Cool Cache (6 page)

“The guy who owns the restaurant next door?” I said. “He would ruin you over a parking dispute?”

Helen glanced at Ewing and then at me. “Our problems started long before that. I didn’t tell you this, Tucker, but right after I opened the shop, Bob approached me with an offer. He wanted to serve my chocolates as a dessert option at the restaurant. What he offered to pay didn’t cover the supplies, much less my time, but his customers were all raving about my chocolates, so I told him I’d think about it. He was so sure I’d say yes he went ahead and printed new dessert menus. Dale convinced me I couldn’t afford to do it. When I told Bob, he was furious. He wanted me to reimburse his printing and design costs. I refused.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not directly.”

“Tell them the rest, Helen,” Ewing said.

She took a deep breath. “For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting strange calls in the middle of the night. The person never speaks. All I hear is heavy breathing and then he hangs up.”

“You sure it’s a he?” Charley said.

“No, but I sense that it is. And chocolates have been disappearing. At first I thought we were just busy because of that newspaper article you pitched to the
Times,
but the cash receipts don’t account for the missing inventory.”

“Helen,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I knew you’d worry.”

“What about your employees?” Charley said. “Maybe somebody’s developed a sweet tooth.”

“I don’t think so. My assistant Kathy brought the problem to my attention. She’s the only one I leave alone in the shop.”

“Except for Lupe Ortiz,” he said.

Helen closed her eyes as if she wanted to shut out the world. “It may seem odd to you, but Lupe and I were friends. I did whatever I could to help her. If one of her kids was sick, I always encouraged her to leave early. When she sold her car, I told her how to transfer the title. She always seemed so appreciative of everything I did for her. I can’t believe she would steal from me.”

“Has anybody been hanging around the shop lately?” Charley said. “Somebody that looked suspicious?”

She shook her head. “We have a lot of regular customers now, but nobody I’d consider strange.”

At least not by Beverly Hills standards,
I thought. I told Charley about the Mercedes I’d seen parked at Nectar the night Lupe was killed.

He frowned. “Did you get a license number?”

“There wasn’t one. Just a dealer advertisement behind the license frame.”

“Do you remember what it said?”

“Garvey Motors. Alhambra.”

Neither Helen nor Ewing had seen the car before.

“You said Rossi might want to ruin your business,” Charley said. “Was there anybody else?”

Helen looked at Ewing before answering. “My ex-husband.”

Charley and I exchanged glances but kept quiet as Helen told us about living the good life in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her CEO husband of twenty-six years. On her fiftieth birthday, Brad Taggart had sent her an e-mail, canceling the dinner they had planned for eighteen of their closest friends and telling her he was leaving her for the company’s twenty-nine-year-old corporate attorney.

The divorce had split the family in two. Helen’s grown daughter had sided with her ex. The son supported his mother. Helen couldn’t face running into Taggart or his new wife at the local market, so she took the money from the divorce settlement and moved to California. She drifted for a while, too emotionally damaged to worry about what the future held. Eventually, she took most of her savings and opened Nectar.

I remembered Eugene’s comments earlier in the day about Helen and all she’d gone through. He must have been referring to her messy divorce. I was surprised he’d grown so close to her in such a short amount of time. Chocolate and bad family relationships must be strong bonding agents.

“Brad was involved with this woman a year before he left me,” Helen said. “All during that time he was hiding our assets in secret accounts. After he filed for divorce I hired a forensic accountant to track down the money. He was livid. He said all sorts of horrible things to me. Told me he’d make me pay.”

“The Ortiz woman’s murder changes everything,” Dale Ewing said. “Her death may have been collateral damage. Helen could have been the real target.”

Collateral damage
was an interesting choice of words. I wondered if Ewing had been in the military. If so, it must have been a long time ago. He looked doughy and benign now, but I’d learned over the years that looks could be deceiving.

“Do you have any evidence Helen was the target?” Charley said.

Ewing shifted in his chair. “I’m only speculating. The police have made an arrest. As for the break-in, we’ll probably never know who it was. The detective told us these burglaries are rarely solved. You’re probably right about the Ortiz kid. He killed his mother and then broke into Helen’s condo looking for something valuable he could fence on the street.”

“Helen,” I said. “Charley is a private investigator. Maybe you should hire him to look into the problems you’ve been having.”

Helen stared at a black footprint that had been tracked onto her beige living room carpet. Her facial muscles were slack from too much trauma and too little sleep.

“I can’t afford that, Tucker. I could barely come up with the money to hire you.”

“Maybe Charley and I could combine our efforts, sort of a marketing-slash-investigating service. You know, two for the price of one.”

Ewing closed the magazine he’d been reading. “I think that’s a good idea, Helen.”

She picked up the Ortizes’ sympathy card from the table and ran her thumb over the stamp to make sure it was secure. “All right. If that’s what you all want.”

Charley pulled a small black notebook from the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ll need some info on your ex, like addresses and telephone numbers.”

She gestured toward the black fingerprint powder. “Can it wait until later this afternoon? My address book is in the bedroom. I want to vacuum before this powder ruins the carpet.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I said.

“Kathy is alone at Nectar. Can you stop by the store and make sure everything is okay? Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I stared at Helen in disbelief. “Nectar is open for business?”

Ewing cleared his throat. “The watch commander called after Helen went home last night. She said they were done collecting evidence and promised to have the place cleaned up in time to open this morning.”

Past experience told me police departments didn’t clean up crime scenes. That was the responsibility of the family or the business owner. I wondered what strings Ewing had pulled to get that kind of service.

“That’s Beverly Hills PD for you,” Charley said. “I’m surprised she didn’t ask her publicist to hold a press conference.”

A Cheshire cat smile stretched across Ewing’s lips. It was obvious he enjoyed Charley’s snide comment, but he wasn’t about to say so.

“Helen, maybe you should have waited a day or two before opening the store,” I said. “Just to catch your breath.”

She flashed a wan smile. “I couldn’t do that. My customers are counting on me. Plus, I have to make chocolates for the symposium. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

My watch read eleven a.m. I had enough time to stop by Nectar and still make my three o’clock appointment with Elizabeth Bennet, but being a business doctor and now a hand holder was becoming a bona fide juggling act.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll make sure everything is okay.”

Before we left, Helen gave me a package for Eugene, six of his favorite Mango-Tango chocolate squares. She said a study just published in the
Archives of Internal Medicine
had found that chocolate lowered blood pressure. She thought Eugene could use a little stress reducer. Maybe I’d down a few of those babies myself.

Charley and I walked to my car, dodging puddles filled with earthworms stranded aboveground after the rain. None of them looked as if they were strong swimmers. I guess learning the backstroke wasn’t a high priority in worm world.

“Thanks for taking this job, Charley. I appreciate it.”

“Like I told you this morning, I’m pretty busy at the moment, so I may need some help from you and the kid. Computer searches. That sort of thing.”

“You can count on us, Charley. Do you really think Roberto Ortiz broke into Helen’s condo?”

He shrugged. “It’s just one theory. We might get lucky if they find fingerprints and match them to a suspect, but Ewing is right: these types of burglaries are rarely solved.”

“How come?”

“For one thing, this wasn’t done by a pro. They don’t ransack a place. That’s usually done by somebody acting on impulse, like a hype looking for his next fix. He cruises by a residence, checks the door to see if it’s open or if the lock can be easily defeated. He’s in a hurry because he doesn’t know who lives there or when they’ll be home. He breaks in and tears the place apart, looking for anything he can fence on the street. Then he moves to another neighborhood.”

“Do you think Lupe’s murder and Helen’s burglary are one crime or two?”

“I don’t want to speculate. I just don’t have enough information.”

When we reached the car, I opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. “So what do you want me to do?”

Charley watched as I buckled my seat belt. “Nothing at the moment. I’ll check out the ex and that Rossi character later this afternoon. For now, I’m going to hang around here and talk to the neighbors. See if anybody saw anything unusual last night. I can also contact a buddy of mine who used to work for the Beverly Hills PD. He might be able to call in a few favors and find out what evidence they have against Roberto Ortiz.”

“I’ll ask Eugene to do an Internet search to see if he can find out any more about that quetzal feather.”

“What for?”

“It might be a clue. I mean, how did a feather of a rare bird found only in the jungles of Central America end up in a chocolate store in Beverly Hills?”

Charley was silent for a moment. “Okay. He can look up stuff on the computer, but that’s it. I don’t want him pulling a Philip Marlowe on me, thinking he can solve the case himself.”

His concerns were justified. A few months back, Eugene had invented an alter ego and set off on his own to interview suspects in one of Charley’s cases. The information he collected had been helpful, but he could have ended up in a body bag. Charley didn’t want any more close calls. Neither did I.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll make sure he understands.”

Charley ambled back toward Helen’s condo to interview her neighbors, and I headed to Nectar.

Chapter 7

“I can’t believe Helen’s being victimized again,” Eugene said. “How is she holding up?”

“I’m on my way to Nectar right now. I’ll tell you more when I get back to the office. In the meantime, Helen hired Charley to look into a few problems she’s having. We’re going to help him with some research. Can you look up more information on the quetzal?”

“It’s a clue, isn’t it? I knew it. Have no fear. Bix Waverly is on the job.”

Bix Waverly was the pretext name Eugene had used in that unauthorized investigation he undertook for Charley. In private investigator parlance, a pretext is a lie you tell people in order to get information you probably wouldn’t get under normal circumstances. It’s a tricky and sometimes dangerous game to play. I remembered Charley’s admonition.

“All I want you to do is download anything you find on the bird. No phone calls. No interviews. No nothing. Got it?”

He huffed out some air. “Honestly, Tucker, was that little lecture really necessary? I’ve worked for Charley for almost six months now. I know what I’m doing.”

I could only hope that was true.

When I got to Nectar, I parked in the alley and went inside. The retail store was packed with customers, more so than usual. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe murder and chocolate did mix.

The decor in the shop was done in the rich autumnal colors of gold, cinnabar, carnelian, and bronze. On the wall was a framed drawing of chocolate molds reproduced from the pages of a 1907 Parisian catalog for professional chocolate makers. There was also an oil painting of a cacao plant growing in the jungles of Central America and a reprint of an 1885 poster Helen had purchased at the chocolate museum in Brule. It was a copy of an original advertisement from her great-grandfather’s chocolate shop, which had once been located in the Grand Place in Brussels. Helen had done a masterful job of combining elements of European and Central American cultures to create a place that made you want to kick off your shoes and stay awhile.

Kathy seemed overwhelmed by the crowd of customers, so I grabbed an apron and got behind the counter. Before Nectar, I hadn’t been much of a chocolate eater, but Helen was educating me. I now knew that the cacao tree rarely survived outside an area twenty degrees north and twenty degrees south of the equator, and its large pods sprouted from the trunk of the tree as well as from its branches. I’d learned that white chocolate wasn’t chocolate at all. Real chocolate had both cocoa butter and cacao solids. White chocolate contained no cacao particles, which was why it didn’t taste or look like the real thing. Helen used only the finest chocolate in her recipes, claiming it required less sugar. She also used a higher percent of cacao, at least 65 or more. You didn’t have to be an expert to taste the difference between grocery store chocolate and Helen’s rich, dense, somewhat bitter, and decidedly orgasmic creations. I hadn’t become a chocoholic yet, but I was moving in that direction.

Just as we were gaining control over the crowd of customers, a woman in a blond wig and a pink Chanel suit stormed through the front door. She looked to be in her seventies, but it was hard to tell because of all the work she’d had done by some plastic surgeon who didn’t know when to say no. She used her Fendi handbag as a battering ram and shoved her way to the front of the line. Her rudeness prompted a chorus of angry outcries from her fellow customers.