Crunch Time

planning fun.

Meanwhile, Tom was not joining in the discussion, much less doing any questioning. He was slicing and dicing something on a cutting board. Curious, I moved over and saw garlic and fresh basil falling from his knife. The scent was deliciously pungent.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Making more of that salad dressing,” he said, his tone nonchalant. He did not look up from his task, which was probably not a bad idea, considering he was holding a very sharp knife. “Could you get the mayonnaise out of the walk-in for me? Please? Also, I need some of your best-quality olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar. If that’s all right.”

“Sure,” I said.

I fetched the ingredients while Boyd washed his hands and set the table for five. Tom turned the blender motor to its loudest buzz. Thank goodness. Such deafening noise meant I didn’t have to mention the moving van and Maserati across the street, much less my escapade that had ended with the death of Stonewall Osgoode, arsonist, gun thief, puppy-mill operator, and drug dealer.

Ferdinanda asked me to bring the quiches and rolls out of the oven, which I did. As instructed, I put one quiche on a rack to cool, for us to take to Humberto’s that night. The other one I placed on the kitchen table, next to a crystal bowl of field greens, pine nuts, grape tomatoes, and blue cheese crumbles. Tom had already tossed it with his new salad dressing.

The harrowing events of the morning had not diminished my appetite. Ferdinanda’s luscious, cheesy quiche was melt-in-your-mouth fabulous, and Tom’s dressing, the same love potion he’d made the night before, was out of this world.

“Need to talk to you all about a few things,” Tom said casually when we had finished eating.

“Who’s ‘you all’?” asked Ferdinanda suspiciously as I got up to clear the dishes. No matter how gently Tom questioned Ferdinanda and Yolanda, I didn’t want them to read my facial expressions.

“ ‘You all’ are you and your niece,” said Tom.

“Espresso, anybody?” I asked. When Yolanda, Boyd, and Ferdinanda all replied in the affirmative, I put the sugar bowl on the table and began pulling shots.

“Goldy got into a bit of a mess this morning,” Tom said.

“Oh, my,” said Boyd. He grinned and looked my way. “Goldy? In a mess? I can’t believe it.”

Tom’s voice was matter-of-fact. “The man who burned down Ernest’s house, who is the same man we suspect of stealing my gun from our garage, the man who tried to break in here—all the same man, right? He was killed today. He had a puppy mill.” Tom paused for a moment. “He was also running a marijuana grow operation.”

Yolanda and Ferdinanda turned stunned faces in my direction. Yolanda said, “What happened?”

“Has either of you ever heard of a man named Stonewall Osgoode?”

They both shook their heads.

Tom pulled out Stonewall Osgoode’s driver’s license. Neither one of them recognized him. “Not any chance you saw him around Humberto at some point?”

Yolanda and Ferdinanda shook their heads again.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tom told them. “I’m just trying to cover all the bases.” When Yolanda said she needed to take a pain pill, Ferdinanda insisted on wheeling into the dining room with her, and Boyd joined them. Tom’s phone buzzed with a text. “I have to go down to the department. Are you going to be all right?” He glanced around the kitchen. “I hate to leave you with this mess.”

“I’m fine,” I said, but felt unconvinced. “I’ll clean up. Are you going to be okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“Would you approve of my driving Ferdinanda to Humberto’s tonight?”

“Absolutely not.” He headed toward the hall. “I’ve been invited. I’m driving you. We’ll follow Ferdinanda.”

“Wait. Tom? I always thought when you had a fresh homicide you worked it until you got a break.”

He turned and gave me the full benefit of his sea-green eyes. “I will be working the case tonight, when I talk to Humberto and, separately, to Lolly Vanderpool. And anyway, if you think I’m going to let you go into Humberto’s house without me, you are entirely mistaken.”

21

While Boyd, Ferdinanda, and Yolanda spoke in low murmurs in the dining room, I set about doing the dishes. This is always a caterer’s least favorite task. In fact, the one good thing about going to Humberto’s house for dinner was that there wouldn’t be any cleanup.

Once every dish and pan was clean, an inner anxiety told me I had to cook. I didn’t have the time to start on the soup for the Bertrams’ party. Ferdinanda wouldn’t be in the mood to give me her recipe for the luscious pork we’d had the night before. But I did peer into the walk-in and saw that Ferdinanda had replaced the meat she’d used with sliced grilled pork and pork tenderloin. Mmm. I could put together a marinade for an old standby of mine, Snowboarders’ Pork Tenderloin. I’d marinate two, one for Boyd and Yolanda to have that night, and one to take to the Bertrams’ house the next night, Thursday, when SallyAnn Bertram had said we’d be cooking out to commemorate Ernest’s life.

Which reminded me! I put in a call to Penny Woolworth’s cell. Once connected to voice mail, I gave the address of the Bertrams’ house and told her about the dinner. Could she please clean the Bertrams’ place when she finished at Kris’s? I’d give her double her usual rate, I promised sweetly, before hanging up.

I gratefully went back to cooking. First I pulled out a pan and mixed together red wine, garlic, Dijon mustard, and herbs for the pork. As I reflected on all that had happened, I whisked in olive oil to make an emulsion. I eased the tenderloins into the silky mixture, turned them over to coat them thoroughly, and covered the whole dish with plastic wrap.

Once I’d placed the meat in the walk-in, I tiptoed up the steps to Arch’s room, where I booted up his computer and reopened the file I’d begun. I stared at the questions I’d asked myself back then. The messy divorce, I now knew, belonged to the Breckenridges. At this point it didn’t look as if Ernest had been following Brie Quarles, as I’d originally heard; he’d been following Sean Breckenridge. I changed that, but it seemed minor.

Ernest McLeod had had cancer and had been self-medicating with marijuana. Yolanda had been cooking meals for him before she and Ferdinanda moved in full-time. He’d decided to leave his house to her in his will.

The night before he was shot, he’d brought home nine puppies. The next morning, he’d told Ferdinanda, she of the encroaching deafness, that if anything happened to him, she should ask “the bird.” Right. Then he’d left his house on foot for an appointment that had been faked. He’d sensed—according to the department’s theory, which put the time of death at about a half hour to an hour after he left his house—that he was being followed and turned down a little-used service lane. When he’d thought he was in the clear, he’d come out, walked back toward the paved road, and been shot in the chest by someone using the same weapon that had been employed to kill a service-station attendant two years before.

The next night, his house had been burned down by Stonewall Osgoode.

The night after that, Stonewall Osgoode had stolen Tom’s gun and tried to break into our house before he was foiled by Arch.

Why would Osgoode steal Tom’s gun? I mean, presumably he had his own weapons. Maybe he’d cased the garage, found the hidden compartment with the .45, and then taken it so that we couldn’t use it on him when he broke into our place. Or perhaps he’d figured he’d use it to commit some other crime. I had no idea.

Two days after the incident with the weeder, someone had held what was probably the same gun that had killed the gas station attendant and Ernest McLeod, and killed Stonewall Osgoode.

I sighed.

From Lolly Vanderpool, I’d found out about the necklace belonging to Norman Juarez’s mother, that Humberto