Pepperoni Pizza Can Be Murder (27 page)

It might as well have been on the moon.

There was no way I could get to it without getting past Sandi first.

Unless I could trick her into letting me over there.

“Okay, I give up,” I said. It was time for some serious lying. “I’ve known all along that it was pretty clear that you’ve been setting Katy up to take the fall.”

“Wrong again,” Sandi said with a grin. “I originally planned to use Greg, but when he got out of jail so quickly, I decided to make Jamie the killer. Then Katy started acting like an idiot, and I realized that it was time to improvise. I didn’t give up on Jamie, though, in case Katy managed to beat the rap, so I’ve been busy working up solid motives for each of them.”

“When did you plan to kill Wade, and why did you do it at my pizzeria?”

Sandi frowned at me. “Why should I tell you anything?”

“Wouldn’t it feel good for someone to know how brilliant you’ve been in manipulating events? It’s not like I’m going to be around to tell anyone.”

“You’ve got a point. Dear old Wade decided to cheat on me, and he honestly thought he could get away with it. Come on, with Katy Johnson? Honestly? He had to be kidding. The fool didn’t think I’d find out, but when I did, he came crawling back to me on his hands and knees. He begged me to forgive him, but I had that image of him kissing Katy burned into my brain. How could I forgive him—let alone forget what I’d seen? He had to pay for what he did.”

Then, much to my surprise, she started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“He paid in more ways than one, didn’t he? The idiot confessed to me that he loved me so much he’d named me in his will so I’d get everything if anything happened to him. Can you believe that? I didn’t even know it until the day before I killed him. He thought it was a grand romantic gesture, but it wasn’t going to wipe out that memory. Without realizing it, Wade sealed his own fate by telling me that. He didn’t have much money before, but when he finally settled his grandparents’ estate with Greg, Wade was suddenly worth a lot more to me dead than he’d ever been alive. He signed the settlement, and I witnessed it. I’ve been waiting for somebody to get arrested for his murder before I filed the paperwork. What a fool Wade turned out to be.”

“Why kill him at the Slice, though?” I asked as I started slowly moving toward that table where the dart gun was resting. Sandi didn’t seem to notice it; she was so caught up in bragging to me about how smart she’d been.

“Greg was always my first choice to frame for the murder, so what better place could I have picked? His apartment was too hard—I could have never gotten Wade to meet me there. But your pizza place was perfect. Wade would have done anything to put something over on his brother.”

“How’d you even get the key to the place? It was locked when you got there, wasn’t it?”

“There are more keys to this place floating around than you know. Wade stole one from your office when he was there fighting with Greg about the will while you were on one of your lunch breaks, and you didn’t even know it. He bragged to me that he could come and go as he pleased, and no one would know.”

“So you got a pizza from one of my competitors and used it to lure Wade there.”

She nodded, clearly pleased with my deduction. “I was wondering if anyone would catch that. I had to get Wade to the pizza place if I was going to implicate Greg, and what better way to do that than to offer him a romantic dinner so we could make up? He thought it was bold and daring, which made me that much more attractive to him. I ordered the pizza, and then I got rid of the box before I went into the Slice. Everything would have been perfect, if you hadn’t kept butting in. You were eliminating my frame-ups as fast as I made them.”

“You had to know I wouldn’t stand by and let Greg go down for it.”

“Why not? He’s just an employee, Eleanor.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. He’s family.”

If I survived this, I was going to have to change the lock to the pizzeria’s door, but at the moment, that seemed like a very small problem that was very far away.

I was two steps from the table where the dart gun was hidden when Sandi said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I feel like I’m going to pass out,” I said as I pretended to feel dizzy. “I need to lean against the wall.”

“Don’t worry, Eleanor, you’re not going to have that problem for very long,” Sandi said with a smile as she lovingly stroked the bat. “I just love a blunt weapon, and the fact that it’s yours will prove that the little break-in I’m about to stage wasn’t premeditated.”

“You don’t have to do this—you know that, don’t you?”

“If you’re waiting for reinforcements, you’re just wasting your time. No one knows we’re here. By the time anyone finds you, I’ll have a new alibi all ready for the police.”

She was probably right, but as long as I could keep her talking, I still had a chance. “Did you put Wade up to the robbery, too?”

Sandi laughed. “Please don’t give me that much credit. He must have come up with that one on his own. I wouldn’t be surprised if Greg told him about the late-night deposits one time, and Wade realized it would be an easy way to come up with some fast money. He was a fool to borrow from Art Young.”

“Why did he? From everything I’ve heard about Wade, he wasn’t stupid.”

“Don’t count on it,” she said. “First he stole from his boss and some of their clients, and when he borrowed money from Art, he had to have a way to pay it back. I still can’t believe he had the guts to rob you.”

“But why did he need so much money in the first place?”

Sandy looked pleased with herself as she answered, “Can I help it if I have expensive tastes? I warned him when we started dating that it wouldn’t be cheap keeping me happy, but he didn’t believe me.”

“So he’d commit armed robbery just to keep you happy?”

“He would have done anything for me,” Sandi said. “He was willing to walk through fire, if I asked him to.” She shook her head. “Wade never suspected a thing. The second we walked into the kitchen, he turned his back to me and I hit him with the rolling pin. It was amazing how fast he went down.”

Was that a smile on her face as she described the murder? She’d actually enjoyed killing him! I liked my chances of surviving the confrontation less and less.

“I’m getting tired of this, Eleanor. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt much. At least not for very long.”

Sandi started to move toward me with the bat—swinging it back and forth like she was going for the fences—but I wasn’t close enough to the dart gun to grab it yet.

“Did you ever love him?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’m not even sure love’s real. When Wade wouldn’t settle his grandparents’ estate with Greg, I told him he needed to come up with some other way to buy me something nice if he expected me to stick around. I was getting bored with him, and the only reason I stayed was because I kept hoping that he’d settle the estate with Greg, and I’d get that money for myself.”

“How many people have you hurt along the way? How many times have you lied?”

“That’s not very smart, Eleanor, making the girl with the baseball bat angry.”

She started toward me, so I pretended to cower, not that it took that much acting. “I’m just trying to understand,” I whimpered, edging closer and closer to the hidden gun.

“Pay attention, then. I planned to get my hands on that money, one way or another.” She grinned as she added, “He laughed when he told me about robbing you. Wade said it was amazing how fast you handed over your money when he held that gun on you. You’re nothing but a coward, aren’t you?”

Sandi looked around the room, and then said, “There’s not much of value here, is there? If I’m going to make this look like a robbery, I’ll need to grab some goodies along the way.”

“I have money in the kitchen,” I said. I had, too, at one time before Greg had depleted it. Still, if I could distract her long enough, I might be able to get back to that dart gun.

“It’s back here,” I said, leading her toward the kitchen. I thought about lunging for the gun as I walked near it, but Sandi was closer. I was going to have to wait.

I reached for the cookie jar and realized there were just a few singles I’d recently added to it. I had to make sure Sandi didn’t know that. Doing my best acting, I glanced furtively over my shoulder as I looked inside it, and I could almost feel her hot breath on my neck.

“What else do you have in there?” she asked with sudden suspicion.

“Just the money,” I said, trying to make my voice sound like I was lying.

“There’s a gun in there, too, isn’t there?”

“No,” I said, letting my voice crack.

“Get out of my way,” she said as she shoved me aside.

As Sandi reached into the jar, her eyes were off me for just a second. It was all that I needed.

I raced for the dart gun, pulled it out of the bag, and then turned to face her with it. She was faster than I had expected. Sandi was just a few steps behind me when I got to it.

“Drop the baseball bat,” I ordered.

Instead of doing what I’d commanded, Sandi slowly stared at me. The frown on her face was quickly replaced with a smile when she looked closer at the gun in my hand.

“Eleanor, that’s just a toy,” she said. “But that was a nice try.”

“It shoots, trust me,” I said. Maddy had been playing with it earlier. Was it even loaded? I’d been counting on using it to bluff her, but now it appeared that option wasn’t going to work.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

As Sandi moved toward me, I pulled the trigger, not sure what would happen. A dart fired from the gun, and struck her arm. I’d been aiming for her heart, but it was close enough.

Or so I’d hoped.

She howled for a second as she reached down and plucked the dart out, threw it on the floor, and then hissed at me, “You’ll pay for that.”

Sandi suddenly lunged at me with the bat.

As she did, I threw the gun at her head. It didn’t hit her straight on, but the force of the strike was enough to stun her.

I should have grabbed the bat, but I turned toward the front door, instead, and started fighting the dead bolt as she screamed in frustration and anger behind me.

It was no use. I wasn’t going to be able to open the door. I heard her take a deep breath and felt her presence too close to me. At the last possible moment, I jumped to one side, afraid that my reactions were a little too late.

I made it, though, just barely. The baseball bat crashed against the front door on the exact spot where my head had been a second before.

As I glanced into Sandi’s eyes for a split second as I whirled around, I saw madness there.

The time for talking was over.

I raced into the kitchen, tearing open the drawer where I kept my knives. I might go down, but it wasn’t going to be without a fight. I was spinning around when I saw her. She swung the bat down toward my arm, and if she’d made contact, I was sure she would have shattered the bones in it.

I pulled out of her way, but I didn’t get off completely. The bat struck the knife in my hand, sending it sliding across the kitchen floor.

Before she could react, I took my precious Garfield cookie jar and threw it at her. It shattered as it hit her forehead, and for a second, I thought I’d succeeded in knocking her out.

All it managed to do was make her even angrier than she’d been before. There was real blood dripping down her forehead now, and she swiped it away with the back of her forearm. If I could manage to interfere with her vision, I might just make it out of this alive.

The blood flow seemed to energize her, instead of weakening her. Sandi took a full swing at me, and I tried to get out of its path again, but this time it caught me in the ribs. It was a glancing blow, but it still nearly put me on the floor. I’d deflected most of it, but I still might have broken some ribs from the attack.

She pulled the bat back over her head one more time, and then snarled at me.

“Get ready to die.”

I might be murdered in the next five seconds, but I wasn’t going to go down without one last fight.

I lunged toward her and somehow managed to get my hands on the bat before she could bring it down on my head for the killing blow. Sandi fought me, but all those hours kneading pizza dough by hand paid off. As we struggled for control, we lost our balance and fell onto the kitchen floor.

I’d like to think that I was winning when we both heard a tapping on the back window of the kitchen, where Greg had come and gone a few days before.

Instead of Greg, though, Kevin Hurley was standing there, his gun leveled straight at Sandi’s heart, and she seemed to lose the last bit of fight in her.

After Sandi Meadows was handcuffed and led away by another police officer, Kevin asked me, “Are you okay?”

“I’m still a little shaky,” I admitted, “and my ribs are killing me, but besides that, I’m fine. I’ve got to admit, though, I’m glad you showed up when you did.”

“Josh called me. He started worrying about leaving you alone tonight, so I promised him I’d check in on you. It looked like you had things under control, though.” He frowned slightly, and then added, “I had Sandi on my list of suspects, but between the two of us, she wasn’t that high up.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I said. “She had everybody fooled.” I’d explained her raving rationales to him, and he shook his head at the grand scale of her delusions.

Josh and Greg came bursting into my house a few seconds later.

“What happened? Did Katy try to hurt you?” Greg asked.

“No, it was Sandi all along,” I said. “How did you two hear about it?”

Josh looked sheepish as he admitted to his father, “We were listening to your scanner in the basement, Dad.”

Kevin nodded. “I’d say it’s too little, too late, wouldn’t you? You boys should never have left her alone tonight.”

“Don’t be too hard on them,” I said. “I made them go.”

“Dad’s right,” Josh said. “We shouldn’t have listened to you.”

Kevin actually smiled at that. “If either one of you could do that, you’d be a better man than I am.”

Maddy and Bob Lemon were next as Kevin and I finished our interview. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving behind a throbbing in my ribs and my head that I couldn’t stop.