Murder Alfresco #3 (25 page)

“I remember the crazy hair and the blackberries. The sexy lips part may have escaped me. He had some kind of an accent. What is he, Caribbean?”

“Jamaican. Love the accent.” She stuffed a heap of mixed baby greens in her mouth. “Totally irresistible,” she said with her mouth full.

“Irresistible.” Wade assumed a worldly expression. “Sounds like you’re telling me this guy puts the afro in aphrodisiac.”

“Very funny,” said Rivka.

“I can’t believe you used that before Monty got here,” said Sunny.

“I tried to hold off, but I couldn’t contain myself.”

Monty Lenstrom turned up near the end of dinner bearing a bottle of Schramsberg. He went into the kitchen and came back with four champagne flutes, which he filled and passed to each of them. Sunny turned the bottle. “Brown label. The good stuff. And of a certain age. This must be important.”

“Only the best for my dearest friends.” Monty stood and raised his glass, his eyes moist behind wire-rim glasses. For a moment no one spoke. Their glasses frosted over and bubbles rose in steady, luminous streams. “My people, I have news.”

“Oh my god,” said Rivka. “You did it.”

“That’s right. Friends, it is my great pleasure to announce that you are looking at the future Mr. Annabelle Reins.”

Sunny gasped. “I don’t believe it!”

“Believe it,” said Monty. “I’ve always known she was the one. I knew the moment I laid eyes on her.”

“That would have been, let me see, about seven years ago,” said Sunny.

“I’ve been busy. What’s your point?”

“No point at all. I salute your conviction, and caution, and Annabelle’s patience. You make a lovely couple. To Monty and Annabelle.”

They chimed and sipped. Wade stood up. “As the senior male of the tribe, allow me to propose a toast to the end of a record-breaking run of bachelorhood, if you can call it bachelorhood when you’ve been living with a woman since the week after you met her. To Monty and Annabelle, may she one day grace us with her presence.”

They drank to the happy couple and hashed through the usual congratulations and inquiries. Would they do it this summer? Not likely. Too soon. Probably not until the fall. This wasn’t a shotgun wedding, was it? Was Annabelle expecting? Certainly not. As far as he could tell, all she was expecting was a solid carat of bling, maybe more, since, considering they already owned a house, lived in it together, and didn’t need a new toaster or bath towels, not much else would change after the big party. Any venue selected? Hardly. He just sprang it on her over the weekend. When this flurry of talk had run its course, a satisfied pause came over the table. Good food, good news, glass of bubbly in hand, the end of another solid Monday, and still plenty of time to brush, floss, and knock off eight hours before the whole business started again tomorrow. Sunny pounced on the moment of tranquility. “I went down to Sausalito this afternoon,” she said. “I found out some interesting stuff.”

She described how she’d discovered that the mysterious man Heidi had been seeing was named Mark Weisman, and that he also owned a sailboat named
Vedana.
She repeated her conversation with Vurleen, the harbormaster’s assistant, and
how she’d corroborated that Mark was married and suggested his wife would go homicidal if she discovered his betrayal, and that she’d thrown in the comment that Dean Blodger, the harbormaster, was smitten, or possibly even obsessed, with Heidi. Then she told them about seeing the mismatched tail-lights on Dean Blodger’s white truck.

“There’s plenty to go on, but where it goes is still beyond me. You tell me how it all fits together. I can’t figure it out.”

Wade frowned. “I don’t like this, Sun. It seems obvious enough to me who killed Heidi, and equally obvious that you’re playing with fire by hanging around down there. This Dean Blodger character is your man. You saw his truck at Vedana Vineyards. You saw the same truck at the place the girl lived. His assistant says he was glued to the window whenever she went by. Then he turns up here in town, not to mention at the racetrack. We don’t know if he followed you there or if he went to check them out like we did, but either way, he’s showing way too much interest in topics related to you and that girl. I don’t need anything more to convince me. I think it’s high time you got the police in on this, like tonight, like right now, and ask them to loan you a bodyguard while you’re at it.”

“I agree,” said Monty. “It’s not safe to be here alone.”

“Dean Blodger worries me too,” said Sunny. “The trouble is, the Dean theory leaves two big holes and no good way to explain them. Why would he transport the body an hour away and leave it tied up in a tree? It makes no sense to risk being seen like that. And what about the boat?”

“Maybe he was trying to throw suspicion on the boyfriend,” said Monty. “Or maybe there’s a piece missing. Just because we don’t know why he did it doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“Hang on a second,” said Rivka. “Back up. I still don’t see how Dean Blodger could have done it. First of all, everybody up and
down that dock knows him. They’re going to notice if they see him carry off Heidi Romero. And there’s no way he could have done it silently. Sun, you remember how sound carried in that place. If she so much as squealed, everyone for half a mile would hear it.”

“That’s simple enough to explain,” said Monty. “All your well-informed date rapists know you can buy chloroform off the Internet for less than it costs to take a girl to a movie. Or you can make your own with nail polish and pool chlorine. It’s just like on TV. You sneak up behind her, hit her with a rag full of chloroform, and she’s yours. This guy is stationed right there in the parking lot. All he has to do is watch for her, call her over, dose her, and let the creepy fun begin.”

“I don’t want to know how you know that stuff,” said Rivka.

“College,” said Monty.

“Exactly how they did it isn’t all that important,” said Sunny. “It matters ultimately, but not in relation to who did it. The fact is, anybody who wanted to abduct her could have. I can think of a dozen different ways. You could break into her house with a credit card. The front door had no deadbolt and a nice, wide gap between the door and the door frame. Or you could make a copy of the key while she was out. You could grab her off the back deck while she was sunbathing, or in the parking lot. Or in the parking lot at work, or better yet while she’s out on some trail riding her bike. She could have been lured somewhere where she was vulnerable. These things aren’t difficult. She might even have been seduced. Killers have been known to be charming.”

“Not by Dean Blodger,” said Rivka. “That guy couldn’t seduce the last woman on earth if she’d been living alone in a cave for six months.”

“My money is on the winker,” said Monty. “I would have made a citizen’s arrest on that guy right there at the table.”

“You mean Ové? Innocent,” said Wade. “If anyone at Vedana is guilty it’s Kimberly Knolls, or possibly Bruce Knolls. She’s way too slick and he’s too quiet for my taste. Never trust a guy who doesn’t drink too much and make an ass of himself at a formal dinner party among strangers.”

“I still say how they did it is not as important as why they did it,” said Sunny. “When we know why, we’ll know who. Leaving all the inexplicable pieces out of it for the moment, I’m with Wade. All Vedanas aside, Dean Blodger scares me most because he has a motive, and he is directly connected to the murder.”

“What’s his motive?” asked Rivka.

“If he was in love with Heidi, he might have done anything to get his hands on her. Once he’d forced himself on her, he would have to kill her to keep her quiet.”

“That sounds sort of thin to me,” said Rivka. “Joel Hyder was obsessed with her too, but I don’t think he did it. What’s Dean’s direct connection?”

“The truck.”

“Also sort of thin. You saw his truck, not him. Somebody else could have taken it. He left the keys hanging right there on the wall in his office.”

“You’re right,” said Sunny. “I forgot about that. He put them on the hook by the door. And somebody broke into his office right around the time Heidi disappeared.” She thought a moment. “Except the office is open in the daytime, so there’s no need to break in, and at night he’d have the keys with him, since he would need them to drive home.”

“Not necessarily,” said Rivka. “Remember he said he lived nearby? Maybe sometimes he walks home.”

“So, assuming for a moment that he walks home with some regularity,” said Sunny, “and assuming he has a pattern the killer
can rely on, which is fairly safe to assume since Dean Blodger is a creature of habit if he is nothing else, someone could have broken in and taken the keys to the truck, used it to deposit Heidi at Vedana, and returned them. Why?” She thought again. “To make it look like Dean did it. Or, if it was Dean, to give himself an out.”

“I think you guys are barking up the wrong suspect,” said Monty. “Sun, you need to follow your own advice. Look at why, not how. Sure, any passing sociopath could have nabbed her. That’s true of all of us, all the time. All you really have to go on is where and how she was left. Find somebody connected to the winery or the rope business, and you’ve got your man. For now, that suggests Mark Weisman, even if we can’t think of a reason for him to have done it. He’s the only one connected to both the girl and the winery.”

For now, that suggests Mark Weisman and the man Kimberly Knolls met in a hotel in Sonoma, thought Sunny. If they were one and the same, or if Kimberly’s Internet hookup was Dean Blodger, she was getting close. Wade was right, it was time to alert Sergeant Harvey, even if it meant admitting she’d been back to the houseboat at Liberty Dock.

“There’s more,” said Sunny, thinking what an understatement that was. The faces around the table waited eagerly. She couldn’t disclose what Kimberly had told her, and she would resist the urge to share her find in the mud. If she was going to withhold evidence from a murder investigation, it only seemed prudent to do so with discretion. “I was talking with one of Heidi’s neighbors tonight, and he said Heidi and her boyfriend had a loud fight a couple of days before she disappeared.” She related the argument as Ronald Fetcher had given it to her.

“There,” said Monty, looking over the top of his glasses meaningfully. “I rest my case.”

Wade searched Sunny’s cottage
, including the closets, the pantry, and under the bed, then went outside and toured the perimeter. He even walked up and down the block checking for suspicious cars. When he came back, he extracted a solemn promise from Sunny that she would telephone Sergeant Harvey within the hour. Only then would he agree to leave her alone in the house for the night.

“Don’t you think the harbormaster or Mark Weisman or whoever the bogeyman du jour is would have come to get me by now if he was going to come at all?” said Sunny, watching Wade check behind the shower curtain. “You’re making me paranoid.”

“Since you mention it, that is exactly what I think,” said Wade, satisfied there were no murderers hiding in the bathtub. “Otherwise I would never leave you here alone. But I still want you to call Steve tonight.”

“I will.”

“You promised me.”

“And I will do it.”

Everyone cleared out by eleven. When they’d left, Sunny locked all the doors and windows, checked the whole house one more time herself, and went for the phone. Steve Harvey was in
the middle of watching a movie with Sarah Winfield, resident yogini.

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“It’s okay, it’s a rental,” he said. “We can pause it.”

“Anything I’ve seen?” said Sunny.

“Dirty Harry.”

“A classic.”

“Sarah says it glorifies violence and revenge.”

“Indeed. That’s the whole point. What’s Clint supposed to do, suggest the bad guys try some breathing exercises and a few downward dogs to relax those destructive impulses?”

“I don’t think that will help.”

“Tell her it’s about mindfulness. That scene at the beginning with the bank robbery is a celebration of his superior powers of awareness. He’s a crime-fighting Zen master.”

“Who packs a .44 Magnum.”

“Let me guess, you picked the movie. Word of advice. Next time, let her pick.”

Steve sighed. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

“I never do. People don’t call my mobile at eleven o’clock on a Monday night to invite me out to pizza. I’m listening.”

“First of all, does the name Mark Weisman mean anything to you?”

“What does it mean to you?”

“I asked first.”

“I’m wearing a badge.”

“Fine. Mark Weisman, owner of the
Vedana,
a sailboat docked in the Sausalito marina, as well as lover of Heidi Romero, recent victim of apparent homicide. Alleged to have had a loud argument with the deceased shortly before her disappearance.”

“Very good. A little too good, as a matter of fact. I guess you didn’t take my advice from last time to heart.”

“I did, but then circumstances intervened.”

“What circumstances?”

“That’s not the important part. The important part is Mark Weisman.”

“Weisman was in Germany starting four days before Heidi went missing,” said Steve. “Verified by his office in Frankfurt. Verified by his office in San Rafael. Verified by the very helpful and courteous staff at Lufthansa Airlines. Verified by his wife. Verified by phone by Mr. Weisman himself. I’m sold on the story. Next topic.”

“So you don’t make anything of the connection between the two Vedanas?”

“I didn’t say that. But I believe Mark Weisman was out of the country during his girlfriend’s murder, and I believe he is still there. If he comes back, we’ll want to have a talk with him.”

“What do you mean,
if he
comes back?”

“Well, if he is involved in Heidi’s death, Germany is a great place for him to be, and I’m sure he knows that. We have a hell of a time extraditing suspects from abroad. There’s no budget for sending somebody over there to track him down, for one thing. The paperwork’s a nightmare. I gotta get somebody who speaks German. Even with way more to go on than I’ve got, I’d be spinning my wheels. The best evidence against him is if he doesn’t come back. That tells us something. In that event, we keep gathering evidence, we watch, we wait for a chance to nail him.”