The Chocolate Book Bandit

by JoAnna Carl

  “I’m afraid she is, Tony.”

  “I guess it’s Mrs. Blake.”

  I nodded and took his hand. Even a step-aunt can’t hug a thirteen-year-old boy in public. “It’s terribly sad, and you’ve helped a lot.”

  “I better get Alicia home,” he said. He walked out with his head high. I was proud of him. Then I called his mom and told her what had happened and how Tony had been involved. She promised to be ready for emotional storms.

  When Tony had asked about Betty Blake, I had told him the truth. By then I felt certain that Betty was dead. If there had been any signs of life, the EMTs would have been rushing her to the hospital, but no gurney had been carried down the stairs. A few minutes later the portable crime lab operated by the Michigan State Police arrived, and I gave up any hope for her.

  I turned back to Gwen and Butch. We looked at each other and took deep breaths.

  Gwen was frowning. “Did you say a shelf fell over? And all the books fell out?”

  “That’s what it looked like,” Butch said. “It must have made quite a rumble. Did you hear anything?”

  “No! Of course, this movie was loud.”

  “I guess that was it,” Butch said. “I didn’t hear anything either.”

  “What a weird accident,” Gwen said. She collected her kids—the baby had stayed home that day—and left.

  As she went out, Rhonda Ringer-Riley came in. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without her knitting bag.

  She shook hands with Butch and nodded to me.

  “Goodness gracious!” she said. “Another disaster. What a run of bad luck.”

  I almost laughed. Yeah, murder can be awfully unlucky.

  Then I felt sick. Both Gwen and Rhonda assumed Betty’s death was an accident. I assumed that it wasn’t.

  Of course, I said nothing. Although Butch and I assured Rhonda that she didn’t need to stay, she didn’t leave. “I guess I’d better act as if I’m the board chair,” she said.

  So we waited. I called and left a message for Joe, explaining what had happened. I guess I hoped he’d run right down to the library to hold my hand, but that didn’t happen. In a while Hogan came down, asked Butch and me for preliminary statements, and told us we could go home. Butch said he would stay and close the building, but Rhonda and I didn’t need a second suggestion. We were out the door immediately. We both stopped on the sidewalk.

  “Whew!” Rhonda said. “What a mess!”

  “It’s a nightmare. I liked Betty.”

  “So did I.” Rhonda turned to me. “Oh. You called me this afternoon, but I didn’t get a chance to return your call.”

  “It seemed important at the time, but now . . .” Actually, I did still want to know. “I was wondering if any particular board member, or board members, had pushed for the hiring of Butch.”

  Rhonda looked troubled. “It wouldn’t do much good for a board member to do that. The city personnel director did the screening and the formal interviews.”

  “Oh? I thought the board interviewed the finalists.”

  “Yes, we did. But our vote was merely advisory.”

  “It’s bound to have a strong influence.”

  “We like to think it does.” Rhonda smiled.

  “Did the board recommend Butch?”

  “The personnel manager selected three finalists, and we talked to all of them.”

  Was it my imagination, or was getting information out of her like pulling teeth? I had asked her a yes-or-no question. Was she dodging it?

  I didn’t repeat my question. I just tried to look expectant, as if Rhonda were going to give me an answer.

  Finally she spoke. “We ranked the three we talked to.”

  I kept looking expectant.

  “And, yes, uh—yes, Butch was our first choice.”

  “And did any particular board member lead the charge, so to speak, in urging the board to back Butch?”

  “Butch has excellent qualifications, Lee.”

  “Oh yes! I’ve read the article about him in the Gazette. He sounds ideal. I guess I was just wondering if he had any local connections.”

  Rhonda still looked a little wary. “I don’t know of any specific connections,” she said. “But I will say that Abigail Montgomery thought he was the best choice. And Miss Vanderklomp, though she doesn’t have a vote, was strongly in favor of him as well.”

  Rhonda and I were saying good-bye as I saw Carol Turley’s car skid into a parking place at the end of the block. Carol jumped out and came toward us, stumbling along with her usual awkward gait.

  The final board member, I thought. At least the library had an active, responsive board. Rhonda and I walked down to meet her.

  “I can’t believe this!” Carol said.

  “How did you hear?” Rhonda asked.

  “Betty’s daughter called me. The police came to her job to tell her. I guess she thought I’d know something.”

  “I don’t think anybody knows much yet,” Rhonda said. “Lee found her.”

  Over to me. I gave Carol a quick report of how I’d discovered Betty.

  Carol had only one question. “Is she dead?”

  Rhonda and I told her we assumed that she was. “It’s a very strange accident,” Rhonda said.

  This drew an odd, sideways glance and another question from Carol. “Were both of you here when it happened?”

  “No,” I said. “Betty asked me to drop by after work.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. She said she had a bookkeeping question for me, but she didn’t have time to tell me what it was. But she’d gone upstairs at least ten minutes before I got here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because when I came in there was a line of people waiting at the circulation desk. Some of them were griping about how long they’d been waiting. If Betty had been able to come to the desk, she would have been there. She struck me as a thoroughly reliable person.”

  “Yes,” Carol said sadly. Her hands were shaking. “Betty was always reliable.”

  I went home then. Somehow I wasn’t surprised that Joe wasn’t there when I arrived. In fact, he’d left a message for me saying he was staying in Holland for dinner for a second straight night.

  Bummer.

  This time I succumbed to the desire to curl up in a ball and feel sorry for myself. Not that I literally curled up in a ball. But I did put on my oldest jeans and scramble some eggs, even if I had to eat them without English muffins. I found tortillas, sharp cheese, and salsa and made some little burrito-like things.

  They tasted pretty good, especially with an episode of House Hunters on HGTV. HGTV is definitely part of my method of curling up into a ball.

  I guess I had been hungry, because I felt better after I’d eaten. I was peppy enough to rekindle my interest in Butch Cassidy’s background. I did this in the full knowledge that I was indulging my crush. Yes, I recognized that I had a crush on Butch Cassidy, just the way I’d once worshipped a certain TV star, and the way Tony’s older sister, Marcia, now had a crush on the teen idol Marco Spear.

  It was a totally stupid way for a woman in her thirties to feel, but I didn’t care. I wanted to think about him, and looking up his background was one way to do it.

  I turned off the television and found the article that sketched Butch’s background when he was named director of the Warner Pier Public Library.

  There was his education—bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan and master’s from the University of Michigan. There was his upbringing—Detroit area. His early job history—U.S. Army for twenty years. He got his undergraduate degree while he was in the army. Then he held library jobs in the Ann Arbor area and at the university while he was in grad school. His age was forty-one. That meant he’d been in his late thirties before he started graduate school.

/>   It all seemed fairly complete. But maybe there was more. I Googled him.

  Henry Cassidy. University of Michigan. Information science.

  A few items came up, but none sounded likely. Hmmm. I decided to take advantage of being married to a U of M graduate. I found Joe’s hidden password and accessed the University of Michigan alumni lists. I searched them. I searched them again. I looked back at the article from the Warner Pier Weekly Gazette. Yes, it said that Butch had received his MLS the previous June. I found the list of MLS recipients. I read it. I read it again.

  Finally I gave up.

  Wha’d’ya know. No one named Cassidy had received an MLS from the University of Michigan in June.

  As far as I could figure out from the alumni lists, Butch had never received such a degree at all.

  Was my crush a fraud?

  Chapter 15

  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.”