Murder from Scratch

by Leslie Karst

  With a flirtatious laugh, I drank down the rest of the drink. “That Venus really is good,” I said. “I’m going to have to buy a bottle to have at home.” I picked up my partially eaten spring roll, and Max reached for the last one on the plate. I wondered if he was afraid that if I ate too much, the drug wouldn’t work as well. Or maybe he was simply one of those uncouth boors who took more than their share of the appetizers at restaurants.

  “So, I told you what I did with my time off work,” I said, licking peanut sauce off my fingers. “How about you?”

  Max launched into a detailed description of his hobbies: mountain biking up at Wilder Ranch, tasting and collecting wine, going to jazz clubs, traveling. “I have a trip planned this summer for Italy, actually,” he said. “Have you ever been?”

  “Not yet. But someday I hope to make it there. I’m told I have a ton of relatives back in Liguria.”

  We actually had a lot in common, I realized. Too bad he was such a scumbag, or we could perhaps have been pals. But no way would I ever want to be alone with this creep, much less be a friend of his.

  “Where ya gonna go ’n It’ly?” I asked, purposely starting to slur my words.

  “Let’s see. Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice. I really want to see Venice before it’s covered in water. What with the rising tides from climate change, it won’t be long before it’s completely—”

  “Innn … dated,” I interrupted, then giggled. “Man, thas hard to say. I think that last drink kinda went to my head. Maybe I should order something else to eat.”

  Max was staring at me intently, the hint of a smile forming on his lips. “Or I could give you a ride home, if you wanted. I’m thinking you probably shouldn’t drive, even if you do have something more to eat.”

  I thought a moment. What do I want to do? It didn’t look like I’d be getting any more information out of him tonight, and since he’d clearly moved into full-on aggressor mode, it seemed time to bail. I did have that handkerchief that I could give to Vargas to have analyzed, so the evening wasn’t a total loss.

  “No, I’m okay to drive,” I said. “But I do think you’re right that I should probably get home.” I slid off the stool and took my purse from the hook under the bar. Pulling a twenty and a couple singles from my wallet, I laid them on the bar to pay for my drink and spring rolls. “Thanks for the Martini, and maybe I’ll see you here again sometime soon.”

  I walked to the front entrance, doing my best to act slightly wobbly, but not so out of it that he wouldn’t believe I could drive home. On opening the door, however, I was nearly knocked off my feet, which certainly heightened the realism of my act. In the short time I’d been at the Tamarind bar, a virtual tempest had apparently descended upon Santa Cruz, and gusts of wind and pelting rain came flying into the restaurant as I tried to regain my balance and make my way outdoors.

  “Close the damn door!” someone shouted from a nearby table.

  “Sorry …”

  A steadying hand grasped me on the shoulder, and I turned to see who it was.

  “Here. I have an umbrella. At least let me walk you to your car.”

  It was Max.

  Chapter 27

  “No,” I said. “I’m okay. But thanks.” I tried to get past him and out the door, but he still had hold of me by the shoulder.

  “Really? In this downpour? You’ll get drenched. C’mon.” Max steered me outside under the Tamarind awning, then opened his large black umbrella. “So where are you parked?”

  I stood there buttoning up my blazer, trying to decide what to do. The last thing I wanted right now was to have Max accompany me to my car. But short of going back into the restaurant, I didn’t see as I had much choice. And even if I did dash inside and accuse Max of accosting me, the dining room staff all worked under the guy, so realistically, what were they going to do?

  “Okay, fine,” I said, stepping out from under the awning. “It’s this way.”

  Max held the umbrella over the two of us as we made our way down the sidewalk, continuing to chat about the trip he had planned to Italy this summer. I did my best to act slightly out of it, wobbling a bit as I walked, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was too busy telling me how excited he was to finally get to see the Roman Pantheon, which, despite being almost two thousand years old, he told me enthusiastically, still boasted the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

  Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he hadn’t doped my drink after all and only wanted to walk me to my car out of chivalry—or at least in the hope of continuing our relationship, such as it was. The way he was going on and on about that ancient Roman building sure didn’t suggest anything other than a purely innocent objective.

  I turned the corner at the side street where my car was parked a block down. Now that we were off the main drag, the road was darker due to the lack of streetlamps and the cars few and far between. I quickened my gait, and Max had to trot a few steps to catch up. He’d now moved on to the subject of the superiority of Italian pizza over the American variety and wanted to know my opinion.

  “Well, now that a lot of places here have those wood-burning ovens, I think you can get just as good pizza in the States as there.” I stopped at the T-Bird. “This is me,” I said.

  He whistled. “Nice car.” I watched to see if he had any reaction to the patch job I’d done on the car’s ragtop, but he showed no sign of noticing it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for keeping me dry getting here.” Walking around the car to the driver’s side, I waved goodbye, then unlocked the door.

  Max tipped an imaginary hat from where he stood on the sidewalk.

  I dropped into the bucket seat, started the ignition, and switched on the wipers and fan. With a sigh of relief that the ancient car had started right up, I let out the clutch, jammed the stick into first, and started forward—only to realize the windshield was so fogged up I couldn’t see a thing in front of me.

  Cursing the car’s Precambrian-era defogger, I hit the brake and grabbed the towel I keep in the driver’s-side map compartment. But before I could take even one swipe at the condensation dripping down the windshield, the passenger side door opened and Max slid into the seat.

  What the—? How could he have gotten in? I always kept the car locked.

  But then I remembered: I’d driven Evelyn to Sunday dinner the day before, and she must have neglected to lock the door. It’s a common occurrence with people who ride with me, since these days everyone is in the habit of letting the driver lock all the doors at once with the push of a button. But the sixty-plus-year-old T-Bird, of course, came with no such automatic locking system; it has those old-school button locks you have to push down manually.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He set the dripping umbrella at his feet. “Just thought I’d come in out of the rain. It’s nice and cozy in here.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you need to get out of the car and let me drive home.”

  But he made no move to leave, instead turning to me with an unfriendly smile. I leaned as far back against the door as I could. “Get out. Now!” I shouted. When he still didn’t move, I reached for my door handle. If he wasn’t going to get out of the car, then I would.

  Max reached out to grasp my right hand in a tight grip. “Not so fast,” he hissed in my ear. A whiff of galangal spice lit up my senses like an electric shock. Ohmygod, it was him that night. The smile had now become a grimace. “We have some unfinished business to complete, concerning a certain party who’s no longer with us.”

  Struggling to pull free, I started to scream. “Help! He’s attacking me!” The street was empty of people and cars, however, and even if there had been anyone nearby, they likely wouldn’t have heard over the sound of the hard rain.

  “Shut up,” Max said hoarsely, leaning in close once more. I screamed again in response, even louder this time. “Help! Help me!” I was taking a deep breath to redouble my efforts when something soft was shoved against my
face, forcing me back, against the car door. The intense smell of wet dog hit me briefly, only to be quickly shut off as I realized I could no longer breath.

  Buster’s pillow. He was trying to suffocate me with the dog cushion that had been at his feet.

  As I struggled to free myself, the conversation with Detective Vargas about Jackie’s death flashed through my brain—how the opiates she’d consumed had caused her to essentially die of suffocation. So if Max had finished her off with a pillow, no one would be the wiser.

  “No!” I managed to utter into the dense mass of cushion. I was not going to go out like Jackie.

  I had one thing in my favor. Max believed I’d drunk that drug-laced Martini, so he’d assume I was weaker and more out of it than I actually was. I had to use that to my advantage.

  Letting my body relax, I slumped down as if losing consciousness and, at the same time, let my hand fall into the pocket of my blazer. It was scary, because Max’s first reaction to this was to press the cushion even harder against my face. But another thing he didn’t know was that I had strong lungs from all that cycling, and could go without oxygen for longer than he likely suspected.

  After a moment he stopped pushing. I could hear his loud breathing, as if he were the one who’d been under attack. I figured he was wondering what to do now. Was I unconscious? Dead?

  Time to act, before he realized he needed to keep the pillow tight against my face in order to finish me off. With my right hand, I shoved with all my might against the cushion. Caught unawares as he was, he fell back slightly, letting the pillow slip from his grasp. In that brief moment, his face was exposed, and I looked into a pair of surprised brown eyes with enormous, dilated pupils.

  Closing my own eyes, I stabbed the fork into Max’s face. I wasn’t sure exactly where it landed, but the jab was followed immediately by a howl of pain. He brought both hands to his face, and I turned and fumbled with the door latch, finally managed to get it open, and jumped out.

  Without turning to see whether or not he was following, I tore down the middle of the dark, wet street as fast as I could.

  * * *

  The next afternoon I sat once more on the small couch in the SCPD interview room, Detective Vargas—no, Martin—on the chair opposite me.

  “He of course denies everything,” the detective was saying. “He claims you invited him into the car and then all of a sudden just freaked out and attacked him with a fork. He wants me to press charges against you and claims he’s going to sue you for damages.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Vargas shook his head. “Not one bit. He was high as a kite when we picked him up last night, with pupils the size of golf balls. And,” he said with a smile, “we found about a gram of coke on him, as well as an empty vial with traces of ketamine—the same substance the tests showed to be on that handkerchief you gave the cop last night.”

  “Ketamine?”

  “Uh-huh. Special K, they call it. It’s a party drug, and folks sometime like to mix it with uppers—such as that cocaine our guy had on him. It’s fast acting and causes, among other things, impaired motor function, distorted perceptions, and, get this: problems breathing.”

  “Whoa.”

  He nodded, and I imagined we were thinking the same thing: if I’d actually drunk that ketamine-laced Martini, my chances of surviving the encounter with Buster’s cushion the night before would have been slim indeed. “Are you thinking that’s what happened with Jackie?” I asked.

  “I think there’s a good chance it is, especially given what happened to you last night. And that would explain the crushed Percocet and Ambien in the upstairs bathroom. He must have found them in the medicine cabinet, come up with his plan, and then crushed and dissolved them in Jackie’s drink.”

  “Exactly my thought,” I said. “And he used the cranberry juice to disguise the flavor. That would explain how the bottle got moved and also the red stain on the carpet.”

  “Great minds think alike,” Vargas said. “I’d come to the same conclusion.”

  “And Max was obviously the one using the cocaine upstairs in the bathroom.”

  The detective tapped a finger on the file in his lap. “We’ll have to wait to see what the tox report on Jackie says when it comes back, to be sure. But I’m guessing you’re right and it’ll be negative for cocaine.”

  Shifting on the saggy couch, I studied the colorful photo on the wall of the Giant Dipper roller coaster, trying to organize my thoughts. “And I’m pretty sure I know why he did it, too,” I said. I told Vargas what Evelyn had overheard Max say to Jackie and explained my “scratch your back” theory. “Max promises to get Al off her case about the recipes, and in exchange, Jackie agrees to keep quiet about Max stealing from the restaurant—and maybe his drug use, too. But then Al keeps on bad-mouthing her around town, so Jackie threatens to tell Al about Max. Max freaks out and decides to kill her.”

  “Yeah, makes sense to me,” he said.

  “So what do you think?” I asked. “You have enough evidence to charge Max with murder?”

  He grinned. “If that was all we had, I’d say maybe not. But we actually have something to place him at the house the night Jackie Olivieri died.”

  I leaned forward. “What?”

  “Well, it was what you told the responding officer last night about that record album that had been moved—Mel somebody?” he said, opening the file in his lap.

  “Tormé.”

  “Right. That guy. We had it dusted for prints this morning, and guess whose were on it?”

  “Max’s.”

  He nodded. “You got it. So with Evelyn’s statement that the record had been moved sometime after she left that afternoon to go to her friend’s house, along with those prints, we’ve got him there the night Jackie died. I also had that upstairs bathroom checked for prints, and they found a partial on the counter that looks like it belongs to Max, too.”

  “Yes!” I pumped my fist.

  “And there’s even more,” the detective said, a glint in his eyes. “We got a warrant to search Max’s house and found Jackie Olivieri’s laptop there.”

  I tried to hide my smile, but it didn’t matter, since Vargas had looked down and was studying the case file.

  “And there was a file on the computer,” he went on, “with photos showing instances where Max had voided out sales, which goes a long way toward supporting your theory about his motive for killing her. So, with all that, along with what happened last evening, it’s not looking too good for the guy.”

  Vargas closed the folder and stood. “Okay, well, I’m going to need an official statement from you sometime in the next day or so, but I think we’re done here for now.” He shifted from one foot to the next, fidgeting with something in his slacks pocket. “I know you need to get going to work, so …”

  “You look like there’s something more,” I said.

  “Uh, yeah, actually there is. I was just wondering if, well, maybe you wanted to go grab a bite to eat sometime.” He smiled uncomfortably, then cleared his throat. “It just kind of seems like the gods have been throwing us together an awful lot lately. Maybe we should just go ahead and get to know each other a little better. You know, when there’s no dead body involved.”

  “Sure,” I said, returning his smile. “That sounds fun. But maybe not Southeast Asian food. I think I need a break from that for a while.”

  Chapter 28

  “You what?” Lucy came close to spitting out her mouthful of Kahlúa, vodka, and cream, only managing to clap a palm over her lips just in time. I’d been telling the story of my encounter with Max the night before, and she’d had the unfortunate timing to take a large drink of her White Russian right as I got to the bit about the fork. “Oh, man, that is so gross! But pretty awesome, too.”

  Evelyn patted her on the forearm. “I told you my cousin was super cool.”

  Lucy laughed and reached out with one hand to locate the top of the table, then set the drink she held in t
he other on the white tablecloth. “Do you know where you got him with the fork? I mean, did you see it?”

  “Ewwww!” Evelyn shrieked, and the two friends erupted in giggles.

  “No,” I answered. “I took off as fast as I could once I heard him scream, so I didn’t get the chance to see the results of my handiwork. But the detective told me this afternoon that I got him pretty bad on the cheek and that the fork missed his eye by only about an inch.”

  “Lucky guy,” said Javier. “Not that he didn’t earn it, but no one really deserves to lose an eye. Though I have heard that women sometimes go for guys with an eye patch.” He started to laugh, then stopped, as if suddenly realizing that jokes about the loss of eyesight might not be all that appropriate in the present company.

  But Evelyn and Lucy had no such qualms. Both burst out laughing once again, and Evelyn slapped Javier lightly on the arm.

  I watched the two women with a smile. Evelyn was enjoying her first-ever cocktail—a Pink Squirrel, just like we’d joked about her ordering to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. The Gauguin bartender had needed to look up the recipe on his phone, he’d said, because it was the first time he’d made the drink in about twenty years. And since Gauguin didn’t stock crème de noyaux, he’d had to substitute amaretto and a splash of grenadine for the almond flavor and pink color.

  But Evelyn didn’t care. She’d proclaimed it “amazingly yummy,” especially the dollop of whipped cream that topped the already intensely sweet concoction. I was monitoring her closely, because the ice cream in the cocktail hid the potency of all the liqueur that also went into the drink. I didn’t mind if she got slightly tipsy, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be the cause of her first hangover.

  For the time being, however, it was clear the two friends were simply being silly. As well they should. Although they’d seen each other at the memorial service and taught that workshop together at the Vista Center the previous week, this was the first time they’d gotten to just hang out and have fun since Jackie’s death.