Black Cat White Paws_A Maggie Dahl Mystery

by Mark McNease

  “I’m kidding!” Gerri said. “But I am going with you to the station.”

  “You really don’t need to do that.”

  “I want to be in the room with you when he questions you again.”

  “Why? And shouldn’t I have a lawyer present instead? Oh, God, Gerri, do I need a lawyer? Does he think I killed Alice?”

  “Of course not. But let’s be honest, he may think you know something about it. Which you don’t. This is just how police investigations go.”

  “How do you know this?” Maggie asked.

  “Years and years of police procedurals.”

  Maggie remembered her sister was a fan of cop shows. Gerri claimed to have seen every episode of Kojak, Cagney & Lacey, and Rizolli & Isles, with seven seasons of The Closer thrown in for good measure.

  “This is not television,” Maggie said. “It’s not even reality TV.”

  “Never mind that. Just get dressed and we’ll stop at the police station before we go to the factory.”

  Maggie had not known Gerri planned to go to work with her but she would welcome the company, and she would politely tell Gerri to stay in whatever waiting area they had at the police station. She’d driven past it many times on the outskirts of town but never had reason to go inside.

  “Take your shower,” Maggie said. “I’ll take mine and we’ll stop for breakfast on the way to see Sergeant Hoyt.”

  “Good,” said Gerri. “I’m starving.”

  She left Maggie alone in the room to finish her coffee. Maggie sipped it slowly, wondering what one wears to an interrogation.

  It’s not an interrogation, she told herself. He just wants to ask you ... the same damn questions he asked you last night. Go talk to him. Get it over. You have a life to get on with.

  She set the mug down and headed into her bathroom, slipping off her nightgown as she stepped to the shower.

  CHAPTER Six

  LAMBERTVILLE’S POLICE DEPARTMENT SITS JUST outside the town proper, along Main Street once it has morphed from New Jersey Highway 29-S. Consisting of several sergeants and a dozen police officers, all supported by a small but dedicated staff, the department serves a community that experiences the types of crimes familiar to a bucolic riverside town—petty theft, burglary, traffic violations and an occasional domestic altercation. Murder is a rarity, and now they had a doozy: Alice Drapier, local eccentric and borderline cat lady, had been found bludgeoned to death on her kitchen floor. The body was discovered by someone new to the community, who admitted to entering the house to tell Alice her cat had come back after running off for the day. At least that’s what Maggie Dahl and her sister had told sergeant Bryan Hoyt.

  Hoyt met the women in the station lobby. His expression was neutral, neither welcoming them nor displaying any displeasure at seeing them again.

  “Can I get you some coffee or water?” he said, offering his hand first to Maggie, then to Gerri, as they got up from their waiting room chairs.

  “Thanks, but ...” Maggie started to say.

  “We’d love some,” Gerri interrupted.

  “Black?” said Hoyt.

  “That’s fine,” Maggie replied, wondering why her sister had jumped at the chance for bland office coffee. Then, to her surprise, he excused himself and disappeared down a hallway. She had not expected a police sergeant to make coffee for visitors. She glanced at the older woman at the front desk who’d asked them to have a seat while she let Sergeant Hoyt know they’d arrived. She did not appear to have any help; perhaps, Maggie thought, everybody pitched in here, including making coffee for suspects.

  You’re not a suspect, she told herself. Get a grip, Maggie.

  Hoyt returned a few minutes later, holding a cup of black coffee in each hand. He handed them to the women. Gerri started to sit back down, when Hoyt said, “Oh, please, I’d like to talk to both of you again. I’ve reserved a conference room.”

  He led them past the reception desk and down the same hallway he’d used to get their coffee. Maggie looked at Gerri and shrugged. Gerri responded with a self-satisfied smile. Maggie glared at her and the smile vanished.

  “Am I a suspect?”

  Those were Maggie’s first words once she and Gerri had taken seats at the small conference table. Maggie quickly determined it was not an interrogation room, at least not one she’d imagined. The chairs were cushioned and comfortable, not metal and cold. The temperature of the room was moderate, not deliberately high to make a suspect sweat and confess just to get out the room. And there was not a handcuff or leg chain in sight.

  “Not at this point,” Hoyt assured her.

  At what point will I be? Maggie thought. She wanted to ask him that but decided it might seem defensive.

  “I will need to record this. You understand.”

  “We understand,” Gerri piped up, with a little too much enthusiasm for Maggie’s comfort. The entire thing was happening because a woman was dead; it was not a dinner theater production of a staged murder mystery.

  Hoyt reached out and turned on a digital recording device on the table. The days of actual tape were long gone.

  “State your name, please.”

  “Maggie ... Margaret Evelyn Dahl. Forty-six, widow of David Dahl. What else?”

  “Do you live at 69 Delevan Street, Lambertville, New Jersey?” Hoyt asked, simultaneously taking written notes in what was either proper shorthand or his own custom scribbles.

  “Yes. I’ve lived there for nine months. Six with my husband and ...” She choked up.

  “That’s fine, Mrs. Dahl,” Hoyt said.

  “I moved in yesterday,” Gerri added. Her tone was subdued now that she’d seen Maggie’s grief resurface.

  “Let’s talk through this again, step by step,” Hoyt said. “Starting when you heard the cat at the door. Then I’d just like to ask ...” He turned to Gerri, not sure how to address her.

  “Ms. Lerner,” Gerri said. “Or just Gerri. I use my maiden name. I can’t imagine going through life with the name of any of my three loser husbands. Who were losers completely on their own, you understand. I had to find out the hard way.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Lerner. I’ll be asking you to tell me your recollections again ...”

  “Corroborate,” said Gerri.

  “Pardon?”

  “Corroborate,” Gerri repeated. “You’ll ask me to corroborate what my sister tells you. I’m her alibi.”

  Maggie’s heart sank. She wished her sister had stayed home with her corroboration and her alibi. She might get them arrested if she kept interrupting.

  Hoyt smiled at her. Turning back to Maggie, he said, “Now, you heard a cat at the door.”

  “Yes,” said Maggie, and she began to repeat what she’d told him the night before—what happened, in what order, and how she came to find Alice Drapier dead on the kitchen floor.

  Maggie let Gerri drive them from the police station to the factory. Gerri hadn’t owned a car her entire time in Philadelphia, choosing to rely on mass transit instead. Driving was one of her pleasures when she had the chance to do it, but Maggie was not convinced her sister was any good at it.

  “You have to drive slowly around here,” Maggie said, glancing at the speedometer. Many streets in the towns of the Delaware River Valley had posted speed limits of 25 miles an hour or less. There were also those cultish bicyclists who treated the roads as their private Tour de France. Maggie often worried she would come around a blind curve and run one of them down.

  Gerri slowed the car. She knew many small towns met their budgets with traffic tickets and summonses. She did not want to contribute involuntarily.

  “We told him exactly what happened,” Gerri said, responding to a question Maggie had asked her just before telling her to slow down. “You worry too much.”

  “I have a lot going on. We have to get the order out for Hearth and Home. I need to be at the store this afternoon for a delivery coming in. And now I have a dead neighbor!”

  Maggie fell silent, rememberin
g the sight of Alice on the floor. It made her shudder.

  “How well did you know her?” Gerri asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your neighbor, Agnes.”

  “Alice,” Maggie said, more sharply than she meant to. “Her name was Alice Drapier. And I barely knew her at all. I saw her a lot, but we didn’t speak much.”

  She remembered the times she’d heard her neighbors talk about Alice and she felt badly for the dead woman. Having seven cats does not make you crazy. Wandering into other people’s homes might qualify, but Maggie thought that fell more under the socially unaware column. Or just oblivious. Alice had struck her as someone who was permanently distracted.

  “It was probably a burglary gone wrong,” Gerri said.

  “That’s an understatement. But what would Alice have that anyone would kill her for? And so brutally?”

  “Maybe she walked in on him.”

  “Him?”

  “It usually is. Him, or them. They work in pairs.”

  “I’m guessing you saw that on TV.”

  “I read about it in a newspaper. Home invaders. One knocks at the front door pretending to be a delivery man, the other crawls in an open window, something like that.”

  “But why kill her?”

  “On reflection I think it probably wasn’t a home invasion. Most murders are committed by someone the victim knows. Often someone the victim loves.”

  “She was a widow. I think the cats are the only ones she loved.”

  “But you said you didn’t know her. People have secret lives, Maggie. I hate to shock you.”

  Maggie looked across the car seat. Did Gerri have a secret life? Was she a dominatrix on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Who were the other people in her life, if there were any? She’d inherited some money from their parents, and had done well in two of her divorce settlements. Had she worked all these years? And how, Maggie asked herself, could she possibly not know something so fundamental about her sister?

  “Well,” Maggie said, “whatever secret life she had died with her.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  They’d pulled into the small factory parking lot. It still looked like an auto body repair shop, which Maggie liked. There were two large garage doors that opened onto the main area where cars had once been hoisted on hydraulic lifts. That was all gone now, but the doors remained, and David had painted them red just before he died. Maggie felt a pang in her chest.

  “I’m just saying,” Gerri said, stopping the unfamiliar car with a jerk, “we could find out more about Agnes … I mean Alice … without much trouble.”

  “If you’re suggesting what I think you are, don’t. Her house is a crime scene. They’ve put tape across the doors.”

  “Haven’t you ever gone under a rope before?”

  “Put that out of your head,” Maggie said, taking her purse from the seat beside her and reaching for the door handle.

  Once spoken, the idea was not something Maggie could forget. The more she tried not to think about it, the more it obsessed her. Maybe a little look-see around Alice’s house might not be so terrible. She knew Sergeant Hoyt, or others in the police department, would keep her on their list of persons of interest until they had good reason not to. What harm could there be in looking for that reason?

  By the time they left the factory, Maggie had convinced herself it would be okay to make a quick inspection of Alice’s home. Very fast, very cursory. Alice’s killer may have left evidence the police missed, something that could identify him. Maggie owed that much to the woman she’d found murdered on a cold kitchen floor. Or so she told herself.

  CHAPTER Seven

  MAGGIE AND DAVID CHOSE THE storefront on Union Street partly because it was a main thoroughfare, and partly because Maggie could afford to pay the rent on it for six months while still losing money on the business. That’s how long they’d expected to operate in the red with Dahl House Jams and Specialties. Neither of them had owned a business before, but they’d poured themselves into researching the realities of it and believed they could start to turn a profit within a year.

  “What if we fail?” Maggie had asked when they first walked into the small empty store that had been a dress shop for several years.

  “We won’t fail,” he’d said. “We have each other no matter what. As long as we’re together, we’re a success. The rest is a dream, Maggie.”

  The rest is a dream. David had truly believed that. He hadn’t been religious or especially spiritual, but his personal mantra was, “All things are of the substance of dreams.” He could not attribute the saying to anyone but he told Maggie it was the only thing that made sense to him in a world with so much suffering, violence and sorrow.

  “Not all dreams are good dreams,” he’d said the very night he died. “But all dreams end.”

  Maggie heard those words repeating endlessly in her mind over the next three months. Had he known he would not wake up? Had he sensed it somehow?

  All dreams end ...

  “Are you okay?” Gerri asked. They had been at the store for an hour, after leaving the factory and their major order in Janice’s capable hands. It would go out that evening, on schedule and carefully inspected by Janice and the others. Every jar, every label, checked over and over. Maggie needed to be at the store to take a delivery of custom designed jam jars and butter dishes. The store would not just be selling Dahl House jams and jellies—they’d added “Specialties” to the name to let customers know they could find much more there: select tableware, custom kitchen items, even homemade potpourri. While they did not want to lose focus on their core product, they knew they could not have a store with only jams in it—they needed an attractive but limited assortment of other items.

  “I’m fine,” Maggie said, letting the echo of David’s voice fade from her mind. She looked at her watch: the order should have arrived by now.

  “Can you trace the packages?” Gerri said.

  “It’s only four o’clock. Let’s give it another hour. Cecile promised it would be here today.

  Cecile was the woman who owned the foundry in New Hope where the porcelain items were made. She’d become friendly with Maggie since David’s death and was planning to attend the store opening next week.

  They both turned at the sound of the bell above the front door. David had wanted it there, saying it reminded him of a store he used to visit with his grandmother. Bells above doors were the old fashioned way of letting store keepers know someone had come in.

  “Crap,” Maggie said. “I meant to put the ‘Closed’ sign up.”

  “It’s okay,” Gerri said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  A woman shut the door behind her, setting the bell off again. “I love that sound,” she said.

  Maggie smiled at her, recognizing her neighbor Theresa Stanley.

  “Tess.” Maggie walked toward her with her arms out. The two of them hugged, then clasped hands a moment. “We don’t open till next week.”

  “I know that, Maggie. I just happened to see you inside ...” She glanced at Gerri.

  “This is my sister Gerri,” Maggie explained. “She moved in with me for the time being. To help get things running, you know.”

  Tess gave Maggie the sort of pitying look she loathed but had gotten used to since David’s death.

  “I think that’s wonderful, Maggie, just wonderful.” Tess looked quickly around the store. “You’ll be a huge success, I know you will, and David will be ... would have been so proud of you.”

  Tess Stanley lived four doors down the street from Maggie. She and her husband Jack often went on long vacations. She would tell her closest neighbors, including Maggie and David, to please keep an eye on the house.

  Tess turned back to Maggie. Lowering her voice as if someone might hear her, she said, “It was so awful about Alice, have you heard?”

  Maggie stared at her. Clearly Tess did not know that Maggie was the one who’d found Alice
’s body. Maggie decided not to tell her. Rumor would take care of that soon enough.

  “Yes, terrible,” Maggie said. She glanced outside, looking for a UPS truck. “Listen, Tess, I’d love to talk but ...”

  “I think it was the money,” Tess said in an even more conspiratorial tone.

  Maggie stopped herself; Gerri came closer.

  “What are you talking about? What money?” Maggie asked.

  “Well, I am not one to speak ill of the dead ...”

  “Of course not,” Gerri said.

  “And it’s not really a judgment,” Tess continued. “But Alice was a little strange. Everybody knew that.”

  “What money?” Maggie repeated.

  “Alice was a hoarder,” Tess said, as if it were a difficult truth she’d finally spoken. “But not of things or animals, although twelve cats is a little much.”

  “Seven,” said Maggie. “She had seven cats. It’s not that many, really.”

  “One is too many for me,” Tess said. “Allergies.”

  “So what did she hoard?” asked Gerri.

  Tess leaned forward. “Money,” she said, barely audible.

  “Money?” Maggie said. “Who hoards money? What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Alice and her late husband, God rest his soul, did not believe in banks. There are people like that. They don’t use computers, they don’t trust financial institutions, and these days who can blame them? The belief was ... I won’t call it rumor, I don’t engage in that ... that Alice and her husband kept their savings, which I’m told were considerable after all those years, somewhere in the house.”

  “And you think she was killed for it?” Maggie said.

  “I can’t imagine what else it could be. The police have the house taped off, you must have seen that, living right next door.”

  “We have,” said Gerri.

  “I’m sure they’ll find any money Alice had hidden there, unless, of course, the person who ... you know ...”

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “I’m sure Sergeant Hoyt ...” She stopped short.