Killer Pancake Part 5

"Don't worry, I'll be here every day," I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper. "Please call me if anything unusual develops with her situation. Will you be checking on her every day?"

He wrinkled his face in incredulity. "Of course." He looked at me unblinkingly through his spectacles that were so thick they reminded me of old c.o.ke bottle bottoms. "She may get very depressed. It's a common response to heart attack. Even if we can bring her back to health, she's going to need you to give her courage and support. Are you going to be able to help with that?"

It was my turn to give him an incredulous look. I pressed my lips together and nodded.

The second time I saw Marla that afternoon she slept through the whole ten minutes of my visit. Her chest rose and fell weakly inside the drab blue hospital gown that was nothing like her customary flamboyant outfits. I closed her hand lightly so as not to disturb her. Her lips, ordinarily lush with lipstick, were dry and cracked, and her breathing seemed uneven, I had seen a young woman dead that morning. Now more than anything I wanted to hold on to this friend who was closer to me than any sister could have been.

I resolved to call our church as soon as I got home. Marla was both popular and active at St. Luke's. She chaired the annual Episcopal Church Women's jewelry raffle and animated the monthly vestry meetings with her irrepressible bra.s.siness and wit. If I didn't let the parish know what was going on, I'd be the recipient of some very unchristian phone calls. I also needed to find out about arranging for a private nurse to come in as soon as the hospital discharged Marla.

I tried to make more mental lists but ended up driving home in a stupor. When the tires crunched over the gravel driveway, I was thankful to see that Tom had squeezed his Chrysler into our detached garage next to Julian's Range Rover. Arch bounded in my direction as soon as I came through the security system. He was sporting the result of his afternoon of tie-dying: a T-s.h.i.+rt big enough for a quarterback and a pair of knee-length shorts streaked with vivid orange and purple splotches. I didn't care what he looked like. I swept him into my arms and twirled him around in a circle. When, breathless, I let go of him, he stepped back, astonished.

"Hey, Mom! Get real! What's going on? I mean, what's happening?" He pushed his gla.s.ses up his nose and eyed me. From his puzzled but happy response, I guessed Tom had not yet told Arch about the events of the morning. "Where've you been?" he continued suspiciously. "Tom brought Julian home but he's lying down. Everybody around here is out of it. But look." He stepped back dramatically and held out his thin arms. "Is my outfit cool or what?" A proud smile broke out over Arch's freckled face as he waited for my a.s.sessment. I was not about to tell this just-turned-thirteen-year-old that the spotted, too-large outfit hung from his bony shoulders and small torso like something salvaged from a large person's clothesline.

"It is cool," I agreed emphatically. "Really. You look absolutely, positively great."

He turned his mouth down in an exaggerated frown. "Mom? You're not tripped out or anything, are you?"

"Do you know what being tripped out means?"

Arch scratched his belly under the s.h.i.+rt. "Forgetful? That's what they used to say, 'I can't remember anything, man, I was tripped out-'"

"Look, I'm fine. I'm only in my thirties, remember, and I was just a kid during the period you're talking about. Where's Tom?"

"Cooking. I told him to fix something groovy from the sixties and he said the only groovy food he knew was hash brownies. That's disgusting! How can you put corned beef hash in brownies?"

It was going to be a tiresome hobby. When I entered the kitchen, Tom was bent so intently over a recipe that I repressed the greeting on my lips. The walls had been cleaned of the cocoa powder thrown by the Jerk, and lump crabmeat glistened invitingly on the countertop next to a tall green bottle of white wine. A seasoned crepier waited next to a wide saute pan, where b.u.t.ter for a sauce sizzled in a slow, circuitous melt. Tom relished cooking even more than gardening. I happily let him do both. I'd take c.r.a.pes stuffed with crabmeat in white wine sauce any day. Especially when it was made by somebody else.

As I watched, Tom leaned over the crabmeat and methodically nabbed and tossed bits of sh.e.l.l and cartilage. I felt a surge of pleasure. It was not only that I now lived in a household where people vied to prepare the food. Nor was it, because of the day's events, that I'd developed a sudden appreciation for life. This unsettling joy surfaced because I still didn't know why I'd been so reluctant to marry the man who now stood in what used to be my domain and was now our kitchen.

I watched the b.u.t.ter dissolve into a golden pool. Of course, my hesitancy stemmed from all that bad history of my first marriage. After I'd left the Jerk I'd come to relish those years of single motherhood and solitude. Except for the celibacy, which I kept telling myself I'd get used to, being single const.i.tuted the perfect life for me, I'd decided. Until Tom.

Nevertheless, transition from my fiercely maintained aloneness to daily companions.h.i.+p did have its glitches. There had been the financial questions. Years ago, the divorce settlement from Dr. John Richard Korman had paid for the expensive retrofit of my kitchen for commercial food service, and I couldn't leave it and still maintain my business. So Tom had moved in with Arch, Julian, and me, and found a renter for his cabin in a remote mountain area. He insisted on putting the rent money into a vacation fund for the four of us. Of course, as a self-employed woman with the only catering business in town, I'd forgotten what the word vacation meant.

These and other material aspects we'd been able to work out fairly well. Our biggest problem was anxiety. Tom worried about me and I returned the favor. Tom had seen some of the damage done by John Richard Korman before our split. He knew my left thumb didn't bend properly because John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer. Tom had examined the hutch gla.s.s I'd never replaced after John Richard had shattered it in one of his rampages, and the buffet permanently dented from the Jerk's repeated kicking when I'd been hiding behind it. After Tom moved in, one of his first acts was to replace the hutch gla.s.s and sand and refinish the buffet's dents.

My apprehension over the dangers of his job were legion. Whenever I heard over the radio of a shooting, whenever a midnight phone call brought him out of our warm bed, whenever that midnight phone call meant that before he left he was cinching the Velcro bands around his white bulletproof vest, my heart ached with fear. My anxiety had not been eased when a murderer had kidnapped Tom for four days this spring, just as we were about to be married. He scoffed and said that had been a bizarre event. He hadn't even believed it himself.

Nor did Tom and I quite know how to talk to each other about our work. Tom claimed he enjoyed discussing investigations with me as long as I wouldn't get upset. Or worse, tell anybody what he or I had uncovered. To me, Tom always appeared either in control: when he was surrounded by his team in an investigation, or in relaxed good humor, when we were together and he was telling me about bloodstain patterns or check-kiting. I, on the other hand, did not relish rehas.h.i.+ng the trials of cooking for, serving to, and cleaning up after the rich and shameless. Occasionally I would regale him with stories about the Thai guest at a reception for two hundred who'd insisted on giving me his recipe for whole baked fish-in Thai, or about the drunk Polo Club host who fell off his horse before eating one bite of the vegetarian s.h.i.+sh kebabs.

Reflecting on all this, I'd failed to notice that Tom had stopped cooking and was staring at the cupboard above the kitchen counter, his face twisted with pain.

"Tom! What is it?"

Startled, he dropped the sh.e.l.l bits he was holding. I apologized and helped him wipe them off the floor. By the time he straightened up, he had a.s.sumed his normal end-of-the-day relaxed look. Still, I was taken aback. In the two months that we'd been married, I'd never seen him look agonized. Until now. Despite his disclaimers to the contrary, the job did take its toll, after all.

He forced a wide grin. "Hey there, Miss G."

"What's wrong?"

"No more than usual." He rinsed his hands and dried them on a dish towel "Julian's okay, he just needs to rest. I think he's asleep. Did you get in to see Marla?"

I hugged him briefly and murmured that I had. Which reminded me. I phoned the St. Luke's answering machine and left a brief message about Marla's condition, then left another message for a woman in the parish who had once hired a private nurse. Did she have any recommendations? I asked her tape. Then I washed my hands and glanced at the recipe before retrieving some fresh garlic. Alas, the Jerk had carried off my knives somewhere.

"Marla was very angry. Claimed she hadn't had a heart attack," I commented over my shoulder as I looked around the dining room for my knifeblock. This seldom-used s.p.a.ce was a monument to my former life as a doctor's wife. It looked like a furniture store. I'd bought the solid cherry buffet, hutch, and dining room suite right after my first wedding. Then I'd feverishly crocheted an enormous tablecloth and undertaken the tiresome needlepointing of floral covers for the chair seats. I should have been taking a karate cla.s.s. Better yet, shooting lessons. I hefted up the knifeblock from the table and brought it back to the kitchen.

"I'm guessing Marla will be home at the beginning of next week," I told Tom as I sniffed a clove of garlic. The garlic was fresh and juicy; its pungent smell filled the air. I told Tom what the cardiologist had told me about Marla's condition and her upcoming angiogram and potential atherectomy. "I'm going to go in and see her every day," I added defiantly as I minced. But of course Tom wouldn't be jealous if I made a daily visit to a friend. I shook my head and reached for another clove of garlic. Old reactions died harder than I thought.

Tom turned back to his recipe card and abruptly changed the subject. "How did Korman get through the security system?"

"Look, it was a fluke ... I was in the middle of undoing the dead bolt, and the phone rang, and he hollered that there was some bad news ... and before I knew it, he was right beside me ... I just wasn't careful."

"Are you all right?" He glanced up from the recipe card, his mouth in a thin line.

When I said I was, he frowned disbelievingly.

"Sorry," I amended, "it won't happen again." And there went my summer breeze through the unsecured upstairs windows, I thought. "What did the hospital say about Julian? Is there any special treatment?"

He dropped ingredients into the melted b.u.t.ter. The delectable scent of crabmeat and garlic rose from the pan. "He just needs to rest. We probably shouldn't talk about the accident around him. Not just yet, anyway, although we'll have to eventually." He reached for a wooden spoon and stirred in flour to make a roux.

"Why not talk to him about it? And why will you have to eventually?"

Tom exhaled deeply. "Goldy, he looked G.o.d-awful coming home from the hospital. I just don't want to upset him anymore. He cried off and on all the way up the interstate. I don't think I've ever seen that kid in tears."

"Maybe if he talks about it he'll feel better."

Tom stopped stirring and gave me a half-grin. "Well, Miss Psych Major, I know that's true. But we've got a lot of unknowns right now, and I'm not sure Julian should hear about them just yet."

"Unknowns?"

He whisked broth into the sauce, set it to simmer, and then trundled over to the walk-in refrigerator. A moment later he emerged with two bottles of carbonated apple cider, one of Arch's favorites. He opened a bottle and poured us each a gla.s.s full of spritzy gold bubbles. The icy drink was heavenly after the heat of the day.

Tom said, "This mess with Claire Satterfield looks real bad. I'm going to be tied up with it for the foreseeable future."

"But I thought the state patrol handled traffic accidents-"

"It wasn't an accident," he said curtly. He drained his gla.s.s. His deep green eyes regarded me grimly. "The patrolman and I saw acceleration marks on the garage floor. They're very different from deceleration marks. That's what you get when somebody's trying to stop."

"You mean you can-wait! Acceleration? Somebody saw her? Somebody saw her and ... sped up? Oh, my Lord-"

He nodded. "And our one eyewitness," he said, "or the one person who thinks he might be an eyewitness, observed a dark green truck veer out of the garage." He stood up to check on his sauce. "We found an eighty-seven green Ford pickup parked by the outside entrance of Prince & Grogan. Stolen. Dented on the grille where it could have hit someone. Coroner's office will match that up with impact marks on the victim."

I said weakly, "Impact marks? You mean bruises? And wasn't there any blood on the grille?"

"The body doesn't have time to bruise." I closed my eyes. "Sometimes there's blood on the vehicle, sometimes there isn't," he went on. "This time there wasn't. The only blood was on the garage floor, from when her head hit the pavement. Unfortunately, there's not a single discernible hair or fingerprint inside the truck. At least so far. Our guys are working on it. We're grasping for anything." He paused. "But here's something. You were the closest person that we know of to the scene of the crime. Relatively near the body, you found that flower."

"You don't think-"

"I have no idea, it's probably nothing. But every now and then you get a hunch. When a flower so perfectly fresh is found by the scene of what we're now realizing was a homicide, we have to get it a.n.a.lyzed. So I took a picture of it and sent it to the American Rose a.s.sociation."

"Sheesh, that is grasping for straws. What do you mean, our guys are working on the truck?"

He measured out white wine and stirred it into the bubbling crabmeat mixture. "As I said, we're now treating Miss Satterfield's death as a homicide. State patrol's out, we're in." His big body sighed. "So. Now all we have to do is figure out who would want to kill her. That's why I'm going to have to talk to Julian as soon as he's feeling a little better. The team's working on the evidence too. We need to figure out who could smash into her like that and then leave. Without being seen. We're thinking the perp either had another car right there, or went right back inside the mall."

"I don't believe somebody could do that without anybody seeing."

"Believe it. People usually are just minding their own business." He swirled Parmesan cheese into the sauce. "Poor Julian."

"What about those demonstrators? Think this could be something they'd do out of spite against Mignon Cosmetics? Because Claire worked for them?"

"At this point, nothing can be ruled out. We're getting the demonstrators' names and addresses. The usual drill."

My gla.s.s was long empty. I needed something else to do with my hands. So I set about a.s.sembling ingredients for a fruit cup-luscious, ripe cantaloupes, strawberries, grapes, bananas. I chopped and sliced and arranged the fruit in concentric circles, trying to bring a similar order to this chaos of news.

At length I poured myself another gla.s.s of cider and said, "Remember the guy I dumped the vegetables on?"

Tom's smile was enormous: back to his old self. "One of your better moments, Miss G. What about him?"

"And remember Frances Markasian?"

"Goldy, how could anyone forget a reporter who looks like a Caucasian Bob Marley and dresses like a cla.s.s in salvage?"

I told Tom that Frances seemed to have ferreted out the activist to interview him and that his name was Shaman Krill Not only had Frances somehow learned that Julian was only the most recent of Claire's many boyfriends, but she also seemed, like Tom and the state troopers, to believe Claire's death was no accident. Tom turned the stove off, held up one hand, and dug out his trusty spiral notebook.

"Other boyfriends. Thinks Claire was run down. How'd she come to these conclusions, did she say? Maybe I should give her a ring."

"Right, and get an earful about her First Amendment right to protect her sources. Then she'd never tell me a thing. You should have seen her: I hardly recognized her this morning, all decked out in an expensive new dress and tame hairstyle."

He snorted with disgust. "Why was she at the Mignon banquet? Since when is southeast Furman County the beat of an Aspen Meadow reporter?"

I shrugged and sipped cider. "She said she'd heard rumors about Prince & Grogan having problems. How that translates into attending a cosmetics lunch I don't know. And please, don't ask what kind of rumors, because I already asked her and she's not saying. But I'm going down there day after tomorrow for the food fair, and tomorrow I need to pick up my check from the Mignon people-"

"Oh, Goldy, no-"

"I'm just going to ask-"

"Okay, ask." He reached over and took both of my hands in his.

"You know I think you have a great mind for these investigations. That's why I like to talk to you about them. I want your ideas."

"Sure."

He kissed my cheek. "I do, doggone it. You love to talk to people and they love to talk to you. Great. You have insights. Also great I just don't want you getting into danger."

"You act as if I'm trying to take over your job or something."

He laughed. "Are you?" Then he answered his own question. "Of course you're not. Take catering. I help you chop, right? Sometimes you even give me a little scoop to measure out cookie batter. Small jobs. Helpful jobs. 'Cuz that's all you'll trust me with, right? I don't tell you what to serve or who to serve it to. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Because you're the caterer and I'm the cop."

"Please, Tom. Let me help Julian by asking around. He loved Claire so much."

He frowned, then held up a warning finger. "Okay. On two conditions. You don't go into situations that you know are going to be dangerous. And two, if I tell you to back off, you do."

"I thought you said your work wasn't dangerous-"

"It isn't when I'm doing it. It could be for you."

I set out the forks, knives, and plates before replying. Then I said calmly, "Okay. But I'm telling you, Tom, I'm going to help Julian. Frances Markasian and I are friends, remember. Or at least sometimes we act as if we are. I have an idea where she might have found out some of these things." I told him that I'd chatted with Dusty Routt, the Mignon sales a.s.sociate, at the banquet. I'd even introduced her to Frances. After hearing about Claire's death, Frances would have felt no qualms about contacting Dusty for information.

"Routt, Routt, that name is familiar. R-o-u-t-t? There was a big bank job done in the early fifties here in Colorado by a guy named Routt. How old is this Dusty?"

"Julian's age. She lives down the street with her mother, little brother, and grandfather. Maybe the grandfather is a bank robber, although in our little town, that's just the kind of news folks love to spread, and I haven't heard a thing. Not only that, but our church helped build the house they're in. A bank robber doesn't sound like the kind of person they like to have living in houses built with charity money and sweat equity. But ... don't you remember my telling you Julian had dated Dusty a couple of times? Then she was expelled from Elk Park Prep, and they sort of broke up. At a party on Memorial Day, she was the one who introduced him to Claire."

"Let me get this straight." Tom was scribbling in his notebook. "This Dusty ... Routt works for the cosmetics people and used to go out with Julian? When Julian met Claire, Dusty had already been dumped? Why was Dusty expelled, do you know?"

I pursed my lips. "Nope. Julian was always too embarra.s.sed to ask her. You know how that school is, it was all kept very hush-hush."

"Another fact the local gossip network seems to have missed," he observed. "And Frances mentioned Claire Satterfield, former boyfriends, and the guy you trashed with roasted vegetables in the mall garage, all in the same breath? Like she thinks there's a connection?" He looked at his notebook and considered. "Sounds like somebody's doing a lot of speculating."

I ignored this. "I'm just saying the rumor is, there seem to have been former boyfriends. Would Shaman Krill have had enough time to get back up to the garage and his precious demonstrators if he'd been driving the truck that hit Claire?"

Tom stood up and ladled a spoonful of crepe batter into the hot pan. It emitted a delicious hiss. "Don't know yet. We're going to have to pace it out, time it. Are you going to call Arch to eat or should I? Think he should hear us talking about the investigation? Think he'd feel bored? Left out?"

"Talking about the investigation? Boring? You don't know Arch." I could well imagine a police-band radio becoming the next craze. When I called to the TV room that dinner was ready, Arch pleaded loudly that he was watching a rerun of Antonioni's Blow-Up and could we just save him some on a plate?

"It's a real complicated film," he yelled helpfully.

Before I could say anything, Tom called back that that would be fine. I murmured that the crepes might toughen with microwave reheating, but he shrugged my worries away.

"What about Julian?" I asked.

"What about me?" said Julian from the doorway. He slumped into a kitchen chair. He still wore his serving outfit, and his face was gray with exhaustion. I had not heard his customary footsteps on the stairs. "This looks good," he said in a tired voice as he regarded the fruit tray. "And before you ask, I'm okay."

I tossed a salad while Tom filled the crepes and put them in the oven. While I poured more cider, Tom said, "Julian? How much of our conversation did you hear?"

Julian's face reddened. "Oh, probably most of it."

"Then I need your help," Tom said matter-of-factly. "If you know the worst already and you're not going to pa.s.s out on us, then maybe you can answer some questions."

"I don't know the worst already," Julian shot back fiercely. He glared at Tom. "The worst I know is that she's dead and we don't know who did it, okay? That's the worst so far. What else is there?"

Tom continued calmly. "Do you know if Claire had other boyfriends?"

"Yeah, she had some. I don't know who they were. But she was here on a twelve-month visa, do you think she was just going to spend all day behind the Mignon counter and then go back to her apartment and sit around?"

"Julian, please." I set a gla.s.s of cider in front of him. He ignored it.

"Well, do you think I knew her every move? I mean, come on!"

"Do you know any former boyfriends who were jealous of your relations.h.i.+p?" Tom asked.