Death By Cashmere

by Goldenbaum, Sally

  “My apartment key!” Izzy said. She looked at the scarlet A on the knitted swatch. “These are the extra keys Angie returned last week.”

  “The night she died,” Nell said, remembering Angie tossing the key ring on the table.

  “I guess we know how someone got in,” Izzy said. “But—”

  “How did they get the keys?” Cass finished. “Where did you put them, Iz?”

  Izzy was silent for a moment, rubbing the kitten’s fur while she thought back over that night and stared at the keys, looped around her finger. Finally she looked up. “Nowhere. I never put the key ring away, just tossed it in one of the baskets on the table, along with measuring tapes and spare needles and a mess of knitting gadgets. I remember now because someone pulled it out during a beginners’ class last Saturday and admired the way I’d used an old swatch— and the scarlet A for apartment. Everyone laughed at that.”

  “So whoever came up here took it from your basket,” Nell said.

  “Next question—who?” Cass followed Nell outside.

  “It could have been almost anyone,” Izzy said. She cuddled the kitten close as they walked back into the shop. “Everyone from my UPS guy to a class of teenagers knitting sack purses has been in the back room this week,” she said. “Even Angus and Pete stopped by. People seemed to want to hang around. Maybe it was a prank, some curious kids wanting to see what was inside. The teenagers loved Angie, thought she was glamorous. Maybe they were curious about where she lived. Whoever did it left the key, so clearly they didn’t plan on going back in.”

  “I don’t think so.” Nell thought about the desk drawer left open and the disarray in the closet. “I think someone was looking for something up there.”

  Cass looked over at the big wicker basket in the middle of the table. “Izzy, I think Nell’s right. Something was going on with Angie. And I hate it, because it’s all tied up with our lives. I want these past few days back. I want our summer back. And that won’t happen until we find out what happened.”

  Izzy walked over to the window seat and sat down, cuddling the kitten. “Well, one thing I know for sure,” she said.

  “What’s that, Izzy?” Nell said.

  “I’m going to keep her.”

  Nell and Cass looked over at her.

  Izzy lifted the kitten to her chest and rubbed her cheek against the soft fur. “The kitten. I’m going to keep her. I think she’s exactly what we need right now. This sweet little thing came to the Seaside Knitting Studio for a reason, and this is where she will live and be happy.”

  Cass leaned over and tickled the kitten’s chin. “You have a good life ahead of you, little calico—clam sauce fettuccine, grilled tuna, the list is endless.”

  Nell laughed. The kitten had worked magic, lightening the mood. She lifted the fluff of fur from Izzy’s lap and cupped it in the palms of her hands, looking into the kitten’s bright blue eyes. The kitten looked back at Nell, steady and calm, its gaze curious.

  If only you could talk, little one. Nell smiled into the kitten’s unwavering look. If only you’d share your secrets with me. Tell me how you got into Angie’s apartment—and what you saw while visiting there.

  Chapter 8

  Birdie Favazza fell in love with the calico kitten the minute she laid eyes on her, but she was dismayed to hear that after twenty-four hours in residence, she still had no name.

  “It isn’t good for the sweet thing’s psyche,” she said, pulling a small waste ball of rose-colored yarn from her knitting bag and rolling it along the floor in the shop’s back room. Birdie always brought a plethora of projects to the Thursday-night knitting group—she was never sure what the evening’s mood and Nell’s treats would move her to knit.

  The kitten scampered after the yarn, its tiny paws barely touching the floor. In one brief day, she had purred herself into the hearts of Izzy’s staff and the dozens of customers who had stopped to stroke and cuddle her.

  “She loves it here,” Izzy said, pouring Birdie a glass of the Pinot.

  “Of course she does,” Birdie said.

  Nell stood at the sideboard, tossing together a salad of sautéed wild mushrooms, fresh greens, tomatoes, and thin slices of fresh tuna, seared on the grill and pink and juicy on the inside. Pine nuts, lightly browned, and chunks of fresh mozzarella cheese would top off the salad, and it would be perfectly complemented by Birdie’s wine.

  Beside her, Cass looked for opportunities to pluck out slices of tuna.

  Birdie rummaged around in her bag and settled on a soft, nearly finished baby sweater she was knitting for her housekeeper’s grandbaby. Birdie loved bright colors and was working up a sweater that boasted a kaleidoscope of hues—bright green raglan sleeves, a bold red border, cobalt blue for the back, and golden yellow and deep green front panels. “Angie’s strange drowning and now this kitten showing up in a locked apartment,” she said, “might make one think our town haunted.”

  “I don’t think it’s ghosts doing these things.” Nell wrapped the forks inside four napkins and set them beside the wooden bowl. “I talked to Harry today about the kitten. He said the kitten must have wandered off from the others. He knew one was missing, but figured that some child whose mother had said no to a new kitten had simply slipped it beneath a beach towel and carried it home.”

  “Was he surprised where she ended up?” Izzy handed Nell a glass of wine and sat across from Birdie. She picked up her half-knit sweater. She was far enough along now that the cables had taken shape and given the sweater definition. Uncle Ben would love it, and it would keep him warm when he walked the beach in the middle of December. Between her and Nell, Ben Endicott would never be without the perfect sweater for any kind of Sea Harbor weather. The kitten jumped up on Izzy’s lap and curled up beside her handiwork.

  “He wasn’t as surprised as I thought he’d be. He comes in early on Tuesday mornings—around four, he said—to bake his sourdough bread. His wife’s been encouraging him to walk to work these days—it’s good for his heart and the bulge around his middle, Maggie says. As he walked past the alleyway, he saw someone just a few feet from the apartment steps.”

  “Good grief,” said Birdie, looking up and taking off her glasses.

  “He said the person had black hair—he thought it was Gideon, even though his backpack was missing. He noticed that because he’d never seen him at work without it. But he was in a hurry, so he went on to the deli, fed the kittens some milk, and busied himself baking bread. He left the door open a crack because of the oven heat, and a kitten could easily have slipped out into the dark.”

  “Do you think it was Gideon?” Cass asked. “That gives me the creeps.”

  “Harry wasn’t sure—he assumed it was Gideon, I guess you’d say. But he didn’t actually see anyone go into the apartment.”

  “But someone did,” Izzy said.

  “Purl,” Birdie declared from across the coffee table.

  “Pearl?” said Nell, looking up from fixing her salad.

  The kitten stopped in the middle of the floor and looked up at Nell, its head cocked to one side, as if to argue the point if necessary.

  “We’ll call her Purl,” Birdie said. “With a U, of course.”

  “I like it,” Izzy said.

  “To Purl,” Nell said, lifting her wineglass.

  “To Purl,” Birdie, Cass, and Izzy repeated, glasses lifted toward the purring kitten rubbing up against Nell’s leg.

  Izzy leaned over and planted a kiss on Birdie’s lined cheek. “It’s a perfect name for her, Birdie.”

  A rapping on the back door startled the group into silence.

  All heads turned toward the sound.

  “Visitors?” Birdie asked.

  “Sometimes my UPS man comes late,” Izzy said, brushing away the anxiousness the noise had stirred up in the room. She pushed her knitting to the side and walked over to the door.

  On the alley step stood two policemen.

  “Hi, Tommy,” Izzy said to the awkward young m
an whose hand was still raised in the air, ready to knock again. She smiled and nodded to his partner, a tall skinny man named Rob who rarely spoke but wore his uniform proudly.

  “What are you two doing here?” Nell asked, thinking that the Sea Harbor police were perhaps more efficient than she’d sometimes given them credit for. Perhaps they’d seen the lights, wanted to be sure everything was all right.

  “Could we . . . c-come in?” Tommy asked. His cheeks were flushed, and he shifted from one foot to another.

  Tommy Porter’s discomfort reminded Nell briefly of the summers when he had been unabashedly in love with Izzy. The two had been in the same sailing class one summer, and she remembered Tommy’s painful stutter when he’d try to talk to Izzy and the teasing he got from the others in the class. Tommy went on to win every race, shine in every regatta, but he never overcame his awkwardness in Izzy’s presence.

  “Of course. You, too, Rob,” Nell said. “We’re just about to eat and knit—two things we do very well.”

  Izzy smiled at Tommy and tried to ease his discomfort. “How are things for you, Tommy?”

  Tommy shifted from one foot to the other. A small sheen of perspiration appeared on his forehead.

  Birdie stood and walked over to the two men. She stood as tall as her frame allowed and looked up into Tommy’s somber face. “You look very nice in your uniform, Tommy. Your mother must be proud of you.” She reached up and touched his shoulder, her voice almost a whisper. “But you might want to stand up a tad straighter.”

  Tommy immediately pulled his shoulders back, sucked in his abdomen, and took a deep breath. “Miz Favazza,” he began, looking down at Birdie. He paused, and then stepped farther into the room. The movement seemed to bring him confidence. He kept his eyes on Birdie, which oddly allowed him to speak clearly and evenly. “We’re here because of Angie Archer.”

  “Her drowning?” Nell said, encouraging him to continue.

  Tommy shook his head. “She didn’t drown, Miz Favazza,” he said, still looking at Birdie.

  Rob stepped up beside Tommy and spoke for the first time. “Well, the thing is, she did drown,” he said. He cleared his throat and looked down at his large black shoes.

  Nell followed his eyes. His shoes must be specially made, she thought. They were bigger than Ben’s size thirteens. She wanted to talk about Rob’s shoes, where he got them, were they specially ordered? Shoes were easy to talk about, and no matter how Rob got his shoes or didn’t get his shoes, it wouldn’t interfere with the lives of those she loved. But his words, Nell suspected, would do exactly that.

  Rob cleared his throat and continued. “She drowned because someone put a drug in her drink and the drug paralyzed her. When she fell into the ocean, she couldn’t swim or move a muscle to save herself.

  “Angie Archer was murdered.”

  Chapter 9

  The news of Angie Archer ’s cruel murder spread through the Sea Harbor community with the force of a nor’easter. According to the autopsy report, she hadn’t gone swimming or strolling or jogging along a breakwater on a bad night, a scenario most of the town had tried to cling to. Angie Archer had been murdered, and in an awful way.

  The Sea Harbor Gazette, with a headline bigger than the Sox beating the Yankees, called it a result of a “date rape drug.” Although Angie hadn’t been molested, the reporter wrote, a drug common in crimes intended to render a person helpless was found in her body. No matter how skilled a swimmer Angie’d been, she wouldn’t have been able to move a muscle once the flunitrazepam was dropped in her drink.

  Tommy and Rob had told the knitters the apartment would have to be off-limits for a day or two, though they didn’t expect to find much up there. The forensics guys would want to do a check, though, Tommy had said. “And, Izzy,” he promised her, “I . . . I’ll be s-sure they’re quick.”

  And Tommy had kept his promise, Izzy told Nell the next day, though the racket they made that morning was unsettling to customers. “They were noisier than Angie,” she said with a sad smile.

  Ben and Nell had kidnapped Izzy from the knitting shop Friday, insisting she take a lunch break and have a sandwich with them at Harry’s Deli.

  “Is there a lot of talk of the murder in the shop, Iz?” Nell said. Her uneaten pastrami sat in front of her. Nell’s phone had rung all morning long, friends and neighbors, Father Northcutt updating her on Josie, board members from the Historical Museum. Everyone was concerned; everyone felt awful; and nearly everyone was sure it was a stranger, an awful person who had committed a terrible, random act of violence.

  Izzy nodded and picked at her mushroom sandwich. “The rumors are starting, as you’d expect. Mostly people are talking about Angie’s love life. Wondering if there’s a connection there. I guess it’s the date-rape drug angle.”

  “As far as I know, Angie didn’t have much of a love life, except for Pete.”

  “And Pete wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Izzy said.

  “Not only that, but he’s so crushed at all this bad news that he can barely function, Cass says,” Nell added. But he had been Angie’s date that night, Nell thought. And she knew that fact would not escape anyone looking into Angie’s murder.

  “I think mostly people who’ve come into the shop want so badly to move on that they’re calling Angie’s murder a random act, a beach bum who’s long gone.”

  Ben took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “It makes it all easier, I suppose. If the murderer has moved on, things can go back to normal more quickly. The gossip is exciting for a while. But it’s short-lived. Then people want it over, want the beaches safe. Want their summer back.”

  “ ‘Murders don’t happen in Sea Harbor,’ that’s what people are saying,” Izzy said. “They happen in Boston and New York and Los Angeles, but not here. Never here.”

  “Except one did,” Nell said.

  “What did they do in the apartment?” Ben asked.

  “Not too much. They looked through everything, but Tommy was with them, and he said he made sure that anything they didn’t need to take they put back neatly.”

  Nell smiled. “He’s trying to protect you, Iz.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt to have a sweet guy on the force watching out for my interests. The police mentioned what we noticed, Nell—that it didn’t look like Angie really lived there. She hadn’t made it her own. They were hoping to find something like a cell phone or a computer, Tommy said.”

  “Her cell phone was with her, we know that. It was like another appendage—she never went anywhere without it. It’s probably rusting and useless at the bottom of the cove,” Ben said. “What about her computer?”

  “She had a laptop,” Izzy said. “But it wasn’t in the apartment, Tommy said.”

  “Maybe at her office at the museum,” Nell said. “I’m sure they’ll check there.”

  “Tommy said they’d be through by this afternoon. I guess I can go up this weekend and gather up the rest of Angie’s things.”

  “Not alone,” Nell said.

  Izzy agreed. “You’re right, Aunt Nell. We’ll do this together for Josie.”

  A shadow fell over the table, and they looked up into the ample, perspiring face of Harry Garozzo. He leaned over the table, his waist buckling beneath the bend and his large baker’s hands flat on the pocked wood surface. “Damn shame,” he said. His voice was gruff with emotion. “Who would do such a horrible thing like this? Not anyone in Sea Harbor.”

  “That seems to be the sentiment, Harry. Or at least the wish,” Ben said.

  Harry pulled an empty chair over from another table and sat down. He wiped his hands on his stained bib apron. “I dunno what to think. Angie was a good girl.” Harry scratched his bald head. He looked at their plates and frowned. “What, the food’s bad? You’re not eating? You donna like it?”

  Izzy, Nell, and Ben picked up pieces of their sandwiches.

  Harry nodded. Then he looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice so the custom
ers lining up to buy roast beef and turkey, chunks of Vermont white cheddar, or his famous sourdough rolls couldn’t hear him.

  “The thing is,” he said in low tones, “Angie came in here a lot. I liked her. She didn’t cook much, that one. But, oh my, she liked to eat.” His round face broke into a smile. “And she couldn’t get enough of my smoked turkey. I’d pile thin slices high on a sourdough roll, then a fat slab of Swiss, smother it with my Russian dressing. She ate those sandwiches like there was no tomorrow.”

  “And?” Nell prompted, suspecting Harry had more on his mind than Angie’s favorite food.

  Harry leaned closer. His bushy brows lifted up into his forehead. “Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t think much of it at the time because it was her business, you know? Not mine. I leave my customers alone with their privacy. But the other day Angie was eating in the back booth like she did. Just enjoying my turkey. And she gets a call on her cell. Her voice got louder than usual, and when I walked by on the way to the kitchen, I could see the look on her face. She wasn’t happy, I’ll tell you that much. And she told the caller never ever to bother her again. It was only business, she said. I thought that was strange, but that’s what she said. ‘It was only business.’ And she told him she wouldn’t be back, that he had the wrong idea. And then she said, and I remember it because her voice got stern, but it was shaking a little, too. She said if he ever bothered her again, she’d tell someone. ‘I swear, I’ll tell,’ she said. ‘And then where will you be?’ ”

  Harry looked up and frowned at a waiter neglecting an empty water glass.

  “Tell who?” Nell asked.

  “Harry, tell who?” Izzy insisted, drawing Harry back to the conversation. “You said that Angie was going to tell someone. Who was it?”

  Harry paused for effect; then he looked from side to side, checking to see that all his customers were enjoying their sandwiches and the wicker baskets on the tables were filled with bread sticks. He looked over at the deli counter and nodded, pleased that the line was moving quickly and no one had to wait too long.