Steeled for Murder (10 page)

I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I began to make a star pattern around my coffee mug with the sugar packets.

“They make a good breakfast here,” Kelly said. She lifted her nose and inhaled.

“Yeah,” I said. I hoped it was the bacon and coffee aroma she was getting. Not me.

“You live around here?” she asked.

“Kind of,” I said, embarrassed to admit to the dump I called home.
Lots better than a prison cell,
I reminded myself. “I got a meeting with my parole officer at ten. Didn’t make much sense to walk all the way home and then back in this direction. Not in this weather.”

She nodded. “How’s the parole going?”

I sighed and lowered my head. “That arrest. It’s a violation. Could lock me back up.” I moved the sugar packets into a new pattern. Prison bars.

“But they didn’t even charge you,” Kelly said.

“Still a violation, if they want to call me on it.” I rearranged the sugar packets so they formed thick bars.

The waitress arrived with two breakfast platters. Eggs. Bacon. Fried potatoes with onions. Pancakes. She put one in front of each of us.

“Freshen your coffee?” She filled both mugs without waiting for an answer and hurried off.

“I didn’t order this,” I protested, staring at all that food.

“I ordered it for you,” Kelly said.

Miserably, I reached into my pocket. “I don’t think I’ve got enough to pay for it.”

“I wouldn’t have ordered it for you if I’d expected you to pay for it.” Kelly picked up her fork and broke the yolk of one of her eggs.

“I can’t take this,” I protested, watching the rich yellow flood toward her potatoes. The tantalizing scent of onions and bacon filled my nose. I was usually a little hungry. Now I was ravenous.

“Why not?” she asked, pouring syrup on her pancakes. “It’ll just go to waste if you don’t eat it.”

“You can’t be buying me breakfast,” I said. Syrup mixed with melting butter and soaked into the pancakes on her plate.

“I just did.” She cut a wedge of the pancakes and lifted it toward her mouth. “It’d be rude of you not to eat it.”

I stared at the sugar packets.

“You don’t want to be rude, do you?” she asked, spearing a piece of bacon.

I looked at the food. “Thank you,” I said, picking up my fork to break my own egg yolks. I speared half an egg into my mouth. I’d never tasted anything so good.

“I hope the babysitter got the kids off to school all right.” Kelly glanced at her watch. “I usually go right home and make sure everything’s okay, but I have to go grocery shopping, and it’s never good to go into the supermarket hungry.”

My heart sank. Kelly had kids. Of course she had kids. She was a woman. Women had kids. And husbands. Why should I feel a pang in my gut when I thought of her being married? Wasn’t like I had anything to offer her.

And what had I expected? She was just being friendly. Probably doing what she thought her old man would have liked someone to do for him under similar circumstances.

I should be grateful for that. More than anybody else did for me. More than I could do for myself right now.

Instead, I felt anger. Anger at myself being in a position where I had to let a woman buy me a meal. Anger at the system for putting so many roadblocks in my way as I tried to improve things. Anger at Belkins for being so sure I’d killed Mitch. Anger at the man who could take Kelly’s warm body in his arms and kiss her.

I took a deep breath. Anger would get me nowhere. Especially irrational anger against a man I didn’t know who hadn’t done anything to me.

I wanted to take Kelly out to dinner, buy her something that would make her smile, talk smoothly and hear her laugh.

Instead, here I sat, eating breakfast on her dime. I couldn’t ask her out; I was on home detention. And it had been so long since I’d had a social conversation with a woman, I was having trouble thinking of anything to say.

Right. So what gave me the idea I had any right to resent that she had a life and I didn’t?

I got a grip on myself and asked, “How many kids you got?”

“Two. An eight-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. They’re both in school all day. I hire a college student to sleep in while I’m at work. She gets them up and off to school in the morning. It’s a lot cheaper than daycare. But not a hundred percent reliable.”

A big part of me didn’t want to know the answer, but I asked anyhow. “How about their daddy? Can’t he help out?” I tried the potatoes. They were perfectly fried, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, with just enough onion.

Kelly snorted derisively. “My ex? He don’t want to actually have to take care of them. All he wants is his ‘rights.’ Just like when we were married. He doesn’t really want to see the kids, but he insists on as much visitation as he can get.”

I was pleased to hear that. Then I was ashamed of being pleased. And I definitely didn’t want to hear about those “rights” he demanded when they were married. Still, sad for Kelly and the kids. I couldn’t see that, under the present circumstances, it did me any good.

Kelly swirled a bit of her pancake in the syrup on her platter. “He’s got them for all of Christmas week.” She put her fork down and picked up her napkin to wipe her nose. Her brown eyes looked watery.

Please don’t cry,
I begged silently. I had no idea how I could begin to handle that. I could never handle it when I cried, much less if a woman cried on me.

“Christmas is overrated anyhow.” I cut a wedge of pancakes with my fork.

Kelly dabbed her eyes with the napkin. “Yeah, I guess you’re right about that.” She laughed.

I tried to remember Christmases from my childhood. My mother had died when I was three, and the old man had been in prison. The thought “like father, like son” flitted through my mind. I squelched it firmly.

I had lived in various foster homes until he got out when I was fourteen. Most of the early holidays were a blur. Big trees with tinsel that I wasn’t allowed to touch. Noisy parties for foster children at the fire hall. We’d all gotten presents. Sometimes, the Santa got them mixed up. One year, all I’d gotten was a package with a Barbie doll and clothes for it. I gave it to a little girl who showed up on Christmas afternoon at the temporary foster home where I was staying. Her eyes had been swollen almost shut with bruises. She’d lost most of the doll clothes right away, but she’d carried that Barbie with her everywhere. Mostly by the hair. Later, I’d heard she’d died in a fire her mother set in their apartment.

Best years were my early teen years with the Colemans. They didn’t make a big deal of holidays, mostly an extra-long church service in the morning and one of Mrs. Coleman’s plain but hearty meals topped off with a special dessert. Practical presents like warm sweaters and school supplies.

“When will you get the kids back?” I asked Kelly.

“New Year’s Eve.” Kelly brushed her hair off her forehead. “Of course he don’t want to be tied down on party night. Although he usually foists them off on his mother or his sister anyhow.” She took a big gulp of her coffee.

I looked in dismay at the empty platter in front of me. I had gobbled it all down. In the prison chow hall, I would barely have time to grab my food, sit down, and shovel it in before we were being hustled out to make room for the next group. Deeply ingrained habits die hard.

No doubt about it, this was the best meal I had eaten in a long, long time. Least I could do was let Kelly know. Why was that so hard?

“That was wonderful,” I made myself say. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She beckoned the waitress over for a refill of the coffee mugs.

I warmed my hands on my mug and stared out the window. The icy rain was as heavy as ever.

“So,” Kelly said, stirring thick creamer into her coffee. “What do you think happened to old Mitch?”

I shrugged. “I thought he was beat up and maybe run over by the forklift.”

“I heard he got hit over the head. Probably from behind. They did say something about him being run over, but that might be somebody exaggerating. The forklift was next to him, though, and it was running.”

“Where did they find him?” I added the luxurious creamer to my coffee, too. I hadn’t realized such a thing existed.

“Back in the warehouse. And they found a lot of other stuff there, too. Some of his drugs. Kind of confirms what we all knew, huh?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, thinking of Aaron, the kid who thought I knew where to get drugs. And who was away from the line when Mitch was killed.

Kelly leaned back and stretched. Her full breasts strained against her sweatshirt. I tried to keep my gaze on the table. It wasn’t easy.

“What did he have?” I asked. Why would he be stupid enough to keep drugs at work? Unless he’d been taking enough meth to totally rattle his brains.

“A lot of grass,” she said. “Can you believe it? Whole bales. Shrink-wrapped. Using the company equipment. Like he was going to ship it. I can’t quite figure out how he managed to do that.”

“Really?” Did sound a bit outrageous, but I supposed it could happen.

“Yep. He’s pretty much the only one who goes back there on our shift. If the afternoon shift doesn’t get everything out to shipping, he’s supposed to take care of it. I’m the only other person who might go back there, and then only if he’s forgotten to get something I need to load. Except the foreman, of course. But as long as Mitch’s job is getting done, he’s not going to hike all the way back there. That’s how they found him; John went looking for him ‘cause nobody was delivering parts to the work stations.”

“Wouldn’t somebody on the other shifts notice whole bales of grass? Or smell it?” I asked. “Even shrink-wrapped?”

“I guess he hid the stuff pretty well.” Kelly shook her head. A few strands of hair worked their way loose. “All he’d have to do was move empty containers out, put the bales behind them, and then put the containers back in front. And I guess a good shrink-wrap job would keep the smell down.”

I wanted to tuck the loose hair back behind her ear. Instead, I concentrated on my coffee. So much better than the instant stuff I’d been making. And so rich and smooth with the creamer in it. I put a coffee maker on my short list of things to get as soon as I could afford it. Along with the warm gloves. Goodwill hadn’t had any gloves when I was there, but they’d had a whole section of small appliances.

“And I guess there was some meth, too,” she said. “I thought a few of those kids on the packing line were gonna cry when someone said they’d confiscated that. They might be into it kind of heavy.”

I wondered if Aaron could have been out looking in the warehouse where Mitch had some stuff stashed. Would they have been stupid enough to be dealing right there, during work hours? And could they have gotten into an argument?

Kelly stacked our platters and put the utensils on them. “It was all in little baggies, packaged for sale. And right out in the open. Kind of like he was sorting it out to fill orders or something.”

I held my coffee where the comforting aroma filled my nose. “If he was selling to people at work, maybe Mitch got in a fight with one of his customers.” Thank goodness I’d been in plain sight most of the night on the plater.

“I guess that could happen.” Kelly brushed her hair out of her eyes.

The warm mug felt good on my hands. “Or maybe he was getting so paranoid that somebody decided to permanently take care of the problem before he did something totally stupid and got other people in trouble, too.”

Kelly gave me a strange look.

Was that the kind of thought that would only occur to a killer? I shifted uncomfortably on the seat. I had to be more careful of the dumb things I blurted out.

“You know who Sterling Radman is?” Kelly drained her mug.

“Yeah. I had to go see him yesterday. See if I still had my job.”

“He’s been acting weird lately. Some people say he’s been buying stuff from Mitch.”

“The plant supervisor?” I tried to picture the man I had spoken to buying illegal street drugs. Carefully dressed. A little on the fidgety side, but being in an office alone with someone he knew had been convicted of murder might account for that. As far as I could remember, he’d been a nice pink color, cheeks well filled out, no obvious paranoia or itching. Not my image of a meth user. “Doesn’t he work days?” I asked.

“Well, yeah.” Kelly pushed back the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Her wrists were thick and capable. “But he’s the plant manager. He likes to come into the plant at night and sneak around. See what everybody’s up to. And he was in that night.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“I didn’t see him, either,” Kelly said, “but I was a little late. My babysitter had car trouble. And then, when I finally got here, a semi was trying to back through the shipping gate, so I drove around behind the plant to get to the parking lot. His silver Mercedes was parked by the fence along the road back there. He usually parks in a reserved space up front.”

Someday, I’d have a car—or a pickup—if I was able to stay out of prison long enough.

Kelly nodded toward the tall woman who was getting up from a stool at the counter. “That’s his wife right there. I went to school with her. Only reason she’d be stopping in here to get breakfast is because hubby wasn’t home to cook for.”