“YOU WERE COLUMBO?” I asked. I stepped backward to put distance between us and looked around for Detective Nichols, for Bobbie, or for anybody familiar.
“Sure. Why is that so important? At first I let Blitz think I was going to take the Sherlock costume that he wanted to wear, but that’s too cruel even for me.”
“When did you give it to him?”
“We spent Friday going over his invite list and assigning costumes to different people. A couple of the women wanted to do their own thing—you know, the ones who work for Candy Girls—but other than that, just about everybody liked what we picked out.”
I looked at the list again, this time scanning for Tak’s name. “What about Tak Hoshiyama?”
“I don’t know what he was doing there. Blitz invited him when he heard he was back in town, but neither of us thought he’d show. He said he’d figure out his own costume. Who was he?”
“Charlie Chan.”
“Man, he did a good job with that. I wondered who was under that mustache.”
The longer I stood at Blitz’s memorial talking to Grady, the more I felt like a mask had been pulled over my eyes, hiding the truth about the people around me. Only it wasn’t so much that the truth was hidden, it was that an alternate truth had been fabricated and fed to me like a fistful of candy corn. If Grady was involved in Blitz’s murder—a fact that I wasn’t yet ready to discount—his current golly-shucks attitude now seemed diabolical. I snuck a look at him from under my curled eyelashes and caught him staring back at me. This time he grinned the same smile that had put me on alert a week ago when he was in the shop.
I turned around again and spotted Bobbie talking to Black Jack. He wore the same cowboy hat and bolo tie he’d worn when I met him at the gas station.
“Thank you for the list,” I said to Grady. “I want to pay my respects to Black Jack and Mrs. Manners.”
“Mrs. Cannon,” Grady corrected. “She took Black Jack’s name when they married. Blitz was pretty angry about that. He stayed at my house for a month so he wouldn’t have to talk to her.”
“But surely he understood that there was nothing wrong with her falling in love with Black Jack after Mr. Manners passed away, right?”
“Blitz didn’t see things that way. He never forgave his mom when she remarried.”
“So Blitz and Black Jack didn’t get along?”
“No, they got along great. That made his mom even more angry. Black Jack never acted like he wanted to be Blitz’s dad. He let Blitz do whatever he wanted. Even gave him a black Ferrari from the dealership when he graduated high school. That just made things between Blitz and his mom worse.”
I nodded as though I was listening, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the wrinkled Columbo coat. Could I trust anything that Grady said? I didn’t know. Kirby had said that the friendship between Grady and Blitz was less than perfect. If they did have a deep-rooted competitive rift between them, what would keep Grady from making up stories about Blitz’s family that would throw suspicion away from himself?
I thanked Grady again and headed toward the shaded picnic tables. The more I thought about that Columbo coat, the more another question nagged at me. Why hadn’t the police found it when they went over the crime scene? A murder had been committed. Every person at that party had been interviewed. According to the crime scene cleanup crew, the fire hall had been left in postparty state for forty-eight hours because the police wanted to make sure they’d gotten every piece of evidence that had been left behind. So how was it that a rumpled and dirty trench coat, balled up and shoved in the oven in the corner of the kitchen, could have gone unnoticed?
Either the Proper City Police Department had done a very sloppy job on the investigation or somebody wasn’t telling me the truth.
I walked across the yellow-green patchy ground and plucked a bottle of water from a large silver bowl filled with rapidly melting ice cubes. Gina Casserole—I mean, Cassavogli—narrowed her eyes at me but said nothing. She hadn’t changed out of her pink skirt and turquoise shoes, and she stood out like an extra from Miami Vice. For a fleeting moment I regretted not adding Crockett and Tubbs to the costumes at the party.
Water from the wet bottle ran down the palms of my hands and dripped onto my dress. I peeked around to see if anybody was watching me and then ran the bottle over the side of my dress to dry it. When I looked back up, I saw Tak Hoshiyama staring at me from the charcoal pits.
Figured.