The Chocolate Snowman Murders

by JoAnna Carl

  Amos might have had a pistol, but he wasn’t pointing it at us when he came in. He was pointing it toward the floor.

  “Yes, it’s Amos,” he said. “Good old dumb Amos. Good for picking up the tab. Good for being an escort. But not good enough to be a permanent companion.”

  He raised the pistol and pointed it at Mozelle.

  She seemed finally to realize we were being threatened. At least she took a deep breath then, and I didn’t hear her let it out.

  Amos kept talking. “I was good enough to try to protect your reputation when that creep Mendenhall called and threatened to slander you. I was good enough to drive nearly to Grand Rapids, good enough to shut his lousy mouth forever. Good enough to spend hours trying to protect you.”

  Amos paused as if he were waiting for a reply. I didn’t have one, but Mozelle spoke. She still sounded more mystified than scared.

  “All I asked you to do,” she said, “was feed my cat.”

  Amos laughed harshly. “Amos the cat feeder. Amos the useful vote on the committee. Amos who helpfully answered the phone, thinking it might be an important call.Amos who’s going to take care of you permanently—and take care of this nosy Lee Woodyard. And her husband.”

  Joe! Joe was going to come back from using Jason’s phone any minute. And he was going to walk in on this scene with no suspicion that something was wrong. And I had no way to warn him.

  Or did I? Moving slowly, I stuck my hand in my pocket.

  “Don’t move!” Amos’ harsh bark was a long way from the tone of his beautiful tenor solos.

  I yanked my hand out of the pocket and held it up.

  “Keep your hands on the desk,” he said. “And you, Mozelle, you keep your hands still, too.”

  “Why?” Mozelle said. “Amos, why are you doing this?”

  “You’re not as smart as you pretend to be, are you? Don’t you get it? You told me yourself that the police suspect you of killing Mendenhall and Mary Samson.” He waved the pistol, but he kept it pointed in our direction. “I found this little gun in your bedside table. I guess your dear late husband—the one you never mention—had it. You’re going to kill Lee and Joe with it. Then, dear lady, you’re going to commit suicide, out of remorse.”

  “Amos,” I said, “no one will believe that.”

  “Oh, yes, they will. With no one around to remember my mistakes.”

  “What mistakes?”

  “The snowstorm! You’re famous for your slips of the tongue. I guess it’s contagious! You were the very person I talked to about driving to Grand Rapids in a snowstorm. And the only night it’s snowed in the past two weeks was the night Mendenhall was killed. And the chocolate snowmen! I thought they were all over town. But, no! Only Mendenhall had a box of the stupid snowmen until the day after the art show opening. They were in his room! Pretty soon you were going to figure out where I saw them.”

  “I didn’t even think about either of those things.”

  “But you would have! Besides, who knows what Mary Samson told you! And you and your handsome, brilliant husband would have blabbed to your uncle, the police chief. So you’ve got to go! I’m just sorry I didn’t get you the first time I tried.”

  It did cross my mind that I wasn’t going to die not knowing who killed Mary Samson. At least that question was answered. But I wasn’t ready to die at all.

  Far away, across the building and out in the restaurant parking lot, I could hear a horn honking, the sound caused by the panic button of a car. Would it only mislead Joe? Would he run into the parking lot, instead of back to the WinterFest office? Were there still diners in the restaurant? Would he think the racket came from someone else’s car?

  As I stared at Amos Hart and worried about Joe, the answer to my questions came. The door behind Amos moved, just slightly.

  Someone was there.

  It simply had to be Joe.

  I exhaled, and my breath trembled, almost becoming a moan. Joe had come. I had punched the panic button on my car keys, and the sound had alerted him. Or else he had simply come back from making his phone call and noticed the door he’d left locked was now ajar.

  But I realized the light was out in the long corridor leading to the office. I felt sure Joe was outside the door. But he couldn’t simply walk in and grab Amos. He needed to surprise him.

  I would have to distract Amos.

  “Amos!” My voice was loud. “Why Mary? Why did you have to kill her? She was so harmless.”

  “Harmless! She talked to Mendenhall! God knows what he told her! And she asked you to call her so she could discuss it with you. I had to shut her up before the two of you put your heads together.”

  The door moved another inch. I had to keep Amos’ attention focused on me. “Then I guess you drugged Mozelle so you’d have an alibi.”

  Amos sneered openly. “The only drug Mozelle needs is a glass of wine and a classical CD. She pretends to be cultured, but she can’t listen to classical music without falling asleep.”

  Now a hand was reaching in the door. I recognized the cuff. It was the cuff of the plaid wool shirt Joe was wearing. He was reaching for the light switch, the switch for the overhead light.

  “I guess you gave Mozelle extra wine at the reception.”

  Amos laughed harshly. “She’s too polite to pour it in the potted plant.”

  I slowly moved my hand across my laptop. Where was the button on the desk lamp?

  Everything seemed to happen at once.

  Joe hit the switch for the overhead light. He yelled, “Get down!”

  I punched the switch on the desk lamp. The room went dark. I yelled, too. “Get down, Mozelle!”

  Two figures were struggling. I jumped up, and went toward them. A shot banged out, echoing against the room’s hard walls.

  Someone screamed, a high bone-chilling keen.

  People were scrambling around on the floor. I tried to get to the door. I ran into someone. We both fell down, and we scrambled around, too.

  “I’ve got the gun!” That was Joe. “Turn on the light!”

  Somebody had hold of my ankle, and I couldn’t get up. I started crawling toward the door, toward the light switch, but these hands kept hauling me back.

  I yelled, “Let go!” But the hands kept their grip.

  The door was outlined by a dim light, probably a reflection from lights back at the entrance to Warner Point. Now it became larger, and I realized it was the silhouette of someone leaving the room.

  “Let go!” I kicked at the hands holding my ankle. “He’s getting away!”

  Another figure rushed past. I saw Joe’s shape briefly as he went out the door.

  If Joe had run out, I deduced, he must have been chasing Amos. So Mozelle was the person who had hold of my ankle.

  “Mozelle! Let go of my ankle!”

  She let go, and I was on my feet. I ran down the hall, back toward the main building of Warner Point. As I ran, I yelled, “Catch him! Stop him!” Anything to get attention, to keep Amos Hart from getting away.

  Suddenly I was in the entry hall, with the art show rooms on my left, the restaurant on my right, and the main entrance door straight ahead. Jason was advancing from the restaurant, clutching a huge cleaver. And Joe had beaten Amos Hart to the main door.

  Amos danced from side to side. Joe was between him and the door. Jason was coming at him through the restaurant, and two waiters and a dishwasher were behind him. Mozelle and I were running toward him down the long hall from the WinterFest office.

  Amos ran into the art show.

  Joe followed and grabbed at him. Amos slithered away. One of the temporary partitions went down with a crash. Amos crashed with it. He got up and again tried to run. This time he went headlong into Johnny Owens’ giant metal reindeer. The reindeer toppled. For a moment I thought Amos was going to be impaled on its aluminum horns.

  We all yelled, “Look out!” But Amos was falling, out of control. He landed in a tangle of antlers, tail, and hooves. This time he didn�
��t get up. He wasn’t hurt, but he was pinned down by the heavy sculpture.

  In the silence, Mozelle spoke. “I do have the worst taste in men.”

  I hope never to have another evening like that one. But at least we now understood what had happened.

  Amos Hart, dropping by Mozelle’s house to feed her cat on the Tuesday night Mendenhall arrived, had answered her telephone. It had been Mendenhall, wanting to talk to the woman he had once lived with in a threesome with another young girl. In his drunken state he had poured out the secret Mozelle had kept for thirty years and had hidden in the Kalamazoo Holiday Inn to preserve. Amos was shocked. He may have thought he was hearing a scandalous lie. He determined to see Mendenhall face-to-face and convince him not to repeat his story.

  Amos went on to his rehearsal, sent the chorus into sectional rehearsals, then quietly left the church and drove to Lake Knapp. If anyone missed him, they merely thought he was in with a different set of singers.

  When Amos talked to Mendenhall at the motel, it became clear that he would not be able to shut up the former professor. So Amos beat him to death with the desk lamp.

  In a side note, Hogan later got a call from Sergeant McCullough. He had followed up on Aunt Nettie’s conviction that Mendenhall might have asked for a visit from a call girl. She had been right, McCullough admitted. When he tracked the girl down, she said she went to Mendenhall’s room and knocked, but no one answered. She left, but as she was getting into her car, she saw a tall man come out of the room. She didn’t get a good look at him, but his overcoat had been hanging open, and she could see that he was wearing a bow tie.

  Aha!

  At the WinterFest committee meeting the day after he killed Mendenhall, Amos had learned that the art show juror had talked to Mary Samson. From her embarrassment he deduced that Mendenhall had made off-color remarks. Amos feared they had been about Mozelle.

  Mary hadn’t seemed sure just what Mendenhall had been saying. But Amos was afraid she would figure it out, especially when he learned Mary was planning to talk to me about it.

  To give himself an alibi, he lured Mozelle to his house and plied her with two things he knew would make her sleep: wine and classical music. Then he went to Mary’s house and murdered her.

  With a good attorney, Amos might make a case for manslaughter or second-degree murder in the death of Mendenhall, but poor Mary’s killing was first-degree murder. There was no other way to look at it.

  Amos later maintained that he had done all this—plus defacing the art show catalogs—to protect Mozelle.

  But Mozelle had caught on to Amos. First she had figured out he was mainly interested in her because he thought she was comfortable financially. Second, she had begun to understand the self-righteous creepiness of his personality. In the scene I overheard, she had given him the door.

  One other mystery was explained three days before Christmas, when Aunt Nettie came into my office, closed the door, and sat down with a serious look on her face.

  “Lee, I’m going to ask you to do something that you’re not going to want to do. Something you’re going to think is immoral, and that I know is illegal.”

  I looked at her warily. “You don’t want me to put preservatives in the chocolate, do you?”

  “Good heavens, no! I’d never do that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Sarajane’s ‘friend’ needs a job for a little while. Off the books.”

  “Off the books? We can’t do that!”

  “Sarajane and George have authorized me to explain who the ‘guest’ is, Lee. Then you’ll understand why we have to do this.”

  It seemed that Sarajane, formerly an abused wife, and George, a member of the board of the Holland woman’s shelter, had become involved in that secret movement that is sometimes whispered about, but that most people deny exists. In cases when its organizers believe the only safety for an abused woman lies in a new identity, she is spirited across the country through a modern-day “underground railway.” The women are handed from person to person, with no single “conductor” knowing where they will wind up.

  “George says they make the exchanges in the Wal-Mart parking lot,” Aunt Nettie said.

  “That’s an ideal spot. It’s always crowded, and people are moving sacks and packages from shopping carts to cars. Who’s to notice a little extra activity? But why did both Sarajane and George go to Wal-Mart on the same evening?”

  “George was picking up the lady who’s now staying with Sarajane, and Sarajane was sending a previous ‘guest’ on her way. The woman currently staying with Sarajane is named Sharon. She needs to earn some money.”

  I sighed. “I can put her on the books as contract labor and hope she doesn’t earn enough to get us in trouble.”

  “She’ll be here only briefly, Lee. No more than a month.”

  “It seems to me that law enforcement isn’t too supportive of this system of sanctuary. What does Hogan think?”

  “He and I are careful not to discuss it.” Aunt Nettie smiled her sunny smile. She came around the desk and gave me a hug.

  “Thank you, Lee. And happy holidays.”

  “Happy holidays to you, Aunt Nettie.”

  One other effect of the whole case, according to the Warner Pier grapevine, was that Reverend Chuck Pinkney preached a heck of a Christmas sermon. It wasn’t his usual “believe and all will be forgiven” theology. God’s people might be forgiven, he told his congregation, but that didn’t give them license to continue sinning. It meant they had to try to reach a higher standard. And while God could produce good out of evil, that was no excuse for doing the evil. And anybody, he said, who thought particular beliefs or virtues or good works were going to produce worldly rewards had better think again.

  I didn’t hear the sermon, but I did give some serious thought to my own failings and sins. I told Joe as much on Christmas Eve.

  “I’m thoroughly ashamed of the way I judged Mozelle,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know that you were too harsh on her. She is a genuine, unmitigated pain in the neck.”

  “Yes, but now that I understand why, I’ll try to be more patient.”

  “So you think her early experience with Mendenhall warped her personality?”

  “Her experience with Mendenhall and her mother’s reaction. When Mozelle kicked over the traces at nineteen, two disasters followed. Her mother declared her ruined for life because she had defied society. Then Mendenhall didn’t even value the sacrifice she had made for him. He just threw her aside.”

  “That would mark anybody’s personality.”

  “Mozelle must have lived her entire adult life too frightened to be anything but conventional ever again. She could never relax and just do what she wanted. She had to be publicly virtuous.” I raised my hand to swearing position. “I hereby resolve to try to be nicer to her.”

  “You’ll get to test your resolve tomorrow, since I understand she accepted Aunt Nettie’s invitation to Christmas dinner.”

  “Yep. It will be a grand multifamily occasion.” Aunt Nettie had invited Joe’s mom; her boyfriend, Mayor Mike Herrera; my friend Lindy, with her husband and three kids; Joe and me; and now Mozelle. Plus Aunt Nettie and Hogan.

  “It’s going to be a big day,” I said. “So we’d better get on with our private celebration tonight.”

  “Do you need me to help bring in that giant item you tried to hide under a tarp on the screened-in porch?”

  “You saw it!”

  “It’s hard to miss something that big, even in the dark.”

  “Well, I’ve been careful not to ask about that huge thing in the basement.”

  “Let’s start with the porch item. I’m curiouser than you are.”

  The porch item was an easy chair and ottoman in a fabric and style that blended with the new couch that was our official gift to each other.

  Joe immediately tried it out. “It’s great,” he said, “as long as I still get to sit on the couch with you now and then.”


  “You’d better! And the chair didn’t come out of the family budget. I bought it with the money Jason paid me to set up his bookkeeping system on his new computer—and to teach him how to use it. Now, you bring that big thing up from the basement.”

  The basement item wasn’t very thick, but it was more than two feet from top to bottom and more than three feet from side to side. I could feel a raised edge through the wrapping paper.

  “It must be a great big tea tray,” I said.

  “Just open it.”

  Inside was a framed print of Bob VanWinkle-Snow’s spectacular view of a storm over Lake Michigan.

  Tears came to my eyes. “Joe! I love it! It’s fabulous.”

  I resolved not to say a word about how much it must have cost. Bob’s work was way out of our budget.

  Joe put his arm around me. “And now I can pay off the Visa bill.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bob and Ramona needed some shelving and storage cabinets in their darkroom. I bought the materials—the stuff you found on my Visa—and they paid me back yesterday. I got the photograph in exchange for building the cupboards and shelves.”

  “Oh, Joe! I’m thrilled!”

  “It’s part of a limited edition of prints. The best-ofshow photograph was number one. This is number nine.”

  We hung it over the mantelpiece, replacing a sentimental print of flowers that my grandmother had hung there forty years earlier. It looks beautiful.

  Everybody brought something to the multifamily Christmas dinner. My contribution was turkey and Texas-style corn bread dressing. I love Michigan food, but dressing has got to be made with corn bread.

  Aunt Nettie baked a ham, and Mike Herrera did a pork loin. The two of them are already arguing over who gets to play host for next year’s Christmas dinner.

  Moral Chocolatiers

  Many of England’s early chocolate manufacturers, it happens, were Quakers. Joseph Fry & Sons, Cadbury’s, and Rountree were all prominent in the business during the early part of the nineteenth century.

  Following the social consciousness principles of their faith, the Quaker industrialists made efforts to set up ideal living conditions for their employees, and both Cadbury and Rountree established model factory towns for their employees. Interestingly, American chocolate maker Milton Hershey—who was not a Quaker—did this in the United States, founding the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania.