Killer Crab Cakes (7 page)

She was sorry that Sam had walked in and been ambushed by the McKennas like this. She said, “I have your father’s things. If you’ll take them I’ll go back upstairs and get his fishing poles. That will finish our business.”

The brothers both sneered at her. “You just wish that would finish things,” one of them said.

Sam looked like he was getting fed up with them and ready to squash both of them like bugs. Phyllis moved between him and the twins and held out the suitcase and tackle box.

“Hold on a minute, Mrs. Newsom,” a new voice said. Phyllis looked over her shoulder and saw Chief Dale Clifton standing in the foyer. He smiled and pointed a thumb at the door. “Hope you don’t mind me barging in like this. The door was open, and I couldn’t help overhearing what you folks were talking about. Are those Mr. McKenna’s personal belongings?”

“Some of them,” Phyllis said. “I was just about to turn them over to his children here.”

Clifton looked at Frances and her brothers and said, “You folks have already driven down from San Antonio, eh? That’s good, since I need to talk to you anyway.”

“What about?” Frances asked. “I thought everything was fairly cut-and-dried about our father’s death.”

“Except for the part that Fletcher here played in it,” one of the twins added in a nasty tone of voice.

“Well, we sort of thought it was cut-and-dried, too,” Clifton said as he came on into the parlor. “But that was before we got the preliminary report from the medical examiner.” He reached for the suitcase and tackle box. “I’ll need to be taking those with me.”

“But why?” Phyllis asked.

“Because they may turn out to be evidence in a murder investigation.”

With a thump, the suitcase hit the floor as it fell right out of Phyllis’s hand.

S
he managed to hang on to the tackle box, which was a good thing. If she had dropped it, it might have broken open and spilled lures, hooks, speck rigs, and assorted other bits of tackle all over the parlor rug.

“Did you say . . . murder?” she asked Chief Clifton.

“Not again!” Carolyn said.

That outburst brought a puzzled frown to the chief’s face. “What does Mrs. Wilbarger mean by that?” he asked Phyllis.

She set the tackle box on the coffee table, afraid that she was too shaken to hold on to it any longer. “It’s a long story,” she said. “I’ve been involved in a few police cases up in Weatherford, where we all live.”

“But not as a suspect,” Sam pointed out. “Fact of the matter is, Phyllis has solved a few murders for the cops up there.”

Clifton’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “Is that so? Well, maybe I’ll have to call on you as a consultant in this case, Mrs. Newsom.”

Phyllis shook her head. “No, thanks. If it’s all right with you, Chief, I’d just as soon stay as far away from any murders as I can.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not going to be possible here.” Clifton’s tone of voice hardened a little as he went on. “You and Mr. Fletcher are involved because you discovered the victim’s body.”

Frances Heaton was on her feet now. She took a step closer to the chief and asked him, “You keep saying that our father was murdered. Do you have any proof of that?”

“The autopsy turned up evidence of poison in his stomach contents.” Clifton grimaced. “Sorry to have to be so blunt about it, folks, but there it is.”

Sam said, “The autopsy’s already been performed? That’s mighty fast, isn’t it?”

“We don’t have a lot of suspicious deaths in Aransas County. The medical examiner got to it right away. Anyway, the procedure is still going on, but the ME gave me a call as soon as he found the poison mixed in what appeared to be crab cakes.” Clifton looked at Phyllis. “I assume he ate the crab cakes here?”

Carolyn said, “Who eats crab cakes for breakfast?”

One of the twins said, “Our father would eat crab cakes for every meal if he could.”

“He loves them,” the other brother said, adding with a slight catch in his voice, “Loved them, I should say.”

Even that tiny display of emotion made the man go up a notch in Phyllis’s estimation. Maybe Ed McKenna’s death actually meant something to his children after all . . . at least to one of them. As she thought that, she recalled something that had happened the previous evening.

“We had crab cakes for supper last night,” she said. “Consuela cooked them. They were delicious. But we
all
ate them. I don’t see how they could have been poisoned.”

Clifton shook his head. “It wouldn’t have taken that long for the stuff to take effect. McKenna would have died within an hour or so of ingesting the poison.”

Phyllis thought about it some more and then nodded. “There were some left over at supper. I remember now, Mr. McKenna asked Consuela if she would save them for him so he could eat them for breakfast this morning. He said he liked cold crab cakes for breakfast.” A shudder went through her. That didn’t sound good to her at all. But then, she had never been one to eat cold pizza for breakfast, either, and she knew there were plenty of people who did that. Sam, for one.

“Who was there when Mr. McKenna said that?” the chief asked.

“It was at the dinner table. We were all there, I suppose. I don’t remember any of the guests missing supper last night. Even though Dorothy and Ben call this a bed-and-breakfast, they offer three meals a day, and nobody wants to miss out on Consuela’s cooking.”

Phyllis looked at Sam, Carolyn, and Eve to see if their memories differed from hers. Carolyn and Eve shook their heads, and Sam said, “The whole bunch was there, all right.”

“So anybody could have heard him say he was going to eat the leftover crab cakes for breakfast,” Clifton mused, “which means . . .”

His frown deepened as his voice trailed off. Phyllis finished the thought for him.

“Which means that anyone who’s staying here could have poisoned those crab cakes, knowing that Mr. McKenna was the only one likely to eat them. Isn’t that what you mean, Chief ?”

“Well, I hate to say it . . . but that’s the way it looks to me, Mrs. Newsom.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Carolyn burst out. “All of us barely knew the old sourpuss!”

“That’s our father you’re talking about,” Frances Heaton said through gritted teeth.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Carolyn said, without actually sounding very sorry at all. “Your father just fished all the time and barely said a word to anyone. Why, when he asked Consuela to save those crab cakes, that was probably the longest speech I ever heard him make.
And
the nicest.”

“Carolyn’s right about one thing,” Phyllis said. “None of us would have any reason to harm Mr. McKenna. We never even met him until a few days ago.”

“What about the other guests staying here?”

“You’d have to ask them . . . although it’s possible that the Blaines and the Forrests were acquainted with him, since they always come to the coast about this same time of year, and from what they told me, they always stay here.”

“Dad always took his vacation at this time, too,” one of the twins said. “It had to be one of those people who poisoned him, Chief. You should arrest all of them—”

Clifton held up a hand to forestall that suggestion. “Nobody’s talking about arresting anybody just yet,” he said. “We may be a small department, but we can mount a thorough investigation when we need to. We’ll be looking into every angle of this case.” He glanced down at the closed suitcase lying on the floor between his feet and Phyllis’s. “That’ll include taking custody of his belongings and going through them, as well as searching the room where he’s been staying.” He lifted his eyes to meet Phyllis’s gaze. “Will we have to get a search warrant in order to do that?”

Phyllis thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t see any reason why that should be necessary.”

“Wait just a minute,” Frances said. “If it’s our father’s belongings that you intend to search, then you most certainly
do
need a search warrant.”

Her brothers nodded firmly in agreement.

Chief Clifton looked at them for a moment, then said, “You think your father might have something in his bags that he wouldn’t want the police to see?”

“Not at all,” Frances answered. “I think if you get a search warrant—and I know you’ll probably be able to find a judge willing to sign one—I don’t believe you’ll find anything except some old clothes and a bunch of nasty old fishing gear.”

“And maybe a couple of Western paperbacks,” one of the twins added. “Dad liked to read those Louis L’Amour books.”

“It’s just the principle of the thing,” Frances went on. “You should follow proper procedure.”

“And this will give us a chance to consult with our attorneys, too,” the other twin said. His brother and sister shot him slitted glances, Phyllis noted, as if they wished he hadn’t brought that up. She knew from talking to Mike that the police automatically grew more suspicious of someone who insisted on “lawyering up.”

Chief Clifton looked like he wanted to sigh in weary exasperation, but he just nodded instead. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to impound this suitcase and tackle box as possible evidence, but they won’t be opened and searched until we have a warrant. Same thing holds true for your father’s room upstairs.”

“How did you know Mr. McKenna’s room was upstairs?” Phyllis asked.

“I’ve been friends with Dorothy and Ben for quite a while,” the chief told her with a smile. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been in this house, and I know all the guest rooms are upstairs.”

“That’s true,” Phyllis admitted.

“You mind coming up there with me so you can lock it up and I can seal it until we’re ready to get in there?”

“Of course not.”

“We’ll be going now,” Frances announced. “When will you be able to release our father’s body?”

“That’s hard to say,” Clifton replied with a shake of his head. “What with the uncertain circumstances and all, and having to get search warrants . . . might be several days, I suppose.”

Frances glared at him. “You’re just trying to make things more difficult for us.”

“No, ma’am,” the chief said. “Just following proper procedure.”

Her eyes narrowed even more, but she didn’t say anything else. She turned and marched out of the parlor with her brothers following her.

“When you get a place to stay, call the station and let us know where we can find you,” Clifton called after them.

When the front door had slammed behind the McKenna siblings, Sam said, “I don’t reckon those folks like you very much, Chief.”

“The feeling’s mutual, even though I just met them.” Clifton turned to Phyllis. “Now, if you’ll show me Mr. McKenna’s room, Mrs. Newsom . . .”

“Of course. Come with me.”

Sam followed them up the stairs. As the three of them went along the hall, Clifton said, “I wouldn’t mind hearing more about those murder cases you’ve been mixed up in. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an amateur detective in real life.”

“Oh, goodness, don’t call me a detective. I just kept my eyes open and made a few suggestions to the authorities—”

Sam snorted. “Don’t let her fool you, Chief. She figured out who committed those murders, plain and simple. If that’s not detecting, I don’t know what you’d call it. Problem is, pokin’ into those killin’s nearly got Phyllis hurt a time or two.”

“It did not,” she argued. “I was never in any real danger.”

“Well, if you have any suggestions to make to me, feel free,” Chief Clifton said. “I’m just a small-town cop. Break up a few fights and haul in a few drunks on Saturday night, keep the college kids in line during spring break. That’s my job. I don’t remember the last time we had anybody poisoned on purpose around here.”

“Say, you think maybe it was an accident?” Sam asked.

“Doubtful. The doc didn’t give me all the details yet, but I don’t think McKenna could’ve gotten that stuff in his stomach unless somebody meant for it to be there.”

Phyllis paused in front of the door to McKenna’s room. “What if it wasn’t an accident? What if Mr. McKenna took the poison on purpose?”

Clifton shoved his hands in the pockets of his khaki uniform trousers and frowned. “Committed suicide, you mean? I suppose it’s possible. Having kids like those three I met downstairs might drive a man to doing something like that. But poison’s usually not the way a man kills himself, if you’ll pardon my gender-stereotyping.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Still, at this point we can’t rule out anything.” Clifton gestured toward the door. “If you’ll do the honors . . .”

Phyllis took the master key from the pocket of her blue jeans and locked the door. The chief took a roll of yellow crime-scene tape from his pocket and ran a strip along the jamb from top to bottom, sealing the room.

“Keep an eye on it and make sure nobody messes with it, if you would,” he told Phyllis. “Wouldn’t want to give McKenna’s kids any ammunition for a lawsuit. They seem like the type.”