Fry Me a Liver Read online

  “I don’t know. It was your idea.”

  “I thought we could learn something watching their body language,” he said.

  “We have. They’re not as lovey-dovey as they pretend to be. That doesn’t exactly make them unique.”

  “True, but their motives may be. Everyone loves a good romance. It keeps us from scrutinizing things too closely.”

  I wasn’t convinced that it was as calculated as that. I thought back to how both of my big-time loves, hubby Phil and Grant, always made a show of putting an arm around my waist when we were at a party or with other people. That actually felt worse than being ignored, like I had value only as an accessory. When we were alone, I was like the pickle that happened to be on a plate. It could be the same with Benjamin and Grace—though, in support of what Kane had said, they weren’t even married yet. Things couldn’t have gone that far south already.

  “So what do we do with that?” I asked.

  “We check to see what they don’t want us scrutinizing,” he said.

  “Whoa, hold on!” I grabbed his sleeve. “What are you talking about?”

  He smiled, reached past me, and popped the glove compartment. He removed a large leather sleeve. “We’re going to investigate,” he said. He hesitated long enough to fold a stick of chewing gum into his mouth.

  My grip had weakened and he slid easily from the driver’s side door. I followed him quickly.

  “Kane, wait!”

  “Do you know what room they’re in?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told me as he strode along the path. He hopped up the stairs to the patio and rang the bell.

  I caught up just as Elsie answered the door. She had on her pleasant, neutral hostess smile. It stopped being neutral when she saw us.

  “Well! What are you two doing here?”

  “We’d like a room,” Kane said provocatively.

  Elsie blushed quickly and actually recoiled. “For . . . the two of you?”

  “Good lord, no.” Kane grinned, winking. “We were talking business, refi for Gwen’s place. She mentioned that a friend is coming up with her husband to help her. Thought they’d make it a mini-holiday.” He looked at me. “Did I get that right?”

  “You sure did,” I said through a big, phony smile. “That’s Liz for you! Her motto is always try to turn a tragedy into recreation. Does that with funerals too. That’s why they don’t want to stay with me, even though I have a house. It isn’t really a vacation, then.”

  My mouth was running like the Pamplona bulls. I couldn’t help it and, worse, Kane seemed to be enjoying my distress.

  “I see,” Elsie replied.

  “Anyway, Gwen said she’d check out the rooms,” Kane said. “Possible?”

  “Certainly,” Elsie said, admitting us. “When are they planning on coming down?”

  “That depends on what rooms are available when,” I told her. “After they looked at your website, they decided they didn’t want to stay anywhere else.”

  “How sweet of you all,” Elsie said. “Well, come on. I’ll show each of the rooms to you, provided no one is in. I don’t think anyone is.”

  I suggested that we start with the four rooms upstairs, since I knew one of those was where the Californians were staying. We followed Elsie up.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I can’t go up and down the stairs any longer,” Elsie said. “Maybe install one of those seats that rides up the banister.”

  “Or maybe Captain Health can come by and carry you,” I offered.

  “Who?”

  “That’s Kane’s alter ego. He entertains children in hospitals, dressed as a superhero.”

  “How very thoughtful,” she said. “Yes, you could run into a phone booth at the bank—well, maybe not a phone booth anymore but a broom closet, perhaps—just like Superman, rush over and assist me, then hurry back before you’re missed.”

  “The superhero’s dream.” Kane smiled.

  We hit pay dirt with the first room. There were three open suitcases, clothes on the bed and hanging in the open closet, and two laptops side by side on the desk. There were towels on the back of the chair and over the footboard of the bed.

  “I apologize for the condition,” Elsie said. “They have requested that I not bother tidying up in here.”

  “Young love,” I said. “It functions wildly, unpredictably, at all hours.”

  “That must be it,” Elsie agreed.

  I pretended to check the view while Kane moseyed about. We left quickly and went on to the next room. I had not missed Kane sticking the gum into the latch opening. That, not the latch, was what held the door shut. I also did not miss Kane backing out the doorway once Elsie took me into the next room.

  “Where is Mr. Iger?” she said, looking around.

  “He probably went back downstairs,” I said. I leaned forward. “I have a feeling this sort of thing bores a lot of men.”

  “Straight men, anyway,” she said.

  “Right.”

  We looked at the other rooms, only one of which wasn’t taken, though everyone was out for the evening. I hoped Kane had done his surveillance work quickly and was back downstairs since the tour took less than five minutes. We went back down and Elsie was visibly surprised not to find him waiting.

  “He must have gone outside to use the phone,” I said.

  “Ah,” Elsie replied. “Reception in here is regrettably spotty. Your friend Benjamin kept going outside to use the phone.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. I don’t think his lady is very much interested in his business dealings.”

  “How do you know they’re business?”

  “Oh, he’s always so intense,” she said. “Not relaxed, like he was with you. I think he is trying to buy property. That is such a brutal business.”

  “Probably more than any of us realizes,” I said.

  I thanked her with all the warmth I could muster considering that I felt as cool and sweaty as that pickle I mentioned earlier. I turned to go outside knowing damn well I wouldn’t find Kane there. My heart thumped annoyingly as I went to the van and waited, hoping I hadn’t made a mistake comparable to Yul Brynner chasing Charlton Heston through the parted waters.

  I received a text.

  “Keep talking to her, away from the stairs. I need to get down.”

  Without hesitating, I turned back. “Oh, Elsie,” I said cheerfully, “there is one thing I wanted to ask.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “The flowers out front—I’d like to ask you about one of them. I’m thinking of growing it at home.”

  “I don’t know about those,” she said. “The gardener takes care of that.”

  “Right, but maybe you could ask him for me if I pointed it out?”

  “Of course,” she said as she got a shawl from the closet and came outside with me. It wasn’t a brisk night, but she was a bony lady and pulled the shawl closer. I was sorry to make her do this.

  I asked her about a purple star-shaped flower at the foot of the walk. I positioned myself so I could see the front door. Kane emerged quietly, walked to the side, and stood there in the shadows with his phone. We saw him when we turned back to the house.

  “Ah, Mr. Iger,” Elsie said. “You were so quiet there we didn’t see you!”

  “After libraries, banks are the second-quietest commercial institutions in the nation,” he said.

  “I didn’t know that,” I told him.

  He grinned. It was a big, satisfied smile. I was eager to learn what was behind it.

  Elsie stood on the patio and faced the street. “It’s a bit chilly but a nice night. They usually are, down here, don’t you think? I have only been north once but it was beastly. I went to Pennsylvania with the late Mr. Smith. It was about ten years ago, a family reunion.” She made a face. “A bunch of Yankees. I never felt so out of place.”

  “I’m a Yankee,” I pointed out. Some things you can’t let stand,
no matter how much you want to move on.

  “I meant no disrespect,” Elsie said. “But people can be good people, well-meaning people, and still have very, very little in common.”

  “But you married a Yankee.”

  Elsie smiled. “Lemmy wasn’t a Yankee. Not really. He spent most of his adult life in the South, building roads. He understood our people, our values, the importance of the land. He knew you couldn’t simply use eminent domain to pave over a farm that had been in a family for generations, you had to go around it. He knew that a hillside could not be blown up if it had significance to the locals as a traditional place of courtship or if it had been an outlook during one of too, too many wars fought in this country.”

  “Blown up?” Kane said. “Was he involved with explosives?”

  “He wasn’t—what do you call them? A demolisher?”

  “Demolition experts,” Kane said.

  “Yes. No. He wasn’t on that crew. He was a supervisor.”

  “How did he die, Mrs. Smith?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “In an accident on the job,” she said. “A landslide when a detonator cap went off in a worker’s pocket. The other man lost his legs but survived.”

  “That’s awful,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I had to fight for two years to get the insurance money that was due me,” she went on. “A Yankee firm in Hartford, Connecticut. They had to do their investigations, you see. It wasn’t enough that I had insurance on my husband’s life and he was, clearly, quite deceased.” She looked at me. “Did you have that problem with your restaurant?”

  “No,” I admitted. “It was a different situation. That was a will. I inherited the property. All I had to do was pay a share of the estate tax.”

  “Yes, well, I had problems with the estate too because there was no will,” Elsie went on. “We were so poorly prepared.”

  The situation was unfortunate but Elsie was getting morose. And I was getting paranoid. I was waiting for her to say that the guy with the detonator cap was named Goldberg or the insurance agent was Horowitz. We thanked her for her hospitality.

  “You will let me know, won’t you?” she called after us.

  “About?”

  “Whether you will need a room.”

  “Yes—of course, absolutely,” I said. I waved as I continued to walk.

  “Worst continuity ever,” Kane chuckled.

  “I forgot. I tend to get caught up in the moment. What about you? Did you remove the gum?”

  He stopped, gasped in horror . . . then smiled. “Of course. Captain Health is very, very thorough.”

  We got into the van. Before the doors were closed, I said, “I assume you found something in the room? You seem very, very excited.”

  “I did find something,” he said. “A couple of somethings. First, a local cell phone number on a pad.” He had copied it down and read it to me. It was Newt’s.

  “Okay. We knew that. What else?”

  He produced a receipt. I turned on my smart phone, read the receipt in the light. “An off-the-rack cell phone.”

  “Purchased three days ago,” he said. “For cash, I’m willing to bet.”

  “I’m not clear how this helps.”

  “An improvised explosive device, triggered by a cell phone,” he said. “And just let your mind run for a second. Homemade devices include hydrogen peroxide, nitric acid, and nitromethane, still easy enough to get in very small amounts that don’t raise flags. As for other ingredients, like pesticides and fertilizer—look along the path. They wouldn’t even have had to buy that one.”

  “All of that from a sales receipt?” I said. “Seems a big leap.”

  “If we were trying to build a case before, maybe. But this is after. The bomb happened. A classic, terrorist IED. It could be that these folks were thinking of opening a restaurant here and didn’t want the competition.”

  “Those still seem like pretty giant steps to me,” I told him, switching off the light. I looked out at the street. “I still don’t buy that they’d risk blowing up the kitchen with Benjamin down there.”

  “Why not? Certainly removes them from the immediate list of suspects.”

  “And what about planting the bomb?” I answered my own question. “A disguise. Grace used them to case my place. And they had the protest as a distraction. She could have been there while he was at my place. She rushed over in time to be seen.”

  “There you go.”

  “But even if it’s possibly true,” I said, “emphasis on the ‘possibly,’ what do we do with this? We aren’t cops and we didn’t exactly have a search warrant.”

  “True, but we can tip off your detective friend that the receipt was in the office trash and have her take a legitimate look for the phone.”

  “The office trash?”

  “He was there, wasn’t he? In your office, replacing the recipe book.”

  “Yeah, but to be that stupid—”

  “Maybe he plans to pin the thing on you. Maybe he’s going to call them with an anonymous tip. For all we know, the cell phone is already there behind some books.”

  That sent a chill up my back.

  “Wouldn’t there have had to be a receiver phone in the bomb debris?” I asked. “Wouldn’t Bean be looking for a triggering device already?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “There’s only one way to find out. Call her.”

  He was right. But now that we were at this point, part of me recoiled against further action.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Part of me is insisting—pretty loudly, in fact—that I not get involved.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?”

  “Sneaking into their room isn’t really—”

  “No, I mean your deli was blown up, your people hurt, your livelihood seriously impacted, your hard work given a big flat tire. What part of your life is not involved?”

  “That was passive,” I said. “Couldn’t be helped. This is aggressive. I’m mad at them because of how they suckered Newt. They’re going to say I have a vendetta.”

  “And the facts will prove otherwise.”

  “What if they don’t?” I asked. “What if Bean goes in there and doesn’t find anything? I can’t show her the receipt and my credibility goes down the drain.”

  “All valid points,” he admitted. “If you want to defend inactivity, I mean.”

  That was a valid point too. “I should think about this,” I said.

  “He may toss the phone.”

  “How do you know he hasn’t already?”

  “I don’t,” Kane said.

  “You didn’t find it.”

  “I didn’t have time to look. But I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing you just dump in a trash can. Someone is likely to pull it out. You pack it in luggage where it won’t raise any red flags, take it back to California, and lose it there. Do you want me to call?” he asked. “I will, if it helps.”

  I looked down at my cell phone. Was I being reluctant to get in deeper or was I having trust issues with Kane? It was silly, but I didn’t want to lean on a man. Not after the way Grant inserted himself in things.

  “No,” I said, sitting back. “I have a better idea. Drive.”

  “Where to?”

  “Just follow my finger,” I said, pointing ahead. “I’ll tell you where we’re going.”

  Chapter 15

  An argument could be made—and my brain was busy making it—that I was on my way to wrecking another relationship in its earliest, most improbable stages. Taking charge of this guy, pushing him around, supporting and then sort of disagreeing with his approach. On the flip side, I was a deli owner, not a private eye . . . despite my track record at solving crimes. These are decisions I shouldn’t have to make. As a balmalocha, an expert, I was no balmalocha.

  But, whether I asked for it or not, the responsibility had ended up on my shoulders. Yet there was a third option.

  Benjamin and Gra
ce had mentioned a few restaurants they wanted to visit. Only Suit and Thai was in walking distance of the Owlet. The place was popular with the business crowd during lunch, less so at dinnertime.

  “Oh ho,” spoke Captain Health as he looked in the big window, past the pulled-back curtains that looked like big neckties. “Intimidation by proximity. I like it. Show up, see how they react.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of something even more intimidating.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I think we should confront them with what we’ve—you’ve—found and see what they do.”

  Kane was silent.

  “My sense of it is they’d have five options,” I went on. “The first three would be deny, deny, deny, followed by bribe and flee. What do you think?”

  Kane Iger did not say a word. I only heard his deep breathing.

  “I take it you have some reservations,” I said.

  “Some.”

  “Share,” I said.

  He reflected a moment longer, then said thoughtfully, “However they respond, we’re not empowered to do anything. We can show up, which is innocent enough, and enjoy them squirming a little because—hell, because they’re bad people. But everything beyond that is a matter for law enforcement.”

  “Even though the evidence—and I use that term loosely—is very, very weak?”

  “It’s enough to send up a flare,” Kane said. “Then we can sit back and watch what happens. You walk in now, as you say, they will deny whatever you say. And we’ll be asked to leave, having accomplished nothing but tipping them off.”

  I looked in at the couple. They seemed relaxed enough, professional gourmands who were really into whatever they were eating. They were actually connecting over the meal, making eye contact, sharing from one another’s chopsticks.

  The tease annoyed me. We had gone from bold to craven. Maybe Kane was right, but I didn’t like getting dressed up with nowhere to go.

  Kane must have sensed my frustration. He grabbed my arm.

  “Let’s call Detective Bean,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I still have credibility with her. I want to keep it. Plus—these guys hurt me. I want to go in.”