“Oh,” said Claudia.
There might be hordes of dark haired young men roaming San Elmo in bright green high-top sneakers, but the person the three of them knew who fit that description was Brandon Pak, and his distinctive, favorite shoes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By the time Carmen and Iryna left, they seemed much happier, and Claudia wished she could say the same for herself. Having passed on what they knew, they felt they had done their duty, and they could stop worrying about their unpleasant information. Now it was up to Claudia to decide what to do with it.
In theory, she should have been pleased. After all, this was the sort of thing she had been after, and it had just been dropped in her lap. Good news, right? Except it didn’t feel like it. But facts didn’t change because you didn’t like them, and if Brendan or Helen had killed a woman and tried to frame Claudia for the murder, then that was something she was going to have to face sooner or later.
While she considered how she was going to do that, Claudia went to check on the process of cracking Lori’s password. All it said was “processing,” but Claudia stared at it for a few minutes anyway, in case that helped.
Her attempt at psychic software intervention was interrupted by the phone ringing. Claudia hesitated in answering it, momentarily afraid to find out what else the world had in store for her. But it was just Julie, calling to let her know that she had successfully contacted several of the rental companies, and the outdoor market event wouldn’t be without tables or portable toilets. Claudia thanked her, then paused before asking her next question.
“By the way, do you know anything about an argument Helen and Lori had last spring?”
“Sorry, no,” Julie said, in a way that suggested her mind had already moved on. “They didn’t like each other very much, did they? I guess you’d have to ask Helen about that. Oh, and one more thing—don’t forget you need to call the papers and see if they can get an announcement in the Saturday edition. It’s short notice, but who knows.”
Claudia promised she would get right on that. (It didn’t seem worthwhile to explain her lack of success in that direction.) Julie’s other suggestion, though, she decided to take as a sign.
Going to visit the Paks didn’t seem very smart, but Claudia couldn’t think of what else to do. The pickle-making family were at or near the center of everything she had been able to come up with about Lori’s murder so far, and, like it or not, that center was where she needed to be.
After hanging up the phone, she picked up her jacket before she could talk herself out of it. Teddy immediately jumped to her feet, looking expectantly at the door.
“Sorry, girl,” Claudia said. “Not the beach this time.”
She started to leave, but the look of hopeful enthusiasm on the dog’s face was too much for Claudia. Besides, she reasoned, it was probably a good idea to bring the dog with her, just in case. Not that she expected Teddy to provide any protection, but if something did happen, at least she wouldn’t be stuck in the house with no one to feed her. If nothing else, the Paks had always been very kind to their dogs.
“Okay, fine, you can come. But you have to be good.”
Whether Teddy agreed to her part of the deal wasn’t clear, but she enthusiastically followed Claudia and took her place in the passenger seat. Claudia wondered if she was supposed to get her to wear a seatbelt or something.
She parked in front of the Paks’ house and considered her plan of action. Her excuse for the visit would be that she wanted to talk about some details of the outdoor market, maybe having them work together with Robbie to pair some of their sauerkraut with one of his sausages. Then she would work the conversation around to the fight, via an as-yet-undetermined method. (Claudia was sure she would think of something, which mostly served as proof that experience is not as good of a teacher as some people believe.)
Claudia had been hoping to catch Helen alone, but she had no such luck. She arrived to find the entire family in the living room, looking like they had either been in the middle of an argument, or a hard-fought staring contest.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Claudia said as she followed Helen into the room where her husband and son were frozen in an unhappy tableau. Victor Pak was facing his son with a mix of anger and hurt, while Brandon sullenly focused all of his attention on the patch of carpet in front of his chair.
Neither of them looked like they had moved in a while, or were planning to in the immediate future, until the Paks’ dogs spotted Teddy.
Claudia had meant to ask if she could put her in the yard, but the three furry specks shot across the room like yipping rockets as soon as they stepped through the door. For the next couple of minutes, everyone was involved in the effort to get them separated from Teddy, who didn’t know what was going on here but clearly didn’t want to get involved, and by the time order had been restored, the ice was well and truly broken.
Claudia apologized profusely, and tried to take the traumatized Teddy back out to the car where she should have left her in the first place, but Helen stopped her.
“No, they need to learn. The trainer said it’s important to get them used to being around other dogs, and they’re supposed to listen to us no matter what. I think this is a good opportunity.” Her voice was bright and brittle and a little bit hoarse, like she had been doing a lot of talking recently.
She turned to her husband. “You do the exercises with them. Claudia, can you just hold your dog there?”
Claudia agreed, and offered a silent apology to Teddy as Victor followed his wife’s orders, trying to get the smaller dogs to form an orderly line. The Paks’ living room had been designed in the sunken style of the sixties, and Helen had furnished it to a corresponding midcentury aesthetic, though they had replaced the wall-to-wall-to-stairs-to-fireplace shag carpet with something more contemporary. Victor was assembling his students between the glass-topped coffee table and the curved orange sofa, though the smallest dog seemed more interested in attacking his ankles. It wasn’t clear what he was hoping to achieve with this activity, in the unlikely event that he ever succeeded at the first step, but Claudia supposed that everyone should have a hobby.
“So, I know we talked on the phone about the outdoor market thing, but I was thinking that maybe we should, um, talk more.” It occurred to Claudia that she should have put some more thought into this approach, but it was too late for that now.
“We have plenty of stock to sell, of course. And the parsnip kimchi is ready, but we can’t have it packaged in time.” From the way Helen was looking at her, Claudia thought she might not have convinced her that the only reason she was there was the necessity of in-person sales planning. The rest of the family was staring at her in polite confusion, and even the dogs seemed concerned.
“But you could offer tastings,” Claudia said, doing her best to sell it. “People can sign up for your mailing list, maybe take pre-orders.”
There was general agreement that that was something that might happen, followed by increasingly awkward silence.
“Was there something else?” Helen asked, finally.
“Um, well, yes.” If there was a good way to ask a friend if they or their child had killed someone, Claudia couldn’t think of it at the moment, so, as with most things in her life, she decided to dive straight in and hope for the best.
“I was just wondering, I know you had a fight with Lori last spring, and I wanted to ask what that was about.”
A person could have heard a pin drop in that room, assuming it didn’t spontaneously combust before it hit the floor.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Helen said, packing each word with cold fury. “Why would you even ask that?”
“It’s just something I heard about, and I wanted to get your side of the story.” It wasn’t a very convincing argument, but in the moment Claudia was just proud of herself for not hiding under the table. Not that Helen’s family was being very helpful on that point. Victor had frozen in the midd
le of an attempt to arrange the dogs in a diagonal line, wearing an expression of horror, and Brandon was looking like he might think the table thing wasn’t a bad idea. And at the center of all of them was Helen, radiating anger.
“Is this your idea to get yourself out of trouble?” she said, her voice rising. “By finding one of us to blame instead? After everything we’ve done, this is how you are going to treat us?”
Helen was ready for war, and Claudia was feeling distinctly unarmed. She was never going to be able to singlehandedly take on the woman who had silenced an entire busload of German tourists who had taken exception to her more creative sauerkrauts with a single withering glare, in her own home, in defense of her family.
It was time for the nuclear option.
“Lori’s neighbor saw Brandon at her duplex the night she was killed. I thought it might be a good idea to give him a chance to explain.”
It was like Claudia had taken that metaphorical falling pin and used it to let all of the air out of Helen. In a moment, her righteous anger was gone, replaced by terror and misery. Then the moment passed, and her expression hardened into blankness.
“We do not need to discuss gossip with you. This conversation is over. If you have any concerns, you should take them up with the police.”
Claudia wasn’t having any of that.
“Oh, come on. You don’t honestly think I’m out to get you, do you? I just want to know what happened, and I’m sorry, but this is definitely something that happened.” She looked over at the miserable young man in the chair. “Brandon, help me out here. What were you doing there?”
Brandon, who had returned his attention to the carpet, looked up at the sound of his name. His face was drawn and scared, looking simultaneously childlike and aged by the stress.
“Somebody saw me?” he asked, as his mother tried to shush him.
“Lori’s neighbor,” Claudia repeated. “She told Iryna, and Iryna told me. No one has talked to the police yet.” She left the last word hanging there, hoping he would take it as an invitation to see talking to her as a viable alternative.
“I didn’t kill her,” Brandon said, to his mother’s horror.
“Why are you talking! Don’t talk, you don’t have to tell her things!”
“I was there,” he went on, stubbornly. “Please don’t tell anyone. But I didn’t kill her.”
“Then why did you go to her house? Why that night, of all nights?”
But Brandon just shook his head. “I was just there.”
“Really? Is that what you’re going with? Four people know you were outside Lori’s house on the night she was murdered, not counting whoever else Iryna has told by now. And the best you can do is to say it was just one of those things, what are you going to do? Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
Brandon cringed under the assault, but he held his ground. He appeared to have decided to say just enough to incriminate himself, and leave it at that, which was an interesting strategy. Claudia stared at him, thinking about the things she knew and didn’t know. Then, out of the blue, a theory started to form. It didn’t do a lot for her personally, but it did fit the facts, and filled in some unanswered questions.
“Brandon,” she said. “The day before Lori died, someone left a pile of papers on my desk that proved the products she was selling were fakes. Do you know anything about that?”
Helen gasped, and Victor lost interest in the dogs and looked at her, an irritated Yorkie nipping at his feet. Only Brandon didn’t respond at first, continuing to stare at the spot on the floor that was, apparently, the key to his escape.
But it wasn’t working, and eventually, Brandon moved his head in a ghost of a nod.
“Why did you do that?” Claudia asked, gently, like she was talking to a bird that might fly away at any moment.
Brandon returned to silence, apparently caught in the throes of some internal conflict. Whatever angels were fighting within him were taking their time about it, but eventually they ruled in Claudia’s favor.
“She was a jerk,” he said at last. “Like, a total—” He stopped there and looked at his mom. “A really bad jerk. She was nice to you, because you were important. But there was this one time some tourists came in and were making fun of how ugly her stuff was, like she wasn’t even there, and she saw me laughing, and after that she had it in for all of us.”
“It was mostly a ton of little stuff, like pretending to think we’re Chinese or talking really loud about how our booth smelled bad. And then last spring I was wiping down the big pickle jar after a bunch of kids got finger prints all over it, and she made this joke about me and, um, the size of the pickles, and she kept laughing like it was the funniest thing, until I just cracked and told her if she didn’t shut up I would take that jar and—” He stopped there, possibly realizing he was taking the self-incrimination too far. “Anyway, Mom found out about it and read her the riot act, but Lori just said some stuff about how she wasn’t PC and we had to deal with it.”
He stopped to take a breath and Claudia was finally able to gather her outrage to the point where she was capable of speaking.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have had her out so fast, those bags of hers would have achieved escape velocity.”
“We had only been there for eight months,” Helen reminded her. “None of us really knew what you were like, and we didn’t want to be the ones causing trouble.” She gave her son a significant look. “Sometimes the best way to handle a problem person is just to ignore them.”
“Yeah, well, not always,” he said. Having defied her once now, Brandon seemed to be living a life without fear, at least temporarily. “Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I was online looking for a birthday present for Mom, and I saw one of Lori’s bags. So I looked into it more, and that’s when I realized that all of the attitude she had been putting on about being this big artist, it was all bull—it was a lie. I wanted people to know what she was doing, but I didn’t know how to bring it up. So I thought if I left the evidence for you, you could take it from there.”
And Claudia certainly had. That part of his plan had worked, at least. She had some follow-up questions, but they were going to have to wait.
“And that’s what you meant?” Helen was almost shouting. “You tell me she’s going to be sorry, and then nothing else, and it was about this? Why didn’t you explain?”
“Because I thought you would freak out, and I was right,” Brandon said. “It was just, it was really bad timing, okay? When I found out she was dead, the last thing I wanted was for anyone to know what I had done. And if I didn’t tell anyone about it, then I could be sure that nobody knew.” He looked curiously at Claudia. “But how did you find out?”
“Just a good guess,” Claudia said. It didn’t seem worth going into her thought process, which had leaned heavily on who among her tenants was most likely to be in the further corners of e-commerce and least likely to approach her directly, with a touch of intuition and a healthy portion of luck. Which was probably a long way of saying the same thing, anyway.
“So, the night after you left the papers for me, you went to Lori’s house,” she prompted.
“I know it was stupid, but I just wanted to see. So I hung around for a while after everyone else had left, and I knew you were going to talk to her, and I wanted . . . I thought it would be fun . . .” He trailed off, embarrassed at his own vindictiveness.
Claudia, who was no stranger to giving in to the baser emotions, filled in the rest for him.
“You knew she was going to be coming home after having been exposed as a fraud and losing her shop in the marketplace, and you wanted to be on the scene for that,” she finished for him. Helen was scandalized, but there was no time for that now.
“So, what did you see?” Claudia asked. “Did she do anything? Was anyone else there?”
“No,” Brandon said. “There was nothing interesting at all. She walked around for a bit, talking to herself, then she sat down in front
of her computer and started drinking wine. That’s when I left, because I was starting to feel kind of dumb.”
He looked from one person to another for support.
“She was completely fine when I saw her,” he said with rising desperation. “And after I left I came right home. I didn’t go back to the marketplace, and I never saw her again, I swear.”
Claudia was inclined to believe him. Theoretically, she could imagine a situation where Brandon, furious that his plan hadn’t produced the emotional response he was looking for, had lured or followed Lori back to the marketplace and made his revenge complete. But here in this living room, with the alleged rage-killer playing nervously with the fringe on a decorative pillow while his father tried to impose order on the movements of small dogs and his mother looked at him like she couldn’t decide between hugging and smacking him, it seemed less credible.
“Okay, so you were there,” Claudia said. “And as far as the police are concerned, none of us heard that. But is there anything else you remember that you saw? It might be important.”
“No,” Brandon said, but the way he drew out the vowel suggested otherwise. Everyone waited, and eventually he went on.
“There was a car parked across the street from her house, and when I was leaving something made me notice it. And it took a second, but I realized the driver’s seat was lying all the way down, and there was a reflection in the window like someone had their phone on. I figured it was just somebody sleeping in their car, but it made me nervous because I didn’t really want anybody seeing me there. Not that I was doing anything wrong, but I just, I didn’t want to . . .” He trailed off as his nervousness returned. “I didn’t know anything was going to happen to her. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known she was going to get murdered.”
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