The Chocolate Jewel Case: A Chocoholic Mystery

by JoAnna Carl

  He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry yet. I still think it’s probably routine.”

  So I stood on the porch like the little woman while Joe walked out—barefoot—and talked to Underwood in a low voice for a few minutes. Then he gestured toward the house and spoke a little more loudly. “Do you want to come in?”

  Underwood grinned. “Darrell would probably like the PD better. It’s air conditioned. I see you’ve got all your windows open.” Joe and both detectives laughed, not very humorously.

  But they did come in the house. Darrell, Joe, and the two detectives sat around the dining table. Joe turned on the fan, and everyone accepted a cup of coffee. Which cleaned out the pot, so I started a new one, then went into the bedroom to get dressed. When I came back into the kitchen—Joe obviously didn’t want me to join the group, but I could eavesdrop from the next room—things were still sounding friendly.

  “So you were here all evening,” Underwood was saying. “Joe and Lee were at the Garretts’ house, of course. Can anyone else substantiate your actions?”

  “Sure,” Darrell said. “Pete was here. And Ms. Woodyard—Joe’s aunt.”

  “She’s missing.”

  “Yeah, but when she turns up, she’ll tell you. I was here all evening.”

  Joe spoke. “What about Brenda and Tracy?”

  “They went out for a while,” Darrell said. “Those two guys they date came for them. I didn’t pay any attention to where they said they were going.”

  “Probably cruising up and down Peach Street,” Joe said.

  Underwood went on. “But Pete Falconer can back your story up?”

  “Well, for most of the evening he can. We watched the baseball game. But he went out for a while. He said he was going to get some beer.”

  “How long was he gone?”

  “Half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes. I didn’t check.”

  “Was Gina Woodyard watching the game with you?”

  “No. She went upstairs. Said she was going to read a book.”

  “So there were forty-five minutes when you were alone?”

  “Alone in the living room. But Ms. Woodyard was upstairs. She would have heard me if I’d gone anyplace.”

  Underwood turned to Joe. “Did she have a fan upstairs? A fan’s pretty noisy.”

  “The one she has is fairly quiet. And Gina doesn’t miss much.”

  “When we find her,” Underwood said, “we’ll ask if she heard anybody leave. Anybody but Falconer.”

  When Underwood went on, his voice was almost too casual. “Darrell, do you mind if we take a look inside the camper?”

  I was pleased to hear Darrell answer without hesitation. “Be my guest. It’s full of dirty clothes.”

  “We can stand it.”

  The two detectives went out to the camper. I brought the cereal and milk into the dining room. Joe, Darrell, and I might as well go through the motions of having breakfast.

  “Thank goodness the girls are sleeping through all this,” I said. “Tracy would have a routine episode made into a novel by lunchtime.”

  Neither Joe nor Darrell laughed. But each of them did pour a bowl of cereal, and Joe calmly spoke to Darrell, telling him he’d handled the questions exactly the right way.

  Darrell frowned. “I’ll feel better once Pete and Ms. Woodyard have backed me up,” he said.

  We could see Underwood and his fellow detective out at the camper. They weren’t tearing the mattress apart, but they weren’t simply looking around either. Darrell was going to have some straightening up to do after they left.

  I was still eating cornflakes when they brought a mesh bag out the camper’s back door. “I guess they really are going to check your dirty clothes,” I said.

  Darrell growled. “Serves ’em right. I’ve been sweating like a pig.”

  We all smiled a little, but we each kept an eye on the two searchers. So we all three knew exactly the moment when they found something.

  None of us said anything. We simply watched as Underwood and his assistant turned their backs toward us, threw their shoulders together, and formed a wall—a wall that hid some object from us. Their ducked heads told us they were examining it closely. Underwood kept that posture, using his body to hide whatever he’d found, while his helper went to the car and came back with a sheaf of papers.

  “They’ve found something they find interesting, Darrell,” Joe said calmly. “Can you think what it might be?”

  “Not drugs! Joe, I’m absolutely clean. There’s nothing in that camper that shouldn’t be there.”

  “I believe you.”

  For a few minutes I thought Underwood and the other detective were going to drive away without asking Darrell about what they’d found, or even telling him what it was. But after they’d pawed through the rest of the dirty clothes, they came to the back door. Underwood was polite enough to knock on the screen door.

  Joe told them to come on in. “What did you find?” he said. He made the question sound unimportant.

  Underwood came into the dining room and laid the paper bag on the table.

  “We found this wrapped in a T-shirt,” he told Darrell. “What do you know about it?” He gently nudged the brown bag until the object inside slid out.

  It was a crescent moon, about an inch and a half from tip to tip. It was gold, set with pearls, and a strong-looking metal clasp stretched across its back.

  “I never saw it before,” Darrell said.

  Underwood held up the papers his assistant had brought from the car. “ ‘Fifteen-carat gold new-moon pin, set with split pearls,’ ” he read. “ ‘Circa 1900. Valued at two to three hundred dollars.’ ” He dropped the papers and looked at Darrell. “It’s on the inventory of the stolen jewelry.”

  Darrell dropped his head, looking completely beaten. “I don’t know how it got there,” he said dully.

  I guess it was his defeated look that made me mad.

  “No!” I jumped to my feet and yelled out the word. “If y’all are trying to say Darrell was one of the robbers who held us up at the Garretts’ house, y’all are flat crazy!”

  “Mrs. Woodyard—” Underwood didn’t sound apologetic.

  “Don’t you ‘Mrs. Woodyard’ me!” I said. “When you were drinking my coffee and acting friendly I was Lee.”

  “I appreciate your loyalty to a guest—” Underwood said.

  I didn’t let him finish whatever he was about to say. “Loyalty, my foot! I’m not loyal. I’m observant. I saw those three robbers! They pointed pistols at me! One was taller than Darrell. One was shorter and fatter. And one had an onion—I mean, a bunion! He had a bunion on his right foot!” I thumped the table. “None of them was daring! I mean Darrell. Darrell was not one of them!”

  Darrell had raised his head and dropped his jaw, looking astonished. Underwood and his assistant had put on their detective faces—strictly unemotional. It was Joe who laughed.

  Then he got up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Lee, the state police don’t want to arrest the wrong guy. But you can see they’re going to have to ask some questions about that pin.”

  He slid his arm around my shoulders. “So if they take Darrell in for questioning, my job will be to go along for moral support. Your job will be to make a list of everybody who was in the neighborhood yesterday. Everybody who would have had a chance to plant that pin in Darrell’s dirty clothes.”

  When he went on, I knew he wasn’t really talking to me. “Because you are completely right,” he said. “We both know Darrell had nothing to do with that holdup.”

  I shut up after that. Joe, after all, had been a defense attorney. I could count on him to handle it. So I stood by while the detectives sealed up Darrell’s camper, then escorted him to their car. I was doing fine until Darrell started to get into the backseat. I was watching from the dining room window, and he turned and yelled at me, “Thanks, Lee!”

  I went into the bedroom and burst into tears. Joe was in there, hastily putting on khakis and
a knit shirt, and my crying jag scared him into next week.

  I found it hard to explain. “Darrell’s just had so many bad knocks. He ought to be raging mad, not thanking me for my pitiful efforts to stand up for him. Which probably made things worse.”

  “I doubt that you made things worse. Underwood’s not a bully, but it won’t hurt for him to know Darrell has friends.”

  “I’m sure Darrell wasn’t involved in that robbery. But I wish I could do something to help him.”

  “You can. I already told you we need to check and see who was around yesterday.”

  “We need to find Gina, too. I’m terribly worried about her.” I gasped. “I forgot! If that van was abandoned in the high school parking lot, it’s probably been impounded.”

  “At least Underwood will know who it’s registered to,” Joe said. “I’ll try to find an opportunity to ask him. You canvass the neighbors. Find out who was around the neighborhood yesterday, even if it was only the UPS man. And try to find Pete. If he can back up Darrell’s story, it will be a major help.”

  “How would I know where to find Pete? He’s in a tree someplace, right? Peeping at some bird.”

  “Yes, but he should have his phone, even if it’s set on vibrate.”

  I said good-bye to Joe as he left, and then yelled up the stairs to tell the girls I needed to talk to them. I called Pete’s cell phone number and left a message on his voice mail. I hoped that the vibration tickled his tummy, but the lakeshore is a notoriously bad location for cell phone reception, so I wasn’t very optimistic. I also wrote a note with a bright red marker and pinned it to the kitchen door. If Pete came back to the house, he’d surely find it.

  I contemplated knocking on the neighbors’ doors and decided I’d better look halfway decent before I took on that job. I tried to put on a little makeup—not easy when sweat is washing it off faster than you can rub it on. I brushed my hair into a ponytail and hoped I didn’t look like a madwoman. Which was what I felt like.

  But in half an hour I was reasonably presentable and had brought Brenda and Tracy up-to-date on what had happened with Darrell. I was pleased that they didn’t immediately assume his guilt. Neither of them was friendly with Darrell—and I guess I hadn’t felt too friendly toward him either before I heard more about his background—so I hadn’t known what their reactions would be.

  Then I got a pad and pencil and started plodding around the neighborhood. I wasn’t going to do it fast. The temperature was rising rapidly, right in tandem with the humidity. I thought longingly of Prairie Creek, Texas, and how dry the heat was there. And how well my dad’s air-conditioning worked.

  My stop at Harold’s was a replay of the stop I’d made there twenty-four hours earlier, when he told me about seeing Gina get into the white van. Once again Alice ran out to greet me. Once again Harold came out onto the porch. Once again I could hear his blessed air-conditioning humming. Once again he didn’t invite me inside.

  I just told him that some prowler had apparently gotten into Darrell’s camper, and that we were trying to figure out who it was.

  “You get around the neighborhood more than most,” I said. “Did you see anybody wandering around yesterday?”

  “Anybody strange?”

  “No. Anybody at all. Even, you know, the UPS man or the meter reader.”

  Harold looked amazed. “You think someone like that might have fooled around with that old camper?”

  “No, no! But they might have seen someone doing it.”

  “Oh! I get it.” Harold enumerated several possibilities. I didn’t find any of them too startling. Not only had the UPS man come by, but FedEx had made deliveries, too. The mailman had come, of course. Harold hadn’t seen a meter reader of any type, but the cable service truck had been parked on Lake Shore Drive. Someone on the lake side had had a tree removal firm working. And Wednesday was the regular day for Lakeside Lawn Service to hit its clients in the neighborhood.

  “I don’t know if that helps,” Harold said.

  “I don’t know either,” I said. “But thanks.”

  I scratched Alice under the chin and walked on. I visited half a dozen houses where people were home, and a dozen where no one answered. I left notes at those.

  One of the apparently empty houses was the Garretts’. When I walked up the drive I thought I saw a curtain twitch, but no one came to the door, so I decided it was merely blowing in the breeze. Not that there was a lot of breeze. I could barely breathe. I left a note for Alex Gold.

  It was after eleven when I got home, walking even more slowly than I had when I started out. The heat and humidity had melted me into a pool of exhausted sweat. And now it was time for me to work an eight-hour shift. I decided to eat lunch in town—someplace air conditioned.

  So I was in the Sidewalk Café, drinking genuine brewed iced tea, when my cell phone rang. I was glad to see Joe’s name appear on the screen.

  I didn’t even say hello. “What’s going on?”

  “I guess they’re going to hold Darrell until Pete shows up. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Now what’s happened?”

  “Underwood finally told me who that white GMC van that was abandoned is registered to.” He took a deep breath. “Lee, it was registered in Indiana, but it belongs to Art Atkins.”

  “Gina’s husband?”

  “Right. Do you think there’s any possibility that she went off with him willingly?”

  “No!” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Chapter 15

  Joe replied like a true lawyer—cautiously. “Lee, we aren’t sure that the dead man is Art Atkins.”

  “I know, but it sure looks likely. And in any case, I can’t imagine that Gina would have gone off with her ex. She’d been avoiding him for ten days.”

  “She was avoiding someone, Lee. We don’t know that it was Art Atkins. It could have been someone else. Heck, she may owe somebody money.”

  I thought about it. “True. But debt collectors don’t usually inspire terror. Just dread. Has Underwood been able to find out anything about Atkins?”

  “He doesn’t have a criminal record. I guess that’s some comfort, but it’s not real helpful.”

  “Underwood doesn’t know what he looks like?”

  “Atkins doesn’t have a Michigan driver’s license, so Underwood hasn’t located a picture of him. I’m going to call Grandma Ida and see if she has one.”

  “Oh, gee! I hate to get Grandma Ida involved. But I’m really getting worried about Gina.” I gasped. “Joe, I was forgetting. Right before Gina ran off, she called those Holland motels and asked for him.”

  “But she asked for Andy Woodyard, too.”

  “Did Underwood check to see if anybody using either name was registered in Holland?”

  “If he did, he didn’t tell me. I’ll ask and call you back. You haven’t heard from Pete, have you?”

  I told Joe about the phone calls and messages I’d left for Pete.

  “I sure wish I knew where to find him,” he said. “I think they’d let Darrell go if Pete backed him up. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I hung up and paid my check. But my mind was on Pete. Darrell needed to find him right away. But where could Pete be? He’d left a note saying he was going bird-watching. Birds were not exactly rare along the lakeshore, and Pete could be looking at them anywhere. He’d never given a hint as to where his main bird-watching hangouts were.

  Or had he?

  When he’d shown us the picture of the owl that caught the rabbit, the owl had been taking off from a red tile roof.

  Red tiles. Hmmm.

  If I were back in Texas, red tiles would have been fairly easy to find. We have plenty of Spanish-style architecture in the Lone Star State.

  But along the shore of Lake Michigan, the architecture tends toward Victorian, Craftsman, or even modern. None of those styles normally uses red-tiled roofs. But there was one place: the River Villa. And it would be an ideal spot for bird-watching.

&n
bsp; The River Villa was built around 1910 by some Chicago millionaire who apparently had spent too much time on the Mediterranean. He created a fantasy Italian villa with stucco walls and a red tile roof. Little balconies and turrets were tacked on here and there with no apparent attention to the overall plan.

  Originally, or so the local historians say, the River Villa employed a staff of twenty-five. Its original owner—or his wife—was a patron of the arts, and throughout the 1920s they kept an open house for Warner Pier’s art colony and for their Jazz Age friends from Chicago. The Depression of the 1930s ended that life. The River Villa was abandoned, its balconies falling down, its patios and flower beds gradually plowed up by maples.

  The house sat on a thousand acres that Warner Pier of the 1920s and 1930s had called worthless. It was worthless in those days because it wasn’t suitable for fruit trees, then the main cash crop of the area, and later it was considered worthless for building vacation cottages, because it was too far up the Warner River. Prime building lots then were on the lake, and there was still lots of lakefront property in those days.

  Today the property would be valuable for development as home sites. Unfortunately, the heirs couldn’t decide what to do with the place, so it just sat there. The house had been considered for a bed-and-breakfast, for a resort, for a school. But the heirs couldn’t agree on who should buy or lease. It was rented to two artists, and they held classes in what was once the ballroom. The grounds were completely overgrown.

  So the place had a red tile roof, and it ought to have lots of birds. Maybe it was where Pete had been watching owls. It was possible to drive into the grounds, and I decided it might be worth doing that, just to see if Pete’s forest green SUV was parked anywhere obvious.

  I called the shop to say I’d be late. I didn’t have the nerve to talk to Dolly Jolly. I’d ignored her and her problems all day, and my conscience was eating at me. Luckily, Tracy answered the phone and told me the air-conditioning crew was there, so that made me feel a little better as I got into my red van and drove off in the wrong direction, away from my duty to chocolate.