“What about him? Did he finally decide to show up again?”
“Well, he did show up,” she said, wondering how to break the news gently. “Um, Rohanna, you might want to sit down for this.” She gestured at one of the chairs and Rohanna, shaking her head and clearly not happy about this, did as she was told.
“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
In a few carefully chosen words she explained that the police had fished the body of Paulo Frey out of the cesspit, and Rohanna was understandably shaken. She placed a hand on her voluminous chest, which was heaving dangerously.“Dead?” she cried, her voice rising. “He’s dead? But how?”
“He was murdered, Rohanna,” she said gently. “Someone murdered him and tried to hide the body.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, her face a mask of distress. “He was such a nice man. A great tipper. Used to leave me a sizable tip at the end of his stay. Said I was the best, on account of the fact that I always left a bottle of bourbon on his pillow when he arrived. Hetta wants me to leave chocolates, and I usually do, but Paulo told me the first year he hated chocolate. So I always left him one of those small bottles of bourbon.”
“I see,” she said. “So he was fond of drink, huh?”
But Rohanna wasn’t listening. She shook her head. “He was always full of stories and jokes. A real live wire. Whenever I was down at the lodge he used to tell me stories of his writing career. The most hilarious stuff. He once told me he had dinner with the President and the First Lady at the White House, and he and the President got drunk and decided to play golf on the White House lawn. In the middle of the night!” She looked up at Odelia. “Whodunit, Miss Poole? You tell me whodunit and I’ll kill the bastard.”
“They don’t know yet. The police only found the body yesterday.”
“How?”
Odelia explained about the laptop, and Rohanna nodded.“He was crazy about that laptop. It contained all of his manuscripts. All of his precious books. His entire life’s work. He never went anywhere without that laptop. It would have been impossible for that laptop to be down there and not…” She swallowed with difficulty, tears suddenly flooding her eyes, and broke off.
“It’s all right, Rohanna,” Odelia said, dragging a few paper tissues from the dispenser on her father’s desk and handing them to the woman. As soon as she’d wiped her eyes, she gently asked, “I want you to think hard. Do you know if Paulo had any enemies? Anyone who would want to hurt him?”
Rohanna shook her head in dismay, then finally choked out,“All I remember is that one day he told me about his feud with Aissa Spring.”
“Aissa Spring of the No Spring Chicks vegan restaurant?”
“That’s the one. He used to go there for dinner sometimes. Until he discovered that Aissa…” She raised her eyes to meet Odelia’s. “That she’s a lesbian.”
She frowned. Aissa Spring lived together with her girlfriend Marissa. Together they ran a vegetarian restaurant right on the main drag. The two women had been together for ages, and very happily so.
“What are you saying? That Frey had a thing against lesbians?”
“You better ask Aissa about it,” she said, loudly blowing her nose. “But from what he told me, he didn’t like gays. At all. Which was a little weird for a writer of his stature.”
Yes, that was a little weird. She now realized she didn’t know all that much about Paulo Frey. Apart from the fact that he was a million-selling writer of thrillers, the guy was a mystery to her.
“Thanks, Rohanna. I’ll go and have a word with Aissa.”
“You do that, and nail the bastard that did this.”
Before she left the room, she turned and said,“Oh, the police will probably want to have a word with you as well.”
Rohanna nodded.“I’ll tell Chief Alec the same thing I told you.”
“It won’t be my uncle. Chase Kingsley is in charge of the investigation.”
Rohanna’s eyes lit up. “Chase Kingsley? That hottie?”
Odelia grimaced.“Yes, the hottie.”
“Oh, he can interrogate me anytime,” said Rohanna, her distress over Paulo Frey’s murder quickly making way for a different emotion altogether.
She managed to give Rohanna a grimace at this, thinking hard thoughts about‘the hottie.’ She needed to get to the bottom of that story, too, and as soon as she revealed that Chase Kingsley was a notorious molester of women, she was pretty sure people like Rohanna would think differently of him.
But first things first. She needed to talk to Aissa Spring. She was the first person who might have a motive for murder. And she was just passing through the corridor on her way to the waiting room, when she bumped into her father, emerging from the examination room with a patient in tow.
“Oh, hey, honey,” he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek. “If you came to check up on your grandmother, she’s fine. I tried to give her a checkup this morning and she brushed me off, insisting she was in greater shape than me!”
“Yeah, I know,” she said with a smile. “She’s probably in better shape than all of us.”
Her father was a big and bluff man, and well-liked by all of his patients. He had a knack for putting anyone at ease in a matter of seconds, and often only needed a glance to know what was ailing his patients. They were two qualities that partly explained his popularity as Hampton Cove’s premier doctor. The fact that he was also the town’s only doctor was another reason.
“See you tonight?” he asked now.
“Yes, Dad,” she said, briefly wondering whether to tell him about the murder but quickly deciding against it. They could discuss it over dinner.
“Your mother invited a guest,” he said as he waved the next patient in.
“A guest?” she asked. “You mean Uncle Alec?”
“Yeah, Alec is coming, and he’s bringing one of his colleagues,” her father said as he walked into his office. Before he closed the door, he frowned. “What was his name again…” Then his face cleared. “Oh, that’s right. Chase Kingsley. A new cop. See you later, honey.” And then he closed the door and she was left staring at it, a look of abject horror written all over her features.
Chapter 8
I was still feeling a little groggy and unsteady on my paws. Usually I like to take my eighteen hours of sleep in one long stretch, interspersed with the occasional run to the litter box and the feeding trough. Today, though, I was a cat on a mission, so I’d decided to cut my nap time short and head downtown to see what I could find out about the case of the murdered writer.
I never followed a strict plan on these trips of mine but simply went where my paws took me. I had my regular haunts, of course. Places where I knew I could find the best information. Like the barber shop, or the doctor’s office, or the police station. For some strange reason I always happened to be in the right place at the right time. Call it cat’s intuition. It’s a very powerful thing, let me tell you. And I’d just wandered out into the street, when Dooley fell into step beside me, looking even more haggard than I was feeling.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked as we trundled along the sidewalk.
“Duty calls, Dooley,” I said a little solemnly. “You simply can’t wait around for the next clue to arrive on its own. A genuine detective goes out there, into the great unknown, and hunts the clues where he can find them.”
Dooley yawned.“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep either. All this stuff about Brutus and that gruesome poo-poo murder got me wondering about my mortality.”
I stared at the cat. I never would have guessed that Dooley even knew the word‘mortality’ let alone pondered about his own perishability. In fact I’d never known him to worry about anything, except when Marge, Odelia’s mom, dished out the wrong kind of kibble. Dooley likes chicken, but Marge tends to forget, and buys him one of those twenty-pound bags of fish kibble which then he has to eat, because she hates to throw away perfectly good kibble. What can I say? We all have our predilections and peculiarities.