Killer Crust (7 page)
Authors: Chris Cavender
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #General
Chapter 7
“A
murder?” I asked as the crowd began to rumble. “Did somebody kill Luigi?” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but all of the contestants on the stage looked straight at me, and to make matters worse, Kevin did himself.
murder?” I asked as the crowd began to rumble. “Did somebody kill Luigi?” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but all of the contestants on the stage looked straight at me, and to make matters worse, Kevin did himself.
He shook his head in my direction with a look of consternation on his face, and then turned back to the crowd. “I’m sorry to say that tonight’s host, George Vincent—otherwise known as Luigi DeMarcos—was killed in the contestants’ greenroom sometime in the three hours between the afternoon session and the beginning of this evening’s competition. My officers will be taking your names and checking your identifications as you leave the auditorium, so be patient with them. We’ll try to get you all processed as soon as we can, but this is going to take a while.” There were more grumblings from the audience, but Kevin asked as though he had perfect silence as he added, “I need to ask that if anyone had contact with Luigi at any point today, or went anywhere near the greenroom just over there, please step forward so we can have a conversation about it. Otherwise, everyone else should find their way to one of the exits.”
For the most part, the crowd headed to the doors in the rear where Kevin’s staff was waiting for them. He approached us on stage first, and I saw David and Bob heading for the stage as well, only to be stopped by one of Kevin’s deputies. I wanted to tell her to let them up, but I wasn’t in a position to make any requests at the moment.
Kevin gestured to the other contestants, and then gathered us together and said, “I need to speak with each of you individually. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can go back to your rooms.”
“How did he die?” Kenny from Charlotte asked.
“Are you sure it was murder?” one of the Raleigh twins asked at nearly the same time.
Kevin held up his hands. “I’m sorry, but you all must have misunderstood me. I’m not answering questions right now; I’m asking them. I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking, to me and to each other, until I can interview you all.” He pointed to me and said, “Eleanor, you’re first.”
“I’m going with her,” Maddy said, taking my hand in hers as though it were an unbreakable bond.
“If they are going to together, then we are, too,” Jeff said. “You aren’t going to separate us, either.”
“I said one at a time, and I meant it,” Kevin said. “Eleanor, let’s go.”
I turned to my sister and said, “It’s going to be fine, Maddy. I’ll be okay.”
“You don’t have to say anything to him, you know,” she said as she looked at Bob, who was still at the steps being blocked from joining us. “You’re entitled to an attorney.”
“I don’t need one. I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. It might have been a foolish response to make, but I didn’t care. If Kevin wanted to talk to me, I wasn’t going to hide behind Bob to keep him from asking me questions.
“Please?” I asked, and Maddy dropped my hand.
“Thanks,” I said as I followed Kevin to the other greenroom on the opposite side of the stage. I was pretty happy that I wouldn’t have to go over to the scene of the crime. The spaces were identical, though they were being used for different purposes. This room, instead of having a table, chairs, and snacks, was some kind of storage area. There were Christmas decorations stashed there, along with Valentine’s Day hearts, and banners and buntings for the Fourth of July. Someone had crammed everything to one side and they’d jammed a small folding card table and two chairs into the remaining space.
I took the seat across from Kevin and said, “Ask away.”
“Why did you assume that it was Luigi who had been killed when I made the announcement?” he asked, all semblance of affability gone from his voice.
“Why wouldn’t I? He was missing his own contest for goodness’ sake, and if you knew the man on any level at all, nothing short of murder could have kept him off that stage and wallowing in the spotlight.”
“Exactly how well did you know him, Eleanor?” Kevin asked, taking out the notebook and pen that were constantly with him.
I considered how to answer that, and finally said, “Not all that well, but our paths crossed for a long time. He tried to buy the Slice from me right after Joe died, but I turned him down cold. I might as well tell you now that we didn’t leave things on good terms, so I was surprised when he invited me to participate in the contest.”
Kevin jotted that down, and I knew that he’d be digging into my past soon. “Why did he hold the contest here? Do you know?”
“I asked him that question myself, as a matter of fact.”
That piqued his interest. “What did he tell you?”
“He just said that there were reasons that didn’t concern me, and then he wouldn’t tell me anything else. Why, do you think that it’s important?”
“It could be,” he said. “Luigi’s business is based in Charlotte, and there are a ton of venues he could have chosen there instead of coming to Timber Ridge. I didn’t understand him coming here from the start, to be honest with you.”
“I guess the only people who have a chance at answering your question are his employees or Gina herself.”
“I’ll follow up with all of them,” he said as he made another note. After a moment’s pause, he asked, “Eleanor, when’s the last time you saw him alive?”
The question had a chilling ring to it. While I’d heard his voice upstairs on our hotel room floor, I hadn’t actually laid eyes on him. “You want to know when I last saw him? It had to be just after the afternoon contest was finished,” I admitted. I’d told him the truth, at least the literal fact even if I was doing my best to obfuscate the truth. If I was lucky, he’d blow right past it.
“I’m curious. Why did you place the emphasis on seeing him just now?” Kevin asked, not missing a beat. “Did he call you after the first stage was judged?”
“No,” I admitted, “but Maddy and I were going to our rooms and we overheard him threatening someone in the hallway.”
“Were you planning on keeping that little tidbit to yourself?” he asked.
“I was just answering the question you asked me,” I protested.
I could tell that he wanted to say something else, but after a moment, he let it go and asked me, “What time exactly did that occur? What did he say and who was he talking to?”
I told him everything that Maddy and I had heard, and then said, “You can ask Maddy for confirmation if you want to.”
“I will, right after we’re finished.” Kevin took down my statement verbatim, and then asked, “And you honestly don’t have any idea who he was talking to?”
I shrugged. “We couldn’t see or hear anyone else from where we were hiding in the little ice and vending machine room, but after we heard that Luigi was gone, Maddy and I knocked on doors to see if we could find out who it might have been.”
“You two just can’t help yourselves from snooping, can you?” he asked, a touch of ire in his voice as he spoke.
“The threats were real, Chief, and Maddy and I wanted to know what was going on.”
“Who did you talk to as you were interviewing suspects?” Kevin asked.
“We spoke with Jack Acre first. I think we woke him up from his nap, as a matter of fact.”
“Okay, who else was there?”
I didn’t want to throw Jeff and Sandy under the bus, but I really didn’t have any choice. “We spoke to the team from Asheville. Actually, they were fighting when we got there.”
Kevin perked up again. “Do you happen to know what it was about?”
“Luigi was clearly their topic of conversation when we overheard them fighting. Jeff was upset about the way the man was acting toward Sandy.”
“Flirting, do you mean?”
“It sounded as though it went way beyond anything innocent, and Jeff was clearly still furious with him,” I finally admitted. I felt like a rat doing it, but Kevin needed to know everything if he was going to investigate this murder.
“Interesting,” he said as he jotted it all down. After the police chief finished, he looked at me and asked, “Can you account for your time between two and five this afternoon?”
I knew that was the window of opportunity for the killer, and realized that Chief Hurley was asking me for my alibi. “I was with Maddy every second, but you’re going to want more than that, aren’t you?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
I thought about it, and then gave Kevin a nearly minute-by-minute accounting. He whistled as he finished writing it all down. “That’s the most detailed alibi I’ve ever gotten.”
“We were busy, and nearly the entire time, we were with other people.”
“Then the magic time right now is between three-thirty and five,” he said.
He checked his notebook, and after a moment, Kevin started to ask me his next question. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he’d accept what I’d told him at face value, but I knew that as soon as he checked out my story, he’d believe me. He had no other choice, actually, and I was glad for every encounter Maddy and I had that afternoon.
Kevin looked up from his notebook. “Let’s get back to your room search. Did you speak with anyone else while you were knocking on doors?”
“We saw the Raleigh twins, but they brushed past us on the way out of their room, and they made it pretty clear that they had no interest in talking to us. After that, we knocked on a few more doors, but nobody else answered. Hang on, that’s not strictly true. We got one guy who wasn’t there for the contest, so we stopped trying to figure out who Luigi might have been talking to after that.”
“You two were busy,” he said. “Think long and hard before you answer my next question, Eleanor. Is there anything else you want to add that might help me in my investigation?”
I hated being such a blabbermouth, but Kevin had a right to know. “When we were in the restaurant eating our meal, a woman named Tina Lance approached us. She’s a reporter from a paper in Charlotte none of us had ever heard of, and she said that the contest was fixed from the start.”
“Did she go into any more detail?”
I nodded. “Actually, she told Maddy, Bob, David, and me that Luigi was partnering with the Charlotte team, and that they were going to win the contest no matter who made the best pizzas for the competition.”
“Did you catch the name of her newspaper?” he asked.
“It was the
Charlotte Touch
. She gave me one of her business cards,” I said as I pulled it out of my blue jeans pocket.
Charlotte Touch
. She gave me one of her business cards,” I said as I pulled it out of my blue jeans pocket.
Kevin took it, recorded all of the information from it into his notebook, and then handed the card back to me. “Wow, I can’t believe all you were able to find out even before we found Luigi’s body.”
“You have to remember something. We weren’t investigating a murder at that point. Maddy and I were just trying to find out if we had a chance of winning the grand prize. I suppose that’s all off now,” I said, realizing that all of the renovations I’d been planning in my mind had just gone up in smoke.
Kevin frowned, and then said, “I’m not so sure that’s true. This fellow Jack Acre; you said he was in charge when Luigi didn’t show up, right?”
“Sure, he ran tonight’s contest round all by himself, but I can’t imagine he has the authority to continue it with the company founder dead.”
The police chief shrugged. “Don’t give up hope yet. I’m going to see if I can get him to carry on with the competition without Luigi.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked. “You’re not just going to ask him as a favor to me, are you?”
He shook his head. “Think about it, Eleanor. If I can keep my suspects here at Tree-Line without being forced to do anything in my official capacity, I have a better chance of solving this murder before everyone scatters to the four winds. Are there any other suspects you might know about that you haven’t shared with me yet?”
I considered it, and then said, “Well, I heard Luigi scolding Jack Acre and Frank Vincent when I first showed up. They’re two of his top employees, and Frank in particular looked at his brother with open contempt when he didn’t think Luigi was watching. There’s also a woman hanging around the contest who was spitting mad at Luigi for dropping her from the competition. I don’t know her name, or anything about her, but you might want to find her and ask about her alibi.”
“I’ve got to admit, you’ve done quite a bit of background work for me on this case.” He hesitated, and then added, “Let me ask you something, Eleanor. You and Maddy are staying here at the hotel for the competition, right?”
“We were,” I admitted, “but I can’t imagine any reason that we wouldn’t go back home now. This thing has lost its appeal for me with the murder and everything. I’m not even sure that I care if we win the money anymore.” Even I couldn’t tell for sure if I was lying or not at that moment. There was too much of a jumble in my brain, and it was still just sinking in that Luigi was dead. Just because I hadn’t liked the man didn’t mean that I wanted to see him murdered.
“What if I asked you to stay on here as a favor to me?” Kevin asked.
“Why would you do that?”
The chief of police took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. “As much as it pains me to admit it, you and Maddy seem to have a knack for finding out things behind the scenes that I can’t uncover in my official capacity. I’m not asking you to snoop, but if you’re here anyway, you could always keep your eyes and ears open for things I might need to know.”
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