By Cook or by Crook (A Five-Ingredient Mystery) (8 page)

“I’ll help. I can suggest things to jazz up your recipes and give them more edge.”

Val cringed inside. Her cousin’s exotic variations rarely improved any dish and often ruined it. “Thanks. You look exhausted, Monique.”

Her cousin nodded. “I am. See you in the morning.” She closed the door behind her.

Val had trouble falling asleep. A lot had changed in the last hour. Earlier today, she’d assumed the police would find Nadia’s murderer. Now she wasn’t sure. She liked Chief Yardley as a family friend, but for all she knew, he’d risen through the ranks because of management skills, not investigative work. And Deputy Holtzman had treated Monique like a criminal. With her as the perfect suspect, the police might not bother investigating further. But if Val found evidence implicating someone else, they couldn’t ignore it.

She didn’t see herself as competing with the police, just pursuing a different goal. They wanted to close the case fast. She wanted to keep it open. Tomorrow she’d try to wangle information from the chief about the murder investigation. She now had an excuse to stop by the police station—to file a report about the SUV that ran her off the road.

That road incident faded in importance compared to her cousin’s predicament. Val went to sleep almost convinced it was a random act of aggression.

She woke up believing otherwise. An image stuck in her mind—Darwin locking his shop door while she climbed into her car to drive to Monique’s. Easy for him to follow her onto the peninsula. But why would he try to force her off the road? Maybe her offhand comment about under-the-table transactions had gotten back to him through his eavesdropping salesclerk. That comment would have made him nervous if he peddled porn or drugs from his backroom. Alternately, her talk about wood rackets would have spooked him if he’d murdered Nadia. He had a perfect opportunity and two possible motives to put Val out of commission. The key question: Did he own a light SUV?

Chapter 8

Val sat at the breakfast bar in her cousin’s kitchen, sipping coffee and eating waffles, while Monique pried cooked batter from her “nonstick” waffle iron. They both twisted toward the wall-mounted television in the adjacent family room to watch a local newscaster.

“This is Junie May Jussup standing outside Bayport police headquarters. The police are treating the death of town resident Nadia Westrin as suspicious. She was found early yesterday morning in her home on Creek Road, some eight to ten hours after her death. The police are asking anyone in the vicinity of Creek Road on Monday night between nine and midnight to contact them. No information yet about the cause of her death or the progress of the police investigation. Stay tuned for breaking news about this case and for interviews with Nadia Westrin’s neighbors and friends. Now back to the studio and the weather report.”

Monique pressed a button on the remote and shut off the TV. “Not much new about Nadia’s murder.” She glanced at Val’s half-empty plate. “I’m glad you’re enjoying my spiced waffles. Can you guess what’s in them?”

Enjoying
wasn’t the word that came to mind as Val chewed the waffle. “I taste whole wheat flour, molasses, allspice, and crystallized ginger.”

Her cousin often made comfort food with a twist that took it out of the comfort zone. Tradition warred with offbeat urges in her cooking and her life.

Monique put her mixing bowl in the dishwasher. “My kids didn’t like these waffles. They wanted ‘regular’ waffles.”

“Regular, as in crispy outside, fluffy inside, and maple syrup instead of agave nectar? What’s wrong with kids these days?”

Her cousin waved a dish towel like a white flag. “I surrender. I’ll ditch the recipe.”

Val ditched the rest of her waffle and put her empty plate in the dishwasher. Fortified with coffee, she could broach sensitive topics. “How did you find out Maverick and Nadia were having an affair?”

Monique rolled her eyes. “An anonymous note. It came in the mail on Thursday.”

She’d wasted no time before acting on it, confronting Nadia that evening at the club. “Do you still have the letter?”

“I’ll get it.” Monique left the room.

So far this morning, she hadn’t given in to the despair she’d shown last night. The tension level had also decreased from last night, in part because Maverick had left for work before either woman woke up.

Monique returned to the kitchen and handed Val a home decorating magazine. “The note’s tucked between the pages. I didn’t want Maverick to find it. I’d rather let him believe I figured out he was sleeping with Nadia. He’ll think twice before he cheats on me again.”

He might think twice and still cheat. Val flipped through the magazine and found a folded page of lined, yellow paper. She unfolded it and read a penciled message in large letters: FIND OUT WHAT NADIA’S DOING WITH YOUR HUSBAND. MAYBE YOU CAN LEARN ENOUGH TO KEEP HIM HOME NIGHTS.

Nasty note. Not only did it tell Monique about her husband’s affair, it insulted her as well. It also provoked her to actions that made her a murder suspect. The busybody who’d sent it had a lot to answer for.

Monique stared at it over Val’s shoulder. “I didn’t even rate a proper anonymous note, letters cut from a newspaper and stuck on the page.”

Val smiled at her cousin’s attempt at humor. “Do you have the envelope it came in?”

“I threw it out. Take that letter with you. I don’t want it in the house anymore.”

Val slipped the note back in the magazine. “You need a lawyer, Monique. Fortunately, we have one on our tennis team. Call Althea.” She pointed to the phone.

“She does family law. Divorces. Custody cases. I don’t need that kind of lawyer.”

“Althea has contacts. Ask her to give you the names of the best criminal defense attorneys in southern Maryland. Set up an appointment with one of them ASAP, and don’t talk to the police again without a lawyer sitting next to you.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.” Monique saluted.

On her way out, Val hugged her cousin. “I’ll call you if I find out anything important. Otherwise I’ll see you tomorrow at six at the club. After the little ceremony for Nadia, let the others decide whether to play the match. We’ll go with the flow, okay?”

Monique nodded. She stood at the door as Val backed out onto the road.

Val stopped at home to shower and change clothes. Granddad wasn’t in his usual chair facing the TV and the fireplace. Instead he sat at the mahogany dining table strewn with papers, clippings, and index cards. Maybe he’d finally gotten around to sorting through one of his catchall drawers.

“Hey, Granddad,” she called from the sitting room.

He looked startled, his furry eyebrows shooting up. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” He slipped the page in front of him under a pile of papers.

What was he hiding from her? She went through the archway to the dining room. Her jaw dropped. Those weren’t his papers. “You dumped my recipes on the table. I had them all organized, and now look at them.”

“I’m reorganizing them.” He picked up an index card and put it on top of a pile. “What’s the problem? Sunday night you said, ‘My recipe file is your recipe file.’ That’s an exact quote.”

“I meant you could use them, not completely destroy my system.” She’d grouped the recipes by the chapters in her cookbook. Now she’d have to put them back in order. She suppressed the anger boiling inside and flipped through the first few cards in the pile in front of him. Two soups, three desserts, and a main course. “This is a random bunch of recipes.”

“They look random to you. Like most women, you’re not geared toward numbers. I’m sorting the recipes by how many ingredients they have. The ones in that pile all have seven. I figure when I run out of the ones with five ingredients, I can just cross out two lines in these recipes.” He beamed at her like a teacher who’d just explained subtraction to a second grader.

She counted to five before replying. “I would have located some simple recipes for you. We could have cooked them together. You didn’t give me the chance.”

“You’ve been gallivanting for the last twenty-four hours. I couldn’t wait any longer.”

True. She’d left him on his own since yesterday morning. “You haven’t cooked anything for seventy-odd years, and now you want to start yesterday. What’s the rush?”

“Well, I’m not getting any younger.”

“Don’t play the age card with me. You have something up your sleeve.” Possibly to do with that paper he’d hidden under a pile when she came in. Today she couldn’t spare the time to find out what he was up to, not with a murder charge hanging over Monique. Val walked behind his chair toward the kitchen and the back staircase. “Any calls for me while I was gallivanting?”

Granddad pointed to a stack of recipes on index cards. “You know why I put that pile of recipes aside? They all have stuff in them I don’t recognize. Sofrito. Tempeh. Kofta. What kind of food is that?”

Changing the subject wouldn’t work with her. “Did I get any calls, Granddad?”

He sniffed. “Yeah. Gunnar. He reserved a tennis court for four-thirty today.”

Granddad wouldn’t have even mentioned that call without her pressing him on it. He was still poring over her recipe collection when she left the house.

She drove to the Bayport police station. The chief could see her in half an hour. While waiting for him, she reported on last night’s road incident. The gray-haired officer who took down her information wanted to know as much about her actions as the other driver’s. Had she perhaps cut off the SUV, blown her horn, or gestured? The officer concluded the interview by giving her a handout with tips on dealing with road bullies.

Chief Yardley fetched her from the reception area. “Let’s go outside. I was about to take a break anyway.” He led her out a back door to a small yard enclosed by a chain link fence.

She followed him to a bench shaded by a white oak. “I saw my cousin last night. She told me she’d burned the racket at Nadia’s house.” Val leaned against the back of the wood bench.

He took out his pipe and sat down next to her. “She tell you anything else?”

“That she didn’t kill Nadia. Monique is a good person, Chief. Right now she’s under a lot of stress, which explains why she set that fire.”

He opened a leather pouch containing tobacco. “Doing something under stress is okay. Lying to the police about it two days later isn’t.”

“She’s ashamed of what she did. That’s why she didn’t tell me or the police at first. That doesn’t mean she’s a murderer. Is she a suspect?”

“She’s guilty of starting a fire on someone’s property. That much we know.” The chief filled his pipe. “We’re still gathering evidence about the murder.”

Val could guess what evidence they’d like to find to clinch the case against Monique. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the racket at the murder scene wasn’t shaved with the hatchet you found at Monique’s, was it?”

“It was carved exactly the same way as the burned racket, but with a sharper tool.”

“Doesn’t that mean someone else did it? She’d have used the same hatchet.”

The chief drew on his pipe. “Not necessarily. Maybe she had a hard time carving the first racket. Her hatchet was old and dull, so she bought a new one.”

She raised her index finger like a student with a question. “Where’s the new tool now? I bet you didn’t find it at Monique’s place.”

“Would you keep a tool you used to make a murder weapon?”

“You can’t have it both ways. If Monique realized the new hatchet could connect her to the murder weapon, she must have known the old hatchet could connect her to the burning racket. Why would she chuck one and keep the other?”

He pulled the pipe from his mouth. “Her husband might notice a new hatchet and wonder why she bought it. And he’d notice if the old hatchet was gone.”

“So what if it was gone? Tools are always disappearing. Like socks.”

“A hatchet isn’t the only thing that leaves a mark. The person wielding it does too. Suppose I give a wood racket and a hatchet to ten different people and tell them to taper the handle. One person might whack it from the throat down to the butt in a single stroke.” He demonstrated the technique on the stem of his pipe. “Another might chip away at the last two inches of the handle. I guarantee no two rackets would look the same at the end.”

“But what if you show your carvers a tapered racket before they start working and tell them their task is to duplicate it? Or suppose you describe the results you want? You wouldn’t see a lot of variations.”

“I’ll concede that someone who saw that racket could have carved another one the same way, but not based just on a description.”

“We could run an experiment.” Val caught the chief scowling at her. “I mean, you could run it.”

“I run with the facts. I don’t need experiments.”

“Luckily, I have a few facts. Monique’s husband, who heard about the burned racket from Nadia, was cagey about where he was the night of the murder. He led Monique to believe he stayed in Philadelphia Monday night, but I know he left earlier that day. Grandma Mott told me.” Val tried to make it sound as if she knew Monique’s mother-in-law well.

The chief glowered. “Checking on alibis is our job, not yours.”

“I can’t help it if people tell me things. I discovered something else. Nadia was on the phone with a real estate client on Monday night around nine-thirty when another call came in. Nadia put her client on hold.”

The pipe moved up and down in the chief’s mouth. “How did you find that out?”

Val described the note she’d seen next to Nadia’s phone and the reasoning that led her to visit Mrs. Z. “When Nadia came back on the line after taking another call, she told Mrs. Z she was expecting someone. That other call could have been the murderer setting up a meeting with Nadia. If you could trace that call . . .”

“We did. It came from a prepaid burner phone. No way to find out who made the call.” The chief peered inside the bowl of his pipe. “I like the way you pick up on details and look at all the angles. You could teach my rookies a thing or two. But they could teach you the first rule of investigation—the simplest solution is usually the right one.”

And Monique fit the bill, with her motive, her history of intimidating the victim, and no alibi. After years of watching
Law & Order
reruns, Val could guess what the police would do next—try to place the suspect at the crime scene. “If you find Monique’s DNA at Nadia’s house, it won’t prove anything. Nadia threw a party on Memorial Day. She invited the racket club crowd and her neighbors. We all have strands of hair caught in her rugs.”

“That DNA stuff takes time and costs money.” He tapped his pipe against his heel. “Shoe leather does the job faster. The sheriff’s deputies and every officer I can spare are out interviewing. Someone must have seen something that night.”

Val breathed in the pipe smoke that hung like a haze in the still air, an entrancing woodsy scent with traces of almond and vanilla. She’d said what she could to convince the chief of Monique’s innocence. Now for another matter. “Last night someone forced my car off the road.”

The chief sat up straighter and scrutinized her face. “Did you get hurt?”

“No injuries except to my tire.” She repeated what she’d told the gray-haired officer earlier. “Right before that happened, my car was parked in front of Darwin’s Sports. Darwin saw me drive off and could have followed me from there to the peninsula. Can you check if he has a light-colored SUV?”

“I can check, but I can’t do anything about it. Unless you actually saw him behind the wheel, we don’t have cause to investigate him. Why would he run you off the road?”

“I don’t know. Maybe something I said at the shop annoyed him.” She debated whether to tell him she’d asked about wood rackets.

The chief stood up, a signal that she’d occupied enough of his time. “Darwin has a quick temper. He used to settle scores with his fists. If you annoyed him, you’d best stay clear of him.”