When Magic Is Murder (Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries Book 4) (7 page)

CHAPTER
14

I was organizing the walk-in cooler
at Sky High an hour later when Julia told me there were two people in my
office.

“Are they from Publishers Clearing
House by any chance?”

Her face remained tight. “It’s
Connie Larson and some chump with a black eye the color of a Japanese
eggplant.”

I complimented Julia on the
colorful description. Then I quickly finished the shelf I was arranging, closed
the walk-in door and crossed the kitchen to the small hallway that lead to my
office.

“…whatever else you do,” Connie was
saying as I came through the door. “You need to be honest.”

The guy with the shiner was slumped
in one of the guest chairs, elbows planted on his knees and his chin propped up
by two hands the size of baseball mitts. When he saw me enter the office, he
quickly got to his feet.

“Hi, Katie,” Connie said. “This is
Shane Scott.”

The man held out one of his fleshy
paws. When we shook, I was glad he went easy on me. He looked like a wrestler,
all muscle, no neck and a crooked nose that had probably been broken more than
once.

“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Reed,”
he said, lowering his considerable bulk into the chair again.

“Likewise,” I said. “Thanks for
coming in this morning.” I smiled at Connie, but she was biting her lower lip
like someone trying not to cry. “How was your meeting with Dina?”

Shane started to answer, but Connie
reached over and put one hand on his arm.

“It was fine,” she said, removing
the hand. “Shane told her all about the fight with the man Eloise found in the
gazebo. And that’s all we talked about.”

I nodded. “She actually stopped by
here a little while ago to ask me what I knew.”

Connie’s mouth trembled slightly.
“Why?” she asked. “Is she upset that I wanted your help?”

“She was just reminding me that
she’s conducting the official investigation. It’s not a concern, so don’t think
it means anything more than that. Dina and I get along fine. We’re actually old
friends.”

Connie shifted in her chair. “And
you also know the Chief of Police, right?”

“Deputy Chief,” I said, glancing at
Shane. “That’s Trent Walsh. He, Dina and I went to high school together. But
we’re not here to talk about me; I want to learn more about what happened the
other night.”

Shane grunted softly. “It was no
big deal.”

“Except it seems that the man you
argued with was found dead in the gazebo at Connie’s hotel,” I said. “That
makes it of keen interest to the police.”

“And us,” Connie said.

“That’s right,” I agreed, keeping
my eyes on Shane. “And that’s why I need to know everything you remember about
the incident.”

He inhaled slowly, his nostrils
flaring and the muscles in his massive jaw clenching.

“Take your time, Shane,” I said
after a few silent moments. “It’s important that you tell me as much detail as
you can remember.”

He nodded, swallowing hard. “Well,
I was pretty much having a good time, you know? Me and Jasper had been talking
about shooting some pool for a while. Since our nights off aren’t usually the
same, it was a rare opportunity to hang out.”

“And drink a few beers?” I asked.

“More than a few,” he said,
frowning. “We got pretty door-knobbed, and—”

I stopped him with one hand.
“Door-knobbed?”

“Hammered,” he said with a faint
smile. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know how much we had.”

“Too much,” Connie muttered,
kneading her hands anxiously in her lap.

“Yeah,
way
too much,” Shane
said. “But that’s the whole reason we got into it with that jerk.”

“Did he say something about you
being…door-knobbed?”

Shane smiled again. “No, but
neither one of us would’ve ever let that broad get so up in our faces if we’d
been sober.”

“That broad?”

Connie made a derisive sound in her
throat. “Whitney Morgenson,” she sneered. “Do you know her?”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe
so. Who is she?”

“Who
is
she?” Connie
repeated. “She’s trouble, that’s who! I also think she had something to do with
the dead guy that—”

“Let’s call him John Doe,” I
suggested. “Until we know his real name. There’s something about calling him
‘the dead guy’ that just seems so heartless.”

“Okay, so John Doe,” Connie
continued. “I wasn’t trying to be unkind. I just don’t know his name.”

“None of us do,” I said. “But we will
soon enough. Now that Dina is aware of the tussle at Bier Haus, she’ll be able
to pull surveillance video and get a look at John Doe and his lady friend.”

“We already know who she is,”
Connie said. “Her name’s Whitney, the former Las Vegas singer who married
Tucker Morgenson after they’d known each other for about a minute!”

I didn’t know Tucker. Or Whitney.
But I wasn’t concerned about that; I wanted to hear what Shane had to say about
the fight at the Bier Haus.

“Okay, so Whitney Morgenson,” I
said. “You guys were drinking and playing pool and having a good time?”

Shane nodded.

“But then Whitney came over and
started—what? Making overtures?”

The big guy in my guest chair
snorted. “You can call it that,” he said. “She was basically rubbing all over
me and asking if I wanted to take a ride in her Maserati.”

“Was she talking about a car?” I
asked. “Or was that a euphemism for something else?”

He frowned. “Huh?”

“Never mind.” I smiled and waited
until the fog had cleared from his eyes. “So, Whitney asked if you wanted to
ride in her fancy sports car?”

Connie scoffed. “More like her
husband’s
car.”

I smiled. “I take it Tucker’s a
wealthy guy?”

“Very much so,” said Shane.
“According to his wife, he owns that big spread up on Coldwater.”

Before I could picture which
property Shane was talking about, Connie told me it had once belonged to Judge
Henry Ashworth. I smiled fondly at the mention of the name. Everyone in
Crescent Creek knew the dear departed judge with the snow white hair, flashy
diamond rings and a habit of dozing off during especially lengthy late
afternoon sessions.

“Oh, my goodness!” I said, suddenly
making the connection. “Tucker Morgenson is the Silicon Valley guy?”

“One and the same,” Connie said.
“He bought Judge Ashworth’s ranch for about half of what it was worth.”

I remembered hearing about the
transaction from my mother a few years earlier. Judge Ashworth had amassed one
of the largest estates in the county. After he retired and his wife passed
away, he’d sold their house in Crescent Creek and put the ranch on the market.
He planned to buy a place in Arizona, but then died suddenly from a heart
attack and left the remaining real estate to his children. Since the son and
daughter were locked in a bitter feud that had begun when they were much younger,
Judge Ashworth’s attorney suggested lowering the asking price on the ranch. In
the end, the Ashworth children sold it for far below market value, something my
mother told me about in exhaustive detail. “And the buyer’s a hotshot computer
whiz from Silicon Valley,” she’d explained. “He made over a hundred million on
some website thingy.” I smiled briefly at my mother’s encyclopedic memory of
all things Crescent Creek before turning to Shane.

“I guess you never took that spin
in the Maserati, huh?”

He laughed, a throaty croak that
filled my tiny office. “Never even saw the car,” he said. “Once that dude she
was with realized what was happening, he just came on like a freight train. He
clocked Jasper with a left hook before we even knew what was going down.”

“Like Jasper?”

Shane squinted. “What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I meant, like
Jasper going down after a wicked punch.”

“Ah, I get it. But you’re wrong;
Jasper didn’t hit the floor. He spun around, shook it off and then lunged at
the guy.”

“Is that when Eli gave you boys the
heave-ho?”

“Basically.” Shane sounded annoyed
that the fight had been interrupted. “Although I know we could’ve turned him
inside out if we had the chance. And the guy totally deserved it, too. He was
calling that woman some terrible names and threatening to dump her for another
chick here in town.”

I nodded. “So our John Doe was
quite the ladies’ man?”

Connie scoffed. “He sounds like a
tool,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”

CHAPTER
15

Since I was already going to the
bank that afternoon, I decided to make one extra stop to ask Eli Odom about the
fight Jasper and Shane had with the man found in the gazebo.

The Bier Haus bartender was exactly
as Zack had described him: tall, brawny and bearded. His dark hair was buzzed
into a crew cut and he kept the facial hair trimmed. His arms were twin
tapestries of art—sleeve tattoos blending red, black and blue ink—and both
wrists were looped with wide leather bands.

“Howdy,” Eli said when I walked in
the door. “What can I get for ya?”

“How about a few workout tips?”

He tossed a white bar towel over
his shoulder and smiled. One of his front teeth was capped with gold; the only
thing he was missing was an eye patch, a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder.

“You look pretty fit to me, ma’am,”
he said.

I eased up onto a bar stool,
introduced myself and ordered a glass of club soda with lime.

“Comin’ right up,” Eli replied.

It was my first visit to Bier Haus,
so I glanced around the room. A guy from Salt Lake City had opened three
locations in Colorado within the past year. The one in Crescent Creek was a few
months old, but it had already earned a stellar reputation for cold beer, hot
sourdough pretzels and a laidback vibe. Since it was around four o’clock, there
were only a couple of guys sipping their brews at a high-top near the pool
tables.

“Here you go,” Eli said, sliding a
glass in my direction. “Care for a pretzel to go with that?”

I shook my head. “I’m cutting back
on carbs,” I said, digging for my wallet. “But I’ve heard all about them.”

He smiled. “Yeah, we got written up
in some paper down in Denver. One of those freebie deals. They pretty much
raved about the pretzels and mustard selection.”

“Was it
Westword
?”

“Could be. I’m not much of a
reader.”

I nodded. “Business good?”

“Yep. Friday and Saturday nights
are wall-to-wall. We do karaoke on Monday and Tuesday. Half-priced ale and
pretzels on Thursday.”

“What about Wednesday?”

He laughed. “Ale’s still cold,” he
said. “But there’s no discount.”

We made small talk for a few more
minutes about dealing with unruly customers and tending bar in a small town.
Then I asked if we could talk about the fight from earlier in the week.

“Which one?”

“Seriously?”

Eli pulled the towel from his
shoulder and idly polished the oak bar. “Yeah. This has been a crazy week. I
blame it on the full moon.”

“Tends to make some people nuttier
than normal.”

He smiled. “Of course, some people
are just born that way.”

“Like the guy who was here with
Whitney Morgenson?”

The smile disappeared. “I got no
comment on that,” he said.

“Because…”

He shrugged. “On account of the
guy’s dead now.”

“Has Detective Kincaid stopped by
to see you?”

“Some guy named Walsh,” Eli said.
“Deputy dog or whatever.”

I nodded. “Or whatever.”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong. As far
as cops go, the dude was fine. But I don’t know anything about some guy getting
killed over at the hotel.”

“Any chance I could take a look at
the surveillance footage from that night?”

Eli grunted. “Yeah, sure. If there was
any. Our system got jacked a couple days before that. I called the service
tech, but the soonest he could come fix it is next Wednesday.”

“That’s a long time to go without
security cameras,” I said.

He reached under the bar and came
back with a weathered baseball bat. “I got Babe Ruth here in the meantime.”

“Your bat’s name is Babe Ruth?”

He nodded. “My old man used to talk
about him all the time. I did some checking around and found out he wasn’t
blowin’ smoke. There really was a baseball player back in the day named Babe
Ruth. Before then I thought it was just a candy bar name that got misspelled.”

“Right,” I said. “The name can be
sort of confusing. Good thing your dad clued you in about the real deal.”

He stowed the bat and asked again
if I wanted to try a sourdough pretzel.

“Not today,” I said. “But I like
the atmosphere in here. And it’s been forever since I played pool. I’ll
definitely be back to shoot a few.”

“Nice,” he said. “That’s what I
like to hear.”

“Okay, so no video of the fight?”

He shrugged. “Sorry.”

“But you witnessed it, right?”

He lifted one arm to reveal four
parallel red marks down the back of his meaty bicep. “I witnessed the whole
thing,” he said. “And I got the souvenirs to show for it.”

“Did Whitney Morgenson do that to
your arm?”

“Whatever her name is,” he said.
“She’s a mess, man. I saw it the first time she came in here.”

“Was she with John Doe?”

He frowned. “Who?”

“The gentleman that was with her
the night of the fight,” I explained. “The guy that was found in the gazebo at
Crescent Creek Lodge.”

“Oh, sorry! No, the first time she
was with some dude that had orange skin, like he sleeps in a tanning bed.
Cheech told me that’s her husband.”

“Tucker Morgenson.”

Eli shrugged. “If you say so. I
don’t remember what he said the guy’s name was.”

“And Cheech is…”

“My weeknight bartender,” he said.
“Good dude. Real funny and takes excellent care of the customers.”

“Including Tucker and Whitney
Morgenson?”

“Yeah, that guy only came in here with
her the once. She’s been back a bunch of times, but always with another dude on
her arm.”

“Maybe a brother?” I suggested. “Or
a good friend of the family?”

He answered with another snort.
“More like a Romeo she’d met on one of them dating sites.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, or one time it was with a
married guy.”

“How do you know he was married?”

Eli’s smile was laced with
mischief. “Because his wife blew through the door while Whitney and her date
were whispering to each other in that booth over there.” He tipped his head
toward the far side of the bar. “The wife made a beeline across the room,
grabbed her husband by one ear and yanked the guy outside while everybody
watched.”

“Do you know their name by any
chance?”

He answered with a frown. “Nope,
sorry.”

“Are they regulars?”

Another frown. “Nah, but I heard
the guy ended up filing for divorce.”

“There’s a lot of that going
around,” I said.

“Yeah, I suppose so,” Eli grumbled.
“What’s that statistic they’re always quoting? Fifty percent of marriages are
doomed?”

I smiled. “Which means fifty
percent are happily ever after.”

“There ya go,” he said. “Always
look on the bright side.”

“I try to.”

The door opened and I glanced over
my shoulder. It was Theo Fry, a regular at Sky High Pies. He saw me and waved.
I returned the greeting.

“Did you happen to hear how Whitney
met John Doe?” I asked. “You said something a second ago about meeting Romeos
online.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s what Cheech
thinks, but I don’t know for sure. And I don’t wanna know.” He flashed another
smile; a quick sparkle of white and gold. “Know what I mean?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “So Cheech
thinks Whitney met John Doe online?”

“Could be,” he said. “But, like I
already told you—I don’t wanna know. None of my business.”

“But it sort of became your
business the other night?” I suggested. “When John Doe got into a brawl with
Jasper and Shane from the Lodge?”

“She started it,” Eli muttered.
“Just an airhead with fake boobs and a big diamond ring. Wanna know my opinion?
If I was her husband, I’d drop her so fast the dye would fly off her hair.”

“Bottle blonde?” I asked.

“You got that right! Fake hair,
fake tan, fake boobs. The only real thing about that chick is the fact that she
cheats on her husband with a new guy every few weeks.”

I frowned. “I’m really sorry to hear
that.”

Eli howled. “Ah, c’mon! The rich
dude has to know what’s going on.”

“Maybe yes,” I said. “And maybe no.
Either way, it’s an unfortunate situation.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. But that
particular situation was coming to a close.”

I asked what he meant by the
comment—the Morgenson’s marriage or Whitney’s dalliance with John Doe.

Eli chuckled again. “Dalliance,” he
said, giving me another peek at his showy gold tooth. “That’s a funny word.” He
took my glass and refilled it. “But I was talking about the affair,” he said,
putting a new coaster under my club soda. “As I escorted the lady and her boy
toy out the back door, I heard her telling him she was thinking about being
loyal to her husband again.”

“Ouch,” I said. “How’d John Doe take
that?”

“Wanna know the truth?”

“Always,” I said.

“I think it actually broke the
guy’s heart,” Eli said. “From what he said that night, the sucker didn’t even
know she was married.”