The Chocolate Cat Caper (6 page)

“Ms. McCoy?” Still no answer.

I was sure the office had been at this end of the house. I spotted a hall with doors on either side of it. I opened one and peeked through. “Ha!” It was the utility room I had gone through when Ms. McCoy showed me out. That meant that the room on the left should be the office.

I knocked at the door. No answer there, either. Champion Yonkers yowled and kicked.

“Sorry, Champ,” I said. “I think this is where you’re supposed to be.” I opened the door and found myself facing the big walnut desk. Marion McCoy was sitting behind it. We both jumped.

“Oh!” I said. “Is this where you wanted the cat?”

“Yes! Give him to me.”

I handed him over, and Ms. McCoy held him at arm’s length, apparently trying to keep the cat hair off her basic black. But Yonkers saw prison on the horizon, and he wasn’t happy. He yowled and kicked, and he managed to draw blood from her wrist.

“Ouch! Let me help you,” I said. “Bad cat!” I quickly closed the door behind me, then looked around the room and spotted a box of tissues on an end table. I plucked one and held it out to her.

Ms. McCoy put Champion Yonkers down. He ran under the desk and knocked over a small wastebasket, then looked at us proudly.

“You’re a naughty cat,” I said. Ms. McCoy was pressing the tissue to her arm. “You should put something on that. Cat scratches can be dangerous.”

“Yonk never roams through garbage cans,” Mrs. McCoy said. “Just the office trash.”

I knelt and started scooping papers back into the wastebasket.

“I can take care of that,” Ms. McCoy said. She was glaring now. I didn’t understand why she should be mad. She certainly was acting oddly. “I’m sure you need to get back to the bar.”

I was dismissed. I stood up. And as I did Champion Yonkers jumped out from under the desk. He capered about, knocking some wadded-up papers around like balls.

“You’re a character,” I told him as I edged toward the door. “And you were right, Ms. McCoy. He jumped down onto the barker—I mean the bartender, I guess from that balcony. The he tried to eat the olives.”

“Jumping down like that is one of his favorite tricks. Thank you for bringing him back. You can go now.”

“Certainly.” But before I could open the door, something shot out across the floor and hit my foot. Champion Yonkers chased it, still capering around. I looked down, but Ms. McCoy moved casually, and her foot almost touched mine. Something crunched.

Startled, I looked around. “Did something break?”

“It’s that cat,” Ms. McCoy said easily. Her glare had softened into a watchful look. “I’ll clean it up. Would you mind taking those two glasses on the coffee table back to the kitchen?”

I nodded. In a chair near the door, I saw a wad of plastic, and I recognized it as a pair of the plastic gloves used by food-service workers. “How did these get here?” I said. I scooped them up and stuck them in my pocket. Then I picked up two glasses from the coffee table. One smelled strongly of bourbon. “Sorry about the scratch,” I said, and I left.

I went back through the sitting room and down the corridor or pergola or whatever—suddenly I remembered. “Peristyle,” I said. “It’s a peristyle.”

Well, I was glad I hadn’t tried to say
that
in front of Marion McCoy. It would probably have come out “parachute” or “percolator.”

Why did the woman intimidate me so much? I wondered all the way down the peristyle, past the kitchen, and into the huge, cold reception room.

And there I stopped, because six people were looking in my direction in horror.

For a moment I wondered wildly just what I had done. Then I realized that they weren’t looking at me. All six of them were staring at something over my head. And whatever it was it was making a horrible choking sound.

I quickly took six steps forward and whirled to see what they were looking at, what the ghastly noise was.

I looked up just in time to see Clementine Ripley tumble over the balcony rail.

She hit the floor in front of the bar, landing all splayed out, like a beanbag toy. She didn’t move. But something brown and white rolled toward me and stopped at my feet.

It was a half-eaten Amaretto truffle.

I
reached down to pick up the Amaretto truffle, just on general principles of neatness. But before I could grab it, Mike Herrera stepped in front of me, blocking me like an opposing guard jumping in front of a top scorer. He didn’t single me out, but shooed all of us into the kitchen.

The Warner Pier hospital closed several years ago, so the village relies on a team of volunteer EMTs, and someone called them pronto. While we waited, Jason, who turned out to be Herrera Catering’s official first aider, did what he could. Of course, there was nothing anyone could do for Clementine Ripley. All of us who had seen her fall knew that. I felt sure she had been dead before she fell over the balcony rail. She certainly hadn’t moved after she hit the floor.

The speculation in the kitchen was that she’d had a stroke. “My grandmother dropped over just the same way,” Lindy said. “Got up to answer the phone and died before she could get into the living room.” Everybody nodded wisely and muttered about Clementine Ripley’s heart.

But the chef who’d been preparing the nest for the steamboat round laughed harshly and spoke under his breath. “What heart?” he said.

The paramedics arrived within ten minutes, and Jason came into the kitchen with the rest of us. He was shaking his head, and his aftershave was almost overpowered by sweat. “God, Mike,” he said. “I was afraid to touch her much. The way she fell—her neck . . .”

“I do not think eet is of importance,” Mr. Herrera said. Excitement had brought out his accent. “Eet’s hokay.”

Jason shook harder. “If Greg just wasn’t on duty—”

“Everybody knows hee’san idiot,” Herrera said.

Lindy and I were leaning against the sink. She snorted. “Oh, no! Not Greg Gossip!”

I spoke in an undertone. “Greg who?”

“Gregory Glossop,” Lindy said. “You remember, Mr. Glossop at the Superette pharmacy? He’s a creep.”

“All I remember was that Aunt Nettie always insisted that her prescriptions be filled at Downtown Drugs.”

“That’s because Gregory Glossop is such a blabbermouth. I bought some prenatal caps in there the day I found out I was pregnant with little Tony, and the phone was ringing when I got home. My mom’s club had already set a date for the baby shower.”

“What’s Mr. Glossop doing as a paramedic?”

She shrugged. “He took the training and all. I think he just hates to miss anything.”

We stood silently, and in a minute I heard a loud voice coming from the cold room where Clementine Ripley was lying on the cold floor. It was a prissy, high-pitched tenor, and its owner had projection. The voice carried into every corner of the kitchen.

“Well! I’m willing to stake my reputation on it.” The tenor’s voice was filled with pleasure.

Lindy grimaced. “There he goes. Greg Gossip.”

A deeper voice a baritone, muttered, but I couldn’t catch the words.

The tenor squawked again. “You’re going to have to call in the state police!”

The baritone made soothing sounds, but the tenor didn’t calm down.

“Well! I believe that piece of candy killed her!”

A piece of candy killed her? One particular piece? That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. What could a single chocolate do? Send her into some kind of diabetic fit? Or was it one piece too many—a chocolate last straw, as it were—and it laid down the final piece of plaque on a key artery, giving Clementine Ripley a heart attack? How could the guy—whoever he was—say a piece of candy could kill anybody?

While I was thinking all that, the lower voice rumbled again. Then the tenor answered, even higher than ever.

“Chief, this is cyanide poisoning! I can smell the scent of almonds.”

Well, that did it. The tenor was claiming that one of my aunt’s delicious chocolates had contained poison. I wasn’t going to stand for it.

I walked to the kitchen door, pushed past Mike Herrera, crossed the dining room, and entered the room where Clementine Ripley had died.

“Of course, that chocolate smells like almonds,” I said loudly. “It’s an armadillo truffle!”

That
stopped everybody in the room in their tracks. Two paramedics kneeling by Clementine Ripley swiveled their heads toward me, and two uniformed cops, both very young, swung around to see who this fool was. But I focused on the two men who were facing each other in the center of the room. They had to be the tenor and the baritone who had been arguing. They had also whipped their heads in my direction when I spoke up.

I walked closer to them before I said any more. “I mean, Amaretto. It’s an Amaretto truffle,” I said. “I work for TenHuis Chocolade. We furnished the chocolates for the party, and Nettie TenHuis sent an extra half dozen Amaretto truffles for Clementine Ripley personally.”

Both men stared at me. The taller man seemed familiar, and in a moment I realized he was the man who had backed up his police car and let me out of Clementine Ripley’s driveway that afternoon. Standing up, he looked like Abraham Lincoln with a shave and a buzz cut. His features hinted that he’d been in several fights over the years, but he didn’t look tough or angry. In fact, he was peering over the top of a pair of half glasses, and the angle of his head gave an impish look to his soft brown eyes. He looked humorous, somehow, but dependable.

He spoke calmly, repeating the key word. “Amaretto?” I recognized the deep voice I had heard from the kitchen.

I nodded. “Yes. It’s an almond-flavored liqueur. Aunt Nettie uses it in that particular chocolate.”

The second man sputtered again. “Well! I don’t care what flavor the chocolates were,” he said. “I still think Ms. Ripley was killed by cyanide.”

This man was several inches shorter than I am. He was chubby and almost completely bald, and he had light-colored eyelashes and eyebrows. The combination managed to give the impression that he had more skin than the rest of us. His pouty little mouth was pursed into a disagreeable little circle.

“It’s not up to me to say how cyanide could have gotten into the candy,” he said. “That will be up to law enforcement authorities. But I’d be derelict in my duty if I smelled that almond aroma and said nothing.”

“We wouldn’t want you to be derelict in your duty,” the tall man said. He spoke deliberately. “And now, miss, I gather that you’re Mrs. TenHuis’s niece.”

“Yes. I’m Lee McKinney.”

“I’m Hogan Jones. I’m chief of police for Warner Pier. And I gather that you know something about the chocolates.”

“I delivered them.”

“Tell me about it.”

I told him. About how Aunt Nettie had taken the bonbons, truffles, molded chocolate, and fruits from the workroom storage and loaded them onto the silver trays that Clementine Ripley had sent. And how she had prepared a small box with samples.

“Did you see her put the chocolates in that box?”

“No. She did it while I was combing my hair. But I’m sure someone saw her. There’s nothing sneaky about Aunt Nettie. And she’s very proud of the quality of her chocolates.”

The tenor—he wore an EMT jacket—sniffed. “Well! She may be proud of her candies, but we all know she had a good reason not to like Clementine Ripley.”

I turned on him. “I’ve only been back in Warner Pier a week, and I’ve already heard all kinds of bad things about Clementine Ripley. She was supposedly crooked. She beat the city out of this land and hurt the community economically. Plus, every news magazine in the country has had some story about how she kept some guilty clinic—I mean, client!—out of prison. Who did like her?”

“I used to.”

The words came from behind me, near the French doors. I whirled toward the speaker.

It was Joe Woodyard. He was standing in one of the doorways that led out to the terrace.

I could have died on the spot. Not only had I been speaking ill of the dead, I’d been doing it at the top of my voice in front of the dead’s ex-husband. I expected Joe to tear into me about the way I’d been talking about Clementine Ripley.

But he didn’t pay any attention to me.

“Hi, Joe,” the police chief said. “This is bad business. How’d you find out about it?”

“Hugh called me.”

“Ah.” The chief nodded.

Hugh? Wasn’t that the security guard? I didn’t ask the question. In fact, I stood as still as a rabbit with a coyote nosing around outside its hole. I didn’t move. I didn’t speak, I didn’t do anything that might call anyone’s attention to me.

Joe Woodyard walked around the three of us, zigzagged past the uniformed cops, and knelt beside Clementine Ripley’s body. I couldn’t see his face. He reached out and touched her hair gently. Then he stood up and turned toward the police chief. He looked pretty serious.