Free When Magic Is Murder (Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries Book 4) by Mary Maxwell Page B

to Judge
Henry Ashworth. I smiled fondly at the mention of the name. Everyone in
Crescent Creek knew the dear departed judge with the snow white hair, flashy
diamond rings and a habit of dozing off during especially lengthy late
afternoon sessions.
    “Oh, my goodness!” I said, suddenly
making the connection. “Tucker Morgenson is the Silicon Valley guy?”
    “One and the same,” Connie said.
“He bought Judge Ashworth’s ranch for about half of what it was worth.”
    I remembered hearing about the
transaction from my mother a few years earlier. Judge Ashworth had amassed one
of the largest estates in the county. After he retired and his wife passed
away, he’d sold their house in Crescent Creek and put the ranch on the market.
He planned to buy a place in Arizona, but then died suddenly from a heart
attack and left the remaining real estate to his children. Since the son and
daughter were locked in a bitter feud that had begun when they were much younger,
Judge Ashworth’s attorney suggested lowering the asking price on the ranch. In
the end, the Ashworth children sold it for far below market value, something my
mother told me about in exhaustive detail. “And the buyer’s a hotshot computer
whiz from Silicon Valley,” she’d explained. “He made over a hundred million on
some website thingy.” I smiled briefly at my mother’s encyclopedic memory of
all things Crescent Creek before turning to Shane.
    “I guess you never took that spin
in the Maserati, huh?”
    He laughed, a throaty croak that
filled my tiny office. “Never even saw the car,” he said. “Once that dude she
was with realized what was happening, he just came on like a freight train. He
clocked Jasper with a left hook before we even knew what was going down.”
    “Like Jasper?”
    Shane squinted. “What?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “I meant, like
Jasper going down after a wicked punch.”
    “Ah, I get it. But you’re wrong;
Jasper didn’t hit the floor. He spun around, shook it off and then lunged at
the guy.”
    “Is that when Eli gave you boys the
heave-ho?”
    “Basically.” Shane sounded annoyed
that the fight had been interrupted. “Although I know we could’ve turned him
inside out if we had the chance. And the guy totally deserved it, too. He was
calling that woman some terrible names and threatening to dump her for another
chick here in town.”
    I nodded. “So our John Doe was
quite the ladies’ man?”
    Connie scoffed. “He sounds like a
tool,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”

CHAPTER
15
     
     
    Since I was already going to the
bank that afternoon, I decided to make one extra stop to ask Eli Odom about the
fight Jasper and Shane had with the man found in the gazebo.
    The Bier Haus bartender was exactly
as Zack had described him: tall, brawny and bearded. His dark hair was buzzed
into a crew cut and he kept the facial hair trimmed. His arms were twin
tapestries of art—sleeve tattoos blending red, black and blue ink—and both
wrists were looped with wide leather bands.
    “Howdy,” Eli said when I walked in
the door. “What can I get for ya?”
    “How about a few workout tips?”
    He tossed a white bar towel over
his shoulder and smiled. One of his front teeth was capped with gold; the only
thing he was missing was an eye patch, a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder.
    “You look pretty fit to me, ma’am,”
he said.
    I eased up onto a bar stool,
introduced myself and ordered a glass of club soda with lime.
    “Comin’ right up,” Eli replied.
    It was my first visit to Bier Haus,
so I glanced around the room. A guy from Salt Lake City had opened three
locations in Colorado within the past year. The one in Crescent Creek was a few
months old, but it had already earned a stellar reputation for cold beer, hot
sourdough pretzels and a laidback vibe. Since it was around four o’clock, there
were only a couple of guys sipping their brews at a high-top near the pool
tables.
    “Here you