Night of the Living Deed (32 page)

“I don’t remember seeing her there,” Paul answered. “But I hadn’t seen her then, so it’s possible she was.”

“That’s grasping at straws,” I pointed out.

“We haven’t got much. The point is, it would have been easy enough for any of them to slip something into our wine.”

I gave him a look. “How?” I asked. “I’ve seen the restaurant. The bar is right near the entrance to the kitchen. The wine comes from the bar to your table, and then the glasses are sitting right in front of the two of you the whole time.”

Paul nodded in agreement. “So the poison had to be put in the glasses either at the bar, or on the way from the bar to the table.”

“Did you see anyone in that area?” I asked him.

Paul twisted up his mouth again. “I didn’t pay close attention to the wine. I wasn’t expecting to be poisoned.”

I would have patted him on the shoulder, if it had actually been there. “It wasn’t your fault. So few of us expect that. Believe me, I’ll be watching everything I eat and drink for, essentially, the rest of my life. But if you didn’t notice, who might have? Who was your server that night, do you remember?”

Paul’s face relaxed; he was happy to have the right answer to a question. “Yes, I remember because he had such an interesting name. Rudolfo.”

“I think I’m going back to Café Linguine to talk to Ralphie,” I said.

Paul frowned again. “Who’s Ralphie?”

I didn’t get the chance to answer because my cell phone started creating havoc in my pocket. I dug it out and opened it, noting only that the incoming call screen read, “Out of Area.”

“You’ve found it, haven’t you?” a voice said. It was muffled. Either the person on the other end was whispering or holding a cloth over the mouthpiece or both.

“What? Who is this?” I put the cell phone on speaker, and Paul bent over my shoulder to hear. There was the usual feeling of a warm breeze when he leaned a little too close.

“You know who it is,” the voice answered. “You have it, and you’re going to hand it over.”

“I
don’t
have it,” I said. “I have no idea where—”

The voice didn’t have any inflection, and wouldn’t rise enough to be identifiable. Not to mention, it cut me off. This was one rude murderer. “You have until midnight tomorrow to deliver it.”

“Deliver what
where
?” I asked at Paul’s instruction. “And when you say, ‘midnight,’ do you mean twelve a.m. early Friday or late Thursday?” That last question was all on my own.

“You’ll be given instructions at the proper time,” the voice said. I still couldn’t tell if it was male or female. And the line went dead.

“Well,” Paul said, “that wasn’t much help at all. Now. Who’s Ralphie?”

 

 

I called Detective McElone, and she said she’d try to track
my cell phone records to see if she could trace the call I’d just received. But she wasn’t promising anything, and reminded me that I was still technically a suspect in Terry Wright’s murder. The woman had a reassuring manner, to be sure.

Once I’d dropped Melissa at school, I drove to Phyllis’s office. She reassured me that the cops didn’t have any hard evidence on me, but had little to add. We moved on to other topics, and discussed frequency of advertising once the guesthouse opened (assuming I lived to see it) and I told her I thought the house renovations would be mostly completed by the weekend, although we still wouldn’t have any furniture until at least a week later.

At lunchtime, I walked over to Café Linguine and asked for Rudolfo.

“I didn’t see anything,” Ralphie protested when I started asking him questions about Paul and Maxie on the night they were killed. His skinny little body was all atremble, and his face, just now recovering from the acne that no doubt plagued his high school years, was pinched. “I swear, I didn’t see anything. Can I go back to work now?”

“You’re sure you remember the night I’m talking about?” I asked him. I felt bad for the kid; I’d taken him out of his lunch shift (which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly bustling) and wasn’t even ordering a cup of coffee. But the answers to these questions might save my life, so I saw a certain urgency in them.

“I remember. The cops asked me about it then, and they asked me about again last week,” the waiter said. “A bunch of people came in after some board meeting or something. The mayor was here. She and her group were all over there . . .” He pointed at the corner away from the bar, not so close to the exposed ovens and grills that it would be uncomfortably hot. “At a big table. They were all laughing and drinking wine.”

“But they’d just had a tremendous argument at the meeting,” I protested, trying to prove to Ralphie that he was wrong, and surely
someone
must have been in a separate corner, sulking, licking his or her wounds.

The kid shook his head. “They don’t care,” he said. “I’ve seen it a hundred times after meetings. No matter what, they all hang out here afterward and drink and laugh with each other. I guess none of it’s personal.”

Well, there went the theory that Paul and Maxie had been killed over a political grudge.

The fact was, it was looking more and more likely that my two houseguests had been murdered over the Washington deed, if only because the other motives weren’t bearing any fruit in the investigation.

“Who else was here?” I asked Ralphie. If he mentioned a brooding history teacher with a dimple in his chin, I was officially going to spend the rest of the day in a bad mood. On the other hand, if Kerin Murphy was on Ralphie’s list, I’d probably buy extra Halloween candy for the celebration of her arrest. You have to have priorities.

“There were lots of people here,” he said, lips twisted downward. “I can’t remember everybody.”

“Do you remember who was hanging out near the bar?” The poison had probably been administered between the bar and the table.

“Just Lisa Pawley.” He grinned.

“Who’s Lisa Pawley?”

“She was in my junior year chemistry class,” Ralphie said, eyes far away. “She’s smokin’ hot.”

I didn’t care who was hot, if they weren’t hot for the father of our country. “How about this,” I asked the kid. “Do you remember whether you got the two glasses of red wine that the people in the table by the window were drinking?” Paul had told me exactly which table he and Maxie had occupied, and I pointed at it for Ralphie.

“Probably. That’s my station, so I would’ve gotten their drinks from the bar.”

I rolled my right hand in a
continue
motion, but Ralphie just stared at it, as if it were an especially shiny object and he were an unusually stupid cocker spaniel. “What about the drinks?” I asked finally.

“What about them?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Did anybody touch them? Anyone stop you on the way to the table? Is there any way that those drinks might have been tampered with between the time you picked them up and the time you delivered them to the table?”

“Look, the cops asked me all this at the time, and that lady cop already asked me the same stuff a few days ago,” Ralphie said. “I told her: I don’t remember anything happening with the drinks, and if they’d gotten spilled or anything, I’d have had to get other ones from the bar.”

“I’m not worried about them spilling,” I said. “I’m asking if anyone could have put something in the glasses before you got them to the table.”

“Like what?”

“Like poison,” I answered.

Ralphie’s eyes opened to the size of hubcaps. “You think I poisoned their wine?” he asked. “I didn’t do
anything. . .
.”

“No, I don’t think you poisoned their wine,” I assured him. “But I think someone else might have.”

“Who?” There was a reason this kid hadn’t gone to Harvard after he’d graduated from Harbor Haven High.

“I
don’t know
,” I told him. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Nothing happened to the drinks after I picked them up from the bar,” he said. “Honest.”

“Could anything have happened
before
you picked them up from the bar?” What the hell; it was worth a shot.

The kid thought for a second or two. “Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t see Francois—that’s the bartender—pour the wine, and I’m pretty sure I had to wait for it until he got glasses from the kitchen. Because I asked him if the glasses were hot from the dishwasher, and if that would mess up the wine, and he told me to go away.”

The plot, and my blood, thickened.

“You remember a lot for something that happened a year ago,” I told him.

“I just got asked about it a couple of days ago by the cops,” he said. “I had time to think.”

I nodded. “The glasses for those two people came out of the kitchen, and not from the ones he had behind the bar?” I asked.

“I think that’s right,” Ralphie said. “Sometimes Francois runs out of glasses and he has to go into the kitchen for the ones right out of the dishwasher.”

“Who was in the kitchen?” I asked him, maybe a little too thickly. “Who could have been in the kitchen that night?”

“I don’t know; just the chef, Pietro, and his staff, usually.” Did they make every employee take on one of these stupid names? “The only other ones who go back there are the owners.”

“Did the mayor go back there that night?” I asked, trying hard not to gasp for breath. “Did Bridget Bostero make a trip to the kitchen before you brought out those two glasses of wine?”

“No,” Ralphie said. “But I think Mr. Morris was back there.”

“Mr. Morris?”

“Adam Morris. The developer guy? He’s the main owner of the place.”

“Did you tell the detective this?” I said when I caught my breath.

Ralphie’s head nodded so hard I was afraid it might fall off. “Oh yeah,” he said. “She knows everything I’m telling you.”

I pulled a twenty out of my purse and handed it to the kid. “Thanks, Ralphie,” I told him. “You’ve been very helpful.”

He grinned, pleased with himself like Melissa is when she can help me with a problem, and turned to leave. Then he stopped and turned back toward me.

“How’d you know my name is Ralphie?” he asked.

I was going to call Adam Morris’s office to make an appointment, but decided that with less than thirty-six hours left to live, I wasn’t bound by the laws of propriety. I barged into his office, barreling past Bianca, his decorative blonde (and no doubt very efficient) secretary. She still looked familiar. But now I remembered why.

Adam Morris, while startled, did not try to throw me out.

Bianca, trying desperately not to be blamed for letting the intruder past the door, asked, “Should I call the police?”

Adam’s face contorted. He rolled his eyes with exasperation and hollered, “No, don’t call the police! Just get your skinny ass out there and answer the phones!” You’ve gotta love a guy who knows how to treat his employees.

Bianca blanched and closed the door. I thought I saw her shoot me a look of respect as she left. She probably wasn’t used to people barging in on her boss and getting away with it. I nodded back my respect for her, as well (sisterhood and all that), and she seemed pleased. Of course, I could have been projecting.

Morris shifted smoothly into charming mode, and gestured toward the low-slung chair again, but this time I stood in front of his desk.

“It’s a charming surprise, Alison, but I have to say it’s a little inconvenient for me right now. Can we schedule this for another time?”

“I don’t know if I’ll have another time, Adam,” I said. “Someone is threatening my life, and I’m here to find out if it’s you.”

Adam appeared more amused than concerned. His smile, if anything, got warmer. He put his palms flat on his desk and leaned over to face me with less distance between us. “Why would I threaten your life?” he asked.

“Because you want my house and what’s in it,” I answered. I was going out on a limb with that last part, since I had no idea if Adam even knew about the Washington deed, but it was worth a shot, anyway.

“There’s something in your house? You mean besides you?” he asked. Okay, so maybe it
wasn’t
worth a shot.

“Something worth about half a million dollars,” I said, inflating the price for effect.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said, leaning closer.

“Does this sort of line usually work for you?” I asked.

“Actually, it does,” Adam said, straightening up.

“I’m talking about an . . . artifact. Something that could be turned into quite a hefty profit.”

Adam laughed. “Five hundred thousand?” he asked. “In this state, that’ll buy you a medium-sized home in Somerset County. How much did you pay for the Preston place?”

I looked at my shoes for a moment. They were scuffed. I was still in my work clothes.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re
really
here?”