by Quinn, Lucy
Another plate at a table by the window was missing both its soup and coffee spoons.
All the settings at a long table near the back were missing their knives.
I went back to the kitchen to tell Leopold that the tables needed to be checked for silverware, and he blew up at me that all the tables, all of them, were perfect, and how could I talk about silverware at a time like this? He went back to standing over a bubbling pot that smelled like browning butter and garlic.
I grabbed Melanie, the hostess, and alerted her about the silverware problem. She sighed and said she would take care of it. “I set those utensils out with the girls. We set each one individually. I walked around with all the main course knives and placed them at each setting, and Jennie gave everyone a salad fork, and we kept doing it. I thought we did it all perfectly, you know? I thought every place setting was complete.” Melanie shook her head. “I know the club is short of cash, but I think we’re going to have to order some more silverware settings. It seems like they just walk off, especially the knives.”
Chapter 29
ONCE I had finished decorating the clubhouse for the Nine and Dine, I grabbed the bundle of the club’s prints that had been in the picture frames and took them out to my car. If I’d left them in the kitchen or storage room, someone would have accidentally crushed them, I was sure.
I juggled the rustling rolls of paper with one hand and opened the back door of my sedan with the other, catching them as they nearly fell onto the hot asphalt. Warm air billowed out of my car, and I hurled the rattling paper onto the back seat.
The rolled prints landed on the newspaper from a couple of days ago, the one where Lale Kollen had written that horrible article about the club, calling it the Canterbury Golf and Murder Club.
May God rest her soul.
Man, that article made me so mad.
Not that I had read it.
And not that I ever was going to read it.
If I read that article, it would just make me even more mad at Lale Kollen and the Canterbury Tales.
And Lale Kollen was dead.
It would be terrible to be mad at somebody who was dead. That had to be bad karma or a sin or something.
And I certainly hadn’t wanted her or anyone else dead. I was getting flustered just thinking about it.
Nope, I definitely should not read that article she’d written. I should pick up that newspaper, walk around the clubhouse, and deposit that trash directly into the dumpster.
Yep, that was what I should do.
I picked up the newspaper.
And opened it, knowing full well that if I read that article, I would work myself into a white-hot rage.
Everybody does stupid things, sometimes.
The first few paragraphs were every bit as sensational as that nasty headline. Lale Kollen had written a hatchet piece.
Well, I had known what the article was going to be before I opened up the newspaper, and now I was committed to reading it.
The Canterbury Golf Club has long been an institution in the town of Canterbury, but its presence is not without controversy. Originally, the club was built on land bought from the town at an alarmingly low price. Nepotism and back-room deals were suggested.
That patently was not true. The club had paid the town what the land had been worth at the time. The golf club was situated on a parcel that had been so far out from the town center that everyone had thought it was folly to build anything out there in the midst of the cows and vineyards. As a matter of fact, people had laughed at the Canterbury Golf Club for buying such an out-of-the-way plot that would surely come to no good and probably be overrun with chickens, rabbits, and poison ivy within five years.
The club has come under criticism in the last few years for exceeding the amount of water that has been allotted for its use. The club now hogs in excess of three times the amount of water that it has been slated to use, drawing the water from the town’s underground perched aquifer, which is depleting rapidly in these times of changing climate.
Yeah, okay. the board really needed to talk to our greenskeeper about that, again. I mean, the fairways and greens looked nice, but the town had set limits on our water use.
But we were also using rain runoff that we caught in our water hazards. It wasn’t all new water from the town’s wells.
But I could see her point on that one.
After the murder occurred at the Canterbury Golf club nearly two weeks ago, the club resumed its normal operations in less than two days.
My teeth ground together in my head at the thought of this terrible sub-textual accusation. How dare she insinuate that we didn’t care about Ruddy Agani’s death?
Although, the course had been closed for only about a day and a half, afterward. I hadn’t been particularly comfortable with it, either.
But we had to consider the other members, and the police officers had told us that first afternoon that they had finished their investigation at the site.
The police had told us to open the course.
—Maybe because Canterbury’s Chief of Police had had tee times that weekend for out-of-town guests.
Oh, I didn’t like that at all.
Despite this reporter’s ongoing attempt to learn about how the club was investigating the murder of Ruddy Agani, no one from the club has made an official comment on the record. However, at least one person has noted that they want to keep the club’s name out of the newspapers.
The club was not investigating the murder.
The Canterbury police were investigating the murder because that was their job.
And yeah, that snide comment probably was directed at me. I hoped the rest of the board hadn’t given her any comments, either.
Other members of the club, however, have been more forthcoming with details about the terrible night out on the golf course.
Gosh darn it, I wondered which of the members had been squealing.
It has been widely reported and was personally observed by this reporter that the victim of the horrible murder, Mr. Rudolph Agani, had an altercation earlier in the evening in the clubhouse with Mr. Oliver Shwetz of Canterbury. Mr. Shwetz is a local attorney who specializes in small claims and local matters. Though Mr. Shwetz was asked for a comment regarding the murder of Rudolph Agani, he had no comment. Indeed, Mr. Shwetz had a rather extreme reaction to this reporter contacting him, citing that he was bound by attorney-client privilege, and that speaking any more would be a breach of ethical and even legal privileges. At that point, Mr. Shwetz sputtered and devolved into a tirade, railing at this reporter again about attorney-client privilege. This reporter wonders who Mr. Shwetz’s client was and what provoked such an extreme reaction to this reporter asking about his involvement.
I lowered the newspaper and looked out over the parking lot.
Oliver had told me that the club had never been one of his clients. It was that whole conflict of interest thing, in case he needed to sue the club.
After what Ann had said, this was just weird.
Dang, I thought newspapers were supposed to answer questions, not make me think up more of them.
Four people went out onto the course that night and discovered the poor, mutilated corpse of Ruddy Agani.
Oh, good grief. Ruddy hadn’t been mutilated. Two stabs and nicking the aorta did not add up to “mutilated.”
One of the people who found the victim, Ann Carmo, agreed to talk to me about that terrible night.
Huh. Ann hadn’t mentioned that she’d talked to Lale Kollen. I hadn’t directly asked Ann whether she had spoken to the reporter, but maybe Ann should have told me that she had contacted the other murder victim, too.
Ann Carmo told this reporter that she was horrified at finding the murder victim at the golf course. “Of course, after that explosive argument Ruddy Agani had with Oliver Shwetz in front of everybody, and then when Oliver went missing right afterward, I think we all know what happened. Oliver Shwetz has always had a terrible temper.
When he was my lawyer, I was always a little frightened of him.”
Oliver didn’t have a terrible temper. Ruddy had had a terrible temper, but not Oliver.
Maybe Lale had gotten the names mixed up.
But when we had been talking just a while ago, Ann had mentioned that Oliver had been a member of the Gnostic Yacht Club.
But she had said that her husband had been very into sailing and fishing.
If Ann and her husband had belonged to the Gnostic Yacht Club, wouldn’t she have said something while we were talking about it?
Because it seemed like she had deliberately not mentioned her own involvement with the yacht club, but she’d specifically pointed out that Oliver was a member.
Discomfort grew in my heart.
And yet, while I was getting very uneasy about Ann and embezzlement, I knew that she couldn’t have been the murderer because Ann had worked for the school district with me. Her fingerprints would have been on file with the police for those background checks we did. If Ann had done it, the fingerprints on the knives would have matched hers in the police files.
Another in-depth interview will be published next week in The Canterbury Tales.
This was weird. Only someone who wanted attention would volunteer to be quoted like this. Ann didn’t seem like an attention-seeker to me.
But it did seem like someone had been promising to tell Lale Kollen more information about the Canterbury Golf Club and the murder of Ruddy Agani.
What else did Ann know?
I looked around the parking lot, but Ann must have already left the club because her sporty little BMW was gone.
She was supposed to be back for the Nine and Dine that night.
I could ask her about the Gnostic Yacht Club and Oliver Shwetz then.
And I could do that right after I’d finished interrogating Pauline Damir about whether or not she’d killed two people.
Oh, the Nine and Dine was going to be a bundle of laughs tonight.
I flinched, already dreading the confrontation, and walked around to throw the newspaper in the recycling bin behind the clubhouse.
But, of course, as soon as my hand dangled that newspaper with its ugly article over the bin, I snatched it back.
Chapter 30
I walked back into the clubhouse and dumped the offensive newspaper at the end of the bar.
Early-evening sunlight bounced off the polished wood like a laser beam, and I shielded my eyes from the glare, inspecting the two figures in the bar area as I strode over. “Uncle Arnie, my favorite relative! Just the person I wanted to see.”
My uncle Arnold Holmes was sipping a pale brown drink in a tall glass, probably an ale of some sort, and he snorted a little of it and coughed as I approached. “Bee, how was your day?”
“Horrid. My day has been horrid. My week and my month-to-date have been horrid, thanks to whoever killed Ruddy Agani and now probably Lale Kollen, too.”
Uncle Arnie nodded. “That’s how it goes.”
“What do you know about it?”
Uncle Arnie sighed and set his drink on the bar. “Not too much. If I’d heard anything of value or that I could depend on, I would have called you or told you during one of the times you’ve driven me to the club.”
“Then tell me the gossip. I think I’m missing something, so I need to hear all of it.”
“Investigating the murders, are you?”
“Not at all. I just want to know who killed Ruddy and Lale so things can get back to normal.”
“Right. That is certainly not investigating.” Arnie rotated the tall glass between his palms. Liver spots dappled the backs of his hands. “The primary club gossip is, of course, that you’re the murderer.”
I raised one finger toward the bartender, who was chopping limes. “Maurice, I’m going to need something strong.”
“Now, now, pumpkin,” Arnie said. “Has anyone stopped calling you for rides to the club or told you that you shouldn’t be in charge of things?”
I considered my ringing phone and packed calendar. “It seems like I’ve been as busy as ever, driving people over here and seeing to the club’s needs.”
“I’d say it lends the club and you a bit of mystique. Besides, everyone’s willing to risk their life to have you drive them around rather than call an Uber for four bucks.”
“They’re all cheap bastards.” Maurice winked at me as he slid a low drink in front of me. “It’s on the house.”
“Yeah, you’d better be careful because I’m so dangerous.” I turned back to my uncle. “So, I’m the club’s femme fatale.”
“Everyone’s having fun talking about it, sure.” He waggled his white eyebrows at me. “It’s scandalous.”
I sipped the drink, detecting orange juice, whiskey, and powdered sugar. “Maybe we should incorporate it into the club’s advertising.”
“Anyway, everyone’s talking about it, but no one believes it. So, I don’t think you should worry.”
I didn’t tell him about the mounting evidence against me that the police were accruing. Besides, I knew he was trying to comfort me. The side-eyed reactions at Ladies’ League and dwindling interest in social events told me the real story. “What else are they talking about?”
He nodded. “They’re talking about the Gnostic Yacht Club a lot.”
That was odd. “But it closed. The Gnostic is ancient history.”
“Yep, it closed after a bunch of money went missing.”
“I know that. Everybody knows that.” Well, I knew it after Erick told me, but I didn’t gossip much. Other people had probably known about it.
“You know who did it?” my uncle asked me.
I turned on my bar chair and regarded him. “No.”
A smug smile creased his face all the way up to the four white hairs stretched across his bright pink scalp. “Nobody does.”
“Dang it, Arnie. You got me.” I turned back to my drink, which though fruity, was properly strong.
“But I know how they did it,” he said.
“Now you’ve got something I should listen to.”
“They formed corporations and used them as false vendors. They submitted invoices to the yacht club, and the club paid the invoices.”
“But we have better accounting practices than they did,” I said, beginning to fret about pages and pages of businesses I’d never heard of written invisibly in white letters on a white spreadsheet.
The companies that Erick had shown me had weird names like Deck Varnish and Rope International. Now that I thought about it, boats used deck varnish and rope, not golf courses. If the same people were embezzling here, they hadn’t even bothered to change the yacht-based names of the shell companies they’d used.
I was insulted that they thought we were so dumb that we wouldn’t notice that a bunch of boat companies were submitting invoices to us.
Even though we hadn’t noticed.
“How hard would it be for something like that to happen here?” Arnie asked.
“Completely impossible!” I insisted. “A committee member has to approve each invoice. People have to be elected to committees, and then each committee has to decide which one person will have invoice-approval authority. It could be anybody. Just because you’re on a committee doesn’t mean you get to approve invoices. And then, after the vendor submits the invoice, and after a specific person on the committee that oversees that particular facet of the club approves it, only then does one of the authorized check-writers like Ruddy cut the check.”
“So, it’s not like the checks are just lying around for someone to tuck up her sleeves like she does the silverware and everyone’s personalized golf balls and ball markers. How does a person get on a committee at this club?”
“You have to volunteer to stand for election. You know this.”
“Uh-huh, but I’m being Socratic. How many people run for each seat?”
I grimaced. “We never fill all the seats. The vote is a formality.”
“Ye
s, and how does one nominate people for these highly coveted committee positions?”
“We get people drunk and shanghai them while they’re smashed.”
“Yes, quite. So, if someone were motivated to be part of one of our highly coveted committees, they could volunteer and get one quite easily, right?”
I gripped my cold drink more tightly. “I suppose so.”
“How many members serve on committees?”
“We have a dozen or more committees, and each one has between five and fifteen members. The social committee has more than twenty.”
“How many committees do you serve on?” he asked.
“Five,” I said, not liking where this was going.
“And how about little Trudi?”
“Almost all of them.”
“How many members really serve on the committees?”
I thought about it. “Maybe a dozen people fill at least some of the spots on all the committees, and then other people fill the rest of the chairs. But there is always a core of people who keep any organization running. That’s normal.”
Arnie nodded. “We have a lot of members in common with the now-defunct Gnostic Yacht Club.”
Maybe some of the club’s revenue shortfall wasn’t due to our member-poaching problem, though that was certainly part of it, too. Maybe our expenses were too high because someone was stealing from us.
The first murder victim had been Ruddy Agani, the guy who cut many of the checks that the committees approved, the guy most likely to discover an embezzlement scheme, assuming he hadn’t been a part of it.
Or maybe he had delayed payments to the embezzlers like he had everybody else, and they’d gotten mad or scared that they had been found out.
I glanced at the newspaper down at the end of the bar.