Hot Fudge Murder

by Cynthia Baxter

  “And Mitchell?” I asked.

  “He’s in his office.” Marissa gestured toward the room with the desk near the kitchen.

  His office? I thought. And here I’d assumed it was Omar’s office.

  My knock on the closed door was greeted with a gruff, “Who is it?”

  I opened it and stuck my head in. “Mr. Shriver? I’m Kate McKay, the caterer who—”

  “I know who you are.” He stuck the papers he’d been studying into a manila folder, closed it, and placed it on a stack of others. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is,” I replied. “I can see you’re busy, but if you have a few minutes . . .”

  “Have a seat,” he said, motioning toward one of the two chairs opposite his desk. Protectively he ran his hand over the top of the manila folder he’d just put down. I wondered if he was making sure I couldn’t see whatever it was that he’d been studying so intently.

  I hadn’t been inside this room before, only in the hallway. But I wasn’t surprised to find that the décor fit in perfectly with everything else in Omar’s mansion. The grandness of this room made it look as if it had been created by someone who designed sets for movies.

  Lining two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases that appeared to have been made from some exotic wood. An ornate, dark red Oriental carpet covered the floor, and two padded leather chairs sat side by side facing a fireplace. A particularly dignified touch was the bust of a man I was pretty sure was Plato. A large window composed of a grid of small panes of glass overlooked the sculpture garden—a window that would have been very much at home in an English manor house.

  The big wooden desk Mitchell was sitting at was undoubtedly an antique, perhaps something Teddy Roosevelt had donated to Goodwill while he was redoing his office.

  He looked at me expectantly.

  “I’ve, uh, been thinking about what you said the other day,” I began, trying to keep my voice steady so he wouldn’t pick up on how nervous I was. “About the possibility of moving into the world of franchising.”

  “Ah,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “Smart lady.”

  “Not that I’m ready to actually do anything,” I added hastily. “Right now, I’m still getting Lickety Splits off the ground. The idea of bringing it to the next level seems—well, kind of ambitious. But I keep thinking about what you said, and I figured I owed it myself to at least find out how something like that would work.”

  “It’s always wise to stay informed, especially where possible business opportunities are concerned,” Mitchell said. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, as if he was about to say something really important.

  “Franchising,” he said, pronouncing the word with reverence, “is the ladder to success.” Shaking his finger at me, he added, “And the beauty of it all is that that ladder can have as many rungs on it as you want it to have.”

  He sat back in his chair and fixed his gaze on me. “First of all, we’d have to come up with a unique idea. Something that makes your shop—what’s it called again?”

  “Lickety Splits.”

  “Cute name,” he said, nodding. “But we’d need to find a way to make your ice cream shop different from anything else out there. At least, in the public’s eye.”

  We, he’d said. Not me. I wondered when we’d gone from the one to the other.

  “Then, of course,” he went on, “we’d need investors . . .”

  Mitchell launched into a long, boring monologue about financing and legal constraints and various states having different laws. I couldn’t have understood half of what he was saying even if I’d forced myself to listen. Earning-claim statements, monitoring systems, working capital requirements, accrual-based accounting . . . I felt as if I was auditing an upper-level course at the Harvard Business School. I did learn that there are franchise registration states, franchise filing states, and non-registration states. What the difference was, however, I couldn’t have said if my ice cream freezer’s life depended on it.

  “And of course I’d be happy to take you through this process,” he finally said, a sign that the lecture was about to end. “You’d be wise to take advantage of the experience and connections that someone like me has, not to mention my financial savvy—”

  His cell phone rang just then. He glanced at it, then said, “I’m sorry, but I have to take this.”

  I waved my hand in the air, sign language for “Do what you have to do.”

  But I couldn’t have been happier that he considered his call private enough that he went out into the hallway. The diminishing volume of his voice told me he was walking farther and farther away.

  This was exactly what I’d hoped for. Without wasting another second, I pounced.

  I grabbed the stack of manila folders on his desk. I assumed it was the same one I’d noticed him carrying around ever since Omar’s death. Eagerly I opened the first folder and scanned the top page. It looked like some sort of financial record: a list of expenditures, with names of what appeared to be suppliers on one side and a column of corresponding dollar amounts on the other. If there was anything meaningful here, it was lost on me.

  The rest of the pages looked like more of the same. So I opened the next folder in the stack.

  This folder contained contracts. They appeared to be agreements between ODV and various manufacturers.

  It all looked very important. Yet I wasn’t seeing anything that was the least bit helpful.

  Frustrated, I opened the next folder. And immediately zeroed in on the title of the thick stapled document inside it: “The Last Will and Testament of Omar DeVane.”

  Now that was something interesting.

  But as soon as I started to read, I heard Mitchell again.

  “Look, just get back to me as soon as you can,” he was saying, sounding exasperated. His increasingly loud voice told me he was heading back to his office.

  I shut the folder quickly and put the entire stack back on his desk.

  “Now, where were we?” he asked, sitting back down.

  “You were telling me why you’d be a good person to team up with,” I said.

  And I leaned forward to show that I couldn’t wait to hear more.

  * * *

  Even though Marissa had said she had a full house today—with not only Mitchell there, but also Federico, Pippa, and Gretchen—no one appeared to be around when I left Mitchell’s office.

  It struck me as the perfect time to do some snooping.

  I wandered through the countless rooms on the first floor, not exactly creeping around but taking care to make as little noise as possible. I’d been inside most of them already. But I spotted a small room off the living room that I hadn’t noticed before. It contained hardly anything besides a small couch, a couple of tables, and a TV.

  There wasn’t much of interest in what looked like a television room that belonged to someone who didn’t actually watch much TV. But I instantly zeroed in on the one thing in that room that was interesting.

  A door. Posted on it was a handwritten sign that stopped me in my tracks.

  “ENTER ONLY WITH OMAR’S PERMISSION!”

  If that wasn’t an invitation to snoop, I didn’t know what was.

  I glanced behind me, just to make sure I was still alone. Then I reached for the doorknob tentatively, expecting to find that the door was locked.

  Instead, the knob turned in my hand.

  My heart was pounding, even though I told myself that I would probably find nothing more interesting than, say, a closet filled with fabric.

  Instead, when I flung the door open, the only thing I saw was completely darkness.

  I blinked hard, trying to get my eyes to adjust faster. As I did, I thought I heard footsteps directly behind me.

  Instinctively, I started to turn around. But before I had a chance, I felt someone give me a hard shove from behind.

  The next thing I knew, I was tumbling down a set
of stairs.

  I let out the long, low cry of an animal as I bounced down one step after another, a guttural moan that was the result of surprise, pain, and fear. But even that didn’t block out the sound of someone slamming the door shut and locking it.

  Chapter 15

  “David Evans Strickler, a 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist at Tassel Pharmacy, located at 805 Ligonier Street in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who enjoyed inventing sundaes at the store’s soda fountain, invented the banana-based triple ice cream sundae in 1904. The sundae originally cost 10 cents, twice the price of other sundaes.”

  —https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_split

  “Ow-w-w-w!” I groaned as I lay at the bottom of the staircase like a heap of laundry.

  I reached over to rub my sore hip, the part of my body that had borne the bulk of my weight as I’d slid down the entire flight of stairs. Thirteen of them. I’d counted as I’d hit the edge of each and every one.

  Yet while I expected that a huge black-and-blue mark was in my future, my hip didn’t appear to be broken. Neither did anything else. In fact, as I dragged myself up, I realized that, miraculously, no other body parts hurt at all.

  Slowly my eyes adjusted to the dim light. I began to make out some of my surroundings.

  And immediately let out a terrified gasp.

  Looming in front of me were several people. I could see their silhouettes just a few feet away.

  And then, for the second time in the past two minutes, I felt someone push against me.

  This time, the blow came from the side. And there was surprisingly little force behind it.

  Still, I instinctively pushed back. As I did, I felt something cool slink down my calf, then curl around my ankle.

  “Ugh!” I cried, instinctively swatting at it.

  And then, nothing happened. The slithering animal didn’t attack me, the person who had assaulted me didn’t move.

  Fighting off my growing feeling of panic, I glanced down and focused on a solid white torso, lying right in front of me.

  And realized it was a mannequin.

  I jerked my head up, studying the row of scary individuals standing in front of me. They, too, were mannequins.

  As for the slithering being that was now resting on my foot, it was a length of shimmery silk fabric.

  A feeling of tremendous relief washed over me. I finally understood where I’d landed—literally.

  I was in Omar’s design studio.

  Relieved, I ran my hand along the wall near the bottom of the staircase. When I found the light switch, I found myself in a spacious workroom that was painted a stark shade of white. The bright overhead lighting practically made the walls shimmer.

  But this was clearly the room that served as the designer’s studio while he was at Greenaway. What a thrill it was to be in the very place where Omar DeVane created the clothes and other items that people all over the world clamored to wear!

  I had to remind myself that I was only here because someone had pushed me down the stairs.

  And that same someone had locked me in.

  Which meant one of three things.

  The first was that that someone was trying to get me out of the way for a while, most likely to give him or her time to do something to cover his or her tracks. The second was that that someone was trying to scare me, since that person had figured out that I was trying to identify Omar’s killer.

  The third possibility was the most chilling. And that was that whoever had pushed me down the stairs had been trying to kill me.

  The good news for me was that I hadn’t been killed. Or even hurt, aside from my hip, which was no doubt developing that giant black-and-blue mark at that very moment.

  The bad news for whoever had done this was that this little maneuver had done nothing to diminish my resolve.

  That person had also forgotten that most of us carry a cell phone at all times. So getting out of here wasn’t going to be that difficult. Still, now that I was here, I couldn’t resist taking advantage of the situation. This was my big chance to get a peek at the inner workings of a world-famous fashion designer’s empire. And despite the circumstances that had gotten me here, I couldn’t help feeling a flutter of excitement.

  I glanced around eagerly, anxious to take it all in. In the center of the large room sat two large tables. Each one was at least the size of a Ping-Pong table.

  One of the tables was printed with a grid. That, I figured, was for cutting fabric. The fact that a few bolts of fabric were lying on it haphazardly, along with a device that looked like pizza wheel but which I’d learned from Grams was called a rotary cutter, told me I’d gotten that right.

  The other table was covered with sketches. Hand-drawn on big pieces of paper were what appeared to be evening gowns. Some were black-and-white renderings—charcoal, perhaps—while some were more finished-looking. A few were even colored in with watercolor or something smeary like chalk or pastels.

  Nearby, bolts of fabric jutted out of barrels. They reminded me of oversized bouquets of colorful flowers. Several sewing machines were pushed up against one wall. But the other three walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelving. On two of them were clear plastic bins filled with scissors and other gadgets related to sewing. There were also piles of spools of thread in every color imaginable. I saw more fabric as well, some of it rolled up, some of it neatly folded.

  The third set of shelves contained more personal items. Books, for one thing, rows and rows of them. When I studied them more closely, I saw that they were all about fashion. Histories of fashion, picture books featuring the works of various designers, serious-looking tomes on technique, biographies of Coco Chanel and Yves St. Laurent, giant coffee-table books on hats and corsets and sleeves. Yes, an entire book on sleeves.

  A few personal mementos were displayed on the shelves, as well. Ceramic vases that were clearly handcrafted, a glass elephant, a fabric doll with straw hair and an evil-looking expression that looked as if it had been made in some exotic, faraway land.

  But what interested me most were the photographs.

  Most of the photos were big, probably eight-by-ten, and polished enough that they had most likely been taken by professional photographers. One was a picture of a younger version of Omar, posing with a very youthful Gretchen Gruen. Another photo was of Omar and Pippa Somers. Once again, both of them were considerably younger. They appeared to be posing at a fashion show since there was a runway behind them. It could have been Omar’s first big show. Or at least an important one.

  One of the smaller photos, stashed on a lower shelf, was faded, making it look as if it had been taken a while ago. I couldn’t be certain from where I stood, but I was pretty sure it was a snapshot of Omar, back when he was still Elmer, standing with his arm around Arthur. The two brothers had probably been teenagers when it was taken, judging from the jeans and T-shirts they were both wearing. Their shaggy hair, too. One thing I could see, even from far away, was that both were wearing huge grins.

  I noticed another older snapshot, also faded. This one was of a young Omar posing with Mitchell. They were both holding up a check. I assumed it was the first big payment Omar had ever received, back when he was just starting out as a designer. Again, big grins lit up both men’s faces.

  In one corner of the huge space, I spotted a folding room divider. It was covered in elaborate pale green brocade that to my untrained eye looked like silk.

  Peering behind it, I found a desk covered with papers and other clutter. Off to the side was a table with a laptop, a printer that was also a copier and fax machine, and a shredder.

  Apparently Omar had had a home office here at Greenaway, just like Mitchell.

  I wasted no time in going through the things Omar had kept here. I touched as few of them as possible, and I made a point of putting everything back in exactly the same spot. I also used a tissue I found in my pocket to pick things up so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.

  First I poked around the pil
e on top of his desk. In addition to more sketches and a few handwritten notes, I found pages torn from fashion spreads in fashion magazines, most of them seemingly featuring the work of other designers.

  Continuing to exercise the same caution, I opened one of the desk drawers. It contained a neatly arranged collection of the usual mundane office supplies, like a stapler, a box of paper clips, and a package of colored pencils.

  The drawer below it, however, contained files.

  I could feel the adrenaline rushing through my veins.

  I crouched down and read the neatly typed labels on the tabs. Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus . . .

  More business files.

  None of them struck me as worth examining. Or, to be more accurate, I didn’t know enough about Omar’s business and how it might be related to his murder for them to interest me.

  Then I noticed the file at the very back.

  Rather than having a typed label like all the others, this one had a single word written in pencil.

  “Will.”

  Eagerly I grabbed it, forgetting all about the possibility of leaving fingerprints. My heart was pounding as I opened it.

  It was Omar’s will, all right. And it looked like an official document, complete with stamps and seals and signatures.

  I skimmed the list of his holdings, all the property that constituted his estate. His New York City residence, which was a townhouse in the East Sixties. Greenaway, of course. An island retreat in the Caribbean. His company’s headquarters in New York, a multistory office building on Madison Avenue with a ground-floor boutique. Other office buildings all over the world, too, as well as apartments in London, Paris, and Milan.

  That was just the real estate. Then there were bank accounts and investments, all kinds of business-related assets ranging from factory equipment to stashes of fabric . . . the list went on for two single-spaced pages.

  The wealth the man had accumulated was truly mind-boggling. Still, I was much more interested in the way his estate was to be distributed.