Chow Down (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

thought. The question wasn’t that hard. I knew exactly where I’d been when Larry Kim died. If the man’s death had come as such a surprise to the Reddings, you’d think they would have had that information at their fingertips, too.
    “Honey?” Bill looked at his wife. “Did we leave before or after Larry and Lisa?”
    “I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I guess I wasn’t paying any attention to them at that point.”
    “The Kims split up when they left the meeting,” I said to help things along. “Lisa took the elevator down and Larry went by the stairs.”
    If someone had said that to me, I’d have asked why. But either the Reddings lacked my curiosity, or else they already knew the answer. Neither one commented.
    “So when you left the conference room to go home, you weren’t with either one of them?”
    “No,” Bill said slowly, “not that I recall.”
    “What about Dorothy and Ben?”
    “What about them?” asked Allison.
    “Were they on the elevator with you?”
    “Oh we didn’t take the elevator.” Bill seemed happy to finally be able to supply an answer. “Ginger hates them. We took the steps.”
    I tried to work that information into my timeline. “So if you didn’t see Larry in the stairwell—or Faith and me, for that matter—you must have gone down ahead of us.”
    “Maybe,” Allison said with a shrug. “The police asked us about that and it turned out that we hadn’t taken the same set of stairs that you and Larry did. There was another stairwell at the other end of the hallway. That’s how we got down.”
    Damn, I thought. I hadn’t realized that. Having another potential exit was going to make it that much harder to pin down where everyone had been when Larry died.
    “One more thing,” I said. “Where were the two of you when you heard about what had happened to Larry?”
    “Outside in the parking lot. We were just about to leave when Chris Hovick came outside and said there’d been an accident. We didn’t realize he was talking about something serious. We had no idea that Larry had died until later that afternoon.”
    “How did you find out?”
    “The Norwalk police called us. A Detective Sheridan,” Bill said. “He said he just had a couple of routine questions, but when he found out that we left before anything happened, he didn’t even ask those.”
    But they hadn’t left, I thought. Hadn’t they just told me that? They’d still been outside the building.
    “Lisa was outside then, too,” I said. “Maybe you saw her?”
    Allison shook her head. “Not me.”
    “Me either,” said Bill. “I guess the Kims must have been parked on the other side of the lot.”
    I stifled a sigh. Under the guise of trying to be helpful, the Reddings had managed to tell me exactly nothing of any value. I wondered if it was by accident or design that their collective recollection of the previous Monday was so vague.
    “Now I have a question for you,” said Bill.
    “Go ahead,” I said.
    “Are you asking everyone what they were up to when Larry Kim died, or just us?”
    “Sooner or later I guess I’ll talk to everyone.”
    “Why?” asked Allison.
    “Because I want to know what happened.”
    The two of them stared at me blankly.
    “Aren’t you curious?” I asked.
    “Not really,” said Bill. “It’s none of our business.”
    “One less contestant to beat,” said Allison. “His loss. Our gain.”

15
    T hat was just cold.
    And though the Reddings apparently didn’t know it yet, Yoda and Lisa weren’t dropping out of the contest. So if either one of them had had anything to do with Larry Kim’s demise, they hadn’t gained much.
    When I got back to the setup, Aunt Peg and Sam were leaning against either side of a bank of stacked crates and sharing a funnel cake. Judging by the evidence, they’d also eaten burgers and fries. Bertie, whose crates they were draped over, was brushing out an Otterhound, munching on a power bar, and looking as though she’d rather be eating a funnel cake.
    “There you are,” said Peg. “You missed lunch. We picked up a hamburger for you at the food stand but Bertie ate it.”
    I glanced at my sister-in-law and lifted a brow.
    “It was getting cold,” she said without remorse. Bertie was still breast feeding Maggie. Always slender, she now ate like a stevedore just to keep her weight up. “Trust me, it was bad enough already. You really wouldn’t have wanted it once the grease had congealed.”
    “Don’t