Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery (21 page)

Twenty-two

R
ena had left for home to bake the doggy cake, and I had just about finished clearing the showroom for the next day’s festivities when our doorbell tinkled again. This time, we found Taffy Nielson and Ken West making their way across the now-empty floor.

“Izzy,” Taffy said, “I have some news.”

Lord love a duck, this was a day for news. I crossed my fingers that this news, too, was good.

“Ken here was working at his restaurant this morning, and he popped across the alley to have lunch with me. When he opened the door, Gandhi made a run for it.”

“No!”

“Yes. Just a little auburn bolt of lightning.” Taffy looked sheepish. “I have to admit it’s good for me that he’s gone. But I know you worry about him.”

Once again, the pig was in the wind.

“I tried to grab him for you, Izzy,” Ken said.

“It’s true. Ken nearly impaled himself on a cut end of lumber sticking out of the construction Dumpster. He really tried.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for trying. Hopefully he’ll turn up again soon. That pig is as willful as a spoiled toddler.”

“I also wanted to thank you,” Ken said.

Heavens, I’d just accused the man of murder. Why would he want to thank me?

“After our little conversation the other day,” he continued, “I realized that I wasn’t being fair to Taffy. I shouldn’t have tried to keep our relationship secret for so long, especially in an effort to hide my past from her. A relationship has to be built on trust, so I decided to tell Taffy about being the Madison Mystery Chef. I expected her to run away screaming, but she seems to have found it in her heart to forgive me.”

He swung their clasped hands up and planted a kiss on her knuckles.

Taffy colored, that blush a sure barometer of her soul. “I didn’t really have to forgive him for anything. I kind of like him having a dark and dangerous past.”

I wasn’t sure being a lecherous chef constituted “dark and dangerous,” but I wasn’t about to rain on Taffy’s parade.

I picked up the last rack of kitty couture to move it back to the barkery, but I hit my finger against the wood a little too hard, and my splinter wound sent a shot up my arm. I hissed air between my teeth trying to hold the pain at bay, but it was tough. Even with the
bandage around my finger, the spot where the splinter had gone in was incredibly tender.

“Besides,” Taffy added, apparently oblivious to my moment of crisis, “it was all a long time before he met me. We all have our secrets.”

“We also wanted to put to rest any lingering thoughts you might have about my involvement in Daniel’s death. I can give you my real alibi now.”

Taffy looked down at the floor and leaned into Ken’s side. “He was with me.”

Ken held up a hand. “I know. As a professional I shouldn’t have left the kitchen, but during the actual ceremony I didn’t figure I’d be missed. So I scooted down the alley to have a little quality time with my sweetie.”

“Then why did you say you’d been having a smoke with Steve Olmstead?”

“I was, at the time, trying to keep our romance under wraps. And I didn’t know what had happened, how high the stakes were, so I blurted out the first thing that came to me. Steve had just come into the kitchen to get a glass of water when I decided to leave, so I figured he’d be my cover.”

“But you didn’t
ask
him to cover for you?”

Ken frowned. “No. I didn’t know I’d need a cover when I left, and by the time I got back and said I’d gone out for a cigarette, the place was practically crawling with cops. I just kept my mouth shut.”

I leaned forward to give Ken a hard stare. “And you never thought to tell the police you’d lied?”

Ken shook his head, perplexed. “Why would I?
Until you came knocking on my door, no one was acting like I was a suspect. And if I wasn’t a suspect, why would anyone care about my alibi?”

Because,
I thought,
alibis run two ways.

*   *   *

As soon as Taffy and Ken left, I grabbed my phone and dialed Jack Collins.

I got his voice mail.

“Jack, this is Izzy. Look, I’m like ninety-nine percent certain I know who the real murderer is. But I’ve had pretty bad luck confronting my suspects over the last week, so I’m going to let you do the confronting on this one. Just come over soon so I can explain everything.”

By the time I’d hung up, I’d missed a call from Sean. In his message, he said he was planning to swing by around five to drop off some magic bars his mother had decided to make for the wedding ceremony the next day. We were catered up the yin-yang, but no one in her right mind says no to magic bars.

Two minutes later, I got the text from Jack: “How about 5? Dinner?”

I set the phone on the counter and pressed my temples. Between Ama, Richard, Jane, and Ken, and now a potential showdown between Sean and Jack, my head might literally explode. And I still had a killer to catch.

*   *   *

Later that afternoon, I was enjoying a moment of peace. Rena had brought the doggy cake in, and it was adorable: two bone-shaped tiers of carob applesauce cake with a peanut butter frosting. She’d decorated it with creamed banana piping. Once she’d gotten adequate
praise from me for her amazing effort, she had taken both Packer and Daisy for a walk. Daisy’s strength and Packer’s general grumpiness over sharing the spotlight gave me pause, but Rena was convinced she could handle it. And Jinx, who was often underfoot when the shop was dog free, had decided to curl up with Val on top of the oak armoire for a catnap. A ferret nap? Whatever, they were quiet.

At ten to five, I was draping the front cabinet with the purple velvet cover we’d used the week before, when the bell over my front door jingled, announcing a new guest. I looked up expecting either Sean or Jack.

I was shocked instead to see Steve Olmstead. He looked like he was about to clock me.

“What did you say to Ama? What did you say to make her cry?”

That was a tricky question. I was pretty sure Steve already knew Ama’s secret, but on the off chance I was wrong, I didn’t want to spill it for her. And I had a lousy track record with lying, especially on the fly.

I settled for a noncommittal shrug.

“Tell me now!” he screamed, his eyes opened to the point that I could see a ring of white around his arctic blue irises, veins visible beneath his ruddy skin.

“We were talking about Jordan.”

That’s when I saw the outline of the gun Steve had in his pocket. I knew the jig was up. There was no way to stall him until Jack arrived, and I knew Steve had already committed the ultimate sin to save his family once.

Carefully, I reached over to the high stool where my bag and phone lay, and I slowly dragged the phone into my hand.

Steve was looking around frantically, taking in his surroundings, so I risked a quick glance down at the phone so I could hit redial. This time, faintly, I heard Jack answer with a cheery hello. Quickly, I depressed the button on the side of the phone that lowered the speaker volume, so Jack could hear what we were saying but we couldn’t hear him.

“Steve,” I said loudly, to make sure Jack caught that I was still present, that I was talking to someone else. “What’s going on here?”

“Why would talking about Jordan make Ama cry? She loves him.”

“I think you know why, Steve.”

He pinned me with his glare. “He’s. My. Son.”

“I think you’re wrong,” I said. “I think Daniel Colona’s his father, and I think you know that.” The words dropped like stones from my mouth, heavy words that could not be taken back.

Steve uttered a sound of disgust. “I’m not stupid. I know Jordan isn’t my biological son.” He closed his eyes, expression intent as he looked hard at the past. “Ama and I tried to get pregnant for so long. She wept every month when we knew we’d missed another opportunity. I was her husband. I loved her. I wanted to start a family with her. . . . Her tears were like daggers in my heart. We finally started seeking medical help, and I learned that I have a low sperm count. I never
told Ama, because I couldn’t bear to be the one to destroy her dreams, but I knew we would probably never have a child.”

He laughed, his expression softening. “Then Ama got pregnant. At first I thought we’d just gotten lucky, that the stars had aligned and we’d gotten pregnant together. I suppose I knew somewhere in the back of my head that I was lying to myself, that it was another man and not luck that gave us our child. But I didn’t care. Seeing the joy on Ama’s face when the baby kicked, working side by side to create a nursery for our baby. I chose to believe the child was mine.”

I could empathize. Looking back, I should have known Casey was cheating on me for months before he finally left. But I wanted so much to believe in the dream of our life together, couldn’t bear the thought of it not coming to fruition, that I chose to believe all was well in our relationship. The heart’s desire can blind us to so many ugly realities.

“What made you stop believing?” I asked.

He sighed and opened his eyes, but he didn’t meet my gaze. “When Jordan was born. Ama and I have blue eyes and Jordan’s are brown. I only took biology when I was in high school, but I seem to recall that’s a genetic impossibility. Even if it weren’t, he doesn’t look a thing like me or his mother. I just knew.”

“That must have been hard, to realize you weren’t his father.”

Steve sucked in a lungful of air through his nose, like you do before the doctor sticks a needle in your arm, anticipating the pain to come.

“It was hard. I’m not his father. But I
am
his
dad
. I’m the one who held him as he took his first breath, the one who rocked him through the night when he was sick, the one whose fingers he grasped as he took his first steps. He’s mine in a way he could never be Daniel Colona’s.”

“Did you blame Ama?”

“Sometimes. But I knew in my gut that she’d just had a fling, and I’ll never forget the way she cried for a child. It changed our marriage, but I never hated her for it.”

“Did you ever confront her?”

He laughed a short, grim laugh. “Absolutely not. She knew what she’d done, and she felt remorse. Sometimes she’d look at me like she was trying to crawl right inside my head, and she’d say, ‘I love you. You know that, right?’ She wouldn’t break the gaze until I acknowledged her love. What good would it have done to say that I knew about her fling? It would have only made her feel worse.”

Or, I thought, it might have lifted a terrible weight from her shoulders. Whether he realized it or not, I suspected that Steve held his tongue so his wife had to suffer in silence.

“Why kill Daniel?”

“What makes you think I killed Daniel?” he asked, his voice growing dangerously quiet.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have let on that I knew Steve was the murderer, but I was hoping Jack was listening to every word and trying to get to Trendy Tails as fast as he could. For the same reason—buying time—I figured I ought to explain my thinking.

“Two things, really. First, there was your splinter. I saw the bandage that morning in the park. I recently did the same thing, probably in the exact same spot on the handrail in my back staircase. My first instinct was to stick the splintered finger in my mouth. It didn’t hit me until later, but you were sucking your finger right after Daniel’s death. You stopped the second you saw me, but I caught it.

“And then there was the alibi. You and Ken both lied about your alibi, saying you’d been having a cigarette with each other in the alley. Ken had a reason to lie, so he could cover up his relationship with Taffy and the extended amount of time he spent with her when he should have been working. But you backed him up. And that made me wonder why you would lie for Ken. The answer, of course, is that you wouldn’t. You weren’t giving Ken an alibi; he had inadvertently given you one.”

Steve cocked his head. “Clever cookie.”

“Thanks? But I still don’t understand why you had to murder Daniel.”

“He was nosing around, taking pictures of Jordan. He’d called her at the house a couple of times. Not that Ama told me. But a few times she’d gotten calls that upset her. I could tell by the way she gripped the phone and the way her lips flattened against her teeth. Then one day her phone rang when she wasn’t around. I picked it up. When I answered, I only got silence. But then I hit redial and I got Daniel Colona’s voice mail.

“Dee Dee seemed to know who Daniel Colona was and claimed he’d been out by the Badger Lake
construction site. So I hoofed it out there a couple of times until I finally saw him for myself. One look and I knew he was Jordan’s father.”

He laughed, a half-desperate sound.

“He’d figured out he had a kid, and his interest in Jordan could only mean one thing: that he was planning to try to take my boy away from me.”

“The courts never would have granted him full custody. Just visitation,” I said. “He’d still be your boy.”

“But everyone would know. They’d know that I’d been a patsy, they’d know that Ama had had an affair, and they’d know that Jordan was illegitimate. It would have haunted all three of us, completely changed the way the people in this community viewed us. My business would suffer, and Ama might even lose her job.”

It seemed to me that Steve was overestimating the extent to which people in Merryville would care about their marriage. Sure, there’d be all sorts of speculation and gossip for the first few weeks, maybe even months. But then things would die down. People wouldn’t necessarily forget, but there wouldn’t be anything new to say about the subject. Why, look at Jane Porter’s torrid fling with Ingrid’s first husband. I’d managed to spend over thirty years in the orbit of Ingrid and my gossipy aunt Dolly before I heard even a peep about that affair.

On the other hand, I suppose when you live with a secret the way Steve had been living with this, it just keeps growing in your mind until it’s this massive rock dangling by a thread over you. The merest whisper of the secret and you’ll be destroyed.

“I didn’t plan to kill him. I wasn’t even sure if he
was in his apartment the night of the wedding. I went to get a glass of water, saw Ken leaving, and thought I’d take a chance that maybe he was at home. I just wanted to ask him to leave us alone. He hadn’t even met Jordan, so why would he care if he got a chance to? Why not just pretend it had never happened?”