Cremains of the Day Read online

  “It’s about time you got here,” Burton said, coming out of the salon to the right and scaring the bejesus out of me.

  I wasn’t normally a skittish or easily frazzled person. But this whole night had me seriously on edge. Waldo’s robbery, or beating, or whatever had happened to him, was affecting me more than I had thought. “I got stopped by some incredibly late flower guy on my way in. Sorry. You want some coffee? I think I’m going to make tea to settle myself down.”

  “None for me. I’m just going to go check out this guy who accosted you. No delivery guy’s going to be out this late unless he’s got pizza in his hand.”

  I let Burton tramp after the guy who reminded me of a bad dream gone good and went in search of something stronger than herbal tea. I was only able to come up with English Breakfast. With the pot on the small stove in the kitchen, I leaned back against the counter and listened for any evidence of a scuffle out on the front steps. It would have served the overbearing guy right to come up against the chief of police in our town. We might have been small, but Burton took his job—and his crew cut—very seriously.

  Burton returned as the kettle shrilled, poking his head into the kitchen and giving me the all-clear signal. “Nothing shady out on the street, girl.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, even if it was short-lived. “Why don’t we sit in here? I really don’t want to go back into the salon if I don’t have to.”

  “You’re in the salon all the time. What’s the difference tonight?”

  I did not want to tell him the difference was my ex-husband could have possibly been laid out there if things had gone differently. I couldn’t think straight with that in my head. But I didn’t go there. Instead I gave Burton a weak smile and a quick, “Please.”

  “Fine, but this is still an official inquiry.”

  “Sounds ominous.” I took a sip of perfectly doctored tea—lots of cream and more sugar than my mother would have been happy with—and tried to quell the shaking in my hands. My adrenaline was fading from the last few hours since finding Katie and Waldo. I had seen shock before when I’d shown Waldo my monthly bills for new shoes, but had rarely experienced it firsthand. Now was a different story altogether as the adrenaline wore off and the reality set in.

  “Look, you need to sit down. I need to get your story while it’s still fresh in your mind. I would have done this at the scene of the crime, but things got crazy and you fled back to the food.” Burton had been the chief of police for years. I did not like being in the same room with him due to mishaps when I was a missus. Burton had had to deal with me and Waldo numerous times over the years. I sent him away when he’d come to the door with another noise-violation call, told him to run along when he tried to give me a parking ticket, and various other things I’d rather not think of ever again. His radar was definitely one I had wanted to avoid when I left Waldo and now I was right in his direct line of sight. Sitting with him now made me feel like I was going to the pokey at any minute, even though I’d done nothing wrong. Except step out into the alley when I knew I shouldn’t have.

  I gulped the tea this time and felt it slide down to warm my throat. I could do this. I’d done a number of hard things in my life. This was the least of them. He was just looking for information. It could have been worse in some big community where I probably would have been the number-one suspect as the angry, duped ex. “I’m not a suspect?” I asked.

  “I’m certainly not ruling it out, girl. There’s unaccounted-for time and I know for a fact you stepped out into that alley after specifically being told not to. We’ve got a lot of folks who say you were over at the firehouse making chow, and then you talked to Gina. She sent you over for more kraut and then Katie says you walked in right after she’d been tied to the chair. I can’t imagine how you’d have had enough time to do all that and still come around to . . .” He looked at his notepad. “. . . Rip tape off Katie’s lip faster than she could scream ow. But I’ll do my own investigation, if you please. Some people will say anything to protect someone they like.”

  A slight smile crept across my lips. Katie had screamed a hell of a lot more than ow. But the disapproving look from Burton put the kibosh on that pretty quickly. I cleared my throat. “Sorry.”

  “This here is a serious matter, and we need to treat it with respect. I know that ex of yours was a horse’s patootie, but we have a serious issue on our hands, and I don’t know what, why, or how yet.”

  “You don’t know how?”

  “Nope. We sent him on to the hospital to get some answers. As of right now, I don’t see any definite reason that would have put him on the ground like that. He’s a little banged up and his hair wasn’t up to its usual standards, but nothing else seems to be disturbed. He even has all his change and money, ID and credit cards. Nothing was taken and I don’t get it. Why was he out there in the alley, anyway, and how on earth did he turn up unconscious? You put him there?”

  “Of course not.” Shaken that he would even consider that, I gulped again, this time with no tea to soothe my dry throat.

  “We’ll see. We shall see.” He licked his thumb and turned the page on his notebook. “Now, do you have any idea if he had any kind of diseases or medical problems? What about enemies?”

  “Medical problems were nil. He was as healthy as the horse he was the patootie of.” That got a chuckle, but it sounded like it was given grudgingly. Especially when he cleared his throat and scowled at me. “I don’t know about enemies, though. I wasn’t aware of what he was even doing all those years and had no idea about his business dealings or business partners. I just spent his money and led my vapid, stupid life until I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  Burton patted my leg in a familiar gesture. A lot of people had done the same over the last three months, but I always felt like behind the concerned gesture was a sneer because I had thought I was so high and mighty.

  Burton, though, left no room for misunderstanding. “You were stupid, no doubt about that. And you’d be stupid to hide something from me now. I’m keeping my eye on you.”

  My cousin, Matt, who incidentally said he loved me but also had enjoyed watching my swan dive, came busting into the kitchen from the front of the building and skidded to a stop on the polished linoleum. He caught himself on the back of my chair, barely stopping in time to stay out of the cabinets behind me.

  “Just got the call from the doctor over the radio. Stun-gunned in the balls, boss.” He looked as horrified as I felt. He ducked his head and tugged on his hat when he finally looked up with a sheepish blush on his face. “Oh, sorry, Tallie.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t using them anymore anyway.”

  Chapter 3

  “Tallulah Beverly!” Burton said with a straight face before he started to cough to cover his laugh.

  “All right, so that wasn’t the most decorous thing to say, but does that mean he’s not going to die?” I admit to wishing death on him when I was in the midst of our marriage, but in reality it would be horrible for anyone to die so young.

  “Yes,” Matt cut in. “They said he’s going to be fine, only not . . . um . . . up to snuff for a little while.”

  “That was terrible,” I said with my own snicker. Waldo had gotten into more trouble with his pecker than anyone I knew, so I didn’t feel bad for thinking of him laid up but not able to get it up.

  “Okay, children, let’s get back down to business.” Burton waved Matt away. My cousin gave me a discreet wave, then headed out the door, though he didn’t actually leave. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, standing right outside the door. To keep me in or other people out?

  Would the chief of police definitely think I was involved now? I would have thought hitting someone in the balls with a stun gun must take some serious hate. I didn’t know anyone who hated anyone with that kind of passion. Certainly not me.

  “So does this keep me on your suspect list or take me off?” I asked him.

  He tapped his pen to his chin. “I
t moves you up from a maybe to a top suspect, Tallie. Don’t think you’re going to weasel out of this if you did it. Don’t leave town, got it? Either you come clean now or you let me do some serious digging and we’ll see where we end up. I don’t know if you had time to run around and shock a guy in the manhood, but I’m not ruling you out until I know for sure you didn’t do it. I need more than your say.”

  “No innocent until proven guilty?” I tapped my fingers on the side of my mug to keep my nerves at bay.

  “Not at this point. You keep your nose clean and we’ll do our investigating. I tried talking to Walden before he went to the hospital, but he refused to name anyone. Says he couldn’t see who hit him.” He scratched his chin. “First I have to find out what kind of jolt he got to the gonads and if it was prolonged.”

  I swallowed a groan as Burton crossed his legs and Matt dropped his hands to cover his own crotch in a moment of stunned silence for the poor guy. God, no one deserved that. Even if Waldo had called me a ball-buster at the end of our marriage, I still would have never wished that on anyone.

  Burton and Matt left shortly after, allowing me to sit with my rapidly cooling tea, think, and take a few breaths.

  I thumped my head on the table, then rose up when I heard the front door open and close and my mother’s voice call for me. I couldn’t face her right now.

  Sneaking up the back stairs as quietly as I could, I locked myself into my apartment three stories above the dead. After flipping on the lights, I called Gina.

  “Is there a bunch more cleanup to do?” I asked as soon as she answered.

  “No, it’s pretty much all done. I grabbed Lonny and a few other guys to help all the women get the things put away, then sent everyone home. Your uncle Sherman said the firemen would clean up the floors for us since we fed them. I’m going home now to drop into bed. Are you okay?”

  “I guess so.” Not really, but I had a lot to process through my poor little brain before I talked it out with my best friend.

  “Was it a nasty scene?”

  “No, it looked like he had taken a nap in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”

  “What I want to know is what in the hell was he doing in the back of my building, and what was Katie doing in it?”

  “The police would like to know that too. Burton said he hasn’t got a place to start at this point. But he seems pretty convinced I probably did it.”

  “What? That’s crap! There’s no way you would have had enough time and I would know if you had a stun gun.” She paused. “You don’t, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.” And thank God for that. I had thought about buying one once and was never so thankful for skipping that particular purchase. “How do you know about the stun gun? I just heard about it myself.”

  “My mom interrupted her own stories to tell me she heard it from Cherise, who heard it from Mabel, who heard it from Suzy at the station. You know how these things go.”

  Of course I did. I had been the topic of the grapevine often enough to know how fast it traveled and how widespread it was.

  “I also heard they don’t have much to go on. I can understand that,” Gina said. “Every time I got close to Katie and asked a question about what she was doing in my shop, she’d get hysterical. Then I’d get the beady eye for disturbing poor, traumatized Katie. But she didn’t look traumatized to me except for the bright red lip you gave her.”

  “I have a feeling when she looks at it in the morning, she is not going to be a happy camper.”

  “But at least she’ll be hair-free and not tied up on a chair.” Gina snorted. “I’d like to tie her up to a chair myself at this point. She refused to go to the hospital when they took Waldo. Apparently she’s just fine, unless I ask her a question. No matter how many times or ways I said anything about being in the Bean, she refuses to tell me how she got in the shop. I never gave her a key and Burton said it didn’t look like anyone had forced their way in.”

  “Does she just ignore you?” I couldn’t imagine Gina wasn’t trying to be her most persuasive, and few people got past Gina’s most persuasive.

  “She won’t give me a straight answer. Any time I get close to one she starts wailing like I’m asking her to cut her own arm off.”

  “Maybe it brings it all back for her.” Even though I was trying to give her cousin the benefit of the doubt, Gina was having none of that.

  She snorted, again. “You always were nicer than I was. She knows how pissed I am about her being in there when she shouldn’t have been, and she doesn’t want my wrath. Though if she thinks I’m not going to chew her a new one for breaking in, she’s got a version of reality that doesn’t exist here in our world.”

  “Maybe she has a key you don’t know about. You should get the locks changed.”

  “One step ahead of you, babe. Lou’s already over there taking care of it. Let’s see her try to get in again. I might just have to get my own stun gun.”

  “Gina,” I whispered, horrified and yet fighting not to laugh. “You can’t even joke about that right now. You do not want to get dragged in for questioning.”

  “Eh, let them try. On that note, I’d better go. Four a.m. is going to come awfully early to this girl. Especially since I have to be up to make enough breakfast pastries to replace everything I put out tonight, instead of getting up and working my butt off with that cute trainer they have on cable first thing in the morning.”

  “I could come over and—”

  “Uh-uh. You remember what happened when we were nine and I let you use my Easy-Bake Oven? There’s a reason you had a cook at your big fancy house on the hill with Waldo. I’ll be fine on my own. I have some raw dough for most of it tucked into the freezer at home. I’ll pull it out before I go to bed so it’s ready in the morning. Now I’m going to say good night. I hope you sleep okay. Call me when you get up in the morning.”

  “Will do.”

  “And make sure to let me know when you decide to go out with Darla’s pool boy. Did he ask you out again when you were there today?”

  “Ugh. Absolutely not. I avoid him like the plague. He’s okay-looking, but I’m not ready and I don’t want to have anything to do with anything associated with Darla.”

  “Come on, now. That’s not a valid reason for avoiding the guy.”

  “I’ve already told you no way. I have enough on my normal plate without dating someone who owes their paycheck to Darla.”

  “Come on, Tallie. He’s not all bad.”

  “I’m not discussing this. I will have to use all my mental energy to avoid the trap that is Waldo. You know he’s going to be pissed about not having use of his—uhm—equipment. He hasn’t yet completely gotten the memo that I left. I have a feeling I’ll be getting a call sometime soon to come help him out in his convalescence.”

  “Keep calling him Waldo and he’ll never even consider asking you to help.”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “You should have never married him.”

  “Preaching to the choir, sister. I was young and I thought I was in love. He whisked me off my feet with promises and gifts and more promises. I wanted out from under the way my parents expected me to join the funeral home. It was like the perfect storm of stupidity and shallowness.”

  “Yeah, well. At least it’s over now.”

  “There is that.” And maybe he wouldn’t call.

  We hung up and I sank back onto the wine-colored couch I had brought from the exercise room in my big former mansion. It was one of the few pieces Waldo had allowed me to walk away with. I’d been tempted to take more. We’d had so much he probably wouldn’t have noticed, but I was more honest than that. Plus, if I’d gotten caught, it wouldn’t have been worth the headache.

  I didn’t hear anyone coming up the stairs, so I took a chance and jumped into the shower for the third time today. I did not want to go to bed just yet, not with images of Waldo in disarray on the alley ground still swirling around in my head.

  W
hat had happened? As much as I should be concerned for Waldo—and I was, in a way like one human being for another—I figured whatever had happened, he had gotten himself into it. Who knew what pies his hand was submerged in? But it did worry me that someone out there was stun gun–happy and not afraid to use it. Plus, the whole tying up and taping Katie. It had to be the same person. But who? And why?

  Freshly washed and ready for some shut-eye, I grabbed peanut butter crackers to quell the rumbling in my belly. In the flurry of making food for the emergency responders and the police, I hadn’t actually eaten anything, just kept dishing it out. In fact, I realized I hadn’t eaten since the cruller after cleaning Darla’s house. That was never a good thing.

  With my belly finally full, I pulled the Murphy bed out of the wall before turning off every light. Tomorrow I would clean a couple of houses, beg off from others, and then go to Sherman to see if he knew anything about the who and why. The fire chief might not be buddy-buddy with the chief of police, but they did communicate.

  Mr. Fleefers, my faithless but cuddly cat, strolled in from wherever he’d been and bounced up on the bed. “Half the time I have no idea where you are. I know we have a large space to roam, but thanks for deciding to grace me with your royal presence.”

  There were some advantages to being related to Sherman, I thought as I petted the cat, who was settling in and soothing my thoughts with his purring. I wasn’t above using those advantages. If Sherman wouldn’t talk, then I could always go after my cousin Matt. Most likely I should leave well enough alone, but I couldn’t seem to let the thought go that Waldo and Katie being there at the same time, even though on opposite sides of the door, had to be more than a coincidence. Not that it was my business anymore who he slept with but, really? Katie?

  Maybe I would also put a call into Monty to find out a little more about this new flower-delivery guy. Not because I wanted to know him any better. Just because I liked to know who I was dealing with and it was best to be prepared for when my dad had a fit about the floral arrangements being delivered in less than a stellar state.