by Quinn, Lucy
“I’m not sure how finely the police can track a cell phone’s whereabouts, but the timestamp might be important. Where was he the night Lale Kollen was murdered?”
Beth pressed her mouth in a prim smile. “She called the house that afternoon and upset him again with all her questions. I didn’t want him to stew in it, so I took him with me to bridge night. All the ladies were so happy to see a man at bridge night that they posted selfies with him on their social media.”
“Nice. I need to talk to Erick,” I said. “Do you know where he went?”
Beth’s eyes became unfocused, and her gaze floated somewhere above my head. “I’m not sure. You might ask Pauline Damir if she’s seen him. No reason.”
Wow, everyone knew about Pauline and Erick’s affair but me. I was always the last to know everything.
“I’ll ask her. Thanks.”
Chapter 33
MORE people had come into the clubhouse for the Nine and Dine, and I skedaddled across the dining room again to where Pauline was talking to Trudi and Priscilla Sauveterre about the nine holes of golf they were about to play. I asked the group, “Hey, have any of you seen Erick Walters?”
Their confused looks and necks craning above the crowd told me that none of them had been keeping tabs on him.
I asked, “Do any of you happen to have his phone number? Trudi, we’re on the operating budget committee with him.”
Trudi tugged her phone from her immense purse—I do not know how she finds anything in that black pit of a purse of hers—and scrolled through the contacts. “I just have his email.”
“Priscilla? Pauline?” I asked. “Anybody know it?”
Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen either Erick or Ann for a while.
Pauline had her phone out, too, and she tapped the screen. “Oh! Look at that. I do have it. Must have been from when we were on the social committee.” She held the phone to her ear and pointed at it. “It’s ringing.”
We waited, looking at Pauline.
Pauline bit her lower lip, looking back at all of us while she held the phone against the side of her head. “He’s not answering.”
“What’s his number?” I said, leaning and looking at her phone. I tapped his digits into my phone and tapped it to call.
My phone rang.
And rang.
“Darny doodles, he’s not—” But the ringing in my ear stopped. “Hello, Erick?”
Priscilla cocked her head to the side. “Why is it so imperative that we call him?”
Quiet voices mumbled in my phone, but no one answered my greeting.
I looked straight up at Pauline. “You’re sure that’s Erick’s number?”
She nodded, her eyes widening.
I tapped my phone to put it on speaker mode and pressed it against my head, closing my eyes to hear better, as one does.
A woman’s voice said, “I said that it’s none of your business.”
Erick said, in a voice far away from the phone, “Put down the knife, Ann.”
I tapped the phone to mute the microphone and my voice and gasped, “We have to find Erick and Ann. She’s got a knife. Where did they go?”
Right then, I did something halfway smart for once in my life: I turned on the voice memo recorder app that I had used in Lale Kollen’s house and began to record what we were hearing and put the phone back on speaker.
Hey, even a retired kindergarten teacher gets it right once in a while.
We all bent our heads around my phone, cupping the phone with our hands to amplify the voices.
I just barely heard Erick say, “I haven’t been in this office since the night of the glow-ball tournament.”
I looked at Pauline.
Her eyes were huge, but Pauline said, “They’re in Ruddy’s office.”
“That’s odd,” Trudi said. “Why would the club’s treasurer not go to his own office since—”
I ran.
With my phone braced against my head, I sprinted toward the stairs. Clomping followed me, and I turned to see Trudi and Pauline hot on my heels as we ran through the dining room, dodging people. We ducked around and behind the club’s glass trophy case and into the area behind it because that passage was less crowded than the main floor, where people were walking between the dining tables.
Over my phone, Erick said, “Now, Ann. We can talk about this. We can work this out.”
Ann’s voice said, “I need you to give me Ruddy Agani’s notes right now. You don’t have concrete evidence for anything. I just want those notes.”
I ran faster. Pauline and Trudi kept up right behind me.
I didn’t want to alert the whole club that yet another murder was about to happen, especially with the Canterbury Tales reporter who had identified herself as Wendy Mack standing right by the bar and watching us with widening eyes, but we ran right past Constable Sherwood Kane.
I grabbed his arm, and he stumbled but fell in with us.
“What’s going on?” he asked as we reached the stairs.
“Erick Walters and Ann Carmo got upstairs somehow. She’s been embezzling from the club, and now she’s threatening Erick with a knife!” I said as I sprinted up the stairs. My side hurt before we got to the first landing.
“What!” Sherwood yelled as we ran. “You were supposed to stop poking your nose in where you—”
“This is not the time! Do you have your gun?”
“I don’t own a gun! I’m not a cop, just an elected constable!”
I ran faster. Our footsteps thundered in the stairwell. “You should have a gun. Why wouldn’t you have a gun?”
“And I certainly wouldn’t concealed-carry at a country club Nine and Dine!”
“Well, this is the Canterbury Golf and Murder Club, so maybe you should!”
At the top of the stairs, I grabbed the door and flung it open, and we all barreled down the hallway.
On my phone, I heard Erick ask, “Are you going to stab me like you did Ruddy and that newspaper reporter?”
Oh, all the cats and dogs in Heaven, Erick was trying to get Ann to confess while she was holding a knife on him and didn’t even know whether anyone was listening or coming to save him at all. That was pretty impressive.
Ann said, “I need Ruddy’s notes. No one has to get hurt. We can even work out a deal. With Ruddy writing the checks, there was too big of a risk that I would get caught. If I approve the invoices and then you write the checks, we could both make some money, and there would be even less chance of us getting caught.”
I told Sherwood, “She just confessed to the embezzlement, and she didn’t deny killing Lale Kollen and Ruddy Agani when he asked!”
Erick said, “Yes, we should talk about cutting me in on your plan. So, what would my percentage be? Fifty percent?”
“Fifty!” Ann retorted. “I’ve set it all up. I made it work. I’m taking all the risk. I was thinking more like five percent.”
Sherwood scowled and turned on the gas, easily pulling ahead of Trudi, Pauline, and I with those stupid, long legs of his.
“Now we’re just haggling,” Erick said, and he chuckled. “So why don’t you put down that knife?”
We were almost to Ruddy’s office.
Ann said, “Or, maybe I don’t want to split the money at all. It was pretty easy to stick a knife in Ruddy and that reporter. What’s one more?”
Sherwood reached Ruddy’s office door and pounded beside the nameplate. “Open up!”
On my phone, Ann said, “Who’s that?”
I reached him and began fumbling in my purse.
Trudi ran up beside us, but she already had her keys out and shoved one in the lock, twisting it.
Sherwood pushed the door open. “Stop! Put the knife down!”
In the middle of the room, Ann Carmo was indeed holding a long kitchen knife, her hand cocked above her head like she was about to attack.
Erick had been holding his hands up, and with all of us piling into the room, he lunged for Ann’s knife.<
br />
So did Sherwood.
So did Pauline, shrieking, “You leave Erick alone!”
Trudi and I were in the back, so we watched the pile-on, horrified.
A masculine voice shouted, and then thumps and scuffling pounded the air in the room.
Sherwood slammed Ann Carmo against a wall.
Erick sat on the floor and held his bleeding arm while Pauline fussed over him. “I couldn’t remember the reporter’s name,” he said, gasping. “I kept trying to get her to confess, but I couldn’t remember the reporter’s name.”
“It’s okay,” Pauline told him. “You did great. It’s okay.”
Trudi and I looked at each other. She said, “Well, I guess that’s it.”
Wendy Mack and Priscilla Sauveterre scooted into the office last.
The newspaper reporter raised her cell phone and flashed a picture. “Anybody dead?”
“Nope,” I said. “We caught the person who killed Ruddy Agani and Lale Kollen, and she was embezzling money from us and the Gnostic Yacht Club.”
Wendy Mack thumbed text into her phone. “Now we’ve got ourselves a story.”
Chapter 34
THE Canterbury police station was the other half of the Town Hall building, and everyone who had been involved in that fiasco needed to be interviewed.
Ann Carmo was expected to be charged with the kidnapping and assault of Erick Walters to keep her in jail over the weekend. Charges for the two murders and embezzlement would likely be lodged against her on Monday morning.
There weren’t too many witnesses this time, but I ended up in Constable Kane’s office instead of the police station.
I suspected that he might be looking out for me.
The Nine and Dine had been postponed until the next week, of course. Chef Leo had stormed around the club’s kitchen like a madman when Trudi had told him, ranting about how all the food was going to waste, until she told him that the club would reimburse him.
Constable Kane came in and set his phone on a little stand. He tapped the screen a couple of times. “I have to video this.”
“Of course,” I said.
Sherwood stated his name, and we went through the events of the evening as I recalled it. He took a few notes, but he just nodded solemnly through most of it.
When I was done recounting the tale, Sherwood leaned back in his chair, chewing the end of his pen. “So, that’s how Ann knew Ruddy was out on the golf course, because Oliver texted her before he called his wife. We’ll confirm that with the phone records.”
“Of course.”
“But I don’t get how she already had a knife when she was just out there playing golf,” Sherwood mused. “It looked like someone must have gone out after him. Wouldn’t she have had to come back inside to get one?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” I picked at a hangnail on my thumb. “I think Ann is a kleptomaniac. She stole my bumblebee golf ball and the one that Trudi gave me with the little pink hearts on it. When she and I were laying out the decorations for the Nine and Dine, a bunch of silverware was missing afterward. The club’s hostess even said we were going to need to order some new silverware place settings because the silverware just walked off so often. I think Ann had already stolen a steak knife just because, and that’s why she had it with her.”
Sherwood nodded. “That’s not bad. It would explain her house.”
“Her house?”
He looked at the ceiling. “You ever see a magpie’s nest? Her house wasn’t like a hoarder’s, where there’s just stuff and stuff and piles and piles lying around. It’s more like a serial killer’s trophies. There were fifty spoons lying on the sideboard, lined up neatly, and a mound of golf balls in a bowl on the coffee table.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We arrested her husband, Wilber, on the embezzlement charges, too. His signature was on the shell companies’ incorporation forms, and he came and got her dirty golf clothes from her car trunk on the night of the glow-ball tournament, just in case the police searched the cars.”
“Oh, right. Ann showered and changed clothes after the tournament. Afterward, she was wearing that long, black evening gown but no make-up. I didn’t even recognize her at first without her red lipstick. She must have gotten some of Ruddy’s blood on her when she stabbed him.”
“Wilber has been charged as an accessory after the fact, too. He told us that he burned her clothes after he got home because ‘something’ had stained them.”
“Oh, and that’s why she didn’t change into her golf shoes to go out on the course, because Wilber had already picked them up. And she got those new, bright red golf shoes after he burned her old ones. I didn’t even think of all this.”
“Yeah, I didn’t, either. It didn’t even register that night. I think that she didn’t expect to change clothes. Wilber said that they’d been up to the symphony in Hartford the night before and she’d changed clothes to drive home. The murder didn’t seem pre-meditated, just opportunistic.”
“Right,” I said. “What I want to know is—”
“I probably can’t tell you.”
“—why the fingerprints on the knife didn’t match the fingerprints that she had on file with the police department.”
“Oh,” Sherwood said, “that’s just a matter of record. The school district only started running those background checks ten years ago. She quit before that.”
I smacked myself in the forehead. “I ruled out anyone who had worked for the school district, ever. That’s why I didn’t think of her. Dang it, I messed that up.”
“Yeah, well,” he leaned in, “I’m not official law enforcement, just an elected official, so I can say off the record that our small town could use some sprucing up in that area. There were a few things they dropped in favor of policing the tourist beaches for parking ticket income.”
I laughed, but said, “Speaking of money—”
“Yeah?”
“I thought Lale Kollen killed Ruddy because she was going to inherit.”
“That didn’t pan out,” Sherwood said.
“So who does inherit?”
“His wife, Linda, should have rights of survivorship. However, if it turns out that she doesn’t get it, his last beneficiary in case of a family tragedy is Virginia Cohen, who lives over on Pink Myrtle Street.”
“She’ll fill up the emergency food pantry and give it to war refugees.”
“Probably,” he agreed.
“But Linda should probably get it for putting up with him all these years.”
“That’s the truth,” he said, fiddling with his pen. “Say, I’m sorry I told you to back off.”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t very smart of me to poke my nose into a murder investigation. Look at what happened to Lale Kollen.”
He nodded. “I’m glad nothing like that happened to you.”
“Thanks, Sherwood,” I said.
“If we’re ever around the CGC clubhouse early in the morning, maybe we could chat over coffee.”
Surely, coffee wouldn’t be too much to ask. “I’d like that.”
Chapter 35
THE next week, the Ladies’ League tee times were fully booked for our nine o’clock shotgun start.
Light clouds filled the sky, cooling the air but not threatening rain. The air looked hazy, like happiness suffused the whole club.
I strode out onto the practice putting green and grabbed the microphone from Sherlynne. All the faces looking back at me were white-streaked with sunscreen, and most of the women were wearing broad hats.
For once, they were silent.
Yeah, they wanted to hear what I had to say.
I cleared my throat and switched on the mic. “Good morning, ladies.”
No one said a word.
“We have a shotgun start this fine morning, and we have threesomes starting at all eighteen holes. Today’s game is net score and total putts, so keep track of both. Your handicaps should be noted on your scorec
ard. Make sure you know what hole number you’re starting at. Walkers, please hang back a few minutes so that the ladies with carts can zip along the cart paths ahead of you. We’ve put cart people starting at the farthest holes.”
Still, no one spoke.
No one moved, either.
The people who were walking shifted their weight and watched me.
The riders stared from inside their little carts.
“All right,” I said. “Go ahead. Who wants to ask?”
Nell Rinaldi’s hand shot up. “Are the police sure Ann Carmo did it?”
“She won’t talk to the police, and she is trying to find a new lawyer, too. It seems that her old one won’t take her calls. However, the police have her confession recorded from my cell phone. Constable Sherwood said that her fingerprints match the unidentified ones on both knives. I think that’s about as good as anyone could ask for.”
Voices rumbled from the crowd.
“Anybody else?” I asked.
A woman in the back, Sun-Ling, asked, “So, it’s safe now?”
“Perfectly safe,” I reassured her and the half of the league who were probably wondering the same thing. “It looks like Ann was responsible for both murders and the embezzlement. She’s awaiting an arraignment. Constable Kane says that it doesn’t look like she’ll be allowed bail.”
The league sighed with relief.
“Okay?” I asked. “Can we get back to business? Have a good round, ladies. Good luck.”
The golf carts chugged down the cart path toward the far holes, and I gave Sherlynne back the microphone before I walked over to where Trudi and Moonie were waiting. “We’re starting at the third hole.”
Trudi grinned at me and shoved her enormous, four-wheeled pushcart to get it moving. Her clubs might be cut down for her size, but she had every golf toy ever made in her bag and cart, and I suspected a few other things, too. “It’s a good day. I get my monthly BLT today, too.”