Playing With Poison – Sneak Peek
Chapter 1
“Going bra shopping at age fifty-two gives new meaning to the phrase fallen woman,” I announced as I gazed at my reflection.
“Oh, Jessie, you always say that.” Candy poked her head around the dressing room door and took a peek at the royal blue contraption she was trying to sell me. “Gosh, that looks great. It’s very flattering.”
I lifted an unconvinced eyebrow. “Oh, Candy, you always say that.”
“No really. I hope my figure looks that nice when I’m old.”
Okay, so I took that as a compliment and agreed to buy the silly bra. And before she even mentioned them, I also asked for the matching panties. To know my neighbor Candy Poppe is to have a drawer full of completely inappropriate, and often alarming, lace, silk, and satin undergarments.
I got dressed and went out to the floor.
“
Temptation at Twilight
giving you trouble?” she asked as she rang me up. Candy hasn’t known me long, but she does know me well. And she’s figured out I show up at Tate’s whenever writer’s block strikes.
I sighed dramatically. “Plot plight.”
“But you know you never have issues for very long, Jessie.” She wrapped my purchases in pink tissue paper and placed them in a pink Tate’s shopping bag. “Even after your divorce, remember? You came in, bought a few nice things, and went on home to finish
Windswept Whispers
.” She offered an encouraging nod. “So go home, put on this bra, and start writing.”
I did as I was told, but wearing the ridiculous blue bra didn’t help after all. The page on my computer screen remained stubbornly blank no matter how hard I stared at it. I was deciding there must be better ways to spend a Saturday night when a knock on the door pulled me out of my funk.
“Maybe it’s Prince Charming,” I said to my cat. Snowflake seemed skeptical, but I got up to answer anyway.
Funny thing? It really was Prince Charming. I opened my door to find Candy Poppe’s handsome to a fault fiancé standing in the hallway. But Stanley wasn’t looking all that handsome. Without bothering to say hello, he pushed me aside, stumbled toward the couch, and collapsed. Prince Charming was sick.
I rushed over to where he had invited himself to lie down and knelt beside him. “Stanley?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Candy,” he whispered, and then he died.
He died?
I blinked twice and told myself I was not seeing what I was seeing. “He’s just drunk,” I reassured Snowflake. “He passed out.”
But then, why were his eyes open like that?
I reached for his wrist. No pulse. I checked for breathing. Nope. I shook him and called his name a few times. Nothing.
Nothing.
The gravity of the situation finally dawned on me, and I jumped up. “CPR!” I shouted at the cat.
But Snowflake doesn’t know CPR. And I remembered that I don’t either.
I screamed a four-letter word and lunged for the phone.
***
Twenty minutes later a Clarence police officer was standing in my living room, hovering over me, my couch, and Candy’s dead fiancé. I stared down at Stanley, willing him to start breathing again, while Captain Wilson Rye kept repeating the same questions about how I knew Candy, how I knew her boyfriend, and—here was the tricky part—what he was doing lying dead on my couch. I imagined Candy would wonder about that, too.
“Ms. Hewitt? Look at me.” I glanced up at a pair of blue eyes that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. “You have anywhere else we can talk?”
Hope drained from his face as he scanned my condominium, an expansive loft with an open floor plan and very few doors. At the moment the place was swarming with people wearing plastic sheeting, talking into doohickeys, and either dusting or taking samples of who knows what from every corner and crevice. Unless Officer Rye and I decided to talk in the bathroom, we were doomed to be in the midst of the action.
“I’ll make some tea,” I said. At least then we could sit at the kitchen counter and stare at the stove. I glanced down. A far better option than staring at poor Stanley.
“Ms. Hewitt?”
“Tea,” I repeated and pointed Officer Rye toward a barstool. I turned on the kettle and sat down beside him while the plastic people bustled about behind us, continuing their search for dust bunnies.
“Let’s try this again,” he said. “What was your relationship with Mr. Sweetzer?”
“We had no relationship.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“No, really. He was Candy’s boyfriend. She lives downstairs in 2B.”
The kettle whistled and I got up to pour the tea. Conscious that this cop was watching my every move, I spilled more water on the counter than into the cups. But eventually I succeeded in my task and even managed to hand him a cup.
“How do you take it?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Your tea. Lemon, cream, sugar?”
“Nothing, thank you.” He frowned at the tea. “So you knew Sweetzer through Ms. Poppe?”
“Correct.” I carried my own cup around the counter and sat down again. “She and I met a few months ago.”
“Where? Here?”
I sipped my tea and thought back. I had met Candy in the bra department at Tate’s of course. It was the day after my divorce was finalized, and she had sold me a dozen bras spanning every color in the rainbow. Candy had even mentioned it that afternoon.
“Ms. Hewitt?”
“We met in the foundations department at Tate’s.”
“The what department?”
So much for discretion. “The bra department,” I said bluntly. “Candy sold me some bras.”
Rye’s gaze moved southward for the briefest of seconds, and I remembered the brand new, bright blue specimen lurking beneath my white shirt.
My white shirt.
If there had been a wall handy, I would have banged my head against it. Instead, I mumbled something about not expecting company.
Rye cleared his throat and suggested we move on.
“Candy and I got to talking, and I told her I was in the market for a condo, and she told me about this place.” I pointed up. “I took one look at these fifteen-foot ceilings and huge windows and signed a mortgage a week later. We’ve been good friends ever since.”
“And Stanley Sweetzer?”
“Was Candy’s boyfriend. He had some hotshot job in finance, and he was madly in love with Candy.”
“So what was he doing up here?”
Okay, good question. I was trying to think of a good answer when one of the plastic people interrupted. “Will someone please get this cat out of here?” she called from behind us.
I turned to see Snowflake scurrying across the floor, gleefully unraveling a roll of yellow police tape. I quick hopped down to retrieve her while the plastic people sputtered this and that about contaminating the crime scene.
“She does live here,” I said. They stopped scolding and watched as I picked her up and returned to my seat.
Snowflake had other ideas, however. She switched from my lap to Rye’s and immediately commenced purring.
Rye resumed the interrogation. “Did you invite Mr. Sweetzer up here?”
“Nooo, I did not. I was working. I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when Stanley showed up out of the blue.”
“You always work Saturday nights?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you?”
Rye took a deep breath. “You were alone then? Before Sweetzer showed up?”
“Snowflake was here.”
More deep breathing. “Did he say anything, Ms. Hewitt?”
“He looked up when he hit the couch and whispered ‘Candy.’” I shook my head. “It was awful.”
“Could he have mistaken you for Candy?”
I shook my head again. “She’s at least twenty years younger than me, a lot shorter, and has long dark hair.” I pointed to my short blond cut. “No.”
“Well then, maybe he had come from Candy’s.” Rye twirled around and called over to a young black guy—the only person other than himself in a business suit—and introduced me to Lieutenant Russell Densmore.
The Lieutenant shook my hand, but seemed far more interested in the teacups and the cat, who continued to occupy his boss’s lap. His gaze landed back on me while he listened to instructions.
“Go downstairs to 2B and get them up here,” Captain Rye told him. “Someone named Candy Poppe in particular.”
“She’s still at work,” I said, but Lieutenant Densmore left anyway.
I looked at Rye. “I really don’t think Stanley came here from Candy’s,” I insisted. “She’s at work. I saw her there myself.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was in Tate’s this afternoon.”
Rye took another gander at my chest. “That outfit for Sweetzer’s benefit?”
“My outfi—What? No!”
Despite the stupid bra, only a madman would find my typical writing attire even remotely seductive. That evening I was wearing a pair of jeans, cut off above the knee, and a discarded men’s dress shirt from way back when, courtesy of my ex-husband. As usual when I’m at home, I was barefoot. Stick a corncob pipe in my mouth and point me toward the Mississippi, and I might have borne a vague resemblance to Huck Finn—a tall, thin, menopausal Huck Finn.
I folded my arms and glared. “As I keep telling you, Captain, I was not expecting company.”
“Is the door downstairs always unlocked?”
“Umm, yes?”
“You are kidding, right? You live smack in the middle of downtown Clarence and leave your front door unlocked? Anyone and his brother had access to this building tonight. You realize that?”
I gritted my teeth, mustered what was left of my patience, and suggested he talk to my neighbors about it. “For all I know, they’ve been here for years without a lock on that door.”
Rye might have enjoyed lecturing me further, but luckily Lieutenant Densmore came back and distracted him. He reported that, indeed, Candy Poppe was not at home.
“What a shocker,” I mumbled.
One of the plastic people also joined us. “You were right, Captain,” she said. “This definitely looks unnatural.”
“Yet another shocker.” My voice had gained some volume, and all three of them frowned at me. I frowned back. “This whole evening has been extremely unnatural.”
Rye turned and gave directions to the plastic person—something about getting the body to the medical examiner. He told Lieutenant Densmore to go downstairs and wait for Candy. Then he scooted Snowflake onto the floor and stood up to issue orders to the rest of the crowd.
I stood up also. Everyone appeared to have finished with their dusting, and I was happy to see that Stanley had been taken away. But it was a bit disconcerting to watch my couch being hauled off.
“You wouldn’t want it here anyway, would you?” the Captain asked me. We stood together and waited while everyone else gathered their equipment and departed.
Rye was the last go. “I’ll be downstairs if you think of anything else, Ms. Hewitt. Or call me.” He handed me his card and headed toward the door. “I can’t wait to hear what Ms. Poppe has to say for herself.”
“She’ll have nothing to say for herself,” I called after him. “She’s been at work all day.”
He turned at the doorway. “Stay put,” he said. “That’s an order.”
“Shut the door behind you, Captain. That’s an order.”
***
I headed for the fridge, desperately in search of champagne. Given the situation, this may seem odd. But champagne became my drink of choice after my divorce, when I decided every day without my ex is a day worth celebrating. Even days with dead bodies in them. I popped the cork. Make that, especially days with dead bodies.
I opened my door to better hear what was happening below and sank down in an easy chair. Candy got home at 9:30, but Rye and Densmore quickly shuffled her into her condo, and someone closed the door.
“Most unhandy,” I told Snowflake. She jumped onto my lap, and together we stared at the empty spot where my couch had been.
The Korbel bottle was nearly half empty by the time Candy’s door opened again. I hopped up to eavesdrop at my own doorway and heard Rye say something about calling him if she thought of anything else. Lieutenant Densmore asked if she had any family close by.
“My parents,” she answered. “But I think I’ll go see Jessie now, okay?”
I didn’t catch Rye’s reply, but the cops finally left, and within seconds Candy was at my doorstep.
“Oh, Jessie,” she cried as I pulled her inside. She stopped short. “Umm, what happened to your sofa?”
“We need to talk,” I told her. I guided her toward my bed and had her lie down.
The poor woman cried for a solid ten minutes. I held her hand and waited, and eventually she asked for some champagne. Like I told Rye—Candy and I are good friends.
I went to fetch a tray, and she was sitting up when I returned to the bedroom.
“Do you feel like talking, Sweetie?” I asked as I handed her a glass.
She took a sip, and then pulled a tissue from the box on my nightstand and made a sloppy attempt to wipe the mascara from under her eyes. “Those policemen told me what happened, but I could barely listen.”
“They wanted to know why Stanley was here tonight. Do you know?”
She shook her head. “They kept asking me where I was. I was at work, right?”
“At least you have a solid alibi.” I frowned. “Which makes one of us.”
“Captain Rye was real interested in you, Jessie. I think he likes you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Would you get a grip, Candy? Rye’s real interested because he thinks I killed your boyfriend.”
Her face dropped and she blinked her big brown eyes. “Did someone kill Stanley?”
Okay, so Candy Poppe isn’t exactly the fizziest champagne in the fridge. Even on days without dead bodies.
“It looks like Stanley was murdered,” I said quietly and handed her another tissue. “Did he have any enemies?”
“That’s what Captain Rye kept asking me,” she whined. “But everyone loved Stanley, didn’t they?”
I had my doubts but thought it best to agree. I asked about his family, and over the remains of the Korbel, we discussed his parents. Apparently Margaret and Roger Sweetzer did not approve of Candy.
“They think I was after his money,” she said. She put down her empty glass. “They don’t like my job either. I swear to God, his mother comes into the store twice a week to embarrass me in front of the customers. And every time Mr. Sweetzer sees me, he asks how business is and stares at my chest.”