Detective Sergeant Drummond parked outside the Kersmon Caribbean Restaurant, and the three of us went in. Althea, the owner and cook, saw Drummond and rushed out from behind a counter to hug him, laughing.
“You leave your old lady for me yet, Drummond?” Althea asked in a Jamaican accent.
“You know she’s one in a million,” the sergeant replied.
“I do,” Althea said. “Just checking to see if you’d lost your mind since I last saw you.”
Drummond introduced us, and she found us a seat in the small restaurant.
“Something to drink?” Althea asked. “Red Stripe?”
Johnson looked at Drummond, who said, “You’re off duty. Don’t mind me.”
“Red Stripe,” Johnson said.
“Make it two,” I said.
Drummond said, “Don’t bother with menus, Althea. Just bring us what you think we should be eating. Some of it should be fish.”
That seemed to make her happy, and she went off.
“You’ll be ruined for Jamaican food for life,” Drummond said. “I’m not kidding. Half the customers are from the Caribbean.”
“I won’t be able to tell my wife,” I said. “She loves Jamaica. Me too.”
“Yeah?” Drummond said. “I’m fond of it myself.”
I looked at Johnson, wanting to include him. “You ready to be a dad, Detective?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you?” Drummond asked me. “Ready?”
“No,” I said. “All I knew was I didn’t want to be like my father.”
“That work out?”
“Pretty much,” I said, and turned back to Johnson. “Don’t worry. You just sort of grow into the job, day by day.”
The beers came. So did small bowls of what Althea called fish tea, which was delicious, along with a basket of fresh zucchini bread, which was also delicious. No way I was telling Bree about this place.
“So, did you see anything we missed, Dr. Cross?” Johnson asked.
“Call me Alex,” I said. “And I don’t think you missed anything, but there are a few things I’m not clear on and a few things you might consider.”
“Okay…” Drummond said.
“Just to make sure we’re all on the same page,” I said. “You’ve got Lisa Martin and Ruth Abrams, wealthy socialites killed within a week of each other and made to look like suicides.”
“That’s right,” Johnson said.
“Friends?”
“Apparently so,” the sergeant said.
“Beyond that, they shared the same maid, Francie Letourneau, who stole jewelry from both women before being murdered herself.”
“Correct,” Johnson said. “We got confirmation from the husbands on pictures we showed them of several jewelry pieces found at Francie’s apartment.”
“Francie told the bar owner in Belle Glade—”
Althea returned with a tray. Fried plantains. Rice and black beans. Oxtail stew. And a whole steamed and spiced grouper. Definitely not telling Bree.
We dug in. The oxtail was simply incredible. So was the grouper. So were the second and third Red Stripes. I’d forgotten how easily they go down.
Once we were into second helpings, I said, “Francie told the bar owner in the Glade she was coming to Palm Beach for a job interview the day she died.”
“That’s right,” Drummond said. “Only we haven’t found a damn thing to say she ever made it to Palm. She just disappears.”
“No phone calls?”
“Her cell phone’s missing, but we found the account,” Johnson said. “I made a request yesterday for all calls in the last three months. We’ll probably hear tomorrow sometime.”
“Other thoughts?” Drummond asked.
“Yes. I think you should focus on the links and chains between the victims, and extrapolate from there.”
Johnson looked confused, so I said, “You want to isolate each thing that connects them. So, say, focus first on Francie as the common-denominator link in what we’ll call the socialites chain. Under this scenario, the maid could have killed them both to rip off their jewelry and then was killed herself by a third party who got wind of the jewels she was holding.”
“I could see that,” Drummond said, dishing a third helping of oxtail onto his plate.
“What’s the second link?” Johnson asked. “Or chain?”
“The socialite friendship,” I said. “Maybe Francie was working for a third socialite, was in the process of robbing her, and someone caught her, killed her, dumped her.”
Johnson shook his head. “From the files I went through at her apartment, Francie had been on hard times, lost all of her cleaning jobs.”
“Before she hit the Lotto?”
“Correct.”
“So maybe there was no Lotto hit,” I said. “Maybe the jewels were the explanation behind her newfound money. And maybe she wasn’t going to Palm Beach for an interview on the day she died; maybe she was going to kill someone and steal more jewels.”