The Chocolate Cat Caper

by Carl, Joanna (Chocolate series 01)

  “Then who did charge these things? Do you think her credit card was stolen?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “Like I say, the only person who handled Clem’s credit cards was Marion McCoy.”

  “Oh.”

  Joe stared grimly at the wall for a moment. “I guess I just wanted confirmation of my feeling that there was something funny about this bill,” he said. “I never trusted Marion, but she was down on me from the time Clem and I hit it off. So I never knew if I was right about her or just reacting to her open dislike of me.”

  “I don’t understand all this.”

  “You don’t understand how Marion could resist my charm?”

  “Oh, you’re charming as all get out. But how could Ms. Ripley stand this situation? I hadn’t been out at this house for ten minutes on Friday when I realized everybody was at everybody else’s throat. I was glad to hand over my chocolates and get away.”

  “I got away, too.” Joe’s voice was bitter.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my affair, and I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  Joe went on, still speaking bitterly. “Clem had her life arranged just the way she wanted it. It suited her. She thrived on all that discord. She deliberately stirred it up. Any efforts I made to make her life smooth and happy were not welcome.”

  He stood up. “Maybe she only married me to make Marion mad. Anyway, thanks for taking a look at this.”

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “Call in the accountants.”

  “Are you going to tell the state police?”

  “I hope it won’t mean filing charges.”

  “But doesn’t this give Marion a real motive for killing Ms. Ripley?”

  Joe paused. “I can’t believe she did it. Her problem was that she adored Clem. I can’t picture her doing anything to harm her.”

  “She appears to have harmed her financially. Joe, I’m sure the state police have accountants. It’ll be better if you tell VanDam about this yourself than to let them find it out and have to say, ‘Oh, yeah. That. Well, I was hoping not to have to file charges.”’

  Joe frowned. “Accusing Marion would look so stupid! Tit for tat. She’s accusing me, so I’m accusing her. I’ll think about it until tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow. There was something about the word . . . My memory clicked into gear, and I gasped.

  “Rats! Joe, tomorrow may be too late!”

  “I don’t think VanDam is going to arrest anybody today.”

  “No, it was something Marion McCoy said! When she was hysterical she yelled out that she could barely wait until tomorrow so she could get out of here. Duncan Ainsley thinks she’s going to go back to Chicago then. Except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “She didn’t say she was going to ‘go’ tomorrow. She said she was going to ‘fly’ tomorrow.”

  Joe and I stared at each other. “It’s possible to fly to Chicago,” he said.

  “Sure. Lots of people drive an hour to Grand Rapids so they can sit in the airport an hour, then fly forty-five minutes to Chicago. That would take a total of two hours and forty-five minutes. I guess some people would rather do that than drive two and a half hours the other direction and get to Chicago faster.”

  Joe just frowned.

  “It may be silly,” I said, “but it sounds to me as if Marion is planning to go someplace besides Chicago.”

  “It doesn’t sound good. Maybe I’d better call VanDam.” Joe sighed. “I can see that this estate is going to be a mess. I’ll have to cash in some investments if I’m going to get the money Clem owed me.”

  I decided not to comment on that, though I was dying to know just why Clementine Ripley owed Joe money. “If you sell the house . . .”

  “It’s mortgaged to the hilt. That’s the way Clem ran things. On credit. The Chicago apartment is mortgaged, too. Even the apartment building we still owned jointly is mortgaged, and Clem’s promise to buy me out isn’t much good now.”

  “Oh!” I heard myself say. That must be what Joe and Clementine had been talking about Friday. I felt quite relieved, then surprised at myself. Joe’s finances were no concern of mine, were they?

  “Is there anything else I can do here?” I said. “I’m supposed to be out at Aunt Nettie’s, meeting with the state police technical team.”

  “Then you’d better get going. I’m sorry I held you up.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We headed for the stairs. “I’m sorry if you’re having problems getting your business going,” I said.

  “Wooden boats are a specialized field,” Joe said. “My granddad worked on them, and I always liked fooling around in the shop with him. Now I’m trying to buy six boats—one’s a cruiser built in 1928—from a guy who’s retiring. It’s a once in a lifetime chance, and it could really set me up. But even in the shape these boats are in, and they all need complete restoration, it calls for a lot of money. If I can’t get my money out of the apartment house . . . Well, I told the guy I wanted them, so it’s going to be embarrassing if I have to back out.”

  “Do you have a contract for sale?”

  “Just a handshake deal. But we’re talking about the world of wooden boats. There are just a couple of hundred people doing this. Contracts aren’t as important as keeping your word.”

  We walked on down the stairs without talking. But the atmosphere had changed. For the first time I didn’t feel that my presence—my mere existence—made Joe angry. Suddenly we were almost friends.

  He led me to the kitchen, then stopped. “Listen,” he said. “You kept trying to apologize, but I’m the one who should be saying I’m sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t been very polite.”

  “You’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  “Which is a cliché excuse for rudeness.”

  “You seem to be the only person who really cared for Ms. Ripley and who was genuinely sorry she died.”

  “I don’t know if I’m sorry or annoyed. I was so angry when we first split up—it’s taken me two years to get my head halfway straight, to get to the point when I’d pretty well put her behind me and begun to move on. Then she’s murdered! And I can’t ignore it. I’m a suspect. And her heir. Even if I don’t get arrested, I’m going to have to settle her estate. It’s thrown me back into some kind of emotional limbo.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I fell back on a platitude. “It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure you’ll handle it.”

  “I hope. . . .”

  He went on to the outside door, opened it, and stepped back to let me out. Or I thought he was going to let me out. I stepped forward, and he stepped sideways, and we bumped into each other again. Suddenly we were standing in the doorway, nose to nose. This time neither of us moved. We stood just there.

  The moment would have passed if either one of us had reacted normally. Or maybe we did react normally.

  It was a heck of a kiss.

  Not that it involved a lot of action. We didn’t even put our arms around each other. Just stood there in a lip lock. For a long time.

  Then I heard a loud, piercing noise. A siren.

  Joe and I jumped apart like a couple of teenagers when Daddy flipped the porch light on.

  We both ran out into the back driveway just as an ambulance came around the corner of the house and skidded to a stop. Greg Glossop jumped out of the passenger door.

  He yelled, “Where is she?”

  We spoke at the same time. “Who?”

  “Marion McCoy! That Hugh called and said she needed an ambulance.”

  “Did Dr. Schiller think she needed hospitalization?” Joe said.

  “I don’t know what Schiller thought! All I know is Hugh said she wasn’t breathing.”

  Joe and I both turned and ran, with Glossop on our heels and the other EMT close behind him. We ran back through the kitchen and dining room and down the peristyle toward the of
fice.

  Hugh was standing in the hall. “Hurry! Hurry!” he said.

  Glossop and his teammate rushed in. Marion was lying on the couch.

  “I managed to get her up on the couch to make her a little more comfortable,” Hugh said.

  We all held our breaths while Glossop yanked her shirt up to her armpits, then used his stethoscope. He touched the skin of her face.

  “We’ll try,” he said, “but it looks like another cyanide death to me.”

  I forced myself to look away from Marion’s flushed face. And when I looked away, I saw the teapot.

  It was still sitting on the credenza behind Marion’s desk. Right where I had put it down a half hour earlier. But the teacup Lindy had sent was now on the desk, half full of tea.

  Chapter 14

  For the second time in three days, someone had died after eating or drinking something I had handed her.

  My first impulse was to throw myself down and kick and scream. But Joe spoke, and he sounded calm, so I decided to pretend to be calm, too.

  “Are the state police on the way?” Joe said.

  In response, we heard another siren.

  “Hugh, Lee—everybody except the EMTs had better go into the big living room,” Joe said. “Where’s Duncan?”

  “He went back to the guest house,” Hugh said. “I can go get him.”

  Joe and I were a somber pair as we walked back to the main part of the house. We stood before the fireplace until Hugh and Duncan came in, almost running down the long hall toward us. The mood was not lightened when Yonkers jumped off the balcony onto Duncan Ainsley’s shoulders, using him as a springboard to bounce onto the bar. Duncan lost his Texas folksiness over that; the words he said were basic Anglo-Saxon. But neither Hugh, Joe nor I took any notice of his language, and Yonkers had the sense to make himself scarce. He jumped down behind the bar and peeked around its end.

  Joe let two uniformed state police in the front door. Then he, Duncan, Hugh, and I sat int the big black-and-white reception room. The beautiful views from the banks of windows failed to soften the cold effect, and the flower arrangements made it worse. In a few minutes I glimpsed VanDam and Underwood arriving, followed almost immediately by the technical team—including a couple of the people who had searched the chocolate shop. Then Chief Jones came in. Each group went back toward the office, leaving a uniformed officer in the front hall.

  We just sat there. Joe spoke once. “I’m glad I told Lindy to go home,” he said. “We’re going to be here all night.”

  But it was only half an hour later when Chief Jones came in and joined us. He sat down in one of the spindly chairs and looked at us over the top of his glasses.

  “Lieutenant VanDam has allowed me to have the honor of telling all of you that you can go home.”

  The three of us inhaled so sharply that the air pressure in the room dropped fifty percent. Then we all talked at once.

  “What about statements?” Joe said.

  “Why? What’s happened?” Duncan said.

  “But I gave her the tea!” That was me. “And she’s dead, and she looked like Clementine Ripley. . . .”

  “Yes, that’s true.” The chief paused—I’m sure for dramatic effect—before he spoke again. “But Clementine Ripley didn’t leave a suicide note.”

  I almost collapsed, but Joe spoke. “Did Marion confess?”

  “Said something about, ‘I loved Clementine. I never meant to hurt her.’ Like that.”

  A huge load seemed to lift off my shoulders. “It was the Visa bill,” I said.

  The chief frowned, and Joe made a succinct report of the questions he had about Clementine Ripley’s Visa bill. “I guess she knew that was going to come out,” he said.

  “Sounds likely,” Duncan said. “Clementine must have found out that her Visa bill was crazy as a steer on locoweed. Marion would have seen disaster on the horizon, so she killed Clementine. Then she was sorry.”

  “It was the chocolates,” I said.

  The chief frowned again. “Well, Marion apparently injected cyanide into the chocolates, but—”

  “No! I mean it was the charge for the chocolates. The Visa bill. Clementine Ripley ordered over two thousand dollars’ worth of chocolates from us. She wanted to put it on her Visa, but Visa wouldn’t accept the charge. So I called and told Marion McCoy we’d have to have a check. When I delivered the chocolates, Clementine Ripley found out that Visa had refused her charge.” I gestured at Joe. “Joe was there. He heard her. She made me tell her just what had happened. Then she told Marion to give me a check, and she said something like, ‘We’ll discuss this later.’ So it looks as if the charge for the chocolates must have tipped her off.”

  “That sounds likely,” Chief Jones said.

  We asked for details, and he told us Marion had apparently heavily sweetened the hot tea I’d carried into the office, then spiked it with cyanide. Underwood found the suicide note propped up on Marion’s dresser. The envelope was marked FOR THE POLICE, and it was sitting on top of a bottle the lab was going to test as possibly containing cyanide.

  The detectives believed the note had been printed out on the ink-jet printer in Marion’s office, and the original message had been found saved in her computer. The message was in memo form, printed out neatly on Clementine Ripley’s letterhead, signed, folded in thirds, and sealed in a white business envelope.

  Anyway, an hour after Joe and I stood in the kitchen door kissing each other, the crisis about the murder of Clementine Ripley seemed to be over. I rushed back to the shop and told Aunt Nettie what had happened, of course. Then the phone began to ring.

  Nancy Burton, the customer who had taken all our Crème de Menthe bonbons for her B-and-B, called and told Aunt Nettie that only that morning she’d rented her last two rooms to reporters, and within an hour of Marion McCoy’s death they’d both checked out and gone back to Chicago. So we figured that the press had gotten the word. We found out later that CNN put an item on right away, being careful not actually to say that Marion had confessed.

  A steady stream of cars must have been leaving town, each with a PRESS decal on the windshield, because we saw no more of the press—tabloid or otherwise—after Marion’s death.

  The chief did come by the shop to give us one other interesting bit of information. “You said the burglar you had last night fell off your porch, didn’t you?” he said.

  “Yes,” Aunt Nettie said. “He fell down the steps.”

  “Try she, not he.”

  “Marion McCoy?”

  “We may never figure it out for sure, but when the EMTs got that long-sleeved black thing off of her, her arms were covered with bruises. Like she’d had a fall. So VanDam had them check her legs before they took her away. They were bruised, too.”

  “But why did she do that?” Aunt Nettie said. “Did her note explain that?”

  “Nope. We may never know the answer to that one. But I guess she did it.” He ducked his head and looked like a tall, skinny elf. “Another thing—when they got that turtleneck shirt all the way off—well, they found scars. She’d had surgery.” His lips twichted. “Pretty recent. A bob job.”

  I gasped. “So that’s what whe saw the plastic surgeon about in Dallas!”

  I guess so. Anyway, I’ve learned a lot during the past couple of days. I’ve never been a suspect before, and it sure gave me a new outlook on law enforcement.

  “I guess you’re glad it’s over,” Aunt Nettie said. “Has Lieutenant VanDam left?”

  “Oh, no. He’ll hang around a couple of days, or Underwood will, making sure the lab work gets done.”

  “Then they’re still investigating?”

  The chief’s manner became evasive. “They have to tie up all the loose ends. Check the fingerprints. Wait for the autopsy results.”

  I started to ask the chief if Joe had told him or VanDam about my idea that Marion might have been about to go on the lam, to “fly” away. But the phone rang, and by the time I got it answered,
the chief had left. So I didn’t mention it to Aunt Nettie.

  In fact, I told myself, the whole idea had probably been wrong. If Marion was planning to kill herself, she wouldn’t be worrying about flying anywhere.

  But one more question did cross my mind: What had Marion hoped to gain by killing Clementine Ripley? Even if Clementine were dead, somebody was going to check that Visa bill. Then I remembered that Marion had been surprised to learn Clementine had not signed her new will, the one cutting Joe out of the estate and naming someone else executor. She’d probably thought she’d be named executor herself.

  But it seemed sort of fishy. And Joe had agreed with me, had seemed to think my interpretation of Marion’s ravings could well be correct. When I thought about the whole thing, my relief turned to unease.

  Chief Jones might have left, but we still had visitors. First Mike Herrera knocked at the street door and came in to exult over Clementine Ripley’s murder turning out to involve “outsiders.”

  “Now Warner Pier can get back to normal,” he said. “I suppose this might even improve business this season. You know, lotsa people will have read about Warner Pier in the newspapers and seen our beautiful city on the television news.”

  This inspired one of the few tart answers I heard from Aunt Nettie. “I certainly hope we didn’t go through all this just as a tourist promotion.”

  Mike seemed a little embarrassed. “Oh, nice lady! I didn’t mean I’m glad it happened! I just want us to make the best of what we’re stuck with.”

  Aunt Nettie let him off the hook. “I know what you mean, Mike. But this has surely been a strain. I just hope it really is over.”

  As Mike went out the front door, a new caller showed up—Greg Glossop. Since we had the door open, it was impossible not to let him in.

  He was enjoying the situation thoroughly. “You can’t believe the silly gossip that’s already started,” he said. “Some one asked me if it was true that Clementine Ripley’s secretary made a run for it and drove her car into a bridge abutment down by South Haven.” He preened. “Luckily, I could tell her that was a complete fabrication.”

  We had to hash over the whole affair before he was satisfied. And the phone kept ringing. The word was spreading like the great fire of 1871, which left half of Warner Pier in ashes. All of Aunt Nettie’s friends called.