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Since that was only the truth, about the only thing I could do was shrug. “I was seeing Calvin,” I said coolly, although I knew that reply was a bit disingenuous. Technically, Danny had made his advances while Calvin was freezing me out and maintaining radio silence. To anyone looking in from the outside, it would have seemed I was totally available.
Danny’s mouth quirked, telling me he’d noted the flaw in my argument. To my relief, though, he didn’t bother to point that out, and only said, “Lisa Callaway is a very pretty girl. I just like to think of myself as an admirer of beauty.”
Even if said “beauty” was barely legal, as in the case of Taylor Harrison.
But since we’d already covered that ground, I refrained from commenting on his statement. Instead, I asked, “Anyone else?”
He was silent for a moment, thinking. “I dated a couple of women over the summer,” he said at length, “but nothing serious. I don’t think any of them were so upset by me not calling them back that they’d do something as serious as slipping poison into my drink.”
One wouldn’t think so. Then again, people could do crazy things when they felt slighted.
“You should probably give me their names, though,” I told him. “Just in case.”
Danny didn’t appear terribly thrilled by that request, but he didn’t argue, only said, “Corinne Newbury, Susan Laughlin, and Jennifer Espinoza.”
I wrote down the names in my notebook. I couldn’t say I knew any of those women well, except that they all seemed to have their own lives and their own careers…and all of them were in their early or middle thirties, which meant Danny hadn’t spent all his dating energies on robbing the cradle.
Except….
Jennifer Espinoza had come into the shop sometime in the middle of July, and had bought a love spell candle. I remembered the incident clearly because she’d seemed entirely embarrassed to be making such a purchase…but not so embarrassed that she hadn’t walked out of the store with the candle in a paper bag. And I also recalled her visit because I knew she hadn’t been the first person to buy a love candle from me. No, I’d sold several to a quietly intense woman with dark hair not long after I’d opened the shop, although she hadn’t told me her name and had paid cash. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her after that.
Had Jennifer Espinoza bought that candle to help her relationship with Danny Ortega along? If so, it obviously hadn’t been very useful. Spell candles could often be quite effective, but if Jennifer hadn’t been clear about her intentions while lighting the one she’d bought from me, the spell could have gone nowhere.
I tried to recall everything I knew about Jennifer Espinoza, which wasn’t much. She was probably a few years older than I, pretty, with a cloud of curly dark hair and big brown eyes. I thought I’d heard somewhere that she was an admin at the Freeport Mine, located just outside Globe’s western town limits. But I had no idea whether she was divorced or just someone who hadn’t found the right guy yet.
Could Jennifer have been so upset the spell candle hadn’t worked that she’d tipped something lethal into Danny’s drink? He’d certainly been flirting massively with Lisa Callaway, and I had no reason to believe he hadn’t been doing the same thing all night with various women at the party, although I hadn’t witnessed any of those other interactions myself.
Something about that scenario didn’t feel right, though. Flying into a rage at seeing the man she wanted flirting with other women was one thing. I suppose that sort of reaction was fairly believable. The presence of poison, however, indicated to me that the murder must have been premeditated. A poison strong enough to knock someone dead within a few seconds of consuming it wasn’t the sort of thing most people carried around in their purses.
I tried to remember if I’d seen Jennifer at the party. Had that been her in the harem girl costume, her face partially obscured by a silky veil? Or had she been the one dressed as a cat, with painted stripes blurring her features?
“Were any of those women at the party?” I asked.
“Jennifer and Corinne,” Danny replied.
Well, that answer narrowed it down a little. I really didn’t want to think either of those women was capable of murdering a man in cold blood, but I’d promised Danny I’d try to find his killer, and that meant following any possible leads.
“Can you give me their addresses?”
That request seemed to take him aback. “Um…I can’t remember for sure. I mean, I know Jennifer lives on Kline Street. Her house is in the middle of the block. It’s light blue with white trim.”
I suppose that piece of information would make it a little easier to find…as long as there wasn’t a baker’s dozen of blue houses with white trim on that very same block. And although I knew I could ask Josie for the exact address, I really didn’t want to get her involved with any of this. For one thing, she’d be sure to inquire as to why I thought Jennifer might be a suspect, and I didn’t want to reveal that my source just happened to be Danny’s ghost. If nothing else, the knowledge that Danny still happened to be hanging around this plane could only be disconcerting for someone who might worry he’d come back to the scene of the crime and take up permanent residence in her house.
“Okay,” I said, making a few notes on my pad. “What about Corinne?”
“She lives in half a duplex on First Street. It’s a sort of Spanish-style place with rosebushes out front.”
His description was vague enough that I had to hope the location would seem more obvious to me when I saw it in person. “Which side of the duplex?”
He squinted for a moment, clearly trying to dredge that detail up from somewhere in his memory. It seemed clear to me Corinne hadn’t left too much of an impression on him.
“The left,” he said, but with a rising inflection on the second word, as though he wasn’t too certain of that fact.
I allowed myself an inner sigh. Well, with any luck, her name would be clearly labeled on the mailbox, or there would be some other clue I could use to decide which half of the duplex was hers.
After making a few more notes, I asked, “Is there anyone else you can think of?”
“Not really,” Danny replied. “I mean, I know Kyle Sanders was mad at me for kicking his son off the football team because his grades weren’t up to snuff, but I don’t think that’s a killing offense.”
