MURDER TO GO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 1) (4 page)

The lunch crowd was fierce. We had more business than we could handle and the profits for the day were beyond my estimates for the new location. It made me wonder if Fred had taken in this much cash. Large sums of money would always be a motive for murder.

I took a deep breath. I had thoughts about the crimes running through my mind as I sorted orders and took in money. It was amazing that I was able to keep it together and do my job. Land had prepared enough of the condiments for the lunch rush, and things went smoother. We were done by 1:30, and we finished the prep by 2:15.

I had barely stepped out of the truck when a large man approached me. I knew this had to be Tony Samples. He was probably 6’ 6” tall and weighed a very sloppy 300 pounds easily. “Hey, we need to talk,” he shouted at me from about a half block away. I figured that this was his way of telling me to wait. Given his size, I could have outpaced him, but I stood there and waited.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” he said, still shouting even though we were closer than we had been. “This is my spot.”

I shrugged. “You’re not here today. I figured it would be a few weeks before you’re ready again, and I didn’t want to see this spot wasted.”

He looked down at me. The anger was clear in his eyes. “Pretty lucky for you, isn’t it? This makes a great spot for you.”

I was tired of being accused of being a killer by men who didn’t know me. While I couldn’t be openly rude to the police, there was no reason why I couldn’t shut this man down. “If you come back, we’ll give the space to you, but I’ve heard you wanted to move anyway. Seems like I’m not the only one to benefit from this.”

He gasped, and I wondered if I’d gone too far. “You think I’d kill my dad just to get the business back on track?”

I saw my opening and went for it. “You just said that the business was off track. You knew that it couldn’t have kept up like that or you would have gone under.”

He snorted. His wide nostrils flared even more. “It’s not that bad, but sales have been flat for a long time and inflation eats away at the profits. I don’t know what my dad was thinking.”

“So you had a better motive than I did to kill him. I’ll move out of here as soon as you move back. My word on it.”

He stared at me. I couldn’t tell what he planned on doing. After a few seconds, the big guy began to cry. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I miss him so much. I know the business will be better, but what a cost, what a cost!” That’s how I ended up with my arms halfway around Tony Samples. We hugged until he tried to slide a hand down to my backside. Compassion and pity sex were two separate things in my book.

I took the truck back to the lot and found my car. I had more business to take care of now, but this was family business.

My parents owned a small ranch house in suburbia. Until my recent inheritance, I’d lived there as well with my ass parked on the sofa waiting for the perfect job to arrive. It still felt like home, which was why I didn’t bother to knock before I entered.

My mother was reading a book in a recliner in the living room when I stepped into the room. No one would ever have taken us for mother and daughter at first glance. My mother is larger than I am. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but I had inherited my dad’s thin build with not many curves anywhere, whereas my mother was all curves. She wasn’t a fat woman by any means, but she was a classic voluptuous gal. Men stopped to stare at her when she walked down the street. I was lucky if I got a second glance.

Even with her curvaceous beauty, she was decidedly a homebody, and I wasn’t surprised to see her sitting in her favorite chair reading. She’d instilled a love of reading in me as well, beginning to read to me at an early age.

I plopped down on the couch and looked at her. She finally raised her head and put a finger in her book to mark the place. There was no bending down the corners of a page in our house.

“Why do you look like that? You should be happy.” My mother tilted the chair forward and stood up.

This next part was going to be tricky. I knew that my mother was still grieving for her sister, but I needed to talk about the gory details of her death. I wasn’t sure how she would take the discussion, especially since I was asking if Alice had been murdered.

“Lots of drama with the food truck,” I started truthfully. “Somebody was killed downtown yesterday.”

“I heard about that. Who would want to kill someone who drives a food truck?” my mother asked as she headed to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and looked inside. My mother was not only full-figured, but she could eat what she wanted and not get fat. She had a metabolism that still ran strong after sixty years. The world was too unfair.

I didn’t speak for a minute, and the import of my words sunk in with her. “Has there been some trouble with the truck or something?” she said, eyeing me while she tried to look like she wasn’t.

“I’m not sure, but I’m getting the feeling that Aunt Alice’s death might be tied to the death of the other truck owner. I didn’t know the details of her passing,” I said, using my mother’s words, “but I want to know more. Maybe I can find out what happened to Aunt Alice. That would be a fitting tribute for her.”

My mother sighed deeply and then sat down again. I sat on the sofa across from her, but this time I tried to be more genteel in my actions. There was no point in antagonizing the woman that was going to provide me with answers.

“It would be just like Alice to cause a ruckus even after she’s gone.” My mother ran a finger under her right eye. I wasn’t certain if there was really a tear there, or if she was just preparing for the onslaught. Neither was a great sign for a frank discussion.

“What did you know about her food truck before she passed?” I asked, trying to get something more specific from my mother.

Another deep sigh came. “She had trouble getting a permit. The city had some permits available; Alice was able to find that out from a friend. However, when she went to apply for one, the agency said they were out. Alice spent months going around and around with them over that. Finally, she took a count of the trucks in town, went back to the permit office and demanded to talk to someone about their lack of math skills. The Consumer Affairs Department was the one giving her trouble about the permit. Then she had to get a health inspection. They failed her the first two times. The third time, another vendor cleaned the place for her and the health inspector failed her again. That would have meant that she couldn’t apply for another permit for six months, but the other vendor went to bat for her and pointed out all the errors in the health inspector’s report.”

“Wow, who did she piss off?” I knew Alice well enough to know that she wouldn’t take things lying down. She’d been a fighter all the years I’d known her, and she’d always encouraged me to be one as well. She could tilt at windmills when she felt like it.

“That’s just it. Alice couldn’t figure it out. First, she just thought it was someone in the Consumer Affairs office, but then when the health inspector started pulling the same thing, she realized that it had to be someone higher up. She never mentioned if she’d figured out who it was, so I guess it was still a mystery to her.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the names of anyone she dealt with?” I asked. I needed to talk to someone, and their offices would be in the same government building that we parked across from. I could go during a break and ask questions.

Mom nearly rolled her eyes back into her head, trying to recall what Alice had said. I could understand the feeling. Alice was a fast talker. She could speak faster than most people could think, and then add to that an Irish gift of gab, and she could talk until you tuned her out or went mad. I’d done it a number of times and so had my mother.

“The Consumer Affairs person, I’m just not sure about, but the health inspector had a weird name. It started with a Q or X or Z, something like that. It was a weird word. I made her spell it the first time she told me about her.”

“Her?”

“The health inspector was a woman. Aren’t you the little sexist?” she said with a smile.

“Not really. I just equate bureaucracy with men.”

My mom laughed. She was not doing too poorly with the discussion of my aunt, so I decided to move forward. “Hey mom, the police mentioned that Alice’s death was suspicious. What does that mean?”

“It means that medical science can’t figure out what she died of. They did the standard tests for cause of death and nothing came up. They ran some tests to see if it was drug-related. I knew better, but they did it anyway. They found nothing. They wanted to do more, but Alice had asked to be cremated and the ME had released her body. So she’s officially dead with no real cause of death listed. She stopped breathing and that was all that the medical examiner said. I guess it’s not all that uncommon, but it drove the police mad.”

“Not breathing is usually fatal,” I agreed.

“The police were very suspicious, but I had my doubts. For starters, she was in her car, apparently alone because the police, for all their scrutiny, never found any evidence of anyone else being in the car with her. No hair, no fiber, no DNA. I just can’t see Alice sitting by idly while someone sticks her full of drugs or allows someone to cut off her air supply.”

“I’m all out of love,” I crooned in a horribly off-key voice. This was why I was now a food truck operator and not a karaoke queen.

“Not that Air Supply. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing either. I’m the mother. I know these things.” She sniffed, but no signs of any waterfalls appeared. Since my mother was the one who had taught me humor as a tool to deflect awkward situations, I knew she would recognize it. Even so, it had kept the tears at bay.

“So what do you think happened?” I asked. I recognized that this was going to be a long haul for me. There were no quick answers when the body was gone, and the police had no evidence. Everything would be speculation and rumor.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just Alice’s time to go. Sometimes you just have to accept that. I miss her every day though.”

“Me too,” I replied, thinking of the good times I’d had with my aunt. “So why a food truck?”

“Alice always recognized a trend. She was good that way. She saw that this market was about to take off, and she wanted to jump on it. The work would appeal to her. She moved around. She didn’t work in an office. She met lots of new people. She would have suffocated, pardon the expression, if she’d worked in an office. It just wasn’t her.”

I nodded. My mother was right about that. Alice was not the type to be tied down to an office job. I couldn’t see her in a 9 to 5 environment, though I wondered how she’d done with 4 to 2. Even so, in listening to the other owners, the food truck was a major cash investment to get started. I wondered where Alice, who had tended to live from hand to mouth, had found the cash to start her own truck.

I decided to stay at my parents’ house for dinner. I thought I owed it to my mother since I’d taxed her emotions with my questions plus, of course, making food all day left me with no desire to come home and do it again. I thought I deserved a meal prepared by someone else.

After I finished my second helping, and put some more in a bowl to take home, I said goodbye to my parents and headed home.

My apartment complex bore an eerie resemblance to the Bates Motel. It was a series of one level apartments slung out around the circumference of a parking lot. Just by pulling into the driveway, I could tell that my front door was open. My heart froze. I knew that I’d locked the door that morning and I hadn’t been home since. I felt a lump in my throat as I thought that I could be the next person to have my head removed from my body. I pulled close to the door of my apartment and put my headlights on bright. The lights allowed me to look inside of my place.

There was no movement inside the apartment. I had no pets, so there was no concern that I was going to be chasing after Fido all night. I grabbed my gun out of the car’s console. While I wasn’t a huge fan of weapons, my father had insisted that I learn how to shoot when I began to go downtown at 4 a.m. and carry large sums of cash. I thanked him now as I pulled it out.

With the headlights still on, I approached the apartment. I realized that if they were planning on hurting me that my shadow was making an easy target. However, my rationale was that if they wanted to kill me, there were millions of better ways to do it than to break into my home, leave the door open and shoot me upon entry. On the other hand, the subtlety of my aunt’s death, compared to the gruesome nature of Fred Samples’ death, meant that this killer was nothing if not versatile.

I made it to the door unscathed and looked in, gun still in my outstretched, locked hands. I tried to mimic the hundreds of cop shows I’d watched in the past six months. At least my hours of television had come in handy for something. I slammed my body against the wall, only because I’d seen it done on
Law & Order
. I took one trembling hand off the gun and turned on the lights. The living room flooded with color and detail. Nothing was stolen that I could see. I repeated the routine with each room of the apartment. I found nothing out of place or missing. Frankly, there wasn’t much to take. I’d only been here a few months, too short a time for me to build up the collection of garbage people accumulate over a lifetime. However, I did wonder why my flat screen and my tablet weren’t touched.

Still shaking a little, I held on to the gun with one hand, like a safety blanket that could blow a hole in you. I walked back out to the car, turned it off, and returned to the apartment. I double locked the door and made a cup of coffee. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I might as well stay wide-awake.