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  “Yes, the judge made him lay down sod and landscape the empty dirt lot behind the courthouse.”

  “Well, I asked him about it and Cooter said that he got tired of hauling all the sod to the lot when his car broke down, so he thought he'd just use grass seed instead. His brother Jake said he knew a guy that could get him a good deal on grass seed-”

  “And it was the wrong kind of grass seed. Poor Cooter, he can't seem to get anything right. What are you going to do about weed garden behind the courthouse?”

  “Cooter will be up for more community service after this latest incident, so Sheriff Wilkerson figures to have him go pull it all up and dispose of it.”

  “You might want to have someone supervise him this time,” I suggested. “He doesn't need to get in any more trouble.”

  “At least Jolene's happy to see him,” Bob said.

  “Yes, as happy as someone can be who is unjustly imprisoned in a dungeon with only bread and water to eat! When are you going to realize that she didn't kill anyone?”

  “Bread and water? Good heavens, Smoker Day has really gone downhill! I was going to stop by for dinner, but I guess I'll see if I still have some of those canned spaghetti circle things in the cabinet instead.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “And by the way, did you know that your star eye witness against Jolene is a raging alcoholic?”

  “Raging alcoholic? Really, Dani?”

  “Maybe raging is too strong of a word, but Harry is known to carry a flask full of Peppermint Schnapps.”

  “Bettter him than me. Have you ever tasted that stuff? Why don't you do yourself and us a favor and let us investigate this case?” he asked.

  “Some investigation!” I said. “You wouldn't even have those two crooks in jail if it weren't for me!”

  “I think Cooter had more to do with it than you did,” Bob said. “Besides, what do they have to do with the murder of Olivia Quinlan? For that matter, what do any of the people that you've investigated have to do with the murder? We've looked at everyone involved too, and there's no evidence to prove any of them killed Olivia.”

  Depressingly, he was right. I hadn't found any evidence that proved Jolene was innocent. Somehow there was something I was missing and I couldn't figure out what it was. Of course I wasn't about to admit that to Bob. “I have plenty of good leads,” I said.

  “And so have we, so why don't you take care of the Breezy Spoon and let us take care of the police work.”

  “I can't,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I need you to drive me to the Breezy Spoon.”

  Smoker Day is always popular with our customers, and the Breezy Spoon had a big crowd through most of the afternoon. It was a little after six when I saw Mark and Bob walk in and sit down at the counter.

  “Should I ask what you want or would it be quicker to just ask what you don't want?” I asked.

  “Lay it on me,” Bob said. “I had to skip breakfast this morning with all the craziness, so I could eat a horse.”

  “Make that two horses,” Mark said. “I was too nervous to eat all day with Bigfoot on the loose, but now that it's in captivity my appetite has returned.”

  “I'm glad to see you recovered so well. I'll get you each the sampler platter, and do you want the cantaloupe pie or the cherry pie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I just remembered,” Bob said, “I'll have to take the food to the jail since your car is out of commission. Everyone wants brisket, except for Jolene, who is watching her figure now that Cooter is in the next cell, and wants a salad.”

  “I'm assuming that she wants the garden salad rather than the kale salad, considering everything that's happened.”

  “Probably best, and she said to go ahead and load it up with croutons because she doesn't have a gluten allergy like Olivia did.”

  Suddenly an idea burst into my head like a firecracker going off. I knew what I had been missing. I went back to the kitchen to put in their orders and when I did I went to Brendan and said, “I need to ask you a favor; two favors, actually.”

  “Sure, what can I do for you, Dani?” Brendan asked.

  “First, I need to borrow your car right now so that I can get to Olivia Quinlan's apartment without Bob and Mark knowing.”

  “Why?”

  “That's the second favor; I need you to not ask me why.”

  Chapter 13

  The next day was the first ever Breezy Spoon Customer Appreciation Day, where a few lucky citizens of East Spoon Creek City would receive a certificate at random for a free meal at 3 o'clock that afternoon. Okay, so it wasn't completely random; the winners were Chuck Bailey, Tony Powell, Jordan Burns, Lester Poole and Monsieur Rene. Today we were serving a steak-house menu, sizzling filet mignon, twice-baked mashed potatoes, creamed corn, lettuce wedge with slices of beefsteak tomato, dinner rolls and cinnamon-apple cheesecake for dessert. I was pretty sure everyone would show up, and they did. I showed them to booths in the back and brought out coffee for everyone, including Suze, who had come too, for some reason.

  “I'm Harry's plus one,” she said.

  “It's our first date,” Monsieur Rene explained. As he ushered her into a booth he asked, “Hey, have you ever tried peppermint schnapps?”

  “Have you ever tried an afternoon delight?”

  Millie was there, too. I wouldn't have invited her for a free meal even if I suspected her of slaughtering half the town, but she had invited herself. Apparently Customer Appreciation Day sounded like a money-laundering scheme to Millie, so she was here to blow the lid off my criminal endeavors. I didn't give her any coffee.

  Once everyone was seated, I said, “Congratulations to all of you who have been the first recipients of the Breezy Spoon's Customer Appreciation Day Award. I hope you enjoy your dinner but I must apologize for your having to eat it in the company of a murderer.”

  There was a collective gasp but no one bolted for the door or took a shot at me, so I figured I was off to a good start.

  “Hey, what are you trying to pull?!” Tony Powell snapped. “I thought the cops already arrested somebody for the murder!”

  “Oh, you mean Jolene Parks?” I asked. “She's not in custody anymore. See?”

  I pointed to the front of the room and everyone turned to see Jolene, in her black smock, wall by the counter and go out the front door. Millie jumped to her feet.

  “Look! This woman has broken a murderer out of jail and let her escape!” she cried. “You all saw it! Oh, you've gone too far this time! Just wait til I tell the sheriff about this-”

  “The sheriff already knows.” Sheriff Wilkerson's voice came from the door of my office. Everyone turned again, and saw the sheriff and Bob step out of my office, and with them was Jolene!

  “Hey, what--” Chuck Bailey spluttered. “How did she- how did you-?”

  “It's easy,” I said. I slipped my cell phone out of my pocket and said, “Okay, Mark, bring him in.”

  A moment later Mark opened the side door of the diner and came inside, followed by Jimmy who was wearing an auburn wig and Jolene's black smock.

  “Can I take this off yet?” Jimmy asked. “I feel kinda ridiculous.”

  “Let me introduce my busboy, Jimmy,” I said to the group. “You all saw him from behind at a distance, wearing Olivia's auburn wig and a black smock and you all thought it was Jolene, just like Harry did when he saw someone wearing the same disguise go up to Olivia Quinlan's apartment and murder her.”

  “Harry, you saw somebody get murdered?” Suze asked. “That's pretty wild!”

  “Yes, I mean... I thought I saw...” Harry stammered.

  “You saw what you were meant to see, Harry,” I said.

  “What is the meaning of this?!” Millie blustered. “Sheriff, are you going to stand here and let this woman-”

  “Yes, I am,” Sheriff Wilkerson replied. “Now sit down and be quiet.”

  “All of you had a reason to kill Olivia Quinlan,” I sa
id. “You, Chuck, were being blackmailed by Olivia. If she had told your wife about your extracurricular activities, you'd be out of a job as well as your home, so you had no choice but to pay her anything she asked.”

  “A fat lot of good it did me,” Chuck grumbled. “Do we have to go over all this again in front of everybody?”

  “No, because your wife kicked you out before Olivia died, so the blackmail was over. You aren't the only one who's in a bad way because of Olivia's underhanded schemes, though. Tony Powell here hadn't done anything for Olivia to blackmail him over, but she still managed to leverage him out of thousands of dollars.”

  “That's different!” Tony shouted. “She cheated me! It was out-and-out theft, that's what it was! Why, I could have--”

  “You could have killed her? You certainly had a reason to, and a temper that gets the best of you sometimes. But you had good reasons not to commit a murder, too; your wife giving birth to your new baby at the time Olivia was killed.”

  “It's a girl this time,” said Tony. “My wife and I think she'll have a calming influence on her two brothers.”

  “You must never have had a sister,” Bob said.

  “Now Jordan Burns had a better reason than anyone to kill Olivia. She was the mother who you had never known, and yet she rejected you in the most cruel way possible when you tried to reconnect with her. Who could blame you for hating her?”

  “But that doesn't mean I wanted to kill her,” Jordan said. “I hadn't seen her in my life before that, and it would be easy enough for me to go the rest of my life without seeing her again. Why hate what you can ignore?”

  “That's easier said than done,” I replied. “But you had a good alibi, so I didn't think much more about it. I should have, though, because even though you didn't know it and I didn't realize it at the time, you gave me an important clue.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is why Lester is here.”

  Lester had been casually stirring his coffee with a fork, but now he looked up at me. “I don't know what you're going on about. I never gave a damn about Olivia Quinlan and she never gave a damn about me, and I don't know nothin' about nothin'.”

  “That's what I thought, too,” I said. “Everyone did. You're just the maintenance man at the salon, and don't stand to gain anything from Olivia Quinlan's death. You're lucky that she kept you on at all, seeing as you're not exactly the best worker in the world.”

  “Hey, I don't need insults here,” Lester grumbled.

  “But Jordan said that the private investigator that he hired to find his birth parents told him that he had found his mother and that she was going by the name of Olivia Quinlan now. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but obviously that meant that she had changed her name at some point. And she had; a glamorous, wealthy businesswoman needs a glamorous name like Olivia Quinlan. It wouldn't do to go around in the better social circles with a plain old name like Patty Poole.”

  There was stunned silence in the room for a moment, and then Harry said, “Poole? Poole like....”

  “Yes,” I said, “like Lester Poole, her brother.”

  All eyes turned to Lester. He glared at me and continued stirring his coffee. “Okay, so Olivia was my sister. Big deal,” he growled. “She wanted to keep it a secret 'cause it would embarrass her with her fancy friends if they knew about her old name and her old life. It didn't make no difference to me so I went along with it.”

  “It was that old life that cost Olivia her new one,” I said. “Your parents had made a lot of money in construction, but neither you or Patty showed much interest in the family business. In fact, you didn't show much interest in anything but getting into trouble; drinking, partying, gambling, you name it. When your parents died suddenly in a car crash, young Patty and Lester expected to come into a lot of money, but to their surprise they found that their parents had made provisions in their will that kept the money out of their hands.

  “A trust?” Mark asked.

  “Exactly. You see, their parents were afraid that if they gave Patty and Lester all that money at once, they'd end up dead or broke before you know it. Instead, they set it up so that Patty and Lester would receive an allowance every month; it was a good allowance, enough to live quite comfortably-- unless you lived like Lester did.

  “Lester burned through his money every month with partying and gambling and always needed more. To supplement his income, he came up with a business idea. Lester had been a bank teller for a while and while he was at the bank he made friends with a lot of the older customers, mostly widows. His new business consisted of bilking those older customers out of a lot of money selling bogus stocks. The scheme wasn't very sophisticated and he was caught before he got too far with it. His lawyer was able to cut a deal with the court to keep him out of prison, but part of that deal was to make restitution for what he had stolen. Lester didn't have the money left to pay the restitution or the fines and lawyer bills, and if he couldn't get it fast then it was off to prison for him.

  “There was only one place he could get the money in time: his sister Patty. Now Patty was no less dishonest than Lester was, but she had been smarter about it over the years. The newly made-over and glamorous Olivia Quinlan had moved to Newtown where she had married and quickly divorced a wealthy businessman, and the divorce settlement allowed the former beauty school dropout to buy her own beauty salon in East Spoon Creek City. With the monthly allowance, the profits from the salon and supplemental income from blackmailing and scamming, she had plenty of money to spare to help her poor brother Lester.

  “Of course, help from Olivia came at a price; she agreed to give Lester the money to keep him out of prison, but in turn he had to sign over his monthly allowance to her. Lester was hesitant to do this, since he would be left with nothing, but he was desperate so he agreed. Once he had put all of his legal problems behind him, what do you think Lester did next? Start fresh, get a job and start living a normal, productive life?

  “Nope! Lester went to Olivia and tried to get her to give him back his monthly allowance. Debts were already starting to add up, and he needed that money coming in every month to live his old lifestyle. Once again, Olivia cut him a deal; Lester would move to town and work managing the salon; half his paycheck would go to repay the money Olivia lent him. It would take three years to pay it all back, but once that was done she would sign over his allowance to him again. Scraping by on half a paycheck for three years was tough on Lester, but he wanted that allowance back, so he did it.

  “Now fast forward three years to a week ago. Lester came to Olivia to get her to sign over his allowance to him again. To his surprise, Olivia informed him that he hadn't finished paying back his debt yet; in fact, he had only payed back about 10 percent of what he owed her. She showed him a contract that said she was charging him interest on the loan; exorbitant compound interest, since this is Olivia were talking about. Most of Lester's paycheck had gone to pay that interest, not the money he owed.

  “At that point Lester realized that Olivia was never going to sign back his allowance to him. The only way he was going to get it was to inherit it from Olivia, and after what she had done to him he was plenty mad enough to kill. He had no idea that she had gotten pregnant in a one-night stand decades ago and had given up her twins for adoption, so he thought he was her only living relative. Like everyone else in the salon, he heard that Olivia had been scamming Jolene just like she had scammed him, so he got the idea to frame her for the murder.

  “It was easy for Lester to swipe Olivia's wig made from Jolene's hair and find a black smock. He knew Olivia's daily routine like the back of his hand, too. He hid his disguise in the basement along with Jolene's hair dryer, and made sure that everyone knew he would be down there fixing the water problems, giving himself an alibi. Once he knew that Jolene had delivered Olivia her lunch, he donned the disguise and sneaked up the back stairs and out of the salon. Knowing that Monsieur Rene would be sitting in his usual spot and would see him
go up to Olivia's apartment, he went in and plugged in the hair dryer and dropped it into the hot tub before Olivia could stop him, killing her and ruining a good kale salad.”

  “That's a bunch of baloney!” Lester snarled.

  “Ha! There's no baloney on the kale salad!” Jimmy cried. “Only the murderer would think that!”

  “At ease, Jimmy,” Mark said.

  “You just made all that up to get your friend Jolene out of trouble!” Lester snapped. “Yeah, I got in trouble when I was younger, but I put that behind me! Me and Olivia had no contract and I had no reason to kill her! I just worked for her; that was it!”

  “Then I suppose that wasn't you who was ransacking Olivia's apartment in the middle of the night trying to find the evidence of the contract so you could destroy it?” I asked.

  “No, it wasn't!”

  “Good, because if it had been, you'd probably be quite embarrassed to know why you couldn't find it. I was kinda embarrassed myself when I remembered seeing that big toaster in Olivia's apartment. What would someone with a gluten allergy need with a toaster? Of course, if you take out the guts of it, it makes a pretty good hiding place for things like personal documents with your old name, evidence of blackmail.... and contracts.”

  Suddenly Lester jumped up and threw his coffee in my face and bolted for the door. Bob lunged forward and grabbed his shirt, Mark tackled him, I slipped on the spilled coffee and fell down, knocking Millie down with me, and Jimmy toppled over a cart of dishes while running to call the police who were already there. I was still blinking hot coffee out of my eyes when Millie's purse hit me in the side of the head.

  “Help! This mad woman is attacking me!” Millie shouted. “I'll teach you a lesson, you vixen!”

  At that moment, attacking Millie didn't seem like such a bad idea. I have had training in hand-to-hand combat but I never had to use it. Millie is a couple of inches shorter than I am and I definitely have a slight weight advantage. At least I consider 20 pounds to be slight. If she hit me with her purse again she was going to find out just how much of an advantage it was.