Murder Goes to Market Page 2

  The one part that was true was that she never lacked for ingredients. There was an unspoken agreement among the food vendors at the market that anything that was in danger of being thrown out was first offered to the other tenants, and though Claudia was careful not to be at the front of the line, there was always plenty to go around. She had things to eat; what she didn’t have was the energy to figure out how to combine two ears of corn, a cured pork jowl, assorted cheeses, and half a jar of kimchi into a meal.

  There were always the empanadas from Carmen, but Claudia suspected they were some of her experimental attempts, and she was in no mood for surprise kale.

  So it was with only a moderate amount of shame that she reached into the back of the freezer and pulled out a pizza. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By next morning the wind had died down and the day was foggy but calm. The geese were awake and on guard, waiting at the edge of their territory for Claudia to pass. She gave them a wider berth than usual, acutely aware of the beady eyes tracking her progress. Rationally, she knew there was no need for her to be afraid of animals that were a fraction of her size, but on the other hand, she didn’t like the looks of those beaks.

  There was no sign of the dog, which had probably been someone’s pet taking itself for a walk. One of the things Claudia found herself having to adjust to was the different relationships people in the country had with their animals, and this was probably one of those times.

  Her view of the parking lot was blocked by the curve of the hill, so she didn’t see Lori’s car until she was more than halfway there. Claudia’s heart sank. She had known she hadn’t seen the last of her problem tenant, but she would have liked a little more of a grace period before diving back into the conflict. She hoped Lori had just decided to show up early to pack up her shop before anyone else arrived, and wasn’t standing by with a lawyer, ready to turn Claudia’s precious market into a dollar store outlet.

  Her first surprise on entering the marketplace was that the lights weren’t on. The windows did a good enough job of illuminating the shops, but not the interior corridor, and very little light filtered in through the three skylights that were in dire need of cleaning. It was enough to see by, but only just.

  Claudia flipped the light switch and looked around. Her first impression was that the place was empty, and maybe Lori had just left her car in the lot for some reason. But something wasn’t right. The display at the front of the Pak Family Pickles shop was in disarray, and the giant jar of kosher dills that had been the centerpiece was gone. She found it on the floor in the produce stall, lying on its side next to a bin of tomatoes.

  Beyond that, everything was fine until she got to the cheese shop. It was in the far corner of the market, with the largest space, including room for two small tables.

  That was where she found Lori, curled around the base of a table, unmoving.

  “Lori? Are you okay?” Claudia wasn’t expecting an answer, but she had to hope. In a daze, she put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. It was cold, stiff, and unyielding, and in that it told Claudia everything she needed to know. But still she pulled, unwilling to turn away until she was absolutely sure there was nothing she could do.

  Then the body finally moved and she saw Lori’s face, and she was sure.

  Claudia stumbled toward the door, fumbling for her phone and trying not to vomit. She might have screamed, or maybe everything felt like screaming. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had gotten her breathing back under control, though her heart was pounding so loud that she thought the paramedics must have heard it from the road.

  She told them what had happened, and they left her to wait at one of the picnic tables at the edge of the parking lot. There wasn’t going to be much they could do, but that was for them to decide. Claudia had seen a dead body before, but only because her great-aunt had insisted on an open casket, and while the mortician’s heavy-handed makeup job had been disturbing in its own way, it had nothing on this. It had been Lori, but not, her swollen face and bulging eyes making a grotesque caricature that Claudia would never, ever forget.

  She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there when the other vehicles pulled up, first a fire truck, then all three of San Elmo’s police cars, then a van with a picture of a cow in a tutu painted on its side.

  “Claudia! What’s going on?”

  Julie Muller parked the van in the only available space and leaned out the window.

  “Did something happen to the market?”

  It took a moment, but eventually Claudia was able to find her voice. “No,” she warbled. “The market’s fine. It’s Lori, she’s . . . Lori got hurt.”

  “Oh no,” Julie’s expression was appropriately concerned, but the tension had left her voice. She and Lori hadn’t exactly been close, and it wasn’t surprising that she wouldn’t take an injury to the other woman as seriously as something like damage to her shop. She would be horrified when she learned the truth, of course, but Claudia wasn’t sure how much she was supposed to be saying at this point. Julie, and everyone else, would find out soon enough.

  Julie was the second generation of the family that owned the Dancing Cow Cheese Company. She was a well-built woman in late middle age, slightly overweight thanks to three children and a lifetime of proximity to dairy products. Her father, Elias Muller, had immigrated from Switzerland in the sixties, taken one look at what passed for cheese in this country and declared it unfit for feeding to pigs, so he had decided to start his own creamery and show his new countrymen how it was done. (It was a well-known story, because he liked to tell it loudly at every opportunity, which was why his grandchildren refused to go into the grocery store with him anymore.)

  They had been the first vendor to sign on to the market, and Claudia was sure that Elias’s seal of approval had helped to bring in the others. She didn’t know what he was going to say when he heard their space had been the site of a violent death, but she didn’t think it was going to be good.

  “Ms. Simcoe? Do you have a minute?” A policeman had emerged from the building and approached Claudia. “We’d like to ask some questions about how you found her.”

  Claudia allowed herself to be led away, feeling Julie’s alarmed stare following her.

  Going back into the market was like entering a dream, the kind where you’re in a familiar place but it’s somehow wrong, like your house suddenly has several rooms you never knew were there. Claudia had spent nearly every waking minute of her past two years in the marketplace building, but it felt alien now. The paramedics had left their equipment scattered around the central hall, blocking the entrances to the market stalls. The pickle jar was still on the floor, and from the fog in her mind a voice she recognized as her own reminded her that she needed to mention that to someone.

  There was a crowd of people at the end of the hall, paramedics, policemen, and a few firefighters who might have been doing something important, but at the moment it looked a lot like hanging around and watching. She had seen most of them around town at some point, but the only face she could put a name to was the chief of police, who was approaching her now.

  “Miss Simcoe? You found the body?” Chief Bill Lennox was a short, stocky man with a face like a disappointed frog. He was the youngest son of a longtime local family, and he had a reputation of being unpleasant and overbearing, particularly to people he considered outsiders in his town. The only other times Claudia had seen him, greeting guests and making speeches at the department’s various charity fundraisers, he had always seemed like he was at least trying to be genial, but there was none of that now.

  “I understand you moved the body,” he said, his voice booming out into the hall.

  “Only to see her face,” Claudia explained. “She was curled up there with her back to me, and I couldn’t tell what was wrong. I didn’t move her very far.”

  “You shouldn’t have moved her at all,” he scolded. It was the last thing
Claudia had expected, but at least his antagonism had the effect of temporarily knocking her out of the shock that had consumed her since she found the body.

  “I didn’t know she was dead. I had to be sure there was nothing I could do to help.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly helped her killer.”

  Claudia nearly gasped. It had been in the back of her mind that Lori’s death didn’t seem natural—with her swollen face and the strange positioning of the body—but she was no expert, and the desire to believe in an explanation other than violence was a powerful argument. But here was the police chief, baldly stating she had been murdered, like it was a secondary problem to Claudia’s own irresponsibility.

  It seemed like she wasn’t the only person there who was surprised. The paramedics exchanged sharp glances, and one of the other police officers started to say something, then stopped himself and gave Claudia a worried look. She wondered how often his boss went off script like this.

  Lennox may have realized he said something he wasn’t supposed to, because he responded by glaring at all of them, before turning the force of his disapproval back to Claudia.

  “I need you to tell me exactly how she was lying when you found her, before you and these yahoos ruined everything.” The yahoos in question were the paramedics, who looked more annoyed than contrite.

  The police chief was clearly trying to sound authoritative, but the way he kept fiddling with the zippers on his jacket undermined the impression. Claudia had heard a rumor once that he had gotten the job despite having no police experience, because someone on the town council had owed Lennox’s uncle a favor, and she wondered if right now he was realizing how badly prepared he was for a homicide investigation, and was taking it out on anyone in range.

  He took a step toward the corner, and Claudia realized with a sickening feeling that she was going to have to look at Lori’s body again. Her knees started to wobble, but before she could fall too far there was a reassuring hand on her elbow.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” It was the cop who had brought her in, who Claudia had barely registered before. She noticed him now, first in gratitude, then to take in the fact that he was a very attractive man, then to rebuke herself for even having that thought at the site of a friend’s violent death. (Well, more of an acquaintance, really, but still.)

  “Thank you,” she said, fighting to keep her voice from rising flirtatiously. “But it doesn’t look like I have much of a choice, do I?”

  He smiled reassuringly and gave her a tiny shrug. Taking that as a no, Claudia let him lead her back toward the cheese shop, where the people still working around the body stepped aside to give Claudia the better look she so badly didn’t want.

  Given the current state of the scene, she didn’t think Lennox had much basis to be mad at her for the small amount of disturbance she had caused. Lori’s body had been pulled fully away from the table and rolled over next to a set of electric paddles for what had to have been the most optimistic resuscitation ever attempted. The body must have been stiff when they tried, even now it was only slightly uncurled from the position Claudia had found it in.

  Lennox was standing next to the table, looking at Claudia expectantly.

  “Well?” he said. “We don’t have all day.”

  Claudia stepped forward and gathered herself, trying to focus on the scene without really seeing Lori’s face.

  “She—the body was curled up over there,” she said, indicating the table. “Kind of wrapped around the base. I didn’t know why she would be there, so I went over and shook her shoulder, and she didn’t move. That’s when I pulled her back, just far enough to see her face, and then I went outside and called 911. I didn’t move her very much, just maybe a couple of inches.”

  “And you didn’t try to help her at all?”

  Claudia wasn’t sure what she was being accused of here—moving the body was a problem, but so was not moving it more? On the other hand, this was not the time for her to be indulging her authority issues, so she only let a little bit of defiance creep into her answer.

  “I didn’t think there was anything I could do,” she said. “She didn’t—she didn’t look like I could help her.”

  Through her effort not to look at Lori’s face, Claudia was starting to notice other things she hadn’t seen before, like the wire encircling Lori’s neck, ending in two thin wooden handles (somehow familiar, but she couldn’t think where she would have seen something like that before), or the dried blood that had run down from the wound it had left.

  “Is that it?” Lennox asked. He stared down at Claudia, as if he could glare more information out of her. But there was nothing to give.

  “That’s all I can tell you about finding the body.” She stepped back, relieved to have an excuse to look away. “But there is one other thing. I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a jar of pickles on the floor in the produce market. And I know for certain that when I locked up last night it was on the display shelf, where it belongs.”

  If she was hoping for gratitude, she didn’t get it. Lennox just narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils at her some more.

  “Oh yeah? How is it you’re so sure of that little detail?”

  Traumatized or not, Claudia had had enough of this. She stood up taller and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “Because,” she said. “It’s a very large jar of pickles.”

  It would have been nice if she had been able to exit on that line, but it wasn’t to be. She had to give them all of her contact information, then repeat her story of finding the body two or three more times, then listen to several reminders from the chief that they were going to want to talk to her again later, and she had better make herself available. Finally, when she had assured him enough that she wasn’t going to go anywhere but home, she was allowed to leave, followed to the door by the attractive officer.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Claudia said, suddenly preoccupied by the discovery that eyes could be exactly the same shade of blue as the pattern on her grandmother’s Delft china. She had never liked those plates, but she was suddenly warming to them. “I, um, I just need some time to recover. Thanks.”

  “No problem. And take it easy, you’ve had a rough morning.”

  That was putting it mildly. And when Claudia got outside, she realized it wasn’t over yet. The rest of the vendors had arrived and their cars and trucks were clustered outside of the parking lot. Except for the Pak Family Pickles van, which Mrs. Pak had a habit of treating as an off-road vehicle, and had taken around the blocked-off entrance and parked in her usual space. There was a lot of confused conversation going on, all of which stopped when Claudia appeared.

  A chorus of “what happened’s greeted her as she got closer. Claudia looked around for her new cop friend, but he had already gone back into the marketplace. She was on her own.

  “I’m sorry about this,” she said, as they gathered around her. “Something happened to—Lori is dead. Last night, in the marketplace. I found her this morning. It’s—it probably wasn’t an accident.”

  Claudia couldn’t bring herself to call it murder, even though the police chief had implied as much, and the wire around Lori’s neck seemed to close the question. But to actually say the word out loud gave it more reality than she was able to deal with right now. She would have rather not said anything at all, but her tenants had a right to know. For most of them, their shops made up a major part of their livelihoods, and Claudia didn’t know when they would be able to open them again.

  There was a moment of quiet while everyone processed her announcement. Robbie, who ran the market’s butcher shop, was the first to put it all together.

  “Somebody killed Lori? In our market? How? I mean, why? I mean, what’s going to happen?”

  He looked around nervously after he said it, like he was embarrassed to have had the presumption to ask the first questions. Robbie was one of the younger shopkeepers, in his
early forties, tall and lean, with big ideas and an abiding love for the things that could be done with pork. He had called his shop Cure, in honor of the cured meats like salami and prosciutto that were his passion, but the name was causing some confusion among both music fans and people who thought it was a pharmacy.

  “I don’t know,” Claudia said, which was an honest answer to most of his questions. “I’m sure the police are going to want to talk to all of us at some point. If there’s anything you know, like if you’ve seen anybody hanging around, or heard Lori talking about being afraid of someone, you should definitely let them know.”

  She didn’t have a lot of hope for that suggestion, and the blank looks she got in return weren’t much of a surprise.

  “How will we know if it is suspicious?” The question came from Iryna who, along with her wife Carmen, ran The Corner Pocket, the best combination pierogi and empanada stand in western Sonoma County. Her car would be full of coolers packed the with pastries they had gotten up at five to make in their rented commercial kitchen space, ready to be heated up in the small oven and cooktop in their shop. They did some business in local farmer’s markets as well, and Robbie was trying to set them up with a website so they could take mail orders, but the marketplace was the lifeblood of their business. Claudia felt a flash of anger at Lori for having her death there.

  It was a stupid thing to think, and she pushed the feeling back down.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. She had a feeling she was about to be saying that a lot. “Anything you can think of, I guess. But I’m sure there’s some obvious reason behind this, and the police will have it cleared up soon.”

  She wasn’t sure of that at all, but the others did her the favor of looking like they believed her. Besides Robbie and Iryna, the crowd consisted of Julie, who had left her cow-bedecked van to join the crowd, a couple of the teenaged employees of the produce stall, and Helen Pak, who was not going to be happy when she found out what had happened to her giant pickle jar, which had adorned the shelf at the front of their shop since it had opened.