A Measure of Murder Read online

  “That sounds like the Marta I know. Fits of rage and euphoria that come and go with no rhyme or reason. Classic Italian behavior, wouldn’t you say?” he added with a wink and a nudge.

  I was trying to think of a witty comeback regarding Eric’s Irish heritage when I spied Jill, who hadn’t moved from the front row of chairs. “Be back in a sec,” I said, and I left him standing there, still chuckling to himself.

  Buster in tow, I threaded my way through the crowd. I had to find out: did Jill really not know until today that Kyle had fathered a child? As I got nearer, however, I saw that she was talking to Kyle’s brother, hands on hips and shaking her head.

  I was going to leave them to it, but then she looked up and saw me. “Oh, here’s Sally,” she called out, beckoning me over. “She’s a lawyer,” she said to Robert.

  “Was a lawyer,” I corrected, joining the duo. “I haven’t practiced in several years.” I turned to Robert. “I’m so sorry about your brother.”

  “Oh, thanks. Were you good friends?”

  “I actually never really got to meet him. I only just joined the chorus. But since he was such an integral part of the group, I thought I should come out today to pay my respects.”

  “Well, I do appreciate it.”

  Jill touched me on the arm. “Robert’s been telling me about Kyle’s will,” she said, “and I thought maybe you could provide some insight on the matter.”

  “I’m no expert on wills and trusts,” I started, but she cut me off with a wave of the hand.

  “No matter. I’m sure you know way more than either of us do. So here’s the thing. The way the will was written, it split Kyle’s property among various people, including Robert and me. And this son I only just today found out about.” Jill directed a scowl Robert’s way before continuing. “Anyway, Robert took the will to a lawyer to have him put it into probate or whatever they do, but the guy told him that it’s invalid. So, long story short, it looks like his son is going to inherit everything.”

  “Really?”

  Robert nodded. “Yeah. I guess he was supposed to have witnesses for the will, and there weren’t any.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Unless it’s a holographic will—completely handwritten. Then it’s okay if there’s no witnesses.”

  “Well, this one was printed, except for the signature and the date, which were in Kyle’s writing. We found it at his house when my parents and I went there to go through his things.” Robert shook his head. “It’s a shame he didn’t do a little research before doing it. Not that it’s so horrible for Jeremy to inherit. He is his son, after all. But given the way the will was written, it doesn’t look like that’s what Kyle intended.”

  Buster, who had been sitting patiently while we talked, jumped up at this point, startling the three of us. He crept stealthily toward a nearby mound of dirt and then paused when a furry brown head poked out of a hole. The gopher looked around and almost immediately popped back down. We all watched as the dog stood sentinel over the hole, head cocked and right paw raised, his body trembling.

  “Anyway,” Robert finally went on when it became clear the gopher had sensed danger and was not going to reemerge any time soon. “I have to say it’s pretty unlike Kyle, you know, to get something like that wrong. He was always so careful about everything, to the point of being downright annoying a lot of the time.”

  Jill was nodding in agreement. “Yeah. He wouldn’t take one step without being sure it was absolutely correct. Like when he bought his Subaru last year. He spent ages researching models online and in Consumer Reports before deciding what to get.”

  “Well, it’s not at all unusual for people to blow it when they make a will,” I said. “Cases like that are the bread and butter of the probate attorney profession.”

  “Which brings me to my question.” Jill touched me again on the arm. “Maybe you could take a look at the will? You still have a copy, don’t you?” she asked Robert, who nodded yes.

  “It doesn’t seem like my looking at it could do anything,” I protested. “If it’s a printed will with no witnesses—”

  “C’mon, please? It couldn’t hurt for you to just take a quick look.”

  “And I’d be happy to scan and e-mail it to you,” Robert added. “I mean, you never know . . .”

  “Fine,” I said with a shrug. “But just for the record, I’m not technically allowed to ‘engage in the practice of law,’ as they say, since I’ve gone inactive with the State Bar. So don’t tell anyone I’m doing this for you, okay?”

  Jill mimed zipping up her lips. “Your secret is safe with us.”

  After Robert had entered my e-mail address into his phone, he excused himself to go mingle with the other memorial service attendees, and I turned to Jill. “So you really didn’t know about Kyle’s kid? That he had a son?”

  “No,” she said, aiming a kick at Buster’s gopher mound. “I had no idea. I can’t believe he would hide something like that from me.”

  “Well, were you at least aware he had an ex?”

  “That I did know, because he used to complain about her all the time. Called her ‘the sorceress,’ because she ‘bewitched’ him into falling for her and then broke his heart by sleeping with another guy.”

  “Is that why they broke up?”

  “Yeah. I gather it was just a one-time thing, but when Kyle found out—vamoose, he was outta there.”

  “Huh.” I sipped my cider and watched Buster stand guard over the new gopher mound he’d moved on to. “What do you know about her?”

  “The ex? Not much. Besides calling her names, Kyle never talked a whole lot about her.”

  “Well, do you know what she does for a living?”

  Jill smiled. “Yeah, actually. That was another thing Kyle loved to complain about—lawyers. What jerks they all are. Present company excluded, of course,” she added with a chuckle. “And since Lydia works for a law firm, that was another big strike against her.”

  “She’s an attorney?”

  Jill shook her head. “Naw. A secretary or something like that, I think. Somewhere here in town.”

  “You know which law firm?”

  “Nope, but I bet you anything it has a bunch of names. Maybe Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe?”

  “Ha-ha,” I deadpanned. Like I’d never heard that one before. But I was curious to find out where Lydia worked. If it was a Santa Cruz firm, there was a good chance we knew some people in common.

  “I wonder if she’ll move into Kyle’s house,” Jill said, interrupting my train of thought, “since it looks like her son is gonna inherit it. Would that be allowed?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It’s a nice place. You can almost see it from here, actually. I’m sure it’s worth a bundle, given how close it is to the ocean.” Jill was frowning at something over my left shoulder as she said this, and I turned to see what had her attention.

  It was Lydia, standing with her back to us and talking to a woman I didn’t recognize. Jeremy was crouched down by her side, poking a stick into the dirt, but when he saw me watching him, he stood up and started my way.

  “I’m outta here,” Jill said. “I don’t want anything to do with that kid. Or his mother,” she added on seeing Lydia follow after the boy, then beat a hasty retreat.

  Jeremy stopped about two feet from me and stretched out his arm. “Can I pet your dog?” he asked.

  “Sure. If it’s okay with your mom. He likes kids.” Buster had finally grown bored with watching the inactive gopher hole and was now lying peacefully at my feet. After receiving an approving nod from Lydia, I let Jeremy squat down and pat the dog on the head.

  “Hi. I’m Sally,” I said, offering a hand. “I sing in Kyle’s chorus. But I only just joined, so I didn’t really know him.”

  “I actually noticed you at the service,” Lydia said as we shook hands, then grinned at my quizzical look. “It was only because Jeremy’s crazy about animals. He pointed you and your dog out to me.”<
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  “He’s got a nice voice, your son. Maybe he’ll join a chorus one day, too.”

  Lydia nodded. “He sure didn’t get it from me. I have a tin ear.”

  Buster, in bliss from the attention, rolled over on his back, and we watched as the equally ecstatic boy stroked his silky belly.

  “So,” I said after a moment, “I was talking to Kyle’s brother at the service, and he happened to mention you worked at a law firm in town?”

  “Uh-huh . . .” She was giving me one of those “What’s it to you?” looks.

  “I only ask ’cause I’m a lawyer. Well, actually I’m inactive now. But I used to work at the Saroyan law firm, so I bet we know some folks in common.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah. I’m a legal secretary at Harrison and McManus.”

  Ah-ha. I did know someone there—a gal who’d been a year ahead of me in law school. She wasn’t my best friend or anything, but I happened to know she was a first-class gossip. “Does Margaret Ng still work for the firm?”

  “Sure. I work with her all the time.”

  Bingo.

  Chapter Eleven

  Genki Desu is a new Japanese restaurant in town that specializes in traditional sushi. No avocado, no macadamia nuts, no inside-out or TNT rolls laced with spicy Sriracha sauce. Just your old-fashioned fare, like what’s been served in Japan for centuries. As a result, the place doesn’t attract the young hipster crowd, who want their deep-fried dragon rolls and sushi with a hodgepodge of ingredients all mixed together.

  But Ichirou, the owner of Genki Desu, has sources for the freshest and best sashimi-grade fish in the county and is a master sushi chef to boot, so it’s become the go-to sushi bar for Eric and me. (Plus, at almost forty, we aren’t particularly young anymore, and I doubt anyone would mistake us for hipsters—though Eric would probably like to be.)

  The restaurant’s name literally means “I’m vigorous,” but it’s also the accepted response to the question, “How are you?” in Japanese. This, as well as the fact that the u is silent, I learned from the ever-eager-to-impart-his-knowledge Eric on our first visit to the place.

  I wasn’t feeling particularly vigorous, however, as I walked from my car to Genki Desu that evening. Although the bad juju from the octets had mostly worked itself out of my system, I still had the memory of the event. I didn’t think that would ever go away.

  Eric hailed me from the sushi bar, where he’d managed to snag the last two seats. This cheered me some. It’s way more fun sitting at the bar and chatting with Ichirou as he molds vinegar-spiked rice balls in his deft hands than it is being relegated to one of the tables.

  “I ordered a bottle of sake,” Eric said as I sat down and poured me some without asking if I wanted any. But then again, he knew me well enough to know my answer without having to ask. “It’s unpasteurized, a namazake,” he continued, showing off his limited familiarity with food-related Japanese terms. I glanced over at Ichirou, whose bland smile betrayed no hint of what he might be thinking.

  “Good,” I said, trying the wine. “Lots of flavor.”

  “Uh-huh. Like sake on steroids. It’s raw, not superheated like most sake, so it just screams out with fruit, and acid, and yeast, and . . . zip and zest!” Eric slurped from his ceramic cup and then grinned.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had sake cold like this before,” I said.

  “You always drink the namazake cold,” Eric replied. “It has to be kept chilled once it’s made, actually, or it will go bad. You know, since it hasn’t been pasteurized. Ichirou recommended this one to me. Oishii desu!” he called out, raising his glass to the chef.

  Ichirou lifted his head and shouted back, “Kanpai!” and then went back to the boat of sashimi he was preparing for one of the tables behind us.

  “But I wouldn’t order it just anywhere,” Eric continued. “You need to trust that the bottles have been stored at the correct temperature.” He poured himself another serving of sake and then tapped the menu sitting at his place. “So you wanna do the omakase, like last time?”

  This is the “chef’s choice,” where the sushi chef presents a series of small courses—sushi maki (rolls) and nigiri (sliced fish atop rice)—based on what’s freshest and whatever his whim might happen to be.

  “Sure,” I said. “Last time it was amazing. And since you’re paying . . .” Ordering the chef’s choice will get you the best sushi the restaurant can provide, but it can also be pricey, since the chef’s whim isn’t generally based on what might be the best value.

  After letting Ichirou know our order, Eric swiveled in his bar chair to face me. “So how are you doing? Any better than before?”

  “A little. But it’s hard getting over something like that. I mean, Marta was pretty brutal, I thought.”

  Eric nodded. “Yeah. She can be that. You should have seen how harsh she was to this poor bus driver during our trip last summer. He’d taken a wrong turn, and we were almost late for our dress rehearsal in Prague. But again, that was about the music. She can actually be pretty mellow about other stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.” I had yet to see this side of our choral director. “So tell me more about your trip to Europe last summer. I know you told me when you got back, but now that I know a lot of the people in the chorus, it’ll mean more to me. Like, where exactly did you go, again?”

  “Well, we flew into Berlin, where we stayed for about three days to get over our jet lag and see the sights. Our hotel was in a neighborhood that had been part of East Berlin, behind the Wall, and you could still see signs of the Cold War all over the place: bullet holes in stucco buildings and these huge cement Soviet-era apartment complexes. It was a trip.” Eric broke his bamboo chopsticks apart and rubbed them against each other, a pensive look on his face. Setting them down, tips on the blue-and-white ceramic chopstick holder, he continued with his story.

  “Next, we all got onto the bus we’d rented for the trip and headed south to Leipzig. That was amazing, because we got to sing inside the Thomaskirche, where Bach was Kapellmeister—you know, choir master—for the last, like, thirty years of his life, and where he’s buried. I tell ya, you know I’m not religious, but I got chills singing inside that church.”

  “Hey, I get it. I’ve been known to get chills at Sunday mass with Nonna when the choir sings one of those medieval chant things and it echoes all over the church.”

  “Yeah, totally.” Eric leaned back to allow Ichirou to place a square black plate before us. On it sat two pairs of pale, translucent slices of fish across oblong mounds of rice.

  “Hamachi,” the chef announced.

  “Domo arigato,” Eric responded with a bow of the head. Drizzling soy sauce from a small white pitcher into his tiny dish of wasabi, he mixed them together with his chopsticks, dipped one of the servings of yellowtail into the sauce fish-side down, and then popped the entire piece into his mouth.

  “Where’d you go after Leipzig?” I asked, helping myself to some of the delicate sushi.

  “Next, we headed east to Dresden, which I was really curious to see, since the Allies bombed the crap out of it at the end of the war.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “I was amazed at how much had been reconstructed, actually. And not completely modern, like you’d expect. Some was, of course, but a lot of the old buildings had been rebuilt in their original style. I really liked the place. It’s a cool mix of old and new. After that, we drove down to Prague, also totally cool, and then to Salzburg, and we finished up in Vienna.”

  “Sounds like a lot of driving.”

  “Yeah, but it was okay because we stopped a lot along the way. Sometimes to sing in churches but also to do touristy stuff.” Eric took his second piece of hamachi and then went on, mouth full. “It was really awesome, actually, since Marta had ins with all sorts of people there, so we got to see stuff you normally wouldn’t have access to. Like getting into these fancy stately homes to see their private art and music collections. Oh, and in Salzburg we even got our own spec
ial tour of the Mozart museum. That was amazing.”

  Ichirou set another plate before us, this one bearing two more varieties of nigiri. “Saba and sake,” he said, indicating the different fish.

  “Sake?” I asked, turning to Eric.

  “Yeah, I don’t think we had it last time. It means salmon. As well as the wine,” he added, tapping our bottle. “I know. It’s confusing. They actually have a slightly different pronunciation, though it’s hard to hear if you’re not a native speaker. But luckily, even if you mispronounce the one you want, you’ll still end up with something delicious.” He dipped a piece of salmon into his soy sauce/wasabi mixture and grinned.

  “This one I remember,” I said, picking up a piece of the other sushi. I bit into it and chewed, relishing the tanginess of the pickled mackerel. “Man, I’d love to get Ichirou’s recipe for his saba. It would make a great appetizer for Gauguin. You think he’d be willing to divulge his secret?”

  “No way. Not to a competitor like you.”

  “Well, I could at least talk to Javier about using some of these leaves wrapped around the fish. What are they called again?”

  “Shiso.”

  “Right. We should really figure out a dish to use them in. I swear they taste just like cumin.” I ate the rest of my saba and washed it down with some sake—the liquid kind. “So, getting back to your chorus trip. You roomed with Kyle, right? What was he like?”

  Eric eyeballed me and then shook his head with a laugh. “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I? Now that you’ve gotten a taste for it, playing Miss Marple and solving crimes around our little town.”

  “I do not have a ‘taste’ for it,” I said, poking at my dab of green wasabi with a chopstick. “It’s just that something doesn’t smell right. Look, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to provoke a lecture, but I talked to the guy who does the maintenance at the church, and he says it would have taken some real force—something beyond just opening the window—for that frame to have come out like it did.”