Wine, Dine and Christmas Crimes, Maria Swan [best short novels of all time .TXT] 📗

had to wait three hours to let our stomach do its job. And yet, no one in Arizona followed that rule, at least no one I knew.

Wait, I found something, I clicked on it.

Martin was not her real last name. You don’t say! The truly shocking mention was at the very end of the article. She wasn’t simply Kay’s maid. She cleaned house for 45 percent of The Nest’s residents but was not on the HOA’s payroll. What? Oh, each resident paid her separately. Cash.

Of course, she was here illegally but no one cared as long as she did a good job and took her pay at half the going rate. Crap.

Somehow that mitigated my resentment toward Kay. Not for employing the girl but for never telling us she had a maid. In reality she had—what—an underpaid cleaning lady? What about Double Wide? Maybe he owned a condo at The Nest? There were over 80 units in the high-rise, and I bet if he did own one it wasn’t under his name either. The more I twirled the questions in my mind the more convinced I was he had some personal relationship with this poor soul.

Her time of death was between seven and eight in the evening. Just about the time I saw him park his fancy Maserati in front of the lobby, dressed to impress as they said around here. That was it. He had a date with the cleaning lady. It all made sense now, she had changed her clothes for the date.

But then, how did he kill her? Put a funnel to her mouth and pour poison into her stomach until she started to throw up? Eewwuu. How come he hadn’t had anything in his hands when he got out of the car? I stopped to take that back—he had the stupid phone and took a pic of my car license plate with.

And I remembered how he’d looked a bit wobbly on his feet. I bet all that had been recorded on the security cameras. I bet it was the main reason why no one asked me what I’d been doing there that evening. It wasn’t hard to see that I’d simply made a wrong turn—even if Walter Gold Buttons had probably bad-mouthed me with Adam and Eve. Not that they would have believed him anyhow. We had an established relationship. The detectives were aware I’m golden regarding reporting bad deeds. And on that last glorious self-proclaimed statement on the subject of my acute sense of investigation, I fell asleep. With the Christmas lights on.

Kassandra called me early the next morning—well, not that early, she was already at work and wanted me to hold. Sunny needed to talk to me.

“What’s going on? Why didn’t she just call me?” My before coffee attitude as usual wasn’t on the happy side of morning.

“Shhss, later.”

“Good morning, Monica, I wanted to put you up to date personally. The Brown sisters are due back today. I bet that’s a relief. Nothing for you to do. From now on they’ll deal with the police, the doorman, and of course the unfortunate sellers. And Monica, somehow I’ll make it up to you. I’m aware that you got caught in the middle of that regrettable drama to no fault of yours. Well, you can relax now, and thank you for being a good sport.”

“Huh, oh, it’s okay.” I yawned. “Sorry. Do you know that Brenda is home?”

“She is? No, didn’t know. Maybe I’ll call her, and we’ll do lunch.”

“Oh, I think today she needs to meet the cops at The Nest. But not sure about the times. Ok, see you at the office then.”

“Wait, wait. Why is she meeting the detectives at The Nest?”

“No clue, you need to ask her. She’s home.” Well, that went well. Why, oh why must I be so spiteful? It’s not Sunny’s fault that the woman puked and... Now I was feeling queasy. I decided to go check on Brenda—check on Brenda and on Brenda’s coffee, which was always better than mine. Go figure.

I put on my bathrobe and crossed the driveway separating our places in not such a good mood. So I went through all that crap surrounding the condo, and when all was said and done I would get a big fat nothing. Okay, I’ll get a big thank you from my boss. Whatever. Dior barked before I had a chance to reach the back door.

“Quiet boy, you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.” Never mind most of them were probably already up and on their way to work. Once again I reminded myself how lucky I had been to have people like Brenda and my father-in-law helping me out in time of need. Poor Ms. Martin was cleaning rich people’s condos, and that was okay, but obviously she must not have had a place to live if she changed her clothes in the vacant condo. That made no sense.

“Well, are you coming in or are you growing roots?” I hadn’t even noticed Brenda standing at the door.

She took my empty mug from my hands and went back in. I followed her. Dior looked at me from the open laundry room door where his breakfast had just been served.

Thirty minutes later I was ready to go. We decided to take one car. Brenda’s Suv.

“I forgot how comfy your car is,” I said to Brenda who looked very businesslike in her black polo shirt with the B&B Catering logo. Maybe I should have worn mine, but I originally had planned on driving myself to the office first. Sitting in the passenger seat of her Honda Pilot gave me a great elevated view of the road compared to my tiny Fiat. Okay it felt tiny compared to the Honda or to Tristan’s Land Rover or to Sunny’s Cadillac.

“What do you think the cops want?”

She shrugged. “Bob said they are trying to figure out where her missing clothes ended up.”

I nodded. “Couldn’t they check the security cameras?”

“Of course, they did that right