The Chocolate Cat Caper (15 page)

Joe started to speak to Aunt Nettie, but before he had more than a few words out—“Thanks for the sandwich. It”—we heard a bang behind us.

Joe jumped to his feet. “Bad cat!” He moved toward the sound. I looked over the back of the couch and saw that Yonkers had knocked over a wastebasket that had been under a spindly little writing table. “You still have your bad habits,” Joe told the cat.

He set the wastebasket upright again, but Yonkers had captured a wadded-up piece of paper and was batting it around the polished floor. Joe let him keep it.

“I guess that’s his favorite trick,” I said. “He knocked the office wastebasket over Friday, then batted the trash around.”

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and Duncan Ainsley came in, walking rapidly, reappearing out of the hall where Marion McCoy had disappeared a few minutes earlier. “Joe, have you got a minute?”

“Sure,” Joe said. He frowned at something behind me. I followed the frown and discovered the uniformed state policeman sitting quietly against the wall, taking in our whole conversation. “I’m waiting to see VanDam.”

Ainsley took him aside and spoke quietly. However, I could hear what he said, and I’m sure the state policeman could, too. He was making a pitch, asking to keep Joe as an investment client after he assumed control of his ex-wife’s estate.

Joe frowned. “It’s all very much up in the air, Duncan.”

“Who’s the executor?”

“Apparently I am.”

“Oh?”

“I was surprised Clemmie left it that way,” Joe said. “Anyway, the first thing I need is a report on just what Clemmie’s investments are.”

“Certainly.” Ainsley’s voice was enthusiastic. “I’ll E-mail my assistant this afternoon, and she’ll have the report for you tomorrow morning.”

“Let it wait, at least for a few days. I may not have time to look at it that quickly.”

“It’s just a matter of pressing a few buttons. We can get you a report anytime.”

Just then a new voice was heard. “Mr. Woodyard!”

It was Detective Underwood. He had entered from the hall. “Please come back and talk to Lieutenant VanDam.”

“That’s what I’ve been waiting to do,” Joe said. He followed Underwood.

Aunt Nettie pulled a notebook from her purse and began to write in it. I settled back on the uncomfortable couch and folded my arms. This was worse than the dentist’s office. At least the dentist provided magazines. I was toying with the idea of lying down on the couch, pretending to be relaxed, when Duncan Ainsley pulled up a chair and sat down beside me.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

I recalled his phone call Friday night. “If it’s local information, you’d be better off asking Aunt Nettie.”

“No.” He smiled his most winning smile. “I wanted to know more about you.”

“Me? Why?”

“Humor me. Did you say you’re an accountant?”

“I have a bachelor’s degree in accounting.”

“Where did you graduate?”

“University of Texas, Dallas. Finally.”

“Finally? You went to several colleges?”

“No, I did it all there, but it took me a long time. I was what they call a nontraditional student. My parents couldn’t help me, and I was determined to get through without a load of debt.”

I didn’t explain why I had a horror of debt. Growing up with bill collectors pounding at the door will produce that effect, and so will seeing money problems wreck your parents’ marriage.

“I worked and took a few courses every semester. Then I got married, and I didn’t work at all for five years, but that didn’t help me get through college any faster. I still just took one or two courses a semester.” I decided not to explain that either. How can you tell a stranger your husband actively obstructed your efforts to get a degree? Or that he was furious when you made the dean’s list?

“So it took me a long time to graduate,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

He gave me a direct look. If we’d met at a party, I’d have thought he was coming on to me. “What’s your particular field of interest?”

“In accounting? I know I’m not interested in taxes. It may depend on what sort of opportunities open up.”

“Then you’re not wedded to the chocolate business?”

“Not permanently. Right now Aunt Nettie needs me, and I need her.”

“Lee, you should have a great business career. If you ever decide to leave Warner Pier, let me know.”

I could feel my jaw drop.

Ainsley laughed. “You look astonished.”

I didn’t answer.

“Do you have any interest in investments?” he said.

“Not in picking them.”

“Good! There are too many of us trying to do that already. But you’d be great at client presentations.”

“Oh, I can’t do oval—I mean . . .” I stopped, formed the words in my mind, and said them slowly. “Oral presentations. I can add like crazy, and I know an asset from a debit. But I don’t talk well.”

Ainsley looked quizzical. “But according to this morning’s
Chicago Tribune,
you’ve done the beauty pageant circuit, so you didn’t just fall off a turnip wagon. I judged a few pageants, some years past. They require a lot of poise.”

“If the reporters get around to checking my pageant scores, they’ll reveal that I did okay in bathing suit and evening gown and so-so in talent. But I completely bombed the interviews.” I decided it was time to change the subject. “Now your career has been really remarkable, Mr. Ainsley. Why were you drawn to investments?”

“Just like to be around money, I guess.” He grinned. “You’re like all the other girls. Just interested in me because I know . . .” He mentioned a famous movie actor.

“I admit I’d love to know what he’s really like,” I said.

For the next fifteen minutes, Duncan entertained Aunt Nettie and me. He told me the in-stuff about that actor, about a certain rock star, about a well-known author of trash novels, about a soap opera star I had idolized as a teenager. It was amusing and just slightly wicked. I enjoyed it thoroughly. At the same time, I had the feeling I was watching a well-rehearsed and carefully developed stand-up act. He’d told those stories a lot of times, and he knew just when to pause for a laugh.

But it was still a pleasant interlude, and I hadn’t had many of those lately. I was almost sorry when Chief Jones came in.

“Ms. McKinney,” he said, “it seems the Warner Pier Police Department has assumed the duties of your social secretary. I have a phone message for you.”

“A phone message? Oh, with the phone at the house out of order . . .”

“Right. The caller couldn’t get through. Since the call seemed to be of a personal nature and the dispatcher said the party was pretty concerned about you, I said I’d hand it along.”

“Thank you, Chief Jones.” He handed me a pink message slip. “It’s a Dallas number,” I told Aunt Nettie. “It must be Mom. I thought she was in the Caymans. She must have read about all this mess in the newspaper.”

“You’d better call her.”

Lindy showed me a telephone in the kitchen. I found my credit card and dialed the number. The phone was picked up on the first ring.

“Lee?”

It wasn’t my mother. It was Rich Godfrey, my ex.

“Rich? Why are you calling?”

“Honey, I just heard about this situation up there. I’m getting on the first plane to Detroit.”

“Detroit?”

“I’ll rent a car and be there by this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Lee honey, you’re going to need money—money for attorneys, for public relations consultants. You don’t have to face this alone.”

“I see.”

And I did see. It was more of the stupid Lee syndrome. It works this way: A. Lee is attractive. B. Lee has a problem with saying the wrong word, so she’s stupid.

Rich thought I was too stupid to handle the situation. And maybe Lieutenant VanDam thought I was stupid enough and Aunt Nettie was naive enough that one of us would incriminate herself and admit we had poisoned Clementine Ripley’s chocolates.

I’d been trying to protect Aunt Nettie by taking an active interest in what was going on, but now I saw that “active” wasn’t going to be good enough. I needed to move up to “aggressive.”

But first I had to take care of Rich.

“Rich,” I said, “if I need help, I’ll call on someone who knows Lake Michigan from Lake Erie.”

“Huh?”

“You said you were going to fly to Detroit. Warner Pier is on Lake Michigan and Detroit is closer to Lake Erie—a couple of hundred miles from Warner Pier. And if you show up here, I’ll throw you to the tabloid press. Get out of my life! And take your money with you!”

I hung up and took two deep breaths.

Lindy laughed. “Right on!” she said.

I pumped my fist at her and headed back into the reception room.

“Aunt Nettie!”

I must have sounded different, because her eyes were wide when she swung around to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that I’m tired of people pushing us around. Burglars. State police. Cops and robbers. It’s time we stood up for ourselves.”

Aunt Nettie smiled. “What do you suggest?

“I suggest we ask Lieutenant VanDam to step down here and then we insist he assign his best officers to search the chocolate shop and the house. Right now!”

A
unt Nettie beamed at me. “Lee, that’s a wonderful idea!”

But Duncan Ainsley jumped to his feet, looking horrified. “Lee! Mrs. TenHeist! What are y’all thinking of?”

Ainsley almost squeaked out the words, including the extra “t” he put at the end of Aunt Nettie’s name.

“Ask any lawyer!” he said. “The authorities should get a warrant.”

“What on earth for?” Aunt Nettie said.

“You can’t just allow the police into your home.”

“I’ve begged them to come twice in the last two days, thanks to our burglar,” she said. “A piece of chocolate from my business contained poison. I know it didn’t get poisoned at the shop, but the police don’t. So the authorities are going to have to search the shop sometime. Besides, if somebody’s put something poisonous in my house or my shop or my car, I want to know about it. I want the police to look in every nook and cranny. I want them to test every bottle on the flavoring shelf, check out every bar of chocolate in the storage room, look under every chocolate mold, behind every pot and in every pan.”

I was glad she saw it the same way I did. I knew that Aunt Nettie and I hadn’t poisoned the chocolates. I felt sure none of the hairnet ladies or the teenage counter girls had done it. And the police knew we’d had two break-ins—or one break-in and an attempted break-in. If they found evidence in the garbage can full of bird seed on the back porch at Aunt Nettie’s house or in the plastic bin of cherry filling in the shop’s storeroom or in a shoe box in my closet, good enough. I wanted them to have it.

But Ainsley was still arguing. “Ask your lawyer,” he said. “He’d be ready to cut his suspenders and go straight up!”

Aunt Nettie waved his objections away. “Don’t be silly. If our break-ins are related to a poisoning, we need to search the whole house anyway, just to make sure the burglar didn’t leave any surprises for Lee and me. If the state police are willing to do it for us—and to check out the shop at the same time—well, I hope it’s a complete waste of public funds, but I appreciate their doing it.”

Joe came out of the hall right then, and Ainsley appealed to him. “Joe, you’re a lawyer. Tell this nice lady she shouldn’t encourage a search of her premises.”

“I’m not a lawyer anymore,” Joe said. But he did react in a lawyerly fashion, I guess. At least he asked Aunt Nettie to explain her side before he expressed an opinion.

“Clem would have gone for the search warrant,” he said. “But I don’t think you need to insist on one.” He turned to look back toward the hall, and I saw VanDam standing there looking at us. “After all,” Joe said, “the police are fully aware that you’ve had a break-in at the house. It’s possible that something was planted. You need to know.”

“Exactly.” Aunt Nettie beamed. She struggled up from the couch. “Let’s go on and get started. I’ve got a lot of work I need to do at the shop, and I can’t do it until we get this over with.”

“Ahem!” I said loudly. “And I have another suggestion. Aunt Nettie and I need to stop avoiding the press.”

Duncan Ainsley frowned, Joe glared, and Aunt Nettie looked dubious.

But I went on. “We need to write a statement pointing out that the reputation and the business of TenHuis Chocolade are threatened by this investigation, demanding that the police proceed as quickly as possible, and telling the world we’re asking the authorities to make a complete search of our premises.”

Aunt Nettie smiled. “That’s an excellent idea, Lee. And we’ll both wear TenHuis shirts, and we’ll insist on getting the shop’s logo in every photograph.”

Joe laughed. “Maybe you’ve got something. If they don’t kill you.”

I ignored him. “We’ll meet them on the sidewalk in front of the shop, where they can’t miss the sign in the window. We’ll pass out chocolates, if Lieutenant VanDam will allow it, and we’ll include copies of that fact sheet on all the different varieties of chocolate.”

“And a price list,” Aunt Nettie said happily.

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll even offer to answer questions, but no matter what they ask, we’ll talk about chocolate.”

Even VanDam grinned at that, but Joe was still glaring.

“That’s a good plan,” Aunt Nettie said. “Can we start the search of the premises now?”

Chief Jones, who had been a silent spectator to all this, joined the conversation at that point. “How about it, Alec? Can I ask a favor for one of my Warner Pier merchants?”

VanDam shook his head. “Well, I guess the lady is right. We do need to search the place. Might as well do it now. But when you face the press, no talk about the case, okay?”