Chapter Thirty. The Body with The Panini
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE BODY WITH THE PANINI
It’s been a while since I saw the inside of Mr. Gutierrez’s place, so the first thing I do is check to see what’s changed.
“New school picture?” I ask, spotting the eight-by-ten frame from across the living room.
“That’s not for public consumption.” He tries to dart ahead of me, but I lean to the right to block him before he can hide the evidence.
“It can’t be worse than the old one.” The clip-on tie and transition lenses combo would have been hard for a movie star to pull off, much less your average middle schooler.
“You’d be surprised. That photographer is evil.”
On closer inspection, I’m sorry to report that it’s not an embarrassing picture, if you overlook the background. “Do they have a lot of red barns in Atlanta?”
“I wanted the lasers,” Felix grumbles. “They vetoed me.”
I assume “they” means his mother and stepfather. “This way you’ll always remember those happy days on the farm.”
“I should wear overalls next year. That would show them.” He takes the frame out of my hand and sets it face down on the coffee table.
“At least now you know the old picture wasn’t my final form.” It sounds like a joke, if you overlook the faint blush.
Taking mercy on him, I walk over to the breakfast nook, where a series of mismatched round and oval frames lines the wall behind the table. “I don’t remember these.”
“Grandpa got inspired after Claude asked him to paint his going-away picture.” Felix joins me in inspecting a small portrait of Mr. Namura. “It was mostly landscapes and animals before.”
I make a show of looking at all of them, but of course I’m most interested in Grandma Lainey’s. The lines are loose and a little dreamy, so it’s hard to say whether it’s from a month ago or a decade. What I can tell is that it was painted by someone who thinks my grandmother is pretty great.
It’s tempting to press Felix to see what he knows about their history, but that would be a delicate operation. Me (super casual): Was your grandpa into my grandma? And while we’re on the subject, what exactly are your feelings about me?
“Is your grandfather home?” Even that sounds strange now that I’ve said it. Why do I care if we’re here alone? “In case he’s taking a nap or something,” I add, making it 20 percent more awkward.
“Let me check.” Felix disappears down the hall. I hear a light knock, followed by the sound of a door creaking open. “Nope,” he says, rejoining me. “He’s probably at the pool doing his exercises. The doctor gave him a hard time about not being active enough.”
“Did he tell him about Killing Me Softly?”
“You know, I’m not sure he did mention to his doctor that he’s a murder LARPer. That would have been a fascinating conversation.”
I pull up a barstool as Felix heads into the kitchen to make our lunch. “So,” I say, watching him sling cold cuts and mustard onto the counter.
“So,” he echoes, dragging a skillet out of the drawer under the stove.
“If the poison wasn’t in my ring, where was it?”
There’s a thoughtful silence as he spreads butter on the outside of the bread. “I keep thinking about the cup.”
“Me too,” I admit, plucking a potato chip out of the bag Felix set in front of me. “It’s a lot harder to tell when something’s a clue in real life.”
He nods while dropping a pat of butter into the hot pan.
“What if we’re grasping at straws because otherwise we have to face the fact that we hit a dead end?”
At first, I’m not sure he heard my mumbled worry over the spatter of cooking sounds, but as soon as he flips the sandwich, Felix turns to face me. “Or maybe this is the point in the investigation where we know all the things, but we haven’t figured out how they fit.”
He lets me sit with that while he slides the first sandwich onto a plate.
I know exactly which moment he’s talking about, because it’s one of my favorite parts of any mystery.
The problem is that from the outside, it looks like magic.
There’s no seven-step guide to triggering an aha!
moment when your own brain is doing the work.
Once the other sandwich is done, Felix brings both plates to the table, and I carry the chips and two glasses of water. I’m about to take a bite when he pops up again, detouring into the living room.
“Maybe this will help,” he says, placing a small chessboard between our placemats.
I shove the sandwich in my mouth, stalling for time. After I chew and swallow, wipe my mouth, and take a drink, I decide to be honest. “I don’t play chess.”
“Me neither,” Felix admits. “My grandpa tried to teach me when I was little, but it didn’t stick. We’re starting over from zero this summer.”
Before I can ask how we’re going to play a game neither of us understands, he extends an arm and carefully sweeps all the pieces off the board and onto the table.
“Let’s start with the king,” he says, wiping his hands on a napkin. “This is Claude.”
Felix moves a tall white piece with a crown on top to the center of the board, glancing at me to make sure I’m with him so far. “That’s not where you would put it to start an actual game,” he informs me, in case I’m tempted to try this at home.
“I assume you also don’t give them names.”
He shakes his head. “You have to use the proper terminology. Like this is one of the horsey guys”—he makes a neighing sound, trotting it up and down in the air—“and these ones are the castles.” Felix arranges four shorter pieces with tops like jack-o’-lantern teeth around “Claude.”
“What about these?” I put one of the smallest pieces with the round tops on a corner square.
“Peasants. Highly expendable.”
The sandwich sits heavy in my gut. “Is that what Bradley was?”
“No,” Felix says after a beat of silence. “I don’t think so. He had a lot of power, like one of these.” He taps a piece that looks like a worm with a dot on top. After another hesitation, he lays it on its side near the center of the board.
I try to swallow, but it takes a drink of water to ease the tightness in my throat. It’s not that I’ve forgotten what we learned about Bradley from Sofia, or how he made my skin crawl. But he’s still dead, and murder is an extreme punishment.
“What about this one?” Even I know it’s the queen, mostly because Felix already IDed the king. The question is who he thinks it should represent on our nerdy murder board.
“It pains me to say it, but I think it has to be Bernie. She’s at the center of the web.” Felix picks up the queen and uses it to nudge the king off to a corner. “Otherwise, it would be your grandmother.”
“I know.” And not only because she inherited Claude’s spangly baton.
I never had to ask what “charisma” meant, because I’d seen it firsthand in Grandma Lainey.
It’s more than being the funniest, or the best-dressed, or the person who knows the most, though it’s a bit of all those things.
When my grandmother is in a room, every eye is drawn in her direction.
And if someone like that thinks you’re magical? It’s a good feeling.
But she would understand the strategic choice we’re making here, because solving the mystery is the most important thing. And as Grandma Lainey often says, true confidence doesn’t require a billboard in Times Square.
I add two of the small pieces to the board. “We’re the peasants,” I inform Felix.
“Because we don’t have a car so it’s hard to cover a lot of distance?”
“I was thinking more like lurking in the background, observing everything.”
“Also easy to underestimate, until we come in clutch and save the day?”
Musical theater, I remind myself. A certain level of optimism is probably a bar for entry. I move our bald little dudes to the lower right, shifting the queen and the prone piece representing Bradley to the opposite quadrant.
“Library,” I say, pointing at our markers before tapping the space to the left. “Billiards room.”
It’s correct-ish, at least architecturally. Felix adds a few more pieces on our side, naming them as he sets them down. “Your grandmother, my grandfather, Mr. Namura, Mrs. A, and Malia.”
“Until she sneaks off to the kitchen,” I remind both of us.
Felix is frowning at the board.
“What?” I try to see what he’s seeing. “Are you wondering where the kitchen is? Do we need more props?”
“You put Bernie in the billiards room.”
Huh. I did, didn’t I? It’s an embarrassing gaffe, even though this is neither real chess nor an actual murder map. “Should we take her off the board for now? I guess she was upstairs until … later.” I reach for the queen, but Felix grabs hold of my arm.
“Was she?” The tilt of his brows says Think about it, so I do.
There was no mistaking the moment she arrived on the scene, volume cranked to max, but I have no idea where she was coming from—or how long she’d been there. I assumed she was in her brother’s apartment, just like I assumed Malia was with us in the library the whole time.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“Or do you?” He goes full movie trailer voice this time.
“Will I ever find out, if we keep talking in rhetorical questions?” I fire back.
“Maybe you know more than you think.” Felix grabs the queen, hopping her from square to square until she makes a sharp left turn at the end of the board. “What if she was there when it happened?”
“And then what, she just left?”
“Ran away, more likely.” He holds up a finger. “But not before hiding her cup in the kitchen.”
The idea that Bernie had some nefarious part to play in Bradley’s murder is so appealing, I immediately mistrust it. “Why would she do that, though?”
“He was standing between her and the dream of a super beige new building.” Felix shrugs.
“She was probably looking at a massive payout, if she managed to overturn Claude’s will, because then they’d have to buy the whole place from her.
Plus she’d get a fancy new condo out of the deal, with her style of neighbors. That’s a huge incentive.”
I was talking about the cup-hiding part, but okay. He’s leapfrogged right over that. “You think she killed her own nephew?”