by Joanne Fluke
“Come in,” she said, waving me inside. “Have a seat.”
She gestured to a sleek chrome and leather chair.
I sat down across from her, marveling at her sculpted cheekbones and startling green eyes.
“Can I have my secretary get you an Evian?”
“No, thanks.”
When it comes to no-calorie water, I’m always able to Just Say No.
“Then let’s get started, shall we? You wanted to talk about Garth Janken’s death?”
“Yes, I’m afraid his fall from the roof may not have been an accident.”
“Oh?” she said, her face an impassive Chanel mask.
“I think someone tampered with the shingles. Someone who wanted to kill Garth.”
“Isn’t that a little far-fetched?” she asked with a dismissive smile.
“Not really. In fact, the police think so, too. They just arrested Willard Cox this morning.”
“Willard Cox?” Her brows lifted a fraction of an inch, her version of surprise. “I knew he and Garth had their differences, but murder? I find that hard to believe.”
“I agree with you. I think somebody else is trying to frame him for Garth’s death. The real killer.”
“And who might that be?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why I came to see you. Do you know anybody who might’ve wanted to see Garth Janken dead? Anybody he was at odds with?”
She smiled wryly.
“Garth Janken was ‘at odds’ with half the neighborhood. The man made enemies like Pringles makes potato chips. But I can’t believe anybody on Hysteria Lane is a killer.”
Same old, same old, I thought, stifling a sigh.
“Wait a minute,” she said, tapping a perfectly manicured nail on her cheek in thought, “there was somebody else he was fighting with.”
I sat up, interested.
“Who?”
“Peter Roberts. Garth’s law partner. I heard through the grapevine that he and Garth were going through a particularly vicious split up.”
How foolish of me. All along I’d been limiting my suspects to people on Hysteria Lane. I should’ve known that a guy like Garth would make enemies wherever he went.
“Not that I’m saying Peter killed Garth, mind you,” Prudence quickly added. “I’m not about to implicate anybody in a murder.”
Spoken like a true attorney.
“Well,” she said, her cool smile still lodged firmly in place, “if those are all your questions…?”
“Just one more,” I said, coming to the point of my visit. “What was your relationship with Garth like?”
“Mine?” She laughed a laugh singularly devoid of mirth. “I hardly knew him. Just to wave and say hello.”
“You judged his house every year in the Christmas decorating contest, didn’t you?”
For the first time since I walked in the door, a look of discomfort flitted across those gorgeous green eyes.
“Oh, yes. The contest. One of my chores as president of the homeowners association. I’ve really got to step down one of these days. It takes up way too much of my time.”
“He won first prize five years in a row, didn’t he?”
She reached for a crystal water glass at her elbow, and took a careful sip.
“Garth may not have been very popular, but he was amazing when it came to Christmas decorations. A true artist.”
“Willard Cox says he was bribing you.”
Bingo. I’d hit a nerve. Prudence’s eyebrows shot up a whole half inch.
“That’s absurd!” she said, an angry flush creeping up her cheeks. “Do I look like I need the money?”
I had to admit she didn’t. But something about that contest had her worried. I’d bet my bottom Pop Tart on it.
“Garth Janken won first prize every year because he deserved to,” she said, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve really got to get back to work.”
And before I knew it, I was in an elevator, zipping down forty-plus floors to the Peon Level of the garage.
I headed to my car, filled with a much-welcome sense of accomplishment. My ten minutes with Prudence Bascomb had yielded two important facts.
Fact Number One: There was something decidedly fishy about the Hysteria Lane Christmas decorating contest.
And Fact Number Two: Garth Janken had a law partner who hated his guts.
But both of those facts paled in comparison to Fact Number Three, one I was about to discover as I made my way toward the exit—that parking in Prudence’s Century City garage was a jaw-dropping fifteen bucks an hour.
I made a mental note to write a letter to the mayor about the exorbitant parking rates in Century City and headed back to my apartment for a bite of lunch.
In spite of the Almond Joy I’d wolfed down on Hysteria Lane, I was hungry. I had an untouched order of pork potstickers in my refrigerator which I intended to demolish the minute I got home.
Back in my apartment, I raced past the eternally napping Prozac and made a beeline for the kitchen. I grabbed the potstickers from the refrigerator and put them in the microwave, counting impatiently as the seconds ticked by. It’s amazing how long thirty seconds can seem when you’re starving.
Then, wouldn’t you know, just when I’d snatched them out, the phone rang.
Argggh! Why does the phone always ring when you’re about to shove a potsticker in your mouth?
“I’ll be right back,” I promised the little darlings, and raced to the living room to get the phone.
“Yes?” I growled, answering the dratted thing. Probably some stupid telemarketer.
“Am I speaking with Jaine Austen?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“It’s Tyler Girard.”
Oh, shoot. In my frenzy to get at those potstickers, I hadn’t recognized his voice. Why had I been so grouchy? I wanted him to think I was sweet and upbeat, not a snarling harpy.
“Oh, hi, Tyler!” I gushed.
“It sounds like you were in the middle of something.”
“Well, yes, actually. I was baking cookies for the homeless.”
Huh? Where had that come from? Why on earth had I made up such an outrageous lie?
“For the Union Rescue Mission,” I added in a fit of lunacy, referring to a local soup kitchen.
“Really? I didn’t know they accepted homemade goods. I thought the stuff had to be packaged for security reasons.”
“Oh, they know me down there. I’ve been doing it for years. In fact, they call me The Cookie Lady.”
If I told one more lie, I’d be struck by lightning.
“So,” he asked, “how was your date with Angel Cavanaugh?”
“Fine! Terrific. We definitely began to bond.”
Would the whoppers never end?
“That’s so gratifying to hear. It’s always nice to know we’ve made a good match. I hope we’ll see you at the Christmas party.”
“We?”
I smelled a Significant Other lurking in the wings.
“Yes, I told Sister Mary Agnes all about you, and she can’t wait to meet you.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The “she” in his “we” was Sister Mary Agnes.
“Well, you’d better get back to those cookies.”
“Cookies?”
“For the homeless.”
“Oh, right. My cookies.”
I hung up, vowing to some day actually donate cookies to the homeless, and praying that Angel wouldn’t spill the beans about our disastrous date. Then I hurried back to the kitchen for my potstickers, whose heavenly aroma had now drifted out into the living room.
What happened next was absolutely heartbreaking. Sensitive readers may want to get out their hankies.
I bounded into the kitchen, only to find Prozac curled up on the kitchen counter, belching softly, surrounded by what just five minutes ago had been my potstickers. Now they were mangled bits of dough, pathetic dim sum corpses.
Prozac, the
little devil, had burrowed her way through the doughy wrappings and devoured every speck of pork inside.
“Prozac!” I wailed. “How could you? That was my lunch.”
And quite delicious it was, too.
I picked up a limp piece of dough and stared at it balefully.
“How can one cat eat so much, so fast?”
Pretty impressive, huh?
For a desperate instant I considered eating the shards of dough, but don’t have the vapors. I didn’t.
Instead I had a nutritious lunch of English muffins and martini olives.
After which, I put in a call to Garth’s law partner, Peter Roberts.
“Law offices of Janken and Roberts,” a perky receptionist answered. “Oops, I mean law office of Peter Roberts.”
Interesting, I noted, that Janken had top billing in the law practice.
“May I help you?” she asked in a friendly voice, about a zillion times more friendly than Prudence Bascomb’s dragon lady secretary.
I asked if I could speak with Peter.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, he’s in court all week. Would you like to leave a message?”
Once again, I posed as an insurance investigator looking into Garth Janken’s death, and asked her to please have Mr. Roberts call me back as soon as possible.
“Of course,” she promised. “I’ll get the message to him right away.”
Not two minutes after I hung up, the phone rang.
Wow, that was fast. Miss Perky really had gotten the message to him right away.
I answered it eagerly.
“Mr. Roberts?”
“No, this is not Mr. Roberts,” a no-nonsense woman replied. “Am I speaking with Jaine Austen?”
“Yes.”
“This is Elizabeth Drake from Century National Insurance Fraud Unit.”
Gulp. I smelled trouble ahead.
“Ms. Austen, we received a call from a Mrs. Libby Brecker, inquiring about a Century National investigator named Jaine Austen.”
Damn that Libby.
“The only Jaine Austen we have on our records is you, and you’re a customer.”
“A loyal customer, too,” I hastened to assure her.
“Be that as it may, I must insist that you cease posing as a Century National representative or we shall be forced to terminate your policy.”
After much groveling and promising to behave myself, I finally got off the phone.
Oh, well. It served me right for trying to pawn off my insurance card on Libby. I should’ve known that a woman who spent her days Windexing reindeer noses would turn out to be a sniveling tattletale.
Somewhat shaken from my brush with the formidable Ms. Drake, I settled down on my sofa to work on my Christmas cards while I waited for Peter Roberts to return my call.
By the time I’d XOXOXO’d my way through my address book at five P.M., I still hadn’t heard from him.
It wasn’t until later that night when Prozac and I were in bed watching Roman Holiday (Prozac has a thing for Gregory Peck), that he finally called.
I launched into my theory about Garth’s roof being sabotaged and asked him if he had any idea who might have done it. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn he had no idea, none whatsoever.
But then I got down to why I was really calling.
“By the way,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I hear that you and Mr. Janken were on the verge of dissolving your partnership.”
“As a matter of fact, we were. We’d been together fifteen years, and we decided it was time to call it a day. It was an amicable parting of the ways.” Accent on the amicable. “Garth and I were very good friends.”
He sounded about as believable as a congressman running for office.
“That’s not what I heard. I heard your break-up was pretty ugly.”
“Whoever told you that was wrong,” he said, daggers in his voice. “Dead wrong.”
And then he did a little casual questioning of his own.
“My secretary tells me you’re an insurance investigator. Exactly who do you work for?”
“Oh, no,” I said, eager to stay out of the clutches of the Century National Fraud Unit. “Your secretary must’ve misunderstood. I’m a private investigator.”
“Is that so? Got a license?”
“Of course,” I lied, and got off the phone before he could grill me any further.
That was no help at all. Peter Roberts would go to his grave, or possibly mine, insisting that he and Garth Janken were best buds. How the heck was I going to find out the truth behind their split up?
And then I remembered his perky secretary, and thought of an idea.
Chapter Nine
The next afternoon I got gussied up in a bizgal pantsuit I keep around for job interviews and IRS audits, and headed downtown to pay a little visit to Peter Roberts’s secretary.
Peter’s office was in a glass-and-steel high rise right off the freeway. A glance at the directory in the lobby told me the place was a veritable beehive of attorneys.
I took the elevator up to the twelfth floor and made my way down the hallway to The Law Offices of Janken and Roberts. I was happy to see that Peter hadn’t gotten around to taking Garth’s name down from the door. It would make it that much easier to bring it up in conversation.
I checked my watch. Ten of five. Right on schedule.
Launching Phase One of my plan, I took a deep breath and poked my head in the door. Peter’s secretary, a pert Latina in her early twenties, sat at her computer, biting her lower lip in concentration as her fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Oh, hi!” she grinned, when she noticed me. I was relieved to see that she was as friendly in person as she had been over the phone. “I’m afraid Mr. Roberts isn’t in right now. He’s away in court all week.”
Just what I’d been counting on.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, I just had a job interview down the hall and I’m wondering if you can tell me what it’s like working here in the building. I’m trying to scope the place out before I make a decision.”
“No problem,” she said, waving me in. “Give me a sec and I’ll be right with you. I was just finishing up for the day.”
Exactly why I’d waited till late afternoon to drop by.
I sat down across from her, gazing enviously at her creamy olive skin and eyelashes thick as velvet. I really had to start moisturizing more often.
“Finito!” She closed out her program with a flourish and swiveled to face me.
“So which attorney did you interview with?”
“Allison Whittaker,” I said, reeling off a name I’d seen on one of the offices down the hall. “Of Whitttaker and Wertz.”
Her lush lashes blinked in surprise.
“Allison’s secretary is leaving? Betty?”
“Yes, Betty,” I nodded.
“I wonder why she didn’t tell me. I guess her husband must’ve landed that job in Bakersfield.
“Hold on a sec,” she said, reaching for the phone. “I’m gonna call Betty and congratulate her.”
Acck. This was definitely not part of my plan.
“You can’t do that!” I cried.
“Why?”
“Um. Because Betty just went home. I saw her get on the elevator.”
“Oh, well,” she shrugged. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
Much to my relief, she put down the receiver and began filling me in on the doings at Whittaker and Wertz.
“You’ll like working for Ms. Whittaker. Once in a while she’ll ask you to pick up her dry cleaning, but that’s about as bad as it gets. Watch out for Wertz, though. Their office is known around here as Whittaker and Flirts. The man comes on to all the secretaries. Which is pretty nauseating, considering he has a wife and three kids and a gut the size of the Goodyear Blimp. He made a pass at me my first day on the job. My boyfriend was furious when he found out. Correction. I should say, my fiancé. Hect
or and I just got engaged last month.”
She thrust out her left hand, beaming with pride. A tiny diamond sparkled on her wedding finger.
“How lovely,” I cooed.
“It’s a whole half-carat. I told Hector I didn’t need a real diamond. I said, Hector, cubic zirconia is good enough. But he insisted. Nothing but the best for my Sylvia, that’s what he said. That’s my name, incidentally. Sylvia Alvarez.”
“I’m Charlotte,” I lied, just in case she remembered my name from my earlier phone call. But her mind was miles away from office business.
“Hector and I are getting married in June!” she announced proudly.
“How wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Hey, let me ask you something.” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a copy of Modern Bride.
“Which dress do you like better?” she asked, pointing first to a picture of an elegant Vera Wangish A-line and then to a frilly traditional nipped-at-the-waist model.
“They’re both really nice.”
“But if you had to choose.”
“I guess I’d go with the A-line.”
“Really?” Her brow furrowed in doubt. “I like the clean lines, but I’ve always dreamed of getting married in a Cinderella dress.”
“With a figure like yours, you’re bound to look great in either one.”
A little shameless flattery couldn’t hurt. And besides, I wasn’t lying. The fattest part of her body were her eyelashes.
“You don’t think I need to go on a diet?”
Why do the skinny ones always want to go on a diet?
“Absolutely not,” I assured her. “You look amazing.” And then I added, in what I must confess was a brilliant segue: “I guess you stay thin working for two attorneys. They must keep you hopping. What are they like, anyway?”
“Oh, I only work for Mr. Roberts. Mr. Janken is deceased.” She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “A horrible accident. He fell off his roof putting up Christmas decorations! Did you ever hear of anything so gruesome? I told my father, ‘Papi, don’t you dare put Christmas lights on the roof this year. You could fall and hurt yourself. A tree in the window is good enough.’”
It looked like little Sylvia was a bit of a chatterbox. Now all I had to do was get her to chatter about Garth and Peter.