Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles Page 3

  Running a gloved finger over the surface of the threadbare carpet I came up with several more slivers clinging to my glove. Russell had probably taken his shirt off here.

  But did that happen in the last twenty-four hours? Not necessarily. For all I knew, the shirt could have been draped over this seat for the past week.

  I turned my attention to the apparel I was more interested in—Russell’s missing shoes.

  If he’d been gussied up as Fred Wixey had stated, Russell Falco would have been wearing shoes—most likely the type of shoes a man wouldn’t want to get wet. So, if he’d jumped into the water to retrieve something that had fallen overboard, he would first have removed his shoes.

  That meant I should see a pair of shoes on the stern of the Lucky Charm. But I found only a crab trap, a net, four rubber fenders and three coils of rope.

  Or he could have taken off his shoes inside the cabin to make himself comfortable. I searched under the captain’s seat, under the t-shirt, under the table. No shoes. But I did spot an unzipped black canvas duffle bag opposite the bench seat with the hand saws.

  To avoid transferring any wood splinters to the bag, I grabbed a yellow pencil from a compartment next to the table, pulled it open, and saw a pair of shoes. A pair of well-worn Reeboks that hadn’t seen white in over a year—not the shoes I had been looking for. Rolled up under the Reeboks was a grimy pair of faded blue jeans dotted with sawdust and next to it a brown leather shaving kit similar to my ex-husband’s—what he had brought with him every time he spent the night when we were dating.

  So it appeared that Russell might have been working a construction job that he traveled to by boat. Then, instead of going home yesterday to get gussied up for a date, he had changed his clothes here. But where were his shoes?

  A red feather suspended from a dreamcatcher hanging in the corner grazed my shoulder as I angled around to open the door of the head. Nothing in there but a well-used towel next to a grungy shower, and a pine air freshener that was probably supposed to mask the outhouse perfume. “Oy.” It didn’t.

  A cursory inspection of the bow revealed nothing other than a light blue dress shirt hanging next to a denim jacket in a compact closet, and a pillow on top of a rumpled green sleeping bag on the bed.

  Since I was no closer to solving the mystery of the missing shoes and I needed to make myself scarce before Steve came back, I stepped off the Lucky Charm and nodded to Howie as I ducked under the caution tape. “It’s in our mutual best interest that you don’t mention that I was here to Detective Sixkiller.”

  Howie cringed. “Shit. You didn’t touch nothin’, did you?”

  “Nope.” Hardly anything. “And that needs to be your answer when he asks if anyone got anywhere near this boat. Say it with conviction and he might even believe you.”

  Since it wouldn’t be at all believable if Steve saw me at the marina, I sprinted to my car to beat it to my grandmother’s house. While I headed up 5th Street, something niggled at me—the haunting feeling that I’d overlooked something.

  But what?

  I mentally rewound the day’s events, retracing my steps back to the Feathered Nest, where Russell had been a no-show.

  When I parked in front of Gram’s two-story Victorian, I spotted my cell phone as I reached for my tote bag and a light bulb clicked on in my brain.

  Kelsey had said she’d been trying to reach Russell by phone. A man who wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity for a job would certainly carry a cell phone, and I didn’t see one on the boat.

  Since Steve’s car wasn’t parked in the driveway across the street I pulled out my cell phone and selected his number.

  After four rings I thought I was going to have to leave a voice message and then he answered with a brusque, “Yeah?”

  Apparently my sex buddy wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. “I need some information for my report.”

  “I’m busy. Can’t this wait until later?”

  Yes, but that didn’t help me now. “Nope. But I’ll make this quick. I just need a yes or no to two questions. Did Russell have his cell phone on him?”

  He blew out a breath. “No.”

  “Did you find his shoes or cell phone on the boat and take them as evidence?”

  A few silent seconds ticked by.

  “Frankie will want to know,” I added since Steve was well-aware that my boss would expect him to keep her apprised of the chain of evidence in the case.

  “No.”

  “Then where are they?”

  It had to be highly unlikely that Russell Falco would have willingly dived into the cold waters of Merritt Bay wearing his shoes. But it was virtually impossible that he would have hit the water with his cell phone, at least by choice.

  “Someone who didn’t search that boat probably shouldn’t be asking that question.”

  Crap. “Uh ….”

  “I have to go,” Steve said before promptly disconnecting.

  I may have just been busted for the unauthorized search of Russell’s boat, but the non-answer from Mr. Less Than Forthcoming told me he’d been asking himself the same question.

  That was enough for me, especially since I also had to go. In my case, inside my grandmother’s house to make a quick pit stop, and then I needed to skedaddle to the courthouse and park myself in front of my computer to write a preliminary report for Russell’s file. At least I now had two additional important pieces of information to add to it—a pair of shoes and a cell phone that had both gone missing.

  That meant one of two things: Russell Falco had either fallen overboard, couldn’t get back onto his boat, and had removed his shoes to swim for shore, or his death was no accident.

  Chapter Four

  It was almost two in the afternoon when I stepped out of the upstairs bathroom and discovered my eighty-year-old grandmother changing my bed linens.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Gram clutched a celery-green bed sheet to her ample bosom as if I’d caught her in a compromising position. “I ….”

  I took the sheet from her. “You don’t have to do this. Part of the deal with me living here for a few months is that I help you with the chores, not the other way around.”

  Given the installment plan I was still paying off with the divorce lawyer, maybe more than a few months.

  I smoothed the sheet over the double bed. “That means that I don’t create work for you, Gram.”

  She stood at the other side of the bed and tucked in the sheet. “You didn’t,” she said, avoiding my gaze. “The fresh sheets aren’t for you.”

  Translation: My mother was back in town.

  When I was a little kid, sharing a bed with my mother had felt more like a slumber party—something I’d yearned for. Now that I was thirty-four, I had no intention of partying with Marietta and didn’t want to share. But Gram’s implication couldn’t be more clear. It was my duty as a good daughter to temporarily relinquish my claim on her guest room.

  I scanned the room for my mother’s monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage. No luggage, no hint of jasmine in the air—nothing to indicate that Hurricane Marietta had blown into Port Merritt. In fact, aside from the bed everything was exactly as I’d left it, which meant I needed to scoop up this morning’s wardrobe rejects from the floor. “Where is she?”

  “Barry is picking her up at the airport.”

  Barry Ferris was my mother’s man of the moment—the same Mr. Ferris who had been my biology teacher at Port Merritt High School. Kind, responsible, over forty—not at all her usual boy toy type. Everyone could see he was completely and utterly smitten with Marietta. She’d told me that he even wanted to marry her, the poor sap.

  Their relationship had just entered its fourth week. Over the course of the last thirty years, this typically signaled kiss off week, when my mother would kick the guy out of her Malibu home. Or worse, she’d marry him.

  For all our sakes, and especially for Mr. Ferris, I prayed that she’d let him down easy. And since
my mother would be sleeping in my bed, I hoped she’d do it soon.

  I knew the drill from her last visit, so I cleared some space for Marietta in my closet and carried a week’s worth of clothes downstairs to my grandfather’s study. There I found a couple of pillows on the hide-a-bed sofa and Gram’s fat, orange tabby, Myron, lying on the stack of bed linens she’d left for me.

  “Comfy?” I asked him.

  Myron cracked open one eye and flicked his striped tail at me as if I were invading his space.

  Obviously I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t in a sharing mood.

  “Just don’t get too comfy. This is my bed for the next few days.” Not that I welcomed the notion of sleeping on the lumpy mattress of the Crippler, as my grandfather used to call the brown Naugahyde sleeper sofa. But since my next best option would have been the king-sized bed at Steve’s house, going a few rounds each night with the Crippler might leave me battered, but it would be much less complicated.

  With my mother in town I was all for avoiding complications.

  As I draped my clothes over the back of a desk chair, I heard a door bang shut.

  My mother had always had a talent for making her presence known so I didn’t have to guess who had just made her entrance.

  “Hell-o-o, anybody home?” she sang out.

  I couldn’t be home for long if I wanted Frankie to have my preliminary report on Russell Falco first thing in the morning.

  With my mother’s entrance as my cue, I grabbed my tote and car keys and headed for the kitchen, where she was waiting for me with outstretched arms.

  “Chah-maine!” Marietta Moreau exclaimed, gliding toward me in red stilettos that gave her a two-inch advantage over my five foot six.

  Leaving Barry Ferris in her jasmine-infused wake, my mother hugged me to her double-D’s, then her manicured hands slid over my waistline like I was being frisked. “Hunay, ah do believe you’ve lost a few pounds,” the former Mary Jo Digby said in the fresh-from-the plantation accent she’d adopted in her mid- twenties after being cast in a southern-fried version of Charlie’s Angels.

  I’d probably lost three pounds since her visit last month. Unfortunately, every time I stepped into Duke’s I found them again.

  Like me, with every break-up over the years, starting with my father, the pasty-faced French bastard, who we knew better than to refer to by name in her presence, Marietta found comfort in the kitchen. Since she didn’t cook, she’d hire someone to bake her favorite chocolate fudge ripple cheesecake while paying a shrink to strengthen her fledgling coping skills.

  Unlike me, to keep her hips from spreading, Marietta had tried practically every fad diet that had come out of Beverly Hills. That didn’t mean I wanted to avail myself of her weight loss expertise or listen to her false praise about how fabulous I looked.

  I pulled out of her embrace. “Maybe a couple.” Which might be true if I skipped dinner tonight. And fat chance of that happening.

  “Ah knew it.” Marietta aimed a Botox-treated, wrinkle-resistant frown at the tote bag slung over my shoulder. “You’re not leaving, are you? I just got here!”

  “I have to go to work for a few hours.” I looked past her and smiled at Barry Ferris. “Do you need any help with the luggage?”

  “Actually, I’m not sure that it’s coming into the house,” he said, his gaze fixed on my mother.

  Her cheeks flushed the same shade of crimson as the cigarette pants hugging her long legs. “Don’t be silly. Of course the luggage is coming in.”

  She narrowed her green eyes at Mr. Ferris for a split second. As a kid I’d seen that look plenty of times, usually when she’d fly me down for a movie premiere and I acted like something less than the perfect child in front of a member of the Hollywood press corps.

  Mr. Ferris sighed. “Fine.”

  “Ah don’t know what he was thinkin’,” Marietta said, fluffing her cropped auburn hair as the door shut behind him.

  I did. After two weeks without seeing the woman he thought he loved, he wanted as much time with her as possible. Alone. At his house. If this hadn’t been my mother and my former biology teacher, I would have envied the blatant desire in their furtive glances.

  Given the fact that Marietta was making a surprise visit during kiss-off week, the less I knew about what anyone in that relationship was thinking, the better for all of us.

  “I thought I heard you come in,” Gram said with a welcoming smile as she entered the kitchen.

  Marietta swept my grandmother into her arms. “Hi, Mama.”

  I could see Gram’s hazel eyes misting over with joy. A split second later, she honed in on my tote bag like a laser.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked, frowning at me.

  “Work.” And since Mr. Ferris would be stepping back through the door any minute, spending the next couple of hours as a desk jockey had never held more appeal.

  As if reading my mind, Gram pulled away from my mother and looked out the back window at the dark blue Nissan parked in her driveway. “It’s Saturday.”

  “I know, but sometimes people die on the weekends.”

  “Who died?” Gram and Marietta asked in unison.

  “I can’t talk about the case.” Sort of true, even though this wasn’t yet an official coroner’s case. But since I didn’t know if Russell’s mother had been notified, I knew I needed to keep my mouth shut.

  Gram pursed her lips. “Will you be back in time for dinner?”

  “Maybe.” It depended on how fast I could get the report done and whether I’d be setting two extra places for my mother and Mr. Ferris.

  “I’m making pork chops and twice-baked potatoes,” Gram added as if I needed a little nudge in the decision-making department.

  She knew I was a sucker for her cheesy baked potatoes. “You don’t fight fair.”

  Gram kissed me on the cheek. “I fight to win.”

  Four hours and one preliminary report later, I was digging into an extra cheesy potato when my grandmother turned the dinner conversation to the art show date she and I had scheduled for later that evening.

  Marietta smiled at Mr. Ferris. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  Not to me it didn’t. Based on the fake smile Barry Ferris was sporting and the fact that he hadn’t had a minute alone with Marietta since they’d stepped through the door, he shared my opinion.

  “We should all go together,” Gram declared.

  Seriously, Gram?

  “And go out for dessert after. Maybe to that chocolatier next door to the Feathered Nest.” She nodded at me with the confidence of a poker player holding a royal flush. “How’s that sound?”

  Since Gram had just sweetened the pot with chocolate—my weakness—it sounded like a bribe.

  “Fabulous!” Marietta said, her eyes aglow with excitement.

  Stone-faced, Mr. Ferris met her gaze. “Yeah, fabulous.”

  For a split second my mother’s smile slipped. She fumbled with her fork, looking as ready to crumble as my first graham cracker crust.

  I didn’t know what was going on between them, but I wished they would take it somewhere else, where they wouldn’t have an audience.

  The mantel clock in the living room chimed seven times, breaking the silence as Marietta pushed her plate away, the cheese missing from her potato the only evidence that she hadn’t lost her appetite completely.

  “We should leave soon,” Gram said, chipping away at the tension in the room. “Parking on Bay Street will probably fill up fast.”

  Marietta bolted from the table like she couldn’t get away from Barry Ferris fast enough. “I’ll get my purse.”

  Mr. Ferris met my gaze over the top of his wine glass, his blue eyes hard as granite.

  “I’m so glad you could join us tonight, Barry,” Gram said like a perfect hostess.

  His lips tightened into a smile. “It was my pleasure, Eleanor.”

  No it wasn’t. Not even close.

  A half hour later at the Feat
hered Nest, Gram removed her trifocals and squinted at the thick raspberry-purple brushstrokes Lance Greenwood had used in Olympic Sunset. “Hmmmm.” Frowning, she took a step back as if some distance would make her heart grow fonder of the garish oil painting. “I give up. Where the heck is the sunset?”

  “Mama, it’s art, an interpretation of sunset.” Marietta’s bejeweled hand swept in front of the painting, fanning me with her musky jasmine. “Look at the color, the lines, the texture in this piece.”

  Gram wrinkled her nose as if she had just sniffed a piece of something else. “Uh-huh.” With her glasses back on she scanned the business card I’d tacked to the wall. “Look at the price! For that kind of money, it should dang well look like a sunset!”

  My mother clucked her tongue. “Good artwork isn’t cheap.”

  “Neither is some not-so-good artwork,” Mr. Ferris said in my ear.

  Marietta’s eyes tracked the latest love of her life as he headed for the corner wine bar. Touching the base of her throat with her fingertips, she stared down at the parquet floor as if she needed to find a hole she could disappear into.

  The throat touch thing was one of my mother’s tells—a silent alarm that everyone in the family had learned to recognize and largely ignore since it usually accompanied some drama of Marietta’s creation that none of us wanted to deal with.

  As if sensing I’d been watching her, she gave me a subtle head shake. Don’t ask.

  Fine by me. When it came to the men in her life, we’d had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy ever since she eloped with one of her TV series co-stars at the mid-season break and then divorced him after the guy’s character was killed off in the season finale. I’d always assumed she’d had a hand in his demise. The only thing Marietta ever said about it was, “Don’t ever get involved with anyone you have to work with.”

  Probably pretty good advice, but I had to work with Steve, sort of. More accurately, I needed his cooperation whenever the coroner’s office conducted a death investigation. Just how emotionally involved we were had yet to be determined.