A Killer Cake (16 page)

“He’s at his job; at least he is if he knows
what’s good for him. His parole officer will send him back in a
heartbeat, all he needs is a reason, and Steve’s too smart to do
anything that stupid. At least he has been so far.”

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up
bad memories for you. That seems to be the only way we talk,
doesn’t it?”

“It’s not your fault, Victoria,” Stacy said
as her hard expression softened, if only for a moment or two.

“Trouble does seem to follow me around,” I
admitted. “Where does Steve work?”

“He repairs tires over at Al’s,” Stacy said.
After a second, she added softly, “Don’t tell him that I told you
where he was, okay?”

“Stacy, are you afraid of your brother?”

“You would be, too, if you’d seen the man he
beat up,” she said.

“I promise that I won’t say a word to him
about you,” I promised her.

“I appreciate that.”

I was about to ask her for directions to Al’s
when Moose came out with Charlie. “Stacy, if you’ve got a second,
my friend here would like to speak to you.”

“That’s okay. We’ve already covered it,” I
said. I slid a twenty under the plate, as much for the information
as the taste of wondrous barbeque. “Keep the change.”

Stacy didn’t fight me on it, and I had to
wonder if she considered it hazard pay for the information that
she’d just given me. If that was the case, I was afraid that Moose
and I were going to have to have a little chat before we tackled
Steve. My grandfather tended to shoot from the hip, and I didn’t
want to take a chance on anything happening to him during one of
our interviews. We were going to have to tread lightly when we
spoke with the ex-con.

I just hoped that my uncle was up to the
challenge of keeping his own temper in check.

“You’re a hard woman to track down,” I said
as we found Loretta in back of the tire place. She was bundled up
and sitting in a folding chair reading a magazine, and the woman
looked genuinely surprised to see us.

“How did you know where I’d be?” she
asked.

Before I could answer, Moose said off the
cuff, “We were driving by, and I wanted to get a price on some new
tires for my truck. It was pure chance that we both saw you back
here when we got out.”

“Well, I don’t sell tires, but they do in
there,” she said as she pointed to the front.

“This is kind of an odd place for you to be
hanging out,” Moose said.

“I’m waiting for my boyfriend.” She glanced
at her watch, and then added, “He gets off work in twenty
minutes.”

“How nice for you,” I said. “While we’ve got
you here, I was wondering if we could ask you something.”

“Sure, go on. Ask me anything. I’ve got
nothing to hide,” she said as she continued to flip through her
magazine.

“Did you speak to your father yesterday at
the celebration before he was murdered?”

Loretta’s face clouded up. “I told you that I
was in town, but I didn’t say anything about being anywhere near
the celebration. What makes you think that I spoke to him?”

“We were going through some photographs
earlier, and your face popped up near him in one of them,” I
said.

“Who was showing you pictures of me?” she
asked, clearly not happy about this new development. It was obvious
that Loretta liked to be in control of whatever situation she was
in, and she was quickly losing control of this one.

“The sheriff had quite a few photographs from
the celebration, and he asked us to help him identify several
people he didn’t recognize,” I said.

“You told him who I was, didn’t you?” Her
voice was calm as she said it, but somehow, it was one of the
scariest things I’d ever heard in my life.

“Be reasonable, Loretta. We had no choice,”
Moose said.

“I’m sorry that you did that,” Loretta said
coldly.

“What did they do?” a burly young man asked
as he came out of one of the nearby garage bay doors. He was
wearing a gray and red Al’s uniform, and from the roughly executed
tattoos on his arms, it wasn’t tough to guess that this was Steve,
the ex-convict Stacy had told me about. He was handsome in a
disheveled kind of way, and he held a greasy rag in one hand and a
tire iron in the other.

“We were just talking,” I said.

“About what?” he asked, getting between us
and Loretta.

“These are the people I told you about who
are investigating my dad’s murder. Guess what? They told the police
who I was,” she said.

“That wasn’t the brightest thing to do,”
Steve said as he frowned. “You both should have kept your noses out
of this.”

Moose stood his ground, refusing to back down
one step. “Let’s not forget that your girlfriend came to us for
help in the first place. She asked us to find out who killed Roy
Thompson, and we can’t do that without the police. Think about it.
If we didn’t tell them who she was, they would have found out on
their own, and they wouldn’t have been happy about it. By telling
them first, we stay in their good graces, and that gives us access
to more information so we can figure out who killed Loretta’s
father.”

“What you should be worried about is staying
in
my
good graces,” Steve said, not buying my grandfather’s
argument.

I was proud to see that Moose didn’t even
flinch. “That’s where you’ve got it wrong. We want to know the
truth; to be honest with you, we don’t care who murdered Roy
Thompson as long as we find out who did it. Our cake was used as a
murder weapon, and we’re not about to let the killer get away with
that. At least you know what our rationale is. Has it been your
experience in the past that the police have such lofty
motives?”

He spat on the ground. “The cops just want an
easy answer. They don’t care if it’s the right one or not.”

“So then we’re agreed. We’ll keep helping
Loretta, but only if she is willing to cooperate.”

The man frowned, clearly wondering how things
had reversed so quickly, and I marveled yet again just how charming
my grandfather could be when he set his mind to it.

“Yeah, I guess that just makes sense,” Steve
said.

“Hey, don’t let them off the hook that fast,
okay? They were asking me if I killed Roy when you came out,”
Loretta protested.

“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “We just
need to know if you spoke to him yesterday before he was murdered.
If you did, perhaps he told you something that might help us, or
maybe you noticed him talking to someone. That’s information we
could use, too.”

“I never said a word to the man in my life,
and that’s the honest truth,” Loretta said as she broke eye contact
with me. It was usually a pretty good indication that someone was
lying to me, but this wasn’t the best time to call her on it.

“What about the pictures we saw? You were
standing pretty close to him in the one the police showed us,” I
told her.

Loretta looked pained to admit it when she
said, “I lost my nerve at the last second, okay? He had that
blasted cake in his hands, and I was three feet away from him. If
I’d had any idea that it was poisoned, I would have knocked it to
the ground right then, but who knows? It might have already been
too late to do him any good.”

“What do you mean?” Moose asked.

“There was a bite already missing from it
when I first saw him,” she said.

“Think hard for a second, Loretta. Was that
before he sat down, or after?” I asked.

“It had to be before,” she said after a
moment. “He was still walking around when I almost got my nerve up
to approach him.” She looked as though she was ready to cry at any
second by the admission, and really, who could blame her? She’d
waited too long to meet her real father, and that hesitation had
killed any chance she might have had to have a relationship with
him.

“It’s okay,” Steve said in a surprisingly
gentle voice as he moved closer to Loretta. “It wasn’t your
fault.”

“I should have talked to him when I had the
chance,” she said, her voice faltering a little as she said it.
“Now I’ll never be able to introduce myself to him as his
daughter.”

“Is that all you need to know?” Steve asked
as he looked at my grandfather. “Can’t you see that you’re
upsetting her?”

“We’re truly sorry for that,” Moose said,
“but these questions need to be asked, if not by us, then by the
police.”

“Will you tell them that she didn’t do it?
And if you do, what chance is there that they’ll believe you? This
is tearing her up.” The hard man had gone soft around his
girlfriend, and he was doing what he could to protect her.

“It would be best if she told them that
herself,” Moose said. “The sheriff’s looking for her, and the
harder he has to search, the worse it’s going to be for everybody
when he finally finds her.”

“What do you suggest I do?” Loretta
asked.

“If it were me, I’d go straight to the police
station in Jasper Fork and let him interview me there. As a matter
of fact, I’ve been the center of one of his investigations before,
and that’s exactly what I did,” I said.

Steve seemed to look at me with new respect.
“He actually accused you of murder?”

“Not formally, but then again, I didn’t hide
from him.”

Steve appeared to consider that, and then he
turned to Loretta. “I’m going to take off early. We need to go see
this guy so we can get him off your back.”

“I’m
not
going to the cops,” Loretta
said fiercely. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“I’m on yours; you shouldn’t even have to
ask,” Steve said. “Do you think I like this any better than you do?
I’m sorry, but it sounds like this is the best choice we’ve
got.”

“I’ve got all those traffic and parking
tickets,” Loretta protested. “He’s going to arrest me for them if I
walk into the station no matter what.”

“Can you do anything about that?” Steve asked
me calmly. “It would really help if we could work that out
beforehand. If this guy gives us his word that he won’t arrest
Loretta for those tickets, can we believe him?”

“You can. If he goes back on his word, you
can take it up with me.”

Steve thought about that, and then he said,
“Go ahead, then. Call him.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. Moose nodded in
agreement, so I got my cell phone out.

“Sheriff, I need a favor,” I said, not trying
to soften my end of our conversation. I wanted them to know that,
at that moment, I was on their side.

“I don’t have time to do anything for you,”
he said gruffly. “I’ve been trying to track this Loretta Jenkins
down all over Laurel Landing, and so far, I’m coming up empty.”

“You’re still in town?”

“I am, for what little good it’s doing me,”
he said.

“What if I could promise you an interview
with her in the next five minutes?” I asked.

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“Loretta’s worried about her outstanding
parking and traffic tickets,” I said. “She’s afraid if she speaks
with you, you’ll arrest her on the spot.”

“What does she expect me to do, tear them all
up if she cooperates with my investigation? I’m not making a deal
like that with anybody, Victoria, and frankly, I’m surprised that
you’d even ask me to.”

“You don’t understand. She doesn’t expect you
to make them go away. She just doesn’t want you to lock her up
because of them.”

“I don’t care one bit about any of that,” he
said. “I’m trying to solve a murder here. I won’t get rid of the
tickets for her, but I won’t arrest her because of them,
either.”

“We have your word on that?” I asked, and
then held the phone out so that everyone could hear his
response.

“You do.”

“That’s good enough for me,” I said. “We’re
in back of Al’s Tires right now. Do you know where it is?”

“I’m two minutes away. Don’t any of you go
anywhere.”

He hung up, and I turned to Loretta. “I held
my phone away from my ear. Did you hear that? He gave his
word.”

“We heard,” Steve said. “Now I just hope that
his word is good.”

“I guarantee that it is,” I said.

“Then you’d better hope he keeps his
promise,” Steve said.

“I won’t tolerate threats against my family,”
Moose said coolly.

“I wasn’t threatening you,” Steve said. “I’m
not like that anymore.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“I stopped drinking. I was a mean drunk, and
I got what I deserved. I’m putting that all behind me now, with
Loretta’s help. If I’m a little defensive and act a little tough,
that’s just what prison does to you.”

Sheriff Croft showed up less than two minutes
later as he pulled up in back of the tire shop. As he got out of
his cruiser, he nodded to Moose and me, and then focused on
Loretta. “You’re a hard woman to track down.”

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Steve
said.

The sheriff glanced at him, and apparently he
knew in a heartbeat that Steve had spent some time behind bars.
“Who are you, and why is it any of your business?” he asked, his
voice flat and without inflection of any kind.

“I’m her boyfriend,” Steve said.

“Congratulations. Now, wait over there with
them until we’re finished.”

It was pretty clear that Steve didn’t like
being ordered around, and I was afraid for a second that we might
have an ugly incident on our hands, but after a moment’s
hesitation, he did as he was ordered.

“This guy’s got an attitude problem,” Steve
mumbled as he approached us.

There was nothing that I could say to that,
so I decided to keep my mouth shut. Besides, I wanted to hear the
sheriff interview Loretta Jenkins. Who knew? Maybe I could pick up
a tip or two along the way.

“Let me get this straight. You claim to be
Roy Thompson’s illegitimate daughter, is that right?” the sheriff
asked.

“I am,” Loretta answered simply.