“I researched it, too, and found a fascinating article that said men and women kill for different reasons. Although men tend to commit the most murders for a wide variety of motives, the main two reasons were concealment and jealousy. For women, it was love or personal gain,” Ninang April said, reading off a page from her notebook.
Which still fit all our remaining suspects. Mr. Weinman could’ve killed Rob out of jealousy. Valerie and Beth for personal gain. And we had to figure in that there were unknown suspects that we hadn’t been able to connect to the case yet. So in other words . . . we were right back where we started.
The restaurant phone rang and Tita Rosie got up to answer it. The rest of us sat quietly, plowing our way through our bowls of shaved ice, which Joy silently replenished whenever we ran low. She was always quiet, but at least had shown interest in our previous conversations. Today, she seemed subdued, her actions a little stiff as if she ran on autopilot. Maybe she was just stressed over the pageant, but I made a note to talk to her later, just in case.
The tinkling of our door chimes cut through the silence, and we all turned toward the door to see Tita Rosie and Detective Park coming to join us. The set of his shoulders and grim expression on his face told me this wasn’t a social visit.
“Is everything OK, Detective? Nobody . . . I mean, there hasn’t been any . . .” I fumbled over my words as I tried to find out whether he was here to arrest Bernadette or if somebody else was dead.
He held up an envelope. “Nobody’s in trouble. Yet. We received another letter threatening the pageant. I already checked for prints and it’s no one in our system, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if you had any theories. No one else at the station is bothering,” he added bitterly.
The aunties and I all raised our eyebrows. Detective Park had always maintained a professional attitude toward his colleagues, even when their ineptitude had caused him problems. I guess their lack of interest in this case was finally getting to him. He wasn’t even supposed to be a regular employee, just a consultant, but since there were no detectives on the force, he got called in whenever a big enough case came in. After all, Sheriff Lamb had to at least pretend he cared, especially when the mayor got involved.
Detective Park handed me the envelope and everyone, except for Lola Flor, scooched closer to inspect it. It had the red and blue markings around the edges that designated it for international mail use. warning was written in scratchy-looking capital letters. I pulled out the letter, which had been written on a yellow legal pad and contained a single sentence.
I hadn’t paid much attention to the first note he’d shown me, so I made sure to take my time looking over this one. The first thing I noted was that it was written in cursive, probably using a black fountain pen, based on the style. My eyes struggled to decipher the script so I could read the letter out loud, but Ninang April got impatient and took it from me.
Shut down the pageant before someone else gets hurt
She lowered the page. “That’s it? They couldn’t be more original with their threats?”
It wasn’t the phrasing that stuck out to me, but the trappings. I’d seen that envelope and script before. “Oh my gulay, I know who’s been sending these letters!”
I ran to my aunt’s office to grab my bag and riffled through it till I found my phone （Lola Flor wasn’t a fan of phones at the table, so I always left it in another room so I wouldn’t be tempted）。 “Mr. Weinman has been writing letters to Winnie Pang to try and woo her, I guess. He dropped off an envelope when I was at her salon and the other salon customers said he does it all the time. There were a few lying open in the waiting area and Adeena got a picture of them.”
I went to the Brew-ha group chat and pulled up the photo to show the detective. The aunties crowded around him to look at the screen—you didn’t have to be a handwriting analyst to see the notes were written by the same person.
“Send me that picture, Lila. I think it’s time I had a talk with Oskar Weinman. Thanks for the tip. This is some good work.” Detective Park handed me back my phone and nodded at me. He didn’t smile or say anything else, but that was high praise coming from him and I reveled in the validation. Nice to see that I was good at something. I mean OK, it was Adeena’s quick thinking that got the photos, but I was the one that put it all together. That had to count for something.
“Does that mean I’m off the hook?” Bernadette asked. She’d been hanging back at the table with Joy, her posture curled in small as if she didn’t want anyone to notice her. The exact opposite of how she usually carried herself. Any other day, she’d be crowded around with the aunties giving her own opinion on the situation, but she must’ve been too uncomfortable to approach the detective since he still considered her a suspect.