Candy Cane Murder (Hannah Swensen #9.5)(46)

But it’s not just the three of us. Every year my parents invite my Aunt Clara and Uncle Ed and my cousin Joanie to join us, along with Joanie’s husband Bradley and son Dexter. All of us bunking in a two-bedroom condo.

My mom calls it “cozy.” I call it hell.

Joanie and her family get to sleep in the guest bedroom.

Uncle Ed and Aunt Clara camp out in the den. And lucky me—I get to sleep on the living room sofa right next to the Christmas tree. You haven’t lived till you wake up Christmas morning with pine needles up your nose.

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And if all that weren’t bad enough, I have to spend an entire week feeling like a blimp next to my cousin Joanie, a perfect size two—and that’s after giving birth to Dexter.

Suffice it to say, the last time I wore a size two, I was in preschool.

All of which explains why I turned down that cheeseburger. I simply had to shed a few pounds before Florida.

True, I was feeling a bit hungry, but I made up my mind to stop off at the market and buy myself a nice healthy 100calorie apple. That would tide me over till dinner. No burgers for me. No way. No how.

Okay, so I didn’t stop off at the market for an apple. I stopped off at McDonald’s for a quarter pounder. What can I say? I got in my car with the noblest of intentions, but the smell of Maxine’s burger hounded me like a hari krishna at an airport, and I couldn’t resist.

After licking the last of the ketchup from my fingers, I drove to the home of Garth Janken, Seymour’s recently deceased customer. Janken lived in the megabucks north-ofWilshire section of Westwood, a bucolic bit of suburbia, which—in the interests of protecting the innocent and staving off a lawsuit—I shall call Hysteria Lane.

The houses were straight out of a Town & Country spread, dotted with gracious elms and white picket fences running riot with rosebushes.

At this time of year, however, landscaping took a backseat to Christmas decorations. Clearly the people on Hysteria Lane took their decorating seriously. No mere Christmaslights-and-a-tree-in-the-window on this block. Everywhere I looked, I saw animated Christmas figures. Santas waved, reindeers nodded, elves pranced. For a minute I thought I’d made a wrong turn and wound up at Disneyland. A far cry from my own modest neck of the woods, where the only animated figure I’d ever seen on a lawn was Mr. Hurlbut, the 164

Laura Levine

guy in the duplex across the street, after he’d had one eggnog too many.

The theme of Garth Janken’s house was Christmas in Candyland. I could tell this was the theme by the gold-embossed CHRISTMAS IN CANDYLAND banner draped out front. Candy canes and sugarplums dotted the pathway to the front door, and perched on the roof on a carpet of pink flocking, amid a jungle of even more candy canes, was an elfin creature that I assumed was either the Sugarplum Fairy or Mrs. Claus after gastric bypass surgery.

As I climbed out of my car, I saw a mailman approaching.

I decided to question him, hoping he’d seen something that would get Seymour off the hook.

“Excuse me.” I flashed him my most winning smile. “Can you spare a few minutes?”

“I’m afraid I’m sort of busy right now,” he said, sorting through some letters. “These weeks before Christmas are nuts.”

He was an energetic guy, in a pith helmet and USPS shorts, tanned and well-muscled from toting all that mail in the sun.

What a difference from my mail carrier, a somewhat less than motivated employee who manages to deliver my Christmas cards just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“I promise it won’t take long. I’m investigating Garth Janken’s death.”

“You a cop?”

“No,” I demurred, “I’m a private investigator.”

He looked me up and down, taking in my elastic waist jeans and unruly mop of curls lassoed into a scrunchy.

“You’re kidding, right?”

I get that a lot. There’s something about elastic waist jeans and scrunchies that tend to take away your credibility as a P.I.

“No, I’m not kidding. I’m representing Seymour Fiedler of Fiedler on the Roof Roofers, and I want to ask you a few questions about Mr. Janken’s death.”

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“Man, what a mess,” he said, shaking his head. “They’ll never get the blood out of the driveway.” He looked over at the Jankens’s house and sighed. “Poor Mrs. Janken. Such a nice lady. I hope she’ll be okay.”

“Do you know if Mr. Janken had any enemies?”

He barked out a laugh.

“Ring a doorbell on this street, you’ll find an enemy. Garth was an attorney. One of those sue-happy characters always threatening to haul somebody into court. Just about everybody disliked the guy.”

“Anybody dislike him enough to want to see him dead?”

He blinked in surprise.

“You think what happened to Garth was murder?”

“Possibly.”

His eyes took on a guarded look.

“Hey, I don’t want to go accusing anybody of murder.”

Rats. I hate it when people are discreet.

Then he took a deep breath and continued.

“But Mr. Cox sure looked like he wanted to kill him sometimes.”

Yippee. He wasn’t so discreet after all.