“So, she takes her cooking very seriously.”
He nodded then shook his head. “No, that’s not what I meant. She never burns her roast. Especially her rumps.”
Cookie pinched me under the table when she saw me contemplating whether I should giggle or not. I flashed a quick glare then returned to my expression of concern and understanding.
“You’re a professional investigator, right?” Warren asked.
I squinted. “Define professional.” When he only stared, still deep in thought, I said, “No, seriously, I’m not like the other PIs on the playground. I have no ethics, no code of conduct, no taste in gun cleansers.”
“I want to hire you,” he said, unfazed by my gun-cleanser admission.
I was already planning to do the gig for Cookie pro bono—especially since I barely paid her enough to eat people food—but money would come in downright handy when the bill collectors showed up. “I’m very expensive,” I said, trying to sound a bit like a tavern wench.
He leaned in. “I’m very rich.”
I glanced at Cookie for confirmation. She raised her brows and nodded her head.
“Oh. Well, then, I guess we can do business. Wait a minute,” I said, my thoughts tumbling over themselves, “how rich?”
“Rich enough, I guess.” If his answers got any more vague, they’d resemble the food in school cafeterias everywhere.
“I mean, has anyone asked you for money lately?”
“Just my cousin Harry. But he always asks me for money.”
Maybe Cousin Harry was getting more desperate. Or more brazen. I took down Harry’s info, then asked, “Can you think of anything else? Anything that might explain her behavior?”
“Not really,” he said after handing his credit card to Norma. Neither Cookie nor I had enough to cover our extra coffees, much less our mucho grandes, and since I doubted they would take my bunny slippers in trade …
“Mr. Jacobs,” I said, putting on my big-girl panties, “I have a confession to make. I’m very adept at reading people, and no offense, but you’re holding out on me.”
He worked his lower lip, a remorseful guilt oozing out of his pores. Not so much an I-killed-my-wife-and-buried-her-lifeless-body-in-the-backyard kind of guilt but more of an I-know-something-but-I-don’t-want-to-tell kind of guilt.
With a loud sigh, he lowered his head into his palms. “I thought she was having an affair.”
Bingo. “Well, that’s something. Can you explain why you thought that?”
Too exhausted to put much effort into it, he lifted his shoulders into the slightest hint of a shrug. “Just her behavior. She’d grown so distant. I asked her about it, and she laughed, told me I was the only man in her life because she was not about to put up with another.”
In the grand scheme of things, it was quite natural for him to suspect adultery, considering how much Mimi had apparently changed.
“Oh, and a friend of hers died recently,” he said in afterthought. His brow crinkled as he tried to remember the details. “I’d completely forgotten. Mimi said she was murdered.”
“Murdered? How?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.” Another wave of guilt wafted off him.
“They were close?”
“That’s just it. They’d went to high school together, but they hadn’t kept in touch. Mimi never even mentioned her name until she died, so I was surprised at how much it affected her. She was devastated, and yet…”
“And yet?” I asked when he lost himself in thought again. This was just getting interesting. He couldn’t stop now.
“I don’t know. She was torn up, but not really upset about losing her friend. It was different.” His jaw worked as he rifled through his memories. “I really didn’t think much about it at the time, but quite frankly, she didn’t seem all that surprised that her friend was murdered. Then I asked her if she wanted to go to the funeral, and my god, the look on her face. You’d think I’d asked her to drown the neighbor’s cat.”
Admittedly, drowning the neighbor’s cat didn’t really clue me in as much as I would’ve liked. “So, she was angry?”
He blinked back to me and stared. Like a long time. Long enough to have me sliding my tongue over my teeth to make sure I didn’t have anything in them.
“She was horrified,” he said at last.
Damn, I wished he could’ve remembered the woman’s name. And why Mimi wasn’t surprised when the woman was murdered. Murder is usually quite the surprise to everyone involved.
Speaking of names, I decided to ask about the one on the bathroom wall. Having found no foreign objects in my teeth, I asked, “Did Mimi ever mention a Janelle York?”
“That’s her,” he said in surprise. “That’s Mimi’s friend who was murdered. How did you know?”
I didn’t, but his thinking I did made me look good.
Chapter Two
DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS. NEVER CROSS THE STREAMS.
—BUMPER STICKER
“What are you listening to?” I asked, reaching over and turning down the radio as Cookie drove home. “This Little Light of Mine” was just way too happy for the current atmospheric conditions.
She hit the SCAN button. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be classic rock.”
“Oh. So, did you buy this car used?” I asked, thinking back to the dead guy in her trunk and wondering how he got there. I still needed to figure out if Cookie had been a black widow before she met me. She did have black hair. And she’d recently cut it. A disguise, mayhap? Not to mention her early-morning, pre-coffee mean streak that made road rage a practical alternative for a healthier, happier Cookie. The departed rarely just hung out on Earth for no particular reason. Dead Trunk Guy most likely died violently, and if I was ever going to get him to cross, I’d have to figure out how and why.