The Proof is in the Pudding (37 page)

After showering, shampooing, brushing my teeth twice, and putting on fresh clothes, I finally managed to erase all traces of the morning’s stomach ordeal.

Tuffy followed me into the kitchen. He already had fresh food and water, so he just glanced at his full bowls and settled down to watch me cook.

The ingredients I needed for what I was going to make were among the staples in my cabinets. No need for a trip to the market. I organized them in front of me on the counter and set about preparing a batch of my friend Carole Adams’s Quick & Easy Chocolate Nut Butter Fudge Pudding. I’d planned it as a gift for Roland when I joined him for tea at his apartment this afternoon.

While I melted the honey, sweet butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter, and other components of the recipe together in the top part of my double boiler, I thought about murder.

I visualized the pieces of the puzzle as though they were real pieces, spread out across the kitchen table. That was where Eileen and I used to put such puzzles together when she was a child. But those were easy, because we had the picture on the box to guide us in fitting the parts together.

As I stirred, I began to think again about what I knew. I hoped that if I concentrated hard enough, I would begin to understand what the handful of fragments were trying to show me.

I decided to organize them as if they were points in a mystery story I was reading:

Eugene Long hated Roland Gray.

For revenge, Long and Ingram plotted to frame Gray for attempted murder.

But before they could implement their scheme, Ingram was murdered.

Ingram disliked Yvette Dupree, and it was probably mutual, even though at some point she’d gone to bed with him and he’d taped the event.

Ingram intended to marry Tina Long, in all likelihood for her father’s money.

Yvette adored Tina as though Tina were her own daughter. I understood how great a force that kind of love could be, because I felt it for my own honorary daughter, Eileen. I doubted that Yvette was happy about Ingram planning to marry Tina. Could she possibly have been unhappy enough about it to want Ingram dead?

There was one unidentified guest at the gala: the mystery man who paid with a phony check. Because no one at the ticket desk remembered him, he must have been innocuous looking. (It certainly could not have been Victor Raynoso. From Olivia’s description he sounded like one big walking tattoo. Anyone would remember seeing him.)

Yvette couldn’t have killed Ingram—but could she have hired the mystery man to do it?

Roland Gray must have had a powerful grudge against Eugene Long to have made him humiliate Long’s daughter. It didn’t seem likely that Roland would have had anything against Tina herself. She was only eighteen at the time he engineered her embarrassment. And, if he did take out anger at Long on his daughter, that was a very cowardly act.

Yvette Dupree killed her husband ten years earlier, in London, claiming self-defense because he was abusing her. Did she have help, as John’s friend at Interpol suspected?

And what about the person in the dark green hooded sweatshirt who was watching me in the library? And the fact that someone slashed the tires on my Jeep? Were those little pieces part of the big murder puzzle? And was the person in the hooded sweatshirt the same one who slashed my tires?

If those acts were connected to the puzzle of Ingram’s murder, then it had to be because someone knew I was trying to find Ingram’s killer.

Thanks to Olivia Wayne’s visit to Victor Raynoso and, later, to Detective Hatch, Hatch was probably going to return to the belief that the murder of Ingram and the attempted murder of Gray were connected. But I was as sure as Olivia was that Hatch wasn’t going to stop looking for evidence that would allow him to arrest John O’Hara. I didn’t doubt that Hatch would be happy if the real killer walked up to him and confessed, but unless that unlikely event occurred, his investigation was focused on John.

I was very glad that I’d broken into Ingram’s house and stolen the tape of Eileen. If Hatch had found that tape before I did, it was likely John would be in custody now. A father protecting his daughter was a powerful motive for murder.

Part One of my theory was that the mystery man murdered Ingram. That was easy to say, but how to prove it? If he was a professional killer, he was long gone by now. From what I’d heard and read, they were phantoms, appearing out of the dark to do a job, and then vanishing. How did one find a phantom?

Part Two was that the murder of Ingram and the attempted murder of Gray were connected. Several people had motives to kill Ingram, but who had a motive to kill Gray?

The only person I could think of was Eugene Long, but I didn’t believe that he would either kill or hire a killer—unless something was done to Tina that was a lot worse than embarrassment, and there had been no suggestion that such was the case.

That question of who shot at Roland was the wall I kept crashing up against. I had to find a way to climb over, burrow under, or smash through that wall.

This morning I’d managed to pry information out of Long by getting him drunk.
In vino veritas.

This afternoon I was going to try to use pudding to loosen Roland Gray’s tongue.

The nut butter fudge pudding in my pot was thickening nicely. I dipped a teaspoon into the glossy mixture and tasted it. Delicious. This was also the first thing I’d put into my stomach since . . . Since this morning.

And all at once an image flashed into my head: Tina Long’s necklace. The word spelled out in little diamonds was “Poppet.” When she said her “mother-person” called her that she must have been referring to Yvette. On the phone, when we were arranging my tea this afternoon with Roland, Will Parker had called me “Poppet.”

My pulse started racing. Will was an attractive man. Lively. Energetic. Much more energetic and engaging than Roland. What if Will Parker was the man Yvette was involved with, and not Roland?

Where does this line of reasoning take me?

Not very far, unless . . . Unless . . .

I knew that neither Yvette nor Roland could have stabbed Ingram—but Will was on the hotel grounds that night. While the police were keeping all of us inside, he’d come to the entrance and spoken to the guard at the door, asking to talk to Roland. Roland told me Will had driven him to the hotel.

Could Will Parker have been the mystery man who paid for a ticket at the last minute, when the crowd was biggest and the ticket people busy? According to an acknowledgment in Roland Gray’s first spy novel, Will Parker had been a British commando. Like members of our Special Forces, he surely would be able to fire a sniper rifle, and to get in and out of places . . . like a phantom.

I remembered the pudding and took it off the stove before it burned. My hands were trembling. In a little more than an hour, I was supposed to have tea with Roland Gray and Will Parker. With what I was thinking, I didn’t want to be anywhere near Parker. I decided to make an excuse and cancel.

I found Parker’s card and dialed his number.

The call went to voice mail, and I heard a recording of Parker say in his Cockney accent, “It’s Monday morning. I’ve ’ad to go to London for a few days. Returning Sunday night. Whether you’re a bird or a bloke, leave a message.”

A wave of relief surged over me.

I didn’t leave a message, but I did take a deep breath of relief.

Then a new thought chilled me:
What if Parker’s plans changed since this morning?

I called Roland Gray.

“Hello, Roland. It’s Della Carmichael.”

“I recognized your lovely voice. I hope you’re still coming to tea this afternoon.”

“Yes, I’m looking forward to it. I’m calling because I’m bringing you a little something I made and I wondered how many people would be there.”

“Just the two of us, my dear. It would have been three, but Will’s mum had a bit of a scare and he’s rushed off to make certain she’s all right.”

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” I said.

“No, I’m sure it’s not. But she’s quite far up in years and Will is her last living child.”

“I’ll hold a good thought for her,” I said. “See you at four.”

“Jolly good.”

Okay, this is my new theory: Will Parker was the mystery man at the gala, and murdered Ingram. (Motive as yet unknown, but my bet was that it had something to do with Yvette Dupree.)

Now here was my biggest leap, worthy of the Cirque du Soleil: Parker, a former British commando, shot at the window of Caffeine an’ Stuff to confuse the police. He probably didn’t mean to wound Roland Gray.

I believed Parker did this because it succeeded in complicating the investigation of Ingram’s murder. The police were forced to try to find a link between Ingram and Gray. When they weren’t able to find that link, Detective Hatch had tried to split the one case into two.

There was one problem with my new theory: How could I prove it?

Stirring the pudding to keep a skin from forming on the top, two ideas occurred to me. The first one involved a call to John O’Hara.

Again, he picked up on the first ring. I wondered if he was sitting in his car, or in a coffeehouse, miserable because he had nothing to do. Well, I was about to give him something to do.

“John, can you get in touch with your friend at Interpol again?”

“You mean now?”

“Yes.”

“I have his home number and his cell. Is it important?”

“It could be. I hope so. Would you ask him to check out a man named Willis T. Parker, a former British commando? He’s listed in the acknowledgments of Roland Gray’s first spy novel—something about helping Gray’s hero out of a tight spot. Now he works for Gray. Ask if he can find out if Parker knew Yvette Dupree, when she was Fabienne Talib.”

“What’s this about?”

“I finally have a theory of the case.” I told John what it was.

“Interesting, but you don’t have any evidence.” I heard the skepticism in John’s voice.

“Not yet, but don’t you think this is a path worth following? Are you or Hugh Weaver or Hatch on a more promising trail?”

“No. While I’m having your idea checked out, what are you doing?”

“I’m having tea at four o’clock this afternoon with Roland Gray.”

“No! I don’t want you near Will Parker.”

“John, I’ve told you not to talk to me like that. I’m not a three-year-old. I appreciate your concern, but I wouldn’t be going to see Roland except for the fact that Parker is thousands of miles away right now, back in London, visiting his mother who’s ill.”

John was silent for a moment. I pictured him with his lips clamped together.

“John, are you still there?”

He cleared his throat. “You’re having tea with Gray at four. That shouldn’t take more than an hour, hour and a half at most. I want—I’d
appreciate
it if you’d call me when you leave.”

“I’ll do that.”

“In case I need to reach you first, keep your cell phone on.”

“I always do.” We said good-bye, with John promising to call his Interpol contact right away.

After ending the call, I poured the pudding into my white Wedgwood serving bowl and stretched plastic wrap across the top.

When I was ready to leave for Gray’s apartment, I put the gift bowl of chocolate fudge pudding into a cardboard box and set the box on the floor in front of the Jeep’s passenger seat.

Then I reached into the glove compartment and removed the small, handheld tape recorder I used for making notes about recipes or ideas for the TV show when something occurred to me while I was driving.

After checking that the batteries were working, I rewound it to the beginning of the tape and slipped the little machine into my purse. It was a bag made of loosely woven net, deliberately chosen in order to capture sound in the room.