Tomb With a View (11 page)

“Then it really cannot possibly matter, can it?”

I would have argued the point if Jeremiah Stone didn’t poof onto the scene. He was carrying a stack of papers and he tapped one finger against it. “You really must get these papers signed, Mr. President,” he said. “They are quite essential.”

“Yes, of course.” The president turned to me. “As you can see, I have matters of import to deal with. The ship of state cannot captain itself, and I must provide Mr. Stone here with the proper example. It is my high privilege and sacred duty to educate my successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.”

Like there was anything I could say to that?

They vanished and I stood there alone in the crypt, wondering what to do next. I mean, besides wait for the cleaning people. In the hopes they might show up sometime soon, I went back upstairs and thought about everything that had happened and all I didn’t know and couldn’t figure out.

“But Mr. President . . .” Jeremiah Stone was nowhere to be seen, but his voice floated on the air from the nothingness he’d disappeared into. “We must get your signature on these papers, sir. It is imperative.”

Signatures made me think about Marjorie and all that stuff—including the Garfield autographs—she had in her house.

And thinking about visiting Marjorie that night made me think about Ray.

And thinking about Ray . . . well, I knew Ray might not have all the answers. When it came to my investigation, he might not have any of them. But something told me that a guy who had the nerve to actually visit Marjorie at home just might be a good place to start.

I
would much rather save my empty calories for the occasional martini than waste them on fast food. Which was why, though the rest of northeast Ohio was flocking to a new franchise called Big Daddy Burgers, I had never been inside the front door of one of the distinctive purple and white buildings. The next day was Saturday and apparently a whole bunch of people were out for lunch celebrating the weekend. It took me a while to find a parking place at the BDB nearest to the cemetery, and even longer to get up to the front of the line so I could ask one of the harried-looking teenagers who was packing the orders and ringing the register if Ray Gwitkowski was working that day.

“The old guy?” The girl’s eyebrow was pierced, and the little silver stud in it jumped when she gave me a look. Clearly, she was trying to figure out why someone as young and stylish as I was needed to speak to Ray. She poked a thumb over her shoulder toward the kitchen behind the counter and I noticed Ray flipping burgers at a grill. He was wearing an apron that matched the purple shirts of the kids taking the orders. “It’s not his break time. I know, because he goes right after me, but, well . . .” She glanced around, and since none of the workers looked as if they were old enough to drive and nobody seemed to be in charge of the chaos, she shrugged. “I don’t think anybody would notice if you went back there. If anyone sees you, they’re going to think you’re from the main office, anyway, since you’re old, too.”

So much for young and stylish.

Insult aside, I managed a tight smile and ducked behind the counter before anyone could tell me I didn’t belong. I’d like to say Ray was happy to see me, but truth be told, he was so busy flipping burgers about the size of a playing card, adding cheese, and stirring the chopped onions browning nearby, he didn’t exactly have a chance.

“I checked your file at the cemetery,” I said by way of explanation, even though Ray didn’t have time to ask for one. “I saw that you have a part-time job here and—”

One of the kids at the counter interrupted me with a shrill, “Big Daddy special. Hold the onions. Extra cheese.”

“Hold the onions. Extra cheese,” Ray mumbled under his breath. He tossed a few more frozen squares of meat on the grill and flipped like his life depended on it.

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about everything that happened at the cemetery and—”

“Baby Big Daddy! Extra onions. No cheese. Extra well done.”

“Extra well done.” Ray slid a burger nearer to the center of the grill, where it sizzled like mad.

“It’s just that—” I dodged out of the way of a skinny kid carrying a box filled with hamburger buns. “With everything that happened, you know, I thought—”

“Wish I could help you, kid.” Ray took his eye off the grill long enough to shoot me a smile. “I don’t have time to talk. Dang!” Ray stabbed his flipper under the burger at the center of the grill. The patties were paper thin, and that one had already gone from raw to crispy. “I hate when that happens,” he grumbled. He tossed the burger into a nearby trash can and moved another one over to take its place. “If the owners weren’t so cheap and would hire a few extra people around here, I wouldn’t have to worry about burning food and wasting it. As it is, I’m the only grill chef at this time of the day, and Saturdays are always busy.” Expertly, he whisked a couple burgers off the grill, slid them onto buns, stepped to the side where he could better reach the pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes in plastic containers, and grabbed a squirt bottle of ketchup.

“Waiting on that Big Daddy!” the kid up front called out.

Ray grimaced, torn between the burgers that needed to be dressed and finished and the ones still cooking on the grill.

And I knew an opportunity when I saw it. Even when it was one I would rather not have recognized.

There was a purple apron like Ray’s hanging from a hook next to the grill, and I grabbed it, looped it over my head, and took the squirt bottle out of his hand.

I hope it goes without saying that I have never worked in a fast-food restaurant. No matter. The work was just as interesting as I always imagined it would be. After a couple minutes, my brain turned off and my hands moved automatically over the buns.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

One slice of tomato. One piece of lettuce. Three pickles.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

“Too much mustard,” Ray critiqued while he stirred the onions. “Not enough ketchup on that one. Here.” He thrust a plastic container of grilled onions at me. “Add those. No! Not to that one.” I stopped with my hand suspended in midair above a square of meat. “That’s the Big Daddy special. No onions. Extra cheese.”

“No onions. Extra cheese.” I was beginning to sound as mindless as all the other Big Daddy workers, and I snapped myself out of it and slid Ray a look, all the while not missing a squirt-squirt-lettuce-tomato-pickle beat.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

He didn’t look especially happy about it. Which he should have considering I was doing condiment duty. “What about?” he asked.

I thought he would have figured that out by now, but since he didn’t, I supplied him with the Reader’s Digest Condensed version. “Marjorie.”

Ray’s spine stiffened. The burger on his flipper slipped off and hit the floor. He stared.

Worried he’d gone catatonic on me or had some kind of age-induced stroke or something, I waved the ketchup bottle in front of his face. “Earth to Ray! I said I needed to talk to you about her, I didn’t say I was raising Marjorie from the dead or anything.”

He shook himself back to reality. “Of course. Yeah. Sure.” Though no one called out another order, he went to the cooler, came back with a stack of burger squares, and carefully arranged them on the grill. “I figured someone from the cemetery would be talking to all of us, taking up a collection for flowers,” he finally said. “If you’re looking for a donation, Pepper, of course I’m willing to contribute. Only it’s kind of hard right now in the middle of the lunch rush.”

I didn’t bother to point out that if I’d been looking for a donation, I could have found a way better place to solicit it. Besides, I didn’t have a chance. A local suburb’s senior citizen bus pulled up outside, and a collective groan went up from the kids behind the counter when a group of bluehaired grannies trooped in.

Oh yeah, we were plenty busy before, but I learned soon enough that
busy
meant zip in the fast-food business. Not compared with being slammed.

 

 

“T
hanks for helping me out, kid.” Ray slipped into the purple booth across from where I sat and plunked a medium diet cola in front of me. “After six months at this racket, I’m good at the grill, but not good enough to keep up with a crowd like that on my own. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Any right-minded person who’d learned the intricacies of squirt-squirt-etc. in so little time would have been rightly proud of herself. I would have been, too, if I wasn’t so bone-tired I could barely sit upright. It was an hour-and-a-half later, the crowds had finally thinned, and Ray had invited me to join him for his break. Since I was never planning to go near a Big Daddy Burger franchise again, it was the perfect opportunity for me to make my escape from the kitchen. Not to mention a chance for me to ask Ray all the things I hadn’t had a moment to talk to him about while he flipped and I squirted.

“This is what the owners of this joint think of as good employee relations.” There was a purple plastic tray on the table in front of him, and Ray tipped it my way so I could see it better. “Every day we get one free Big Daddy burger, an order of fries, and all the soft drinks we can swallow. I wish they’d just add another twenty-five cents an hour to my minimum wages. The food, it’s OK for the first week. Then your stomach starts reminding you that too much Big Daddy is not a good thing.” He pushed the tray away.

The sight and smell of food reminded me that I hadn’t eaten a thing that day. Empty calories be damned! I made a grab for the burger.

“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you.” Ray shook his head in warning. “I know what they put in those things.”

I set the burger down, then let my hand hover above the fries. When he didn’t offer another warning, I popped one fry into my mouth and grabbed a few more. I waited until I swallowed before I said, “So here’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to figure out what happened to Marjorie. And so far I’m not getting anywhere and I’d really like to solve her murder because . . .” Big Daddy Burgers wasn’t exactly the kind of place I wanted to discuss my relationship with Quinn, and Ray wasn’t a person I wanted to do it with, either. He reminded me of my grandfather, and Grandpa wouldn’t have understood. Not about Quinn. I was beginning to realize that when it came to me and Quinn, even I didn’t understand.

I twitched the thought aside. It was then that I noticed I had ketchup stains on the sleeves of my new black tunic shirt. It was cotton, sure, but it was dry clean only, and I promised myself I could pout about it later. For now, I couldn’t afford to waste time. “Every time I try to think through what happened to Marjorie,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I’ve been wondering . . . you know, about that night you stopped at her place. The two of you were fighting.”

“Were we?” Ray didn’t blink. In fact, except for the fidgety tap of his fingers against the purple tabletop, he didn’t move a muscle. His face was suddenly as pale as if he’d already swallowed a couple Big Daddy burgers before someone bothered to tell him what they were made out of.

Oh yeah, I knew Ray was a lousy liar. I recognized all the signs. He looked exactly like my dad always did back in the day when he swore up and down that he didn’t have anything to do with the Medicare fraud that landed him in federal prison.

I was so not in the mood to try and convince Ray that there was nothing to be gained from keeping anything from me. “Come on, Ray,” I whined. “I know you might not want to gossip about it since Marjorie’s dead, but it might be important.”

“I don’t see how it could be.” There was a paper napkin on the table and he folded it with careful creases, then unfolded it again. “Marjorie and I, we hardly knew each other.”

This time, I didn’t need the lie-o-meter to see the writing on the wall. All I had to do was think back to that night. I propped my elbows on the table, the better to stare Ray down. “Hardly knew each other, huh? Is that why the minute you walked into her place, she was all over you like white on rice?”

Ray’s cheeks got red. “You noticed that, huh?”

“I noticed that Marjorie seemed a whole lot more interested in you than you were in her.”

“Yeah. Well . . .” He ran a thumb and forefinger up and down his throat. “Marjorie . . . well, I don’t exactly know how to say this . . . Marjorie, she thought—”

“That you were a hot hunk?”

When he realized he didn’t have to actually come right out and say it himself, Ray let go a sigh of relief. Now the tips of his ears were red, too. “Something like that,” he admitted. “She’s been after me practically since the day my Vanessa went into hospice. Once word of my wife’s death went around to the other volunteers and Marjorie found out I was available . . .” Yeah, his cheeks and his ears were red. The rest of Ray’s face turned an unflattering color that reminded me of olives. He fiddled with the straw in his diet cola.

“Marjorie was a pompous windbag, and I’m sorry she’s dead, but really, there’s nothing more to say about her and . . .” He glanced at his watch and slid toward the end of the bench, making it clear that it was time for me to get a move on. “You probably have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

Was I imagining it? I thought he looked disappointed when I stayed right where I was and said, “What I can’t figure out is if the reason you stopped in at Marjorie’s has anything to do with her death.”

“No! Of course not. Not at all.” All that color drained out of his face and left him as white as the napkin in his trembling fingers. “Marjorie and I, we were . . .” He creased the napkin again. “Well, this is a little hard to explain. And it’s embarrassing, too.”

He expected me to give in and tell him if that was the case, not to bother explaining. When I didn’t, Ray swallowed hard and said, “A few months ago, Marjorie came to see me one day when I was working on a mailing project for the cemetery. I was in the copy room, sticking labels on envelopes. I knew she thought I was . . .” Another flush of color darkened his face. “Well, what you said. About me being a hot hunk. I knew she felt that way about me and I hope you know me well enough to realize I never thought of her like that. Not at all. Marjorie was a heck of a dedicated volunteer and an intelligent woman, but she wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”