Kernel of Truth (9 page)

He shot me a look with one eyebrow raised. “All lawyers are the kind who go to court and argue. Don't ever let one of them tell you different.”

“And how did Jasper become your client?” The sky had gone gray and the wind was coming in from over the lake. I pulled his suit jacket a little tighter around me.

He shrugged. “Dan asked me.”

“Why would Dan do that? And why you?”

Garrett sat back up and turned the collar of the jacket up around my neck. “Because Dan believes in the judicial system
and part of that is making sure everyone gets a decent defense and because I used to be the kind of lawyer who went to court and argued about criminal cases before I became the kind of lawyer who does wills and trusts and stuff.”

My eyes narrowed. “You were a criminal defense lawyer?”

“Yup. And a fairly decent one at that.” He stopped, a pained look passing briefly over his face. “Sometimes a little too good.”

I bent forward and rested my head on my knees. “I can't believe this.”

Garrett put his hand on my back. “I know. These kinds of cases are always surreal. And to spice it up a little more, Jasper's been asking to talk to you.”

“Why?” To say that I didn't want to talk to Jasper would have been an understatement along the lines of saying that I didn't want to use imitation caramel sauce in my popcorn balls.

Garrett shrugged. “He won't tell me. He's pretty insistent, though. Would you be willing to talk to him?”

I thought about it for a minute. “If he tells me one thing that is incriminating, I'm taking it directly to the prosecuting attorney.”

“That's fair.” Garrett nodded.

“And I'm not baking him anything.”

“Also fair.”

I sat up to look Garrett in the eye. “If he had anything to do with Coco's death, I'm not forgiving him. Whoever killed Coco took one of my favorite people in the world away from me. I will never forgive that person for that. Never.” My voice choked up and I could feel my face going all squishy the way it always does when I cry.

Garrett reached around me into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. “Just don't
forget about that whole ‘innocent until proven guilty' thing with Jasper, okay?”

“But why did he have the money and the candy? Was it a Robin Hood kind of thing by the person who did it? And why did he bang Huerta over the head with a frying pan? For fun?” My indignation had the benefit of warming me up a little.

“I'm not telling you anything. I'm asking you to keep an open mind.” Garrett reached over a tucked a piece of my hair that had escaped my bun behind my ear.

There was a stillness to him, a quietude that was nice. “I'll keep my mind as open as I possibly can,” I promised. Then I leaned my head against his shoulder.

“For the record,” he said softly into my hair. “I really like the
dress.”

After I got
home from the funeral, I changed into yoga pants, a hoodie and sneakers and took Sprocket for a walk. It was like he could read my mood and even though he'd been cooped up in the apartment all afternoon, he didn't bolt down the sidewalk or jump on me. We took our usual route, out to the lighthouse at the end of the pier and back.

The air had turned crisp, but the sun was still warm. We wandered up the river toward the lake where the lighthouse rose up from the end of the pier. About three-quarters of the men of Grand Lake had proposed to their sweethearts in the shadow of the lighthouse. I'd participated in a make-out session or two by it. It's that romantic.

No one was making out there now, though. A black SUV and a blue station wagon sat in the parking lot, but I didn't see any people. When we got closer, I saw that the door to the lighthouse was open. I stopped to peek in. “Hi, there.”

Gina Paoletti came out from behind the circular staircase that dominated the middle of the lighthouse with a broom
in her hand. She was a plump woman in her fifties with dark hair and a bit of flash in her brown eyes. “Hello, Rebecca. What are you doing here?”

“Just taking a walk. Trying to clear my head a little.” I pointed toward her broom with my chin. “You're on lighthouse-keeping duty?”

She nodded. “It's my turn this week.” The Grand Lake Historical Society had a regular roster of people who took turns keeping the lighthouse tidy. “Terrible thing about Coco.”

I nodded. “Terrible.”

“You okay now that you got that popcorn lump out of your throat?” she asked, looking down at the floor and I suspected trying not to laugh.

I sighed. “Just fine. Thanks. See you.” Terrific. My near-death experience at my dear friend's funeral was going to be the town's go-to joke for a while.

“I thought the dress was fine, by the way,” she called after me.

Terrific again. Sprocket and I walked the rest of the way down the pier. The lake was calm so I sat down and kicked my legs against its rough wooden edges while the ebbing sun shone on my face and my doofus of a dog leaned against me. A little bit of calm seeped back into my soul.

I'd missed living by water when I was in Napa. Which wasn't to say wine country in Northern California wasn't gorgeous. It was. But it doesn't have a lake so big you can't see to the other side. It doesn't have the sounds of water lapping against pylons or the romance of a lighthouse built from melted-down Civil War cannons still flashing its Fresnel light to keep sailors safe on dark and stormy nights. The sunlight doesn't dance along waves there, sparkling like diamonds on a fall afternoon.

It wasn't home.

Grand Lake was home, but one of the main reasons it was had died. I stopped fighting them and went ahead and let the tears spill for my Coco. I put my arm around Sprocket and cried into his doggie neck until there weren't any more tears to cry. Then I pulled Garrett's handkerchief out of my sweatshirt pocket, dried my face and stood up. It was time to soldier on. Like Coco would have wanted.

My cell phone chirped. I glanced at the screen.

Antoine:
R u ok? Do you need legal representation?

Me:
?

Antoine:
Heard about your arrest.

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. It must have been my little adventure with Huerta at Barbara's house. The funeral had put it completely out of my head.

Me:
All taken care of. Nothing to worry about.

I was going to have to see if I could get Ned Twirby to cancel Antoine's subscription to the
Sentinel
. He was getting far too much information about me for my comfort.

Sprocket and I headed home. Dan was sitting on the front porch drinking a beer as we walked up. I sat down next to him, took the bottle and took a long hard swig.

“You want one of your own?” he asked with the polite tone of a man who really wanted to drink his beer himself, but knew better than to say that out loud.

I nodded.

“In the fridge, but be quiet. Haley and Evan are both napping,” he said with a nod toward the house.

I left Sprocket with Dan and tiptoed into the house, avoiding the board in the hardwood floor in the entryway that creaked. I made it back out with a longneck in one hand and
a Milk-Bone in the other as silently as a sous-chef trying not to disturb a soufflé. I lowered myself back down on the step below Dan's and Sprocket settled onto my feet. Dan pulled one of my corkscrew curls and let it bounce back. “You okay?”

“I've been better.”

He tugged the curl again.

“Hey,” I protested. “Stop pulling my hair, okay?”

He dropped his hand back to his leg. “You got it, Bec.”

We drank in silence for a second or two before I asked. “How come you didn't tell me that Garrett was representing Jasper?”

He didn't answer for a minute, which meant he was thinking. Dan rarely said anything without thinking about it. “It's not really your business, Bec. Plus, I didn't want you to get mad at Garrett.”

“Not my business? Of course it's my business. It's the whole town's business. And who cares if I'm mad at Garrett?” None of what he'd said made sense to me.

“That's my point. It can't be the whole town's business. It has to be done right. That's why I asked Garrett to step in. And I don't want you to be mad because it makes my life easier when all my friends get along.” He rubbed his chin.

I settled back down and gave Sprocket a scratch behind the ears. I knew he had a point about the town and about the friends. “You should be more worried about Garrett being mad at me once he sees what I did to his handkerchief.” My mascara had run when I'd started crying by the lighthouse. It was going to take some serious stain remover to turn that thing white again.

“So why did you think Jasper needed a fancy lawyer anyway? Why isn't the public defender good enough?” I picked at the label on my beer with my fingernail.

It took Dan a really long time to answer. “Because I'm not convinced Jasper's guilty. Even before the attack on Barbara something didn't seem right.”

“He had the money and the truffles,” I pointed out.

“And he bonked Huerta on the head. There are other factors, though.” Dan held up one finger. “Number one: the break-in at Barbara's. Whoever did it had to, at the very least, know what the back of Coco's shop looked like after the break-in there, and Jasper was locked up when it happened.”

He held up a second finger. “Two: no glass on his shoes. Any of his shoes. Crime scene folks tested every pair from Jasper's house—not that there were many.”

“He could have thrown them out somewhere between Coco's and his place,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. I thought about that. But why throw out the shoes and keep the money and the truffles in plain sight?” Dan's eyes narrowed a bit as he looked out over his yard. “Doesn't make sense.”

He had a point. “Is there more?”

“Honestly, motive. He doesn't really have any.”

“Uh, money. Chocolate.” There were totally times in my life when I would have killed for a truffle.

“Jasper's done a lot of things, mainly centered on being a public nuisance. You know what he doesn't have anywhere in his record? Any kind of theft. No shoplifting. No purse snatching. No pickpocketing. Nothing like that.” Dan sighed. “Also nothing violent. He occasionally gets het up and yells at people in the park about how the Scottish independence referendum was fixed and that Eisenhower had secret meetings with aliens, but he's never hit anyone, never laid hands on anyone, never even threatened to do anyone physical harm.”

“People snap. Or get desperate,” I pointed out.

“They do. But there's usually a reason.” He sat up again. “Listen, Jasper really wants to talk to you.”

“Garrett told me.”

“Will you?” Dan put his hand on my back. “Maybe he'll tell you something that can push this one way or the other.”

“I don't know, Dan. Why me?”

“Jasper won't say. I think the only way to find out is for you to talk to him. Will you do it for me?”

I rested my head against him. As if he even had to ask. “For you, I'd lasso the moon, Dan.”

“Bec, can you remember if you turned on or off the lights when you came into Coco's office?” He patted my head. It was nice. No wonder Sprocket liked it.

“Why would I walk into a room and turn off the lights?” I knew I'd been a little unpredictable recently, but I wasn't crazy.

He shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe you were so upset about seeing Coco . . . the way she was . . . that you turned out the lights?”

I raised my head to look at him. “No. I did not turn off the lights. That would be ridiculous.”

“Do you think Jessica might have?” he asked.

Jessica hadn't seemed capable of much of anything at that point. I didn't think I would ever be able to forget her eyes huge and red in the stark whiteness of her face. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen such a picture of woe. “I think she was too busy standing in the middle of the room screaming like a teakettle about to boil over to turn anything off or on. Why?”

“I'm just trying to make sense of the fact that the lights weren't on in Coco's office.” Dan let his beer bottle swing and tap against the step.

“None of them were? Not even the one over her desk?” Coco would have had her desk light on by late afternoon.
Her eyes had been getting worse and worse and she snapped on the light to do just about anything. She couldn't even read the labels on her measuring spoons without her glasses and extra light—not that she needed to read them. She could tell a teaspoon from a tablespoon in her sleep.

“None of them. Not her desk light. Not the office overhead light. Not the porch light. Nothing.” He kept tapping.

“Dan, that's weird. If she was in there, she would have had the light on.” I thought for a second. “Were there any fingerprints on the light switch?”

“About a dozen. Coco's, Jessica's, yours, Annie's, plus some that we haven't identified yet,” he said.

I sat up straighter. “But, Dan, if someone turned those lights out after Coco was dead, then that person's fingerprints are probably on that light switch.”

“Wow, Sherlock, do you really think so?”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “No need for sarcasm.”

“Oh, there's every need for sarcasm. There's too much at that crime scene that doesn't make sense, Bec.” Dan took a deep breath and blew it out.

I'd been focused on how senseless the crime was. It hadn't occurred to me that it hadn't made sense, either. “What else?”

“There's glass on the feet of Coco's quad cane. There's glass on the bottom of your shoes and Jessica's shoes,” Dan said.

“That makes perfect sense.” Jessica and I had both walked through the broken glass in the kitchen. I'd walked through it twice, once on the way in and again on the way out. I'd taken Jessica out the back door of Coco's Cocoas to go to POPS to wait for the police. The glass on Coco's quad cane must have gotten there when she walked through the glass to see what had made the noise.

“There's no glass on Coco's shoes,” Dan said.

That brought me up short. “None?”

“Not a single shard, according to the lab.”

“But there is glass on the cane? The cane that was way over on the other side of the room from Coco?” He was right. I was having trouble coming up with a scenario that would make that all make sense.

Dan took a long pull from his beer. “Yup. Time of death according to the coroner doesn't match up, either.”

I turned it all over in my head. “What does that all mean?”

“I think the break-in part of Coco's death was staged. Someone came back and did that all later.” His tone was flat, but he was clenching and unclenching his jaw. “Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Coco stumbled, fell, and hit her head and whoever was there panicked. They used the cane to break the back window, took the money and the truffles, and left Coco there for Jessica to find her the next morning.”

“Then what's the deal with Barbara? Is it some kind of copycat? And, if so, why?” My mind raced. “You've got Jasper in custody. Whoever broke into Barbara's would have to know that would make Jasper look innocent. What would be the point?”

“I'm not sure.” He started to pick at the corner of the beer bottle label.

I gazed up at the clouds puffing along in the sky. “Could Barbara's break-in be a way to throw you off the trail?”

“The trail of what?” He looked down at me.

“Of whoever killed Coco. Maybe the break-in at Barbara's was a way to make us think that there was a serial burglar of little old ladies' stores to cover up something about Coco's murder.” I wasn't sure what there was to cover up, but maybe there was something.

Dan snorted. “You mean because I'm so hot on the trail of whoever it was who shoved Coco into that desk? I got
nothing, Bec. Nothing. No one has to try to throw me off the trail because I'm not on one.”

“That you know of.” I leaned down to give Sprocket another pet.

“That anyone knows of,” he countered.

“Except whoever did it,” I pointed out. “Whoever did it knows exactly what you are and aren't on the trail
of.”