The Chocolate Snowman Murders

by JoAnna Carl

  “I told the cops the truth.” The clerk sighed. “Listen, around here I’m just a peon. If you want to know what’s really happening, you talk to Raymond.”

  “Raymond? Is he the manager?”

  “He might as well be. I don’t dare cross him because he could get me fired. But Raymond’s job is night custodian.” Gary leaned across the desk and lowered his voice. “Raymond Kirby is the only custodian I ever heard of who drives a Mercedes.”

  Aunt Nettie said, “Oh,” but she meant, “Aha!”

  Gary’s face grew serious. “Don’t let Raymond know I sent the cops after him. I can’t afford to get crosswise with him.”

  That was all he was going to tell us. But it was something. Aunt Nettie’s sweet face and little-old-lady act had pried some actual information out of him. It was information that Hogan, Sergeant McCullough, and Alex VanDam apparently had not learned: The night custodian handled the vice situation at Motel Sleaze. The desk clerk had been instructed to pass any inquiries from guests on to Raymond.

  Aunt Nettie smiled proudly. “And where can we find Raymond?”

  That was when I jumped in. “Oh, no, Aunt Nettie! Now we call Hogan!”

  I was not prepared to beard Raymond in his toolshed, and I wasn’t going to let Aunt Nettie do it either. A night custodian who could intimidate young male desk clerks and who was prepared to provide prostitutes for patrons of a sleazy motel was not someone I wanted to talk to without large, tough, burly police people to back me up.

  I was relieved when Gary said Raymond was on his dinner break and wouldn’t be back for half an hour, “if then.” This gave me a chance to convince Aunt Nettie it would be better to leave questioning Raymond to professionals.

  I got her outside; then Aunt Nettie stopped to argue. “Lee, this Raymond might admit something to us that he wouldn’t tell the detectives.”

  “But if we tip him off, the police won’t be able to question him effectively. He might even run. Let’s ask Hogan what to do.”

  Aunt Nettie finally agreed, but she insisted that we continue her plan to retrace Mendenhall’s steps. Literally. We walked around the motel, sticking to the cleared sidewalks, the way Mendenhall would have. Then we slogged through the slush to cross that extremely busy street I remembered from my first stop there. We took the shortest route to reach the cleared sidewalks of a strip shopping center, a center that held an appliance store, a pet supply place, a beauty shop, a chain store selling discount shoes, and a Chinese takeout restaurant. Then we had to walk through another parking lot, filled with more slush, to reach the supermarket. Inside, we went to the liquor, wine, and beer section. We looked at the bourbon display. We walked back outside, retraced our steps past the shops in the adjoining mall—the giant-screen television sets in the appliance store window featured Gordon Hitchcock pontificating—and dared death by heavy traffic to get back to the motel.

  I sighed with relief when I got Aunt Nettie buckled into the van. We had crossed an extremely busy street—twice—without being flattened by some suburban mother trying to get the kids home from basketball practice. I thought the whole episode was pointless, but I didn’t tell Aunt Nettie that. I simply offered her my cell phone so she could call Hogan and tell him what we’d found out from the desk clerk.

  But that probably was pointless, too. Even if the detectives were able to prove Mendenhall entertained a prostitute in his room, it wouldn’t explain what I considered the key mystery we had to solve to figure out who killed him. It would not explain how Mendenhall’s cell phone wound up in the pocket of my coat. No Grand Rapids prostitute had put it there. It had been planted by someone from Warner Pier.

  To McCullough, of course, there was no mystery about that. Either Joe or I had taken the phone from the scene to cover up our guilt in his death. To him the only mystery was why we had kept the phone, instead of tossing it in the river. Actually, he could probably answer that one, too: Rivers were covered with ice right at the moment.

  Anyway, Aunt Nettie and I had looked over the situation at the motel, and she had dug a little information out of the desk clerk. We drove home, fighting commuter traffic in the winter dark. Apparently I looked pitiful when I got to the house, because Joe offered me dinner out. I requested Warner Point.

  Joe looked surprised that I was willing to return to the place where I’d been chased by the sinister snowman thirty-six hours earlier. From my viewpoint, it was a case of getting back on the horse that threw me. Warner Point is a major center for Warner Pier activities, and I didn’t want to get the heebie-jeebies about being chased by a snowman every time I had to enter that building. I determined that I’d go there every chance I got for the rest of the winter.

  Aunt Nettie may have felt the same way. At least, we ran into her and Hogan there, and we joined them for dinner.

  Aunt Nettie and I seemed to have trained Joe and Hogan right; they didn’t laugh at our afternoon of detective work. In fact, Hogan said he’d already passed along our information about Raymond Kirby to Sergeant McCullough and Alex VanDam.

  “I hope you didn’t tell them that it came from the desk clerk,” I said. “He was scared stiff of that custodian guy.”

  Hogan grinned. “I told McCullough I got it from a reliable informant.”

  “He’ll think one of your Warner Pier pals patronizes the place.”

  “Let him.”

  “But I don’t really see what good all this will do. I’ll never believe a call girl killed Mendenhall, not when his cell phone was found in my pocket thirty miles away, and I didn’t put it there.”

  “You’re right,” Hogan said. “But if a call girl was there, she could be a witness.”

  The rest of the dinner conversation was more cheerful. We all made a conscious effort not to talk about the deaths of either Mendenhall or Mary Samson.

  After we’d paid our bill and were saying good-bye to Jason, I noticed that the lights were on in the art exhibit rooms, across the hall from the restaurant.

  I turned to Jason. “Is the art show still open?”

  “Anytime the restaurant is open, the show is open.”

  “Joe, do you mind if we take another look? It was so crowded at the opening I missed a lot.”

  Joe didn’t object. We waved Aunt Nettie and Hogan off, then went into the show for a nearly private view. I even picked up a catalog and took time to read it as we wandered through the show. Two other couples who had eaten at Warner Point came in, but we had the place almost to ourselves. It was a weeknight, and the Warner Pier Winter Arts Festival wouldn’t draw a big crowd again until the weekend.

  I guess the best part of a private showing is that you can make funny remarks about the art. I kept my voice down, because of the other couples, but I was able to tell Joe that I found Mozelle’s watercolor so insipid that she must have used a bowl of milk toast for inspiration, that Johnny Owens’ large metal statuary wasn’t nearly as much fun as the little cartoons he drew at meetings and must have been a lot harder to display, and that another artist’s bulbous purple nudes looked like the “before” pictures in diet drug ads. Joe had a few comments about something that looked like a warped cottage. The artist had experimented with perspective, but as a woodworker, Joe thought the building in the painting was going to fall down the first time a wind hit.

  We both liked a modern painting that was all blocks of bright color. We were impressed by a tiny exquisite carving of three chickadees. And we both thought Bob VanWinkle-Snow’s storm photo, the best-in-show winner, was stunning. Its price was stunning, too. We weren’t tempted to buy it, even though thirty percent of the price would go to the WinterFest.

  The catalog made an entertaining side note to all this. It started with a two-page synopsis explaining why the Warner Pier Arts Festival included a jurored art show. The rest of the booklet listed each artist, one per page. Each page had a reproduction of the art entered in the show, a short bio of the artist, and an artist’s statement.

  I learned that Bob VanWinkl
e-Snow had trained with some photographer I never heard of and that he strove for “realism filtered through creative vision.” Johnny Owens had a degree in art from Waterford College, and he tried to bring out the “inner strength of the metal” he welded. I liked the work both of them did, but I merely thought their art was beautiful to look at.

  “I’m just an accountant,” I said to Joe. “I don’t get these artist statements.”

  “They get pretty highfalutin,” he said. “What does Mozelle have to say about her milk-toast watercolor?”

  “I didn’t notice.” I thumbed through the book. Then I thumbed through it again. “She’s not here.”

  “What? Mozelle missed a chance for some public notice?”

  “It’s out of character for Mozelle, isn’t it? Besides Mary Samson helped put this little book together. I’m sure neither she nor George would skip an artist. But the artists are in alphabetical order. French should be here between Ervin and Garrity.”

  I looked at the booklet carefully. “Joe, Mozelle’s page has been cut out.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Look!” I showed him where the page that would have held her name should have been. The page had been neatly sliced out. Only a eighth of an inch of the paper was left.

  “Someone did that with a razor blade or a craft knife,” Joe said. “How odd.”

  “Let’s check to see if they’re all that way.”

  We went back to the stack of twenty-five or so catalogs at the table by the entrance, and we checked all of them. Mozelle wasn’t in there.

  “Some other artist was on the back of her page,” I said. “So there are two missing.”

  “There are probably more books someplace. I wonder if this page has been cut out of all of them.”

  “I think I have one of these at the office. Seems as if either Mary or George passed a few out at one of the meetings.”

  “Let’s go over there and look. And speaking as a committee member, we’d better talk to George about this tomorrow. I hope this wasn’t vandalism.”

  We went in the street door at TenHuis Chocolade, and I went straight to the file drawer where I keep what I call my “club work.” I don’t really belong to clubs, but I do serve on a committee for the Warner Pier Chamber of Commerce, as well as the WinterFest committee, so I have papers that are not related to work. I try to keep them separate, and I was sure I’d stuck all the papers I picked up at WinterFest meetings in that drawer. The WinterFest financial records are on my office computer and are backed up on a CD.

  It took a little digging, but I found the copy of the art show catalog that had been handed out early.

  “Aha!” I waved it triumphantly. Joe leaned over my shoulder, and we looked for Mozelle.

  “Here she is,” I said, “right before Garrity. And on the other side is that artist Marie Fung.”

  We both read about Marie Fung. She lived in Chicago and produced art she adapted on the computer. I barely remembered her show entry. Joe nodded to indicate that he was finished with the page, so I flipped back to Mozelle’s information. We both read it silently.

  “Sounds pretty ordinary to me,” Joe said. “She went to art school back east and then came home to join the Warner Pier art colony, not that the Warner Pier art colony noticed her presence.”

  “She attended Gerhard College.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Seems as if I have. But I don’t know where.”

  As I gathered up my WinterFest papers to put them back in their drawer, I was completely mystified about Mozelle’s biography and artist’s statement being cut out of the art show catalog. Or had it been Marie Fung, the artist on the back of her page, who had been cut out?

  Who on earth had done that? It had been a neat job that had been done carefully. It wasn’t as if someone had ripped out a page to wrap up a wad of chewing gum.

  Had all the catalogs been defaced in that way? Or only the ones out at the show? I vowed to check. When I got time. It was still Christmas season at TenHuis Chocolade. And I was a suspect in a murder case. Missing pages in an art show catalog would have to wait.

  Chapter 17

  Our late dinner, followed by a visit to the art show and a quick stop for a little detection, meant it was nearly eleven when we got home and got ready for bed. Suddenly I gave a gasp. “Oh gosh, Joe! This darn committee meets tomorrow.”

  “It does?”

  “Eleven thirty at Warner Point. Dutch lunch. I’d completely forgotten that.”

  Joe sighed. “Seems as if once the whole thing is under way, it could run on its own. But it will be a good chance to ask George about the missing page from the catalog.”

  “Rats! I’ll have to do a financial report first thing in the morning.”

  As I climbed into bed, I turned to Joe. “I guess Mozelle simply can’t be the murderer.”

  “She’s got a real good alibi.”

  “I know. But it’s got to be someone from Warner Pier—because of where we found Mendenhall’s telephone.”

  “Your pocket.”

  “Right. If the killer has to be someone I know, sending Mozelle up the river would bother me less than sending someone I like. My grandmother would say I’m completely lacking in Christian charity when it comes to Mozelle.”

  “I don’t like her either. I wouldn’t mind sending her up—as long as she was actually guilty. How about the snowman with the snow shovel? Could Mozelle have taken that role?”

  I thought about it. “I suppose she might have. I think we can deduce that the snowman’s head was not worn by anyone who was in tiptop condition. If the person had been stronger or had more stamina, he or she would have caught me.” I shuddered, and Joe pulled me over close to him so that when I went on talking, I was speaking into his neck. “That crazy head—thanks to it I can’t guess at the snowman’s height, and it sure hid the person’s face.”

  “So it could have been Mozelle,” Joe said. “Of course, if we’re making a list of people who might have killed Mendenhall, Mozelle is not really a possibility.”

  “I know. She was in Chicago. At a very fancy hotel.”

  “Yep. Besides, her phone number was not on that list George Jenkins sent to Mendenhall. She wouldn’t have known where Mendenhall was, and he wouldn’t have known how to find her. If he’d had any reason to.”

  We dropped the discussion then, and after a while we went to sleep.

  At the breakfast table, I dragged out my list of committee members and their alibis for the night Mendenhall died.

  Maggie McNutt had been at play practice. George Jenkins and Ramona had been together, hashing out a problem about the art show, until seven. After that, Ramona had been at home with her husband, and George had made a trip to Wal-Mart. Sarajane had also gone to Wal-Mart that evening. That wasn’t as coincidental as it might seem. Warner Pier doesn’t have a Wal-Mart, but it’s impossible to enter either the one in Holland or the one in South Haven without running into a fellow Pier-ite.

  Amos Hart had been rehearsing the WinterFest Chorales, so he had about fifty people to back up his whereabouts. Both Jason and Johnny Owens claimed to have been home—Jason going to bed early, but with his partner and his partner’s grown son in the house, and Johnny watching a DVD of a Disney film when he wasn’t talking to an art dealer who called from Chicago.

  I didn’t try to count the people who might have answered committee members’ telephones, people like Ramona’s husband, Bob VanWinkle-Snow. Bob had admitted he once had a public argument with Mendenhall, and I hadn’t found out if he had an alibi for the night the guy died.

  But I didn’t want any of these people to be guilty. I wanted Mozelle to be guilty. And that didn’t look likely.

  At least I was going to see the rest of the WinterFest committee the next day, so I could check on how many more catalogs were floating around. Then we could find out if Mozelle and Marie Fung had been clipped out of all of them.

  My head was spinning at eleven fifteen the next
morning, when I drove onto the grounds of Warner Point for the WinterFest committee meeting. It seemed as if the situation couldn’t get any more confused.

  At least that was what I thought until I saw Gordon Hitchcock and his photographer in the circular drive in front of the building, getting equipment out of an LMTV van.

  I rushed inside, eager to avoid another interview, and immediately ran into Chuck O’Riley, editor of the Warner Pier Gazette. He was sitting in the dining room, near a long table Jason had apparently set up for our meeting.

  “Yikes!” I said. “LMTV is outside, and you’re inside. Is there going to be a news conference?”

  Chuck looked slightly pained. “The WinterFest committee is big news all of a sudden. When two people connected with the committee get murdered, it has that effect.”

  Ramona was already in her place at the head of the meeting table. She switched her long gray ponytail around as if it were a real pony’s tail and glared at Chuck. “Not a thing is going to go on at this meeting but routine business. We have nothing to do with a crime investigation. It’s just a progress report.”

  I shrugged. “I can snow ’em with really boring financials. We’ll have the reporters sound asleep in five minutes.”

  That drew only a small smile from Ramona. “I’ve been swamped with press calls since Mary died,” she said. “The reporters have been much more annoying than the police.”

  Joe’s voice came from the door. “That’s because the police think they know who did it.”

  He took me by the arm and led me over to Ramona. He took her arm with his other hand and marched the two of us into a corner, well away from Chuck O’Riley. When he spoke, his voice was low, but firm.

  “Ramona, I’m sure you understand that the cops—at least the Lake Knapp cops—consider Lee and me the main suspects.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Bless Ramona’s heart. She sounded outraged.

  Joe spoke again, still keeping his voice low. “I appreciate your support. But that’s the situation right now. Would it be best for the committee if Lee and I both resigned?”