Death of a Batty Genius (Stormy Day Mystery #3) (23 page)

Guiltily, I glanced at the empty bottle of vintage port on the dresser. “We thought everyone was accounted for last night,” I said. “Marie didn’t say you were missing.”

Jessica brought a washcloth from the bathroom and started cleaning his face. “Let’s hope you learned your lesson,” she said. “Treat your wife better so she actually notices when your big, dumb, shiny head isn’t on the pillow next to hers.”

The color was returning to his face, and his words came out clear but soft. “Last thing I remember, I was checking on the generator. I was tired. Sometimes it comes on fast, especially in times of intense stress. I’m awake one minute and asleep the next.”

“This could be dangerous,” I said. “Somebody needs to be keeping an eye on you if you do this regularly.”

“Like a sitter,” Jessica said. “Or a nanny. But not a cute one that you would try to make out with, obviously.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he grumbled. “I’ve got medication to manage my condition.”

“About your medication,” I said. “Hypothetically speaking, is it possible your bottle of pills has expired and lost potency? Or that somebody who handles your medication mixed up your wakefulness dose with a sleeping pill?”

I was careful not to spell it out for him, that his wife had been swapping his pills to get him out of the way, but he needed to be warned. I had to speak to Marie as well. If he’d died of exposure in the woods because of her actions, she could have been criminally liable.

“Marie swaps my pills from time to time,” he said. “She thinks I don’t notice, but I always do, and I play along. The secret to marriage is letting the other person think they’re getting one over on you.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Not great,” he admitted.

Jessica leaned over Butch to examine the back of his head. “You’ve got a big goose egg back here. Did somebody whack you upside the head last night?”

He reached up and touched the red lump. “I might have slipped and fallen. It was awfully slippery out there in the rain.”

She looked into his eyes. “Did Marie hit you?”

“Of course not,” he snorted. “My sweet little Marie? She’s as nice as pie.”

I scoffed. Nice as pie? Pie had never wrestled me in the mud, but the man had survived a rough night, so I let it go.

We stopped by Butch and Marie’s room, two doors down, so Butch could trade his blankets for clothes. He opened the door without using his keys.

Jessica frowned at the lock, then ran over to check our door, which she found was also unlocked.

She asked, “Don’t hotel doors lock automatically?”

Butch had already gone into his room, so it was just the two of us in the hallway.

“Usually they do lock,” I said. “Maybe the rules are different in a lodge. All the better for people to sneak in and out of each other’s rooms.”

I looked up at the dome covering the security camera.

“While you were showering, I got access to the hallway footage,” I said.

“You sly fox,” she said.

I told her about what I’d seen on the video, from her chaste kiss with Dion, to the kissing between Butch and Della, five hours later.

“At least it was just kissing,” she said. “He could probably use that footage to exonerate himself.”

I rubbed my chin and stared at the dome again. Maybe he already had. Could he have altered the footage to change the timestamps? No, he didn’t strike me as the hacker type, and even if he were, it wouldn’t have been easy.

“What do you think of Dion?” Jessica asked.

“What do
you
think of him?”

She looked down and pointed her toes together. “Stormy, I didn’t tell you this before, but before Christmas, I had an appointment with Voula Varga, to talk about my love life. She sold me one of her dolls and promised a man would come into my life soon. A man who was so smart, his friends all called him a genius.”

“Voula Varga was a con artist.”

“Sure, but what if she really was psychic? They always say psychics can’t see their own future anyway, so what happened to her doesn’t mean she couldn’t be right about other things.”

“Benji is also a genius,” I said with a smile. “Maybe Voula was right about you catching a genius, but you went for the wrong one.”

She rolled her eyes, smiling. “Something about a man running around pretending to be a rooster doesn’t do it for me. And why are his pants so short? Wasn’t his company worth five million dollars?”

“That’s why he was rich. He was working on his chemical formulas and not worrying about the length of his trousers.”

“The way he was crowing out there, I think he might have been testing some of his chemical formulas on himself.”

“Maybe he figured out what was in the Rainforest Delight. It could have been a natural fungus, like the ergot that grows in rye. That stuff has caused mass hysteria more than a few times throughout history.”

“But it wasn’t ergot,” she said. “I’ve been reading up, and I didn’t have the burning skin or convulsions.”

“You seem okay now. How are you feeling?”

She smiled. “In the light of day, everything’s great.”

“How about at night?”

She didn’t answer, and then Butch emerged from his room.

Christopher had beaten us to the dining room. He sat alone at a table by the windows.

“Dion’s in the kitchen helping Marie,” Christopher said. “Benji’s still outside, communing with nature. Butch, if you hear a rooster crowing out there, it’s your wife’s friend Benji.”

“Is that so? What a geek.” Butch took a seat next to Christopher.

I found it odd that Butch didn’t check in with his wife in the kitchen, but it was just the latest in a series of odd things, and I was finding it difficult to keep being shocked.

We had a carafe of coffee, plus ice water and grapefruit juice at the table, so all was well in my world.

Jessica broke the morning’s news to Christopher. “Your cousin Butch decided to earn his Boy Scout badge for sleeping in the freezing rain without a tent.”

Christopher frowned. “They give badges for that? It seems a bit irresponsible.”

Butch guffawed, then told Christopher about his cold night sleeping in the woods. He was showing off the big bump on the back of his head when Benji Biggs came running into the dining room, gasping for breath.

Jessica and I exchanged a glance.
The rooster was back.

Benji didn’t crow, though.

Still panting, he exclaimed, “He’s dead!” He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “Franco is dead.”

Chapter 26
 

There are three
things you need to know about the Darwin Awards. First, they are only awarded posthumously. Second, nobody wants to get one. Third, originality and style count, so simple stupidity isn’t enough to make one a winner.

Personally, I never liked the idea of mocking those whose terrible ideas got them killed and thus removed from the human gene pool. No matter how rash, they were still people. However, if a new Darwin Awards list happens to come across my inbox, I’ll give it a scan.

Unusual deaths make us curious, thanks to self-preservation. We make thousands of choices every day, and we hope they’re the right choices. Only through our shared stories—even the silly ones we send around by email—do we learn about other people’s choices and consequences.

I may enjoy a superior smirk at the idea of some fool using a lighter to check for a gas leak, but I will read the whole list in earnest, filing away facts, just in case. You never know when you might need to steal the metal cables from an elevator, and it’s a good tip to not attempt this while inside the elevator box that’s held up by those same cables.

When Benji showed us pictures he’d taken of Franco Jerico’s body on the ledge, wearing that silly tuxedo-print T-shirt, I feared Franco had done something worthy of a nomination for the Darwin Awards. He certainly was dressed for it.

I stood back from the group while Butch, Christopher, and Jessica comforted Benji and pressed him for more details.

His story came out in spurts. He’d been on his walk, enjoying nature, when he heard some crows making a racket. He peered over the edge of a steep crag and spotted Franco on a ledge, on his back, facing up.

He thought Franco was joking around, but then he saw what the crows had been squawking over. In tears, Benji described how he’d thrown rocks at the birds to drive them away. He ran straight back to the lodge to get help bringing Franco inside.

“But you can’t move the body,” I said.

Everyone turned and stared at me as though I was a monster. They all assumed it was an accident. Apparently, I was the only paranoid person thinking the mountain ledge could be a crime scene.

“He’ll get picked to the bones,” Butch said. “We can’t leave a man out there.”

The others murmured in agreement.

Christopher had Benji’s phone, and was examining the photographs. “He must have fallen, maybe hit his head. Is that dark spot around his head blood, or just a shadow?” He tried to show Jessica for a second opinion, but she covered her mouth and stepped back.

“Might have been a cougar,” Butch said. “They sneak up behind you and then it’s one quick bite to the spine.” He gave Benji’s shoulder a soft pat. “It would have been quick and painless.”

Benji took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Franco loved animals. He always talked about owning exotic pets, like snakes or tigers. I can see him now, trying to make friends with a cougar.” He choked back a sob. “You idiot. Franco, why’d you have to get yourself killed? You had so much to live for.”

Jessica sat next to Benji and put her arm around him.

Christopher came over to me. “We need to call the police, and someone has to break the news to Dion and Marie.”

“You call it in, and I’ll talk to those two.”

He nodded appreciatively. “You always were better than me at breaking bad news.”

“You’re the good news guy.”

“We made a great team.” He glanced at the door to the kitchen. “Good luck in there.”

I thanked him and slipped quietly into the kitchen.

Dion was smiling as he laid slabs of streaky bacon on the grill. He said to Marie, “Rule number one? I know that already. Never fry bacon naked.”

Marie laughed. “Rule number one of being a chef is you have to get all your ingredients set out before you start cooking. It’s called
mise en place
. That’s French for
everything in its place
.”

“More like French for
boring
. You’ve gotta loosen up, girl. Chillax. That’s chill plus relax.”

Marie stopped stirring her pancake batter when she saw me standing there. We hadn’t spoken since we’d tried to talk to her through the door of the honeymoon suite, and she didn’t look pleased to see my face.

“Everything’s under control in here,” she said tersely. “If you’re starving, go ahead and take that fruit platter out.”

Dion looked up from the grill and asked, “Have you ever had pancakes with bacon cooked right into them? You’ll die when you taste these.”

He took the bowl from Marie and poured strips of oblong pancakes over the crisp bacon, then wiped the edge of the bowl with his finger and licked it.

“Interesting,” he said to Marie. “These are gluten-free?”