The Bakers and Bulldogs Mysteries Collection: 20 Book Box Set

by Rosie Sams

  Both Sheila and Wayne, reluctantly, came in for questioning only. Sheila said that she didn’t have anything to do with the situation, and Wayne implied that Melody had it out for him “because your dog doesn’t like my cologne.”

  Al had them both brought in anyway.

  Between Sheila’s shoulder-length dark hair and Wayne’s close-cropped blond hair, neither person matched the person that Melody had seen running into the trees. Melody decided that, in addition, Sheila was too short to be the suspect: she was about Melody’s height, and would have been much shorter against the trash container than Melody remembered the figure being. Wayne was probably a little short as well, being only five-nine to Carole’s five-eleven at most—the heels of his shoes were built up, and he may have been even shorter. He was still wearing the extravagant plaid suit from earlier that morning.

  Al brought the two suspects to the women’s holding cell, then left again, bringing Trevor back with him. Melody wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to have everyone together at one time, especially with Wayne in the mix. It made her nervous. Smudge stood protectively next to her, staring fixedly at Wayne.

  Wayne seated himself on one of the other cots as though he were settling onto a throne. “What seems to be the difficulty, Sheriff Hennessey?”

  “You mentioned to Ms. Marshall that you thought that Bill Gardner had blown all the profits of the business. Care to go into more detail on that?”

  Wayne’s eyes slid toward Sheila with an almost audible click. The corner of his mouth twitched.

  Sheila seemed to sense that something was going on. She backed into a corner of the cell, holding her hands in front of her. “I did not take Bill Gardner’s money. Not that I wouldn’t have, if he offered it. But he didn’t.”

  “You were sleeping with the man, weren’t you?” Wayne said. “That was what this was all about. The well-made-up nail salon owner getting in good with the lawyer who no woman could stand. I applaud you on your good taste, madame.” He held out his hands and gave her a golf clap. “I, myself, never saw the financial records. But I knew there had to be a reason that Gardner wasn’t coughing up the dough. Even he wasn’t so foolish as to disappoint his employees without a reason. But I didn’t think it was you he was sleeping with, Miss Weatherby—I thought it was that awful secretary, Ms. Gray, he hired a few months ago.”

  Sheila had turned bright red. “I wasn’t sleeping with him! I just approached him for a loan.”

  Wayne just winked at her, then turned toward Al. “Things never go the way you hope they will, do they? Gardner probably dropped her like a hot potato once he got into the secretary’s pants.”

  “I didn’t sleep with him!”

  “Sheila, how much money were you asking Mr. Gardner for?” Melody asked.

  “Sixty thousand dollars.”

  Wayne barked out a laugh. “You really think you’d ever be able to pay that back? Your nail salon is a flop and everyone knows it. Go back to cutting hair for Ms. Marshall’s pooch.”

  “Smudge only needs a wash not a cut,” Melody said, and Smudge gave a bark and then growled at Wayne. “Carole, did Mr. Gardner ever talk to you about making a loan to someone? Or how much liquidity he had?” Melody asked.

  “In late November, just before Thanksgiving, he asked about the balance in the main account,” Carole said. “I thought he was trying to figure out how much he could afford to give out for bonuses.”

  “And how did you hear that Mr. Gardner was planning to give out larger bonuses than usual?”

  “From Wayne—Mr. Truman.” Carole pointed at Wayne.

  “That’s true,” Wayne said to Al, ignoring the women. “I told her that in… it must have been around December first. Mr. Gardner had spoken to me about it. If I remember correctly, he said that he was thinking about three thousand for her. More for me, but I don’t like to mention the number. Nothing for the secretary, of course, who had only been there since September and was going to get fired.”

  “Did he say that in so many words?” Al asked.

  “No, but close. I asked him how she was working out, and he rolled his eyes and grunted, then said, ‘She’s not, for much longer.’”

  “And where is she now?”

  “She went home to her mother’s for the holidays, out of state,” Wayne said. “May she never return. She made me miss several appointments with clients, she was so bad at scheduling. But then again, we never keep secretaries for long. Bill’s bad at keeping most women around.” He looked at Carole and smirked. “And then there’s sad-sack Carole. Who would have thought that she would have ever drawn the line at any of Bill’s behavior?”

  Melody scowled at him and Smudge growled again. It felt like anything involving Wayne was like holding an electric eel in your hands, both slimy and hurtful. She felt dirty just being around the man. Anything she said would be turned against her, no doubt. She had to do this carefully.

  She turned to Sheila. “What made Mr. Gardner change his mind?”

  “I’m sorry?” Sheila asked, surprised.

  “You said that Mr. Gardner had been planning to invest with you, or at least thinking about it. What made him change his mind?”

  “The surprising thing is that he considered it in the first place,” Wayne muttered.

  “Everything was looking good, until about the first week of December. Then suddenly his attitude changed,” Sheila said.

  “How so?” Melody asked.

  “He said,” Sheila’s face screwed up, showing hurt. “He said that he had found out some unsavory things about me. Things that he didn’t want to associate himself with.”

  “Did he say what those things were?”

  “No!” Sheila shook her head. “He just said that and asked me to leave his office. I didn’t know what happened. I have no idea what he was talking about.”

  Wayne inspected his nails coolly. “Or so you say.”

  “I do say,” Sheila insisted. “And, right after that, business started dropping off, and nobody would look me in the eye at the grocery store. I feel like someone was going around behind my back, spreading rumors.”

  “Excuse me,” Melody said, and taking Smudge with her, she stepped out of the holding cell and outside, where her phone would get better reception. She called Kerry. “Kerry, have you heard any rumors about Sheila Weatherby?”

  Kerry paused. “I didn’t want to say, because Sheila, well, if you know her, you’d never believe it of her. But people were saying that she was cutting corners at the nail salon, and had caused several women to get fungus under their nails. They were saying that her salon wasn’t clean. Because of all the dogs she groomed at her other job.”

  “Thanks, any people specifically?”

  “No, come to think of it, it was just all someone said.”

  Melody hung up and crouched down, petted Smudge and told her that no matter what anyone said, dogs were not dirty. It was coming together so she went back to Al and reported the gossip.

  Sheila looked horrified. “No wonder people had stopped coming!”

  Melody looked up toward the ceiling. “Who could have started a rumor like that, I wonder?”

  “Who indeed?” Wayne said.

  “You bastard. You arranged the whole thing,” Trevor said his face turning red.

  “I didn’t,” Wayne said. “I may have arranged for Ms. Weatherby to get what was coming to her a little faster than she would have otherwise—because that salon is filthy—but I didn’t ‘arrange the whole thing,’ as you say.”

  Trevor turned toward Al. “I would like to un-confess. I didn’t kill Bill Gardner. I didn’t even wake up when my wife left the house. I made up my confession to spare her and the kids.”

  Melody thought, I don’t think you spared either her or the kids very much, but didn’t say anything. She could understand that Trevor had wanted to defend his family, however he could.

  “Trevor, don’t…” Carole said.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Trevor said. “I w
on’t put my hands on that slime ball. I thought Gardner was bad, but whatever Truman is, is far worse. I wouldn’t want to get any of that on me.”

  “Insulted by an artist who can’t support himself without his wife’s salary? I’m flattered,” Wayne said and sat with a superior smirk on his face.

  Melody had an idea. “Carole, how soon would Mr. Gardner have wanted Mr. Truman to return your things from the office?”

  “As soon as possible,” Carole said. “When he fired the secretary before this one, he sent Wayne over to her house with her things an hour after she left. He was serious about never wanting to see people again and wanting all ties with them gone.”

  Melody took a big breath. She had most of what she needed to know now, in order to tell Al her theory. There would still be a lot of legwork to do afterward, but at least he would know where to look. Smudge headbutted her leg encouragingly, grinning up at her, then going back to glaring at Wayne.

  “Here’s what I think happened.” Melody paused, and Al gave her a nod to continue. “Sheila pitched her new business idea to Mr. Gardner. Mr. Gardner realized that her idea was a great one, and that she was exactly the kind of friendly, open person who could make it work. He knew that giving her sixty thousand dollars would not be a waste of money, and that he would likely profit.

  “Then, suddenly, he changed his mind. Why? Because someone told him about how Sheila supposedly was a sloppy nail tech, and that her salon—which I have been in—was dirty, when it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know what planet you live on, but that place is not clean.” Wayne crossed his arms and shook his head.

  Melody ignored him. “The rumor spread. Suddenly, Sheila’s business was going under, when until then it had been successful. It looked like it was due to a couple of other nail salons opening, but that was because Sheila doesn’t know about the gossip.”

  “You’d have thought someone would have told me,” Sheila said.

  “You?” Wayne shook his head again. “You’re dirty. Why would anyone tell you?”

  Melody glared at him and he stopped. “Then the night of the tree-lighting ceremony happened, and Trevor accused Mr. Gardner of refusing to pay his wife a bonus, after working her to the bone. Mr. Gardner never actually said that he wasn’t paying out bonuses. He said, ‘I don’t owe your wife, or anyone else, anything more than their agreed wages.’ I think I have that right. He was angry at Trevor, and he was a very proud, stiff man who could never admit that he was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t intended to cancel the bonuses. We don’t know. The only person who had ever said that he was, was Mr. Truman.”

  Carole’s jaw dropped, and she looked at Wayne with horror. “That’s true. He never said anything to me, either about giving a large bonus or about not giving one. And in previous years, he always just waited until the last minute and shoved an envelope at each of us, then he expected me to track down who got paid how much, for the records later.”

  Wayne shrugged. “He told me that he wasn’t paying bonuses. What was I supposed to do, drag everyone into his office and make him repeat it, so there were witnesses? You can’t prove any of this.”

  Melody smiled. “I think Mr. Truman was upset about the possibility of Mr. Gardner taking profits out of the business without consulting him. After all, it was a business that he hoped to be made a full partner in. I think Mr. Truman considered himself a full partner already. I think he decided that Mr. Gardner was going behind his back by talking to Sheila about starting her new business.”

  Wayne crossed his arms over his chest. “I refuse to respond to that ridiculous comment.”

  Unlike Wayne’s previous rebuttals, this one was a stiff denial instead of a snakelike insinuation. Melody told herself to take heart.

  “Mr. Truman saw his opportunity at the festival of lights—or rather heard about it, as people gossiped about the situation. I think he called Mr. Gardner that night and asked him to come in before the office opened in the morning, to go over something in Carole’s office. Maybe he accused her of stealing.

  “Mr. Gardner came in early and started going through Carole’s drawers. While he was doing so, Mr. Truman took the letter-opener and stabbed Mr. Gardner in the back. He wasn’t expecting Carole to come in that morning. If she hadn’t, everything would have been perfect. But she did, and Mr. Truman was forced to flee before he could finish what he needed to do.”

  “Flee where?” Wayne asked, rolling his eyes. “To the bakery?”

  Melody continued, “No, just upstairs. Carole discovered the body and tried to give CPR. You waited upstairs until she thought she saw someone outside and ran off.”

  “Leaving her footprints behind,” Wayne said.

  Wayne must not know that they’d figured out about Carole and her slippers yet. Melody crossed her fingers.

  “You came downstairs, went into the office, and put Mr. Gardner back into Carole’s office chair. The last thing you wanted was for it to look like Carole had tried to save her boss. You were probably upset at first when you couldn’t find the letter opener, but amused when you found out what had happened to it.”

  Wayne pressed his lips together, as if repressing a smirk.

  “Then you packed up Carole’s things and left the overturned box in the doorway so it would look like she had come to pick them up, but had fled without them.”

  “And then?” Wayne asked. “I flew out of there like a little bird, did I? You interrupted Carole and scared her off. When was I supposed to be doing all this?”

  “Carole had left before I ever arrived,” Melody said. “She didn’t remember what time she’d left. You were the one who told me she must have left at eight o’clock. But that wasn’t correct. She didn’t see me at all. She might not have seen anyone. She only said she heard a noise. But you saw me. You stopped at the secretary’s desk, probably for the same reason that Carole had, to get some wet wipes in case you had left some fingerprints behind. I saw you and circled around the building. You had put on Carole’s pumps already. You grabbed your own shoes and fled out the back door, then into the wooded area behind the trash container.”

  “I see,” said Wayne. “Because I always wear a dark suit and have dark hair.”

  “Or you were wearing a hat,” Melody said. “I only thought it was short dark hair, and maybe you wore a dark suit that day—and that’s why you’ve been wearing more flamboyant suits since your boss’s death.”

  “Well, Cinderella, I think Melody has made her case,” Al said.

  “What?” Wayne asked. “She’s crazy. All of this is supposition. There’s not a fragment of evidence.”

  “That’s right,” Al said. “But I have a whole lot of deputies who can comb over things to find those fragments. Let’s have those shoes of yours off.”

  “I refuse.” Wayne shook his head and crossed his arms, the smirk apparent on his face.

  “What foot was it you said they gave you blisters on?” Al asked Carole.

  “The right one,” she said, slipping off her sock to show him again. “The right.”

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Wayne Truman was arrested and processed; during the course of his arrest, he was forced to remove his clothing and change into the same orange prison scrubs that Trevor and Carole were wearing, along with the same white socks and orange slippers.

  It had only been a few days since Bill Gardner’s death, and the blister on the outside of Wayne Truman’s right foot was still a doozy. Women’s shoes, even if you have small enough feet to wear them, can hit the foot in just the wrong place, damaging the skin very quickly, and Wayne had been running in them barefoot.

  His house was searched. Carole’s shoes were found in a trash bag, waiting to be picked up with the morning trash. They also found business cards that Wayne had gotten printed up: Wayne Truman, Partner, Gardner & Truman Law Agency. Bloodstains matching Bill Gardner’s blood type were found upstairs in Wayne’s office, where he had indeed been waiting, tapping his foot and checking his watch every
thirty seconds, as Carole, downstairs, vainly tried to save her boss’s life. More evidence came to light in a dark stocking hat, a pair of driving gloves, and a dark suit. These were found in the trash at Wayne’s house, all of them stained with Bill Gardner’s blood.

  The evidence was so overwhelming that the case was cut and dried.

  Soon after Wayne’s arrest, Carole and Trevor were both released and allowed to pick up their children from Leslie’s house. Carole was still wearing a pair of jail slippers—men’s this time—because her own holiday slippers had, sadly, been kept as evidence.

  It was a joyous reunion. Trevor swept Mariel up into his arms, and Carole grabbed Leo and covered his face with kisses as he giggled.

  “I’m sorry they’re up so late,” Leslie said, “but none of us could sleep. We were watching Christmas movies and making cards for you.”

  “Cards?” Carole asked. “You made me a present?”

  Mariel shrugged shyly. “They’re just cards, Mommy.”

  But both Trevor and Carole were overjoyed at the sight of the colored computer paper, folded in half and printed with careful, childish letters saying, “We love you Mommy” on one, and “We love you Daddy” on the other. Both parents had to wipe tears from their eyes.

  “Can we go home now?” Mariel asked. “My Christmas wish was to have everyone at home together. I want to go home now.”

  “Me, too.” Leo nodded his head with exuberant agreement.

  Both parents thanked Leslie and Melody—and especially Smudge—for helping care for their children in such a difficult time.

  “We owe you, big time,” Trevor said.

  “I’d like to put my order back in—” Carole started to say.

  Melody put a hand in front of Carole’s mouth to stop her. “Don’t order all that food,” she said. “Stop by and pick up some cookies and a few pies. Splurge a little, not a lot. Everyone loves you, even if you don’t bend over backward to make them happy.”

  Carole sighed. “You’re right. I’m going to have to relearn all that… it’s going to be difficult for the next few months until I get back on my feet, but I’m going to try to find the good in the situation. I’m going to start taking Trevor’s advice, and look for a job where I feel useful and appreciated, not one where I feel used and abused.”