All's Well That Ends (3 page)

We sat glumly in a tiny Ethiopian restaurant, each of us sad and/or angry for our own reasons. We favored third world cuisines—they were generally hearty and inexpensive, although it did feel out of kilter to be dining on the cuisine of a country with 17

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a starvation problem. Perhaps it should have put our problems in perspective.

“Is your cousin really named Junior Bear?” Sasha suddenly demanded of Mackenzie. Then she waved the question away. “I thought you were all supposed to be named Bubba. Except you, given that you don’t even have actual names, only initials. But really—what kind of a name is Junior Bear?”

Mackenzie smiled for the first time since he’d entered the restaurant. “Northerners have no common sense. Isn’t it obvious?

Junior Bear would be the child of Senior Bear.”

We sat at an hourglass-shaped wicker table, Sasha and I on stools, Mackenzie on a low sofa. To his credit, he had offered to switch, but we figured we’d be as Ethiopian as possible and let the male keep the comfiest spot.

“Those stools of yours,” he said. “To be authentic, they should be covered in monkey fur.”

I was glad they weren’t. But still, “How do you know that?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I read.”

He did read, and mostly the sort of things I did not, but wished I did. Aside from the varied texts he had to read for his doctoral program in criminology, his leisure reading was mostly history, biography, and cultural studies, and he was becoming a world-class master of the justifiably obscure factoid.

His observation did not relieve the gloom. We were on hold until we were presented with an enormous plate covered with a gray, rubbery-looking pancake. “Injera,” the waiter said, and he then demonstrated how the various stews we’d ordered—chicken, lamb, and vegetable—were to be wrapped into a piece of pancake and popped into the mouth. I liked this part. No utensils, although they had provided forks for the timid.

The waiter also poured us honey wine, but it isn’t my favorite, so I ordered sparkling water.

“It makes me sad and angry,” Sasha said. Again.

“Junior Bear?” Mackenzie asked. “Or the lack of monkey fur?”

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She shook her head.

Mackenzie and I both sighed. “What?” we both asked with no enthusiasm.

“That nobody cares.”

“I care,” Mackenzie said. “It’s breakin’ my heart.” The devastation in his home state and his distance from and inability to help his family grew less tolerable with each passing week. “Can’t imagine why you’d think I didn’t,” he added.

“You do?” Sasha said. “I can’t tell you what that means, you of all people.”

“Wait—” I began. “You two are talking about two sep—”

“So you won’t let this pass as a suicide, either,” she said before I could finish my sentence. “Will you help me?”

Mackenzie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

I’d spared him Sasha’s obsessive post-Phoebe discussions. He had enough real and terrible things on his mind. He didn’t need figments and rationalizations.

Sasha looked surprised. “Phoebe, of course,” she said.

“Phoebe’s murder. What else?”

“What else? My God, there’s an entire . . .” Mackenzie let his thought go unsaid and he looked at me as if he wanted to read what was behind my forehead.

It wasn’t always great being with two people you knew well, who didn’t know each other well enough to read the signs. Sasha turned and looked at me with the barest hint of a frown. Her un-spoken dialogue was fast and furious and irritated that I hadn’t bothered to tell my husband her worries and theories about Phoebe’s death.

Having made sure that I knew that she knew what was up, she rolled a piece of the rubber pancake around the chicken stew, chewed, leaked only a little bit of the sauce, nodded approval of the taste, then took a deep breath and used her fingers to tick points off rather than eat. “It’s obvious that somebody wouldn’t take sleeping pills when they’re still in their street clothes, 19

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nowhere near their bedroom. It feels wrong. Wouldn’t you be on the bed and not on the living-room sofa if you were headed for either a good night’s sleep or your eternal rest?”

“She was downstairs?” Mackenzie asked.

“Dressed to go out.” Sasha spoke with new urgency. Her anger over my failure to involve the great detective in the case was now replaced by this opportunity to make a convert to her cause.

“Wearing really nice slacks, a red silk blouse, chocolate velvet blazer, and great shoes. And to think I always worried that she’d break her neck on those spike heels. Life’s ironic, isn’t it? She was wearing jewelry, too, of course. Not too wild, not too overdone, but . . . perfectly accessorized for company, curled up in the corner of the sofa, her head on the armrest.”

Mackenzie shot another glance my way. I think he wanted me to stop her, or to explain why any of this was at all important.

But I knew either attempt would be futile.

“The front door was unlocked,” Sasha said.

“Why were you there?” Mackenzie asked. “Was this night-time? Did she expect you?”

Sasha shook her head. “It was a spontaneous visit. She hadn’t mentioned any plans to go out. I phoned from my car, twice and no answer, but she did that sometimes, opted not to answer the phone. I do that, too. I had photos of her—she’d asked me to take them—but mostly, I was out and in my car anyway, and I had a good story to tell her. I thought we’d have a glass of wine and a lot of laughs. Worst case scenario, she would have gone out, and I’d have left the photos for her anyway.”

“Okay, I bite,” Mackenzie said, and he finally did, on the injera. “This is good,” he said with audible surprise. “Gingery. I could do with a good story and a few laughs. Or is it a for-girls-only thing?”

“You judge. Somebody Phoebe liked, a friend, had acquired a stepson via a recent marriage. Got that so far? An artist. Divorced, available. And since I’m a photographer, divorced, and GILLIAN ROBERTS

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available, when she heard about him she was sure it was a match made in heaven. Two artists!” Sasha shook her head, her eyes lowered in mock horror. “I met him that night. The night Phoebe . . .”

“And?” Mackenzie prompted when it was obvious her thoughts had drifted away from the story.

“He hadn’t sounded all that stupid on the phone, not world-class stupid, but for all I know, he had somebody else speak for him. And I say this despite the fact that I have low standards when it comes to men, so—”

“Actually,” I interrupted, “I’d say you have no standards whatsoever.”

She nodded. “I was surprised to find out that I did. We met at a restaurant. I was there first, and in he swaggered with the kind of missing-link looks that prove not everybody fully evolved from the apes. Can you remember the experience of praying that an approaching person is not your blind date? I got religion the minute he entered the restaurant. I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, so maybe that’s why my prayers were not answered. Instead, he raised his eyebrows when he saw me, wiggled them, and gave two thumbs-up. That was meant as a compliment.”

She wrapped another morsel of hard-boiled-egg-and-lamb stew and pointed at the gray roll. “This injera has twice the I.Q.

he had.” She chewed for a moment, then said, “A better personality, too.” She bit off another piece. “Better-looking as well.

“This restaurant in Old City, near you guys, was once some kind of retail outlet, and it still has the big storefront kind of window. So he gets the conversation rolling—that’s how he put it—

by ordering us beers without asking me what I’d like—which wouldn’t have been a beer—then by telling me at great length, especially for a man with an extremely limited vocabulary, what a bitch his ex-wife was, and why. And how lucky he was to get rid of her, because ever since he had, he was ‘getting plenty’—his romantic description of his love life. More eyebrow wiggling.

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“ ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he said, ‘in every way.’ And apparently his great good luck had just been proven once again by the parking spot he found. And then he waves and says his car is outside, and indeed it was, driver’s side facing me.

“It was orange, with black graffiti all over it. ‘My art,’ he said.

‘Art on wheels. Unique, huh?’ So there’s my soul mate, the other artist. Outlines of naked women with bosoms so large they were like deformities, and sayings like ‘Ready, Freddie’ and painted flames coming out from the wheel wells—and yellow crime-scene tape pasted on the side. And on the rear door facing me it said ‘Honk if you’re horny.’ ”

She put one finger up to squelch any editorial comments on our part. “That’s when I told Nick-the-Artist that I had suddenly developed a terrible gastrointestinal problem and had to leave immediately. He didn’t understand ‘gastrointestinal’ so I translated into his language. He sulked, shrugged, and said, ‘Suit yourself.’ He didn’t even say good-bye and before I made it out the door, he was downing my beer.”

She shook her head. “Talk about the bottom of the barrel! He was the sludge that’s under the barrel. So I decided to drive to Phoebe’s and tell her how her matchmaking with the artist—

artist!—had turned out. I mean she’s—she was—practically right across the bridge. She was there, on the couch, the TV playing, all dressed up, and it took me what feels way too long to realize she was dead. It does not make sense.”

“Any sign of forced entry?” Mackenzie asked.

Sasha shook her head.

“Anything missing?”

The question made it clear that he had not known Phoebe.

“Who could tell? Nothing was turned over, and nothing looked rifled through. Drawers weren’t open, but she wasn’t into minimalist décor. She believed that less was less.”

That was putting it mildly. Divorce was Phoebe’s only method of getting rid of excess possessions.

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“What are you thinkin’, then?” C.K. asked.

“She had a date. She simply hadn’t told me about him.

Dressed up. Drinks—well, at least she had one.”

“But why, Sasha?” I asked. “Why would anybody want to do that to her?”

“I don’t know!” she said. “I’m not a detective. You guys are.”

“Hardly,” I murmured. I am tired of needing to demur, but neither can I speed up the process of becoming an actual investigator.

“You have an idea who she might have been seein’?”

Mackenzie’s accent had increased since the hurricane, as if carefully preserving that remaining bit of Louisiana, no matter what.

Sasha shook her head. “The photos were for an online dating service.”

“One she belonged to or was going to belong to?” C.K.

asked.

Sasha sighed, and her shoulders lowered. “I don’t know. I think—I think she already belonged somewhere because she mentioned getting inquiries from guys who ‘weren’t it,’ she said.

She thought she looked too stuffy in the photo she was using, a half of a wedding photo. I offered to Photoshop out the hat and veil, but she said the whole dressed-up ‘granny-thing’—that was her phrase—wasn’t the image she wanted to project. Neither was undressed.” Sasha looked down at her hands. I was sure it was so that we couldn’t see her face, but we could see and understand what the rapid eyeblinks meant.

I patted my friend’s shoulder. “You miss her a lot,” I said quietly.

Sasha nodded, her head still downcast.

“Maybe the date was with a woman,” I said. “Maybe she had plans to paint the town with another woman, or be fixed up for a double date.”

“And what?” Sasha asked. “They had drinks before facing the evening out, and then Phoebe said, ‘Oh, wait—I need to commit 23

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suicide instead, so would you please go wash out your glass and hide it?’ How does that work?”

“Then maybe they were simply spending a quiet evening together. We do that sometimes, you and I. Why not Phoebe?”

“Or maybe a man drugged her,” Mackenzie said softly.

Sasha shrugged.

“Do you know her women friends? Know how those relationships were going?” he asked her.

Sasha turned and stared at the side wall. A couple at a table frowned at her, thinking she was staring at them. She wasn’t, and they finally realized it, shrugged, and returned to their meal. Finally Sasha blinked and returned to this planet. “Friends,” she said. “The ones there today. Joanie and Harriet something, Caro-lyn and . . . a neighbor, though I think in a different time, husband, and neighborhood. I could look them up, but I don’t think any of them were hanging-out-together kinds of friends. She was in a book group a year or two back, but I don’t know if she saw those people nowadays. And there’s her business partner—former partner because the place is going under—that flake, Merilee.

They’ve been friends for years. Since when Phoebe and my dad were married.”

Two years ago, when Phoebe and the pampered Merilee had been funded by Merilee’s husband, supposedly via his trust fund, I took it as a given, though I never asked, that nobody expected the biz to actually make money. How could it? Does any dog need a manicure set or a pair of sunglasses? Are there doggie gourmets who prefer hand-shaped and home-baked “cookies”?

Do kitties feel better if their litterbox is in a turreted castle enclo-sure or they’re eating their food off hand-painted plates? How about feather boas and tiaras for your pets?

“Her husband pulled the plug,” Sasha added.

“Phoebe must have been furious.”

“More like acutely disappointed. Merilee was the furious one—but with Phoebe, although it was ridiculous. Marc Wilkins GILLIAN ROBERTS

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was very dramatic about the closing. He came to the store, and not surprisingly there were no customers, and he used that as the trigger for exploding. He chewed out the two women—blaming Phoebe in particular because she hadn’t risked a cent of her own.

He said they were bleeding him dry and he wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. They were out of business as of that moment.”

Sasha sighed again and shook her head, though nobody had offered her anything. “The real story was that Marc Wilkins was revving up to dump Merilee. He’d found somebody newer, and the floundering pet shop—his lost trust fund cash flow—was the pretense for his splitting. The crazy thing is that instead of being furious with him, which would have been rational, Merilee turned on Phoebe. Acted as if Phoebe’s need for this business, or Phoebe’s bad business sense or outright thievery, had driven Marc into the arms of whoever it now was. She revved up to the point where she accused Phoebe of having stolen the money or cooked the books—she could never decide which, but stealing in one form or another. And Marc snapped up that theory as well.