Murder Has a Sweet Tooth Page 9

  “Perfect timing!” she crooned. “The wedding is exactly what I wanted to talk to you both about.”

  “Er . . .” I looked to Jim for guidance, but since he knew better than to try and put the brakes on Eve—or to get between two best friends—he grabbed a nearby towel and pretended to be busy wiping off the stove even though Marc had already cleaned it and it was spotless. I knew I was on my own. “We weren’t talking about the wedding,” I told Eve. “Not exactly, anyway. We were talking about Alex.”

  “Oh, pshaw!” Eve can get away with saying things like that. She’s a former beauty queen with a honey-thick Southern accent. When she tossed her head, her blonde hair gleamed in the overhead lights. “I’m not the least little bit worried about Alex. You’re going to take care of that, Annie. By the time the wedding rolls around, we’ll all be laughing about this crazy mix-up. You’re going to prove who really killed that poor woman and Alex won’t ever have to think about this whole mess ever again.”

  “I’m glad you have that much faith in me. I’m just not sure—”

  “Of course you are.” Eve waved away my protests with one perfectly manicured hand. “You always work things out. You’re not going to let Alex down. I know that, Annie. So does Jim and everyone else. That’s why we can worry about other things. Like . . .” She took a deep breath and looked from one of us to the other. Why did I have a feeling I wasn’t going to like whatever it was Eve said? “Wedding favors!”

  “We’ve talked about that. Jim and I thought—”

  “Oh, I know what you thought. You thought you’d give something small and tasteful to every guest. A candle shaped like a wedding cake maybe. Or an African violet plant. That’s all well and good. For an ordinary wedding. But then I got to thinking, and what I was thinking was, who’s going to remember a wedding where what they get is a small and tasteful favor?”

  “So we’re talking big and not in good taste?”

  Eve was on a roll so she ignored Jim’s comment. She reached into the Kate Spade bag she had on one shoulder and pulled out what looked like a spiral-bound—

  “Calendar?” Call me slow, but I couldn’t put the concept of calendar and wedding favor together. I stared at her in wonder.

  “Not just any calendar. I had a special sample made.” Smiling with every ounce of beauty-queen charm she had, Eve flipped open the calendar. Open, it was bigger than a regular piece of copy paper, maybe twenty inches tall by eleven or so inches wide. She happened to open it to the page that showed July. On one page, the dates were marked with boxes. The other page was a picture of Eve’s pup Doc in a swimsuit and little terry-cloth beach cover-up. Eve was so excited, she could barely keep still. “Every month features a picture of Doc. Isn’t it adorable?”

  “It is. He is.” A smile pasted to my face, I reached for the calendar and paged through it. In August, Doc was dressed in back-to-school duds. He even had a backpack. September showed him in an apple orchard. He was wearing overalls and a straw hat. Predictably, in October, he was dressed in a Halloween costume, a little red devil, complete with horns. “This is—”

  “I know. Brilliant!” Eve sparkled as only Eve can. “Everyone’s going to love it, because everyone loves Doc. And look . . .” She plucked the calendar out of my hands and flipped through the pages. “Here in April, the date of your wedding is marked so that everyone remembers your anniversary. And Doc . . .” She made a little ta-da gesture to show off the picture of Doc in a tux. Where she’d found another Japanese terrier owner to go along with the plan, I don’t know, but there was another dog in the picture. She was dressed like a bride.

  “Annie . . .” From behind me, Jim’s voice simmered somewhere between heaven help me and you tell her or I will.

  I got the message. “It’s so sweet,” I said, and really, it was. “But Jim and I, we want to keep things low-key, and you know, giving a favor that cute, it’s going to upstage the rest of the wedding.”

  Eve hadn’t thought of this. Her enthusiasm melted in front of my eyes. “You mean—”

  “I mean, Doc is so adorable. And all the pictures of him are adorable. But—and don’t take this the wrong way—but I—”

  “You want to be the center of attention that day! Of course.” Eve couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this sooner. “And Doc is so cute—”

  “He’d take all the attention away from me. Away from us.” I wasn’t going to let Jim off the hook. I grabbed his hand and dragged him over to stand beside me. “You understand, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, honey.” After another quick flip through the pages of the calendar, Eve tucked it back in her purse. “It was silly of me not to think of it in the first place. You’re the bride. Everyone should be watching you. Once Doc walks in with the ring on a little satin pillow—”

  “No.” I couldn’t be clearer. I’d already tried beating around the bush, and Eve wasn’t listening. “No Doc. No pillow.”

  “But, Annie—” Luckily, we heard a pounding on the front door, and Eve went to answer. When she swooshed back into the kitchen, she had Tyler with her.

  We exchanged hellos and Jim got back to work. There’s a lot of cleanup and organization that goes on in a restaurant when the doors close for the night.

  Left to my own devices, I closed in on Tyler. There were some things I’d been meaning to ask him, and yeah, I realized the chances of him giving me a straight answer were slim to none. But like I said, I don’t give up easily.

  “I hear there was an anonymous tip and that’s how you found Vickie Monroe’s body in that alley.”

  He wasn’t surprised I’d ambushed him with the comment. Tyler rolled back on his heels. “You did your homework.”

  “But I don’t have the answers to all my questions. Like who made the call.” Pleading, I looked at him. “If we knew that—”

  “If we knew that, we’d know a whole lot more about what happened in that alley.”

  Encouraged, I jumped on his comment. “Which means you don’t think we do know what happened in that alley. Not all of it, anyway. You think we’re right, don’t you, Tyler? You don’t believe Alex killed that woman any more than we do.”

  One hand out flat and at the level of my nose, he distanced himself from the thought. “I never said that. I just said I’d like more answers.”

  “And you’re not getting them.”

  “It’s not my case.”

  It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he said it. I looked at Tyler hard. “You don’t think the detective who’s handling the case is doing a good job.”

  “Derek Harold never does a good job.” It was more open than Tyler usually was with me. That told me how frustrated he was by the situation. So did the way he twitched his shoulders, like just thinking about Derek Harold made him want to hop right out of his skin. “Harold takes everything at face value. The man has no imagination. He can’t see past what’s right in front of his nose.”

  “Like Alex being in that alley with the victim.”

  “Well, it is a little hard to ignore that fact.” Tyler scraped a hand through his short-cropped, sandy hair. “And yes, the whole thing is driving me crazy. That’s why I made some inquiries. I heard talk around the office about the tip, see, and it got me to wondering. Seems the call was made from a public phone a couple blocks away, over at the corner of North Glebe and Seventh Street North.”

  “Which means some well-meaning passerby may have seen Alex and the victim, panicked, and ran. Then once he—or she—came to his—or her—senses, and he—or . . .” Tyler knew what I meant; I didn’t have to elaborate. “Once the person who saw Alex and Vickie in that alley realized what had happened, he called in the tip.”

  “That’s the simplest explanation. And it’s probably what happened, but—”

  That one little word raised my hopes higher than they had been since Jim got that first call from Alex. I took a few steps closer to Tyler. “But?”

  He breathed a sigh of surrender, and I knew why.
Tyler doesn’t like showing any signs of weakness and, to him, letting me in on what he was thinking was a little too close to actually asking for help. And asking for help . . . well, to Tyler’s way of thinking, that definitely was a weakness.

  I knew I was right when he latched on to my arm and dragged me over near the back door that led into the alley where Jim parked his motorcycle. Jim was still busy cleaning up and Eve was in the middle of showing the Doc calendar to Marc, but Tyler checked over his shoulder anyway to make sure no one could hear us.

  “You’ve got to help me out here, Annie. Eve is so worried about this whole thing . . .” He checked over his shoulder again and lowered his voice. “She’s making me crazy. You know how she can be. She’s taken all her worries about Alex and sort of transferred them. You know what I mean? She’s obsessed. With your wedding. And if we don’t do something fast to calm her down . . .”

  I thought of the Doc calendar. I thought about Eve’s plans for Fi and Richard’s girls, and about the champagne fountain. I knew Tyler was right. Not only did we need to help Alex, but we needed to de-stress Eve. Fast. Before my own wedding was completely out of my control.

  And we had a dog as a ring bearer.

  Just thinking about it made me woozy, so I concentrated on the case instead. “You think the phone call is suspicious?” I asked Tyler.

  “I think . . .” He ordered his thoughts. “If the person who placed that call was nothing but an innocent by-stander who just happened on the scene, that person would have stayed around. Or at least shown up at the station later. That’s what usually happens. They think about it, they know they have to do the right thing, they come clean and show up and admit they made the call.”

  “But that’s not what happened in this case.”

  “You got that right,” Tyler grumbled. “If Derek Harold wasn’t such a bonehead, he’d see what this means.”

  “And what this means is . . .”

  “Well, any idiot can see that,” he said, and then when he realized he’d just called me an idiot without actually calling me an idiot, he had the good sense to blush, but, Tyler being Tyler, not the good manners to apologize. “It means the person who placed the call is probably the person who killed Vickie Monroe. The killer wanted us to find Alex with the body.”

  Hope sprang in my heart. Tyler and I were on the same page! Before I could let my relief get carried away, I stuck with the facts. “And that person wanted you to find Alex with Vickie so it would look like Alex was the killer.” Tyler and I eyed each other for a couple seconds, and I knew he was thinking what I was thinking: It was so unusual for us to agree about a case—any case—that he was wondering where to go from here. So was I, so I went for the obvious. “Is there any way you can take over the case?” I asked.

  His cynical laugh was the only answer I needed. “Is there any way,” Tyler asked, “that you could talk to the husband? You know, get us some firsthand information so that I don’t have to accept what Detective Harold says? I swear, the man wouldn’t know his head from a—”

  I wasn’t as worried about Detective Harold as I was about Edward Monroe. That was why I interrupted. “He’s a suspect?” I asked, then clarified. “Edward Monroe? You think he—”

  Tyler’s mouth thinned. “The husband’s always a suspect. And I hear he’s got an alibi, but I’m just not buying it. The whole thing’s a little too convenient. She was stepping out on him, and she ends up dead. It’s every husband’s dream come true.”

  I flinched. “That’s a cynical view of marriage.”

  “It’s a fact. Most victims are murdered by people they know, and if they’re married . . .”

  “Then it’s usually the spouse who did it.” I might not like what Tyler was saying, but I nodded my understanding. “Edward has an alibi?”

  “Says he was at a soccer league meeting.”

  “Then the people he was there with must have confirmed that.” Tyler didn’t say a thing. He didn’t have to. The police weren’t about to accept an alibi without checking it every which way and backward. I came at the problem from another angle. “And you think Edward has a motive because he knew about Vickie and Alex.”

  “He thought she was going to a cooking class every Tuesday night.”

  “With her friends.” This tallied. Sort of. “But if her friends were at the cooking class and Vickie wasn’t there with them . . .” I made a mental note to myself.

  “Her friends say that lately, she had excuses for not going to class every Tuesday,” Tyler told me. “She wasn’t feeling well. One of the kids was sick. She was too busy, too tired.”

  “But you’re not buying it.”

  Without making it look like he was surrendering to confusion, Tyler shrugged. “I’m not sure it adds up. If you could talk to Vickie Monroe’s friends, if you could chat up her husband . . . well, maybe they wouldn’t give you the pat answers they’re giving us. If Edward Monroe found out Vickie wasn’t where she was supposed to be . . . if he found out she was really over at Swallows with Alex . . .”

  Again, I nodded. “I wonder why her friends never bothered to mention it to me,” I said, talking more to myself than to Tyler. I knew he wasn’t following so I filled him in. “They told me that Vickie never would have snuck around behind Edward’s back. But they never mentioned that she’d missed cooking classes. They knew she wasn’t with them when they went to Sonny’s on Tuesday nights and she must have missed plenty of classes. She went to Swallows more than once. So what did her friends think she was up to?”

  It was a very good question, and I intended to find the answer.

  Before I left Bellywasher’s, I let Jim know I would gladly take him up on the offer of the cheese platter and the Greek dessert.

  After all, designated cooking expert or not, I was going to a wine tasting, and I couldn’t go empty-handed.

  Seven

  BETH AND MICHAEL’S HOUSE WAS EVEN MORE elegant than the brick Colonial I imagined for myself. It was sprawling and modern, with lots of windows, clean lines, and a roof sloped at impossible angles. The yard was a match for the house, neat without being severe, landscaped with just the right amount of shrubs to be interesting without being overdone or overwhelming. In fact, the one and only concession to hominess was a too cute Welcome Friends sign on a post stuck into the flower bed near the front door. The sign was shaped like a giant egg and made out of weatherproof resin. The smiling, waving bear and moose on the sign looked as out of place in the gee-whiz neighborhood as I felt.

  Beth welcomed me inside, and I saw that the house had an open, airy foyer with a ceramic tile floor in a shade of ecru that appealed to my love of all colors neutral and my sense of decorating restraint. Just inside the front door and at the bottom of a winding staircase, the wall to my left was made from glass block and lit from behind. Set in front of it on see-through shelves was a collection of art glass that took my breath away.

  At the risk of being rude, I couldn’t take my eyes off the vases and plates in various shapes and sizes and in a riot of blue, red, green, purple, and orange. Yeah, my mouth was hanging open, but I managed to gasp, “I’m not a fan of lots of color, but that’s just spectacular.”

  Perfect hostess that she was, she smiled and thanked me. “The glass is Michael’s baby,” she said. “He’s the collector. I just go along with whatever he wants. That, and take out the feather duster when it all needs cleaning!”

  I was so fascinated, I was being rude. I shook myself back to the present, remembered the bottle of wine I’d picked up at Très Bonne Cuisine and the darling gift bag Norman had chosen for it, one with the Eiffel Tower on it. “For you,” I said, handing the bag to Beth. It was the first I registered that she was a riot of color that Friday evening, too, in a floral print sundress as cheery as the daffodils that grew around the front door. “The wine is a zinfandel, just like you asked for. And here . . .” I’d brought the cheese plate and the mizithra, honey, and phyllo dessert in a carry bag and I gave that to her, too. �
�My contribution to the nibblers.”

  “But no husband? We were looking forward to meeting him.” Wineglass in hand, Celia appeared from around the corner and looked over the scene. She was wearing silky black pants and a flowing black top that made my khakis and powder blue sweater look positively passé. “No problem if he can’t come until later. Our guys aren’t here yet, either, but they’ll be along eventually. You know how traffic is this time of the day.”

  “Jim’s out of town on business!” I’d practiced the phrase in the car (and not incidentally, I’d borrowed Norman’s silver Jag for the occasion), and delivered it in a way that made it sound like again! even though I didn’t say it. “He sends his best and says he hopes to meet everyone next time. Oh!” I didn’t have to pretend to be embarrassed. If I wasn’t on a case and hadn’t come there specifically to try to get people to talk, I’d never dream of being that rude. “I mean, if we’re invited next time.”

  “Of course you’re invited. We’re neighbors!” Glynis came from the back of the house. She was wearing a linen apron embroidered with spring violets over a pantsuit in an ashen color that matched her hair. She wound an arm through mine and gave it a squeeze. “And next time, you can bring those adorable girls of yours, too. The kids are playing upstairs.” Just as she said this, we heard a sound like thunder from upstairs. One of the doors along the hallway at the top of the steps flew open and a troop of children raced from one room to another. I recognized Beth’s Jeremy, Glynis’s Eli, and Carter, the soccer star. There were a couple older girls with them as well as three older boys I didn’t know and Vickie Monroe’s Henry and Antonia.

  “Oh, Edward’s going to be here?” It was, of course, exactly what I was hoping for, so I tried not to look too pleased with myself. “I thought—”