A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (5 page)
Read A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Online
Authors: Jaqueline Girdner
Jest Gifts didn’t work as smoothly as Yvonne’s businesses seemed to. Maybe being an heiress to start with helped. But I spent most of my time doing paperwork and clearing up business and employee crises when all I really wanted to do was design gag-gifts. My gaze drifted over to the papers where I’d begun sketching the plans for a line of acupuncturist earrings, all in needles. Sterile needles, of course. I wasn’t sure how well they’d sell. After all, how many female acupuncturists are there in the United States? A lot if you judged by Mill Valley, certainly. But that was Mill Valley. Still, the chiropractor’s cup with the twisted spine for the handle was one of my top sellers, so maybe…
“Damn, how many of them are broken?” I asked, Judy having retrieved my roving attention with the announcement of yet another crisis.
She was fully enmeshed in the details of the bad news when I noticed Wayne sidling his way toward the front door. It was too early for him to go into the restaurant. Way too early. In fact, he didn’t even usually visit La Fête à L’Oie on Mondays at all.
I put my hand over the receiver and asked him where he was going.
“To interview Campbell Barnhill,” he muttered and then made his break for the door.
“Not without me, you’re not,” I objected.
But by the time I got off the phone with Judy, or whoever she was today, his Jaguar was already gone from the driveway.
Still, I knew where Wayne was going. I jumped in my Toyota and raced out after him, popping gravel on the way. Campbell Barnhill managed a family-owned market not very far away in Jacinta Hills. I was about halfway there when I caught up with Wayne. He pulled his Jaguar over to the side of the road. I pulled over after him.
I got out of my Toyota like a traffic cop about to issue a ticket.
“Why were you going to see Campbell without me?” I demanded once Wayne reluctantly rolled down his window. I didn’t ask for his driver’s license.
“My problem, not yours,” he mumbled.
“No,” I shot back. “We stick together on this one. It’s too dangerous otherwise. Don’t you remember—”
“Yes, I do remember,” he interrupted. Then his tone softened. “But Kate, you don’t even think I should be looking into this.”
“I don’t care,” I told him, crossing my arms. “If you’re going to visit a suspect, I am too.”
Ten minutes later, we were at the Jacinta Hills Market in our separate cars.
The store that Campbell managed was not a supermarket. It had been owned and operated by the same family for three generations and were still going strong in the nineties. The bright lighting, friendly clerks, organic produce, upscale wines, homemade pasta and sauces, and soft classical music in the background didn’t hurt any.
Wayne and I walked in together and asked a woman stocking shelves if Campbell Barnhill was in.
She pointed at one of the front registers where Campbell was carefully packing up a silver-haired woman’s meager assortment of groceries. Somehow we had missed him coming in. What was it about his round face under the neatly trimmed ginger beard and mustache that made him invisible?
“Do you need any help getting these to your car, Mrs. Singleton?” he asked in his musical voice. Now, the voice I would have recognized anywhere.
“Not a bit, you sweet man,” the silver-haired woman replied, lifting the bag easily and exiting with a wink.
A hint of pink crept into Campbell’s cheeks.
“Campbell’s such a cutie,” the woman stocking shelves whispered to us. It appeared Campbell had his admirers. She stood up, pulling off her work gloves. “Did you want to speak with him privately?”
We both nodded, and she led us to the register, deftly slipping in to take over for Campbell as she rang up a bottle of wine for a well-built man clad in a sleeveless T-shirt and biker shorts.
“Thanks, Candy,” Campbell said. “I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.”
“Anytime,” Candy answered and turned to her next customer. Yes, definitely an admirer. I wondered if Emma knew.
Campbell led us through a set of swinging doors, past boxes and boxes of fresh produce, up a rickety set of stairs to a totally different environment. There was no classical music playing up here in the “employee lounge.” The walls were bare wood and the chairs were landlord-green vinyl, some repaired with black electrical tape. But there was a table in the center with a potted palm. And a couple of empty yogurt containers. And used paper plates.
“Did you want to talk to me about Sam Skyler?” Campbell asked, his harmonious voice easy as he picked up the yogurt containers and threw them in the wastebasket. But I couldn’t see his face as he spoke.
“Yes, Diana asked me to,” Wayne answered. No more. No less.
“I thought you might,” Campbell admitted, taking care of the paper plates next, then turning to us. “I know I look like the classic serial killer. The guy no one really notices and all his neighbors say he was a nice-enough young man.”
Actually, he was right, I thought. What would Jeffrey Dahmer have looked like with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache? And a little more weight…
I shook the thought out of my head as Campbell continued to clean up and talk at the same time. Anyway, Campbell’s hazel eyes were friendly, not haunted.
“I should’ve never yelled at Skyler,” he told us, wiping off the table with a damp cloth. “And shaking my fist. Ye gods, what a stupid thing to do.”
Finally he settled down into a taped chair and began tapping his foot rhythmically.
“Then why did you?” I asked, keeping my voice stern with half a heart. Half a heart because Campbell Barnhill seemed too damn sweet to be dangerous.
“Well, Emma—” He paused and his cheeks pinkened again. “Skyler was always flirting with her. And Emma…” He leaned forward carefully. “Emma is actually pretty naive for all her…well…her striking of poses. She’s very creative. And very hardworking. A real Renaissance woman. Performance art. Her rock band, Angie and the Angst. Her Connie the Condom series.”
Connie the Condom?
“But she’s been really abused by men who don’t understand her sensitivity. Oh, she smokes those unfiltered cigarettes and drinks coffee by the gallon, but beneath it all, she’s shy and vulnerable. And watching a man like Sam Skyler preying on that vulnerability…”
“Did you think he was going to seduce her?” I asked curiously.
“I thought so, at the time,” Campbell answered slowly, his eyes drifting up as he considered it. “But I jump to conclusions too fast. And shake my fist too fast, too. I’ve even shaken it here in the store. I just don’t stop to think sometimes. Because if I had, I’d have known that Emma would have just laughed him off if he’d tried. She has her own code of honor.”
He sighed deeply. “But there I was, shaking my fist. And now he’s dead.”
“Irrespective of Emma,” Wayne asked, “what did you think of Skyler?”
“I thought he was an arrogant, pompous bull of a man,” he declared. “Ona had told me a little about how he treated her and—”
“You knew Ona before the wedding seminar?” I interrupted, surprised.
“Oh, she’s shopped here for years,” Campbell assured me.
But was shopping at someone’s store enough to constitute a friendship? Maybe with a man as seemingly open as Campbell. I began to understand a little more of what Emma saw in him for all her insistence on wild experience and sensation. He seemed to be a sincerely kind man, and an attractive one in his own old-fashioned way. And he
was
old-fashioned for someone who couldn’t be very far into his thirties. On the other hand, he hadn’t been exhibiting much old-fashioned kindness when he’d shaken his fist at Sam Skyler. I remembered his bellowing voice. And the expression on his face.
“Liz Atherton shops at Jacinta’s too,” Campbell added helpfully. It was hard to believe he was the same man who had been so angry at Sam Skyler. “And sometimes Diana.”
There was a short silence, as I tried to think of another relevant question for Campbell.
“Do you think Sam Skyler was pushed?” Wayne asked finally. Well, that was relevant.
Campbell shrugged. “The police do, obviously. They’ve already been here to see me. As well as some of the local media.”
My stomach churned. Police? Media?
Campbell chuckled uncomfortably. “I’ve really got to stop shaking my fist. Once, someone hit me in the face for it. I thought that was bad enough. But this is the first time I’ve been accused of murder for the habit.”
“Manager to checkstand two,” came a ghostly voice from a grille set into the wall. It sounded like Candy. “Manager to checkstand two.”
“Well, duty calls,” Campbell announced before standing to shake our hands. Then he led us back down the stairs, through the swinging doors, back into the upscale brightness of the Jacinta Hills Market.
Wayne and I didn’t talk much before we got into our separate cars. Maybe we were both too immersed in our own impressions of Campbell Barnhill. But we still managed to arrive home at the same time, ready to pull our cars into the driveway in tandem.
But there was no room in our driveway for our cars. Or on the street for that matter.
Our house was ringed with cars and people and trucks. My brain tried to take in the meaning. A fire? My heart jumped. But these weren’t fire trucks. A surprise party? But it wasn’t my birthday or Wayne’s.
And then I took a closer look at one of the trucks, a big white one, bristling with equipment. It even had what looked like a small satellite dish on the back. The truck said Channel 7 News on the side. My insides curdled.
And then I noticed the people. A couple of them carried hand-held cameras. A few held microphones. And some clasped notebooks.
And finally, as Wayne and I got out of our cars, the people noticed us.
“There she is!” someone shouted.
And I realized they meant me.
- Six -
My body went rigid. For a moment I felt like a deer caught in the headlights of an onrushing car. Because these “people” weren’t people after all. They were reporters.
I should have realized sooner. Sam Skyler was a famous man. And an infamous one to boot. His death had to make great media fodder. I tried to take a deep breath, but I couldn’t get past the constriction of my immobilized ribs.
“So how does it feel—” a blond woman in jeans began, launching a small hand-held tape recorder toward my head.
But she was deftly shouldered aside by a more elegantly attired woman with a perfect brown pageboy swinging gently over her ears and a slim microphone in her hand moving much less gently toward my gaping mouth. And behind her, yet another woman, this one in khakis with a steady-cam slung over her shoulder, its lens aimed at my face. I closed my mouth, trying to neutralize what I was sure had to be a look of complete panic contorting the muscles of my face.
“In fact, I’m speaking to Kate Jasper right now,” the elegant woman declared, her delivery quick and crisp. “The woman who discovered Sam Skyler’s body on the rocks only two days ago. Actually, Kate Jasper has found quite a few dead bodies over the last few years here in mellow Marin. So, Ms. Jasper, just how do you explain all these grisly discoveries?”
“I…I don’t—” I blurted out before I felt the pressure of Wayne’s elbow in my ribs.
I shut my mouth again. And heard the kaclunk and whir of a picture being taken. My picture? Wayne’s picture? Were we the media event? Not Sam Skyler?
“House,” Wayne growled into my ear and stepped in front of me, straight-arming the elegant woman with the microphone.
It took me a moment to respond, and by then a big muscular guy with another tape recorder was standing in front of me.
“Did you know Sam—” he began, holding his arm out to the side, leaving his chest wide open. When he stepped close enough to me that I could smell a combination of smoke and mint on his breath, I shifted my weight back, letting him move even closer, then shifted forward again quickly, my hands on his chest. He stumbled to the rear, a grimace of surprise on his face. I sent a little psychic message of thanks to my tai chi teacher of eight years.
Another woman came up on my side, trying to move herself into place where the big man had been. I turned my body from its center, letting my arm swing with the momentum, and swept her away. Actually, this was kind of fun, I decided, and took a good deep breath, unconstricted now. Push hands in action. Then I took a couple of quick unimpeded steps forward, catching up with Wayne, who was still straight-arming himself through the crowd. He was showing an awful lot of restraint for a man with a black belt in karate. But the crowds were still parting as he moved forward.
I was just beginning to feel in control again when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Do you think the police might have arrested the wrong people before?” the voice asked loudly. “I mean, look at the body count and always this same woman finding them.”
I willed myself not to look behind me and kept moving forward, but now I was beginning to shake with the urge to defend myself, verbally as well as physically. I pressed my lips together hard and kept moving.
“You mean, like, this Jasper woman hypnotizes them into confessing, but she’s really the killer?” a new voice hypothesized.
What!
Keep moving your feet,
I told myself.
And don’t move your mouth.
“Yeah, Yeah! Like Bundy or Dahmer. A real serial killer. And the police just haven’t figured it out.”
“Yet,” someone added helpfully.
“You think her boyfriend’s in on it with her?”
I stopped in my tracks, and instantly a short man with a notebook and pencil wedged himself between me and Wayne’s back. I used the same tai chi movement to dislodge him that I’d used on the bigger man, but it wasn’t fun anymore. They couldn’t believe Wayne had anything to do with the deaths, could they?
“Or a maybe she’s just the Typhoid Mary of murder,” I heard as we made the stairs. It was a catchy phrase. So catchy, I could picture it in newsprint. In very large type. Wonderful.
“Or maybe it’s some karma thing. Like she attracts murder because of her past life. Or…”
By that time Wayne was at the front door with me right beside him. We turned to face the crowd as he unlocked the door behind him. A good trick, which I wondered if I could carry off. But this wasn’t the time to think. It was the time to act. A few more pushes and we’d backed inside the house and slammed the door shut. We were safe.
Safe but not sound, not of mind. Scared. At least I was. Very scared.
Wayne put his arms around me and I could feel the trembling in him too.
“Did you hear what they were saying?” I whispered into his armpit finally.
He grunted in affirmation and held me tighter.
“Can they really believe…” I began.
“Don’t think about it,” he ordered brusquely.
Oh, sure.
I was opening my mouth to discuss the low probability of my ever forgetting what I had just heard outside, when I heard a new sound inside. The sound of the flap on the cat door opening. I turned, expecting to see my cat, but what I saw was a hand with a microphone.
That was enough. I made a decision to do something I never thought I would do. Not to stomp on the hand with the microphone and grind it into the floor, however tempting the image was. No, something even more radical. A phone call for help. From the one person I knew who might be able to get rid of these people. And their suspicions.
“Felix,” I whispered as I pulled Wayne down the hall into the bedroom.
“Felix Byrne?” he squeaked, his voice almost as high as mine now, if not Minnie Mouse’s. A look of horror twisted his features.
I put my finger over my lips and closed the bedroom door behind us.
“But Felix,” he whispered hoarsely. “He’s a human pit bull when he’s on a story. Kate, he’ll badger us and badger us. Sometimes I think he’s not even human—”
“He can get rid of those people outside,” I interrupted, hoping I was right. “He can put them on another track.”
Wayne closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Maybe,” he admitted finally and dropped onto the bed,
his head in his hands. I sat down next to him and put my hand on his thigh.
“Yes?” I asked, then heard the sounds of footsteps on the rear deck and a knock on the back door.
Wayne stood up abruptly. “I’ll cook lunch,” he muttered and headed out of the bedroom toward the kitchen.
I took that as a yes and made my way slowly to the bedroom phone to call Felix, wondering during the few short steps if the whole idea was a mistake. Because my best friend Barbara’s sweetie or not, Felix as a reporter was everything Wayne had said he was. And worse. But not worse than that gang lying in wait outside. I punched Felix’s number in quickly before I could change my mind.
Felix was ecstatic once I’d told him the story of the scuba wedding and Sam Skyler’s body on the rocks.
“Far friggin’ out,” he purred. “Kate Jasper, my old compadre, finds another friggin’ corpse. And this time, she decides to tell me about it.”
“It wasn’t just me!” I objected.
“But you were the first one to see him, pal. Right?” he shot back.
“Besides the murderer—” I began, then remembered why I’d called Felix in the first place.
“Felix, the house is surrounded by reporters,” I told him, keeping my voice down. “And they’re acting like I’m the murderer. How long do you think they’ll stay out there?”
“As long as it friggin’ takes,” he answered, his voice low with something that sounded like pleasure. In fact, I could almost hear him drooling. He was enjoying this.
“An exclusive,” he said softly.
“What?”
“An exclusive,” he repeated more loudly. “You tell me everything, man, the whole poop. Me and nobody else, you get it? And I’ll disappear the reporters for you, zippo presto, pronto. Cool?”
“I guess so,” I answered slowly. “But Felix, they think it was me.”
“They won’t be so sure after a few other rumors get passed around,” he assured me.
I didn’t even get a chance to consider the ethics of that proposal before he was wheedling again. And wheedling some more. I gave in finally. An exclusive it was.
Then I hung up the phone and waited in the kitchen with all the blinds shut as Wayne cooked. Darkness at noon. And we listened to the mingled voices of the reporters hovering outside. High and low, loud and soft. But all intense. After a while, we heard some shouts and the sounds of a few cars being driven away. Then a few more departures a couple of minutes later. And a few more. Until all the voices had disappeared.
Half an hour later the doorbell rang. I peeked out the window. No reporters in sight—except for Felix Byrne. He was at the front door with a big grin twitching under his mustache. Felix is not an unattractive man, at least physically. Small and slender with a luxurious mustache and soulful eyes.
“How’d you get rid of them?” I asked, opening the door.
“I buzzed in a hot tip to three news rags and two TV stations,” he declared in a radio announcer’s voice. “Gave them the poop that a prominent state senator was up on Mount Tam to meet the aliens that he believed visited him seven years ago. Said I got it from his deep throat assistant who couldn’t handle working for a senator anymore who thinks he’s a secret UFO diplomat.”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“And they bought it?” I asked incredulously.
He nodded, shoving his way in through the doorway.
I instinctively moved to block him, then remembered that I was the one who’d asked him here.
“Then I switched phones and told a bunch of other media geeks that Campbell Barnhill had just confessed to the county sheriffs that he killed Sam Skyler…”
Damn. That wasn’t fair.
“Then I switched phones again and told a whole different bunch of the boys and girls of the press that Yvonne O’Reilley was busy confessing her little heart out down at the Quiero cop shop—”
“Stop,” I told him, putting up my hand. I didn’t want to hear any more.
“Hey!” Felix objected, arms outstretched. “You wanted them off your friggin’ back, right? And don’t get your hemorrhoids in a twist—I spread the rumors around plenty. Now everyone’s a suspect. With the truckload of bull puckey I threw out there, they’ll need a shovel to get through it all. And they won’t have time to be on your case. You know, you’d be deep in doo-doo without a pooper scooper—”
“I know, I know,” I conceded. I even forced myself to thank him. I’d worry about the ethics later.
Then Felix raced me to the kitchen to eat the lunch that Wayne had prepared. Wayne cooks when he’s nervous. That day, he’d made seitan-stuffed tomatoes, two kinds of cucumber salad, and three kinds of sandwiches on his homemade sunflower-millet bread. Avocado-tahini, marinated tofu, and pesto eggless “egg-salad.” And there was leftover carob fudge torte for dessert.
Felix’s eyes lit up when he saw the food. If Wayne could cook, Felix could eat.
“Speak,” Felix ordered and dug in.
I spoke. I told Felix what I could remember. In bits and pieces. But I kept my own suspicions to myself. Especially of Diana. Wayne even threw in a word here and there so I could take a few bites in between questions. The pesto-eggless was delicious, even if the dining circumstances were less than desirable.
After Felix’s third sandwich, I asked the question I’d been wanting to ask. And not wanting to ask.
“Are the police sure it was murder?”
He smiled widely.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he asked and tilted his head coquettishly.
Wayne rose from the table.
“Hey, everything’s cool, big guy,” Felix backtracked. “Great food.”
“Well?” I demanded.
“Yeah,” Felix said, his voice low with lust. He leaned forward as Wayne sat back down. “Nine times out of ten they wouldn’t have a clue, but this time…”
He paused for suspense.
Wayne stood up again.
Felix came back up to speed.
“See,” he told us, “usually when some geek dives off a cliff like that you can’t tell what the hell happened ‘cause they’re all bruised up. But there was this really weird thing, I mean really weird, you know.”
He stopped to grab another sandwich.
“What?” I prompted as calmly as I could. My heart was pumping hard now.
“First of all, don’t tell a friggin’ soul, ‘cause my source told me, but no one but the cops are supposed to know. She made me promise not to go public until she gives me the word.”
“All right, I promise I won’t tell anyone,” I agreed impatiently as he bit into his fourth sandwich.
“Well,” he mumbled through the avocado-tahini. “All the bruising from the rocks is cool, you know, regular stuff, but there were these really bizarre patches of bruising on the shoulder blades. Even that salami-brain Woolsey could tell they’d been made by a man-made object, not the friggin’ rocks. And get this, they were in the shape of five-sided stars—”