By Cook or by Crook (A Five-Ingredient Mystery) (12 page)

Chapter 13

Val pulled into the club parking lot at five forty-five. Odd that only one of the six courts had a game in progress. Three others had signs of occupation—floppy athletic bags on the ground, towels flung over the net, rackets propped against the fence—but no players on them. They must have joined the crowd clustered around a camera crew near the club entrance. A van identified the crew as belonging to a Salisbury, Maryland, television station.

Val spotted Althea on the fringes of the crowd and joined her. “Is this local news covering Nadia’s murder?”

“What else?” Althea put a hand on Val’s shoulder. “Squeeze in front of me so you can see Chatty’s get-up.”

Val slipped into the space Althea made for her. Chatty wore black from her headband to her socks and shoes. She stood out among the tennis players in white or bright colors.

A newscaster spoke into a microphone. “This is Junie May Jussup at the Bayport Racket and Fitness Club. The local women’s tennis team is gathering here to honor real estate agent and avid tennis player Nadia Westrin, murdered three nights ago in her Bayport home. Let’s talk to one of her teammates, Chatty Ridenour.” She tilted the microphone toward Chatty.

Chatty blinked her black-shadowed eyelids. “We’re just devastated about Nadia. She was active in the USTA league and set up the Bayport women’s tennis teams. She was our star player. Our team is a big family. We feel like we’ve lost not just a friend, but a close relative.”

“She’s laying it on as thick as her makeup,” Althea muttered.

The newscaster angled the microphone toward her own mouth. “I understand Nadia was competitive on the court and off.”

Chatty tilted her head toward the mike. “Nadia worked in real estate, a business where your colleagues are your rivals, everyone vying for commissions. She came to the club to take a break from all that. Tennis is competitive, of course, but it’s healthy competition.”

The newscaster gave a grim smile appropriate for a wake. “Did you see any sign of fear or anxiety from Nadia before this awful tragedy?”

Val held her breath. Chatty could double her airtime by mentioning Nadia’s affair, Monique’s rage, and the burned racket. Would she resist that temptation?

Chatty’s head rocked from side to side. “You should ask that at her real estate office and in her neighborhood. Nadia relaxed here and put her anxieties aside.”

Val wanted to applaud Chatty. Nice try at sending the news team elsewhere.

Althea leaned down to whisper in Val’s ear. “The way Chatty’s dodging questions, she may have a future in politics.”

Val caught sight of her cousin approaching from the parking lot. “I can’t let Monique walk into this, Althea. I’ll take her around to the back door near the locker room. Can you open it from the inside and let us in?”

“Meet you there.” Althea maneuvered around the crowd at the club entrance.

Val waylaid her cousin. “We’re steering clear of a TV news crew. Let’s go in the back way. The hedges will hide us.”

Monique rubbed her eyes, the dark circles underneath making them look sunken. “I can’t avoid the media forever.”

“Practice saying two words until they roll off your tongue:
No comment
.”

“That’s what guilty people say.”

“And innocent people who have lawyers.” Val scanned the bushes to make sure no reporters were hiding there. “By the way, did you contact a lawyer?”

“I have an appointment tomorrow with an attorney in Annapolis. But the only thing that’s really going to help me is for the murderer to be caught.”

True, and Val would do her best to make it happen. She had plenty to tell Chief Yardley tomorrow.

Monique helped her set out snacks at the café. The tennis team gathered there for hugs, tears, and a Perrier toast to Nadia. Althea announced a memorial service would be held at the Faith Fellowship Chapel, Saturday at eleven, followed by lunch at her house. They then took their drinks and snacks to the veranda overlooking the courts. The team’s youngest members, high school and college players, had arranged to start their matches early and were already on two courts.

Val studied the women who sat at the veranda table with her. They’d welcomed her when she moved to Bayport and now formed the nucleus of her social life. Would rifts form among them under the pressure of murder or would they stick together?

Bethany bit her lower lip and sent speculative glances toward Monique. Had she decided that Monique made a more obvious suspect than her previous choice, Nadia’s ex?

Monique looked toward the courts, the parking lot, and the club doors, avoiding eye contact with her teammates. The tightness around her mouth betrayed the strain of acting nonchalant while being a murder suspect.

Chatty leaned back in her chair and watched Monique. Whatever her suspicions now, she’d shown her loyalty to the team in front of the camera, trying to shift media attention from the club to Nadia’s office and neighborhood.

Althea contemplated the bubbles rising in her glass of mineral water. “You know how I met Nadia? She sold me a house. At the settlement, she gave us a bottle of wine and told us to save it for a special occasion. I went to buy another bottle so I’d have enough for a dinner party, and found out it cost eighty dollars. Can you believe that?”

Chatty swirled her Diet Coke. “Nadia had a weakness for expensive wine. I could never see spending a lot of money on something to drink.”

Given a choice between pricey wine and the pricey lotions Chatty sold, Val would go for the drink. “How was the wine, Althea? Worth the cost?”

“I’m no connoisseur. I invited Nadia over to share it with us, and she raved about it.”

Yumiko scurried toward them from the courts, carrying a clipboard. She had a round face and a wide mouth like a smiley. “The two matches that started early are going well. Our girls are winning on both courts. We just need to win one more tonight, and then we go to the district finals.”

Althea tapped her fingernails on her glass. “Give it up, Yumiko. No one wants to play.”

Yumiko’s mouth went from upturned to straight. “I believe Nadia would want us to play. She got the team into the league. We should play to honor her.”

Bethany nodded vigorously, her ginger curls bouncing. “I don’t think that would be wrong. And it would be therapy for our grief to get out there and really try to win for her. What do the rest of you think?”

Val answered before the others had a chance. “I don’t favor that, but if everyone else is going to play, Monique and I will too.”

After five minutes of debate, the argument “to win one for Nadia” prevailed.

Easier said than done. In the first set Val and Monique played erratically and lost quickly. They kept pace with their opponents in the second set until Val noticed a man on the veranda watching them. He wore rumpled street clothes instead of the athletic wear common at the club. He might as well have worn a sandwich board that said REPORTER on it. A minute later, Chatty and Althea grimly shook hands with their smiling opponents. One match lost. If that wasn’t depressing enough, the reporter intercepted Chatty as she left the court.

Val and Monique lost their momentum and the match. Val glanced at the third court, where Bethany and Yumiko looked worn-out and dispirited. They weren’t winning either. Unless their match turned around, the team wouldn’t go to the district finals this year.

Val stopped by the locker room. Althea stood in shorts and a bra beside an open locker, her tennis clothes and a damp towel heaped at her feet.

She pulled a folded T-shirt from her locker. “Why did we play tonight? How could anyone concentrate on a game?”

Althea often couched her opinions in questions she didn’t expect anyone to answer.

Val parked herself on the wooden bench between two rows of lockers and loosened the laces on her shoes. “Did Chatty go home already?”

“She left with a reporter from the
Treadwell Gazette
.” Althea’s voice was muffled as she pulled a shirt over her head. “It won’t take him long to find out what happened here last week. Not that Chatty would intentionally hurt Monique, but she just can’t stop her mouth, can she? And Monique couldn’t stop her jealousy.”

Val sprang to her cousin’s defense. “What about Nadia? She couldn’t stop her lust.”

Althea banged the locker door shut, startling Val. “Maybe you’d call it lust. I call it loneliness.”

“Lots of women are lonely, but they don’t go after married men.”

“From what I know of Maverick, he went after her, not vice versa. When I first joined the club, he started flirting with me and then, before long, he was coming on pretty strong. I didn’t dare tell my husband. He’d have wrung Maverick’s neck.”

“What did you do?”

Althea folded her arms and leaned against the lockers. “I told him that, contrary to his expectations, not all black women are loose. He was shocked to be accused of racism. I was wrong, of course. He doesn’t discriminate. He thinks all women are his for the asking.”

Maverick didn’t discriminate based on age either. Althea and Nadia both had a few years on him. Maybe he figured an older woman would be grateful for his attentions. “No wonder Monique went ballistic.”

“But why did she do it now? He’s had other affairs. She must have known.”

Not necessarily. Easy enough to overlook signs of cheating if you don’t want to see them, as Val had done with her fiancé. “If Monique knew about those other affairs, she may have reached a breaking point. And Nadia was her friend. Monique felt betrayed by her.”

Althea dropped her athletic bag on the bench next to Val. “She expected more fidelity from her friends than from her husband. What does that say about their marriage?”

“Okay, the Motts don’t have a great marriage. Nadia still shouldn’t have done it.”

“Agreed, but Maverick hit on her when she was vulnerable.”

“Nadia vulnerable? How did I miss that?” Val kept the sarcasm out of her voice, but only with great effort.

“You haven’t lived here long. You didn’t take the time—have the time to get to know her.” Althea sat on the bench opposite Val. “I can’t believe Bethany pushed us into playing tonight. Yumiko too. They didn’t want to think about Nadia any longer than necessary.”

“Well, Nadia treated Bethany pretty roughly.”

“Are you kidding? She put up with her longer than the rest of us would have. Yet Bethany got more sympathy when Nadia ended the partnership than Nadia got for sticking with her.”

“Nobody blamed Nadia for breaking up the partnership, only for the way she did it.”

Althea’s dark eyes studied Val. “What do you know about the way she did it?”

“Bethany told me—” Val broke off. “Of course, she’s not an unbiased source.” Yet Val had accepted Bethany’s version of the incident.

“I’ll tell you what really happened. I overheard the whole thing. It was after our team practice last week. Nadia and Bethany were in the locker room here, and I was toweling off in there.” Althea pointed her thumb toward the shower room. “Nadia said what most people say when they want to end a partnership—‘we’re not playing as well together as we used to.’ What’s the socially correct response to that?”

“You shake hands and say good-bye?”

“But that’s not what Bethany did. Oh no, she said, they were playing as well as they ever had. She told Nadia to check their match record. When the gentle approach didn’t work, Nadia got more blunt.” Althea shoved her foot into her tennis shoe.

Blunt or cruel? “She accused Bethany of making questionable line calls.”

“That’s the truth, and someone needed to say it. When Bethany joined the club two years ago, Nadia took her on as a partner to ease her into team tennis.” Althea propped her foot up on the bench and tied her shoe slowly and deliberately, as she might tie up an argument in court. “Bethany wouldn’t leave the nest without a push.”

A gentler push might have done the trick. Futile to argue the point with Althea. She wouldn’t admit Nadia’s faults any more than she would a client’s guilt in court. She acted like a defense attorney, making a case to counter Bethany’s prosecution case. Each side shaded the facts.

Althea packed up her athletic gear.

Val had yet to hear Althea’s take on the murder. “Who do you think hated Nadia enough to kill her?”

“Are you sure that’s the right question? Hate isn’t the only reason to kill.” Althea retied her shoe as if she hadn’t gotten it right the first time. “Mind you, that was a general statement. I’m not going to speculate on who killed Nadia or why.”

A lawyerly response. Perhaps Val could get her to respond to a yes-no question. “Do you know why Nadia divorced Joe?”

“You’re on a roll with the wrong questions. I represented Nadia in the divorce, and it went smoothly.” The locker room door squeaked. Two women entered, flushed and sweaty from a workout, towels slung over their shoulders. End of private conversation. Althea stood up. “See you Saturday at the memorial service, Val.”

“Bye.”

Val didn’t move from the bench, weighed down by sadness. Maybe grief was infectious, and she’d caught it from Althea. Adding to her shock over Nadia’s death and her concern for Monique, Val now felt a sense of loss. If a murderer hadn’t struck, she might have come to know Nadia and seen a better side of her. Val blamed herself for rushing to judgment based on a brief acquaintance. She’d accepted Monique’s view of Nadia as predatory and Bethany’s view of Nadia as heartless because they reinforced her own opinions. And Althea had called her on it.

Val pressed her palms down on the bench and hoisted herself up. From now on, she would do better. She’d have to give up her own biases and reserve judgment until she knew the facts. That much she owed Nadia.

She left the locker room and went out to the parking lot. Climbing into the car reminded her of the last time she’d driven home from the club in darkness Sunday night, Nadia sitting next to her. Would a phone call to the police about the burning racket have changed anything? Would returning Nadia’s call the following day have made any difference? Without knowing the answers, Val couldn’t shake her guilt.