by Lois Winston
“I got a great deal,” Chad said. He held the package (about as big as a bread box) against his plaid flannel shirt. Tape bandaged the bright red.
Chad’s mention of a “deal” filled me with apprehension. Possibly this was the beginning of his evolution into a person like Mary, a person whose life was ruled by the word “sale.” Although Mary lived on Social Security, I’d known her to buy ten chickens at Safeway because they were on sale. Of course, she’d had nowhere to freeze them, so that had meant an instant party. Barbecue was the easiest, but she didn’t have a grill. But we did. I feared Chad would become Mary, just as I feared that I’d fall into my mother’s world of cliché. Even hating my mother-in-law seemed like cliché.
“Wanna feel how heavy it is?” Chad asked.
“Nah, that’s okay, Chad.” I didn’t need to touch it to guess he’d bought a CD player. We’d discussed the idea several times.
He lowered the gift to beside our potted tree that we’d hauled in from the back yard. The box dwarfed it.
“I feel bad, Chad. I don’t even have an idea for your present. Unless you want a plot at Collins Rolling Acres Memorial Park. At the funeral, I thought it would be a nice place to be buried.”
Mary fanned herself with a scrap of wrapping paper. “Thinking about such stuff at your age isn’t natural. Now, when you are old and decrepit like me, that’s a different story.”
My hatred of Mary was unfair as she couldn’t focus on me long enough to hate me back with the same intensity.
“When I was your age....” She stopped, trying to remember either what my age was, or what she was doing back then.
Normally, Chad would have started a peacekeeping campaign by now. Instead he wrinkled his forehead. “Boy that funeral put you in a cheery mood.”
I forgave his sarcasm. If I’d spent the afternoon with his mom, I’d be way beyond cutting remarks. He was probably miffed, too, that I hadn’t paid proper attention to his gift.
His mother smiled, happy at the hint of dissension. The simper didn’t even unwrinkle her lips.
“Mary said Fortier was poisoned.” His inflection seemed to add, And where is that poison book of yours? This was silly. Was Chad entertaining the idea of me as the killer?
“Geez, Chad, I’m not going to slip hemlock into your eggnog.” I peered in the refrigerator for a snack. “At least, not until you’re fully insured.” I pivoted and watched with satisfaction as Mary’s lips dried into prunes. The down side was the small jolt, like a muscle spasm, in Chad’s neck.
“Do the police have any suspects in the Cuisine King’s murder?” The timing of her question and her emphasis on the last word dripped with implication. She sniffed, her lips puckered. Her eyes squinted into boreholes.
“Detective Peters attended the service,” I said, “but they haven’t even declared Fortier’s death a homicide.”
“Channel 8 called it a suspicious death,” Chad said. He was sweeping up scraps of paper and ribbon.
I felt piqued that I’d missed the television coverage. Eldon had done a great job of suppressing the news. The Sentinel article had been second-page and more focused on Fortier’s career than his sudden death.
“Let me do that, honey.” Mary struggled from the couch, making an elaborate show of reaching for the broom, in spite of her poor, swollen feet.
“Sit down, Mary.” Chad called his mom by name because she had abandoned him to her parents on a dairy farm near Ferndale, while she’d drifted around the country, trying to make a living, experimenting with various partners and lifestyles. His grandmother was mom.
“You need some help, son.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“This murder is just the gruesome thing to interest Carol.” Mary settled her large rump back onto the cushions.
My neck prickled with antagonism. “I do think it’s more stimulating than a sale at Mervyn’s.”
Mary’s thin eyebrows shot up, but she wore a tight smile.
Chad sighed as he emptied the dustpan.
“You better watch out that Carol doesn’t start playing detective,” Mary said.
“Hello, Mary.” I pranced in front of her, crossing my arms like semaphores. “Yo, over here.” I was regressing quickly, and I hated her for it. “I am in the room.”
“Well, I know you are, dear.” Her saccharine voice was smug with victory. She’d reduced me to a twelve-year-old right before my husband’s eyes. “I’m telling my son this because I don’t think he knows.”
“Knows what?”
She blinked her stubby, painted lashes like it should be obvious what she meant. That was the flash point. I burned to my scalp. Chad didn’t need to worry that I might investigate a murder; he needed to worry that I’d commit one. “If I decided to play detective,” I spit into the wrinkled face, “I’d be damned good at it.”
She smiled with condescending patience, secure in the protection of her son.
Chad decided to whisk Mary away from his half-crazed wife, across town to her one-bedroom HUD apartment near the railroad tracks. They roared off in his Ford truck and my bad mood left with them.
~*~
When the mail came, Lola followed me out to the old-fashioned metal box on a post. “Let’s see if you won that cat-food sweepstakes.”
She meowed in agreement and looked up.
Inside the box were some junk mail fliers and a letter from a screenwriter, a distant friend. I’d written him in a flurry of excitement about an idea for a movie: a woman collects a cool million in insurance money after she knocks off her drunken husband by plastering his chest with nicotine patches. My distant friend politely thanked me, and then asked a barrage of questions about the story that indicated he found the plot implausible.
“Have you ever thought you might be in the wrong line of work?” he’d written. “I can’t imagine you braiding dough. You should be a private investigator, a reporter on the city desk, or maybe a mortician.”
As I walked to the house, I hugged the European-style writing paper to my heart. Someone who believed in me!
Lola protested: “Open the door, my pompous, silly person.” She meowed indignantly. “I thought I’d trained you better than this.”
I opened the door and made a resolution. I’d bury Chad’s mom without killing her. She’d rue the day she’d made that quip about my being a detective.
NINE
The next day after work, I sat glumly at the indoor fountain at the Capitola Mall. The water had been turned off and the circle converted to a Christmas wonderland. I detested the mall, especially the day before Christmas. The hordes. The masses. The mind-numbing joviality. My chest tightened, the way it had many moons ago at rock concerts, but now it wasn’t from eau de marijuana. What if something excited the crowd? A fire? An earthquake? A blue-light special? A person could be trampled.
The mall reminded me of the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It fed on people and grew and grew. The growth had exceeded the ability of the lifelines to support it. Coming from the south at this busy time, one waited through four or five changes of the light to exit the freeway to 41st Avenue. Then the traffic moved like blood through a clogged artery.
I looked around for local television crews who roamed malls on Christmas Eve to humiliate last minute shoppers.
I’d considered buying Chad a CD case containing several choice discs, maybe even a best of Van Halen strictly for him. To go with the CD player. But Chad didn’t know how obvious he was and I didn’t want to enlighten him.
I also needed something for my mom. Her gift to me would be crocheted, possibly useful, but just as likely to be an orange toaster cover.
Questions about what to buy Chad and how to investigate Fortier’s murder bumped and mixed in my head with piped-in Christmas carols and the tidal hum of hundreds of frantic shoppers. I sat at the edge of the waterless fountain and dug my hand into a box of caramel popcorn. I liked snacks that I could grind between my teeth and that I didn’t see at Archibald�
�s.
The police were investigating Fortier’s suspicious death, but the tox screen would be done in Sacramento. It could take weeks before they officially declared the death a homicide.
The kitchen staff seemed determined to believe that Fortier had been gripped by a massive coronary. But, for once in my life, I agreed with Mary. The quick, deadly flu-like symptoms Eldon reported suggested poison. I couldn’t understand how someone like Mary, who had the sensitivity of a whetstone, could have figured that out. Yesterday when Chad had returned from taking her home, he’d said worriedly, “Mary thinks you’re going to get tangled up in this.”
“I’d make a good detective,” I’d grumbled, rankled that my distant friend, the screenwriter, could recognize that, but Chad couldn’t.
“That may be so, but you’re not a detective.”
He was right, but I felt like he was siding with Mary. “I could be like Rat Dog.”
“Rat Dog?”
“Don’t worry. She doesn’t have a gun. She just tracks down dirty rats.”
“She’s real?”
“Shit yeah,” I’d said, pissed off by Mary’s phony concern, that now had Chad worried. Without a doubt, the woman intended to undermine me, but she was so disorganized and inconsistent with her attacks, I could never formulate an effective defense.
Even now, after cooling off for twenty-four hours, I felt irritated as I replayed the scene. I bit into an “old maid” kernel, shooting pain up my jaw and temple. I tried discreetly to pick the ground seed from a molar, but with my short nails, I had to abandon delicacy. Naturally, that was when I spotted the blond reporter in her tailored suit, wielding her mike and leading a man with a video camera. Fortunately, they missed my excavation and honed in on a big, frantic-looking man in the corridor. My head swiveled back to the man.
Eldon.
He was the last person I wanted to see, but I wondered what inspired him to frenzied shopping. I decided to tail him. He ducked into a jewelry store, as though evading the press. For a simple evasion, Eldon was going to extremes. He confronted a weary-looking clerk, and began such a self-absorbed monologue that I entered the store behind him with no fear of detection. The slender clerk, who looked as though he’d rather be anywhere else, set a velvet tray on the glass counter.
“Yes, something along these lines,” Eldon said. “She has brown eyes, so I think gold findings would look better than silver, don’t you?” The young man opened his mouth, but Eldon continued. “Delicate, not clunky.”
The clerk lifted a pair.
“More feminine.”
The clerk glanced past Eldon at me, so I edged out the open entrance and melted into the flow headed toward Sears.
To me, everyone in the kitchen was now a suspect, so I considered Eldon for a moment. He was the fussy, methodical kind who might use a poison, but why would he knock off Fortier, who’d added prestige to his kitchen?
Poison was a rare way to kill. According to my books, it accounted for about one half of one percent of homicides. However, poison was also a smart way to kill, and I imagined people got away with it, which skewed the statistics. What I couldn’t understand was why anyone, poisoned and sick, would stop in the bakery to eat lebkuchen dough.
Sears’ furniture section spread to my right. I plopped into a cozy, tweedy armchair and tried to imagine Eldon with a woman, someone for whom he’d buy earrings. From the chair’s safety, I gazed at the shoppers in the stunned state that malls induce in me.
In the past, when I’d wanted to know more about crime, I had pestered both the coroner and Sergeant Gold of Homicide. Both had tolerated me on the phone, probably because they didn’t know how to hang up on a woman. I’d never met either man. For all I knew, they could be among the frenetic shoppers.
To investigate, I’d have to question everyone from the morning kitchen shift. That task would be formidable even if people cooperated, and even if I didn’t count the wait staff who moved between the kitchen and dining rooms; Big Red, the cook in the employees’ dining room; or the housekeeping staff who picked up dirty towels and uniforms and delivered fresh ones.
Besides, for all the excellent motivations in the kitchen, weren’t these things usually domestic? And, poison seemed like a woman’s method. Of course, that same reasoning could point to his lovers in the kitchen. He’d worked his way through the women as though searching for an answer by process of elimination—Esperanza, Suzanne, Delores and God knew who else. I had to start somewhere, and even though she wasn’t employed in the kitchen, the ex-wife seemed as good a place as any.
No time like the present, even if it were a cliché, Christmas Eve, and the day after the funeral.
Alexis probably had not only Fortier’s ex-wife Julieanne, but also her father and grandmother staying with her. With an effort, I lifted myself from my warm nest. The swarm had thinned, but I dodged the remaining desperate shoppers, who hurtled from store to store like juggernauts. At the entrance of the shopping center, I called Alexis at Archibald’s. She couldn’t see me that night, or on Christmas, but she still planned to go to our employees’ party the day after, and promised to talk to me then.
I escaped the mall, drove across the street to a record store, purchased a handsome oak CD holder and several discs—Springsteen, Hungarian Rhapsodies, Garth Brooks, and Poi Dog Pondering. I’d wrap each CD separately, disguising the shapes to create suspense. I meandered down to the Capitola Book Cafe and bought my mom a book. I could wrap at leisure, as Chad had taken his mom to Mass and would dine at her apartment.
Now that I’d solved my shopping problems, I had only a murder case to solve.
TEN
Working on Christmas Day was brutal, not because I was sentimental or minded being at work on the holiday, but because I had to crank out fourteen hundred pieces—stars and apple strudel and cranberry Danish pockets from puff pastry; Danishes with raspberry jelly and jalapeño jelly, and sugar cookies in Christmas shapes.
As I twisted dough, I sifted through the usual motives for murder—love, money and revenge. Revenge suggested Buzz. Love? That got messy fast. Money? I had trouble grasping money as a motive. It didn’t seem like there could ever be enough. Not for murder.
I hated raw dough, but I pulled a little piece from my finger and nibbled it, trying to remember if I’d put in the vanilla. Normally I liked my day to be busy. “Idle hands make the devil’s playground,” had been instilled in me from youth, but today my mind wandered farther afield than automatic pilot. The nibble made me suspicious.
“Carol, want to see me walk on my hands?” Victor asked. He was Esperanza’s brother and Delores’s uncle, but had a whole other set of genes. His flat, indigenous face more striking than handsome, he grinned at me from the door.
I pinched a marble of dough and thrust it at his face.
“First taste this.”
It was a routine command, and he ate from my finger with closed eyes and exaggerated smacking. “Tase like ... ,” he smacked some more, “... tase like dough. Gringo food. No tase.”
“Does it need salt?”
He pinched another sample from the mound on my table and repeated the charade. “No.”
“All right. Let me see you walk on your hands.”
He made a show of wiping his hands on one of my white towels as though preparing for a cartwheel. He stooped and placed his foot on one hand, then the other.
I smiled.
“Good joke, huh?”
“Great joke.”
He turned to go. Tasting and joking were the depth of our relationship.
“Victor, how much money would it take for you to kill someone?”
He straightened to his full height, which was about five eight because his offended eyes stared right into mine. “Me kill someone?”
“A hypothetical situation,” I said. “Pretend.”
“If I don’ like the cabron, if he raped my sister or something, I do it for free,” he said. “But I wouldun’ kill someone I like.” He scratch
ed his dark hair. “Not for a million dollars.” In Spanish he bade me a good day and spun on his heels.
Well, Victor felt as I did, but I knew that people did kill for money, sometimes piddly sums if they were desperate. With his recent successes, Fortier could have a nice nest egg. One person might know about Fortier’s financial affairs, but it wasn’t going to be easy to extract any information from Concepción Galisanao.
~*~
Not even a former Employee of the Year escaped Christmas duty, but then Concepción rivaled Eldon for company loyalty and probably would have been at work even if she could have stayed home. Down the hall in personnel, the tiny Filipina had been at Archibald’s since its opening, which given the hospitality business’s turnover, made her an institution. Concepción was the Head of Human Resources. She sat primly at her desk, reading over half glasses. She’d adored Fortier, not because she was fooled, but because she felt it was nice that he bothered to flirt with someone her age.
I extended two cellophane-wrapped brownies.
“Oh, Carol, my favorite!” She smiled up at me, wagging a finger back and forth in the air, the nail manicured and painted with a minuscule wreath. “But no time off.”
I held onto the brownies. A person would never surmise from the woman’s figure that Concepción lived on a candy bar diet—one delicious Hershey’s for breakfast, another for lunch, and a wholesome, satisfying Symphony bar for dinner.
She fanned herself with the papers she’d been considering. “Too hot for Christmas,” she said in her accented, helpless voice that made people forget that she was ruthlessly competent.
I wondered if the ageless Concepción Galisanao could be having a hot flash. Her office felt cool to me. But then, I’d been in the bakery all morning. Any place would seem cool to me. I sat opposite her. She wore a red dress; candy cane earrings peeped from her dark hair. From this distance, she could smell the brownies, made with pieces of Belgium chocolate. I played with the cellophane to make sure.