Silenced by the Yams (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #3) (8 page)

I gasped. “You did it again!”

Colt’s expression was blank. “What?”

“You called me Barb!”

He spoke slowly, as if I was missing a few marbles. “It’s your name.”

“Not to you it isn’t.” I’d put the van into drive but kept my foot on the brake. “Curly. You call me Curly. You’ve never called me Barb.”

“Never?”

“Never ever. Not until yesterday when you brought Meeeee-gan by.”

His lips curled into a devious smile. “I think you’re jealous.”

“I think you’re stupid.”

“Now you’re just being childish.”

“Childish is holding back information from the FBI. I’m pretty sure you just broke a few laws back there.”

“That’s not being childish. That’s being smart. To cover your ass, I might add. And you’re changing the subject.”

“Give me a break. How were you covering my . . . derriere?”

“Giving up swear words again?”

“I’m trying.”

“Good for you.” He adjusted the ac vents on my dash so they blew directly onto his face. “It occurred to me while we waited. Suppose that really was Guy Mertz they were rolling into one of those ambulances. And suppose we’d told Agent Smith that you were on your way to meet this victim, who just yesterday on his newscast linked you to a famous murder.  Seems to me the police would be interested in more than just what you might or might not have seen. I was getting us out of there fast before they put two and two together and hauled you in. Capisce?”

I threw the gear shift back to park, took my foot off the brake and sat back in my seat feeling defeated. “So you think it’s a mistake to go talk to Frankie?”

“Big one.”

“But I know he didn’t kill Kurt Baugh. He brought those yams to the table for Randolph Rutter.”

“Well, it’s a bad name, but I doubt Frankie’d want to kill him for that. Didn’t you say that Randolph insulted his food?”

I shook my head. “No. He said his yams were cold, but Frankie didn’t seem mad about it. Certainly not mad enough to poison him.”

Cars whizzed past us on the road where I sat, parallel parked.

“I think someone else poisoned those yams either to frame Frankie for Randolph Rutter’s murder which then went awry. Either that, or they were meant for someone else altogether and Frankie just grabbed them and passed them on to Randolph. Kurt was just an innocent yam stealer. Either way, I’m positively certain Frankie’s not involved. I feel it in my gut, Colt.”

He thought quietly for a minute. “Do we know for a fact the yams were poisoned?”

“I don’t know anything except what Guy Mertz has reported. That’s why I want to talk to Frankie.” I added some sweetness to my smile. “And maybe my favorite private detective could help by talking to some of his friends in the DC police department . . .”

Colt answered my smile with a frown.

Suddenly, whizzing cars were swerving and honking. When I turned to see what was causing the commotion, I shrieked. A man was pulling my driver’s side van door open and before I knew what was happening, he was diving into my back seat. I continued to scream until Colt had managed, in one fell swoop, to secure the man by his collar, hanging him precariously like a kitten by the scruff of his neck.

The uninvited back seat visitor was Guy Mertz.

Alive and bullet-free.

Chapter Eight

 Truthfully, it was hard to pin Guy as a good egg or a bad seed, but either way, I was relieved to see him. “Thank God you’re not dead!”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” he panted. “Could you call your dog off?”

I tapped Colt’s hand. He dropped Guy, who straightened up and did a little self-adjustment on his neck.

“Who’s the goon?” Guy asked.

“My friend Colt. He’s a private detective and he carries concealed, so watch yourself.”

“Watch myself from what? You think I want to hurt you?”

“I guess not. I just always wanted to say that. It feels cool.”

Guy smoothed his shirt. “It’s illegal anyway.”

“What?”

“Carrying concealed in DC. But your bodyguard knows that, I’m sure.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You have some explaining to do. I saw you standing at the hot dog stand that just got shot up like Daffy Duck during wabbit season.”

Guy’s face went pale. “That wasn’t me.”

Poor Guy Mertz spilled his guilty beans. Seems he had been called in for a spur-of-the-moment meeting at Channel 10—one he couldn’t get out of. So he sent his assistant to meet me and let me know he’d be running late and not to leave. He had the assistant, a young college kid, wear his hat and carry the signature umbrella so I’d be sure to recognize them, which of course, I did. Guy was making his way down 17
^th
street when he heard the gun shots. He bolted like Chicken Little, not knowing that it was the hot dog stand under fire. When he overhead two people talking about the incident he felt sick and sat down on a stone bench at the World War II museum worrying if he’d just innocently gotten his assistant killed. He spotted Colt and me walking to the van and decided to follow us.

“Why didn’t you just catch up and talk to us while we walked?”

“Because I wasn’t the only one following you.”

Colt broke a smile for the first time. “Kid with a goatee wearing cargo shorts and a red baseball cap?”

“You know him?”

I sighed. “He says he’s a projectionist at ACL and he knows who killed Kurt Baugh. I met him earlier, but Colt scared him off before he told me what he knew. For some reason he’s still following us.”

“He probably has a crush on you, Curly,” Colt said.

“Great.
Now
you call me Curly.” I turned my attention back to Guy. “Let’s cut to the chase. What evidence do you have that Frankie isn’t the murderer?”

Guy ran a hand over his partially balding head. “That’s a little complicated.”

Colt didn’t look happy and I thought he might grab Mertz by the scruff of the neck again and shake some stuffing out of him. “Either you have evidence or you don’t. Not complicated.”

“See, here’s the thing,” Guy said, sniffing and pulling on his skinny nose. “Things are tough at Channel 10 and—”

“You don’t have any evidence, do you?” Colt’s generally cool blue eyes were turning angry red.

“I might not make the cut!” Guy shouted. “I need a great story like this to save my job.”

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Guy, what did you do?”

“Do? I didn’t do anything. I was just hoping to . . . you know . . . you’re a great story. You find yourself in some pretty, I don’t know, exciting, dangerous predicaments. I thought if I could get the story on this one from the inside—you know, kind of like a war correspondent—I’d be able to hold my rank at the station.”

Colt looked ready to kill. “Who knew that you were planning to meet Barb at the hot dog stand?”

Guy shook his head. He looked confused. “I don’t know. My assistant, obviously . . .”

“Anyone else? Anyone else know about this hair-brained scheme of yours?”

“Sir, I take offense—”

“You can take a flying leap for all I care—who else knew?”

With a horribly defeated look on his hound dog face, Guy Mertz leaned back in the seat and began twirling his bushy eyebrows with his fingers. “Randolph Rutter,” he said finally.

My head was spinning. A crazy kid claiming to have valuable information was now stalking me, a down-and-out news reporter wanted to shadow me in hopes of getting the news story of the century, and Colt was ready to pop a gasket over who knew about our meeting plans. What? Did he suspect that someone was trying to have me snuffed? That was plain silly. Who would want me killed? I’m a nice person. Relatively speaking.

I was about to ask Colt where he was going with his line of questioning when my phone rang. I pulled it from the pocket in my shorts. Howard’s number showed on the caller ID. I took a deep breath and pressed talk. “Hi, Honey!” I said, chipper as a blue bird on a sunny morning.

“Where are you?”

Uh oh. I had to think back. What did I tell him I was doing? Certainly I hadn’t told him I was meeting with informants in Washington, DC. After a frantic rifle through my memories, I recalled my fib about Roz’s going-away party. Unfortunately, the pause was too long, and Howard answered his own question. “Smith told me you were in DC. At a drive-by shooting.”

“Oh.”

“That’s all you have to say—‘oh’?”

“No. I was also going that say that it was nice of her to call you and tell you I was okay.”

He didn’t respond right away, but I could easily picture him rolling his eyes. “Put Colt on the phone, would you?”

Uncle Sam! That Agent Smith was such a tattle-tale. I handed Colt the phone.

“How’s it hangin’ Howie?” Colt loved to tease Howard, but he became serious pretty darned quick. He nodded and frowned throughout what I assumed were Howard’s instructions to get me home, lock me in the house and throw away the keys. “Right,” he said finally. “I’m on it, Dude,” and he hung up.

I wanted to ask him what Howard said, but my phone went off again almost instantly in his hands. “Oh, right—someone was calling while I was on the phone.” He glanced at the caller ID, then threw the phone toward me as if it was infected with the plague. “It’s your mom.”

It was that kind of reaction to my mother that made it hard for me to keep friends when I was growing up. I clicked the talk button. “Mom?”

“First, let me tell you, Alka is fine, but we’re at the hospital.”

“What?”

“She took a little tumble while trying a move at my new dance class. We’re just waiting to see a doctor.”

“What happened?”

“I thought I just told you what happened.”

“Which hospital?”

“Rustic Woods.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

My phone beeped in my ear, telling me another call was coming in. I looked at the caller ID. Virginia Ham! It was my home phone. “Mom, I’ve gotta go. The girls are trying to reach me. Tell Mama Marr I’m coming.” I clicked over to the incoming call without waiting for my mother’s response. “Is everything okay?” I answered, skipping the ‘hello’ stuff altogether. My heart skipped a beat when I heard screaming in the background.

“Mom,” said Bethany calmly. “We have a problem. Someone left Mama’s door open and we just found Indy and Mildred Pierce in there.”

Bethany had a way with understatement.

“Where’s the bird?” I asked.

“Right. Well, that’s the problem. We don’t know.”

I started banging my head against the head rest. “This can’t be happening,” I heard myself say.

“We found the cage on the floor and the door was open, but Pavrotti is gone.”

Amber screamed again in the background.

“Wait,” Bethany said. “Callie says she found him.”

“Alive?” I asked, closing my eyes in a moment of prayer. Mama Marr was already lying injured in a hospital. The last thing she needed to hear was that her beloved Pavrotti was now singing his canary arias to a higher power.

Bethany hollered to Callie and I had to pull the phone from my ear to avoid going deaf. “Is he alive? Mom wants to know! Okay, scratch that. It’s only a pile of feathers. Oh, and Puddles pooped on the floor.”

I groaned and instructed her to tell Amber to stop screaming and put the cats in the basement, pronto. Then they were to find that bird. If he still had a breath of life in his little yellow body, they were to put him back in the cage and close the guest room door—tight.  Finally, don’t forget to clean up the poop and make sure to let the dog out to do his business next time. I hung up the phone and banged my head on the head rest a few more times. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.

“Wow,” Guy said after a second. “If that’s married life in the suburbs, I don’t want it.”

I highly doubted he had much choice in the matter. Women probably weren’t knocking down his door looking for someone to mate with. “Yeah,” I said. “I need to take care of some things. Can you go now?”

“Sure,” he nodded. “But about—”

“Now,” Colt added.

Guy hung his head, pulled the sliding door open and stepped out, but before he closed it again, I grabbed a pen and piece of paper from my purse. “Wait,” I said. I scribbed down my cell phone number. “Here. Call or text if you hear anything more about Frankie or the murder. And tell me when you know more about your assistant.”

He scratched his head and smiled. “Gladly.”

“By the way,” I added, “why did you tell Randolph about our meeting? I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t. He called me. He was pretty unglued knowing those yams were for him. Wanted to know if I knew anything. Just to jerk his chain, I told him I was meeting with you to get some inside information, but I wasn’t going to be able to share it with him.” He slammed the door shut, waited for traffic to ease up, then ran across.

As I pulled from the parking space to speed toward Mama Marr’s bedside at the hospital, I spied Clarence far off under a cluster of trees, standing on a park bench, watching us drive off.