Candy Cane Murder (Hannah Swensen #9.5)(53)

“Of course, Garth was foolish to go up on the roof in the first place,” she said. “You really need to hire a professional for that. I always do. But then I’m acrophobic. Dreadful fear of heights,” she added, in case my vocabulary didn’t extend beyond three-syllable words. “I get dizzy in high heels. Ha ha.”

(Translation: If you’re hinting at foul play, sweetie, don’t even think of trying to pin this on me. ) “Are you sure you didn’t see anyone else up on the roof, other than the roofers?

“Omigosh!” she cried, hitting her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I just remembered!”

At last! A lead!

“My cookies!” she said. “I’ve got cookies in the oven!”

So much for leads.

“C’mon inside, and we’ll talk there.”

I followed her into her house, past a border of newly planted rosebushes, little stubs with the nursery tags still on them. Probably replacements for the ones that had been poisoned.

“Take your shoes off,” Libby instructed, kicking hers off.

“I just waxed and buffed the floors, and I don’t want to track in any mud.”

We put our shoes on something Libby called her “mud THE DANGERS OF CANDY CANES

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rug,” an area rug so pristine, it was hard to imagine it had ever been sullied by a speck of actual mud.

“I’ll be right back,” she trilled. “Make yourself comfortable in the living room.”

She pointed to a room off the foyer and then scurried to the back of the house.

I made my way through an arched entranceway to the living room.

Yikes, I thought, looking around. The place was a real-life issue of Martha Stewart Living.

The furniture was upholstered in a palette of white and beige, accented by colorful throw pillows and strategically placed vases of fresh-cut flowers. Cinnamon spice potpourri scented the air. And framed in the window was a magnificent Christmas tree, studded with what looked like exquisite handmade ornaments—angels and snowflakes and fragrant pomander balls. What a masterpiece. It made the one at Rockefeller Center look like a blue light special at Kmart. I wondered if the resourceful Libby had grown the darn thing herself.

Padding around the room in my socks, hoping I wouldn’t skid into a tailspin on the freshly waxed floors, I came across a pine étagère filled with artfully arranged photos and mementos.

There was Libby on the beach with a sunburned potbellied man, both of them wearing leis, smiling into the camera. Her deceased husband, I presumed. There were several pictures of twin boys at various stages in their lives, from diaper days to high school graduation. But what caught my attention was a framed newspaper photo of Libby grinning at the camera, clutching a trophy. The headline above the photo read: LIBBY BRECKER, 42, WINS ANNUAL ROSE COMPETITION

FOR FIFTH CONSECUTIVE YEAR. And indeed, proudly displayed and dramatically lit on a center shelf were five golden trophies from the West Los Angeles Gardening Club for Most Beautiful Rose.

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Laura Levine

Interesting, I noted, how the roses got better shelf space than her husband and kids.

Libby was crazy about her roses, all right. Crazy enough, I wondered, to have killed someone she thought poisoned them?

“I see you’re looking at my family pictures.”

I turned to see Libby sailing into the room with a tray of cookies and milk.

“The twins just went off to college this year,” she said, putting the tray down on a gleaming pine coffee table. “Golly, I’ve missed them. Empty nest syndrome, you know.”

Why did I get the feeling she was secretly relieved not to have to worry about the twins tracking mud onto her floors?

“I brought us some cookies.”

She waved me over to the matching white sofas that fronted the fireplace and I sat across from her, sinking into a luxurious down cushion.

“Have one,” she offered. “They’re chocolate chip.”

As if I didn’t know. I can smell a chocolate chip cookie baking in Pomona. And these looked particularly scrumptious, studded with chunks of chocolate and walnuts.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly allow myself to have a cookie, not after the brownie I’d just had at Willard and Ethel’s.

(Okay, so I had a brownie at Willard and Ethel’s. Okay, two brownies. Oh, don’t go shaking your head like that. I’d like to see what you’re eating right now.) The last thing I needed was another calorie clinging to my thighs. But I couldn’t say no, could I? Not after all the trouble she’d gone to put them on a tray and bring them out to me. No, under the circumstances, the only polite thing to do was eat a cookie. But just one, that was all.

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing one. “They look scrumptious.”

“They are,” she said, with a confident nod.

I took a bite. I thought I’d died and gone to cookie heaven.

With great effort, I forced myself to resume my questioning.

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“So do you know anyone on the block who might’ve wanted to see Garth dead?”

“Of course not!” Libby exclaimed, plucking an errant cookie crumb from her lap. “He wasn’t a very popular man, but nobody actually wanted him dead.”

“Nobody?” I asked, suppressing the urge to reach for another cookie. “Are you sure there wasn’t anybody who had it in for Garth?”