Murder on the Rocks Read online

  “Serrated?”

  “No.”

  Albright sighed and turned his attention to the crime scene techs standing nearby. “Bag these,” he said. “And the block, too.” Then he removed his gloves, took my arm, and steered me out of the kitchen. “The autopsy on Ginny isn’t done yet, but the description of the knife you gave me matches what the ME described.”

  “You think my knife killed her?”

  “It seems a likely possibility.”

  “Does this mean you’re rethinking your earlier theory that someone is trying to frame me?”

  He stared at me for several long seconds, looking so deep into my eyes I felt he could see into my very soul. I stared right back at him, afraid to so much as blink. Eventually he sighed and broke off the contest.

  “We haven’t found any blood evidence on you, in the bar, or in your apartment. And whoever did this would have been covered in blood.”

  I shuddered at the thought.

  “Granted, you could have ditched the clothes you were wearing and showered before calling us this morning, but the techs used Luminol on your shower drain and in your apartment and found no evidence of anything. Still, you have to admit, the evidence so far is a bit damning.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  I sighed. “I guess that’s the best I can ask for at this point.”

  “Let’s stick with the plan we have and see what develops. If we find the knife that was used as the murder weapon, we might have to rethink things. But for now let’s just go for it and see what turns up.”

  “Does that mean you’re not going to arrest me, Detective Albright?”

  “Not yet. And given that we’re supposed to be friends and I’ve seen you practically naked, I think you should start calling me Duncan.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, blushing. “I might have overreacted a little bit earlier.”

  “You’re not going to do it again, are you?”

  “What? Overreact or take my clothes off?”

  “Both,” Albright said with a crooked little grin.

  “I’ll try not to do either.”

  “Hmm, too bad,” Albright said. Then, with a wink, he left.

  Chapter 7

  With Duncan Albright out of my hair, I turned my attention back to getting the bar prepped. Making money was more important than ever now because at the rate things were going, I’d need it to pay a lawyer. Or post bail.

  Up first was washing and chopping fruit for the drinks, and then doing the same with the lettuce and tomatoes we used for sandwich orders. But without my knives, it was going to be a difficult task. I went back out to the main bar area and searched until I found the paring knife I used to create lemon twists. Fortunately it was still there, though not in the spot where I usually kept it. Apparently the crime scene guys had examined it and decided it wasn’t worth taking. I considered asking if it was okay to use it, and then decided the hell with it. The crime scene techs all looked busy and uninterested in what I was doing, and Duncan was nowhere to be seen. So I took it and went back to the kitchen. It wasn’t easy trying to slice tomatoes and lettuce with the thing, but I managed, though the tomato slices ended up looking rather flat and dejected.

  I turned on the oven so it could preheat for the pizzas I serve, a very popular item on my menu since I make them fresh and to order. I also turned on the deep fat fryer I use for my waffle fries and cheese curds, and added fresh oil. The food and kitchen prep used up half an hour or so, and after checking to make sure my occasionally cranky ice machine was producing, I inventoried the bottled beers in the cooler and headed down to the cellar to get what I needed to restock.

  The basement was my least favorite area in the building. It was dank, gloomy, and filled with stuff that created way too many dark corners, creepy cobwebs, and odd shadows. I kept vowing to go down there and clean out all the junk, but most of it was my father’s stuff. He was a bit of a pack rat and there were boxes stacked to the ceiling in places. He also liked to dabble in woodworking in his spare time, and did so at a large built-in workbench that spanned nearly half of one wall. The emotional toll of going through his things was something I hadn’t felt ready to tackle yet. I avoided the workbench whenever I came down here, rarely even looking at it. I preferred to leave it exactly the way it was on the day my father died, every tool, every scrap of wood right where he left it.

  Looking at it now, however, it was obvious that things had been moved and disturbed. A fine patina of dust had accumulated on the table, and it created outlines of some of the tools that had been moved. Apparently the police and crime scene techs had been down here while conducting their search and evidence collection, though they had been more careful here than they were upstairs, returning each item to almost the same exact spot each time. I examined the tools hanging on the pegboard and those spread out over the table top to see if anything was missing, but near as I could tell nothing had been taken. While that was some consolation, the workbench area had been something of a shrine for me, and seeing it disturbed brought tears to my eyes.

  Eager to escape the emotional cues in the cellar, I focused on the task at hand, loading my milk crate with bottled beers and hauling them upstairs. I felt flushed and a little winded by the time I made it back to the bar, and when I found Duncan Albright there watching me, my flush inexplicably spread, leaving me with a hot, prickling sensation over my entire body. I wasn’t sure if this was a new type of synesthetic experience, or something else entirely.

  Either Duncan had gone home or he kept a change of clothes in his car because he had ditched his suit in favor of khaki pants and a collared pullover shirt. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and he waved the other in front of himself. “I hope this will pass for bartender wear.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, setting the crate on the floor and moving beers from it to the cooler.

  He held up the coffee cup. “My fellow cops and I, and our crime scene techs, are quite taken with your coffee. Bars aren’t typically known for their coffee, unless it’s in a bad way. Most places have stuff that tastes like battery acid. What’s your secret?”

  “I’m something of a coffee junkie so I like to have some decent stuff available all day. Plus it helps to have some on hand if I need to sober up one of my customers. I make my own blend using beans from a coffee shop a few blocks over and I grind them fresh every morning. It’s a mix of Ethiopian, Guatemalan, and a mild Arabica, but my secret ingredient is a pinch of salt used to brew each pot. It takes out the bitterness. Do you drink battery acid often?”

  My question momentarily stumped him but after a few seconds he caught on, winked, and smiled at me. “Only when I’m grilling suspects. It makes me meaner.”

  I finished loading the beers into the cooler and walked the crate back into the kitchen, setting it in a corner. When I came back out, Duncan was standing in front of the liquor bottles lined up along the back bar, staring at them.

  “It’s all rather overwhelming,” he said.

  “It seems so at first, but it’s not that bad. And I have a cheater for you.” I reached under the bar, grabbed my bartender’s bible, and handed it to him. “Even I have to look drinks up from time to time.”

  Albright set down his coffee and flipped through the book, looking intimidated.

  “Tell you what,” I said, taking it from him and returning it to its hiding place beneath the bar. “Let’s start out with the basics and we’ll move up from there. For tonight you can just follow me around and watch what I do. You’ll be surprised how fast you’ll get the hang of it. The easiest drinks, like your basic booze and mixers, you’ll be doing before the night is out. But there is one drink you should learn by tomorrow because it’s my signature drink and very popular with my lunchtime crowd. It’s a coffee martini that I call the Macktini. Use chocolate vodka instead of the plain stuff and you have a mocha Macktini.”

  “Chocolate vodka?” Duncan said, grimacin
g. “Isn’t there a law against that? If there isn’t, there should be.”

  “Don’t knock it until you try it. I buy the chocolate vodka ready-made, but I create a lot of my own vodka infusions here and I’m experimenting all the time with new ideas. I’ve made ginger vodka, blueberry vodka, citrus vodka, vanilla bean vodka, habanero pepper vodka, cinnamon and apple vodka, rose—”

  “Okay, okay, I give,” Duncan said, holding his hand up to stop me.

  “It’s really easy to do,” I said. “And it makes for some very interesting drinks. All you have to do is put some vodka and whatever food or flavoring you want into a jar with a lid, and let it sit. Sometimes it takes a few days, sometimes a week or two, depending on what ingredients you use. Citrus fruits infuse nicely in about four days but the ginger takes a little over a week. I have several infusions going in the kitchen now, and while I’ve only played with vodka so far, it can be done with other liquors, too. I’m thinking of trying gin next.”

  Albright stared at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “Anyway,” I said, ignoring his skepticism, “the vodkas are popular for making many types of specialty martinis. And they’re all the rage these days, so you might as well start learning them now.”

  I grabbed a shaker from beneath the bar and scooped some ice into it. “I make a jar of espresso that I keep here in the fridge,” I told Albright, showing him where it was. “To make a Macktini you just add an ounce of the espresso, half an ounce of heavy cream, an ounce and a half each of vodka and Kahlua, and an ounce of white crème de cacao.” I poured each item over the ice as I talked and, since I was teaching Albright how to do it, I used a shot glass to measure, though I don’t normally. I’ve been able to eyeball an ounce with astounding accuracy for years now. “Once the ingredients are all in, you put the lid on and shake.” I showed him how to put the double lid on the shaker and how to take off just the strainer lid once the shaking was done. “Now I need a martini glass,” I told him.

  Albright looked at the array of glasses behind the bar and then back at me with a helpless expression. “I only ever drink beer,” he admitted. I rescued him by showing him where the martini glasses were. I poured out the concoction and offered him the glass.

  “I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m on the job.”

  “You don’t have to drink the whole thing,” I said. “Just take a sip.”

  He did so, and his expression changed from grimacing skepticism to surprised pleasure. “Wow,” he said. “That is good.” Apparently being on the job wasn’t that much of a concern because he followed the first taste with another, much bigger one before handing the glass back to me.

  Recalling that I had earlier pegged this as a four-martini day and not wanting to waste good booze, I chugged back the rest of it while Albright watched.

  “Okay,” I said, licking my lips and putting the empty glass in the sink, “let’s learn about some basics.”

  I spent the next half hour showing Albright each of the different sizes and types of glasses we have, from highball tumblers and martini glasses to red wine goblets and white wine glasses. By the time I got to the beer steins and mugs, he looked shell-shocked.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “No one is going to shoot you if you use the wrong glass.”

  “Bullets I can handle,” Duncan said. “This . . . I’m not so sure.”

  Time flew by as we readied the place for opening and continued our crash bartending course. Anxious to clean up the rest of the black fingerprint dust the crime scene techs were leaving everywhere, I asked them to let me know when they were done. It was nearly four o’clock and I was on the verge of panicking when one of them finally told me they were done with the main bar level and had only the basement left to process. I thanked him for letting me know, grabbed a pile of rags and a bottle of spray cleaner, and went to work as fast as I could.

  The print dust seemed to be on every surface and half the time it smeared when I tried to wipe it off. Duncan heard me grumbling as I went and offered up an apology. “Sorry it’s such a mess but it’s a necessary evil.”

  “If you say so, but I imagine your crew will end up with hundreds of customer prints to wade through that will prove nothing more than that those people were in the bar.”

  “It might prove to be a wasted effort,” Duncan admitted. “But it’s what we do. Investigations like this involve a lot of grunt work.”

  As five o’clock drew closer my staff began showing up, and I gave Duncan a quick lowdown on what I knew of them. The first was Helmut, a slightly cranky, seventy-something German who had been cooking for my father for more than thirty years. His wife kept nagging him to retire and I secretly kept hoping she’d win that argument because it was time for Helmut to be gone. His ideas about food and cooking were as old as he was and his resistance to the changes I’d made in the menu over the past year or two made things difficult at times. But I was determined to update our menu both to make it simpler and to enhance the flavors of what we did have in order to compete with other bars and restaurants in the area. Helmut hated change and he resisted and grumbled about every single one I made. It was annoying and time consuming, but I didn’t have the heart to fire him. Cranky or not, uncooperative or not, he was like family to me, a crotchety old uncle who finally admitted that my BLT sandwich was one of the best things he’d ever tasted. Plus, he always showed up for work. He never stayed over; when the end of his shift came around he was outta there regardless of how busy we were. But while he was working he always gave it his all.

  I filled Duncan in on what I knew about Helmut and his wife and did a brief introduction. Helmut was my biggest challenge with this little ruse because he’d been around long enough to remember someone from my childhood, the story Duncan and I had agreed on. But if he found Duncan’s presence at all suspicious, he didn’t show it. He grunted a greeting that sounded like hello but might have been lacking the last letter, and glanced around the bar at the crime scene techs that were still there. “What a damn mess,” he grumbled with a frown and a shake of his grizzled head. Then he disappeared into the kitchen, dismissing us both. Small talk was definitely not one of Helmut’s stronger attributes.

  My night bartender, Billy Hughes, an attractive twenty-something African-American whose skin is the color of a Macktini, came in a few minutes after Helmut.

  “Billy has worked here for a year and a half,” I told Duncan in private before doing a formal introduction. “My father hired him to bartend in the evenings and he attends law school during the day. He’s quite a chick magnet and hence good for business.”

  “He was here the night your father was killed.”

  It wasn’t a question. “He was, but he left before it happened.”

  “Do you know if he had an alibi for the time of the shooting?” I was taken aback by the question and my expression must have shown that because he then added, “Look, I know you don’t want to think your friends or employees could be responsible for any of this, but we need to look into everyone no matter how far-fetched they may seem, if for no other reason than simply to rule them out.”

  “Billy had nothing to do with my father’s death. I’m certain of it.”

  “Did he have an alibi for that time?”

  Though I felt badgered by Duncan’s persistence, his tone was gentle. And damn if he wasn’t also right. I knew there were several people who couldn’t account for their exact whereabouts at the time my father was shot. Billy was one of them. And there was little sense to lying about it because Duncan could simply look it up later in the case file.

  “No,” I admitted. “He claimed he went straight home to his apartment after leaving the bar that night, dropped into bed, and fell asleep. Since he lives alone, there was no one who could vouch for his story.” At the time of my father’s murder the cops had questioned me at length about Billy’s relationship with my father, but there was nothing there for them to latch on to. Billy adored my father. Everyone did. Well, everyon
e except his killer.

  “A couple of the other detectives talked with Mr. Hughes earlier today and he has no alibi for much of last night, either,” Duncan said. “I don’t have a definitive time of death for Ms. Rifkin yet, but the ME gave me a range between four and six this morning. Mr. Hughes can’t prove where he was after leaving your bar last night at two-thirty and arriving at an eight A.M. class this morning.”

  I started to speak up again in Billy’s defense, knowing in my heart that he wasn’t the kind of monster who could kill someone in cold blood, much less two someones. But I also understood Duncan’s need for an open mind and decided it was best to let him sort through things on his own.

  Per our plan, I introduced Duncan to Billy as a family friend in need of a job, making no mention of Duncan’s real vocation or reason for being there. Billy greeted Duncan amicably and then with a whispered aside as he surveyed the remaining crime scene techs said, “The cops already questioned me. Came to my place a little while ago and asked me for an alibi, which I couldn’t give them. I heard it was Ginny.”

  “It was,” I said. Billy looked understandably edgy and I felt a need to reassure him despite knowing that he was, at least for now, high on the list of suspects as far as Duncan was concerned. But Duncan beat me to it.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” he said. “I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before and they consider everyone a suspect in the beginning.”

  I shot Duncan an amused look. “You make it sound like you’ve been a suspect yourself.”

  “I have,” he said, winking. “But we’ll save that story for later.”

  Billy eyed Duncan warily a moment and then shrugged. “Well, welcome aboard. Let me know if I can be of any help.”

  I explained to Billy that the alley was off limits and then directed his attention to the crime scene tech with the fingerprint scanner. “They’re getting prints on everyone who works here,” I told him. “It’s so they can rule people out.”

  Billy shrugged again, turned on his megawatt, chick-magnet smile, and said, “Whatever.” Then he made his way over to Jenny.