The Chocolate Cupid Killings (21 page)

As I expected, it was answered by a woman's voice saying, “PDQ Investigations. How may I help you?”

I muttered about a wrong number and hung up. At least my suspicions had been confirmed.

Then I stared at the second number, the Chicago one, the line that had been answered by the man who called me names. I knew I ought to stay away from it, but I sure was curious.

I yielded to temptation and punched in that number.

After three rings, the guy with the raspy voice answered. “Yes.”

“Hello. I'm calling from Warner Pier, Michigan, and I'm trying . . .”

Too late. “I told you not to call me anymore! Call Elliot ! Is that plain enough? I don't want to talk to you.”

Slam. End of call. I hadn't even been able to use my wrong number excuse.

Hmm. Maybe the State Police would tell me who was at that number—once they got around to requesting the information. I didn't think the unknown number—which might have no connection with Pamela—was a high priority in the investigation. But someday I'd like to finish reconciling the phone bill.

Meanwhile, I cleared the calls my answering machine had piled up since the last time I had checked. The
Grand Rapids Press
. I killed the message. Moselle French, the nearest thing Warner Pier has to a grande dame. I didn't want to talk to her; message killed. George Jenkins, the other Warner Pier connection to the underground railroad. He wanted to know if he could help. He couldn't. Message killed. Then there were two actual business calls—retailers who order our chocolates. I wrote their numbers down so I could call them back, then killed their messages.

Next the answering machine played back a familiar voice. It was Webb Bartlett, a friend of Joe's who has a law practice in Grand Rapids. “Hi, Lee. I heard about the killing on the radio, so I know you're swamped. But I really need to find Joe. I've tried his cell, the shop, and your house. If you talk to him, tell him it's important that he talk to me. There have been developments since we talked at breakfast.”

Webb? Webb was the person Joe had met for breakfast?

But why hadn't Joe told me that? He and I got together with Webb and his wife now and then. Why had Joe said he had to meet “a guy” instead of saying, “I'm getting together with Webb for breakfast.”

Of course, then I might have asked why he and Webb were having a stag breakfast, rather than bringing their wives along for a nice dinner out.

Was Webb part of Joe's secret? Part of whatever had made Joe so uncommunicative lately?

I found Webb's card in my Rolodex, and my fingers caressed the telephone. But I laid the receiver down without calling. I didn't know where Joe was, so I had nothing to tell Webb, and I was determined not to interfere with Joe's problem—whatever the heck it was.

There was one more message on the answering machine—a very meek Sarajane asked Aunt Nettie to call. I called her back, just to tell her to try Aunt Nettie at home.

She still sounded meek when she answered. “Peach Street B&B.”

“Sarajane, I . . .”

Before I could say more, Sarajane gave a loud gasp. “You! Where are you?”

“I'm here at the office, Sarajane. Where you called. Is something wrong?”

Slight pause, then, “Who is this?”

“It's Lee, Sarajane.”

“Oh!”

“Who did you think I was?”

“You sounded like Pamela.”

“Pamela? But she's from Michigan. Have I lost my Texas drawl?”

“No. No, you haven't. I guess I just have Pamela on the brain. I'm even hearing her voice when she's not there.”

Sarajane then launched into a big apology, begging us to forgive her for dragging us into Pamela's problems. I assured her that we didn't blame her.

“You didn't do it on purpose, Sarajane.”

“I still feel guilty. And now Myrl's dead.”

“You certainly can't blame yourself for that. Myrl brought Pamela to you, remember? You didn't introduce Pamela to her. I just called to tell you Aunt Nettie has gone home. I don't know if she's answering her phone, but you can try her there.”

We left it at that.

The day dragged on. Hogan called to confirm that Dolly's hairstylist said she didn't color her hair. The hair stylist also thought the stains on the towels we'd found in the dryer were red dye.

“We'll turn the lab loose on it,” Hogan said. “But it sounds as if you and Nettie were right.”

I hung up and tried to picture Pamela as a killer. She was certainly the person who had the best opportunity to shoot Myrl, hide her body in Dolly's garage, and use her apartment to dye her hair. Or was she the killer's second victim? Had some other person done all those things? After all, we were sure Pamela could not have killed Derrick Valentine. She had a solid alibi from Sarajane and—indirectly—Rhett Spivey for that death.

I was deep in concentration on Pamela when the phone rang again. Maybe I only imagined it, but the ring sounded urgent. And when I looked at the caller ID, it was Dolly.

Finally.

I snatched the phone off the hook and spoke before she even had a chance to say hello. “I have so much to tell you that it's hard to start. But you don't color your hair, do you?”

“Color my hair!” Dolly gave her loud, ho-ho-ho laugh. “If I did, I'd ask for a more normal-looking color than the one I have. But what's going on up there? Is everybody all right?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Dolly, things are complicated here. Sit down.”

I started with the death of Derrick Valentine and finished up with Dolly's Jeep being missing and her apartment being invaded. I tried to keep it short.

“I'm so sorry, Dolly! We just don't understand what's happened up here. It looks as if the killer stole your car. We can hope that it will not be harmed.”

“Gosh, Lee!” I held the phone away from my ear. Dolly always talks at top volume. Her whisper is what the rest of us call a shout. “I can't take all this in.”

“I don't blame you. I'm just sorry about the car.”

“I don't care about that Jeep! Somebody's dead?”

“Two people are dead, Dolly. But I don't think they're people who have anything to do with you.”

“Still . . . You and Nettie have had a heck of a time. And you say Pamela is missing?”

“Yes, only she's not really Pamela Thompson. She's Christina Meachum. I mean, Belcher.”

“You're not making sense!” Dolly was still shouting.

I had to backtrack and explain further. Our conversation got more detailed. But I finally staggered through the whole story.

“Now let me get this straight!” Dolly screamed. “This Pamela Thompson is really the ex-wife of that Detroit crook, Harold Belcher—Belcher the Butcher.”

“That's right.”

There was a long silence. “You know, that can't be right,” Dolly said. This time her voice was only slightly loud.

“Why not?”

“Because I remember the Belcher case especially because Mrs. Belcher grew up in Ann Arbor. And that's where I grew up.”

“I know. Did you go to school with her?”

“Nope. But I know Ann Arbor. And Pamela didn't.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that someone asked Pamela where she was from, one day at lunch, and she said, Ann Arbor, so I tried the old hometown bit on her. You know, where'd you go to high school? Who was your English teacher? Like that.”

“So?”

“So she didn't know anything about Ann Arbor. She'd never heard of the Fleetwood Diner. She couldn't tell me which high school she went to. She ate Oscar Mayer hot dogs without complaining, instead of holding out for Kowalski's Kwality with the natural casing. Nobody from eastern Michigan does that. I mean, they may eat some other hot dog, but they don't look blank when you mention Kowalski's Kwality.”

Dolly paused again. “When Pamela saw that she'd goofed, she told me she'd only lived in Ann Arbor a year. But I didn't think she'd ever even been in the town. I always thought there was something funny about her.”

I urged her to call Hogan immediately. He needed to know about that. In fact, he needed to know several things Dolly could tell him.

Dolly and I had talked nearly half an hour before we hung up. She wasn't going to have a minute left on her cell phone plan.

I gave a deep sigh and stared at my computer screen. I'd learned at least one amazing thing from Dolly.

She didn't think the woman we'd known as Pamela had ever lived in Ann Arbor. But Christina Meachum Belcher had supposedly grown up there.

I pulled out my file folder and looked at the pictures I'd taken off the Internet. I laid the pictures of Harold Belcher aside and stared at the ones of Christina.

Such a pretty girl. Big brown eyes. Beautiful heart-shaped face with a deep widow's peak, wide cheekbones, and a pointed chin. Dark hair piled up on top of her head.

I tried to picture her with the bleached blond hair Pamela had had. Pamela had had bangs, long bangs that hid much of her face. And her jaw had been misshapen from the beating she's taken.

I connected with the Internet and Googled “Christina Meachum Belcher.”

If Pamela wasn't from Ann Arbor, why was she claiming that she was?

People always talk as if finding something on the Internet is—well, automatic. You type in your subject, and the information magically appears on your screen.

Reality, of course, is different. Unless the information has been posted on some site that can be accessed from the Internet, you're not going to find it at all. If it has been posted, it may be listed along with a thousand or more other sites. It can take hours to wade through them to find the one that contains the information you're looking for. If any of them do.

That was the situation for information on Christina Meachum Belcher.

Christina wasn't a famous person. She was simply a woman whose husband got in a lot of trouble. The Detroit newspapers had a lot about Harold the Butcher, but hardly anything about the prime witness against him, housewife Christina Meachum Belcher. And what I found was duplicated over and over. News writers are apparently too lazy to create entirely new stories. Once I read the phrase “whom sociologists have called a classic battered wife,” I knew I was reading an excerpt from the same darn article all over again. Not only did news writers plagiarize from one another—they plagiarized from themselves. One particular writer called Christina “a battered wife who—fearing death—finally rebelled” in no fewer than ten articles. I decided he had kept the phrase stored in his computer and automatically plugged it in early in every story he wrote.

Few of these articles had been accompanied by pictures of Christina. And if they did have pictures, often they weren't displayed online. In the latest articles—the stories about Harold's most recent trial—Christina had been photographed while heavily disguised.

But an hour into the search, when I was down to the 132nd online reference to Christina, I got some actual information. A biography of Christina had run as a sidebar—I think that's what newspaper people call an extra background article—for a
Detroit Free Press
story about Harold's first trial.

“Her high school friends in Ann Arbor remember a sweet, dark-haired girl who made good grades in English and competed in speech tournaments, but who didn't have a lot of self-confidence,” it read.

Hmmm. Ann Arbor again. Journalists were sure Christina had been reared in Ann Arbor, but Dolly was just as sure that she hadn't been. Did it matter?

Maybe not, I admitted to myself. But I was still curious, so I kept reading.

“ ‘Christy never felt sure of herself,' said Jack Vecchio, who escorted the young woman to their senior prom. ‘Her mom made her take part in speech competitions, or so Christy told me, because she thought it would help her become more poised.'”

I felt a pang of sympathy for Pamela or Christy or whoever she was. My mom had pushed me into scholarship pageants, the kind that feed into the Miss Texas competition, because she thought it would help me develop poise. Most of the other contestants had seemed to enjoy the pageants, but the main thing I got out of the experience was learning how to smile when I was publicly branded a loser. That and a first husband who wanted to show off his beauty queen wife as long as she kept her mouth shut. I guess I did learn how to fake poise. I certainly never felt it.

The article went on along predictable lines, but then I noticed an item at the top of the computer page. There were three photo captions for pictures of Christy Meachum Belcher. These, I gathered, were different photographs from the one I'd found earlier, the picture taken at a fancy party. But the photos were not on that Web page.