The Chocolate Cupid Killings (27 page)

The thought of my fanny framed in the window when Patricia Youngman raised that pistol—well, I couldn't make myself climb out. Besides, I'd be leaving Joe behind. He would have no way to escape from a woman with a firearm.

If Joe and I rushed her together, maybe we'd have a chance.

I moved toward the stairs, toward where I thought Joe was standing.

But I had taken only a couple of steps away from the window escape route when the door opened, and the overhead light flashed on. Patricia Youngman came down the stairs, bending over, looking around.

I was right out in the middle of the room; there was no way she could miss seeing me.

She did see me, and she laughed.

What she didn't see was Joe, standing under the stairs. His head was even with her ankles.

Patricia came down two more steps. Now Joe's head was even with her knees.

Then she saw the open window behind me. “You little devil!” she said. “You almost got out the window!”

She aimed her pistol at me.

I stared, mesmerized. There was no place to hide, nothing to jump behind.

Joe swung the leg of that wonderful bedstead. Aiming through the space between the steps and using what looked like a tennis backhand, he hit a mighty blow at the side of Patricia Youngman's knee.

She fell sideways, pitching down the last four steps and landing on the little cement pad at the bottom of the basement steps.

She screamed. Her pistol went off. I don't know where the bullet went, but it didn't hit me, and it didn't hit Joe.

I ran toward her, and so did Joe. I stood on her arm, and Joe grabbed the gun away.

Patricia lay in the sand, sobbing. “My knee!” she screamed. “My shoulder! My arm! You've broken my knee!”

“Fair enough,” Joe answered. “You tried to break mine.”

I heard the kitchen door fly open. Feet pounded on the floor above our heads. Yells rang out. “FBI!” “Police!”

“Finally,” I said. I went up the steps.

“Better keep your hands up,” Joe said. “The FBI might not know you're one of the good guys.”

I guess they figured it out when Hogan ran over and scooped me into a giant hug. “Lee! Lee!”

“Quick!” I said. “Go downstairs! Joe's standing on top of Patricia Youngman!”

Things got a bit confused then. At least ten law enforcement types rushed into the house, plus a half-dozen EMTs a few minutes later, after two ambulances arrived. Hogan told me that other lawmen were taking care of Marson Endicott—yes, he was the guy with the gruff voice.

Endicott had been arrested as he left our drive, Hogan said. “They also picked up that butler guy, Rhett Spivey,” he said. “He apparently hid Endicott in the back of his SUV so he could get out of the Dome Home.”

“Why didn't Patricia Youngman just have Rhett sneak her into the Dome Home?” I said.

Hogan looked surprised. “Spivey might have blabbed.”

“I don't think so. After all, they went to college together. They exchanged class rings. I think he was her spy inside the Dome Home all along.”

Hogan blinked. “How'd you figure that out?”

“Internet. When Myrl Sawyer rousted Patricia out of bed to leave here in a hurry, Patricia lost the ring. I found it when I stripped her bed. In fact, it's in the vase on the mantel. I came back to get it; that was why she caught me. Anyway, Rhett had a similar ring he wore on his pinkie. I used the Internet to figure out what college the rings came from, and I'm willing to bet Rhett and Patricia graduated the same year. I left you a message about it.”

Hogan had the grace to look a bit shamedfaced. “Sorry. I've been too busy to check my messages.”

By the time they carried Patricia Youngman out, handcuffed to a gurney, she had stopped yelling and sobbing. One of the EMTs knew Hogan and stopped to speak. “I don't think she's hurt bad,” he said. “Just bruised up. But we'll get a doctor to look at her.”

“Keep your eye on her.”

“We'll have these guys with the FBI jackets along.”

Joe got a better diagnosis from the EMTs, after they saw that he could move his knee easily, despite the swelling. It looked like a bad sprain, they said. The bleeding came from a badly skinned knee. They still wanted to load him into a second ambulance and take him in for an X-ray.

“No.” Joe's voice was firm. “I'll go to the doctor tomorrow.”

That didn't make me happy. “Joe! This injury could be serious.”

“I'm not going to the emergency room. Have you forgotten? We're due at Mom's house for dinner. Right now.”

“She'll understand.”

“I know. But I want to get this little family meeting over with. I'll see the doctor tomorrow. Just give me a king-sized Band-Aid and an ice pack and help me get into some clean pants.”

While Hogan was ordering the law enforcement vehicles out of our drive, the FBI agent who seemed to be in charge followed Joe into the bedroom to quiz him about what he'd heard while he was listening from the basement.

“That was a stupid thing to do, Woodyard,” he said. “Once you were out of the house, you should have stayed out.”

“I know,” Joe said. “But it was obvious that Patricia Youngman had set up some sort of meeting in our house. Normally, neither Lee nor I would be home that time of day, so it was a good enough spot for it. It was simply bad luck that we both came home. That forced her to lock us in the basement.

“Once we got out, I was extremely curious about what she was up to. This house is like—the inside of a drum, I guess. There are no secrets. Anything that's said anyplace inside can be heard anyplace else inside. I couldn't resist eavesdropping. And it was my house. I didn't need a warrant.”

“As long as you were listening, what did you hear?”

“She and Endicott were making final arrangements for a payoff. He was to pay a substantial sum into an offshore account. Then she would send him ‘the records.' ”

“She didn't say where those records are now?”

“Oh, no! She was too cagey for that.”

I thought about it. “Records” could take a million forms—anything from a ledger or diary to a computer disk.

If I were Patricia Youngman, I asked myself, where would I hide “records,” records that could bring a major corporation down and send its top executives to jail?

I didn't think I'd put them in a safety-deposit box. I might want them on a Sunday, for example, and bank robberies get so complicated. No, I'd want to keep them with me. Wear them in a locket maybe.

Well, they would search Patricia Youngman to the skin when they got her to the hospital or to the jail. In the meantime, I needed to get the box of chocolates I was taking to Mercy's house . . .

“Oh, my gosh!” I said. “She put the records on the end table!”

The FBI agent stared at me. I led him into the living room and pointed to the end table. On it was a small tube of M&M Minis.

“Don't touch it!” I said. “You'll want to check it for fingerprints.”

The FBI guy—I didn't learn his name until later—frowned. “Why?”

“Because through all her identities—Pamela, Christina, and Patricia—Ms. Youngman always carried a tube of M&M Minis. She was working at TenHuis Chocolade, where we were making fabulous chocolates, and each employee could have two samples every day. But she always bypassed our scrumptious truffles and bonbons for those M&M Minis you can buy at the grocery store. That tube is exactly the right size to hold the flash drive for a computer, and it's something she could have in her purse or pocket without raising questions.”

The FBI man called for an evidence bag.

While I had his attention, I asked another question. “But who hired PDQ Investigations?”

Hogan had reappeared, and he chuckled. “Patricia Youngman hired them to find herself,” he said.

“That's crazy!”

“After Myrl Sawyer was killed, we were able to get some of those ‘underground railroad' women to open up. It seems that Patricia Youngman had donated money to their cause for years, so she knew how to get in touch with them. But, of course, they wouldn't help someone like her hide out. They only help abused wives they are convinced are actually in danger. So Patricia decided to find such a person and exchange places with them. She hired PDQ Investigations to find Christina Meachum.”

“She must have looked for her specifically, because they did have a superficial resemblance to each other,” I said. “I should have figured out that Pamela was using that odd eye makeup as a masquerade. I guess she wore brown contact lenses and stuffed cotton or something in her cheek, too. I know that the night she stayed here, she was careful not to let me see her without makeup.”

“That could be. We speculate that Youngman got Christina Meachum to take her place and flee to Namibia. Then she inserted herself into the underground railroad as a ‘victim.' The problem, of course, was that she couldn't let anyone who knew her as Patricia see her.”

I nodded. “I remember that when she came face-to-face with Myrl, Myrl gasped. Then she laughed. I guess Patricia knew then that she'd have to kill Myrl. She must have already prepared a hideout by stealing Dolly's keys from my desk. And, of course, she was lying when she told Sarajane Harding that someone had called her at the Peach Street B&B. She just wanted an excuse to get out of the underground railroad.”

“I'm sure that's right.”

“But how did Patricia Youngman get the underground railroad to send her to Warner Pier?”

“I haven't got the answer to that one. Apparently Sarajane's house is a regular stop on the railroad, and Youngman must have jimmied the deal somehow—forced them to send her there. But it was a convenient spot for meeting Endicott, since he had a house here.”

“But why did she blow it with phone calls? I'm sure that's how PDQ Investigations found her.”

“Huh.” Hogan made a contemptuous sound. “Youngman forgot that she was dealing with a bunch of sleazeballs. She hired PDQ to find Christina Meachum—who was not involved with the underground railway or the Federal Witness Protection Program. She was just hiding out on her own. Then PDQ sold the information to Harold Belcher. Of course, by then, Christina had moved on. So Belcher paid them to continue the search.”

By then Joe was limping out wearing clean clothes and carrying a cold pack provided by the EMTs. I was also relieved when one of Hogan's patrolmen reported that Dolly's Jeep had been found in our neighbors' drive.

We left the law in charge of our house and headed for Joe's mom's house in my van.

After we turned onto Lake Shore Drive, I began to quiz Joe. “How did you get involved with the FBI?”

“You know how Hogan feels about them, of course.”

“He says all local lawmen regard them with suspicion.”

“Hogan certainly does. But they've been investigating Marson Endicott for a long time, and when Endicott came to the Dome Home, they set up wiretaps and so forth. In cases like that, protocol requires that they touch base with local law enforcement.”

“But that would be Hogan's problem. How would it involve you?”

Joe chuckled. “As the husband of Hogan's stepniece.”

“Huh?”

“Hogan wanted a witness to his dealings with them, but he was afraid that if he got one of his patrolmen involved, word would leak out. He could swear me to secrecy.”

“Were the FBI agents staying at the Lake Michigan Inn?”

“Yep. They had a listening station set up out there.”

“For the wiretaps?”

“Not only wiretaps. A wire.”

“A wire? You mean they had an informant?”

“Right. Elliot J. Smith, the CFO who probably came up with the whole scheme to loot the Prodigal Corporation.”

“Potty Mouth!”

“That's him. Now he's scrambling to cut a deal and avoid prison. You can see why Hogan and I were so firm about not mentioning him being in Hogan's office.”

We both laughed. “Now,” I said, “let's put this whole thing out of our minds until your mom and Mike have had time to announce whatever they've called us together to announce.”

“Yeah. Our day might have been a little more exciting than theirs. Besides, I have an announcement of my own.”

“What's that?”

He told me.

Of course, our plan to say nothing to Mercy, Mike, Lindy, and Tony about the afternoon's excitement didn't work. As mayor, Mike had his ear out, and he'd already heard about the big FBI raid on our house. Joe's sprained knee was also hard to ignore. But after a flurry of conversation and concern, we were able to eat dinner. Then Mike and Mercy broke out the champagne and made their announcement.

A cruise. We were to go to the Caribbean during spring break for Warner Pier schools—all six adults plus Lindy and Tony's three kids. The wedding was to be on the ship.

“Just quiet,” Mercy said. “We're not inviting all the passengers and crew.”

March. The end of the Michigan winter. A perfect time and the perfect reason to get out of town.

After we'd all stopped hooting, whooping, hugging, and kissing, they got down to the financial plans they'd made. It was fairly complicated, but it boiled down to requiring that all businesses be sold in case of the death of one or the other spouse. Money from the sales would go to the particular partner's son.

I could see the relief in Tony's face when he saw that his dad didn't expect him to take over his restaurant business. And maybe a little relief in Joe's face when he learned he wouldn't be responsible for an insurance agency—except for selling it.