Fatally Flaky gbcm-15 Read online

  “Ah, my dear, not between Craig and Billie. Between Craig and Charlotte.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “And who was your source of information this time?”

  “Same drunken one as before. I told you Paula Carmichael, Lucas’s ex, did those kinds of contracts, right? After the whole story about the alimony that isn’t going to end because Jack won’t give Lucas money, Paula said I couldn’t imagine how boring her work was. I murmured sympathies and poured her some more vodka. This time, she waved away the vermouth and olives and asked if I had a bigger glass. So I gave her a big tumbler, with a few ice cubes thrown in.”

  Thank God for the car service, I thought. I would hate to think what could have happened if Paula Carmichael had downed that much liquor and then gotten behind the wheel. Reflecting on Arch driving while drunk drivers were wreaking havoc on the roadways was almost more than I could bear.

  “Are you telling me that Paula Carmichael got so smashed she just happened to spill the details of a prenuptial agreement?” I picked up my knife and moved on to the smooth, pale cloves of garlic, which I began to crush.

  “It wasn’t that easy,” Marla huffed. “I had to dig for it, darling. Lucky for me, it was after Charlotte Attenborough had left.”

  “Lucky for you?”

  “Wait for it. What happened was that I said to Paula, ‘Always boring? What about prenuptial agreements between really, really rich people? Can’t they be pretty exciting?’ She said, ‘No, they’re depressing, because they always remind me of what I should have done before marrying Lucas.’ Then she got all pensive, as if she was thinking hard about whether to tell me something, but she was so comprehensively inebriated, I could have gotten anything out of her, I think. She was slumping precariously on my sofa, and I had to prop her up with one hand. Finally she said, ‘I did do a contract, not prenuptial. It wasn’t like anything I’d done before. But it did involve a marriage, or it will when the wedding takes place.’”

  “She made sense like that?”

  “Not really, I’m interpreting. But after a while, Paula said, ‘Okay, picture this: a woman has a loudmouthed brat for a daughter, and that daughter has just turned thirty-six, with no marital prospects in sight. I mean, who would want to marry a monster?’”

  “Try catering for her.”

  “Then Paula says, ‘So this mother goes to her doctor for bunions. The doctor is a cute young thing, age twenty-eight. And he complains to Charlotte about his medical school loans, and how he’s never going to get out from under the debt load, never be able to afford a house, never be able to raise a family, et cetera, et cetera.’”

  “You know,” I said, folding the ingredients into the sauce base, “it just breaks my heart how doctors can’t make ends meet in this country.”

  “Cry me a river,” Marla agreed. “Lawyers can’t make any money either, according to Paula, but that’s only when they’re stupid enough to have to pay spousal support ad infinitum.”

  “So,” I said, trying to hurry Marla along, “Charlotte’s left your party, so Paula can spill this dirt, although she doesn’t say the person she’s talking about is Charlotte. But anyway, there’s Charlotte with her doctor—did Paula ever tell you it was Charlotte when she told you this story?”

  Marla raised her eyebrow. “Give me a little credit, Goldy. I figured that part out. See, hanging out with you and Tom has really sharpened my deductive skills—”

  I gave her an absolutely sour look, and pulled out my long knife, plus the cutting board.

  “You don’t need to threaten me with sharp instruments,” Marla said in mock horror. “Anyway, back to this doctor. Charlotte, hereinafter known as the client—”

  “Marla!”

  “Okay, okay. Charlotte described the doctor to Paula as very attractive, just without money. And there Charlotte is, with lots of money and an unattractive, unwed daughter. This daughter has no job, a fluffy education at a second-rate school, where she got Cs, and no skills apart from spending money. Up until that moment, Charlotte must have been thinking she was never going to be able to catapult Billie out of the family homestead. So after Craig moaned and groaned about his financial situation, Charlotte said, ‘I have a lovely daughter I’d like you to meet. I mean, you’ve been such a great doctor to me, taking you out to dinner would make this old lady so happy.’”

  I stopped slicing. “Charlotte called herself an old lady?”

  Marla nodded, grinning broadly. “I guess she wanted Craig to feel sorry for her. You know, with her bunions and all.”

  “So they had dinner, and Craig and Billie fell in love—”

  “Ha! You’re such a romantic, Goldy. Billie might have fallen in love, but Craig would have to be living in the next solar system to think Billie is someone he’d want to spend the rest of his life with.”

  “Try the next galaxy.”

  “So after this dinner,” Marla continued, “which went okay, apparently, Charlotte found out from her boyfriend Jack about his ex-daughter-in-law, Paula, who does prenuptial agreements. Charlotte called Paula for clarification on how to set things up. Then Charlotte called Craig with a proposition. ‘I want to do a contract with you,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s not a prenuptial contract, because that’s just between a bride and a groom. This is a regular old contract. Marry my daughter, stay married to her for at least five years, and I’ll give you four million dollars on signing and another million a year after the five are up.’” Marla crossed her arms in triumph.

  “Jeez!” I exclaimed. “I’ve heard of the cost of free agency in baseball, but this is ridiculous!”

  Marla raised an eyebrow. “Do you think? Paula still hadn’t told me who the doctor and the lady with the problematic daughter were, but at the end of the story, she said, ‘I did the contract. And the doctor and the lady’s daughter are getting married this Sunday, right here in Aspen Meadow.’ So that’s when I fired up Ye Olde Deductive Reasoning again and concluded, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the couple she was talking about consisted of Billie Attenborough and Craig Miller.”

  I carefully blended the crab cake ingredients in an enormous bowl, then began forming and rolling. As Marla ran water over her dishes, I remembered earlier in the day, when Craig had circled Jack’s Mercedes. At the time, I’d wondered why I couldn’t decipher the motivations of love. A cute late-twenties doctor bonding with a difficult midthirties woman? I think I finally had the answer to the motivation, and love had nothing to do with it.

  MARLA LEFT NOT long after relating all her gossip. I called Yolanda through the main switchboard at the spa, and asked her if she’d had a chance to look at the menus and arrangements. She said yes, and that all would be well. She apologized for yelling at Billie, but I told her to forget it.

  After I’d finished forming the final batch of crab cakes, I hopped up the stairs to check on Arch and his pals. There were murmurings going on behind the door, so I knocked. When Arch opened up, I noticed that the boys were stuffing their backpacks with M&M’s, granola, salmon eggs, hooks, and other hiking and fishing essentials.

  “Going on an expedition?” I asked. “It’s a mite late in the day to be starting out.”

  “Time is relative, Mom.” Arch frowned, his brown eyes serious. “These days? The sun doesn’t set until after eight. Todd is going to Montana on Monday, and we’re trying to take advantage of the last days of summer.”

  I took a deep breath. “So, where are you going?”

  “Up into the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. Don’t worry,” he said, smiling, “we’ll be back in time for a late supper. We’re hoping to snag a few trout that we can grill.”

  “Take rain gear,” I advised. “You never know. And cell phones, you know how I worry.”

  Once Arch and his pals had roared off in the Passat, I finished the gribiche and took a shower. By the time I was out and getting dressed, Tom had arrived home. Incredibly enough, I didn’t have any more cooking to do for Billie Attenborough’s wedd
ing, as Julian was doing the extra food, including the rest of the rolls, which he could get from a marvelous Boulder bakery, the green beans vinaigrette, and the cake. The first batch of rolls was made and frozen. Perhaps before the boys got home with our fish to grill, Tom and I would have a chance to kick back, have some fun together—

  One look at Tom’s face, exhausted and slack with worry, made me cancel the have-some-fun idea. Even though it was only four o’clock, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of scotch in front of him.

  “Tom?”

  I knew better than to ask whether he was all right. Clearly, he wasn’t. He was a veteran; he’d headed hundreds of death investigations. I didn’t know how he could do what he did, but he kept on, claiming he loved the work. He spoke for the dead, he said. He championed them. But the work took its toll, and I was looking at it.

  “Tom, what can I do for you? Is there something I can get for you?”

  He looked up and gave me a rueful smile. “Nothing except yourself, Miss G. Come sit down with me.”

  First I poured myself a glass of water, then I sat next to him and sipped my water. Mindful of the story Marla had just told me about overimbibing, I didn’t want to be tempted to overindulge. Anyway, I knew that after Tom told me what was going on—which was his way to unburden himself—I was going to want to cook. Not have to cook. Want to cook.

  I put my glass on the table, sat down, and scooted my chair over by Tom’s. Then I gave my husband a long, wordless hug. He embraced me back, holding tight.

  When he let go, he looked around the kitchen as if registering his surroundings for the first time. “Don’t you have prep to do for the wedding tomorrow?”

  “It’s done. I did extra crab cakes and gribiche, just in case. Julian offered to do the rest of the extra cooking for the added guests. Arch and his pals are here, though, or at least, they’re in the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve, ostensibly fishing for dinner. We’ll see. Maybe I should get out some steaks.”

  “Good idea. If the boys bring home trout, great, I’ll throw it on the grill.” His expression turned pensive. “I can eat here, but then I have to go back. To night.” He smiled thinly. “Got any salad to go with grilled trout?”

  “Tom, I’ve got enough fancy balsamic vinegar to make a salad to serve the entire armed services—army, navy, air force, coast guard. The Attenborough wedding reception will only consume enough for an army, I think. Plus, with it being held at Gold Gulch Spa, maybe the guests will feel guilty and not touch the potato salad. They’ll see all that exercise equipment and figure they should be losing weight instead of stuffing themselves.”

  “Gold Gulch Spa, eh?” Tom was perusing the contents of the walk-in. “That’s where the reception is?”

  “Tom, I told you, remember? Bridezilla decided she was having an extra fifty people, and moved the whole show out to where she was trying to lose weight to fit into her wedding gown. She just neglected to tell me until yesterday.”

  Tom shook his head, lost in thought. “Yeah, I remember, and that’s why Jack picked you up this morning. Listen, I want Boyd to go with you.”

  I thought, but did not say, Oh, brother, here we go. But Tom was right in being suspicious, I supposed, as some of the people who’d apparently disliked Doc Finn were going to be at the wedding, making it a volatile situation.

  Tom smiled at me. “Why don’t you fix that salad now? I don’t remember having any lunch. I’ll cook after I’ve had some of your good food, how’s that?”

  I returned his smile, wrapped a baguette in foil, and put it in the oven. Then I melted a knob of butter in my sauté pan, cracked in three organic eggs, salted and peppered them, and made a quick salad of frisée and arugula, which I drizzled with a freshly made balsamic vinaigrette. I brought out the baguette, which was steaming, put it on one side of the plate, then arranged the frisée on the other side. Finally I slid the luscious-looking eggs on top of the frisée.

  “Wow, Miss G. I wasn’t expecting all this.”

  “Do you want to talk about the case?”

  He nodded, and talked as he ate. “It ticks me off when people kill other people, but I especially get ticked off when someone kills a child or an older person. Especially a nice older person like Doc Finn, whom almost everybody seemed to love.”

  “Yeah, almost everybody.”

  “Did you hear that?” Tom glanced out the window. Sure enough, periwinkle gray clouds were darkening the horizon, but I hadn’t heard thunder. I frowned and hoped Arch would have the sense to stop fishing if it began to storm.

  “So, Tom, have your guys figured out any more particulars about who didn’t like Doc Finn?” Of course, I had a couple of answers to that myself, but I would wait until Tom finished telling me what he’d learned.

  “Since you mention Gold Gulch, Miss G., I’ll tell you first off that Doc Finn was out there the day he died. Thursday.”

  “Doing what?” I imagined the easygoing, flinty-faced doctor out at the spa, frowning at all the baby boomers tearing up their tendons and muscles, and putting way too much stress on their joints.

  “Having a fight with Billie Attenborough, apparently.”

  “I know Billie didn’t like him. Do you know why they were fighting?”

  “Nobody seems to remember that, exactly. Doc Finn was talking in low tones. But everybody could hear Billie. He would say something, and she would yell at him to mind his own business. Then he would start to talk, or try to, and she would scream at him not to be so nosy.”

  I sighed and got up to wash the pan I’d used to fry Tom’s eggs. Charlotte Attenborough’s magazine, Mountain Homes, had recently run an article entitled “How to Spot Good Breeding.” She should have had a caption: “Don’t Look at My Daughter.”

  I said, “Won’t Billie tell you what Doc Finn was talking to her about?”

  “She says he told her she was losing weight too fast, and that it wasn’t good for her.” Tom took a last bite of his lunch. “Thanks, that was great. Here’s the deal with Billie: She’s lying. I’ve been in this business long enough to be able to spot that. So I took a different tack and told her we’d heard she was angry when Doc Finn ran off her two fiancés. She shrugged. Plus, we’ve got access to Finn’s files, and Billie wasn’t even a patient of his. When we asked her when the last time she’d seen a doctor was, and when exactly he had weighed her, she clammed up and told us that if we wanted to talk to her further, she needed to have her attorney present.”

  “Did you tell her you were in the middle of a homicide investigation, for God’s sake?”

  “She already knew. The higher-ups in the sheriff’s department thought we should announce that Doc Finn’s death was a homicide. No particulars, of course, just the usual, that we were looking for help with the investigation. But none of that made any difference to Billie.”

  “Oh, God. That means Jack knows.”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you think I should go over there?”

  “No. If he wants to contact us, he will.” He looked expectantly around the kitchen. “I know you’ve got some cookies stashed around here somewhere.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not going to want any trout.”

  “Speaking of which, you better get out those steaks. I think I just heard hail on the roof.”

  I don’t know where Tom got his supersonic sense of hearing, but just at that moment, a flash of lightning and an almost simultaneous loud clap of thunder announced that, indeed, a hailstorm was upon us. The lights went off, then came back on again.

  In the walk-in, I found half a dozen individually wrapped filets mignon, which was a good thing. If I knew Arch and his pals, they’d come racing home from their fishing trip, soaked, starving…and, if the hail kept up, empty-handed.

  “Do you want some cookies?” I asked Tom. “We don’t have anything on hand. I could bake some, though.”

  “Please don’t go to the trouble. I was just wondering.”

  “I’ll do some baking whi
le you’re barbecuing, how ’bout that?”

  “Super.”

  “Now, Tom,” I said, as I began to melt butter with brown sugar, “tell me why you want Boyd to go out to the spa with me. Is it just that Finn and Billie fought out there?”

  Tom opened his palms. “No. It’s more of a feeling. Too many things going on that don’t add up. Doc Finn goes out there and has a big fight with a spa client. Then that night, somebody makes a bogus call to him from Southwest Hospital. The rear of his Porsche Cayenne was badly dented, so we figured someone ran him off the road. And get this: we found a towel from Gold Gulch in the back of Finn’s car.”

  “Maybe he had a shower out there.”

  “He didn’t, we checked. Plus, the towel was behind the seats. Who takes a shower and then puts the towel in the very back of his SUV?”

  “Nobody I know.”

  “Exactly. And guess what else we found in his car? Not with the towel, mind you, but on the floor of the front seat. A pair of women’s shoes.”

  The hail was hammering on the roof now. “No name inside, I suppose.”

  “No, but when we went to talk to Billie Attenborough, we took the shoes, and asked her about them. She recognized them, no question, but she wouldn’t say whose they were. Then her mother walked into the living room, and said, ‘Oh, there are my silver pumps. Did you borrow them, Billie?’”

  “They were Charlotte’s shoes? So, did Billie borrow them?”

  “Who knows? ’Cuz just at that moment, Billie said, ‘Don’t say or do anything, Mom.’”

  “Jeez, Tom.”

  “I know.”

  I said, “I certainly hope their house gets broken into, so the sheriff’s department can answer their call with, ‘We can’t say or do anything.’ Is there anything else you found out?”

  Tom said, “Out at Doc Finn’s house? There was a vial in the trash can out back. We also found a note to himself that said, ‘Have analyzed.’”