Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  “You’ve got a lot of conditions for someone who’s being investigated for a murder,” he said, and Claudia’s stomach filled with rocks. Her first instinct was to deny it, but she remembered who she was talking to, and the last thing she wanted was to give him any quotes that could be used against her.

  “So is that a no?” she asked, hoping bravado could stand in for the confidence she didn’t have. “The event is happening whether or not you write about it, but without my tips you don’t have any sort of story.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line as the reporter weighed his options. Finally, for whatever reason, he decided to play along.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “Your name won’t be in it. But I can’t promise the event listing will be in the paper. Might just make the website.”

  It was less than ideal, but Claudia had the sense that she had pushed the negotiations about as far as was wise.

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess we have a deal.”

  “All right then. So what’s this big thing you have for me?”

  “Three names. There’s a man named Neil Hahn who just arrived in town, claiming to be the victim’s ex-husband. He says he’s here on the behalf of her great-aunt, who’s too sick to travel. Which I have no reason to believe is anything other than totally true.”

  “I see,” Todd said, picking up on her tone. “And is there anything else you can tell me about this completely normal and unsuspicious person?”

  “Only that for someone who was supposed to be representing the victim’s only living relative, he doesn’t seem to be very well informed about his legal rights, or hers. And most of the questions he had seemed to have more to do with Lori’s life here and her death than things that might be important to her estate. But I’ve never had to deal with the death of an ex-spouse, so what do I know?”

  “What indeed. Well, thanks, that does sound like someone I’d like to find out some more about. Who’s next?”

  “Dana Herschel. She was a good friend of Lori’s in the past, but now apparently no one can get in touch with her. I have reason to believe that she was someone who was very important to Lori, one way or another.”

  “So? Lots of us have friends we aren’t talking to anymore. I can’t get a story out of that. You better have something pretty good behind door number three, or otherwise this deal is off.”

  “I don’t know. How do you feel about a former boy band member turned ex-con cult leader who may have crossed paths with the victim in the past, currently living in Humboldt?”

  The silence at the other end of the line lasted for so long that Claudia thought the line might have gone dead. Finally, Todd let out a low whistle.

  “Well, that’s no goat. Okay, you have my attention. How about a few details?”

  Claudia filled him in on what she had learned, being careful to emphasize the fact that she couldn’t guarantee Lori and Mr. Serenity Icono Bartok had ever actually encountered each other in person. Todd listened intently, asking occasional questions, until he was sure he had gotten all he could out of her.

  “Okay, if that’s it then that’s it. But I hope you realize that this is some suspicious behavior on your part.”

  “Suspicious? How so?”

  “Well, I just have to wonder if you’re feeding this stuff to me on purpose, to keep the attention off something closer to home.”

  Claudia had to admit it sounded like a valid strategy. Not out loud, of course.

  What she said was, “You’ll have to keep wondering, then, unless you can find someone else to talk to you. Because I’m talking now, and this is what I’ve got.”

  Todd laughed.

  “I like you, lady. You’ve got some balls, don’t you?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll get to work on these names of yours and see what I can come up with. You can look for the story on your market event to show up on the website by noon tomorrow at the latest. If it’s in the paper it’ll be the Saturday edition.”

  Claudia thanked him, and said if she came up with anything else, she’d let him know. They were both aware she was lying, but it was okay. She felt like they had reached a certain level of understanding and the reporter was, if not quite sympathetic toward her, at least aware it was in his interest to stay on her good side, whatever the facts of the case might turn out to be.

  As interactions with the press as a murder suspect went, Claudia thought that could have been worse.

  By the time they were done, it was too late to make any more calls, so Claudia settled for emailing a few regional bloggers. She was in the middle of making a list of local tourism sites to contact in the morning when it occurred to her that it was after eight, and that uncomfortable sensation in the area of her stomach was probably hunger. The feeling, once acknowledged, took over her thinking to the point where there was no use trying to do anything more until she had some dinner.

  Most days, this would have been the time she started coming up with excuses for why she should just heat up another pizza, but the crisper drawer in her refrigerator was full of almost perfectly good produce, and Rob and Emmanuelle had pressed a half-dozen fresh eggs on her as she was leaving, and under those circumstances, the shame of another frozen dinner was too much to bear.

  So Claudia took out what seemed like a reasonable range of ingredients and lined them up on the kitchen counter, along with a hunk of cheese to snack on while she contemplated her options. Two lightly bruised zucchini, half a bag of baby spinach, and three heirloom tomatoes weren’t the most inspiring starting point, but a couple of Internet searches and a hunt through an old cookbook later, Claudia settled on a frittata as the dish most likely to use her ingredients and not take upward of an hour.

  She sliced up the zucchini and tossed it into a pan where she had heated up some olive oil, and while it was browning, she let her thoughts turn to recent events.

  It seemed like so much had happened, but she was no closer to knowing what was going on than when she had received those damning printouts four days ago. (Was it really only that long? Claudia felt like she had been living like this for years.) In that time, Lori had gone from being a mildly irritating tenant, to a fraud, to dead. And Claudia’s own journey, which had begun with the desire to keep her marketplace free of counterfeit goods, had gone on to having to face the horror of the death of a person she hadn’t exactly liked, but who was still a person who should be alive, through being accused of the murder by an incompetent blowhard who was in way over his head and trying to pull her down with him, and into an introductory course in Murder Investigation for Total Morons, for which she suspected she wasn’t getting a passing grade.

  Claudia tossed the mountain of spinach into the pan and watched it melt down to a couple of tablespoons while she thought about the situation. What, in fact, did she actually know? Lori was dead, and someone must have killed her. (Claudia had no medical expertise, but she was confident that there was no way for a person to hit her own head with a jar of pickles and while unconscious, strangle herself with a cheese wire.) Whoever it was almost certainly had a reason—while she couldn’t completely eliminate the possibility of a random attack by a deranged vagrant and/or serial killer, she wasn’t giving it high odds.

  So, what reasons did people have for killing? Money, anger, and fear were the ones Claudia could come up with off the top of her head. The financial argument was dubious, based on what she had seen in Lori’s credit report, but maybe she had had a source of income that didn’t go through any of the official channels. Of course, it didn’t have to be money that she had. What about blackmail?

  Claudia sliced up the tomatoes and tested the edges of her new theory. It was a stretch, but maybe Lori had been using her stall in the marketplace to get close to someone, to threaten them or gather more information? Or maybe her scheme had already blown up on her somewhere else, and a market stand in a rural backwater had seemed like a good place to hide out until things calmed down.


  Okay, so it worked as a theory. So what? That and four bucks got you a cup of coffee. Without any proof, Claudia might as well have been theorizing that Lori had been killed by government agents to protect the secret that all of the nation’s cats were really aliens in disguise, for all the good it was going to do her.

  As if sensing her distress, Teddy came over and pressed her nose against the back of her leg. Claudia reached down and rubbed her behind the ear as the dog whimpered and turned her head to maximize the scratching.

  “You’ll protect me from the alien cats, won’t you, girl?” Claudia said, and Teddy panted her apparent agreement.

  That settled, Claudia got back to the business of making her dinner. She cracked four eggs into a bowl, mixed, and added milk until it looked about right. It was going to be a large dish for one person, but it would make good leftovers, and she couldn’t see the point in preparing a single-serving frittata.

  The eggs and tomatoes went into the pan with the cooked vegetables, floating and sinking according to their individual inclinations. After some thought, she chopped up the remainder of the cheese and mixed it in too, then stuck the whole thing in the oven and hoped for the best.

  When it came out, the top was golden brown, with bits of tomato and zucchini poking through, and taking out a slice confirmed the interior was fluffy and cheesy in the appropriate amounts. Claudia was so pleased with herself that she considered taking pictures and posting them, but decided that might be overdoing it for the achievement of managing to cook herself dinner. So she settled for raising a forkful in the direction of the pan, in an eggy toast.

  “I dub thee the fridge-ttata,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next day dawned without its usual blanket of fog. Instead of the normal soft grayness, the sky was bright blue and naked, and the buildings along the edge of the bay stood out clearly in all their faded, tin-roofed glory. There wasn’t even a breath of wind, and the regular tone of the foghorn had fallen silent.

  It was unnerving, to say the least.

  Claudia had set an early alarm, and only gave herself one snooze cycle before she got up, let Teddy out, and started gathering the mental resources she was going to need to face the day. That required caffeine, so she loaded up the coffee maker and set it on “kill.” It was Friday, just over twenty-four hours from the start time for the Hail Mary event Claudia was hoping would save her business, and she did not have one damn thing ready.

  Breakfast was a cold piece of leftover frittata, eaten out of hand as she tried to identify her ducks and figure out what kind of row they should be in. She was writing up a schedule for what she was going to have to get done by what time, when she remembered that one of the first items on it should be her meeting with Julie in twenty minutes.

  The Breakers Bakery and Coffee Shop was a local institution in San Elmo. Housed in the same Victorian building it had occupied since it outgrew its beachside lean-to in the eighties, it was a rambling space, with uneven, creaking wood floors and well-worn furniture tucked into cozy nooks. The former dining room was dominated by a long oak counter, jammed with raspberry bars, apple turnovers, allegedly healthy granola wads, and the stickiest cinnamon buns to ever challenge dental work.

  Upstairs, the space had been converted into a series of small meeting rooms, popular with the apparently endless need of the locals to organize themselves around various causes and interests. Claudia had been meaning to join one of them, or at least make the appearance at Betty’s book group she had been promising, but at the end of a long day, the option of staying in her cottage, wearing comfortable pants and not talking to anyone had always won out. But now, as she ordered her latte and felt the eyes of the other patrons on her, she cursed her weakness. At a time when a not-insignificant portion of the population was likely to believe that she had hit a woman over the head and strangled her with a wire, it would have been nice to have a few more people who at least felt obligated to greet her in public.

  There was no sign of Julie, so Claudia took her drink and looked around for an empty spot. Even on a weekday morning, the cafe was so popular that it wasn’t easy, and it took a few minutes of wandering around before she found an appropriately isolated seat.

  At least, that’s what it looked like. The spot Claudia had selected was a high-backed chair upholstered in shocking pink, facing the fireplace with its painted concrete logs. She was just settling in, ready to look innocent and return the text she had gotten from the manager of the local waste management agency about the possibility of getting some extra trash bins, when she realized there was another chair about eighteen inches away, previously blocked from her view, and it was occupied.

  By Officer Derek Chambers.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there,” Claudia said, awkwardly shifting to try to make it look like she had done anything other than walk straight across the room and sit down right in front of him.

  Derek didn’t seem to put out by her sudden appearance.

  “No worries,” he said. “There’s plenty of space. Want the funnies? I’m done with them. I’m afraid someone’s already done the crossword, though.” He offered a rumpled section of the paper, and Claudia accepted it with thanks.

  “You know, I’m not sure I’ve laughed at a newspaper strip in twenty years, but they’re still my favorite part of the paper. Does Mark Trail still talk in all caps whenever he sees an owl?” she asked as she tried to smooth the sheets to the point that she could comfortably hold them.

  “I think it’s bears this week,” Derek said. He was out of uniform, dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt, with a tan line on his upper arm illustrating the difference in sleeve length from his uniform. The pile of paper on the seat next to him and his nearly empty mug suggested that he had been here a while, and Claudia wondered if this was usually how he spent his days off.

  “Is this how you usually spend your days off?” she asked.

  “One of the ways,” he said. “It’s nice to find a place to come and sit for a while, and their apple turnovers are amazing. What about you? What do you do with your free time?”

  “Free time? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with the concept. This is the longest I’ve gone without putting in a full day at the marketplace since it opened. Nothing like being forced to take an unpaid vacation to really catch up on your R&R.” It had started out as a joke, but as the words came out of her mouth, Claudia could hear the bitterness in them. She cringed, but there was no way of calling them back.

  “Sorry, I guess that was out of line. I don’t really know what the protocol is here,” she said, forcing herself to smile and relax a bit. She was confident that police officers weren’t generally supposed to mingle with suspects, and vice versa, but San Elmo was a small town, and things would have to be different. There just weren’t that many people to talk to.

  “No worries. To be honest, I’m kind of at a loss when it comes to socializing these days,” he admitted. “Back in Raleigh, the chances I was going to run into anyone I’d met on the job were pretty slim, but here it seems like I can’t avoid it.”

  “Well,” Claudia said, raising her paper cup in a mock toast. “Here’s to being unavoidable.”

  Derek laughed and returned the gesture. “I’ll drink to that. Have you always lived in small towns?”

  “No, this is all new to me, too. I grew up near San Francisco. Plenty of experience with panhandlers and streets closed for random protests, none with meeting people everywhere who know all about you and want to chat.” Claudia frowned. “Did you say Raleigh? For some reason I thought you were from the Northeast.”

  “I am, originally. Got tired of the snow and started looking for other options. Then I got tired of the paperwork of a big-city job and thought I would look for something a little more slow-paced. Got that part wrong, but I can’t say I regret the decision.” He looked out the window at the blue sky. “Though I’ve gotta say, this is the first time since I’ve been here that it’s real
ly felt like how I imagined California would be. When I moved here, I didn’t even pack a jacket in my suitcase. Had to wait for the movers to arrive before I could feel my fingers again.”

  “Rookie mistake,” Claudia said. “But at least you can go inland to warm up.”

  “And we can all be grateful this weekend that we don’t have to.”

  Derek seemed to sense that this discussion of the weather had run its course and, looking around for inspiration to keep the conversation going, had settled on an amateur painting of a fishing boat that was hanging over the fireplace.

  “Um, so, do you like going out on the water?”

  “I do, but I get seasick,” Claudia admitted. “But I’ve been meaning to go out fishing for crabs once Dungeness season starts. According to Betty, you just sit there for a while until it’s time to pull the pots up. I think I could manage that.”

  “The dull-diest catch,” Derek quipped. It wasn’t very funny, but Claudia gave him points for effort. It was difficult carrying on a conversation with someone when you couldn’t talk about the one thing you had in common, which was also the main topic occupying both people’s time and attention. Still, Julie hadn’t showed up yet, and the corners of Derek’s eyes crinkled up when he smiled, so Claudia decided to give it another try.

  “Teddy was really taken with you,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound quite so much like a Victorian matron as she thought. “Do you have any pets?”

  “I would, but my landlady isn’t so into the idea. I’m thinking maybe I can get a fish and she won’t notice, but I’m not sure I want to take the chance. I’m pretty sure whenever I’m not there, she sneaks in and turns down my thermostat.”

  The conversation turned to terrible landlords they had had, and Claudia had almost forgotten what she was there for when Julie appeared next to her chair.

  “There you are,” the cheesemaker said. “I was starting to wonder if you had abandoned us.” She turned to Derek and smiled. “Do you mind if I steal her for a second? I’ve got a few people waiting to talk to her.”