“No, she went to community college in between. It was her uncle who hired her to work for H&J.”
“But why would she want to work in a law firm?”
I pressed my lips together and tried to remember exactly what Dusty had said about that particular leap. We’d been working on a breakfast pie at the time, a light-tasting but hearty concoction of blue cheese, eggs, and cream cheese, mellowed with sauteed shallot and chopped scallion. We’d just decided to call the dish Blue Cheesecake, when Dusty launched into a story about a family on our street suing a Colorado electric company. When a March blizzard dumped five feet of snow on our little burg, we’d lost power for a couple of days. But west of Aspen Meadow, the outage had lasted for five days, because some dummy at the power company had sent every one of their tractors over to the western slope. This family on our street had been particularly distraught, as their very independent eighty-year-old grandmother lived out in the area that didn’t have power. Cell-phone service in the mountains is iffy at best, and the family hadn’t been able to raise the grandmother or any of her neighbors. By the time the power company managed to bring a tractor over from Grand Junction and replace the fuse that had blown in the neighborhood, the grandmother had run out of firewood. She had frozen to death.
The family on our street had been unable to get the county attorney to charge the power company with negligent homicide. But they’d been determined to sue the power company in civil court for wrongful death. This had gotten Dusty interested in torts, and the law. She hadn’t had the wherewithal to go to college, but she received a partial scholarship to a community college. After that, she was determined to become a paralegal, and maybe even eventually a lawyer. If the family whose grandmother had died was going to sue the power company, then maybe, Dusty reasoned, she could eventually help people like her grandfather, who had been treated so abominably by that cosmetics company, all those years ago. And then her uncle had shown up, and been willing to foot the bill and hire her, so Dusty had seen it as divine intervention.
All this I explained to Britt. He whistled.
“Sounds like a pretty extraordinary young woman.”
“She was.”
He asked, “What about Dusty’s love life?”
I thought back, trying to remember what had been just out of reach when I’d first seen Vic a few hours ago. “A couple of months ago, Dusty told me about some problems she was having with her boyfriend. He’s Vic Zaruski, the fellow who helped me tonight. I just happened to run into him when I was looking for a phone.”
“Stop and tell me about that.”
This I did, as Britt wrote. “Vic was very nice and helpful, and he seemed extremely broken up when he heard something had happened to Dusty.” I went on to explain that I knew little of Vic, beyond a short but friendly chat I’d had with him one time when I’d brought a meal over to the Routts, and he’d been waiting for Dusty. He was going to a technical and vocational school somewhere outside of Denver, and he loved to play the piano. I did remember that he was particularly proud of his car, a vintage white Chrysler Sebring convertible that he kept in immaculate condition. This summer, I’d admired the way Vic glided that ultracool car into the Routts’ driveway, when he came to pick up Dusty. I didn’t know the details of the breakup, I only was aware that I hadn’t seen the Sebring for a while. Still, what twenty-year-old woman didn’t have romantic ups and downs?
“So, did Dusty have a current boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Dusty told you all this stuff while you cooked together, but you don’t know whether she had a boyfriend?”
“Wait a minute.” She’d said she had something to tell me. And she’d promised to explain the new bracelet. My brain finally recalled what had been bothering me. “There might have been somebody, though she didn’t exactly tell me about it.”
“What do you mean?”
I bit my lip. I was so tired. And was it warm in this room, or was that my imagination? “I’m not sure,” I said finally.
“Tell me anyway.”
“When Dusty came last week for her cooking lesson, she was wearing a bracelet. It wasn’t the kind of jewelry she could possibly afford.”
“What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “It was a complex arrangement of opals and diamonds. I asked her about it, almost, you know, playfully. Anyway, she…glanced down at it and kind of frowned. Then she said she’d go take it off, she really shouldn’t cook while she was wearing it. Then I said, ‘Aren’t you going to tell me about it?’ And she said, ‘How ’bout this? I’ll wear it next week and explain it to you.’”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. Did you find a bracelet on her?”
“Did
“No, I did not.”
“Was she wearing it when you discovered her?”
“I don’t remember.”
Detective Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and half grinned. “What do you think was going on with this bracelet?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to speculate.”
“Exactly. So, in all your cooking lessons, Dusty Routt never mentioned a boyfriend. But once, you caught sight of a bracelet? And she said she had something important to tell you? Something important to tell you last night, to be exact, when she was going to explain the bracelet.”
“That’s correct.”
Since I wasn’t supposed to speculate, what I didn’t tell Britt was that I had thought Dusty was kidding around one time when she had told me that her
“Look,” I said, “I have a ton of kitchen work to do for a big party tomorrow, if the party actually takes place. And I mean what I keep telling you, I really am exhausted. Do you have any idea when I could get back the kitchen equipment that I dropped in the H&J office?”
“We’ll have your husband bring it to you.”
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess I left in the reception area.”
“Not your fault. A cleaning team will come in when we’re done with the crime-scene analysis.”
“Good.” I rubbed my eyes. If there had been a bed there in that toasty-warm interrogation room, I think I would have lain down on it.
“Okay, Mrs. Schulz. Where will you be for the next couple of days? In case we need to talk to you some more.”
I gave him our address, the Ellises’ address, where I was supposed to be doing Donald Ellis’s birthday party the next day, and the location of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Aspen Meadow, where I was catering Gus’s christening on Sunday. Almost as an afterthought, I said, “I sure don’t feel like going back to work after a friend of mine has died. I don’t want to think about having to act happy when I see people.”
“Oh, Mrs. Schulz,” said Britt. “Tell me about it.”
CHAPTER 4
Tom was waiting for me in the department snack room. I blinked in the bright light of the pop and candy machines that lined the walls. In one, glassed-in shelves offered limp, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that looked like one of Arch’s lab experiments. Several patrol officers, appearing even more exhausted than the sandwiches, sat talking at one of the small tables. Upon our entrance, they put down their foam coffee cups and surveyed us with hooded, curious eyes. Tom nodded to me and tilted his head, indicating the door. The less said in the department, he seemed to be saying, the better.
Fine by me.
