The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  “I’ve got the cases of jewel boxes for that Indianapolis gift shop stored in there,” she said. “Plus the latest shipment of chocolate.”

  So I had to tell Darrell it wasn’t a good time for him to work on the shelves.

  Joe immediately came up with an alternate plan. “You can go to the lumberyard in Holland,” he said. “I’ll make a list for there and for Smith’s Boat Supply.”

  He made the list quickly and gave Darrell the keys to his truck. As Darrell left I caught Pete sending Joe one of those significant looks I resented. Pete stood up. “I’ll volunteer to do the dishes,” he said.

  “Pete, I can do that,” I said. I like help around the house, but I don’t like strange bird-watchers messing around in my kitchen. They hide things, and heaven knows how a macho type like Pete would do dishes.

  Joe took my hand. “Let Pete do it,” he said. “He’s fairly sanitary, and I need to talk to you.”

  All the significant looks had annoyed me. I pulled my hand away from Joe, leaned back in my chair, and folded my arms across my chest. “Are you going to let me in on whatever the heck is going on around here?”

  Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You and Pete, and sometimes Darrell, are always exchanging these looks that seem to be fraught with meaning. And whenever I ask what’s going on, y’all say I’m imagining things.”

  “In this case it’s more a matter of breaking it to you gently,” Joe said. “The searchers found a body this morning.”

  “Who is it?”

  “We don’t know, Lee. But the state police detective thinks it might be one of the robbers from last night. He wants both of us to take a look at him.”

  I guess I didn’t look very pleased at that prospect, because Joe patted my arm reassuringly. “They say he doesn’t look too bad.”

  “Then you’ve seen him?”

  “No.” Joe smiled. “And I’m not supposed to tell you anything. Van Dam wants your unprejudiced opinion. Will you do it?”

  “Of course.”

  “We need to get going then. The state police are holding the body here until we’ve had a chance to see it.”

  Joe was completely silent as he drove me to the Warner Pier Funeral Home, where the man who’d been pulled from the lake was temporarily in residence.

  Detective Sergeant Larry Underwood, of the Michigan State Police, was sitting in the funeral home office. When we came in, he hastily stuffed the remnants of a sandwich into a Sidewalk Café sack and stood up.

  Underwood had moved up the ranks since Joe and I had met him a couple of years earlier. He still had a blocky build, and his buzz cut was just as black as ever. He was just a little shorter than I am, but who wasn’t?

  “We appreciate your coming, Lee,” he said. “The guy doesn’t look too bad.”

  “I’ve seen dead people before,” I said. If I sounded a bit tart, it was probably because all this solicitousness from Joe and now from Underwood was beginning to give me the jimjams. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Underwood led the way into what I suppose was the cold room of the funeral home. A long shape lay on one of the tables, covered by a sheet.

  Underwood went to the head and gently lifted the sheet.

  “I didn’t see the face of any of the robbers,” I said. “I might do better looking at this guy’s feet.”

  “Take a look at the face anyway,” Underwood said. “Does he look familiar?” He pulled the sheet back, revealing a shock of hair, then a face.

  For a minute I was too surprised to answer. I clutched Joe’s arm.

  Joe gave me his left hand and slid the right one around me. “Do you recognize him, Lee?”

  “Joe! It’s that guy who said he was your dad!”

  Chapter 12

  “Are you sure?”

  That was Joe’s first question, of course. But I was sure. And as I pointed out the reasons, all Joe could do was nod.

  “The gray hair, the scar on the cheek,” I said. “I can’t tell how tall he is, and he’s not smiling, but I’m sure it’s the guy.”

  Larry Underwood was frowning. “This is Joe’s dad?”

  “No!” I barked the word out, surprised that Joe didn’t reply even more quickly than I did.

  Then I quickly filled Underwood in on the unexpected arrival of a person claiming to be Joe’s dad—returned from the grave.

  Underwood scowled. “Then this guy is not one of the robbers?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “They were completely disguised. He could have been one of them. Let’s take a look at his feet.”

  Underwood uncovered the other end of the body, revealing a large pair of masculine feet. Feet in general aren’t particularly beautiful, what with toes going off at angles and strange calluses and odd-looking toenails, but these feet were neat, if not attractive. They were slender and well shaped, and the nails were trimmed.

  And on the right foot was a large bunion.

  I pointed to it. “I guess that’s not proof,” I said, “but the robber who ran down from upstairs did have a bunion large enough to be visible in the soft shoes he wore.”

  “It’s sure a funny coincidence if he wasn’t one of the robbers.” Underwood turned to Joe. “Do you recognize him?”

  Joe said the man’s face didn’t look familiar to him, and he hadn’t noticed the robber’s foot. Then Underwood told somebody they could take the body to the medical examiner, and he escorted Joe and me down to the Warner Pier PD to be interviewed. Because, of course, the idea of a strange man coming to the door and claiming to be Joe’s dad one day and turning up dead a couple of days later was, as he’d said, “a funny coincidence.”

  “Too funny to laugh at,” Joe said. “Underwood, have you run prints on this guy?”

  “We’re in the process.”

  “Maybe you should check your records and see if you have prints for an Art Atkins.”

  “Gina’s ex?” I blurted the words out.

  Joe nodded.

  “Did he have a record?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of, but I’m beginning to wonder.” Joe turned to Underwood. “This guy who came to the door—he’s got to have some connection with my family; at least, he knows some member of it. That’s the only way he could know who my dad was and that he died when I was so young that I wouldn’t know what he looked like. And my aunt’s ex-husband is one person I can think of who might fit that role. If it was him, it might begin to explain why she seems to be afraid of the guy.”

  “Surely Gina wasn’t married to a cricket—I mean, a criminal!” I was horrified.

  “I’m not so sure,” Joe said. “Art Atkins had her on the run, Lee. He still does, maybe. She’s scared of him. And Gina’s not one to back off from confrontation. This is something more than an argument over who gets the dishes.”

  At this point Underwood began to ask questions, and Joe gave him background on Gina—background I hadn’t known.

  His aunt Gina—Regina Woodyard—had long operated a successful antique business, Joe said. She ran a shop in her hometown, with the help of a couple of employees, and also dealt over the Internet, specializing in antique costume jewelry. Of course, I’d learned that from Alex Gold.

  Her marital history was checkered. “She got out of the habit of taking a new name with every husband,” Joe said. “In fact, back when I was in law school I advised her not to do that. She simply trades them in too fast. I think Atkins was number five.”

  And he hadn’t been kidding, Joe assured me, when he said that Gina met her most recent ex-husband at a family reunion. He was a third cousin to Gina and to Joe’s dad.

  “He might be a relative,” he told Underwood. “If you count that far back. One of the things that makes me wonder if this guy is Art Atkins is that Lee said his smile was sort of like mine. And my mom has always said that even though I look more like her family than like my dad’s, I do have his smile. And once when I got stubborn about something, my dad’s mother said I had the Atk
ins jaw. She meant I looked pigheaded, but it could have been something about the mouth and jaw muscles, I guess.”

  Gina and Art Atkins had been married for a year or so, but Joe had never met him.

  “I try to go see my grandmother every couple of months,” he said. “But I deliberately check on her when Gina’s out of town. Not because I don’t like Gina, but because that’s when my grandmother might need a family member around. Anyway, I just never happened to cross paths with Gina’s latest. Gina said he traveled a lot. Apparently he was also in the antique business. He went to a lot of sales and auctions, or so he told her.”

  The three of us raised our eyebrows at that. Sales and auctions might be code words for burglary and theft when it came to explaining where Atkins had picked up his antiques.

  The main thing our talk with Underwood accomplished, from my point of view, was to alert the police that Gina was missing. Or that in my opinion she was missing. Since she was an adult who had been gone only a few hours—and who had called to say she was all right—she definitely wasn’t a missing person from the law enforcement standpoint. But if—as Joe suspected—the man found in the lake that morning turned out to be her ex-husband . . . well, Underwood was going to have even more funny coincidences. There had to be a connection to her sudden departure.

  Joe didn’t go into one of the other coincidences around our house—namely Pete the bird-watcher. I asked him about this on our way home, but his answers were absentminded. I finally got his attention by telling him that Pete had told me about Darrell’s involvement in his father’s death.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Darrell has a tragic background. I guess that’s why he got so upset when he saw the body.”

  “You said you didn’t see it.”

  “I’d gone into the office there at the marina when they lifted the body out onto the dock. But Darrell was still sitting in the boat. And one of the divers yelped out, ‘He’s been stabbed.’ When I came out, Darrell was shaking all over. So I told him I’d get a ride from one of the cops and sent him back to the house.”

  “The dead man was stabbed?”

  “That’s what the diver said. Underwood didn’t say anything about a cause of death. But it wouldn’t be surprising. Thieves fall out.”

  When we got home, Joe went to the boat shop. Pete was gone, leaving a pile of dishes teetering in the drainer.

  I sat down then, and I realized that I was alone, and I could do anything I wanted to do.

  So I called Garnet Garrett.

  That may seem like a strange thing to do. True, she’d entertained Joe and me for dinner the night before, and the custom along the lakeshore was the same as most other places. The phone call of thanks has largely replaced the thank-you note, but some expression of appreciation to a hostess is still a convention.

  I practiced saying, “You gave us an unforgettable evening,” with a straight face. But while the evening might have been unforgettable—and terrifying—to me, it had been a severe financial loss to Garnet, if her uncle Alex had used the stolen jewelry for collateral for a loan. If he’d wiped out the nest egg she and Dick had needed to get their son through medical school debt-free, Garnet might have spent the day crying her eyes out.

  But I wanted to talk to her. First, I needed to make sure she knew Joe and I didn’t blame her in any way for the scary experience we’d had. Second, I was dying to know if she’d noticed anything about the three robbers that I hadn’t.

  Garnet had given me her phone number, but I’d apparently left it at the office. I got the number from information and punched it in. Uncle Alex answered.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Woodyard,” he said formally. “Garnet and Dick have gone home to Grand Rapids.”

  “Please tell her that I’m sorry those bad guys interrupted her lovely dinner party. We were having such a good time! How are you taking it all, Mr. Gold?”

  “With a deep sense of guilt, I’m afraid.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself!”

  “But I do. I’ve carried valuable jewelry all over the United States and have never had a problem. I got overconfident.”

  I made a few soothing comments, then asked when Garnet and Dick would be back.

  “Not for a few days,” Alex said.

  “Then you’re alone?”

  Alex paused. “Yes, but it’s fine.”

  I felt awful. Garnet must be really mad at her uncle to have gone off and left him on his own. “Please come over to our house and take potluck tonight,” I said. “We’re not having anything elaborate, but we’d love to have you.”

  Alex cleared his throat. “That’s very kind, Mrs. Woodyard, but I’ve already planned to treat myself to my favorite dinner. I’ll tell Garnet that you called. Good-bye.”

  He hung up, leaving me still undecided about just what to do next.

  Had I really had the nerve to invite Alex Gold to dinner? I didn’t even know what we were going to have.

  That thought brought me back to earth after the emotional highs and lows of the past twenty-four hours. My Texas grandmother never got up from the table after one meal without knowing what she’d be serving at the next. When I’d teased her about this, as a twelve-year-old, she’d firmly said that good meals didn’t just appear on the table. They took planning.

  I could feel her frowning at me from some heavenly vantage point. I had all these houseguests, and they’d received only “bought” food and no entertainment. I got out my recipe collection and started through it.

  Pot roast was out. It was too hot to cook it, and it took too long. The same objection eliminated stew; besides, the gang had had something similar to stew within the past couple of days. It looked like meat loaf night. We could stand the oven for an hour. It was so hot already that no one would notice.

  I checked the refrigerator, made a list, and pulled out of the driveway with every intention of going straight to the Superette to pick up three pounds of ground round and seven baking potatoes. But for some reason I went out the back way and got sidetracked.

  Leaving that way took me past the little gray house where my friend Inez Deacon used to live. Now that Inez was in a retirement center, that house was rented to Harold Glick and his dog, Alice. While I had early rejected asking Harold if he’d seen Gina, Harold did see every darn thing that happened in our neighborhood. Maybe there was some way I could ask him about Gina without asking him about Gina. Which shows how much sense I was making.

  By then I’d stopped in Harold’s driveway, and Alice was running to the fence to greet me. There was no help for it. I had to get out of the van and go to the door. I opened my umbrella and went to the gate. Alice frisked around, yapping madly, while I edged inside the yard.

  Once I had the gate closed behind me, I knelt and greeted her. “Hello, Alice. Nice to see you, too.” She let me rub her behind the ears and scratch between her eyes.

  I heard the door to the house open, and Harold spoke. “You know what she likes.” He’d come out on the little front porch.

  “All dogs like that,” I said. “Sorry to drop in on you, but I had one quibble. I mean, question! I wanted to ask you something.”

  Harold closed the door behind him and stood at the top of the stairs. “Of course.” He looked at me expectantly. I had to come up with a question, and I wasn’t sure how to phrase it.

  I killed time by walking over to stand right in front of Harold. It was still drizzling, and I almost joined him under his porch roof. I could hear his window air-conditioning unit whirring, and I had an impulse to push inside to get a whiff of cool air. He didn’t invite me to do that, however. I stood in the yard and looked up at him from under my umbrella.

  “Those guys you saw last night,” I said. “How many were there?”

  “I didn’t actually see anybody, Lee. I heard them.”

  “What exactly did you hear?”

  “The state police detective asked me that same question, and it’s hard to explain. All I know is that I did feel sure that someo
ne was running up the road. There were at least two of them. I heard feet pounding, and I think they must have been panting.”

  “That makes sense, if they’d been on the beach.... Running in sand is one of the most adamant—I mean, arduous! It’s arduous—a really hard thing to do.” I went on quickly, trying not to give Harold any time to think about how stupid my remark had been. “But about your idea for a neighborhood watch—have you thought any more about that?”

  “I haven’t done anything. I think we’d have to register with the city, have membership meetings and such. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “It could be. All neighbors should look out for one another. But this area is so full of summer rentals, I’m not sure how it would work out. I mean, I see some really strange people walking up this road sometimes. You know, outfits that have to be seen to be believed! Some people apparently leave their fashion sense behind when they go on vacation!”

  I decided to try a little flattery. “Of course, you know that, Harold. You don’t miss much about your fellow humans.”

  He smiled. “It’s Alice, of course. I have to take her out, and that means I have the opportunity to observe people. And you’re right about people wearing funny outfits. A lot of the bodies I see at the beach are showing off far too much skin!”

  We both laughed. “It’s those beer drinkers I wonder about,” I said. “I guess those guys work hard to build those big paunches, so they’re determined to show them off. And some women are just as bad!”

  “Right. There are a lot of people in bikinis who shouldn’t be.”

  “And hair choler. I mean, color! I can see going frankly fake, but what I hate are these home dye jobs that wind up looking absolutely dead.”

  “You’ve got it! I saw a woman with hair that was such a phony black it looked like she’d used shoe polish!”

  “Was that the one with the blue shirt and all the jewelry?”

  Harold shrugged. “Seems like her shirt was blue, but I wasn’t close enough to see her jewelry. She was down at the beach parking lot, getting into a big white van with a bright orange sign on the side.”