Fat-Free and Fatal (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (15 page)

“You’ll burn, you know,” Vesta hissed at me.

“What?” I asked, startled. Was she talking about the hot oatmeal?

“You’ll burn,” she repeated. “In hell.” She leaned forward and grinned triumphantly. “Wanna know why?”

I SHOOK MY head. I most definitely did
not
want to hear why I would burn in hell. At least not at breakfast. Shaking my head didn’t stop Vesta, though.

“Because adultery is a sin!” she proclaimed, pointing her long, skinny finger at me for emphasis. Then she leaned back in her chair, a smug smile on her face.

“That’s nice,” I replied and returned her smile for a few heartbeats before standing back up.

I stepped up to the refrigerator and opened it, wondering in spite of myself. Why would I burn in hell for adultery? I wasn’t even married. I found some soy milk and brought it back to the table. I knew I should just ignore Vesta’s proclamation, but…I sat back down.

“All right, what do you mean, ‘adultery is a sin’?” I asked.

Vesta just winked at me, happy to have caught my attention.

“I’m not married, nor is Wayne,” I pointed out.

“If you’re not married, how come you have a husband?” she demanded happily.

“I don’t have a husband,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “I have an
ex
-husband.”

“Have it your way,” she said sweetly. “But God knows. And the Devil.” She rubbed her hands together. “You’ll fry for sure.”

“Thank you for sharing,” I said, and ate my oatmeal.

I had plenty of time to mentally replay the interaction with Vesta as I drove over the Richmond Bridge and down the highway to Jest Gifts’ Oakland warehouse. Ad nauseam. Next time I’d ignore her, I promised myself as I handed out paychecks.

On the return trip, however, my thoughts drifted back to Sheila Snyder’s death. Dan and Alice. Alice and Dan. Their names rolled through my mind and connected again and again as I traveled up Highway 580 toward the bridge. But they weren’t the only suspects, I reminded myself as I pawed through my purse, searching for the bridge toll.

There was Iris, for instance, with her creepy photo collection. I dropped a dollar bill into the toll collector’s outstretched hand, then rattled out of the toll booth onto the bridge. Had Iris hung the photo of Ted Bundy’s hands with the others because his hands were interesting or because he was her personal role model?

I drove across the bridge and down 101, my neck and shoulders aching all the way. Maybe it was the weight of the multiple suspicions crowding into my head. Paula Pierce was another formidable woman, I thought, seeing her stocky, business-suited body in my mind’s eyes. How far would Paula go to protect her husband? To defend anyone she believed was oppressed, for that matter? And Meg Quilter, pale, talented and quiet. Too damn quiet, actually. Maybe she was repressed. Maybe she was raging inside! Then again, maybe not. I sighed as I took the Stinson Beach turnoff.

And how about the three I hadn’t seen since the night of the murder? Paula’s husband, Gary: the mathematics professor with the fondness for crystals. He was another quiet one. Then there was Leo. Ugh. He certainly wasn’t quiet. He was a loud, leering drunk. Could I add violence to the list of his faults? And Ken. I had almost forgotten Ken, almost forgotten the way he had giggled in the wake of Sheila’s murder.

I pulled into my driveway and climbed the stairs to my house, feeling both sore from driving and crabby to boot.

The phone rang on cue the instant I opened the door. I charged ahead, beating Vesta to it by a hand’s length. She snorted and headed back down the hallway as I picked the receiver up.

“Hey, kiddo,” Barbara greeted me.

“How do you do that?” I asked her impatiently. “How do you know when I’m walking in the door?”

“Practice,” she answered. “Hey, I went up to Leo’s gallery today—”

“We’re supposed to visit these people together,” I interrupted her. “The buddy system, remember?”

“Oh, Leo’s harmless—”

“Barbara!” I shouted, picturing a drunken Leo with his plump hands wrapped around my friend’s slim neck. In my current mood, it wasn’t a totally unattractive picture.

“Okay, okay,” she capitulated cheerfully. “We’ll go together this afternoon, right after we visit Paula and Gary.”

I opened my mouth to object, then closed it again, hoist by my own buddy system.

“I’ll see you around three,” Barbara caroled and hung up.

I sat down at my desk to stare at the piles of paper that covered it. I looked at my watch. I had less than four hours to do twelve hours’ worth of work. I sharpened a pencil and began filling in forms.

I had barely worked an hour when the phone rang. If that was Barbara again, I thought, I’d murder her myself. I had work to do, damn it.

“Hello!” I barked into the phone.

“Hi, this is Ann,” a concerned voice said. “Are you mad about something?”

“I’m fine,” I lied as my mind shifted gears. I hadn’t seen my friend Ann Rivera in at least a month. Something began to itch at the back of my consciousness

“Did you forget our lunch date?” she asked. That was it. Lunch! I pushed a pile of papers aside and saw it written there on my desk calendar, “Ann—Miranda’s—12:00.”

“Right, lunch,” I said, trying to put some enthusiasm into my tone. I looked at my watch. It was after twelve. “I’m on my way,” I told her.

It took me seven minutes to get to Miranda’s in downtown Mill Valley. I burst through the doors, startling a doe-eyed waitress clutching two menus to her breast. Mozart murmured from the sound system in a quiet rebuke to my noisy entrance. Even the pastel decor and tastefully arranged flowers seemed offended.

“One for lunch?” squeaked the waitress.

“I’m meeting a friend,” I told her, peering around her slight form.

I saw Ann in a booth near the windows. I semaphored frantically. Ann smiled and waved. The waitress jumped back as I rushed by.

“You look great,” I told Ann, panting as I slid into the booth across from her.

And she did. Her black hair hung in a new, sleek pageboy. Her brown skin glowed. Even her gray pinstripe suit looked good against the mauve upholstery of the booth. Ann’s chocolate-brown eyes look worried, though.

“You seem awfully anxious, Kate,” she said quietly, pulling a yellow marigold from the flower arrangement in the center of the table. “Is something bothering you?”

“Who, me?” I protested, resisting the urge to get up and run around the table a few times to calm down.

She smiled her toothy smile and stuck the flower behind her ear. Suddenly, she didn’t look very businesslike anymore.

“Yes, you,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Murder!” I blurted out.

I heard a gasp to my side. I turned and saw the doe-eyed waitress. Her head was pulled back, her arm extended full-length, holding out a menu as if she were feeding a snarling lion. Should I explain myself?

“I’ll have the chevre-walnut salad,” interjected Ann, wisely cutting off any explanation on my part. “And iced herbal tea.”

I followed suit, ordering the soba noodle salad with grilled tofu. And carrot juice. I didn’t need to see a menu. I had memorized the precious few vegetarian entrees at Miranda’s in the first three times I’d visited.

The waitress didn’t write our orders down. They never did at Miranda’s, part of their general atmosphere of good taste. They averaged about one mistake an order. I wondered what it would be this time.

“So,” said Ann once the waitress had left. She looked me in the eye. “Are you talking about the murder of the woman who owned the Good Thyme Cafe?”

I nodded, wondering if all my friends were psychic now.

“The Good Thyme’s an awful place,” Ann drawled. “Are you sure she wasn’t killed because of the cooking?”

I thought about it for a moment. The cooking had been pretty bad. But who had eaten there before? I had. Alice, probably—

“I was joking, Kate,” Ann enunciated carefully. She waved a hand in front of my face. “Joke? Ha-ha?”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Now I was feeling foolish as well as nervous. I leaned across the table to explain. “I guess I’m a little spooked. See, I was there. I saw Sheila Snyder’s dead body. There was an electrical cord twisted around her neck—”

I heard another gasp beside me. The waitress had returned to confirm our drink order.

“Did you say carrot juice?” she asked in a high, fluttering voice.

I nodded.

She looked at Ann. “Then you’re having the apple juice?”

“No, I’m having herbal iced tea,” Ann corrected her slowly and clearly. Ann Rivera was the administrator of a mental hospital. She was good at directions.

“Oh, of course,” the waitress whispered, nodding her head vigorously at Ann, while her eyeballs traveled surreptitiously back to me.

I wondered if the service would be better or worse, now that I had apparently terrified the waitress. What was wrong with her? Had she heard about the Good Thyme murder? Was she afraid her days were numbered as a restaurant employee? She turned and left, with a backwards look over her shoulder. Maybe she was just naturally timid.

Once we were alone again, Ann got serious. “Have you ever asked yourself why you keep getting involved in these things?” she said.

“Of course I ask myself,” I shot back, my shoulders tightening. “But I don’t get an answer. And if you mention karma, I’ll kill you!”

I looked quickly to my side. Luckily, the waitress had missed that one. I turned back to Ann with an apologetic smile.

“So, tell me about it,” she ordered.

I did. Ann was a good listener as well as a good director. By the time the juice and tea arrived, Ann had a pretty good idea who all the players were. By the time our salads arrived, Ann knew just about everything I did.

“There’s a murderer on the residential ward at our facility,” she said thoughtfully as she stuck her fork into her salad. “Killed his wife about forty years ago.” She took a big bite of greens, nuts and goat cheese. “Apologetic little guy,” she mumbled through the salad. “Though he claims to be Attila the Hun. It’s the only name he’ll answer to.”

“Claiming to be Attila the Hun probably kept him away from the electric chair,” I pointed out.

I took a bite of my own salad. The soba noodles and crisp vegetables were as good as ever in a light, tangy dressing, the tofu marinated in the same dressing and charcoal-grilled. Tasty, as well as tasteful. That’s why we came to Miranda’s.

“Maybe he would have gone to Death Row,” she conceded with a shrug. “But maybe not. The way it is, he’s been warehoused for forty years. And he’d get out if he’d only knock off the Attila story.”

“Wayne’s mother, the woman who’s living with us now, spent twenty years on a psych ward,” I told Ann through a mouthful of noodles. “Overmedicated.”

“What was wrong with her originally?” Ann was looking at me with new concern in her eyes. I could tell she didn’t like the idea of a former mental patient living with us. Well, neither did I.

“I think she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic,” I answered. “But she’s really just…” A number of words went through my mind, none of them genteel enough to utter at Miranda’s. “She’s mean,” I said finally.

“What do you mean, ‘mean’?” Ann prodded.

It took me fifteen minutes to tell her, between mouthfuls. Ann shook her head sympathetically as I finished the tale.

“I’m sure glad we don’t have her at our facility,” she told me. She plucked the marigold from behind her ear and put it back in the vase, looking like a hospital administrator again.

“God knows how we’d diagnose the woman,” she added, her voice taking on weight as she spoke. “Just plain ‘schizophrenic’ doesn’t cut it anymore for most of them.” She shook her head. “We have to be specific, very specific. Or else we get sued for malpractice. You wouldn’t believe it. There’re about a million psychoses and conditions and disorders.”

“Like what?” I asked. I was curious. When I had worked on a psych ward, we had used three basic categories: schizophrenic, manic-depressive and alcoholic.

Ann took a sip of tea before answering. “Okay,” she said, her voice a little lighter. “Say someone comes in with amnesia—”

“Hit ‘em over the head again,” I advised.

She laughed. “I only wish it was that easy,” she drawled. “If someone has amnesia, it might be from prolonged alcohol abuse, or delirium, or brain damage, or MPD—”

“What’s MPD?” I asked.

“Multiple Personality Disorder,” she answered. She took another sip of tea.

“You mean like
The Three Faces of Eve
? And
Sybil?
”

“You got it,” she told me. “God, these MPD patients are bizarre. Flipping in and out of personalities like they’re changing the channel on a TV set.”

Someone cleared a throat next to me. I jumped, startled. It was our waitress. I wondered how long she’d been standing there.

“How about dessert?” she proposed, a weak smile on her face. Her eyes took on a glazed look as she began to recite. “We have homemade lemon cheesecake, chocolate brownies with ice cream, fresh fruit compote, guava-mango sorbet—”