Death is Semisweet (21 page)

“She probably just forgot. Probably goes in and out the back door,” Heaven said, doubting her own words. What if Bonnie was killed or wounded because of her? “Pull your gun,” she hissed.

Bonnie waved her Smith & Wesson at Heaven, already by her side. “Stay here,” she said and opened the door
and stepped inside with her weapon in front of her. She turned on all the light switches by the front door, lighting up the front porch, the entry hall and the living room. “Kathy Hager. Are you all right?” Silence. The house felt empty. She stepped back to the door and smiled at Heaven. “You followed my orders for once. How refreshing.”

“This was a bad idea,” Heaven said as she stepped into the hall. “One of my really bad ideas. Maybe we should call for backup.”

Bonnie was already in the living room and headed for the kitchen. “Stay with me now. Be close to the one with the gun.” She turned on the lights in the dining room as they passed through. An arched doorway without a door led to the kitchen. She found the light right inside the arch and they peered in at a tidy, clean kitchen with President plates displayed around the top of the cabinets. “I haven’t seen President plates since grade school,” Bonnie observed.

“The whole house has a retro feel to it,” Heaven remarked. “I haven’t seen an Early American dining-room set for a while either. I’m surprised there weren’t crocheted doilies on the chairs. Maybe I’m all wrong on this, Bonnie.”

Bonnie Weber had already moved toward the bedroom wing of the house, gun still out. “Stick close,” she said softly, opening the first door. “Bathroom,” she said. Heaven caught up with her for the next door opening. It was a home office with a computer station, a file cabinet and a bookshelf filled with lots of photos of Kathy and a pretty, feminine-looking woman with long, curly, strawberry-blond hair. There were also photos of the strawberry blonde in a baseball hats and turbans. It was clear she had lost the beautiful locks, Heaven supposed
during some form of chemotherapy. There were also a dozen trophies from body building contests on the bookshelf.

Bonnie went to the last door at the end of the hall and opened it, Heaven right behind her. It was clearly the master bedroom. The bed was made, the comforter fluffed, the television turned off, the shoes and dirty clothes put away somewhere. Bonnie turned on the light in the closet and master bath as well as the bedroom. “Her closet is still full. If she ran, she didn’t take clothes with her from this closet.”

Heaven opened a drawer in a wooden bureau. It was full of tee shirts. “Same here. Maybe Kathy went to the grocery store and just forgot to lock the front door.”

“At eleven-thirty at night?”

Heaven shrugged. “That’s why they have twenty-four-hour stores. Someone uses them. Did you see a door to the basement? Most of these Brookside houses have basements.”

“Let’s go back to the kitchen,” Bonnie said and as they headed down the hall they spotted a door tucked in the entryway area that Heaven had taken for a coat closet during the first tour. Bonnie quickly opened it. “Well, well, what do we have here?” she said as she flipped on the light. There were stairs leading down.

Heaven bent down and peeked. She saw a washer and dryer. “I hate this part. This is always where the detective gets jumped by the homicidal maniac.”

Bonnie held her gun out in front of her. “Put your hand loosely on my shoulder and let’s go,” she ordered and they quickly went down the stairs. There was another light switch on the wooden beam at the bottom of the staircase and Bonnie flipped that on. As well as the laundry area, the basement had a workshop with a
pegboard wall hung with tools, coffee cans full of nails and a work table built from a four-by-eight piece of plywood. Back in the corner was a small door.

Heaven straightened up from the crouch she’d been in coming down the stairs, looking around with relief. “Just a normal basement. No torture chamber or chain saw or anything. Let’s go.”

“Are you thinking of that old case where the guy escaped from a house just wearing the dog collar and nothing else?” Bonnie asked. “And the killer cut up his victims in the basement? I worked that case. Let’s just check this little door. Probably full of Christmas decorations.”

Heaven shuddered. “Bonnie, did you notice? There wasn’t one holiday decoration upstairs? The house was totally Midwest traditional. Why wasn’t there a Christmas tree?”

“You told me she said she wasn’t in the holiday spirit,” Bonnie said as she walked carefully toward the small door. She tried it and it was locked.

Heaven had moved over behind Bonnie. “That’s weird. Usually these canning rooms aren’t locked up.” Using the phrase canning room jolted Heaven’s memory. “Bonnie, do you remember when that darling little old lady tried to kill me in her canning room?”

Bonnie nodded her head, then threw her weight into pushing at the door. From the other side, there was movement, the rustling of paper. “Hello, this is Detective Bonnie Weber. Is someone in there?

Muffled sounds. “That sounds like a person trying to talk,” Heaven said. “Let me help you with this door.” She threw herself against it but it didn’t give. However, the weight of Heaven’s body jarred the door frame enough that a key fell off the top of the doorjamb to the floor.

Bonnie scooped up the key and grinned. “Now I know why I let you come with me on these jobs.” She leaned over, working the lock, and shortly the little door popped open toward the main room of the basement. Bonnie straightened up and looked at Heaven. “We’re almost done,” and she felt around inside the open door for a light switch. As she stepped in the darkness, the smell overwhelmed her. “H, come here.”

“Oh, my God. It must be a chocolate cellar,” Heaven said as she stood in the door, breathing in deeply. “Try the middle of the room. Usually there’s a lightbulb hanging in the middle of the room.”

“You’re now an expert on canning rooms,” Bonnie said with a chuckle. She stepped deeper into the room and her foot hit something soft. “Oh, shit. Stay there.” In just a second, the lightbulb was turned on and Bonnie and Heaven saw Janie Anderson, trussed up like a Christmas turkey on the floor covered with candy wrappers, her face and body soiled with chocolate. As Bonnie reached down to pull the duct tape off Janie’s mouth, Heaven looked around the small room, lined with every kind of chocolate she could think of. “Bonnie, this place is a stash. Look, there must be a hundred pounds of Scharffenberger over there.”

“Water,” Janie moaned, her eyes fluttering.

Bonnie looked up at her from where she was kneeling beside Janie. “H, do you have your cell?”

“In the car,” Heaven said.

“Then get the hell up the stairs, find a phone and call 911. And be careful. You can ogle the chocolate later. Bring some water and a blanket.”

I
wish Sal was open,” Heaven said as she looked over at the barbershop from the front windows of Café Heaven. She and Bonnie Weber were eating vegetarian chili with chocolate in it and Diet Cokes. It was ten in the morning on New Year’s Eve.

“It’s Sunday, Sal’s only day off. What’s the matter, don’t you think we’ll be able to think on this side of the street?” Bonnie teased.

“Thanks for coming over here,” Heaven said, ignoring the jibe. “I had to stay put. I came in at eight and everyone else came in at nine. We have lots of prep to do for tonight.”

“Are you having your usual floor show?”

“Oh, yes. Chris and Joe asked for a hundred bucks last week for costumes. I’m afraid to ask.”

“So, I guess you want to know what Janie Anderson said when she got hydrated and calmed down.”

“Every word.”

“It will be disappointing to a drama queen like you.
No big confrontation. She drove home and even though it was barely five it was getting dark and as we know from Stephanie, Janie had acted out at the Christmas dinner so she was in an agitated state and probably wasn’t watching her surroundings. Let that be a lesson to us all. She got out of the car and Kathy evidently had been watching her house, waiting. She came up behind Janie with chloroform or something like it on a rag. Kathy is strong; Janie was caught off guard. She just remembers being grabbed from behind and this smelly rag put over her face. When she woke up she was in the chocolate cellar. She still didn’t know who had snatched her until the next day sometime when Kathy came down, smacked her around and crammed chocolate down her throat for a few minutes then left. She called Janie a Foster’s bitch but didn’t say much else. I’ll talk to her again tomorrow when she gets out of the hospital. Her folks are going to take her to their house and they promise to get her in therapy. I told them about the food specialist at the Med. Center. Everything Janie told me was a little sketchy, unfortunately. Janie isn’t the best witness on a good day, and this isn’t a good day.”

Heaven pulled out a cocktail napkin from her chef’s jacket pocket. “I’m guessing you haven’t found Kathy?”

“You guessed right. What’ve you got there?”

“A list. First crime: the airship incident. Kathy Hager is certainly muscular enough to look like a boy-type Santa in a Santa suit with some padding.”

Bonnie nodded. “Yes and I suppose knowing she can shoot a shotgun could lead to the assumption that she could be good enough with a rifle for the airship hit. It’s a stretch but I think we can put a small check on that one.”

Heaven took a pen out of her pocket and made a big
check. “Now, the death of Oliver Bodden. Kathy was strong.”

“She could have knocked him unconscious, pushed him in the chocolate, and then pulled the wire tight, yes.”

Heaven made another check. “Stephanie has never met Kathy, to my knowledge. In all the bustle at the Chocolate Queen last week she could have slipped some larvae in the back room storage containers and she wouldn’t have recognized her as anything but a random customer.”

“What about the bad chocolate at Foster’s?”

“I don’t know how she could have pulled that one. Unless the secretary let Kathy come into the building?”

Bonnie slapped Heaven on the shoulder. “Marie Whitmer. That’s probably why she’s feeling so guilty. I’ll have to talk to her son, the lawyer.”

“So I’ll put a check by the bugs and a question mark by the bloom at the factory.”

“The graffiti and the windows here at the café have to get another question mark. We don’t have anything to tie Kathy to that.”

“Oh, please. Who else could it be? She knew I was friends with Stephanie and that I was going to be a chef for the Foster’s party. It must be her.”

“It most likely is but we don’t have any proof. Actually we don’t have one eyewitness for any of this,” Bonnie pointed out. “You were hot for Janie as the perp just yesterday. And she is deluded. Maybe she broke into Kathy’s house and set her up to conceal her own guilt.”

“And duct taped her own mouth and tied herself up? Come on, Bonnie,” Heaven said impatiently.

Bonnie got up. “I’m just bringing up a point. We don’t have jack. I believe as you do that Kathy Hager
has the best motive so far. And she’s missing and her daughter in Omaha says she told her she was going on a retreat for Christmas. She didn’t go pheasant hunting with the son-in-law.”

Heaven stacked the dishes and loaded them on her arm. “Have they heard from her?”

“Neither daughter has heard from her since Christmas Day, when she told them she was in Atchison, Kansas, at a Benedictine monastery.”

“Kathy Hager is the one. I just know it, but you’re right, I just knew it was Jane Anderson until last night. I’m glad you’re the detective, not me.”

Bonnie headed for the door. “I’ll remind you you said that. I hope I don’t see you until next year,” she said as she left.

H
eaven had folded a white napkin around her head as a sweatband. The kitchen was swamped. It was eleven and the last round of guests had been seated. They were turning out mostly starters right now, salads, patés, snails and blini with caviar. Heaven had ordered some lobes of foie gras for the evening and on her station she seared the liver in a dry pan with some kosher salt. Then she put it on a thin slice of toast, topped it with some caramelized onions and some mango chutney that she’d made the day before. She was also doing a wild mushroom stroganoff at her station, sauteing a mixture of wild mushrooms and adding a little lemon juice and sour cream at the last minute, serving it on a thicker piece of toast with a little fresh dill on the top. She had ten pans of those two starters going at the same time. And she was smiling. “I love it when we’re in the weeds but you can see the way out,” she said.

Brian Hoffman, standing next to her, working the pasta station, looked over. “This is sure different from lunch,” he said as he worked with five or six plates.

“What a wuss,” Heaven said. The bravado of the line was like electricity running through her veins.

Joe Long stuck his head into the pass-through, picking up a couple of foie gras and some blini. “Heaven, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Murray says Stuart Watts is on the phone and he says he must talk to you, that it’s an emergency.”

Heaven thought of the scene in the bathroom the other day and felt her stomach turn. She hoped Iris was all right, that drugs weren’t involved. She didn’t even argue, just went over to the phone in the kitchen. “What?” she bellowed over the din.