Trudy, Madly, Deeply (Working Stiffs Mystery Series) (6 page)

No. No. NO.
“Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

There were only two rooms upstairs with beds. Gram’s and the guest room.

I met my grandmother’s hazel-eyed gaze. “In my room.”

“It’s only for a few days. Until after the funeral.” She bit the inside of her lip. “At the outside, a week.”

“A week! Where am I supposed to sleep?”

“I put your pillow and some linens on the hide-a-bed in your grandfather’s study.”

Swell. That
rack
was older than I was. “I’ll need to move my clothes out of the closet.” And stock up on aspirin.

“I already took care of everything. You don’t need to do anything except go up and say hello to your mother.”

I rolled my eyes. It was like I’d entered a time portal and was thirteen again.

Gram shot both barrels of her
do-it-now
look at me. “And tell her it’s time for dinner.”

“Fine.”

Crossing the foyer, I caught a glimpse of a stack of clothes in the study—
my
clothes, folded and neatly laid out on the cocoa brown Naugahyde sleeper sofa like I was packing for summer camp. And Gram’s fat tabby, Myron, was lying on top of the pile.

Wonderful.

At the top of the steps, I rapped on what had been my bedroom door for the last nine weeks.

My actress mother turned and her cherry red lips stretched into a megawatt, chemically enhanced, white smile. “Chah-maine, sweetie!” she exclaimed, gliding toward me in bare feet. Since I rarely saw her out of high heels, she seemed even shorter than her five foot four.

“Hi, Mom.”

She pulled me into her arms, enveloping me in musky jasmine. “It’s so wonderful to see you.”

She took my hands in hers, and the wattage of her smile dimmed. “Ah just wish it were under happier circumstances,” Marietta Moreau added solemnly, acting like she was blinking back tears, which might have been very effective except for the fact that her green eyes were dry.

In her heyday, the former Mary Jo Digby had been a working actress in Hollywood—just not a very good one. Not a very employed one since hitting the big four-oh, either. But she still looked like a show stopper in skin-tight white capris, a scooped neck red and white striped cotton sweater that accentuated her double D’s, a white patent leather belt cinched at her tiny waist, blood-red nails, cropped auburn hair, and flawless makeup.

At fifty-six, she didn’t look that different from the fascinating beauty I used to watch on the big screen after I moved in with my grandparents. Once I’d realized that I had more in common with my dark-haired father, the sperm donor she’d only refer to as
that pasty-faced, French bastard
, and accepted the reality that I’d barely fill out a C cup, I lost any illusion of reaching anything resembling
fascinating
status. Which was okay. I couldn’t afford the upkeep.

Marietta’s gaze swept over me, and despite her last Botox injection, a little wrinkle etched between her perfectly arched brows. “Oh, sugah,” she said, using the dripping-with-honey accent she’d acquired in her mid-twenties when she got cast in a southern-fried
Charlie’s Angels
ripoff. “Ah’ve been on that divorce diet, too. It’ll come off. Trust me.”

She should know. She’d been divorced three times.

I forced a smile.

She squeezed my hand. “Ah hope I’m not inconveniencin’ you, takin’ over your room and all.”

“Of course not,” I lied, but couldn’t bring myself to do it with much conviction.

It didn’t matter because she instantly beamed, then we stared in silence at one another.

Criminy, it couldn’t have been more than two minutes and we’d already run out of things to say to one another.

She tilted her head and sniffed the air. “What’s that heavenly aroma?”

“Pot roast.”

“Ooooh, mah favorite! Let’s eat!”

Okay, in some ways, I am my mother’s daughter.

Chapter Six

“Where do you think you’re going?” Gram demanded, staring at me over the rim of her teacup as I headed for the back door. “Your mother wants to give us facials.”

Not a chance.

“Sorry,” I said, barely breaking stride. “I just remembered; I have a date.”

It was a whopper of a lie, but after two hours with my mother grilling me like a patty melt about my divorce, the only way I was going to make it through the evening twitch-free was to vacate the premises.

Heaving a sigh, Gram leaned back in her easy chair. “Sure, abandon me.”

I kissed her plump cheek and grabbed my car keys. Ten minutes later, I arrived at Eddie’s Place.

Eddie’s featured the best pizza in town, and a couple dozen beers on tap, served up in a renovated red brick warehouse too far off the beaten path to benefit from the tourist trade, making it the local watering hole of choice.

Tonight, Jon Bon Jovi belted out a song about living on a prayer through the speakers bookending the well-polished oak bar, but no one in the room was listening. Everyone, Eddie included, had their attention fixed on the Seattle Mariners game on the fifty-inch flat screen mounted in the far corner—their groans after a strikeout with the bases loaded drowning both Mr. Bon Jovi and the background clatter of bowling balls striking pins in the adjoining Merritt Lanes.

Roxanne Fiske, Eddie’s wife and my best friend since grammar school, grinned at me from behind the bar, looking pretty as always with little more than a coat of mascara on her long dark lashes. “Well, look who’s up late on a school night.”

After years of working as a pastry chef and getting up before the birds, I didn’t have much of a reputation as a night owl.

“My mother’s in town.”

“Say no more,” Rox responded, pouring beer into a frosted glass. “We’ll commiserate over that, but first we need to celebrate your first day at the new job.”

Ordinarily, I’m not a beer drinker, but since she was buying I made an exception.

Tucking back several chin-length caramel strands of hair that had escaped from behind her ear, she raised her glass. “To Char, our new … what the hell is your title?”

“Among others, Deputy Coroner.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Ewwww!”

“It’s not like that. I won’t have to see any dead bodies.” At least I hoped not.

She clinked her glass with mine. “I’ll drink to that.”

The guys behind me groaned in unison, and a human mountain in greasy denim overalls stepped up to the bar and slid an empty plastic pitcher at Rox.

George Bassett, Jr. was a beefy six-foot-six redhead with a scruffy beard and a ruddy complexion. He’d been called Little Dog ever since he had strapped on his first pair of overalls and gone to work lubing engines and rotating tires for his dad, the Big Dog, at Bassett Motor Works.

“Hey ya, Chow Mein,” he said, using the nickname that had come from hanging out with Steve in high school.

I saluted him with my beer glass. “Hey, Georgie.”

He edged closer, and I smelled engine grease mixed with sweat. I also got a whiff of the salami and onions he’d had on his pizza.

“You here alone?” he asked.

I froze. George had never come on to me before. I met Rox’s brown-eyed gaze to see if she could clue me in.

She shrugged.

I inched back, trying to get a read on him. “Yep.”

“Dang! I thought your mom might be with you.”

Like she’d want to spend her evening at the local bowling alley. “She was tired and decided to turn in early.”

“Too bad. Your mom is
hot
,” he said, blasting me with onion breath.

I smiled at Rox. “That just never gets old.”

She slid the refilled foamy pitcher of beer toward George. “You’re quite the sweet talker, Dog.”

“What?” He looked at Rox and then back to me. “She is hot. And if I said any different, you’d know I was lyin’.”

Mainly because he’d been saying the same thing ever since I first met him back in the eighth grade. “You never disappoint, Georgie.”

He nodded, satisfied. “See?” he said to Rox, as if she needed convincing.

Sipping my beer, I turned to watch him rejoin his baseball buddies and noticed a willowy woman in her mid-forties entering the bar. She had straight reddish-brown hair that brushed the collar of her dusty rose, linen blouse. Designer jeans hugged her slim hips. The man with her wore chinos and a pressed, white cotton shirt. Casual, yet not completely casual.

They were on a date.

“Who’s that?” I asked Rox as the couple sat at a table in the far corner.

She followed my gaze. “You don’t recognize Nell?”

The only Nell I knew had thick glasses and mousy brown hair pulled back in a long braid and spent her evenings at home taking care of her mother, who had become a shut-in after she’d had a series of heart attacks.

Tonight, nothing about this woman seemed mousy. “That’s Nell Neary?”

Rox nodded. “It was a shame about her mom, but maybe that was a blessing in disguise.”

With everything I’d learned today, that blessing was feeling more unholy by the minute.

The crowd gathered around the flat screen roared. Something big had just happened. I came to the same conclusion when I saw Bernadette Neary’s daughter lean into her date’s shoulder, laughing, happy—probably for the first time in years.

Before I’d met Dr. Cardinale, I wouldn’t have given this date a second thought. But now, Jayne Elwood, Ernie Kozarek, and Nell Neary appeared to have something in common besides a dearly departed loved one.

* * *

After four sleepless hours of cursing the invention of the hide-a-bed, I headed for the upstairs bathroom like a punch-drunk boxer staggering to a neutral corner. One steamy shower, two cups of coffee, and three aspirin later, my back still ached like it had been pummeled by the
Crippler
, but at least I felt capable of stringing together a couple of coherent sentences.

I blasted my hair with my blow dryer, then applied a few swipes of mascara, a dab of concealer to minimize the circles under my eyes, and a swish of my mother’s bronzer to add a little glow to my chipmunk cheeks. Not that I should care that much about how I looked this morning.

Although if Kyle Cardinale were to give me another once-over like yesterday, I might care.

After smoothing on a layer of copper glaze lip gloss and checking my look in the mirror, I shrugged into a black and blue plaid tunic, which matched how I felt. Fortunately, I could still zip my black cotton twill fat pants. Barely. All the more reason for me to change into a pair of sweats and go for a jog instead of heading over to the hospital in the middle of the night. Of course, that meant I’d have to do the hair and makeup thing over again in an hour. Not happening. It was enough effort the first time around. Instead, I opted to burn a few calories by going on the hunt for a hot doctor.

Ten minutes later, I found Kyle Cardinale in the hallway outside the ER. No chocolate pudding stains on his white lab coat this time.

The corners of his mouth curled into a charming smile as he watched me approach. “You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“There’s a lot of that going around.”

I pointed at the deserted ER lobby. “Could we talk for a few minutes?”

“Sure, it’s pretty dead right now.”

Dark humor? Considering Dr. Cardinale had taken it upon himself to report the suspicious nature of Trudy’s death, if he were joking, this whistleblower was one cool cat.

“So to speak,” he added sheepishly.

I took a moss green vinyl chair next to a sparsely stocked magazine rack. He sat to my left, facing the ER desk. His knee grazed mine as he stretched out his legs.

He didn’t say anything about the knee contact, and I shifted in my seat to give him a little more room, which drew a little flash of amusement.

Reminding myself I’d just divorced an Italian and had no intention of hooking up with another one, even if he was a charming doctor, I pulled out a pen and my list of potential victims from my tote bag to get down to business. “You mentioned a pattern yesterday. Along with Trudy Bergeson, two patients of Dr. Straitham’s who died suddenly.”

His gaze hardened. “We already talked about this.”

“I know. I wanted to ask you about two other patients who died at the hospital—Rose Kozarek and Jesse Elwood.”

Kyle frowned. “I don’t recognize the names.” He reached for the spiral notebook in my hand. “May I?”

“They died over a year ago,” he said after a quick scan of my victims list, then handed the notebook back to me. “I didn’t start working here until last January, so I never saw them.”

“There’s an indication that they could have died under similar circumstances.” I neglected to mention that the indication had come from Lucille.

“This might be an unusual request,” and I was sure it was, “but could you find out who was on duty that night?”

He shrugged. “I can look it up.”

“And while you’re doing that, see what you could find out about how they died?”

“Anything else you’d like me to do?”

The laugh lines at the corners of his eyes deepened when I took too long to consider my options.

“Not officially,” I said, all too aware of the burn creeping into my cheeks.

I wrote my name and cell number on the back of one of Frankie’s business cards and handed it to him. “I don’t have any business cards yet.” I also didn’t know my phone number at the courthouse, but that was a pesky little detail he didn’t need to hear.

He tucked the card into his breast pocket and started to push away from the chair.

“I do have a couple of questions about the other patients of Dr. Straitham that you mentioned.”

Kyle’s jaw tightened. “Okay,” he said softly, his knuckles white as he settled back in his seat while his gaze played ping pong between a ringing telephone at the ER desk and a sandy blonde nurse zipping down the hallway.

Since this clearly wasn’t a conversation he wanted to continue, I knew I needed to get to the point before my information source decided he’d rather play doctor than detective.

I pulled the four death certificates I’d printed from the inside pocket of my notebook. “Their death certificates don’t appear to suggest anything unusual.”

“I wouldn’t expect them to.”