Pastrami Murder: Book One in The Darling Deli Series (6 page)

“Find anything?” She asked as she locked the front door of the deli behind him.

“Sorry, no. I’ve got some things to look over tonight though, and I’ll question a couple of other people tomorrow.” He gave her his best reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. We’ll find something sooner or later.”

“What has that private detective found so far?” Candice asked as she served herself the last helping of mashed potatoes. Moira and her daughter were finishing up a late dinner together, and both of them had been unusually silent so far. Moira looked up from the small pile of peas that she had been pushing around her plate and caught her daughter up on what had happened earlier that day.

“So, we don’t really have much,” she finished. “Henry Devou’s sister
might
have stopped at the store Saturday evening, but Danielle isn’t certain. Devou was poisoned, and the police think that a bowl of my soup did it. According to David, it could take them days to weeks to figure out what poisoned him and to match it to the samples of the soup that they took at the scene. I don’t know what we’re going to do if business stays this bad for that long. No one wants to buy lunch from someone they think is a killer.” She sighed and propped up her head with one hand as she halfheartedly stabbed at a pea with her fork. “Maybe I should just close down the deli now. Someone used my soup to kill someone. Even though I didn’t do it, it’s partially my fault.”

“That’s just silly, Mom. Don’t blame yourself for this. We all know you’re innocent, and the other employees and I all support you. We can have another staff meeting and make a list of everyone that we remember selling soup to on Saturday. It shouldn’t be that hard—not all of our customers even bought soup, and we only have to try to remember people who bought soup to go, which narrows the list down even further,” her daughter said.

“I guess it’s worth a try.” Moira paused, struck by the feeling that there was something that she should be noticing. “Saturday…” she murmured. Candice gave her an inquisitive look.

“Candice…” she began slowly. “The police told me that there was a half-eaten bowl of chicken noodle soup next to Henry, when he was found. We served Leeky Soup on Saturday, not chicken noodle. We served that on Friday. We’ve been going over the wrong day. Whoever bought the soup bought it on Friday.” She was amazed that she hadn’t realized this before. “And I have an alibi for Friday evening; I spent it with you, remember? That was the day we went to Arlo’s for burgers after work.”

“Yeah, I remember. And Danny was working there—I went to school with him, he’ll remember us for sure.” She grinned at her mother. “I mean it’s not perfect; since Henry didn’t die until Saturday, you could have gotten the soup to him any time between Friday and Saturday evening, but it’s definitely something.”

“I’ve got to tell David.” Moira glanced at her watch. It was just before nine o’clock. It would probably be okay to call him, if she did it now.

Excusing herself from the table, she slipped into the kitchen and grabbed her cell phone.

David answered on the second ring. Moira quickly told him what she had realized—that whoever had bought the soup used to poison Henry Devou had done it on Friday instead of Saturday.

“I’ve been going over the wrong day,” he said with a groan. “I took pictures of your stack of receipts while I was looking around the deli. I’ve been making a list of everyone who bought a bowl of soup to go with a credit card, and searching for them online to see if they had any connection to Devou. It’s pretty incomplete, since you didn’t print out cash receipts, but I thought I might get lucky.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I should have made the connection earlier.”

“It’s not your fault; this is my job. I have a picture of your employee schedule right here, which has the daily specials written on it. It was right here in front of my face the whole time and I didn’t notice it.” He gave a dry laugh. “Some investigator I am.”

“You’ve been doing great,” Moira assured him. “You realized that his sister had motive to kill him, and she’s still our most likely suspect, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely. While a lot of people might have had a reason to dislike Henry Devou, his older sis is definitely the one that would benefit the most from his death. Do you still have that picture of her?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s in my purse,” she told him.

“Great, can you show it to your other employees and see if they recognize her? I’ll start going over the receipts from Friday.” He sighed. “I doubt that she paid with a credit card, but you never know.”

“I’ll let you know if Darrin or Candice recognize the picture of Mathilda,” she promised. “Good luck. Hopefully one of us will turn something up.”

Neither Candice nor Darrin recognized Mathilda from the picture, so Moira was back at square one when she went into work the next morning. The fact that David hadn’t called her meant that he probably hadn’t found anything, either.

She had one customer early in the morning, then saw no one else for almost an hour. She was reading a magazine when she heard the front door open.

“It smells like heaven in here,” a familiar voice called out. Moira looked up to see the elderly diner owner, Arlo, standing at the entrance to the diner.

“Come on in,” she said. “I was just about to take a break for lunch. Care to join me?” He paused, his expression unsure.

“It’s on the house,” she added.

“Then count me in.” He gave her a grateful smile and walked forward to lean against the counter. Moira knew that his business had been hit hard by the Soup Shoppe. Arlo’s Diner had been the most popular sit-down restaurant in town before Henry Devou had opened his business just a few blocks away from the diner. She suspected that the diner was now in trouble. Arlo had cut his hours multiple times over the last few months, and had let the majority of his employees go.

It’s a shame
, she thought.
I would hate to see it close.
The diner had been around for as long as she could remember. She and Candice had often gone there for a burger and fries after school when her daughter was younger, and Candice had even gotten her first job there.

“It’s quiet today,” he said as she led him over to a small bistro table in the corner. He took off his bowler hat as he sat down, revealing sparse white hair. “You usually have a couple of people in line when I come in for lunch.”

“Yeah.” She gave a dry laugh. “Thanks to the fact that everyone knows Henry Devou was poisoned by one of my soups, no one wants to eat here anymore.”

“I’m sorry about that, Moira. That man is bad for business even when he’s dead.” Arlo shook his head. “I can’t say I was sorry to hear the news though. World’s better off without him, if you ask me.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, shocked. “I know that we’ve both been seeing fewer profits since his business took off, but he definitely didn’t deserve to die.”

“It’s not just about losing customers to him. That man was wrecking the town. Maple Creek is about tradition, and sticking together.” He grimaced. “Henry Devou was just another big businessman that didn’t care about anything except money. We don’t need people like that in our town.”

Moira was speechless. She knew that Arlo was old-fashioned, and like many other elderly people, had gotten used to speaking his mind, but this was just too much. It was never okay to talk about the dead like that, at least not in her book.

“I think you should take your soup to go, Arlo,” she said. “I need to get back to work.”

Even though the conversation with him had ended unpleasantly, it had given Moira a lot to think about. Maybe she and David were way off target when they had thought that Henry’s sister had killed him. Could it be that the diner owner had done it? And if so, why was he trying to frame her? She decided to contact David with her new information; hopefully they would figure this out soon.

“So do you really think it could be this Arlo guy?” David asked, his voice tinny over the phone.

“I don’t know. The diner is everything to him, though. If it’s about to go out of business, he might be feeling desperate. And with what he said about Devou destroying the town… it sounds like he really hated the man.” She sighed. She had known Arlo her whole life. Could he really have done it?

“Well, I’ll look into it,” the detective assured her. “Let me know if you think of anything else.”

Anticipating another slow day, Moira decided to take advantage of the downtime to experiment. For most of her soups, sandwiches, and salads, she took old favorites and gave them a delicious new twist, but Moira was itching to create something unique. She began by mixing together a few cups of vegetable stock, a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce, and a dash of powdered ginger root in a big pot, which she set over a low flame. That would simmer while she chopped the vegetables.

She wanted this to be a colorful soup—she thought she might use it for one of her spring specials—which meant digging the last of the rainbow carrots out of the freezer. She had bought them from an organic hobby farmer at the last farmer’s market of the season, and had been saving them for something special. They would definitely serve to make the soup unique. Not many people even knew that purple, red, white, and yellow carrots existed, let alone that each color had a different variety of nutrients and a slightly different flavor.

She set the colorful bowl of sliced carrots aside and opened the fridge to figure out what else she wanted to put in her new creation. She had already decided that it would be vegetarian, so she wouldn’t be adding any meats. Bok choy was just the thing for this soup, she decided. It would go well with the soy flavoring, and she could create a sandwich that incorporated bok choy leaves, which would tie the two dishes together nicely.
Where is it?
she thought, peering into the refrigerator.
I know we have some.
She had used it in a salad just the other day.

Moira moved some mushrooms aside to look behind them, thinking
I might add some of those too
, and paused. There was a small ziplock bag with something green in the very back of the fridge. She always kept fresh herbs in the front, since they had to be used quickly or they would lose their flavor. The back of the fridge was only for large items that wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle. Plus, all of her ingredients were clearly labeled and dated—this bag had neither on it.

She reached in and took the bag out, absently closing the fridge door with her hip as she moved over to the counter to examine the little plant. Was one of her employees doing drugs? She didn’t test them, but they all knew that she had a zero tolerance policy.

It wasn’t a plant that she recognized off the top of her head, but it looked somewhat familiar. She was an avid gardener in the warmer months, so chances were that she had come across the plant in some gardening book or the other.

She decided to do a quick Internet search before she asked Darrin, who was out front, if he recognized it. The only problem was, what should she search for? It looked almost like the tops of carrots or parsnips, so she decided to start there. Candice had tried to teach her how to use keywords when she was looking things up, but Moira wasn’t very confident of her own ability to do it correctly, so she took the easy route. Typing
plants that look like carrots
into the search engine brought her results quickly. She clicked on the first link and began comparing pictures to the plant on the counter in front of her.

A few seconds later, a chill went through her. She looked from the plant to the screen and back again, hoping that she had made a mistake, but there was no doubt. The little green plant that had been hidden at the back of her fridge was hemlock. Now the question was, who had put a deadly plant in her fridge… and why?

David stared at his computer screen, tapping a foot on the ground as he tried to draw lines where there just weren’t any. Mathilda Devou had just made an appearance on the local news, thanking the public for their support after her brother’s death. The only problem was, she had also explained that she was selling the franchise, as she had no interest in running a business. She would be donating all of the proceeds to his favorite charity.

Well
, he thought,
that takes away any motive she could have had to kill him
. Her tears looked real, and the sadness in her voice was unmistakable. He had to accept that Mathilda Devou was no longer a realistic suspect in the murder case.

Maybe Moira was right, and it was the diner owner.
He had never spoken to Arlo himself, but he knew the diner; it was impossible not to drive by it when he was passing through Maple Creek. But just because the old man had motive, it didn’t mean that he had done it. It seemed like half the town had a reason to want Henry Devou dead.
The motive may be there., but the evidence just isn’t
, he thought.

So, where does that leave Moira?
he wondered. He had to admit to himself that with the Devou sister out of the picture, the evidence just kept pointing back to his client. He made a mental list: the bowl of poisoned soup from her deli, her declining business, her lack of alibi for Saturday—although Moira’s alibi for Friday was strong, David wished she’d gone out with friends on Saturday… it just didn’t look good She was in the deli almost every day, and wouldn’t have had to pay for the soup, which meant there would be no paper trail. And even though she and Henry Devou had been competitors, he would have known her well enough to answer the door if she knocked. From what he had seen of Moira, she was smart enough to trick the man into eating the soup somehow.