Grounds for Murder (4 page)

‘Hurt, shmurt. That sign’s going down. Henry’s going―’

‘Look, Maggy, there’s Janalee.’ Sarah sounded like she was placating a crabby two-year-old. Which was probably about the right level of maturity for the way I was acting.

I turned reluctantly.

In the midst of all the high-tech activity, Janalee LaRoche was an island of calm. A tall, blue-eyed blonde, Janalee favored peasant skirts, vests in natural fabrics and espadrilles – those canvas sandals with the woven platform soles. I would have looked like Heidi in the get-up, but Janalee managed ‘chic’ even with a baby hammocked across her chest.

‘Is that a coffee bag?’ I asked.

The baby was in a sling-type carrier, seemingly fashioned from one of the burlap bags used to ship coffee beans.

Janalee came toward us with a smile. ‘Maggy, Sarah. How good to see you. And yes, it is a coffee bag, Maggy. One of the 154-pound bags from Columbia. Little Davy just loves it.’ She patted the baby’s red cheek. ‘Don’t you, sweetie?’

‘Little Davy’ looked like he wanted to be anywhere but in the bag. He let out a yowl.

‘I think he’s leaking.’ Sarah pointed toward a growing wet patch on the carrier.

Janalee reached around and felt it. ‘I’m afraid it’s one of the perils of using cloth diapers,’ she said. ‘But nothing but the best for my little boy and the world he lives in. Isn’t that right, Davy?’

She was talking in that annoying sing-song baby voice, the one I no doubt had used when Eric was little. Being a new mother is a little like getting drunk in public. It’s only in hindsight that you realize what a fool you made of yourself.

‘Don’t you use rubbers?’ Sarah asked.

‘Maybe Davy was unplanned,’ Janalee said, drawing herself up indignantly, ‘but―’

‘No, no.’ I elbowed Sarah in the ribs. ‘I think Sarah meant rubber pants.’

‘Ohhhhh.’ The smile came back. ‘Actually, Sarah, I use organic wool diaper covers, instead of rubber or plastic pants. The wool is not only more environmentally friendly, but it holds thirty percent of its weight in urine without feeling damp. The wool cover doesn’t lock in the wetness next to Davy’s little bum, like rubber pants would. When I’m at home, I let him go with just the cloth diaper. So freeing, don’t you think?’

Frankly, Sarah looked like she didn’t give a damn about freeing little Davy’s butt.

I jumped in. ‘Don’t disposables wick the moisture away?’ I asked in a mother-to-mother tone.

Janalee’s hand went to her mouth. ‘Six thousand disposable diapers go into landfills for each baby. Can you believe that, Maggy?’

Well, Eric and I had certainly done our part. Somewhere there was probably a landfill named for us.

‘That is just a great baby carrier,’ I gushed, trying to steer the subject away from me and waste management. ‘Did you get it at Evram’s?’

Janalee gasped. ‘No, no – this is from Rene at Coffee Roasters of Las Vegas. You don’t buy anything at Evram’s department store, do you, Maggy? They use child labor from Third World countries.’

Way to go, Maggy. Right back in the toilet.

I turned toward the office, leaving Sarah to talk to Janalee.

It pained me to admit it, but Marvin LaRoche might well be a saint.

Chapter Four

Like I said, I’d never been to this particular HotWired, but since LaRoche valued the cookie-cutter approach to business, I knew where to find him: the loft.

HotWired shops were two stories high – airy and open to the roofline in the front, with a loft/office forming a partial second floor in the rear of the building. Large windows in the office overlooked the coffeehouse floor. It was a great layout for keeping an eye on your employees or picking off the enemy as she climbs the metal steps to breach your position.

I have a fear of heights. Did I mention that?

It’s not so much that I’m scared I’m going to fall, as I think I might just go crazy and toss myself over. Freud, Jung, Skinner: have a go at me. Bring your friends. If you have any.

Anyway, clanging my way up the iron-pipe stairway held together by assorted nuts, bolts and, I hoped, heavy-duty lock washers, made me nervous. As I climbed, I asked myself what I was doing there. Not only was LaRoche a worm, he made me feel stupid. And I hated to feel stupid. So why put myself through it? Maybe I should just leave.

Too late. The door above me opened abruptly and LaRoche stared down at me. Sort of. With a shock, I realized the man was slightly cross-eyed. How could I have missed that?

I’d always thought LaRoche was a little shifty-looking, even when he was being ‘faux friendly’ to us. Had I just been reacting to the fact he was cross-eyed? Maybe it made me vaguely uneasy, even if I hadn’t quite registered why.

Geez, if that was true, I was dirt. Insensitive, prejudiced dirt. I held out my hand to him.

LaRoche took it and turned it over to plant a kiss on the palm. ‘Coming to negotiate terms of surrender, Maggy?’ He grinned and turned away, leaving the door open for me to follow.

OK, he was dirt. Cross-eyed dirt. Smiling, cross-eyed dirt. I wiped off my hand on my pants.

‘Surrender?’ I asked, following him in. ‘Whatever do you mean, Marvin?’ I could be charming, too. Faux charming.

‘Do I smell a story here?’ a female voice asked. Kate McNamara, aforementioned editor and crappy driver, stood by LaRoche’s desk, sorting through papers in her briefcase.

More likely what she smelled was over-roasted coffee beans, but Kate probably wouldn’t know the difference anyway.

LaRoche shook his head. ‘I was merely teasing Maggy, Kate. I’ve been re-reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.’ He nodded to a slim book on his desk. ‘I’m afraid I have military maneuvers on my mind.’

And all over his office. On the shelves next to LaRoche’s desk, miniature toy soldiers did battle on three levels, the books behind them forming a backdrop. One tiny soldier was even tied to a string, apparently rappelling to the shelf below to land on a tome about the Battle of Normandy.

‘Guess he’s going up, not down,’ I murmured.

LaRoche seemed startled, then he saw what I was looking at. He tipped his head in approval. ‘Quite right. Scaling the cliffs of Normandy.’

The way he said it made me think of a professor who had just been surprised by a student he believed was a dolt. Little did he know I’d just watched The Longest Day on DVD the prior week.

Kate looked like a dolt herself for a second, but recovered nicely and handed LaRoche a paper. I figured she’d be Googling ‘cliffs +Normandy + toy soldier’ within five minutes of getting to her office. ‘Here’s your copy of the ad contract, Marvin.’

Kate turned to me. ‘You should be advertising, too, Maggy. Offering free drink coupons, like HotWired. People would love it.’

My first thought was that if we spent money on ads, it wouldn’t be in a glorified shopper like The Brookhills Observer. My second thought was, Free drink coupons?

LaRoche was nodding. ‘It’s a great way to get people in the door.’

Also a great way to bankrupt your competition. Free drinks for a week was one thing, but if HotWired gave them away for any length of time . . .

‘So, Marvin,’ Kate said, picking up her briefcase and crossing to the door, ‘we’ll just automatically renew in thirty days. You tell us when to stop.’ She smiled, all teeth and glossy black hair and freckles. I wanted to stomp her.

This was my worst nightmare.

Well, this and not being able to get to the basement before a tornado comes. My ‘I’m hurrying, but not getting anywhere’ dream. Now that Ted and I were divorced, the nightmare had devolved into an ‘I’m trying to get to the basement, but there is no basement’ dream.

Scary enough, but a competitor with pockets sufficiently deep to give away their product until they ran you out of business? That was right up there with tornadoes – with or without basements – believe me.

Sarah’s ‘Don’t let them know they’ve hurt you’ reverberated in my head. ‘Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes’ was bouncing around in there, too, for some reason.

I smiled back at Kate. ‘I’ll think about that advertising. Thanks.’ In fact, I had a feeling I’d have trouble not thinking about the advertising. Especially around three a.m.

LaRoche said goodbye to Kate and closed the door behind her. He didn’t seem at all upset she had blabbed about the ads. Probably hoped I’d be intimidated.

He picked up The Art of War. ‘As I was saying, Maggy. If you’re a student of military gamesmanship, you really must read this.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t think killing, or being killed, is much of a game,’ I said dryly.

‘Such a female way of looking at it.’ He laughed, his blue eyes and white teeth flashing in contrast to his Fake n’ Bake tan. ‘It’s all about strategy, Maggy. Tactics. And that’s a game we play every day in business –’ a yowl from Little Davy downstairs – ‘or in our personal lives.’

I eyed Sun Tzu’s book, which I actually had read at the suggestion of a colleague twenty years ago. Two decades, but that was just a drop in the bucket for the Chinese general’s book. Sun Tzu had been born around 500 BC. Which just went to show you, nothing really changes. Especially human nature.

Flip-flop BOING, flip-flop BOING, fli-flop BOING. Janalee was coming up the stairs in her thick-soled espadrilles. I hoped the BOING wasn’t Davy’s head hitting the metal railing as the baby-sling swung with every step. Encouragingly, I didn’t hear crying, though I guess that could have meant either unscathed or unconscious.

Janalee tapped on the door and came in. Davy’s bulky carrier was under one arm. In the opposite hand, Janalee carried a big brown paper bag. The woman was a packhorse. How in the world had she scaled the steep steps like that?

Janalee divested herself of the brown bag – presumably the boing of the flip-flop BOING – and fished Davy out of the sling. She set him down on the pine-planked floor.

‘Janalee, dear,’ LaRoche said, eying Davy as the baby settled himself next to his father’s battle-shelves. ‘Can I help you with something?’

While the words said one thing, the tone said something altogether different. Something not very nice.

But Janalee just smiled. ‘Sarah told me that Maggy has volunteered to oversee the barista competition, and I wanted to thank her and turn over the files.’

I guessed that explained what Sarah needed to see Janalee about.

‘Really?’ LaRoche turned to me. ‘That’s a marvelous idea, Maggy. It’s a very visible position, and Uncommon Grounds could certainly use the exposure.’

I hate this man, I hate this man, I hate this man.

I gritted my teeth and smiled – it’s harder than it sounds. ‘I would love to take over the competition.’ Especially if that competition was HotWired.

I was looking at Marvin when I said it, but Janalee answered. ‘Thank you so much, Maggy. You’re a lifesaver.’

She pulled a big stack of files out of the bottom of the baby sling. I wondered if she had a Volkswagen and clowns in there, too.

‘It was no problem doing the upfront arrangements,’ Janalee was saying, ‘but with Davy . . .’ She gestured to where the baby was now standing, having pulled himself up on the bookshelves to grab the dangling soldier. He’d left a puddle on the floor – apparently the ‘organic wool diaper cover’ had reached its thirty-percent organic wool saturation point. ‘. . .starting to get around, it would be impossible for me to get anything done.’ She handed me the files.

They felt a little damp, so I took them gingerly. ‘Thanks, Janalee. I’ll call you if I have any questions after looking them over.’

Which would be subsequent to drying and disinfecting them.

LaRoche nodded in approval. ‘I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job, Maggy. I’m head judge, so don’t hesitate to turn to me for advice.’

Right. That had worked out so well once before. ‘Thank you, Marvin, but I was an event manager in my PR life, remember? I think I’ll be able to handle it.’

In truth, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. I’d only seen one barista competition in my life. Not that I was going to tell LaRoche that. As his hero, Sun Tzu, had said, ‘The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.’ I didn’t intend to provide LaRoche with anything, especially information on my possible shortcomings.

But LaRoche wasn’t paying any attention to me. He was staring at the coffeehouse floor below us, where ground zero of the Battle for the Barista had just walked in.

Amy.

She was with a gray-haired man, who towered over the five-feet two-inch, rainbow-haired, multiply-pierced barista by a full foot. I recognized the man as Levitt Fredericks, president of EarthBean, a consortium of storeowners and roasters who worked for environmentally friendly trade practices.

‘Now what’s he doing here?’ It was like LaRoche had given voice to my thoughts. Except in my head, the question was followed by, Has LaRoche grown a conscience?

Not that I had any right to talk, really. While Caron and I stocked Fair Trade and shade-grown coffees, we didn’t carry them exclusively, much to Levitt Fredericks’ dismay.

‘Amy and Levitt are friends, Marvin,’ Janalee said. ‘You know that.’

Amy had worked for Janalee long before LaRoche had appeared on the scene, making her the obvious choice to take over the store when Janalee had gone from making coffee to making . . . Davy. Word had it that despite her heavy-on-the-metal appearance, Amy was a genuine environmentalist. The rainbow hair and tattoos? Henna, I suspected, though I didn’t share that with anyone. Every town needs a legend.

Janalee had turned her attention to preventing the soldier-on-a-rope from dying a watery death in the pool of baby pee. ‘Davy,’ she said gently, ‘let’s put Daddy’s toy down.’

But patience apparently wasn’t one of Daddy’s virtues. ‘Friends,’ he said, mimicking Janalee’s saccharine tone. ‘Exactly what does that mean?’

Tossing the Sun Tzu book on the desk, LaRoche snatched the soldier from Davy. The look the one-year-old gave him in response was pure Damien – the original Omen Damien. Even I hadn’t wasted any time with the sequels.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably, wanting out.

Janalee gestured toward the brown paper bag on the desk. ‘That’s the first-place trophy. It’s a barista, as interpreted by a local artist. I’m having the rest of the trophies shipped directly to your attention at the convention center.’