Fool's Puzzle by Earlene Fowler (reading eggs books .TXT) 📕

He let me squirm for a minute before answering. “You’re not my first choice. But I can’t say the same for your brother-in-law.”

“Wade would never kill anyone.”

“Everyone has the potential for murder.”

“Is that the cop or the philosopher talking?” I asked.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“What kind of day I’m having.”

“So who wins today?”

“It’s still early. I’ll have to wait and see.”

“Well, Friday,” I said. “As always, it’s been just the greatest fun talking with you, but I need to get back to the festival. Make yourself useful. Buy something.”

“I want that napkin,” he said. “And I want you, the man says like a broken record, to stay out of this investigation.” He reached over and pushed down the brim of my cap, a slight smile on his face. “And I told you, the name is Gabe.”

“Whatever.” I irritably pushed my cap back up. Everyone thinks they invented the wheel. “Why don’t you find someone else to bug, Ortiz?”

“Whether I bug you or not is entirely up to you. I’ll stop when you get out of this investigation. It’s that simple.” He gave me a serene look, then walked away.

I’d begun climbing the steps to the museum when Carl called to me. He ran up the steps and fell in beside me.

“I saw you talking to Ortiz. Anything new on the Eric Griffin murder?”

“I don’t know one bit more than what I told you at six o‘clock this morning and, for your information, I was being given a lecture, not a progress report. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “Just trying to do my job.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m so grumpy. I just haven’t gotten much sleep these last few days. And Ortiz just has a way of getting under my skin. Really, I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Good enough.” He put his arm around me. “Don’t worry about the chief. He’ll quit harassing you once these murders are solved or shelved.”

“He’d better,” I said, telling myself that wasn’t regret I was feeling, just relief.

“I’m still waiting for you to come down to the paper for lunch,” he said. “You need some fun in your life. Maybe we should make it dinner and a movie.”

“Carl Freedman,” I said, laughing. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were asking me for a date.”

He smiled crookedly, his blue eyes serious. “Is that so hard to imagine?”

I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t want to say it had never crossed my mind. He was Jack’s best friend. One of my oldest and dearest friends. I’d never even considered him in that context. Since his divorce four years ago, Carl had entertained me and Jack more times than I could remember with hilarious reenactments of some of his unbelievable dates. I couldn’t imagine being one of them.

“What’s wrong, you need some new joke material?” I asked, not entirely sure if he was kidding or not.

“Benni,” he said in a pained tone. “You know it would be different with you. You’re not just some bimbo. Give me a break. Just think about it and call me.”

“I will,” I said to his back as he turned and ran back down the steps.

Sitting at my desk, I thought about the complicated path my life had taken. A week ago, I was coming home to a lonely chicken pot pie and chocolate no-bake cookies and now I was involved up to my ears in two homicides and my brother-in-law’s affair with one of the victims, was contemplating dating my dead husband’s best friend and having uncomfortably erotic feelings for a blue-eyed Hispanic man from Kansas, of all places, whom I couldn’t be around for ten seconds without starting a fight. So I did what most women do when faced with a life too complex to sort out. I decided to clean out my purse.

I discovered at the bottom of my saddlebag-style purse, one of the parking tickets I’d forgotten to pay. It was only five months old. That cheered me. I thought it had been much longer than that since I cleaned out my purse.

Also down at the bottom, next to a paperback book I was looking for a few months ago, lay a small red-labeled computer disc. Eric’s book. I swallowed hard. We’d never know what happened to Dack and Cassandra now. I knew I should give it to the police. It was possibly evidence, but the thought of a bunch of cops sitting around laughing at Eric’s writing made me feel sad and a bit protective. I wasn’t sure what family he had, but this really belonged to them. Out of curiosity, I flipped on my word processor and slipped it in.

Dack’s carnal capabilities were impressive, though I doubted the technical accuracy of six times in less than an hour. Eric had obviously overestimated what women who read romance novels were expecting. His writing was overdone and superficial, but there was something humorously appealing about his abuse of almost every basic writing rule I’d learned in the one creative writing class I’d taken in college.

Write what you know. The words of my professor flooded back to me. There was an elaborate subplot threaded through the eight finished chapters, concerning a blackmail scheme Dack and Cassandra had going. No hint about who they were blackmailing. Just someone with a very nasty secret.

Write what you know. Eric seemed to know a lot about blackmail. Too much. Or maybe, it suddenly became apparent to me as I stared at the words on the screen, just enough to get himself killed.

13

IT STARTED RAINING again Monday morning, but I lay in bed and enjoyed the sounds of the whooshing river running through the gutters.

The festival turned out to be a bigger monetary success than we’d hoped, with the co-op’s cut being over a thousand dollars and most of the artists getting enough orders to keep them busy for a few more months. Though the studios were open, the museum was