Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

When I got home, Marcus was in the living room with all the aunties, enjoying a meryenda of coffee, cheese, and the last of the mamón. I brewed a pot of tea and set out the ube crinkles I’d been experimenting with.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon, Marcus. Or is it C.O. Marcelo?” I grinned and held out the tin. “Try some of these cookies. I remember you having a particular fondness for ube.”

“You remember right.” Marcus popped a whole cookie in his mouth before stacking several more on his plate. “Whoa, these are so good. Thanks, Lila.”

Ninang Mae smacked him upside his head. “What do you mean, ‘Lila’? That’s your ate, show some respect!”

I flushed. “Ninang Mae, it’s fine. I don’t really care about that stuff.”

Tita Rosie smiled at me. “She’s right, Mae. As long as they respect their elders, what’s the harm in not using the titles among themselves? I mean, Lila and Marcus aren’t that far apart in age. Marcus, how old are you now?”

He swallowed a mouthful of cookie. “I’m twenty-one, Tita.”

Ninang Mae huffed. “No member of my family will be so disrespectful, especially not in front of all my friends. Now, Marcus, tell us everything you know.”

Poor Marcus. He probably wasn’t supposed to tell us anything, but he seemed to not care about the bounds of professional privacy as much as Bernadette and Amir did. Or at least, he wasn’t as scared of losing his job as he was of angering the aunties.

He picked up another cookie. “Well, I’m sorry to say it’s not looking too good. Along with the arsenic in Derek’s dessert dishes, they seem to have found narcotics in his system, similar to the ones found in Li—I mean, Ate Lila’s locker.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Wait, so he was drugged first? Maybe someone forced him to eat the poison?”

He shrugged, not so much in nonchalance as discomfort, his words coming out more like questions than statements. “Uh, well, it seems more likely that he purposely took the pain medication? You know, for uh, recreational use?”

“So maybe an overdose?”

Ninang June shook her head. “I doubt it. The EMTs would’ve recognized the symptoms of opioid overdose and used Narcan or something similar. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is becoming more common. Not in Shady Palms necessarily, but throughout the county.”

I sighed and nibbled on an ube crinkle, so lost in thought I couldn’t even enjoy how the light coating of powdered sugar gave just enough sweetness to the subtle, almost vanilla-like flavor of the purple yam. It all turned to sand in my mouth.

I put the half-eaten cookie down. “So what does this mean for me?”

Marcus rubbed the back of his head, the rasp of the short-shorn bristles grating on my already fragile nerves. “You need to prove that those drugs didn’t belong to you. It’s their main piece of evidence. Or that the arsenic got into Derek’s food through some other means. If you can’t prove those things, then I don’t know.”

Ninang Mae frowned. “Amir’s good, but Detective Park is relentless. He doesn’t care that Rosie is a friend. If he thinks he’s right . . .”

Those ominous words hung in the air for a moment before Ninang June spoke up. “So, Lila, have you checked out anyone on the list yet?”

I glanced at Marcus and Tita Rosie, who didn’t seem surprised. Guess that was to be expected—not like my godmothers to keep a secret for long.

“I’ve met two so far. Adeena and I went to Stan’s Diner today to meet Stan Kosta and his wife. I don’t think it’s them. They had reason to be angry, but it hasn’t hurt their business at all, so it’d be foolish for them to risk a murder. Plus, how would they even get the poison in our food?”

“You’re all forgetting something,” Ninang April said. “Yes, the fact that arsenic was in the dishes is very strange, but how quickly does it kill? Did anyone bother looking it up?”

Ninang June leaned back in her chair and tapped her chin. “Arsenic tends to be more slow-acting, taking anywhere from two hours to maybe four days, depending on the dosage. He vomited, which is definitely a sign of arsenic poisoning, but it’s also a sign of most other poisons. And it was less than an hour from when he started his meal till he passed.”

We waited for her to say more, but she had her thinking face on and wouldn’t talk to us until she was good and ready. Ninang April picked up the thread of the conversation again.

“June, if I understand you correctly, that means while Derek may have had arsenic in his system, it was a low enough dosage that symptoms shouldn’t have appeared yet. Which points to something else as the cause of death.”

Ninang June nodded. “It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what I think. Also, the arsenic was only in Derek’s dessert dishes? Nothing on any of the other plates?”

Marcus shook his head. “When Detective Park was out, I took a look at the report. The dishes were all mixed together from other tables, but arsenic was only found on two dishes, and one of them was the almost-full bowl of whatever Derek was eating when he passed out. The other still had banana leaf and bits of sticky rice on it, which we assumed was his other plate.”

I nodded. “He ate suman, so chances are good the other plate was his. But it doesn’t make sense. They seemed to think arsenic was in our rice, so it should’ve been in all the dishes, not just the dessert ones.”

As I said that, another thing occurred to me. “Wait, that definitely doesn’t make sense. The tainted bag held jasmine rice, but we don’t use that for the desserts. We use glutinous rice. We’re being set up!”

Ninang April nodded her approval at me. “That’s a huge discrepancy. So what do you think happened?”

I tried to think outside the box. “Someone added arsenic to the dishes and bag of rice after Derek had already eaten. Is it possible for there to be another kind of poison in his system that didn’t show up on the lab report?”

Marcus shrugged. “Dunno. My job is just supervising the people that get arrested. I don’t have anything to do with like, on-the-street stuff. This is all stuff I heard ’cause people in that building love to talk.”

Ninang June cut in. “From what I know, labs test for the most common toxins in a case like this. If there was something else in his system, then it was a substance they hadn’t tested for.”

“But why wouldn’t they test for everything? This is a murder!” Ninang Mae exclaimed.

Ninang June shrugged. “We share the facilities with the entire county and there’s limited resources. Plus they found drugs and arsenic in the initial screening, so why waste taxpayer time and money?”

“But do you think there’s enough evidence to convince the lab to test for anything else?” I was desperate for anything to turn the case in my favor.

Ninang June nodded. “I think so. If Detective Park won’t run it, I could pull some strings, but it’s best not to go behind his back.”

Marcus pulled out his phone. “You’re right. Should I tell him what we talked about?”

I shook my head. “You’re not supposed to be involved in this, remember? I don’t want you getting in trouble. I’ll tell Amir and he can pass it on. I don’t think the detective will take it very seriously if I tell him.”

I left to go make the call, then went to go check on Tita Rosie after I’d finished. She’d disappeared into the kitchen pretty early on and hadn’t come back. “Tita? Are you OK?”

She was at the kitchen counter kneading dough. “Of course, anak. I just needed to get started on the ensaymada for church tomorrow. You know it takes a long time to let the dough rise, and then we have to rest it overnight.”

The brioche-like bread covered with butter, sugar, and occasionally cheese was my favorite treat and one of the few things I looked forward to every Sunday. “Wait, I thought that was Lola Flor’s job? Where is she anyway? I haven’t seen her all day.”

My aunt blew a puff of air up at her bangs. “You know how your lola is. Not like she tells me anything. Anyway, I have a lot to do right now, anak, so go keep mga ninang company.”

I nodded and went back out to the living room at the same time Amir called me back with an update.

“Hey, what did the detective say?”

He laughed. “Told me to mind my own business and stick to defending criminals. However, he’s a fair man. He really does care about doing the right thing, so he’s going to ask the medical examiner to run tests for basically any poisonous substance in the database. It’s going to take time, though.”

“I’ll take what I can get. Thanks, Amir.”

We hung up and I grabbed the cookie I’d abandoned earlier. This time I savored it. I had a chance now. The medical examiner would prove that someone else killed Derek and this was one big frame job.

Ninang June coughed. “Lila, didn’t you say you talked to two suspects on the list? You told us about Stan and his wife, who was the other one?”

“Yuki Sato. We actually shared a jail cell for a while last night. Marcus, anything you can tell us about why Mrs. Sato was brought in?”

He started to laugh again but cut himself off. “Sorry, that was messed up. It’s just hard to picture that tiny woman getting into such a loud screaming match with her husband.”

I held my hand up to my cheek, which was covered with an extra layer of concealer and powder to hide the souvenir from my run-in with Yuki. “Don’t let her size fool you. That woman has a temper and packs a wallop. Felt like that time Ate Bernie ‘accidentally’ hit me in the face with a tennis racket.”

“Oh, is that why you quit playing? She told me you were banned from the junior league for chucking your racket at a ref.”

“He made a bad call! The ball was clearly in bounds, and I should’ve won—OK, you know what, not important.” I took a sip of tea to calm myself down.

Ninang June tried to hide a smirk as she said, “Let’s get back on track. So Mrs. Sato was brought in for a domestic dispute? Did her husband call the police?”

Marcus was working on what must’ve been his tenth cookie. He wiped some crumbs from his mouth before saying, “No, a neighbor called it in. Disturbing the peace, since they were having this fight on the sidewalk outside their restaurant. The neighbor tried to ignore it, but eventually they got tired of the Satos scaring away customers.”

“Do you know what the cause of the fight was?”

“They were speaking in Japanese when they got to the station, but I managed to pick up the gist of the conversation,” Marcus said. “She accused him of hurting someone, and he said it was her fault. Or something like that.”

I raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Since when do you know Japanese?”

He ducked his head, not meeting my eyes. “I, uh, watch a lot of anime. Like, a lot. I can’t speak it or anything, but I can understand a basic conversation.”

Ninang Mae smacked him again. “Oh, so you can learn a new language from watching your stupid cartoons, but you can barely speak Tagalog? Your own language? Gago.”

I ignored Ninang Mae’s rant as I put two and two together. “Oh my gulay, did they get into a fight because she accused her husband of killing Derek? She didn’t come out and say it while we were talking, but those two were definitely having an affair.”

“Oh, that’s what I wanted to tell you! Derek came into the station awhile ago to charge Mr. Sato with assault, but he never filed the paperwork. Said he changed his mind and that it was just a disagreement between men.”

“Well then, I know where I need to go tomorrow. Yuki told me to stop by her restaurant sometime and I think I’m going to take her up on that. In the meantime, I’m getting dinner at that Mexican restaurant. What was it called again?”

“El Gato Negro!” Marcus said. “I love that place. And the waitress is really cute. Can I join you?”

“Well . . .”

I tried to ignore the laser-eyes Ninang Mae was shooting me, but it was tough. She’d been trying to set me up with her bevy of sons and nephews my entire adult life, and I just knew she was going to start pushing Marcus on me as well. He’d filled out nicely, was rather cute, and a sweet kid, but too young for me. Though if he knew the waitress, maybe that’d provide an in at the restaurant.

To clinch it, he added, “Actually, I should introduce you to the waitress. Her family pressed charges against Derek, so she might have some information for you.”

“That would be great! Adeena will be there, too, but the more eyes and ears we have at the restaurant, the better.”

I purposely didn’t bring up that Dr. Jae would also be there since I didn’t need the aunties grilling me about him and his potential dateability. Romance was the last thing on my mind, but the aunties’ need to matchmake and meddle overthrew any of my particular wants or needs.

Marcus looked excited at the thought of a night out. “Great! Want me to pick you and Adeena up so we can ride together?”

“No, thanks, I need to run a quick errand later and can pick up Adeena on the way. How about we meet at the restaurant at eight o’clock?”

Marcus grinned. “Awesome! See you there.”

Ninang Mae, who only ever heard what she wanted to hear, clapped her hands and literally squealed. “You’re going on a date! I can’t wait to hear all about it!”

Dear Lord, why did this keep happening?