The Chocolate Raccoon Rigmarole Read online

  “Wounded? Tough luck.”

  Joe nodded. “From what he says, two of the guys in his unit had to pull him out, unconscious, and he spent quite a while in hospital and rehab. But Mike seems to be a pretty nice guy. I doubt we’ll see an obit for somebody named Bob in the Holland Sentinel tomorrow.”

  We both laughed. The idea seemed ridiculous.

  Joe’s coffee club changes its makeup often. Sometimes I think all the guys have in common is a liking for coffee and another liking for doughnuts. And it’s rare for all of them to show up for the club on the same day.

  So far, no career women in our small town have asked to be included. Which may be a mistake on the women’s part; the coffee club hears all the gossip first, and sometimes I get tired of getting it secondhand.

  But on this particular day I was concentrating on my visit to Holland. I forgot Mike Westerly as I considered taking time for a little shopping. In fact, I forgot Mike Westerly and his problems for about a week. And I didn’t hear a word about anybody named Bob dying.

  I stay pretty busy with chocolate. When they were young, my aunt Nettie and uncle Phil TenHuis spent a year in Holland—the country Holland—apprenticing in the chocolate business. They came back to their hometown as experts in truffles, bonbons, and beautiful molded chocolates—a perfect business for what we think is the best resort on the Great Lakes, Warner Pier.

  I had worked at TenHuis Chocolade during my teenage summers, and after Uncle Phil died, I brought my accounting degree to the shop and joined Aunt Nettie. I hadn’t planned to stay forever, but now I hope I can.

  We’ve both acquired husbands who are nice guys. Aunt Nettie’s is Warner Pier’s police chief, Hogan Jones.

  For marketing reasons, we do a lot of themes at the shop, and this summer’s special chocolates centered around small wild animals of the area, using molds representing beavers, squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons.

  My favorites are the chocolate squirrels. Somehow they taste nuttier.

  I’d almost forgotten Mike making threats at the Rest-Stop until, late one evening a week or so later, the phone rang. Joe was working extra late at the boat shop, and I answered.

  An excited voice boomed out. “Lee! It’s Dolly! I need Joe!”

  The fact that she was yelling didn’t worry me; Dolly’s always yelling.

  “Hi, Dolly,” I said. “Joe’s not here. I can take a message.”

  “This is an emergency! Mike needs help, and he needs it right now!”

  That made me a bit concerned. “Did you try to catch Joe at the boat shop?”

  “No! I tried his cell! And he’s not picking up.”

  “I’m sure he’s on his way home. I can have him call you. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s Mike! And this new sheriff! The idiot seems to think Mike is a burglar!”

  Chapter 2

  I tried to keep my voice quiet, the way Joe does. Every lawyer gets excited calls from clients. Usually Joe can calm people down by sounding calm himself.

  “Where is Mike?” I asked.

  “In our alley! Get Joe here quick!” And Dolly hung up.

  “Dolly? Dolly?” I couldn’t believe she had done that. I stared at the phone. “I need information! You can’t just hang up!”

  But she had. I stood there, trying to decide what to do. I was still staring at the phone when headlights bounced on the trees in our yard. Joe had come home. I could hand the problem—whatever it was—off to him.

  Not for one moment did it occur to me that Mike could really be suspected of robbing somebody. After all, Mike was a friend. Also a cop, of sorts. Warner Pier paid Mike to keep us from being robbed.

  When Joe came in the house, he wasn’t happy about the message I gave him. He had already done a day’s work in his Holland office, then skipped dinner to work in the boat shop for three hours more. He deserved food and an hour of sitting with his feet up in front of some mindless television show before he took a nice hot shower. A trip to help a—maybe—client was not likely to be on his preferred schedule.

  But I fixed him a meat loaf sandwich, something easy to eat in the car, and volunteered to drive him back to town. In a small place like ours it doesn’t take long to get wherever we’re going.

  Joe sighed as he climbed into the passenger side of my van and slammed the door. For a moment I thought he had merely wanted to drive. Like most men, Joe thinks that if the car is moving, he should be behind the wheel.

  But a second sigh changed my mind. Then he spoke. “Thanks for the sandwich,” he said. “I should have quit earlier. I’m tired. But I didn’t see any excitement as I came through town.”

  “You wouldn’t have passed our alley,” I said. “So you couldn’t have seen anything.”

  “And that’s where Dolly said she was?”

  “She said Mike has tangled with the sheriff, and something had happened in the alley behind the shop. Which, of course, is also the alley behind her apartment. That’s all the definite information I got.”

  “Frankly, I can’t think of any business worth robbing in your block. The only places that are open this early in the season are the shoe shop, the wine shop, and TenHuis Chocolade. But you don’t handle much cash. And the other shops handle even less.”

  “True. Nearly all sales are by check or credit card. I hope this is a false alarm.”

  “I do, too. I consider both Dolly and Mike my friends. I don’t want to find them in some big mess.” Joe took a bite of meat loaf sandwich and used a paper napkin to wipe at a splotch of mayonnaise that had squirted onto his work shirt.

  But when we got to the block where TenHuis Chocolade is located, there were a half-dozen vehicles with flashing lights in the alley.

  “Bad sign,” I said. “Some of those are definitely county cars. I guess the sheriff’s here.”

  “I see the chief’s car, too,” Joe said. “And Mike’s work truck is down there.”

  I parked my van on the side street, and we walked toward the alley. We’d taken only a few steps when someone called out.

  “Lee! Joe!”

  Both of us stopped and turned toward the sounds.

  “It’s T. J.!” I said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Remember that he’s on the late shift now,” Joe said.

  I groaned. “Oh yeah. Getting life experience.”

  Joe and I stood still and waited for T. J., or “Tony Junior.” At seventeen, he now was taller than his dad, and he strongly resembled that member of Joe’s coffee club.

  Behind him was an older man, a bit shorter than T. J., wearing a black baseball cap. He was slightly built, making him look underfed to me. This was T. J.’s boss in his job cleaning kitchens. He had moved to Warner Pier only a few weeks earlier, but I knew him by sight.

  The two of them weren’t carrying cleaning materials, but the man had a small gadget in his hand. He put it in his pocket, and I saw it was a cell phone. “Interesting light patterns from all these cop cars,” he said.

  He turned away. “Come on, T. J.”

  “I gotta find out what’s going on,” T. J. said. “Joe, Lee—has there been a crime or something?”

  Joe answered, “All we know is that somebody apparently needs a lawyer.”

  T. J. and his companion stopped a couple of yards from us, and Joe took a step toward the older man. “I’m Joe Woodyard,” he said.

  “Watt Wicker.”

  Joe offered his hand. “Mike Herrera speaks highly of you. How’s your new assistant working out?”

  T. J. ducked his head. “Aw, Joe. Watt’s got better things to do than talk about me.”

  Watt and Joe both laughed. Then Joe turned back to T. J. “I’ll leave a message on your phone,” Joe said. “You get finished up and get home to bed.”

  “We’re only getting started with Herrera’s,” T. J. said. “So we’l
l be on the job several more hours. I’m just curious. So many weird things have happened in the past couple of weeks.”

  “Really?” Joe made his own voice sound curious. “Are you talking about the invasion of the raccoons?”

  This brought a snicker from Watt and a scoffing sound from T. J. “Aw, Joe! You know I mean the burglars. This gang has hit five or six places in the past two weeks!”

  “The chief may not read it that way,” Joe said. “Anyhow, if we find out anything interesting, I’ll tell you.”

  “Yeah, T. J.,” Watt said. “If Joe is here, I guess Mike will be okay.”

  Joe laughed. “You must have met my mother. She paid the bills for law school.”

  Watt nodded, but kept his deadpan expression. “Come on, T. J. We’ve still got two kitchens to do.”

  T. J. looked rebellious, and he was definitely muttering as he followed the older man.

  Joe and I looked at each other and grinned. Yes, T. J. was getting life experience.

  We walked toward the lights. A knot of lawmen and civilians had formed behind our shop. I could hear talking, loud talking. It was Dolly. Her voice was doing its usual booming, coming out of the darkness. “Mike was just coming to see me!” she yelled. “He drops by during his break!”

  Then Mike spoke. “Dolly! I can handle this if you’ll quit talkin’!”

  But her voice continued. “This so-called law officer—”

  “Dolly!” “Quiet, Dolly!” It took two deep voices to drown her out. There was a moment of quiet, and when someone spoke again, I realized it was my uncle—my aunt’s husband—Police Chief Hogan Jones. Hogan’s voice was quiet but firm.

  “Dolly, you can have a turn in a few minutes,” he said.

  By now I could see the group more clearly, and I saw Hogan turn toward a man in a tan uniform. I recognized him as Ben Vinton, Warner County sheriff.

  As Warner Pier police chief, Hogan is responsible for law enforcement in our small town, and he’s hired by the town council.

  The sheriff, Vinton, is an elected county official. He’s responsible for rural areas and for small towns without their own law enforcement. He and Hogan frequently work together. Hogan wouldn’t want Dolly to be disrespectful to the sheriff. He needed to get along with him.

  Hogan cleared his throat. “Ben, I think this is all just a mix-up. Mike really is the night patrolman in Warner Pier. He makes two rounds a night, checking on the stores. I brought him around and introduced him to you last month.”

  “I remember. But why did we get a call tonight?”

  Hogan’s throat rumbled again, and he spoke. “We’ll have to find that out. But first, maybe Paige here could put her pistol away, and we could ask Mike to stand up.”

  The sheriff looked around at the crowd. He seemed to shrink into his uniform. He had quite an audience of Warner Pier residents and law officers.

  “It’s okay, Paige,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of backup here now. Put the gun away.”

  I turned to look at a new character. This one was a woman. She wore a tan uniform that coordinated with the sheriff’s outfit.

  “You’re the boss,” she said. Her voice trembled. “But this guy is big. And he’s a stranger to me!”

  Dolly’s voice boomed. “Ha! Being big is no crime!”

  Hogan didn’t speak, but he looked toward Dolly and gave a glare that would have stopped a riot. Or incited one.

  As Deputy Paige replaced her pistol in her holster, it seemed to me that both Joe and Hogan relaxed slightly. And I felt stupid. Until Paige was told to put her gun away, I hadn’t even realized that a firearm was part of the scenario we were watching.

  In fact, the light was so crazy that I hadn’t seen either Dolly or Mike at first. Now I saw that Dolly was standing against the back door to TenHuis Chocolade, and that Mike had been spread-eagled on the asphalt pavement.

  I knew both of them as law-abiding citizens. But if I’d been walking down a dark alley, I might not have wanted to run into either of them, given their sizes.

  With Hogan sounding calm, and the sheriff backing him up, the situation sorted itself out. But Mike stood up slowly, looking as nonthreatening as a giant is able to. Hogan saw Joe, and used a nod of his head to draw him into the inner circle, introducing him as the city attorney, a job Joe holds as a volunteer. In a quiet voice, Hogan asked me to take Dolly up to her apartment and wait. Dolly didn’t like that much, but I was able to nudge her into the TenHuis building and up the back stairs to her apartment. When she tried to talk, I shushed her until she began to make sense.

  Apparently the whole brouhaha had started over a call reporting a break-in at the jewelry shop—actually the soon-to-be-opened jewelry shop—next door to our chocolate business. The deputy, Paige, answered the call. She had surprised Mike on his rounds and didn’t recognize him. When she saw a huge man in the alley, she held him at gunpoint. Despite Dolly’s loud objections.

  Now two of the Warner Pier patrolmen and two of the sheriff’s deputies were to be sent into the building next to ours to look around, and Hogan wanted me to keep Dolly calm.

  When Dolly finished her tale, she threw herself into an easy chair, covered her face with her hands, and began to sob.

  The sight of a weeping giantess scared me. I found a box of Kleenex in the bathroom and brought it to Dolly. She blew her nose loudly and rubbed mascara all around her eyes.

  “Oh, Lee,” she shouted. “I’ve made a fool of myself, and Mike’s mad at me. But I was so scared!”

  “Hey! Hey!” I said. “Let’s start over. First, I smell codfish! I mean, coffee. I smell coffee!”

  Like all my good friends, Dolly didn’t turn a hair at my idiotic comment. I suffer from malapropism; this means I mix up words with other words that sound like them. The condition is named after a character in an eighteenth-century play, Mrs. Malaprop, who describes someone as being “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.” I’m a direct descendant of Mrs. Malaprop.

  So Dolly didn’t reply directly. She said, “Yes, I always make a pot for Mike and me to share on his break. Would you like some?”

  “Sounds great.”

  In nearly every crisis, I’ve noted, there are two kinds of people. Those who get hungry, and those who can’t touch food. Dolly and I are both among the hungry ones. A cup of coffee and a Kahlua truffle (“a coffee-flavored interior enrobed in milk chocolate and embellished with a K”) calmed the situation as we waited for news of what was happening to Mike.

  “Since Mike works part-time,” Dolly said, “he works a shift from nine p.m. until eleven or twelve. He takes a break. Then he works another three-hour shift.” Dolly turned red. “And, well, he’s gotten into the habit of dropping by here for coffee and a snack between the two shifts.”

  I assured Dolly that was a perfectly respectable schedule for a dating couple. She seemed reassured as she continued her story. Of course, I knew a lot of it already.

  Warner Pier’s regular police force consisted of five people—the chief, my uncle Hogan; three patrol officers; and a clerical worker. The police department office closed at five o’clock on weekdays. After that time, law enforcement was turned over to the Warner County Sheriff’s Department. They had more staff and operated the county’s 9-1-1 system.

  During the past few weeks, Warner Pier had experienced a series of minor crimes. A half-dozen break-ins and burglaries had plagued our businesses. Merchants got nervous. They urged the city to provide round-the-clock law enforcement, something closer than the county seat.

  Enter Mike Westerly, the former helicopter pilot who, as he had said, had “killed a lot of guys for minimum wage.” Mike was eager to find a steady job in Warner Pier, and at some time in his life he had completed an approved training course for law officers. So Hogan hired him to drive through town a couple of times during the night, to check the entrances of b
usinesses and to keep his eyes open for strange vehicles and suspicious circumstances. Mike also kept his eyes out for raccoons: darling animals who can be pests. Some victims had been blaming the break-ins on the nimble-fingered creatures. This was only sort of a joke, and the animal control department tried, not too successfully, to keep them from invading Warner Pier buildings.

  At each of his stops, Mike would check all the doors and windows, making sure every entrance was locked as it should be and that any security systems were functioning.

  Mike was sharp-eyed and smart, though minimally experienced in law enforcement. If he found anything strange, he called the 9-1-1 operator on duty, the police chief, or the sheriff. He wasn’t supposed to investigate without calling for backup.

  Mike usually ended his first patrol segment with a check of the chocolate shop. I figured that he planned it that way so he could see Dolly.

  I never mentioned those interludes. Mike and Dolly were both adults. I didn’t ask any nosy questions, like whether or not they had discussed marriage. I considered that an extremely happy state, but they might not. For one thing, Mike had once revealed that he had gone through an unhappy marriage. He might not be ready to try again. It wasn’t any of my business.

  This particular evening, Dolly told me, proceeded as usual. Dolly heard Mike’s truck pull up in the alley. This was the signal for turning on the coffeepot. But the next sound she heard wasn’t so usual.

  “I heard that deputy yelling,” Dolly said. “She hollered, ‘Hit the ground, mister.’ And I heard Mike yell back, ‘Hey, I’m from the Warner Pier cops.’ They yelled back and forth. I ran to the bedroom window and opened it. And I could see what was going on by the outside light on the building across the alley.”

  Dolly quit talking and sighed deeply. “I guess that’s when I lost it.”

  “Lost it?”

  “It was awful, Lee. That terrible woman made Mike lie down on the filthy asphalt out there by the Dumpster. I yelled out the window, and I tried to tell her that Mike was not an intruder or a burglar or a bad guy of any sort! But she didn’t even seem to hear me!”