Crunch Time

6

After we’d prayed, Tom busied himself slicing the ham. I passed around the applesauce, the Caprese salad, and—yum—the homemade macaroni and cheese. A crust of cheddar had browned over the creamy lake of pasta, and I took a bite that was both crunchy and soft. When my eyes widened in amazement, Tom smiled. The ham, which Tom had glazed with brown sugar and Dijon mustard, was meltingly tender, and the chunky cinnamon applesauce set it off perfectly. The meal was a wonderful way to remember Ernest.

Marla stopped eating momentarily, took a sip of wine, and turned her attention to Yolanda. “So, when did you and Kris break up?”

“That pendejo,” interjected Ferdinanda. “Don’t mention Kris to me. Don’t mention him at this table.”

Taken aback, Marla cleared her throat and touched one of her jeweled barrettes.

I said, “Ernest invited Yolanda and Ferdinanda to stay at his place.” I omitted the part about the rental burning down, knowing that would bring another torrent of questions. “Yolanda was fixing his dinners—”

When Marla waved her fingers to interrupt me, all her gems glittered in the kitchen light. “After the Jerk and I got divorced? And Ernie and Faye did the same thing? Ernie and I used to drink together at the Grizzly. Then he got sober and I had a heart attack, and that was the end of that.” She reflected a moment. “I hadn’t seen him in a while . . . and now you say—” She stopped talking, shocked into silence.

Tom mildly asked Marla, whom everyone in Aspen Meadow would agree was the most reliable source of town gossip, if she had any idea whether Ernest had any enemies.

Marla twisted her mouth to one side. “Well, let’s see.” Then her eyes twinkled. “I heard from a source at the church that he was investigating Brie Quarles.”

“The junior warden?” I asked, incredulous. Brie Quarles, a short, slender lawyer, had a head of wavy blond hair, light blue eyes, and porcelain skin. She was thirty but looked twenty, and she had separated from her husband . . . but then I’d heard they were getting back together. They did not have children. So, Brie was being investigated? “Why would Ernest be interested in her?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Marla said matter-of-factly. “And no, I don’t know who the client is. Maybe Father Pete. I’m sure he doesn’t want his vestry doing things that could get the church bad press.”

Ferdinanda had blanched. At the possibility of wrongdoing in the church? Sad to say, Episcopalians didn’t have the market cornered on that one. Tom, meanwhile, had furtively taken out his notebook and written down a few words that I was sure included Brie Quarles.

“So anyway,” I said, groping for any topic beyond the ecclesiastical, “Yolanda and Ferdinanda will be staying with us for a little while. Tom? Will you and Boyd put in a ramp for Ferdinanda?” I asked brightly, nestling a second juicy piece of ham beside a heap of applesauce.

“Tomorrow morning,” Tom replied, not at all fooled by my digression. “That was Boyd on the phone. He’ll be here at seven.”

“But,” said Marla, also one not to be put off by conversational diversion, “you don’t think Brie had anything to do with—”

“We don’t know yet,” Tom said. “We’re open to all theories. Who was your source on that piece of information?”

It was rare to see Marla blush, but this was one of those times. To hide it, she again turned to Yolanda. “Do you know if Ernest had any enemies?”

“We’ve already questioned Yolanda,” Tom said firmly. “Who’s your source of information?”

Marla closed her eyes and sighed. “My cleaning lady, Penny Woolworth. If you talk to her, she’ll never tell me anything again.”

Tom made another mark in his notebook. He said quietly, “We won’t mention you.”

Marla scowled at him, then smiled at Yolanda. “So, when did you move out of Kris’s?”

“A few weeks ago,” said Yolanda before Ferdinanda could offer another opinion of Kris Nielsen.

“That bitch,” said Marla.

“What bitch?” I said. “Who are you talking about?”

“Penny Woolworth, my cleaning lady! I share her with Kris Nielsen and a couple of other people,” Marla said. “She’s the bitch. I pay her extra to keep me up-to-date on the romantic affairs of all her clients.”

“A cleaning lady sharing dirt,” I observed drily.

“I remember Penny,” Yolanda said weakly, looking into her wineglass. “She used to clean Kris’s house once a week. She was nice. It was too bad about her husband going to prison.”

Marla went on. “Yes, well, our little mountain town doesn’t keep secrets all that well. This not-keeping-secrets is something Kris should have known, or at least have figured out. Penny Woolworth, as you know, is a young woman who’s fallen on hard times, since somebody”—here she looked at Tom—“got her husband sent to prison for car theft.”

“Zeke Woolworth,” Tom said matter-of-factly, “stole not just one or two ultra-expensive cars, but more than thirty, which he eventually sold to chop shops. Unfortunately, before he sold the cars, Zeke would speed all over the place. Sometimes he even crashed into something, usually a pylon, or a street sign, or sometimes a lane divider. He got caught not just once, but eight times. He served short stints, but when he stole a Ferrari and sped up the interstate to Aspen Meadow at more than a hundred miles an hour, he was, yes, finally sent away for two years. He’s getting out soon, but in the interim we’ve all been a lot safer.”

“Maybe so,” said Marla. “But with no income, Penny’s had to work for me and four other people.”

“Marla,” I interjected, “it’s really not right for you to pump Penny for information on her clients—”

Marla waved this away. “How do you think I found out Ernest was investigating Brie? She cleans Brie’s next-door neighbor’s house, and Brie told the neighbor she thought someone was following her. The guy was driving a red pickup truck. I got the neighbor to ask Brie the license plate of the truck, which Brie told her, and Penny got it from the neighbor, who told me. I recognized the license plate as the one Ernie had on his old pickup. You see, Goldy,” she said triumphantly, “you’re not the only one in town who can figure things out.”

Tom shook his head. “Did you tell Brie or her neighbor it was Ernest who was doing the following?”

Marla frowned at Tom. “What do you think I am, nuts? No, I wanted to call Ernie first, but then I forgot.”

Tom wrote in his notebook. Marla turned her scowl to the notebook, then raised her eyebrows at me.

She went on. “Anyway, Penny did tell me that Kris Nielsen’s huge house in Flicker Ridge cost over a mil. But he can afford it,” Marla said. She took a sip of wine. “Penny says that she had to work there late one night, because it had snowed in the morning, and she couldn’t get through until the late afternoon. By the time she left, Kris had had more than a few drinks. While Penny was waiting to be paid, she asked him if he knew about expanding a business, because she had more clients than she could handle, and she wanted to hire some more people. She figured he would know the answer, because supposedly he was a successful businessman. He said he wasn’t a businessman, and did she want a drink. She said yes, drank with him, and he ended up telling her that he’d inherited all his money from his dead mother.”

“What?” exclaimed Yolanda. “He told me he’d started a company in Silicon Valley and sold it, and that was how he made his money.”

“What was the name of the company?” Tom asked mildly.

“I don’t know,” said Yolanda, dumbfounded. “I didn’t ask.”

“Hmm,” said Tom, in a way that showed he would look it up.

“Well,” said Marla, “I guess sharing the ‘I inherited all my money’ tidbit with his cleaning lady made her recoil in horror. She said, ‘You don’t have to work?’ And he shut up about it. The next time she cleaned, she pressed him again on the business thing. He said he’d turned over all his hiring to the human resources people at his company.”

I said, “For crying out loud.”

Marla beamed. “Penny thinks that Kris should be serving time for being lazy. Penny says it’s not fair that poor dear can’t-keep-from-boosting-cars Zeke is in prison.”

“I agree that Kris should be serving time,” said Ferdinanda. She squinted at Marla. “Does this woman have any real dirt on Kris?”

Marla regarded Yolanda somberly. “Did you know he was, ah, being unfaithful to you?”

Yolanda’s voice was weak. “Yes, I did know that. I mean, I figured it out.” She knew that if she mentioned the venereal disease to Marla, it would be in next week’s Mountain Journal.

“And you know how he did it?” asked Ferdinanda emphatically. “While Yolanda was working at the spa, Kris hired a nurse to take me out for a drive. Every day I had to go out with that woman so he could have some ‘free time.’ Free time to do what? I always asked that nurse. He’s not going to a job. But she never told me.”

“Do you remember the name of the nurse?” asked Tom, as mildly as before.

“Just her first name,” Ferdinanda replied. “Patty. I called her Pattypan, because she squashed any chance I had to take a nap.”

“Ferdinanda?” I said. “You didn’t protest? You just made a joke out of it?”

Ferdinanda pulled herself up tall. “I tried to protest, but I didn’t have a weapon. That’s why I had Yolanda buy me the baton, when we moved out of Kris’s.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Marla finally said, “Penny doesn’t know anything about this nurse, at least not that she told me. She claims Kris drives her nuts because he’s in the house a lot, not out working, and because he loves to go shopping for stuff he doesn’t need, stuff that she then has to dust. But she neglected to tell me that you had moved out, Yolanda, which I am sorry about—”

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Yolanda said, her tone bitter. “I’m fine.” As if to prove it, she took another swig of wine. “Can we change the subject?”

“I’m still mad at Penny,” Marla said stubbornly. “She should have told me that Yolanda had moved out, and then I wouldn’t have had to ask about it. Oh well,” she said. She looked around the kitchen. “Tom? Could you open that second bottle of wine? We should be talking about Ernest, not about problems with cleaning ladies.”

Tom opened the wine and filled the glasses again. When he sat down, he said, “Unlike many cops, Ernest was a neat freak. His desk was always the cleanest one I’ve ever seen in the sheriff’s department.”

And so we talked about Ernest. Ferdinanda said he was without prejudice and welcomed them into his home. Marla became weepy, and Tom diplomatically moved the open wine bottle off to a cupboard. Yolanda said Ernest cared about his clients. “He cared about everybody,” she added. “Even us,” she whispered.

It seemed as if the conversation was going to veer into something maudlin requiring more boxes of tissues than I knew I had on hand.

Marla and Ferdinanda began to talk about other topics, thank God. The two women seemed to have a natural affinity and found that they agreed on a variety of issues, from immigration reform (they were for it) to using margarine (they were against it). Neither Kris Nielsen’s nor Ernest McLeod’s name came up again.

Concentrating on food kept us from talking about all that had happened. Yolanda gradually seemed to relax. Tom winked at me several times as we ate and talked, and I found the stress melting out of my own body as well.

Speaking of men who love to shop, Tom had gone browsing in some specialty food stores the previous day, before all hell had broken loose with the murder of Ernest McLeod. He’d picked up a box of my favorite toffee, which was made with butter, cream, chocolate, and almonds. He chopped it, placed it on a plate, and passed it around. Marla restrained herself and had only one piece—there was that heart attack, after all—but Ferdinanda and Yolanda each had three pieces, plus coffee into which, as usual, they measured so many teaspoons of sugar, I couldn’t watch.

“If you want me to get those dogs bedded down at my place for the night,” Marla said at last, “I need to get cracking. Penny comes tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll find out why she held out on me regarding—” But when Marla saw Yolanda’s stricken face, she broke off. People may love to gossip, but when they discover how much being the subject of gossip hurts others, they often don’t love it so much anymore. “Sorry,” Marla mumbled.

“I’m doing the dishes,” Yolanda announced as she got up.

Tom protested. “You’re a guest. Besides, I’m the only one who knows where everything goes.”

“You cooked,” said Yolanda. “As soon as I get Ferdinanda settled in the tub, I’m cleaning up. Please just give Marla her three puppies.” Her voice cracked when she said, “Cleaning will help me.” Tom backed off.

Reluctantly, Tom and I gathered up a promising-looking trio of the little beagles. Outside, the weather had become even colder. When we picked up the puppies, they were covered with mud.

I felt horribly guilty. “We should have brought them in earlier.”

“They’ll be all right,” said Tom. “They’ve been out here having fun. Let’s just commandeer the kitchen sink and rinse them off in warm water. Can you get some thick bath towels that you don’t mind having stained?”

“You bet,” I said as I carried one of the squirming puppies into the house. While Yolanda pushed all the plates to one side of the counter, I put the first puppy into one half of the double kitchen sink, then turned the warm water on in the other sink.

“Good Lord,” said Marla, peering down at the grimy animal. “Please tell me you’re going to get those animals clean before they plop down in my Mercedes that I just had detailed.”

“Of course,” I called as I nabbed baby shampoo from the pantry and handed it to Tom. Then I headed to the linen closet.

When I returned, Tom was using a warm spray of water to rinse the shampoo off the puppies. He handed me the first beagle, and I rubbed it down with the old, plush towel.

“Very odd,” said Tom as he handed me the second puppy.

“What is?” Marla and I asked in unison.

“Every single one of these puppies is a female,” said Tom.

“So?” I asked as I dried off the third puppy. Marla was already hugging her first charge to her shoulder.

“Well, it looks as if they’ve been spayed already,” said Tom as he towel-dried his puppy. “I want to take a picture of this little pup and have my guys canvass the town’s veterinarians. I want to know who did these surgeries and why. It might explain why Ernest took them.”

Once Tom had taken photos, we got the puppies into a box and the box onto the floor of Marla’s expensive German car. By that time, she appeared to be having second thoughts. But she soldiered on. Like Yolanda, she wanted to do whatever it took to honor the memory of Ernest McLeod.

After shampooing the rest of the puppies, plus Jake, we bedded down all the dogs on clean newspaper in the pet-containment area. Tom showered and we finally fell into bed an hour later. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even contemplate the prospect of catering the next day. But I dutifully set the alarm and snuggled in next to Tom.

“Thanks for a fabulous dinner,” I said.

“Miss G., when I think about that fire, and our guys being pulled off that house, and you in there, unprotected, I just . . . it’s not like you’re a regular vic, for God’s sake. You’re my wife.”

“We were fine. But we do still need to find out why someone wanted to hurt Ernest, and then why that person would try to destroy his house, and maybe us in the process. I wonder if it’s the same guy who was peeping in Yolanda’s windows at the rental. And could this guy have burned down that house, too? Really, we need to figure out if this is all the same person.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ woman?” said Tom. “The department needs to find out. Not you. Please don’t meddle in this.”

“I’m not meddling. I’m trying to help Yolanda, who is, remember, my longtime friend. Boyd likes her, don’t you think?”

Tom kissed my ear. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Your friend, who’s now been at the center of two arson investigations, was not particularly helpful, in case you didn’t notice.”

“She was downstairs in Ernest’s house, trying to help Ferdinanda—”

“There are caps you can wear that make you look bald,” Tom said.

“I know, Tom. But this person was husky.”

“There are big coats.”

I was about to disagree with him, but his cell rang. He rose quickly and punched the Talk button. “Schulz.”

He listened for a while, then said, “Is that a fact.” It was not a question. Then, “Okay, thanks, buddy, I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Now what?” I asked.

Tom pulled me in playfully. “I thought you weren’t going to meddle.”

“Okay, don’t tell me.”

“That was Boyd again. Nobody in town saw Ernest. So they’re now pretty sure Ernest was on his way to the dental appointment when he was shot. It looks as if he was trying to get away from somebody on foot. There were shell casings nearby, from a thirty-eight.” Tom sighed. “But that being-on-the-way-to-the-dentist part? Seems Drew Parker, the dentist, left for Hawaii on Friday for a two-week vacation. So of course he didn’t have any appointments on Saturday. He gave us permission by phone to break into his office. We couldn’t find evidence that a receptionist or dental hygienist was working there in his absence, and Parker thinks he’s the only one with the right key, besides the building manager, who used to be with the department and is a good guy.”

“So who—”

“Ernest McLeod had been put down in the computer schedule to have a crown put on in a couple of weeks, right after Parker returned. That was probably the appointment that someone changed. We just don’t know who that person is. Parker says he recently fired his secretary, because she was snorting cocaine when she wasn’t getting patients into their chairs. The dental hygienist is a woman who always goes to Arizona at this time of year to see her widowed mother. Parker gave us the hygienist’s name and contact information.”

“If he fired his secretary, who’s he using as a receptionist, typist, cashier, and so on?”

Tom sighed. “He said he’s been using a temp service when he needs it, but he couldn’t remember what it was called. He did recall the name of the last temporary receptionist, which was Zelda. Apparently, she misfiled everything and charged patients either too much or too little, depending on her mood.”

I said, “Did she have her own key?”

“He can’t remember whether she did or not. Time change to Hawaii, you know. Plus, our guy thinks Parker had had too many mai tais.”

“So, is he hard on secretaries, or is he hard to work for?”

“Don’t know. But somebody used the phone in Parker’s office to change Ernest’s appointment. There’s no record of the appointment in the computer, but we dumped the numbers from Ernest’s home, and there was a call from Parker’s office on Thursday.” Tom lapsed into thought. Finally he said, “There’s more. The department got a call from Ernest McLeod’s lawyer, Jason Allred. He saw the news about Ernest on television.” Tom took a deep breath. “Ernest McLeod went to him last week.”

“Because?”

“Ernest changed his will. We originally thought all the files in Ernest’s house were destroyed. But it turns out our guys did get a single box of files. In it was the file with his will, which our guys read. When Allred called us, he said yes, the document we have is indeed Ernest McLeod’s last will and testament.” Tom paused. “Ernest left ten thousand dollars to the Sheriff’s Department Widows and Orphans Fund. He left the rest of his money, plus his house, to Yolanda.”

“He did what?”

Tom went on. “So now we don’t know for sure if Yolanda knew about the weed, and we don’t know if she was aware she was inheriting Ernest’s house. Yolanda broke up with Kris while you were working at the spa. That’s what, three, four weeks ago? She moved back into her rental and it burned down after a week. So she and Ferdinanda had been staying with Ernest for less than two weeks. And yet he’d changed his will to give her almost everything. It’s very strange.”

“Yes,” I agreed. After a moment, I said, “What was that she was saying about the gold and gems? Do you know about that?”

“Yup. You ever heard of the Norman Juarez family?”

“The Norman Juarez family? No. Do they live up here?”

“Norm owns a bar and restaurant near the department. He and his wife have a house next door. When Ernest and John were partners, one of the most challenging cases they worked concerned this family.”

“The Juarez family,” I repeated, for clarification.

“Right. Norm, who originally had a Hispanic name and changed it, claims that before the Juarez family left Cuba, they gave a box of gold, gems, and a valuable necklace to Roberto Captain, who promised to keep them safe until the family could leave Cuba and come to America.”

“Where did they get gold and gems in Cuba?” I asked. “It’s not like they’re natural resources on the island.”

“Miss G.,” Tom said patiently, “I don’t know. Last time I looked, what they have in Cuba is nickel that they mine, cane that they cut to make sugar, and tobacco they grow for cigars. Anyway, according to Norman, five years or so after giving Roberto the box with the goods, the Juarez family tried to cross the gulf with someone else piloting the boat. The vessel was torn apart in a storm. There was only one survivor, a teenage boy who knew that if something happened to his loved ones, he was supposed to get in touch with Roberto Captain.”

“And did he?”

“The son, Norman Juarez, made it to Miami by clinging to a piece of wreckage and kicking as hard as he could. But he couldn’t get in touch with Roberto Captain, because El Capitán had died of a heart attack the year before. Cancer took his widow soon after, and their child, Humberto Captain, who was about twenty at the time, was nowhere to be found.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Norman got a job as a dishwasher, then a server, and eventually, a restaurant manager. He kept looking for anybody who could tell him where Humberto Captain was, because he, Norman, wanted his family’s necklace and the other stuff.”

“These were the gold and gems Yolanda mentioned?”

“Apparently. What we do know is that Norman Juarez finally tracked down Humberto Captain in Aspen Meadow, which is not that big a town. Still, it took Norman thirty, count ’em, thirty years to find Humberto, who might have thought he was smart to move far away from Miami, but he’s a risk-taker, a crazy-ass big spender, and a guy who thinks he’s never going to get caught—at anything. Anyway, no matter how arrogant Humberto is, it’s not because of his intelligence, because he wasn’t smart enough to change his name. With the advent of Google, Norman was able to find Humberto Captain, no sweat. Norman moved out here with his wife. He found Humberto and confronted him about his family’s assets. According to Norman, Humberto said he didn’t know what Norman was talking about.”

“But if Humberto has money he can’t prove he earned—”

Tom sighed. “Financial crimes are hard to prove, Miss G. Humberto has a little export-import business on the Internet, which is all he needs to cover his tracks. Norman Juarez came to us, asking for help. Ernest and his then partner, John Bertram, worked on the case when they had time, but they didn’t get anywhere. Couldn’t get a search warrant, couldn’t get Humberto to cooperate, the usual. Then Ernest retired. Case closed, or so we thought. But then, this morning? After we found Ernest, and before anything was on the news? Norman Juarez called us and asked if we’d heard from Ernest McLeod.”

“So,” I said, “Norman had hired Ernest, and that’s why he was investigating Humberto.”

“You jumped to that one, Miss G. Norman was indeed one of Ernest’s clients. When Ernest became a private investigator, he called Norman to see if he was interested in a non-cop looking for his stuff. Norman hired him.”

I inhaled. I almost didn’t want to hear what Tom would say.

Tom went on. “This morning Norman was anxious, because he couldn’t reach Ernest. Norman said that Ernest had called him, all excited, Friday morning, as in two and a half days ago. Ernest said he had retrieved some of the Juarez family goods. But then Norman didn’t hear back from him. According to the coroner’s preliminary guess, Ernest was shot some time on Saturday. I wish the canvass had turned up something, but up to this point, nothing.”

“And the gold and gems?”

“So far, we can’t figure out what was going on in Ernest’s search for the assets. But here’s the significant part. We suspect Yolanda was spying on Ernest in exchange for cash from Humberto Captain. She already admitted she got the money from Humberto, and she told us that she knew Ernest was investigating Humberto regarding assets. But there’s a lot she hasn’t told us, such as whether she knew Ernest had left her the house.”

“She’s been through hell,” I said gently, and then brushed my hand over his chest. “Her ex hit her with a broom and gave her a sexually transmitted disease. She’s traumatized.”

“Uh-huh. And Ernest leaving her the house?”

“Tom, of course she didn’t know about that. She would have told me.” But suddenly, then, or maybe not so suddenly—perhaps this had been building throughout the day—a seed of doubt planted itself in my brain. Did I believe Yolanda?

Understandably, she had not told me about contracting a venereal disease from Kris. But less comprehensibly, she had not told me that he’d hit her, with a broomstick, no less. I felt suddenly cold and pulled up the bedcovers. Had I heard something outside, or was it just the unfamiliar sounds of Yolanda and Ferdinanda being in the house?

“Miss G.? You going to sleep? I think I hear someone moving around in the kitchen. Yolanda, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know.”

Tom eased out of our bed and pulled on his robe. “I’m going to go see what’s going on.”

While he was gone, I tried to regain my thought process. Okay, Yolanda had not told me about her rental burning down. Yesterday, the day before, and the day before that, when we’d been talking about the high school catering, she hadn’t mentioned that she had moved in with Ernest or that he had undertaken problematic investigations, especially Humberto Captain versus Norm Juarez’s claim to stolen gold and gems.

And of course, she hadn’t said anything about dope, beagles, or inheriting a house.

When Tom returned, he said, “It was just Ferdinanda.”

“She’s probably like me. When she’s trying to figure something out, she cooks. Listen, Tom. Maybe Yolanda didn’t know she was inheriting Ernest’s house. That happens, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does. But think of this another way. Maybe Yolanda went through Ernest’s files and found, then read, the new will. And maybe she was helping somebody. Humberto, say. Humberto wanted her to discover what Ernest had on him. Maybe Humberto or somebody else had promised Yolanda a big payout if she could come up with information. Maybe this person had said he’d chip in to build Yolanda a new house on that site that Ernest had promised good old Portia he would never develop. Plus, we don’t know how much Ernest had insured the place for, but with all the adding-on he did, you’re probably looking at three, four hundred thou. And the property, with unobstructed mountain views, but close to town, is worth at least ten times that. Maybe the prospect of a big payday is why she’s been crying. Tears of guilt. Or maybe they’re tears of joy, over her big inheritance.”

I said quietly, “At the moment, Tom, she’s sad. Plus, I have to say that in all the time I’ve known Yolanda, she has never been anything but honest and upright.”

“I know she’s your friend, but I have to treat her just the way I would treat anyone else in a murder case. I can’t just take her word for everything. But I understand if you do, with that big heart of yours.”

I said softly, “You have a big heart, too. And I miss you.”

He put his arms around my waist and pulled me toward him. Then he made love to me so tenderly, so lovingly, that afterward—around midnight, I suppose, when the house was finally quiet—unexpected tears of gratitude slid down my own cheeks.