Death at the Door, page 23
“Shoddy wiring,” I said with a shrug. “You know how it is.”
It was a good excuse, but eventually he’d start to wonder why the lights in his apartment were fine but mine burned out at an alarming rate.
The casserole dish, colander, and giant pot Ian had borrowed from him were stacked neatly on the blue and white towel in my kitchen. The towel matched all the other towels in Tosh’s kitchen. It was a good sign when a man owned matching towels. I’d never had matching, or even coordinating, towels.
I handed them all over to him. “Thanks for letting me borrow these.”
“And thanks for inviting me over for dinner, both times. Well, I ought to get going. I’m gonna pop in one of those DVDs and veg out in front of the TV for a while.”
“Just don’t turn up the volume too loud, or Milly might get mad,” I said, before closing the door behind him. Alone at last, I looked around my apartment. “Cordelia? You still here?” In response, the heavy living room curtains snapped open.
My stomach growled loudly. If anyone other than Cordelia had been around to hear it, I would have been embarrassed.
The refrigerator door opened and Cordelia started pulling out various items. She lined them up neatly on the counter.
“What are we making?” I asked. I spent the next ten minutes assembling ingredients, then popped it in the oven. I didn’t expect I’d ever become a chef, but with Cordelia’s help, at least I’d learn how to feed myself, and that was a start.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
RUBY
Sunday afternoon I was heading off to the supermarket, reusable canvas totes in one hand and a shopping list in the other. Cordelia had shown me a few new recipes in her cookbook, and I picked one that seemed simple enough. I opened my front door, and standing on the other side of it was a woman I didn’t recognize, her hand raised to knock.
“Hello?” I asked, startled. I hadn’t been expecting company. Then again, people kept showing up, whether I was expecting it or not.
“Ruby, I presume?” She was huffing and puffing after the walk up the stairs. She was white. Tall. In her thirties or forties. Her blondish hair was pulled back and she had a pair of reading glasses dangling from a beaded chain around her neck. “I don’t know how you manage those stairs every day.”
“It gets easier,” I said. It hadn’t yet, not in the months since I’d moved in, but it had to get easier, eventually, or so I told myself. “Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“Funny, I don’t remember you, friend,” I said.
“I said I was a friend, not necessarily yours. Not yet.” She gestured at me to step back. “Let’s go inside and chat.”
“I’m good here,” I replied. I was tired of having strangers in my apartment, and after Mom threatening to send Jordan to stay with me this summer, I was feeling overprotective of my personal space. I was starting to figure out why Cordelia never had any visitors.
“Suit yourself. I guess you don’t want to know about Marty.” She turned and started walking back down the long hall toward the stairs.
I really did want to hear what she’d come all the way here to tell me, starting with who she was and what she knew about Marty.
“Wait.”
The word was out of my mouth before I realized I was going to say it.
The woman paused, but didn’t turn around.
“Would you like to come in and get a glass of water or something?”
“Coffee would be great,” she said, turning and grinning at me as she approached for the second time. She held out her hand. “Call me Chelle.”
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about her that unnerved me. Even the way she introduced herself put me on edge. “Call me Chelle” wasn’t exactly the same as “My name is Chelle.” It made me wonder what she was hiding.
“Have a seat.” I gestured to the loveseat as I set up the coffee maker. While it brewed, I studied my guest.
She didn’t seem bothered by the silence, or my scrutiny. I was the opposite. I wasn’t comfortable unless someone was talking. The first few weeks in this apartment—long before I even suspected Cordelia’s presence—I’d talk to myself all day long, just to break the long stretches of quiet. Now that I knew that I’d had a ghost watching me, I felt kind of foolish. She must have thought I was a terrible chatterbox.
One of us had to speak first. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it was me. “How do you know Marty, Chelle?”
“He worked for me.”
I felt myself relax. “Oh, you must manage Beantown Deli. Great place. I order from there at least once a week.” It was odd, someone from Beantown Deli showing up at my doorstep. How did she get my home address? I guess she could have called or emailed TrendCelerate, but I would have known because I would have been the one to answer that call or email. But, considering that I’d convinced the person at the cash register to give me Marty’s home address the other day, it was only fair that they knew mine.
“Not that employer,” Chelle said. She stared at me with a completely blank expression. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a smile or the shadow of a frown. Her face was neutral, not even betrayed by her eyes.
“Not that employer? Then who?” I asked, confused. Then it hit me. Marty wasn’t just a deli delivery person. He was also a drug dealer, which meant he had a drug supplier.
I studied Chelle with renewed interest. She didn’t look like what I pictured when I thought of a drug kingpin. She was too young, for one thing. I didn’t know what I was expecting. An expensive suit. Tattoos. Lots of jewelry. A flashing neon sign above her head that declared her a Bad Boss Bitch.
She had none of those things, but then again, a flashing neon sign was a sure way to attract the wrong kind of attention, the kind that came with handcuffs and warrants for your arrest.
I had lots of questions floating around my head. How exactly did one become a drug supplier? Was there some kind of certificate you went to school for? But instead of asking any of those questions, I busied myself pouring coffee into two mugs. “Sugar? Cream?” I offered.
“Black is fine,” she said.
I brought both mugs over and handed one to Chelle. “My condolences for your loss,” I told her.
She laughed. Without that carefully blank expression that made her look more like a wax figure at Ripley’s than a real person, she had a kind face, a face that belonged on a PTA mom, not a drug boss.
“Thanks. Marty was a good kid.” She took a sip of her coffee.
I was on the fence about that. Yes, he took care of his sister and her son. And he was a single dad. He worked two jobs to support his family, but one of them was dealing illicit drugs. And he had a criminal record. In my opinion, a good kid got passing—if not spectacular—grades in school and sent money home whenever she could afford it, like I did. Good kids didn’t do prison time.
“He seemed nice.”
I should have been more nervous. There was a drug boss in my living room. A year ago, that would have freaked me out. But now I was living with a ghost, and her recently-released-from-prison brother apparently had a key to my apartment. In the short time I’d lived in Boston, I’d stumbled into not one but two murder investigations. I would have noticed Chelle if she’d been at the TrendCelerate office on Monday, so while she was the furthest thing from a law-abiding citizen, she wasn’t Marty’s killer.
She set her drink down on the coffee table in front of the loveseat and focused her attention on me. “With Marty gone, I’ve got an opening in my organization. Know anyone who needs a job? Someone who won’t sample the merch? Someone who won’t hide things from me? You, maybe?”
Her mug tipped over with a crash, spilling hot coffee all over my coffee table and dripping down to splash on the carpet. I jumped up to grab a towel from my bathroom and started mopping up the mess. Part of my agreeing to take this apartment as-is, furnished, was that the building manager hadn’t made me pay a security deposit, which was a good thing. I doubted I could ever get that coffee stain out of the carpet.
Although, the carpet had seen better days long before I moved in. The same could be said for the coffee table. There were water stains on the wood, along with a host of scratches in the varnish. Considering how meticulously clean Cordelia kept her apartment, I had to assume that the coffee table had been secondhand. Was she thrifty, or was she paranoid like Tosh?
I swiped at the spilled coffee, trying to get it all up, but I ended up pushing coffee deeper into the scratches. The coffee table might be old, but I didn’t want to go buy a new one, and if I knew myself, I’d end up living with a stain before I’d spend an afternoon learning how to refinish it.
“Sorry about that,” Chelle said. She righted her mug and held it under the lip of the table, using her hand to gingerly push the hot liquid back into the mug. It was a nice idea, but she just ended up getting even more coffee on the carpet. I could get a rug and pretend the stains didn’t exist.
“Not your fault,” I assured her. “Everything in this apartment is…” I paused, looking for the right word. Possessed? Haunted? “Well, nothing is level.”
“Still, it’s completely my fault.”
Not hardly. It was Cordelia’s fault. I’d bet money on it. Not that I blamed her, not really. If my roomie was being recruited to deal drugs, I’d do everything in my power to interrupt the conversation, too.
“What did you mean by not sampling the merch?” I asked.
“Let’s say that hypothetically, I sold candy. Easy access to that many sweets?” She shrugged. “It’s a temptation. It’s also the cost of doing business. But just once I’d love to recruit reliable help that didn’t dip their hand in the cookie jar.”
“And Marty was dipping his hand in your cookie jar?” I asked, then blushed. I hadn’t meant it to sound quite so dirty. Chelle was a drug supplier. Marty was a drug dealer. I could only assume that the “candy” in Chelle’s scenario was drugs. Marty’s sister said he didn’t partake, but his supplier seemed to believe otherwise.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” She was so matter-of-fact in her response, like she saw this every day. Then again, for all I knew, she did see this every day. The pills Marty peddled weren’t completely illegal, but they were regulated for a reason. “How about that job? You interested?”
I took the towel, now sopping wet, and Chelle’s coffee mug into the kitchen and left them both in the sink. It gave me a minute to craft my response. “No offense, but—”
Chelle interrupted me with a wave of her hand. “Now, before you say no—”
“No,” I said.
Chelle laughed. Her laugh was genuine and cheery. If she’d been anyone else, anything else, we might have become friends. But I didn’t think I’d ever get over the whole drug dealer thing.
“Hey, no, I get it. You’re young. Smart. Quick on your feet. Don’t take this the wrong way, but this building is a shithole.” She gestured at the newly stained coffee table. “Where’d you get your furniture? The dumpster?”
I bristled. Cordelia’s furniture wasn’t museum quality, but it was literally all that was left of her in the world. And despite keeping cash hidden in the apartment and stashed away who-knows-where, like her bloated health savings account, she’d led a frugal life. I was frugal out of necessity. Who cared what my coffee table looked like, anyway?
“You could be doing better.” She shrugged. “A lot better.”
“Let’s say I could,” I said. The temperature in my apartment dropped ten degrees, as if someone had just opened a window on a blustery day, or perhaps, upset a ghostly roomie. I wish there was some way of reassuring Cordelia that I had absolutely zero intention of agreeing to Chelle’s employment offer. But how was I going to learn more about Marty’s death unless I played along?
“Oh, you so could.”
“How does it all work?” I asked. “What would I do? Walk around all day with a purse filled with bottles until someone comes up to me and asks if I have an extra Vicodin for sale?”
Chelle pointed at my nose. “Good question. Now this is all just in theory, mind you. Marty was real popular, if you know what I mean, but hypothetically, it wouldn’t take but a few days for his customers to start coming to you to satisfy their sweet tooth once they realize there’s a new candyman in town. If one of these hypothetical customers wanted to place an order, they’d text me, and Venmo me the amount. All you have to do is drop it off, like Grubhub.”
I blinked at her. Drug dealers took Venmo?
“I let you know who you’re meeting and what to give them, and once the deal is done, I transfer you your cut. Before you know it, you’ll be rolling in so much cash you won’t know where to put it all.”
She said that, but I happened to know that the silverware drawer was a great place to keep cash. After all, Cordelia had done just that. I wondered, not for the first time, why Cordelia had felt the need to hide money in the silverware drawer, and where she’d gotten all that cash in the first place. I could ask her, but I doubted she’d give me a straight answer.
“Sounds great, except for the part about me going to jail if I get caught,” I said. Since I wasn’t seriously considering Chelle’s offer, I wasn’t worried about going to jail. I wasn’t going to end up with a record like Marty or Ian.
Chelle continued. “That’s the beauty of it. Hypothetically, you’re not holding anything illegal. Even if you got stopped and searched, all you’ve got on you is a prescription with your name on it. That’s why you can’t get into trouble for working for me.”
“Yeah, but then a bunch of people would be walking around with pills in bottles with my name on it,” I pointed out.
Chelle let out another one of her laughs. “Silly girl, you keep the bottle. The customer keeps the candy.”
“And if they get caught…?” I let my voice trail off.
“Not my problem. Or yours. Now, with Marty, it was easy for him to move around and not get noticed, with his delivery job. Your day job is more static. I assume you don’t want customers coming to you?”
“Hell no,” I said.
“Figured. I mean, except for your coworkers. I assume that’s not a problem.”
I’d confirmed that Melissa, Seth, and Marc were all buying from Marty. How much further did it go? “Like who?” I asked.
She patted my knee. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Do you run errands at lunch? Pick up food for the office? Fetch supplies?”
I shook my head. “Everything is delivered.”
“Not a problem. We can work with that. A couple of innocent mix-ups and they’ll be begging you to go out instead. We’ll use that as a cover for you to do drop-offs. What do you say?”
“But isn’t it dangerous? I don’t want to be running around with pockets full of cash.”
“You won’t be. We’re cashless. Venmo, remember?”
Well, there went one of my theories. If Marty didn’t carry cash, then he wasn’t killed for any money he might have had on him.
“And you’re only carrying a tiny bit at a time.” She looked me over. “You’re such a little thing. No one would ever suspect you. You’ll be a perfect addition to my team.”
“Gosh, I don’t know,” I said. There was a loud noise coming from the kitchen as Cordelia tried to get my attention. I ignored her, but Chelle’s head swiveled toward the sound. “Did Marty make any enemies? Dissatisfied customers? Rivals?”
She returned her attention to me. “Don’t you worry yourself about that. My customers are always satisfied. And as for rivals, they’re more worried about me than my team members. Trust me, you’ll do fine.”
Chelle had systematically shredded several of my theories about Marty’s death, but I couldn’t categorically rule out his drug-dealing hustle as being the reason he ended up dead on the bathroom floor.
I shook my head. “Gee, thanks for thinking of me and all, but I’m really not interested.” Then it hit me that she apparently knew everything about me, from where I worked to where I lived, but I didn’t even know her last name. “How did you even find me?”
“Hazel,” she said.
“Hazel? Marty’s sister Hazel?”
“She said you came sniffing around right after Marty’s death. Said you were supposedly there to offer your condolences, but you were asking a lot of questions, she assumed you were looking to replace him. You do ask a lot of questions.”
I shook my head. How had Hazel gotten that out of our conversation? Then again, I guess it was odd that a total stranger came around right after her brother died, not to mention coming home to find her dog on the front lawn, her door unlocked, and the smoldering remains of her brother’s laptop in her shower. “She misunderstood. I’m not looking for a new job.”
“Suit yourself.” Chelle stood. “When you change your mind, let me know.”
I wouldn’t. Even knowing that Marty only dealt in prescriptions, my mom hadn’t raised a drug dealer. But I might have more questions later that only Chelle could answer. “I don’t know how to reach you.”
“Don’t worry,” she said with a smile. “If you ask around, you’ll find plenty of people who can get a message to me.” She paused at my door. “Marty didn’t give you anything before he died, did he?”
“Like what?” I asked. “He dropped off pastries and a fruit platter. Is that what you mean?”
“Never mind. Talk to you real soon,” she said, and let herself out.
It didn’t occur to me until after she was gone that even if Hazel had told her that I might be open to working for Chelle, Hazel had no idea where I lived. Chelle would have had to get my address from someone at TrendCelerate. It wouldn’t have been hard, since now they all knew I was living in Cordelia’s old apartment.
I’d already confirmed that some of my coworkers bought from Marty, but how would any of them know Chelle? With Marty out of the way, there was an opening for a courier job that probably paid a lot more than I was making now. It probably even paid more than what anyone I worked with earned, which could be good incentive for someone looking to move up in the world. If Chelle was telling the truth, it was easy money. Was Marty’s job worth killing for?
