Death of a Dapper Snowman (17 page)

He squeezed my hand and said, very gravely, “I know I shouldn’t joke around. The truth is… I want a cane sword because of those giant warehouse-sized jars Pam always buys because they’re such good value. Because of the arthritis in my hands, I don’t like reaching my hand into the cold juice. I’d use my new cane sword to get out the last pickles.”

That comment about the pickles got Tony snickering, and then they were both laughing like the way they used to in the old days.

If Tony was ever going to get any straight answers from him about Mr. Michaels, it would have to be with the two of them alone.

I patted my father’s arm to get his attention for a moment. “Dad, I’m going to leave you guys for a minute, but I’ll wait outside of the room, because I still need to talk to Tony about something. Please just answer his questions and don’t say anything weird, okay? I can see by your pupils that you’re high as a kite on pain meds, so just stick to yes and no answers, and if you get confused, call for me.”

He seemed annoyed to have me talking to him like he was a doddering old man, but agreed and waved for me to leave them.

I walked out of the room and stood a few feet outside the door, listening. Tony must have guessed that was exactly what I’d do, because he closed the door behind me. They stopped joking around and began speaking in low voices, getting down to business. I couldn’t hear anything.

The rest of the hospital buzzed with ordinary daily activity. A man about my father’s age walked by slowly, using a walker for balance as a young physical therapist cheered him on.

I looked around for my father’s therapist, Dora. I spotted her down the hall, with another patient. She gave me a smile and a wave, but didn’t come over, to my relief.

I took out my phone and found a dozen messages from Jessica.

Highlights included:

Isn’t Harper sweet? The three of us are going to have so much fun!

Hey, who was the guy with the beard again? He was cute underneath the beard, I think. We should shave him down and see!

Where are you?

It’s margarita o’clock. Right now.

Stormy! Where are you?

I started to compose a message asking her what she knew about Harper, then decided an interrogation would be less creepy in person, so I asked if I could stop by her place around dinner.

She wrote back immediately:
Sure, but I have zero food in the house, unless you count dried beans.

I replied:
Don’t sweat it! You provide some clean plates and I’ll grab some pizza on my way over.

We texted back and forth a few more times about pizza toppings. Before long, the door to my father’s room opened and Officer Tony Milano came out.

I jumped to my feet. “You’re wasting your time talking to my father. In fact, he’s probably messing around with you because he’s lonely and bored here in the hospital.”

“I’m just doing my job. In a small town, you can’t skip investigating the people you think you know, or you’ll have to skip everyone.”

“But I’ve got a stranger for you. You’ll know her when you see her, because she’s really pretty. Too pretty for Misty Falls, but whatever. She knows my friend Jessica, and when I see her tonight, I’ll find out more.”

He scrunched his dark eyebrows at me. “What do you mean by
too pretty for Misty Falls?
Is that a slam against people who never left here? You should realize you’re one of us now, even though you took off and came home with your tail between your legs.”

“My tail between my legs?” I got up from my seat, reached out, and pushed him back by the shoulders. “You take that back.”

He licked his lips, narrowed his golden brown eyes at me, and said, “No. You left. And now you’re back, but only because you’re defeated. As soon as you lick your wounds, you’ll fly out of here again.”

“I will not.” I looked around to make sure nobody was watching us, and I gave him another shove. “Just because you watched me grow up, you don’t know me now. I’m not a little girl throwing temper tantrums.”

He tilted his head to the side and smirked. “Why don’t you shove me one more time and say that?”

I pulled my hands behind my back and looked away as my cheeks burned. “Sorry.”

He chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind so much, but I am in uniform, Stormy. If you feel the need to beat me up because you’re angry I didn’t stay in touch after you moved away, wait until I’m in civilian clothes.”

I kept looking down at the shiny, buffed floor of the hospital hallway. “Tony, I’m not angry at you. Maybe there was a time, for a while, that I was angry, but I’m okay now.”

“You’re still Stormy, though. Even when the sun is shining, those dark clouds are on the horizon.”

I flicked my gaze up and saw that he was definitely teasing me, with a huge smirk on his face.

“You shut up.” I launched myself at him a third time and gave him a shove powerful enough to make him stagger back. “You heard my father. My real name is Ignateous, not Stormy. I’m going to change it back.”

He chuckled. “That’s not even a real name.”

“You’re one to talk, Tony Baloney.”

He nodded for me to walk down the hall with him. “Let’s check out the cafeteria, shall we? I’m sure you’ve got some theories about what happened to Mr. Michaels.”

“For one thing, I suspect it was a suicide, and he set the whole thing up to pin it on my father as the final revenge in their decades-old battle over who was responsible for that spindly hedge between their yards.”

“Hmm.”

We started walking toward the elevator.

“That’s obviously a total joke,” I said.

“I figured you were joking, but when I started on the force, I had a fantastic mentor who told me to consider absolutely everything, no matter how crazy it sounded.”

Chapter 22
 

The hospital cafeteria
had just put away the lunch buffet and didn’t have the dinner ready yet, so we chose some sandwiches from the cooler and paired them with bowls of hot vegetable soup.

Tony insisted on paying for both of our meals, despite my protests, which caused the woman ringing in our meals to make big doe eyes at him.

“Do you get that a lot?” I asked him as we made our way over to a table by the cafeteria’s wall of windows.

He didn’t understand what I meant, so I explained, “Women gawking at you, just because you’re tall and handsome and wearing a police uniform. And she didn’t charge you for your sandwich, just for mine.”

He unwrapped the plastic wrap off my sandwich, then his.

“Nothing escapes your notice, does it?” he teased. “If we have another citizen get reported missing, I’ll call you up first and ask you where the body is.”

I laughed for a moment, then leaned in and said, in a hushed voice, “I know you’re not supposed to share your cases with regular civilians, but I’ve got someone working at the gift shop now, and I’ll have some time on my hands. Do you think I could help, like how I used to help you and Dad?”

He raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “Like a consultant? I’m afraid we don’t have the money for that.”

I hurriedly chewed and swallowed my bite of sandwich so I could answer, “I wouldn’t ask to get paid. I just need to keep busy.”

“What happens if you don’t keep busy?”

I stared into his golden brown eyes. What would happen if I didn’t keep busy? I didn’t know. Maybe I would go to one of those meditation classes, or learn how to snowboard.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Please don’t answer that,” he said.

“Because you’ll feel sorry for me?”

“Because people who have a new baby, plus a couple of pre-teens, do not want to hear about single people and their exciting lifestyles.” He looked down at his sandwich, then frowned as though confused by it. “Did I just cut this sandwich into quarters?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Tony Junior will only eat sandwiches cut into quarters. I must have been on autopilot there. See? This is what kids and lack of sleep does to you.”

“Plus a murder investigation.”

He gestured for me to eat up. “Go on. Finish your soup and at least half your sandwich, or you don’t get any dessert. They just put out a fresh tray of Jell-O, and it’s my treat. But you have to eat your lunch first.”

I giggled. “Okay. You’re good at that.”

We ate our lunch and then, true to his word, Tony bought us two freshly-cubed bowls of Jell-O.

Between mouthfuls, I said, “I haven’t had Jell-O in years.”

“If you don’t like the red cubes, I’ll eat them.”

I moved my arm around my bowl protectively. “Nice try. Those are the best ones.”

He chuckled. “I should get driving back to town. You said you had a lead for me to follow up on? Someone connected to the victim?”

“Not exactly. At first, I thought she was connected to Mr. Jenkins.”

“But he’s not the killer, so it’s a dead end. Did you hear about that? He came in a couple times for questioning and then follow-up, but he’s not the one we’re looking for.”

“Let me take a wild guess. Rock solid alibi?” I held up my hand so he didn’t answer. “Actually, I ran into him this morning at the police station. I thought he was going to strangle me with his long strangling hands, but he was actually quite nice, and look at my neck.” I pointed to my neck.

“Not strangled at all,” Tony said.

We both laughed. I leaned in and whispered, “Am I the worst person in the world, that I make jokes about these awful things?”

“You’re not the worst,” he said. “It’s a coping mechanism. You have to laugh, because what’s the alternative? You should hear some of the things we cops say to each other.”

“Do you still have the quote board?”

He glanced around the hospital cafeteria, looking sheepish. The quote board was where they’d write down something particularly appalling yet funny that one of them said spontaneously. Taken out of context, the quotes were even more shocking.

“Officially, there’s no quote board,” he said with a wink. “Now, who’s this other suspect? You’ve got me curious.”

I took a moment to compose my thoughts. I’d already tried to tell him about Harper once, but we’d gotten sidetracked by a discussion about me returning home with my tail between my legs.

“That blonde I was telling you about. The pretty one. Harper. I guess that’s her first name, but it might be her last name. Or it might not be her name at all, because I just saw her, here in the city, and she didn’t turn around when I said her name.”

“She was here in the hospital?”

“No. At a pawn shop. The same pawn shop where Mr. Michaels was selling the things he’d been shoplifting.”

Tony gave me a wolfish grin as he finished off his Jell-O. “What were you doing in a pawn shop? Don’t you have enough cash in the bank to buy half the town?”

“I wish people would stop saying that. I cashed out, sure, but it was just enough to buy the gift shop and my duplex. And, by the way things are going at the gift shop, I’ll probably be broke by this time next year.”

“You’ve still got more than most people in town. We pulled the financials on Mr. Michaels. He wasn’t just shoplifting for the thrills, I bet. He was in debt up to his eyeballs. Apparently, he liked to gamble.”

I gasped. “He was murdered for gambling debts?”

“Not unless the Misty Falls Credit Union is putting out hits on people who are behind on their mortgage payments. When I said he liked to gamble, I meant on the housing market. He’d overextended himself with a second property, and when rates went up, he was barely getting by on his pension.” He glanced around the nearly-empty hospital cafeteria. “It explains why he was so petty over minor expenses, like the trimming of the hedge between his and your father’s property. It’s no wonder they’d been fighting more lately.”

“He was always cheap, though. Remember that year he put out a stack of dog-eared paperbacks instead of Halloween candy?”

Tony chuckled. “Remember it? I’m the one who got called to his house three times that night to chase away kids throwing rotten eggs.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. “I seem to recall a young woman by the last name of Day leading the rotten egg brigade.”

“Must have been my sister.” I batted my eyelashes innocently.

His expression got serious. “The town’s lost a little bit of its charm now that he’s gone.”

“Maybe these will help you catch the killer.” I pulled the envelopes from my purse and handed them over with my head bowed. “The mail carrier dropped these on my porch, and the moisture from the snow made the flaps accidentally come open.”

“Mmm. Accidentally.” He dug into the envelopes and had a look at the checks. “I can see by your face that you’ve been on the case, Stormy. Why don’t you save us both the hassle and just tell me everything you know?”

“Do I have full immunity for the, uh, mail tampering?”

He gave me a warm smile.

I had to look away quickly, because his smile, on top of sharing a meal, had erased a dozen years’ worth of time. I didn’t want to have my heart flutter over Tony. He was married, with kids, and that was sacred to me. I wouldn’t even pursue a friendship with him. We would just happily co-exist in the same town, ignoring each other, in between those times my father became a murder suspect.