Joe glanced at the portrait of Tate and Angie on the wall. His lips moved into a grim line. His gaze shifted to the couple, who hadn’t moved from their sad huddle.
“I’ll go see what I can find out from Stan,” he said.
Mel nodded. As a prosecutor, Joe was privy to information in ways that Mel never would be. Before he could walk away, she grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze.
He glanced at her and Mel said, “Tara is here, too.”
Joe raised his eyebrows. “Should I be concerned about that?”
“Only in that she has a thing for you,” Mel said.
“Says you,” Joe said. He shook his head as if he didn’t know where she got her crazy ideas. Mel could have pushed the point, but this was not the time nor place.
Instead, she said nothing as she watched him go and confer with the others. Lisa passed him on the way, with Cupcake at her side. They exchanged greetings and Cupcake sniffed Joe’s pant leg and then moved on.
“Listen, I have another call,” Lisa said to Mel. “They need Cupcake to sniff out a possible drug house. Stan said he’d take your statements. You guys going to be okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” Mel said. “We’ll be fine.”
Lisa accepted the lie, giving Mel a quick half hug on her way out the door. Cupcake followed her handler without looking back. Mel wished with all her heart that she could go with her.
• • •
“Let me see if I’ve got this,” Marty Zelaznik said. “You went to the photographer’s studio to pay him, but when you got there he was dead.”
“Yup.” Mel twisted the pastry bag in her hand. She was making specialty cupcakes for an anniversary party where the husband wanted bacon and/or bourbon flavored cupcakes but the wife wanted lemon cupcakes with lavender frosting and/or black forest cupcakes. Instead of arguing, the couple had decided to go with his-and-hers cupcake towers and order all four flavors.
Mel figured this was probably why their marriage had survived twenty-five years. Clearly, they had the art of compromise down. Personally, she had been delighted when the wife requested the lavender frosting. It took Mel a couple of tries to get it just right but she was pleased with how it had turned out. In fact, the lemon-lavender combo was so tasty she was considering making it a specialty item on the menu. Sort of like the McRib sandwich or the bacon crust at Little Caesars.
“What is it with you two?” Marty asked, bringing her attention back to him. He clapped his hands on his bald dome and his bushy eyebrows rose up to his forehead. “You just had to find another body, didn’t you? I was almost in the clear. The girls were about to call off that shark of a lawyer and leave me be. If they get wind of this, I’m doomed.”
Mel lowered the pastry bag and stared at him. “Really, Marty? A man is dead. A friend of Tate’s, and your biggest concern is that your daughters are going to find out that we ran across a body and decide you’re a few eggs short of a dozen?”
“You’re missing the bigger picture here,” he said. “My daughters, Nora and Julie, are still convinced I’m off my rocker.”
“But you passed your psych eval,” Mel said.
“They don’t care; they still think this place is—”
“A hell mouth,” Mel said.
“Yeah, pretty much. They’re just looking for a reason to make me move back to the Midwest and live in some old person’s home, so they can keep an eye on me and my money.”
“I take it they haven’t warmed up to Olivia?” Mel asked.
Olivia Puckett was Marty’s girlfriend, and his grown daughters had taken an instant dislike to her. That was likely the only thing Mel agreed with them about, but for Mel it was more that Olivia owned a rival bakery than whether she was good for Marty or not. As far as Mel could tell, Marty and Olivia had been happy together, which was saying something given that Marty was well into his eighties and Olivia could be a handful.
“No, they haven’t, and discovering another dead body isn’t going to help,” Marty said.
“It wasn’t just a dead body,” Mel said. “He was an old friend of Tate’s, so you can’t look at it through the filter of how his murder affects you.”
“You make me sound very petty and selfish when you put it like that,” he said. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared. “You know it’s not that simple.”
Mel heaved a sigh. He was right. She wasn’t being fair, but at the moment Angie was home, no doubt crying her eyes out, while Tate was with Stan, telling Blaise’s mother that he was dead, and even worse than that, he’d been murdered in his own studio.
“I know, Marty,” she said. “I’m sorry. I do realize that your daughters are worried that we’re a bad influence on you and that Blaise’s murder will not help convince them otherwise, but there really is nothing we can do to keep it quiet. Someone strangled Blaise with his camera strap. It was grisly.”
Recalling Blaise’s vacant eyes, the strangulation marks around his neck, and the cold feel of his skin beneath her fingers made Mel shiver. She inadvertently squeezed her pastry bag and purple frosting shot out, hitting Marty in the apron with a splat.
“Sorry,” she said.
Marty took the bag out of her hands and put it on the table. Then he used a wad of paper towels to clean off the bib of his apron. He nudged Mel into a seat at the table and went over to the coffeepot they kept in the corner and poured her a piping-hot cup of coffee. He put in the exact amount of sugar and milk
