Mocha and Murder Read online

He looked annoyed that he had to get up from his chair to talk to us.

  "Then we're at the right one," Mom said, hopping out of the van.

  "Excuse me?" the security guard asked.

  "We were hired to clean the office. I guess they're selling the place or something," Mom said.

  "I didn't hear anything," the man said.

  "It's okay. We have room keys," Mom said, dangling her keychain as if the fact that security wasn't informed about a cleaning crew coming would somehow be related to us having a random keychain. We weren't even sure if these were the keys to the building.

  "Kid, unload the van while I figure out which key it is!" Mom called to me as I sat in the van panicking.

  "Do you have any paperwork?" the security guard asked.

  "Sure," Mom said.

  This was the moment of truth. Mom had made me create a contract using the same template and header we used for the catering business, except I changed Mom and Christy's Catering to Mom and Christy's Cleaning. It was surprisingly easy.

  Mom grabbed the fake paperwork out of the glovebox and handed it to the man. "Do you know which key it is?" she asked, handing him the keychain while he was still looking over the paper. "I wish they would just hand us the one key instead of a wad of keys."

  Mom's ruse distracted the man from looking at the "contract" too closely. He handed the paperwork back to Mom and searched the keys. "Happens to me all of the time," he said. "If they would have told me you were coming, I could have just let you in. I think it's this one. At least for the lobby. They only gave me that one and a master key to the rooms."

  Mom put the key in door. It worked.

  "Are the two of you going to clean the entire hotel?" he asked.

  "We were hired to clean out the office," Mom said. "But if you hear that they have an opening for the rest of the rooms, tell them that we're available most nights."

  The security guard nodded and went back to his chair. "Let me know if you need anything."

  "Let us know if you need to go and pick up something to eat," Mom said.

  The security guard smiled. "Come to think of it, I think I'll just go over to Mr. Toodles for a quick sandwich." He gave Mom his cell phone number if anything happened, and happily went off to the fast food place across the street.

  "See?" Mom said. "Easy."

  "Unless the police come," I said.

  "Why would they come?" Mom asked, entering the office. "Bring the stuff. We'll need those gloves just to make sure we don't put any fingerprints on any evidence."

  A feeling of déjà vu passed over me as I put on the yellow gloves. For our last case, the one I called Milkshakes and Murder, we'd been at this exact same hotel wearing yellow cleaning gloves. This time, however, it was a disguise.

  I brought in the mop buckets, and handed Mom the gloves. "What exactly are we looking for?" I asked.

  "Paperwork," Mom said as we entered the lobby and looked for the door to Burt's office.

  Mom and I had met Dar-dar at the motel six months ago.

  "Maybe there is an entrance to the office somewhere near where Dar-dar lived?" I said.

  We left the mop buckets and other things in the small lobby area of the motel and went behind the counter toward the little hallway that led to Dar-dar's living area. Despite the fact that it was small, Dar-dar had painted the walls, hung home photos, and made it look entirely nicer than the seedy motel that it had originally been.

  "Where does that door lead?" Mom asked, pointing to a door at the far end of the hallway.

  "I thought it went outside," said.

  "No," Mom said, "remember when we ran when the police raided? We left out that door," Mom said, pointing to the door closer to Dar-dar's quarters.

  Mom grabbed her keys and rushed to the door. After much fiddling, she unlocked the door, and sure enough, it was Burt's office.

  "Make sure you keep everything exactly the same," Mom said.

  "Maybe you should just look there and I should keep an eye out," I said.

  "No one's going to come," Mom said. "We have to hurry before Darwin gets off work at the coffee shop. We only have about forty minutes."

  I followed Mom into the office, and we turned on the light. "Oh, good," Mom said, looking at the bills stacked on this desk and filing cabinet that were crammed so full they could barely close. "It's a mess."

  Honestly, I thought it was just a little disorganized, but my standards are lower than Mom's. Wearing our rubber gloves, Mom started with the stacks on the left half of the desk, and I took the other side.

  "This is interesting," Mom said after we'd been reading through loads of junk mail.

  "What is it?"

  "It's a letter confirming Madonna's delay of her acceptance to Caltech," Mom said.

  "She got into Caltech?" I asked.

  "Apparently she was transferring as a junior from Mission College."

  "Why would she delay her admission to such a prestigious school?" I asked.

  I could tell from Mom's expression she wanted to know the answer to that too.

  "Did you find anything in your stack?" Mom asked.

  "Nothing but bills," I said.

  "What kind of bills?" Mom asked.

  "The usual. Electric, taxes, garbage, cable, medical stuff."

  "I got a few of those over here," Mom said. "Hand me over the medical stuff."

  I handed her the small stack that I'd gathered and sorted.

  "Should we put the stuff back exactly where we got it?" I asked.

  "It doesn't look like anyone's been in here. You can put it back in the basket, but leave it sorted. One less thing for Madonna to do when she comes here."

  "I'm surprised she hasn't been in here yet," I said.

  "I didn't have a key," Madonna said.

  I jumped, and I think Mom did, too. Our heads snapped in the direction of the doorway to find Madonna staring at us.

  So. Busted.

  "Hi, Madonna!" Mom said, her voice chipper.

  "What are you two doing here?" she asked.

  "Looking for clues about who killed your husband," Mom said. "Sorry we didn't tell you, but we thought it might be you."

  Her jaw dropped open, and so did mine. Mom's habit of rigorous honesty had a tendency to disarm people.

  "I would never kill Burt," she said.

  "I believe you—especially now that I know you knew he was dying," Mom said.

  Our jaws dropped open again. We were like dumbfounded people on a corny television show. Where did Mom come up with such a weird theory?

  "How do you know?" Madonna asked.

  "Yeah, how?" I chimed in, knowing Mom only had a few minutes with the medical bills.

  "My husband, Christy's dad, had a lot of the same tests. Those bills with the letter saying you delayed going to Caltech—" Mom didn't finish and just gestured the etcetera.

  "You shouldn't be looking in here," Madonna said.

  "Is that why you two fought?" Mom asked.

  "No one was supposed to know about his health," Madonna said. "It's the only thing he ever asked of me—to keep this secret."

  "That's why he quit smoking and was selling the motel," Mom said.

  Madonna nodded. "The weight loss wasn't from the spaghetti diet. He just liked to say that." She looked around and sighed. "It still smells like him in here." Here eyes shined with tears, but she brushed them off. My heart ached for her. "How did you guys get in here anyway?"

  "We rummaged through Dar-dar's things and got his keys to the motel," Mom said. "A lot of people think he killed your husband."

  "I'm not one of them," Madonna said.

  "It was a green card marriage wasn't it?" Mom asked.

  "Can they still deport me?" Madonna asked.

  Mom shook her head no. "There's no way they can prove it now. And I won't tell."

  "He was like an uncle to me. And my parents really wanted me to be able to come to the United States. They're the ones who helped him qualify for the loan on this place. L
ike a deal. I've always wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't get in when I first tried. We thought if I did a local community college here in California…" she trailed off. "But now it all seems so selfish."

  "He'd want you to go," Mom said. Madonna nodded. "You have a whole year to get things straightened out.

  Madonna looked around the office. "Can you leave the key?"

  "Sure," Mom said. "If Dar-dar looks for it, I'll say we gave it to you, because you needed it. Okay?"

  "Of course," Madonna said. "Speaking of Dar, if he didn't kill Burt, who did?"

  Mom shrugged. "I don't know. We'll have to go over the night of the murder again. Don't worry though. We won't tell anybody about Burt being sick or the whole green card marriage."

  "And I won't tell the cops that you broke into the motel," Madonna said.

  That almost sounded like a threat to me, but Mom didn't seem fazed by it.

  "What made you come here tonight?" I asked.

  "I stopped by Mr. Toodles to get some food and saw the security guard in there. He said the cleaning crew was here and they had the keys. I thought that perhaps Burt had arranged for somebody to clean the place, and I wanted to get a copy of the key. I've been meaning to call a locksmith, but then I thought about you two. For a second there I thought maybe you two were moonlighting as cleaners."

  "Christy likes Mr. Toodles. I find the meat strange," Mom said.

  "I love it," Madonna said. "Especially the 'Tood' sauce."

  But before I could bond with Madonna over our mutual love of Mr. Toodles, Mom's cell phone rang.

  "It's Dar," Mom said. She answered the call, nodded, and told him we'd see him in a little bit. When she hung up, she turned to me and said, "We gotta go."

  "Hey, wait a second," Madonna said. "Are you the one from that commercial?"

  "Yeah," Mom said. "I used to be on a television show. As a matter of fact, when I was pregnant with Christy—"

  "Mom!" I interrupted. "Do we want to go? Because Dar-dar is going to notice we're not at the Lucky Dragon to pick him up and take him home."

  "Oh yeah," she said. Then she made her poop face and said to Madonna, "I gotta go."

  Madonna laughed, and Mom and I left. And then Mom and I rushed out to the van to get to the Lucky Dragon before Dar-dar noticed we'd stolen his keys.

  9

  Memories and Mushrooms

  I pulled out of the motel as fast as I could, which was admittedly not all that fast.

  "We have to hurry, kid," Mom said.

  "When did he say he was going to leave the Mocha Muse?" I asked, turning onto Foothill Boulevard. Luckily, it was just after nine in the evening, and there wasn't a lot of traffic.

  "He said he was closing up, and he'd meet us at the Lucky Dragon. I don't want him to know that we weren't there all evening," Mom said.

  I stepped on it, which meant I essentially went the speed limit for the very first time driving this catering van.

  "You're getting good," Mom said. But at this point I'd stopped talking, because I was focusing on driving.

  Our van was a converted passenger van that we bought six months ago. It was a little temperamental, and a lot larger than the automatic Honda that I'd been driving my entire adult life. Every turn made me feel like we would topple over on our side. Not to mention, Fletcher Canyon was at the foot of the Los Angeles Crest Mountains, a small section of the mountain range not far from the Los Angeles Crest Forest that wasn't even listed on most maps.

  The van flew down MacClay Avenue at a breakneck thirty-eight miles per hour. I turned onto Marple Drive and then finally onto Main Street. As I turned on the side street so I could park behind the Lucky Dragon, I saw a police car stopped on Main Street. Looking closer, I could just about make out who it was.

  Mom whispered to me. "Is that Dar-dar talking to that Officer Keller again?"

  "Yeah," I said. Things weren't looking good for Dar-dar suspect-wise. This had to be the third time they were talking.

  "Mom," I said. "You should tell Dar-dar to stop talking to him without a lawyer."

  "I will," Mom said. "Just give it time."

  Mom pointed for me to drive down the side street and into the back of the restaurant. I pulled into our usual space, and we entered the Lucky Dragon through the back.

  Wenling and Chef Li were arguing in Chinese in the kitchen.

  "What's wrong?" Mom asked.

  Chef Li shook his head no, and Wenling said, "We do fried chicken wings all the time. They are tired of Chinese food."

  Chef Li responded in Chinese, but I surmised that he said something like, "But we're a Chinese restaurant."

  "The book club," Wenling said, turning to me and Mom, "is getting tired of Chinese food. So I told them they could have the Chinese fried chicken."

  The chef shook his head, and the three of us went back to our booth.

  "Did you find anything out?" Wenling said to Mom.

  "Only that Madonna didn't have a reason to kill her husband," Mom said.

  "So what are you going to tell the people tomorrow night?" Wenling asked.

  "I guess we'll have to improvise," Mom said. "We'll go over the scene of the crime."

  "That's right!" Wenling said. "Christy hasn't done her weird memory thing yet."

  I didn't like the idea that the group was coming to find out who the killer was, and they'd be met with me just closing my eyes remembering the trauma of the actual finding of the body. It seemed weird, and I didn't like speaking in front of groups of people.

  The bell over the front door rang as Dar-dar entered. "Hi, Aunties and Cousin!" he said as if he hadn't been in a major conversation with the police. "Are we ready to go home?"

  Mom looked to her best friend.

  Wenling nodded. "We've cleaned most everything up. Once the book people left it was very slow."

  Darwin said he'd meet us around back; he didn't want to push his bicycle through the restaurant. We loaded his bike into the van, and the three of us went home.

  "So who do you think did it?" Dar-dar asked.

  "I don't know," Mom said. "Everyone thinks it's you."

  I pulled into the driveway of our house. I was surprised that Mom had actually said that to Darwin

  "Aunt Jo," he said. "You know I didn't do it."

  "Of course not," Mom said, motioning for him to open the door. Mom had let him sit by the window, and she'd taken the hump yet again. "But you haven't exactly been honest with us, have you?"

  Dar-dar hopped out of the van and stared at the ground.

  "I'm going to feed the cat, and you're going to take a shower, and then we're going to talk."

  Thirty minutes later, Dar-dar sat in the kitchen looking guilty. Mom had made us three hot chocolates.

  "You'd think after having mocha all day at work that I would be tired of this, but I'm not," Dar-dar said.

  "Why were you and Burt fighting?" Mom asked.

  "That's personal," Dar-dar said.

  "That works out, because we know you personally," Mom said.

  Silence.

  "Is it because you guys were fighting? Like couple-fighting?" I asked.

  Dar-dar gave me a strange look. "What do you mean couple-fighting?"

  "Were you having an affair with your boss, Dar-dar?" I heard myself ask. Maybe Mom's directness had worn off on me.

  "Do you two know I'm gay?" Dar-dar said.

  Mom and I exchanged incredulous glances.

  "Dar-dar!" Mom began in English, and then rapidly spoke to him in Visayan.

  "Do you think everybody knows?" Dar-dar asked.

  "I think most people do," I said.

  Dar-dar sighed with relief. "I thought that people wouldn't like me if they knew."

  It never occurred to me that Dar-dar hadn't been out. You'd think with winning the beauty pageant, and his dressing like a woman a lot of the time, that he would assume that we would assume that he was gay. But then again, who's to say that those things are always correlated?

  "We
love you like you are, Dar-dar," Mom said. "So were you having an affair with your boss?"

  "Burt's not gay," Dar-dar said. "He just married Madonna for the green card, but I think he's still seeing Lisa."

  "I thought it was a one-time fling," I said.

  "Let's just say I think it's an off-again on-again thing," he said. "But most recently I think off. I think that's why she got so mad."

  "So why were you two fighting?" Mom asked.

  "Let's just say a new friend of mine wanted to take me somewhere, but Burt didn't approve. And he wouldn't give me the weekend off to go on a trip with my new friend. And I'm not telling you who the new friend is, because he's very sensitive about being gay."

  "So that's what you fought about?" Mom asked.

  "Well he said that I couldn't go, and then like a week and a half later he says he's selling the motel anyway? So I told him I might as well quit, and he said my new friend was not good for me. But I think he didn't like the idea that I might be dating a man."

  "I don't know," Mom said. "Did he give you a more specific reason why he didn't think he was good for you?"

  "He said he thought the man couldn't be trusted and had a bad temper," Dar-dar said.

  "Do you think that might be true?" Mom asked.

  "Maybe. I'm not seeing my new friend anymore anyway."

  "If that's what you two fought about, that wouldn't give you a reason to kill him," Mom said.

  "No. So who's left?" Dar asked.

  "Maybe we should talk to Lisa again or her son," Mom said. "But we won't likely get a chance before tomorrow."

  "What's tomorrow?" Dar-dar asked.

  "Those people from San Fernando Valley are to coming to the Lucky Dragon and hoping to find out who the killer is," Mom said.

  "Oh," Dar-dar said. "Make sure to tell them that I'll give them a discount at the Mocha Muse." He didn't seem all that concerned that we didn't know who the killer was. And the police were definitely after Dar-dar.

  "Mom," I said, "you were going to remind Darwin about talking to the cops."

  "Dar-dar, everybody thinks it's you, and we haven't been able to find someone else. You're going to have to get a lawyer if the police want to talk to you again."

  "No problem," Dar-dar said.