilot for my dad’s outfit; with only the occasional minor correction to my work orders, critiques, and reshuffling of customers to suit his own preferences, he pretty much allowed me to run the business all by myself.
I’d earned my seat the hard way, and if the pilots and farmers we worked with didn’t like me, they at least respected me. I wasn’t so sure my father actually respected me, but I was the next best thing he had to a son and heir.
Taciturn, irascible, and laconic by nature, he’d withdrawn like a hermit crab into his shell when my mother died. Not till Leslie, my brother, hotfooted it to San Francisco to live his dream as a set designer for the Civic Light Opera did Noah Bains believe his only son would refuse his rightful place with his dad. I, on the other hand, was just another cross the old man had to bear.
I was studying my unpainted toenails sticking out of the cast when I realized he was talking.
“Lalla?”
“Huh?”
“You asked about Machado? I said he bought Hollander Chemical Company a few years back.”
“Oh, we use them, don’t we?” I was only half listening because my childhood friend, Caleb Stone, was standing in the doorway, tension and relief skimming across his face. His sheriff’s uniform was wrinkled and sweaty, his face flushed from the summer heat, but he was here, and the sight of him instantly lifted my spirits.
Noah was still talking. “I wouldn’t know who you deal with these days, because as you well know, I’m a convalescing heart patient.”
I ignored his complaint and motioned that he should move over and make room for Caleb. I forgot all about Machado and Hollander Chemicals as Caleb and I kidded with each other about who was the biggest klutz.
Later, much later, I would wish I hadn’t let the question about John Machado slide.
TWO
I was leaning on my cane, listening to a balding traveling salesman blocking my path into Roxanne’s Truck Café and my first cup of coffee. Standing on a casted leg, I’ve discovered, is harder than it looks. Seeing I was impatient to get about my business, he hurried to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
“No thanks,” I said. “Got her in a trade. You wouldn’t want her anyway. Air conditioner’s busted, and the radio only gets AM.” Like admiring an unavailable girl, it helps to know her beauty is only skin-deep. I ticked off a few more flaws, eventually disconnecting another unhealthy fantasy. He got into a company car and took the on-ramp for the long stretch of Highway 99 that ended at our state capital.
I patted my belted jeans for the cell phone I naturally forgot to wear and the digital recorder I did manage to remember, then lugged my accordion folder of county papers through a parking lot full of step-side pickups toward the door.
A white Prius, the windows cranked halfway down, barely contained Patience McBride’s psychotic, ankle-biting Chihuahua as he baptized innocent passersby with ear-piercing doggy-curses. Wise to his antics, I detoured two cars over and hobbled for the front door.
The café’s air-conditioning is always blissfully on overdrive, which accounts for the trucks and cars four deep. Farmers, chemical salesmen, and ag pilots like me, are here for the coffee, breakfast, and gossip. It isn’t gourmet, but on any given day, Roxanne Leonard holds court, dispensing wisdom and admonishments while her husband works the kitchen. Breakfast dialogue at my house consists of monosyllabic work-related instructions issued from behind the wall of the morning paper. Obviously, I’d rather eat wadded between the locals at Roxanne’s than suffer the terminal silence in my own home.
My godson was Roxanne’s oldest, and Terrill, head bobbing to the earbuds attached to his head as he mopped a sticky spill, presented his cheek for the requisite godmother kiss. I patted his muscled, coppery shoulder as it rippled in the sleeveless T-shirt.
“Keep your day job, college boy.”
Terrill detached one of the buds, flashed me the famous Leonard dimples and said, “I’m still your favorite, right?”
I smiled. “You bet. Just don’t tell your sister.”
He laughed, knowing I regularly told each of them the same thing, and nudging the pail toward the
kitchen, executed a few more sensuous dance steps with his stringy-haired partner before sliding the bucket through the door.
The girls at Berkeley had better watch out. Though Terrill’s parents had effectively blocked the NFL scouts and extracted Terrill’s promise to graduate before turning pro, I always figured nobody argued because both his parents are the size of linebackers.
I took a worn green vinyl stool at the counter and stuck my casted foot sideways, then wound the other around the stem in an ancient habit to keep my big feet out of the way. Roxanne deftly positioned a hot cup of coffee so I wouldn’t miss the handle. Black, no cream, and wonderfully fresh.
Just as I was thinking kind things about her, she leaned her elbows on the counter and said, “Sure you don’t want to reconsider that birthday party? It’s not too late to change your mind, you know.”
“Thanks, but no. If I get to change my mind about anything, it’d be about my last plane ride. Or about the last two husbands—that would help a lot.”
“As for that plane wreck, at least it’s only a cast on your leg. And as for your two failed marriages, you didn’t bother to ask my opinion, but…”
Roxanne kept a framed degree for her PhD in Psychology nailed to the wall in the kitchen, but I wasn’t in the mood for analysis. “Yeah, yeah, I know, lyin’, cheatin’ written all over those two. Did I ever tell you I’ve sworn off men? Never getting married again?”
“They don’t all leave, you know,” she said, looking over her shoulder at her husband, happily up to his elbows in sudsy dishes.
I saw what was coming and held up a hand to stall the lecture. “We’ve been over this before, Roxy. I know the difference between dying and leaving. Can’t we just leave it that I like bad boys and move onto something else?”
“Sure, sweet pea, but someday we’re gonna talk about that chip on your shoulder you got ridin’ for free.”