Crunch Time (34 page)

I was too tired to argue. “Sounds great.”

“I’m also putting together a salad for you,” he said, his head back in the walk-in. He emerged carrying the pork, a container of cooked rice, and a bunch of fresh cilantro, which he placed on the counter. “Now, where is that balsamic vinaigrette I was making. . . .”

“What you’re making is a mess,” I said. But I found the sauté pan and brought out the olive oil for him.

“I have an ulterior motive,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” I replied, “you don’t want me to get grouchy because I’m hungry.”

“That, too,” he said as he washed his hands to prepare for cooking. “Not another word until I have the food in front of you.”

He poured me a glass of an expensive sauvignon blanc that Marla had given us, set the table for one, and went about his tasks. Twenty minutes later, he placed a heavenly scented platter on the table, filled with ground pork in a steaming orange-lime sauce. Next to it he put two bowls: one filled with fluffy heated rice topped with chopped fresh cilantro, the other brimming with a salad of baby field greens, grape tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, and tidbits of blue cheese, all cloaked in Tom’s new dressing.

“This is enough for at least four people,” I murmured. “But thanks.”

“Don’t worry about too much food,” said Tom as he pulled a chair up close to mine. “If I know Arch, he’ll have smelled something in the air, and he’ll be banging in here in a couple of minutes, wanting a second dinner.”

“So what’s your ulterior motive?” I asked.

“Have some salad first,” he said.

I obliged. “Great dressing. What’s in it?”

Tom’s smile was so akin to the Cheshire cat’s that I became nervous. “Oh, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, balsamic vinegar, garlic, olive oil, fresh basil. It’s what I’m calling it that reveals my ulterior motive.” He opened his eyes wide. “That’s Tom’s Love Potion.”

“Tom,” I said as I took my first bite of the pork. It was velvety and scrumptious. I would have to ask Ferdinanda for the recipe. “This is out of this world. And in the love potion department? I’m a sure bet. You needn’t have gone to all this trouble—”

“I want us to have a baby,” Tom blurted out.

I swallowed hard to avoid choking. “
What?
”

At that moment, my current baby, sixteen-year-old Arch, whacked the kitchen door open. “Aha!” he exclaimed. “Food! And does it smell great!” He looked from Tom to me. “What’s the matter? Mom, you look as if you saw a ghost or something.”

“I, uh, yeah, well,” I said. “Let me get you a plate and silverware.” I pushed my chair back, but Tom held up a hand.

“I’ll do it,” he said in that commanding way he had.

“Mom?” asked Arch. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m just peachy.”

18

T
wenty minutes later, I stood under a very hot shower. Tom was downstairs cleaning up. I thought,
Maybe I should make this shower cold.
And while I’m at it, I could pull Tom into it.

A baby? Tom wanted to have a
baby
? Why?

What would Arch think of the idea? What did
I
think of it? Was it selfish for me to wonder what would happen to my catering business if I went back to changing diapers? Besides, wasn’t I too
old
to have a baby?

Thirty-seven was not that old, I reminded myself as I dried off. I loved Tom. But this thought, the very idea of having another child, was not something I had expected from him. And I felt exhausted just thinking about the prospect of doing the whole infant thing all over again.

There was a tapping on the door and I jumped.

“Miss G.? You coming out?”

“In a sec.” I wondered if I should put on my cotton pajamas, if that would be seen as a signal that I did not want to—

Tom opened the door to the bathroom. “Come on, let’s talk about this like normal married folks. In bed. Make that sitting on the bed, since I have to wait for Boyd and Yolanda. In fact, maybe that’s where I should have broached this subject in the first place.”

“I’ll be right there.” I pulled on my PJ’s and walked quickly across to the bed, where I sat down.

Tom followed and pulled me in for a warm hug. “I’m sensing you don’t like my idea.”

Putting my arms around the man I had come to love so much, I thought,
I have to give him what he wants
. Then I thought,
No, I don’t
. Through all the years with the Jerk and then post-Jerk, I’d come to see that my own opinion about what was right was the most important one. “What made you think of this all of a sudden? I mean, why do you want a baby?”

“I don’t know,” Tom replied. “It’s been sort of building in my mind. I love you, and I love Arch. At work, I see death and pain and cruelty, all day, every day. And I just like the idea of making our family bigger, and spreading more joy into the world.”

“Can I at least turn it over in my mind for a while?” I whispered.

“You can turn it over in your mind as long as you want,” said Tom. Did I detect a note of disappointment in his voice, or was my imagination making me paranoid? He kissed me . . . and then his cell went off. He blinked at the screen. “Oh, Christ, it’s Boyd already. ” Tom talked briefly into his phone. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. I’m going out to the driveway, and then we’re going to help Yolanda inside.”

“Wear your service revolver,” I said.

“Don’t worry.”

I shimmied off the bed, slid into a bathrobe, and for reasons I couldn’t quite name, turned off the lights in our bedroom. I pulled open our curtains covering one of the windows facing the street.

Soon Boyd’s car drove into view and crunched over ice in the driveway. Tom waited for Boyd to come around the front of the vehicle, then opened the passenger door. The two of them flanked Yolanda and helped her, slowly, into the house.

Again my skin broke out in gooseflesh, and my glance darted across the street. On the second floor of Jack’s old house, new bedroom curtains there, too, were parted. Was my imagination making me paranoid again? Was somebody, or were somebodies, looking out the window at Yolanda coming home?

Was it Kris? Harriet? Were they watching us? Watching for Yolanda?

I
raced downstairs, opened the front door, and waited for Boyd and Tom to bring Yolanda over the threshold.

“Oh, Yolanda!” I cried, seeing the thick white bandages that covered her thighs. “What can I do for you?”

Yolanda’s russet hair was pulled back in a rough ponytail, and her skin looked as if it had been blanched. The wheels of Ferdinanda’s chair squeaked as the elderly woman rolled into the hall. Seeing all of us there, Yolanda said, “I’m fine now. I’ve got my family, my friends, and my painkillers. What else do I need?”

After assuring us that the only thing she wanted was the ladies’ room, Yolanda allowed Boyd to carry her in there. Ferdinanda followed, yelling to her niece in Spanish that she was coming to help. A moment later, the bathroom door closed, water ran, and Boyd reappeared, shaking his head.

“Poor girl,” he said. “I know she’s in a lot of pain.” He pressed his lips together and looked at Tom. “Learned anything yet?”

“The pan that fell apart didn’t belong to the Breckenridges.”

“Interesting,” said Boyd. “Although I have to say, I figured as much. I called one of our teams. They came to Southwest Hospital and took the evidence I had, the broken pot rack, the parts of the frying pan. I uploaded the pictures I took of both ‘accidents,’ so our guys could look closely at them.”

“Good work,” said Tom.

“I also gave the team the names of every single dinner guest. Our guys are out interviewing them now. The one thing I’ve heard so far? Nobody confesses to owning the electric frying pan. It just appeared. I called Rorry on her cell, to find out who could have had time to loosen the pot rack with the cloth dish towels. She said folks were in and out of the kitchen all day. When I asked her who had requested the Navajo tacos? She said she was pretty sure the request had come through her husband. So I called him. The son of a bitch said he couldn’t remember.” Boyd ran his thick fingers over his black crew cut. “He’s lying.”

“Good job.” Tom shook Boyd’s hand.

The door to the bathroom off the dining room opened, and Boyd nodded at both of us, said good night, and moved off to help Yolanda into bed.

When Tom and I were back in our bedroom, I stared at our alarm clock. I didn’t need to set it, because as I had reminded Tom, I did not have a party to cater the next day. Feeling oddly helpless, I walked over to close our curtains. “Tom? I could have sworn Kris, or someone, was looking out the upstairs window over at Jack’s place. Whoever it was was watching for Yolanda to arrive back home, all bandaged up.”

“Miss G.” Tom took his clothes off and slid into bed. “The only way to solve this crime and all the other crimes Ferdinanda mentioned is to work the case. We find out who killed Ernest? Everything else will fall into place.”

“What about Yolanda’s house burning down? And Ernest’s? The attempted break-in here, at our place? You think they’re related to Ernest being shot?”

“I do. I’m just not sure how.” He pulled me to him. I did not resist.

“But
how
are you working the case?” I whispered.

“Miss G. You heard Boyd. We’re interviewing people. We’re analyzing evidence. Our canvass of Ernest’s neighborhood didn’t turn up much. The shell casings are being analyzed. Maybe somebody else had been out there on that service road, shooting off a weapon, but I doubt it. Maybe the casings will come back to a gun we can prove belongs to one of the people we’re looking at for this crime.”

“People you’re looking at,” I repeated.

“Someone had a big motive for killing Ernest and burning down his house. Our theory is that Ernest had looked under one rock too many, and somebody wanted to destroy him and the evidence.”

“Okay.”

I did not feel as confident as Tom that we were, in fact, going to find out who murdered Ernest. Hermie Mikulski’s face popped into my brain. Had
she
seen the same man as Sabine Rushmore? Was it too late to call Hermie?

I slid away from Tom and reached for my cell phone.

“Miss G., what are you doing?”

“Just making one more call,” I said quickly, then hustled into the bathroom.

As I suspected would happen, I was immediately connected to voice mail. Either Hermie behaved like most civilized people and refused to answer the phone late at night, or she was still not home.

When I slipped back into bed, Tom did not ask me why I’d been making a call late at night.

Okay, so: I’d spoken to every person that Tom, Yolanda, or anyone else had mentioned in connection with Ernest and his investigations. I’d come up short. If anything, I realized painfully, I’d made things worse. I’d confronted Kris, and, after finding out from Penny Woolworth where Yolanda was staying, he’d bought the house across the street from us. If you had a lot of cash, you could do a real estate deal pretty quickly. Even if Kris hadn’t closed yet, he could have worked out a deal with Jack’s son to rent the place until he did. Maybe, as at the dinner party, Kris only wanted to flaunt to Yolanda that he had a new, pretty girlfriend. People reeling from a breakup could do weird things. Spending a lot of money on a house definitely fell into the rich-people-doing-crazy-stuff category. But was this a rich person doing a crazy thing, or was the rich person actually crazy? I sighed.

I’d questioned Charlene Newgate. If Charlene had been up to something, now she knew she needed to cover it up. I’d used Donna Lamar to help me dig into Sean Breckenridge’s extramarital activities, and she had inadvertently let
him
know what I was up to. I closed my eyes. I’d questioned the Juarezes, and they’d bought tickets to the fund-raising dinner, where Norman had confronted Humberto. If Humberto really did have the gold and jewels, did he now know to hide them? I wondered.

Tomorrow, I would go talk to Lolly Vanderpool, aka Odette. But I didn’t hold out much hope of that turning into anything substantive regarding the theft of the Juarezes’ gold and jewels. What would a tutor-turned-hooker know?

All the faces involved with Ernest and his cases swam up before my mind’s eye: Humberto, Sean, Brie, Kris . . . I was trying to figure this all out, how the people were connected. . . .

I felt like a failure.

Tom sensed I was still awake. He moved toward me and kissed my forehead. “Stop worrying.”

“If only it were that easy.” I paused, then said, “Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you mind talking about Ernest’s murder for a couple of minutes? Arch is in his room, and I can’t use his computer.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay . . . so, Ernest picked up nine puppies, probably because he’d found the illegal mill that Hermie Mikulski had hired him to find. Right?”

“Okay.”

“A bald guy burned down Ernest’s house. Maybe the same bald guy tried to burn down our house, or to break in, before Arch stabbed him with your weeder. But . . . remember Sabine Rushmore had an encounter with a menacing bald guy at the feed store? He was buying a lot of puppy chow. When Sabine tried to be polite to him, he cut her off.”

“You told me,” he said patiently.

“You can talk to Sabine. But did I tell you that Father Pete saw Charlene Newgate, the temp service lady, with a bald guy at the Grizzly Saloon? How many bald guys are there?”

Tom reached over and turned on the light. He made a couple of notes in his trusty book, then firmly closed it and flipped the switch on the lamp. He said kindly, “It’s good to cover everything. I’m glad you brought these things up, Miss G.”

What I had not brought up was our conversation in the kitchen. Still, I’d fully expected that he would want to talk further about his desire for progeny, or, even better, make love that night. But he merely hugged me again, said he was tired, and turned away.

Great,
I thought as I fluffed my pillow. A good marriage takes open communication and a willingness to give, the advice givers were always saying. Apparently, this was one more area where I’d failed.

The next day’s dawn brought a deep blue sky and brilliant sunshine. Melting ice gurgled and dripped down our gutters. With any luck, Indian summer’s lush grass would soon be poking through the snow. I lay in bed and realized that we hadn’t even had the first day of
fall
yet, much less winter.

I felt with my left hand to where Tom’s body had left an impression in the sheets. The linens were cold.

“Miss G.,” he said cheerily, startling me. He had showered and dressed, and now placed a steaming cup of latte on my night table. “Aren’t you the one who told me sloth was one of the seven deadly sins?”

“Thanks for the coffee and for reminding me of my wicked nature.” I smiled at him and glanced at the clock. Quarter to seven? “Where are you going so early?”

“Remember that thing I told you last night, about working the case? That’s where I’m going. What are you up to?”

“About a dollar fifty.” I grinned again. “How’s Yolanda?”

“Still in bed.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, we have Humberto’s dinner party tonight. I don’t suppose Yolanda and Boyd will go. But Ferdinanda promised to make spinach quiches.” I sipped the latte, which was delicious. “Do you remember that?”

“Yup,” said Tom. “She’s banging around in the kitchen already, making the rice for the crust, grating Gruyère, and who knows what all. I’ll tell you one thing, I cannot
wait
to see the inside of Humberto’s house, either. He must have a security system that rivals a nuclear installation.”

“You said his place was broken into a while back?”

“Last week,” said Tom, sitting on the bed. “Or so he claims.”

“What did the burglar take?”

“He won’t say. He demanded that we analyze his guards’ rum bottles from that night. We said we would if he would pay for the analysis.” Tom shrugged. “He agreed, and we found traces of temazepam on the bottles’ glass.”

“Rum bottles, plural? How many guards are we talking about?”

Tom inhaled. “Three. These are the same guys who alibied Humberto for the time of Ernest’s murder. Remember I told you about our guys smelling rum on their breaths? They couldn’t be very good guards if they drank on duty.”

“When Humberto was broken into . . . was there a security code, like, an electronic burglar alarm, too?”

“Yup. It had been turned off, then on again, while the guards were asleep. So somebody came in, we just don’t know who. Humberto is strangely silent on who had the code.”

“And he won’t tell you what was missing.”

“He will not. But I do have an interesting bit of information. The casings on the gun that killed Ernest? The same weapon was used two years ago, to kill a gas station attendant.”