Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) (28 page)

Pete and Sadie had long ago established a rule about crossing the threshold into one another’s sleeping quarters. It was too intimate and they were too unmarried. Never mind that they had the maturity to control themselves much better than your average young adult. Still, it was a good rule for two people who believed certain intimacies were to be reserved for marriage and wanted the full splendor of their wedding night. However, that was a rule that they chose to break tonight, so as not to be overheard discussing potential murderers should they have had this conversation in the hotel lobby.

They’d brought the boxes and the landscape painting up to Sadie’s room and stacked them against the wall next to the boxes of files they’d gotten from the police yesterday. The room really wasn’t big enough to function as a storage unit, but at least the apartment was now empty and Sadie was reasonably sure she wouldn’t be adding any more boxes to the mismatched collection.

It was still weird to think that these things were all that was left of Wendy’s life. She created the spreadsheet she needed for the suspect list and organized a couple of Word files that would serve for other lists and notes she would need to jot down once they began their deliberations.

Sadie sat cross-legged on the king-sized bed of the hotel room with her computer on her lap while Pete sat at the desk in her room. He had some bursitis in his knee that made sitting cross-legged uncomfortable, so she gave him the desk chair.

Sadie cleared her throat, announcing that she was ready, before launching into her nomination of suspect number one. “Shasta has wanted that apartment for years, and with Wendy dead, she’s finally able to get it.” She typed the information into the newly created spreadsheet as she spoke.

“Why would she let Wendy rot in the bathtub?”

Sadie startled at the bluntness, and Pete offered an apology. “It’s okay,” she said, waving it away. “I wanted a quick-thought discussion. I can handle it.” She
hoped
she could handle it. Sometimes she was fine with the details, and other times they brought an image to her mind that shocked her. She cleared her throat. “Maybe she let Wendy . . . remain in the bathtub because she was the killer and was worried it would look suspicious if she was the one to find the body. So she had to wait for someone else.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But then, after a month, she ran out of patience and lit the body on fire? What if the whole building had gone up in flames?”

“Everyone’s commented on how perfectly contained that fire was—and the decomposing corpse, too—I don’t know why anyone thinks that was such a coincidence.”

“You think Shasta would plan something like that?” Pete shook his head. “I see her as an arsenic-in-the-wine-and-watch-while-you-die-a-violent-horrible-death kind of person, petting her dog the whole time, but—”

“And maybe that’s exactly how Wendy died. The police haven’t been able to conclude if she’d drowned or not. I know the tox screens came back clear, but some things can be worked through the system and not show up in those tests.
And
Shasta admits that she’s an actress, so maybe she’s putting on a show for us and isn’t the Hollywood darling she appears to be. Come next week she’ll be in leather and driving a Harley down Mission Drive. Maybe she
could
have pushed Wendy under the water.”

Pete gave her a half smile, cuing Sadie in that she was very close to crossing the “silly” line.

“I’m putting her on the list anyway,” Sadie finished. “She had motive and opportunity and was glad Wendy was gone.”

“Okay,” Pete said. “Who’s up next?”

“The landlord. Wendy was causing Mr. Pilings a lot of trouble, and he was making less money off of her than any other unit, even though she had more space. Getting rid of her would make his life much easier—one less headache of a tenant
and
more income. Double motive.”

“But, again, why not discover her body sooner? If Wendy’s body had been found within a couple of days, there would have been no need to remodel the entire bathroom, Shasta could have moved in as soon as the police cleared the crime scene,
and
Mr. Pilings would have made more money sooner. Didn’t Ji say he asked for the missed rent for the time Wendy was dead in the tub? Why shoot himself in the foot by waiting all that time if his motive is money?”

“Hmm,” Sadie said, looking at what she’d typed, even though she agreed with Pete’s assessment. Finally she admitted it out loud, “So, both Mr. Pilings and Shasta had reason to have the body discovered sooner,
but
the body was burned in such a way so as not to cause permanent damage to the apartment building, which supports both of their interests as well.”

“Maybe the fire not catching
was
a coincidence,” Pete said. “Maybe the arsonist
meant
to burn down all of Mission District and something went wrong. Maybe they’d never burned a body in a bathtub before and didn’t realize how it would work. If that’s the case, we can rule out Shasta and the landlord. It points toward someone not associated with the building.”

Sadie shook her head. “Why would they call the fire department if they wanted the whole building to burn?”

“Good point,” Pete accepted with a nod. “Except that we don’t know if the anonymous caller was also the firebug.”

Sadie wanted to argue but Pete was right. They didn’t know who placed that call, only that it was a woman and she hadn’t left her name.

“So,” Pete continued, “there are indicators both for and against Shasta and the landlord. Who else is on our list? Min?”

“Min did not do it,” Sadie said quickly, then narrowed her eyes at the teasing grin on Pete’s face. “There wasn’t a hint of dishonesty in what she told me earlier.”

“She lied to her mother about the letter
and
the boyfriend
and
she went to Wendy’s apartment behind her parents’ back for months.”

“Those are very different than killing your grandmother. Min seemed very smitten with Wendy and genuinely hurt when Wendy rejected her.”

“A rejection that took place a few weeks before Wendy died. Maybe she was more upset about that then she let on. Maybe
she’s
taken some theater classes too.”

“Stop playing devil’s advocate about Min; she didn’t do it and you know it.” Sadie knew she was not being objective, but she couldn’t make herself react with anything other than defensiveness.

“A good investigator doesn’t ignore possibilities.” There was a note of seriousness in his tone that Sadie disliked very much.

“Okay,” she said, squaring her shoulders and deciding to play along. “So Min, who adores the grandmother she’d never met before last fall and who feels this freeing sense of rebellion against her strict parents by sneaking around to have a relationship with her, broke into the apartment she’d helped clean for months and killed her in the bathtub. Does that seem reasonable?”

“Reasonable is not a mitigating factor when looking for a killer.”

“Okay, but why is Min a better possibility than Shasta, who actually had something to gain by Wendy’s death?”

Pete put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, short of Min being psychotic and killing Wendy out of the rage spurred by Wendy’s rejection, she probably didn’t do it.”

“She
didn’t
do it,” Sadie clarified.

Pete put down his hands. “What about Ji? Maybe he found out that Min was seeing Wendy and snapped.”

Sadie wanted to be equally defensive of Ji, but Wendy had hurt him so much that she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe knowing Min had met Wendy
would
push him over the edge. “I think he would have stayed clear of the apartment—and us—if he had killed her,” Sadie said, though she could hear the lack of defensiveness she’d had when she’d advocated for Min. “Surely we would have seen something within his reaction to the apartment, right?”

“Probably,” Pete said. “But when the police learn about Min, they’ll probably question both Ji and his wife with more intensity than they did the first time around. Like Shasta and the landlord, it’s not a perfect fit but it
is
motive, and they had more reason to leave the body there and then perhaps go back to try to get rid of the evidence when they realized no one was going to find the body on their own.”

“Gosh, I hate thinking that.”

Pete nodded his understanding. “Maybe Rodger did it,” he said, changing the person of interest. “He wouldn’t care that her body wasn’t found for a month, and he saves a lot of money if she’s gone.”

Sadie considered that. “And he didn’t think it was the least bit strange that she just stopped calling after having called him almost daily for months. He just assumed she was feeling better.” She pointed toward her purse lying on the dresser. “Will you get the bank statements out of my purse?” she asked.

Pete complied while Sadie added Rodger to her database. Pete crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “You want to check to see if the alimony was still paid, right?” he asked.

“It would be too obvious if he didn’t pay it, but I just want to make sure.”

Pete thumbed through the statements and pulled out several papers, handing them to her. Their fingers touched when she took the papers, and she became acutely aware of how close he was. She told herself they’d been close to one another all day. But this was different. They were in a hotel room. On a bed. She cleared her throat. “The alimony came through in June and July.”

“But all that proves is that Rodger’s motive wasn’t saving on alimony
right away.
It doesn’t change the fact that he’ll be saving a lot of money from here on out. Maybe he had another motivation, like getting her to stop calling.”

Sadie reviewed her conversation with Rodger—had it really been today? “He seemed so realistic about her. He saw her weaknesses and felt compassion for them.”

“You know, if you defend everyone, this won’t do us any good,” Pete said.

“I’m not trying to defend anyone—well, except Min and Ji—but . . . I don’t know. I’m soft toward Ji because I think he loved her, and Min because—”

“You think Ji loved Wendy?” Pete said. “I sure haven’t gotten that impression from him.”

“I think Ji cares about her,” Sadie said, wanting it to be true.

“I agree that he cared about her, but that’s not the same thing as truly loving her.”

Sadie wanted to argue that Wendy was his mother, that Ji had to have some love for her somewhere, but from what she’d learned about Wendy, she realized that might be overly optimistic. Of all the people Sadie had met and talked to, Ji had been the most damaged by Wendy. It was an uncomfortable point to acknowledge, but she allowed her brain to follow it. Ji
did
have motive—his mother had brought so much misery into his life, and, despite Min’s assurance that her parents knew nothing about her relationship with Wendy, what if they did? She wondered how she could find out. She looked at Pete sitting beside her. “You’re right that I can’t just stick up for people because I don’t want anything to point toward them. But I don’t want Ji or Min to know we suspect them.”

“I agree,” Pete said, nodding.

“So, I’m thinking about how Jason had seen Min and gave a pretty good description of her, but did you ask
when
he saw her? She said she went back twice after Wendy told her not to, but never got inside the building. If Jason—or anyone else for that matter—did see her inside the building after about the twelfth of May, it would . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t want to say that Min being in the building would prove that she’d lied to Sadie, that she was hiding something.

“We could also ask if anyone ever saw Ji there. Didn’t he tell you he’d never been to her building before he met the landlord there last week to get the keys?”

Sadie nodded.

“So if anyone saw him there prior to the first of this month, it would prove some deception on his part.”

Deception. Such an ugly word. She hated thinking of Min or Ji being deceptive, and yet she felt like the deceiving one by even considering checking up on their stories. “We could talk to the tenants tomorrow,” Sadie said. “Did you talk to anyone today other than Jason about Min?”

“I didn’t,” Pete said, shaking his head. “Also, I know Shasta said she didn’t track the comings and goings of people, but she was at the top of the stairs listening to me talk to Jason, and when I ran into her that first night, she had commented that the other tenant on the second floor worked late on Thursdays and wouldn’t be home until ten. I think she keeps better track than she wants to admit.”

“You better conduct that interview,” Sadie said. “I have a feeling you’ll get better information from Shasta than I will.”

“I don’t know,” Pete said with exaggerated concern. “She seems so distracted by my sexy manliness that my attempt to get information might just dwindle into abject admiration.” He shrugged and made a face that seemed to indicate how powerless he was in regard to the eccentric woman’s attraction to him.

Sadie smiled and leaned into him. “Well, she’s not the only one. It’s a constant battle I face when we’re together.” She kissed him quickly, then turned back to her computer and added “Talk to tenants about Min timeframe and if Ji was ever visiting” on her to-do list for tomorrow. She reviewed the other items on it:

• Check with PD to see if they have ID on Mr. Green Shirt

• Follow up with landlord about rental addendum

• Follow up on claims Wendy made against landlord

• Call Jack

Sadie frowned at the last item on that list. She’d told Jack that she’d call him tonight, but it was getting so late. She glanced at the clock on her computer—9:06, which made it 12:06 in Miami. Plus, it was his and Carrie’s first night on vacation. An e-mail would be better.

Pete shifted on the bed so he was leaning against the headboard. It didn’t move him any farther away from her, just somewhat behind her. She sat up a little straighter, suddenly mindful of her posture. Caught off guard by the instant tension—the delicious kind—that was suddenly between them, she clicked over to her list of questions and focused on the next one on her list.