Smoked (The Alex Harris Mystery Series) (5 page)

I stepped inside realizing with a tinge of regret that this was the first time I was ever in the house. It made me sad. Why hadn’t I come over sooner? Of course I talked to Mrs. Kravec several times outside, but I never got around to inviting her over and she had never asked me in. Not because she was rude. I found her to be quite friendly, but mainly because the only time I saw her was while she worked in her garden. If I was out walking or riding my bike, I would stop and chat and admire her lovely flowers. Sometimes I was just coming home and would wave a hello. Now she was dead and there would be no time to get to know one another over a cup of tea.

Ellery ushered me into the kitchen where Mr. Kravec was seated at the table. He stood when I came in and gave me a quick hug. I always thought Sergei Kravec was a good looking man and truthfully, I thought he looked a lot younger than his wife. And maybe he was.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Kravec.”

“Sergei, please. Have a seat. Dotsya, get Alex a cup of coffee.”

“Tea, Dad. She drinks tea.”

“Dotsya?” I asked.

“It means daughter.” Ellery busied herself getting me a cup of tea while I sat down next to Mr. Kravec.

“Ellery tells me you can help. Maria said you solved some other murders in town over the last year.” He leaned back and propped one arm up on the back of the chair while his other arm rested on the table, the fingers gently tapping the placemat. “Is this true? Do you help the police?”

“Mr. Kravec, Sergei, I want to make it clear I am not a private detective. I do not help the police in any official capacity. As a matter of fact, my husband is in charge of this case as you know and he’s probably going to have a fit when he finds out I’m talking to you about this.”

Sergei smiled and I could see why Ellery said her father was charming. He was certainly a good looking man with his thick dark hair, piercing eyes and strong chin.

“Then we won’t tell him. I have total respect for the police. But in cases like this, they get their teeth into the husband and don’t want to let go.” Sergei got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. “Statistics say it is always the husband or the lover. But not this time. What I want,” he continued as he sat down again, “is not for you to prove I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it and Ellery knows it and that is the most important thing. No. What I want is for you to find out who did. And not just to clear my name but to find the person responsible for taking my Maria. And Ellery’s mother.” He looked up at his daughter as she placed the tea in front of me.

Sergei took a sip of his coffee. He reached across the table to where a pad of paper rested and pushed it over to me. “Do you have a pen?”

I reached for my purse and pulled out a gel pen. I loved them and bought them in bulk for the office.

“Good. Now we begin. I am going to tell you the story of Maria and Sergei and then you will go out and find me a killer.”

Sergei Kravec talked non-stop for close to thirty minutes and showed no signs of stopping.

“Did I tell you we met at her university? My father was a butcher and supplied the school with meat. I was going to junior college but always helped him with deliveries. There was a problem with an order and we had to wait for someone from the shop to bring the remainder of the meat. It was a spring day, unusually warm, and I went to find something to drink and use the restroom. I was leaning against a tree, drinking my soda when I saw Maria across the lawn, sitting there, reading a book. Her hair was almost down to her waist.” Sergei had a slight smile on his face and then it was gone and a tear escaped his eye. He wiped it away with his hand and took a sip of what I assumed to be now-cold coffee.

“That’s how it started. Who would have thought this quiet, studious woman would want anything to do with me, but in truth I was just what she was looking for. She came from a small family. Nice people but quiet. Studious like her. My family was big and loud and instead of putting her off, she embraced them. Like she had been looking for them her whole life. And they loved her.”

“My grandmother loved my mom,” Ellery added. “Alex, more tea?”

“I would love another cup.”

Ellery got the tea, poured her father more coffee, and put some coffee cake on the table.

“Ellery’s right. My mother loved Maria. Maria was several years younger than me, just a lovely young woman; shy, naive. We were all boys. Loud and rough. My parents had a daughter who died when she was a baby. My mother took to Maria right off the bat. Taught her to cook all my favorites, to sew.”

“She always made my clothes for school,” Ellery said.

“Thank you for indulging me with my ramblings, Alex, but this isn’t what you need to find a killer. Maria and I were happy. Despite my somewhat un-husbandly ways, we were well suited and we loved each other. She knew me and understood me and for whatever reason things worked between us. But not lately.”

I shifted in my chair uncomfortably. “Mr. Kravec, Ellery told me Mrs. Kravec always knew you would come home each night and if you ever stopped then it would be over. Ellery said you weren’t coming home so much lately.” I hated to put the man’s philandering ways out on the table, but he himself had admitted as much.

Now it was his turn to shift uncomfortably. “It’s a sad fact my daughter has to know these things about her father. The truth is, I’ve stayed away, sometimes sleeping in my shop, but not because I wanted to end things with Maria. No. Never.”

I noticed that he said
sometimes
he slept in his shop. I wonder where he slept the other times.

“I stayed away because she was different. Maria was different. Something was going on. I don’t know what but she had that
blog
.” He spat out the word and I wondered if perhaps he took Maria’s venomous tirades against butchers more to heart than I would have thought. Mr. Kravec seemed like a strong man and that nothing could touch him, but maybe it had. “Maria liked gossip. Being a professor she had heard her share of the stuff and she could be—what’s the word, Dotsya?”

“Catty.”

“Yes. Catty. Petty. Vicious, even. Professors are like that I have found. But she left that all behind and then this.” Sergei shook his head. He reached for the coffee. “It’s cold again.” He got up and made a fresh pot.

“Forgive me for asking but could it be possible Mrs. Kravec found someone else?”

Sergei shrugged. “Could I blame her if she had after all I put her through? But I don’t think that was the reason. What I think is she simply became obsessed. Maria was always like that. Once she put something into her head, she never let it go.”

“It’s true,” Ellery said. “I told you she made my clothes. They were lovely. The quality excellent. But they weren’t what the other kids wore.” Ellery played with a piece of coffee cake on her plate. “I wanted to be like the other girls but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“This is true,” Sergei added. “Somewhere she read about clothing being made in sweat factories, of inferior quality. The fabric,” Sergei shook his head, “it wasn’t burn proof.”

“Flame retardant,” Ellery corrected.

“Right, right. Maria searched all over for just the right cloth. You see. Obsessed.”

I was beginning to see something I really didn’t want to—Ellery clearly had issues with her mother. She certainly tossed out the word
catty
quickly enough. And if Maria was so frantic about clothes, what must she have been like about boys and sleepovers and other stuff that kids want to do. Of course people didn’t kill over that kind of stuff, did they? I would have to delve deeper into the mother/daughter relationship. But right now I had some questions about the poison ivy.

“You’ve given me a lot of stuff to think about. For now, can we talk about the poison ivy?” Sergei and Ellery both nodded. “Ellery told me you were diligent about pulling the stuff up.

“Of course. It was so dangerous for Maria. When we first met, she got it all over her, she was in the hospital because of it. Lots of things. Mangoes. Did you know mangoes are part of the same family as poison ivy? No mangoes. No cashews. No bees.”

“So there is no way she would have raked up the ivy with the leaves?”

“No. Never. I cleaned up everything at the end of the summer. We have those woods behind our house. The stuff likes to grow there but close to the edge. Right at the end of our yard.”

“And what do you do with it when you pull it up?” I asked, wondering if Sergei had been stockpiling the stuff somewhere waiting for just the right moment.

“I put it in bags and dump it at the shop. My butcher shop. Alex, it is not a problem. What I mean to say,” Sergei leaned toward me, “is that it is a big deal now, yes, because Maria is dead, but I would just pull the stuff up when I got around to it and then I would toss it in the big container behind my shop. A small bag. Not tons. It wasn’t like we talked about it or Maria would freak out about it. No. If I saw it creeping into the yard I pulled it up. Done. We didn’t think about it.”

I couldn’t think of any other questions to ask about poison ivy. It was probably exactly as Sergei said—he pulled it, threw it away, end of story.

“Alex, if this is all for now, I have to make some phone calls. Call my shop. Make…arrangements.” Sergei suddenly looked old and tired.

He excused himself and I turned to Ellery.

“Ellery, could you give me a list of people I should be speaking with? Your mother’s colleagues, friends, etc., would be helpful.”

“Of course.” She began writing names and numbers from a small phone book she pulled out of a kitchen drawer onto a sheet of paper. “Do you think my father has a chance? Will they arrest him?” She looked at me with pleading eyes.

I didn’t have an answer for her so I just shrugged. But I did wonder if Sergei had really tossed all the ivy and exactly how long did the urushiol oil stay active.

As it turned out the urushiol oil stayed active for quite a while. A couple of years in fact, even after the plant was dead. So it was conceivable Sergei had been quietly building a neat little pile of the stuff just waiting for his chance and what better time than when he was out of town with an ironclad alibi.

In cases such as this it did seem the guilty party was the spouse and maybe it would turn out that way in the end here as well. But I had to keep an open mind. Sergei was attractive and charming so I needed to be on guard at all times. Ellery had supplied me with quite a few names and after I got some work done at my actual job, I planned on paying a few people an unannounced visit.

I suddenly heard a commotion out in our reception area and went to see what was going on. My mother, Mable Harris, was stooped down, fussing about something. Millie stood next to her with a big smile on her face and then my sister walked in.

“What on earth is that?” Samantha asked.

My mother stood up to her full height, which was about an inch taller than me. “I believe it’s called a dog, Samantha. A Welsh Terrier, to be exact.”

I walked around my mother to get a better look and sure enough it was a small dog. An adorable small dog with soulful brown eyes and the cutest little Teddy bear legs. “Oh my goodness,” I said as I got down on the floor. “Can we keep him?” I asked looking up at my mom.

“No. I’m dog sitting.”

“For who?”

“For
whom
, Alex. And no one, actually. Someone in the seniors group inherited him and they can’t keep him. So I took him. He’s just a puppy, really. And now I need to find him a home.”

“Gran’s allergic or else I would take him,” Millie piped up.

Sam reached down and rubbed the dog’s head. “I’d take him but we just got a rodent. Wait, on second thought, don’t terriers keep the rodent population down? I’ll take him.”

“Samantha!” I admonished my sister. “Henry would be devastated if anything happened to Scoop.”

“Scopes. Not scoop, though that’s what I’d like to do. Scoop it right out of the house.”

“Well, I’m taking Riley home with me until I can find him a suitable home and one, preferably without a pet rat,” my mother said.

“I wonder if I could get Henry to trade.” My sister stared at the dog and I could almost see the wheels spinning in her head.

“Alex, I just stopped by to ask you to keep an eye on your grandmother.”

My mom and Riley followed me back to my office. “Why? I was just there last night and she seemed fine to me.”

My mother patted an errant piece of her lovely thick silver gray hair back into place. “Oh, she’s fine. It’s just the company she keeps that worries me. I stopped by this morning and a man was there. Sloth.”

“The man’s name is Sloth?” I asked, wondering what my grandmother was up to now.

“I’m sure it’s not the name he was born with, but that’s what he’s calling himself now. He’s a tattoo artist with a questionable past and your grandmother is helping him open up his own shop.”

I smiled. “She told me about him last night. He actually won some award for best new artist of the year. Meme helped him find a suitable place and offered to loan him the money for the deposit and first couple months of rent.” My grandmother was a bit of a loan shark, though on a much smaller scale than say the mob. She sought out young people who had a bit of bad luck and offered to help them. So far, she’s never been stiffed. She has a real knack for picking out worthy causes and Sloth, from what she told me, was quite gifted in the tattoo area. He found a small shop, got some backing for equipment, but needed a bit more help with the first few months of rent and deposit on his new place.

“She’ll be fine,” I said to my mother. I always wanted to get a tattoo. A small one. Maybe a little fish on my ankle. My sister wanted one, too, and I bet I could convince Millie as well. Once Sloth was ready for business it might be fun to be his first customers. I decided not to share this latest inspiration with my mother. “So what are you going to do with the dog?”

My mother looked down at Riley, who was sitting on one of her feet. “He is adorable, isn’t he?”