Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  “You don’t seem to have lost your swing this winter,” I remarked.

  Sherwood turned and, seeing me, grinned. “Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be here? There’s always something to attend to. Ladies’ League always needs new ranking sheets made.”

  “Did you see the newspaper this morning?” he asked.

  “Oh, that. It doesn’t concern me in the slightest.” I felt bad about lying to law enforcement, but this was an extenuating circumstance. “I’m sure they’ll find out who did it soon, and everything will go back to normal.”

  Sherwood shrugged and turned back to the fairway to hit another ball. “We sent the knife to the state forensics lab, but they’re backed up. I’m not sure how long it’ll take to get even the most basic fingerprint analysis on the knife. Might take months.”

  “Oh, I hope you’re not going to let it drag out like that. People are going to be scared away from Canterbury Golf Club.” I realized how bad that sounded. “And Ruddy’s poor wife and family. They need some closure. They need justice. The police have to find the murderer so that his family and wife will have justice.”

  I didn’t like myself very much at that moment.

  Sherwood said, “Well, we can’t do anything until we get the forensics back. Even if we did identify suspects, that all might be out the window if we get a fingerprint match for somebody else on the knife. It’s a waste of police resources and town money to go chasing after suspects when one fingerprint might solve the case.”

  I sighed. “The steak knife was from the club. They go missing all the time. The serving staff thinks we must have magpies or elves that steal them. Even if the lab did find a fingerprint on the knife, it’s possible that the murderer took someone else’s knife.”

  Sherwood glanced at me. “Are you worried about your prints showing up on the knife?”

  “No. I had the lobster. I didn’t touch my knife. Surely, though, we can spare some officers to investigate who killed Ruddy. The Town of Canterbury employs twenty police officers, which is probably fifteen too many. Most of them end up sitting on the beach during the summer, giving out tickets to the tourists for littering. We only need a few officers to direct traffic when we get a traffic jam during Memorial and Labor Day weekends or to ask around when someone shoplifts a seashell picture frame from the knickknack shop. It’s even still early in the season. The tourists don’t even really arrive until after Memorial Day. I would hesitate to say that our finest are just sitting around drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, but when I was driving to the course this morning, I saw four police cruisers parked at Bess Eaton.” That was the local doughnut shop. “What do they have to do that’s more important than investigating the murder of a Canterbury citizen?”

  “It’s standard operating procedure to pause investigations when there is forensic evidence until the analysis comes back from the state forensics laboratory. I don’t make the rules, Bee. I just make sure that the town is in compliance with them.”

  “So, it might be months before anyone even asks where people were when Ruddy was killed?” My voice rose in what I hoped was not hysteria, but it probably was.

  Sherwood rubbed his chin. “I hope it won’t be months. At the most, maybe three months.”

  “But,” I stammered, “but Ruddy’s family, and his wife, and justice.”

  “Bee, do you have information that I should know about?”

  “No, I don’t know anything! I don’t know anything at all, and nobody else knows anything either. There’s a murderer running around Canterbury, and it creeps me out. They might be a member of the club. They might be walking along the beach when I’m there next time. They might be standing behind me in the grocery store.”

  Sherwood cocked his head to the side and gave me a lopsided smile. “Most murders are personal. Chances are that this was an argument that got out of control. We’ve got someone watching Oliver Shwetz, so he’s not going to argue with anybody else and then kill them.”

  “Do you think it was Oliver?” I asked him. “Should we revoke his club membership?”

  “Due to my elected position in the town, I have no opinion about who it might or might not have been. My only concern is for the town and to make sure that the rules are followed so that the town’s legal liability remains as limited as possible,” Sherwood said while nodding vigorously.

  So, Sherwood did think Oliver had killed Ruddy.

  Okay, I had to figure out what the club should do about that.

  Sherwood asked, “I’m going to ask you one more time because it feels like you’re trying to tell me something. Do you know of anyone else who might have killed Ruddy Agani?”

  “I just know that Ruddy was delaying payments from the club to a lot of local small business owners.”

  “Yes, you were supposed to get me a list.”

  “And I will, just as soon as I figure out how. I don’t know if he was doing the same for his accounting clients. He might have been. Plus, he was just so unpleasant to everyone, so I don’t think we should rule out anyone in his personal life.”

  Sherwood raised his eyebrows. “It sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot.”

  “Of course, I have. It concerns the club. I’m the Lady Captain here, and everything that concerns the club concerns me. Plus, Oliver wasn’t accounted for after his argument with Ruddy. After the argument, I told him that he could go up to my office to cool down because his cardiologist had told him that getting upset wasn’t good for his blood pressure, and then when I went up there later to make a phone call, he wasn’t there. I don’t know where he was during that time.”

  Sherwood frowned and rested his elbow on the top of his bag. “You went back to your office during the party last night, while Ruddy was missing?”

  “Yes, I called Jacob Hibbert from up there because the bar was running out of liquor because Ruddy hadn’t paid our bill at Jacob’s package store for the past three months. I had to arrange with Jacob to have him deliver a case of scotch and a few other things to the bar, or else the bar was going to run out of alcohol during this very important reception. That’s why I had to find Ruddy afterward, to get him to cut a check for Jacob.”

  “I thought Oliver Shwetz was in your office.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “He wasn’t up there when I opened my door. He must have left before that.”

  Sherwood was still frowning at me. “Did anybody see you go upstairs? Did anybody see you come back downstairs?”

  “I talked to Jason Hibbert on my cell phone. That would have a timestamp, and his cell phone would, too.”

  “But that doesn’t establish your location when you made the phone call like a landline does. How long were you upstairs?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes? Maybe longer, because then I looked over the accounts to make sure that we had enough money in the daily operating account to pay Jacob what we owed him.”

  Sherwood was staring directly at me. “How much longer?”

  I blinked in the strong sunlight. “I’m not sure. I know that Ruddy was gone for almost two hours before we started looking for him, but I was mingling for most of that.”

  Sherwood took out his cell phone and tapped the screen a few times. “You didn’t tell the police officers you had left the party and were unaccounted for, while the victim was still missing.”

  “I was rattled when I talked to them. I’d just found a dead body. I’m surprised I wasn’t in the bar, sucking down half of Jacob’s delivery.”

  “You didn’t mention it to the officers yesterday morning, either,” Sherwood said. “We’re going to need you to talk to the police officers and amend your story, and you should make sure to tell us if anyone can corroborate when you went upstairs and when you came back downstairs, and especially if there’s any evidence that you were in your office that whole time. There is a set of stairs that leads from the back of the second story of the clubhouse and right out down to th
at side door by the pro shop. In theory, and I’m not saying this happened, you could’ve come down those stairs while you were talking on the phone, gone and found Ruddy, killed him, gone back up the stairs to your office, and then back down the main staircase to the party. It’s very possible that no one might’ve seen you leave the clubhouse.”

  “Well, you could say the same thing about Oliver Shwetz.”

  “Yes, we could. I need to add the possibility that Oliver went down those back stairs and out to the course to your statements, too.”

  And, I’d just made Oliver’s life harder, which I had not meant to do, doggonit. “But you just said I must have been yammering on my cell phone the whole time. Someone would have noticed that.”

  “It was a loud party, from what the neighbors said. We had one noise complaint about the DJ. Even if you were talking, people might not have heard anything.”

  “And Oliver and I were both wearing light-colored shirts that night. He wore a white shirt, and I was wearing pale blue. I can’t even properly cut up a steak without dripping the juice on myself. Someone would have noticed blood on our clothes if either one of us had stabbed a person with a knife. You saw all that blood on the green. Wouldn’t I have gotten some of that on me in a—” I struggled to remember the correct terminology from all those forensic television shows. “—blood spatter or spray?”

  “Not necessarily,” Sherwood said. “When people are stabbed, they don’t spray blood like a popping water balloon or a high-pressure pipe with a leak. Sometimes, they just drip a little.”

  “You saw the blood on the green. There was so much of it.”

  “It was a blood pool,” Sherwood said, “that had sunk into the ground. Most of that could have seeped out of him, rather than sprayed out like a firehose that got loose.”

  There had to be a reason why I couldn’t be a suspect. “I wasn’t gone that long when I popped up to my office.”

  But I had been. I’d been sitting in my office, talking first to Jacob and then to my dead husband for probably twenty minutes before I’d felt fortified enough to go downstairs to find Ruddy.

  Sherwood said, “Well, we are going to have to establish a timeline for you, just to make sure.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to investigate the murder at all because the forensic evidence isn’t back from the state lab.”

  “Unfortunately, between you and Oliver Shwetz, we now have two suspects who were unaccounted for when the murder might’ve taken place. Other than investigating you and Oliver Shwetz, the police probably won’t look any further for suspects until the forensic analysis is complete.”

  Great.

  Just great.

  I managed to make myself a suspect in Ruddy’s murder and to make sure that the investigation was stalled.

  That meant the murderer was going to be freely walking around Canterbury Golf Club, which likely would make people afraid to join the club.

  And I didn’t like the idea much, either.

  How had I managed to make things worse?

  Chapter 8

  INSIDE the Canterbury Golf Club clubhouse, the air-conditioning blew at full blast because it was finally warm that day after being so cold for weeks, even during our nighttime glow-ball tournament just days before. The large, plate-glass windows of the clubhouse created a greenhouse effect, which helped with heating costs during the long, New England winter, but people don’t golf much during the winter. The club needed to add some shades above those windows, but committing to that kind of expense right now would be foolhardy.

  Up in my office, I opened my computer and stared at the screen, angry for allowing myself to become a suspect in something that I obviously hadn’t done, which therefore impeded the investigation and delayed finding the real murderer. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. I shouldn’t have said anything.

  I resolved to keep my mouth shut and not discuss the murder with anyone, for any reason, until the police had caught the real murderer. Canterbury Golf Club depended on me not to make this worse.

  On the screen of my computer, the club’s daily operating budget account was still open. I scanned the list of vendors, but they all seemed like perfectly reasonable businesses for a golf club to pay for services or goods. The names all seemed to be normal business names, even if I didn’t recognize some of them.

  Shoreline Landscaping, Inc.

  Surf and Turf Meat Shop, which was a good butcher shop. I bought meat from them when I had company over.

  DeWitt’s Flower Nursery. They had nice mums last year.

  Healthy Plant Organic Farm.

  Handy Hands Carpet and Upholstery Cleaners. Good, the carpeting in the dining room was getting grungy.

  I scanned the list, looking for anything unusual or weird, but even in a small town like Canterbury, I didn’t know every vendor that might supply the golf club. Besides, there were a dozen other small towns near enough to have places of business that Canterbury might be using as vendors, not to mention some of the smaller cities located within an hour or two away.

  A knock rattled my open office door.

  When I looked up, Linda Agani, the wife of the deceased Ruddy Agani, leaned against the frame in my doorway, wearing golfing attire and a serious expression on her face. “I heard you found Ruddy after it happened.”

  I closed my computer and folded my hands on top of it. “I’m so sorry.”

  She walked in and sat in the chair in front of my desk. Her eyes weren’t red, but she seemed quieter and more solemn than usual, and her sigh was heavy. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Me, either.” I wasn’t lying. It seemed unbelievable that someone, anyone, whom I knew had been murdered.

  “The police won’t tell me anything,” she said.

  “I don’t think they know very much. I just talked to Constable Sherwood Kane, and he said that the police wouldn’t even begin an in-depth investigation until after they get the knife back from the state’s forensic lab to see if there are any fingerprints on it.”

  “Oh, no. That means it’s going to be months before I can move.”

  “I told Constable Sherwood that the investigation should start now because Ruddy’s family would want closure and justice.”

  “It’s not just that. I’m moving to California.”

  “Permanently?”

  “California seems like a good place to start over. I need to start fresh.”

  “This seems sudden. Maybe you should think about it for a couple of weeks, just in case maybe you don’t want to move to California. Maybe you’ll want to move to Arizona.”

  “I rented an apartment out there last week. It’ll be ready for me to move in on the first of the month.”

  Last week? “But what about your club membership?”

  “Didn’t Ruddy resign the family membership and change it to an individual membership? He was supposed to.”

  I opened the computer on the desk between us and pulled up a spreadsheet that showed membership details.

  Five more families were resigning their memberships effective at the beginning of the next month. The rival country club Greens of Grass had probably poached them with their loss-leader promotion, too, which meant I had even more memberships to make up for. When I flipped to the page for current membership changes, neither of the two entries were the Agani family. “No, he didn’t submit a change. Do you want me to mark you down to change your membership status?”

  Linda sighed another sad and heavy sigh. “I suppose you should since I’m moving to California and Ruddy isn’t going to be around to play golf anymore.”

  “Am I missing something here?” I asked.

  “You knew about the divorce, right?”

  I leaned back in my chair, shocked. “No. I suppose I only saw Ruddy in committee meetings, and we tried not to talk about personal stuff in meetings. You know how there’s always so much business to take care of. If he had mentioned it, I didn’t hear him. I haven’t seen you around the club
much this year because you didn’t sign up for Ladies’ League this year. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  Linda sadly contemplated her hands, knotted in her lap. “I’ve been unhappy for years. Our last kid went off to college last fall, and I stayed through the winter, hoping we could work things out or that things would get better. They didn’t. I don’t want to talk about him right now because I just wanted to get away from him and start a new life, but I never wanted this to happen to him.” She paused, frowning, and a tear splashed on her hands before she repeated, “I would never have wanted something like this to happen to him.”

  “So, that’s why you didn’t come to the glow-ball tournament with him? Because you were planning on leaving soon, anyway?”

  Linda shook her head, her dark hair swishing about her face.

  Her hair was darker, with no gray streaks like she’d had last year during Ladies’ League. She’d started coloring her hair.

  Not that coloring your hair means you’re a murderer. Half the ladies at the club would be indicted for murder if that were the case, including me. But maybe it did indicate that Linda had been thinking about starting a new life.

  She said, “We had a fight that night. The last thing I said to him was, ‘If that’s how you feel, then maybe I should leave right now.’ And I did. I walked out of the house, got in my car, and left. I figured he was going to go to the club for the tournament because we’d already paid for the tickets, and the tickets included dinner. Lord knows Ruddy wouldn’t have wasted money that had already been spent just to chase his crying wife around. I wish I hadn’t said that, though.”

  I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  Linda shrugged. “I’ve said a lot of things like that in the last year. We both knew that our marriage was ending. I hate to say it, but I’m relieved there isn’t going to be a big divorce battle in court. Ruddy would have fought for every penny, and then no matter what I did get out of it to start my new life after raising four kids for thirty years, he probably wouldn’t have written me a check until I’d threatened to have him arrested.”