by Maddy Hunter
“Yes, she could have,” I cried as I riffled through my shoulder bag for my cell phone. “And we sent her to the hospital with him. What if the only reason she agreed to go was to finish him off while he—”
“I’m really sorry to bother you ladies.” Cal Jolly came up behind us on cat’s feet. “It’s my dad. He’d like to speak to Emily. To the both of us, actually. About the ring. He’s acting pretty weird for Dad, so I’m kind of worried. It’s like he blew all his internal circuits at dinner and is blathering about stuff that doesn’t make any sense. I know it’s an imposition, and I apologize for asking, but could I drag you away for a few minutes? It seems really important to him.”
“Uhhh—” I froze, my hand locked around my phone, torn between courtesy and obligation.
“You go,” urged Jackie, whipping out her own phone. “I’ll make the call.”
“But … do you know what to say?”
“Emily! I’ve got it.” She shooed me away. “Where are you taking her?” she asked Cal.
“My dad’s cabin. Number thirty-eight. I just hope he’s still there. Like I said, he’s not himself. It’s like he’s suddenly turned into an entirely different person.”
_____
Woody Jolly was pacing the floor when we arrived, the bluster gone from his demeanor. He greeted me with a nod before indicating that Cal and I should sit on the bed.
We sat.
He continued to pace.
“I never should have left home,” he said in a voice that trembled with emotion. “But how could I know this would happen? No one ever figured it out. No one even suspected. It was my secret, and no one was any the wiser.”
Acid bubbled up in my throat. Oh. My. God. My hunch had been right. It was him. He was the traitor.
“Damn ring.” He tried to pull it off his finger, but it wouldn’t budge.
“It’s not a Jolly family heirloom, is it?” I regarded him with forced indulgence.
He shook his head.
“Why’d you do it, Woody?”
He shrugged. “I grew up thinking integrity was the most important virtue a man could have. And then, one day, I discovered it wasn’t.”
“What took precedence over integrity?” asked Cal.
“You have to ask?” He let out a humorless laugh. “Money, Cal. Money’s the only thing that matters in this world. Without it, you’re nothing.”
“That’s the reason you did it?” I flung out. “Because the Nazis offered to pay for your betrayal?”
He studied me with sober eyes. “There you go again. What the devil are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your being a Nazi collaborator. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about being an imposter.”
“A what?” squealed Cal.
“He’s an imposter,” I repeated. “He’s the man who sold out his principles to the Germans for thirty pieces of silver, and his name is Pierre Lefevre.”
“Who?” asked Woody.
I raised my voice in accusation. “Pierre Lefevre.”
“Who’s that?”
Maybe I was pronouncing it wrong. “Pierre La-FEV? La-FURV? La—”
“My name’s not Pierre,” spat Woody.
“Well, you just admitted you were an imposter, so if you’re not Pierre, who are you?”
“Woodrow Jolly the Third!”
Cal threw out his hand in exasperation. “See what I mean? I hope he’s making sense to you, because he’s making no sense to me.”
“I’m Woodrow Jolly the Third,” he continued, a pained expression reshaping his features. “But I’m afraid I’m not the honorable, trustworthy guy I’ve always pretended to be.” He hung his head as he hocked the words up from his gut. “I’m a thief.”
Nazi collaborator wasn’t bad enough? He was a thief besides?
“What do you mean you’re a thief ?” Cal fired back. “What kind of thief ?”
“The kind I always taught you to condemn.” He sat down on the bed across from us, shame running rampant in his eyes. “I take things from the dead.”
Euww.
“Jeezuz, Dad! Are you crazy?”
He stared at his hands, shoulders slumped, voice halting. “I couldn’t help myself. It started with this.” He poked his ring. “I just couldn’t force myself to bury it with the guy. What good would it do him anymore? It was way too nice to be locked in a casket and buried. That would have been a terrible waste. It needed to seen, admired. So I … borrowed it.”
“That’s how you justified what you did? By calling it borrowing?” Cal’s chest was heaving so violently, he looked to be in danger of hyperventilating. “You didn’t borrow it, Dad. You stole it. You committed a crime!”
“It’s only a crime if you’re caught.” A hint of a smile touched his lips. “I never got caught.”
“JEEZ!” raged Cal. “I can’t believe this!”
“I started out small,” he said matter-of-factly. “A ring here, a tie pin there. But you can’t get rich off men’s jewelry, so I cast my net wider. The ladies were a goldmine. Necklaces, broaches, favorite dinner rings, earrings, wristwatches, evening bags, diamond tiaras.”
My Grampa Sippel had been buried with his fishing pole, so I understood the concept of being interred with a bit of your favorite stuff, but still, who were Woody’s clients? Royalty? “You bury women who can’t part with their diamond tiaras?”
“Indeed I do. Straight into the ground they go, after I remove the tiara, of course. Society ladies are quite attached to their bling. Considering the extravagant way they insist on being laid out, I sometimes don’t know if I’m preparing them for a wake or a charity ball.”
Cal bent forward, elbows on knees and head in hands. “How long, Dad? How many years have you been desecrating the family name and reputation?”
Woody nodded thoughtfully. “Goes a long way back. Long before you were born. When I was learning the business from your grampa after the war.”
“He never caught you?”
“If he’d caught me, I would’ve stopped.”
“Who fenced the stuff for you?” demanded Cal.
“Fenced it? No one! I’m a one-man operation. A businessman with a reputation as esteemed as mine can’t afford to confide in a middleman. Loose lips sink ships.”
“So how did you convert your stash to cash? Or do you have it all locked away in a safety deposit box someplace?”
“It wasn’t very difficult,” explained Woody. “Pawn shops. Antique dealers. Online auctions. When e-Bay started up, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.” Woody bobbed his head at me. “A little undertaker humor.”
“There’s not a pawn shop within fifty miles of where we live,” challenged Cal. “So where are these pawn shops you’re talking about?”
“How many conferences do I attend every year, Cal? Six? Seven? Las Vegas. Boston. LA. Chicago. Believe me, it’s not hard to liquidate hard assets. Everyone’s buying.”
“Jeeeez,” groaned Cal. “So what now, hunh? I just find out my father’s a criminal. What do I do? Turn him in? Keep it under my hat and become an accessory to the crime by withholding information? Did you ever once—in the decades you’ve been committing grand larceny—stop to think what would happen to me, or Mom, or the rest of the family if your secret career as a felon was found out?”
He shook his head. “I thought about it once, a long time ago, but it made me so nervous I never thought about it again.”
“The idea of spending the rest of your life in jail too intense for you?”
“Jail I could handle. What scared me was the thought of having to tangle with the IRS. They’d probably want to do an audit.”
Cal snorted. “You’re guilty of grand theft larceny, and all you’re worried about is an audit?”
“You would be, t
oo, if you never saved receipts.”
“Well, I hope you made lots of money as a thief because you’re going to need every red cent to pay your legal fees … if they don’t freeze your accounts and shut down the business. Our business. My business. You’ve ruined everyone’s life, Dad. Are you happy now?”
“I poured every penny I made back into the business,” defended Woody. “A state-of-the-art computer system. Additional viewing rooms. New vehicles. Top-of-the-line caskets and vaults. That’s where the money is, Cal. Hardware! But what do you do? Encourage everyone who walks through the door to be cremated. I’m surprised you’re not encouraging clients to go coffin free with some kind of cockamamie green burial. I’ve sunk a million dollars into this business only to be sabotaged by you at every turn!”
“Million dollars?” Cal looked stunned. “Where did you get a million dollars?”
“The economic boom in the nineties. People were paying top dollar for gold and gemstones, so I was pulling in money by the bucket loads.” He shrugged. “I’m not proud of it, but the truth is, I’m a damn fine thief.”
Cal groaned as he buried his face in his hands again.
“Could we return to the discussion about your ring?” I asked during the lull.
Woody looked me square in the eye. “Just so you and I are on the same page, I might be a thief, but I’m no Nazi. I fought hammer and tong against the Nazis, for crying out loud.”
“I believe you.”
“I’m glad someone does,” droned Cal.
“I realize it was decades ago,” I continued, “but do you remember anything about the man who owned the ring?”
Woody nodded. “He was dead.”
Cal’s groans turned into a whimper.
“I understand that,” I persisted, “but is there anything else you can recall about him? Age? Cause of death? Name?”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if he were massaging a memory out of his brain. “Yup.” He pinched his eyes tighter. “Pine casket, Model number P-628. No frills service onsite. Burial in Rosewood Cemetery.”
I gawked at him, dumbstruck. “You remember the model number of his casket?”
“Baseball managers remember balls and strikes. Funeral directors remember caskets. We’d just purchased that line. The gentleman had the honor of being the first client to occupy one.”
“First client to occupy your low-end pine caskets,” taunted Cal. “First client to be robbed of his possessions. He was a man of many firsts.”
“He had a closed casket,” Woody reminisced. “That’s what made it so easy. And there were no family members clamoring to view the body, so it was like taking candy from a baby.”
“Why was the casket closed?” I asked.
“Bad car accident. No one would’ve wanted to see the way he ended up. He was a pretty young fella, too. Mid-forties, as I recall. Got the impression he must have been a loner because he sure didn’t have many people pay their respects. The man he worked for took care of the arrangements. Angelo Agnelli. Remember him, Cal?”
“The jeweler? Sure. He kept a dish full of candy on the counter just for us kids, so we’d always stop by his store on the way to the movies every Saturday.”
“The man who died worked for a jeweler?” I felt suddenly energized. Now we were getting somewhere. Of course a jeweler would work in the jewelry industry. It’s what he knew! Duh?
Woody nodded. “Yup. Old Angelo turned out some of the finest pieces of jewelry I ever lifted off a corpse.”
Cal covered his eyes. “Jeeez.”
My heart began pounding double-time. “Is he still alive?”
Woody shook his head. “We laid him to rest thirty years ago in our Mahogany roadster, Model number M-24. Our very finest casket at the time.”
“Oh.” That would make talking to him about his one-time employee a little out of the question then. Nuts. “I don’t suppose you recall the name of the man who died in the car accident.”
“Of course I do.”
“REALLY?”
“A funeral director never forgets a client’s name. His was Peter Smith.”
Which was obviously not the name I wanted to hear. Not unless … “Is Pierre French for Peter?”
Cal shrugged. “Stuff like that is above my pay scale.”
“Well, it’s not above mine,” said Woody. “Pierre, Pedro, Pietro. They all mean Peter.”
“So if Pierre Lefevre had needed to escape France during the war, he could very well have made his way to America, started a new life, and changed his name to Peter Smith.”
“Or Jones,” said Cal. “That’s just as generic.”
I yanked my phone out of my bag. “Unless Smith isn’t as generic as we think.”
“Who’re you phoning?” asked Woody.
“No one.” I pulled up my keypad. “I’m Googling.”
I typed “French Surname Meanings,” found a genealogy website, and scrolled down a long list of surnames until I reached the Ls. “ ‘Lefevre,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘A derivation of the French occupational name Fevre, which described an iron-worker or’ ”—my heart skipped a beat—“ ‘smith. From the Old French “fevre” meaning craftsman.’ ” I glanced from Cal to Woody. “The name Smith wasn’t generic to Pierre. In fact, it was probably very dear to him, because it described the profession he’d allowed to flourish in France. Metalsmith.”
I inhaled a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I believe we may have just identified the traitor who escaped from Pointe du Hoc the morning of June 6, 1944.”
BAM BAM BAM!
We shot looks at the cabin door. Cal stood up. “Hold on,” he yelled. “I’m coming.”
When he pulled the door ajar, Jackie rushed into the room, breathless with frenzy. “I wanted you to be the first to know. The police have nabbed Krystal’s killer.”
“Because of your phone call?” I asked expectantly.
“I never got to complete my call.”
“Then how did they know to arrest Virginia?”
She fisted her hand on her hip and regarded me archly. “They haven’t arrested Virginia. They’ve arrested Victor.”
seventeen
“WHAT?”
She held up a scrap of paper and recited from it as if she were Lady Macbeth speaking through a breathing mask. “Ethyl biscoumacetate.”
I stared. Woody stared. Cal stared.
I decided to pose the question that was causing all of us to stare. “What?”
“It’s the drug that killed Krystal. It’s a blood thinner, and Victor was taking it to prevent stroke, because he apparently has issues with atrial fibrillation.”
“Victor’s the killer?” I mentally picked my jaw up off the floor. “Not Virginia?”
“I’m only repeating what Rob just told me in the strictest confidence, so you can’t tell anyone else. But I have to tell someone because I’m about to burst. Victor was carrying a huge quantity of the drug with him, way more than he’d need for the trip, so he had enough to take out several people. Which means … he probably had a long hit list, and my name might have been next up!”
“But … why would he kill Krystal, or any of you? Aside from being frustrated by your backstabbing, whining, and snarky insinuations, he genuinely seemed to like all of you.”
“How should I know? Rob didn’t say why Victor did it; he only said that the authorities have him in custody at the hospital for doing it. His name was on the list of guests slated to be interviewed, so the police apparently searched his cabin while he was being treated, and that’s when they found his stash. They also found a miniature mortar and pestle that would have been perfect to crush tablets into powder form, so that puts another nail in his coffin.”
Woody tipped his head. “Excellent analogy.”
“Okay,” I conceded, “but if Victor killed Krystal
, who tried to kill Victor?”
“Rob said the police don’t think anyone tried to kill him. They’re speculating that he deliberately overdosed to throw suspicion away from himself.”
Cal nodded. “The police were definitely stepping up their involvement in the case, so maybe Victor felt the noose tightening and panicked. Heck of a stunt though. Blood thinner’s nothing to fool around with. He could have bled to death.”
“So when’s he supposed to have dosed himself ?” asked Woody.
“I vote for dinner,” said Jackie. “I bet he dumped the crushed tablets into his own soup.”
“But no one knew the police dragnet was tightening until Rob made his announcement before dinner,” I reminded them. “Victor was already in the lounge when that happened, so he had to have been carrying the stuff with him already to pull it off.”
“And if that’s the case … it means he definitely had plans to use it.” Jackie went white with the implication. “On one of his dinner companions.” She riveted a look at each of our faces. “On one of us.”
“But we still don’t have motivation,” I complained. “Even if Victor pulverized a thousand blood thinner tablets into powder, it still doesn’t explain why he’d want to kill any of us, and certainly not four women whose sales efforts have kept him a wealthy man.”
“Maybe it has nothing to do with wealth,” offered Jackie in a tentative voice. “Maybe it has to do with the other thing Rob told me in the strictest confidence that I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”
I waited a half-beat.
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone else. When the police did a background check on Victor, they were able to verify some of his work history, but prior to 1950, they came up with nothing. Prior to 1950, there’s no record of Victor Martin. It’s like he’d never been born.”
_____
“Did you read what’s on this leaflet what they slipped under our door last night?” asked Nana as she caught up with me at breakfast the following morning.