Tip a Hat to Murder by Elaine Orr

Author:Elaine Orr [Orr, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780986338045
Publisher: Lifelong Dreams
Published: 2016-11-20T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ELIZABETH WENT TO THE frat house when she finished at the bookstore about ten AM. After she pushed the doorbell, she thought more about Alice and her rocky finances. Given her seeming fondness for Ben, her financial straits and Ben's murder were probably unrelated. Still, defense lawyers were kept plenty busy with cases about people who genuinely cared for each other at one time.

Did Ben owe Alice a lot of money? From what Elizabeth gathered, Jen would be more likely to seek it on Alice's behalf than Alice would herself. Neither the bookish college teacher or the bookstore owner seemed prone to rage. Probably true of lots of killers.

At Elizabeth's fourth insistent push on the doorbell, a bleary-eyed Blake Wessley opened the door. So, he isn’t always sober. Unless his expression was due to late-night studying, which she doubted.

“Chief. Kind of early.”

“May I come in?”

“Sure. But I have to make coffee before we talk.”

Elizabeth nodded. In plaid, flannel sleeping pants and a KIZZ t-shirt, he didn’t appear nearly as charming, or as sure of himself, as he had two days ago.

She followed him through the dining room to the kitchen. Unlike her last visit, the plywood dining room table was covered in yellow plastic, the kind of disposable table cloth used for picnic tables. The kitchen was orderly, even clean.

And no goats. A big improvement.

Wessley added a coffee pod to the single-serve coffee maker and, in a groggy tone, asked, “Want a cup?”

She shook her head. “Had my fill, for the morning anyway.”

Coffee dripped as he took a small creamer from a drawer.

Elizabeth moved to a window near the back door, and her eyes were drawn to a plastic tub, about the size of a shoebox, on the small table near the door. She sniffed. A chemical smell emanated from it and she stared at it.

“You don’t want to touch that, Chief.”

She faced him. “I certainly won’t without permission. What’s the smell?”

Wessley yawned. “Formaldehyde.”

She turned toward him. “In a kitchen?”

“It’s a pig.”

“What the…?”

“A fetal pig. For biology dissection.”

“Why is it in your kitchen?”

Wessley yawned more widely and seemed totally disinterested as he added cream to his now full coffee cup. “It’s Monty’s. He’s not going to cook it.”

Elizabeth spoke firmly. “You’ve got your coffee. I have a couple questions for you. Let’s go to your front room.”

He followed her. Elizabeth sat on one of the couches. Wessley leaned into its arm a couple of cushions away from her, angled so he could observe her.

Elizabeth took the small notebook and a pen from a breast pocket. “When we talked two days ago, you omitted something that would have been helpful to me.”

From the fast slide of his eyeballs back and forth, Elizabeth guessed the frat president had figured out what she wanted to talk about. He was devising a response that would cause him the least trouble.

He took another sip of coffee and smiled. “If you’re talking about some of our times at the Bully Pulpit, I simply didn’t want to tarnish Mr.

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