Camilla T. Crespi - The Breakfast Club Murder (12 page)

“I don’t even remember what got us off,” Seth said with a laugh, “but we’re old buddies again.”

“He’s going to need your help. Now tell me what good things are happening to you.”

“I’d like to keep it for Janet, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. I’m sorry.” Lori was embarrassed. She had forgotten what it was like to have a partner come first.

Seth stood up. “I really think I should give that man his seat back. See you around, and Janet said she’s going to be helping you with your dinner Saturday night. Soon she won’t have to do any of that stuff. Don’t forget to read your letter.”

Lori looked down at her hand, still clutching Alec Winters’s letter addressed to Mrs. Lori Corvino. She’d worn her wedding ring to Italy, that’s why he thought she was married. Her mother had it all wrong. She’d worn the ring to keep men at bay, not to bring them on. Lori slit open the envelope with her finger.

Dear Mrs. Corvino,

I enclose the
gnocchi della regina
recipe you were interested in. I hope your readers enjoy it. I have tried to make it and failed miserably, but I am sure you will be successful. The trick is interpreting the meager Italian directions. They always assume everyone is a natural cook, which I’m sure you are. My talent resides in pushing buttons on the microwave. I wish you well.

Sincerely,
Alec Winters

For a moment Lori wondered what he meant by readers; then she remembered Beth’s calling cards, her own lie to the Roman waiter about being a writer for the
Greenwich Dish.
She read the recipe, written out in a neat, almost childlike handwriting. The waiter had claimed the recipe was a family secret. How had Alec Winters managed get hold of it? It didn’t look daunting. Maybe on her way home she should buy some potatoes and the other ingredients and try making the gnocchi and their sauce tonight. It would keep her mind off Valerie’s death.
Alec Winters, you’re a sweet man, and a lifesaver,
Lori said silently, putting the letter and recipe in her handbag. The ruined dress was forgiven.

“You holding up?” Callie asked as she refilled Lori’s mug with freshly brewed coffee.

Lori was sitting at her usual booth, her back to the wide window that revealed a morning with the perfect blue sunny sheen that always reminded her of the September morning when the idea of a safe world burned to nothing. She was reading “dogs for sale” ads in the
Hawthorne Park Post.
“If I don’t end up in jail, I’ll be fine.” She had hastily put on a jeans skirt and a white T-shirt, run fingers through her hair, and forgotten makeup. Whatever she looked like, Lori knew Callie would always welcome her. Ten years ago, she had stopped one of Callie’s seven grandsons from chasing a ball into the street just as a car whisked past, and a friendship was sealed. “Thanks, Callie.”

“You sound hoarse,” Callie said.

“Too many phone calls.” Once she had gotten home from Manhattan last night, she had answered calls from various newspapers, from people who had dropped her after her divorce but now wanted in on the latest murder news, and, of course, her mother, Janet, Margot and Beth. Only to her three friends did she give honest answers. Then she’d unplugged the phone and gone to bed, feeling grouchy, exhausted, and excluded—a woman exiled from her family. Making
gnocchi della regina
might have helped, but the thought of botching it up stopped her. She couldn’t deal with failure right now. She’d left the cell phone on, but Jessica didn’t call.

“The others coming?” Callie asked.

Lori sipped her coffee and nodded. It wasn’t their usual breakfast morning—that only happened on Mondays when Beth’s gallery stayed closed and Sally’s Blooms opened at eleven—but these were extraordinary times and she needed help. After a sleepless night, she’d come to the conclusion that she’d better be proactive in this investigation if she didn’t want to end up at the Bedford Correctional Facility.

“I’ll get you some fresh lemon juice and honey,” Callie said, “and from the looks of you, you need to take home a couple of apple pies. When the going gets tough, eat. Which reminds me.” Callie squeezed herself into the booth next to Lori and brought her thick black eyebrows together in a formidable frown. She smelled of browned butter and caramel.

Lori looked at her in surprise. Callie sitting anywhere in her coffee shop was a first. “What’s up, Callie?”

“Take a piece of advice from an old Greek woman.” Callie leaned closer. Powder or flour sat in the deep groves of her face. “Bearing gifts or no gifts, be careful of friends.”

“What do you mean?”

Callie looked up behind Lori. “I mean you should take care of yourself.” She edged herself to the end of the booth. “If you don’t watch it, you’ll come down with a bad cold.” She pulled herself up just as Margot walked up. “And I’d get a mutt, if I were you. Fancy dogs are like fancy cars. They always need fixing.”

“Good morning, Callie,” Margot said, then leaned down to peck Lori’s cheek.

“Glad it’s good for you,” Callie said. “I’ll get that lemonade with honey.”

“She’s such an old grouch,” Margot said, sliding into the booth and spraying the smell of Opium in the air with a toss of her hair. She was wearing the same pink Juicy Couture sweat pants and top as Ellie, except this one looked great on Margot’s size-six body.

Lori watched Callie walk toward the back of the coffee shop with the characteristic sway that made her look as if she’s just hit land after six months at sea. What had she meant by “be careful of friends”? Surely she wasn’t talking about Callie’s Gals, as she’d dubbed the breakfast group in one of her more generous moods. And no, Lori wasn’t planning to get a dog, fancy or mutt. She’d just been trying to keep herself from staring at a stunning close-up of Valerie splattered on the front page next to a two-column article on the murder. At least she had learned the murder weapon was a nine-millimeter revolver. Useful information if you knew what to do with it. “Callie’s upset about the murder,” she told Margot.

“Aren’t we all. To think the killer could have been lurking outside my house waiting to follow Valerie. It gives me the shivers. How can I help?”

“I’m going to need a car. The police are taking mine sometime today.”

“Ooh, that bad?”

“That bad.”

“Silver Mercedes SLK55 or white Lexus LS 430? I got rid of the Jag, a real lemon.”

“I’d be too scared to drive either. Got a battered Ford in your stable?” Her Ford was eight years old.

“You’re driving the Mercedes. You’ll love it. It’s like slipping into a lacy thong.”

Lori grimaced. “Ouch.”

“When’s the last time you had sex?” Margot asked in a voice full of concern. “Not alone, I mean.”

Jonathan’s lean body dressed in tennis whites flashed before Lori’s eyes. She lifted the coffee mug to her face in an attempt to hide the blush she was sure was there.

“I get it,” Margot said with a dismissive shrug of one shoulder. “None of my business. Get the police to drive you over to pick it up. That’s the least they can do.”

Lori thanked Margot for the fancy loaner. “When you called me the night before last to tell me Jess and Angie were going to be late, did you call my home phone or my cell?”

Margot widened her eyes. “You expect me to remember? I sure could use some coffee to get the brain cells working.” She jangled her bracelets at Cy, the counter man, one of Callie’s countless relatives. He grinned back with a nod.

“It’s important,” Lori said.

Margot stood up and walked over to the counter, her pink mules flipping against her bare heels. Cy held out a mug full of coffee. She blew him a kiss and drank half of it on the way back to the booth. “I remember now,” Margot said, sliding back in. “Your cell. You didn’t answer your home phone. Why is it important?”

“Now I’ve got no alibi for that night. I must have unplugged the phone in my sleep. The funny thing is, I don’t remember plugging it back in either.”

“You’re turning into a sleepwalker? Stress can do that to you. You better lock your front door. You don’t want to wander through the streets at night in your nightgown.”

“I wear pajamas.”

Margot smoothed Lori’s forehead with a finger. “Please stop worrying. Alibi or no alibi, the police can’t possibly think you killed anyone. They’re taking your car because they have to show they’re on the case. Have to keep the boss happy.”

“I hope you’re right, but just in case you’re not, did you see anyone lurking around your house when Valerie drove the girls home?”

“No, I was in my bedroom, which you know faces the water.”

“Can you ask your neighbors?”

“They won’t have seen anything. I’ll walk into a hornet’s nest if I start asking around. The cul-de-sac is dark because of all the trees, and just two weeks ago, some of the old biddies insisted on calling a meeting to discuss safety issues. I invited them all to my house for cocktails, thinking that getting them drunk would make it all go away. I couldn’t have been more wrong. They want to cut down most of the old trees, can you believe that? Those trees are legendary!”

Lori put her hand over Margot’s. “Please? If some of them are so worried about safety, they might have looked out of their window when Valerie drove by. They could have seen another car, taken down a license number. Start with the older owners.”

“Oh, all right. Maybe I’ll invite them over again and make it a game. Like Clue. Whoever saw something gets a bottle of Kettle One for a prize.”

“Margot, this is serious.”

“Of course it is. I just hate it, that’s all. Valerie might have been a bitch, but I knew her from forever, and to think she got shot down like a deer and stuffed into the trunk of a car.” Her eyes showed a mixture of fear and genuine sorrow. “How do you cope with that?”

“By trying to find out who killed her,” Lori said.

“Sure,” Margot said. “I’ll work on one of those gorgeous CSI guys, and while he’s in mid-moan, I’ll clamp my legs together and get him to tell me all about the incriminating fibers he found on Valerie’s body. Come on, Lori, we can’t compete with the police.”

“I know we can’t, but we can try to make sense of it. I can’t just sit back and let the police stick their noses in my life and in Jessica’s. I want some control. I need it.”

“And I bet you’re itching with curiosity, just like I am.”

Lori found herself smiling. “It’s given me a rash.”

“Where do we start?”

“Tell me everything you know about Valerie.”

Margot pursed her lips to indicate she was thinking. “Well, what is there to say? She wasn’t popular at boarding school. You know, one of those all-A students who liked to rub it in how clever, rich, skinny, and gorgeous she was. And very ambitious, which is more than I can say for myself. No one could believe she wanted to become a dentist. We all thought it was grubby work, staring at decayed teeth and wet tongues all day long, but she said holding a drill to someone’s mouth was sexy and empowering.”

“Why didn’t she marry before?” The
NewYork Times
wedding announcement that Ellie had left lying on the kitchen table hadn’t mentioned a previous husband.

“I know she had some serious relationships along the way. I remember Dad once asking Valerie why she’d broken up with some perfectly nice guy who’d proposed to her, and she said that since she had money of her own and she didn’t want to have kids, she saw no point to locking her door.”

Lori wondered which of Rob’s qualities had bowled over marriage-phobic Valerie. Was it the droop of his ass? The mushrooming paunch? His snoring? His lying tongue? God, what if Valerie had wanted a child? “Do you have any idea why she changed her mind?”

“I stopped talking to her when you told me she’d snared Rob. Look, I was as surprised as you were, you know that.”

Callie’s insidious words, “Be careful of friends,” curled themselves in Lori’s ear. “Yes, I do know that,” she said finally, believing it. Margot was too straightforward, too self-centered, to lie. She wouldn’t understand the point of it.

“Look, I didn’t like her a lot,” Margot said, “but she’d been in and out of my life since I was a kid, and she could be fun when she felt like it. You have to admit she was a great dentist. Warren had extensive work done and was very pleased, and you know my ex-husband and still dear friend is very stingy with compliments—one of the many reasons I left him. He used to date her, you know. Before me. In fact, I met Warren through Valerie. Stole him right from under her upturned nose.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Beth said, suddenly appearing dressed in a gray linen pantsuit. “Janet will be here in a sec. I saw her parking the car. Hi, Margot.” Margot waved fingers. Beth leaned over to hug Lori. “How are you? God, what an awful thing to happen. Are you okay? Have you heard from Rob? Do the police have any idea yet?”

“I’m a little shaky and no word from Jessica or Rob.”

Beth slipped into the booth next to Lori. “Call now,” she suggested, always ready for instant action.

“Later.” During the night, Lori had also realized that she was scared of facing Rob. How would she feel seeing him suffering over Valerie’s death? Would she start hoping again? Out of loneliness? The need for sex? Or simply because she wanted to make Jessica happy? “I didn’t know Warren dated Valerie,” she said, to stop the questions whirling in her head.

“Not for long, but she wasn’t a bit pleased when I stole him, which I confess gave me no end of pleasure. What about you, Lori? Aren’t you just a little bit glad she’s dead?”

“Margot!” Beth said, in the command voice she used to rein in the twins.

Margot tossed her hair. “Come on, girls, let’s get real here. That woman was bad news and it’s only natural—”

Beth interrupted her. “Could you please swallow the exquisitely pedicured foot that’s in your mouth, sweetheart?”

Margot looked at Lori’s tired face. “I’m sorry. I was being bitchy. I didn’t mean anything by it. Look, I did one good thing. I called Warren before coming here and told him he had to do something about the police annoying you. He wants you to call him.”

Callie slid a mug of hot lemonade and honey toward Lori, then swayed away on her slippered feet before Lori finished her thank you and Beth said hello.