The Chocolate Castle Clue

by JoAnna Carl

  The overhead door wavered. Then it stopped going down and started to go back up.

  “What the hell?” Charlie’s voice was angry. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t.” Joe sounded surprised, too. “I just punched the button once.”

  “Punch it again.”

  The door clattered and groaned. Again it started down. I let it get about two feet down, then punched my opener. It quivered to a stop and went back up.

  It wasn’t completely dark inside the garage. There was some sort of light in there, and I figured out that it was coming from the makeshift light over the little workbench at the back of the garage. I was familiar with that light. It wasn’t a real lamp; it was a mechanic’s work light clamped onto a hook on the wall. It cast a glaring light on the workbench, but it left the rest of the big room pitch dark. The wall-mounted garage door opener was over the bench.

  If Charlie and Joe tried to look out into the garage, they couldn’t see anything. I decided I could push the small door open a few inches without getting caught.

  Luck was with me. When I peeked into the garage, there was no reaction from either Charlie or Joe. I opened the door wide enough that I could slip inside, and I pushed the door almost shut behind me. The three big filing cabinets were between me and Good-Time Charlie. Plus, he was turned away from me.

  I heard Charlie growl. “There’s something screwy going on. You must have the opener.”

  “Not me.” I could see Joe holding his hands under the work light.

  I could see Charlie’s hands, too, and I had been right. A silver pistol was in one of them.

  “To hell with it,” Charlie said. “I’m not waiting any longer.”

  The words chilled me. Fooling around with the garage door opener wasn’t going to save Joe. I had to do something fast.

  So I swung back the bottle in my hand, and I threw it as hard as I could. It smashed into the back wall.

  “Run!” I yelled it with full lung power. “Run, Joe!”

  I turned and ran myself, yanking the small door open and plunging out into the alley. I made a hard right and ran toward the cross street.

  “Help! Murder!” I shrieked all the way up the alley. And I zigzagged. I knew Charlie still had that gun, and I didn’t want to be an easy target.

  I heard feet pounding behind me. I hoped it was Joe, but I didn’t turn around to see. I just kept running and screaming.

  I came to the end of the alley and rushed out into Peach Street.

  And I was surrounded by a throng of bicycles.

  The sun was just setting, and there was plenty of light. “Lee! Lee!” People were yelling at me. Bicycles and women were all around me, going every which way. The scene was mass confusion.

  I had run into Aunt Nettie and the Pier-O-Ettes. All six of them—and each on a three-wheeled bicycle. They were circling around, teetering this way and that, yelling, stopping, riding—any action that can be done on a bike was being performed.

  I skidded to a halt. I wanted to run, but I was surrounded. I didn’t know which way to jump.

  I whirled around toward the alley, and I realized that I needed to move some way. I’d better not stand still.

  Charlie had just come dashing out of the alley, close on my heels. I needed to keep running away from him.

  But I couldn’t. I was surrounded by those darn women on three-wheelers. If I ran right, if I ran left, I was going to smash into one of them. And if I did, one of us was going to go kerflop, right into the gutter, or up the curb, or onto the roof of a car—someplace we didn’t want to be.

  But Charlie was in the same predicament. He couldn’t move either. He stood there, waving a pistol, and turning round and round.

  He looked like a madman. His face was frantic.

  More footsteps pounded, and Joe ran out of the alley. Charlie apparently heard him, and he swung around, pointing that pistol toward him.

  “No!” That was me, screaming.

  “No!” That was Aunt Nettie, screaming.

  “No!” That was Joe. Growling. He ran straight toward Charlie.

  Charlie pointed his pistol directly at Joe.

  If Charlie was any kind of a shot at all, Joe was dead.

  Then Aunt Nettie rode in from the left, hit Charlie full-on with her three-wheeler, knocked him flat, and ran over him.

  The pistol went off and shattered the upstairs window of the souvenir shop on the corner.

  And Joe jumped on top of Charlie and wrestled him to the mat—I mean, the pavement—just the way he had pinned his opponent in the high school wrestling finals fifteen years earlier.

  After grabbing Charlie, Joe ended up with the older man in some sort of scissors hold. This meant Joe was almost lying on his back on the street, with Charlie tied in a knot on top of him. Ruby ran over and sat on Charlie’s legs.

  The silver pistol went flying. It landed at the feet of Kathy Street. Kathy got off her bike, picked it up, and stood looking at it seriously.

  “Oh,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve held a gun since the night I shot Mr. Rice.”

  It’s strange to remember, but I hardly noticed Kathy’s remark. I was so mad at Joe Woodyard that it went right over my head.

  I knelt on Charlie’s left arm, joining the tangle of limbs, and I managed to look Joe in the eye.

  “Joe! That was the dumbest thing I ever saw! How could an intelligent person do anything so stupid?”

  Then I yelled at Aunt Nettie. “And you! You could have been killed!”

  She stood there beside her bike. “Well, I didn’t think about that,” she said calmly. “I just didn’t want Charlie to shoot anyone. But neither Joe nor I is hurt.”

  “Not for lack of trying!”

  I shifted my irate gaze to Joe. “You ran right at a man who was pointing a loaded gun at you!”

  Joe tightened his grip on Charlie. “Was that any stupider than trying to chase down a guy on a motor scooter when your van had two flat tires?” he said.

  He had me there.

  Shep ran up and reported that the police were on the way. Then he produced a camera from that black bag he always carried. And he snapped a few pictures.

  Finally, he dropped to one knee beside Joe. “Do you need help from an old photog?”

  “Hang around,” Joe said. “It depends on how long it takes the guys with the handcuffs to get here.”

  Shep grabbed another arm that was flailing around, shoved it to the ground, and leaned on it with both hands and his whole weight. Charlie stopped struggling.

  We all waited, with Charlie pinned head and foot, until the cops got there. That’s when things got really confusing. The cops didn’t know what to do with Charlie.

  I immediately told them he had killed Verna Rice, but my unsubstantiated opinion didn’t seem to give them a good reason to arrest him.

  Then Joe and I said we were willing to charge Charlie with assault, since he’d threatened both of us with a pistol.

  Charlie countered by saying he was going to charge me with assault because I’d thrown a bottle at him.

  I said I hadn’t thrown it at him. I had thrown it into another part of the garage, and the shattered glass would be there to prove it.

  Besides, Joe said, the missing motor scooter was at that moment in the back of Charlie’s panel truck, so the cops could hold Charlie on evidence that he’d been the one who chased me and slashed my tires twenty-four hours earlier.

  Plus, I figured out why Charlie came by to see me that afternoon, carrying on an almost pointless conversation. He must have been showing me his eyes were all right, trying to allay any suspicions I might have had that he was the guy I hit with pepper spray.

  And all the Pier-O-Ettes, plus Shep, plus the bartender from the Sidewalk, who had seen the whole thing through the restaurant’s window—all of them said they were willing to testify that Charlie had run out of the alley with a pistol in his hand, pointing it as if he were going to fire at someone.

 
So the police finally collected enough on Charlie to justify taking him to the hoosegow. But as they loaded him in the patrol car, he was saying he would ask his lawyer to meet them at the jail.

  And that brought it clearly home—at least to Joe-the-lawyer and to me—that at that point there was no real evidence that Charlie had killed Mrs. Rice. As for the license number of the panel truck, the clue that had tipped me off, that would simply be my word against his, since I hadn’t told anyone about seeing the panel truck parked in the Garretts’ driveway until after I’d seen the panel truck again in our alley. And even if I had seen it, being in the area where a crime had been committed didn’t mean Charlie had done the slightest thing wrong.

  I could see that Joe was concerned about the whole thing. Charlie could easily walk free, unless some sort of forensic evidence linking him to Mrs. Rice’s death turned up on that panel truck that was now in the alley.

  As soon as Charlie had been taken away, Aunt Nettie invited everyone—all the Pier-O-Ettes, plus Shep, Joe, and me—over to her house. No one said no.

  Bob the Bike Man showed up to collect his tricycles. He was loading them in his truck when Margo Street took Joe aside. “Joe, I think Kathy is going to need a lawyer. Can you represent her?”

  “I can refer you to someone, Ms. Street.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” The light was dim, but I thought I saw a tear in the corner of Margo Street’s eye. “I guess I knew all this would come out someday.”

  She turned to me. “I suppose you told Joe about the revenge of the Pier-O-Ettes.”

  “No. Aunt Nettie said I shouldn’t.”

  “You’d better tell him now.” So I took Joe aside and told him the tale of Kathy being forced to stand naked before Daniel Rice and how her friends got even with him and tried to enforce his silence.

  Joe obviously couldn’t figure out if he was supposed to laugh or cry. He settled for shaking his head. “Aunt Nettie did this? Ruby I could believe. Even Margo Street. But Aunt Nettie?”

  “She did it, Joe, and she says she’d do it again.” I punched him on the arm for emphasis. “And I’d help her.”

  Joe put his arms around me. “And I’d hold your coats,” he said. “Let’s be friends again, Lee.” Then he kissed me.

  My mouth was too busy to form words, but I nodded.

  Chapter 24

  An hour later we were gathered at Aunt Nettie’s. The brats were ready to go on the grill, and we had opened a couple of bottles of red wine and poured some beer. The initial excitement of the chase and capture of Good-Time Charlie was wearing off when Margo cleared her throat and silence automatically fell.

  Gosh! What I wouldn’t give to have the authoritative personality of that woman. Or would it be a good thing? I don’t know.

  “Joe is going to help Kathy and me get a local lawyer,” Margo said. “But tomorrow we’ll tell the police the whole story of what happened the night Dan Rice died. I doubt that any of you will have any trouble about it. Not after all this time.”

  There were murmurs from all the Pier-O-Ettes, assuring Margo that she must do what was best for Kathy. “We’re all ready to face the music,” Julie said.

  Kathy touched her eyes with a handkerchief. “It’s all my fault! Margo said I should never tell what happened, but tonight I just forgot.”

  All the Pier-O-Ettes murmured again, and Margo patted Kathy’s hand. “It’s all right. I’m sure the police will understand it was all an accident.” She sounded confident, but she looked worried as she went on.

  “I guess Joe and Shep now know about how the Pier-O-Ettes went to Daniel Rice’s office and made him take his clothes off.”

  Aunt Nettie giggled. “At gunpoint. It’s one of the best memories of my life.”

  “The subsequent happenings weren’t so funny,” Margo said. She sipped her wine and seemed to steel herself to continue. “When I got home, Kathy had slipped out. Our mother, of course, had no idea what had happened earlier in the evening. She was frantically worried about Kathy. She said Kathy had been talking wildly about returning the trophy our sextet had won. And Kathy had taken the trophy with her.” Margo paused. “So I ran back to the Castle, hoping I could head Kathy off. When I got there, she was in Dan Rice’s office.”

  Kathy giggled. “He was wearing an apron. Two aprons. One in front, and one in back.”

  We all snickered at the thought. Hmmm, I thought. One mystery solved. Now we knew why aprons were found in Dan’s office.

  “I guess Dan got them from the kitchen,” Margo said. “I know he couldn’t swim, so he wouldn’t have been able to dive for his clothes, even if he figured out where we sank them.” She shook her head. “He was the maddest man I ever saw.

  “Kathy was holding the trophy, and she told him the Pier-O-Ettes didn’t want it. She said, ‘We don’t want anything from you, Mr. Rice. Not ever again.’ I was proud of her. She was very dignified.

  “But Rice was incoherent. He reached in his desk drawer, and he pulled out a pistol.”

  The whole group gasped.

  Margo went on. “I had no idea he kept a pistol there. If I had, I would have put it over the side of the deck with his clothes. But he turned toward me, which put his side toward Kathy. He pointed the pistol at me, and he said, ‘I should kill you for what you’ve done.’ And Kathy, bless her brave little heart, swung the trophy like a club and hit his arm.”

  “Yea!” We all applauded.

  Kathy wiped away another tear. “If that’s all I did, it would have been fine. But the gun fell out of his hand. And it landed on the desk, right in front of me. And I picked it up.”

  Margo slid an arm around Kathy’s shoulders. “She was my brave sister,” she said. “Unfortunately, the pistol went off.”

  I felt tears welling. The picture of the two sisters—just eighteen years old—confronting a half-naked, furious man was dramatic enough. To picture them suddenly faced with that man lying there, shot—well, it was shocking.

  We all sat silent. Finally Aunt Nettie spoke. “Was he dead, Margo?”

  “Oh no! It seems anticlimactic, but he didn’t even seem to be hurt—at least not badly. He ducked down behind his desk. I thought he was going to crawl under it. And I yelled at him, ‘Are you hurt?’ And he yelled back, ‘I’m all right. Just get out of here, both of you!’ And we did!”

  “We ran like bunnies!” Kathy said. “We were clear home before I realized I had picked the trophy up again. I wanted to throw it away, but Margo was afraid someone would find it. So we gave it to Nettie.”

  “But none of us wanted it anymore,” Aunt Nettie said. “I hid it in a closet, and years later I did throw it out. I guess Phil found it and thought I’d be sorry that I hadn’t kept it. He must have locked it in the filing cabinet.”

  “Anyway,” Margo said, “when Kathy and I left the Castle, we thought Dan Rice was all right. I was appalled when we heard that he’d been shot to death.”

  I spoke. “But if the shooting wasn’t deliberate . . .”

  “Yes, it might have been smarter to go to the police. And, of course, we would have done that if anyone had ever been accused of the crime. But with the police thinking it was suicide . . .”

  “But Mrs. Rice fought for her insurance settlement,” I said. “She claimed it was an accident.”

  “We didn’t know that,” Margo said. “Our mom had already sold our house, and we moved to Los Angeles just two weeks later. I went to UCLA, and Kathy took classes there in L.A. I didn’t hear anything about Mrs. Rice’s fight with the insurance company until we came back this weekend.”

  Joe and I looked at each other. The story of Dan Rice’s shooting could leave Kathy in a world of hurt. There would be no way to prove the shot was fired accidently. It was hard to believe the gentle and innocent Kathy could have deliberately shot someone, but on the other hand, she didn’t seem to be real responsible, mentally.

  One thing was certain. Kathy and Margo definitely needed a good lawyer. Luckily, Margo could affor
d to hire one.

  Margo was speaking again. “Anyway, when Mrs. Rice tried to blackmail me—”

  Joe yelped at that. “Blackmail!”

  Margo nodded. “Yes. But all she had on me was the episode when the five of us made Daniel strip. I don’t know how she found out about it. And she didn’t have any proof. I told her she could tell everyone about that. I felt pretty confident that she wouldn’t blab about it. And I was right.”

  “When was this?” Joe said.

  “About ten years ago. Right after my investment strategy was written up in Business Week. Why?”

  “I was wondering if you were the only one she tried to blackmail.”

  He looked around the room. No one jumped up and confessed that they’d been blackmailed. Aunt Nettie spoke. “Actually, Joe, there’s no point in blackmailing someone unless they have money. Margo is the only one of the old crowd who has been really successful financially.”

  Shep growled. “Margo and Charlie.”

  Joe nodded. “Actually, although I feel sure Charlie killed Mrs. Rice, I don’t know why. And blackmail makes such a good motive.”

  “Joe,” I said, “I think it was the other way around. I think Charlie had been blackmailing Mrs. Rice.”

  Joe frowned, and I outlined the reasons I had come up with earlier—ending with her allowing her house to be used for wild parties and nude sunbathing.

  “I don’t know what Charlie knew,” I concluded, “but Mrs. Rice by all accounts was a woman who cared a lot about respectability and her position in the community. A person like that, frankly, is easy to blackmail.”

  Joe didn’t look convinced. “But what would he have been blackmailing her about?”

  “Drugs,” Shep said. “Charlie was selling drugs, back in the old days. He could have convinced Mrs. Rice that Dan was in on the deal.”

  “Drugs!” All the Pier-O-Ettes burst out. “Drugs!”

  But I didn’t say anything. I was remembering how Charlie had several times described—almost proudly—the Warner Pier drug scene of forty-five years earlier.

  “Oh, he kept it quiet,” Shep said. “I worked with Charlie two summers before I figured it out. But he and his buddy Phin were selling pot and pills, right there on the deck of the Castle Ballroom.”