The Chocolate Snowman Murders Page 6

  “Cell phone.” McCullough sounded thoughtful. “What kind of cell phone did Mendenhall have?”

  “I never saw it,” I said. “I talked to him on it, but he had put it away by the time we met at the airport.”

  “I only heard it,” Joe said. “Or I guess I did. I called his number from outside the room, and I could hear the ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’ But he didn’t answer, and I never saw Mendenhall at all. Alive.”

  “You heard the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?”

  “That’s right. One of those special rings.”

  McCullough made just one more request before he sent Joe and me off to headquarters. He asked to search my purse.

  I responded by dumping the contents out on the bed, then handing the empty bag to McCullough. He and Robertson looked through my junk. I had makeup, keys, a billfold—containing an embarrassingly small amount of money, two credit cards, and a snapshot of Joe—two old grocery lists, a packet of Kleenex, and a small zipper case with a dozen plastic cards which entitled me to special treatment when buying books, groceries, greeting cards, hardware, and other items. They looked at all the numbers in my cell phone and wrote down the one I said belonged to Mendenhall.

  Joe and I were then driven to the Lake Knapp police station. We each had another session, going over our stories. Mine didn’t change, and I’m sure Joe’s didn’t either. Then we each had our fingerprints taken with one of those strange electronic machines now in use for that chore. It was two hours before we were delivered back to the motel. By then it was way past lunchtime. Joe moved his truck to the parking lot of the chain restaurant next door, and we went in and grabbed a booth.

  I ordered a hamburger with extra mustard and pickles and told them to leave everything else off; Michigan has great food, but ordinary, everyday restaurants tend to think a hamburger is a dry meat patty and a dry bun. If they put anything on, it’s ketchup, and that’s heresy to a Texan.

  As soon as the waitress left, I spoke to Joe. “Did I see traces of fingerprint dust on your dashboard?”

  “Yep. I told them to go ahead and search the truck. I guess they didn’t find anything, or they would have kept it.”

  “Do you think McCullough seriously suspects either of us?”

  “He seems to be a pretty smart guy, Lee, so I imagine that he’s still keeping all his options open. I can see at least one thing that doesn’t seem to fit in with either of us killing Mendenhall.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The guy’s cell phone is missing.”

  I gasped. “Golly! That went right by me.”

  “Yeah. McCullough didn’t make a big deal out of it, but it’s obvious that they haven’t found Mendenhall’s cell phone.”

  “It could still turn up in the motel room. Under the bed or someplace.”

  “By now they will have looked every place that’s likely. My guess is that the killer took it.”

  “Why?”

  The waitress came with our drinks then, so I had time to think through the answer to my own question. As soon as she left, Joe and I leaned toward each other and did our unison-speaking act again.

  “The killer’s number was on the phone.” Then we both sat back, looking at each other.

  “But, Joe,” I said, “can’t the police trace Mendenhall’s calls, even without the phone?”

  “Sure. The cops will find out who had his phone service and call them. They’ll know all the calls he made—oh, by five o’clock today—even if they don’t find the phone.”

  “Then why would the killer take it away?”

  “Maybe he—or she—took it by accident. That’s one reason they searched the truck. Mendenhall could have dropped it there. And it might have somehow wound up in your purse.”

  “Like he left it in the seat of the truck, and I thought it was mine? Something like that.” I grabbed up my ski jacket and hastily went through the pockets. “No, I’m sure I don’t have it. I was wearing jeans yesterday, and they’re tight. I would never have put a cell phone in my pants pocket.”

  “I know you don’t have it,” Joe said, “because when I called Mendenhall’s cell number around six thirty yesterday, I heard the phone ring inside the room. But when I called this morning, standing outside his door, I didn’t hear it. So I think that phone left the premises between last night and this morning.”

  “But taking the phone was useless, since the cops can trace the calls anyway.”

  Joe shrugged. “The killer might not have known that.”

  “You mean it’s someone who doesn’t know much about phones?”

  “Could be.”

  “But who would Mendenhall have called? George didn’t talk as if the man had any personal connection with Michigan.”

  “He’d been in contact with George, of course. But in any case, McCullough and his team will figure it out.”

  “I guess there’s nothing we can do.”

  Joe reached across the table and took my hand. “There’s one thing I can do, Lee. Warn you about McCullough.”

  “I caught on to the fatherly act.”

  “Good. I did call Webb while they were questioning you. Just to alert him to the situation.”

  “What was his advice?”

  “Play it just the way we have been. Be honest and open. But he said not to underestimate McCullough. He retired from the Grand Rapids force—and Webb was a little cagey about that.”

  “McCullough retired under a cloud?”

  “Webb wouldn’t say. McCullough’s record wasn’t bad enough to keep this suburban force from hiring him. But Webb says McCullough’s a really smart guy and can be tricky. So if he wants to question you again, call Webb before you talk to him. Okay?”

  I shuddered. “I hate this, Joe. I hate having to watch every word I say. I hate being under suspicion. I hate having people think I’m capable of killing someone.”

  At that point I looked up and my eyes met those of the man in the next booth. He was staring right at me, and I couldn’t believe the look on his face. It could only be called a leer.

  A stranger was leering at me? Why? I was dressed conservatively—blazer and slacks. I wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup. And I thought I’d been behaving myself.

  Then I recognized the guy. It was the desk clerk from the motel, the one who had offered to “do me a favor,” apparently meaning he would not identify me as the woman who dropped Mendenhall off at the motel. He hadn’t specified what favor I would have had to do in return. But he’d made it clear he had thought I was a professional girl bringing a client to his motel.

  The creep.

  “I also hate people thinking I’m a call girl,” I said.

  Joe’s eyes popped. “Who thinks that?”

  “The guy in the booth behind you.” We hadn’t been talking loudly, but I lowered my voice even more as I told Joe about my run-in with the desk clerk.

  Joe frowned. He also kept his voice low. “It would give me a lot of pleasure to tie him in a knot,” he said. “But right at this juncture it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do the protective-husband act.”

  “I’m afraid McCullough would be sure to hear about it,” I said. “You’d probably be in jail before the hamburgers get here. Let’s talk about something else. For example, I stopped by George Jenkins’ gallery this morning and told him he’d lost another juror.”

  We talked about George, then went on to the rest of the WinterFest committee.

  “Do you think we need to call Ramona?” I said.

  “Let George do it. I’m hungry.”

  The food came, and we both tucked in. As I predicted, the hamburgers weren’t much, but the French fries were pretty good, and there was a tomato slice on the side of the plate. We ate in a hurry, since we both wanted to get out of there and head home. The desk clerk in the next booth had just received his order when we stood up, ready to go.

  Joe winked at me and spoke loudly. “You’ll have to hurry, dear. I know you don’t want to be late for Bible study.”r />
  I tried not to look at the desk clerk, but his eyes were wide as we went by his booth. I didn’t laugh.

  The day had warmed up, and the gutters of the busy street were full of slush, so Joe drove me across the street, left me at my van, then told me he’d see me at home. While the van was warming up, I called Aunt Nettie, to tell her I was okay and to see how TenHuis Chocolade was going. I think I wanted to touch base with my normal life.

  “Oh, Lee, I’ve been so worried,” she said. “Does Hogan need to come up there and see what’s going on? I mean, what’s the point of having a police chief in the family if you never use him?”

  I assured Aunt Nettie that Joe and I were on our way home, but I didn’t tell her we were both still under suspicion. We could discuss the situation with Hogan later.

  Hogan Jones and his first wife had moved to Warner Pier after he had retired from the Cincinnati police department. After his wife died the next year, he became the chief and the sole detective for Warner Pier’s five-person police department. And the previous summer he’d taken on Aunt Nettie as the second Mrs. Jones. Both of them had had long, happy first marriages, and they seemed to be settling in for a second marriage that would be as happy and maybe as long.

  Aunt Nettie did pass along two messages: Ramona VanWinkle-Snow and George Jenkins both wanted me to call as soon as possible. I sighed. I knew these were the first of many calls from people who would want all the details on Mendenhall.

  I started with George, since Aunt Nettie said he had called first. He answered on the second ring.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Lee. Were you able to get the show judged?”

  “Oh, yes, that worked out.” Then George began to ask about just what had happened, but I said I’d talk to him later. “I need to get started for home,” I said, “and I don’t like to talk while I’m driving if I can avoid it.”

  “I just wish I’d had my phone turned on last night so I could take Mendenhall’s call.”

  “I’d forgotten that you said Mendenhall called you last night. That call may be important!”

  “It wasn’t important enough for him to tell me what he wanted. He just made some incoherent remarks and left his number.”

  I started to tell George that Mendenhall’s phone was missing, then decided to allow McCullough to handle that. After all, I might be mistaken.

  “Phone calls Mendenhall made to anyone might be important,” I said. “I wouldn’t erase the message.”

  “I had e-mailed Mendenhall a copy of the committee roster,” George said. “He could have called anybody.”

  I hung up then and sat in the supermarket parking lot, thinking a moment, before I called Ramona. Mendenhall had had a complete list of the WinterFest committee members. Hmmm.

  I pictured Mendenhall running down the sidewalk as I pulled out of the motel. He’d been furious. So, I wondered, after I disappeared, what would he have done?

  A man that mad probably wouldn’t just go back to his room and watch television, I decided. No, he’d do something, even if it was stupid. And since we knew he had a cell phone, and we could assume he’d brought his list of WinterFest committee members with him, and he was unlikely to know anybody else in Michigan—well, he probably got that list out and began calling people.

  I had just reached that conclusion when the phone in my hand rang. It did not play “The Hallelujah Chorus,” but I jumped as if the noise was the last trumpet. I probably sounded scared to death when I answered. “Hello.”

  “Lee, it’s Ramona.”

  “I just got your message.”

  “Are you and Joe all right? Will you be back soon?”

  “Yes. We had to make statements, and it took a lot of time, but I’m leaving Grand Rapids now.”

  “We’ve called a special committee meeting for six thirty. I hope both of you can make it. It will be at the Warner Point Center office, right before the opening reception.”

  The opening reception. Damn. After the day I’d had so far, the last thing I wanted to do was go to a big party where everybody I knew was going to want Joe and me to tell them all the details about finding a murdered man and explain how Fletcher Mendenhall came to be in the place where he was found.

  My impulse was to tell Ramona I was going to go home, take a hot shower, and crawl in bed.

  But logic asserted itself.

  First, Joe and I simply couldn’t hole up and refuse to see our friends. It might make us look guilty.

  Second, if we went to the meeting and the party, the whole WinterFest committee ought to be there. Maybe we would find out more about Mendenhall and whether he had called anybody with the missing phone.

  “Joe and I might be a bit late,” I said, “but we’ll be there.”

  Chapter 6

  I got to the office at four o’clock and found a dozen e-mails waiting. I replied to one of them—a major customer who needed a rush order of eight-inch chocolate Christmas trees decorated with tiny chocolate toys. I promised that we’d make them the next day and overnight them to her. The rest of the messages dealt with Valentine’s Day items or chocolates from our regular stock. They could wait, but it was still after five when I left for home to get ready for the WinterFest art show opening reception, the biggest event of Warner Pier’s limited winter social season.

  I’d called Joe as soon as I talked to Ramona, so he’d gone straight home and was already getting dressed when I got there. I jumped into our wonderful tiled shower and felt glad Joe had remodeled the old farmhouse bathroom as soon as we had moved in the previous summer. When I got out I was ready to climb into my best party dress—the knee-length champagne number I’d worn to get married the previous spring. It had long sleeves, so I could wear it around the calendar. I did drape a paisley shawl over my shoulders. The gold, brown, rust, and amber shades complemented the dress, I thought, and would make me look wintry. Joe was wearing his wedding outfit, too, though probably I was the only person who could tell it wasn’t his regular lawyer suit. By six fifteen we were ready to knock ’em dead at the WinterFest opening.

  Before we went out the door, I asked Joe a question. “Do we have any goal at this event?”

  “Goal?”

  “Yes. You’re city attorney. You often need to drop a casual word to someone, something you want to say without making it look purposeful. I’ve known you to leave for the post office at seven in the morning so you could catch somebody ‘accidentally.’ ”

  “True.”

  “So? What about tonight? Do we have a goal?”

  “I always have people I need to talk to about city business. But as far as a goal for you and me, it’s to let it be known that the Lake Knapp police want to talk to anybody who spoke with Mendenhall last night.”

  “And to tell everybody we didn’t do him in.”

  “Right.”

  “And to come home early. I’m exhausted.”

  “Right again.” Joe kissed my cheek. “Let’s go.”

  We got into the van and drove to the Warner Point Conference Center.

  The conference center has played an important part in our lives. Ten years earlier, the land it stood on had been acquired by Joe’s first wife, famed defense attorney Clementine Ripley, as payment for a legal fee. The triangular property has Lake Michigan as one boundary and the Warner River as a second. All that waterfront makes it one of the most valuable pieces of property within a hundred miles.

  On it Clementine Ripley built a showplace home, actually a series of stone buildings, simple in design and linked by glassed-in walkways. Then she stained the woodwork and floors stark black, and had the walls painted stark white. The result, to my way of thinking, was rooms that looked so cold they were like walk-in freezers even when the temperature was ninety degrees outside.

  Joe never talks much about his life as Clementine Ripley’s husband, but he did tell me she didn’t consult him about the house. Or maybe he didn’t show any interest when he was consulted. Anyhow, he only admits having input on the b
oathouse.

  The house seems to have been one of the final nails in the coffin of the Woodyard-Ripley marriage. Joe hated it, and he was beginning to realize that his original feelings for his wife had been based on a sort of crazy heroworship, an admiration for her abilities as a defense attorney, rather than a true estimate of her character. At the same time Clementine was apparently realizing the young lawyer she had married wasn’t willing to approve her questionable ethics and didn’t like her spend-likethere’s-no-tomorrow lifestyle. The divorce was amicable in the sense that they both wanted out.

  A year later Clementine died without changing a will made while she and Joe were married, and Joe discovered that he had inherited her estate—including the Warner Point house. The inheritance only added to the nightmare the marriage had been; Joe immediately made it known he didn’t want her money. Then he discovered the truth—there was very little money. The Warner Point house and Clementine’s apartment in Chicago were heavily mortgaged, and an adviser Clementine had trusted had made off with most of her investments. It took Joe two years to get the estate straightened out, and it took two years and all the money he could get together to pay off the Warner Point property’s mortgage.

  And as soon as he’d done that, Joe gave the property to the Village of Warner Pier, to be used as a conference center. He couldn’t do it anonymously, since everybody knew who owned it, but he declined any public recognition of his gift.

  Now the property was gradually becoming useful to the city. Jason Foster had leased the main building and opened a snazzy restaurant, including rooms for special events. It was drawing weddings and smaller banquets from all over western Michigan. An experienced bedand-breakfast operator was about to build an adjoining inn. There was talk of putting up an outdoor pavilion for summer events.

  And Joe was gradually becoming able to enter the property without visibly shuddering.

  He dropped me at the wide stone steps leading to the main entrance, since they had been thoroughly cleared of snow. Even the giant snowman was gone for the evening; a volunteer would be wearing the suit for the art show opening. But the building looked festive, with swags of greenery, tiny lights, and red bows everywhere.