14 The Chocolate Clown Corpse

by JoAnna Carl

  It was definitely not fancy, but it would keep a homeless man from starving.

  After the food was served, Elk instructed the volunteers on how to put the leftovers away. Then we began the cleanup, scrubbing down the tables, washing up the pots and pans, mopping the floor. The clients drifted into another room, where there was a television set, or wandered up the stairs, apparently toward the dorms.

  Elk offered all the volunteers dinner, but the other three declined. He told us we could leave, but Joe was still talking to one or two of the men, so I waited around, changing to dish drying duty. By the time Elk carefully rinsed and scoured his final serving pans, then put them into the hot soapy water, Joe was through with his interviews. He came over and picked up a dish towel, ready to help dry.

  Elk glared at him. By then I’d realized that Elk glared at everybody.

  “This woman of yours,” he said. “She ain’t afraid of hard work.”

  “I picked a good’un,” Joe said. “And luckily, she picked me, too.”

  “Darrel says you’re a lawyer. Whatcha askin’ everbody about?”

  “I’ve got a client who’s in a lot of trouble. His name is Royal Hollis.”

  “Ha! I guess he’s in trouble!”

  “I’m hoping I can help him out.”

  I jumped in then. “Did you know him, Elk? He may have stayed here. He’s the old guy with a harmonica.”

  Elk lowered his head until it was almost inside the giant pot he was scrubbing out. “Some people knew him,” he said. “But Royal Hollis never come to the shelter.”

  Joe nodded. “It sounds as if he liked to camp on his own.”

  “That’s how he got in trouble.” Elk rinsed out the big cooking pot and handed it on to me.

  Then he stood back and glared at us again. “I could give you some dinner.”

  Joe took a deep breath, and I knew he was going to say we had to leave. So I spoke quickly. “I’d love some of that sloppy joe, Elk. It smells just like my mom’s.”

  “That sauce ain’t canned,” he said. “I make it myself.”

  Joe gave me a quizzical look, and I winked at him. By the time Elk had warmed some sloppy joe and fixed three plates—we got heavy crockery plates, not paper ones—we were through drying the pans, and the three of us sat down at the kitchen worktable.

  Elk’s sloppy joe turned out to be pretty good. The frozen vegetables left a lot to be desired, but I’ve definitely had worse meals. Heck, I’ve cooked and served worse meals.

  We all ate for several minutes before I spoke. “Royal Hollis came by our house once,” I said. “He raked some leaves for us. Seemed like a nice old guy. I was sure surprised when I heard they thought he killed someone.”

  “He’s a kind of a loner,” Elk said. “Or that’s the scuttlebutt around this place.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Joe said. “I was hoping to find somebody who hung out with him, maybe who’d camped with him.”

  “Why would you want to talk to somebody like that?”

  “The deputies didn’t do much of an investigation, but when they picked Hollis up he was in a cabin at least a mile from where the killing took place. They did notice that more than one person had been staying there. I thought the other guys might know something that could help him.”

  “I guess they all split.”

  Joe nodded. “Probably Hollis came back after his run-in with Davidson and said he’d had some trouble, so the others took off. What I don’t understand is why Hollis didn’t take off with them.”

  “I guess he didn’t know the guy was dead.”

  “Yeah, but if he told the others he had punched somebody, or shoved him down—or whatever happened—you’d think he would have known it was likely the sheriff would be there PDQ.”

  “Maybe Royal told them a different story.”

  “Like what?”

  Elk sighed. “Well, the talk is that ol’ Royal claimed the guy had shoved him down.”

  “That Moe Davidson struck Royal Hollis?”

  Elk nodded seriously. “Now that’s just Royal talkin’. And he didn’t always make good sense. Or so I’ve heard.”

  I was careful not to look at Joe. Elk’s story was a new version of what had happened when Moe Davidson was killed. If Moe had struck first, that might be the basis of a plea of self-defense for Royal. I considered that and decided—in my nonlawyer way—that it was unlikely. Moe had been the householder. All the prosecution had to say was that Moe was protecting his life and property.

  But Elk was still talking. “What I always wondered was what that woman had to say.”

  I paused, my fork loaded with overcooked carrots and halfway to my mouth. When I spoke, I tried to sound innocent.

  “Woman? What woman?”

  Elk dropped his head nearly to his plate and didn’t reply. “It’s just scuttlebutt,” he said. “Probably nothin’ to it.”

  Joe chewed and swallowed. I could almost hear him thinking, I must not spook this guy.

  “The sheriff didn’t know that there had been a woman there,” he said. “It might help Royal a lot if we knew there had been someone.”

  Elk kept looking at his plate. “Anything I heard was gossip,” he said.

  “I understand,” Joe said. “Of course, it would have made sense for Mrs. Davidson to come up to the cottage with her husband.”

  Elk shrugged. “You want dessert?” he asked.

  The conversation was over. Joe didn’t ask another question, and I kept my mouth shut as well. We declined the sheet cake, told Elk his sloppy joe was delicious, thanked Darrel for his cooperation, and went out to the parking lot.

  “You didn’t get a fancy dinner out,” Joe said.

  “It might not have been fancy, but it was interesting.”

  “We could go to Russ’ for pie and coffee.”

  “You’re on.”

  Russ’ is like a large-scale diner, with down-home food and good pie. I always like to go there, and I was eager to talk over Elk’s comments and to find out if Joe had learned anything else interesting about Royal Hollis.

  As soon as our order was on the table, I wanted to ask Joe a question. But he asked me one first. “How’d you figure out Elk was the guy who called us this morning?”

  “I don’t know that he is. But the caller this morning made a little noise—well, it could have been a cough like Elk’s. I just thought you should talk to him. For someone who claimed that he never met Royal Hollis, he seemed to know a lot about him.”

  “Elk’s the only person I talked to who admitted he’d ever heard of Hollis.”

  “Do you think he might testify?” I asked.

  “I doubt it would do much good. But he’s convinced that some woman was there at the house when Davidson died.” Joe took a bite of apple pie and followed it with a sip of his coffee.

  “Do you think it might have been Mrs. Davidson?”

  “I don’t know. But I guess I’d better try to track her down tomorrow.”

  “Do you think she’ll be willing to talk to you?”

  “I guess I’ll find out.”

  Chocolate Chat

  The Maya followed the Olmecs, settling on the Yucatán Peninsula and in what is today Guatemala. According to some accounts, the Mayan name for the cacao tree was simply “tree.” They may have felt cacao was so important that it didn’t need a specific name.

  They believed that the cacao tree belonged to the gods, and its pods were gifts to humankind. Ancient drawings indicate that the pods were used in religious rituals.

  Apparently the Maya originated chocolate as a drink. This was a bitter concoction, spiced with peppers and sometimes thickened with cornmeal. It was used for religious rituals, not just as an ordinary beverage.

  The scientific name for the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, means “food of the gods.�
� The name was selected by Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who came up with the method for naming plants. He named it after the Mayan belief that the trees belonged to the gods.

  Images of cacao pods were carved into the walls of Mayan palaces and temples, and apparently were the symbols of life and fertility.

  Chapter 9

  At nine the next morning, Joe started calling Emma Davidson. At two o’clock that afternoon, they had not made contact.

  He began with the Davidson house, talking to Chuck three separate times. Emma was out calling on friends, Chuck said. He had no idea when she would be back. Would she be home for lunch? Chuck had no idea about that either. And he had no idea exactly which friends Emma had intended to visit.

  On the off chance that she might come home to eat lunch, Joe went by the Davidson house at twelve thirty. Lorraine opened the door. This time, Joe said, she didn’t yell and swear at him, but she didn’t invite him in either. The only information Joe got was that her stepmother was out, and Lorraine didn’t know when she would be home.

  “But,” Joe had observed, “there are three cars in your driveway. One each for Lorraine, Chuck, and Emma.”

  “Some friend picked Emma up,” Lorraine had said. She did agree to give Joe’s phone number to Emma if her stepmom should happen to check in.

  I got all this secondhand, of course, when Joe met me for a late lunch and reported on his frustrating morning.

  “Is Emma giving you the runaround?” I asked.

  “Very likely. If she hasn’t spoken to anybody about her husband’s death yet, she probably still doesn’t want to say anything.”

  “Did she talk to the sheriff’s office after Moe died?”

  “Not in any official way.”

  I grazed at my salad a minute before I went on. “Are you overreacting? Maybe Emma went shopping with her friend. If they went to Grand Rapids, they could easily spend the whole day at the mall.”

  Joe shook his head. “Chuck and Lorraine didn’t have their stories quite straight. Chuck told me Emma had gone out to ‘pay some calls on her Warner Pier friends.’ But when I pointed out to Lorraine that Emma’s car seemed to be in the driveway, she said someone had picked Emma up. So their stories don’t match.”

  “One of them could have honestly been mistaken.”

  Joe spoke grimly. “I can attest to that. They’re definitely mistaken if they think I’m going to give up.”

  No, I knew all the Davidsons were in for a surprise if they believed Joe would simply disappear because Emma was avoiding him. Joe doesn’t yell and scream and beat on his chest, but he can wear down any opponent.

  Joe smiled philosophically. “Let’s think about something else while we’re eating. How was your morning?”

  I laughed. “That’s not changing the subject. I spent most of the morning thinking about the Davidsons’ building.”

  “You’d still like to get hold of it.”

  “Sure. I went over and talked to Tilda. She thinks there may be a good chance. But the guy I saw with her definitely has an interest.”

  “Chuck doesn’t seem to object to you as a buyer.”

  “No, he’s a realist. But I’m not going to pay more than the building is worth just to butter the Davidsons up. So it may be a lost cause. I don’t like their asking price.”

  “Are you going to view the building again?”

  “Tilda’s coming over to show it for me at five o’clock.”

  “I’ll stay out of the way.”

  We both laughed. Yes, even if Lorraine hadn’t been rude to Joe that morning, the less contact they had, the better.

  Life became more normal when I got back to the office. Dolly Jolly, who was in charge of making the chocolate while Aunt Nettie was in the South Seas, was working on the big clown figure that was to be the star of our exhibit for Clown Week.

  The three-dimensional figure stood two feet tall, and Dolly had named him Warner Whacko.

  Warner wore traditional clown whiteface—made of white chocolate, of course—with dark chocolate eyes and milk chocolate hair. His baggy suit was of white and milk chocolate in a Harlequin pattern, and his slippers were dark chocolate, with white chocolate pompons. He had a white chocolate ruff, edged in milk chocolate. This was the first time Aunt Nettie had turned a major display piece over to Dolly, and Dolly had produced a work of art. Clown Week visitors were going to ooh and aah as they passed our window.

  Warner was simply for show, of course. The clowns we would be selling in the shop were much simpler in design. They were also solid chocolate. A chocolate piece as large as Warner would work only if it was partially hollow. But, like Warner, the smaller clowns also had Harlequin suits and white ruffs, as well as merry expressions on their white chocolate faces.

  When I stopped to watch her, Dolly was adding eyelashes to the face of the big Warner.

  “He’s gorgeous!” I said.

  “He’s a lotta work!” Dolly yelled. Dolly is over six feet tall and big-boned, with a larynx to match her size. Even when she tries to whisper, her voice comes out as a shout.

  “I wish I could make him more colorful!” she said.

  “You could have dyed the white chocolate any color you like.”

  “Nettie didn’t want to do that! She wanted him to look like chocolate!”

  “I think she was right, Dolly. Warner might not have looked so subtle and sophisticated in bright colors.”

  “There’s nothing sophisticated about a clown! Remember Moe and his squirt bottle?”

  “Only too well. Hey, at five o’clock Tilda’s going to show me that building. Do you want to come along?”

  “I have an appointment for a haircut, but I could change it!”

  “That’s up to you. I won’t commit to anything until you’ve looked the situation over.”

  Dolly leaned close to me, and I could tell she wanted to talk quietly. But being Dolly, she bellowed in my ear. “What are you going to do if the Davidson kids want an immediate commitment to buy?”

  “I don’t see why they should. The building just went on the market yesterday. I’ll just tell them we have to wait until Aunt Nettie gets home. That will be less than a month.”

  But my stomach did a little dance as I walked back to my office. I didn’t want to commit to buying that building without consulting Aunt Nettie. I didn’t have the authority to buy it in the name of TenHuis Chocolade. Joe and I didn’t have the money to do it on our own, and getting a loan on my own hook might be a hassle. I could, I supposed, mortgage our home to get the money, but I really didn’t want to do that, and I wasn’t sure Joe would go along with it. He was already up to his ears in mortgage payments for the boat shop. His legal activities had grown so—well, active—that his time at the shop had suffered. Now the shop was barely breaking even.

  No, I wanted to wait until Aunt Nettie came home to make a final decision on the purchase of the Clowning Around building.

  But at five o’clock I learned that might not happen.

  At that time Tilda was sitting in my visitor’s chair, managing to look alternately sympathetic and excited. Her artificially red hair was standing on end, and the nap on her fake fur jacket seemed to be imitating it. Her cute little face was having a hard time taking the right expression at any given moment, because she had brought news—good and bad. Good for her, and bad for me.

  “Lee, I was totally astonished. The phone call came out of nowhere. Yes, I showed the guy the building yesterday—you saw us. But I didn’t expect him to make an offer! Not this quick.”

  Ecstasy took over her face for a moment. Then Tilda remembered to look concerned and sympathetic. I understood her mixed feelings. As a Realtor, Tilda represented the Davidson heirs. Her job was to get the most money for their property that she could. Doing that also increased her fee. But as a Warner Pier businesswoman, Tilda wanted to get along wit
h the locals. Like me. She didn’t want to sell some outsider a building I was interested in if it left me with hard feelings. A dissatisfied local customer could cause her a lot of problems.

  “Did the caller make a good offer?” I asked.

  Tilda nodded. “Above asking.”

  “And who is this guy?”

  “His name is Philip Montague, and he represents a development company. I don’t know any more than that. Montague made it clear he was acting for the company, not for himself.”

  I knew Tilda wouldn’t tell me the amount of their offer until she had an okay from the Davidsons. Her face was still flashing between the exaltation brought on by getting a good offer and the sympathy she thought she should offer me.

  I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t want to display my feelings. I tried to make my face deadpan. “Have you presented the offer to Emma, Chuck, and Lorraine?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is there any point in my looking at the building?”

  “Of course, Lee! You may want to bid against these people.”

  “I doubt it.” There was no point in making Tilda feel too sure of herself. “I’m not sure I would go as high as the asking price, much less above it. But I’d still like to see the building.” I made a grimace I hoped looked like a grin. “I may want to crow over the final purchaser—tell him why he was a dumb bunny to spend real money on that property.”

  Tilda laughed nervously.

  I stood up and reached for my jacket. “Let’s go.”

  We had only to walk next door, of course, but it was closing time for the downtown businesses, so the street wasn’t as empty as we might have expected. In fact, the people at the wine store on the other side of Clowning Around were outside on ladders, putting up plywood clowns—painted in garish colors—above their show windows. They’re neighbors, so Tilda and I stopped to admire their decorations.

  Then the out-of-town clowns—Kyle and Paige—came along. They were wearing their costumes and did a few handsprings for us. This caused cries of “Watch out!” from Tilda and me and the wine shop owners. A patch of ice is always a possibility on a Michigan sidewalk in February.