1 Nothing Bundt Murder (6 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

At Babette’s house, I rang the bell and a drunken Doug answered.

“I’m here to feed Cupcake,” I said.

He nodded as if expecting me and went to get her but she ran out of his grasp.

“I’ll get her if that’s okay,” I said. “She likes me."

He breathed whiskey on me but moved aside to let me in, scratching his neck and watching me.

“Cupcake,” I called out. I knew where her favorite hiding places were and found her in the third one, behind the couch, under the console table. I bent down to lure her out. “Cupcake, food, honey.”

She came out and rubbed herself against me and we went i
nto the kitchen for together.

After
feeding her and staying with her a few minutes, I was heading back out when I passed the den and heard the chiming of a cuckoo clock. I reached out to push the door open and look inside, when just then, Doug walked up.

“You have another cuckoo clock? Here at home?” I asked surprised.

He shook his head no and made a disgusted face. “Please. I made Babs take ours to the store. I hate that thing.”

“Oh, Rosie,” Doug said, following me to the doorway.

I stopped and turned to look at him. He was trying to focus his drunken tired eyes on me, and was scratching his arm like crazy.

“Just for your information
,” he said. “It’s not that I would starve Cupcake. I don’t even hate her, really. It’s that I’m allergic. Babette knew that when she got her and she went ahead and got her anyway. My wife is not the saintly cake-baking-angel you think she is. She can be quite selfish and stubborn.”

“Right,” I said, frowning. I
realized that I’d just solved one mystery that I didn’t even know was plaguing me.

I hopped back into Casey’s car. “Ready for dinner?” he asked.

“No, we have to go back to the store.” I put my seatbelt on even though we
weren’t going far. “I think we can prove that Doug was the killer.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Casey kept the car idling outside
Bundt Baby
, insisting that I explain what happened at Doug’s. He threatened to call the cops on me otherwise, and tell them I was about to break into the store.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Fine. Now, I’m not sure about all this but I think Doug has
Bundt Baby
’s bugged.”

“You do like those alliterations,” he said, nodding intently. “But what on earth do you mean?”

I looked him in his eyes, which were dark and inviting in the dim light of the car. Of course I had no idea whether I should trust him or involve him in all of this. But since he already was involved, it seemed I had no choice.

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound as logical as possible. “Doug just knew something that he couldn’t possibly have known--because I only just told it to you fifteen minutes ago.

“Okay,” Casey said, shaking his head, utterly confused. “What?”

I sighed loudly for emphasis. “ I just went in to feed Cupcake just now, and Doug told me that he wouldn’t starve her. But why would he even think that I would think that? He wouldn’t, unless he knew that I just told you he’d starve her only 10 minutes before, in the kitchen of the bakery. How could he have known that I’d said that to you?”

“Coincidence? Or…perhaps you’ve said something like that to him before?”

“No
, I haven’t. Also, he’s known some other things about me. Things I told Babette that she promised she never told him. But he knew!”

Casey didn’t look convinced but the more I the thought about it, the more certain I was that I was right. “You know…Babette always said that Doug was jealous and paranoid. And Nana told me a few days ago that Doug was trying to catch Babette cheating. What better way than by planting a camera in her store!”

Casey shrugged, unconvinced.

“And then there was the cuckoo clock,” I said mysteriously.

“Not the cuckoo clock,” Casey gasped. He was making fun of me, so I shot him a look. “Okay what’s with the cuckoo clock?” he asked.

“I heard it chiming in the den when I was at Doug’s house. But when I asked him about it, he told me he didn’t have a cuckoo clock at home. I think the cuckoo clock was really chiming in the store—and he was watching it in his den from a surveillance camera.”

Casey looked at me, then at the store. He shook his head, growing irritated. “Okay, so what? You want to go in and find this camera? And …what then? It’s his store. He can plant twenty cameras in there if he wants.”

“That’s true,” I frowned. “But if he was filming the store that night, he knows exactly what happened in the kitchen that night. Exactly who put the poison in the Bundt cake.” I took off my seatbelt. “If Babette did it, he would come forward and given it to the police, just like he did with the poison research in her web browsing history. I’m sure of it. So we just have to get the surveillance camera footage and see what’s on it. My guess is it’ll be Doug himself who put the poisonous oil in.”

“And how exactly do you plan on getting this supposed surveillance tape?”

“By breaking in, obviously.”

He looked at me as if I were nuts. “Breaking in? Really? I’m a businessman. A pillar of this community.”

He caught my smirk.

“Well, I’m at least a really wide column of this community. I can’t just go breaking into places that…”

“Fine, don’t help me then
,” I said. “I’ll do it all myself.”

And with that I got out of the car and walked towards
Bundt Baby
.

The slamming of the driver’s-side door behind me, alerted me to the fact that Casey was now out of his car and following me in. Which was good, since I needed him for my plan.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“So what exactly are we lookin
g for?” Casey asked when we walked into the kitchen of the store, several minutes later.

“A clue. That Doug has a camera set up in here.”

“But wouldn’t the police have found it if it were here?” Casey asked with a frown. He started looking into various cabinets, then he opened the oven door.

“Not necessarily,” I said, studying the drawer knobs, seeing if they could be hiding a button-sized camera lens. “ The police were looking for something having to do with poison. No one suspected there were any cameras.
”

There was a ceiling vent up high, over a counter, so I pulled over a stool and climbed on top of it.I was feeling around, trying to see in through the vent slats, but there didn’t seem to be anything up there.
I decided to unscrew the covering anyway, just to be sure.

After ten minutes of struggling I got the vent cover off and saw what was behind it. Nothing.

I was just starting to think that the whole idea was stupid and that perhaps Casey was right, when the cuckoo clock began its half hour chime/chirp combo. Startled, I nearly fell off the stool. Casey came up and grabbed me, steadying me.

“Thanks,” I said softly, as he helped me down.

“You’re welcome. Now let’s go. It’s not here.”

I sighed loudly. “Fine,” I said. I started to follow him out
to the front, when I stopped, frozen.

“Wait! The clock!” I screamed.

“Yes, it is an irritiating clock,” Casey said. “Now let’s go before it starts again.” 

“No
!” I turned to look at him. “Maybe the camera is in the clock itself.”

Casey frowned at me, then he went over to clock. “Wouldn’t that be a hard place to hide it?”

He was tall enough to see into the little doors that opened when the cuckoo came out so he pushed them open and squinted inside. “No camera that I can see.” 

He then pulled over the stool
and climbed on top of it. From that vantage point he was able to look over whole clock from bottom to top.

“Well
, well,” he said, noticing a black button sized lens, hidden behind the decorative wooden foliage on top of the camera. “I think you’re right.”

I gave him a smug smile.

“But we shouldn’t touch it,” he said, jumping to the floor. “We should call the detective and have him come in and find it.”

“Good idea,” I said.

Casey took out his cell phone, pressed a button and put it to his ear. “Yes hello, this is Casey Baron for Detective Sanders,” he said into the receiver. He waited a few moments then spoke again. “Yes, hello, Detective. I’m in the
Bundt Baby
kitchen. I think there’s some evidence here that might help you in the Dahlia Wiggins murder. Yes, that’s fine. Thanks.”

Casey put his phone back into his pocket and looked at me. “The detective will be here in an hour.”

“An hour? Why so long?” I knew I was overreacting but I couldn’t stop myself. “This could be the evidence that breaks open the case and proves that Dahlia’s innocent! And that Doug is guilty! Why would they take so long?”

Casey sighed. “Believe it or not, I don’t know the workings and scheduling of a small town Police department. But I do know that we have an hour to kill, so, in the meantime, let’s go get something to eat. I’m starved.”

He walked to the kitchen door and opened it.

I hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go. But we’re coming back here in an hour.”

He nodded, then we turned out the lights and walked out of the store.

***

We waited in the car, which was parked under on the street, under a big fig tree, down the street from Doug’s house.

“Do you think he bought it?” Casey asked, eyeing the house. “We don’t even know for sure  he was watching our little drama
. Nice overacting by the way.”

I rolled my eyes at Casey. But inside I just hoped that my overacting didn’t tip Doug off to our little plan. The little show we’d just put on in the kitchen of
Bundt Baby
had been purely for his sake after all.

Though we really had been looking for the camera and we really did find it in the cuckoo clock, Casey never actually made the call to the detective. That was all just a ruse to get Doug over to
Bundt Baby
’s and out of his house so I could break into his house and get the surveillance footage.

Which so far, wasn’t working.

I frowned. “From what I read on the internet, these surveillance cameras usually have a motion sensor thing so they automatically turn on if someone’s in their vicinity. And they have a USB doohickey to stream what they’re filming to someone’s computer. So my guess is that if Doug was home, he saw us in the store.”

“Well he’s definitely home. His car’s there,” Casey motioned with his head. Then he sat back and closed his eyes. “I really am starved you know.”

He sat quietly for a moment then checked his watch. As he did, I noticed something colorful peeking out from underneath it. “Is that a tattoo?” I asked in disbelief, reaching over to get a better look at it.

He quickly covered his right wrist with his left hand and pulled his hands away. “
That. Is none of your business.”

“Oh my gosh! It is!
Mr. Stuck up Brit upper lip has a tattoo. You have to show me.”

He shook his head, ‘no’ and kept his wrist far aw
ay from my grasping hands.

“No
. I don’t know you well enough to show you the evidence of my misspent youth. After all…”

“Wait! Shh,” I
said—as just then the front door swung open and Doug stepped outside.“Here he comes!”

I was whispering even though Doug was much too far away to hear me.

He ran out of the house and over to his car, still in his bathrobe. As he screeched out of the driveway and sped past us down the street, I ducked down in my seat. Though I suspected Doug was too focused on getting the hidden camera out of the store to pay attention to anything else.

“There he goes,” I clapped. “It worked!”

“Great,” Casey said. “So now, let’s really call the cops and have them meet us at his house. We’ll tell them that they’ll find footage from the night of the murder inside on Doug’s laptop.”

“We can’t do that! We don’t know what we’ll find. And they’d need to get a warrant to search and all kinds of stuff…by which time he could destroy the evidence.”

Casey shrugged, looking petulant, though he obviously knew that I was right.

“My only option is to go in and find the tapes myself,” I said. “Look, it’s not really breaking and entering. It’s half Babette’s house and she lets me go inside to feed the cat…”

“The cat which you fed a half an hour ago?” he said sarcastically.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll go fast and be gone by the time he gets back.”

He sighed. “Aah. Okay, fine, then I’ll go in and you wait out here.”

“No way. I know the house. Look, we don’t have much time. Just park at the end of the street and call me if you see his car coming back. Okay?”

“I don’t like this…”

“Great. Thanks.” And before he could stop me I jumped out of the car and ran across the street and up to Babette’s house.