Murder, Malice and Mischief

by Quinn, Lucy

  Indeed, I told Eleanora that I would be over in about an hour to pick her up.

  Eleanora’s call was practically a sign from the heavens, a signal that I should mind my own business and keep to my schedule, rather than poke my nose into police investigations where I wasn’t welcome.

  After dressing in golf attire, I made sure I had my keys and other necessary things as I went outside to get into my car and drive Eleanora to the club.

  See? I wasn’t thinking about anything other than my own business at all. I had put those other things completely out of my mind.

  As I stepped out of my front door and turned to make sure it was locked, my foot slipped slightly.

  I looked down at my welcome doormat.

  A newspaper was lying on my front step, and my foot had slid on the paper when I had stepped on it.

  The newspaper was, of course, the Canterbury Tales, Monday Edition, and the headline read, “Canterbury Golf and Murder Club.”

  Drat, that Lale Kollen had written another story about Ruddy’s murder.

  Everyone in town was going to read it.

  Our club members would stay away even more.

  No new members would sign up.

  My teeth ground against each other.

  Obligations came first, so I drove over to Eleanora’s house to pick her up and drive her to the club. We chatted amicably during the short drive, although I think I was less successful at hiding my anger at Lale Kollen than I would have liked.

  Eleanora kept asking me if the kittens were all right and if there was anything she could do to help me with club matters.

  When she asked for the third time if something was bothering me, I reached into the back seat of my car, snagged that horrible newspaper, and dumped it in her lap. “I can’t believe that Lale Kollen wrote yet another article in the Canterbury Tales about what happened to Ruddy Agani. I mean, it’s terrible. Of course, it’s terrible. We invited Lale Kollen into the club as a favor to her. She’s the one who needed more local stories. She contacted us, not the other way around. Now, not only did she write one sensational article about this horrible tragedy, but now she’s written another one just a few days later.”

  Eleanora peered at the newspaper and frowned. “This does seem to be taking matters too far. ‘Golf and Murder Club,’ indeed.”

  “This is insane. Lale Kollen is insane,” I said, watching the road but shaking my head. “She keeps calling people who were there and coming up with these stories. She called me a few days ago and wanted to know if I’d heard anything around the club about who might have killed Ruddy.”

  “Well, she is a journalist. I imagine that’s what they taught her in college,” Eleanora said.

  “But she was there when Ruddy was killed. She saw Oliver and Ruddy arguing, and people weren’t keeping an eye on her. She might have gone out after him. Maybe she did it.”

  “I would hate to think that about that young lady,” Eleanora said.

  “She could have grabbed one of the club’s steak knives. It didn’t have to be a club member.”

  “I suppose that is so.”

  “And now she’s latched onto writing about Ruddy’s murder like a hungry pit bull, and she won’t let it go. Everything in that newspaper is going to be about the club and how Ruddy was murdered at the club. Maybe she’s trying to throw suspicion onto someone else. When you think about it, being a reporter is a great way to deflect suspicion by accusing other people. Did you read the article?”

  “I’m looking it over right now,” Eleanora said. “It doesn’t seem to say anything new. It seems like all the facts are the same as they were a few days ago, that Ruddy was killed with a knife and no one knows who did it.”

  “She shouldn’t keep publishing about the club. This is harassment.”

  “Oh, nothing ever happens in Canterbury. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that there is more than one newspaper article about the only scandalous thing that’s happened here in the last ten years. Why, when those high school kids toilet-papered the principal’s house, there were three articles about that, not to mention the letters to the editor demanding that they be put in juvenile detention.”

  “This is harassment,” I repeated, grinding my teeth together. “I should go down there and have a word with her.”

  Eleanora turned in her seat and squinted at me just as we turned into the golf club’s parking lot. “I don’t know if that’s wise, Bee. You don’t want to stir up a hornets’ nest and make them think that there’s more of a story here than there is.”

  I helped Eleanora get her little satchel out of the back of my car. Her golf clubs were stored in the bag room at the club, so we didn’t have to wrestle them in and out of my trunk. “I’m going to go downtown to that newspaper and give them a piece of my mind. At the very least, they should stop harassing the club. Maybe Lale will say something incriminating if she did it.”

  Eleanora frowned, her dark skin already beading with sweat in the summer swelter. “Bee, perhaps we should just let this article go. If there’s a third article, then maybe someone should have a word with her editor or something. In any case, if you suspect she’s violent, I don’t think you should confront her at all.”

  I opened my car door and tossed my purse back inside. “I’ll be back to pick you up in four hours or so. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Chapter 20

  THE building that housed the Canterbury Tales was an old, red-brick structure on the banks of the river. The original building had probably been constructed in the late 1800s, but renovations, additions, and reconstruction had produced a much bigger building that housed several of Canterbury’s businesses.

  Inside, the stale air seemed to hover, even though ribbons on the air conditioning vents fluttered. Some of the walls had been stripped, and the exposed, antiquated red brick was crumbling in some places, whereas others were plastered over with modern drywall.

  I passed the orthodontist’s office, where teens slouched in the waiting room, and a small café serving soy lattes and vegan pastries before I found the wide, marble staircase for the upper floors.

  The Canterbury Tales newspaper occupied the entire second floor of the building. A receptionist’s desk was stationed in front of a long wall of frosted glass, behind which shadowy figures floated and merged. A single, closed door in the same material interrupted the diaphanous glass.

  A black-haired man sat ramrod-straight at the reception desk, his hands spread on the frosted glass. The burgundy polish on his nails was expertly applied and unchipped. He drawled, “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” I said, trying to be brisk and pleasant. It wasn’t this guy’s fault that a reporter had written a hatchet piece about the Canterbury Golf Club. “I’d like to see Lale Kollen, please.”

  He picked up a tablet and looked at it. Sharp lines cut into his hairstyle like the prim set of his mouth. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I was hoping Lale would see me. I already know her. I’m the one who helped her get into Canterbury Golf Club for her big exposé. She called me Friday. I have some more information to tell her.”

  The man gently set his tablet on his frosted glass desk, the bottom of it squared to the edge nearest to his pressed dress shirt. “I’m sorry. I can’t allow you back into the newsroom without an appointment.”

  “Could you please call her and tell her that Beatrice Yates is here and has more information that she was looking for?” I hoped that would do the trick.

  He glanced down at his tablet and sighed. “I suppose.”

  The man made a big show of dialing a cell phone and beeping through extensions. He looked straight into my eyes, unblinking, while he listened to the phone for several seconds before tapping the screen. “She’s not picking up.”

  I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and found Lale’s contact information. A few taps later, I listened to her phone ring and ring until I gave up, too. I asked the man, “Has she been in today?”
<
br />   “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t she have to walk right past this desk? Wouldn’t you have seen her if she came in?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is there someone you can call to see if maybe she’s in the ladies’ room and will be back in just a minute?”

  “No.”

  I gritted my teeth and opened up the web browser on my phone. Within a minute, I had found the Canterbury Tales website and the editor’s phone number. I tapped my screen and called her. “Hello, this is Beatrice Yates. I am one of Lale Kollen’s sources for her ongoing Canterbury Golf Club story. I have some important information for her.” The important information was that she should stop writing the stories about CGC, and I was planning to record the conversation on my cell phone in case she did say something that would incriminate herself. “It’s vital that I talk to her right away. Your gentleman here at the reception desk is not allowing me to come inside. Can I come back there and talk to her?”

  “Lale Kollen hasn’t come in today,” the editor, Wendy Mack, replied in her gruff voice. “She uploaded her story from home yesterday afternoon on account of the weekend, but she probably had to go to the gym or get her nails done again or something.”

  “Can I leave a message with you or with your gentleman here at the front desk?” I smiled at the man. He did not smile back.

  “Not sure what good that will do if she doesn’t come in. Maybe a better option would be for you to tell her that we are looking for her.”

  A beep over my phone meant the call had ended.

  I smiled at the man at the front desk, trying to charm him even though I knew it wasn’t going to work. “She said that I could leave a message with you, and that you would put the note on her desk for me.”

  The receptionist lifted one eyebrow. “Fine. I’ll take a message and put it on her desk when I have a minute.”

  Even though I knew the message was going to end up in the wastepaper basket beside his foot, I dutifully wrote a perky little note, telling Lale that I had some important information for her and asking her to call me at my cell phone number, which I also wrote down.

  When I left, I knew that effort had been a spectacular waste of time. Maybe hunting down Lale Kollen at her house would produce better results.

  Oh, I probably shouldn’t say it like that, hunting down Lale, because everyone thought I killed Ruddy.

  I’d only said it in my head, right?

  But I had no idea where she lived.

  Canterbury wasn’t a teeny-tiny town where everybody knew everybody, but it was a small town where surely somebody would know someone who knew that person.

  It wouldn’t take me long to find out where she lived.

  As I exited the building into the warm morning air, I tapped my phone and dialed a number. “Hello? Uncle Arnie?”

  Chapter 21

  BY the time I got to my car, three text messages from three different people had popped up on my phone, all of them with the same address, the one for Lale Kollen’s house.

  Uncle Arnie hadn’t known where she lived, but as I’d suspected, he knew people who knew.

  Driving over to Lale’s neighborhood took only a few minutes through some middle-class areas of Canterbury. Small houses with nicely tended yards lined each of the residential streets, and I drove slowly because children wearing bathing suits were running through sprinklers in the warm summer afternoon.

  As I parked on the street in front of Lale’s house, I reminded myself that my primary purpose was to convince her not to write any more stories about the Canterbury Golf Club.

  But just in case she said something to incriminate herself because she was the real murderer, I would record everything that we said with my cell phone. Confessions were no use unless they were recorded in the murderer’s voice. Just me telling the police wouldn’t be enough. I’d watched enough movies to know that was true.

  A car stood in the driveway, a coppery sedan with local license plates. I didn’t know what Lale’s car looked like, but the hood seemed sun-warmed under my palm as I walked past, but not hot as if it had recently been driven.

  As I walked up her short sidewalk to the front door, I turned on the voice memo recorder on my phone. I whispered into it, “I, Beatrice Yates, will now go knock on the door of Lale Kollen’s house, and I am recording this in case it becomes evidence in a court of law.”

  That sounded stupid, but at least I had something to establish what was going on.

  Even though it was noon, Lale’s front porch light was lit, a bright spark of light in the shadow from the overhang of the house.

  I also told my phone the date and time, in case that was important, even though the app probably had some sort of a timestamp.

  “I will now knock on Lale Kollen’s door and ring her doorbell.” No reason to stop saying stupid things now.

  As I rapped on her white-painted door, the wood moved under my knuckles.

  The door swung open, and my last knock missed the wood entirely.

  That was weird. I hoped that everybody had given me the right address.

  “Lale? Are you here?” I called.

  There was an odd odor in the house, maybe like a cat box needed cleaning.

  “Lale!” I held my phone up near my face as I stepped inside her living room to make sure that my voice was being recorded. The front room was decorated in clean lines, mid-century modern. The dark blue couch stood on silver feet that matched the silver rod-and-glass coffee table. A television hung on the pale green wall, surrounded by framed prints of ferns, fruit, and fairies. “Hey! I just wanted to talk to you about that article in the Canterbury Tales newspaper this morning. I’m not mad or anything. Are you here?”

  A cat peeked around the corner of a wall and retreated. Quick scratching on the floor sounded like it had run away.

  I closed the door behind me so her cat wouldn’t get out.

  “Lale! Are you here? Hey! Your front door was open. If you are not here, I’m just going to back out and leave. I’ll catch you some other time.” I realized I was talking to an empty house, but I took a few more steps inside. “Is anybody here?”

  I leaned forward to peer around the edge of the wall and into the next room, the kitchen.

  Bright stainless-steel appliances reflected the sunlight, but a dark stain and a woman’s body lay on the white-tiled floor.

  Chapter 22

  “BUT I didn’t—” I gasped, holding onto the armrest as I sat in the passenger seat of Sherwood’s car, sucking the air inside a paper bag. The paper rattled as I tried to get my breath.

  Sherwood sat in the driver’s seat but was twisted in his seat to watch me. “Breathe, Beatrice. Just breathe.”

  “I swear to God, Sherwood—”

  “It’s okay, now. Don’t say anything else.” His worried eyes watched me over the inflating and collapsing white paper that I held. The bag smelled faintly of french fries, but the man had produced a paper bag when I’d been hyperventilating. Paper-bag beggars can’t be choosers. “Come on, Beatrice. Take your hands off your face. I know this is hard, but please calm down so that you don’t make anything worse.”

  “But you heard the recording. I had just gotten there. I walked in. There, she was. It was horrible!”

  “The recording does back up what you told us. Personally, I don’t think that scream on your recording could have been faked, but it’s not like it’s physical evidence. Some people might think you staged it.”

  “But I didn’t. I didn’t even know where Lale lived until I asked my uncle Arnie where her house was. And then people sent me texts. There are timestamps on those texts. Didn’t that police officer say that she had been killed hours ago? Something about the blood or her body was cold or something? Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. I can’t believe someone killed Lale Kollen.”

  “I know it’s odd—”

  “Things like this don’t happen in Canterbury. No one kills journalists here. That sort of thing happens in Russia, or thir
d-world countries, but not in Canterbury.”

  He said, “Beatrice, you know that I like you. I have to advise you to stop talking. You found both of the murder victims. That looks bad. It looks like you knew where the bodies were because you killed them.”

  “I didn’t. I would never—”

  “Of course not.”

  “I have to call someone to pick up Eleanora at the club and take her home. I have to feed my cats. I have to socialize the kittens.”

  “Don’t panic. Breathe into the bag.”

  “You think I killed her, and I’m going to go to jail, and I have to drive Eleanora home!”

  “I don’t really think that, but some people are paid to be suspicious. Several people knew that you were looking for the second victim. You’ve already told us all the people who will corroborate that you were looking for the second victim.”

  “I was looking for her because I didn’t know she was dead!”

  “Beatrice, please. Don’t say any more.”

  “I didn’t touch Lale after I got there. My fingerprints probably aren’t even on the doorknob because I knocked and the door opened in front of me. I didn’t touch anything else in the house. My fingerprints shouldn’t be on the murder weapon. So, shouldn’t that prove that I didn’t do it?”

  Sherwood nodded. “If we find someone else’s fingerprints on the knife, then it would certainly support that someone else killed her.”

  “But it’s going to take months to get the fingerprints back on this knife, too, isn’t it? Why do murder investigations take so long? No one else here has anything to do. There hasn’t even been a shoplifting incident this summer for them to investigate.”