The Misadventures of the Laundry Hag 00 - Skeletons in the Closet

unsure of what to say. My mother always told me to stick with the truth whenever possible. “They have salted tops.”
    “Well I can’t eat them; high blood pressure, you know. Maybe I could have a piece of bread and butter.” The words sounded more like an order than a question.
    As I fixed his bread and butter, he asked Kenny to pass the salt.

Chapter Thirteen
    T o my astonishment, Coop was an excellent cleaning partner, despite the fact that he couldn’t recognize anything five feet in front of his face. True, he couldn’t see well enough to dust or wash windows, but his methodical mopping put me to shame and he had a way of charming the clients.
    “Now I just can’t believe that a pretty little gal like you has five great-grandchildren!” It was Sunday night, and Coop flirted shamelessly with the widowed Mrs. Duncan, who was one of our less well-to-do clients. Mrs. Duncan was hard of hearing, and Coop made his pronouncement in something close to a bellow. I thought they made a cute couple, especially since between the two of them they had a handle on all five senses.
    “You are a rascal, Coop! How the girls must chase after you!” Mrs. Duncan hollered back.
    With a stick!
    I leaned over the plastic-sheathed sofa to dust the horizontal mini-blinds. Coop was growing on me kind of like a fungus, eating every meal he could at my table and sniping over the smallest of details. The White Cloud of Death was still in the auto body shop, not due back until the next morning. After some world-class haggling, Coop had agreed to let me drive his Olds to and from jobs, so long as I coughed up fifty-two cents a mile on top of his salary.
    Coop waggled his caterpillar-like eyebrows at Mrs. Duncan as he pushed a Swiffer across her kitchen linoleum. I assumed he was gearing up to ask her to a bingo game so I made myself scarce.
    I doubted Mrs. Duncan had anything to do with my murder investigation, but I was keeping my eyes open. The first two jobs had been for acquaintances of Francesca Carmichael and Alessandra Kline. The first woman had obviously gone to the same snooty finishing school as Mrs. Kline because she refused to address me and Coop directly. The maid, who’d acted as a translator, however, bubbled gossip like a freshly uncorked champagne bottle and filled me in on the upper-crust scuttlebutt.
    The affair between Alessandra Kline and Greg the Gym Rat was common knowledge, but no one was sure of exactly how much Douglass knew. Greg the Gym Rat had been living off of his well-to-do paramours for several years, using each neglected woman’s need for affection as a gateway to his own greedy ambition. Slug slime as far as I could figure, especially since he’d pinned his sights on me not even twelve hours after her death.
    The second cleaning job had been a privately owned banquet hall halfway between Boston and Hudson. The chairwoman for the Red Cross fund had worked on several projects with Alessandra, some even before the Kline’s had moved into my neighborhood.
    “Sandra was meticulous,” she’d told me. “She was more comfortable taking on a job for herself than delegating responsibility. I once appointed her as the leader for one of our donation drives; it was a disaster. She kept shoving people out of the way to take over their work because according to her, they were too slow or not doing something correctly.”
    “Wow,” I had said as I ironed table linens for the evening’s fund-raiser. “It sounds like Mrs. Kline didn’t get along with most people.”
    “Hardly any,” the chairwoman admitted. She arranged place cards on a sterling tray. “We all respected Sandra for her hard work and dedication to a greater good, and her family dates back to the Mayflower, but she wasn’t someone who you’d think to put at the top of your invitation list, if you know what I mean.”
    As I mused on all I had learned, two disturbing thoughts shook me. First, Mrs. Kline’s propensity to step on other people’s feet made for a much larger pool of suspects than I’d originally thought, despite Mr. Kline’s claims to the contrary. Then two, it was feasible that her death was the result of a mugging gone awry. While I was in cahoots with Bradley Patterson, I was only a source of information for the police, and as such, I wasn’t privy to forensic detail. But that still wouldn’t explain Greg’s death or why I kept being sucked into the thick of it all.
    “Earth to Missy.” A wrinkled hand waved in