Rosemary Harris - Dead Head

Just then two cops entered the diner. Babe got up and handed them a gray cardboard box that was stashed under the counter. It was filled with three dozen donuts. One of them opened the box and inhaled deeply.

“Can’t survive the weekly community meeting without a little help from Pete.”

“Standing order every Tuesday. Come to think of it, Brookfield was here on a Tuesday. Same time. As soon as the boys came in, he left.”

“You think he doesn’t like donuts?” Lucy said.

Or he didn’t like cops. I wanted to hear what Roxy Rhodes had to say. I still had a few reservations about Kevin Brookfield before I was ready to jump on the welcome wagon.

Forty minutes later, we were at Rhodes Realty with Roxy Rhodes demanding to know what I’d said to Kevin Brookfield to put him off buying the nursery. Without even asking us to sit down she launched into her assertion that I’d poisoned the waters by leaking information about the former owner’s murder.

“It’s not exactly a secret,” I said. She didn’t threaten legal action but came close. I thought I heard the word ruin mixed into her rambling, apoplectic message.

“Roxy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I only saw the man once. Maybe the Moms told him. Maybe he read about it online. Maybe he was full of baloney and was never really interested. Lots of people look at places and have no intention of buying. They’re real estate junkies. Window shopping.”

She calmed down briefly. She knew I was right.

“And who is this?” she said, pointing a bony, reaperlike finger at Lucy.

“She’s a friend. Can we sit down and talk like civilized people? Like neighbors?” (Thank you, Mr. Rogers.) Roxy collapsed onto her designer throne, and Lucy and I pulled over two stylish but decidedly uncomfortable wire chairs. “Thank you.”

All Roxy knew about Kevin Brookfield was that he specifically came to her office to see about buying the Chiaramonte nursery. No other property interested him.

“I should have known he wasn’t for real. He didn’t even try to get the price down. But he was so simpatico. He said he was making a fresh start and he had that wonderful smile.”

Good grief, did he flirt with her, too? I showed her the picture, but she was noncommittal.

“It’s this economy,” she said, tossing it aside. “Or perhaps I’ve just lost my mojo.” Suddenly Roxy looked old, as old as she really was. This was more than the loss of a 6 percent commission.

“That’s not it,” I said, trying to make her feel better. “Your mojo is fine. But there’s a possibility Kevin Brookfield may not be who he says he is.”

She wilted, seeing her commission, and perhaps a budding romance, flying out the door. “Brookfield suggested you and Caroline and he might go into business together.”

“Highly unlikely, especially given Caroline’s situation.”

A door in the outer office slammed and Roxy’s assistant tapped gently on Roxy’s for permission to enter.

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Rhodes. The documents you requested? You wanted to know as soon as they arrived.” The assistant maneuvered her way around the enormous desk and placed a light blue bubble pack envelope in front of the slumping Roxy. Then she turned on her kitten heels and left.

“What are you women staring at now?” Roxy said. “Is there some other deal you’d like to put the kibosh on? Some other area of my business that you’d like to involve yourself in?” The outside door slammed again.

“Just one,” I said, rising out of my seat. “Can you tell me what delivery service you use?”

“This isn’t from a delivery service. It’s a personal matter.”

As if on cue, Lucy jumped up and ran to the window.

“A blue Civic,” she said. “Connecticut license plate 485 SMK. It could even be the one I saw last night.” She grabbed a felt pen from Roxy’s desk and in the absence of any paper, scribbled the license plate number on the palm of her hand.

“Will you two fruitcakes please get out of here?” Roxy sank her head into both of her hands. “Natalie,” she yelled for her assistant, “get my calendar. I need four days at the ranch and a stop at Dr. P’s on the way up.”

“Save us some time, Roxy. Unless that envelope has something to do with Brookfield or Caroline Sturgis, we don’t really care what’s in it. We just want to know who delivered it.”

She closed her eyes and made circles with her head in a stress-reducing ritual I imagined she performed many times during the course of a morning like this one.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with either of them. I do represent a great many properties apart from that decrepit, blood-soaked nursery. It’s from an agency we sometimes work with. Nina Mazzo’s.”

I called Nina and made an appointment to see her that afternoon. This time I didn’t pretend to be Thelma Turner.

Lucy stared at the image we’d printed out from my computer. “Kevin Brookfield must be a helluva lot better looking than this picture if every woman in this burg would be so all-fired happy to see him relocate here.”

“We don’t know that Donnelley is Brookfield. You may be looking at a picture of someone else. But Brookfield has something. No denying. It’s something else,” I said, trying to figure out what it was. Lucy and I had time before our meeting with Nina Mazzo, so we doubled back to the Paradise to pick the brains of the town’s resident expert on men. Maybe Babe could put her finger on it.

“It’s true. I am generally acknowledged to be an expert on a great many subjects-movies, music, and men included,” Babe said. We’d parked ourselves in a rear booth and made our guru join us.

“What makes a woman gravitate toward a man?” Lucy asked.

“She kidding or is this some Sphinxlike riddle?” Babe said.

“We’re serious.”

“You mean if he isn’t wealthy, famous, or powerful and doesn’t look like Johnny Depp, act like Mr. Darcy, and make love like Don Juan?” She gave it some thought. “Okay, he’s got a sad story. How’s this? He’s a single parent whose wife died young-and tragically-and he nursed her until the bitter end. Could be his mother dying but not as effective as the wife. The kid’s not necessary; in the absence of a kid, a dog would work. Dogs are chick magnets, but best for generating one-night stands, not lasting relationships.”

Lucy and I were extremely impressed. “Where do you get this?” she asked.

“Soap Opera Digest, 1994. Classic story line. I think it was on Another World,” she said. Babe continued spinning her hypothetical situations. “Hoping to reconnect with a childhood sweetheart is another good one, but the dead wife story works really well. Shows he’s a romantic and will stay faithful-even after you’re in the ground.” She stood up to go back to work.

“Did Brookfield say anything like that to you?” I asked.

“He suggested it. Single guy, not too handsome, not too neat, so probably straight, looking for real estate in a new town, to start a business. To start over. Charming, no ring, or ring line, as if he’d just taken it off. A little flirty but nothing overt. Screams ‘you can trust me, I have a broken heart.’”

Even if she was wrong, it was a damn good answer on the fly and something to be filed for future reference. Oddly enough, apart from the wife and the part about being new in town, she had also just described Mike O’Malley-romantic, faithful, looking after an aged parent, and a dog owner, always a plus. And just at that moment entering the diner.

“Oh, this looks a mite scary. Three beautiful women conspiring? Or is it gossiping?” O’Malley said. He sat at a counter stool a few feet away and waved off the young waitress’s efforts to bring him a menu.