14 The Chocolate Clown Corpse

by JoAnna Carl

  Joe got up and rearranged one of the fireplace logs. Then he stood before the fire, toasting the backs of his legs, and he gave me a long look.

  “Lee, I wish I could believe that Royal didn’t kill Moe at all.”

  That possibility was so remote we didn’t really discuss it.

  But Emma’s role remained open to question. Royal claimed that Emma was there. But Chuck and Emma had both said she wasn’t. Moe’s neighbor, Harry Vandercool, hadn’t reported seeing Emma at the Davidson house the day Moe died. Clancy, the sheriff’s deputy who had investigated the case, had not indicated that Emma had been there.

  But did Royal know Emma? Could he have mistaken someone else, such as Lorraine, for her?

  “And speaking of Emma,” Joe said, “I never did get to talk to her.”

  I thought about Emma. She called our house and left a message, but when Joe tried to call her back, Lorraine and Chuck said she was unavailable. Then Tilda and I found her unconscious—apparently after a suicide attempt. And now I was convinced someone had tried to kill her.

  Finally I spoke. “Emma’s whole story about her overdose doesn’t work, you know. If you want to talk to someone before you commit suicide, you don’t quit trying to reach them. Emma would have kept calling you.”

  Joe nodded. “Right. And as for the attack on Emma you witnessed this afternoon, that doesn’t make sense either. If someone is trying to commit suicide, and you want them to die, then you don’t interfere and try to smother them the next day. Most killers would just wait and see if the suicidal impulse returns.”

  “That seems like a more practical solution.”

  I got a simple supper together, and we tried to talk about something else while we ate it on our laps in front of the fire. But I was still thinking about Moe Davidson’s death and the new questions about how it had happened, and I’m sure Joe was, too.

  We had worked our way to ice cream by the time Joe went back to the subject.

  “I guess the next thing to do is talk to Moe’s neighbor,” he said. “Harry Vandercool. I’ll call and see if I can meet him tomorrow.”

  Chapter 14

  The name Harry Vandercool seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. Neither could Joe. That might mean nothing in a larger community, but in a town of twenty-five hundred, it’s a little odd.

  Joe looked him up online. He didn’t find out much. So we looked at the address in the phone book, and I figured out the name of someone I knew slightly who lived nearby. I called her. She didn’t know Harry Vandercool either, she said, but she knew who he was. Vandercool was one of the army of retirees who had moved to Warner Pier in recent years.

  “He had some sort of business in Holland,” my informant said. “Retail, I think. Maybe.”

  “Does he go to a church? Or belong to any clubs?”

  “Not that I know of. I don’t think we’ve ever met. Not formally. He was at the property owners’ association meeting.”

  Joe really likes to know some background about a witness before he interviews him, but he gave up and called Harry Vandercool cold.

  Vandercool readily agreed to talk to him. He suggested that Joe come to his house the next morning. Then Joe got a surprised look on his face. “Lee? I’m sure she would come if she doesn’t have something already scheduled.”

  Joe listened. Then he grinned. “Oh! Well, I’m sure she’d be glad to give you an update on the chocolate business in southwest Michigan. Let me ask her.”

  Joe took the phone away from the side of his head and looked at me. “Are you available to go calling at ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “I guess so. But why?”

  “It seems Harry Vandercool had Vandercool’s Chocolate in Grand Rapids until he retired.”

  “Oh! He’s that Vandercool! I’ll be glad to talk to him.”

  Joe confirmed the time and hung up. We both laughed. “I’ve never met Mr. Vandercool,” I said. “I didn’t know his first name, but Aunt Nettie has spoken of him.”

  “Vandercool says you bought a cooling tunnel he sold when he retired.”

  “We’re still using it.”

  “He says we should come to his house. ‘That way we can look at the situation on the ground, so to speak.’”

  “Sure. You can see how long it took him to walk over to Moe’s and other details like that.”

  Harry Vandercool’s house was in a wooded area south of Warner Pier, off Lake Shore Drive. He was, like us, on the inland side. Lakefront property is extremely valuable these days, but ordinary people can manage to live in the area if they don’t insist on a lake view.

  Harry was a bit farther away from the lakeshore than we are, maybe half a mile, on a lot with plenty of trees. His property was nice and neat. His house was painted white, with black shutters. His walks and even his driveway were bare of snow. And he had a real concrete walk and drive; none of this gravel stuff Joe and I use. There was a folksy Welcome sign beside the front door.

  Harry Vandercool was clearly a man who would be bothered by a cottage that looked abandoned and neglected—especially right next door. I immediately saw why he had noticed something was wrong at Moe and Emma’s house and why he had called to tell them about it. This was a man who wanted the neighborhood kept up.

  Yet his house sat alone, surrounded by trees. And since it wasn’t on a main road, no one except Harry and his callers would ever see it. The Davidson cottage wasn’t even visible from the Vandercool house. Although most of the trees were without leaves in winter, a large plot of evergreens lay between the two properties. The bushy trees completely blocked the view from one to the other.

  So I wondered just how Harry Vandercool had known there had been a prowler at the Davidson house. He wouldn’t have just casually noticed. He would have had to go over and look.

  Had Moe and Emma asked him to keep an eye on things? Or had he taken the job on himself?

  As soon as Joe parked his truck in the Vandercool drive, I saw a man come out the front door and start down the steps, accompanied by a small black dog. This had to be Harry Vandercool.

  Vandercool was a small man, the kind of man who makes me feel like a giantess. I guessed his age at around seventy. He had thin white hair and a colorless face and pale blue eyes. I still didn’t remember meeting him before, but I might have. He was so ordinary I could have stumbled over him daily and never noticed. The dog wasn’t even very noticeable. Just a short-haired black dog of no particular breed. He didn’t bark or jump on us, though he frisked about at the sight of strangers. When Joe knelt to greet him, he stood quietly to be petted, arching his neck.

  Mr. Vandercool told us the little dog was named Java. “Because he’s the color of black coffee,” he said.

  Mr. Vandercool gestured toward the house. “Come in, come in,” he said. “I’ve made some coffee. And I have some TenHuis chocolates!” He smiled proudly.

  Oh dear. He was a customer—a local customer—and I didn’t remember him.

  But Mr. Vandercool was shaking his forefinger at me. “I usually shop in South Haven,” he said, “so I got these truffles at the supermarket there. I’m sure yours are fresher.”

  “Oh, we deliver down there every other week,” I said. “Their chocolates ought to be fine. And I appreciate a chocolate expert seeking TenHuis out.”

  Mr. Vandercool’s living room matched the outside of his house. It was neat as a pin, with very few decorative items on the walls and tables. It was masculine, but traditional—no overstuffed sectionals or square cornered leather chairs. I was a little surprised by the floral fabric on the camelback couch, until I saw the picture on the mantelpiece. It was Mr. Vandercool standing beside a lady of a suitable age. The picture screamed “anniversary.” The room screamed “widower.”

  Java’s bed was next to Vandercool’s chair. As soon as we were in the house, Vandercool said, “Go
to your bed, Java,” and the little dog obediently sat in his special spot.

  Mr. Vandercool served coffee—remembering to offer cream and sugar—and put out a plate of truffles and bonbons. I took a blackberry truffle (“dark chocolate filling flavored with genuine Michigan berries, enrobed with dark chocolate, and decorated with a purple swirl”). Joe went for a mocha truffle (“dark chocolate interior and coating, trimmed with white stripes”). Our host then sat down on the flowered couch, took a deep breath, and began speaking before Joe could formulate a question.

  “I’ll always have a deep sense of guilt about the death of Moe Davidson,” he said. “I mean, what did it matter if that poor homeless man tried to get warm? It wasn’t worth dying over.”

  “Calling friends about a problem at their home is a neighborly act,” I said. “You had no way of foreseeing . . .”

  Mr. Vandercool was shaking his head. “I didn’t do it to be neighborly. I did it to point out Moe Davidson’s dereliction of duty. I wasn’t a good neighbor. I was a know-it-all. And Moe knew that. I think he came up here mad—mad at me—and that anger probably figured in the situation with Royal Hollis. So I am partially responsible for what happened.”

  “Mr. Vandercool,” Joe said, “you’re raising some basic questions about human relations. How much are we responsible for our fellow man? That one is way beyond me. All I can do is gather the facts about this case.”

  Vandercool nodded. “I understand. The law isn’t interested in why I did something, but in what I did. But I do want you to understand that I feel a lot of sympathy for both Moe and Royal Hollis in this—this stupid situation. It should never have led to anyone’s death.”

  “Just what did happen? From your point of view.”

  Mr. Vandercool took a deep breath. “Emma did ask me to keep an eye on things when she and Moe left in October. She assured me that they’d be back to close the house properly in a week. But they never came.”

  He continued his story. He walked Java twice a day, and one of their favorite strolls led by the Davidson house. “There’s a path between the two houses. It leads through the evergreens. And Moe and Emma didn’t mind us going that way.”

  Because of this he saw the house nearly every day, so he was quite sure the Davidsons hadn’t come back to put up shutters, drain the pipes, and do the other things necessary to winterize a house.

  “Of course, it’s a year-round house,” he said. “As long as the furnace was working, it probably wasn’t going to damage anything, but it’s just, well, a careless way to manage things.”

  Mr. Vandercool would definitely not have approved of doing anything in a careless way.

  November and December went by. Freezing weather set in. Snow fell, and on his walks Mr. Vandercool began to notice footprints that were not his own.

  Finally, on a day early in January he came upon Royal Hollis in back of the house. The Davidson house had an unattached garage, and Hollis was standing near its door.

  “Did he startle you?” Joe asked.

  “Not really. He was around this neighborhood quite a bit.”

  “So you knew who he was?”

  “I didn’t know his name—not his full name. But he would come by and play his harmonica, and sometimes I had a little chore for him.” Mr. Vandercool smiled. “He had a lively personality, you know. You couldn’t get mad at him.” His smile went away. “Or I couldn’t. Maybe I encouraged him to stay around in the neighborhood.”

  Mr. Vandercool was determined to feel guilty about Moe’s death, I saw.

  “But he wasn’t doing any harm,” Vandercool said. “Not that day. He was doing just what I was doing—walking around the house. I didn’t see him again.”

  It wasn’t until about a week later that Mr. Vandercool noticed that the latch on the hot tub was broken. When he touched the lid, it lifted easily.

  “I blame Moe,” he said. “You’re not supposed to put temptation in people’s paths. You shouldn’t leave money out, or wave an expensive cell phone around on a public conveyance, or just swallow any story that someone tells you. So I thought that Moe was—well, asking for it. The tub should have been properly emptied and locked.”

  That’s when he called Moe and Emma at their Indiana house. Moe had sounded angry, but when Vandercool offered to call the sheriff and report a prowler, he said no. He said he’d be up the next Saturday to drain the pipes and put up the shutters. He’d look for any damage himself.

  So Vandercool hadn’t been surprised when he heard a car the next weekend. “It drove in around noon,” he said. “Of course, I can’t see over there. Moe planted those evergreens years before I moved here.”

  Huh. So it was Moe who hadn’t wanted anyone to look at his house.

  “Did you go over to talk to Moe?” Joe asked.

  Vandercool sighed. “I started to. But sound carries so out here—well, I heard yelling. I thought it would be better to stay away for a while.”

  “Did you think Moe was yelling at Royal Hollis?”

  “No! To tell the truth, I assumed he was yelling at Emma. He could be awfully rude to her. But I went out on the porch. I was really surprised when Hollis ran into my yard.”

  “Hollis ran into your yard?”

  Vandercool nodded vigorously. “He ran toward me down the path that connects my lot with the Davidsons’. He was half-dressed.”

  “Half-dressed?”

  “Yes. He had on his overalls, and he was carrying his shirt and coat. But he didn’t even have his shoes.”

  “He was barefoot?”

  Another nod. “It was pretty obvious that Moe caught him actually in the hot tub. Moe must have yelled at him, and they must have fought. I guess that’s when Royal Hollis hit Moe. Killed him.”

  “What did Hollis say to you?”

  “He said, ‘I left my shoes. I gotta go back and get ’em.’ But I tried to talk him out of that. I thought it would just cause more trouble. I told him he could have a pair of mine. But he kept moving as if he was going back over to Moe’s. I ran into my mudroom and grabbed up a pair of tennis shoes. I shoved them at him; then I went to get two pairs of socks. He sat down on the porch steps and put them on.”

  Vandercool turned to me, looking almost as if he were going to cry. “The shoes were too small, but the temperature was way below freezing. He had to have shoes! I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I patted his hand. “That was a kind act, Mr. Vandercool.”

  He grimaced. “Anyway, Hollis put the shoes on and before I could stop him he took off through the woods.”

  “Did he go toward the Davidsons’?” Joe asked.

  “No, he ran off toward the Interstate.” Vandercool sighed. “I was afraid to face Moe. I admit it. But I decided I had to try to get Hollis’ shoes back. So I waited, oh, maybe fifteen minutes, and then I went over there. I walked down the path, and when I came out on the Davidsons’ side of the bushes, I saw Chuck kneeling on the driveway. It took me a minute to see that he was kneeling beside Moe. And Moe was dead.”

  Chapter 15

  I felt that Mr. Vandercool seemed to have reached an emotional stopping place. Joe apparently realized that, too, and he spoke.

  “How about a little break? Maybe this would be a good time to walk over toward the Davidsons’ so I can get an idea of the layout.”

  The older man nodded and turned to his dog. “Java! Walkee.”

  Java jumped to his feet and scurried across the room to get his leash. As Mr. Vandercool snapped it onto the little dog’s collar, he smiled apologetically. “Since my wife died, Java and I are partners.”

  I looked at the gray on Java’s snout and hoped that Mr. Vandercool wouldn’t be left alone.

  We three humans put on our jackets and boots, and we started on our expedition. The path between the Vandercool house and the Davidson place led through the evergreens on th
e Davidson side. The path wasn’t wide, but Mr. Vandercool had obviously trimmed back some branches to make it easy to get through, and the surface of the snow was trampled down. The only really narrow place was the final gap through the evergreens.

  When we came out on the other side we were perhaps a hundred feet from the Davidson house. The house was nondescript. Two cars were parked in the drive. I could see heat vapor coming out of a roof vent.

  The house was quite ordinary—just a white frame structure of no particular architectural style. Because we live in a quaint little town filled with historic houses, all Warner Pier people are interested in architecture. I mentally placed the construction of that one in the mid-1950s. Midcentury modern, it’s called. Personally, I would have labeled it “midcentury boring.”

  Mr. Vandercool stopped as soon as he came through the evergreens, and Joe and I stood on either side of him.

  “I see that the drive is quite close to the evergreens,” Joe said. “Just where was Moe’s body?”

  “Right where that blue car is,” Mr. Vandercool said. “I guess it’s Lorraine’s. Chuck’s Chevy was parked farther back.”

  “Where was Moe’s car?” Joe asked.

  There was a long pause. Mr. Vandercool turned around, frowning. “I can’t remember. It doesn’t seem to me . . . Honestly, I don’t remember it being there at all.”

  Why had Joe asked about Moe’s car? According to Chuck’s story, Moe’s car had never been at the house at all. Moe, presumably driven by Emma, had met his son someplace between their Indiana home and this house. Chuck had dropped Moe at the house, then gone out to get gas. When Chuck got back, he witnessed the struggle between his dad and Royal Hollis.

  But Elk Elkouri claimed that Emma had been at the house. So did Hollis. Were they dragging Emma in as a distraction? Or had Emma really been there?

  My heart began to pound. Emma Davidson might be able to tell the real, true story of what happened.