Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

lipstick or a compact or a comb or anything like that in the briefcase. It seemed to suggest that there might have been a purse, though we didn’t find one near her body.”
    “I’ll keep my eyes open for it,” I said.
    “You can’t remember anything else about it?”
    I shook my head.
    “Well,” he said. “Perhaps you could—”
    “Aha! There you are!”
    We all started and turned to see Señor Mendoza standing in the office doorway.
    “Can I help you, Señor?” the chief asked.
    “Just the people I wanted to see,” Mendoza said. “
El jefe de polícia
, and my poor hostess.”
    The chief sighed, got up from the desk chair, and courteously offered one of the evil guest chairs to Mendoza. Mendoza seated himself with a flourish, planted his cane in front of him with a brisk tap, and leaned both hands on it. The chief reseated himself and pulled out his notebook.
    “First, Señora, I must apologize for having so terribly abused your hospitality,” Mendoza said to me. “How can I possibly make amends?”
    “That depends on what you’ve done,” I said. “If it’s about the fish, you had no way of knowing.”
    “Fish?” Mendoza seemed puzzled. “No, this is not about fish, but murder!”
    “You have more evidence for me, Señor?” the chief asked.
    “I have a confession!” Mendoza exclaimed. “I did it!”
    “Did what?” the chief asked, peering over his glasses.
    “It!” Mendoza repeated. “The assassination of Señora Wright.”
    The chief sighed, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes. I found myself thinking, not for the first time, how good Mendoza’s English was. He probably understood a lot more of what was going on around him than some of the students gave him credit for.
    “Aren’t you going to arrest me?” Mendoza asked.
    “We like to take our time about things like that,” the chief said.
    “Since we don’t get that many murders in a small town like Caerphilly,” Dad added. “When we do get one, we like to savor it.”
    The chief winced and cast a sharp glance at Dad, who didn’tnotice. Life was finally providing the kind of drama Dad loved in his beloved mystery books, and he sat there beaming happily at Señor Mendoza from his ringside seat.
    “Let’s take things one step at a time,” the chief said, settling the glasses back on his temples. “Just tell me, in your own words, what happened.”
    “Well, if you like,” Señor Mendoza said. His shrug and the expression on his face seemed to suggest that he was puzzled at the chief’s lack of enthusiasm for his confession. “I became enraged at her villainous treatment of young Ramon—her and her friend, the one who has a Spanish name but not, in my opinion, a Spanish soul! To reward his years of patient labor and his courteous treatment of me in this way! The villains! The ingrates! I cannot say how angry I was to hear it. To think that these . . . these . . .”
    “You became enraged,” the chief said. “Got it. Go on.”
    “And I entered the room in which she had hidden herself and confronted her. I rebuked her for her treatment of Ramon and implored her to keep her word to him. But she would not relent. I was enraged. Somehow I found that hideous statue in my hands and before I realized, I had struck her with it.”
    “Hmm,” the chief said. He looked up from his notebook. “You were confronting her, you say? So you struck her . . . where?”
    “On the head,” Señor Mendoza said.
    “Yes, but where on the head? The front? The side? The back?”
    Mendoza frowned. I was already suspicious of his confession. Now I was sure he was lying. I’d bet the chief thought so,too, and had just posed what Mendoza clearly recognized as a trick question.
    “To be truthful, I do not know,” Mendoza said finally. “I was facing her, so it could have been the front. But equally she might have turned away at seeing my rage, or tried to. I really don’t remember. It was all a red blur.”
    “A red blur,” the chief repeated. “Do you mean there was a lot of blood?”
    Clearly Señor Mendoza was on his guard.
    “I have the impression of a great deal of red,” he said. “But I have no idea if I am recalling blood or whether it was merely the force of my rage that made me think so.”
    The chief rubbed one temple absently. I wondered if he was getting a headache. Should I offer him some aspirin? Probably better to wait until he was finished with Señor Mendoza. And considering how many people