The Fatal Funnel Cake (20 page)

Chapter 29

W
ith the broadcast set being taken down, soon there wouldn't be anything left here to see, Phyllis thought as she and Sam said good-bye to Chet Murdock. They were about to walk away when a couple of workers lowered a section of what had been the back wall of the “kitchen” so that it could be carried out and loaded. That allowed Phyllis to look straight through into what had been the backstage region. The partitioned-off area that had served as Joye Jameson's dressing room was plainly visible with the wall down.

Phyllis turned to the security guard again and said, “Do you mind if we go back there, Chet?”

“Want to take one last look around before it all goes away, eh?” Chet shrugged. “Sure, go ahead. There's not much left. The cops already cleared out all of Ms. Jameson's things. I guess they considered them evidence.”

“Were you ever back there?”

Chet's eyebrows rose. “You mean in Joye Jameson's dressing room? No, ma'am!”

“I didn't mean anything improper—”

“No, no, I didn't figure you did. It's just that to me, well, she was like a sports hero would be to a lot of guys. You know? That's why I meant it would have been a real honor to visit her in her dressing room.”

“I understand,” Phyllis said. “Who did go in there while you were around?”

Chet frowned. “Well, Ms. Broderick, of course. And Mr. Hayes. The two of them were in there more than anybody except Ms. Jameson herself. Sometimes Mr. Farrar, the director, but not very often. And that guy Hank, the cameraman. I heard him tell somebody that she liked to go over the way she wanted the show to be shot, which didn't always agree with what Mr. Farrar wanted.”

“What about makeup artists, hairstylists, people like that?”

“Eh, not really. I'm pretty sure Ms. Jameson did her own hair and makeup. That was part of the whole lifestyle thing, you know. It wasn't just about cooking, even though that was the show's main focus.”

“You really were a fan, weren't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Chet said. “That's why it's been hard to accept that she's gone.”

Phyllis and Sam walked around the stage, staying out of the workers' way, and stepped up to the door of the dressing room. It was open. Nothing was inside except an empty clothes rack where Joye's wardrobe would have been hung up, a couple of metal folding chairs, and a dressing table with a lighted mirror mounted on the wall above it.

Phyllis was sure the police forensics team had swept the room by now, or else it would have been marked off. She said to Sam, “Keep an eye out.”

“You gonna do something clandestine?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

She walked over to the dressing table and pulled out the drawer underneath it where cosmetics would be kept. That was also the most likely place in the room for Joye's pens to be kept, Phyllis thought. The drawer was empty now.

“Phyllis,” Sam said from the doorway.

She looked around quickly. “What is it? Is someone coming?”

“No, but you might want to come take a look at this.”

She joined him at the door. He nodded toward the far side of the area where the show had been broadcast. Standing over there, partially concealed by a piece of wall that was still upright, was Reed Hayes. It appeared he was talking to someone, and judging by the grim, intense expression on his face and the way he jerked his hand in a curt gesture, he seemed angry. Phyllis couldn't see whomever he was talking to.

Then Hayes's shoulders slumped slightly, as if he were giving in to the demands of the other person in the conversation. He nodded and said something else, then turned and stalked away.

“Who do you think he was arguin' with?” Sam asked.

“I don't know,” Phyllis said, “but maybe we can find out.”

She started quickly toward the piece of set wall. By the time she reached it and peeked around the corner, though, no one was there. She spotted Chet Murdock talking to some fair visitors who must have stopped to ask him a question and hurried over to him.

“Chet, did you see Reed Hayes talking to someone just now?” Phyllis asked.

“What?” Chet said as he turned away from the tourists he'd been talking to. “Mr. Hayes? Yeah, maybe. I wasn't really paying attention, but it seems like . . . yeah, he was talking to some woman, over there by the set.”

“Gloria Kimball?”

Chet shook his head. “No, I don't think so. Like I said, I didn't look that close, but I think this woman had red hair. I don't recall seeing her around before, but she might have been one of the crew. A makeup lady or something.”

“All right, thanks.”

Phyllis couldn't help frowning. Hayes might have been upset for any one of a hundred different reasons, but Phyllis was still trying to link him up with Joye's murder. The redhead was a wild card, though. Phyllis had no idea who she was or how she fit into the case.

“Is everything all right, Mrs. Newsom?” Chet asked. “You look worried.”

“I'm just trying to fit things together in my head,” Phyllis said, “and they don't want to go.”

“Like a jigsaw puzzle missing some pieces.”

“Exactly.”

Chet shrugged. “When that happens, sometimes you just have to put it back in the box and forget about it.”

“I know,” Phyllis said with a sigh.

The problem with that was that if she put this case back in the box, as Chet phrased it, then there was a good chance Bailey Broderick would be wrongly convicted of murder.

•   •   •

Phyllis's cell phone rang while she and Sam were on their way back to Peggy's house.

“Mrs. Newsom, this is David Miller,” the defense attorney said when she answered. “How are you today?”

“All right, I suppose,” she told him. “Sam and I have been down to Fair Park to take one more look around. They're taking down the broadcast set in the Creative Arts Building. By this time tomorrow, the rest of the people involved with
The Joye of Cooking
will be on their way back to California.”

And with them would go any realistic chance of her figuring out who killed Joye Jameson, she thought.

“I know,” Miller said. “There's no reason to hold them here now that an arrest has been made. Did you find out anything?”

“Not really,” Phyllis said. She felt an uncomfortable stirring in the back of her brain, as if she had seen or heard something important and just failed to recognize it.

The feeling was a familiar one. She had experienced it a number of times before, when she reached a point where her investigations were at a crossroads, where she faced either success or failure, depending on how she was able to piece everything together. Always before she had succeeded . . . but she had a very real worry that this time that streak might be coming to an end.

“Well, I've found out a few things.”

“I'm glad, but I thought you said you wouldn't be able to get any more information out of the district attorney's office until Monday.”

“This didn't come from the DA's office,” Miller said. “I have contacts in other places, too, contacts that I've carefully cultivated over the years.”

Paid off, in other words, Phyllis thought. She couldn't blame Miller for that. Some of his actions probably stretched the boundaries of the law, but he was fighting for the best interests of his clients.

Miller went on, “This tip came from someone in the forensics lab. That autoinjector Ms. Broderick used
did
contain peanut oil, just like we speculated. Whoever tampered with it really did want to make sure Joye Jameson died. Overkill, so to speak.”

“That's a terrible way to put it,” Phyllis told him. “Accurate, though.”

“Yes, and it's a good thing the killer took that extra step. Good for him, that is, but not for anyone else. The concentration of peanut oil in the funnel cake was small enough that while it was sufficient to trigger an allergic reaction, it probably wouldn't have killed her. If the pen had contained epinephrine like it was supposed to, it definitely would have saved her life.”

“So the pen was the actual murder weapon, just like we thought, not the funnel cake.”

Sam looked over at Phyllis when she said that. He nodded, as if he had been convinced of that all along. She appreciated his confidence in her.

“That's right,” Miller said. “Here's the other thing I found out. There were no fingerprints on the pen except for Bailey's.”

“Well, that's no surprise. The killer wiped off the pens he tampered with before he switched them out with the ones in the dressing room. What about the pens that were still in the dressing room? Were they doctored with peanut oil, too?”

“My source didn't know that, but it seems pretty likely under the circumstances. We're dealing with a really cunning killer here. Otherwise he wouldn't have gone to the extra trouble of switching out the cooking oil
and
tampering with the pens. That's pretty obsessive behavior, but like I said, it paid off for him.”

Phyllis's eyes narrowed. They weren't far from the exit for Mockingbird Lane now, and that would take them back to Peggy's house. She said, “Mr. Miller, I have to go. Was there anything else you found out?”

“No, and the information doesn't really help us that much. It just confirms what we already suspected. But I wanted to let you know anyway.”

“I'll talk to you later, then,” Phyllis said. She broke the connection and slipped the phone back in her purse. “Sam, would you mind turning around?”

He took his foot off the gas and said, “No, not at all. Did you think of somewhere else you need to go?”

“I need to go back to the fair.”

He looked over at her, and he couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice as he said, “You really have figured it out this time, haven't you?”

“No, but I thought of a different way of looking at it,” Phyllis said. “And I hope now I can see all the pieces that will lead us to a killer.”

Chapter 30

O
n the way back to the fairgrounds, Phyllis turned the theory over and over in her head. She thought back to the information she had gleaned from all the websites she had read about Joye Jameson, from the straightforward fan sites to the glitzier, trashier celebrity gossip sites. One thing was conspicuously absent from all of them. By itself that absence didn't mean much, but looking at it in the context of the idea that had come to her, it could be important.

She could tell that Sam was intensely curious about what she had figured out, but he didn't want to ask questions and break her concentration. When she had gone over everything in her mind, she said, “That was Mr. Miller on the phone. He got some information from a source of his in the crime lab.”

“Somebody he bribed?”

“That's the impression I got,” Phyllis said. “I don't really care about that. What's important is that we have confirmation now about the injector Bailey used to inject Joye Jameson. It had peanut oil in it, instead of epinephrine.”

“Well, other than knowin' for sure, I don't see how that helps much,” Sam said. “You already had a hunch that must've been what happened.”

“Yes, but Mr. Miller made some comment about how it was overkill, switching out the corn oil for peanut oil and then loading that pen with peanut oil, too. He said it was lucky for the murderer—but for no one else—that both methods were used, because there wasn't enough peanut oil in the funnel cake to have killed Joye, especially if the pen hadn't been tampered with.”

Sam thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “I'm still not gettin' it,” he said.

“Mr. Miller assumed—and we have been, too—that the person who switched out the cooking oil was the same person who tampered with the pens.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Makes sense, doesn't it?”

“It does,” Phyllis said. “But it makes even more sense if
two different people
were responsible for those things.”

Sam looked over at her again, his eyes widening with the realization that she was right.

“You should probably watch the road,” Phyllis reminded him gently.

“Yeah,” he said, putting his eyes back on the freeway and the traffic in front of them. “That changes everything if you've got two would-be murderers instead of one.”

“I'm wondering if the person who switched the cooking oil didn't intend to kill Joye. Maybe he just wanted to make her sick.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

“Well, think about what happened as soon as Joye had that allergic reaction.”

“Bailey jumped in right away with that pen to save her life.”

Phyllis nodded. “And unwittingly wound up killing her instead. But if the pen hadn't been tampered with, she would have saved Joye's life. She would have been hailed as a hero. And if Joye had to take some time off because of it, who would step in and take her place on the show?”

“Bailey would have . . . just like Joye took over for Gloria Kimball. And who knows if she ever would've given the job back? It's like Lou Gehrig and Wally Pipp all over again!”

Phyllis shook her head. “Lou Gehrig the baseball player?
The Pride of the Yankees
? What in the world does he have to do with this?”

“Wally Pipp's the guy Gehrig filled in for at first base one day. Twenty-one hundred and some-odd consecutive games later, Gehrig was still playin' first base and everybody had forgotten about poor ol' Wally Pipp, the guy whose place he took. Same thing happened with Joye and Gloria Kimball, and now it might've happened again with Bailey and Joye.”

“That's exactly my point, although I probably never would have thought of the baseball analogy.”

Sam said, “But wait a minute. It sounds to me like you're makin' a case for Bailey bein' the one who replaced the corn oil with peanut oil. She's the one who stood to gain from it.”

“No, I still don't believe that's what happened. She was too shocked when Joye collapsed. She didn't know about the peanut oil. But whoever made the switch could have done it in a misguided attempt to help Bailey become a star.”

Sam nodded slowly. “I can think of two fellas who might fit that description.”

“So can I. Hank Squires and Reed Hayes. Both of them were around the set all the time, so no one would think it was odd for them to be there. Both of them were romantically involved with Bailey, so either might have tried to do something to help her career. Something short of murder, although they were playing awfully fast and loose with Joye's life. They couldn't be absolutely sure the peanut oil in the funnel cake wouldn't cause a severe enough reaction to kill her . . . but they were counting on Bailey being right there with an injector to save her, either way.”

“If the pen had worked,” Sam said, “there probably wouldn't have been any real investigation. The whole thing would've been written off as an accident that almost had a tragic result. The cops would never have gotten involved and tested all the evidence.”

“That's the way I see it,” Phyllis agreed.

“Would Hayes have done such a thing if he knew that Bailey was cheatin' on him with Hank?”

“I don't know,” Phyllis replied honestly. “He may not have known about that. He might have set up the business with the cooking oil just to give Bailey a shot at being a star, and get back at Joye a little for some of the trouble she had caused him over the contract negotiations. He could have done it to show Joye how easy it would be to replace her and to make her come down on the salary she was demanding. Or if he did know about Bailey and Hank, he could have come up with the idea of making Joye sick in an effort to win Bailey back. If he told her that he was responsible for her chance to take over the show, he might think she would be grateful enough to him to end the affair with Hank.”

Sam shook his head. “Sounds like sort of a harebrained scheme to me.”

“Unfortunately, once someone comes to the decision to take such drastic action, their plans can turn harebrained in a hurry.”

He laughed. “Yeah, we've seen that happen more than once, haven't we? But what about the pen? How in the world did somebody come up with that, and how does it tie in with the rest of what happened?”

“Here's the way I have it figured,” Phyllis said. “Whoever tampered with the pen had to know that the cooking oil had been switched. Otherwise there wouldn't have been any way of him knowing that one of the pens was going to be used. He must have seen the switch take place and figured out why someone would want to replace corn oil with peanut oil. Knowing that Joye would take a bite of the funnel cake and have a reaction to the peanut oil, he also knew that Bailey would inject her with the pen. By tampering with the pen, not only did he deny Joye the epinephrine she needed to save her life; he also made sure the reaction she suffered would be severe enough to kill her.”

“Who would do a thing like that, and why?” Sam wanted to know.

“I'm not positive yet, although I have a pretty good idea.”

“And how could he be sure that Joye would take a bite of the funnel cake?”

“Because she always does,” Phyllis said. “Or rather, did. Anytime she and a guest prepared anything, Joye always sampled it.”

Sam nodded in understanding. “And anybody connected with the show would know that.”

“I don't see how they could help but know it.”

“So now we're lookin' for two fellas instead of just one. Who do you think swapped out the cookin' oil, Hank or Hayes?”

“Remember when we saw Hayes arguing with someone earlier today?” Phyllis asked.

“Yeah. Although we don't know for sure he was arguin'. Looked like it, though.”

“Yes, it did. I'm convinced he was talking to the person who tampered with the pens.”

“My head's startin' to hurt,” Sam said. “Now you're sayin' that the two of them are workin' together?”

“Not at all. I think Hayes switched the cooking oil, and the other man saw him and decided to kill Joye by tampering with the pens. But think about it . . . at this point, Hayes doesn't know there was anything wrong with the pens.”

“So he thinks what
he
did was responsible for killin' Joye!” Sam nodded emphatically. “So the real killer not only gets away with murder; he turns around and blackmails Hayes over a killin' that he didn't actually commit.”

“That's what I believe is going on,” Phyllis said. “It fits everything we know and answers all the questions about what happened.”

Sam took the exit ramp from North Central onto Interstate 30. Fair Park was only a short distance to the east. They would be at the fairgrounds in a few minutes.

“So does Bailey Broderick really tie into this at all?” Sam asked. “Was the killer tryin' to frame her?”

“I don't think so. She was just a tool he used to get what he wanted.”

“Blackmail money.”

Phyllis didn't say anything. Sam didn't grasp everything about her theory yet, but she wasn't sure it was correct. There were still a few fuzzy areas. She hoped to find out soon if she was right.

Proving it was something else again. The killer had done a masterful job of manipulating everything, but Phyllis thought she saw one narrow opening she might be able to exploit.

The safest thing to do, she told herself, would be to call Detectives Morgan and Hunt and drop everything in their laps. But to their way of thinking, they had already arrested the killer. They wouldn't be interested in some theory that might well be, as Sam put it, harebrained, especially when there was nothing but some circumstantial evidence to support that theory. They wouldn't follow up on anything she told them. Phyllis was sure of it.

David Miller might be more receptive to her idea. She should have called him back, Phyllis thought.

But it was too late now. Sam took the exit for the fairgrounds, and there it was up ahead, crowded with people out for a pleasant Sunday afternoon in autumn.

And one killer.