Holidays Can Be Murder: A Charlie Parker Christmas Mystery Read online

  Holidays Can Be Murder

  A Charlie Parker Christmas Novella

  Connie Shelton

  Author’s Note

  I hope you enjoy this holiday mystery with Charlie, Drake and friends. This novella was originally published in book club format by Worldwide Mystery under the guidance of my editor and friend, Feroze Mohammad. It was his suggestion that I write a Christmas mystery and I had a wonderful time doing it. Readers of my entire series may notice a few references in this story that seem out of sequence. Keep in mind that it was written in 2002, which places it between the other titles in my series, Honeymoons Can Be Murder and Reunions Can Be Murder. Still, the holiday traditions in Albuquerque remain much the same as I remember them from my early years, with the addition of a few fictional ones I’ve created for purposes of this story. Enjoy!

  1

  The holidays bring out the best in all of us, and the worst. Between crowded shopping, endless cooking, and hosting a variety of visiting relatives, many a normally rational person has been driven to desperation—sometimes even murder.

  I’d been to the mall--something I don’t relish in the best of times--and the holiday crowds, traffic, and surly temperament of my fellow shoppers had served to put me in a less than charitable mood. Rusty, our red-brown Lab greeted me at home with his usual I-love-you-no-matter-what exuberance. By the time I’d dropped my shopping bags on the sofa, shed my winter coat, and received a few doggy kisses from him, my attitude had begun to ease.

  “Hey, you’re home,” Drake said, emerging from the kitchen. He carried the portable phone and extended it to me now. “Want to say hello to Mom?”

  My mother-in-law and I haven’t exactly established a rapport just yet. In the fourteen months I’ve been married to Drake I’ve met her only once, on a quick trip through Flagstaff, when we flew our helicopter there, on our way to a charter job at the Grand Canyon. During that visit, and a few other phone calls, she and I had probably not exchanged more than two hours worth of chit-chat. To be fair, the conversations had all been pleasant, with the only hint of coolness coming when she discovered that I hadn’t taken the Langston name when I married her son. Drake was holding the phone out to me.

  “Catherine! How are you?”

  “Hi Charlie—I’m doing just great. I’m so excited about the visit.” She got high marks for her bubbly voice and general enthusiasm for life.

  “Visit?” Somewhere in there I must have missed something.

  “Oh, Drake didn’t tell you yet? Well, we’ve decided that I’ll come out there and spend Christmas week with you guys.”

  We have, huh. I glanced over at Drake but he’d gotten very busy scratching Rusty’s ears.

  “I can’t wait,” Catherine continued. “He tells me how special New Mexico Christmases are, and I’m just dying to get in on some of the traditions.”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, we can’t wait either,” I said. “What day will you arrive?”

  “The twentieth—that’s the Friday before Christmas Day. I can stay a week. And Drake said I should bring Kinsey. Charlie, are you sure that’s okay with you?”

  Catherine’s three year old blond cocker spaniel, named for her favorite mystery character, had been absolutely adorable when we’d visited their home. I felt sure she would be as well behaved when traveling and would get along with Rusty.

  “Sure, she won’t be any problem.” I looked toward Drake again, but he’d disappeared into the kitchen. Catherine ended the phone call with love to all and I hung up, ready to track my husband.

  “Your mother said thanks for the invitation,” I told him when I found him at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes for dinner.

  He turned around sheepishly. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “It kind of popped out. See, she originally called to invite us to her place for Christmas. And, well, you know how it is with the helicopter service. I could get a call anytime and I can’t really afford to leave town. So, I suggested she think about coming here instead. Guess I thought she’d take a few days to think about it and I could check with you in the meantime.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, a little warning would have been better, but I don’t mind. It’ll give me a chance to get to know her better.”

  He pulled me into a hug. “You’re terrific,” he mumbled into my ear, giving a little nibble.

  I pulled back to arm’s length, eyeing the project on the kitchen counter. “So, what are those potatoes going to turn into?”

  “Homemade French fries, smothered with chile and cheese?”

  “Umm . . . consider yourself forgiven for anything at all.” Drake makes the best homemade French fries ever.

  I turned back toward the living room. “I think I finished the last of the shopping. I’m going to put all this stuff in the guest room. That way I’ll be forced to finish wrapping it before your mom gets here.” I mentally ticked off other things on my to-do list as I carried my bags into the newly remodeled section of the house, hoping I could fit it all into the following week. The baking for the annual neighborhood cookie swap could wait, as would the final touches on the luminarias for the yard decorations.

  We live in the old Albuquerque Country Club neighborhood, and a big tradition in the city is that our neighborhood is decorated to the max so everyone else in town can drive through and stare at us. My parents did it when I was a kid and apparently the tradition goes back at least a generation beyond theirs. My neighbor to the south, Elsa Higgins, is like a surrogate grandmother to me and she’s decorated her yard annually for the fifty-some years she’s lived in that house. The tour thing has grown over the years. It used to be that folks just climbed into their cars and drove around. Now there are city bus tours, sold out weeks in advance, and the police place barricades so the tour can only follow certain streets—ours being one of them.

  “Hon? Telephone.” Drake handed the portable over to me. I hadn’t even heard it ring. He shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know who it was.

  “Hello, Charlie, this is Judy. Judy Garfield. Next door.”

  Our newest neighbors, a couple of mild-mannered Midwesterners, had moved into the house north of ours two months earlier. The adjustment from life in one of the better suburbs of Chicago to the Southwest was coming as a bit of a culture shock to them.

  “I just heard about the decoration requirements,” she said. “I don’t know what some of this stuff is.”

  It’s probably only in the Southwest that a brown paper lunch sack, some sand, and a votive candle can be considered beautiful, but that’s how we do it. I explained to her that they could either make their own or buy them ready-made and delivered from the Boy Scouts or other groups that sell them.

  “Well . . ..” She hesitated. “Wilbur is really getting into the holidays this year, with everything being so different and all. Could you show us how to make them?”

  I added one more thing to my to-do list. “Sure. I think Drake wants to make ours too. We can have a lesson on it in the next few days.”

  We hung up after setting a time to work on luminarias the next afternoon. I closed the door to the guest room, leaving the pile of shopping bags in the middle of the bed, out of sight. I changed from the wool slacks and fluffy sweater I’d worn shopping into jeans and a sweatshirt before rejoining Drake in the kitchen.

  Rusty was supervising the dinner preparations, making sure any tidbits that fell to the floor were swiftly dispatched.

  “Boy, those fries smell good,” I told my husband, wrapping my arms around his middle and resting my face against his back. “Are they almost ready?”

 
“Five more minutes. I poured you some wine.” He indicated a glass standing on the counter.

  I sat at the kitchen table and took a sip while he stirred the green chile sauce simmering in a pan on the burner. I watched him pull the basket of fries out of the deep fryer and prop them on the side to drain. He set two dinner plates on the counter and reached for a bag of grated cheddar. Rusty whimpered but I managed not to.

  “Forgot to tell you—Elsa called while you were out shopping.”

  “Busy day with the telephone, huh?”

  “Wish they were business calls instead,” he said. He divided the fried potatoes between the two plates, then shook the shredded cheese over them. It began to melt instantly against their heat. He ladled a good-sized dose of green chile sauce over the top of the heap, making a small mountain in the middle of each plate. I pulled flatware and napkins from a drawer and met him back at the table.

  “Wow, am I ever hungry,” I told him. “Braving the mall during the Christmas season is tough work.”

  “Hey, the least I could do is have dinner ready.” he said. Shopping is not Drake’s strong suit.

  “I should probably get a little something extra for your mom, now that she’ll be here,” I said.

  “I hope that was all right, my asking her without checking first.”

  “Just don’t ever do it again,” I teased, poking at him with a cheese coated French fry. “As punishment, you have to help with everything that needs to be done before Christmas.” I told him about Judy’s call and the planned sacks-and-sand operation for the next day.

  “I’ll go get the supplies,” he promised. “And some spare light bulbs. Everything looked okay when I checked the strings in the garage this afternoon but it never hurts to have extras.”

  We usually decorate the house and trees with red bulbs, offset by the soft golden glow of the luminarias lining the sidewalks. When fire claimed part of our home over a year ago, we lost our supply of light strings but were, fortunately, able to replace them at last year’s post-holiday sales.

  We finished swabbing the sauce off our plates and Drake put the dishes in the dishwasher while I returned Elsa’s phone call.

  “So, red or green?” she asked, after we’d checked on each other’s state of health.

  “Green, of course,” I told her. Not being much of a cook, I have my old favorite green chile stew recipe I fall back on every year for the annual Red and Green Chile Cookoff. New Mexico’s two flavors of chile lend themselves so well to the holiday season that the cookoff has become an annual fund raiser for charity. Between my regular work as a partner at RJP Investigations and my occasional hand in Drake’s helicopter service, I have to confess that there isn’t much time to give back to the community. The holidays are one time when I make a little extra effort.

  “The Cookoff is just a week from today,” Elsa reminded. “I think I’ll do my grocery shopping tomorrow. Need anything?”

  I gave her a short list of ingredients for my stew. Now that it looked as if we’d spend the upcoming weekend decorating the yard, time was about to become crunched. I’d also promised Ron at least two full days at the office next week, the gifts would need to be wrapped, the tree set up in the house, and Catherine would get here the same day I had to be down at the Convention Center cooking chile stew all day.

  I glanced up at the wall calendar and noticed that today was Friday, the thirteenth.

  2

  The sky turned white Monday morning and tiny grains of snow fluttered onto my windshield as I drove to the office. Sally, our part-time receptionist, was already there. Her car sat in the parking area behind the gray and white Victorian that houses the private investigation agency I own with my brother, Ron.

  “Hey there,” Sally greeted as Rusty and I blew in through the back door. “Weather’s kind of taken a turn, hasn’t it?” Her normally ruddy cheeks were pinker than usual but her shaggy blond haircut didn’t look any more ruffled than it usually does.

  “Whew! I’m just glad it wasn’t doing this yesterday. We hung a hundred and forty-three strings of lights all over the outside of our house. Covered the trees with them too. And Saturday—I can’t even begin to guess how many paper bag tops I folded down. Drake’s got them all over the floor of the garage so he can fill them with sand over the next few days.”

  “By next year he’ll probably be more than willing to buy them ready-made,” she said with a chuckle.

  “Who knows? He’s very much a do-it-yourself kind of guy. And he offered to help the new neighbors with theirs, too. I don’t think any of them knew what they were getting into.”

  “Ron’s upstairs. Left his car off for an oil change and he wants you to take him out at lunchtime to pick it up. Looks like the only case in the works right now is one of those spouse-spying things. Can you imagine? Wanting to track your spouse during the holidays so you can get divorce ammo on him?”

  I raised one eyebrow. Things people do to each other never cease to amaze me.

  “Probably her way of saying ‘Happy New Year!’.” Sally finished stirring creamer into her coffee and headed back to her desk at the front of the converted old house.

  I found my favorite mug and poured the last of the coffee from the pot, switching it off as I added sugar. Rusty stared expectantly up at the countertop, waiting for me to get him a biscuit from the tin we keep there.

  Upstairs, I peeked through Ron’s doorway and gave a little wave when I noticed he was already on the phone. He swears ninety percent of an investigator’s work is done on the telephone and I’m beginning to believe it. I rarely see him without it pasted to his ear. In my own office across the hall, a stack of new mail awaited, which I quickly sorted by categories: bills to pay, letters to write, and circular file.

  I was intent on entering expenses into the computer when I became aware of Ron standing in my doorway.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  “Sally said you’d take me downtown to get my car from the lube place. Hello? Remember?”

  “Jeez, is it noon already?” I glanced at my watch and saw that it was.

  “Time flies when you’re having fun?”

  I growled.

  Rusty opted to stay at the office with Sally, who was microwaving a cup of hot chocolate. Thirty minutes later, I returned with a bag from McDonald’s and the dog was more than happy to turn his affection back toward me. I was still intent on my fries when Sally came through, announcing that she was done for the day and going home to relieve her husband, Ross, of babysitting duties. I spent a couple of hours sending dunning notices to delinquent accounts and answering miscellaneous correspondence.

  When I arrived back home, Drake had made little progress on the luminarias. He was slipping his jacket on as I took mine off.

  “Got a call for a charter photo job,” he said, brushing my lips with a quick kiss. “Been on the phone with this guy half the afternoon, planning the logistics of the thing. Wants to catch the sunset on the Sandias. I told him the light was terrible today, with this gray sky, but he wants to give it a try. Guess I’ll buzz him around the west side for an hour or so. If he doesn’t get decent pictures, the forecast is better for tomorrow and we’ll try it again.”

  “Flight time?”

  “No more than an hour. I’ll call as I’m taking off.”

  The FAA requires a commercial aircraft to file a flight plan or provide someone within the company to monitor each flight. In Drake’s business, that was me. I gave him a quick kiss and watched him drive away.

  A faint tapping at the back door drew my attention.

  “Got your groceries,” Elsa said, coming into the kitchen. “The pork tenderloin looked wonderful. It’s gonna make yours the winning stew.”

  I smiled and thanked her. Bless her heart, she has a lot more faith in my cooking abilities than I do. I heated a kettle and made us each a cup of tea. Drake called to give his takeoff time, which I jotted down, then Elsa and I settled back with our tea
and several cookbooks to choose our recipes for the neighborhood cookie swap.

  “Well, I’m doing my spritz,” Elsa said, before we’d delved very far into the books. “They go over pretty good every year, especially the ones I decorate with those little candies.”

  “They’re fabulous,” I agreed. “Nothing like a cookie with tons of butter in it to get my loyalty.”

  I flipped aimlessly through the cookbook. “You know, I think I’ll make biscochitos this year. They’re Christmasy, and not nearly as much work as some of the frosted, decorated, fancy things other people bring.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed enthusiastically, “those are wonderful. Do them.”

  I’d already filled her in on all the projects I had to accomplish within the week, and the fact that my mother-in-law would be here, now only three days away. We finished our tea and Elsa headed back to her house through the break in the hedge that’s been there since I was a little girl. I used to duck out the kitchen door and try to get through the hedge before Mother could catch me and make me come back. Then I’d sit in Elsa’s kitchen and be fed cookies and milk. When my parents died in a plane crash, Elsa Higgins took me into her home and kept me out of trouble until I could move back into the family home and be on my own. Anyone who’ll take in a teenager for a couple of years should probably have “Saint” stenciled above her doorway.

  I flipped aimlessly through the cookbooks for a few more minutes but didn’t change my mind about my choice. Drake phoned to say he’d landed and I noticed that the gray day was dying, becoming a gray twilight.

  The next two days flew by, filled with gift wrapping, freshening the guest room, and setting up the tree in the living room. By Friday morning, I’d made about all the preparations I could for a mother-in-law visit. I gathered my ingredients for green chile stew and headed downtown to the Convention Center and the cookoff. The plan was that Catherine would arrive about mid-afternoon and Drake would bring her downtown to sample the results.