Donna Andrews - Chesapeake Crimes - This Job Is Murder!

She shook her head. “So Mr. Rudy poisoned himself.”

“Looks that way. The medical examiner agrees, based on the residue on the gloves and on the victim’s hands. Right where there’d be residue if you took the gloves off incorrectly.” He smiled down at her. “So, like I said, you provided the important clue.”

She felt herself blush at his compliment. “Did you tell Mrs. Rudy?”

“I just did. Can’t say she was terribly grateful. There’s a chance this could affect the settlement from the life insurance company since the victim was committing a crime at the time of his death.”

“The woman almost gets killed and she’s worried about life insurance? She should be relieved she avoided being poisoned.” Katie shook her head. She supposed it was as good as they were going to get: a killer brought to justice, the case solved and closed. Too bad the victim in this case wasn’t terribly innocent or his intended victim terribly grateful. She shrugged. Not all murder mysteries had happy endings.

Wertz grinned. “Well, let me just say that I’m grateful you figured the bit out about the gloves. And I was wondering if it would be okay if I call you some time. When I’m off-duty, of course.”

Katie smiled as she handed over her business card. Now that was a happy ending.

Cathy Wiley achieved her lifetime goal of being an author with the publication of Dead to Writes , the first in the Cassandra Ellis mysteries. The second novel, Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Write , continues the series and her dream. She draws upon her experience in the hospitality business to show the lighter, quirkier side of people, and upon her own morbid mind to show the darker side. In her free time, she enjoys scuba diving, dancing, wine, food, and reading. She lives near Baltimore, Maryland, with two very spoiled cats.

“Where the hell were you Friday?” Tiffany shrieked as I walked through the office door.

I ignored her and continued to my desk.

“Now, now,” Jessica said. “Let’s try to behave like adults. Kate,” she said, turning to me, “we’re very disappointed in you. You were supposed to open the office and cover the phones on the day after Thanksgiving. Hasn’t Dr. Grace already spoken to you about the importance of keeping your commitments?”

For Jessica, apparently, behaving like an adult meant adopting the kind of tone you’d use when talking to a four-year-old child. I set down my purse and took off my coat.

“There’s just no use talking to some people,” Amanda said, while staring at the top of the window behind me. In the eight months I’d been working for Edith Grace Personnel Services, she had yet to look me in the face or address me directly.

All three of the mean girls, as I called them, were lined up in front of my desk. Normally, they waited until afternoon to pick on me. Maybe they’d missed doing it over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend.

Maybe this would be the day they’d push too far and propel me into quitting this thankless, dead-end job.

Or maybe I wouldn’t have to quit. Business was slow, and it was an open secret that Dr. Grace would probably be downsizing her staff before too long. A sane boss would fire one of the mean girls, who were overpaid, underworked, and largely interchangeable. Tiffany and Amanda were slightly ruder, but Jessica, though arguably incompetent, was better at sucking up to the boss. And they were all expert at blaming anything that went wrong on me. So the odds were that Dr. Grace would lay me off instead. As I stared at the frowning faces in front of me, I almost hoped she would.

“Good morning to you, too.” I tried to keep my tone even and my face cheerful. “What seems to be the problem?”

They all three blinked and gawked at me for a few seconds.

“You didn’t come to the office on Friday,” Tiffany said.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in the office because the key I was given didn’t open the outer door.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out the key in question, still attached to a small tag marked “Building Entrance” in our boss’s spidery handwriting.

“That’s impossible,” Jessica said. “That’s the key we’ve always used.”

“Oh, dear,” Tiffany said. “Didn’t we change the lock after the last receptionist left?”

Jessica’s mouth formed a little O. Amanda sighed loudly. Tiffany actually growled. I had to suppress a giggle at this rare break in the mean girls’ solidarity.

Jessica recovered her composure and turned to me, a frown marring her perfectly made-up face.

“Still, you could have called someone,” she said.

“I called Dr. Grace and left a message,” I said. “I knew the three of you were planning to be out of town. So after waiting outside the building in the freezing cold for an hour, I went home. I kept my cell phone with me for the rest of the day, but Dr. Grace never returned my call.”

I refrained from adding, “So there!” They could probably hear it in my voice.

“Let’s just see about that, shall we?” Jessica said. “I can’t imagine that Dr. Grace would not have done something if she actually got such a message.”

She set off briskly down the hall toward Dr. Grace’s office.

“Someone slipped a nasty note under the front door,” Tiffany said. “And who knows how many other clients went away upset.” She was waving a slip of paper-the nasty note, I assumed. But her eyes were on my in-box. In fact, she and Amanda were both staring at the foot-high stack of work the three of them had dumped on my desk Wednesday, when they heard Dr. Grace order me to come in on Friday. I wondered how many of the projects in that stack they were supposed to have finished by this morning?

“Unbelievable,” Amanda said to the ceiling. “Come on, Tiff.”

They followed Jessica down the hall. I sat down and pressed a key to wake up my computer.

“Dr. Grace?” I heard Jessica saying, as she knocked on our boss’s door. “Can we talk to you for a moment?”

Dr. Grace would probably look puzzled and disappointed, and claim that she didn’t recall getting my message, and ask if I was quite sure I had dialed her number correctly. At least that’s what she’d done a month ago when I’d called her to say I’d had a flat tire on my way to work. So this time I’d followed up my voice mail message with an email from my home computer.

“Dr. Grace? Are you in there?”

Of course she was in there. It was only a few minutes until the regular nine a.m. Monday staff meeting. Any second now she would emerge, ready to pontificate to her minions and receive their daily tributes of candy, baked goods, lattes, and flowers.

I scanned my own email. Yes, there were several complaints from people who’d tried to reach us Friday. And the copy of my Friday message. Any reasonable person would understand what had happened.

And if they were unreasonable and fired me, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Maybe-

“Oh, my God!” Jessica exclaimed from the other end of the hallway.

Someone began shrieking, but I couldn’t tell who it was until Tiffany burst into the reception area, still shrieking.

“What now?” I muttered.

Jessica dashed in behind Tiffany.

“Now, Tiffany,” she was saying. “We must be brave.”

Tiffany threw herself onto the couch in the waiting area and added sobs to her shrieks.

“Go help Amanda!” Jessica snapped at me.

I got up and headed down the hall. I found Amanda crumpled in the doorway of Dr. Grace’s office. Her eyelids were fluttering, so either she’d fainted and was coming around or she was faking it and vexed that no one had come to her aid.