Mumbo Gumbo (19 page)

“Really?” Jennifer looked astonished. “Thank you, Artie.”

“It’s a long time coming,” he said. “You deserve it. Now, I’ve got to meet some network boys for a lunch. Would you believe it? I told them we were too busy. It was crazy. I couldn’t leave the office. But they have ideas for a new opening for next season’s shows, so I can’t say no. You girls stay here. Help yourselves to anything you want from the fridge. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Okay, Artie,” Jennifer said. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

“I hope so,” he said, looking a little more worried than he had previously let show. “I hope so. Tim isn’t here, which is a real, real shame. And then Greta left us. So now we must move ahead, yes? Okay, now. I have to go to lunch.” He looked at us and smiled. “You’ll do well. And, Susan, get the finished script to me by five, will you, honey? We’ve got to send it to Pete Steele right away. He’s having a conniption fit.” And with that final instruction, Artie Herman was just about to leave us.

“I still can’t believe Greta would walk out on the show,” I said before he got to the door.

Susan and Jennifer became quiet instantly. Perhaps this wasn’t a comment I should have made within earshot of Artie.

“Greta has worked for me for a lot of years,” Artie said, turning back to us from the door, “but never again. Sure, the police with their questions can upset a person. ‘What happened to Tim? When did you last
see him,’ and so forth. I don’t want to think that anything terrible might have happened to our Tim any more than Greta does. But did I rush home and have to lie down?”

My stomach sank. Greta had run out.

“No,” Artie answered his own question. “I stayed. I talked. The policemen were out of here in five minutes flat.”

“The detectives were here?” My voice was small.

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Artie said. “I told the guard, ‘Sure, go ahead and send the cops right on up here.’ Why not? I didn’t have time to see them, of course. I’m trying my hardest here to save our show from disaster, as you three know. So I told Greta to handle it. That’s her job. But Greta had a headache. A headache. I told her, ‘If you walk out now, don’t you ever come back.’” Artie kept his voice even, but we could all tell he had to work at it as he finished his story. “You see how much Greta cared about my show? Don’t get me wrong, ladies. The thing with Tim Stock, it’s terrible. No one wants to hear bad news. No one wants to think maybe one of our dear friends might be dead.”

Jennifer gasped. This was clearly news to her.

“Yes, I can see that Greta would be very upset. But…but…Hell, what’s the phrase I’m looking for?”

“ ‘The show must go on’?” I said.

“The show must go on! Where the hell are people’s priorities anymore? Where are their values? Hell, people die every second of every day. That’s part of life. But how many times in the history of the world do we have a chance to create a game show as perfect as
Food Freak
?”

T
he good news was, nothing at all was out of place in Tim Stock’s office when I returned. The bad news was imagining why Greta Greene would leave the show that meant more to her than anything in her life, rather than talk to the cops about Tim Stock’s death. I wasn’t going to jump to conclusions, though. There could be some simple explanation, after all. I dialed Greta’s home number and got her machine. Perhaps she just wasn’t picking up. Perhaps she was lying down. Perhaps she was at the doctor’s. Perhaps she was just about to cross the border from San Diego to Tijuana. I hung up.

Just because Greta got a headache at a weird point in time didn’t necessarily mean she was avoiding the cops, did it? There had to be other reasons for her having fled. Maybe Greta had known more about Tim’s disappearance than she’d let on. Perhaps she knew he had been hiding out. Hiding from what, I still couldn’t figure, but Greta could have known Tim was in danger. Perhaps she was afraid of the same men who were after Tim.

Or maybe Greta was more involved with the fire at Tim Stock’s garage last night than I’d ever suspected. I
swallowed hard. That grim possibility was shocking, but could I ignore it any longer? What if instead of worrying about Tim, all this time Greta had been the one who was after Tim and wanted to see him dead? I had witnessed her manipulate situations to her own advantage before, with no one the wiser. Had she manipulated everyone again this time? Even me? Wasn’t it possible? Maybe Greta had sent an accomplice to search Tim’s office and then feigned shock when we discovered the room had been vandalized. Maybe they were searching for signs of where Tim might have been hiding. And here I’d been, helping her cover up evidence, tidying the room, throwing away papers. Helping her keep secrets. What did that make me? Some sort of idiot, obviously. Damnit. How did I get into this?

The phone on my desk rang. I looked at it, wondering if it could be Greta, calling me back, full of simple explanations rather than an intricate web of lies.

“Tim Stock’s office,” I said into the receiver.

“Madeline? Is that you?”

“Honnett?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice warm. “I must have missed you earlier this morning.”

“At the house,” I said, recalling how I had quietly crawled out of bed, leaving him to sleep longer than the hour I’d managed to catch. “You knew I had to go out early.”

“So what happened with that? Wild-goose chase out to Woodland Hills, or what?” Honnett had a deep, gravelly voice and it sounded wonderful, even as he teased me.

“I learned a few things,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Well, I did find those girls I was looking for. Heidi and Monica. The ones the note said might have to die, remember? And they are just fine, if you were worried about them.”

“You did? No kidding. So, who are they?”

“Well,” I said, trying not to admit defeat too easily, “they’re livestock.”

“What?”

“Sheep, actually, but the point is, they were fine. Not dead. Nothing like that.”

“Sheep, did you say?”

“Okay. Yes. They were sheep in a barn out at Pierce College’s school farm. But the good news is, they have not been harmed. So we don’t need to worry.”

He let out a soft laugh. “You are too much, Maddie,” he said. “And you were too much for me last night, too.”

“Don’t start with me, Honnett. I don’t think I can handle any sexy talk after the morning I’ve had.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. That’s the problem.”

“Tell me about it,” Honnett offered. He was taking me seriously and for that I was grateful.

“The body that was found last night? I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t really Tim Stock. Everything about that fire seems suspicious, doesn’t it? It seems like an awfully convenient way to disfigure a body beyond recognition.”

“Why do you think someone would want to do that?”

“I had this notion, based on how hard Tim had been trying to disappear last week, that it might have been helpful if some people believed Tim was dead. I have tried to ask around here and I’ve gotten exactly
nowhere. No one wants to tell me anything.” I knew I sounded angry.

“That’s usually the way it is, Maddie,” Honnett said in his soothing tone. “I was out at your office this morning, by the way. I asked a few questions. But I got nothing. That’s the way it works.”

“So I’m left with this hunch,” I said, “but there’s really no way to prove the fire victim wasn’t Stock since all the evidence was conveniently destroyed in the fire.”

“Not necessarily,” Honnett said. I heard him pause.

“What’s that?”

“Here’s the thing about a fire,” Honnett said. “Some folks would think you could have a body in a fire and there’d be nothing left to identify, like after a cremation. But that’s not exactly true. It’s got to do with the temperature of the fire. A simple garage or house fire would likely leave behind a great deal. Teeth, bones, even tissue and clothing. The kindling temperature of wood is low enough that the body may not be completely consumed by the time the fuel is exhausted. Also, if the structure collapsed, as is often the case, pockets where there is less fire damage might occur. If the body were in such an area, the ME might be left with a great deal of evidence. Unfortunately for us, that wasn’t the case in Tim Stock’s garage.”

“Damnit.”

“Hold on. We can also learn a lot by just how much damage we find. Too much damage to that little garage, and we start asking new questions.”

“Like what?” I asked, intrigued.

“One way to assure that as little as possible of the victim remains after a fire would be to use an accelerant
such as gasoline, rocket fuel, almost any highly flammable substance. That means the fire is deliberate, and whether the fire causes the death or is only meant to be a cover-up, you’ve got a crime.”

“Did the fire investigators find traces of an accelerant at Stock’s fire?”

“Gasoline,” Honnett answered.

“Really? So that proves it was arson.”

“Yep. Whoever set it, guess he figured like you did that everything burns up. But that’s not exactly true. Even if the body was completely consumed by the fire and no clothing or tissue was left, the teeth and bones are almost always found in the debris. As it happens, bones were recovered that gave us general height information, and teeth were found in good enough condition to make a match.”

“And you tried matching them to Tim’s dental records? And they didn’t match?”

“Whoa. Slow down. It’s only been about sixteen hours, okay? Nobody works that fast except maybe Superman.”

“But I thought you
were
Superman,” I said into the phone, “last night.”

“Now, don’t get me started, Maddie.”

I liked to yank his chain, but I turned my mind back to considering Honnett’s news. “So what you are saying in your infinitely slow way is that the body could still turn out to be somebody
other
than Tim Stock.”

“More than that. I think it’s
likely
that our victim is not Stock, yes,” Honnett said.

“You do?” I was stunned. “Because of my theories?”

“Well, don’t take this wrong, Madeline, but no. It’s not your theories. It seems that the man who got
torched there was mid-thirties or a little older, like Stock. But our victim’s teeth couldn’t have been Stock’s. Our victim had been wearing braces. The metal and plastic were melted, but they were still there.

Braces.

“The thing is, we can try to match these teeth we found with the dental records of Tim Stock, but if they come up negative, like we think they will, we are kind of stumped. We’ll check missing persons reports and other databases to see if anyone missing might fit the general size and sex of the corpse. Then we’ve got to check the teeth we recovered against any dental records available for the missing persons. Of course, if the victim has no dental records, or hasn’t been reported missing, this will obviously be a fruitless search.”

“I see,” I said. “You know, I have an idea.”

“Shoot,” Honnett said.

“There’s a guy who worked here. Quentin Shore.”

“Yeah?”

“He didn’t show up at work today.”

“Well, I’m sure we could find a thousand guys in L.A. who didn’t show up at work, Maddie.”

“Yeah. That’s true,” I said. “But Quentin Shore was a thirty-eight-year-old guy. And I’m pretty sure he wore braces.”

“That so?”

“I think.”

“Well, I’ll check on it. We’ll go out and see if we can find him. If not, we’ll look for his dental charts. It takes time, but I’ll get on it.”

“Good. Have you had to give up on your drugworld contract-killings theory yet?”

“Naw. Just a new wrinkle, that’s all. A matter of
sifting out the deaths that belong in the pattern and those that don’t. Even if we do make a positive ID with Quentin Shore, we still have a lot of questions to answer.”

“I see.”

“But as long as we’re talking, you wouldn’t have any idea why Shore might have got himself killed over in Tim Stock’s garage, now would you?”

“Not yet.” My speculation meant nothing to Honnett, obviously. He’d said as much. Without the sort of hard evidence he dealt with on a regular basis, like identifying traces of accelerants and matching teeth to dental records, my notions were of no use at all. The ponderings of the lion down the alley would probably hold more credibility.

I saw no point in sharing my concern that Tim might have tried the ultimate way to keep pursuers at bay, by playing dead. And if it turned out to be Quentin who had died in the garage, did that make Tim the killer? Was Susan’s buddy and Artie’s head writer and Dawn’s former date the kind of guy who would kill a coworker just to cover his own tracks?

“So, now, what are you going to do?” Honnett asked.

“Me? I’m working. I’m slaving away in the game-show salt mines,” I said. “I’m writing questions for our next show.”

“Try some out on me,” Honnett said, making small talk.

“I would. But if I told you any of my new questions before they air, I’m afraid I’d have to kill you.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Not perhaps the most prudent joke to make to a homicide detective.

“I won’t take that as a threat,” he answered calmly.

Lucky for me, cops have a pretty dark sense of humor, too. And as he hung up, I thought back to the last time I’d seen Quentin Shore, the previous morning out at Chef Howie’s trailer. At the time, of course, the man had had little reason to smile. I recalled using a few strong words. But still, I was almost positive he was wearing braces.

S
usan Anderson popped her head into my office. “Hi, Madeline. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

“Sorry to disturb you. Here’s some copy. It’s a recipe for one of the bumpers,” she said, and then kindly explained, “A bumper is the part of the show—”

“I do know what a bumper is, Susan,” I said, with a hint of dignity in my voice.

“Oh, of course. Good.” She handed me a few sheets of paper. “You’ll need to rewrite that a bit. We need about forty seconds for this one.”

“So, I write something, and then read it out loud, and time myself?”

“I think so. I always heard Quentin talking to himself, so I guess that’s what he was up to. I think Tim used to give some recipe ideas to Quentin, and then Quentin wrote the bumpers and I put them in the scripts. But now, without either of them here or…Well, whatever you come up with will be fine.”

I glanced at the pages. It was a simple enough recipe for guacamole. Susan turned to leave.

“Susan?” I called after her. “You know he isn’t dead, don’t you?”

Susan turned back around with an almost guilty expression on her sweet face.

I looked her over. “You knew it all along, didn’t you?”

“I’m not good at keeping secrets.” A resigned look crept into Susan’s eyes. “Even when I was a kid, I would warn everybody in my neighborhood not to tell me anything.”

“That sounds promising,” I said, smiling at her. “Have a seat.”

Susan, in her Chuck Woollery T-shirt, stared at the large rose-colored sofa in disbelief. “Where did that come from? Where’s Tim’s old sofa?”

“I hope they took it out and chopped it up for toothpicks,” I said. “It was pretty gross.”

“Oh, damn,” Susan said. She looked like she might start to cry.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“I had given Tim a gift. It’s a long, long story. As sort of a joke, Tim kept it under one of the sofa cushions. Anyway, it cost over fifteen hundred dollars and I bet it was still there.” She sighed a big sigh. “Never mind.”

I opened one of the deeper side drawers in Tim’s desk and extracted a knitted woolen vest in a bright turquoise blue.

“You found it!” she shouted. “Oh my gosh! I just can’t tell you how much that vest means to me. Maddie, how can I thank you for rescuing it?”

“Well,” I said, patting the sofa cushion on the brand-new sofa, “let’s get back to the part where you aren’t very good at keeping secrets.”

“You want some more answers.”

“Start with this vest. It’s very nice,” I said, “but…fifteen hundred dollars?”

Susan nodded.

“And just why are you giving Tim gifts that cost fifteen hundred dollars?”

“It’s a long story,” she said, sitting down and shaking her head. Her brown curls jiggled.

“About Tim?”

“Well, yes and no. It’s about money.”

“Cash money?” I asked. This discussion had suddenly become much more fascinating.

“Did you find some?” she asked, hope in her voice.

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Oh, thank goodness! It’s mine,” Susan said.

That stopped me cold. “It’s your money? All of it?”

“Tim helped me sell something pretty valuable and he got the money in cash. He was keeping it for me. That’s why he was meeting me at Pierce this morning, Maddie. He was going to give me the money. To save my sheep.”

“Tim was going to give you fifty thousand dollars in cash,” I said. “For your sheep?”

“Maddie, what are you talking about?”

“Fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills.”

“Are you crazy? No. Tim owed me five hundred.”

It was my turn to stare.

“Five hundred might not sound like that much, but it is enough to keep Heidi and Monica in feed for three more months at least.”

“I think we’re talking about two entirely different things,” I said, and sighed, “but money is money. Where did Tim come up with the five hundred?”

“I told you. I had something kind of special and Tim knew how to find the right kind of buyer.”

“Are you talking about drugs?” I asked, keeping my voice steady.

“Are you crazy?” Susan almost shouted. “What kind of person do you think I am? Tim and I are game-show people, Maddie. That’s bad enough. But don’t make us out to be druggies.”

“Sorry,” I quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. Someone kind of put that idea into my head and I had to ask. So, what did he sell for five hundred dollars?”

“A packet of Kool-Aid.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Berry Blue.”

“A packet of Berry Blue flavor Kool-Aid?”

“Yes.”

“For five hundred dollars?”

“Yes.”

“And there were no drugs of any kind in the packet of—”

“No! Of course not.” Susan giggled. “It was a very old packet. Rare.”

I groaned. “Don’t tell me there are Kool-Aid aficionados out there somewhere who appreciate the rare vintages. Don’t tell me that, please,” I begged her.

“I know these people sound strange…”

“Strange? I know strange people! I count many honest-to-gosh strange people among my dearest friends, Susan. But I can’t say I know any who yearn for a good packet of aged fruit-drink powder. I must be slipping.”

She giggled again.

“Go ahead. Tell me about them.”

“There are these collectors…,” Susan said.

“You’re deadly serious, aren’t you?”

“They call themselves Koollectors, spelled K-O-O-L—”

I groaned again.

“I’m not making this up,” she said, smiling. “They buy and trade all the different flavors of Kool-Aid. I think it’s just a hobby.”

“Why not?” I offered. “Not any weirder than collecting stamps, I guess.”

“Right.”

“But,” I muttered, “at least stamp collectors stop short of calling themselves stampectors.”

“Well, yes, but probably because it doesn’t sound as cute.”

I looked at Susan and appreciated her simple perspective. “Okay, vintage Kool-Aid traders. Tell me more.”

“Honestly, Maddie, I only learned about these Koollectors recently myself. Primarily, I know about Kool-Aid from the dyers who are just crazy to get their hands on the great bright colors. The old Berry Blue ‘Smiley,’ that’s the packet with the smiling frosted pitcher, makes a great dye. Kool-Aid hasn’t produced Berry Blue since 1988 and any original packets marked P-5139 are extremely rare.”

All of a sudden, I had the crazy impression I’d recently seen just such a Berry Blue “Smiley.” I pulled open the center drawer in Tim’s desk and found the paper I had left there. A Xerox copy of an old packet of Kool-Aid, a Berry Blue Smiley packet marked P-5139. Bingo.

“Tell me again. You said something about dyers?”

“Yes. You know I’m into sheep, but you probably don’t know I’m also into wool. Most of us sheep women are. We spin it and dye it and knit it. All of that stuff.”

“And where does the Berry Blue Kool-Aid come in?”

“That vest you’re holding was dyed with Berry
Blue. It makes a beautiful dye color, don’t you think? I made that vest for Tim using the fleece of one of my favorite sheep, Dances with Wool.”

That stopped my train of thought like a, well, a fluffy white sheep in the middle of the tracks. “Susan, where do you get your names?”

“My friends think them up,” she said with a smile. “Tim named Dances and as a reward, I spun some of Dances’s wool and dyed it this special color for the vest. Of course, not everyone can appreciate a color this bright. Tim didn’t wear it much.”

“But I still don’t quite get it,” I said. “You use
Kool-Aid
to dye your wool? Why not just use real dye?”

“It’s part of the fun, really. You can use lots of things to dye wool. You’d be surprised. Every year I have a group from my spinners club who come to my house and we do up a bunch of different dye batches in the backyard. It’s so much fun. We drink beer and talk. We have to watch it, because all the minerals and chemicals we use can get pretty toxic if you aren’t careful. For instance, we boil a big cauldron of water and add some copper to it, to make up our own mordant. But sometimes buying this chemical called alum in the store works best. And there’s always vinegar, of course.”

“Wait. What’s a ‘mordant’?”

“If you use something to help the wool accept the dye, it will make the colors brighter. That’s what the mordant does. Anyway, then we usually gather all sorts of natural materials to dye the wool. You get a cool reddish brown by using onion skins. And alfalfa leaves and stems leave the wool a nice baby yellow.
But unfortunately you just can’t get a good blue using all natural materials.”

“So you use Kool-Aid?”

“Kool-Aid makes for a terribly effective dye. Didn’t you ever dye something using Kool-Aid when you were a kid, Maddie?”

“I wasn’t that kind of kid, Susan, no.”

“You have to try Kool-Aid dyeing! You don’t need a separate set of utensils. If you hate the color, you can drink it. It makes the kitchen smell terrific. It works without any mordants. The colors are a stitch. And if the baby gets in it, you don’t have to worry about poison.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that all in mind,” I said, awonder at the myriad weaving-arts expertise developed over the millennia, none of which I possessed, except this new Kool-Aid trick. “So you like to dye with Kool-Aid.”

“Well, I actually prefer the natural colors, myself. But for folks who have got a craving for that clear aqua blue…”

I caught on. “They need to find a packet of discontinued Berry Blue,” I said.

“Right.”

“Only they can’t get any more because it’s so rare,” I finished.

“Right. For a while, Kraft was making this flavor they called Great Bluedini, but now that’s been discontinued, too. It made a nice turquoise-color dye, but my spinners are sticklers for the Berry Blue. I’ve got this friend Lenny who came up with a great discovery of Berry Blue Kool-Aid last year. Her aunt found an old display case filled with it at a yard sale in Maine, of all
the weird things. Anyway, for holiday gifts, Lenny gave everyone in our spinning group four packets.”

“How cool!” I was enjoying Susan’s tale of found treasure.

“It was. I used three packets to dye the wool for Tim’s vest.”

“So then what?”

“Then, as I told you before, I had this trouble with money. Artie wasn’t going to keep paying my sheep’s bills, and I was pretty depressed. Tim and I tried to figure out if I had anything of value to sell. That’s when he found out about the Koollectors on the Internet, and how much they would pay for a rare Smiley packet in perfect condition. And I had one packet left over.”

“I can’t believe it. Who would know something like that?” I asked, marveling.

“Tim is a professional game-show writer, Maddie,” she said, quite matter-of-fact. “He knows everything, and anything he doesn’t, he can research in about three seconds.”

I had an instant flush of unworthiness. I was not fit to wear the crown…But I got over it, fast. “So he sold your Kool-Aid. How?”

“I think he used eBay,” she said.

Just like Holly, Tim had been mining the odd tastes of the buying public by putting up an unusual item for auction. It was a great way to connect with just the right buyer, and if you were trying to unload an old packet of drink powder, I suspected that right buyer might have to find you.

“Tim took care of everything. When he told me it brought in five hundred dollars, I nearly fainted. Just think. I used up three packets to dye Tim’s vest.”

“So that’s why you said this vest is worth fifteen hundred dollars.”

“And,” she whispered, “he didn’t even like the vest.”

We both looked at the bright-turquoise woolen garment.

“Only then Tim had to leave so quickly…” She shook her head at the recent memory. “And then he was hiding out next door. He planned to meet me at Pierce today and I slipped him that note about what time we should meet. You know the rest.”

“Do you know where Tim is right now?” I asked.

“Of course not.” Her eyes were wide. “And now, I really have to get the scripts collated.”

“Susan, finding Tim is pretty important.”

She ran her hand through her shaggy hair, the curls twisting through her fingers. “I wish I could tell you more,” she said.

It was infuriating. I could get only so much, and then she clammed up. “I’m frustrated,” I told her simply. “In the week or so I’ve been here, I’ve been insulted, flirted with, frightened, bullied, praised, hit on the head, mocked, underestimated, stalked by a lion, kissed, barked at, locked in the dark, off on a wild-goose chase, introduced to sheep, yelled at, befriended, confided in, overworked, and lied to. And now, what I’d really like is to know what’s going on with Tim Stock.”

“Look, Madeline, okay. I’ll tell you. But please understand, I am scared. Really, really scared. Tim won’t tell me any details. That’s the truth. I swear. But he says he’s sure someone is going to kill him.”

“Who would want to kill him?”

“He absolutely wouldn’t tell me. Maybe he was just
trying to protect me, I don’t know. But here’s the thing. Tim and I had a long talk about two weeks ago. That’s when everything turned upside down.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Tim said he was finally ready to start on his dream. Somehow, he’d come into a lot more money than he was expecting. I don’t know where it came from, he wouldn’t say. But maybe it was the money you told me you found. He said he had taken on this extra assignment this season, and it paid very well.”

“What else?”

“You remember when Tim and I had that talk a long time ago, and he told me he was only working on game shows to finance his big dream?”

I nodded.

“Tim said he was ready. He had the money now. He could go to London and do research for his novel.”

“And you must have been happy for him. You have been friends such a long time.”

“I was. Of course. And I told Tim I had saved just about enough money after this season of
Food Freak
to buy some land up near Eugene and start my sheep ranch. And you know what? I realized right then, when Tim and I were talking, that I didn’t want to move to Oregon.”

“You didn’t? You don’t?”

She shook her head. “And Tim said he didn’t really want to move to England. See, we realized sort of all at once that we would be too far away from each other.”