Free Fat-Free and Fatal (A Kate Jasper Mystery) by Jaqueline Girdner

Felix was still there, so be it. I could handle his harangue better than Vesta’s Alice-in-Wonderland questions. Malice-in-Wonderland, I corrected myself.
    But Felix was nowhere in sight when Barbara opened her apartment door.
    “I told him to take off,” she explained with a sigh.
    Then her eyes flashed with indignation. “He was driving me bananas with his questions. Jeez-Louise, Kate, he’s a vampire! He wanted to know everything. What the body looked like, what I felt like, who I thought did it…”
    She ranted for a full five minutes. I didn’t blame her. I had been at the receiving end of Felix’s inquisitions before. She hadn’t. And he was her boyfriend. That had to be worse.
    “Sic him on Iris,” I suggested once Barbara ran out of words.
    “Maybe I’ll just do that, kiddo,” she said, smiling.
    She wrapped her arms around me and laughter vibrated through both of our bodies as we hugged. Then she let go and motioned me into her apartment. I took a seat on one of the blue futons and looked up at her.
    “I got a call on my answering machine…” I said slowly, hating to spoil the mood. “I think it was Dan Snyder—”
    “He called me too,” Barbara interrupted cheerfully. She sat down next to me. “He thinks the two of us killed his wife.”
    “He what?” I yelped.
    She reached over and patted my hand. “He’s in pain, Kate,” she said earnestly. “He wants to blame someone. And we’re it. He has this theory that we were in it together. Someone must have told him that we found Sheila’s body.”
    “Aren’t you scared?” I demanded, fastening my eyes on Barbara’s lovely, serene face.
    “I don’t think he’s really dangerous,” she said with an easy wave of her hand.
    And that was that. I wanted to call the police. She didn’t. I wanted to quit investigating. She didn’t. I wanted to move to Alaska. She didn’t. She had some paperwork to do. She advised me to do the same.
    It was good advice. After an hour of meaningful interaction with the Jest Gifts payroll account, I wasn’t in a gibbering panic anymore. So what if this maniac thought we killed his wife? What was he going to do about it? Now I was only frightened. Very frightened.
    Barbara tapped me on the shoulder as I was reaching for my accounts payable file. My rear end levitated a full inch above my chair, then landed again with a whump . “It’s time to visit Paula Pierce,” she said and dragged me down the stairs to the apartment parking lot before I could formulate an objection. She offered to drive. I refused the offer. Barbara’s driving style—eyes on her passenger instead of the road—scared me almost as much as Dan Snyder.
    We were on the Golden Gate Bridge when Barbara drew a sheet of newsprint from her purse and unfolded it to its full three-foot length. This was the “paperwork” she had been working on for the last hour, a chart of murder suspects that included columns with the scrawled headings of “opportunity,” “motive” and “psychological profile.” She read pieces of it all the way into San Francisco, occasionally flashing the sheet between my eyes and the windshield when she wanted me to see something important. She had read almost to the bottom of the chart when we reached Paula’s office in the Mission District.
    As I circled the block looking for a parking space, Barbara told me her conclusions. Boiled down, her chart seemed to prove that anyone could have done it. Alice, Meg, Ken, Leo, Iris, Gary, or Paula. Or the family members. Or Dan’s friend Zach. According to Barbara’s chart, they all had opportunity. They all had motives. Lots of motives.
    I prayed to the goddess of parking spaces as Barbara expounded. I was instantly rewarded. A Honda pulled out of a legal parking space in front of me. I slid into the space thankfully.
    “Well?” prompted Barbara as we got out of the Toyota. She looked into my face eagerly.
    “You’ve got a great imagination, that’s for sure,” I