Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,17
caught red-handed? If you’re going to play detective, you’d better learn not everybody is what they seem.”
“Alex is.” I was certain of it. Jim wouldn’t be his friend otherwise. Rather than argue with Tyler and get nowhere, I decided to stay with the tried-and-true. Nothing appeals to a cop like logic. “If he is telling the truth, then he could have been drugged, right?”
“If there are drugs involved—and this is a big if, remember—I think it’s more likely Alex intended to give them to Vickie.”
It was the second time that afternoon that I felt as if I’d been knocked for a loop. Since we were out on the sidewalk, I stepped over to the side to stay out of the way of other pedestrians so I didn’t get bowled over, and I motioned to Eve to stand aside, too. She, however, wasn’t paying attention. There was a pricey boutique next door and Eve had her eye on a green cocktail dress with skinny straps and a neckline cut down to there.
I left her at it and collected my thoughts. When I didn’t make any sense of what Tyler was saying—when I couldn’t—I stammered, “What on earth are you talking about, Tyler? Why would Alex want to drug Vickie? He admitted that he liked her, that he wanted to get more serious with her.”
“Uh-huh.” I could picture Tyler sitting at his desk. When he sat back, I heard his chair squeak. “But what Alex didn’t bother to mention was that Vickie wasn’t just Vickie. She was Vickie Monroe, Mrs. Edward Monroe.”
“She was married?”
“Married? Oh, yeah. And from what her husband said when he came in to identify the body—poor bastard—happily married. They live up in McLean. I can pretty much place the address. It’s one of those nice homes in an upscale development. Nice husband, too. He’s the owner of some hotshot company up that way. You see what I’m getting at here, Miss Annie the Detective? Home, husband, two little kids, too, by the way. Vickie was a member of the PTA at their school. She volunteered with her little girl’s Girl Scout troop. She was a member of the local garden club. She took cooking classes with her friends.” He let me digest this information before he added, “Sounds like Vickie Monroe had a nice life, so if your friend Alex was looking to take things to the next level, I can see why Vickie wasn’t all that thrilled about having it ruined by a guy she met once a week for a couple laughs. And if Vickie refused, Alex might have—”
“No. It’s not possible.”
Tyler chuckled. Not like it was funny, like he expected me to argue and he wasn’t disappointed. “When you’ve done this as long as I have, you know that anything and everything is not only possible, it happens all the time.”
“But—”
“When you get some real evidence, something we can actually verify, give me a call,” he said, and because he didn’t expect that to happen anytime soon, he hung up.
I stood there on the sidewalk, trying to make sense of everything he’d told me, and when that didn’t work, I waited for Eve to join me and tried to fit the information I had into what I did know about the case.
“Listen to this,” I said. “And help me make sense of it all. Alex was found, passed out, with a knife in his hands, with Vickie’s body.”
There was no denying any of this. Eve nodded. “Ugly but true.”
“Yeah, but wait.” I held up a hand to let her know I wasn’t done. “Tyler says Vickie Monroe was from McLean, one of those ritzy suburbs the two of us always fantasize about.”
Eve couldn’t deny this, either. Once in a while, back in the day before we both got jobs at Bellywasher’s and got so busy, we used to take drives through some of the suburbs we fantasized about. Yes, in our weaker moments, both Eve and I had imagined ourselves living Vickie’s life. We’d have perfect homes in a perfect gated community, and of course, we’d be neighbors. My brighter-than-average children would attend the better-than-normal schools nearby with Eve’s. Because our husbands would make enough money to support us in the upper-class style we were used to, neither of us would have to work. But that didn’t mean we’d be couch potatoes. Both of us would be involved in our kids’ lives, and in their activities. Together, Eve and I would contribute to our community.