Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake

by Sarah Graves

  “We’ve heard,” I told him, hustling them both back into the shop. “Come with me, now, the two of you.”

  Inside, the old paddle-bladed overhead fans turned slowly under the high, pressed-tin ceiling, stirring warm air that was richly sweet with the aroma of baking chocolate. Emerging from the kitchen, Mika slid a tray of really lovely-looking almond-chocolate biscotti into the glass-fronted display case.

  Meanwhile, at Sharon’s anxious insistence, Andy’s story poured out of him: he had not in fact been arrested, just questioned intensively and told to remain available.

  “They think I did it, though. I could tell they think I poisoned that little son of a . . .”

  “Andy, how could they?” she cried. But then I saw it hit her, the memory of me telling her I’d seen him coming out of the tavern when he had told her he’d be home.

  He must have seen it, too, the question on her face. “I was in the Duck last night,” he confessed. “I got done studying; you’d said you wanted the night to yourself . . .”

  Crocheting, I recalled. “And you had words with Toby Moran?” I put in. “In the Ducky, you and he argued about something?”

  He looked down at his freckled hands, clasped atop the café table. “Yeah. You know Toby, he can’t leave anything well enough alone. Couldn’t, I mean,” he amended.

  A pair of customers came in, bought Fudge Drops and Toll House cookies, and went out again. No milkshakes, though, and when I angled my head queryingly at the pretty green Mixmaster on the counter, Mika shook her head.

  “But after a little while he did leave me alone and got rowdy with someone else, and Marienbad tossed him out,” Andy went on. “Not much later, I headed home, too.”

  “By way of the harbor path,” I said. “Where Toby had gone. I saw him, and you as well,” I added, and Andy looked guilty, suddenly.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t see him down there. Either he’d gone on ahead of me or he was passed out in the bushes, somewhere.”

  The passed-out-in-the bushes part was possible, I supposed. “And your forehead?” I asked gently. “Was that also a part of your argument with Toby in the Rubber Ducky, him slugging you?”

  He frowned. “No, there was no fistfight; you know how Marienbad is about that.” A pause, then, “It happened back at the station, I walked into the corner of my locker door,” he added, touching the spot gingerly.

  He was tall enough for that to be true. Just not clumsy enough, I thought. Putting his hand atop Sharon’s, he changed the subject.

  “About the cops, though. I mean, this thing’s making me pretty nervous. I’ve been in on disciplinary hearings before, you know? Just not in the hot seat myself.”

  Of course not. He was the golden boy. “So I know the voice, the look,” he went on, glancing at me in appeal. “Those cops think they’ve got their guy.”

  Because of Sharon being harassed by Toby, of course; then the argument in the Rubber Duck . . . but no, Andy hadn’t told the cops he wanted an attorney, he said when I asked. Why should he, when he’d done nothing wrong? It would only make him look guilty.

  I didn’t answer on account of having already said all my allotted swear words for the day. Instead, “Wait,” I told him, and he did.

  Then in swift succession I sent Sharon home—“And no detours into the Duck this time,” I called sharply after her—and relieved Mika of her shop duty for today, after making sure Ellie was both free and willing to hold down the fort for a little while.

  “Also, I’m borrowing your car,” I told her, and in reply she nodded enthusiastically at me, no more believing Andy Devine’s story about last night than I did.

  * * *

  “All right, now, damn it,” I told Andy as I pulled out of the parking spot in front of The Chocolate Moose.

  Beside me in the passenger seat he looked as miserable as a kid being grounded, his hands in his lap and the eyes behind his pale blond eyelashes downcast.

  His whole demeanor, in fact, clued me in on how best to approach this. “You know,” I remarked, “I’ve got a son only a few years younger than you.”

  More like a dozen years, actually, but never mind, it wasn’t my accuracy being questioned at the moment, it was Andy’s.

  “So I know what a lie sounds like,” I went on, gunning Ellie’s little sedan up Water Street past the big granite post office building on the corner. Beyond that lay the breakwater parking lot, the boat ramp, and Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand.

  “But I’m not—” Andy began as we passed them.

  “Oh, can it,” I cut him off. Uphill between the Coast Guard’s iron-fenced lawn, the street narrowed and curved between small wooden houses overlooking the water.

  “I’d like to help you, Andy, I really would.”

  No kidding; his fortunes and Sharon’s, I was now very sorry to realize, were inextricably linked to mine and Ellie’s.

  “But I don’t quite yet know how,” I went on, “and I don’t get why you keep shooting yourself in the foot about the whole thing, either,” I added.

  I mean, really, he wasn’t stupid, was he? I wouldn’t have thought so, but . . .

  Sighing, he took a biscotti from the bag Ellie had handed us as we went out and bit into it, his clean white teeth making quick work of the crunchy goodie.

  Personally I thought he was in way too much trouble to be eating anything but the kind of energy bars the Tibetan Sherpas feed to you in the hours before an Everest attempt. And this much, at least, he seemed to understand.

  That he needed help, I mean. Just maybe not how much.

  Or from whom. “Seems to me what I’ve got to do now is figure out how to handle this being arrested stuff,” he said.

  Then, turning earnestly to me. “Because there must be a right way to go about it, you know, the proper steps you’re supposed to take.”

  Controlling my temper, I reminded him that there were people who did know how to handle such things, and that these people were called lawyers.

  “Also, you should have a talk with your commanding officer,” I went on, “but not until after you consult with your own lawyer first.”

  I had no experience of how the military handled this sort of situation, but a little attorney-client privilege never hurt anything that I’d ever heard of.

  Thinking sourly about how delighted said attorney was going to be when he found out that Andy had already spoken at length to the cops, I gave the accused young Coast Guard officer the number of a defense lawyer that I had confidence in.

  Then, after reaching the end of Water Street and the high bluff looking out over the bay from the gravel turnaround there, I took a calculated risk.

  First, I reminded him that by his own admission and Sharon’s, he’d had the motive and opportunity to kill Toby Moran. Now all the cops needed for an arrest was to figure out a plausible method.

  “And you have had access to our shop, Andy; you’re in and out of there all the time,” I finished. “You could’ve gotten the milkshake.”

  Finally, I declared that if he wasn’t 100% truthful with me right that minute, Ellie and I wouldn’t bake the whoopie-pie wedding cake that Sharon had her heart set on.

  “But that’s okay. You can get yourself a nice sheet cake from the IGA,” I added mercilessly.

  He groaned as my shot hit home. “Oh, man, she really wants that cake. Her folks from away are all big fans of whoopie pies, and—”

  “Then spill it,” I insisted, whereupon he did . . . sort of.

  “Yeah, well,” he began a little embarrassedly as he gave in. “The thing was, it was Friday night, you know? Nobody around the station, and after I’d been studying a while I just decided to take a break.”

  “You said that already. What else?”

  Out on the water over the bluff at the end of the turnaround, the waves were the deep, dark indigo of new, unwashed blue jeans. He gazed glumly at them.

  “So I walked down to the Rubber Ducky,” he replied. “I figured a lot of the guys from the station wo
uld probably be in there.”

  He turned to me. “But they weren’t, they’d moved on to the Happy Crab.”

  I understood: the Duck had cheap beer, but the Crab had a pool table and a flat-screen TV the size of a highway billboard.

  “But Toby was there,” Andy went on ruefully, “in the Ducky, all boozed up and running his big mouth as usual.”

  “And you were already mad at him, weren’t you? Because she’d told you about the pictures of her with her face stuck onto a lot of lingerie models’ racy advertising photographs.”

  Talking about it was a relief to him, I could tell from the way his shoulders relaxed and his face smoothed. But now at the memory of encountering Moran, anger furrowed his forehead.

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, and in the bar I overheard him yapping about them, too, and what he was saying wasn’t very nice.”

  I could imagine, and I could imagine Andy’s reaction, as well. “So you confronted him.” Because naturally he would have.

  “And he backed down,” I guessed further. “Then he got into it with somebody else, though, did he? And Marienbad tossed him out?”

  That’s when I’d seen Toby fly through the Duck’s front door, out onto the street. “But afterward, outside—”

  Here came the tough part. Andy had lied about it before, I wasn’t sure why. But if at first you don’t succeed, et cetera. So . . .

  “You didn’t know he’d be there, either,” I said. “In the shadows behind the Duck. You were walking home on a pleasant spring evening, that’s all, not looking for any trouble.”

  I took a breath. “But he was there, and . . . he jumped you?”

  Andy’s hand went reflexively to his forehead. It must’ve been quite a punch, I thought, to open a gash that had needed stitches.

  The pale blond hairs on the backs of his fingers gleamed as he touched them. “Uh-huh,” he admitted. “Got me a good one, Toby did.”

  But, of course, Andy hadn’t been carrying a poisoned milkshake, ready to somehow force it on Toby Moran. That was a crazy idea, Andy said indignantly; he wouldn’t poison somebody for revenge.

  And yes, he had told the cops all of this, he declared. He just hadn’t wanted Sharon to find out about it because he thought it would scare her.

  Which probably he was right about; I’d have been scared, too. Except for the method, which still had to be nailed down, from the cops’ point of view it all couldn’t have been neater if it had come in an envelope marked: “Contents: One Murder Conviction.”

  “What happened, then?” I asked. “After he slugged you?”

  And naturally he’d told the cops all of it; heck, if he’d had a third foot he’d have probably stuck that one in his mouth, too.

  Now at my question he looked regretful. “I took a swing back at him. He’d surprised me, you know? I did it before I could think.”

  He shook his head, remembering. “But it didn’t connect. He was already half-passed-out drunk, so he just staggered backward and sat down in the bushes. When I left him, he was trying to get up again.”

  “And the stitches?” I asked. “Who put those in?”

  Was there a medical record of all this, I meant; it seemed like a simple question. But when he heard it, for the first time Andy’s chin thrust out stubbornly.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  I glanced at him in surprise, but he didn’t relent, just stared out the front windshield as we made our way back toward town.

  By this time it was just past two-thirty, when the high school let out and the teenagers began flooding downtown; as we arrived, a line was already forming outside the Moose.

  As I’d noticed earlier, nobody else in town was touching our milkshakes now. In Eastport, the gossip wire is so fast and accurate that if you catch a cold at one end of the island, twenty minutes later someone’s making hot lemonade and getting out the Kleenex for you at the other end.

  But teenagers all know for a fact that they’re immortal and anyway, they’d have drunk liquid uranium if we put enough chocolate in it; through the shop’s front window I saw Ellie running the milkshake mixer.

  “I’ve got to go back inside now,” I told Andy, pulling the car back into its parking spot out front.

  On the sidewalk, I confronted him a final time. “I mean it,” I said. “You need an attorney.”

  Maybe a good lawyer could pound some sense into his head. Because while Sharon seemed properly worried by what might happen next, for a guy who was a hairsbreadth from being a murder suspect, Andy himself appeared oddly unmoved.

  Concerned, naturally. But far from frightened. Once I’d pressed him about it, he’d very calmly related what had happened the night of the murder; accurately, too, I was guessing.

  Well, except for whatever it was that he was still lying about, of course.

  Three

  “Okay, so here’s an idea,” said Ellie a couple of hours after I’d sent Andy on his way.

  She turned the key in the shop door’s lock as we went out.

  “We make each cake layer in sections, in square cake tins, and we lay the sections like tiles for the base and then the same for each of the layers.”

  I shrugged my sweater up onto my shoulders and slung my satchel over one arm while clutching our bank deposit in the other hand.

  “That way,” she said, “we won’t need such sticky frosting, so—”

  It was by no means a large bank deposit, but it would cover the light bill so the power didn’t get cut off.

  “Aren’t wedding cakes supposed to be round?” I asked as she drove us up Washington Street toward the bank. Not only did we not have a big deposit today, we hadn’t had one last week, either.

  Or the week before that. “So we’ll have to trim the corners, and then what’ll we do with all the parts we cut off?” I continued.

  But she wasn’t listening. Instead, “Oh, look!” she exclaimed.

  In the grassy vacant lot behind the massive old granite-block post office building, the farmer’s market was setting up for the first event of the year. This early in the season, it would feature pansies and peas, new potatoes the size of babies’ fists, and the last of the garlic.

  “It’ll make a lot of waste,” I said, meaning the cake, as Ellie selected pale-green lettuces, tender scallions, and a bunch of parsley I thought would go beautifully over those infant potatoes. She must have thought so, too, because she also bought a lot of those, and some garlic for the butter sauce.

  “Trimming the cake layers that way,” I clarified. “To make them round, for a wedding cake. Will create—”

  Ellie sighed deeply, acknowledging my remark, and if she’d seen the deposit slip I’d filled out she’d have sighed even more. But . . .

  “Buy some pansies, Jake.” She waved at the table offering bunches of newly picked blooms, their winsome purple-and-yellow faces so fresh and pretty that I couldn’t resist.

  The overalls-clad woman at the table took my money and wrapped wax paper around the stems, and I bought a bar of homemade goat’s milk soap, too, the grapefruit-and-honey variety that Bella liked so much.

  No doubt she also could use some cheering up, or she’d be needing some soon; my dad was still out in his new pickup truck, I imagined, but he’d have to face the music sooner or later.

  “I’m dreading when Bella finds out about that truck,” I said.

  “You don’t think your dad already told her about it?” Ellie asked as we got back into her car and started up Washington Street again.

  I shook my head as we passed the Eastport Arts Center and, across the street, Spinney’s Garage with a jungle of geraniums in its window.

  “If my dad had told Bella about the new truck he bought without consulting her, we’d have heard the explosion already,” I said, only half-jokingly.

  “Actually, though,” I added, “I expect he’s getting home right around now. He gets hungry this time of day.” Then, “But, Ellie, there’s something very weird about what Andy Devine tol
d me.”

  I’d been mulling it over. “Those stitches in his forehead,” I went on.

  We passed the IGA, a hair salon called the Mousse Island Clipper, and the convenience store. “He admits Toby slugged him. Even says he took a swing, himself.”

  “So?” Ellie pulled carefully into the bank’s ATM lane, where the night deposit slot was. I handed her our envelope.

  “So,” I replied, “there’s no medic at the Coast Guard station. Coasties go to the clinic here in town just like everybody else.”

  I knew because I’d seen them and talked with them in the waiting room while accompanying my dad to his many appointments over the past twelve months. And the clinic, I also happened to know, was closed in the evenings.

  Ellie looked puzzled, meanwhile lining the car up opposite the deposit slot with military precision. “So who did put those stitches in?” she asked.

  Then she glanced into our deposit envelope, and her look changed to one of horror. “Jake, how do we only have—?”

  A sigh escaped me; throughout the previous winter we’d bumped hopefully along toward spring when we thought sales would surely pick up, and in fact they already had, a little bit.

  Just not enough, and not soon enough. Now with the amount we’d spent on ingredients for that dratted wedding cake—not to mention the other toothsome goodies we’d promised for the wedding reception—we were flat broke.

  I explained all this. “Once they’ve paid, of course,” I added, “we’ll have money again. Some, anyway.”

  If they paid, I added silently; if all this murder stuff didn’t put the wedding entirely off the rails.

  “We should’ve asked for a deposit,” I said.

  Any other time, we would have. But Sharon, a school teacher, was nearly as broke as we were, and at the time Andy had been out on a Coast Guard cutter, training new enlistees how not to fall overboard and drown.

  “I’d feel terrible asking for money now, though,” I added.

  Sharon had told us that most of Andy Devine’s paycheck supported distant family members, and we knew her own went for food, the roof over her head, and the clothes on her back, as well as a lot of school supplies for her less-well-off kindergarteners.