Chopping Spree

I hit the accelerator again and wove through traffic. There’s something else, I promised myself. I know it. If I could find whatever it was before the next morning, Julian could be freed. I felt giddy. He’d be out for Arch’s birthday! This thought, combined with greedy chugs of latte, made me speed up even more.

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled up behind Darlene Petrucchio’s old pink Cadillac, one of the consignment items she’d never been able to sell and so had bought herself. Covered with five inches of crusty snow, the Caddy looked forlorn.

“OK, here’s the deal,” Darlene said, once I’d reassured her I wasn’t returning Barry’s basset hound. She invited me into her kitchen, where I declined a beer. This day, she was clad in a crimson cashmere sweater sewn with bugle beads and a matching pleated skirt—an outfit dating from circa nineteen-fifty-six. “Barry always relied on me when he went on trips,” Darlene went on. “I told the cops ‘bout startin’ his cars once a week, waterin’ his plants, walkin’ an’ feedin’ that dog. While the lawyers do the will, the cops axed me to watch over Barry’s stuff. They said because he has no next of kin, I’ve got, y’know, a proprietary interest. Doesn’t mean I get anything,” she added as she lit a cigarette. “It just means the cops can’t take care of the stuff, and Barry trusted me with it when he was alive, so why not now?”

“I understand,” I said, then launched into a spiel I’d rehearsed mentally all the way up the mountain. “It’s just that I seem to have left a computer disk full of menus over in his house. I simply have to have it. Barry loved menus, and he asked if he could borrow a bunch of mine. But now my computer’s crashed, and all I have is that disk, dammit.”

Darlene hesitated, and my heart sank. She pulled noisily on her cig. “You sure you don’t wanna beer? ‘S almost five.” I shook my head ruefully. She took a long sip of hers, then, to my delight, snagged a key ring from a drawer. “I don’t mind if you look in his house. Jes’ don’ take anythin’. The cops said they’d finished their processing. Finished their processing? What were they doin’, smokin’ hams in the livin’ room?”

A moment later I was ducking long icicles hanging from the Swiss-style gingerbread on Barry’s front porch. Behind me, the street was almost completely hushed, with only a slight breeze whisking the freshly fallen snow. I unlocked the front door, which featured a massive brass door knocker in the shape of a basset hound’s head.

Get in and get out, I ordered myself. You still have a birthday cake to make. Problem was, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. Which was the way with scavenger hunts, wasn’t it? Especially when the person who’d set the hunt up was dead.

Contrary to what I’d told Darlene, I’d never been in Barry’s house. Once inside, I put the key ring in my pocket and leaned against the door, taken aback.

A decorating magazine would have entitled the living room in which I now stood Homage to the Basset Hound. The color scheme was entirely devoted to gold, white, and black. Gold walls were lightened with white trim and chair rail molding, in front of which Barry had placed a black lacquered liquor cabinet and long buffet. Black-, white-, and gold-upholstered sofas and chairs were grouped between black lacquered tables and around black braided oval rugs. Wide, narrow, rectangular, and round needlepoint pillows graced the couches and chairs. Every one of them pictured a basset hound.

As I looked for the kitchen, I noticed a faint but pleasant smell of dog still hanging in the air. The scent made me unaccountably sad. When I finally found the kitchen, it was a small, plain oak-and-tile affair that didn’t look as if it had been used much.

“Latte,” I said aloud. “So, Barry, where’d you put your coffee stuff?” I began opening cupboards.

Because that was what it had to be, I’d suddenly realized at the espresso place. After the attempted- murder-by-truck, Barry had realized he was in terrible danger. So that was why he’d raced back to his office—to call his neighbor and finish setting up a trail of clues, a scavenger hunt of crime, in case he didn’t make it.

Why would he do that? my mind demanded. Why not go directly to the cops? Or at least to the mall owners? But I thought I knew the answer to that one, too. Barry had bent the rules for himself and his own appetites, the likes of which I’d seen with the sexy, gift-greedy Pam Disharoon. Any kind of official investigation would have unearthed the fact that Barry had obtained goodies from vendors, reps, and who knew who else. If he made it home, and the truck driver was arrested, he’d be OK. If not, he’d left a scavenger hunt for me, his old coffee pal, to figure out what was what. Maybe he’d been planning to leave the state, or even the country.

Anyway, he’d called Darlene. He said if he didn’t show up after work, she was to give his dog to me. He’d told Darlene how to spell the dog’s “new” name, and instructed her to tape the coffee moniker onto the canine food dishes. In her world of beer, cigarettes, and old Caddies, Darlene did not know from espresso drinks: She’d simply thought Barry had misspelled Late.

But the word Latte had meaning for yours truly. Correction: It had meaning for us, Barry and me. But what exactly was that meaning? We’d drunk the dark stuff together in college; we’d had some together in the last month. And somewhere in that common experience, I was absolutely convinced, he’d pounced on a detail that he now wanted me to ferret out.

I located a pair of scissors and a white plate, which I put on the counter before retrieving a fresh trash sack from under the sink. I opened the sack, set it aside, and pulled out every bag of coffee beans I could find, from the cupboards, two canisters, and the freezer. These I methodically cut open and dumped onto the plate. I was looking for anything remarkable, anything out of place, and most importantly, anything that would somehow clear Julian. After sorting through the beans, I tossed each examined lot into the trash. Eight bags of coffee later, I gave up.

His computer, I thought. Maybe he had a special “latte” or even another “dog” file with information. I pushed open the door to Barry’s study, which felt much colder than the rest of the house. I booted his PC, but wasn’t blessed with any luck in that department, either. Lots of files on 1st Quarter Profit Projections, Advertising Budget Breakdown, Lease Schedules, and the like, but no dog or latte file.

“Something to put the latte into!” I cried, and zipped back to the kitchen. Reopening cupboards, I laid eyes on too-high shelves of cups, saucers, and mugs. I dragged over a chair, climbed up, and took down one after another —the man must have owned fifty mugs and cups—and examined each one, inside and out. On about mug number forty, I began to feel disheartened. But when I came to the last row of five, my heart leaped. The logo on the orange mug said Thanks a latte. The cup clanked when I picked it up, and I thanked God with all my heart.

Inside the mug was…a key? A Saab key? I had a key to Barry’s Saab on the ring Darlene had given me. I scrambled down from the chair, pulled the key ring out of my pocket, and held both car keys up to the light. They were identical.

“This isn’t making sense, Barry!” I protested aloud. Startled by my own voice, I slammed through the door out into the cold, and headed grimly toward his garage.

CHAPTER 19

Behind the garage, Barry’s pontoon boat was parked at a slight tilt. It was covered with a canvas sheet now frosted with snow, and spoke of a summer that felt more than three months away. I turned to the garage door. It boasted a hefty new padlock.

The padlock must be an addition from Darlene, I figured. After the cops had processed Barry’s Saab, previously parked in the Westside Mall lot, they would have delivered the Saab to Darlene, as the one with the so- called proprietary interest. But I was willing to bet that Darlene’s own garage was filled to the brim with consignment stuff. I could imagine her insisting the Saab go back into Barry’s garage, with her promise that that was where it would stay.

As my chilled fingers fumbled for the padlock’s keyhole, I wished desperately for my gloves. I thanked all the heavenly angels when the smallest key on the ring Darlene had given me slid into the padlock and turned. The lock gave; I removed it and pushed through the wooden door.

Barry’s silvery-green Saab, glazed with ice like the padlock, was parked next to a black M-6, his BMW racing car. My footsteps scrunched over garage-floor grit as I headed to the Saab. I unlocked the driver-side door—Barry had probably either lost the remote opener, or hidden it in the bottom of a uranium mine—and pulled the lever to open the trunk. You had to start somewhere, I thought grimly.

Carpeted with black fuzzy stuff, the trunk was a disappointment. It held nothing but a pristine spare tire in its