Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  It didn’t matter what the business was, she supposed; there was always going to be someone around to muck it up.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was getting late, and at this point there was no way Claudia was going to be able to make it to all of the people she wanted to see. Carmen and Iryna would be getting ready for their weekly trip to visit Carmen’s sister and test their latest products on her nieces (Claudia suspected this was the origin of the ill-fated “birthday cake pierogi,” but she had no proof), and Orlan, of the vegetable market, was based out of Petaluma, a good half-hour’s drive away. Of all her tenants, he was the least likely to expect a visit—he ran a large operation and while that didn’t mean having the shop closed was no problem, she wasn’t worried how they were going to keep it together in the meantime. A phone call would be fine.

  That left Robbie and Emmanuelle or the Paks. She would need to talk to both of them, but she only had time for one more stop. Ultimately, Teddy tipped the balance. Claudia didn’t know how long you were supposed to leave a dog in a bathroom, but it seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution, and the Pak’s home was closer.

  They lived in the newer part of town, built up in the sixties during a brief flash of optimism about a freeway extension that would turn San Elmo into a thriving exurb. The freeway never came, but the houses stayed, a patch of stuccoed suburbia tucked against the dunes. Claudia had been to the Paks’ house before, but even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been hard to find. There weren’t a lot of houses in town that had a front yard full of carefully pruned yew topiaries, including a surprisingly realistic squirrel. Then, of course, there was the aroma.

  Like everyone else, the Paks were required to make their products for sale in a commercial kitchen, but there was nothing to stop Helen from turning her home into a research and development center (as her neighbors had learned, to their annoyance). Today the scent was the usual mix of fermented funk and eye-watering spice, with an added hint of ocean-y tang.

  Claudia rang the doorbell and waited through the responding chorus of barks for the sound of approaching footsteps.

  “Caesar, Ducky, no. Down. Oh, hi, Claudia,” The door was answered by Brandon, the Paks’ twenty-year-old son. He had been involved in the business from day one, splitting his time between working in their booth in the marketplace, maintaining the website for their mail-order business, and commuting to a local college where he was studying business administration and art history. Claudia’s impression of him was that he was a good kid who could probably use some more free time, but that was none of her business.

  He held the dogs back as best as he could and let Claudia in.

  “Sorry,” Brandon said. “It’s almost their dinner time, and they get excited. No, Delaware, no jumping. Are you here to see Mom?”

  “Is this a bad time? I just wanted to give you guys an update on the situation at the marketplace and see how you were doing.”

  “Thanks. We’re okay, I think.” Brandon led her through the house, spotless despite the trio of small dogs that milled around at ankle level. “Mom was pretty annoyed this morning, but she’s mostly calmed down, and Dad’s at a trade show, so we were going to be shorthanded anyway. Do you know when we’re going to be able to reopen?”

  “I wish I did. I’ve talked to a lawyer about it, but in the meantime I’m going to look into some other options for temporary solutions. How are your online sales doing?”

  “Okay. The burst we got from that gift list thing has died down, but we’ve settled at a higher volume.”

  It was almost a year now since a major regional magazine had included a short blurb about the Paks’ sweet and spicy pickled cabbage in a roundup of food items to put in a holiday gift basket for people you didn’t know very well, and the effect on sales had been close to overwhelming. The Paks had pushed their production capacity to the limit, and several of the other marketplace tenants had pitched in to help with the packing and shipping. The consensus was that it was a great thing that everyone hoped wouldn’t happen too often.

  Claudia followed Brandon to the kitchen, where his mother was lost in contemplation of a pile of shiny brown leaves that looked familiar in a way Claudia couldn’t place. Helen was a compact woman in her early fifties, with short black hair and a predilection for bold patterns. Today she was wearing a pink floral tunic over houndstooth-print leggings, paired with the fluffiest slippers known to man.

  “Oh, hello,” she said to Claudia. “I thought I heard your voice. Sorry I didn’t answer the door, I have my hands full with these kelp.”

  It finally struck Claudia where she had seen those leaves before: in sandy piles on the beach.

  ‘You can pickle those?” she asked.

  “Of course you can,” Helen said dismissively. “The question is, will people eat it?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Brandon.

  Sometimes Helen’s ambitions ran ahead of local tastes, to her son’s frustration. But Claudia appreciated it; anyone could pickle a cucumber, but who would have known that pickled blackberries could be so delicious? Still, she was dubious of this one.

  “It’s the local thing,” Helen went on to explain, ignoring her son, who vanished back into the living room. “I get all the vegetables from around here, but I was thinking, what is really local? What’s right here? And then I thought: the ocean. So I’m pickling seaweed. It’s legal to harvest, I checked the rules. You just go out and gather it.”

  And that was your answer right there, Claudia thought. If there was anything Helen loved more than fermenting, it was reducing overhead.

  What she said was, “That sounds great. I’ll look forward to trying it. We should think about doing some sort of display once you’re ready to sell them.”

  That brought her back to a more unpleasant thought.

  “Speaking of your products, I’m afraid you may need to replace the giant pickle jar from your front table. When I found—when I was in the marketplace yesterday morning I saw it on the ground. I don’t know if the jar was damaged but you probably wouldn’t want to keep it around anyway.”

  Claudia was expecting the news to be upsetting, but she wasn’t prepared for Helen’s response. She stopped what she was doing and remained frozen, with a piece of kelp in one hand and a vegetable peeler in the other, for several seconds. She started to say something, stopped herself, started again and turned that into a hiccup, then finally took a deep breath and laid the peeler down on the counter.

  “Well, that is too bad,” she said, carefully measuring out each word. “Those large jars are expensive. But maybe it was time to rethink that display anyway.”

  She looked around the kitchen, as if noticing for the first time that it was there.

  “I have a lot to do right now. Could we pick this up later? Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help while the marketplace is closed.”

  And with that Claudia found herself being politely but firmly given the bum’s rush, ending up on the front step, wondering what could possibly be so upsetting about the loss of a jar of pickles, no matter how large.

  Claudia spent the drive home simultaneously trying to process the events of the day and her options for the future. Deeply involved in the question of whether it was worthwhile to try to research what kind of printer had produced the sheets that had tipped her off about Lori, she almost failed to notice the police car in her driveway.

  “Hello?” Claudia tried the door to her cottage, but it was still locked, and the only sound was a faint whimpering coming from the direction of the bathroom. She was about to go inside when a voice answered her.

  “Oh, hey there.” The voice belonged to Officer Derek Chambers (funny how easily she remembered that name), who was coming around the corner from behind the other cottage. “I thought I heard someone.”

  He was in his normal uniform, but somehow on him it looked both sharper and more louche than any of his fellow officers. His short, light brown hair was slight
ly mussed, revealing a cowlick over his left ear, and the tan lines around his eyes suggested a love of a particular shape of sunglasses. Claudia realized she was staring and mentally slapped herself. This was no time to be distracted by a muscular pair of forearms or a charming smile.

  “We got your message about having some of the victim’s things in storage, so I was just coming out to pick them up. I hope that’s okay?”

  “Of course,” Claudia said. “There probably isn’t anything interesting in there, but I thought you guys should be the ones to make that call.” She didn’t feel like she needed to let him know she had already been through them, or what she had and hadn’t found. Not that she had done anything wrong, but it was the sort of thing that police probably found annoying.

  “Good call,” Derek said. “We never know what we’re going to find until we look. If you can just point me to it, I’ll get them out of your hair.”

  “Okay, right this way.”

  He smiled again and Claudia had to scold herself for the warm feeling it gave her. It was too easy to be comfortable around him, and that was not a good idea. His boss was treating her like a murder suspect, and no matter how nice he seemed, there was no reason for her to believe that Derek didn’t agree with him, and it was his job to charm her into incriminating herself. (Everyone knew about good cop–bad cop, but for her money, it had nothing on bad cop–hot cop.)

  “Do you mind if I go and let my dog out?” she said as she opened the door to the storage cottage. “She’s been inside for a while and I think she might need some fresh air. The boxes are all the ones in that corner.”

  “Sure, no problem. I didn’t know you had a dog.”

  “It’s kind of a new development. She seems to have adopted me.”

  Derek’s smile grew wider.

  “They do that don’t they? I’d love to meet her.”

  Claudia agreed to arrange the introduction and left him to haul the boxes out on his own, depriving herself of the view of those arms in action for the sake of her bathroom.

  Teddy was happy to see her, and Claudia was happy to see that the room was still pretty much intact. (She hadn’t liked that bath mat very much anyway.) She let the dog out to do her business, and watched Derek load the boxes into the back of his cruiser. She and Teddy were disputing the ownership of a stick when he came back, peeling off the latex gloves he’d been wearing and stuffing them in his pocket.

  “This is your dog?” He reached down at Teddy, who immediately lost interest in the stick and came over for some expert-level ear-scratching.

  “Apparently,” Claudia said. She picked up the abandoned stick and waggled it, hoping to distract Teddy’s attention, but it was clear that Officer Chambers’s appeal wasn’t limited to humans.

  “You know, this really is an amazing place. Even the stray dogs are friendly.” He finished the scratching job and leaned on the corner of the house, looking out over the ocean.

  “How long have you been here?” Claudia asked. Whatever the officer was up to, Claudia didn’t see any benefit in sending him on his way, at least not yet. Maybe she could be charming too. Stranger things had happened.

  “Almost a year now,” he said. “I’d been working in the city and it was wearing me down. Too much violence, too few good days. I thought I’d get away to the country, find some peace and quiet, maybe learn to surf.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  “The ocean’s ice cold and I’m knee-deep in a murder investigation. Other than that, everything’s peachy.”

  In spite of herself, Claudia laughed.

  “Well, nothing’s perfect,” she said.

  A light breeze picked up, bringing a whiff of salt air, and in the short silence that followed, Claudia allowed herself a moment to imagine the other ways a conversation like this might go, under different circumstances. But that imagined place wasn’t here and now, and reluctantly she pulled herself back to the real world.

  “So, Officer Chambers—”

  “Please, you’ve got to call me Derek. No one around here is that formal. Lieutenant Derek, if you must.”

  “All right, Lieutenant Officer, are you really supposed to be talking to me like this? You’re in the middle of a murder investigation, and I get the impression your boss only sees mug shots when he looks at me.”

  Derek looked mildly embarrassed. “Well, a person can have a conversation, can’t they? For what it’s worth, I don’t think the chief really has it in for you. He’s just worried about trying to solve the case, and he doesn’t want to let any possibilities get by him.”

  “That’s nice for him, but he isn’t exactly making it easier for me. Do you have any idea when I’m going to be able to reopen the market? This is our high season, and I’ve got a lot of people who depend on their shops being open. Myself included.” Since she wasn’t going to get any pleasure out of the encounter now, Claudia decided that at least she could try to get something accomplished.

  But her new friend was having none of it.

  “Hey, look, I just work here,” he said, stepping back with his hands raised. “I’d love to help, but I can’t tell you anything that’s going to interfere with the investigation.”

  “I don’t want to interfere,” Claudia argued. “I just want to know if I’m ever going to be able to get back to my business.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s up to the chief. Thanks for turning over the boxes. If you find anything else that belonged to the victim, please let us know.”

  “Of course,” Claudia said, and watched with regret as he got into his patrol car and drove away. Not that there was any other way that could have gone, she reminded herself.

  Teddy came up and bumped her head under Claudia’s hand, who responded with some clearly inferior scratching.

  “Sorry, girl,” she said. “It looks like it’s just us for now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was getting late, and there was only time to make a few more calls before the end of the business day, so Claudia put off any plans to contact her other tenants in favor of calling around to other local businesses and farmer’s markets until she came up with enough options to get them through the next week or so. What was going to get her through was still an open question, but she’d come up with something. Maybe dig up her old clarinet and try busking. People would probably pay good money to get her to stop.

  That got Claudia thinking about more practical steps she could take. She had only scraped the surface on her previous search into Lori’s Internet presence, and it occurred to her now that she had a couple of tools that might be helpful. Possibly not legal, and definitely not ethical, but murder was neither of those, so Claudia felt like she had some moral leeway.

  The sun was starting to set, sinking into the fog with a last gasp of pink and orange. Claudia heated up a bowl of the chili that Betty had insisted on sending home with her, opened her computer, and got to work.

  As a matter of course, Claudia ran a credit check on every one of her tenants. She wasn’t authorized to use the information for anything other than leasing decisions, but at this point, a terms of service violation was the least of her worries. With it, and the help of the Internet, Claudia was now able to build a pretty complete resume of the victim’s adult life.

  Lori Roth had gotten her first credit card in college, listing her address as an off-campus housing complex which appeared to sport an extensive collection of outdoor couches, at least based on the current street-view photos. That was in Ohio, and the resume Claudia had found earlier indicated that Lori had majored in communications and graduated without doing anything significant. From there she had moved on to a job and apartment in Virginia, after a break of about six months in Connecticut, during which time she leased a used car and was delinquent on paying her credit card bill three times.

  The car lease had been cosigned by a John Roth, with a home address near where the purchase was made. That house was a modest suburban split-level with a minivan parked in the
driveway and a basketball abandoned on the lawn. A search of the archives of the local paper brought up an obituary for John Roth, a widower who had succumbed after a short battle with cancer eight years ago, survived by his daughter, Lori Natalia.

  So Lori had been basically alone in the world by the time she had moved to San Elmo. That was as good an explanation as any for why she had never talked about her family; by the looks of things, there might not have been anyone to talk about. Claudia wondered briefly what was going to happen to the boxes of merchandise Derek had claimed from her storage, before realizing that was probably the least important question she was facing right now, by several orders of magnitude.

  Back to the reconstruction of Lori’s life. She spent twelve years living in Virginia, working at various marketing jobs and living in apartment buildings that ranged in appearance from okay to pleasant. From Virginia, Lori had moved to Maryland for four years, though that was after the online resume ended. Whatever she had been doing there, she ended it abruptly seven months ago, breaking her lease in Maryland and moving into the duplex she had been living in in San Elmo, all in the space of about a week.

  She had put in her application for the marketplace spot two days later.

  And that was pretty much the end of the story, at least as far as her current materials could tell it. Claudia looked back over the timeline she had created, hoping something might stand out, but nothing did. Despite the details she had uncovered, Claudia found it unsatisfying. There were all the bones of a life, but none of the meat. Who were Lori’s friends, her lovers? Did she enjoy the various jobs she had worked, or were they just a paycheck? What excited her, what did she regret?