Murder Brewed At Home (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 3) (10 page)

              I looked at the faces of my audience before I continued. I was very satisfied with their rapt attention.

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              I gathered my thoughts and continued:

              "There were two variables in this mess. One was Restocruz. The other was Candace Young. Planning a murder must eat away at the conscience. Maggie became paranoid. So, she decided to take care of the situation in advance by tainting Candace's Valium with the cerbera tincture. Luckily it wasn't enough to cause death. But it did cause Candace to slip into a coma and safely out of the way as far as Maggie was concerned. Maggie then began worrying about Restocruz. She feared he was going to talk to the cops. So she met with him under some pretense one night. They took a walk down by the Yacht Club. And she stuck him with the needle. Restocruz went down. Maggie dumped his body into the water. The trouble with Maggie is that she's not a professional. She got sloppy and needed to escape. The same help she had in arranging the murder helped fake her own death. A visual match? A payoff to the mortuary? Who knows. There's a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in the criminal underworld. We'll figure it out. For now, Maggie was safely hidden herself. Until she got my text that Candace was out of her coma and had gotten her memory back. She was out of poison, so she came back here to finish the job with that gun."

              "You can’t prove any of this," Maggie said with a sneer.

              "Well, not really. Not here anyway. Detective?"

              Detective Moore, my wonderful beau, went behind the couch and brought out the reflective parka that Kyle Young was wearing when he went out. Lester brought it with him on my request and stashed it there.

              I went and took it from him.

              "That's evidence," said Lester. "Be careful."

              "I will," I said. "Now, if you take a look at this parka, which Lester's boys did – and they took samples which will be analyzed tomorrow – you'll find PVA residue in the material. It's hard to find, even if you know what you're looking for. But they'll find it, because it's there. Trust me."

              "That proves nothing," said Maggie.

              "Not on its own, but Owen Schiff knows about this too."

              I looked at Daisy, who still had her head in her hands.

              "Daisy's husband also had an affair with Maggie. She enlisted his help in a very significant way. She got Owen to smuggle cerbera seeds out of Madagascar when he was there on business. She had no money to give him, so she made a trade: a book worth about ten thousand dollars at auction. A first edition of
House on Pooh Corner
. That bought the seeds as well as his silence."

              I walked up to Daisy.

              "Daisy, I'm sorry about all of this. Folks, Daisy was in on it too, in a way. Forced into silence by her husband, their marriage was already on the rocks. Then, amidst all the stress and tension, she found out about his affair with Maggie. She couldn’t take it anymore and promptly filed for divorce. She feared for her life after that. I can tell you this: Daisy tried to do what was right."

              I walked over to Daisy and whispered in her ear, "I know it was you who sent the email." She merely looked at me with a sad, yet comforted expression on her face.

              "And now, Maggie," I continued, "to answer your accusation of no evidence, I'm afraid there's one last piece of evidence, and it just happens to be in Daisy's house: the book. Owen was quick to list it on eBay. The police are on their way to your house as we speak, Daisy. They are going to arrest Owen when they find him."

              "They found him," said Lester, "I just got the text."

              "Well, there you have it," I said. "Where did they find him?"

              "He was in the house he shared with his soon-to-be ex-wife. He was waiting for her to come home. He was waiting there with a pistol."

              "Oh my God," said Daisy, her hand on her head as if warding off a fainting spell.

              "I think I'm done here. Lester?"

              "Ms. Childsworth," he said, "you're under arrest for the murder of Kyle Young..."

              "You're now a tried and true private investigator," said Tanya.

              We were drinking tea in our pajamas. I had just finished telling her the entire story from top to bottom.

              She stared at me, a quizzical look on her face.

              "What?" I said, blowing over the rim of my teacup.

              "Mr. X. What’s up with that?"

              "I have a physical description. Nothing else. No proof of anything. He's insulated pretty well."

              "But he did help Maggie fake her death."

              "I have no proof of that. I don’t even know the guy's name."

              "There's got to be something."

              "There is," I said confidently.

              "What is it?"

              "I don’t know yet. But I'll find it."

              "Until then, what?" she said. "You're just going to let him harass or extort you into selling him the brewery?"

              "Of course not," I said. "I can’t put my finger on it, but something tells me that that isn’t his game. He knows what I'm capable of when it comes to solving these crimes and he wants to profit off it. It came to me in a flash. That's his game. He's a businessman and he sees an opportunity. I think he thinks he can intimidate me by threatening to acquire the brewery. Without the brewery, I'll do the private eye thing full time. With my keeping the brewery, he can up his bargaining tactics to try and get me to lose the brewery and do the private eye thing full time. Like I said, he's a businessman and he's trying to strategize based on the number of possible outcomes."

              "What if he really is a nasty person?" Tanya said quietly.

              "What do you mean?"

              "What if he's right about everything? The police chief being in his pocket and all. You said it yourself. The chief told Lester to back off the case. If Mr. X really is in control, he could have orchestrated that very easily. So my question still remains: what if he's as bad as he implied he is? What then?"

              I thought about it. And I blew over my cup and took another healthy sip of delicious, soothing tea. And maybe it was the euphoria from having solved another case that was governing my words, but I sat back and said, "So what? Let him try to get the best of me."

              She shrugged. I sipped. And later on I went to bed and slept very well indeed.

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