Mike gave her a friendly smile. “No, Karla, I’ll wipe it down myself. You’d better get home. Thanks.”
That was Karla? Cute Karla? She was cute. She wore her graying hair in a thick braid that wound around the top of her head and her elbows were as dimpled as her cheeks.
“Nighty night, then.” Karla closed the door. Chase felt some of the stiffness go out of the room, and out of herself. That nice, older woman was no romantic threat.
“I could do dinner on Saturday,” she said.
“Good. We need to talk.”
Did that sound ominous? Promising? Both?
• • •
Anna called Chase a little before 8:00 that night. “I got in to see Hilda. I had to say I was her cousin.”
“How did it go?” Chase asked.
“Not as well as I would have liked. The poor woman is sedated up to her eyeballs. She was very nice and very polite, and very vague. She doesn’t seem to remember anything right now.”
“Oh great. Wait, that could help. If she loses her memory of that day, I’m off the hook.”
“I suppose.” Anna sounded doubtful. “One problem was that she didn’t know who I was. I tried to explain that I worked at Bar None, but she grew agitated every time I said the name of our shop.”
Chase told Anna how Mike had clipped Quincy’s dewclaw, then clipped the other one as a precaution.
“He refused to charge me anything.”
“I’ll have to remember to start dating a vet if I get another pet.”
Anna and her husband had owned a series of miniature dachshunds. The two elderly dogs they’d owned when he’d died had passed away within two years. Anna hadn’t had the heart to get another pet since then.
Well, if Anna thought she and Mike were dating, and if she was going to dinner on Saturday, maybe she should shove the redhead out of her mind. If only she could.
THIRTY-TWO
Anna had sounded pleased when Chase told her that she and Mike Ramos were going to dinner on Saturday. Chase had noticed this matchmaking tendency in Anna before, but it hadn’t come up lately. Julie was much too busy with her job in the state attorney’s office to see anyone and Chase had needed time to recover from her ordeal when she first came back home to Minneapolis.
Before they hung up, Anna had said that she and Bill Shandy were going out Saturday, too. Chase didn’t consider that she herself tended toward matchmaking, but she would be more than pleased if those two worked out. Bill deserved a chance at happiness and Anna was beginning to get over losing her mate, enough so that she was ready to start seeing Bill—and to tell Chase and Julie that she was doing it. Even if it did bother Julie because her trial was so closely connected.
Chase shook herself. What was she doing, daydreaming about romances when she was a suspect in two murders? Three, if Hilda Bjorn didn’t pull through.
• • •
Chase was filling in at the sales counter while Vi went out to lunch on Friday. Business was sporadic, as it often was, coming in waves and lulls. During one of the lulls, Chase, humming “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from My Fair Lady, turned from restocking the pink shelves with preboxed treats to find Torvald’s sister, Elinda, regarding her from just inside the front door. She was dressed, again, in tight-fitted clothing, a short black skirt and a purple blouse that strained to contain her bosom, with a miniature black purse over her shoulder.
“Hi,” Chase said. “Can I help you? Would you like some dessert bars?”
“No, I don’t think so. I wanted to see the place Gabe and Torvald were so crazy about getting.” And Shaun? Chase could see more tattoos now. One snaked up her left arm and another wound around her right ankle.
Chase waved her arm around the shop with a smile. “This is it.”
“He died for this?” Elinda’s sneer dismissed Chase’s shop as something not worth dying for.
Chase’s smile died. “Excuse me? How do you figure that?”
“He wanted to buy you out.” She stated that as if it explained everything.
“I don’t think I’m following you. Yes, he wanted to buy my shop. However, I never gave him the impression—we never gave him the impression that we would sell it. This property has been in Anna’s family for a long time.”
“Who’s Anna?”
“She’s the other owner.”
“Which one of you killed him?”
Chase stomped her foot. “Neither of us killed him! Torvald killed him!”
Elinda took a step back, blinking. “You’re crazy.”
Anna, no doubt responding to Chase’s foot stomp, poked her head through the kitchen doors. “Everything all right?”
“Are you the one who killed Gabe?” Elinda asked Anna.
“Oh, sure.” Anna blinked. “I ran over there and stuck a knife in him, just for the heck of it. I had no reason to, and didn’t have time to do it, but somehow, that’s what happened.” Anna looked at Chase. “Who is this?”
“She’s Torvald’s sister and Gabe’s mistress.”
“Oh!” Anna was struck by enlightenment. “She’s Hilda’s floozy.”
Elinda looked confused. “Huh?”
“Tell me,” Chase said. “Exactly what time were you at Gabe’s the day he died?”
“I wasn’t there that day.”
“You certainly were,” Anna said. “The older woman across the street saw you enter and exit.”
“Ted saw you, too,” Chase added. “Gabe’s son.”
“Ted?” Elinda asked. “A guy named Ted was going with Krystal, but not for long. Are you telling me he was Gabe’s son? I never even knew Gabe had a son. For some reason, Gabe never introduced me to any of his family.”
“Just answer the question,” said Anna. “What time were you there?”
“Was he dead when you got there?” Chase asked.
“No! He wasn’t dead! I didn’t kill him! He called me to come over and I got there about, I don’t know, around three thirty, I think.”
Chase nodded. “That fits. That’s when Ted says she was there, soon after Gabe got home from our shop. Before Doris got there.” If Elinda had killed Gabe, Doris may have walked in, seen him dead, and fled, just as she’d said she had. He couldn’t have thrown tomato sauce on Doris if he was dead when she visited, though.
“I don’t have to stand for this. I have places to be.”
“Dressed like that?” Anna said.
“I’ll have you know this is just like what I wear for work. Krystal and I both work at Cooter’s Sports Bar. She’s my roommate. We’d feel overdressed if we wore jeans, after working there.”
Something clicked into place for Chase. “Krystal. She dated Ted, you said?”
“She was with Ted Naughtly when Laci passed out.” Anna nodded.
“Ted Naughtly?” Elinda said. “So he is Gabe’s son?”
“He is,” Chase said.
“He’s been spying on me?”
Anna narrowed her eyes at the young woman. “Did you come back to Gabe’s condo after Doris left?”
“That bitch was there? No. Gabe said he was too busy to see me that day. I’ll bet it was because he was seeing her. We kinda had a spat. I wasn’t going to talk to him again until he called me.” Elinda whipped a tissue out of her tiny purse and dabbed at her eyes. “And now he’s dead. I wish I hadn’t gone away.” She stopped dabbing her eyes. “He saw her after he sent me away? Is that what you’re saying?”
Anna nodded. Elinda stormed out of the shop. Could Elinda be crossed off as a suspect? If only the police would cross off Chase.
• • •
Somehow, Chase made it through the rest of the hours of operation on Friday. The words murder suspect kept echoing in her mind throughout the day, preventing her from thinking about anything else, even driving all the show tunes out of her head.