Chapter 39
SOPHIE
I called Nicholas and told him to drop the pizzas off at various cottages—the veggie for Ocean and her kids, the cheese for Hamilton, the spinaccia for us, and nothing for Lily-Ann because she’d rather eat her own cooking.
“What about Hamilton?” he asked on the phone.
“He gets the cheese,” I repeated.
“No, I mean—he was planning on hosting everyone.”
“Right, but we’re not there anymore.”
“It’s just, Hamilton loves having people over.”
“Are you worried about hurting his feelings?”
“Of course not,” Nicholas grumbled. “A little.”
So I silently vowed to never let this man go and said, “Bring ours to his cottage, we’ll eat with him.”
I went home to grab a few bottles of beer, and changed into sweatpants to further enhance the pizza-eating experience. When I got back, Nicholas and Hamilton were sitting across from each other, two pizza boxes on the coffee table.
I cracked the beers and offered the first to Hamilton.
“It’s not flavored,” he said.
“It’s beer-flavored,” Nicholas told him.
He took a sip, and a knock sounded on the screen door. The three of us turned to the door and waited. We expected a Marigold tenant to simply walk in, so we didn’t respond until a man said, “Hello? It’s Pax? CJ’s friend?”
“Oh,” I said. “Hi!”
“Come in, come in,” Hamilton intoned, in his innkeeper’s voice.
“Thanks.” Pax stepped inside, wearing a shirt with pictures of dogs across his muscular chest. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Would you like a glass of small-batch artisanal kombucha? Oh, and feel free to keep your shoes on.”
Pax eyed the complete absence of shoes on the entryway floor, then said, “Uh, thanks.”
“We’ve got plenty of pizza, too,” Nicholas told him.
“I really just wanted to talk to you about CJ?”
“Sure.” Hamilton gestured to the couch. “Make yourself at home.”
As Pax took a seat I realized that the text under the bland-looking dog on his shirt said NAMASIT and the text under the rainbow-colored dog said NAMASTE. Cute.
“So I don’t know if you heard the cops arrested her?” he asked.
“We know,” I told him.
“Right. Well, she asked me to take care of Mouse and Mona—her parakeets.”
“She has birds?” I asked.
“I want a cat,” Hamilton said.
“Why didn’t she ask Ocean?”
Pax shrugged one of his muscle-y shoulders.
“She, uh, she’s afraid of imposing on her.
A few dates, and she’s already living across the courtyard.
She doesn’t want to make Ocean take care of her.
She, uh … I just wanted to talk to someone about this.
The cops can’t genuinely think she killed Frank, right? ”
“They’ve got eyewitnesses,” Hamilton said.
“Karina? Surely, that’s not enough to convict her?”
I swallowed a bite of pizza. “What did she tell you about the accident?”
“Frank tripped, she reached for him. Karina never liked her, she imagined the shove.”
“Two people saw her push him,” Hamilton said.
“What? No. I was there. No one else said a word.”
“Sunny Wheeler just came forward.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Pax shifted on the couch. “You’ve met CJ. She’s better than that, she’s more evolved than that.”
“Why would they lie?” I asked him.
“Well, Karina saw what she wanted to see. But Sunny? Yeah. I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t he speak up immediately?” Nicholas asked. “Did Karina bribe him?”
Pax shook his head regretfully. “That part is very Sunny. Taking his time to think through what speaking up meant for him.”
“Didn’t he send in a written statement?” I asked Hamilton.
Hamilton nodded. “I’m sure once the cops interview him, they’ll learn more.”
“They’ll learn he was too drunk to know what he was seeing,” Pax insisted, then he gave an apologetic smile and stood. “Sorry for crashing your pizza party. I just—the whole thing is so mind-boggling. And now there’s a second witness.”
“Maybe Sunny’s covering his tracks,” I suggested.
Nicholas nodded. “Yeah, apparently Frank helped Sunny with a legal problem, so they could be, like, entwined somehow.”
“I love a tragic backstory,” I said.
“That’s so playwright of you.”
I chased my last bite of pizza with a sip of Nicholas’s beer. “We need to talk to Sunny. And I still think we’re overlooking clues in the staging. Like in the background. Obvious things we’re overlooking.”
“Not your killer ice cubes again,” Nicholas said.
“You could murder someone with an icicle and there’d be no weapon once it melted,” I informed him.
“Is that from an Agatha Christie novel?” he asked.
“Die Hard 2,” Hamilton murmured.
“I’m just saying those ice cubes on the stairs were suspicious,” I told them. “Anyway, there’s only one thing that will make them dismiss CJ as suspect.”
“What’s that?” Pax asked.
“Finding a better suspect.”
Even as the words left my mouth, I felt Nicholas tense. Like I was about to admit to Pax that we’d “found” better suspects for the murders of James Dedrick and Gregory Ybarra and framed Lily-Ann’s ex-husband, Piotr.
So I added, “That is, the person who actually did kill him.”
“Or we can prove it was an accident,” Hamilton said.
“Is that possible?” I asked. “To prove that nobody did it?”
“Probably not,” Pax said, scratching his flat stomach through his namaste shirt. “I can’t see the police backpedaling from ‘we found the killer’ to ‘oops, he just tripped.’ They’ll keep going until someone’s in jail for life.”