Double Shot

get the door. You get the oven.”

The quiches were puffed and golden brown. I laid them carefully on cooling racks and closed the oven door.

“It’s Frances Markasian and another reporter from the Mountain Journal,” Marla announced. “They’re even wearing press badges! I didn’t let them in. What do you want me to do?”

“Tell them I have no comment, except that they should go away!” I threw the pot holders on the counter. The heat on my face wasn’t coming from the oven. Reporters were showing up to question me, the prime suspect, at half-past eight in the morning? My criminal attorney wanted to start working on my defense? My own son wouldn’t talk to me?

When Marla returned from tongue-lashing the press, I asked her to accompany me to our detached garage. Then I stuffed Brewster’s business card, my new cell phone, and my newly printed inventory sheets into my canvas tote. After checking that there were no journalists out back, I sloshed furiously through the wet grass with Marla on my heels.

It was time to figure out why someone was trying to frame me.

10

I flipped on the garage light. With Marla growling, we pulled out all the boxes from the back of the van. After we’d gone through two of them, I used my new cell to call Brewster’s office.

“Aw, Goldy, you’re not on your old cell phone, are you? Gossip columnists can be such a hassle!” Even when Brewster was irritated, he couldn’t manage to sound upset. Aw, man, you’re not telling me you forgot the beer! Dude! I could just picture him, leaning back in a sleek leather executive chair, his blond curls framed in a halo around his head, his eyes contemplating an oil painting of a snow-boarder catching air.

“Don’t get paranoid on me, Brewster. I’m using the new one.” I creaked open the door to the garage and glanced all around. “Nobody’s hearing this except Marla. My home phone line started ringing at oh-dark-thirty, and now there are reporters at my front door. I may not be a criminal, but I sure feel like one. So what do you need?”

“How about a self-defense angle?”

“Brewster, he was already dead when I got there.”

“We’re just talking theories, Goldy. I might need to know how he beat you up, how you responded, and his history of assaulting other women.”

Suddenly chilled, I wished I’d put on a jacket over the sweatshirt. “Tell you what. If the cops arrest me, you and I can talk. In the meantime, I’ll keep running my business, and Marla will work on a list of John Richard’s ex- girlfriends and what she knows he did to them. Will that work?”

Reluctantly, he agreed. We signed off.

I pulled out my inventory sheets from the previous day and squinted at them. As usual after washing and drying each piece of equipment, Julian and Liz had meticulously checked off every single knife, serving spoon, grater, and other kitchen doodad before stowing it in three cardboard boxes. Marla and I wrenched open all the boxes. The cops had gone through them, all right, but it looked as if they’d put everything back, even if in a somewhat jumbled fashion.

The previous afternoon, someone had gone into my van looking for something. Maybe they’d found what they were looking for, and also taken my gun, as a bonus.

I peered at the top of the inventory sheets, and began to rattle off items, which Marla then found and laid to one side. Two butcher knives, check. Three paring knives, check. Two graters, check. Butane torch, check…

Twenty minutes later, we found the answer, but I was even more perplexed than I had been when I’d begun. Finally, I called Julian at the bistro. The bangs and shouts of a restaurant kitchen echoed behind him as he assured me that yes, he’d put the item into the van. He remembered wiping them off and stowing them.

But what, I wondered, as I stared at my inventory sheet, would anyone hope to do with my kitchen shears? Had the killer wanted to use the scissors as a murder weapon, then found the gun and decided to use that instead? But just in case, he or she had stolen both?

As Marla nabbed her cell phone to make a call, I put all the equipment back in the boxes. Then, filled with resolve, I stashed the inventory papers in the canvas bag. The two of us traipsed back to the house, Marla still jabbering, me thinking about how to proceed.

Okay. After Marla and I hit the Rainbow Men’s Club to question Sandee, I wanted to meet with my client of the previous day, Holly Kerr. I felt guilty, calling on a widow right after I’d catered the funeral lunch for her dead husband, but I wanted to refund her payment and needed the guest list from the Roundhouse event. If Holly did not have a printed list, I’d ask for her best memory of who had attended. Kleptomaniacs included.

“Listen up,” Marla said as she clapped her phone shut. “I found out some good stuff from Frances and her sidekick. They wanted a ‘Do you confirm or deny’ statement. I promised that if she left, I’d call her back, which I just did. I traded a couple of tidbits about the Jerk’s girlfriends for facts we couldn’t have weaseled out of the cops.” Marla paused for effect. “The reporters have already canvassed the neighbors. They didn’t hear anything. No yelling or fighting, no shots. But someone saw a woman, or someone who looked like a woman, wearing heels, a black raincoat, and a black scarf. The neighbor noticed the rain gear because it was dusty and windy, which he thought was weird. Anyway, the Jerk roared up the driveway in the Audi, and then this woman raced up after him.”

“ ‘This woman’? What woman?”

“Good question. Apparently, after the lunch, Sandee arrived with him at his house. She stayed in his car for a while—I think we can guess doing what—then got out and drove off in her VW. Not two minutes later, this other person ran across the cul-de-sac and up the driveway. The neighbor figured it was somebody who knew him, because she was carrying a shopping bag. As if she was going to give him a present or something.”

“Yeah, slugs in the chest. But the neighbor didn’t hear anything?”

“Nada. Someone shooting inside a garage, with a wind howling outside? Gunshots could easily get muffled.”

I bit the inside of my lip. “So are all the reporters gone?”

“Nope. Three of ’em from the Furman County Monthly haven’t had this hot a news item since they caught eight real estate agents having a sex orgy in an empty house.”

I smiled. “I need to change into something respectable. Those nut cookies I made last night are in a tin on the counter.”

Marla didn’t need a second invitation.

Upstairs, I rummaged through my closet, crammed myself into a black skirt and top, and put in a call to Holly Kerr.

“I’m just on my way to water aerobics,” she said, with what sounded like forced brightness. “Everyone tells me that…after the death of a loved one, it’s important to keep the routine going.”

I thought of Arch and Tom out on the golf course. “This will just take a moment,” I promised. Marla called up that she’d eaten the cookies and I needed to haul out to her Mercedes with her! I closed my eyes. “Holly, I was wondering if you had a list of the people who were invited to the lunch yesterday.”

“There wasn’t a list. That’s what I told the police.” I stifled a gurgle of dismay. “Apparently there was some trouble afterward, they wouldn’t tell me what. I told them that you don’t invite guests to a funeral. You call people up, tell them about it, and guess how many will be there. Remember, I told you to make food for sixty? We had fewer than sixty, I think. I have the guest book here somewhere. A friend brought it over. I don’t know if everyone signed it. As soon as I find it, I’m supposed to call the police so they can come get it.”

“Besides the guest book, did the police ask you to make a list of the other people you remembered who were there?”

“Yes, but why are you asking me this? Do they want you to make a list, too?”

“Holly, John Richard was killed after the lunch.”

She gasped.

“I’m the one they suspect—”

“You? But Goldy, why?”