Chocolate Quake Read Online Free PDF Page B

countenance were expressionless. Asian inscrutability? A stereotype, but perhaps accurate.
    “Actually, I was here this morning, visiting my mother-in-law—”
    “She a cop?”
    “No, a prisoner.”
    “Complaints about the jail go to the Sheriff’s Department. City Hall.”
    “Well, she didn’t make it sound luxurious, but I’m not here to complain about that. Is one of the detectives investigating the murder of Denise Faulk here today? I just got back from lunch at Citizen Cake with my mother-in-law’s lawyer and thought perhaps I should talk to—”
    “Sit down. Your name would be?” He took out a notebook.
    “Carolyn Blue.”
    “You live here in town?”
    “El Paso, Texas.”
    He looked up. “I got a nephew-in-law teaching at a university out there in West Texas. Millard Fillmore Fong. Ph.D. in psychology. You know him?”
    “No, but he certainly has an interesting name.”
    “Yeah, my wife and her sister are into presidents and first ladies. I got a daughter named Dolly Madison Yu. She’s not real happy about that.”
    “Well, you could point out that it’s better than Millard Fillmore. Dolly Madison was a heroine first lady, whereas Millard Fillmore—well, I don’t know anything about him.”
    “I’ll tell her that. So you got something that would exonerate your mother-in-law? That is one tough lady. Reminds me of my grandmother.”
    “Well, really what I wanted to say is that she’s a professor at the University of Chicago—”
    “So she told us.”
    “And a famous feminist scholar.”
    “She mentioned that, too.”
    “And she wouldn’t kill anyone. Especially not another woman.”
    “Mrs. Blue, I was at the scene, and I questioned her, and I’ve seen the evidence. It’s my opinion that she did kill the accountant.”
    “But have you looked at other suspects?”
    “We asked around. She was the only person besides the corpse at the scene, bending over the victim, covered with blood, and the only one who had a loud fight with the woman that same afternoon. Not only did she have the victim’s blood all over her, but her bloody fingerprints were here and there in the office.”
    “Did you search for other fingerprints?”
    “Sure. Only the professor’s were bloody.”
    “Well, did you find the murder weapon?”
    “Nope, but we will. She must have put it somewhere around the center. It’s one of those old Victorians that rambles all over the place. Unless someone else got rid of it for her. But we’ve turned up no evidence of an accomplice. When they’re not taking flack from the ladies about obstructing business, we’ve got a team turning the place upside down looking for the knife.”
    “But, detective, you owe it to your own sense of justice to look further than my mother-in-law. She’s just not the killer type. Women seldom—”
    “Mrs. Blue, in San Francisco, women are as weird as men, although I’ll admit they don’t commit as many crimes, but your mother-in-law is more aggressive than most. And she’s got a record.”
    “What?”
    “Bunch of disturbing the peace charges, one inciting to riot, and an assault with a deadly weapon. She attacked a minister.”
    “With a phone book,” I replied defensively. “He’d been making threats to women’s clinics, and then he made some to her. She had caller I.D. and confronted him at the next demonstration.”
    “She still whacked him on the head with the Chicago phone book. Detective in Chicago says she sprained his neck.”
    “The charges were dropped.”
    “Yeah, and she had to drop the telephone harassment charges against him. It was a standoff.”
    “Detective, she’s almost seventy.”
    “Seventy-two.”
    “Really? She never has said.”
    “I’ll grant you that the women at that Union Street Center are a wild lot—lesbians, witches, counselors, blacks, whites, Asians, kids, old ladies. They’ve even got a woman that I’ll swear used to be a man. My grandmother thinks San Francisco is an urban nut