by Quinn, Lucy
And maybe the reporter, Lale Kollen, had found out too much, too.
I tried not to growl, and surely my uncle understood the anger in my voice. “I need a list.”
He said, “You can start with Pauline Damir and her husband.”
The Damirs’ marriage didn’t seem solid enough for them to be partners in crime, and Pauline had mentioned that her flower shop had been in dire straits because Ruddy wasn’t paying her. That didn’t sound like someone who had a second stream of income from embezzlement.
My suspicions about Pauline lowered a notch, but they didn’t go away. “Who else?”
“All the usual suspects about town: the Shirazis, the Sauveterres, the Jacksons, the Walters, Oliver Shwetz, plus the Carmos, Shins, Rinaldis, and Berkowitzes were all members at Gnostic.”
“Are those the usual suspects?” I asked, staring into my amber drink.
“They are if we’re talking about being members of both clubs.”
“Tell me more about the Damirs and the Walters.”
“Like what?”
I sipped my drink. The liquor burned my tongue and throat. “Like how long have Pauline and Erick been an item?”
“Ah, so you know about that.”
“I suspected.”
“Pauline and Erick have only been carrying on for a few months. They were on a committee together.”
I swallowed hard. “Which one?”
“Grounds, I think? Or the clubhouse committee?”
“Right.” I could find out.
I sipped my drink and asked him about other things, anything to take my mind off of my growing suspicions. “So, what was the final verdict on how people liked the glow-ball tournament, other than the murder on the seventeenth?”
“Oh, people liked it,” Uncle Arnie said, signaling to the bartender for another ale.
“Did they, though?” I mused, swirling the dregs of my drink around the ice in my glass. “Sometimes, I think I organize all these things and people only pretend to like them because they’re supposed to, but they really don’t.”
“Oh, no, honey.” Arnie wrapped his arm around my shoulders and jostled me around. “People like your events. Ann lost her nifty, glowing ball and wandered around in the dark for an hour looking for it because she’s such a magpie, but Pauline and Thorny had a great time. So did everyone else I talked to. You saw that everyone was in high spirits in the clubhouse.”
“Yeah.” Until Ruddy and Oliver had their spat, but everyone recovered quickly afterward.
“You’ll be okay. This murder thing will blow over. Next month, people will be on to something else.”
Yeah, they would.
If the murderer were caught.
I needed to talk to Pauline Damir and probably Erick Walters, too. Maybe I could arrange to sit with Pauline at supper.
The Nine and Dine began in an hour.
Cars were already pulling into the parking lot, and the bag guys were zipping out in their carts to help unload clubs.
Chapter 31
THROUGH the clubhouse’s front windows, I saw Trudi walking in from the parking lot, so I ran outside to walk in with her.
Other people in the parking lot were farther away than they would be once we all got inside, so people were less likely to overhear us. Plus, people were talking to each other or the bag guys.
“Hey, do you know which committees Pauline Damir is on?” I asked Trudi.
“Pauline?” Trudi scrunched up her face. “I’d have to check the computer, but I thought she resigned from the social committee a few months ago due to time conflicts. I don’t think she has any official duties at all right now.”
“So, she’s not on any committees? How did we miss her?”
“I don’t know,” Trudi mused. “Well, she drinks. We can pour a few down her tonight and put her on the promo committee. That one needs members.”
That halfway ruled Pauline out for being part of the embezzlement scheme. She was looking less and less likely to me, and yet, she’d had so much to say about Ruddy. A tickling suspicion about her would not go away. “That’s not quite what I mean.”
I glanced around the parking lot, but everyone was beyond the median planted with blue hydrangeas.
Ann Carmo zipped her little car into the parking lot and waved to us as she trotted into the clubhouse. We waved back.
When Ann was far enough away, I whispered to Trudi, “It seems that we’ve had a little embezzlement problem.”
“What!”
People across the parking lot turned and looked at us, including Pauline Damir and her husband, Tom.
Oliver Shwetz and his wife hurried past them.
Huh, Oliver was showing his face around the club. He must have bought the tickets some time ago.
I laughed and waved at all of them.
They resumed walking in.
“Keep your voice down,” I shushed Trudi. “Remember when Erick Walters was talking about spreadsheets in the budget committee meeting a while ago?”
“Sure,” she said, her voice rising.
I squinted at her. “Do you really?”
Trudi waved her hand. “I remember that he was holding a bunch of paper that was probably going to take hours, and I had to get home to my grandbaby.”
“Yep, that’s the time. Anyway, Erick showed them to me. It didn’t click at the time, but some of the companies’ names were things like Deck Varnish LLC, Rope International, and Shipmo Corp.”
She frowned and gestured toward the clubhouse. “Our deck is concrete. It gets power-washed. What’s a shipmo?”
“I know, but boats use deck varnish and rope. That’s the point. I think whoever embezzled so much from the Gnostic Yacht Club that they had to close—”
Trudi’s eyes widened. “What?”
More people turned, including Priscilla Sauveterre and her husband, who were walking past a row of sports cars.
Oh, sweet baby-child in a manger, the Sauveterres had been members of the Gnostic.
I laughed and waved again, and I shushed Trudi harder. “People are going to talk.”
“You need to tell me what’s going on right now.”
“Someone was embezzling from the Gnostic Yacht Club using shell companies. I think we have a problem, too. I think Erick found some of them on those weird spreadsheets I showed you.”
“The spreadsheets with Oliver Shwetz’s name on them,” Trudi said. “The ones you showed me over lunch.”
I stepped back, shocked. I had forgotten that Oliver’s name was on them, but it was. That was why Trudi and I had played golf with him and asked him about his clients. That was why he’d gotten mad. “Yes, those spreadsheets.”
Trudi asked, “Does Erick Walters still have those spreadsheets? Is he going to be here tonight?”
I gestured toward the winding road that led to Canterbury Vineyard and Winery. “He just drove into the parking lot.”
She shook her head. “Dang, but we have a problem.”
“And I think everybody who might be involved is coming to the Nine and Dine tonight.”
“Oh, lovely. Did we invite a reporter to write it all up for the newspaper?”
I rolled my eyes. “Inviting the media is part of our basic promo effort. They never used to come.”
Trudi sighed, “But all of them are definitely going to accept their invitations to the Canterbury Golf and Murder Club.”
Chapter 32
TRUDI walked into the clubhouse in front of me and scanned the room, looking for who she should talk to during the pre-golf social hour.
I dawdled, ordered a drink from Maurice, and sidled up to Pauline Damir, who was standing near the punchbowl with her husband.
Time to knock at least one suspect off my list of potential murderers.
But I couldn’t ask Pauline directly whether she’d killed Ruddy. She would say no, whether she had done it or not. I needed to get Pauline to admit that she was somewhere else during the time that Ann Carmo had said she was u
naccounted for. Then, we could determine where Pauline had been, either somewhere innocent or out on the golf course, murdering Ruddy.
Her whereabouts for the time when Lale Kollen had been killed might be of interest, too.
“Hello, Tom and Pauline!” I said, gesturing with a glass of sweet orange-juice stuff and whiskey toward Pauline and her husband. “How are you two doing tonight?”
I chatted with them a while, not insinuating anything at all until Tom went to the bar to procure some before-golf drinks for himself and Pauline.
I turned to her and tilted my head. “Hey, I was wondering, what do you know about Erick Walters?”
Pauline finished sipping her bright pink punch quite deliberately before she said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
I looked up at the corners of the clubhouse’s ceiling, where the white molding met the peaked roof, and said, “It seems that he was missing for a while after the glow-ball tournament when everyone else was back in the clubhouse.”
Pauline shrugged. “So?”
“Erick was unaccounted for at least half an hour while Ruddy was out on the golf course and then killed.”
She looked into her glass. “Oh.”
“The police want to question Erick.”
“About Ruddy?”
“Lots of other people have alibis,” I said. “Lots of other people can account for their every minute after Ruddy stormed out of here. There aren’t many suspects who were missing for longer than half an hour.”
“But, why would Erick want to kill Ruddy?” Pauline asked. “Erick doesn’t have a motive.”
Shoot. I hadn’t thought this through. “Well, at this point, I think the police are looking at people who could have done it, who have a hole in their alibis. Everybody here told the police who they were with and when, and there’s about half an hour where Erick was missing.”
Pauline gulped her punch.
“I think the police might arrest him tonight,” I said.
“But he didn’t do it,” she insisted.
“They don’t know that.”
Pauline glanced across the room. “I was with him during the time he was supposedly missing.”
I followed her line of sight. Her husband, Tom, was leaning against the bar quite far away, talking to Maurice.
She whispered, “We sneaked upstairs to his office to be alone.”
“And you were there with him the whole time?”
She nodded, tears springing to her eyes. “We’ve never done anything like that here at the club during an event. We always met during work hours, when no one would suspect anything. We were always careful so no one would find out.”
“Sneaking out of an event together seems pretty risky,” I said.
Pauline nodded. “When I came back into the clubhouse, Ruddy almost ran me over when he stomped out. I was upset, so I had a few drinks. Erick had some, too. We were reckless. We were gone for about half an hour. That’s the time he was missing.”
“Ann Carmo said that you were gone for at least forty-five minutes,” I said, pushing Pauline to explain her alibi more.
“How would she know?” Pauline shot back. “She was out on the golf course the whole time. She didn’t come back to the clubhouse forever, it seemed like.”
I paused. “She was?”
Pauline nodded. “Ann lost her glowing golf ball on the sixteenth. You know how obsessive she is about shiny things like that. We looked for ten minutes, but she insisted that we should go on inside without her. I was horrified later that she had been out on the course in the dark with the murderer.”
This wasn’t making sense. “When did she shower and change clothes?”
“After she got back, I suppose. Hopefully, she wasn’t out there for too long. It’s scary to think that the murderer might have gotten her instead of Ruddy.” She grimaced. “Especially since we left her out there alone.”
“How many groups were behind you and Uncle Arnie?” I asked her.
“We were pretty much the last group in.”
I sucked down a decent gulp of my drink. “I need to talk to somebody. Don’t go anywhere.”
Though Ann and Erick were nowhere in the bar area, I had seen Oliver Shwetz over by the bar, near Pauline’s husband.
What I had to say to Oliver had nothing to do with Pauline and Erick, so I walked over. “Hey, Oliver.”
He turned his chubby back to me and went back to talking to his wife, who peeked around his shoulder with wide, surprised eyes.
I asked the back of Oliver’s collar, “Did you see the newspaper article where Ann Carmo threw you to the wolves?”
He turned around to face me. “I beg your pardon?”
I leaned on the bar and waved to the bartender. “Maurice? Do you by any chance still have that newspaper I dropped here earlier?”
He grimaced but fished it out of the recycling bin.
I flipped the paper open to Lale’s article and handed it to Oliver. “Take a gander at that last part.”
Oliver Shwetz read the last few paragraphs where Ann Carmo had told Lale Kollen that she had been afraid of Oliver’s terrible temper when he had been her lawyer.
I said, “She confirmed in this article that you were her lawyer, so that’s now public knowledge. She made it sound like you weren’t her lawyer anymore, though.”
Oliver glanced at me, his dark eyes angry. “I cannot discuss matters that are under attorney-client privilege.”
“So, she is or was your client. She’s throwing you under the bus, Oliver. She’s counting on you not to say anything. She’s going to implicate you for Ruddy’s murder.”
“I didn’t do it,” Oliver said. “I’ve already given the police my fingerprints. They’ll rule me out soon.”
“But the fingerprints might not matter. Anyone’s fingerprints could have been on that knife if it was dirty, and the murderer might have worn gloves. That kind of evidence supports the theory, but it’s not enough to eliminate you as a suspect.”
“I cannot comment,” he grated out from between clenched teeth.
I went in for a very quiet, whispered attack with my eyes wide open. “She’s going to crucify you in public. You were missing during the time of the murder. You went upstairs to my office. You could have gone right down the back stairs, grabbed one of the steak knives from a bussing bin in the kitchen, and gone out to the course through that exit next to the pro shop. After that, it would have been easy for you to walk through the fifteenth hole to the parking lot. No one would have seen you if you’d gone around that way.”
“I didn’t do it. The police will exonerate me. I cannot discuss privileged information,” Oliver snarled.
“Ruddy argued with you in public right before someone killed him. The police will have to do something, unless there’s better evidence that someone else did it.”
Oliver Shwetz scowled at the newspaper again.
“What did Ruddy Agani say to you when you were arguing?” I asked him.
“Privileged.”
“Why was he so mad?”
“Privileged.”
“You’re going to go to jail for murder. You need to tell people what happened.”
His wife touched his arm and read the newspaper article, though the paper was quivering in his hand. She asked him, “Does this have something to do with the ethics committee inquiry?”
His scowl deepened. “Beth, don’t say anything else.”
“The ethics committee inquiry was for telling Agani something about your client during the argument.” Beth Shwetz turned to me and spoke in a hurried, low voice. “I won’t have my husband going to jail for something he didn’t do.”
“Beth, stop,” Oliver said. “It still counts against me if you say it.”
“It’s still better than murder charges.” She looked straight at me, resolute in what she was doing. “Ann Carmo has been Ollie’s client for years. She instructed Ollie to send a threatening letter to the club when her invoices weren’t paid on ti
me. The club was three months in arrears.”
“Ann Carmo was sending invoices to the club?” I whispered to Beth, thinking that yes, Ruddy had always responded badly to threatening letters from attorneys. I’d heard stories.
She said, “Ann knew that they had been approved because she was on the committee that approved them.”
“Because she was approving her own invoices,” I said.
Some of the names of the shell corporations came back to me.
Wilber and Friends, LLC.
Ann’s husband was named Wilber Carmo.
Carmo.
Good grief, one of the shell companies had been named Shipmo.
Not a car-mo but ship-mo, because they had been embezzling from a yacht club.
It was as if Ann wanted to get caught.
It was like she was doing it for the thrill as much as the money, to laugh at the people who were blindly paying her invoices.
Like the Canterbury Golf Club.
Real, true anger lifted in my gut.
I asked Oliver, “Who else have you talked to about this?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny—”
I turned. “Beth?”
She said, “Erick Walters called two days ago, asking about the corporations. He said that the checks had been sent to Oliver’s office to be passed on, so he knew Oliver had something to do with it.”
Oliver looked outraged. “How did you know that?”
Beth’s lips were set in a firm line. “Ollie, I keep telling you to wear your hearing aids. Then, you wouldn’t have to put your cell phone on speaker so that everyone in the house can hear it.”
“Beth, the police are going to want to talk to you,” I told her, and at that point, I was only talking to her. “How do you know that Oliver didn’t kill Ruddy that night?”
Her chin lifted. Beth had this figured out, too. “He called me from his cell phone from your office, directly after the argument and right after he texted Ann that he’d slipped and told Ruddy that he was passing the checks on to her.”
Things began to slip into place in my head. “Wait. He texted Ann that night, right after the argument?”
Beth continued, “I didn’t come to your glow-ball tournament because I had a summer cold. Sorry, darling. I told him to come home and talked to him every minute, from walking down the back stairs to the parking lot, to when he was driving, until he pulled into the garage. He was distraught, and I didn’t want him to get in a road-rage wreck.”