The Chocolate Bear Burglary (14 page)

T
he girl was standing on the floor, of course, but she was so fluttery that she almost gave the impression she was perched on the headboard of the bed.

“Who are y’all?” she said in a chirpy little voice.

“We don’t intend to hurt you,” I said. “We’re trying to help Jeff.”

“He promised he wouldn’t tell anybody I was here.”

“He didn’t. We figured it out. Who are you?”

The question seemed to be too hard for her to answer. She twisted her wings—I mean her hands—stood on one foot and lowered her lashes. Maybe it was just her tousled hair that made her look so birdlike, I decided. That and her size. She was tiny, with small, delicate features. She was wearing a white T-shirt, and the effect was of a cute little bird, maybe one of those Easter chickies. Then she moved, and I amended the impression. She looked like a cute little chickie with a cute little bosom.

Her short, spiky hair and the lashes against her cheeks were almost black. She had that fine-grained, pink and ivory skin that I personally would kill for. In fact, when I was sixteen and felt like a giraffe, I’d have killed to look exactly like her.

Finally the girl spoke. “I’m Tess Riley.”

“You came up here with Jeff?”

“Well, sort of. Jeff met me in Chicago.” She fluttered her eyelashes, then looked at us with bright black eyes. “Where is Jeff?”

I looked at Joe, wondering what I should tell her.

Joe didn’t hesitate. “Jeff’s in jail,” he said.

“In jail!”

“Yeah. He may be charged with murder.”

“Murder! Jeff would never kill anyone.” Then the dark eyes grew wide. “Oh, no! He didn’t!” She pressed her hands over her mouth.

“We’re hoping you can alibi him,” Joe said.

“Oh, yes! Anything I can do. Jeff was with me.”

“Oh?” Joe said. “He was with you about eight p.m. last night?”

I drew a breath and looked at him. Joe touched my arm in what was obviously a signal for me to keep quiet.

Tess didn’t hesitate. “Eight o’clock? Oh, yes! Jeff was here then.”

I almost groaned. She not only looked like a bird, she apparently thought like one. Just what we needed. A dippy little cuckoo who was willing to lie for Jeff.

She was warming to her theme now. “Right. Jeff came here a little before eight, and he brought me something to eat.”

She gestured, and I saw one of Aunt Nettie’s refrigerator dishes on the desk. Jeff had brought her the leftover sloppy joe. Joe and I looked at each other, but neither of us spoke.

Tess went on. “We watched television, and then we went out for a drive. Then we came back here. Jeff stayed until after midnight.”

“But he came before eight o’clock?” Joe said.

“Oh, yes! I’m sure he was here by then.”

“That’s really funny,” I said. “Since at my house Jeff was helping me with the dinner dishes at eight o’clock.”

“Oh!”

“Why don’t we all sit down,” Joe said. “Tess, are you hungry? Lee? We could go out to breakfast. Maybe we could get acquainted a little. Then Tess might trust us enough to tell the truth.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t lie.”

“You just did,” Joe said.

“You tricked me!” Tess perched on the edge of the bed and did the eyelash thing again. “When does Jeff need an alibi for?”

“I don’t think we’d better tell you, Tess. If you feel sure that Jeff would never kill anyone . . .”

“Oh, I do. Jeff would never commit murder.”

“In that case, all Jeff needs is the truth. He’s obviously trying to keep you out of the situation. Why?”

“Because he’s really a nice guy.”

I was beginning to get a little impatient with Chicky Tess. “Jeff may be a nice guy,” I said, “but most nice girls don’t hide out in motels. Why is Jeff trying to keep you out of sight? Why didn’t he just bring you out to my aunt’s house?”

“He wanted to.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“I was afraid.”

“Of us?”

“Oh, no! Not of you. Of . . . of . . .” She wasn’t a very good liar. I could see the improvisation flitting around in her head. “I was afraid of . . .”

“Forget it!” Joe’s voice was harsh. “We’ll just call the police to come and get you.”

“No! Then he’ll find me!”

“Who?”

“My family! And if they find me, then . . .”

“Then what? What would happen?”

“If they find me, my dad’s boss will find out, and then the police will think they know why Jeff might want to kill a guy!”

Kill a guy? That stopped me, and it seemed to stop Joe, too. Neither of us said anything, but we looked at each other.

It was beginning to sound as if Tess thought Jeff really might have killed someone. But she expected it to be a male person—a “guy.” And you could call Gail Hess a lot of things, but no Texas girl would ever call her a guy.

Joe rephrased the question a couple of times, but Tess quit talking. Finally he sighed. “Look. Tess. You obviously don’t know anything about the crime Jeff is suspected of committing. If you’ll just talk to the police chief, then you may be able to straighten everything out. But you’ve got to tell the truth. You can help Jeff the most if you tell the truth.”

“But I can’t. . . .”

Joe went on. “Frankly, you’re not a very good liar, and you’ll get tripped up right away. So get dressed, and we’ll take you over to the police station.”

“The police station!”

“Yes. If you tell a straight story, maybe we’ll get to take Jeff home.”

“Yes. Come on,” I said. “If you really want to help Jeff—”

“Oh, I do!”

“Then get dressed.”

Joe moved toward the door. “I’ll wait outside.”

Tess gathered up an armful of clothes and disappeared into the bathroom. I sat down in the one chair. Obviously Joe was right not to question Tess further. She was willing to say anything, and she wasn’t bright enough to tell a good lie. She’d sound coached if we talked to her too much before Chief Jones did.

I laid my head back in the chair and realized that I was tired right through to the bone. I had almost dozed off when I heard Tess give a yelp. Then I heard a sliding noise. In two leaps I was at the bathroom door.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing! Nothing!” Tess sounded like something had happened, but she didn’t explain. I heard the sliding noise again. Then the door opened. Tess came out, pouting. Behind her I saw a window, the kind with clouded glass to keep people from looking in. It had been raised about an inch.

I almost laughed. The temperature in west Michigan that February morning was about fifteen. Nobody in their right mind was going to be opening a bathroom window for a little ventilation. Tess had obviously tried to open it with the idea of crawling out. I went into the bathroom and looked out through the crack. There was a storm window, of course, and the light outside was dim, but I could plainly see Joe standing about twenty feet away, with his back to the window. He’d been way ahead of me in anticipating that our birdbrained little Tess might try to flit.

Tess had put on an SMU sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that couldn’t have been bigger than size three. She was wearing socks and tennis shoes.

“Why don’t you pack up your stuff, Tess,” I said. “You can move out to the house.”

“I don’t want to impose on you.”

“Do you have any money?”

“Not a lot.”

“Jeff says he doesn’t have any either. And I can’t afford motel rooms. If you don’t want to contact your parents, I don’t think you have a lot of choices. I assure you my aunt is perfectly respectable, and now that we know you exist, she’ll worry a lot more about you being in a motel than being in her spare bedroom.”

Tess didn’t look convinced, but she put her few belongings into a backpack—she obviously hadn’t been any more prepared for a long trip than Jeff had—and gathered makeup and toothbrush out of the bathroom. When she got to the stage of putting on her jacket, I went to the bathroom window, pushed it up, and looked out. Joe was still there. I rapped on the storm window, and he turned around. I waved, and he made a circular motion, pantomiming coming around the building. He was there by the time Tess and I got her stuff into the floor of the truck’s cab.

“I told the manager you were checking out,” he said.

Tess fluttered her eyelashes. “You’re not really going to take me to the police chief, are you?”

“Not on an empty stomach,” Joe said. “The Stop and Shop should have some fresh doughnuts by now.”

Tess refused a doughnut, and she pouted all the way to the police station. She hung on to my arm, looking terrified, after we got out of the truck. She was so short I felt as if I were dragging her along.

Chief Jones was coming out as we approached the door.

“Hi, Chief,” I said. “We found out why Jeff kept coming into town in the middle of the night.”

“Well, well.” The chief looked Tess over. “I was gonna call all the motels after I had breakfast. I figured Jeff wasn’t coming in to admire the quaint Victorian decor.”

Tess cast imploring looks at us, but the chief escorted her into his office and left Joe and me in the outer room. I called Aunt Nettie to tell her the latest development.

“I should have known enough about human nature to figure that out,” she said. “I’ll change Jeff’s bed. He’ll have to sleep on the cot in the little room.”

“I just hope he gets out of jail,” I said.

I told Joe to go home, but he said he’d stick around.

“Thanks,” I said.

He shrugged.

I sat down on a plastic chair, and I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew Joe tapped me on the shoulder, and I opened my eyes and saw the chief coming out of his office. He motioned for Joe and me to come in. Tess was huddled in a chair. The four of us filled up the little office.

“Now, Miss Riley, I’m going to paraphrase your story,” he said. “You correct me if I’m wrong.”

Tess looked at him adoringly and nodded. He smiled back. She’d found somebody who was susceptible to eyelashes. Good for her.

The story the chief told us was incomplete. Tess said she was from Tyler, Texas, and that she was a freshman at SMU. She had left her dorm room five days earlier and had driven north from Dallas. She had not really explained why she had taken a notion to do this.

When she got to Chicago, she’d seen she was going to run out of money pretty quick. So she called Jeff—“He’s a good friend,” she said when the chief got to that part of the story—and asked him to wire her money. Instead, Jeff got in his car and drove to Chicago to meet her. But Jeff hadn’t had any money either. So early in the morning two days earlier they had headed for Michigan, apparently because Jeff thought I’d be a soft touch.

“So,” I said, “you were the person in the second car with the Texas plates.” I’d figured that out, of course, but I wanted to confirm it.

“Yes, I was,” Tess said. She looked at the chief and fluttered her eyelashes. “Jeff said you’d towed my car.”

“It’s in the lot out back.”

“I guess I can pick it up now.”

“The gas tank is still close to empty,” Chief Jones said. He continued her story.

When Tess and Jeff got to Warner Pier, Jeff rented a motel room, using almost the last of their pooled money, then went out to Aunt Nettie’s house, where he was discovered by Joe before he fell in the window over the stairwell. Jeff had sneaked into town that evening and the next to see her.

“Tess says that Jeff was with her from eleven p.m. until around one thirty last night,” the chief said. Tess nodded eagerly. “She was tired of being cooped up in the motel room, so they went out for a ride a little after one o’clock. After about fifteen minutes, Jeff suddenly said she had to go back to the motel, because he’d seen something he had to check up on.”

“The person in front of the shop,” I said.

“Maybe. But Jeff didn’t tell her that. So her story substantiates Jeff’s, sorta, but it’s not really an alibi.”

“Still, her presence in Warner Pier explains a few things,” Joe said. “Now we know why Jeff was sneaking into town in the middle of the night. That fills the biggest gap in his story. Can you let him go?”

Chief Jones looked more Lincolnesque than ever. “Well, I’d like to wait until we see what the medical examiner says. And whether or not there are any fingerprints on that bat.”

I started to speak, then remembered that Joe was the lawyer.

“We couldn’t really expect any fingerprints when the temperatures are down in the twenties,” Joe said. “Unless the murderer was too macho for mittens. And the medical examiner isn’t going to be real specific about a time of death. After all, even when I got to the scene, Gail had only been dead a little while. Jeff must have stumbled across her body very soon after she died.”

“I’m still going to hold on to him until I can run a couple of checks,” the chief said.

Tess fluttered her eyelashes again. “What kind of checks?”

Joe spoke before the chief could. “He’s probably going to see if Texas—or anyplace else—has outstanding warrants for you or Jeff. So if there’s anything you want to tell us, now’s the time.”

Tess sighed and leaned back in her chair. “No, that’s okay.”

Tess asked to see Jeff, but the chief told her to come back later. Tess produced her car keys, and the chief escorted us out to the City Hall parking lot, where Tess’s car occupied a corner. Joe brought Tess’s backpack around from his truck, and I began to give Tess directions to Aunt Nettie’s. “We’ll stop at the Shell station, and I’ll buy you some gas,” I said.

But Tess wasn’t paying any attention to me. She was staring at her car.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Tess pointed. “My taillight. How did it get broken?”

I
stared at the broken taillight, trying not to panic. It was the left one, like on the car Jeff and I had seen. Would Chief Jones think that Tess had been in the car that sped away after the burglary? Would he think Jeff had tried to cover up her connection with the crime?