MURDER TO GO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 1) (8 page)

Now that I was in this mode of questioning everyone’s death, I wondered what Shirley had died of. I asked my mother.

“How should I know, dear? It wasn’t as if Alice announced it. One day her friend was here and the next she wasn’t, so it had to be somewhat sudden. You need to stop seeing murder victims everywhere. It’s not healthy,” she said as she propped her feet up in the recliner and sipped her coffee again.

“What was Shirley’s last name?” I asked. If my parents hadn’t cared about Shirley’s death, then I would find out for myself. I wondered if the timing had been merely coincidental or if there had been something about Shirley’s death that had led to Alice’s own demise—and my concussion.

My mother shrugged. “Ask your father. Maybe he remembers.” That was typical of my mother’s apathy on the subject.

I went through another box, which brought up a trove of photos of the two women smiling for the camera, but no documentation of any kind. If I’d found these photos elsewhere, I would have thought the two women were involved, but I kept my mouth shut to my mother. While she tended to be progressive about orientation, she had a very black and white view on the subject. She considered someone to be either gay or straight, and once you were one, you couldn’t change your mind, according to my mother. So Alice would always be associated with Ralph and Shirley would just be a friend.

I found a box of papers that looked interesting. There were a number of photos of what appeared to be the food truck. The logo wasn’t there and parts of the outside were rather beaten up, but the general shape and form of the vehicle resembled the truck I’d driven to the lot this afternoon. It merely looked like it had been in need of care and repair. I wondered what she’d seen in the truck that had appealed to her so much.

There were also numerous papers regarding the start-up of the business. I found my aunt’s notes from the health inspector. The papers regarding the purchase of the truck were included. I leaned back on my haunches and rested as I scanned the documents. I had to wipe away sweat from my forehead twice to keep it from running into my eyes as I read.

One document was a layout of the truck and its kitchen. The sketches showed the refrigeration units, the cutting surfaces and sinks. The overall document would have been helpful when I’d started working on the truck. I was forever pulling open a door, only to find something I hadn’t even known existed.

The gist of the documents was that Alice had bought the food truck from a police auction. The truck had been impounded for some reason and then sold at auction to make money for the local police. Probably to buy Detective Danvers some more new ties, I thought sarcastically.

Alice had never been one to have a big estate. She wasn’t destitute, but she certainly wasn’t the type to buy big-ticket items for cash either. I wasn’t sure where she’d procured the money to do so, but she’d managed to outbid someone else for the truck. If I was to believe the document, she’d paid cash. A lot of cash.

“Mom, where would Alice have gotten $30,000 in cash?” I asked. “Did someone die and leave her money or give her some cash?” No one in our family paid cash for anything if they could help it. I knew that my parents would have been unable to raise that much cash, and I could barely raise $30.

My mother’s brow furrowed. “Not that I know, dear. She had a bit of savings; I know that. But that was maybe $10,000 at most. You could ask your father. He’s the executor of the will. He’d know if anyone would.”

I nodded. I’d found one question in the story of the food truck that needed investigation. I also wanted to find out more about Shirley and her life. Maybe Shirley had given Alice the money for the truck.

The rest of the boxes yielded nothing, so I called it a day. I was hot, sticky and tired and I wanted nothing more than a shower and a nap.

I called Land the next morning, professing to be ill. I was actually fine, but after all that had happened, I needed a rest. My father had agreed to meet with me for an hour to look into the source of Alice’s funds for the truck. However, he’d dictated the ridiculous hour of 9 a.m., knowing I had to work, but I opted to make time for the meeting rather than try to change it.

We met for coffee at the Starbucks closest to my house. While I didn’t think that their coffee was nearly as good as the coffee at Dogs on the Roll, it was decadent to have someone else serve me for a change. I just sat in my chair while they brought me steaming drinks and pastries. No one screamed at me for creamer or relish. It was refreshing.

He pulled out a pad of paper and some documents from his bag. In his desire to be a hipster, my father had grown a goatee and carried a bag rather than a briefcase. I wasn’t bothered, but I did find it amusing at times. I would never say that to him, but my mother has made comments behind his back. She felt that their counterculture days were long behind them.

He cleared his throat in his best business voice and looked into my eyes. “I don’t like what you’re doing here, you know that.” I wondered if he spoke to his clients like this or just his daughter. I wanted to know which part of what I was doing he objected to. Was it the investigation of Aunt Alice’s death, the manner in which the truck was obtained, or the will or—? I had too many irons in the fire to decipher vague pronouncements.

I nodded and made sure to reply in the same. “I totally understand. I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that people keep dying, and the only thing they have in common is the food truck. I want to learn more about how Alice got the truck, where it came from. The first peculiarity I ran into was the fact that she’d bought it at a police auction for cash when she didn’t have that much money available to her.”

My dad looked down at the papers. “You’re right about that. She didn’t have $30,000 at the time that she purchased the truck. Not in savings and not in investments. Even if she had that much of value, she did nothing to liquidate her assets to gather that much in cash. Besides, it would be extremely foolhardy to collect that much cash on the off chance that you might end up buying a used food vehicle at an auction. I have to wonder if she had some advance knowledge that the truck would be there and that it would go for approximately that much money.”

“I noticed that someone else was trying to outbid her. Did she get rooked on the sale?” I had to wonder if she’d gotten a bad deal.
Was that the real scam involved here

My father shook his head. “The other bidder dropped out after a while, if I remember correctly, but the price she paid was still below market value. So I don’t think there was anything wrong with the transaction from that standpoint. She just didn’t have that kind of money to be spending though.”

I took a deep sip of my coffee and swallowed. Not bad, though I still preferred our coffee to theirs. I took a bite of my muffin and waited for my dad to continue. He didn’t. After a moment, I asked, “Do you have an explanation?”

He shook his head. “None. There’s an influx of cash into her account in the month before the auction. Three transactions for $9,000 each. No explanation. They were completed at an ATM, so no questions from the teller. It’s probably been too long to ask the banks to review the ATM cameras, and that’s even if you could get a subpoena to get them to review them in the first place. They don’t give away private information because you ask nicely. The totals kept this entire deposit under the radar in terms of the federal government. This is the way that drug dealers and terrorists do things. It’s not how nice suburban people operate. This is way too slick to be coincidence or just a friendly loan. There’s no note or IOU for the loan in Alice’s papers. It seems to be just a pure gift with no explanation at all.”

“Nothing?” I popped another piece of the muffin in my mouth and wondered if Dogs on the Roll should offer breakfast foods rather than hot dogs in the mornings. I wasn’t sure at this point. I’d ask Land about it. I also wondered where I could get someone to give me a $30,000 gift. Such a huge amount of money would be so helpful, but the Kinkaid family had no rich relatives or buried treasure. We had to work for our money.

“No. I have the papers on the truck, if you’re interested. The vehicle has a rather colorful history.” My dad handed me some papers that had seen better days. They looked like someone had set a coffee cup on them, and the edges were curled as well.

I started reading the pages. The truck had been used as a getaway vehicle for a number of high-end heists in the city. The truck itself hadn’t been involved, but the owner’s nephew had scouted out likely locations using the truck as a blind. The police only got suspicious when the food truck was seen in multiple spots around town, always the same truck near different crime scenes. As I knew, a truck tended to stay in the same part of town, or even on the same street, so that it can be found by its loyal customers. A truck that moved constantly would be practically begging for walk-by business only. Regular customers were what kept a food business afloat. That was not a great business model, and most people would have avoided the moves at all cost.

I read through the papers, but my father was right. Nothing in the files showed any reason why Alice would want to run a food truck, but the invoice from the police auction was there along with her signature—a scrawl I knew rather well after all this time. Besides, she had driven the truck for months afterward, so she was most certainly aware of having purchased it; the sale couldn’t have been made in her name behind her back. She left it to me in her will, knowing that it had been a gift and not an investment or a loan. Why hadn’t she bothered to share the secrets of its purchase with me?

“Okay, so what does all this tell us?” I asked after I finished reading the papers. I had a few questions I wanted answered after this discussion, but nothing in these papers helped me answer the questions I had already.

My dad cleared his throat again. “That’s why I wanted to meet you out rather than at home. Your mom adored her sister, but frankly, if I were looking at this file without knowing the people involved, I’d be thinking that the person who did this was a crook. I don’t like thinking that about Alice. I liked her, but this whole deal is shady from beginning to end. Just the cash transactions by themselves would be enough to raise a red flag. It raises so many questions.”

He was right. Mom would have had a fit if she’d heard him say that. She had loved Alice dearly, and nothing bad could be said about her. Calling her the front woman for a criminal operation would be grounds for divorce.

“Any ideas about how she could have heard about this truck?” I asked, thinking that someone else might have given her a tip on the truck.

My dad shook his head. “Nothing. Of course, if this was shady, it’s not as if someone’s going to send her a formal letter to spell out the details. It would have been done in person or via a private cellphone or some other method that did not leave a trail a mile wide behind her. So I know nothing about who else could have been involved.”

“What about Shirley?” I asked, thinking back to the woman in Alice’s life who might have been involved in this. Any business partnership between them would have to be spelled out and there were no mentions of it in Alice’s papers. Since they had passed away before marriage equality came to our state, if there was a relationship between Alice and Shirley, they would’ve had to have listed each possession and who would inherit it after their death.

“Maybe. I don’t know. We never knew Shirley all that well. She just showed up with Alice one day and she was there until she died. Your mother would never let me ask anything about them or the relationship. She wanted to live without knowing. Don’t ask, don’t tell, according to your mother. So Shirley might have been involved in the transfers, but I have no way of telling. You’d have to ask her executor.”

“Who is that?” I asked, wondering if my dad knew any more about Shirley than my mother had. “Mom didn’t even know her last name, much less the conditions of her will.”

“Shirley’s last name was Bradley. She lived in a house down the street from your aunt. They met and became friends after Alice had lost Ralph. Inseparable friends. Your mother, who is normally the most tolerant woman around, wouldn’t hear about it. Alice brought Shirley to events even after your mother put her foot down about it.”

“Any thoughts on why?” I asked, curious to hear about the backroom scandals of my family. Who knew that my dad could be a gossip? I leaned forward like a co-conspirator.

“It could just be that Alice was her only sister, or that it became such an matter of curiosity. Your mother thought gay was gay and straight was straight, and no one could cross that double yellow line. It was just odd and very unlike her. I wish they had ended on a better note.”

I nodded. “Do you think that’s why I inherited?”

My father smiled and patted my hand. “Not at all. Alice always planned to leave you something in her will. She’d said so for a long time. You were her only niece and our only child. We just hadn’t expected that it would be a food truck—but that was Alice to the end.”

“So did Alice inherit anything from Shirley’s estate?” I asked, trying to get back to the conversation at hand. I still had to figure out how Alice had purchased the food truck with no resources of her own to help her.

“Some possessions, but no real liquid assets. They had some things they had purchased together: a sofa, a table, and things like that. There were also some photos that Shirley wanted Alice to have. I don’t know about the rest. There would have been a house and likely a car and the normal day-to-day things of life.”

“But you can find out the name of Shirley’s executor, right?” If that executor were anywhere as helpful as my father was, I’d have the answers in no time.

He nodded. “Give me a day or two, and I’ll find out everything you need.”

I did know one thing. There was no way that she could carry out any covert operation in the food truck without being seen by Land. Either he’d turned a blind eye to whatever it was or he had been in on the operation.

Land had already begun work when I arrived at the truck the next morning. His back was to me when I opened the door, and I wondered if he had been stowing something in a secret location in the truck. The space inside the truck wasn’t big, and I wasn’t good enough at spatial reasoning to know if there was an unaccounted for space in the truck. I would have to be the one to put the truck away and devote some time to looking around. I had the drawings for the truck at my apartment now. I could give the place a thorough going over.

I decided to be forward with Land. I asked, “Do you know why my aunt wanted a food truck?”

“Why not? She wouldn’t be the first woman to think that she could do anything. I can’t tell you how many people over the years I’ve seen go into the restaurant business without a clue as to what was needed. Almost an equal number of them failed, too.” He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his work.

Land had saved himself from a sexism speech by throwing a “people” in the diatribe, but he’d made it clear how he felt about businesswomen. “So how was my aunt in the restaurant business?”

He smiled. His corners of his eyes crinkled and he almost looked human. “Not bad. Better than most, not as good as others. I helped her with a variety of things that she’d forgotten or didn’t even know were needed. She didn’t have a clue about how to handle the cash required for a restaurant, but she learned quickly.”

“So she never mentioned why she got a food truck? It makes sense for her in terms of being her own boss, but I’m trying to figure out how she paid for the truck, to be honest.” While I wasn’t keen on sharing my personal business with Land, it felt like he’d already been dragged into this mess by the fake will and my aunt’s supposed promises to him. Besides, he was the only non-family person who might know where Alice had gotten the money to buy the truck. My family certainly had no idea of the source of her funds.

“No idea. She was very evasive about that. There was a time that we needed a new burner for the cooktop. She had the money a few days later. She laughed and said that she got by with a little help from her friends. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but then I heard it as a song later.”

Leave it to Land not to know the Beatles. Of course, the reference meant nothing to me either. It was vague enough that it could refer to nearly anyone in her life. It certainly didn’t help me find out who had bankrolled this endeavor. I made a mental note to ask Shirley’s executor once my dad found him.

I was curious though. Again, there seemed to be two opposing forces at work. I would think that if someone gave Alice $30,000, then that person would expect something in return, presumably something worth more than thirty grand. Yet, they had received nothing in the will.

However, assuming that she’d been killed, no one had come to me with the same bargain. So Alice’s killer could not be the person who had given her the cash to buy Dogs on the Roll. Either that or he’d gotten the very short end of the hot dog here.

I sat puzzling this for a few minutes. Land finally cleared his throat. “The coffee isn’t going to brew itself,” he reminded me, and I got back to work. Land’s coffee was to die for, and most of the customers asked for two or more cups of coffee on their way to work. He had his own blend that he refused to share with me, pointing out that he still wanted his own truck and that the coffee blend we used here was just a loaner.