Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  “That sounds cool.”

  Claudia laughed. “We thought so. Most people thought it was dumb.”

  “Yeah, well, people are dumb.”

  “Hear, hear,” Claudia raised her Allen wrench in salute. The kid, she thought, was going to be all right.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning, over Betty’s objections (but after her delicious breakfast of blueberry pancakes with homemade lemon curd), Claudia returned her borrowed pajamas and headed for home. She had spent a lot of the previous night lying awake, trying to distract herself from dwelling on what Lori had gone through by focusing on what she could do next. She suspected that the police didn’t have the right to keep the marketplace closed indefinitely, and that her best step toward getting it open would be to find a lawyer to help her make that point. But she had also gotten a very clear impression that Chief Lennox considered her a decent candidate for the role of murderer, and even aside from Betty’s urging, she was aware that the smart thing to do in that situation was to get another, different kind of lawyer.

  Unfortunately, Claudia had been telling the truth when she said she didn’t have the money for one form of legal representation, let alone two. That was the choice she had been stewing over at four in the morning, even though she already knew the answer. When it came to picking between her personal freedom and her business, there was really only ever one thing Claudia was going to do. As soon as she got back to the cottage, she hunted through her email until she found the contact information of the property lawyer who had drawn up her lease agreements, took a brief, hopeless look at her bank balance, and gave him a call.

  Forty minutes later, she wasn’t as much poorer as she had feared, but also not as optimistic as she had hoped. The lawyer, who seemed to find this a more interesting problem than he usually saw, did confirm that the police weren’t justified in keeping her property off-limits indefinitely but, unfortunately, getting a court to officially agree would likely take months, even in the best-case scenario. Claudia thanked him for his time and expertise and set up an appointment for the next opening he had available, in a week and a half. She hung up the phone and wondered where she was going to be then.

  There were plenty of other things Claudia could be doing, from following up on her ideas for alternate locations for her vendors to making all of her social media accounts private before the news of the murder spread too far. But without the immediate urgency of the legal questions, she found it hard to commit herself to a task. The things she had been trying to put between herself and the memories of Lori’s stiff body and distorted face weren’t strong enough anymore, and ultimately she gave up and faced the horror head-on.

  It was, she thought, a particularly horrible way to kill someone. Not that Claudia had spent a lot of time ranking murder methods, but there was something both personal and cold about the idea of taking a wire, wrapping it around a neck, and pulling until life was gone. It wasn’t the action of a thoughtless moment, but too risky to have been planned. Whoever it was had done it with strength and determination, not to hurt or incapacitate, but to kill.

  Claudia tried to imagine how Lori could have inspired that sort of feeling, but she found she couldn’t conjure up that clear of an impression of the dead woman. Not just what would have made someone kill her, but anything at all. Lori had been a tenant in her market for over six months, and most of the impressions Claudia had of her were based on her outfits.

  It wasn’t like she was deeply involved in the lives of her other tenants, but she at least had a sense of who they were as people. Even Orlan Martinez, who mostly managed the vegetable market from a distance, because it was a small part of his larger business, was less of a cipher. She only saw him once every couple of months, but there were pictures of his farm and dogs posted around his stall, and whenever they spoke on the phone about the market, the conversation seemed to drift to some sort of related issue, like the trouble with getting reliable work out of the high school students he hired in the summer, or the sudden uptick in sales of specialty cabbages. (Claudia still didn’t have an explanation for that one.)

  She thought about the conversations she had had with Lori, trying to come up with something, some personal topic they had discussed, but came up blank. It hadn’t seemed strange at the time, but going back over them now, Claudia realized that every time their personal lives had come up, Lori had changed the subject or otherwise nonanswered. She didn’t think of herself as particularly nosy, but if she spent enough time around a person, she generally came away with at least some idea of who they were and where they were coming from, literally or figuratively.

  But for Lori she had nothing. No sense of where she had been living before she moved to San Elmo Bay, or why she had come, or what she might have done before she arrived. She might as well have stepped right out of the sea foam; an Aphrodite in natural fibers.

  Claudia knew that Lori had lived in a duplex in town, because that was the address on her rent checks, but her social life was as much of a blank as her antecedents. On the other hand, Claudia hadn’t had much time for extracurriculars lately either, so she wouldn’t have been in the best position to find out. She thought about asking some of the other tenants if they had seen Lori out and about—maybe Julia had run into her at one of her many community groups, or Robbie had spotted her at the bar where he occasionally played drums in a friend’s band. Then, as she was planning her list of questions, she wondered what she was doing.

  Claudia knew that it was a very bad, very dumb idea to try to investigate this, or any murder. No matter how curious she was, or how worried about her business or her freedom, murder investigations, like brain surgery or stand-up comedy, were no place for the unprepared. She was not a police officer, she didn’t have the training or the resources, or frankly the legal right to go poking her nose into the whys and wherefores of Lori’s untimely end.

  But, oddly enough, she did have some relevant experience. Not with murder—that was entirely new to her—but through an unusual series of events, she had briefly developed a hobby as an amateur private investigator.

  Claudia had been in her twenties when her grandfather showed up at Thanksgiving talking about his brilliant new investment strategy. It was in a company that had been recommended to him by other people at his church, and featured enticements like “no risk” and “guaranteed returns.” When Claudia tried to press him about the questions that raised, he had rather snippily pointed out that other members of the congregation had already done very well off the deal, and she should really stick to, in his words “your Internet thing.” The rest of the family had smiled and nodded and humored him, because her grandfather was a loud man, and very sure of himself, and on the surface everything looked all right.

  So Claudia had taken some time and looked deeper. There were members of her family who believed to this day that she had uncovered the fraud through some sort of top-secret hacking methods, but the truth was she had mostly just put in the time in front of her computer, trekking through a bewildering array of addresses, post office boxes, and personal and business names, real and fictional. What she ended up with was a pretty complete portrait of a team of serial con artists, with arrests and judgements across multiple jurisdictions and a habit of targeting Presbyterians.

  She had ended up getting a little obsessed with the project, to the point of driving to one of the addresses her research had turned up, where she took a series of pictures of the scheme’s chief player with his luxury cars, boat, and, brand-new backhoe, all of which turned out to have been purchased with investors’ money. That part had been determined by the postal inspectors, of all people, because of the group’s practice of sending solicitations through the mail. They were the ones who finally sent the investigation staggering slowly through the courts, though fortunately by then the weight of Claudia’s evidence had been enough to keep her grandfather from losing more than a nominal amount of his savings.

  Not that she had gotten much grat
itude for her effort. Reactions from her family members had ranged from grudging thanks to suspicions about her motives, and had centered around a sense that young people should really mind their own business. It wasn’t what she hoped for, but ultimately Claudia hadn’t minded that much. The hunt had become puzzle for its own sake, and she had discovered she had something of a talent for it. She had even briefly toyed with the idea of changing careers and becoming a private investigator, but at the time the plan had seemed excessively impractical.

  These days, impracticalities were the least of her worries. Under normal circumstances, Claudia would never have considered applying her self-taught investigative techniques to the problem of Lori’s murder, but what she had seen of Lennox’s approach had not filled her with confidence, and if he was really serious about keeping the marketplace closed until he caught the killer, her business could be in real trouble. The way she saw it, she didn’t actually have to come up with a complete solution; based on her previous experience, if she was able to assemble a sufficient suite of information, the relevant authorities would be able to take it from there.

  That was assuming, of course, that the relevant authorities hadn’t already arrested her because they couldn’t come up with anything better. And the fact that was even a possibility made it all the more vital that Claudia try her best to figure out what had actually happened.

  It was a bad idea, but it was the only one she had.

  Anyway, the first thing she was going to do wasn’t hazardous at all. Half the town was probably googling Lori’s name right now, and one more wouldn’t make much difference. It took a while to sort through to find the correct Lori Roth (and, incidentally, Claudia was relieved that the news of the murder didn’t seem to have been picked up beyond the local papers), and when she did, the results were disappointing. Lori’s social media presence was minimal, and what she had was set to private, with a profile picture that clearly hadn’t been updated in over a decade. What Claudia was able to find wasn’t much more enlightening: a resume that ended eight years back, detailing a previous career in corporate communications; some streaming music playlists that were heavy on pop-oriented R&B; and a mention in a review of San Elmo on a travel site that the writer had bought one of Lori’s bags and been disappointed by the quality. (That one had taken some digging, and Claudia wasn’t sure it had been time well spent.)

  Frustrated, Claudia leaned back from her computer and looked out the window. She was sure there was more information out there about Lori, but without more of a toehold, she didn’t think much of her chances of finding it in the vastness of the Internet. As she considered where that might be found, she let her gaze drift over the view, until it settled on the empty cottage across the way.

  Since it wasn’t currently habitable, Claudia had been using the building as storage, and she had made it available to the vendors to keep their nonperishable goods too. Most of them only had a few things; Robbie’s least favorite butcher knives, three cases of pickle jars that were overflow from the time Helen had found them on sale, some apple crates of unknown origin. But Lori had claimed an entire corner for herself, for what she said were boxes of extra dyeing and printing supplies. That was obviously a lie, so the next step of Claudia’s investigation was going to be to find out the truth.

  The second cottage had the same layout as Claudia’s home, but in skeletal form. The main room had been stripped back to the bare plaster and concrete, with stubs of the plumbing and electrical connections protruding optimistically from the wall where the kitchen might someday be. The bedroom had retained some carpet, and the bathroom its fixtures, and the less said about both, the better.

  The electricity had been turned off, for the sake of safety and economy, so Claudia rolled up the paper blinds to let some light in and got to work. She had brought a pair of latex gloves from the box on the shelf in her bedroom, left there for some long-forgotten reason, and put them on, feeling a little silly as she did it. But, while she had good reasons for her fingerprints to be found on pretty much everything in the marketplace, it was going to be harder to explain if they showed up inside boxes of the victim’s personal goods. If there was ever a time to develop some paranoid tendencies, Claudia decided, this was it.

  With her hands suitably attired, Claudia dove in. The first two boxes were packed tight with Lori’s signature “handmade” goods, complete with packing slips detailing how many of each item were there and how much had been paid for them. Initially, Claudia thought it had been some sort of joke at her expense, for Lori to keep the evidence that she was cheating her right under her nose, but after a while it occurred to her that maybe it was just necessity. The wholesaler Lori was ordering from appeared to require purchases in bulk, and since she couldn’t have more than one of each identical item for sale at the same time, she would have needed somewhere to store it all.

  After five boxes, Claudia figured she had pretty much gotten all she was going to out of this expedition, but there was one more, a box that didn’t match the rest, wedged in the corner, that caught her attention.

  It was taller than the merchandise boxes, and had begun its life as the packaging for a paper shredder, though based on the dents in the cardboard and multiple layers of tape, it had gone through some other roles since then. It wasn’t sealed, so Claudia just had to carefully lift the flaps to see what was inside.

  At first, the box seemed to be filled with nothing but office supplies. Some empty three-ring binders, a cup filled with pens, a couple of staplers, an empty tape dispenser; nothing you wouldn’t expect to find in the last-day box of someone cleaning out their desk at a job where nobody kept a close eye on the supply cabinet.

  The sweat was starting to pool in her gloves, but curiosity kept Claudia digging. Lori was exactly the sort of person to have kept her passwords written down on a sticky note on her desk, and it was just barely possible that such a thing might have gotten jumbled into a box like this.

  Unfortunately, no such thing appeared, and she was about to give it up as a dead end when she came across an old-fashioned paper date-book.

  Flipping it open Claudia hoped there might be some appointments listed, or the names of contacts who might lead her to someone with a better reason to kill Lori than some counterfeit tie-dye and a couple of stink bombs. But apparently it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  The first eight pages of the book were blank, and starting on the ninth, they were filled with a list of women’s names, scribbled across the lines for appointments with incomprehensible notes, like “Kara Young 5k cousin cancer Philly,” and “Rebecca Cobb 10–15? Palmyra.” The notes filled a page and a half, getting sketchier toward the end, to the point that the last few entries lacked last names, followed by more question marks than words.

  Claudia flipped through the rest of the pages but there was no more writing. Instead, she found a three-by-five photo tucked into the back cover. It must have been at least fifteen years old, from a time when people still took photos and had them developed instead of leaving them to be forgotten on old hard drives. A much younger Lori was smiling at the camera, her arm around another woman who was hugging her back and sticking out her tongue. Both were dressed in early-2000s pink and green, with plaid for Lori and florals for the other, and the non-Lori woman was holding an ice cream cone in her free hand. On the back of the photo someone had written, in purple ink, “Lori + Dana BFF Forever.”

  It was an image completely unlike the Lori that Claudia had known. Claudia wondered when she had changed, and why. And, more to the point, why this one photo was kept in a book otherwise devoted to the inscrutable notes.

  It was past noon by the time she had the storage room put back to rights, and the effects of Betty’s breakfast were wearing off. Claudia had locked up and was heading back to her cottage, thinking about lunch, when she noticed her front door was open.

  It wasn’t the first time it had happened; the latch was old and cheap, and when Claudia was in a hurry she sometimes forgot
to go through the ritual of pulling the door tightly closed and then pushing to check it. On a normal day she would have just been annoyed with herself, but the last few days hadn’t been normal.

  The question was, what was she going to do about it? Standing outside and frowning at the door wasn’t a long-term solution, and going for help seemed like an overreaction. Claudia settled on waiting for a while longer and, when nothing continued to happen, approached the door. She pushed it open the rest of the way with her fingertips, standing back as if she expected someone to come bursting out at her. No one did, so she looked inside.

  She didn’t have to look far. The source of the intrusion was right in front of her, curled up in front of her couch (okay, loveseat) with its ears perked up and tongue hanging out.

  Claudia sighed, both in irritation and relief.

  “I guess you liked the empanada?” she said.

  The dog laid its head down and whimpered in agreement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In small towns, like small houses, you rarely had to look for too long to find someone. The local vet (also the florist) had been out on a call, but he was on his way back to the office when Claudia reached him, and insisted it was no trouble to stop by and check on her visitor on his way. He said he would be there in about half an hour, so in the meantime Claudia called the police station to tell them she had some boxes of Lori’s stuff, because the last thing she wanted was to give Lennox another reason to suspect her of being uncooperative.

  Then she had to figure out what to do with her uninvited guest. First, after some debate, she shut the door. On the one hand, she had the impression it was a bad idea to close oneself up in a confined space with an unfamiliar dog, but on the other hand, she didn’t want the vet to make a special trip out to see her only to be told that the patient had wandered off. Tipping the scales was the fact that the dog could hardly have been less threatening if it was a stuffed animal, still curled up on the floor, watching her over the tail wrapped around its nose.