The Chocolate Moose Motive: A Chocoholic Mystery (18 page)

Joe answered on the first ring.

“How about lunch?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Great! And how’s your white steed doing?”

“He’s fine. Do you want me to ride him?”

“Please.”

Joe laughed. “Okay, Lee. What kind of mess have you gotten into this time?”

Chapter 17

When Joe and I got to the Willard General Store, I spotted a rental car parked in front. It was small and a flashy yellow; it had probably been the least desirable car in the leasing company’s lot. I recognized it as a rental by the sticker on the back bumper.

I pointed to the car. “I guess Chip is already here.”

“I’m surprised he agreed to talk to you about Buzz,” Joe said.

I stopped walking. “You know, he didn’t even ask what I wanted to talk about.”

Joe frowned. “You mean he wanted to meet you way out here to talk, and he didn’t even wonder why?”

“That’s right. I just realized it.”

“That’s nuts.”

“I agree.”

“No wonder your subconscious was telling you something was crazy. That something may be Chip, and you may well be better off not coming alone. Maybe I should have brought my brass knuckles.”

Joe took my hand, and we headed inside.

For at least a minute I couldn’t find Chip. The Willard General Store wasn’t exactly brightly lighted.

I couldn’t remember ever being there before, though of course I knew it existed. The store is one of those hangovers from earlier rural life, a convenience store serving a small specific community. Willard is a clump of maybe two dozen houses, rather than a town or village. I’m sure it’s not incorporated. The Willard school was probably absorbed by Warner Pier as soon as the school bus was invented. There’s one small church, but no restaurant, post office, or other meeting place.

The Willard General Store is the only place there to buy gasoline or a loaf of bread or—well, anything. Five miles west of the community are an up-to-date service station and convenience store that cater to the interstate traffic, but Willard itself remains isolated.

Inside, the store was probably forty feet long and thirty feet wide, and it was crowded with shelves. As we walked through, I spotted rifle shells—lots of deer hunters around here—motor oil, bubble gum, Hershey Bars, fishing lures, miniature sewing kits, garden rakes, white socks, canned goods, pantyhose, and a large supply of beer—and a thousand other items.

At the back of the store was an old-fashioned meat counter, not too large, holding deli meats and cheeses. On the worn wooden floor in front of it were three Formica-topped kitchen tables that looked as if they’d been picked up at garage sales. Behind the tables were two glass-fronted refrigerators loaded with milk and soft drinks.

The whole place was so dimly lighted I barely recognized Chip, who was sitting at the table farthest from the meat cooler. When he stood up, I saw the table tip over about an inch. I couldn’t tell if the table had a short leg or if the floor was uneven.

“Hi!” I said. I walked close to him and spoke quietly. “How’d you find this place?”

“Originally? Buzz guided me here.” Chip smiled nervously and lowered his own voice. “They used to be real lax about checking IDs. All the high school guys we knew came out here to buy beer.”

“Fascinating variety of stock.”

“You should have seen it last February. Believe it or not, they moved everything around so they could paint. It was the biggest mishmash in the history of the world.”

Joe and I turned back to the counter, where a plain girl with a lot of large teeth stood ready to take orders for food. I decided on a cheese sandwich; the General Store’s deli meats didn’t look particularly fresh. Chip already had a sandwich and a Bud. Before he sat down again, he went to a rack displaying individual sacks of chips and pulled down some Fritos. You waited on yourself at the Willard General Store.

At least the service was quick. In about two minutes Joe and I had our sandwiches, had taken chips from the hanging rack, and had pulled Cokes from the cooler. Chip grinned as we sat down at the uneven table. “If I keep my elbows on the table,” he said, “your drinks won’t tip over. And Ace isn’t here to scold me about my table manners.”

We all bit into our sandwiches. The cheese I’d ordered was strongly flavored, better than I’d expected.

I saw that Chip was eyeing me, apparently waiting for me to speak. So I did. “Why did you want to come all the way out here to talk, Chip?”

“I thought it would be a good place for a private conversation.” He flashed that boyish grin again. “And I thought Ace wouldn’t find out that we’d gotten together.”

“Is that important?”

“He has a lot of clout with my boss. And I have to head back to duty in two weeks.”

“Why wouldn’t Ace want you to talk to me?”

“Because you’re friends with Sissy and her grandmother.”

“So are you, Chip. Or you act as if you’d like to be friends with them.”

“I do like Sissy. And Wildflower. But—well, Ace will never forgive Wildflower for being antiwar. You know, peace marches and so on forty or fifty years ago. And he considers Sissy part of the same culture.”

I took another bite, then chewed and swallowed his comment along with my bread and cheese. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t want to talk about Sissy. I had something else on my mind.”

“I know, I know! It was a crazy situation, and I handled it all wrong.”

Huh? If my mouth hadn’t been full, I would have let it gape open. What was Chip talking about?

He didn’t go on, so I did. “I don’t know what situation you’re talking about. I only wanted to find out something about Buzz.”

“Buzz? Oh.” He sounded amazed.

“Yes. What did you think I wanted to talk about?”

Chip occupied himself with opening his Fritos before he answered. “I didn’t really know. But I’ll be glad to talk about Buzz. He was a great guy. I’ll never get over his…what happened to him. What did you want to know?”

“How long had you known Buzz?”

“Our dads were cousins, but we hadn’t met until he started military school. We weren’t roommates every year, but we always lived in the same dorm. Then in college we roomed together for three years.”

“What kind of a guy was Buzz?”

“Deep.” Chip said the word without hesitation. He stopped and thought before he went on. “Yeah. Deep is the right word.
Buzz couldn’t just slough things off. He buried them inside. Where they bother you the most.”

“Sissy said he was the nicest guy she ever knew.”

“He was when he was around her.”

“But not around you?”

“Oh, Buzz was always a great guy. He had a lot of heart, I guess. When we were in—when we were overseas, he tamed a stray dog. You know, fed it. Named the dog Nero. But he didn’t always think ahead. Like the deal with the dog. When we left, he couldn’t take the dog along. There was no one over there to take it in. So he’d gotten the dog used to being taken care of, then he was going to have to abandon it.”

“How awful! The poor dog could have starved.”

“No. He made sure that didn’t happen.”

“How could he manage that?”

“Oh, he handled the situation.”

“How?”

Joe spoke for the first time. “Did he have to dispose of the dog?”

“Oh no. He paid someone to take him in.” Chip ducked his head and stared at his sandwich. “Left some money for feeding him. Asked me to check on the situation.”

“Did the people take care of Nero?”

“As near as I could tell.” Now Chip was staring at the nearest shelf. It held a selection of garden tools. He didn’t seem real confident that Buzz’s solution for Nero had worked. Joe shook his head at me, and I decided it was best not to pursue it further.

“How’d Buzz get along with the guys y’all worked with?”

“Okay.”

“I’d have thought they would be a rough bunch. Hard for a ‘deep’ guy to handle.”

Chip shrugged. “There was a certain amount of hazing in the unit. But Buzz had learned to deal with that at military school. In fact, once he made a crack—something about ‘just like eighth grade.’ It didn’t go over very well. But his dad was an executive of the company, after all. Nobody messed with him much.”

I tried a different tack. “Were you surprised when Buzz and Sissy got married?”

“No. They’d been nuts about each other for a couple of years. Buzz just had to make the break with his dad before it could happen. After he finished his tour overseas, he said he was going to quit his job. He said his dad was asking too much of him. He just hated it all.”

“All?”

“It’s rough over there. You have to compartmentalize your life. You do what the job requires, and you don’t let it affect you.” Chip shrugged. “That’s the way to get along. Of course, Buzz wasn’t made that way. Ace should have realized it.”

“How did Buzz react to his dad’s testimony before Congress?”

“He hated it. Ace still thinks everything he did was right, you know. He isn’t a bad guy. He’s the most patriotic guy in the world. Buzz was split right down the middle—embarrassed for his dad, but he understood where Ace’s critics were coming from, too. And that bunch of liberals made him look like a traitor.”

Hmmm. I hadn’t known I was one of “a bunch of liberals.” Giving private political ideas priority over the instructions of the U.S. Congress didn’t strike me as particularly patriotic, and that was apparently what Ace Smith had done. However, I didn’t want to get sidetracked into a discussion on political ethics. I bit into my sandwich, glad of the excuse to shut up for a moment.

Chip had described Buzz as a person who was bothered by the things that went on while he was working for Dobermann-Smith Corporation. His dad’s testimony must have bothered him even more. I chewed, swallowed, and felt sorry for Buzz. Then I spoke again.

“What about Buzz’s novel?”

“Novel?” Chip’s voice was completely innocent. “What novel?”

“The novel he was writing.”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t know about it? Sissy thought you and Buzz exchanged letters about it.”

“No! I didn’t know anything about Buzz writing a novel.”

I was incredulous. “But Sissy was sure…”

“No.” Chip’s denial was firm. “I didn’t know anything about a novel. I can’t imagine Buzz writing a book.”

Well, I could. Based on Chip’s own account of his personality, Buzz had been an introspective person who absorbed unhappy experiences. “He buried them inside, where they bother you the most,” Chip had said. It occurred to me that Chip might have a few things buried inside, too.

And when unhappy experiences are buried inside, the creative process is one way to get them out. I could see a counselor advising Buzz to write about the things that bothered him. Of course, I had no idea that Buzz had ever seen any sort of counselor, even though it sounded as if he needed one. But writing a novel might have been a therapeutic experience for him.

I was concentrating on this topic so hard that I was surprised when Joe spoke, asking Chip some innocuous question. When he had to return to duty, I think. Or maybe how often he got leave. I was so surprised by Chip’s flat denial that he knew anything about Buzz’s novel that I hardly listened.

We finished our lunch with ice cream bars. I was still quiet. My mind was racing, but Chip had stonewalled me completely by denying that he knew anything about Buzz’s novel.

Joe and I were on our way back to Warner Pier before I had any significant comment.

“He lied,” I said. “Chip lied about the novel.”

“Probably,” Joe said.

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Duh! Why not?”

“Oh, I expect you could come up with some speculation on that point.”

I sighed. “I’d guess that whether or not Chip knows what’s in the novel, he thinks it’s too hot to handle. He doesn’t want anyone—for ‘anyone,’ read ‘Ace’—to find out he knows about the novel.”

“And Sissy says Buzz wouldn’t tell her anything about his book?”

“No. And he wouldn’t let either her or Wildflower read any of it.”

“And the manuscript disappeared?”

“That’s what Sissy told me. Of course, it wasn’t on paper. But there was no file with a novel on it in Buzz’s computer. And the thumb drives he used to back up his files were blank.”

“It sounds as if the person who shot Buzz raided his computer.”

“It sounds like it to me, too, but Sissy said the sheriff wasn’t convinced.”

“I think Ramsey got stuck on the idea that Sissy had a lover and wanted to get rid of Buzz. He didn’t really look at any other possibility.”

“What does Hogan think?”

“He’s not tipping his hand. Especially since Helen Ferguson was killed in his jurisdiction, not Ramsey’s.”

“And I guess he thinks the two killings are connected.”

“They’re both connected to Ace Smith. Maybe to Sissy.” We left it at that.

Joe didn’t fight the Warner Pier summer season traffic for a parking place. He just dropped me in front of TenHuis Chocolade, and I ran in the door.

As soon as I was inside, I heard a woman yelling.

“Because of you my mom is dead! I’ll see that you get what’s coming to you if it’s the last thing I do!”