Pepperoni Pizza Can Be Murder (22 page)

“Bob has a nice ring to it,” she said.

“Then Bob it is.”

Mark brought us our breakfasts, and we enjoyed our meal together, discussing the weather, the price of gasoline, and whether winters were milder than they were when we were kids, but we didn’t touch on boyfriends or murder until we were out in the parking lot again.

“Where to now?” Maddy asked.

“I’d like to talk to Katy Johnson again. I’m not sure I’m willing to accept her spin on things, no matter what Greg thinks.”

“How about Sandi and Jamie?” she asked as we approached her car.

“Why should we start with them?”

She pointed to the other end of the parking lot. “Because they just drove up.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s go poke a stick into a hornet’s nest and see if we can get something going.”

“You first,” she said.

I walked over to their parking spot and saw that they were clearly in no hurry to leave their car. They were in a deep discussion about something that was bordering on a fight. I held back, hoping to hear something before they noticed I was standing there.

It was a lovely morning, and I was glad that one of the windows was partially cracked. If they’d both been rolled up, I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything but a muffled exchange, but as it was, their argument was easy to pick up.

“You have to tell the police chief,” Jamie said. “The cops need to hear what you’ve got to say.”

“You know as well as I do that I can’t do that. What are they going to think?”

Jamie asked, “Who cares? It’s going to be a lot better if they find out from you. If someone else tells them, it’s going to make you look bad.”

“I can’t do it,” Sandi snapped.

She happened to glance out her window and spotted Maddy and me. With a quick shake of her head toward Jamie, she got out of the car.

“What do you two want?”

“Don’t mind us,” I said. “Go ahead and finish your conversation. We can wait.”

Jamie glared at me. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough to be interested in hearing the rest of it,” Maddy said.

“Come on,” Jamie said as he grabbed Sandi’s arm. “We’re going in.”

“That sounds great,” I said. “I’m kind of peckish myself.” If I had to choke down another breakfast, even though I was full, I’d have to find a way to do it for the cause.

“You’re not invited,” Sandi said.

“The funny thing about a public restaurant is that we don’t have to be invited in.”

They glanced at each other, then pivoted and got back into their car.

“Don’t leave on our account,” I said.

Neither one of them commented, and as they drove away, I noticed Mark standing nearby looking at us. “Are you two still driving away my customers?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We were just talking.”

He shrugged. “You know what? I don’t mind. There’s something about that girl I never have warmed up to.”

“It’s Jamie I don’t care for,” Maddy said. “I hate the way he treats her.”

“Neither one’s a prize,” Mark said. “Just do me a favor. Don’t run anybody else off, okay? I’ve got bills to pay.”

“We won’t let it happen again,” I said.

“Come on, Eleanor, you know we can’t promise him that.”

Mark laughed. “I guess it’s crazy to even ask, isn’t it?”

We got in Maddy’s car after Mark was gone.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

“I understand him not wanting to lose customers,” Maddy said. “You really can’t blame him.”

“I’m talking about Jamie and Sandi, you nit,” I said.

“They’re hiding something, aren’t they?”

I nodded. “But what could it be? From the sound of it, Sandi knows something that might be relevant, but she’s not telling. Can you believe Jamie’s trying to get her to tell someone about it?”

“You heard him, he wants her to spin it in their favor,” Maddy said. She started the car, and then said, “Where are we going? That might be nice to know, if I’m supposed to drive us there.”

“Why don’t we go to Roger Henderson’s office? I want to talk to him, but I need to make a telephone call first.”

“Who are you going to call?”

“I’d tell you,” I said, “but you wouldn’t like it. Why don’t we just let it be a surprise for now?”

He picked up on the first ring, and I was surprised to catch him at his desk this early. “Hey, Kevin, it’s Eleanor Swift.”

“Eleanor, trust me, you don’t have to identify yourself. I know your voice. What’s going on?”

“I’ve got a tip you might want to look into,” I said as Maddy shook her head in my direction. I knew full well she didn’t approve of me sharing anything we learned with the police, but there were questions they could ask that we couldn’t—if I could just convince him that it might be important.

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“I just heard that Sandi Meadows has some information that might be relevant to your investigation, so I thought you might want to drop in on her at work today and ask her.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

“Jamie Lowder was talking to her outside Brian’s urging her to tell you something, but it was pretty clear she didn’t want to.”

He paused, and then asked, “How did you happen to hear that? I doubt Jamie would say anything to her in front of you. The whole town knows he’s had a crush on her since the third grade.”

So our chief of police wasn’t as clueless as I thought. “He didn’t exactly know we were listening,” I admitted.

“Don’t tell me you’ve stooped to eavesdropping,” Kevin said.

“Maddy and I were in the parking lot, and we happened to overhear them arguing. Talk to her, don’t talk to her. I don’t care.”

“Take it easy,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that last bit.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” I said, and then I hung up on him.

When I looked over at Maddy, she was smiling at me. “Wow, you really spanked him that time, didn’t you?”

“He called us a couple of snoops,” I said.

“Well, he was right, wasn’t he?”

I studied my sister for a few seconds. “Whose side are you on?”

“If you have to ask that, I think I’ll take you back home and go see Roger by myself.”

She started to turn in toward my place. “I’m sorry. Kevin just pushed me a little too hard. I know I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Maddy said without any trace of rancor in her voice. She was like that, able to detach herself from situations that made my blood boil. And yet sometimes my sister took offense at the mildest slight. There were times I could understand men’s frustrations with women. If they only knew that sometimes we didn’t know the reasons we acted the way we did any better than they did. I wasn’t sure if the knowledge would make things better, or infinitely worse.

When we got to Roger’s business, there was only one car parked out in front, and it wasn’t one of the black sedans we’d seen the day before.

I said, “I wonder if the feds know he’s here all by himself?”

“Maybe we can use that,” Maddy said. “Do you feel like taking another swing at the hornet’s nest?”

“I’ve got my stick all ready,” I said.

“Hang on a second. I’m going to park out of sight so he doesn’t know we’re coming.” She pulled up beside the building out of anyone’s clear line of vision, and we got out and headed for the bookkeeper’s office.

When we walked in, Roger had a cash box out on his desk and was obviously counting money. The second he saw us, he jammed the money back into the box and slammed the lid shut. “What are you two doing here?”

I decided to ignore his direct question, a skill I’d learned from my local congressman. “Wow, for somebody who’s supposed to be broke, that looked like a lot of money.”

“This is all I’ve got in the world,” he said. “I know the embezzlement wasn’t my fault, but I still feel responsible. After all, Wade was my employee. I’m going to pay back what I can, even if I’m not obligated to.”

“That’s big of you,” I said.

“It’s not much, but it’s what I can do. Is there something I can help you with? The auditor’s due in any minute.”

I suddenly didn’t feel like poking him anymore. “No, we just wanted to stop in and see how you were doing.”

“Just peachy,” he said, the sarcasm dripping from his voice.

Once we were outside, Maddy said, “You gave up too easily in there. What about poking the nest?”

“It felt like kicking him when he was down,” I admitted. “Can you believe he’s trying to make some kind of restitution?”

“Frankly, no,” Maddy said. “Who’s to say that was his money he was really counting? Or how he managed to get it?”

I shook my head. “You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

“Me, a hundred percent. You, about eighty-five. Everybody else in the world is on probation.”

“Wow, I know I should feel honored, but somehow I don’t.”

We were still sitting in Maddy’s car when a long black limousine pulled up in front of Roger’s business. I kept waiting for the passenger to get out, but instead, Roger came out and handed a thick envelope through an open window in back of the car.

As soon as he made the handoff, the car sped off, and Roger hurried back inside.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Maddy put her car in drive, and then said, “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

She started heading in the direction that the limousine had just taken, but we were three blocks away before we both realized that we’d somehow lost them.

“How did that happen?” Maddy asked. “He was right there.”

“I don’t know. Did you realize that someone in town had his own limo?”

“I didn’t have a clue,” she admitted. “That’s really odd, isn’t it?”

“It’s just one more thing to add to the list.”

As she wheeled the car around, I asked, “Where are we going?”

“I don’t think we’re finished with Roger Henderson, do you?”

“Not on your life.”

We got back to Roger’s office, but to my surprise, his car was gone. “Where did he go?” I asked. “He was just here.”

“Cars keep disappearing on us, don’t they?” Maddy frowned. “Is there anyone else we can run off before we start work at the Slice this morning?”

“I’d like to talk to Katy,” I said. “Clara’s the only other name on our list, but I’m not really in the mood to go up against her first thing in the morning, are you?”

“We don’t seem to be faring too well in the exchanges, do we?” She paused a moment, then asked, “Then what should we do?”

“Greg’s coming in at noon, so we can ask him about Katy then. As for Clara, I’m still trying to figure out how to get her back for what she did to us.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Maddy said.

“Do you care to share it with me?”

She shook her head, but I didn’t like the grin she had. “Trust me, the less you know about this, the better. There’s something to be said for plausible deniability.”

“Normally I’d say don’t do anything we might regret, but right now, I honestly don’t care.”

“That’s the spirit,” Maddy said.

As my sister started driving, I realized we were going in the opposite direction of the Slice. “Where are we headed?”

“Just have a little patience.”

It took me a minute to realize that we were heading for Clara’s house, and I wondered what my sister had in mind, but I wasn’t going to find out just yet.

She wasn’t home, and from the look of the newspapers piled up on her front porch, she hadn’t been there for at least three days.

But where could she have gone? We’d seen her around town, so she hadn’t gone far.

Then it hit me. If she wasn’t staying at her own place, there was only one other place she might be.

“Come on,” I told Maddy. “I think I know where she is.”

We got back in the car, and I said, “Head over to Wade’s house.”

“Do you honestly think she’d stay there, instead of here?”

“Where else could she be?”

Maddy nodded. “It’s as good a place as any to start looking for her.”

When we got to Wade’s, I was surprised to see a line of trash in front of the place. It appeared that Clara had decided to clean house in the most basic sense of the term.

“Wow, that’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?” Maddy said as she surveyed the discards of Wade Hatcher’s life.

“You’d think she’d make the place a shrine to him,” I said.

We walked up onto the porch as Clara was heading out with another box. When she saw us standing there, she dropped the box onto the porch floor, clearly spooked by our sudden arrival.

“What do you two want?” she asked as she edged back toward the front door. “I’ve got to warn you, I’m armed.”

“Do the police know that?” I asked.

Maddy said to me, “Relax, Eleanor, we’re fine as long as she doesn’t have a rolling pin in her hand.”

That was pretty mean, even for my sister. I wasn’t any happier with Clara than she was, but it was a quick, painful cut, nonetheless.

“I’m ordering you to leave my porch,” Clara said.

“This isn’t your property,” I said. “You can’t order us to do anything. I’m not even sure you should be here doing this yourself.”

“He was my son. It’s my right to put things in order again.”

Maddy reached for her cell phone. “Let’s see what the chief of police has to say about it.”

“Call him. I don’t care.” Clara slammed the door in our faces, and Maddy put her telephone away.

“Aren’t you going to call Kevin?”

She shook her head. “It was a bluff that didn’t work.”

“Should we call Sandi Meadows? From what Emma told us at the courthouse, there’s a legal dispute about which will is the valid one.”

Maddy nodded. “That’s even better than what I had in mind for payback.” She took out her phone, called information, and phoned Sandi at work.

After a few seconds, Maddy said loudly, “Your inheritance is walking out the door over here at Wade’s. His mother’s decided to do some spring cleaning.”

She held the phone away from her ear, and I could hear Sandi yelling.

When there was a break, Maddy said, “I just thought you should know” then she hung up.

“What should we do next?” I asked.

“Now you can call the police. Things might get ugly, so it could be a good thing having Kevin here.”