The Chocolate Book Bandit (14 page)

Why had I wanted to know this? All it had done was make me worry, and I already had more important things to stew about.

Checking on Butch’s qualifications was not my business. The city’s human resources director had that responsibility.

Of course, in a town the size of Warner Pier the HR director’s responsibilities averaged one hour a week and were performed by the city clerk. This wasn’t Detroit. Heck, this wasn’t even Dowagiac. But I was sure Butch’s qualifications had been checked, and his employment had been approved. It had to be all right. My research had been superficial, and all it had done was make me unhappy.

I forced myself to face the worst possible scenario. What if Butch had lied about his qualifications to get the job in Warner Pier?

So what? It was no skin off my nose. I barely knew Butch Cassidy. I wasn’t even an official member of the library board.

But Butch had simply bowled me over. I practically panted whenever he came in the room. Why? He was an attractive, virile man, true. But the world was full of attractive men. I’ve been married to two of them. I got so disgusted with the first one that I divorced him, and right at the moment I wasn’t too happy with the second one. So surely Butch didn’t make me weak at the knees just because of his macho appearance.

And I had no intention of acting on those feelings.

Except that I had already acted on them.

By helping Butch move the letter—the letter that had been under the body of Abigail Montgomery—I had committed myself to supporting and believing in him.

Why had I done that?

I belatedly faced the fact that I might be helping a murderer.

Everybody who had been at the library board meeting on Monday had had the opportunity to kill Abigail. Any of us—Rhonda, Carol, Gwen, Corny, me, and, yes, Miss Ann Vanderklomp—could have done it. Betty Blake had had the opportunity, too, but, well, even though there was no official cause of death yet, I strongly suspected that Betty was another murder victim. Which would pretty much eliminate her as a suspect.

But of all those people, Butch was the one I’d helped to deceive the detectives. And now I discovered that he might be falsifying his credentials. But the Warner Pier city clerk was an intelligent person. She would have made a complete check of his résumé. There must have been some logical explanation for the discrepancies in his background, or she would have warned off the library board.

Still, it had been extremely foolish to lie for a man I barely knew.

Should I make an immediate confession to Hogan and Larry Underwood?

There was little point, since they had already figured it out. Neither of them had really bought my story about finding the letter in my purse.

Why had I done that? I didn’t understand my own motives. Granted, the guy was magnetic. But why would I protect him? I was sophisticated enough to know that a physical attraction was not worth acting stupid about.

And what about Joe? Here I was terribly worried about our marriage because he was seeing a girl he’d dated nearly twenty years earlier. And at the same time I was getting involved—emotionally—with another man.

Not that I was going to do anything about it. But the fact that I kept telling myself that—well, it indicated that the idea was somewhere back in the recesses of my mind.

If I were a Catholic I’d be headed for the confessional.

I closed out the computer. My thoughts on all this were extremely confused.

I had to force myself to think logically. I got up resolutely and carried my dishes into the kitchen.

And through the kitchen window I saw the headlights of a car pulling into the drive.

Joe. It must be Joe. If only I could get him to talk to me tonight. We’d hardly spoken for several days, and I desperately needed to talk to him, to communicate with him.

I went to the back door and waited for him to come up to the porch. The driver of the car was nearly there before I realized it wasn’t Joe at all.

I swung the door open. “Hi, Hogan,” I said. “Come on in. I was just thinking about making coffee.”

“Have you got a sandwich? I never did get dinner.”

“I’ll fix you some of Abigail Montgomery’s eggs.”

“Abigail’s? Nettie told me you two had cleared out her refrigerator. Eating a murder victim’s eggs seems a bit kinky, but I’m so hungry I’ll do it.”

I made coffee and got bacon and eggs ready, and gave Hogan toast rather than tortillas. We talked about nothing while he ate. Only one touchy question came up.

“Where’s Joe?” Hogan asked.

“He stayed in Holland for dinner.”

“I thought this was a day he spent at the boat shop.”

“It usually is.”

I didn’t make any other explanation. Hogan gave me a shrewd look, but he didn’t demand one.

With his plate empty, he pulled out his notebook. “Okay, Lee, I’d like to have a preliminary statement about Betty Blake.”

“Sure. Plus I’ve been trying to follow Larry Underwood’s instructions and understand the personal dynamics of the library board.”

“Forget Larry’s instructions. From now on you stay out of the whole deal.”

“Sure. But do you want to know what I found out so far?”

Hogan sighed deeply. “I guess so. You do seem to catch on to things sometimes.”

I took about twenty minutes to go over the visits I’d had with the members of the library board and with Betty Blake. Hogan didn’t take notes until I got to Betty.

“So,” he said, “Betty called and said she wanted to talk to you about some bookkeeping problem. But she didn’t give you a hint as to what it was.”

“No. I don’t know if it was something like—oh, which account some payment should come from. Or about how to classify income from memorial gifts. I doubt it was anything serious, because Betty’s function was simply to keep records. She didn’t do any complicated accounting, and Butch would do the budgeting. Or Catherine Smith would have, when she was library director. Carol Turley is secretary-treasurer, but she doesn’t handle day-to-day bookkeeping.”

Hogan frowned and drank coffee, then changed topics. “If Betty had been doing bookkeeping chores for several years, it seems odd that she’d have a record-keeping problem now.”

“I agree. But it may have been a gift of a specific type she hadn’t run into before. Something new is always coming up in every field.”

“Okay. Now, about this afternoon.”

I described what happened at the library. I arrived shortly before five o’clock. There was a line at the circulation desk, with no one staffing it. No sign of Betty. I went back to Butch’s office, and he immediately got up and went to take her place at the desk. Since Betty had asked me to come to the library, I thought she must be there someplace, so I walked around looking for her. I saw no one in the downstairs stacks. I went upstairs. I walked around the stacks near the front of the building and saw no one. When I moved to the back, I saw the shelf tipped over against the wall.

I stopped talking then and gave several big gulps. “Sorry,” I said. “Seeing those shoes . . . I immediately knew it was Betty by the shoes.”

“What was so special about them?”

“Oh . . . it’s just that I’d noticed them when we met for lunch.” I didn’t want to explain that they were run-over, shabby shoes that testified to Betty’s low-salaried job and the financial problems of her family. Saying that out loud would feel like a slap at Betty’s pride. I gulped again and shut up.

“Was there anybody else upstairs?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“Did anyone pass you on the stairs?”

“Going down as I went up? No. I suppose someone could have hidden in the stacks up there and run for the stairs when I had my back turned. But I think I would have heard them or seen them.”

I stopped for a moment, then looked closely at Hogan. “Hogan, I’ve been assuming that someone killed Betty. Am I right?”

“Of course, we don’t . . .”

“Oh, I know! You always give out that stuff about not having an official cause of death! But are you working on the assumption that someone helped that accident happen? That someone killed her?”

“Yes, I am, Lee. Betty was the person who found Abigail Montgomery, and we’re feeling real strongly that Abigail was killed by a blow to the back of the head. It’s too much of a coincidence for Betty to die in a freak accident just two days later.”

“So you think someone had been up there with her.”

Hogan doodled an unhappy face in his notebook before he replied. “Well, there’s a complication.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your pal Tony Jr. I went by to talk to him before I came over here.”

“And?”

“Tony was kinda miffed about having to take his younger sister to the library for the kid’s movie. He thought that was for little kids. But at the same time he, well, he sorta wanted to see the movie himself.”

“I understand. Once upon a time I was thirteen myself.”

“Yeah. You want to be grown up, but you want to be a kid, too. The result was that Tony found himself a seat on the stairway. From there he could look at the movie but pretend he wasn’t watching it.”

I chuckled.

“So Tony sat there at least for the second half of the movie. Without moving. And he swears that Betty Blake was the only person who passed him going up those stairs during that time. And nobody at all came down.”

The first thing that flashed through my mind was that I’d never make a detective. I had felt sure someone killed Betty, but I’d failed to wonder who had the opportunity. I somehow assumed someone had slipped upstairs, done the dark deed, then slipped silently downstairs and out of the library.

But that isn’t the way the Warner Pier Public Library works. It’s just too small. The person at the desk can see almost everywhere all the time. And those stairs were the only way to get to the second story. Or were they?

“Is there a fire escape?” I asked.

“There are the back stairs.”

“Then the killer must have left that way.”

“Those stairs go down right by the director’s office. And Butch Cassidy says he didn’t see anybody. Or hear anybody. They’re noisy wooden steps.”

“Was Butch in the office all the time?”

“Until you called him and he took over the desk.”

Hogan still looked skeptical, and I spoke sharply. “Hogan, either someone got out by the back stairs, or Butch or I killed Betty. Take your pick.”

“No, you didn’t kill her,” he said calmly. “We’re pretty sure she was dead before you went upstairs.”

Was he kidding me? No medical examiner could tell the exact minute when someone had been killed, not within a half hour or so. I looked at him narrowly.

“Plus, Tony alibis you,” he said. “He says you weren’t up there even five minutes.”

He didn’t say anything about Butch.

He left after that. But as he opened the back door, he frowned. “I don’t like your being here alone,” he said.

I tried to sound casual. “Oh, Joe will be along.” I sure didn’t want to admit I had no idea when Joe would get home. But I hated hearing the sound of Hogan’s car moving away from the house.

It seemed terribly silent in our semi-rural house in our semi-rural neighborhood. I started putting dishes in the dishwasher with a tremendous clatter. I clanked and crashed and slammed pans and plates. It’s a wonder I didn’t break every dish I’d used. But the noise made me feel a bit less lonely.

I jumped when the phone rang.

“Mrs. Woodyard?” The caller was a woman. I didn’t recognize her nasally voice.

“Yes?” Who was this? Was she selling something?

“I’m so sorry to call you so late,” the voice whined. “This is Madelyn Jones.”

“Jones?”

“You don’t know me, but I’m—I was—a close friend of Betty Blake’s.”

“Oh?” Why would a friend of Betty’s be calling me?

“It’s her daughter. Alice Ann. She’s really upset.”

“I’m sure she is.”

“Anyway, she’d like to talk to you.”

“To me? Why?”

The whiny voice somehow became even whinier. “You were one of the last people to see her mother alive. She had some questions.”

“But my meeting with Betty was just to discuss library matters. I know nothing about Betty’s death.”

“It would be such a help to Alice Ann.”

“I really don’t see—”

“Oh, Mrs. Woodyard, Alice Ann is just frantic! I think you could help us calm her right down.”

I sighed deeply. How could I refuse? “Where is she?”

“At the house. Betty’s house.” The woman—Mrs. Jones?—gave me the address, and I said I’d come over. Before she hung up she apologized again for calling so late.

Because of the ridiculously high property values in Warner Pier, there are no shabby neighborhoods in the town. But Betty’s address was in an area that was largely occupied by locals—waitresses, yardmen, sales clerks, and clerical workers; the people who do the grunt work of a resort. If we have a shabby neighborhood, that’s it.

I got a jacket, wrote Joe a note, and left. I wasn’t happy about the request, though I saw no way to refuse it. Being called out to comfort a person I’d never met because her mother—a person I barely knew—had died? Frankly, it stank. I did not want to go.