Most Likely to Die (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (13 page)

- Thirteen -

“
Por dios
, Kate!” Pam admonished, her voice seeming unnaturally loud over the buzz of restaurant noise. She shook her finger across the table at me, her lustrous brown eyes narrowed with anger now. “I know you’re checking everyone out, but you don’t have to be so weasely about it. If you have a question, just ask.”

I shrunk into my seat. My lungs shrunk with me, making breathing difficult. I wondered just what color my hot face was. I hadn’t been weasely, had I? Just, well, subtle. At least that’s what I’d been trying for.

“Excuse me,” came a quiet voice from my side. It was our waitress with our vegetarian specials.

Pam sighed and leaned back in her chair as the waitress set out our plates quietly and cautiously, looking neither of us in the eye. I wondered just how much she had heard of our conversation. Or was Pam’s expression and shaking finger alone enough to inhibit her?

“As if I don’t have enough problems,” Pam went on once the waitress was gone. She crossed her arms over her formidable chest. “The police are on my case too. I have an appointment with them this evening. I have to leave work early and drive all the way to Gravendale.” She paused and looked me in the eye. “And no, I did not kill Sid Semling.”

I was glad to hear the direct denial. So glad, I hurried to make amends. By way of unrequested and most likely ill-considered confessions.

“Wayne and I have already been grilled by the Gravendale police,” I confided in a whisper. “And they accused both of us of murdering Sid.”

All the anger went out of Pam’s eyes. Now they widened with concern.

“But why you, Kate?” she asked. “You don’t even have a motive.” She paused, peering even more intently at me. “Do you?”

“No,” I snapped, annoyed. Now she was doing it. All right, she wasn’t being weasely, but all the same. “I just own the pinball machine in question. A previously harmless piece of entertainment equipment, now a murder weapon. Unfortunately, that may be a simple enough solution for the Gravendale Police Department.”

Pam shook her head, then looked down at her plate and seemed to forget about murder.

“Yum,” she said cheerfully. “The baked eggplant with onions,
sabroso
.” She kissed her fingertips to complete her sentence. “Even the basmati rice is special. And the chutney—”

“Pam,” I said, keeping my eyes off my plate and on my duty. “I don’t want to be weasely, but I do want to ask people more questions. Not just you, but everyone. See, if the police want to pin this thing on Wayne and me, I have to do what I can to figure it out myself.”

Pam took a bite of eggplant and nodded solemnly. The muscles in my chest relaxed.

“So, about motive,” I began enthusiastically. Then I stopped. How was I going to get into this without spilling the beans about Charlie spilling the beans? Pam chewed and stared at me, awaiting the next installment. Maybe it would help their relationship if I let her know what he’d said, I told myself, conning my own conscience. And Charlie hadn’t specifically asked me to keep our talk in confidence, I remembered. I opened my mouth again.

“Charlie came to talk to me and Wayne on Saturday night. He filled us in on…” How to put it? I looked down at my plate in distraction. The food did look good. And the aromas that drifted up to my nostrils were doing their job, filling my mouth with saliva.

“What did he tell you?” Pam prompted impatiently.

I jerked my head back up and shot out the words fast in an attempt to bypass any self-censure synapses. “He told us how Sid tried to blackmail him, and then how Sid spread the news about your pregnancy all over Gravendale.”

Pam’s face colored again, but a slightly different shade. Embarrassment was represented in the mix, but so was anger.

“And did he mention how Sid informed me that Charlie was sleeping with half the girls at school, including you?” she fired back evenly.

I flinched at her tone but answered, “He didn’t say Sid had included me.”

“Listen, Kate,” Pam pressed on, holding the edges of our small table. “That was twenty-five years ago. I was pissed at Sid. But I was more pissed at myself. And at Charlie. Getting pregnant. God,
estúpida
!”

Then she flung out her open hands as if trying to grasp the right words.

“But what Sid did, it was just, just icing on the cake. Or icing on the morning sickness maybe.” She managed a little laugh. “Ugh, I wish I hadn’t said that. But you know what I mean. Sid’s rumor-mongering couldn’t, and didn’t, make the situation a whole lot worse than it already was.”

I nodded, hoping she would go on. Because she just about had me convinced.

“And I wouldn’t know how to rig a pinball machine anyway,” she finished up. Bingo. I was convinced.

“Who would know?” I demanded, glad to be on to somebody other than Pam. Now I could breathe again.

“Well…” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Jack’s a mechanic. So is Lillian, isn’t she? And Natalie does some kind of computer programming—”

“And Charlie’s a handyman,” I threw in without thinking.

“Kate!” she objected, her palms slapping on the table on either side of her plate. “You know Charlie. Charlie couldn’t even conceive of murder. Much less carry it out.”

“But could Rodin Rodent?” I murmured, mostly to myself.

“No,” Pam answered seriously. “I went and got a couple of Rodin Rodent books from the public library yesterday. Rodin never hurts anyone. He saves them.”

Then suddenly her whole face softened. “What else did Charlie say about me?” she asked in a whisper.

“He thinks everything that happened twenty-five years ago was his fault,” I told her. “And,” I added happily, “he thinks he’s in love with you.”

Pam’s skin flushed to terra-cotta again. There was a soft little smile on her full lips, and her big lustrous eyes were out of focus. She was lovely, a woman in love. A woman to be loved.

“Oh,” she sighed after a moment.

When her eyes finally refocused, she looked at me as if she had just noticed me.

“Kate, you’re not eating,” she reprimanded. “Eat! I’m the one who shouldn’t be eating, not with all these pounds on me. I—”

“You’re beautiful,” I interrupted. “And curvy and luscious—”

“Oh, cut it out.” She turned her head and waved a hand by the side of her face.

“I won’t,” I insisted. “I get so tired of big, beautiful people putting themselves down. If you’re so damned unattractive, then why is Charlie in love with you?”

“Okay, okay,” she capitulated, her lips curving into a tilted smile. “I’m big and I’m beautiful.”

Satisfied, I speared a piece of eggplant and brought it to my lips.

“To some people,” she muttered under her breath.

I pretended not to hear the amendment and took a bite of the eggplant. Pam was right about one thing. The food was great here. The eggplant and onions tasted roasted, even barbecued, instead of stewed. And the chutney had to be homemade. I could taste peaches and pears as well as the usual mangoes in the spicy mix. Even the basmati rice was subtly flavored and bright saffron yellow.

We ate for a while without talking, listening to the clank of plates and hum of other conversations in the restaurant, then spent the rest of our time sipping herbal tea and gossiping about the people we’d known at Gravendale High. Sip. Gossip. Sip. Gossip. Pam was the one who brought up Sid again.

“You know, even after he drilled the peepholes in the girls’ dressing room, I still liked him,” she confessed with a self-deprecating shake of the head.

“Damn,” I said. For those of us whose breasts had barely sprouted, that trick had seemed especially humiliating. “I’d forgotten that one. Whose swimming pool was it?”

“Charlie’s parents’,” she answered, chuckling. “Of course. You should have seen Charlie scouting around for wood putty, scared to death his parents would find out. But the thing was, it was hard to get mad at Sid because he was so vulnerable underneath all that need for attention. And he
was
Charlie’s friend.” She leaned across the table, her face serious. “I know Charlie doesn’t believe it, but I think Sid really did like Charlie. Liked him a lot. He could be a big brother to Charlie. It was when Charlie started rebelling against Sid’s authority that the friendship started eroding. And Sid was jealous of Charlie’s relationship with me, even though he helped kick-start it.”

I nodded and took another sip of honey-sweetened tea. Pam was smart about people. She was probably right.

“All our relationships were incredibly fragile,” I put in, remembering a fight I’d had with my best friend Patty that had lasted for months. I couldn’t even remember what had started it. Just the sick feeling in my stomach I’d had all the way through it. “Painful too.”

“That’s because we were all so weird,” Pam concluded brusquely. “I still haven’t figured out if it was just our group, or if everyone is strange at that age.”

“Remember how Becky used to drink codeine cough syrup from a brown bag during lunch?” I reminisced. “She had a refillable prescription and her parents’ charge account at the local druggist. She refilled it every week.” I’d admired the trick in those days, thought it an incredibly clever way to get high without spending any money. Now, all I could think was drug/alcohol problem.

“And Natalie’s dorky clothes?” Pam threw in.

“And Elaine as a hippie,” I added. “Remember when they sent her home for having a skirt shorter than the feathers in her headband?”

“Ay, Dios Mìo
,” Pam said, her hand over her heart as she laughed. “You know, that
muchacha
was already a racist even when she was a hippie. She wouldn’t date my brother because he was Mexican.”

I shook my head and took another sweet sip of tea. That sounded like Elaine.

“Now, Charlie didn’t have a racist bone in his body,” she added, her eyes glossing over.

Fifteen minutes later of Charlie-this and Charlie-that, I walked Pam to the bus stop to see her off. I wrapped my arms around her luxurious body in a tight hug, glad we knew each other again. And wondering if we would resume our friendship once the murder was solved. “Not if she’s the murderer,” someone in my mind shouted from the back row. But I ignored the heckler. I didn’t want it to be Pam. I liked her too much. “What if it’s Charlie?” the heckler added.

“
Hasta la proxima,
Kate,” Pam said quickly as a Muni bus lurched up to the curb.

I waited till she was on board and the bus had lumbered away, exhaling exhaust, then walked slowly back to my car, pawing through my purse for my stack of business cards as I went. I was already away from my desk. Maybe the next thing I’d do was go and talk to some of the people who’d been mentioned in Elaine’s anonymous phone call.

Rebecca Vogel, Attorney at Law, was on the top of the stack. Perfect. I studied the address, then looked up just in time to sidestep an elderly man limping along directly in my path.

Becky was right here in the city, albeit all the way downtown. But at least her son wouldn’t be at her office. I hoped. I didn’t want to mention the alleged rape anywhere near D.V. Actually, I didn’t want to mention much of anything anywhere near D.V. The kid spooked me.

I found a pay phone on the next block and called Harvey, Payne, and Putnam, studying incomprehensible graffiti as the switchboard placed my call. Unfortunately, Becky wasn’t in her office any more than D.V. was. I suspected she might actually have been present physically. But in her secretary’s words, she was “unavailable for the rest of the afternoon.”

I hung up and looked at my other cards.

Who else? According to the phone caller, Jack had owed Sid money. Lillian was a bigamist. And Natalie Nusser had AIDS.

Karma-Kanick Auto Repair was in Gravendale. Natalie Nusser’s office was in Santa Rosa. It was a toss-up which would take longer to get to. But I felt pulled toward Gravendale.

I got in my car and drove without even phoning, thinking about Jack Kanick as I traveled over the Golden Gate Bridge, long past Mill Valley and into the rolling brown hills of Sonoma. He’d been a nice kid. Quiet, musical. Crazy?

Would I have even recognized crazy at that age? I still didn’t have an answer by the time I parked in front of Karma-Kanick Auto Repair in downtown Gravendale.

The whole front of the Kanicks’ auto shop was open, its corrugated doors rolled up to the beams. The walls were red brick and lined with metal shelves filled with cans and boxes and car parts I’d never be able to identify. I peered in and saw Lillian, wiry in her blue overalls, standing and pointing like a conductor in the din of air-powered drills, hydraulic lifts, revving, grinding, and shouting. Three men in the same color overalls were responding to her directions, but none of them looked like Jack.

I walked in hesitantly, resisting the urge to plug my fingers in my ears, smelling oil, gas, and rubber. And something burning. Maybe I should have made up something wrong with my car. Not that I really had to. There was plenty wrong with my Toyota. But did I really want to leave it in Gravendale?

“Lillian,” I shouted, just as she disappeared under an old Lincoln Continental.

“Can I help you?” a man yelled from my side.