Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  “Yeah, but you opened the spreadsheet. It should know that you’re looking at it.”

  “It’s Ruddy’s computer. It can’t tell who opened the spreadsheet, just who’s logged onto the computer.” I glanced at the webcam hole in the top of the screen, which might be spying on me. “Right?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Erick sounded relieved. “That must be it. I’m just always paranoid about accounting. The Gnostic Yacht Club that we belonged to got sloppy with their accounting, and someone embezzled a hundred thousand dollars from them a few years ago. That’s why they closed.”

  “Is that why they shut down?” I asked him. “That’s shocking.”

  “It was very hushed up,” Erick agreed. “I was on the board. I managed to avoid doing any of the financial stuff there, which is hard to do for an accountant, even an ex-accountant. Everybody assumes that if you were a CPA, you must like looking at spreadsheets.” He gestured at the laptop’s screen. “This gives me hives.”

  “So, you didn’t have anything to do with the money there?” I asked.

  Erick shook his head. “Nope. I might have caught on if I’d had access to the records. I mean, maybe. I don’t know how well they were hiding it.”

  “I didn’t realize that you were a member there, too.”

  “We quit about a year before it fell apart. I admit, though, that I didn’t like being part of a club where something like that went on, but the main reason we quit was that you can’t have two side hustles. Golf is a harsh mistress, and between men’s league, committees, club tournaments, and just playing, not to mention range time and lessons and committee commitments, I was spending a fortune and all my spare time over here. Our oldest, the sailor in our family, went away to college. Afia was getting tired of paying to maintain a boat that we only used when he came home, so we gave up sailing for golf. There are a lot of people here who were members over there, though. Sailing and golf are hobbies for people who have the money, and a lot of people do both.”

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “Oh, the Sauveterres joined up here after the yacht club went under. LaMonde Jackson and his wife stayed at the yacht club right up until the bitter end, I heard. The Carmos, the Damirs, the Shins, and Berkowitzes. Lots of people.”

  “I never knew that. Now, with all your magical accounting skills, can you see which of the vendors we have paid and which ones we haven’t?” I asked him. “Someone has to pay our bills. We have to task someone else with that job.”

  Erick frowned. “I’m paying the bills.”

  “For the electric and the water bills you said, right? But not for the ones that require approval like Jacob’s package store.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re looking at. Maybe if we sort the spreadsheet data by the date of approval or bill-paid—”

  I lifted my hands off the keyboard and backed right up. “You do it. I’ll mess it up.”

  Erick swiveled the laptop toward himself, though I could still see the screen. “If we do this,” he did something, “then, there! All these bills without a date in this field”—he pointed at the screen—“have not been paid.”

  Hundreds of them.

  My stomach turned acidic at the thought of all those people in town who needed their money. “Oh, no.”

  “We’ll have to task someone to pay those bills, I guess.”

  “Are they all approved by a committee member?”

  He squinted at the screen. “If this box is initialed, then yes. You can see who initialed it, and it should match their log-in credentials in the note.”

  “Good. Can we get someone to pay all these bills at the next board meeting?”

  Erick bit his lower lip. “I suppose that’s the best way to do it.”

  “Well, we need to. I’ll just print out a copy of the—Dear sweet holy baby in a manger, how do you make this thing print?”

  Erick laughed and clicked around. “What do you want printed?”

  “Just the names, addresses, and amounts of people we owe money to.” Erick clicked, and I heard a mechanical whine from down the hallway. “Constable Kane wants a list of them, too.”

  “There you go, then. They’re all printed out. If you need anything else, let me know.”

  “Thank you, Erick. I appreciate it.”

  His wrist, right beside my hand, buzzed. “What was that?”

  He tapped the watch, and it stopped. “Oh, it’s one of these new-fangled watches that connects to your phone. My son made me get it because he has one. That’s my wife calling. I’ll call her back. It tracks my steps and my sleep, too.”

  “Oh, cool. I don’t have a new-fangled watch.”

  He smiled and cocked his head to the side. “My brother is divorced, you know. If you wanted to meet him for coffee, he would appreciate it. I would appreciate it.”

  Oh, all the saints. How would I get out of this one? I ventured, “Does he golf?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  “It would be a waste of his time, then. Thanks, but no thanks. And thank you for your help with the computer, Erick.”

  Chapter 12

  BACK in my Lady Captain’s office, I swiped and tapped my phone screen until it rang up Trudi.

  The printed-out spreadsheets littered my desk. On some of them, the ones with white-on-white numbers, thin lines cross-hatched the page, but they were otherwise blank.

  My office walls were painted a nice, restful shade of dark green, as befitted a golf-based country club. Maybe I should hang some of the plaques that I’d won in there. They were sitting a box in the garage, gathering dust.

  “Hello?” Trudi’s voice squeaked out of my phone. A baby cooed and gargled in the background.

  “Hey, do you have a minute?”

  “Sure, let me put you on speaker. I have my hands full. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Full of grandbaby.”

  Trudi was completely smitten with her grandbaby Nigel, and her smittenness was just the cutest thing in the world. “I’m waiting.”

  The timbre of the sound coming out of my phone hollowed out, and Trudi’s voice said, “Okay, go ahead.”

  “I found something weird when I was looking at the club’s spreadsheets,” I told her.

  “Oh? Math?” Trudi relished being everyone’s resident nerd whenever they needed math or science explained in small words.

  “Yeah, there are a bunch of formulas that take data from other sheets in the file, and then those sheets have weird formatting so that you can’t see what someone has written there.”

  “So, how do you know it exists?” Trudi asked.

  “The numbers and words were formatted as white text on a white background, so you can’t even highlight them. If you click on the cell, though, you can see what’s written there in the little box at the top.”

  “Nice sleuthing. Good job, there.”

  Warm happiness wafted through me. It’s not every day that a PhD-level ex-neuroscience professor compliments your ingenuity. “So, that’s weird, right?”

  “Very weird. When can I take a look at them?”

  “I have print outs of the ones you can see. I have blank pages of the white-on-white ones.”

  “Print-outs? Not the computer files?”

  “No. I was going to drop them into my cloud drive but didn’t get a chance. Erick Walters barged in on me and took over.”

  “Yeah, he does that.”

  “Can I drop by sometime? Or could we meet at the club for lunch?”

  She asked, “How about we take a look at them over lunch at the club tomorrow, and then we’ll play nine?”

  Trudi never let me down. “Sounds great.”

  Chapter 13

  AFTER lunch, as Trudi and I sat at a round table far in the back of the clubhouse, she snagged a piece of bacon off my plate that had fallen out of my sandwich and crunched down on it. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she sucked on the crisp meat. “Oh, my word. Real salt.”

  I tugged the spreadsheets out of a shopping bag. “About these spreadsheets.”
<
br />   “Yeah,” Trudi said, pushing her empty salad plate to the side. “Let’s take a look, or maybe we should sneak into Ruddy’s office again. I’m kind of sad that you did that without me.”

  “But your hands were full of grandbaby.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, they were. So, let’s see the pages.”

  I fanned the paper across the table. “You can see here, where I had a cell selected, that the formula in the cell isn’t a simple sum of the row.”

  Trudi flipped through the pages, scowled, flicked back and forth between sheets of paper, circled some numbers in black, and finally sneered at it. “Jeez, that’s inefficient. Look at that formula up here that was in the Name Box when you printed the sheet. It’s pulling data from four other sheets in the document, and they’re all the same type of data. All this could have been on one sheet and just summed with one pull of the cursor, but no. The references go here,” she pointed one blunt, sensible fingernail at a square on one page, “here,” pointing at another box on another page, “and way over here.” She dragged her finger down a column of digits. “This is ridiculous. It’s so ugly.”

  I nodded as if I had understood the spreadsheet well enough to have come up with that thought, myself. “Yes. Definitely.”

  Trudi threw an amused glance at me. “It’s like it’s deliberately complicated.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes all kinds of sense.”

  “Sure does.”

  “But who would want to hide something from the club?”

  Trudi raised one gray-blond eyebrow at me. “Someone who is stealing from the club.”

  “Was Ruddy stealing?” I asked. “Do you have evidence of that from these papers?”

  “I can’t be sure,” Trudi said, “but either somebody was trying to hide something, or whoever managed these sheets was incompetent or dumb as a box of rocks.”

  “Ruddy was a certified public accountant,” I reminded her.

  “I don’t see how that changes what I said.”

  “Oh, Trudi,” I laughed. “Surely, Ruddy wasn’t incompetent.”

  “That leaves—” she prompted.

  “No, no. Surely he wasn’t that, either.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Trudi tapped the papers on the table. “He didn’t pay people on time either, and that’s one of the basic job skills for being a CPA.”

  “But that’s because he was cheap.”

  “Or maybe he couldn’t figure out whose bills were due because he was incompetent.”

  “Well,” I said, wincing, “that would change things a bit.”

  “Or maybe because he was stealing from the club and trying to obfuscate.”

  That would be horrible. “And that would change things a lot.”

  “Yeah. What’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I leaned over to look at where she was pointing.

  Her finger rested on one of the blank spreadsheets, a waste of paper and printer ink that I’d almost dumped into the recycling bin rather than tote down to lunch. The tip of her fingernail pointed to the Name Box at the top, where the text that was in the selected square showed up.

  The word in the box read, Oliver Shwetz.

  “That’s weird.”

  Trudi looked up at me, peering at my face. “When I was in the lab, when someone said, ‘That’s weird,’ we’d all look up because it meant they’d found something unexpected, and perhaps, something important.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s weird that Oliver Shwetz’s name would be on these spreadsheets, right? He isn’t a club officer, and I don’t think we retain him for any club business, right?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  And Trudi probably would know. She had a finger in pretty much every committee in the club.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Yeah, huh.”

  I gathered the pieces of paper together. “I wonder if there’s any way to find out.”

  “Oliver Shwetz must know why his name was on these spreadsheets,” Trudi said.

  “But it’s not like we could just come right out and ask him.”

  “If we talked to him, maybe we could figure it out.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told her. “He might get angry.”

  Trudi mused, “I think I saw his name on the afternoon tee times list for around two o’clock. I think we should play golf with him and casually work it into the conversation.”

  I shredded my paper napkin like a naughty kindergartener caught cutting Play-Doh with scissors. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”

  But Trudi was already striding toward the staircase to the second floor.

  Chapter 14

  AFTER a quick consultation where neither of us divulged any real information, Sherlynne Orman finagled the tee times list and added Trudi and me to Oliver Shwetz’s twosome. We met them on the first hole’s tee box to tee off.

  I whispered to Trudi, “I don’t like this.”

  “It’s just golf.” Trudi was dragging her little hand-cart that held her clubs behind her. She sometimes called it her sportsing stroller when she was pretending that she was a non-sports-oriented, intellectual nerd. She asked, “What could be wrong with playing golf at a golf club?”

  “Still,” I muttered, but I pushed my clubs and cart toward the first hole’s tee box.

  I was surprised to see that my uncle, Arnold Holmes, was Oliver’s playing partner that Friday afternoon.

  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. My uncle Arnie was a talkative extrovert and would play a round of golf with just about anybody, although he usually preferred to shepherd ladies around the course. He liked ladies, and they liked him. However, all his flirtations came to nothing, which had always seemed odd to me. “Uncle Arnie!”

  “My favorite niece,” he said and returned a quick cheek-kiss. “Are you walking out with us today?”

  “Yep, playing nine holes. I need to smack a ball around with a steel rod to blow off some steam.”

  “Wonderful.” He leered over my hat to see who was behind me. “And you brought company?”

  Trudi frowned at him. “Put your eyes back in your head.”

  “As you wish, my lady.”

  Trudi rolled her eyes. Arnie was probably doing it to get a rise out of her. He was easily old enough to be Trudi’s father and maybe her grandfather, and Trudi was married.

  And all Uncle Arnie’s flirtations came to nothing.

  We shook hands with Oliver, who had looked fidgety ever since Sherlynne had strutted over and informed him that ladies would be joining them that afternoon.

  The guys at the club grumbled a bit about Ladies’ League taking up prime tee-time real estate on Wednesday mornings, but the guys didn’t dare say anything about women playing golf. Indeed, most of them were more than welcoming during the rest of the week, at least to our faces. I’d always suspected that most of them had the ulterior motive of trying to get their wives to play. Though almost all of them would deny it over beer, when their wives came to play, they fell all over themselves to make sure their girls had a good time. Most of them wanted to golf with their wives because they missed them and because they had probably noticed that the guys with golfing wives played a lot more golf in total.

  Normally, Oliver was fine with women golfing with him. Indeed, I’d golfed with him a dozen times or more.

  But that afternoon, he looked twitchy.

  I grinned at him. “Hey, Oliver. As one prime suspect to another, how’re you holding up?”

  He sighed, but he looked less worried once I phrased it like that. “Not too well. I hate everyone looking at me like I’m a murderer.”

  I nodded. “I hear you on that. I’m catching all kinds of flack. Nell practically accused me in front of the whole Ladies’ League, though Ann and Trudi stood up for me.” I glanced at Trudi, and she smiled back at me.

  His shoulders deflated. “These people have known me for years. I went to elementar
y school in this town. I had Mrs. Toltinetti for kindergarten.”

  “I remember her.” Mrs. Toltinetti had retired a year after I had begun teaching. She’d worked at the school for forty years.

  “I’ve been everyone’s attorney for decades. You know what they say: all attorneys are sons of guns, but your attorney is your son of a gun. I’ve advocated for half of Canterbury.”

  “And you’ve advocated against the other half of Canterbury,” Trudi said, because she had no filter.

  “Trudi! Don’t worry about it, Oliver. When they catch the real killer—”

  “Heavens to Betsy, that sounds guilty,” Uncle Arnie said as he inspected the few clouds drifting across the sky.

  I continued, “As I was saying, when they catch the real killer, then everyone will be sure it wasn’t one of us, and they’ll be sorry they suspected us. Has anyone said anything to you?”

  Oliver kicked a wayward tee that was lying on the ground. “The other three guys of my usual foursome got here an hour early today and forgot to text me. They’re already on the fifth hole.”

  “Oh.” That was mean of them. “Well, instead, you get to play with us, and we’re much better golfers than they are.”

  “Yeah.” He still looked dejected.

  “Come on. Let’s tee off.”

  One by one, we all hit our first balls into the air. The white dots soared down the fairway.

  Uncle Arnie traipsed off into the thick grass to find his, while the other three of us walked down the middle of the smooth fairway to where our balls were staggered.

  Trudi set up to hit hers again first, holding the smaller club in her tiny hand as she bent over and peered down the fairway. “So, Oliver, why was the club secretly giving you money?”

  “What?” he shouted and stepped backward.

  “Jeez, Trudi,” I said. “Oliver, she didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Trudi swung her club, and her little ball bounced down the grass in the middle of the fairway. “Hey, I’m not accusing him of murder, but his name was hidden in some very convoluted spreadsheets. Who was secretly giving you club money, and why?”