Black and Blueberry Die (A Fresh-Baked Mystery Book 11) (4 page)

“Like any married couple that’s struggling to get ahead,” he had declared. “With the economy the way it is now and just getting worse all the time, not that many people our age even
try
anymore. Of course we fussed at each other some. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love her or that I would...that I would...”

Danny hadn’t been able to go on. His emotions had gotten the better of him. But of course the prosecutor had implied that was just an act to get the jury to feel sorry for him.

If that was true, it hadn’t worked. Less than an hour after both sides had rested, made their closing statements, and the judge had given his instructions to the jury, those twelve peers had been back with a verdict of guilty on one count of second-degree murder. The next day, that same jury had sentenced Danny to thirty years in prison...a sentence he would start serving at the penitentiary in Huntsville as soon as the paperwork got straightened out.

Phyllis handed the last page of the transcript to Sam. It took him only a moment to read it, turn it over, and add it to the stack of papers he’d made in front of him.

“Who’s goin’ first?” he asked.

“You can,” Phyllis said.

“There’s nothing that jumps out at me. Looks like the cops made a good, solid case. Not air-tight, mind you. There aren’t any eyewitnesses, and there’s not a lot of physical evidence. But what is there points to Danny.” Sam tapped the stack of papers. “From the looks of this, his lawyer didn’t do much to help him, but he didn’t foul up anything, either.”

Phyllis nodded slowly and said, “That’s the way I see it, too. But there’s no indication that anyone—either the sheriff’s department investigator or Danny’s attorney—looked into the question of who
else
might have had a reason for wanting Roxanne dead. They also didn’t check for Danny’s blood on the bumper to see if his story was true.”

Sam frowned and thought about that, then said, “Everybody just went with the conventional wisdom that the spouse is always the prime suspect. What evidence there was, matched up with Danny just fine, so that was that. Can’t blame ’em too much. There’s a reason something becomes conventional wisdom.”

“Because it’s usually right,” Phyllis said. “But not always.”

“Nope,” Sam said. “Not always.”

“And there’s something else...”

Sam leaned toward her and asked, “You got an idea?”

“No, it’s not clear enough in my head to call it an idea. It’s more just a...sense...that something’s not right, that the facts don’t match up quite as neatly as they appear to at first glance.”

“That’s enough for me,” Sam said with an emphatic nod. “If you’ve got doubts that Danny’s guilty, we got to look into it.”

“I think you’re right.” Phyllis pushed back the heavy chair. “Let’s go talk to Mr. D’Angelo.”

“I’ll let Mr. Jackson know I’m going to take his case, and I’ll file an appeal immediately,” Jimmy D’Angelo said as he sat back in his chair, laced his fingers together on his ample belly, and grinned at Phyllis and Sam. “I’ll also file a motion requesting that he continues to be held in custody in the Tarrant County jail rather than transferred to TDC in Huntsville.”

“Will that be better?” Phyllis asked.

“County’s no bed and breakfast,” D’Angelo said with a shrug, “but I’d rather have him close by. It’s a legitimate request since I’ll need to confer with my client...and so will my investigators.”

He pointed both forefingers across the desk at Phyllis and Sam, with his thumbs raised to make them look like guns.

“That still seems strange to me,” Phyllis said. “We have absolutely no qualifications to be investigators.”

“Other than solving a dozen murders.” D’Angelo chuckled. “All right, I’ll get the wheels in motion.” He made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go do what you do. Just let me know how it’s going. I’ll go over to Fort Worth and talk to Danny and try to be encouraging.”

As they left the office, Sam said, “Mike’s gonna be happy. Or at least, maybe not quite as worried about his old friend. I don’t reckon he’ll be happy until Danny is cleared.”

“Things could still turn out badly,” Phyllis reminded him. “Mr. D’Angelo won’t be able to get Danny’s conviction set aside without strong evidence that he’s not guilty. That’s going to require discovering who
did
kill Roxanne. Reasonable doubt won’t be enough.”

“So we’ll find the real killer,” Sam said confidently.

“And hope that it doesn’t turn out to be Danny himself.”

“Yeah, there’s that,” Sam admitted.

Phyllis wasn’t sure of Mike’s work schedule, so she didn’t want to call his cell phone to let him know she was going to look into the case. She might wake him. She would call Sarah a little later, she decided, and ask her to have Mike call back when it was convenient for him.

As Phyllis pulled the Lincoln into the driveway back home, the first thing she noticed was that the front door was closed. They had been leaving the wooden door open and hooking the screen door while the central unit wasn’t working so that air would circulate better through the house. The sight of the closed door raised her hopes, and as she and Sam walked through the garage entrance into the kitchen, she felt cool air blowing from the vents in the ceiling.

A big grin appeared on Sam’s face as he said, “Doesn’t that feel nice?”

Carolyn came down the hall from the living room to meet them. She waved a hand and said, “I guess you can tell the air conditioning man has been here.”

“He got it fixed that quickly?” Phyllis said.

“He just had to replace two little parts. A solarnoid and a capacitater, I think he called them.”

“You mean a solenoid and a capacitor,” Sam said.

“Isn’t that what I said?” Carolyn responded with a glare.

A quick glance from Phyllis told Sam he would be wise not to pursue this line of conversation. He smiled and nodded and said, “Well, I’m sure glad it’s fixed, that’s all I got to say.”

“So am I,” Phyllis said. “Is he going to send me a bill?”

“That’s right. I would have paid him myself, but you said to do it the other way.” Carolyn paused. “How did it go at the lawyer’s office?”

“Interesting,” Phyllis said.

Carolyn gave her a look. “You’re going to investigate that poor young woman’s murder, aren’t you?”

“I want to see justice done,” Phyllis said, “and I have a feeling that so far, maybe it hasn’t been.”

••●••

Carolyn had already started lunch, bacon tomato pie, along with a spinach salad that included chunks of pear, bleu cheese crumbles, walnuts, and a refreshing lime dressing.

As they sat down to eat before Phyllis and Sam pondered their next move in the case, Carolyn said, “I’ve been thinking about that magazine you work for, Phyllis.”

“
A Taste of Texas
? What about it?”

“Well, you know, I haven’t entered any of their recipe contests since you started writing your column.”

Phyllis thought about it and realized her friend was right. If Carolyn had come up with a recipe she liked well enough to enter in a contest, she would have said something about it, and she hadn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Phyllis said instantly, feeling a bit guilty because she
hadn’t
noticed. “You haven’t stopped entering because of me, have you?”

“Well, I thought it would look bad and probably wouldn’t even be allowed. You know, all sorts of contests and sweepstakes have fine print about how employees of the company sponsoring them, and even relatives of employees, are prohibited from entering. I think it may even be a law.”

Phyllis shook her head and said, “I don’t think it’s a law. More like a policy. And we’re not related.”

“I know that, of course. But we’re friends, and for goodness’ sake, I live in your house. If I entered a contest and won, and the connection between us got back to the magazine, we might both get in trouble.”

“My editor knows you and I are friends,” Phyllis pointed out. “I’ve mentioned you several times in the column and used some of your recipes.”

“I know, and I appreciate that. But I miss the competition. I like the feeling of sending something in and hoping that I might
win
.”

Phyllis could understand that. For a long time, she had entered her recipes in various contests, and it was always exciting. The thrill of competition, they called it, and there was a lot of truth to that old saying.

“After lunch—which is delicious, by the way—I’ll get one of the issues of the magazine and look at it. I really don’t think you should have to give up entering their contests because of me.”

“Neither do I,” Sam said. “And these hot dog tacos are mighty good, by the way. I like how you can put two things together you don’t normally think of that way, and it turns out to taste great.”

“Fusion,” Carolyn said. “Although this is a rather down to earth version of it.”

“Whatever you call it, I like it.”

The most recent issue of
A Taste of Texas
was in the living room. After cleaning up the lunch dishes, Phyllis found it and turned to the pages containing information about the current contest, which was looking for fruit pie recipes. She couldn’t find anything about friends of the magazine’s employees being prohibited from entering, or even relatives of employees.

She pointed that out to Carolyn and said, “I promise you, I’m just a tiny fish in this pond. I couldn’t pull any strings to help you win even if I wanted to.”

“And you don’t,” Carolyn said.

“Of course not. We’ve both always competed fair and square.”

“That’s the only way winning means anything.” Carolyn took another look at the magazine. “There’s still a week until the deadline for sending in entries. I’d better get busy!”

“Do you have anything in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Carolyn said, but she didn’t elaborate. She’d always been tight-lipped about recipes when she was working on them, and Phyllis knew she wasn’t going to change at this late date.

When Carolyn had gone back into the kitchen, Sam joined Phyllis in the living room.

“Get it all squared away?” he asked.

“I think so. She’s going to enter the current contest. I’m sorry she felt like she couldn’t do that until now.”

“You didn’t know she’d stopped on account of you writin’ for the magazine.”

“That’s just it. I should have known.”

“Well, it’s settled now,” Sam said. “How do you reckon we ought to start on the other chore that we’re lookin’ at?”

Phyllis knew he was talking about investigating Roxanne Jackson’s murder. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “I want to take a look at the crime scene.”

••●••

Paul’s Beauty Salon, located on Camp Bowie Boulevard in west Fort Worth, was about a thirty-minute drive away from Phyllis’s house in Weatherford, and a significant part of that time was spent navigating through the traffic that clogged South Main Street where it crossed Interstate 20. Phyllis remembered quite well when there hadn’t been anything past Tin Top Road except a pleasant drive through the country to Granbury, but huge shopping centers and tons of traffic were part of the price of progress, she supposed.

Although sometimes she wondered if maybe that price was a little too high.

But by two o’clock in the afternoon, she and Sam were on Camp Bowie, this time in Sam’s pickup with him at the wheel, as they looked for the beauty salon where Roxanne Jackson had been killed. Phyllis had looked up the address before they left and programmed it into the GPS app on her phone, even though Sam had assured her he could find the place. He really was a bit of a “livin’, breathin’ GPS”, as he sometimes claimed, but he wasn’t infallible.

Camp Bowie Boulevard was named for the Army camp established on the west side of Fort Worth during World War I, Phyllis knew. It had been a sprawling base covering much of the area where the Botanic Gardens were now located, and its establishment had sparked a housing boom that had extended the town for miles in that direction. A lot of wealthy people had flocked to the area, and many of those old-money families still lived on the west side. The boulevard wasn’t as ritzy as it once had been—nowhere was, Phyllis thought—but there were still quite a few stretches of high-end establishments that catered to the wealthy.

Paul’s Beauty Salon was located in one of those shopping centers, although it was in its own brick building at one end of the center. The nearest business was an expensive dress shop, flanked on the other side by a jewelry store. All the businesses shared the same parking lot, and there were quite a few cars in it this afternoon, mostly luxury sedans but also a few crossovers and SUVs.

“We didn’t think this through,” Sam said as he pulled into the parking lot. “This ol’ pickup of mine is gonna stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. We should’ve brought your car.”

“That’s all right. I don’t much like driving in a lot of traffic anymore. If people want to be snooty and look down their noses at your pickup, let them go ahead and do it. It doesn’t mean anything to me except that they’re stuck-up, and that’s
their
problem.”

“That’s sorta the way I feel about it,” Sam said with a smile. He parked between a Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade. “Do you want me to come in with you or stay out here?”

Phyllis thought about it for a moment, then said, “Why don’t you stay out here, if you don’t mind? I’m going to try to get an appointment to have my hair done, so right now all I’ll be doing is glancing around the place, just to get it in my head so I can see if everything matches up with the transcript we read.”

“Fine with me. I’ll have a look around the shoppin’ center, see if there’s anything that strikes me as funny.”

Phyllis nodded and said, “That’s a good idea. We’ll meet back here.”

“This isn’t the sort of place where you can just walk in and they’ll take care of you right away, though, is it?”

“I doubt it. But I’ll see how long it’ll be before I can make an appointment.”

“And while they’re doin’ your hair, you can do a little gossipin’ about the murder that took place here, right?”

“That’s the idea,” Phyllis said. She got out of the pickup and walked toward the building.