Beeline to Trouble (18 page)

Thirty

I’d been startled speechless and still hadn’t found
my speaking voice when Johnny Jay deposited me at The Wild Clover. But my brain wasn’t one bit numb. Inside, I was yakking up a storm. Thoughts were zinging all over the place, talking fast and loud.

Patti!

My mind slowed down long enough to take a moment to express gratitude. At least, I didn’t have to confess to giving it to her as a gift or something like that, which would only keep me in focus with the head investigator. Like I wasn’t already in his sights.

This time, I was totally in the clear.

But what was her bottle doing at the coroner’s office, carefully wrapped in plastic, now turned over to the police chief?

What the heck was going on?
Had
Patti murdered Nova? Why had her water bottle been found on Nova’s night table loaded up with poisonous water hemlock? Sloppy wasn’t Patti’s M.O. If anything, she was meticulous about undercover procedure, saving her own skin at my expense more times than I like to count, leaving me behind to suffer the consequences by myself.

Yet Patti had been creeping around inside Holly’s house the night after Nova died. Sure, she’d said it was all in the name of research and a possible breaking-story exclusive. But what if she’d been just trying to cover her tracks?

Speaking of the devil, my cell phone chimed the special song that notifies me when Patti is calling from the other end—“Tubular Bells,” the theme song from the
Exorcist
movie. Somehow it fit Patti to a T.

“I was in,” she said. “And now I’m out.”

“Huh?” I tried to balance my cell phone between my ear and shoulder because I was rearranging my honey display to include a brand-new honey stick flavor—red grapefruit. My latest creation smelled divine and tasted as good as it smelled, maybe better. But would it sell? I sure hoped so.

I had to stop what I was doing. The shoulder thing wasn’t working.

“Do I have to spell out everything to you?” Patti said, not sounding mean, more subterfuge-ish. “Listening ears and all. Remember what we discussed.”

“Oh, right.” Our agreement to help each other, and Patti was reporting in. Was that it?

“Toys,” she said. “If you get my drift.”

“Come again?” By now, I was in the back room. “And will you please go someplace where no one can hear you. Otherwise this is going to take all day.”

“Fine. Just a minute”

I heard background sounds while I waited. Muffled, unidentifiable, as though Patti had her hand over the micro- phone.
See, the woman is über-cautious
, I said to myself in a self-convincing (hopefully not delusional) tone. Plus, Patti and I had shared a few adventures and caught ourselves several bad guys (the hard way, I might add). I couldn’t picture her switching sides.

I heard a familiar beep and paused to read a text from Hunter:
“
ME says u ok. I agree but 4 dif reason. JJ gone?”

I sent my own text:
“”

Then Patti was back on the airwaves, just as someone banged on my office door. “Hang on,” I said, and opened it to find Patti with her phone still to her ear.

We both ended our calls, me more annoyed than ever. Patti slid past me and slumped down in my desk chair. “I had to hide in Gil Green’s bedroom closet forever,” she whined. “He picked the wrong time to take a nap. And I had to pee. It was awful.”

She unzipped a small black backpack and dumped the contents on my desk.

“Oh my God,” I said, taking in the sight of brilliant-colored items. “You found all this in his room?”

“Sure did.” Patti picked up a stick with a feather on the end. “A tickler,” she said. “For long lingering strokes.” She tried to sweep it over my face, but I was quick. No way was that thing touching me. Who knew where it had been.

She pulled it back and said, “I do believe this is an ostrich feather.”

Patti had stolen Gil Green’s stash of sex toys? I didn’t want to come in contact with any of them, but I got as close to the desk as possible to study the props. “Sex flash cards?” I burst out laughing.

“Of different positions. And look at this game. Twelve Months of Naughty Nights.”

“And love dice,” I said, spotting the hot-pink dice and remembering one particular evening when Hunter and I had played that game. Very romantic really. All those cute words to act out after taking turns throwing the dice and watching what appeared—“Kiss” and “Chest” and “Neck.” Not the throat kind of neck, of course. The action verb.

“I didn’t find anything in Camilla’s room,” Patti said. “These things”—here she wrinkled her nose in either disgust or disappointment or both—“confirm their alibi.”

“And how did you arrive at that conclusion?” I argued. “All this proves is that he has sex. Or really wants to.”

“There’s more proof,” Patti said, poking at her phone while I pondered the best way to approach her in regard to a confiscated, personalized, lethal water bottle.

There just wasn’t going to be an easy way to bring it up.

But what she showed me next took precedence.

“While Gil was napping, I snuck out of the closet and scored his cell phone,” Patti said. “Then I took it back into the closet and went through everything, including photos he’d taken with his phone. Then I sent select pictures to my e-mail.”

I tucked in behind her so we could both see.

“Those two hound dogs weren’t lying about their sexual encounter,” Patti said, using her arrow to move forward. There the lovebirds were, taking turns showing the camera their mugs, in Holly’s guest bed, covers pulled up just enough to conceal private places, looking rumpled and ruffled. Patti said, “Camilla had to have taken this one of him. I don’t get what she sees in him.”

“Or what he sees in her,” I added.

“It’s almost like they’re posing,” Patti said.

“Like they know they’ll need an alibi,” I said back.

“Give it up,” Patti told me. “I don’t think either of them did it.”

“You don’t have any proof that they didn’t,” I pointed out. I didn’t want to accept that. Mainly because it didn’t leave many other suspects. Holly? Max? Me? Patti?

“Let’s discuss you for a minute,” I said, launching into my excursion to the morgue.

“I thought that was you I saw inside Johnny Jay’s gumball machine,” Patti said.

“Gumball machine?”

“Mobster slang for police car,” Patti answered. “What does your morgue visit have to do with me?”

So I told her the rest, how Jackson had handed a particular piece of evidence to the chief and how I’d ID’d the water bottle as belonging to Patti. To be on the safe side, I sidled over to the door for a quick exit, realizing that ID’ing her bottle would be a bad thing if Patti was the killer.

Patti stared at me for so long I started worrying that she’d lapsed into a seated coma (is there such a thing?). Then she jumped up from the chair and came at me fast. I tried to remember some of Holly’s wrestling moves, ones she’d used on me to take me down and keep me there. Nothing helpful came to mind.

Next, I turned to get the heck out of the room, but she already had me from behind.

Squeezing the air out of me. Harder and harder.

I screamed as loud as I could while I still had enough breath to manage more than a squeak. “Help!” I said, but it came out as a croak.

She released her hold.

I turned to fend her off.

And she attacked again.

By now, I heard people coming to my rescue. I also realized (belatedly) that Patti was actually hugging me, not squeezing the life out of me. This was the first physical contact we’d ever had. Patti wasn’t usually a toucher. “I just realized something,” she said excitedly. “We’ve finally caught a break in this case!”

Maybe having the wind knocked out of me had also rearranged my brain cells because I had no idea how her water bottle meant a break in the case. Maybe for the cops, but it should have serious consequences for Patti.

Carrie Ann bounded into the room with Stanley Peck right behind her. Stanley wasn’t concealing at the moment. He had his handgun out at the ready, pointed in the air. Customers were crowding in, too. Boy, I must have really let out a blood-curdler.

Unfortunately, all those inquisitive pairs of eyes landed on my desk, mouths gaping open as they took in the collection of sex toys.

I heard another voice, one that made my own blood run cold.

“Story Fischer,” my mother said. “What is all this . . . stuff?” Then, “For cripes’ sake. I am
so
embarrassed.”

I try to make my family proud. I really do. Except as I’ve mentioned before, I have the unfortunate knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the time when Lori Spandle and I got in a fistfight in front of Stu’s. My mother had witnessed that brawl, too, along with her boyfriend and all of Stu’s customers who spilled into the street.

This was another perfect example.

I’d have liked to blame everything on Patti, but she hadn’t always been in the vicinity when things went south. Although this one was entirely on her shoulders and she’d better step forward and come up with some explanation to tell all these people, pronto.

I swung my head around, looking for her. Where had she gone?
Crap
.

“These things belong to Patti,” I told the roomful of spectators. “Really . . . she stole . . . I mean . . . you have to believe me . . . Patti, where are you?”

Carrie Ann reacted. “Okay, everybody, Story is fine. Let’s clear out.”

Stanley put his piece away and practically fled.

My mom stomped off. The customers backed out of the room. Patti’s troublemaker face wasn’t among them. How did she do it? Hadn’t Hunter warned me about her? Multiple times? Wait until this rumor found its way to him. I’d never hear the end of it.

Once we were alone, Carrie Ann started hooting and tee-heeing.

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying this,” I said, feeling weak in the knees.

“Did Patti really bring these into the store?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m dying to hear it, but let’s do damage control first.”

“What am I going to do?”

“Hide out for a while.”

“K.”

“Get rid of these . . . objects first.” My cousin’s managerial skills were showing themselves, and boy, were they needed. Then I heard music swelling from her voice. “I’m going to tell everybody,” she said, “that one of your deliveries got mixed up, that you were expecting a box of candy and when you saw what you opened instead, you were so shocked you screamed.”

What a brilliant idea! “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“That raise I’ve been asking for would do it.”

“It’s yours,” I said, caving in a moment of extreme vulnerability.

Before Carrie Ann would leave the room to complete her mission to save my character, she made me put her increase in writing.

After that, I scooped the items into a paper bag and slipped out the back door with it clutched in my fist, and a good deal of revenge swelling in my heart.

I called Hunter’s cell phone. “Did the cops find adult toys in Gil Green’s room?” I blurted right at him since if they had, it might have been going the rounds when they talked shop. At this point, I couldn’t believe anything coming out of Patti’s mouth.

“Ah, yes, why?”

So she had told me the truth. “I wish you had mentioned that,” I said. “You knew about Gil’s and Camilla’s alibis, too, didn’t you?”

By the silence on the other end, he had known.

“We need to talk more,” I told him. A little communication from him would have been helpful.

“Let it go, Story.”

“One of the flavorists did it, or both. Max said the team didn’t get along and neither of them seems too broken up by Nova’s death.”

“I don’t have every single detail,” Hunter said, “But the chief seems to think they’re innocent. And he’s a suspicious guy, as you know. He wouldn’t let them off just because. He has a reason.”

I whined a little. “All along I’ve been convinced that Camilla Bailey killed Nova Campbell.”

“That’s because you want your killers to be unlikeable people, and sometimes they just aren’t.”

That certainly had a ring of truth to it. Bad people should act bad, right? “What are you saying? That killers can have hearts of gold?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Look at sociopaths for example. On the surface they can be friendly and interesting. You have to delve down much deeper to find the dark side.”

“That’s not always true,” I argued. “Lori Spandle’s personality is just as slimy as her heart. On the other hand, you happen to be just as good as you look.”

“Thank you, sweet thing. But do me a favor and take a break from your sister and her houseguests and all the drama, okay?”

“I will,” I lied.

After hanging up, I considered what Hunter had told me. My main suspect in the Nova Campbell murder had been a flavorist with what I thought was a taste for poison. I’d let myself run wild with assumptions based solely on our unpleasant meeting in a wildflower patch, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, Gil probably hadn’t killed Nova, and Camilla Bailey might actually be innocent. Geez, I hate when that happens. Especially to such a nasty woman.