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
“Thanks 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 . . .”
Sure I was looking for the truth, but I hated watching him suffer. “She wanted you, but you didn’t want anything to do with her.”
He nodded. “I’d been avoiding her. Until that day in the copy room when she planted herself in the doorway and cut off my escape route. That’s when she told me . . .” Ray leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Marjorie came to me and told me that she had a get-rich-quick scheme. It was a sure bet, she said. Can’t miss. She told me she’d do me a favor and let me in on it.”
Marjorie and money. The two words didn’t jibe, not with her personality, and certainly not with a wardrobe that included those cheap, ugly shoes of hers. Maybe she was about to corner the market on filmy head scarves?
I batted the thought aside and asked Ray, “And did she? I mean, did she tell you about the get-rich-quick scheme?”
He sat back and chucked the napkin down on the table. “She didn’t say any more than that. Not that day, anyway. But she promised she would. And I was stupid enough to believe her. It’s not that I’m some kind of shallow jerk, Pepper. I don’t want you to think that. I don’t buy lottery tickets and I don’t bet on the horses. I don’t even play poker. And I don’t light up like a Christmas tree anytime somebody just mentions money to me. It’s just that Vanessa was sick for a long, long time and the bills really piled up. If I didn’t have those medical bills to pay, believe me, I wouldn’t be working here four times a week.”
He didn’t need to convince me it would take an act of desperation to don the purple apron.
