Vanilla Vices by Jessica Beck Page B

doing me a kindness giving me all of this? If so, our ideas of favors varied greatly. In the end, it was a last service I could do for him, whether I got anything out of it after his list of bequests was satisfied or not.
    “Should we go room by room and see if we can find anything that might possibly be a clue? Where was his body found, do you have any idea?”
    “It was in one of the side rooms where the cast iron things were kept. It’s hard to believe that Dan organized anything, but I’m starting to see a pattern here. This main room has a little bit of everything, a way to tease his customers into delving deeper into the building. Look through the doorways that open up from here. I can see cast iron in one room, jewelry and trinkets over there, and there’s even a space for small furniture. I have a hunch the deeper we dig, the more surprised we will be.”
    “I don’t know. I’m kind of stunned right now, to be honest with you,” Grace said. After taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, she said, “We might as well go ahead and tackle the cast iron room first.”
    We walked into the side space together, and we found walls covered with shelving, all heavy duty, since it was holding goods that had been cast in iron. There weren’t just ancient skillets and Dutch ovens there, though there were plenty of those, but besides the collection of cookware, there were trivets, fireplace covers, and even figurines that had all been cast long ago. One section held the old-fashioned irons, like the kind in old games of Monopoly. I usually chose the racecar when I played, but I’d settle for the thimble if someone else got to it first. I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing the iron by choice. I couldn’t imagine heating the real deal near the fire and then pressing my clothes with it. Then again, I rarely ironed anything at home now, and it was as easy as plugging in the iron and setting up my ironing board. The row of irons here had an obvious omission. That must have been where the murder weapon had sat, probably for years, rarely being picked up and examined until it had been used to commit murder. The floor beneath it still had traces of blood on it, though there was no chalk outline as I’d expected.
    Grace must have wondered about the same thing. “Don’t they do chalk drawings anymore at the crime scene?”
    “I guess not. It’s clear enough where they must have found him, though,” I said. Looking around the room, I said, “This isn’t the biggest space in the shop by any means. Why was Dan in here with the killer? Does the location of his murder give us any clues?”
    “Maybe he suspected whoever was there was going to try to kill him, so he wanted something to defend himself. What better spot than around all of this heavy metal?”
    I shrugged, and then I stepped back out into the front room again.
    Grace asked, “Are you getting squeamish on me, Suzanne?”
    “No, I just want to see something,” I said. I looked around the room for something else that might be used as a weapon. Within three feet of the door to the iron room, I found an old tool, a heavy wrench that would have served as a better bludgeon than an ancient iron. “Why didn’t the killer use this instead?” I asked as I picked it up. It wasn’t quite as heavy as an iron, but it would do the job just fine.
    “Maybe they didn’t want to be seen from the outside?” Grace asked as she pointed to the windows facing the parking lot. “Or maybe Dan was already back there looking at something else when the killer came in.”
    “I’m starting to see why the state police think this was just part of another robbery,” I said.
    “How so?”
    “In one scenario, Dan is upstairs. He comes down to investigate when he hears a noise, confronts the burglar, and then tries to get back upstairs. The thief panics, chases him, picking up an iron along the way and bashing him in the back of the head with it. But for that theory to work, we