The Chocolate Cupid Killings (19 page)

He raised his eyebrows. “Without my chocolate?”

“What chocolate?”

“The lady who came up to help me is fixing me up a special box of those cute little cherubs.” Now his smile became sarcastic. “Don't tell me you don't want my money.”

“Please be seated.” I took off my jacket. “Aunt Nettie, perhaps you'd better check on the workroom.”

“I'll find out about the cupids,” she said. I thought she looked a bit relieved as she moved toward the back of the shop.

I tried to act as if confronting a gangster was the way I started every workday. I went into my office—the door was standing open—and hung my coat on the hall tree in the corner. I went behind the counter and checked the cash register to see if we'd had any earlier sales.

While I was doing that, Belcher seated himself again. In a few minutes one of the hairnet ladies—the geniuses who actually make our bonbons, truffles, and molded chocolate—brought me a white cardboard box marked with the TenHuis Chocolade logo. “He asked for three large and a dozen small cupids,” she said. “Assorted flavors.”

I peeked inside to check the order. Then I tied a red Valentine ribbon around the box and added a TenHuis card and a gold cupid. I told Harold Belcher the price, and he produced cash.

Belcher had been silent for five minutes now. He seemed to be cooperating with our request that he leave. Maybe that made me overconfident.

Anyway, I spoke to him, perhaps a bit condescendingly. “Our custom is to give every visitor to our shop a sample truffle or bonbon. Please select anything you like from our display case.”

Belcher raised his eyebrows. “Free samples, huh? Now that's interesting.”

He put on his jacket, examining the chocolates on display while he did it.

“The dark pyramid is filled with a milky coffee-flavored chocolate,” I said. “The dark rectangle with a milk chocolate dot is double fudge. It has layers of milk chocolate and dark chocolate fudge.”

Belcher smiled that cold smile again. “I guess I don't need a sample. I have my box of little angels. I'll carry it carefully.” He leaned over the counter and stared into my eyes.

“I'd hate it if something bad happened to anything having to do with this shop.”

He went out the door without ever losing his smile, the smile that seemed to turn the shop into a deep freeze.

As soon as he was gone Aunt Nettie reappeared. “I called Hogan,” she said.

“Thanks. So much for their promise to keep an eye on Belcher the Butcher.”

“I hope we've seen the last of him.”

“I hope we've seen the last of him
and
his ex-wife. I wish the best for Pamela—or Christina or whatever name she's using now—but I don't want to be mixed up with her anymore.”

“She certainly was an inconsiderate employee. The last thing she did was go off with the key to her locker. Unless she gave it to you?”

I groaned and shook my head. “That didn't seem very important to either of us at five thirty yesterday morning. I'll get the master key and make sure the locker is empty. Then I'll have a new key made.” I got the master key from my desk drawer and went back to the lockers, located in their own area just off our break room.

TenHuis Chocolade employees are all local women, and as far as I've ever heard, we've never had a case of theft. But it's good business practice to make sure everyone has a private space for her belongings, and that each employee uses that space. Aunt Nettie is quite strict that purses, combs and brushes, and other paraphernalia are kept locked up. Most of the hairnet ladies keep their locker keys on expandable bracelets—the spiral kind that look like old-fashioned telephone cords—that they wear on their upper arms or keep in the pockets of their white smocks. Pamela had had a white bracelet. I recalled seeing it the last afternoon she'd been there.

Heaven knows what would be in her locker. When one of our older employees died unexpectedly, I was astonished at the nature of two paperback books I found when I cleaned out her locker. I didn't return them to her family.

But when I opened Pamela's locker, there was only one item there. It was a spiral bracelet. For a moment I thought Pamela had left her keys in her own locker. But that wouldn't work. First, she couldn't lock the locker if the keys were inside, and second, this bracelet was blue, and I was sure Pamela's had been white.

I picked the bracelet up. Had Pamela had someone else's locker key?

But this bracelet held no keys. The only thing attached to the metal ring was a small charm, a silver Raggedy Ann doll. And the moment I saw that charm, I knew whose keys had been on this bracelet.

I grabbed the bracelet and dashed back through the workroom and to my own desk. I took my own keys out of my purse and unlocked my desk. Then I yanked the top left-hand drawer open.

“Darn!” I said. “Dadgum it to heck.” Or I think that was what I said.

Aunt Nettie had followed me. “What's wrong, Lee?”

“Pamela had Dolly's keys!” We stared at each other, completely dismayed.

Dolly Jolly, Aunt Nettie's chief assistant in the chocolate-making end of the business, is a very important friend and business associate to both of us. Dolly is as tall as I am, but broader, and she has bright red hair. She's a talented cook—not only at chocolate, but at nearly everything—and author of a cookbook on Michigan cooking. When she expressed an interest in learning the chocolate business, both Aunt Nettie and I were delighted. Aunt Nettie had even redone the apartment over the TenHuis Chocolade business so that Dolly could live there.

Because she lived right upstairs, Dolly kept more than her locker key on her expandable bracelet. She kept a key to her apartment, so that she could run upstairs if she wished. Because she functioned as assistant manager, she had a key to the shop. And she had a key to a storage area we leased from a neighboring business. Accessed off the alley, it was basically a double garage. Dolly parked her Jeep SUV in one side, and we stored some rarely used pieces of equipment in the other side.

Right at the moment, Dolly was on vacation—two weeks earlier I had personally driven her to Grand Rapids to catch a plane for a month in Florida. And since she was out of town, Dolly had left me her keys. She had trusted me with them, and I had let her down.

Pamela had snagged them from my drawer—I had no idea when. I also had no idea what Pamela had used them for.

I gnashed my teeth. “Darn Pamela! And darn Dolly!” I said. “I told Dolly she didn't need to leave the keys.”

“Why did she leave them? Don't we have another set of keys to her apartment?”

“Sure. I keep them in a lockbox in the bottom drawer. I told Dolly that, but she said we might need to get into the storage room. She said she'd leave them handy. A little too handy!”

I examined the bracelet.

“I don't understand,” Aunt Nettie said. “Why would Pamela want Dolly's keys?”

“I don't know. But I'd better check Dolly's apartment and the garage and storage room. I hope she hasn't robbed Dolly—and us!—blind.”

I got the master keys out of their locked box in my bottom drawer. Then Aunt Nettie followed as I walked swiftly through the workroom and out the door to the alley. I decided to start by checking the garage. Fear stabbed through me as I put my hand on the door. Should I call Hogan before I opened it?

I thought resolute thoughts, turned the key, and lifted the overhead door.

As daylight entered the dark garage I saw the bumper of a car. But it wasn't the bumper of Dolly's Jeep. I reached for the light switch.

The glaring overhead fixture showed us a gray sedan. The license plate ended in 812.

I walked around the side of the car and peeked into the window. A huddled shape lay across the backseat. For a moment it didn't look like anything but a jacket tossed back there.

Then I saw the dark hair and the earmuffs.

It was Myrl. And I felt sure she was dead.

Of course, when we found Myrl dead, my immediate expectation was that we'd find Pamela nearby, just as dead. But we didn't.

It wasn't easy telling Hogan we'd found another body. I was glad we didn't have to tell him we'd found two.

Not that Aunt Nettie and I looked for an additional body. Once we'd spotted Myrl lying in the backseat of her car without moving, we backed out, and Aunt Nettie ran for a telephone. I stood in the back door of TenHuis Chocolade until the patrol car got there, but I didn't go into the garage again.

A half hour later, as Aunt Nettie and I sat in my office waiting to talk to the State Police, I was calm enough to make a list of questions about Myrl's death.

Question One was, Had Harold “the Butcher” Belcher killed Myrl? It was easy to think he had intercepted Pamela and Myrl and had killed both of them.

But if that were true, it raised Question Two. If Harold had killed Myrl and Pamela, why hadn't he fled Warner Pier? And that led to Question Three: Why hadn't he left Pamela's body with Myrl's?

And then there was Question Four: If Pamela wasn't dead, where the heck was she?

Question Five was, How could Harold have known about Dolly's garage? The answer to that one was, Pamela would have had to tell him. Question Six—Why on earth would she do that?

As part of an escape plan? Had Pamela managed to escape her murderous ex? Was she now fleeing for her life—on foot in the December snows of Michigan?

Or could she be fleeing in Dolly's car?

Because someone—probably the murderer—had taken Dolly's car out of the alley garage and hidden Myrl's car in its place. So Question Seven was, Where was Dolly's car?

But Pamela didn't have the keys for Dolly's car. Or did she?

After all, we knew that Pamela had had the keys to Dolly's apartment as well as those to her garage. The car keys hadn't been on the key ring Dolly had left in my desk, but Dolly probably had a set of car keys in her apartment someplace.

The situation was terribly confusing, but Harold Belcher still seemed to be the obvious suspect in Myrl's death. And in Pamela's death—if Pamela was dead. But if Harold had killed them, why was he hanging around Warner Pier threatening Aunt Nettie and me?

I'd already written that one down as Question Two, but I considered it again. Could Harold's threats be a ploy to make himself seem innocent? That was pretty far-fetched.

If Harold wasn't guilty, the only alternative would be that Pamela had snapped completely, had herself killed Myrl, and then fled in Dolly's car. That was even more far-fetched.

I threw my pencil down and tried to call Dolly's cell phone. She needed to know that her Jeep was missing and the police were searching her apartment. I could hear them walking around overhead, and I was glad that there was no indication they had found a second body up there. At least they hadn't called for a second ambulance.

I punched in Dolly's cell phone number, but she didn't answer. I left a message on her voice mail, asking her to call me; then I called the hotel where she was staying. She didn't answer, so I left a second message there. I hoped Dolly was frolicking on the beach.

Next I called Joe and had just as much luck reaching him as I had had reaching Dolly. He didn't answer the phone at his shop or the one that should be in his pocket or the one at our house. I didn't try City Hall. If he had been there, someone would have told him Aunt Nettie and I had found another body. He surely would have come over to see about us.

Hogan came into the office to check on Aunt Nettie, and he assured us that law enforcement officers were looking for Dolly's car and that no second body had been found.

Completely frustrated, I opened my computer and began to play Spider. I lost every game.

All work at TenHuis Chocolade had come to a halt. The hairnet ladies were standing in knots gossiping, and Aunt Nettie and I were in the office wringing our hands. I wasn't answering the telephone, and we'd locked the front door.

I'd lost a dozen games of Spider when someone rattled the door handle hard enough that I went to see who it was. When I peeked around the edge of the window blind, I was surprised to see Rhett. I opened the door a crack.

“Hi,” he said. “I was sorry to hear you have more problems.”

“I'm beginning to feel like the kiss of death. I meet someone for five minutes, and they die.”

He looked dismayed. “You knew this person?”

“Not really. Like I said, our paths crossed for five minutes. It's nice of you to come by and sympathize.”

“You weren't answering your phone, and I wanted to explain about last night.”