Chopping Spree

The line went dead.

Well. I hadn’t felt particularly good since the portable toilet ordeal, but now a warm glow suffused my senses. I had helped Ellie, after a fashion. And now I was helping Liz. Arch might think I was always bugging him or getting in the way, but at least my friends appreciated me. On this happy note, I put in a call to Marla, who was out. Well, Easter was right around the corner. Marla always spent enormous amounts of time and money finding clothes in the hues of dyed eggs. Then again, maybe she was hunting for more gossip that could help Julian—to her, this would be much more attractive than groping in ice-covered undergrowth for eggs.

And speaking of which… outside, a blinding curtain of snowflakes had begun to whirl down. Welcome to spring in Aspen Meadow. One year, it had snowed every day in May. I pitied Liz driving the narrow, winding foothills road between Boulder and Aspen Meadow.

I turned my attention back to the Stockhams’ menu. The dishes Shane had ordered—primarily cold salads—were more suitable to the brief spell of unseasonably warm weather we’d had back in March than to what we were experiencing now, that is, the usual “Springtime in the Rockies,” which was basically “Return to the Arctic.” Plus, what about these extra people I’d heard about… not from the client?

I took all the food for the Prospective Tenants’ Lunch out of the refrigerator and placed it on the counter. It was possible I had a way out of this food mess.

Making small last-minute changes to a menu was a prerogative I reserved. The proviso—always explained to clients—was that Goldilocks’ Catering would make up the cost difference if the new dishes, necessitated by market, weather, or oversight-on-our-part situations, were more expensive than those originally ordered.

And speaking of expensive, I wanted to ask Shane about these possible extra guests, and remind him of his payment due. Yes, I had the money from Westside, but if I didn’t hold Shane responsible for his bill, too, then word would get out, and all of my contracts would be undermined. I fully intended to give Westside a huge discount on their next catered event, anyway. I just could not start doing last-minute renegotiations for the number of guests and the financial terms of my contracts. If there was one thing I’d learned on the business side of catering, this was it.

Eight o’clock was a tad early to be calling a client, but Shane was pretty Type-A, so I figured he, too, could be on his third cup of coffee. I punched in the buttons for the Stockham house.

Shane answered on the first ring. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you’re canceling!” His voice shook with dismay. “Sorry! I have caller ID, Goldy The snow’s really coming down, but I know you’ll be OK. Problem is, I’m worried now that a dozen deep-pocket investors won’t want chilled food—”

“A dozen, Shane?”

He continued, oblivious. “Could you whip up another soup? Maybe a French onion, with cheese-slathered croutons? Page bought some Gruyère last week, I think it’s still around. Omigod, look at this snow. Do you have four-wheel drive on your van?”

“Shane, hold on.” I then reassured him that the snow was not an issue, except as it impacted the menu. “Remember, Shane, you booked for six people. Not twelve. Six.”

“Oops! I’ve added half a dozen women, didn’t I tell you?”

“You did not. Most caterers would say it was impossible.”

“Oh, please, Goldy. I’ll pay you more than double.”

“You’re in luck. I’ll do it for one and a half times the first rate, provided I actually get the payment from you when we arrive.” He moaned, but I went on: “How would you feel about a gorgeous prime rib of beef with red wine gravy?”

“Today? Really?”

“Yes. But Shane, remember your check? I need it before my assistant and I set up.”

“Can we barter?” he whined. “I can get you some fabulous electronic equipment! Wholesale!”

“Shane!” I closed my eyes. You may eventually want to work with this person again, I reminded myself. “I need a check from you for a thousand dollars before we start.”

He lowered his voice. “I’ve got a perfectly nice ruby, sapphire, and diamond ring right here in front of me, Goldy,” he whispered. “Over a half carat for each stone, flawless quality, great colors. The stones alone are worth twelve thousand bucks, and that’s not even counting the fourteen-carat-gold setting. If I don’t get a check from an investor today, you keep the ring.”

I sighed. “Do you own the ring? Or did you lease it?”

He gulped. “It’s… mostly paid for. We owe about another thousand for it on Visa. I promise, Goldy, that’s the truth. I swear, if I don’t pay up today, it’s yours, and the Visa bill is ours. The ring’s worth about fifteen thousand. Such a deal!”

I cast a glance along our counter, taking in the enormous rib roast, the bundles of endive and radicchio, the boxes of wild mushrooms, the bowls of fresh strawberries and rhubarb. I tried to imagine hauling all of it over to the Stockhams’, along with a bald guy with a jewelers’ loupe. Then if the gems weren’t genuine, I could wring Shane’s neck.

“When do I get the ring?” I heard myself say.

“I can bring it over now, or, or, I can give it to you when you arrive.” He hesitated, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Probably safer if we wait until you get here. I swear, Goldy. If I don’t give it to you the second you walk in the door, you can dump the food in Cottonwood Creek. It runs right past our house.” Before I could reply, he said, “Hey, that prime rib sounds great. Oh, and could you name one of the dishes after these women? I want to flatter them a bit. We all know gadgets are the wave of the future! But these females keep moaning about nest eggs. Help me placate them, will you? I tell them they need to ‘Get wild!’ I even call them my ‘Wild Girls,’ and they love that. See you at ten.”

And then the slimeball hung up.

What would happen to the women’s nest eggs if Shane’s business failed again? Would they be offered emerald necklaces? In these situations, I always tried to think of what Tom, my wise husband, would say.

You’re already driving yourself crazy trying to control your own burgeoning business, plus Arch, plus a police investigation involving Julian, my internalized Tom-voice reminded me. You don’t need to add taking care of Shane’s investors to Goldy’s List of Controllees.

I checked our larder, fixed myself another coffee, and began to type.Investors’ Lunch for Twelve——Revised Menu

Wednesday, April 13

Steaming Gadget-Dumpling Soup

Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad

Ad Guys’ Roast Beef and Gravy

Mashed Russet and Sweet Potatoes

Brioche Rolls

Super Spenders’ Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler with

Vanilla Ice Cream

First things first. I brought out cardboard boxes and packed in the vats of chilled, Asian-flavored stock I’d already made. After preheating the oven, I put in the roast. I would sear and roast it partway at home, then finish it at the Stockhams’.

Outside, the snow was thickening. Looking down, I wondered how my raw-skinned, much-washed hands would look with a ruby, sapphire, and diamond ring glittering on one finger. It didn’t matter. If we didn’t get paid for this lunch, I was going to sell the damn ring.

I started water boiling for the potatoes. After trimming the enormous, firm Portobello mushrooms, I whisked together the luscious sherry and balsamic vinaigrette in which the mushrooms would be briefly bathed before I grilled them in the Stockhams’ state-of-the-art kitchen. Food was great, I reflected, as I got swept up in the rhythm of cooking. It’s dealing with folks that makes catering so challenging.

Liz arrived, her coat dusted with snow, her nose red. She proffered a bag of cinnamon and cheese Danish from the Aspen Meadow pastry shop.

“I didn’t want you to fix anything for me,” she protested sheepishly. “Anyway, I thought I wouldn’t be hungry, what with my son on the loose, getting us into so much debt I won’t be able to charge at the grocery store anymore. But I’m ravenous and out of cash… not a good time to run into the store clutching your credit card.”

It turned out that I was ravenous, too. While the potatoes and roast cooked, we dug into the Danish and told credit card jokes. I wrote Liz a check for the Monday event, for which she was almost pathetically grateful. Then we rewashed our hands and quickly divvied up the tasks for the rest of the lunch. Liz, who had a remarkable knack for presentation, asked to be put in charge of piping side-by-side dollops of mashed sweet and russet potatoes in the potato skins.

“I’ll make it look great,” she promised. “A fat golden swirl of mashed russet next to a creamy orange swirl of sweet potato, both piping hot and crackling with melted butter. Trust me.”

“Trust you? You’re making me hungry all over again, and I just downed two Danish!”

We worked feverishly over the next hour. As I energetically mashed the white potatoes—Liz was working on the fleshy, orange sweet ones—I wondered how to broach the subject of Teddy. Can anyone account for every movement of Teddy’s, from the time he left the security office to the time you picked him up at McDonald’s? I wanted to asked. How about someone vouching for your own doings?

“How’s Julian doing?” she asked as she fitted a piping tip onto my pastry bag.

“I saw him yesterday. He was feeling pretty low, didn’t talk much about what was going on there. I do know that the day after an arrest, the sheriff’s department does an advisement by video from the courthouse. Lets you know what you’re charged with. The arraignment comes a couple of days later. I’m just hoping that someone else will emerge as a suspect, someone, say, without an alibi—”

“Teddy and I are lucky in that department,” Liz interjected, without looking at me. Instead, she concentrated on heaping scoops of mashed potatoes into the pastry bag. “I left you around quarter after eight, then went straight to Security. I left them around eight-thirty, which, thank God, is what the guards told the cops. Somebody was just coming in for his shift at McD’s when I arrived there at eight-forty, and watched me talking to Teddy until we left, around nine-thirty.” She finished the first four potatoes, and gave me a look. Triumphant? Defiant? I couldn’t tell.

“Well,” I said thoughtfully as I brought an oversized bag of field greens out of the walk-in. “Hmm. So… if Teddy’s not a suspect, why would he take off? It’s just going to make them come down harder on him when they do find him.”

Liz filled another bag with snowy whipped potatoes. “Teddy took off because he was under stress. When he’s under stress, he shops.”

Or steals, I added silently, but said nothing. I rinsed the field greens and set them aside to drain. What else could I ask Liz before it was time to take off? “Know anybody who might have pushed Barry down, causing him headaches?”

Super Spenders’ Strawberry-Rhubarb CobblerFruit:

½ to ⅔ cup sugar, depending on the sweetness of the strawberries

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1½ pounds strawberries, washed, trimmed, and halved

½ pound rhubarb, washed, trimmed, and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 teaspoon vanilla extractTopping:

¾ cup all-purpose flour

⅜ teaspoon baking powder (High altitude: ¼ teaspoon) ¼

⅛ teaspoon salt

11 tablespoons (1 stick plus 3 table-spoons) unsalted butter, softened

¾ cup sugar

1 egg

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Vanilla ice cream or heavy creamPreheat the oven to 375°F. Butter a 9 × 13-inch pan or 2-quart au gratin pan.For the fruit: In a small bowl, mix the sugar with the cornstarch. Place the trimmed fruit in a large bowl and pour the sugar mixture and vanilla over it. Mix together gently and pour into the prepared pan.For the topping: Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside. In the large bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter until creamy and light. Add the sugar gradually, beating until light and smooth. Beat in the egg until thoroughly combined, then mix in the vanilla. Turn off the beater and with a large wooden spoon, stir in the flour mixture just until all the ingredients are well combined. Using an ice-cream scoop or other large spoon, drop the dough in large, even spoonfuls onto the fruit in the pan.Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the topping is golden brown and the fruit is bubbling. Test for doneness by spooning up a small section of the middle of the topping. If it is like cake, it is done. If the topping is still a liquid yellow, bake until it is like cake. Serve warm with best-quality vanilla ice cream or heavy cream, either poured or whipped.Makes 6 large or 8 small servings

Liz finished a creamy swirl of whipped white potato and smiled at me. “What are you talking about?”

Nothing, I said. After all, if she or Teddy had had enough physical strength to push Barry Dean down, I was pretty sure that she would have at least blushed when I mentioned it.

Two new inches of heavy, wet snow plastered the sidewalk, trees, and streets by the time Liz and I set out. My new van boasted not only four-wheel drive, but new snow tires, also taken care of by Tom. Gosh, but it was nice to have a husband who actually cared about me.

Liz told me that she, too, had new tires. But she wasn’t nearly as gleeful about it. Teddy had had new radials put on her van right after he got out of jail for his latest shoplifting offense. It was to say he was sorry, Liz explained, as we trudged through the cementlike white stuff with our last boxes. Of course, he’d charged them.

I led the way to the Stockhams’ place. The Aspen Ranch area was situated just at the foot of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve, a sprawling hundred-thousand-acre wooded refuge for elk, mountain lions, and all other manner of wildlife. Hunters, hikers, fishermen, Scouts, and nature lovers shared the Preserve and gloried in the Aspen Meadow itself, reputedly one of the largest living organisms on earth (a stand of aspens is actually one tree that has developed an extensive root system and become many trees). The Aspen Meadow was also the namesake for our town, which benefited from the tourism that the Meadow itself brought.

Four years ago, the sale of the ten-thousand-acre Burdock Ranch abutting the Preserve had provoked the usual hysterical conflict between Colorado’s pro-and anti-growth folks. After two years of vicious wrangling, Aspen Ranch, a luxurious subdivision featuring five-to ten-thousand-square-foot homes on ten-acre lots, had been approved. The builders swore they were preserving the character of the Wildlife Preserve. We could put up ticky-tacky condos, they’d threatened the planning commission, who eventually denied their application. But the county commissioners—all of whom had received huge campaign donations from the builders, it was later reported, and not just in the Mountain Journal—unanimously reversed the decision of their own planners and approved the project.

Wending my way through the wide, snow-blanketed streets of Aspen Ranch, I quickly lost my way. Lots of snow-covered trees and meadows looked like lots of other snow-covered trees and meadows. Plus, for all their money, the builders had messed up pretty dramatically on the street signs. They were long, slender, wood-carved affairs now completely frosted with ice and snow. Unfortunately, the numbers for the houses were also carved in this same style, and despite their placement at the end of each driveway, were illegible. I wasn’t having fun trying to find Thirty-two Aspen Ranch Lane, even though I’d been there before.

I finally got a clue from the mailboxes, grand wood-and-metal boxes painted with birds, pine branches, stagecoaches, and—thank you, Lord—Dr. and Mrs. Turner Macalester, 18 Aspen Ranch Lane lettered on the side. I slowly rumbled past Dr. and Mrs. William Knapp, Dr. and Mrs. Bachman Wilson, Dr. and Mrs. Paul Cardero…and wondered why the developers hadn’t built a hospital at the entrance to the Wildlife Preserve. It would surely shorten up everybody’s commute.

I slowed as we climbed Aspen Ranch Lane. I knew we were only about a mile from the Preserve, but the white expanse of trees did not look familiar. I’d visited the Stockham place when the ground had been clear and the wooden street signs legible.

Finally, I drew up to a long, gently ascending driveway that looked vaguely familiar, not because of the trees and rocks or snow-covered sign, but because a familiar vehicle was blocking the driveway.

Marla had told me at the jewelry party about Pam Disharoon’s white Audi, with its license plate GOGIRL. I groaned.

I hadn’t anticipated having to ask a very early guest to move her car, especially not a guest who reportedly had an unstable relationship with her sister, the volatile Page Stockham, my client. Still, would this give me a chance to question the elusive Pam on her relationship with the hapless Barry Dean?

Another question formed in my brain as Liz and I sat in our vans, plumes of exhaust spiraling upward through the cold, moist air. Was Pam here to attend her brother-in-law’s cash-raising lunch?

Or was she here to disrupt it?

CHAPTER 14

Are the keys in it?” Liz demanded, banging on my windshield. When I shrugged, she raked her hair with her gloved hands, traipsed through what must have been ten inches of snow—it always snowed more west of town, here by the Preserve—and peered into the Audi.

“Think you should call them on the cell phone?” she cried.

I shook my head and jumped out of my van. “By the time I reach them, and they argue and debate until somebody decides to get dressed and come down here, I could have made it up there and put pressure on Shane to drive me back down.” I arrived at her side. Despite the fact that I wore a wool jacket, I shivered in the biting cold.

“OK. While you go up, I’ll stay and guard our stuff.”

I began the long tramp up the driveway. There was only one set of footprints in the snow, undoubtedly Pam’s. The uphill walk itself was actually very pretty, like being transported into a set for The Nutcracker. Trees high and low were hung with glittering ribbons of snow. The ground was thickly frosted, and was still a pristine, crystalline white. Sunbeams slanting through the pine and aspen branches winked off errant flakes. I would have had more inclination to appreciate all this if I hadn’t been worrying about how we were going to do the lunch without being able to drive up to the house. We really needed someone to move Pam’s damn car.

After what must have been a mile of trudging, the large log house came into view, a pretty-but-oversized two-story affair that Shane had smugly informed me was in the style of Swedish Country. By the time I arrived at the carved front door and rang the bell, I felt as if I’d traipsed across Sweden by way of the North Pole.

“Where have you been?” Shane demanded even before I began shaking off snow in his foyer. “I was expecting you twenty-two minutes ago.” His face was flushed, his tone accusing. I told myself to count to ten. While silently ticking off numbers, I took in his outfit: cream-colored silk shirt, suede Western riding jacket, leather cowboy pants and boots, Stetson hat. Shane was apparently going to make his pitch costumed as a high-flying cowboy. Well, I’d seen weirder.

“There’s an Audi blocking your driveway,” I pointed out. “We can’t get in. And I need payment before we start.”

Shane heaved a sigh of exasperation. He mumbled, “The ring’s coming, I promise.” Then he hooked his thumb in the direction of female voices bubbling from the interior of the house. I tugged off my boots and shuffled past the dining room, which was beautifully done up with a lavish floral centerpiece, gleaming crystal, Imari-pattern china, and linens in rich red, navy, beige, and gold.

“Dining room looks good,” I mumbled, and forced a smile at Shane. I really didn’t want to carry my bad mood into a confrontation with Pam Disharoon.

“Oh, I got the flowers and styling done in exchange for a Palm pilot,” Shane replied. “And the china was one of Page’s many, uh, extravagances.”

The living room offered more Swedish Country stuff. This seemed to mean lots of tall white furniture, wood sculptures of forest nymphs, chunky tables, and etched portraits of Nobel prizewinners. A fire blazed and crackled in the moss-rock hearth. Still shivering from my trek up the driveway, I longed to warm myself in front of it. But I sensed that wouldn’t go over very well.

Pam and Page, both lounging in tall, white corduroy wing-back chairs, registered my arrival. Why was I bothering them, their dismayed looks said.

“There’s an Audi in our way,” I announced to the two women. “We can’t get the vans up the driveway.”

“Oh, it’s mine,” Pam said offhandedly, reaching into a large Louis Vuitton purse. Was that purse the uniform tote of the yuppie set? And how had she avoided having it snatched by Teddy Fury? “I just had to take that nice long walk up the driveway. It was so…so sensual! Out here in the boondocks, the snow is seductively pretty! Couldn’t you just imagine rolling in it with someone you love?” She treated Shane and Page to a dazzling smile. Then she turned and tossed me an LV key ring, which only my best imitation of Arch snagging the lacrosse ball enabled me to catch. “Here. You can move it.” So much for my hopes of Pam shrieking with embarrassment for causing so much trouble with her car, and then scrambling from the room to move it.

In my business, pots can boil over. The caterer can’t. Not for the first time, I was having a hard time staying cool. I avoided a glance into the gilt-edged mirror over the mantel. If I did, I was sure to see steam whistling out my ears.

“I’ll drive you back down,” Shane interposed hastily. “Need me to preheat the oven or anything?”

I swallowed the words What I need is for you to give me that damn ring this instant, or call Kentucky Fried Chicken for your lunch. Instead, I nodded. “Four hundred degrees.”

“Done.”

A few ringless minutes later, we were bumping down Shane’s driveway in his old truck. He had put on a navy cashmere coat to cover his invest-in-me outfit, and his nervousness was increasing to the point that he almost made me jittery.

“I’m going to get you the ring,” he announced preemptively, “I just need to wait until Pam and Page have settled into one of their little squabbles. Then neither one of them will leave her seat to get wine or whatever, and we can do the deed.”

“Shane—”

“I don’t know why Pam’s here,” he interrupted me. “Page told her we were having investors over for lunch, and Pam decided to crash the party. Unless she has a wad of money somewhere that I don’t know about, she’s just another mouth to feed. At best. At worst, she and Page will have a fight.” Slowing the truck, he shot me a worried look. “Do you sometimes have to break up arguments at catered events?”

You mean, I nearly said, like the tussle between you and your wife just two days ago? Instead, I answered, “It happens. Usually I can find a way to distract everybody’s attention. Like inviting them to come eat dessert. Speaking of which, does that mean we’ll now have thirteen for lunch?”

Shane blushed. “Well, yeah. I guess. Sorry. But don’t worry, they always get into such a big fight that they miss dessert. I just wish they’d argue now, and Pam would stomp off before my investors arrive.” He swerved to avoid a pine tree—his driveway was treacherous—and pulled up by Pam’s Audi. From behind her frosted windshield, Liz beeped and waved.

“Just park the Audi on the far side of the garage, near the middle storage shed,” Shane advised. “Then you all can get your vans next to the house.”

I hopped out, mulling over the words middle storage shed. How much stuff could a couple with two ninth-graders have? Enough, apparently, to fill a house and several sheds. I started the Audi on only the second try. Pam wouldn’t have won any awards in the Clean Car Competition, that was for sure. A cereal bowl with hardened flakes clanked back and forth on the carpet in front of the passenger seat; newspapers strewn across the backseat swished forward as I accelerated; a Starbucks cup of long-dead coffee sloshed in the container by the radio. Well, I now knew one thing for certain about Pam: She was a true slob. During the few minutes I let the Audi warm up, I pawed through everything within reach. With Julian in jail, I had no scruples left. Unfortunately, I found nothing about Barry’s murder or anything else that might bear on the case.

I crept up the driveway and pulled Pam’s car carefully to the right of the garage where there were indeed three lovely log storage sheds. Liz piloted my van behind me. Shane trucked her back to her own van while I began unloading supplies. After Liz roared up the driveway and parked beside me, Shane used the plow-blade on his truck to smooth out a parking area in front of the house. Meanwhile, Liz and I quickly trekked the last of our supplies into the kitchen.

One of the gold-and-white-granite countertops held two almost-empty wine bottles. The sisters’ talking and laughing had ratcheted up several decibels. I began to worry. It was only 10:30 A.M. Forget dessert, how sloshed would Pam and Page be by lunch? I shoved this concern aside and relieved Liz of her last box. Within five minutes, we were working side by side in the kitchen.

“If this guy can’t manage to keep a store going, where did he get the money to buy this place?” Liz whispered as we carefully heaved the twenty-plus-pound beef roast into the oven. It would be hot and perfect by the time lunch was ready.

“He inherited it, I think,” I whispered back. “According to Marla, Shane’s gone through a string of bad businesses. Page married him for his money, but the dough’s leaking away. That’s the main reason he’s seeking investors to take his business on-line.”

“Have you ever actually catered an event for Page Stockham?” Liz asked. Her tone indicated that she had, and had lived to tell the tale.

“I thought you didn’t know them,” I protested, still whispering. “I’m only vaguely acquainted with them, through Marla.”

Liz rolled her eyes. “I don’t know them. But I had the misfortune of having to cater for her once.” She hissed: “She is impossible.”

I pressed the button on the nonstick spray can and lightly coated the Stockhams’ indoor grill for the mushroom salad. “I thought you only catered for your corporation.”

“I did,” said Liz, as she organized thirteen soup bowls on large saucers. “But Page was chairing a fund-raising event that my company was hosting. She drove me nuts—nickel-and-diming my department to death, trying to get a more expensive menu for the amount contracted. She kept saying she’d talked to this or that catering company and they could do such-and-such for so much less! Finally I told her I didn’t care, go ahead and hire somebody else. Just be sure to have it OK’d by the corporation. The corporation told her I was their in-house caterer, and she could not hire anyone else and expect them to pay the bills. Plus I was in charge of approving the guest list. I never saw it, and had a floating number of attendees from her, ranging from two to three hundred. In the end, Page invited all her friends, even though they didn’t give a whit about the charity. She acted as if it was her party, thrown just for her and her pals, to whom she talked loudly while the director of the charity made his pitch. ‘Try some of my caviar,’ she urged her pals, once we broke for food. She kept telling them to load up on the barbecued prawns and roast suckling pig, they’d been so difficult for her to get! She used that party to pay off all her social debts, forever.”

“For crying out loud.” The themes of this marriage—of entitlement to money that belonged to others, of treating people who worked for you like slaves, of not paying for what you received—were becoming crystal clear. The Stockhams were arrogant, self-centered rule-breakers who blamed all their problems on others. Had Barry Dean threatened this selfish way of doing things? According to Marla, Barry had discovered The Gadget Guy’s nonpayment of rent, and had demanded compensation. In the parent guidebooks, they call this consequences. Had Barry’s insistence on consequences for the Stockhams cost him his life?

I couldn’t concentrate on this question, because I had to plate up the greens that would form the base for the mushroom salad. Worse, Liz was still regaling me with her tale of Page Stockham.

“So at that point, Bitch Page went behind my back and complained to one of the vice presidents that I’d been uncooperative. She even advised him not to pay my food bills. She claimed I was jacking up the price! She is an insufferable bitch! I hope she doesn’t recognize me today. Maybe my new haircut will help.”

She advised him not to pay my bill…. Well, here we were setting up in the kitchen and I still didn’t have a ring. I glanced around the kitchen: Liz was bringing the Asian stock up to the simmer and unwrapping the dumplings. I drizzled the glistening marinade over the wild mushrooms, and went to look for our host. By golly, I was going to pack everything up and skedaddle if he didn’t pay.

Shane, his mouth drooping, sat in what I hoped was not a drunken stupor on a love seat across the living room from Page and Pam. The sisters’ conversation seemed to be reaching the simmer much faster than our dumpling soup.

“I helped Aunt Linda find the new doctor who did her so much good,” Page was insisting, gesticulating with her wineglass. “I fired that cardiologist who’d misdiagnosed her, and I was the one who ordered new tests and hired her a new cook. You couldn’t be bothered, Pam, because you were too busy trying on nighties for men twenty years your senior—”

“Excuse me, but at least I have a job,” Pam retorted, then slugged down wine. “That’s unlike some people, who live off others’ unearned wealth.”

“Oh, so you’re a communist now?”

“Furthermore,” Pam steamed on, “I didn’t go rifling through Aunt Linda’s cobalt stems until I found the goblet where she hid the diamond pendant—”

“That diamond pendant was stolen!”

“By whom?”

“The cook!”

“Would that be the same cook you hired?”

“I didn’tknow she was a thief!” Page screamed.

Pam took another noisy gulp of Burgundy. “Excuse me, but I think you know all about thieves!”

“Exactly what are you insinuating?”

“You’ve got that pendant and I want to know where it is!”

“Shane,” I said in a low voice. “I’ll need payment before we can proceed.”

Shane’s face was frozen in pain. While the two sisters screamed, he hauled himself out of the love seat and motioned for me to follow him down the hall. Intent on their argument, Pam and Page did not register our departure, which was probably for the best.

“These are the bathrooms, in case clients ask,” he told me, pointing to each side of the hallway. I told him this was good to know. I reached in to flip on the lights of a black-and-silver rest room on one side, and a peach-papered and marble-countered one on the opposite wall. I never broke my stride. I didn’t want to give Shane the chance to get distracted—again.

“OK, now we need to be quiet and quick,” he warned, as he creaked open a door that bore a floral-bordered needlepoint sign: Page’s Place.

“You’re going to take the ring out of your wife’s room?” I asked, incredulous. I looked around the room. Page’s Place was as disheveled as Pam’s Audi. Clothes spilled out of drawers of white-and-gold French Provincial furniture; open closet doors revealed a heap of discarded coats next to a heap of shoes; the plush cream-and-floral carpeting was so paved with discarded stockings and rejected lingerie that it was like a Victoria’s Secret obstacle course.

Like her sister, Page was a dedicated slob.

Shane put his finger to his lips, then paused to listen. Page and Pam were now squabbling over who Aunt Linda would have wanted to have the cobalt.

“I bought the ring for her birthday next month,” Shane told me. “But she always goes through my stuff, and she found it and took it.” His nose wrinkled. “See, one time I had to take one of her presents back and she’d already gone through my stuff to find out what she was getting. When the bills came in, I decided to return one gift, an emerald bracelet. She was furious and…well, you’ve seen how Page is when she’s furious. So now, no matter how good I get at hiding stuff, she gets better at finding it, and she takes her presents, so I won’t decide I’ve been too extravagant and return them. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve gotten better at going through her stuff, so—” He stopped when he saw my mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter?”

“You said we needed to be quiet and quick.”

Shane took long, zigzagging steps across the large room, avoiding discarded outfits as if they were piles of elephant dung. Since my legs weren’t quite as long as his, I had a hard time following him.

“Here we go,” Shane announced, pulling open a drawer dripping with slithery nightgowns. He groped in the back of the drawer for a silk sachet of potpourri. “This’ll just take a sec,” he promised.

He untied the lace drawstring of the sachet, sending bits of dried rose petals fluttering to the floor. His stealthy behavior was making me so nervous that I averted my eyes hastily and looked around the room. Four lacy bras, black, beige, white, and pink, were laid out on the chaise lounge. Clearly, Page hadn’t been able to decide among them. All four were of the amply padded variety. Page Stockham may or may not have been a thief, as her sister claimed, but there was no doubt the woman stretched the truth.

“Here we go,” declared Shane, as he extracted something shiny from the potpourri. More dried petals fluttered to the carpet. He handed me the ring—it was a dazzling trio of jewels: sapphire, diamond, and ruby—and told me to try it on.

“It looks like something for the Fourth of July,” I commented, as I obeyed. The ring was a tad big for me. Not that it mattered, because this was collateral. I took it off and slipped it deep into my skirt pocket.

“Yeah, well,” Shane muttered, as he hastily reassembled the gutted potpourri bag, tucked it back into the drawer, and picked at the dried bits at his feet. “Let’s just hope she doesn’t go looking for it before her birthday.”

“Shane,” I protested, as he hustled me down the hallway. “I really don’t think this—”

“Aunt Linda never intended for you to have the chandelier! We specifically talked about it when I was visiting her!” Pam’s voice shrilled from the living room.

“You mean, visiting her when you were ten?” Page shrieked back.

The doorbell rang. Peeping through the hole, Shane gasped. “It’s four of my investors!” he said, trying to be heard above the yelling. “Can’t you do one of those distractions you mentioned?” he begged me. The ringer bonged again: Page and Pam raised their hollering a notch. “Just do something, will you?” Shane implored desperately.

I zipped into the kitchen, where Liz was spooning out juices and melted fat from the standing rib roast pan. The roast wasn’t quite done, of course, but I really needed to start on the gravy from the drippings Liz was gathering. The doorbell chimed again. OK, first things first. When in doubt, reach for a cliché. I nabbed a pack of matches, hopped up on a chair, teetered perilously toward a stack of bookshelves, and lit the entire pack without closing the cover before striking. Then I thrust my little conflagration up to the kitchen smoke alarm.

Within seconds, the pealing of the alarm made me think I would go prematurely deaf. But the alarm certainly had the desired effect. I heard Pam screeching to Shane for her car keys. Shane, his face stricken, appeared at the kitchen door, while I imitated one of the Broncos’ razzle-dazzle plays by doing a one-handed toss of the keys to him, while keeping my little book of matches held high.

Over the racket Liz cried, “Goldy, what the hell are you doing?” Still, she had the presence of mind to slam the kitchen door shut behind Shane. We heard Pam make a noisy, stamping exit out the front door—so much for keeping the investors out of the fracas—while shouting, “I’ll be back to talk about this some more! I’m not done!” Liz actually giggled.

Next Page’s voice shrieked at the kitchen door, accompanied by her pounding on same. Liz cried, “Please go to a separate part of the house, Mrs. Stockham! We don’t want the smoke smell to wreck your—uh—cobalt stuff! Not to worry! We’ve got the situation under control!”

Page stamped away. I hoped it was not in the direction of Page’s Place, where she might want to try on some of her jewelry to calm herself down. But I had no time to worry about that: The chatter from arriving guests was unmistakable. My mind chattered, too, when a volume on an upper bookshelf snagged my attention. Unfortunately, it was then that the fiery matches reached my fingertips. I yelped and flung the ball of flame toward the sink. It hit the roast, landed in the pan, and ignited. Without thinking, Liz grabbed an open bottle of Burgundy and poured it over the flames, and a genuine explosion rocked the kitchen. I screamed, jumped down from the chair, nabbed an extra-large bottle of Evian, and dumped the contents on our beautiful, blazing, twenty-dollar-a-pound prime beef.

Ad Guys’ Roast Beef and Gravy

4-to 5-pound standing rib roast, prime grade

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Melted unsalted butter, if necessary

¼ cup high-quality Burgundy

¼ cup all-purpose flour

3½ cups homemade beef stock or 2 tablespoons beef bouillon granules dissolved in 3¼ cups boiling waterPreheat the oven to 450°F. Take out a roasting pan with a rack and line the bottom (underneath the rack) with either a very large piece of foil that completely covers the bottom of the pan and can be folded up over the sides or two pieces of foil that have been rolled tightly in the middle to form one large piece. The bottom of the pan should be completely covered with an airtight piece of foil.Use a paper towel to pat the roast dry, then season the roast with the salt and pepper. Place the roast, bone side down, on the rack. Insert an instant-read digital thermometer into the roast so that the sensor is in the middle of the roast.Place the roast in the oven and immediately reduce the oven heat to 325°. Roast until the temperature reads 115°F. (At this point the beef is quite rare, and the cooking is not done yet.) Remove the roast to another pan (even a large pie plate will do) and return it to the oven. (To obtain medium-rare, the roast should be removed when the thermometer reaches 125°F to 130°F; for medium, 135°F to 145°F.) If the thermometer reaches the desired temperature before the gravy is finished, remove the roast to a serving platter and tent it with foil.Drain off the fat in the bottom of the foil-covered pan and measure it; you should have ¼ cup. If you have more, discard it. If you have less, add melted butter until you have ¼ cup. Place this in a sauté pan over low heat.Pour the Burgundy directly into the bottom of the foil-covered roasting pan and let it sit while you start on the gravy.Raise the heat under the sauté pan to medium-low and whisk the flour into the fat. Whisking constantly, cook the flour in the fat until the mixture just begins to bubble and turn color, less than 5 minutes.Using a heatproof plastic spatula, scrape the flavorful brown bits adhering to the foil into the wine. Stir this wine mixture into the cooking fat–flour mixture. Whisking constantly, add the beef stock in a slow stream. When all the stock has been added, taste the gravy and correct the seasoning.Over medium-low to medium heat, whisk and cook the gravy until it thickens and bubbles. Serve hot with the roast beef.Makes 4 to 6 servings

The smoke alarm was still squealing as Liz, now splashing a second bottle of Evian over the still-flaming roast, yelled, “I don’t think they’re going to hire us again!”

In spite of all this, the luncheon came off well. I was disappointed not to have had a chance to talk to Pam about the Barry mess, but wasn’t sure I actually would have been able to. And anyway, my disappointment was allayed when Marla sashayed through the front door, claiming she was taking the place of someone who was sick. Because the luncheon was quite a bit smaller than Monday’s party, we didn’t have the opportunity to share gossip—except when she tiptoed into the kitchen to say Page and Shane had started to fight again, and that Page had stalked out. A few moments later, I saw Page’s Audi—a duplicate of her sister’s—whiz away.

Without his wife there to scrutinize and criticize his every move, Shane was unexpectedly brilliant. His enthusiastic pitch about The Gadget Guy On-Line reminded me of Tom Sawyer’s whitewash-the-fence psychology. Only a select few were good enough to do this job, and if you wanted to be in on this opportunity to invest, you were just going to have to get in line! Shane’s enthralled guests all beamed and asked, Was there an upper limit on how much one could invest? All, that is, except for Marla, who gave me a dramatic wink.

The food, despite our disastrous start, was out of this world, if I do say so myself. As if on cue, the snow began to flutter down again as Liz and I ferried out the steaming, fragrant bowls of soup dotted with floating dumplings. Liz stoked the fire in the dining room fireplace while I served Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad. Since Liz and I had learned one of Julia Child’s lessons well—Never criticize your own food at a party—we were able to serve “Lightly Smoked Prime Rib” without batting an eye or even giggling. The investors gobbled it all up, right to the Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler, of which, like the investment, everyone demanded large pieces.

While we were serving the lunch, however, my curiosity began to nag. During the ring-stealing and fire-starting escapades, I’d seen a couple of things that had perplexed me, and I wanted to look into them—OK, snoop—a bit more. There were a few too many things about the Stockhams that were bothering me—the vicious way they fought, the nasty games they played, their ruthless habit of blaming others for their financial problems. All these, plus their current money mess brought on by The Gadget Guy’s eviction from Westside, were making me wonder if they were more involved in the death of Barry Dean than the cops suspected. Anything to try to help Julian, I said to myself, as I scooped globes of ice cream.

While Liz handed out seconds of ice cream and cobbler, I climbed back onto the kitchen chair and turned my attention to the bookshelves. The lowest shelf contained the usual assortment of gourmet cookbooks people bought these days but rarely used. All looked brand-new. Above them was another array of cookbooks, these of the specialty-fad type, featuring Cooking With Bananas the Fiji Way, Creative Tofu Touches, and Bread Soups from Around the World (spare me). My guess was that these books hadn’t ever been opened.

But above those, I’d spotted something that hadn’t quite fit. As Tom was always telling me, that’s what you should look for. Off the top shelf, I pulled a well-worn copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, otherwise known as The Big Book. Was Shane or Page an alcoholic? Or thinking he or she might be? The way Page had been hitting the wine this morning might indicate so. But why keep this reading material in the kitchen, as if to hide it? Still perched on the chair, I opened the book and caught two pieces of paper before they fluttered to the floor.

Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad

4 ounces Portobello mushrooms (about 1 large or medium-size)

4 ounces shiitake mushrooms

1 ounce oyster mushrooms

3 large garlic cloves, peeled and pressed

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons best-quality medium-dry sherry (recommended brand: Dry Sack)

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Nonstick cooking spray

6 cups field greens (mesclun)To clean the mushrooms, wipe them carefully with damp paper towels. Remove the stems from the Portobello and shiitake mushrooms and discard. Using a sharp knife, lightly trim the gills from the Portobello mushroom and slice into 1 x 1-inch pieces. Slice the shiitakes in half. Weigh the mushrooms; you should have about 8 ounces total.In a large glass bowl, whisk together the garlic, mustard, sherry, and vinegar until well combined. Pour the oil into this mixture in a steady stream, whisking all the while. Place the mushrooms into this marinade and mix very carefully to coat all sides.Spray a grill with nonstick spray and preheat the grill for 5 minutes, while the mushrooms marinate. Do not over-marinate the mushrooms, or their delicate flavor will be lost.Grill the mushrooms over medium-high to high heat for about 3 to 4 minutes per side, or until cooked through. Serve immediately on a bed of field greens.Makes 4 servings as a side dish, 2 servings as a main dish

The first was a list of the Twelve Steps, but something about it was different. I read, We admitted we were powerless over our spending, that our lives had become unmanageable. I turned to the second sheet. Shopaholics Anonymous Meeting Times, the heading announced. Hmm. I’d heard of Debtors Anonymous, but not this. Meetings were held at two times, on two days—ten o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening Mondays and Thursdays, in the—I had to read this part twice—shoppers’ lounge at Westside Mall? Hello? Would you have an AA meeting in a liquor store?

Hearing Liz approach, I shoved the book back into its spot, then scrambled off the chair.

“Ten more coffees, two more teas,” she announced, giving me a quizzical glance as I shoved the chair back into place. “Want to refill the coffeepot?”

“I already did, and it’s percolating,” I replied. “I’m going to the little girls’ room,” I added.

Liz bustled around, working on the hot drinks. Meanwhile, I sprinted down the hall, turned on the fan in the peach-colored bathroom, and, still standing in the hall, shut the door hard. Then I whipped into Page Stockham’s room, aka Page’s Place.

Unless I was very wrong, I’d glimpsed something here, too. Something—no, make that things—that I’d seen before, but in a wholly different context. If I was right, these items were of interest not only to me but maybe to law enforcement. I tiptoed over the clothes-strewn floor, bypassed the chaise lounge with its multicolored array of bras, and only cast a cursory glance at the armoire with its jumble of jewelry. As quietly as possible, I eased the bifold closet door to its fullest open position, then flipped on the light.

I had not been wrong. There, on Page Stockham’s closet floor, was a jumbled mountain of shoes and shoe-boxes. Red, pink, black, navy, beige, and white pumps spilled from cardboard and tissue. Each and every one was of the same style, featuring a cutout toe.

The last time I’d seen this style shoe, hundreds of them had been littered around the body of Barry Dean.

CHAPTER 15

Damn, I thought as I stared in astonishment down at the footwear. What exactly did this mean? That Page Stockham was the Imelda Marcos of the Rockies?

Logistics: Page hadn’t physically attacked Shane; she’d acted in self-defense. She must have rejoined Marla after being hauled out of the lounge, because I knew that Marla, Ellie, and Page had been shopping together, even buying shoes, at that mammoth sale. But how could Page Stockham have bought so many of one style, and not seen Barry Dean Monday night? Forget seeing; could she have done something else? Was it possible that Page had stolen my knife, and in that corner of the shoe department that the cameras couldn’t see, killed Barry herself? Maybe she hadn’t quite succeeded in eliminating her husband’s financial enemy, but had shoved him into the cabinet still moaning, then come back to finish the job, and bop me in the process?

I squatted down and stared at the shoes, thinking hard. What had Marla told me? That she, Page, and Ellie had left the mall together Monday evening, just before nine. I’d found Barry just after nine. In the nightmare that followed, I’d ruled each of the three women out as being the person who deserved to be behind bars, instead of Julian. Where had the women gone when they left the mall? Had they been together? I doubted the police had even questioned them, because they hadn’t been in the shoe department when Julian found me. I doubted I’d find a receipt with a “time of sale” in the jumble of footwear. How long had Barry been in that Prince & Grogan shoe cabinet, anyway?

My cell phone bleated in my apron pocket. I leaped up and almost careened onto Page’s chaise lounge. I grabbed the phone and turned off the power. If Page or Shane or anybody, for that matter, found me snooping around in a client’s closet, my catering career would be over.

Strolling officiously down the hall to the kitchen, I popped back into the bathroom. There I turned the fan off. Back in the kitchen, I leaned against the side-by-side refrigerator, repowered the cell, and checked the incoming calls. Apparently, somebody at Hulsey, Jones, Macauley & Wilson wanted to talk to me in the worst way.

“Liz,” I said when she came in with an empty cobbler pan, “how’s it going? Sorry to have been gone so long.”

“They love it.” When Liz’s eyes twinkled, her face seemed to light up, too. “They’re demanding the recipe. With Page gone, it’s a real party.” She began filling the sink with soapy water, and I realized how much I appreciated one particular perk of success: being able to delegate to a trustworthy lieutenant. I said impulsively: “Liz, I’m very thankful we’re working together.”

She smiled. “Me, too. I haven’t received any calls on my cell since we started over here. But… was that your cell phone I heard?” she asked, lifting one of her silvery eyebrows.

“Don’t tell me you heard it.”

“It wasn’t for me, was it? I mean, just on the off-chance.”

Of course, I knew what was worrying her. “No,” I replied. “It wasn’t about Teddy. It was… my lawyer.”

“Everything’s all right?”

“Oh, yeah.” If it wasn’t, I’d probably be the last to know. I checked my watch: one-thirty. While Liz whisked back into the dining room, I began rinsing out and packing up our containers. The window over the sink revealed that the thickening snow was coming down at an acute slant. This was a sure sign of a fast-moving storm. Liz reappeared, her eyes alight with laughter.

“Two of those widows are under Shane’s spell. He looks like he’s in a state of sexual ecstasy, just waiting for those checks to roll in.”

I smiled. Maybe I wouldn’t have to hold on to Page’s ring for very long, after all. Just don’t ask me to contemplate the safety of those infatuated widows’ investments. In any event, that was beyond my control. What I really needed to know was what was going on with Steve Hulsey, Esquire.

“Look, Liz. As I said, that message was from my criminal defense lawyer. Can you handle clearing while I give him a call?”

“Of course,” she replied cheerfully, as she placed a stack of dirty dishes beside the sink. “I wouldn’t want to miss the widows writing those checks. Fifty thou each.” She glanced outside, then added, “Listen, Goldy, why don’t you let me finish up everything here? It’ll provide some distraction from obsessing about Teddy. Anyway, aren’t you chaperoning a school field trip today?”

“I’m picking Arch and his pals up at their school at four.” I sighed, dreading another chilly encounter with my son. “Thanks for reminding me. Maybe I better see if the attorney wants to huddle before then.”

She nodded and moved back into the dining room. I dialed Steve Hulsey’s number.

“He wants you to meet him at the jail as soon as possible,” his secretary informed me, her voice crisp, efficient, and not at all friendly. “He needs to speak to you about Julian Teller.”

“Why does he need to talk to me about Julian?”

“Mr. Hulsey has taken on his case. Mr. Hulsey is down at the jail now. Mr. Hulsey needs to see you.”

I couldn’t count to ten, so I counted to three. “I’m catering way up by the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve.” I could hear the secretary tapping away at a keyboard. Clearly, my answer wasn’t worth her full attention. I raised my voice a bit. “The snow’s coming down pretty hard. It’ll take me at least half an hour to get down to the jail. Can’t you please tell me what this is about? Can’t I talk to Steve over the phone?”

“Mr. Hulsey will be waiting for you in the jail lobby.” She disconnected before I could protest. I threw the cell phone onto the counter.

At that moment, Marla tiptoed into the kitchen, coffee cup in hand. She wore a royal blue and black wool suit, an onyx and sapphire necklace and matching earrings, and royal blue shoes. She gave me her cat-who-swallowed-the-canary look and filled her cup with coffee from the big percolator. “So,” she began, “the last time I saw you with Liz Fury, there was a bit of a disagreement going on. Now you two are all cozy. What happened?”

“Oh, she’s having problems with her son. In case you haven’t noticed, I have the same kind of problems. Listen,” I rushed on, “Monday night, how did you meet up with Page after she was ejected from the lounge?”

Marla’s eyes widened. “Ellie and I just had to know what had happened, so we went looking for Page at the mall’s security office. The cops had just released her, so we again heard how much she hated and despised Barry Dean and her husband. She was really ready to shop then, so we all headed toward the shoe sale!”

“OK, but were you shopping together? I mean, the whole time in Prince and Grogan?”

Marla crinkled her nose and slurped her coffee. “We all bought a ton of shoes, if that’s what you mean. Why? Does this have something to do with Julian? I’ll do anything to help.”

“I know Ellie went home with Elizabeth Harrington. Did you and Page drive back to Aspen Meadow together?” I pressed.

“No, why? The cops had told Shane they’d take him home, Page said. He’d left his BMW there at the mall, so I drove Page to it. She said she was bringing it back up here.”

“When was that? Eight-thirty? Eight forty-five?” I asked breathlessly.

Marla moved her wrist back and forth; the diamonds on her Rolex sparkled. “It’s a nice watch, Goldy, but I feel it’s gauche always to be checking it. Sorry, I don’t know what time it was.”

“How about Ellie? When did she leave?”

“For crying out loud, Goldy! She’s our friend! Why do you want to know all this?”

“Just tell me!”

Marla expelled breath. “We saw an old friend, Elizabeth Harrington, at the shoe sale. You remember, the widow of Brian Harrington?”

“Right, Ellie told me she was with her.”

“Elizabeth lives near Ellie, so she offered to take her home. Around nine, I guess. Why does it matter?”

“Just something else I’m trying to figure out for Tom,” I said lightly, as Liz reappeared at the kitchen door.

Marla sighed at the appearance of Liz, rolled her eyes at me, and trounced out of the kitchen.

Four minutes later, I had thanked Liz for both her hard work and her offer to clean up by writing her another check, the second one I’d given her that day. I quickly explained that I was sure old Shane wasn’t going to cough up an extra gratuity. Even with all of Liz’s own problems, she actually laughed. I thanked her again and hugged her.

Four additional heavy, wet inches of snow had accumulated since we’d arrived. At the end of the driveway, I looked right and left to check for traffic—there wasn’t any—and glanced up into the Preserve. The curtain of flakes had thinned; maybe we were experiencing a mere flurry. Snow fell softly on millions of rows of perfectly frosted pines. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and made me feel a bit better. At least for a while.

“Julian Teller passed the second polygraph,” Steve Hulsey informed me in the lobby of the jail. His voice was a deep wheeze, like a snake with bronchitis. This day, he was wearing an impeccable dark beige silk suit. “But he still will be formally charged—arraigned—on Friday morning.” He loomed over me. “Second-degree murder, a heat-of-passion crime.”

“What are you talking about?” Denial rose in my throat like a scream. The sergeant on duty, a pudgy woman with a face like a raisin cookie, watched our interchange with, I imagined, one finger on the button you use to summon officers into the lobby. But I couldn’t help myself. “There’s more to Barry’s murder than you think!” I snapped.

Hulsey held up a hand, his face as cold and impassive as a stone statue’s. I flinched. “Calm down,” he commanded. “They’re telling me you’re not a suspect anymore. So I’m taking over on this case now. Please listen calmly while I tell you what’s going to happen.”

I bit back another protest, crossed my arms, and glared at the gleaming white tiles on the lobby wall. Couldn’t they have made this place look a bit less like a bathroom?

“They’re still developing evidence in the case,” Hulsey told me, his voice back to the bronchilian reptile. “And the county attorney’s office and the detectives are going over that videotape from the party in the shoppers’ lounge with a microscope. Julian is on it, having not one but two heated arguments with the victim. And let’s not forget, the store security guard found Mr. Teller with his hand on the murder weapon. Friday, ten in the morning, is the time of the arraignment.”

I nodded. I’d been to one of The Jerk’s arraignments. There I hadn’t heard justice being served; I’d heard a dispassionate declaration of war between the prosecution and the defense.

“With second-degree murder, they’ll probably let Julian out,” Hulsey said, a bit more gently, but with a peek at his watch. “For a price, of course. Mrs. Korman is seeing about bail.”

“Mrs. Korman?” I said. Of course: Marla. I blinked and tried to focus. The lawyer’s voice seemed far away.

“Marla Korman.” Hulsey could not disguise his impatience. “Your friend, the other ex-wife of Dr. John Richard Korman? You’re probably looking at bail of a million dollars. Bond’ll be a hundred thousand.” I nodded blankly. A hundred thousand dollars. “One more thing,” Hulsey added briskly. “Since you’re not a suspect anymore, you can visit Julian. That’s it, then. I need to go.” He handed me another one of his cards (I was accumulating quite a collection), grasped his briefcase, and sailed out the doors.

I watched Hulsey make a determined tramp through the snow to his Jag. OK, Julian was going to be arraigned. I shook my head. Our wonderful friend was suffocating behind bars. No matter what it cost, we had to get him out on bail.

I signed in to see Julian and was sent to the same phone-containing cubicle as before. What was I going to say to him that could possibly cheer him up? You could be out on bail pretty soon? Like Hulsey, I snuck a peek at my watch: almost half past two. Would Julian feel hurt when I said I could only stay for thirty minutes? Tears stung my eyes when he strolled through the door. I cemented a smile in place and sternly ordered myself to buck up. I couldn’t help him if I was slobbering.

“Hey, Goldy!” Julian sang into the phone. His face was even thinner and more haggard than before. But either he was doing a great acting job or his spirits had taken a turn for the better. “Didn’t expect you here!” He pulled a torn piece of paper from his pocket and leaned forward in his chair. “Sorry if you had to wait. My lawyer just left—”

“Yeah, I heard about it—”

“And then I called Arch on his lunch hour—”

Julian’s face cracked in a broad smile. He glanced down at the sheet in his hand. “This paper is my lifeline! It has the numbers of everyone I know. Arch told me to call him on his cell at certain times. So we talk three or four times a day. At his lunch hour, between his classes, like that. It’s great. He told me you were taking him to the anatomy field trip. I did that at EPP. The smell of formaldehyde’s really gross, by the way. Prepare yourself.”

I thought of Julian’s adoptive parents in Utah. Had he called them yet? I doubted it. “Yes, but—”

“And then you’ll never guess whose message I just answered!” His tone was beyond bubbly; it was feverish. No talk of the arraignment. No talk of the future. I swallowed and remembered my admonition to the parents of my Sunday school kids: Sometimes they just need you to listen.

“Kim Fury!” Julian exclaimed. I tried not to look surprised as he continued: “Kim was a classmate of mine at EPP. We got to know each other pretty well, since we were both science kids among all the rich brats. Kim’s really smart. Finished her B.S. in three years. Now she’s doing graduate work at C.U. in computer science. Anyway, Kim is really pissed off with her brother for running away with her mom’s credit cards.”

I tried to look as if I understood where all this was going. But I was worried. Julian was beyond both bubbly and feverish. He was manic. How was I going to have a logical strategy-planning session with him?

“Anyway. Kim’s sure her brother Teddy had something to do with this Dean thing, and that’s why he skipped! But that’s not all. She says her mother will do anything to keep Teddy from facing the consequences of his actions. Like this one time, he swiped a purse that had some car keys in it, and when he tried to start the car it jumped forward because it was still in gear—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whose car? Ellie McNeely’s?”

“I don’t know,” he rushed on. “But I was thinking, maybe—”

It was time to interrupt. “Julian,” I said. “Please. Just take a deep breath, OK?”

Immediately the spark of hope in his eyes went out. I felt a pang of guilt.

“Sorry!” I said hastily. “But I need to take notes if I’m going to get all this down. Do you know what kind of car it was?” I dug into my purse for an index card and pencil.

“I don’t know that either.” His voice was barely audible.

“Did Kim have anything concrete to share about Teddy and Barry Dean? Something that might help us?”

“No.”

“Well, give me her number, will you?” I scribbled the number he recited.

Julian looked up at the ceiling. “I passed the second lie detector test. Here’s what’s funny—it didn’t matter. I had a wicked headache from caffeine withdrawal, so I’ve drunk about eight cups of jail coffee since the test. Stuff tastes like motor oil.”

“We’re going to get you out of here—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, right, sure.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “Sorry to be so jazzed up. Listen, I still don’t want my folks to know about this yet. I’ll call down to Bluff when I’m ready, I promise.” He straightened. “The formal charge on Friday will be second-degree murder. You probably heard. It’s different, somehow, from that advisement on Tuesday. It all feels out of control.” He shook his head. Again the sight of his thin face and unkempt hair felt like a blade in my heart. “I … I feel so bad about the bail money,” he went on. “I feel so bad about everything. Seeing that knife in Mr. Dean was like noticing an electrical wire down on a wet road. You know you’re not supposed to touch it. But your only thought is that you want to help, and then as soon as you touch it, you’re either dead, in the case of the wire, or screwed, in the case of the knife—”

I leaned forward and urged, “Julian. Don’t do this to yourself. As you said, all you tried to do was help, and that was the right thing to do. You are innocent of this crime. And we’re going to prove it.” I managed what I hoped was a courageous smile. “I promise to ask Tom to look into Kim Fury’s allegation about her brother.” And to look into my own questions about the whereabouts of Ellie McNeely and Page Stockham from quarter to nine to nine, and why Page had ended up buying so many of a certain kind of shoe, I added silently.

Julian rubbed his forehead. “I don’t really want Teddy to get into trouble.” He was suddenly restless. “Look, thanks for coming. Have fun at Arch’s field trip.” Then he hung up and walked away. He didn’t look back.

Snow fell steadily as I drove up to Elk Park Prep. My muscles ached and my stomach growled. I had had nothing to eat except a reheated chocolate croissant (one of Julian’s creations from the freezer) and double espresso. My mind jumped around: Page Stockham and her shoes. Liz Fury fretting over her troubled (and missing) son. Julian, alone in jail.

First things first. I punched in the phone number Julian had given me for Kim Fury in Boulder. No answer. I left a message identifying myself and asking her to call. Then I tried Tom, who was off somewhere, and brought him up to speed on the shoes I’d found heaped in Page’s closet. Had the cops checked the alibis of these two women, Page Stockham and Ellie McNeely, for the time of Barry’s murder? Finally, there was Kim Fury’s report of her brother stealing a car. Was he aware of any of this? I wanted to know. Had Teddy been a suspect in the theft of Ellie’s car? And finally, had the cops found anything at the Elk Park Prep portable toilet?

At quarter to four, I pulled off the interstate at the Aspen Meadow exit. I had to pick up my own son plus four other boys, drive back down the mountain, and endure an anatomy class. I was going to pass out if I didn’t have something to eat.

To my surprise, there was no line at our little burg’s drive-through espresso place. Through the thickening swirl of snowflakes, I ordered a hot croissant ham-and-Swiss sandwich for myself, plus six biscotti and six large hot chocolates. Yes, extra-hot for the cocoa, and yes, with whipped cream. Extra whipped cream. I accepted the treats gratefully. Times of trauma, I reflected as I bit into the delicious sandwich—flaky pastry surrounding hot, thinly sliced Danish ham, just-melted Jarlsberg, and a hint of Dijon mustard—demand comfort food. I gunned the van toward Arch’s school, secure in the knowledge that when I’d finished wolfing down the sandwich, I had a cup of steaming, cream-topped cocoa waiting. Is there any better comfort food than chocolate? I think not.

Outside the Upper School, I pulled the van behind a line of Mercedes, Jags, Audis, four-wheel-drive Lexuses, and late-model BMW’s. In the prep school big-spender environment, I knew that my van, with its emblazoned logo Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! gave Arch no end of anguish. The parents who did not know my son attended EPP undoubtedly thought I was there to serve gourmet hot dogs, maybe at that day’s volleyball game.

Arch and a group of boys, their jackets unzipped and their wool hats askew, tumbled out of the school doors. Steam issued from their mouths as they hollered and flung quickly scooped snowballs at each other. To avoid enemy missiles, they ran and slid expertly across the snowy ice. Seeing them free and happy made me think of Julian, trapped in jail. I shuddered.

“Please say you brought us something to eat!” Arch exclaimed as he and his pals heaved their Sherpa-worthy backpacks into the van’s rear. “We’re starving! And freezing!”

“Hot chocolate and biscotti!” I called and received a deafening but grateful chorus of Oh, yeah!

“Mom, thanks,” Arch murmured uncharacteristically, as he balanced his treat and surreptitiously leaned forward from the backseat, so his friends couldn’t hear. Well, maybe my request for a little courtesy had hit its mark. That was two nice things he’d said to me in twenty-four hours. I glowed.

“This is how a cadaver’s bone breaks,” called one of the boys, as he snapped his biscotto in two.

“Oh, yeah?” my son replied. “This cocoa? It’s the color of the inside of the liver.”

I placed my hot chocolate firmly in the cup holder and turned my attention to the road.

During the drive, the boys joked mercilessly about the dissection and who was going to puke first. I clenched my teeth and decided not to accompany the boys inside. I had calls to make and a stomach to calm. But once in the hospital parking lot, the anatomy teacher hailed the van and said she was hoping all the moms could accompany the class, at least for the first ten minutes. I gulped the rest of my cocoa (for strength), hopped out carefully onto the ice, and told myself to buck up. After all, I’d seen corpses before, hadn’t I?

As we filed into the small, windowless room, the odor of formaldehyde hit me like a slap. Undoubtedly kept as a sterile environment, the hospital classroom reminded me of the Furman County Morgue. A sheet draped the body, which lay on a metal table. Rows of gleaming medical instruments sat at the ready on a nearby wheeled shelf. I took a deep breath—not a smart idea, as the horrid odor flooded my lungs—and did a yoga centering exercise.

No matter how you tell yourself to detach from your feelings, it’s impossible not to be apprehensive and sad when faced with a dead body. Once, the chilled flesh under this sheet had been a child, had played, and loved, and been loved. I shivered. When the teacher pulled back the sheet from the dead man’s face, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried the yoga exercise again. When I reopened my eyes, the corpse’s gray face and dark head of hair came into view. I slid my eyes around the group of students. Their bravado had evaporated. Instead, looks of fear, horror, and shock registered on the kids’ faces. A boy and a girl bolted from the room simultaneously. When the boy threw up on the linoleum floor outside the dissection room, the girl, who was racing to the ladies’, noisily followed suit.

After ten minutes of cleaning up, settling down, and comforting from the nurses and the teacher, the red-faced pair rejoined the class. Quite uncharacteristically, their classmates made no fun, but patted their peers on the back and murmured that they’d almost blown lunch, too.

Once things had calmed down, the teacher explained to the sickly-looking-but-attentive class that the subject was a middle-aged male, a diabetic with heart disease who’d died in his sleep in a small-town motel at the southwestern edge of Colorado. No family had claimed the body. The county coroner had determined the cause and manner of death, that is, that the man had died of a heart attack. There were no signs of a struggle, no foul play was suspected, et cetera. Since the unclaimed body was of a relatively young man who hadn’t been too fat, too thin, or a drug user, the Pueblo County Coroner, instead of doing an autopsy, had contacted the state anatomical board to offer the corpse as a donation for study. The board had accepted the specimen.

I steeled myself as the teacher gently peeled back the sheet. The kids gripped one another’s arms and turned even more pale, but managed to keep their equilibrium. I was proud of them. After a moment, they began to study the specimen, thank God. It took courage to pull out their notebooks, turn academic attention toward the corpse, and start acting as if this really was a lab, and not hell.

The dead man had been short and stocky, with a flat abdomen and wide shoulders. Well-developed muscles had strained under skin that was now as gray as the trunk of a dead tree. Long, thin black hair curled over the cadaver’s ears. An unremarkable face was distinguished by a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. The teacher droned on, explaining that at one point this man, an insulin-dependent diabetic, had suffered from gangrene. The effects of that disease were still visible. The class nodded, took notes, and donned surgical gloves while my eyes traveled the length of the body.

And then I gasped.

To distract the students from my gaffe, the teacher hastily murmured about how they needed to check their notebooks carefully, that they needed to follow the procedure they had been taught. I pressed my lips together and forced myself to look again at the cadaver’s right foot.

Yes, this man had once been someone’s son, had loved and played. He’d also once worked as a construction manager at Westside Mall. Unless I was very much mistaken, the deceased was Lucas No-toe Holden.

CHAPTER 16

I made a hand sign to the teacher, mouthing that I’d be right back. The poor woman nodded at me distractedly as I tore out of the classroom, no doubt certain I, too, was about to be sick. In my distress, I nevertheless remembered that cell phones were prohibited in hospitals. A phone, I thought desperately, I need a pay phone. Tom will know what to do.

I raced at a clippety-clop down a linoleum-floored hall with echoing pastel-painted walls. The phone booth, however, boasted walls, a floor, and ceiling completely covered with carpet. It was so quiet I felt paranoid as I whispered my frantic discovery to Tom.

“Goldy, the sheriff’s department can’t touch that body,” Tom replied calmly when I’d finished. “The only person who can deal with it is the county coroner.”

“But… what about the hospital? Can’t they at least confirm this guy’s identity? I mean, if it is Holden, that has to mean something. Maybe someone murdered him. Maybe the person who murdered Barry killed No-toe—”

“Hold on a sec.” Tom called across to an associate, asking him to call the coroner’s office and check if the cadaver now in the Lutheran Hospital teaching lab was Lucas Holden. In the distance, someone promised to get right on it. Tom returned to me.

“Miss G., the hospital’s not going to know the name of the donor.” He was tapping computer keys. I rubbed my forehead. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe there were a lot of corpses with missing toes, and I was going overboard. “Yeah,” Tom said, “we’re still looking for Lucas Holden since it’s an open case of a missing person. The coroner will talk to the anatomical board first, I can guarantee you that. He’ll find out exactly how and where they got this body, then send a staff member over to the hospital. OK? But if this guy with the missing toe died of natural causes in a remote area, that really doesn’t tell us much. Well, except why we haven’t been able to find him.”

“If it is Holden, he was a diabetic. If Holden had to inject insulin, he could have been given a shot of something else, something to precipitate a heart attack. Heroin, say. They didn’t do an autopsy, remember.”

“Miss G., please. The anatomical board won’t accept a cadaver where there’s any suspicion of foul play. And you also have to ask yourself why someone would want to kill this Holden. If he was an insulin-dependent diabetic with heart disease, any doctor is going to say you’d expect him to drop dead at the first opportunity. I’m not trying to be negative here. It’s just the truth.”

“Maybe Holden saw something,” I insisted stubbornly. “Maybe he knew something. There must be a link. And you are being negative.” My fingers drummed the vertical carpet. “Did you get anything back on the Page Stockham shoe situation? I just found out Page separated from Marla and Ellie in the parking lot that night.”

He inhaled, an attempt to be patient. “The three women did tell us they were at the shoe sale, Goldy. They all agree they left just before nine. If they hadn’t bought shoes, I’d be suspicious. But I’ll mention to the guys that I think Page Stockham should be questioned again. If she doesn’t have an alibi for the time Barry was killed, and if she was a bona fide enemy of his, they’ll be interested. And before you ask, the Teddy Fury failed car-stealing incident involved a VW bug.”

“But Kim Fury said—”

“You yourself told me that Kim the sister and Teddy the brother had an argument about one of Liz’s cars on Monday. Nobody here has any idea where Teddy Fury is at the moment. My guess would be he’s getting as far from that sister as possible.”

I felt derailed. But I persisted. “I saw Hulsey at the jail. Any idea why they don’t consider me a suspect anymore?”

“Maybe they believe you. Your story doesn’t have holes. Only the guitar has holes. Should I be out looking for another present for Arch, by the way?”

Guilt thudded against my chest. “Sure,” I said, and gulped. “Great. Thanks.”

“No sweat. So, what about Hulsey?”

“He’s representing Julian now, and says the charge at the arraignment will be second-degree murder. Bail is set at a million. Julian passed the second polygraph, by the way.”

“I heard.”

I thought of the seconds ticking by while the kids dissected Lucas Holden, maybe destroying valuable evidence that might free Julian. Had Tom’s deputy reached the coroner? Or was I, like Julian, becoming both manic and desperate?

My thoughts whirled. Ellie’s stolen Lexus had been rammed into Barry’s Mercedes. That seemed like too much of a coincidence to attribute the burglary to a garden-variety car thief. Plus, somebody had tried to get rid of Ellie last night. That had not been an accident. Plus, somebody had been driving that dump truck on Monday. Somebody had definitely tried to kill Barry in the West-side Mall parking lot. And, hours later, somebody had succeeded in killing him.

“Tom, getting back to Ellie’s purse. Suppose Barry’s new wannabe girlfriend, Pam Disharoon, had been watching Ellie. Pam’s incredibly competitive. Say she saw her opportunity to nab the purse Teddy dumped. Could Pam have crashed Ellie’s car into Barry’s, picked up the cuff links, and later driven the runaway truck? All to make Ellie look bad in Barry’s eyes? Then when Barry said he was sticking with Ellie, Pam stabbed him.”

“Mm, I’d probably believe anything of Pam Disharoon. That woman has been difficult.”

Visions of the cadaver abruptly intruded. “Tom, can you stay on top of this cadaver question? To help Julian? Please?”

Tom made his tone kind. “I promise. Don’t worry, we can handle this. But I do have one thing that might interest you.” I heard him shuffle papers. “A lawyer called us this morning, guy from a firm in Denver. Says his client is offering us evidence about the Barry Dean case, but only in exchange for immunity from prosecution by another governmental agency.”

“You mean, immunity from a federal agency? As in, Make the IRS leave me alone?” My heart started to thump.

“Probably. Happens all the time. Only the IRS and other federal agencies don’t prosecute. Not technically, anyway. They turn all their stuff over to a government attorney, who makes or doesn’t make a case.”

I exhaled. “What kind of evidence was this guy offering?”

“The attorney says his client will tell us why Dean had headaches.”

“You mean, the client knows who pushed Barry down?”

“Probably. And it looks as if the guys are going to take the deal.”

While he mused aloud on the immunity question, I debated about confessing to my pill-bottle-in-the-apron discovery. It was finding the Vicodin that had spurred me to get the medical records faxed to me. But I hadn’t actually told Tom about the Vicodin yet. If I showed Tom the pills, was there any way I’d be able to avoid being charged with evidence-tampering? If the cops knew about Barry’s headaches and their cause, would they really care so much about the painkillers themselves? I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Tom use my clarified butter, where I’d stashed the pills. I didn’t think so.

“Uh, well,” I stammered. “Just let me know about the coroner, will you?”

Tom paused. “You, uh, you don’t know anything more about this headache deal, do you? I mean, I know you’ve… reviewed Dean’s records.”

I gnawed the inside of my cheek, remembering my forging exercise to get Barry’s medical records. “Sorry. Listen, are you going to be home for dinner? I… have a couple of new theories about… this and that.”

“I wish I didn’t have to say ‘I knew it.’”

“I’ll explain it all later, promise. See you at six.” I bade him good-bye and hung up. Sometime in the next few hours, I had to figure out how I was going to present to Tom all the stuff I’d kept from him. My own head began to hurt.

When I showed up at the classroom door, the teacher slipped out and asked if I was all right. I nodded. She informed me that the students had just started on the cadaver’s spleen.

“Is there any way,” I asked, “that you could wait? There could be a question from the coroner’s office—”

“Wait? Wait for what? The class has waited for this trip the entire semester. If we don’t proceed, we won’t finish. We can’t wait.”

“Well, it’s just that I… thought I might have recognized the cadaver.”

The teacher’s face turned as ashen as the corpse’s. “Oh, dear! Mrs. Schulz, please! I really have to get back to my class. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll just…go to my van,” I faltered. And hope for whoever Tom’s deputy could muster to put an end to this, before more evidence was destroyed. I knew I couldn’t go back into the lab. Say the coroner did appear and demanded, “Which mom called about this cadaver?” Arch would never speak to me again.

Instead, I sat in my van and tried to raise Pam Disharoon on the cell. No answer. I gave up when the anatomy class rushed out the hospital doors. The five boys I’d brought squeezed into the van in high spirits. All were eager for a gross-out competition. The snow had turned to slush on the interstate, so I concentrated on my driving. It was better than listening to merrily delivered descriptions of each organ, and how it was not as bad as the dead bat they’d found on a Scouts expedition or the dead elk their dad had scraped off the Rover bumper.

To my great surprise, Tom was already home when Arch and I got there, putting the finishing touches on a cake with shiny chocolate icing. Comforted by his presence in the kitchen, I gave him a big hug, washed my hands, and got to work myself. While I defrosted stock and sautéed mushrooms, he told me he hadn’t heard anything back yet on any of my inquiries. I tried to put the case out of my head as I energetically chopped vegetables for the salad I’d intended to serve at the Stockhams’ lunch before changing the menu.

Because salads of chopped ingredients were all the rage among the Shop-Till-You-Drop set these days, I’d dubbed the creation Chopping Spree Salad. First I placed some hearts of palm into water to remove the brine, then assembled the rest of the ingredients. Since I was a great fan of limes for tanginess, I’d decided to feature lime in both the grilled chicken and the dressing itself. I sliced several of the bright green citrus globes and juiced them, then pounded fresh chicken breasts between layers of plastic wrap. After I’d whisked together a marinade of lime juice and olive oil, I carefully placed the breasts into it. Then I rewashed my hands and set about slicing and dicing a mountain of crisp romaine lettuce, flavorful vine-grown tomatoes, crunchy, barely sweet jicama, and fat scallions. Yum. While I preheated the indoor grill, I pulverized fresh and ground herbs in my mini food processor and whisked them with more lime juice, a bit of mayonnaise, and a touch of cream. Tasting the spicy mélange, I decided to add a bit more tang by grating in some aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. The result was a rich, sharp ranch-style dressing that would have sent Escoffier spinning in his grave. So what, I thought smugly, as I toasted pine nuts for a finishing touch. Soon the luscious scent of the grilling chicken brought Tom and Arch clomping back into the kitchen.

At six, Arch, Tom, and I sat down to a meal of steaming cream of mushroom soup, heated cornmeal rolls, and dressing-topped slices of hot grilled chicken over an enormous bed of crisp, fresh, sliced, and diced vegetables. Arch and Tom could not have cared less what the dish was named, nor did they give a hoot about it being the fad among mall-crawlers. They dug into the salad as if they hadn’t eaten for days. (Come to think of it, Arch and Tom didn’t care much about Escoffier, either.)

Ah, men!

Ah, food!

After supper and two pieces of Tom’s melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cake, Arch announced that he had to write up the field trip.

Chopping Spree Salad

1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts

¼ cup fresh lime juice

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 large head romaine lettuce, outer leaves removed

4 canned hearts of palm, well rinsed

Nonstick cooking spray

¼ cup pine nuts or blanched, slivered almonds

½ cup diced fresh jicama

1 cup seeded diced tomato (about 2 medium tomatoes)

½ cup trimmed, thinly sliced scallions (about 2 scallions)

Tangy Lime Dressing (recipe follows)Place the chicken breasts between sheets of plastic wrap and pound them with a mallet to a ⅓-inch thickness. Slice each breast in half lengthwise.In a 9 × 13-inch glass pan, mix the juice with the oil and place the chicken into this marinade while you prepare the rest of the ingredients and dressing, about 15 to 20 minutes.Wash the head of romaine very well, then cut an inch off the top to make an even edge. Carefully slice the rest of the head into ½-inch slices. You should have about 8 cups of romaine pieces. Rinse these well, spin them to remove any moisture, and wrap them in paper towels. Chill until you are ready to assemble the salad.Place the rinsed hearts of palm into a bowl of cold water and allow them to soak for 5 minutes to remove the brine.While the hearts of palm are soaking, lightly spray a small sauté pan with nonstick spray (or use a nonstick pan) and toast the pine nuts over medium-low to medium heat. Stir frequently to prevent burning. When the pine nuts are just beginning to turn golden brown (3 to 4 minutes), remove them from the heat, place on a plate to cool, and set aside until you are ready to assemble the salad.Remove the hearts of palm from the water, pat them dry with paper towels, and cut them into ¼-inch discs. Wrap the pieces in a paper towel and chill until you are ready to assemble the salad.Dice the jicama and tomatoes, slice the scallions, and set aside. Spray the grill with nonstick spray and preheat the grill while you prepare the Tangy Lime Dressing.Grill the chicken over medium-high to high heat for about 4 minutes per side, or until it is cooked through but not dry. Remove the chicken to a cutting board, cool slightly, and cut into bite-sized pieces.Place the lettuce, hearts of palm, jicama, tomatoes, scallions, and chicken in a large, attractive salad bowl. Toss with half of the dressing, then add the dressing by tablespoons until the salad is lightly dressed, not overdressed. (You may have a bit of dressing left over.) Sprinkle the toasted pine nuts on top and serve immediately.Makes 4 large servingsTangy Lime Dressing:

½ garlic clove, minced

¼ teaspoon dried fines herbes (available in the spice section of the grocery store)

1 teaspoon minced fresh parsley

1½ teaspoons minced fresh cilantro

⅓ cup buttermilk

1½ tablespoons fresh lime juice

⅓ cup best-quality mayonnaise

3 tablespoons (or more) heavy cream

1 tablespoon finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to tastePlace the garlic, fines herbes, parsley, and cilantro into a miniature food processor and blend until pulverized, less than a minute. In a medium-size bowl, whisk together the buttermilk with the lime juice and mayonnaise until well combined and smooth. Whisk in the garlic-spice mixture, the cream, and the cheese, blending until smooth. Taste very carefully and add more cream if the dressing seems too tangy. Add salt judiciously, as the mayonnaise and cheese are already salty. Grind in some pepper and taste again. Use immediately.

“Did anyone come in before you left?” I couldn’t help asking. “To… claim the body?”

He blinked. “Yeah, Mom. Some woman crashed through the door, grabbed the cadaver, and screamed, ‘Dad! Where have you been?’”

I shook my head while Arch and Tom exchanged grins. “Someone from the coroner’s office, Arch.”

“Oh!” Arch shook his head. “No.” He dumped a third piece of cake onto his dish and disappeared upstairs.

I busied myself wrapping up the unchopped vegetables. Tom started on the dishes. After I’d stored the leftovers in the walk-in, he asked me to sit down so we could talk. My mind reeled off an “Uh-oh,” and I uneasily took a seat.

“You showed me those pages you got from Dean’s doctor’s office,” he began. He was drying the bowl I’d used for the salad. “But the guys working the case didn’t find the prescription the doc made that Dean had just filled. A bottle of Vicodin Extra Strength.”

I swallowed. “From what you’ve told me, they couldn’t find a lot of things.”

“The prescription was only for twenty pills,” Tom went on. “If you assume Julian is innocent, then somebody followed Dean to that shoe department to kill him. Our perp saw an opportunity—customers have left, clerks gone for a moment, big cabinet to hide behind—and took it. Then when the killer was slipping out, maybe he or she saw the clerks coming back to clean up. Or maybe the killer saw you coming in with the guitar. Barry Dean was barely alive, so our perp shoved him into the cabinet. Still, Barry might tell you who stabbed him. So the perp panics. Whacks you with the guitar and calls nine-one-one. Julian shows up, tries to pull the knife out of Barry, and gets arrested. Hitting you and incriminating Julian were unplanned.”

“So you think Barry’s murder was premeditated. How does the sheriff’s department see it? The same as you?”

“That depends,” Tom mused. “At this point, they’re just trying to gather enough evidence to turn this thing over to the district court.” He gave me the full benefit of his ocean-green eyes. “The only thing that’s going to help Julian is if our guys find out who killed Barry Dean. I don’t know if they’re telling me everything about the case. But I have to warn you that the trail is getting cold. It’s been over forty-eight hours since you discovered the body.” I tsked while Tom continued: “Our guys turned Dean’s house inside out, went through his two cars and his boat. When they pulled their detail off his place, they still hadn’t found much. Julian’s Rover, his apartment? Nothing there, either.”

I groaned. “I can just imagine the mess the cops must have made at Julian’s place.”

“You know how I got that chocolate icing shiny tonight?”

“How?”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out Barry Dean’s Vicodin prescription, and placed it on the table. “I used an ingredient I hardly ever use. Your clarified butter. The kind you keep in the freezer.”

“Tom, I was going to tell you…”

“Uh-huh.”

“They… the pills, they slipped into my apron pocket somehow when I was on the shoes, you know, beside Barry…. The bottle must have fallen out of his pocket. That’s how I got Barry’s doctor’s name.”

“Goldy, you should have handed these over. With both of us handling them, there’s not a hope of prints now.”

“I was just trying to help Julian. How can I trust the sheriff’s department, when all they’re trying to do is find evidence to convict Julian? But I’ll turn them in tomorrow, if you want.”

Tom arched an eyebrow. “I’ll do it,” he told me gently. “Remember, I already told our guys about the shoving incident… that was in the doctor’s report. They went out to the site—logical place to look for a ditch, since Barry worked at the mall. Sure enough, we found two witnesses who claim it was a woman who did the pushing. We’re figuring it was one of Dean’s two girlfriends. Ellie McNeely or that lady who works in lingerie.”

“You’re kidding!” I was incredulous. “That’s it? No description?”

“That’s it,” he said, as he pocketed the pills and gave me a skeptical look.

“Tom, I really meant what I said about being sorry. About hiding the pills.”

“Yeah, yeah, Miss G. Sorry until the next time.”

“No more evidence from crime scenes. I swear it.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He couldn’t have been too angry. Or maybe I convinced him my contrition was sincere. I say this because a couple of hours later, once snow was again falling quietly and the house was hushed, Tom pulled me up the stairs and we made love. Afterward, wrapped in his warm arms, I drifted off, thinking that it sure would be nice if we could both take a vacation. Then, at least for a couple of weeks, we could make love all the time.

Thursday morning, I awoke feeling groggy. To my astonishment, a new five-inch blanket of snow had muted not only the traffic noise coming up from Main Street, but Arch’s and Tom’s getting-ready-to-go shuffling about. My body had apparently demanded, and received, its long overdue dose of sleep. I went through a slow yoga routine, showered, and dressed. This was the day of the shopaholics meeting at the mall, which I fully intended to attend. Today I also would try to talk to Pam and/or Victor, if they’d see me. Ah, but for the meeting, I needed something else….

I reached for a brown ski hat that I’d crocheted in a burst of domestic-goddess energy, back during one of Goldilocks’ Catering’s slow periods. In the end, the knobbles and swirls I’d crafted into the cap had made it too big and cumbersome for skiing. Now the thing looked like a twenties-era flapper’s cap. Or maybe a chocolate-colored wig. But it was perfect to disguise myself for my foray to Shopaholics Anonymous.

Tom had left me a note on the kitchen counter.Miss G.: The corpse was Lucas Holden. Found in a motel near Durango, dead of a heart attack, no sign of struggle or forced entry. Coroner’s office is looking into the situation, but it’s going to take a while. Sorry to say, our guys didn’t find anything up at that portable toilet. Too much new snow. I’ll pick up Arch today. He says they’re doing lacrosse drills in the gym. See you at six. T.

Remembering my promise to bring cookies to Victor Wilson, the excavator-cum-construction-manager, I removed a batch of homemade currant-cookie dough from the freezer and preheated the oven. Then I pulled a double espresso, reread Tom’s note, and sipped the coffee. Even after the pop of caffeine, a weight seemed to be pressing on my chest and dragging my spirits netherward. I just could not believe that Lucas Holden would have quit his job at the mall in an angry huff, then conveniently died only days later in a motel in southwestern Colorado. Maybe Lucas was the “friend” who’d pushed Barry Dean down. Then again, he hadn’t looked even remotely womanly.

I sliced the log of rich, currant-specked dough into thin disks and popped them into the oven. I set the timer and wondered about these witnesses who’d said a woman had pushed Barry down so that he fell into a ditch. If this included the guy who’d supposedly seen Julian driving the dump truck, then the first thing everybody at the construction site needed—after they had some cookies—was a trip to the ophthalmologist.

OK, say Lucas saw the person who’d pushed Barry into that ditch. And then someone had, someone had, someone had… what? My mind circled back to the idea of Lucas Holden being followed and injected with something lethal. With no autopsy done on an unsuspicious death that resulted in a donated cadaver, there wouldn’t have been a drug or any other kind of screen.

The fragrant smell of baking cookies infused the kitchen. When the tantalizing treats were done, I carefully placed them on racks, and pulled another espresso. I munched thoughtfully on a buttery, crunchy cookie, whose texture was perfectly balanced with the sweet chewiness of the currants. I washed the cookies down with the espresso, and peered out the kitchen window at the new-fallen snow. My face in the glass reflected doubt about all the speculative roads my mind seemed bent on exploring. Then I thought of Julian waking up in jail for the third morning, and phoned Helen Keith, assistant coroner for Furman County.

Helen Keith was a fiftyish, unmarried, longtime colleague of Tom’s. They were also longtime friends. He admired her professionalism; she appreciated his work ethic. Maybe she’d extend that appreciation to my attempts at amateur sleuthing. Then again, maybe not.

Helen answered on the first ring, and I genially reminded her who I was, that we’d visited at sheriff’s department barbecues two summers in a row, and wasn’t it great we could touch base? Not fooled, Helen politely said she was waiting for an important call. I took a deep breath and asked if we could have a quick chat. She assented.

I gave her an abbreviated version of recognizing Lucas Holden’s missing-toe cadaver. In an Oh-by-the-way fashion, I asked if her office could do a standard drug screen on Holden’s body.

“Goldy, I know that you have a friend in jail. But the tests aren’t going to be easy, and the results certainly won’t be quick,” she replied, her voice matter-of-fact. “But since this corpse was connected to a crime, we’d be doing a drug screen anyway.”

“Ah, well. Thanks. Any chance I could find out if he had any drugs in him?”

Helen Keith laughed. “Good-bye, Goldy.”

I guessed that was a no.

On the way to the mall, I tried again to call Pam Disharoon. No luck. Ditto with Kim Fury. Liz Fury, however, answered her cell on the first ring—understandable for a mother who must be worried sick about her son. I told her this wasn’t about catering work. Then I asked about Teddy.

“They haven’t found him yet.” Her concern crackled through the cell. “There was some activity on the credit cards, but it was all over Denver.”

“All over Denver? Er, how’s he getting around?”

Immediately her tone became suspicious. “Why?”

“I just… look, somebody hinted that Teddy stole Ellie McNeely’s car one day at the mall,” I blurted out.

“He did not take Ellie’s car. Teddy… isn’t a very good driver. He hates driving. He wouldn’t steal a car. He has friends who drive him, most of the time…. You’re breaking up, Goldy. I have to go.”

She disconnected before I could ask her if Teddy might like driving big trucks more than he liked driving cars.

At Westside Mall, the blanket of snow had not slowed construction. In fact, the building process seemed more frenzied than ever. I pulled the van up by a plastic fence that now prevented folks from parking in the hard-hat area and watched the flurry of activity in amazement. Workers using pickaxes broke through frozen slush—the former parking-lot drainage lake—to lay pipe. Beyond the newly smoothed sidewalk, two loaders belching black smoke chugged around the rim of a huge pit whose snow-filled bottom resembled a bowl of muddied meringue. Victor, wearing his usual day-glo orange hard hat, strode back and forth, pointing and barking orders. When he’d finished hollering at one group of workmen and yelling at a second, he hopped into a bright green golf cart and bumped over ruts to the next problem area.

“Excuse me!” I hailed him, once I’d stuffed the bag of cookies into my purse, stepped awkwardly over the plastic fence, and skirted a Porsche with the license plate DIRT GUY. Victor was scowling at the clipboard in his hands. When he turned the stare and the scowl in my direction, however, he smiled.

“The caterer!” He sounded plugged up, as if he had a bad cold. Laboring in the snow and cold wind probably didn’t help. “How’re you doing? Bringing us goodies?”

“You bet! If I’d known your crew was working in this weather, I would have brought you cocoa, too. Do you have a minute to talk?”

He tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Great idea. Let’s go into the trailer and have some coffee.”

People were always very cordial in anticipation of food you’d brought, I reflected, as I followed Victor to the construction trailer. I leaped across an area where two workers were putting in pipe, then carefully ascended the wobbly, ice-slick wooden steps to the trailer. Once through the bent aluminum door, I looked around. The trailer resembled the inside of a much-battered can. Worse, it was poorly warmed by glowing space heaters. At the desk inside the door, a bulky woman in her sixties silently thrust her formidable chin in my direction. Using a pencil, she scratched her scalp through her thinning black hair. She was watching my every move.

“Victor,” she said in a low voice, “have you taken that sinus medication I gave you?”

“Not yet, Rhonda. I just need to have a bit of a visit with—”

Rhonda’s fleshy jowls jiggled as she addressed me. “No reporters yet, miss. We’ll have a big press party in six weeks, and then you can—”

“I’m not a reporter—”

“It’s OK,” Victor interrupted. “We’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Mall management said no journalists, Mr. Wilson,” she scolded him loudly, the edginess provided for my benefit. “And I have six urgent messages here for you.” She waved a handful of pink slips and sent another glower in my direction. Rhonda’s look said Every one of these is more important than you, bitch.

Victor ignored Rhonda’s protectiveness and handed me a foam cup of muddy coffee that he murmured might not be fresh, but was definitely hot. Huddled beside one of the space heaters, I thanked him gratefully. He gestured toward diet sweetener and nondairy creamer, non-food inventions that I wish could be relegated to kindergarten projects involving glue and construction paper. I declined and grinned in Rhonda’s direction, tempted to ask for real cream. Sensing a demand, she narrowed her eyes and jutted out that scary chin.

“Let’s go in my office,” Victor mumbled. I followed him into a walled-off cubicle, where he shut the plywood door, removed his hard hat, and shrugged out of his filthy overcoat. Then he nodded to a metal chair on the near side of his paper-strewn desk.

“Thanks,” I said again. “I really won’t be but a few minutes. Here you go,” I added, pulling the zipped plastic bag of cookies out of my purse. “My thanks for helping the other day.”

“No problem,” he replied cheerfully as he settled into his own squeaky desk chair. He unzipped the bag, put in a hand so dirty I shuddered, and brought out half a dozen cookies. Pushing a whole one into his mouth, he nodded, mumbled gratitude, and washed the crumbs down with the coffee.

As I watched him, I wondered why I’d ever thought catering was so demanding. Construction had to be much worse. Victor’s haggard cheeks glowed with grime, and his bloodshot eyes made me wonder if he was getting any sleep. After he finished a second cookie, he reached for a foil packet, probably Rhonda’s sinus meds. Pulling off the foil, he popped the pills into his mouth, then washed them down with more of the dark swill in his cup. He winced and said, “’Scuse me.”

“You probably shouldn’t be working if you’re sick.” Would my controlling-mom voice never shut up?

Victor gave me a half-grin. “Fat chance. Listen, I never got a chance to apologize about that truck situation. We figure it was a guy from the old crew, a misfit that No-toe Holden, our former construction manager, fired. The guy’s name is Jorge Sanchez. Sanchez is your standard disgruntled worker. Sometimes they come back, try to steal equipment or vehicles. Anyway, I’m really sorry about that, if you’re here looking for someone to take the blame.”

“No, that’s not why I’m here.” I smiled. “You’ve been on this project, what? A year?”

Victor blew on his coffee, took a sip, and let out a long breath. “From the beginning. Eleven months. Got promoted when Holden quit.” He furrowed his brow. “Hey, sorry about Rhonda, too. You’ve got to understand we’re under a ton of pressure here. We’ve got a drywall contractor refusing to send a crew out and landscapers claiming they can’t put in bushes until the snow melts. Half of the interiors were painted the wrong colors. The portable toilets haven’t been cleaned in two weeks, and I’ve got guys passing out from the stench. And that’s just today.”

Hey, don’t talk to me about portable toilets. I pretended to sip some of the viscous black liquid, then set the foam cup on a grubby plastic table. “Actually, the problem is a… this friend of ours ended up in jail after Barry Dean was killed—”

Victor nodded and rubbed his filthy forehead. “Yeah, I know. Poor Dean. He really wanted to see this project finished.” He drank more coffee, then sighed. “And I’m sorry about your friend. I know one of our guys said that the kid who was with you was driving our truck when Dean nearly got killed. I never did see who exactly was driving that truck. I still think it was Sanchez.”

Since I was quite sure that someone, if not several people, would come forward and say that Julian had been running up the parking lot, and not driving the truck, I let this pass.

“You know, if I just could have more crew,” Victor was explaining, “we could have had more supervision of the—”

“Victor,” I said quickly, to forestall more apologies, “there’s going to be something in the newspaper, probably in a few days. Lucas Holden has been found dead.”

He dropped his coffee cup. “Oh, Christ!” Shaking his head, he rolled back his chair and stared at the mess at his feet in disbelief. Then he grabbed a handful of tissues from a dusty box and threw them onto the floor. “Did he kill himself?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. Suicide was not a possibility I’d even contemplated. And Helen Keith certainly hadn’t mentioned it.

“Heart attack, I think,” I stammered. “But… I guess I was hoping to find out about his background. I’m thinking maybe there’s something in it that could help our friend in jail.”

“I’ll bet it was suicide. No-toe was just so damned depressed,” Victor continued gloomily, as if he were thinking of offing himself, to end his own remorse about everything. “One day, he just said, ‘I quit.’” He shook his head in disgust. “Some guys just can’t take the pressure of construction.”

“I need to ask you about the time before Holden quit. About a month ago. Was Holden the one who pushed Barry down, so that he landed in a ditch out here on the construction site? Or did he see who pushed Barry?”

Victor’s thin eyebrows rose. “No. It wasn’t No-toe. But how did you hear about that?”

“Oh, you know, some gossip was reported in the paper…”

His voice turned cautious. “Well, Barry told us to keep our mouths shut about that incident. If it got out, he said, things would get worse for him. That’s what he said. They’re putting pipes and cables in that ditch now, but it was about seven feet deep before.”

“Did you see who pushed him?”

“Yeah. I did.” He lowered his voice. My skin crawled, and I imagined the dreaded Rhonda with one of her large ears pressed against the thin door.

“So did No-toe,” Victor added, just above a whisper. I waited, heart hammering. “Dean had had a real bad fight with his girlfriend,” he continued. “One of ’em, anyway. Dean was two-timing, see. But if you heard about the ditch thing, you probably heard that, too.” I nodded. Victor squirmed, then finally whispered, “That girlfriend was here the day of the truck thing. Anyway, she didn’t push him down so that he fell into a ditch, she pushed him into the ditch. Right then, Dean screamed, ‘Don’t! Ellie, don’t!’” Victor’s bloodshot eyes squinted at me. “So. Do you know this Ellie?”

CHAPTER 17

At the mention of my friend’s name, I made my face blank and, shivering, tugged my coat around me. The office’s little space heater suddenly seemed woefully inadequate.

“I sort of know her,” I evaded.

“I found out her last name when her car got crashed into Dean’s Mercedes,” Victor told me. “It was in the newspaper. McNeely. Wealthy woman who swears she wasn’t driving.” He grinned in mock defeat. “The rich never have to pay. You and I work our butts off and we get what? Hot kitchens, freezing offices, and no appreciation.” He stopped to pull out a tissue. “Ever notice?”

While he blew his nose, I cleared my throat, and looked around the room again. Plans, charts, and notes were pinned to every bit of wall space. Victor was right about one thing: I’d already decided I wouldn’t want to work in this frigid, disorganized environment.

I asked, “Did anyone besides you and Holden see Ellie McNeely push Barry into the ditch?”

“It was early in the morning,” Victor replied. “Couple of guys might have been around. We were discussing delays on the project, when this woman comes running up and starts screaming at Dean about how he had a commitment to her.” The phone rang and he answered it. “They are?” he said, with a glance at the clock. “OK. Just a coupla minutes more, I swear.” He grinned. “Yeah, thanks. I took ’em.” Clearly, the omniscient and nosy Rhonda was trying to throw her weight around.

As he hung up the phone, I stood. “Victor, I appreciate your seeing me. Did you tell the police the details of this ditch incident?”

He shook his head. “No. They asked me if Dean had any enemies, and I said I didn’t know of any. He had a coupla people he didn’t get along with, I told ‘em, like his two girlfriends and No-toe. But I didn’t want to get one girlfriend over another in trouble. Anyway, Rhonda just called to say the cops are on their way over. They’ve got a coupla more questions, apparently. Do you think I should tell them this McNeely lady pushed Barry?”

“That’s up to you.” I thanked him again, picked up the foam cup, and backed out of the tiny, icy office.

“Real sorry about your friend in jail,” Victor called after me.

I ignored Rhonda’s vicious glare, clomped out of the trailer, and poured the dark liquid into the ditch. Could Ellie really have pushed Barry in there, when it was seven feet deep? Was it possible she could have set up the whole portable toilet incident, just to look innocent in my eyes? I simply could not fathom it.

A sudden icy wind blasted my nostrils with a horrid stench. I gagged and stared at the stinking turquoise portable toilets. They were scribbled with racist graffiti. Wetbacks Go Home!! was scrawled beneath a Spanish retort that I translated, more politely than it was written, as We can’t wait to go back to Mexico, and good luck having an incestuous relationship with your mother. So much for racial harmony on the job site.

Near the plastic fence, a Hispanic man was hovering between my car and the Porsche. He was dressed in the garb of a construction worker, and was putting one of those bright orange ads under my windshield. Just what I needed, an encouragement to do yet more shopping. Before he could put an ad under the Porsche’s windshield, a Furman County prowler pulled up. The ad-placer vanished as the prowler disgorged two men. They were detectives, no doubt… and maybe they would give a ticket to someone illegally distributing ads to parked cars.

The workmen hacking at the ice stopped to stare at the cop car. Bucking the wind, I ignored the detectives, and made my way toward the mall. On the way, I tossed my cup into the overflowing Dumpster with such fury that it bounced up, was caught by the wind, and sailed away.

Tampering with evidence, disobeying my lawyer, and now littering. Pretty soon my charge sheet was going to have more scribbling on it than those toilets.

Inside the mall, I ducked into a women’s room and examined myself. My lips, nose, and cheeks were crimson from the cold. I reached into my bag and pulled out the crocheted cap, a small compact, and a pair of sunglasses. After doing a bit of damage control on my face, I put on the hat and glasses and emerged into the mall. I didn’t know if I was incognito or not, but the sunglasses made everything awfully dark. I headed toward the Shopaholics Anonymous meeting, where I sincerely hoped I’d hear something useful, especially from Page Stockham, such as I’d kill to be able to keep shopping. In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve done!

A handwritten sign was taped beside the entrance to the shoppers’ lounge: Private Meeting in Session. By the time I pushed through the lounge’s massive doors, the group was reciting a posted list of the Twelve Steps. As I skirted the furniture—all put back in place since the jewelry-leasing party—I focused hard through my sunglasses on the attendees, who were clustered on three long couches around a pastry-laden coffee table. No Page. At least, not that I could tell.

One member started reading aloud what sounded like a preamble. We are not so much concerned with debt, as are our colleagues in Debtors Anonymous, as we are with shopping itself, which we use as a drug to avoid dealing with our feelings of inadequacy….

The reader droned on as I looked around the room, where the atmosphere was palpably tense. To my surprise, the nine attendees were comprised of five men and four women. Five men! And here we women were always wondering what men were up to in those long trips to the hardware store. By inserting myself into the group, I created an even division between the sexes. I sat down as unobtrusively as possible and nodded at two welcoming smiles.

“I’m George, and I’m a compulsive spender,” one balding man began, as he lofted an éclair. Before the woman seated beside George could introduce herself, he added, mouth full, “I got a eating problem, too.”

Everyone laughed, and the edgy atmosphere vanished. At my turn, I said I was Gertrude—no lie, as this is my real name—and that I was visiting. A packet of pamphlets was pressed into my hands by George, who left chocolate smears on the top sheet. It began: If you do nothing but shop, you WILL drop. DEAD! Now there was a cheery thought.

“My name is Page, and I’m a compulsive shopper,” someone said.

I sat up so quickly my crocheted hat wobbled and threatened to topple. Through the sunglasses, I hadn’t spotted her. I slid off the sunglasses, put on my patented blank expression, then looked around. Page, who looked as if she, too, had come in disguise, was seated almost out of my range of view, at the far end of the couch. Her long blond hair was tied back in a bun that was concealed by an elaborately tied scarf. She, too, wore sunglasses—hers were of the aviator variety, and boasted pink lenses. Most atypically, she was clad in black tights and a black T-shirt, as if she’d just dropped in after ballet class. I did notice that despite the outfit, she wore a strand of large pearls—diamond clasp in front, so we’d know they were real—and a sparkly bracelet that (with my glasses off) looked like half a dozen strands of pink, yellow, and white diamonds. Why did wealthy women go out looking as if they’d just been to exercise class for hookers? Another unanswered question of the universe.

Clearly, I was losing my perspective. I reminded myself to focus, then glanced at the tray of pastries. One of the women who’d smiled at me offered me a paper plate and plastic fork.

“They’re for everybody,” she urged. “Food eases the pain.”

Well, I couldn’t disagree with that. And I do love Linzer torte, I thought as I chewed into a big bite laden with spice, ground nuts, and raspberry preserves.

A tiny woman with bobbed brown hair announced in a high voice, “My name is Carole and I’m a compulsive shopper.”

Everyone murmured a greeting to Carole. Her fingers nervously pleated her skirt. “My boyfriend left at Easter last year. For a while, I didn’t feel anything. I was just numb. Then a friend insisted on getting me out of the house. She took me shopping.”

There was a chorus of groans.

“It was weird,” Carole went on. “I felt better once I bought a new sweater. It was a cabled pink mohair, and buying it and wearing it made me feel loved again. So my friend insisted on taking me to the mall again the next weekend. With new gray slacks, plus a matching belt and purse, my feelings improved even more. I mean, I felt alive again! Problem was, I had to spend more money each time I went. One new sweater became two new sweaters. Then four new sweaters. Then ten—all on one trip!”

Carole began to sob. The group waited while one member handed her several tissues, and another put a plate with a cream puff in front of her.

“Now,” Carole continued between gulps, “I’m sixteen thousand dollars in debt on four credit cards. I have, uh… Last week, I finally did a count. Six hundred and thirty-two sweaters, most of them still with the price tags on them. The worst part is that on some trips, I must have had a memory loss or blackout. Almost a dozen times, I bought the same sweater twice.” She stopped to blow her nose. “OK, but I do have some good news. I didn’t buy a single sweater this week!” The group made supportive noises. Carole snuffled and managed a shy, red-nosed smile. “It was so hard! It’s cold outside! And… oh, God, Talbot’s just put their winter stuff on sale. I can barely walk by their window!”

The group burst out laughing. Carole, recognizing the laughter was affectionate, not mocking, dug into her cream puff. Murmurs of “Oh, Carole” and “You should see the stuff on sale at Saks” accompanied big grins and hands reaching for babas au rhum. I glanced around for some coffee or tea to go with the pastries, but saw only a table lined with bottles of water. Maybe caffeine stimulated shopping, blast it. When Page stood and strode over to snag a water, I quickly turned back to the group.

“So,” Carole was saying, as she delicately wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, “now, instead of shopping, I’m looking forward to seeing you all, because you make me feel better. Not quite the way Rob my ex did, but close. And get this! On the way over here, I stopped at Goodwill, and left them two hundred and fifty-nine sweaters!”

The group clapped wildly. Carole, blushing and triumphant, reached for another cream puff.

“I’m Jack and I’m an image spender,” a lanky fellow with gray hair offered. “Can’t say I’m doing as well as Carole, sorry. Last week my ex-wife wanted to have a lunch meeting with our attorneys. This should have raised a red flag, but it didn’t. I suggested we make it easygoing, you know, something modest, both lawyers and the two of us. At Duccio’s.” This time I gasped along with the group. Minimum tab at Duccio’s on the Sixteenth Street Mall in downtown Denver, for one person having lunch, without liquor, would run about forty dollars. Add a single glass of wine, coffee, dessert, and tip, and you were looking at twice that. I had the feeling that Jack, in his gray pin-striped silk suit, Italian leather shoes, and imported tie, didn’t know the concept of a modest lunch.

“Of course,” Jack went on, “it turned out to be a terrible meeting, full of wrangling over child support and visitation issues. Oysters and two bottles of Château Lafitte didn’t help make things jovial, either.” He sighed. “I’m twenty-two thousand dollars in debt, which Gail knows but pretends not to.” He gave the group a rueful grin. “Still, when the check came? I grabbed for it. I mean, I had to! It was like an unseen force pushed my hand to reach out for that slip of paper!” He paused. “Now I’m twenty-two thousand, four hundred and ten dollars in debt. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and bought a case of peanut butter. On sale.” The group sighed. “But you all are here,” Jack concluded with a wide grin. “And at least I can have free pastries on Thursdays!”

“See, that’s what bothers me!” Page Stockham burst out savagely, as the group murmured encouragement to Jack. There was a collective gasp. “People always angling to get free stuff,” she added, her tone hostile. An uncomfortable silence ensued, interrupted only by the sounds of pastry-eating.

“Uh, my name is George, and, Page, remember that we have a format—”

“My name is Page and I have a sister problem. I’m here because my therapist said it might help.” The members squirmed. I peeked over at Page, who tilted up her chin and gazed defiantly down her nose at the group.

“My sister has always been a taker,” Page told us bitterly. “She gets into relationships with people by adoring them. These people are never low-income types, I should add. As soon as they start spending money on her, she adores them even more!” Page examined her manicured fingernails. “So rich folks, mostly guys, get addicted to being loved by my sister. Then she starts freeloading. First she gives them some sob story, of course. ‘I just need to borrow your car because mine’s not working.’ Two weeks later she’s all ‘Your stepson wants this car back? What am I supposed to drive? Besides, you have five cars, can’t he drive one of those? Don’t you care about me?’ Then she cries and withdraws affection from the rich guy, who feels guilty and finally gives her his damn car. She’s a horrible flirt, of course. And a slut, I should say.”

For the first time in the meeting, no one was reaching for pastries. The members sat without moving, concentrating on appearing neutral, although frowns and pursed lips indicated creeping discomfort. You need help, girl, their expressions said. Jack, for his part, looked downright disgusted. Maybe he’d been seduced by Pam, too, and had bought her lunch at Duccio’s.

“OK,” Page snarled, “I probably do shop too much. But I need to. My husband used to buy me nice things, and now he takes me for granted. I have to buy stuff for myself. Meanwhile, my slutty sister has a new boyfriend, or she had one, anyway, and she got him to give her discounts, big ones, on all kinds of stuff.” Her voice turned shrill. “Another one of her boyfriends sweet-talked the dean at… his former college, so my sister could get into a special scholarship program to go to night school for her degree. Free! This new guy gave her furs and jewelry from… vendors or reps or whatever they’re called. And then he bought her a round-trip ticket to Hawaii for next Christmas, because he knew the travel agent here in the… well, here.” Her voice ramped up a few more notches. “This boyfriend even got Pam a fifty percent discount on… a piece of jewelry. Not to buy, but… to rent. And he leased it for her!” Page screamed, “And then this same guy…fired my husband, so we suddenly had no income! I was so furious I couldn’t sleep! Couldn’t eat! Couldn’t drive!” She leaped to her feet. “That son of a bitch ruined our lives!”

Page ran out of the room.

Silence fell over the group.

George said, “Next?”

I wanted to follow Page, but my inner voice warned me to stay put. At this juncture, she’d be in no mood to chat. So I listened sympathetically to two more people talk, or as they called it, “share.” One man was a bargain-hunter with six storage sheds full of stuff he never used. He said the seller always represented his mother, who’d withheld love from him as a child. By ruthlessly bargaining, he tried to outsmart the seller, so he could “get love for free.” Except he never got the affection he needed, just lots of fishing rods and motorcycle parts. The final speaker, a very large woman with a pointed chin, announced that she was a codependent spender. She fingered her plastic dark glasses and tried to straighten her very crooked curly-haired wig. She said she had a compulsion to spend money on others. By giving people huge gifts, she was hoping they would love her. The previous year, she’d won fifty thousand dollars in the lottery, now all gone on presents for which she had not received a single thank-you note. Now she had to work a crummy job that caused her no end of stress.

I squinted at her thoughtfully as the group broke up. “Why, Rhonda!” I whispered to myself, then hightailed it out of there.

In the mall, shoppers scurried or moseyed past, many of them with that hungry, pinched look that said they were rushing for a bite to eat. Monday morning, I’d bemoaned the fact that I never had time for lunch out with Marla; now I was so stuffed with pastries and water that the idea of a midday meal made my very full stomach holler in protest.

I pulled off the crocheted hat and found a chair. I needed to sit and think. Just down the staircase, the window of Westside Music displayed a painted banner: Open Late! With a start, I recalled that Arch’s birthday was tomorrow. Tom had bought him a new lacrosse stick, helmet, and official-size goal, which he planned to put up in our backyard, snow be damned. He’d also promised to look for another guitar, since the much-desired one was dented, and not done being inspected by the cops. Still, I knew Arch well enough to be sure of this: The gift he would most cherish would be to have Julian at his party. So it was in the free-Julian department that I needed to continue to bend my efforts.

I ran my fingers through my hair and reflected on the shopaholics’ meeting. Page Stockham had confessed to a sister problem, a problem that appeared to have been very much aggravated by the presence of discount-supplying Barry Dean. My mind circled back to one of its many questions. Had Tom spurred the investigators to find out exactly where Page—and Ellie too, for that matter—had been after the two women split from Marla? Would the desires to a) have revenge on the man who evicted her husband’s profitable store, and b) deprive a sibling of her ride on the gravy train, be sufficient motive to kill Barry?

There was one person I had not been able to talk to, but who, in light of the shopaholics’ meeting, I now desperately needed to see. I headed toward Prince & Grogan. With Julian facing formal charges the next morning, I might have to buy a hundred dollars’ worth of nighties from Barry Dean’s onetime girlfriend. But wait—there was one detail of Page’s story that I needed to check out first. I turned and quickly headed toward the mall management office.

Heather the receptionist looked quite a bit cheerier than when I’d seen her earlier in the week. She’d had her hair colored with bright pink streaks and cut in a new, spiky do. New fluorescent pink nail polish and lipstick matched her hair. She looked like an ad for pink lemonade, which she happened to be drinking from a plastic cup. When I entered the office, she set down the lemonade by her half-eaten personal pizza, which, I shuddered to see, was topped with ham and pineapple.

“The caterer!” Heather exclaimed, then clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oops! Did I forget to call you?”

For a horrid, sinking moment, I thought Rob Eakin, the interim mall manager, might have changed his mind about the canceled prospective tenants’ lunch, originally scheduled for that day. If so, and Heather Featherbrain had forgotten to notify me, then all my worry about success would be something I’d laugh about as my business went under. You simply do not fail to show up to cater an affair.

“First of all,” she said, handing me a check, “here’s a new payment for your gratuity. Rob Eakin cut another check, since the cops are keeping everything. Plus, I found what you were looking for,” Heather continued brightly. She sucked noisily on her straw. “Barry did leave you something.”

“Oh, Heather.” I groaned, thinking of Julian’s haggard face behind the jail glass. “Why didn’t you call me? For crying out loud, this is about a murder case!”

“Look, I’m sorry, but we’ve been busy,” she cried. “It’s been nuts around here, with the crews working day and night, and Rob trying to stave off the potential tenants. Plus, somebody just called here to ask for a comment about our old construction manager turning up dead. It’s like, this mess never stops.”

“Just give me whatever it is, would you please? Then I need to ask you something about Barry.”

“Not again!” she protested as she wedged past her desk and nabbed a manila envelope that was cantilevered off a filing cabinet. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do!”

I didn’t remark about her seeming to have time for so-called Hawaiian pizza and pink lemonade or for getting her hair done. Instead, I eyed the envelope that had a scrawled Goldy——Dog File across it.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“Barry had a file labeled ‘Catering.’ The cops went through it but didn’t take stuff from it, it looks like.” She was peering at the envelope in my hand with undisguised curiosity. “Your contracts were in the file, plus that manila envelope. What’s a dog file?”

“I have no idea, and I doubt I’ll find out anytime soon.” I tucked the envelope under my arm. “Look, I’m sorry to be crabby but—”

“It’s all right,” she said, suddenly contrite. Maybe all this new cheer of hers was just her way of denying what had happened to her boss.

“A friend of ours is in jail—”

“I heard. Your assistant.”

“My assistant did not kill Barry,” I said emphatically. “And I’m trying to find out who did.” When she wrinkled her nose, I persisted. “Will you help me?”

She took a sip of lemonade. She said, “I’ll try,” without much enthusiasm.

“What I need to know now,” I told Heather earnestly, “is about discounts and gifts that Barry received. Say, from stores. Reps. Vendors. Stuff that might, you know, make people jealous.”

Heather’s forehead wrinkled. She didn’t seem to be thinking so much as trying to find a way to say something unsavory. When I cleared my throat impatiently, she eased back into her chair. “We’re supposed to have a no-gift policy….”

“Supposed to?”

She took a bite of pizza and avoided my eyes. After a moment, she said, “Before Barry took over, the only discount we got was at the mall’s fast food places. But when the expansion started, stores were really wild to get in here.” Her hand went to her throat, where she fingered a thin gold chain. “Barry, uh, did take gifts. He gave a lot of them away, though,” she added hastily. “I mean, he didn’t need a woman’s diamond Rolex or a monthly getaway trip to some exotic place like Maui.”

I gripped the lumpy envelope. “Heather, this is terribly important. I have to know the truth. I need to know about specific things he received.” In fact, that was what I’d been mulling over since Page’s outburst at the meeting: Is this true? Or is jealous Page imagining or exaggerating gifts Barry gave Pam?

“All right, all right!” Heather cried, blushing. “Barry… gave me this chain, a free gift from Barton’s Jewelry! And he gave my dad a case of Glenlivet. My mom asked for a Vuitton bag and he surprised her with it. That’s it, I promise! We didn’t take any other gifts from Barry and I don’t know where he got the stuff. So… are you going to turn me in?”

I exhaled and remembered that someone with evidence about Barry’s headaches had hired a lawyer to offer that evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Would that prosecution have been for receiving gifts without paying gift or income taxes? “What did Barry give Pam Disharoon? Do you know?”

Heather’s eyes widened. “Nobody knows that for sure. But lots of people wanted to.”

“Like?”

“That private eye,” she replied, with a dramatic wave of one hand. No question, this girl had seen too many TV crime shows. “The cops. And some tall blond woman who said she was from the IRS, but I didn’t believe her for a second. She looked a lot like Pam, too. Maybe she was her cousin.”

“Do you know exactly what Barry gave Pam?” If it was big, I thought, if it was really, really, really big, then maybe someone had been so angry, jealous, or something, that he or she had felt justified in killing Barry Dean.

Heather shrugged and popped a piece of ham into her mouth. “Barry showed me some of the jewelry. That diamond Rolex I told you about, a diamond bracelet, some emerald earrings. I asked him if he was giving pieces to Ellie, too. He said, ‘Of course! Only her taste is so conservative. And anyway, she’s already got lots of jewelry.’”

“What else did Barry give Pam?”

“He… let her have his Audi, I think. His car got wrecked, and the Audi was in the shop, so he ended up with two problem vehicles, plus he didn’t drive his BMW, usually. He only wanted one new car, the Saab, plus the Beemer racing car. Oh, and he gave Pam tickets for luxury trips, although I’m not sure they had a chance to have sexual relations anywhere but in that new car of his. Barry thought he was being followed on the weekends. Looking back, you know, I figured it was that investigator—you know, the one Ellie McNeely hired—who was following Barry.”

“Barry and Pam had sex in the new Saab?” Was that before or after he drove me out for a latte? Blech! Anyway, I wasn’t sure Heather was telling the truth. She was at that age when imagined sexual details made any story more fun. Come to think of it, I suppose that was any age.

“I’m not kidding!” she protested. “Barry told me about it, along with all the juicy details. I should have sued him for sexual harassment. ‘Ever done it in a car, Heather?’ he used to ask me, after lunch. He was laughing. His clothes were all rumpled; he’d gone out with the emerald earrings and come back empty-handed, so I just knew he and Pam had done it. He said, ‘The car is just the best place. You’ve got leather smells and risk, and then every time you drive it, you can think back to what you did in it a few hours ago.’ I mean, is that sexual harassment or what?” She punctuated her question by taking another bite of pizza.

So much for Rufus Investigations being able to tell Ellie definitively what was going on. Whatever had been going on between Pam and Barry, it had not been a “mental affair,” it had been the genuine article. No wonder he’d missed all those dates with Ellie. I felt a pang of sympathy for my old church friend. “Did Barry give Pam anything else?”

Heather folded up the pizza box and pushed it into her trash can. “Double discount coupons at all the stores, part of a promotion campaign to get mall workers to shop at the mall. He also gave her at least one mink jacket that I know of. I haven’t the faintest clue how he got that. Oh, and he sent her lots of flowers. Denver Floral wanted to lease here really bad.” She arched an eyebrow. “Mrs. McNeely probably got really upset when she found out about what he was doing for Pam, huh? What he was doing to Pam. I mean, that he was doing Pam.”

CHAPTER 18

I thanked Heather and left. Two minutes later, I locked myself into a bathroom stall and opened the envelope. I wasn’t tampering with evidence, I reasoned, because Barry had left this for me. Besides, Barry had always been interested in what dishes I’d be serving. Maybe it was just menus.

It was not menus. The manila envelope contained two newspaper clippings, a business-envelope-size piece of opened mail, and three cardboard boxes from the same high-end line of women’s cosmetics.

First I studied the slightly tattered envelope. My name was scrawled above a typed address:Lucas Holden

General Delivery

Prescott, Arizona 86301-9999

The envelope also bore a post-office-stamped pointy finger. I’d always thought those inked pointed forefingers looked vaguely accusatory. The reason given for the return, Addressee Unknown/Return to Sender, included a penned date-of-rejection, from a month before. The return address was the Westside Mall office. Inside I found Lucas Holden’s paycheck, five thousand and change, plus a handwritten note:Lucas, here’s your last check. I sent it to the place you said you were going. Please come back. I know we can work things out.

B. Dean

I put the letter on top of the toilet paper dispenser. So, I figured, that was at least one thing Barry had wanted me to figure out: what had happened to Lucas. Maybe Barry hadn’t been sure; maybe he thought Lucas was on the road, or just plain sulking. But I had found out what had happened to Lucas, hadn’t I? The ex-construction worker had died in a motel. Being extra cautious, though, why would Barry not have called the cops and reported Lucas as a missing person?

I knew the answer as soon as my mind posed the question. Barry’s own words—Nothing clears a mall like a security threat—would surely have applied to a construction manager who’d quit in a huff and then turned up missing. So Barry wanted me, the amateur sleuth, to locate Lucas, because he couldn’t afford any bad publicity. No doubt, the charming Mr. Dean couldn’t have imagined the way I would find Lucas, any more than he would imagine the way I would stumble over his own corpse.

Unfortunately, the other items in the manila envelope were much more baffling. First was a clipped editorial from the February twenty-sixth issue of the Mountain Journal. The title, Does Furman County Really Need Forty More Stores?, was hysterically answered in the first paragraph: No way. But if Barry had been truly interested in my keeping this editorial, why had he clipped it off mid-point? The page’s other side was a pastiche of ads, and included an ‘81 Mercedes At a Great Price, a lot out by the Elk Preserve where the owner would Build to Suit, a sale on delivered topsoil from We Got Dirt, and a heartfelt ad for homemade dog biscuits from Caring for Canines, which implied that if you really loved your pet, you wouldn’t feed him those nasty treats from the grocery store.

Frowning, I reread the editorial that was missing part of its text. It was the standard stuff about the mall addition ruining the environment, encouraging big corporations to usurp state jobs, funneling profits out of state, and, horrors, contributing to the mindless growth of materialism! Maybe it was to avoid this kind of rap that Westside had offered their mall for shopaholics’ meetings. But why would Barry want me to have a slice of Mountain Journal polemic?

The second clipping was another cropped article, this one entitled Teen Held in Shopliftings. Of course I knew all about Teddy Fury, so I skimmed it. But I still puzzled over this clipping, because again Barry had trimmed a portion of the text, this time vertically. Had he had eye problems? The back of this sheet held more ads similar to the others. I sighed. The more evidence I collected regarding Barry’s murder, the more bewildering things became.

The last three items, the fancy cosmetics boxes, were indeed all makeup. First I opened the slender rectangular box and pulled out a pale green, marbleized plastic compact, a cream foundation designated as Honeycream. I opened it; the compact looked as if it had been slightly used. Yuck. The next box held new red lipstick; the third was a roll-up cream blush. I checked all three for secret compartments, tiny written messages, you name it. There was nothing. No question about it—this made a lot of sense, as in none. I went back to the compact mirror, where my exhausted face squinted back. Barry wasn’t the only one who had thought I needed a new look.

I stuffed all the items back in the envelope, which I slid deep into my tote. Tom would have some ideas, I reasoned. He might even know what a dog file was.

I was confused. I was tired. So, I was not in the best of moods when I plodded into the luxurious lingerie department of Prince & Grogan. Pam was there, holding up a lacy teddy, and shaking it from side to side, while a potential customer, a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman with silver hair, gaped. I edged over and heard her croon, “Incredibly slinky and soft against the skin,” and “Oh, you’ll thank me! And so will she!” and “This one’s our top seller. The highest quality, of course. You have to spend money to get the best, but you know that.”

I eased over to a table of reduced flannel pajamas and surreptitiously watched Pam go through her routine. She was good. “Don’t you want something for that special weekend?” “Oh, she deserves it! You deserve it!” “We can’t keep these in stock!” Pam was like a drug dealer for the heroin of shopping. Unlikely she’d ever be a guest speaker at Shopaholics Anonymous.

As Silver Hair smiled and piled items up by the cash register—black lace teddy, pink transparent nightgown, two-piece (very small pieces) nightwear, red satin bustier, feathery mules, push-up bra—he seemed to take on a glow. He told Pam jokes. Her little laugh tinkled. He tilted his silver head close to hers.

Several times, Pam announced, “Then there’s one more thing you must buy! She is soooo lucky to have you.”

Silver Hair beamed some more. This man was in a shopping zone. Since I’d first spotted him, he looked taller, more powerful, even happier. Which I suppose was the whole point… while it lasted.

When he finally whipped out his credit card, I held my breath. Pam’s demure voice said eight hundred and something dollars. Where was that security guard with the smelling salts? The silver-haired man beamed and said that would be fine.

“Oh, it’s you,” Pam said flatly when I appeared at the counter after Silver Hair had swept away triumphantly with his purchases.

“You promised you’d talk to me,” I reminded her firmly.

“Yeah, yeah.” She glanced around her department, probably to see if there was anyone more important than Goldy the caterer, which meant anyone who was willing to splurge on lingerie. “OK, make it fast,” she said impatiently. “Thursday is a big noontime shopping period for us, because businessmen usually have lunch with their mistresses on Fridays. Did you know that that’s why Fridays are the worst day to get a table at a romantic restaurant? The guys just can’t stand the prospect of spending the weekend with their wives, and they want to reassure their girlfriends that they really care. So they buy them a sexy present for that special pre-weekend lunch.”

“And then have sex in the car afterward? Sort of like dessert?”

Her glare was withering. I smiled innocently. “Sorry. You just hear all kinds of stuff in the catering business. I serve Friday lunches, you know. I’m always wondering what the big rush is to get out.”

“Maybe it’s your food.” She grinned, sending the blond ponytails trembling.

I ignored that. “Pam, I just want to talk to you for a few minutes. Can’t I take you to lunch?”

“I told you. I can’t go to lunch because it’s our busy time.”

“I’ll buy something.” I gestured at the silken heaps around us.

“Yeah, right. I saw you pawing through the sale flannels.”

“Sell me a bathrobe, then.”

Her face brightened. “Lace or sheer?”

“Er, terry cloth.”

“I knew it!” she said, her voice scathing.

She wiggled over to a rack of sherbet-colored terry robes that I thought looked quite cozy. Then she lifted an assessing eyebrow at my short, pudgy self, moved away from the small-size robes, and pulled out three medium-size ones. I put on the first, a pale green with satin edging, and assessed myself in a mirrored column. I looked like a half-eaten lime Popsicle.

“Pam, a friend of mine has been accused of killing Barry Dean. I don’t think he did it. You seemed to be Barry’s friend—do you think he had any enemies the cops aren’t looking at?”

Scanning her department unsuccessfully for more sugar daddies, she rolled her eyes. “I wish I knew who those enemies were. I’d kill ’em myself.”

I unwrapped myself from the green robe and put on the blueberry-colored one. “Ellie McNeely is my friend. I’ve heard a lot of stuff lately about how jealous she was of you.”

Pam sniffed and scowled at the blue robe. “You look like you’re wearing a sleeping bag.” When I reached for a lemon-colored robe, she said, “I don’t know what Ellie’s problem was. Barry preferred me. Maybe he would have married Ellie, but so what? I didn’t want to marry Barry. My sister’s married, and she’s miserable. I just wanted to … you know… do stuff with him.”

Like have sex in the car, I thought, but did not say. I did want to hear about Pam’s sister, but I also needed to dig a bit more on the topic of Ellie. “So,” I asked noncommittally, “did you read in the paper about Barry’s steamy love life?”

Pam’s eyes lit up. “You bet I did! That article even brought me business. See the sexy other woman, that kind of thing.” She shook her head dismissively. “Ellie was a bitch, and she only got worse. She was so mad at Barry, it was scary. What’s that famous quote? ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned….’”

“Did you ever see her argue with Barry?”

“Are you going to buy a robe or not?”

“The pink, I think.” I pointed to one I hadn’t even tried on. Pam assumed a disgusted expression, tugged it off its hanger, and quick-stepped to the counter.

“No, I never saw or heard Ellie argue with Barry,” she told me as she scanned the robe’s tag. “I heard plenty about how they didn’t get along, but it was all gossip.”

“Oh, speaking of gossip,” I said, as I handed over a wad of bills, “I heard some about your sister Page.” I lowered my voice. “Something about how jealous she was of stuff Barry gave you? How she inventoried each of his gifts to you, then bought things just like them for herself, only in a bigger and more costly version? I heard she couldn’t keep up, and that she really hated Barry, as a result.”

How about that—I had undone Pam Disharoon. She stood stock-still, her cheeks vermilion, her eyes ablaze, her blond ponytails quivering. If a dozen sugar daddies had flooded into the lingerie department at that moment, I don’t think she would have seen them.

She shrilled, “She inventoried what Barry gave me?” She cleared her throat and handed me the receipt and the bagged bathrobe. “Just leave me alone now, OK?”

I nodded to her and grasped the bag. Pam might have been convinced that Ellie was furious with Barry, but in her heart, I was pretty sure Pam now realized someone else had hated Barry even more. Someone who was family. And she couldn’t face it.

Back in the van, I turned on the engine and let it idle while I reviewed what I’d learned in the mall. Barry had been a seductive, gift-giving two-timer. OK, I’d already pretty much figured that one out. Hearing more details hadn’t contributed much. I was still very skeptical about the Ellie-shoving-Barry-into-a-ditch scenario, and I couldn’t believe that two sisters would go to war, take no prisoners, and kill a mall manager, over the eviction of a husband and stuff given to the other sister.

Next: Barry had, in his weird way, sought my help in finding his missing construction manager. In addition, Barry had left me, in the cryptically named “dog file,” a clumsily clipped article about Teddy Fury’s thievery. Three days after Barry had been murdered, Teddy Fury was still AWOL. Barry wanted me to have the editorial decrying the mall’s contribution to materialism. In the anti-materialism department, I doubted Barry’s death had been staged by a group of rehabbed shopaholics.

The van’s heat had not yet kicked in. I shivered from cold, from frustration, from hunger—the sugar high of pastries is woefully short-lived—and from the fact that my vow of abstention had utterly collapsed. I hadn’t had any caffeine for several hours! Agh!

I squeezed back sudden hot tears. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how any of my recently acquired information was going to help Julian.

Scolding myself aloud, I dabbed my eyes and applied some makeup—not from Barry’s compact—to my nose and cheeks. There was at least one of my problems that I could solve right away. I put the van into Drive and eased out of the mall parking lot. The Westside Buzz, the espresso place that Barry had taken me to, was only a few blocks away.

As I was pulling out of the mall parking lot, a brittle flapping sound caught my attention. I made a quick turn back into a parking space; the sound ceased. I checked the backseat and found nothing. There were no loose papers, no open window…Wait a sec. A piece of folded blue paper was wedged into the right rear window. I powered down the window, which made the paper fall out. Sighing, I jumped out, rounded the van, and picked up the fallen sheet.

On one side of the turquoise-colored paper was a printed advertisement extolling the virtues of having your oil changed at Westside Lube—While U Shop! Virtually all the vehicles in the lot, I now noticed, had blue sheets stuck under their wipers. Then why hadn’t the ad-placer put mine under one of my wipers? The answer lay on the back side of the sheet.

Someone using a black felt-tip pen had scrawled an indecipherable message in what looked like Spanish. Whoever had written it had been in a hurry, that was certain, as the tip of the pen had dragged from word to word. I raced back into the driver side of the car, locked the doors, and stared at the sheet. Of course, I realized glumly, I should be worried about fingerprints and all that. But someone had left me a note. And Julian was being arraigned the next day.

I took a pen and an index card out of my purse and tried to copy the note. It was a question, actually. It only took a few moments of staring at and copying letters before I was pretty sure I had the right words in front of me.

Porque tuvo dolores de cabeza?

I plugged in my not-brilliantly-remembered Spanish vocabulary, and eventually honed in on the question as a whole—not that it made any more sense than when I’d received the anonymous phone call.

Why did he have headaches?

Oh, man, I was getting tired of this. Why don’t you just tell me? my mind yelled back. He was pushed and fell into a ditch. Aside from that, you’re going to have to fill me in.

My own head was beginning to ache. I needed caffeine now more than ever, so I gunned the van in reverse. The brakes squealed and sent up a cloud of dust as I raced to The Westside Buzz.

On the way over, I left a message for Tom, telling him of all the developments and asking again about the women’s alibis and how Arch was doing in the gift department. I also called Marla again. She was not at home. Into her machine, I asked what time she had driven away from Westside on Monday night. Specifically, I went on, for what part of that crucial half-hour, from eight-thirty to nine P.M., had Page and Ellie been with her? Did she have any idea whether either or both of them had actually left the mall when they said they were leaving? The digital clock on the van dashboard said it was just past three o’clock. Good old Marla was probably down visiting Julian.

There was no line at The Westside Buzz. Usually by three in the afternoon, folks are trying to lay off caffeine. In my present state, this was definitely out of the question. I ordered an extra-hot four-shot latte made with—decadence!—half-and-half, and two cinnamon cookies. I took a sip of the rich, creamy drink, decided the barista deserved a two-dollar tip for her exquisite creation, and slotted the cup into the van’s plastic cup holder.

It was when I was driving away that an insight hit with such force that I slammed down on the brake. Latte slopped out on the mat. I stared at the creamy liquid and told myself I was insane.

But I didn’t think I was.

I may not have completely answered the question of why Barry had crippling headaches. I certainly did not understand the meaning of the cosmetics items Barry had left for me. But I had deduced something.

I’d just figured out why Barry Dean had left me his dog.

I had to get back into Barry’s house. Tom had said the department had pulled their detail off the place. Would Darlene be home next door? Would she give me a key?

I hit the accelerator again and wove through traffic. There’s something else, I promised myself. I know it. If I could find whatever it was before the next morning, Julian could be freed. I felt giddy. He’d be out for Arch’s birthday! This thought, combined with greedy chugs of latte, made me speed up even more.

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled up behind Darlene Petrucchio’s old pink Cadillac, one of the consignment items she’d never been able to sell and so had bought herself. Covered with five inches of crusty snow, the Caddy looked forlorn.

“OK, here’s the deal,” Darlene said, once I’d reassured her I wasn’t returning Barry’s basset hound. She invited me into her kitchen, where I declined a beer. This day, she was clad in a crimson cashmere sweater sewn with bugle beads and a matching pleated skirt—an outfit dating from circa nineteen-fifty-six. “Barry always relied on me when he went on trips,” Darlene went on. “I told the cops ‘bout startin’ his cars once a week, waterin’ his plants, walkin’ an’ feedin’ that dog. While the lawyers do the will, the cops axed me to watch over Barry’s stuff. They said because he has no next of kin, I’ve got, y’know, a proprietary interest. Doesn’t mean I get anything,” she added as she lit a cigarette. “It just means the cops can’t take care of the stuff, and Barry trusted me with it when he was alive, so why not now?”

“I understand,” I said, then launched into a spiel I’d rehearsed mentally all the way up the mountain. “It’s just that I seem to have left a computer disk full of menus over in his house. I simply have to have it. Barry loved menus, and he asked if he could borrow a bunch of mine. But now my computer’s crashed, and all I have is that disk, dammit.”

Darlene hesitated, and my heart sank. She pulled noisily on her cig. “You sure you don’t wanna beer? ‘S almost five.” I shook my head ruefully. She took a long sip of hers, then, to my delight, snagged a key ring from a drawer. “I don’t mind if you look in his house. Jes’ don’ take anythin’. The cops said they’d finished their processing. Finished their processing? What were they doin’, smokin’ hams in the livin’ room?”

A moment later I was ducking long icicles hanging from the Swiss-style gingerbread on Barry’s front porch. Behind me, the street was almost completely hushed, with only a slight breeze whisking the freshly fallen snow. I unlocked the front door, which featured a massive brass door knocker in the shape of a basset hound’s head.

Get in and get out, I ordered myself. You still have a birthday cake to make. Problem was, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. Which was the way with scavenger hunts, wasn’t it? Especially when the person who’d set the hunt up was dead.

Contrary to what I’d told Darlene, I’d never been in Barry’s house. Once inside, I put the key ring in my pocket and leaned against the door, taken aback.

A decorating magazine would have entitled the living room in which I now stood Homage to the Basset Hound. The color scheme was entirely devoted to gold, white, and black. Gold walls were lightened with white trim and chair rail molding, in front of which Barry had placed a black lacquered liquor cabinet and long buffet. Black-, white-, and gold-upholstered sofas and chairs were grouped between black lacquered tables and around black braided oval rugs. Wide, narrow, rectangular, and round needlepoint pillows graced the couches and chairs. Every one of them pictured a basset hound.

As I looked for the kitchen, I noticed a faint but pleasant smell of dog still hanging in the air. The scent made me unaccountably sad. When I finally found the kitchen, it was a small, plain oak-and-tile affair that didn’t look as if it had been used much.

“Latte,” I said aloud. “So, Barry, where’d you put your coffee stuff?” I began opening cupboards.

Because that was what it had to be, I’d suddenly realized at the espresso place. After the attempted-murder-by-truck, Barry had realized he was in terrible danger. So that was why he’d raced back to his office—to call his neighbor and finish setting up a trail of clues, a scavenger hunt of crime, in case he didn’t make it.

Why would he do that? my mind demanded. Why not go directly to the cops? Or at least to the mall owners? But I thought I knew the answer to that one, too. Barry had bent the rules for himself and his own appetites, the likes of which I’d seen with the sexy, gift-greedy Pam Disharoon. Any kind of official investigation would have unearthed the fact that Barry had obtained goodies from vendors, reps, and who knew who else. If he made it home, and the truck driver was arrested, he’d be OK. If not, he’d left a scavenger hunt for me, his old coffee pal, to figure out what was what. Maybe he’d been planning to leave the state, or even the country.

Anyway, he’d called Darlene. He said if he didn’t show up after work, she was to give his dog to me. He’d told Darlene how to spell the dog’s “new” name, and instructed her to tape the coffee moniker onto the canine food dishes. In her world of beer, cigarettes, and old Caddies, Darlene did not know from espresso drinks: She’d simply thought Barry had misspelled Late.

But the word Latte had meaning for yours truly. Correction: It had meaning for us, Barry and me. But what exactly was that meaning? We’d drunk the dark stuff together in college; we’d had some together in the last month. And somewhere in that common experience, I was absolutely convinced, he’d pounced on a detail that he now wanted me to ferret out.

I located a pair of scissors and a white plate, which I put on the counter before retrieving a fresh trash sack from under the sink. I opened the sack, set it aside, and pulled out every bag of coffee beans I could find, from the cupboards, two canisters, and the freezer. These I methodically cut open and dumped onto the plate. I was looking for anything remarkable, anything out of place, and most importantly, anything that would somehow clear Julian. After sorting through the beans, I tossed each examined lot into the trash. Eight bags of coffee later, I gave up.

His computer, I thought. Maybe he had a special “latte” or even another “dog” file with information. I pushed open the door to Barry’s study, which felt much colder than the rest of the house. I booted his PC, but wasn’t blessed with any luck in that department, either. Lots of files on 1st Quarter Profit Projections, Advertising Budget Breakdown, Lease Schedules, and the like, but no dog or latte file.

“Something to put the latte into!” I cried, and zipped back to the kitchen. Reopening cupboards, I laid eyes on too-high shelves of cups, saucers, and mugs. I dragged over a chair, climbed up, and took down one after another—the man must have owned fifty mugs and cups—and examined each one, inside and out. On about mug number forty, I began to feel disheartened. But when I came to the last row of five, my heart leaped. The logo on the orange mug said Thanks a latte. The cup clanked when I picked it up, and I thanked God with all my heart.

Inside the mug was…a key? A Saab key? I had a key to Barry’s Saab on the ring Darlene had given me. I scrambled down from the chair, pulled the key ring out of my pocket, and held both car keys up to the light. They were identical.

“This isn’t making sense, Barry!” I protested aloud. Startled by my own voice, I slammed through the door out into the cold, and headed grimly toward his garage.

CHAPTER 19

Behind the garage, Barry’s pontoon boat was parked at a slight tilt. It was covered with a canvas sheet now frosted with snow, and spoke of a summer that felt more than three months away. I turned to the garage door. It boasted a hefty new padlock.

The padlock must be an addition from Darlene, I figured. After the cops had processed Barry’s Saab, previously parked in the Westside Mall lot, they would have delivered the Saab to Darlene, as the one with the so-called proprietary interest. But I was willing to bet that Darlene’s own garage was filled to the brim with consignment stuff. I could imagine her insisting the Saab go back into Barry’s garage, with her promise that that was where it would stay.

As my chilled fingers fumbled for the padlock’s keyhole, I wished desperately for my gloves. I thanked all the heavenly angels when the smallest key on the ring Darlene had given me slid into the padlock and turned. The lock gave; I removed it and pushed through the wooden door.

Barry’s silvery-green Saab, glazed with ice like the padlock, was parked next to a black M-6, his BMW racing car. My footsteps scrunched over garage-floor grit as I headed to the Saab. I unlocked the driver-side door—Barry had probably either lost the remote opener, or hidden it in the bottom of a uranium mine—and pulled the lever to open the trunk. You had to start somewhere, I thought grimly.

Carpeted with black fuzzy stuff, the trunk was a disappointment. It held nothing but a pristine spare tire in its well. I’d heard once of people hiding money in the well, though, so I hefted out the tire, which was as cold and heavy as a frigid boulder. For all my effort, the wheel well was empty.

I slammed the trunk shut and slid into the Saab’s driver’s seat.

I should have guessed the upholstery would be cold, but the icy, hardened leather still sent a chill down my spine. My breath clouded the inside of the car as I poked around, looking in every crevice. I was careful, though. After hearing Heather’s story of her boss’s lunchtime activities, I didn’t want to examine the seats themselves too closely.

At least the cops had not left a mess. The car interior was spotless. On the backseat floor, a thick rumpled towel indicated Barry had probably taken Latte on rides the way he had taken his beloved Honey years ago. Other than that, there were no newspapers, no clothes, no sporting equipment, no clutter of any kind. I groped gingerly under the seats and again came up empty.

The glove compartment yielded the proof of insurance and manual, period. I slammed it shut, frustrated. Then, remembering a trick I’d seen in a movie, I turned the Saab key one click in the ignition, so as to run the accessories. Then I deftly punched the Eject button on both the CD and cassette players. They were empty.

“Dammit!” I yelled, creating another big cloud of verbal steam. Barry had been so proud of this car. The perforated leather seats were ventilated with fans, the turbo kicked in with a blast of power, and he had shown me all its zippy bells and whistles when he’d taken me out for…

Coffee. I smiled. Bells and whistles, indeed. Those inventive Swedes had designed a particularly cool gizmo for holding your coffee. Barry himself had pressed the button that brought down a vertical plastic cylinder that automatically turned ninety degrees to hold my … latte.

Breathing another prayer, I pushed the button. It didn’t move. I cursed silently and pressed it again. The vertical panel squeaked out and opened sideways. Inside the empty circle where my latte had once sat was a key, stuck under plastic tape.

With my frigid fingers barely able to move, I scraped and ripped at the tape until I’d pulled that sucker of a key out of the cup holder. As I stomped back to the house, key ring and new key in hand, I tried to stay calm.

You think this is fun, Barry? my mind growled. Did you ever spend time in jail? Have any of your friends been stuck behind bars? Next time, leave typed instructions with your lawyer. It’ll be easier on both of us.

I ransacked his office, looking for a file cabinet that needed a key. Nothing. Every drawer was unlocked.

Dog File, Barry had written beside my name on the manila envelope. Maybe if I again spread out everything that was in that packet, I’d see a common element that would lead me to the dog file.

I jammed all the keys into my pocket, slammed out the front door, and traipsed over the ice to my van. It was getting late. I was tired, frustrated, and upset. But it was unlikely Darlene, much less the cops, would ever let me into Barry’s house again to look for an imaginary disk. Not only that, but I was running out of time. At my van, I pulled out the manila envelope, then crunched through the packed ice back to Barry’s chalet.

Packet in hand, I settled onto the scratchy, black braided rug in the living room. At eye level, I was surrounded by the mournful faces of needlepointed, painted, and lacquered basset hounds.

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered to them. “How come your master had to make everything so difficult?”

On the floor, I laid everything out: the compact, lipstick, and blush; the editorial decrying the mall addition; the article on Teddy; the paycheck to Lucas Holden that had been returned by the post office. Next to them, I placed the manila envelope itself, with its scrawled Goldy and Dog File notations written in different colored inks, probably penned at different times. My guess was that the Goldy reminder had come later, once Barry decided after the truck incident to send me on a wild-goose chase, in case he took a powder.

I surveyed the stuff. Some people enjoy creating a tangle for others, so that only the most determined folks will try to figure out the solution. Clearly, Barry was that kind of person. On the day he died, he’d bequeathed his newly named basset hound to me; he’d also assembled some articles and stuffed them in a manila envelope labeled with my name and a reference to an enigmatic dog file. Less than an hour before he’d been murdered, he’d written me a note saying he had a “tip” for me. Since Barry had mentioned both a check and a tip in his note, I had to assume that that “tip” was verbal in nature, and would have explained everything.

“But the risk, Barry,” I said aloud, thinking hard, “is that when you leave too many clues, no one, not even a caterer-turned-sleuth-with-a-friend-in-jail, no one will be able to figure out what the hell you were trying to say.”

All around the room, the basset hounds looked sadder than ever. I ignored their canine countenances and picked up each item from the floor, examined it again, then set it down.

Nothing.

My back ached. I eased myself up to a chair, propped my feet up on an ottoman, and again surveyed the pattern of items. Still, no ideas popped. If I were an old-fashioned deductive English detective, I reflected, I’d have a nice glass of sherry and ponder. I surveyed the living room. Along one wall, the black lacquered cabinet—complete with a family of basset hounds painted on the front—held a silver tray of crystal sherry glasses and, bless me, a bottle of Dry Sack.

I heaved myself up, crossed the room, uncorked the opened bottle, and poured myself a very small dose. I recorked the bottle and downed a lovely sip. Barry the showman undoubtedly would have preferred offering me a rare wine, and I probably should have checked to see if he had any, but I wasn’t choosy, I thought, as I took another sip. Besides, I thought as I peered downward, the liquor cabinet was… oh, God.

Locked.

I was so startled I turned too fast and sent the sherry bottle flying. I grabbed for it and missed. The bottle didn’t break, thank goodness, but rolled across the living room rug. In trying to catch the bottle, though, I did drop my glass, which crashed and shattered. Exhaling, I stepped over the splinters of glass and the puddle of sherry, tiptoed to Barry’s keys, and nabbed the one I’d extracted from the Saab cup holder. With my heart thundering, I inserted it into the cabinet keyhole.

The heavy door opened easily. Inside were not the bottles of expensive wine I had expected, but a stack of files about three inches high. I grabbed them. Why had the cops not taken the cabinet? I wondered. I could hear what they would say. Because it was extremely heavy, because it was in the living room, because it was a liquor cabinet, because it was locked. As the ace investigator in the department, Tom would have taken it, of course, and broken into it. But he’d been off the case from the beginning.

I danced back across the room and opened up the files.

Inside the first file was a bulkily folded blueprint. I spread it out, stared at it, and finally figured out that the Existing Structure was Westside Mall. Numbers dotted the plan for the addition and lot, but what did that tell me? Not a thing. Someone—Barry?—had penned X’s in three different spots. Barry had been trained as an architect; he’d known what the diagram meant. For me, it might just as well have been in Swahili.

Next in the pile was a banded packet of Polaroids and folded sketches. I laid the sketches—there were three of them—out in front of me like cards. The Polaroids were not of Pam or Ellie, but of concrete and dirt photographed from what appeared to be different angles. At the bottom of each photo were penned dates, all in February. The sketches were in Barry’s hand, and resembled a cross-section of an archeological dig. Where footings should be, he’d written, beside a set of lines. Where they are, he’d written to the left of another diagram, and then added: CHECK PHOTOS!

O-kay. I took a thoughtful breath and plowed on. Next was a sheet: Siblings & Incomes, with two names typed and annotated.

Lawrence. Criminal defense attorney; partner in firm. Annual income: 5 million ++++.

Bachman. Orthopedic surgeon; operates on world-class athletes. Annual income: 3 million ++++.

At the bottom was another Barry-scribbled note. Amount he’s borrowed to build custom home: $520,000. Approximate profit from sale of topsoil from this site: $1,600,000.

And last, there were two more newspaper clippings. One was a piece on a new playground in Aspen Meadow, the other covered the rise in traffic stops for reckless driving. Mystified, I turned them over. Both of them, like the flipped clippings on the floor, included ads for topsoil from We Got Dirt.

OK, so Barry had been on to something. But what? I went back to the Siblings & Incomes sheet. Did I know either Lawrence or Bachman? With a sinking feeling, I pulled out one of the cards that my—and now Julian’s—lawyer had handed me. Underneath Hulsey’s name was the listing of the firm’s partners.

“Oh, Lord,” I breathed. I scurried over to a lacquered end table that held a phone and directory. Flipping through the Aspen Meadow section, I looked for the name and address I’d seen right near the Stockhams’ gorgeous place. Brother Bachman, too, had done very well, moving into one of the ritziest areas of Aspen Meadow. And he’d dated Marla!

This was just like Pam and Page, I thought, as I punched buttons. Like Kim and Teddy. One sibling can’t stand having less than the other. And then he or she just can’t stop competing for stuff, no matter what gets in the way. No matter what.

Tom’s number had not connected before a large hand closed around my neck. In a split second, another hand wrenched the phone away, and pulled it so hard the cord snapped. The phone went flying. I twisted away from the choke hold with all the energy I could muster. The second hand closed around my throat. I gasped for breath and kicked backward instinctively with first one, then the other foot. Black clouds formed in front of my eyes as a distant voice reminded me, The abusive husband always tries to silence the wife, to make sure she has no voice….

With a surge of furious energy, I simultaneously clamped my own hands onto the choker’s, turned my head, and bit as hard as I could into my attacker’s palm. The choker screeched with pain as blood spurted into my mouth. I yanked myself free and dived toward the front door. Two fists banged into my back, and I reeled onto the couch.

Above me, Victor Wilson tried to hit me again, but I rolled away, scrambled to my feet, and screamed bloody murder as I raced the other way, toward the back door.

“Hey!” he bellowed, sprinting after me. “Get back here!”

I slammed into the back door and fumbled frantically for the doorknob. Victor crashed into me, grabbed hand-fuls of my hair, and jerked me so brutally that I almost passed out.

“You aren’t going anywhere!” he snarled as he flung me down. I staggered sideways into the liquor cabinet and bounced off it onto the floor, the breath utterly knocked out of me.

“Stay there! And shut up!” Victor yelled, as he kicked me viciously in the back.

Again black spots spiraled in front of my eyes. I whimpered and panted for breath.

“You’re a thief,” I gasped. Victor placed his booted foot on my thigh. He was pressing hard as he looked for something. Pain ratcheted into every cell of my body. “You followed me here!”

“Shut up, you nosy bitch! Or I’ll smack you again!” He was groping, I realized dimly, through a filthy sack.

Not for a knife, I prayed. Please, not for another knife.

“You killed Lucas Holden! And Barry, too!” Talking might slow him down, might give time for Darlene to figure out that the racket she was hearing next door was not the noise from some TV show.

“Shut up!”

Squirming, I looked around desperately for something—anything—to distract him. His boot pressed down firmly, pinning me to the floor. Where in the hell was my cell phone?

I wheezed, “And… and you were going to let our friend Julian, or Ellie McNeely, take the rap. Ellie never crashed her car into Barry’s, you did. What’d you do, pull her purse with the jewelry receipt and car keys out of the Dumpster where Teddy threw them? Ellie never pushed anyone into a ditch. She never killed anyone. What were you going to do after you trapped her in the toilet tank, kill her and dump her body under some cement at your construction site?”

Victor, still rummaging for something, grunted, “Something like that. Now shut up before I choke you again!” He pushed down harder on my thigh. I winced. There was a lot more to say, but I knew now it wouldn’t help. They teach you in self-protection classes to talk to criminals if they attack you. You’re supposed to call them by name, you’re supposed to appeal to their soft side. Crap to that. Talking doesn’t change the mind of a greedy, vicious man.

Victor finally found what he was looking for in the huge bag: a long coil of thick rope.

“What’s that for?” I gasped.

“I’m gonna bury you under the foundation for our last store,” he said matter-of-factly.

My adrenaline soared and I desperately scanned the room. How could I get away from him? Applying more pressure to my leg, he leaned over me. Double crap.

“Victor,” I screamed, “I know about your brothers! I know what you’re doing! And I brought you cookies, you bastard!”

This took him back for a millisecond. And in that millisecond, I kicked away his boot with my free leg, and crab-scrambled a yard away. With an angry roar, he vaulted after me. But by that time I had something in my right hand. When he pounced around the corner of the couch, I hit him square in the face with the Dry Sack bottle.

He squealed and reeled backward, his face a bloody mess of glass shards, liquor, and torn flesh. While he howled, I scooted over to Barry’s door and snatched up the doorstop with its needlepoint picture of a basset hound. Under the decoration, thank God, was a heavy brick. While Victor screamed, “You bitch! You bitch!” I slammed it into his stomach with all the strength I possessed. He wheeled forward, bellowing with pain, spun around, and landed hard on top of all the papers Barry had meticulously assembled to prove his excavator’s wrongdoing. Then, because I’d learned about this in self-defense and because I didn’t want to risk Victor waking up before I could get the cops here, I hit him once more, very, very hard. With the brick.

Where it really hurts.

CHAPTER 20

It’s called overexcavating,” Tom informed me, as he broke eggs carefully into a bowl late the next morning. “Most of the builders in the Denver area are honest. But there are some crooks, and they love to brag. That’s probably how Victor Wilson heard about the way to do it.”

It was Arch’s birthday. Tom had taken the day off, he said, so he could take care of me and bake Arch’s cake. After my violent struggle with Victor Wilson, I was definitely out of cooking for the next couple of days. Tom was happily taking over so I could recuperate. And I was determined to let myself rest and heal. I’d even handed my next client over to Liz Fury.

Meanwhile, Arch—otherwise known as the Birthday Boy, which we of course could not call him to his face—was ecstatic that Elk Park had another in-service. My son was sleeping in.

“Overexcavating?” I asked Tom, as I chased four ibuprofen with a double espresso. Every part of my body ached. I was determined to think about, to talk about, anything except how I was feeling.

Tom measured sugar, then dumped it into the whirling mixer. “Works like this. Guy either is or is not in cahoots with the soil and building inspectors. Sometimes inspectors are just stupid, which is what we had with the Westside Mall addition.”

“Oh, great.”

Tom checked the bittersweet chocolate he was melting in the top of our double boiler. “Remember you told me about that lake of drainage water by the back entrance?” he asked.

“You mean, the one that Victor was so helpful bringing my boxes across?”

“The very one,” Tom replied with a grin. He lifted the pan with its pool of melted chocolate off the heat.

“OK. So there’s a lake of drainage water by the mall’s back door. How is that so important?”

“Drainage problems, which that project had in the worst way, often come from improper grading. With overexcavation, your crook is going to sell over a million dollars of extra dirt. The grading is never going to fix the problem. Lotta rain, lotta snow? That water’s gotta go somewhere. It can’t drain back into the earth, because the impervious surface of a parking lot won’t let it. So it just becomes a puddle, a pond, or one of the Great Lakes.”

“How much had Victor overexcavated?”

“’Bout six or eight inches. Over that huge expanse of land, you’re talking a lot of dirt. He sold it all through those little We Got Dirt ads, and he made about a million and a half. He had his crew helping him out, too, for cash.”

“So… how do we reconstruct the whole thing?” I puzzled.

Tom tilted his head and considered. “It’s complicated. Victor Wilson was not only very greedy, he was a very mean, very smart guy.”

But he acted nice, my mind automatically supplied. The creep.

Tom went on: “Say Lucas No-toe Holden, the former construction manager, discovered the drainage problem and accused his excavator of overexcavating and selling off the dirt. Maybe Lucas wanted to alert Barry but Victor intercepted him. By the way, you want to hear about everybody’s favorite cadaver?”

“Is this going to destroy my appetite?”

“Hope not. We got back the drug screen. Holden had been injected with cocaine, and that, we think, caused the heart attack. Again, it was probably Victor, but I doubt we’ll ever be able to prove that. Our theory is that after Victor Wilson intercepted Lucas Holden and used the hypodermic on him, Victor quickly drove—through the night—to a motel where he could wear Lucas’s sweatshirt and ball cap to check in as Lucas. Then Victor set up a scene so that it looked as if Lucas died of natural causes, and left the body.”

“And the coroner out there didn’t test for drugs because…”

Tom stood to make me another espresso. Except for bruise marks around my neck, I was in pretty good shape. I liked being pampered, though. In fact, I loved it.

“Because Lucas Holden was a diabetic with heart disease, Goldy,” Tom explained, as velvety dark coffee spiraled into a new English china espresso cup. Tom had bought it for me and hidden it until an appropriate occasion presented itself. He figured catching Victor Wilson qualified. “There was no obvious drug use,” he went on. “So they didn’t run a screen. That kind of case, the medical examiner probably wouldn’t get involved. Remember, a coroner can be a nurse whose husband is a rancher, say. Her only job is to determine the cause and manner of death. And with no foul play, no obvious drug use, the corpse in pretty good shape, then the coroner thinks, Bingo! Donation.”

“But how did Ellie become involved?” I wondered aloud, as I gratefully accepted the crema-loaded espresso.

“First you gotta look at what happened with Barry and Victor. Again, our theory is that Victor typed up a note, supposedly from Lucas Holden, saying ‘I quit! I’m going to Arizona. Send my check there.’ ‘Where in Arizona?’ Barry probably asked Victor, and Victor said ‘Prescott’ because it came into his head. While Barry was out at the site, though, he saw that something was wrong with the footings. They were even with the surface level of the dirt, instead of below it. Barry had an architecture degree, so—”

“So he acted on his own,” I interrupted, “and got the plans from the county. And took pictures. And confronted Victor?”

Tom sighed. “We think so. But that’s not all Barry confronted him about.”

I sipped the coffee and ran my fingers along my throbbing neck. “When was all this?”

“We’re guessing a month ago. That’s when Barry first confronted Victor with the overexcavation, and the returned check from Arizona. Where was Lucas? Barry wanted to know. Why hadn’t Lucas ended up where you said he was going? And, what the hell are we going to do about this drainage problem you’ve created?”

“Good Lord.”

“We figure Victor pushed Barry into the ditch when they had this confrontation. Unknown to Victor at that time, two illegal Mexican immigrants who worked for him, Jorge and Raoul Sanchez, were watching. Jorge and Raoul speak great English. And they worked their butts off for Victor, who sometimes paid them and sometimes didn’t. One day, the two brothers came early for their money, and overheard the whole thing. Barry probably asked Victor one question too many. Hey, by the way, how come these concrete footings are even with the topsoil, instead of being eight inches lower than the soil?”

I sighed and shook my head. “So Jorge and Raoul saw Victor push Barry Dean into the ditch? And knew why, after that, Barry complained about headaches?”

“Yup. Jorge and Raoul, chewed out, unpaid, and maybe just a little scared of how violent Victor could become, walked off the job. Victor, instead of being afraid of Jorge and Raoul ratting him out, called them up and said, ‘One of you needs to come over here and drive this truck into Barry Dean or I’m going to turn all of you into the INS. Then you two and your mother and all your little illegal family will be bused straight back to Mexico.’”

“That bastard.”

“Victor made Jorge and Raoul swear the person who had pushed Barry into the ditch was a woman. Using the same blackmail technique, he forced Raoul to phone in an anonymous tip that Julian had driven the truck that almost killed Barry and you. But they both felt guilty, which is why they called you anonymously to tip you off about the headaches. And left you that note in Spanish, too.”

“And I brought the bastard cookies! But I still don’t understand about the cuff links, and Ellie, and all that.”

“After the ditch incident, Victor must have been real worried about what Barry would do. In particular, he might have worried about how much Barry had told his very public girlfriend, Ellie. So before Barry could do anything, Victor probably decided to kill Barry and frame Ellie. He followed Ellie around, saw Teddy Fury nab her purse. Teddy kept the purse and the cash, but tossed the rest of the purse’s contents—including Ellie’s car keys and the cuff links receipt—into the Dumpster. Victor fished that stuff out and laid his plans. First he’d crash Ellie’s car into Barry’s, to establish the jealousy. Then he planted the cuff links in the dump truck, so it would look as if Ellie tried to kill Barry because he was having something on the side with Pam. But the truck scheme to kill Barry failed.”

“And I lost a box of shrimp rolls,” I commented.

“At that point, Victor was probably desperate,” Tom went on. “He stole your Henckels knife, stalked Barry, and stabbed him in an area invisible to security cameras, behind the P and G shoe cabinet. When the clerks approached to do the cleanup, he shoved Barry into the cabinet. But as he was leaving the store, he saw you coming in with Arch’s guitar. You were asking one clerk after another where the shoe department was. He waited, watched you discover Barry, and whacked you with the guitar.”

“Then when Julian was arrested, that worked for him, too,” I concluded glumly. “He just blackmailed—who was it? Raoul the construction worker?—to say Julian was driving the truck! That son of a bitch! He didn’t succeed in getting Jorge and Raoul into trouble, did he?”

“Don’t worry,” Tom reassured me. “Jorge’s lawyer got the INS deal he wanted, and both Jorge and Raoul are cooperating fully in the investigation.”

“Raoul and Jorge,” I murmured. “Two siblings who really care about each other.”

“Oh! And speaking of siblings! Kim Fury finally called. Apologized profusely for not getting back earlier, but she had gone out looking for her brother, whom she still seems to be constantly ticked off at. But at least she found him. Teddy wasn’t holed up studying quantum mechanics, either, sorry to say, or doing volunteer work in the ghetto. But they’re probably going to close the strip bar where he’d been living in the basement.”

“Ah.” I frowned at the dregs in my demitasse. “What was Teddy doing there?”

“Busboy. Got free rent and meals, made good tips, and he got to see the shows for free.” He perused his cake recipe and began assembling ingredients.

“All right,” I said finally. “Before we get into the whole Pam and Page thing, tell me why Barry didn’t just fire Victor when he discovered what he was doing.”

Tom turned to me. “Goldy, you yourself gave us the answer to that. First of all, as mall manager, Barry didn’t have the power to fire Victor. Pennybaker International would have had to do that. And why didn’t Barry contact Pennybaker?”

“Because he was afraid of negative publicity,” I answered grimly. “Because he was afraid all his borderline-legal antics with giving the vendors’ goods away would be discovered. Because if Pennybaker swooped in with their analysts and managers, Barry would be blamed, somehow, for the delay in the mall construction. Maybe they’d discover he was blackmailing Shane Stockham over the rent issue. And… maybe they’d even get wind of his affair with Pam Disharoon. So Barry figured, ‘I’ll hire my old college pal Goldy, the caterer who solves crimes. She’ll help me to find out what happened to Lucas No-toe Holden.’”

“You did great on this,” Tom reassured me. “The guys did check out those alibis for Ellie and Page, by the way. The women did go straight home, Ellie with Mrs. Harrington, Page in Shane’s car. Shane called a former employee of The Gadget Guy to drive him back up to the Stockham place. He didn’t want to risk driving with his wife after they’d almost killed each other at the party. Oh… and our guy who checked out Page’s alibi also asked her about all those suspicious shoes. Page never saw Barry in the shoe department. She said she bought so much footwear because that was the best way to get revenge on her stingy old husband.”

I shook my head. Tom folded sifted cocoa and sugar into the melted butter and chocolate mixture, then folded in yolks, then creamy, beaten whites. Even as much as my neck now was beginning to ache, I had to appreciate his skill. Tom regarded me with concern. “You look like you’re in pain.”