Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  “She needed a check to pay for the booze!” Trudi said, nearly snarling.

  I lifted my hands to stop them from arguing. “Ladies’ League is about to begin. We need to get onto the course to be in our places for the start time. Ann, I think you are starting on the fourth hole with Constance and Priscilla Sauveterre. Trudi, come on. We don’t want to keep Moonie waiting on the seventh. She starts picking at scabs when we keep her waiting.”

  I herded Trudi in front of me, and we set off at a brisk pace to meet Moonie on the seventh hole tee box. When we got there, I had to use a bright pink golf ball because my bumblebee-colored soccer-style golf ball must have fallen out of my bag somewhere.

  Somehow, I managed to hold onto my cool, and after the first few holes, Trudi and Moonie had me laughing and thinking about golf for the rest of the round.

  Chapter 10

  PAULINE’S comment about how Ruddy had been delinquent on payments to other businesses rankled me.

  Someone at his CPA business must have taken over and paid his bills there, but no one had taken over his bill-paying duties at Canterbury Golf Club.

  I thought about it all day, all night, and into the next day, wondering how many businesses around town Canterbury Golf Club might owe money to.

  There might be dozens of people who weren’t being paid.

  I might be bumping into people at the grocery store or my favorite Italian restaurant, and CGC might owe them money.

  They might be blaming me from behind their smiles.

  Or they might really need the money we owed them. Pauline had said that she had nearly lost her flower shop due to unpaid invoices, probably including ours.

  I needed to find out who they were.

  So I needed to see Ruddy’s CGC accounts.

  Besides, I had promised Constable Sherwood Kane that I would compile a list of people to whom the Canterbury Golf Club owed money.

  Breaking into Ruddy’s office was wrong.

  I knew it was wrong.

  And yet it was my civic duty to get that information for Constable Kane.

  Breaking and entering was surely wrong.

  But I didn’t need to break anything.

  Up on the clubhouse’s second floor where my Lady Captain’s office was, business offices lined the hallway, and we all just roamed around, sticking our heads in other people’s offices, talking and drinking coffee while we caught up on all the little things that were necessary for someone to do if the club were to run smoothly. Most of the office doors on the second floor stood open during the day.

  So, that Thursday afternoon when I was in my Lady Captain’s office, I stood up and walked around.

  Having Trudi with me would have helped calm my nerves, but she was sitting with her grandbaby that day. The little chub was all of nine months old and crawling like a puppy, and Trudi didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

  Sherlynne, the women’s golf pro, was sitting at her desk in her office. I waved as I walked by, a casual wave that suggested I wasn’t going anywhere important or doing anything interesting.

  To act any more obviously nonchalant, I would have had to stroll with my hands folded behind my back, whistling something chipper.

  Sherlynne waved back, but it seemed like she was concentrating deeply on whatever was written on the sheet of paper lying on her desk. She tapped the numbers into a calculator with a pencil.

  I shouldn’t disturb her.

  Not that I was going anywhere important.

  I was just going to see if Ruddy’s old office was, maybe, unlocked.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with what I was doing. Walking through an unlocked door was neither illegal nor immoral.

  Unlocked doors were essentially invitations.

  I reached Ruddy’s office and grasped the doorknob.

  The doorknob did not turn under my hand, just stiffly clicked as I tried to twist it.

  Of course, Ruddy’s darn office was locked.

  The one office that might help me was locked.

  But it didn’t have to stay locked.

  I pulled my keys out of my pocket and sorted through the jangly bunch of them.

  The rumor was that most of the offices on the second floor had been keyed to the same key because Ruddy had cut corners wherever possible to save money.

  I inserted my key for my door to the Lady Captain’s office into Ruddy’s doorknob, and it turned easily.

  Now, it was an open door, and walking through an open door was not illegal, as I had already established. Entering an office that was currently not assigned to anybody and taking a look around to perhaps solve a crime, provide closure to his family, and save the reputation of the club had to be a good thing.

  And maybe people would stop whispering that I’d killed him, too. That would be nice.

  Inside, Ruddy’s office was bigger than mine, which was odd because as the Lady Captain, I spent more time at the club than Ruddy did. He was just a member of several committees and could write checks because he was a financial officer for some of those committees, but he didn’t hold an official, albeit volunteer, position.

  His window was bigger, too.

  And his sheer curtains were newer.

  Not that it was a competition or anything.

  Still.

  Plaques hung on Ruddy Agani’s wall, listing his name and golfing accomplishments, such as winning low-net at the member-guest tournament three years ago and being on the team that placed second in the men’s league a few years before that.

  A laptop lay closed on Ruddy’s desk.

  Pale powder filmed the top of his computer and the desk, sticking to smudges and whorls on the plastic and polished wood. Clear squares, where the dust had been removed, disturbed the even layer.

  A forensic technician must have been in there to dust for fingerprints, probably Saturday morning when I’d seen Constable Sherwood Kane and my two ex-students on the seventeenth green.

  I opened the laptop computer, wishing I was wearing my thick winter golf gloves to conceal my fingerprints.

  Not that I had anything to hide.

  I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been in there.

  I sat down in his chair and clicked on the spreadsheet software icon on the bottom menu of the screen so I could see which files had been recently opened. One was labeled Canterbury Discretionary Money, so I clicked that file to open it.

  A solid wall of numbers filled the screen.

  I blinked, backing up a little in the chair.

  My college major had been elementary education, not math. The jumble of numbers and decimal points seemed like a whole lot of digits in one place. Just looking at all those numbers made my brain feel garbled.

  So many, many numbers.

  The only part that wasn’t numbers was the left-most column, which was a list of business names, and the top row of headings.

  My goal was to see whether I could tell if any other vendors needed to be paid. If they did, I could find Erick Walters or someone else and get them to write a bunch of checks because surely this was an emergency.

  Okay, accounting software. As a kindergarten teacher for thirty years, I had mostly used a double-entry accounting ledger to keep track of grades. Even in kindergarten, children receive grades, and grades must be tracked. Otherwise, some helicopter parent will demand to know why little Jimmy got a star-minus in alphabet recognition instead of a star-plus.

  It was only when I was ready to retire that those newfangled, grade-tracking computer programs like PowerSchool and GradeBook had become available. I had used them a bit when the administration had forced me to during my last few years of teaching, so I had a rudimentary knowledge of spreadsheet programs.

  Looking at this morass of numbers, I realized how very rudimentary my spreadsheet knowledge was.

  This looked like the Matrix.

  I hovered over the tiny rectangles on the spreadsheet. When I scanned my eyes over the screen, the
y just looked like rows and rows of numbers. However, when I clicked on a cell, long equations full of dollar signs, abbreviations, arithmetic signs, and Greek letters were actually written in there, and all that added together to make the numbers that I saw in the boxes.

  However, being a teacher in the olden days before grade-tracking programs does lead one to acquire a certain skill set.

  One essential skill is adding long, long rows of numbers quickly and accurately. Everyone hates the end of the grading periods when every teacher stays up late to calculate those last few grades.

  The longer you teach, the more efficient you get at adding long, long rows of grades.

  I was quite good at it.

  The problem was that when I scanned those long rows of numbers, the sums on the ends didn’t add up.

  Computers should be able to add numbers correctly, right? That was the whole flippin’ point of these oversized calculators.

  I clicked on the number at the end that should be the sum of the row, and the whole row before it highlighted. The equation buried under the number should make that number the sum of the row.

  But it wasn’t.

  The actual number, which was supposed to be all the previous numbers added up, was too high every time. Some were inflated ten dollars or so, but one was several thousand dollars higher than it should have been.

  That was weird.

  When I tried to inspect the long equations, some of the references went to other pages of the spreadsheet.

  When I clicked over to look at those pages, they were blank.

  Why would Ruddy have blank pages in the club’s accounting spreadsheets?

  I deleted the page.

  On the first page, the numbers in the last column changed to red hazard triangles.

  That was bad.

  I did the control-plus-Z thing that undoes whatever you did that messed everything up, even if you don’t know what you did.

  The numbers came back.

  Which meant there were invisible numbers on that other spreadsheet, the blank one.

  I went back to the spreadsheet that appeared to be blank and clicked on a cell. When I clicked an empty square, text appeared in the Name Box, the box at the top where you type in what you want into the computer, but the cell still looked empty.

  Someone had hidden numbers in the spreadsheet by making the text color the same white as the white background. Not even highlighting the cells revealed the text written in them.

  Well, that was easy enough to fix. I selected-all on the page and changed the font color to black.

  The boxes still looked empty.

  It hadn’t worked.

  When I looked up in the corner of the page, a little padlock denoted that the page was locked and thus was read-only.

  Well, chicken gizzards and fries.

  At least I could still see the contents if I clicked on them.

  As I clicked around on different boxes and looked at the top of the screen, I found numbers, amounts, and names.

  The names that I found in the first column going down were the club’s vendors, like our florist and the carpet-cleaning people.

  The numbers in the fourth column varied, but most were a few hundred dollars.

  Oddly, most of the numerals were round numbers, like $50.00 or $200.00, rather than the precise numbers you would expect to find on a complicated invoice that included labor, materials, and taxes.

  This looked like someone had been padding invoices, adding a bit of money to each one.

  Had Ruddy been stealing the club’s money?

  And yet, even if it had been tens of thousands of dollars, no one at the club would have killed Ruddy for skimming money from the club. The Canterbury Police Chief was a club member, as was Constable Sherwood Kane. We would have had Ruddy arrested and sued him to get the money back. The club membership included several lawyers, too, like Oliver Shwetz.

  Oh, no. Ruddy had been arguing with Oliver Shwetz at the glow-ball tournament before he had been killed.

  It still didn’t make sense. If Ruddy had been skimming off the club, any club officer would have just called Constable Sherwood or the police to arrest Ruddy.

  Plus, Oliver Shwetz was just a club member. He wasn’t an officer or on any boards or committees, and he didn’t have the power in the club to write or approve checks or do anything with money. Oliver was just one of the members who paid dues, played golf, and ate food in the clubhouse.

  No, that altercation looked like it had been personal.

  Well, now I had two possible motives for Ruddy’s murder: a personal one because Ruddy had been so unpleasant to everyone he met, including Oliver, and a possible criminal connection because Ruddy might have been skimming money from the club.

  I scowled at the computer. The darn thing had complicated my investigation instead of helping it.

  Investigation.

  I almost smiled to myself as I closed Ruddy’s computer, hearing the crisp click as it closed.

  An ex-kindergarten teacher and golf club Lady Captain couldn’t investigate a murder. How amusing.

  And yet, I was being forced to investigate Ruddy’s murder because people thought I had killed him. My reputation and the reputation of Canterbury Golf Club were at stake.

  So, I was cornered.

  I scowled at Ruddy’s computer, mad at Ruddy for getting himself killed.

  A man’s voice said, “Good afternoon, Bee. Who unlocked Ruddy’s door for you?”

  Chapter 11

  I glanced up from Ruddy’s computer, startled.

  Erick Walters, the club’s treasurer, was leaning against the doorway, his long legs crossed at his ankles. His relaxed smile seemed unassuming, like he didn’t suspect me of trying to cover up a murder by messing around with Ruddy’s computer, thank goodness.

  I had so many guilty thoughts.

  Erick said, “I’ve been trying to get in here for days to see what was going on with Ruddy’s accounts. What’cha doing?”

  “Oh, hi.” I stood up, brushing off my golf slacks and giving myself a minute to think. “Just remembering a few years ago when Ruddy won”—I squinted and read the plaque again—“the low-net prize at the member-guest tournament. He was so proud of himself.”

  Erick laughed. “Yeah, he was proud that he had brought in a ringer to win it. I still think paying the pro from New Scot Links golf course to play with him was right on the edge of cheating.”

  Oh, yes. That had been the year that Ruddy had brought in a ringer, because the next year, the membership had approved a rule to ban paying PGA professionals to play as “guests” for the member-guest tournament.

  Erick had argued for the new rule, I remembered, standing up in front of the all-member meeting and announcing, “If you don’t pass this rule, I will mortgage my dang house, and my guest for the member-guest tournament next year will be Tiger-freaking-Woods.”

  Some members did take club tournaments very seriously.

  Erick asked, his tone light, “Did you find anything interesting on Ruddy’s computer?”

  “You’re a CPA, right?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Yeah, but I’m a lapsed CPA. I hated accounting. Long rows of numbers, stupid spreadsheets that made their own errors overnight, and the clients. Dear Lord, the clients. I do not miss a minute of it. Selling real estate is my calling.”

  I flipped up the lid on Ruddy’s laptop. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Erick walked around the desk and squinted at the screen. He pulled his neck backward like a cat about to cautiously bat at a bug. “Forgot my readers.”

  “I can make the font bigger.”

  “No, don’t change anything. I’m not even sure we should be in here. I’m surprised that the police didn’t take his laptop.”

  I wiped my finger through the gritty powder on the desk. “They dusted for fingerprints.”

  He nodded. “And this is a small town. I’m not sure what kind of resources the police department has.”
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  “Constable Kane said that they sent the knife to the state forensic laboratory.”

  “Oh,” Erick nodded. “The one with my fingerprints on it. Great.”

  “Your fingerprints? Oh, did you actually touch it before Trudi could warn you off?”

  Erick’s eyebrows crumpled in, and his mouth pressed in a rueful, embarrassed smile. “I thought I would pick it up to give to the police. Seeing Ruddy lying on the ground dead really freaked me out. I’d never seen a dead person before.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird, especially your first time. I imagine even more so when it’s a murder.”

  “Have you seen a deceased person before?” Erick asked, peering at the computer screen.

  My hands wove themselves into a knot in my lap. “My husband had his stroke while we were eating lunch at home.”

  “Oh.” Erick glanced up at me. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  “No, I’m okay.” It wasn’t okay. I wasn’t okay. But my grief makes other people feel bad, so I don’t talk about it. Instead, I said, “No one lives forever, and we had thirty good years. Some people don’t get a quarter of that.” I was getting better at saying it. “I wanted to show you what I found on this spreadsheet.”

  “You shouldn’t be looking at this, anyway. You can tell who edited the document.”

  “I’m not editing anything,” I said.

  “Yeah, but see? You can tell.” Erick clicked over to the Review tab and clicked something saying Notes. “Holy cow! Who are all those people?”

  A long list populated down the page. Quite a few of the names were familiar. I mused aloud, “Nell Rinaldi, Sherlynne Orman, and Trudi? Everybody on there has been making changes on this spreadsheet? No wonder it’s all messed up.”

  Erick squinted and leaned back. “These are all the people who have permissions to make changes.” He pointed. “Oh, it’s because they have check-approval power. Anybody who can approve checks can make changes to the top sheet, but the other sheets are locked. You can tell by the little padlock on the tab. Why aren’t you on here?”

  “Because I don’t have check-approval power, I guess.”