Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (4 page)

“Yes, Gil.” Hannah paused to stare at him. Gil looked very earnest.

“You found Ron, didn’t you?”

Hannah sighed. Everyone she met wanted to know something about Ron. She was becoming a local celebrity, but being catapulted to instant fame by virtue of Ron’s murder made her feel rotten. “Yes, Gil. I found him.”

“That must have been very upsetting for you.”

“It wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.”

“I was just thinking…that’s a terrible thing you had to go through and you might want to talk to someone about it. My office door is always open, Hannah. And I’ll do my best to help you through this.”

Hannah wanted to tell him that she didn’t need a shrink. Even if she did, a Jordan High counselor who dealt with the heartbreak of acne and dateless Saturday nights wouldn’t be the shrink she’d choose. But then she reminded herself that she’d vowed to be tactful, and she took a deep breath, preparing to lie through her teeth. “Thanks for the offer, Gil. If I need to talk to somebody about it, you’ll be my first choice.”

Edna had left by the time Hannah had packed up her supplies and carted them out to her Suburban. She’d tried to call Bill several times, but she’d been told that Bill was out in the field and couldn’t be reached. Hannah glanced at her watch. She’d promised Lisa that she’d be back by four, and she had only five minutes to make it. But finding the cup with lipstick was more important than getting back to The Cookie Jar on time.

Hannah glanced down at her best dress slacks and sweater set. She was catering the mayor’s party tonight and she’d planned to wear it.

The knit outfit was light beige, but it was washable. Giving a little groan for the load of laundry she’d have to do the moment she got home, Hannah pushed up her sweater sleeves and marched to the Dumpster, girding her loins to do battle with the cafeteria leftovers that awaited her.

The Dumpster was huge. Hannah wrinkled her nose at the stench that rolled out of the metal bin and muttered a curse. The lip of the container came up above her armpits and there was no way that she could lift all the bags out to examine them. Muttering another curse, a more colorful one this time, Hannah walked back to her Suburban and drove it up nose-to-nose with the front of the trash bin. Then she clambered up on the candy-apple red hood and reached into the Dumpster to pull up the first trash bag.

Her first attempt yielded wadded napkins, globs of butterscotch pudding, and clumps of something brown that looked like beef stew. At least she knew what the students had eaten for lunch. Hannah was about to haul up the second bag when she remembered that the kitchen wastebasket had been lined with a smaller green plastic bag. She stretched out over the hood and lifted the black bags one by one, dragging them over to one side. Near the bottom—she should have known that it would be on the bottom—she saw one lone green bag.

Even though she scrunched forward until her entire upper body was hanging over the edge of the Dumpster, the tips of her fingers were still a good three inches from the top of the green bag. Hannah sighed and then she did what any good sister-in-law and dedicated amateur detective would do. She turned around to dangle her legs over the lip of the metal bin, took a deep steadying breath, and slid down into the bowels of the Dumpster.

Now that she was on the inside, grabbing the green trash bag was simple. Climbing back out of the Dumpster wasn’t. Hannah had to stack the big black bags in a pile so that she could scramble up on top of them, using them like a slippery and squishy staircase. One bag broke under her weight and she groaned as her shoes sank down into a morass of stew. By the time she emerged from the malodorous depths and pulled herself back up on the hood of her Suburban again, Hannah knew that she smelled every bit as bad as she looked.

“Bill’s going to owe me big time for this,” Hannah grumbled as she loosened the tie on the green plastic bag and began to search through the contents. Several crumpled bread wrappers and a slew of illicit cigarette butts later, she encountered two Styrofoam cups.

“Gottcha!” Hannah crowed. She was about to grab the cups when she remembered that movie and television detectives always used protective gloves and evidence bags. If there were fingerprints on the cup with the lipstick, she certainly didn’t want to smudge them. Since Hannah didn’t happen to carry gloves or evidence bags on her catering jobs, she settled for slipping a bread wrapper over her hand, plucking out the two cups, one by one, and depositing them inside a second empty bread wrapper.

With the evidence secured, Hannah slid down from the hood of her Suburban and climbed into the driver’s seat. As she started her engine and drove out of the school parking lot, she felt a little foolish about the elaborate precautions she’d taken. Modeling herself after a television detective was crazy unless she was dumb enough to believe that the prefix of every telephone number in the entire country was five-five-five.

L
isa was filling a bag with Peanut Butter Melts and her eyes grew as round as saucers as Hannah blew in the back door. “Hannah! What…?”

“Don’t ask. I’m going in to take a quick shower.”

“But Bill’s here and he needs to talk to you.”

Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. “Where is he?”

“Out in front. He’s minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”

“Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I’ll be out just as soon as I’m decent.”

The moment she’d closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an “added bonus” when he’d shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She’d used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she’d muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.

She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt that had faded from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn’t smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn’t worn since the last time she’d fallen for the old “jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.

Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah assumed that Lisa must have plied him with cookies to keep him from becoming too impatient.

“About time,” Bill commented. “Lisa said you smelled worse than the panhandler that hangs around the Red Owl. What happened?”

“I was just helping you. Edna Ferguson told me that Max hired a woman assistant for Ron. I was collecting the coffee cups they used this morning.”

Bill looked confused. “But Ron didn’t have an assistant. I asked Betty about that. If there was a woman with Ron this morning, she wasn’t hired by the dairy. Didn’t Edna recognize her?”

“Edna didn’t see her. Ron and this woman left before she came in to work.”

“Wait a minute.” Bill held up his hands. “If Edna didn’t see this woman, how did she know about her?”

“From the cups. Edna always leaves a jar of instant coffee out for Ron and there were two cups on the counter this morning. One of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim and that’s how she knew that Ron was with a woman. I collected them and they’re right over there by the dishwasher in that bread wrapper.”

“Why did Edna save them?” Bill looked puzzled as he got up to retrieve the cups.

“She didn’t. I dug them out of the cafeteria Dumpster. They were all the way in the bottom and I had to climb in to get them.”

“That’s why you smelled like a panhandler?”

“You got it.” Hannah gasped as Bill started to reach inside the bread wrapper. “Don’t touch them, Bill! I went to a lot of trouble to preserve any fingerprints.”

Bill’s eyebrows shot up and he froze for a second. He took one look at her earnest face and then he began to laugh. “The lab can’t lift prints from this kind of cup. The surface is too rough.”

“I knew I never should have climbed in that Dumpster!” Hannah groaned. “How about the lipstick? Can you do something with that?”

“It’s possible, unless it’s such a popular color that half the women in Lake Eden wear it.”

“It’s not.” Hannah was very sure of herself. “Most women look awful in bright pink.”

“How would you know? I’ve never seen you wear lipstick.”

“That’s true, but Andrea bought a color like that once and it looked horrible on her. She’s got every other shade there is, so I figure that this one can’t be very popular.”

“You’ve got a point.” Bill started to smile. “Good work, Hannah.”

Hannah was pleased at the compliment, but then she started thinking about the logistics of finding the Lake Eden woman who owned that color of lipstick. “What are you going to do, Bill? Inspect every powder room in town?”

“I hope it won’t come to that. I’ll start with the cosmetic counters and see if they carry this color. Whoever she is, she had to buy it somewhere. That’s called legwork, Hannah, and I’ll need your help. You may not know much about lipstick, but you’ve got to know more than I do.”

Hannah sighed. Watching paint dry held more interest for her than cosmetic counters, and legwork didn’t sound like very much fun.

“You
are
going to help me, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. I’m sorry I’m not more enthusiastic, but rooting around in all that garbage got me down.”

“Next time just call me and I’ll do it. I’ve got coveralls in the cruiser and I’m used to stuff like that.”

“I
did
call you. I even left a message, but you didn’t get back to me in time. And since Edna told me that the trash company was coming to empty the Dumpster at five, I figured that I’d better do it.”

Bill reached out to pat her on the back. “You’d make a good detective, Hannah. Your dip in the Dumpster gave us the only real clue we’ve got.”

Rhonda Scharf, her plump middle-aged body encased in a baby-blue angora sweater that might have fit her thirty pounds ago, leaned forward over the glass-topped cosmetic counter at Lake Eden Neighborhood Pharmacy to stare at the smudge of pink lipstick on the white Styrofoam cup. Rhonda was wearing a scowl that turned down the corners of her heavily rouged lips, and her too-long, too-thick, too-black-to-be-real eyelashes fluttered in distaste. “That lipstick didn’t come from my counter. I wouldn’t be caught dead displaying a product like that!”

Bill pushed the bag closer. “Take another look, Rhonda. We need to make sure.”

“I did look.” Rhonda pushed the bag back to him. “I do all the ordering and I’ve never carried that brand or that color.”

“There’s no doubt in your mind, Rhonda?”

Rhonda shook her head, her coal-black hair swaying from side to side. The strands moved together, like they’d been dipped in glue, and Hannah suspected that Rhonda must get a massive employee’s discount on hairspray.

“See how it’s smeared?” Rhonda poked at the bag with the pointed tip of a long, manicured nail. “I don’t sell any lipstick that isn’t smudge-proof, and the lines I buy from don’t make garish shades like that.”

Hannah looked up from the color charts that Rhonda had handed her. Her grandmother had always said that you’d catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and she was about to put that old maxim to the test. “We really need your help, Rhonda. You’re Lake Eden’s only cosmetic expert.”

“Then why did you go to CostMart? I know you did, Hannah. Cheryl Coombs called to tell me.”

“Of course we went there,” Hannah acknowledged. “We checked out every cosmetic counter in town. But we saved you for last because I told Bill you’d know more about lipstick than anyone else in town. Your makeup is always so perfect.”

Rhonda preened slightly, giving Bill a sidelong glance that was definitely flirtatious. Since Rhonda had to be pushing fifty and Bill hadn’t yet celebrated his thirtieth birthday, Hannah figured the gossip her mother had told her about Rhonda and the UPS driver might not be as ridiculous as she’d thought.

“I’ll help any way I can.” Rhonda simpered a bit, her violet-colored contacts trained on Bill. “What do you want to know?”

Hannah sighed, reminding herself again about flies and honey. “If you wanted to buy a lipstick like the one on the cup…and I know you wouldn’t, having such good taste and all…but
if
you did, where would you go to buy it?”

“Let me think about that.” Rhonda pursed her perfectly drawn lips. “No store in town would carry that lipstick, so I’d have to look elsewhere. Not that I would, of course.”

Hannah agreed quickly. “Of course not. We’re just pretending here, trying to get a feel for where the owner of this lipstick might have gone to buy it. You’re helping Bill with a very important investigation, Rhonda, and he really appreciates it.”

“Just a minute.” Rhonda’s eyes narrowed. “Does this have anything to do with Ron LaSalle’s murder?”

Hannah kicked Bill and he took his cue from her. He leaned close and lowered his voice. “It’s confidential, Rhonda. The only reason we asked is because we knew that we could trust you.”

“I see.” Rhonda reached out to pat Bill’s hand. “If I wanted to buy this particular shade of perfectly awful lipstick, I’d just have to get it from Luanne Hanks.”

“Luanne Hanks?” Hannah was surprised. Luanne had been in Michelle’s high school class, but she’d had to drop out when she got pregnant. “I thought Luanne worked at Hal and Rose’s Cafe.”

“She does.”

“They sell lipsticks at the cafe?” Bill asked.

“No, silly boy.” Rhonda batted her unnatural lashes. “Luanne works at the cafe during the week and she sells Pretty Girl cosmetics on the weekends. I’ve seen her lugging her sample case around town.”

Bill stepped back, preparing to go. “Thanks, Rhonda. You’ve been a big help.”

“There’s one more thing, Rhonda.” Hannah put on her most serious expression. “Bill hasn’t warned you yet.”

Bill turned to stare at her with a perfectly blank face, and Hannah knew she’d have to take charge. She turned back to Rhonda and plunged ahead on her own. “It’s like this, Rhonda. Bill doesn’t want you to say anything about any of the questions he’s asked you. If Ron’s killer finds out that you helped, you could be in real danger. Isn’t that right, Bill?”

“Uh…right!” Bill was a little slow on the uptake, but Hannah figured he was still rattled by Rhonda’s attempt to flirt with him. “Mum’s the word, Rhonda. Just keep in mind that Ron’s killer has already committed the ultimate crime. He’s got nothing to lose by killing again.”

Rhonda’s face turned so pale that Hannah could see the place where she’d blended her foundation. Rhonda deserved a good scare for flirting with Bill, but Hannah didn’t want to be responsible for the damage if Rhonda fainted and crashed into the glass cosmetic counter.

“You don’t have to be nervous, Rhonda.” Hannah reached out to pat her arm and steady her at the same time. “No one overheard our conversation and we went to every cosmetic counter in town. As far as anyone knows, you just told us that you didn’t sell this type of lipstick.”

“Hannah’s right,” Bill said. “There’s no cause for alarm, Rhonda. I’ll protect your identity by keeping your name out of my notes.”

“Thank you, Bill.” A little color began to come back to Rhonda’s face. “I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I swear it.”

Hannah was satisfied that Rhonda wouldn’t blab, but she still looked awfully pale. “When the killer’s behind bars, Bill will put in for a special citizen’s merit certificate for you. You’ve been really helpful, Rhonda.”

Bill echoed Hannah’s words and picked up the plastic bag. With a final goodbye and a thank-you to Rhonda, they walked out of the store and climbed into Bill’s county cruiser. They were driving back to Hannah’s shop when Bill started to chuckle.

“What is it?” Hannah turned to stare at him.

“I was just wondering how I’d put in for a special citizen’s merit certificate for Rhonda when the sheriff’s department doesn’t do things like that.”

“No problem,” Hannah assured him. “Gil Surma’s got a bunch of blank award certificates for his Boy Scouts. I’ll just ask him for one and you can fill it in with Rhonda’s name.”

“That won’t work. Sheriff Grant will never sign his name to a trumped-up award.”

“He doesn’t have to.” Hannah gave him a grin. “We’re going to solve this case, Bill. By the time you get around to giving Rhonda her certificate, you’ll be a detective and you can sign it yourself.”