The Chocolate Cat Caper (22 page)

“Maybe she was going to return it. Exchange it.”

“Or give it to the National Association of Former Good Girls.”

We both smiled, and I turned around. “I don’t suppose she would have given clothes to Marion McCoy. It would have fit Marion great.”

Joe’s jaw dropped.

“She was tall enough to wear it,” I said, “and she was thin—Oh, my gosh!”

“Marion,” Joe said.

“Marion,” I said. “She’d bought all those clothes in Dallas. She’d had a boob job. I’m willing to bet that gown was hers. And what’s the most logical reason for all that?”

“She had a boyfriend.”

“But she certainly wasn’t wearing any of those new clothes when I saw her Friday, Joe. Or Saturday. Or today. She looked really dowdy. Yet she’d actually stolen—stolen!—money to buy clothes. Why would she do that?”

“She didn’t want anybody to know about the boyfriend.”

“I think you’re right. She was keeping the boyfriend a secret even from Clementine.”

“Maybe especially from Clementine.”

“Why?”

Joe didn’t have an answer for that, and neither did I.

The conversation was at an impasse. For the first time I looked down and saw that Joe was in his stocking feet.

“My shoes were wet,” he said, “so I left them outside. The sign of being raised by a mother who hated cleaning house.”

“That’s why I didn’t hear you coming up the stairs.” I shook my head. “Actually, I didn’t come here to discuss black lingerie. I wanted to know if you told Lieutenant VanDam about that flying comment Marion made.”

“Yes, I did. He didn’t seem too impressed.”

I moved toward the door. “I just wanted to know if you’d told him. I’d better get home now.” Joe followed me out onto the balcony and down the stairs.

“Apparently everybody thinks that Marion’s suicide solves Clementine Ripley’s murder,” I said.

“That seems to be the general attitude.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’d like to be. I’d like it to be settled for once and for all.”

“How about the state police? Did VanDam talk as if he considered the case closed?”

“He seems to be keeping his options open. I know he kept the mobile lab people here overnight—or in Holland maybe. I don’t think they could get rooms here.”

“Duncan found one. Aunt Nettie and I ran into him at the Dock Street and he said he’d checked into a B-and-B.”

“Is he still around? He left here so fast I thought he was headed back to Chicago. I’m going home in an hour or so. I’m only staying out here until I can find somebody to take care of the cat for a while tomorrow.”

“A cat-sitter?”

“Yeah. A breeder from Grand Rapids is going to board him for a while, but she can’t pick him up until eleven. And one of the attorneys from Clem’s firm called to say he thinks we can get started on the Michigan end of the estate if we appear at the Warner County Courthouse at nine. So I need a place to leave the cat.”

“That’s just a couple of hours. I could keep him.”

“That would be asking a lot.”

“I don’t go to work until noon. I could go a little early and meet the breeder at the shop.”

Joe made appreciative noises, and we went on down the stairs.

“You said you intend to sell the house,” I said. “Will Yonkers mind finding a new home?”

“He’s more at home at the Chicago apartment. The housekeeper there is the primary person who takes care of him.” Joe gestured at the imposing reception room. “I’ve always hated this place. The weird part is that in a way Clem built this house for me.”

“I’d wondered if she came here because it was your hometown, or if you met her because she came here.”

“Oh, she was here first, but she used to rent a beach house—the old Lally place, on Lake Shore.”

“That’s right near Aunt Nettie’s.”

Joe nodded. “I was with Legal Aid in Detroit then, and we had a case that was a doozy. We really needed some help with it. Something that would draw some public interest. I came home for the weekend. My mom mentioned that she’d heard Clem was in town. I decided I didn’t have anything to lose by approaching her. So I went out to the Lally place, talked my way past a part-time security guy—I’d never have gotten past Marion, if she’d been there. Clem and I clicked. She helped us with the case; the rest is history.” He opened the front door for me.

“How did Ms. Ripley come to build the house?”

“She already owned this property. I mentioned that I’d always wanted a place on the lake where I could have a private boathouse. The next thing I knew the architects were hard at work.” Joe reached for the handle of the Buick’s front door. “The plans were drawn before I knew anything about it. I got to comment on the plans for the boathouse.”

I saw a chance to check out the rumor Duncan had passed on. “Do you ever think about going back to practicing law?” I kept my voice real innocent as I slid into the driver’s seat.

“No. I’ve been approached by a couple of guys I was in law school with—but, no. I guess I’m permanently soured on law. Boat owners don’t argue like legal clients do.” He grinned. “I’ll just keep being a disappointment to my mother.”

He leaned closer, and a kiss seemed possible. Then I chickened out and looked away, and the moment passed.

He watched as I drove off. Was it my imagination, or did he look lonely? For a moment I wondered if I should have offered to make him a sandwich. But no, that would have been what my Texas grandmother called forward. I decided that after that kiss and now the mix-up over the nightgown, I’d better not even invite Joe Woodyard to church to hear a sermon on chastity. I shouldn’t have gone near him. I still wasn’t quite sure why I had gone.

I wasn’t interested in him, I told myself, ignoring the signals my innards were sending, but he sure could get the wrong idea easily. He might even get the idea I was interested in the money he inherited from his ex-wife. Worse and worse. I took a few deep breaths and thought about a cold shower.

I had to tell Aunt Nettie I’d stopped at the Ripley estate because I had to prepare her for Joe to bring the cat by the next morning. She looked at me narrowly, but she didn’t make any comment except “We can’t have a cat in the shop.”

“He’ll be in his carrying case. Maybe I can leave him in the van.”

“If he’s in a case, he can probably wait in the break room.”

A few minutes later a car pulled past the house and into the drive. We both ran to the window and looked out to see a Warner Pier patrol car in the driveway.

“What now?” I asked.

“It’s Chief Jones,” Aunt Nettie said.

The chief came in the door holding out a cell phone. “It occurred to me that you two ladies were out here with no telephone,” he said.

“Don’t you need it?” Aunt Nettie said.

“I can let you have it for a few days. It’s an extra. Used to be my wife’s”.

Aunt Nettie laughed. “If you’d brought it before we stopped for pizza, we could have called the dispatcher and asked her to pass the order along. Would you like a leftover slice?”

“No, but I would like a look around the house.”

“We checked under all the beds after the state police left,” I said.

“I know, I know,” Chief Jones said. “But humor me.”

I made a pot of coffee, while Aunt Nettie followed the chief around the house. They started by going into the Michigan basement. Then they came back up and went through the kitchen and into the living room. Next I could hear them chatting in the bedroom, then on the stairs and upstairs. I don’t know what the chief was looking for, but he didn’t yell, “Aha!” at any point during the tour.

When they were back in the living room I offered the coffee. I knew Aunt Nettie would say yes; the chief did, too, so I got out a tray, napkins, and the whole schmeer. The chief took two spoonsful of sugar, and he seemed to relish the real cream, which Aunt Nettie snitches from the shop, taking a half cup at a time out of the half-gallon cartons she buys it in. “Ah,” he said. “Great stuff.”

“Lee, I think there are a few Jamaican rum truffles (“The ultimate dark chocolate truffle.”) in a box in the pantry.” Aunt Nettie was going all out.

I put the truffles on a plate and brought them back to the living room. “Did you find anything when you looked around the house?” I asked.

“No. Not even an idea.”

“An idea? Is that what you were looking for?”

“I guess so. I hate loose ends, and I just don’t understand that burglar.”

“Wasn’t it Marion McCoy?”

“It probably was, but what was she looking for?”

“If she took it away, we may never know.”

“I don’t think she found anything. After the first burglary, Saturday afternoon, you and Nettie said you looked all over and couldn’t find anything missing.”

“Except my grocery money,” Aunt Nettie said. “Lee had to put the pizza on her credit card tonight because we haven’t had a chance to get to the bank.”

“True.” The chief sipped his coffee. “But I wondered if that wasn’t just a cover-up. Because the burglar—Marion—came back that night.”

“Yes,” I said. “Apparently she thought we’d hidden valuables in the birdseed.”

“In the birdseed?”

“Yes. That’s all that was touched really. Just those tin trash cans on the back porch. The ones Aunt Nettie uses to store seed for the bird feeder.”

“Tin trash cans.” The chief’s voice was thoughtful. “Of course, the burglar might not have known that Nettie stores her birdseed in trash cans. She might have thought that they actually contained trash.”

“You mean Marion might have been looking for something she thought we might have thrown away?”

“Why else would she have gone for those trash cans?”

“Maybe she wanted to lure some birds in for Champion Yonkers to jump on. Or maybe she wanted to plant something—like that syringe we found in the Dumpster. Sorry, Chief Jones, I just don’t understand. What could we have that was so unimportant to Aunt Nettie and me that we’d be likely to throw it out, but was so important to Marion that she’d break into the house once and try to break in again looking for it?”

“I don’t know.” He turned to Aunt Nettie. “Did she break into your car?”

“I don’t think so. Saturday afternoon the car wasn’t even here. Last night it was in the garage, and the garage was locked. The garage was still locked this morning, and the Buick looked just the same.”

“Oh!” I said. “I wonder if the searchers found my van.”

“Your van?”

“Yeah. It’s been hidden at the Baileys’ house since Saturday night.”

The chief choked on his coffee, and after he got his breath back I realized he was laughing. “You hid your van? That’s rich.”

“Why? I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I don’t know if you fooled your burglar or not, but you sure did fool Alec VanDam. His lab team didn’t search your van.”

“I didn’t mean to mislead them. I thought I’d be here while they were searching, but then Marion died, and I had to stay out at the Ripley house. After that, I wasn’t even sure they were going to finish the search of the house anyway.”

The chief put his coffee cup back on the tray and stood up. “Maybe we ought to take a look. The van is the one thing you and your aunt own that hasn’t been searched by either that burglar or the state police.”

We got flashlights and jackets and hiked the two hundred feet or so along the path that led through the woods to the Baileys’ house. I led the way around behind the garage and unlocked the van.

“The van’s probably a mess,” I said, “though I try not to leave too much junk in it.”

“It looks pretty good,” the chief said. “You wouldn’t believe the way Jerry leaves his patrol car. I get on him all the time.”

He looked in the glove box and under the front seats, using his flashlight to augment the interior lights. Then he opened the van’s side door and slid it back. “What’s this back here?”

“It’s clothes for the cleaners. I was going to take them to Al’s, but I couldn’t find it.”

“Al’s closed,” the chief said. He picked the garments up. “When did you wear these?”

“Oh, the dress I wore to work the last week I was in Dallas. The coat—well, I never got around to getting it cleaned last spring. Now the slacks—those I wore out to Clementine Ripley’s house the night I worked for Herrera Catering.”

The chief looked through the rest of the van, but he didn’t seem to find anything else very interesting.

“I will take those slacks, the ones you wore out to Warner Point,” he said.

“They’re my best.”

“You should have them back pretty quick.”

I decided just to leave the van at the Baileys’ until morning. The chief saw Aunt Nettie and me into the house, scolding us because we’d left the back door open when we went over to the Baileys’. He urged us to lock all the doors and keep the 911 phone handy that night. Then he left, Aunt Nettie curled up with a PBS special, and I eventually got in the shower.

The shower felt great. I luxuriated in the hot water for a long time and put the whole nightmare of the past three days out of my mind. So I wasn’t happy when I turned off the water and heard the chief’s rumbling voice. Why had he come back?

I didn’t hurry out. I dried off, applied some baby powder, put on my glamorous baggy flannel sleep pants, blew my hair dry—well, half dry. I could still hear the chief’s voice, and I was becoming really curious about why he was there.

I slipped into my terry robe—this outfit was certainly different from the filmy black number Yonkers had found in the closet—and went out to the living room.

“I thought you left,” I said.

Then I realized that Aunt Nettie and the chief weren’t the only people in the living room. Alec VanDam was also there, with his pal Jack Underwood.

“What’s going on?”

“Sorry to bother you, Lee,” the chief said. “But those slacks . . .”