3 Loosey Goosey (21 page)

“Actually, I missed the protest part. I was in East Helena. One of the business reporters got that story.”

Of course, because he was there covering the opening.

“But when I saw her standing in front of the restaurant...”

His natural nose for a bigger story led him to talk to her, and his nose had been right, if an hour or so early.

“Why was she standing in front of her apartment at eleven at night?” I asked.

“She didn’t say, but, like I said, she wasn’t all with it either.”

“Do you think she was still waiting for someone?”

Had she overdosed on her own and then wandered up to Ben’s van? Had that all been coincidence?

o0o

Pondering what Daniel had shared, I left the paper and returned to Dusty Deals.  

I was greeted by a scene from
The Brady Bunch
—the one where Bobby and Peter divide their room in two with a piece of tape on the floor.

Except instead of tape there was a six inch stripe of white paint breaking Dusty Deals into two distinctly different shops.

To accommodate the new layout, a central check out area had been added, complete with two cash registers, one for each half.

I stopped, one foot in post-modern and one foot in Victorian West. “What have you done?”

Betty and Phyllis, both standing poised by the front door, ready to grab the next innocent person to enter and drag them to their side, turned to face me.

Betty flipped her yellow boa over her shoulder. “You said to settle things, and we did.”

Phyllis, wearing a sheath mini that reminded me a lot of something I’d seen on
Mad Men
, patted her hair—which had taken on a distinctly bouffant look today—and added, “Yes, this is much nicer. Much easier for my customers to find the quality merchandise on my side.”

“But... there’s a line. Down the middle of my store.”

They blinked at me, then turned back to the door as if I wasn’t even there.

And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe this was all part of a surreal dream. I picked up an antique advertising ice pick and poked myself in the thigh.

Nope. I was awake.

Rubbing my self-inflicted wound, I hobbled to my office and pulled out the notes that I’d made earlier.

I wrote down my new information, mainly the order of events leading up to Tiffany’s death.

7 p.m. - Restaurant opens

8 p.m. - Protest starts

8:45 p.m. or so - Protesters, Peter, and I leave.

9 p.m. - Carl talks to Tiffany and gets impression she is waiting for a call from someone else.

11 p.m. - Daniel sees Tiffany and thinks she is “on” something.

12 p.m. - Tiffany dies.

8 a.m. - I find Tiffany under Ben’s van.

According to Ben, he was with the other HA! members and Rhonda from nine that night until the next morning when I found him at the grocery. That should have been enough to give him an alibi, except according to him, everyone had been asleep.

But what if they weren’t? Hope could have snuck out, and Ben wouldn’t have known.

Then there was the question of what the police had found in the Egg. It wasn’t a weapon. George had told me that. But if Daniel was right, they wouldn’t have been looking for a weapon, they would have been looking for drugs or poison or... I couldn’t think of anything else.

And I believed that Ben didn’t use or sell drugs.

So far as poison, he wasn’t the type to poison anything, even the ugliest, stinkiest of rats. And even if he wasn’t all “let every living creature live,” there was Pauline. He wouldn’t keep anything like that in his small trailer where she might find it.

Which left only a couple of solutions. Either George had lied to me, and the police hadn’t found anything in the trailer after all, or someone had put something into Ben’s trailer to frame him.

Chapter 19

I turned on my computer and slid the flash drive that I’d gotten from Marcy into the USB port.

I was caught between having too many possible murderers and not enough.

Carl Mack, Richard Danes, Leslie Danes, and Hope all had possible reasons to want Tiffany dead. As did all goose-loving or animal-protecting protesters in the world. And maybe other wives too.

Richard Danes seemed nice enough, but he was not my idea of a chick magnet. My guess was that if Tiffany was having an affair with him, it said more about her than the cattle rancher. Well, aside from the fact that he was, despite his “nice” exterior, a two-timing scumbag.

I scanned Daniel’s notes, but turned up nothing new. Then I started on my own notes and list of suspects. After a moment, I added Xander, Eric Handle, and a few blank lines for the other members of HA! whom I had seen, but not been officially introduced to.

Then I tapped my pen against the notebook and tried not to scream in frustration. I needed more information.

According to Ben, our mother thought she knew who the killer was.

Obviously, though, that couldn’t be true. She was 2,000 miles away. How could she possibly be closer to figuring this out than I was?

My gaze drifted to my computer.
FriendTime
.

I flipped it on and, for the first time in my life, tried to channel my mother.

I started with her profile, but if she’d been corresponding with anyone there about Tiffany or Ben, she wasn’t doing it publicly. Actually, now that I scanned her wall, I realized her activity wasn’t all that frequent. Which made me wonder if she’d put me on some kind of screening mode.

I turned to share my suspicions with Kiska, only to remember that I’d left him at home. Even more annoyed, I went back to the computer.

Okay, so I wasn’t going to learn anything from her page. That, I guess, would have been too easy. Where else to look?

Tiffany’s page for her restaurant revealed nothing new, but then I realized if she had a business page, she had to have a personal profile too. Feeling oh-so-proud of myself, I did a search. Sure enough. There she was, looking young and healthy and not at all like a husband-stealing goose-liver-eating murder victim.

I clicked on her image and her wall came up with... nothing. Damn people who kept everything private.

I scrolled down a bit, wondering where to go from here. And there she was: Hope of the no last name, listed as a “friend.”

Except Hope wasn’t listed as Hope. She was listed as Kathy, and when I clicked through to her page, I seemed to be looking at a completely different person’s life.

This “Kathy” “liked” over 300 restaurants, 50 food supply companies, and a number of trade organizations involved in food, fur, or some other type of business that used animals in some way. It wasn’t often you meet someone who liked rodeo, fur coats, and pig’s feet.

But apparently I had.

Then there were her “friends.” They ranged from cowboys, including Richard Danes, scientists, and chefs, like Tiffany.

Kathy aka Hope got around on FriendTime even more than my mother did.

After wasting much time clicking around, looking for some other bit of useful information, I returned to Tiffany’s page to check her friends for other leads.

Richard Danes showed on her friend page. Leslie Danes did not. At first this “friendship” seemed a bit bold, but then I realized that as Tiffany’s landlord, Danes had a perfect cover for at least a casual relationship with the chef.

I scrolled down some more, noting that Tiffany, like my mother, had many more friends than I did.

At least Tiffany was younger, and arguably hipper, than me. My mother? Well, she certainly wasn’t younger.

As I was mulling this over and settling into a nice funk, my gaze moved over another familiar face—Eric Handle.

The fact that he was listed among Tiffany’s friends surprised me. I knew that Hope had said they had started HA! together, but I’d also, based on the fact that Tiffany had become the purveyor of goose liver, assumed that they no longer had that much in common and most certainly wouldn’t still be “friends.”

Of course, as my mother’s 2,300 friends showed, friendship on FriendTime was something totally different than friendship in the real world, where I almost certainly had more ties than my mother. Not, of course, that I was counting or that it mattered one whit.

But now knowing that three of the people on my list had very likely had some connection with the dead chef via FriendTime, I wished more than ever that the site didn’t allow its users to set posts to private.

Seriously, wasn’t a lack of privacy what the Internet was all about?

Grumbling a bit to myself, since my usual furry sounding board was home snoozing on his bed, I searched through the rest of Tiffany’s friends, looking for any other familiar faces.

No Carl. No Pauline. I was about to call my task done when I saw the one familiar face I least expected to see: my mother.

I had her on the phone within the minute.

“You’re FriendTime friends with Tiffany the chef,” I blurted out as soon as she’d said hello.

“Am I? I lose count.”

Lose count. “Aren’t you worried about how that might look for Ben?” Nothing like a little guilt to bring her back to reality.

“That his mother is popular?”

“No, that his mother has a relationship with the victim and that adds a tie to him.”

“A bigger tie than that his sister found her body?”

We both fell silent. I was busy mumbling under my breath and plotting my next comeback. I don’t know what my mother was doing.

After a moment, she sighed. “Besides, Pauline has posted all over Tiffany’s page. Have you seen that?”

“Yes.” I wasn’t quite ready to let my mumbling and plotting go.

“Not that it matters. I have everything figured out. I’m just waiting to hear back from a friend of mine in Culbertson

“Culbertson?”

“Yes...” I could hear her warming up, ready to knock my socks off with her genius FriendTime-powered investigation.

She sucked in a breath and then... “Tiffany was having an affair with a married man. His wife knew everything. He thought that she was tucked away at some spa, but instead she drove to Helena, did in her rival and drove back to the spa, which is half an hour from Culbertson.”

She paused then, giving me time to voice my marvel.

“You mean Leslie Danes?”

“Yes, that’s her name.” I could tell my mother was disappointed that I’d known who she was referring to.

“It’s a seven-hour drive.”

“She could have done it.”

Not, as I’d already determined, in time to murder Tiffany.

“Well, I’ll know soon enough. I have a friend who just checked into the same spa. She’ll let me know.”

Okay, Nancy Drew
. I felt guilty as soon as I had the thought. She was trying to help, and her lead was no more farfetched than any of mine. In fact, it had been mine. I’d just deserted it a little more quickly.

“Yes, well, that sounds good. I’m following up on some other things.”

“That’s nice, honey. I’m glad you’ve decided to help your brother.”

I could almost feel her hand patting mine. I growled, but in a resigned, this-is-my-life kind of way.

“You just let me know if I can help you any too.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, resisting the urge to say that I was the expert here, that I was the one who had solved two murders and reported on at least one before that.

But then, that had been her argument when she told me I should investigate the murder.

Feeling more and more like I’d been played somehow, I held my tongue.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

I grunted out a laugh. “Not unless you know how to hack into some FriendTime accounts to see what people have been saying in private.”

“Oh. That’s a good idea. Who were you thinking of?”

I stared at the phone, startled. Was my mother offering to break some kind of rule, if not law, for me? My mother, who wouldn’t even let me cross the road outside a crosswalk?

Wondering if a talk show host type was going to jump out of a corner and tell me I was the latest victim of some new reality TV show revolving around pranking one’s kid, I stuttered out the names.

No talk show host appeared, and my mother didn’t falter. “Got them. Now they all have profiles? You’ve checked?” She was strangely all business.

“Uh, yes. In fact, you’re friends with one of them.”

“Oh, Kathy. She doesn’t post much.”

Perhaps not as herself, but she posted plenty as Pauline. I didn’t, however, reveal that to my mother. Giving her information felt like leading the witness.

I heard clicking, like a keyboard.

“I’ll get on this right now. Just make sure you leave your phone on and charged.”

With that less-than-subtle order, she hung up.

o0o

Lunchtime had come and gone, and I was hungry and tired and generally spent from my conversation with my mother. I decided to call it a day and head home so I could rest up for the cattle drive the next day.

I opened my home’s door to a total
aw
moment.

Kiska was passed out on his bed, and Pauline was passed out on Kiska. Realizing this was exactly the kind of thing people with more friends than me shared on FriendTime, I hurried to get my camera before either of them could move. I’d snapped off four good shots that I was sure would score me at least twenty new friends when it occurred to me that when I left, the goose had been securely shut in my laundry room.

I froze in place. My heart beating loudly in my chest, I turned and looked for any other signs that someone had broken into my house while I was gone.

Nary a dust bunny seemed disturbed.

Kiska opened one eye and stared at me. Pauline fluttered one wing and ignored me.

She was way too relaxed. Kiska might have lain still while someone burgled my house, but Pauline? No way. Which meant... what?

A few quick steps took me to my laundry room door, the one I had left closed. It was most certainly open now. Thinking the latch must have been defective, I reached for the knob. My hand met dented, misshapen metal.

Dented misshapen metal that had, by my best guess, been squeezed by two powerful malamute jaws. While said malamute was urged on by one trouble-making, dominant goose.