Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

by Joanne Fluke

  “I think I’m a couple of dollars ahead.” Lisa glanced down at her tray. “Why don’t you try it? It’s really a lot of fun.”

  “All right, but only for a few minutes. I want to get back before nine. Just let me get some change.”

  “Take some of these.” Lisa scooped some quarters out of the tray and handed them to her. “Maybe they’ll bring you luck.”

  The machine next to Lisa was empty and Hannah sat down. Her last suspect had been eliminated. If the bouncer had been at the hospital with his wife, there was no way he could have shot Ron. As Hannah pulled the handle and lost her first quarter, she wondered what people found so fascinating about slot machines. They weren’t really interactive, but the man across the aisle from her was patting his machine with his left hand while he pulled the handle with his right.

  It must be superstitious behavior, Hannah decided, and as she glanced at the people around her, she realized that every one of them was doing something to try to change their luck. The lady in the red dress talked to her machine, murmuring endearments as the reels spun around. The older man in the polo shirt held down the handle until the reels stopped moving and then he released it to fly back with a jerk. The young brunette in the pink sweater was cupping her left hand in the coin tray as if she could will the coins to fall. Hannah was amused as she turned back to her machine. Everything was mechanized. Didn’t they realize that nothing they could do would change the outcome?

  Prompted by the thought that the sooner they left, the sooner she could get home to Moishe and her comfortable bed, Hannah noticed that it was possible to drop five quarters into the coin slot before she pulled the handle. That was nice. She’d get rid of her money five times faster that way. Hannah concentrated on dropping in multiple coins, pulling the handle, and waiting to drop in more.

  “Isn’t this fun, Hannah?”

  Lisa turned to grin at her and Hannah put on an answering smile. Some fun. As far as she could see, the only benefit that might come from playing the slots was a possible strengthening of the muscles in her right arm.

  Hannah dropped in her last five quarters. One more pull of the handle and she’d be finished. She yanked down the lever and turned to Lisa to ask her if she was ready to leave, when a siren wailed, red lights flashed, and quarters began to spew out of her machine.

  “You hit a jackpot!” Lisa jumped up from her chair and rushed over to watch the hailstorm of coins bouncing down. “How many quarters did you put in?”

  Hannah just stared at the avalanche of coins clanking noisily into the metal tray. “As many as it could take. I just wanted to finish so that we could go home.”

  “You did it, Hannah!” Lisa’s mouth dropped open as she looked up at the flashing numbers above the machine. “You just won one thousand nine hundred and forty-two dollars!”

  Hannah stared at the flashing numbers with absolute amazement. Then she looked down at the reels and saw that they were all lined up on the jackpot icons. No wonder people liked to play the slot machines. It was a lot more fun than she’d thought.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hey, Moishe. How about some grub?” Hannah tossed her purse onto the couch and carried Moishe out to the kitchen. She draped her parka over a chair, set Moishe down next to his food bowl, and poured in a generous serving of Meow Mix. Then she remembered that she’d just won a slot machine jackpot and she opened a can of fancy albacore tuna and dumped that in, too. Moishe meant more to her than any of the other males in her life. He should enjoy the fruits of her good fortune.

  She’d already shared her winnings with Lisa. Hannah had given her a bonus of two hundred dollars, making her promise to buy a fancy dress to go with her new shoes. Lisa hadn’t wanted to take it, but after Hannah had convinced her that she never would have played the slots if Lisa hadn’t urged her, she’d accepted the money.

  Hannah had done some mental arithmetic as she’d driven home, taking into account the money she’d spent investigating Ron’s murder for Bill. Even after she’d subtracted the cost of the makeup from Luanne, the dress from Claire, and the money they’d spent at Twin Pines, she’d still come out over a thousand dollars to the good.

  While Moishe munched and rumbled his contentment, Hannah marched to the kitchen phone to call Bill and tell him that she’d eliminated the bouncer as a suspect. Bill wasn’t at his desk at the sheriff’s station, but she left a message there and another with Andrea, who promised to prop up a note by the phone. Hannah hung up, her duty done, and went to her bedroom to change into the oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants she’d bought when the furnace had gone out last winter.

  Ten minutes later, Hannah was sitting in her favorite spot on the couch, sipping her wine and holding Moishe. He was always starved for affection when she’d been gone for hours, and tonight was no exception. She scratched him under his chin until he purred in ecstasy and she sang the silly little song she’d made up for him. She’d never been able to carry a tune, but as long as she kept on scratching, Moishe seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps it was a very good thing that she lived alone. If anyone had heard her singing about how much she adored her “big strong puss,” she’d be locked up as a nutcase.

  The condo complex had free cable and Hannah surfed through the channels. There were fifty, but there was still nothing she wanted to watch. She settled for a documentary on forensics. It was possible she might learn something. But all the expert talked about were the new advances in fingerprint technology. Hannah listened to him expound on the use of superglue in subzero temperatures to lift prints from a victim’s skin and then she switched to the classic movies channel. Klute was playing and she’d seen it before, but she didn’t feel like channel-surfing any longer and she left it on.

  Hannah thought about the crime for a while, but that was depressing. None of her sleuthing had done a particle of good. The cup with the lipstick had been promising at first, and she’d managed to find out that Danielle had been with Ron right before he’d been murdered. But what Danielle had told her really hadn’t mattered in the long run. She’d checked out Coach Watson and the jealousy motive, but he’d been with Maryann at his mother’s house when Ron had been shot. Norman was no longer a suspect, now that Delores had confirmed his alibi, and the homeless man that Claire had seen had been eating breakfast at the critical time. The bouncer that Ron had fought with at Twin Pines would be in the clear just as soon as Bill checked with the hospital, and Hannah was fresh out of suspects. She had to come up with some other suspects, but she didn’t have any idea where to start.

  She reached for the notepad she kept by the couch and scrawled a list of names: Coach Watson, Norman, Blaze, and Alfred Redbird. Then she sighed and drew a line through each of them. As an afterthought, Hannah added Danielle to the list, but she really didn’t think that Danielle had shot Ron. All the same, she decided to check to see if she had an alibi.

  Hannah picked up the phone book and paged through to find Danielle’s number. If Coach Watson answered, she’d just hang up.

  Danielle picked up on the second ring and Hannah breathed a sigh of relief. “Hi, Danielle. It’s Hannah Swensen. Can you talk?”

  “Just a minute, Hannah.” Hannah heard Danielle say something to Boyd about ordering cookies and then she came back on the line. “We’ll need five dozen for my art class Halloween party, Hannah. I was thinking of something with orange frosting.”

  “No problem,” Hannah answered quickly. “If I ask you yes or no questions, will that be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. Did you see anyone or make any calls after Ron dropped you off on Wednesday morning?”

  “Yes. I’d love to see a sample, Hannah, but I can’t come in that early on Wednesday morning. The Sparklettes man delivers our water between eight and nine and I have to be here to let him in.”

  “Can you figure out any way to tell me exactly what time he was there?”

  “I hate those morning deliveries, too. Last Wednesday he was here at eight and
I almost overslept.”

  “Thanks, Danielle.” Hannah hung up and jotted down a note by Danielle’s name. She’d check with the Sparklettes driver and if he’d delivered water to Danielle at eight, she could cross Danielle’s name off the list.

  It was another dead end. Hannah sighed and tried to think of something positive. Positive thoughts were supposed to lead to pleasant dreams and she didn’t want a repeat of last night’s nightmares. At least she was getting along with Andrea much better lately. Perhaps all the old resentments were fading with the years and they could actually become friends.

  Hannah had to admit that she’d been a pretty hard act to follow in school. Andrea had taken a lot of criticism from her teachers about the fact that Hannah had been a straight-A student. Instead of competing with Hannah’s academic record, Andrea had thrown herself into extracurricular activities. She’d starred in school plays, sung solos at concerts, and edited the school paper and yearbook. And Andrea had certainly been more popular with the boys than Hannah had been. Andrea’s Friday and Saturday nights had been booked from her freshman year through her senior year.

  Hannah sighed. She could boast of only two dates during her entire time in high school. One had been a study date at her house with a classmate who was about to flunk chemistry and it had taken some very broad hints from Delores before he’d agreed to take Hannah out for pizza to thank her for his passing grade. The other had been her senior prom date. Hannah had found out later that it had entailed a promise of a part-time summer job in her father’s shop for Cliff Schuman to show up at her door with a corsage in his hand.

  College had been different. There she hadn’t been treated as a pariah because she read the classics and knew who Wittgenstein and Sartre were. In college, the ability to do an algebraic equation in her head wasn’t considered a personality defect, and no one thought less of her if she knew the atomic number of einsteinium. Of course, there had been a group of incredibly gorgeous, bubbleheaded girls who’d turned male heads, but most of them had either flunked out or left to get their MRS degrees.

  Hannah had finally started to date as a sophomore in college. She’d gone out with a too-tall, too-thin history major for several months. After that, there had been an intense art major who’d confided that he was celibate right after she’d begun to think they’d had something going, and a master’s candidate who’d wanted her input on his thesis. True love, or perhaps it was true lust, hadn’t found her until November in her second year of postgraduate work. That was when Hannah had met the man she’d thought would be her soul mate.

  Bradford Ramsey had been the assistant professor in Hannah’s poetry seminar, and the first time he’d given a lecture, she’d been spellbound. It hadn’t been his manner of speaking or the way he’d read stanzas from Byron and Keats. It had been his marvelous, soul-searching dark blue eyes.

  Social meetings after class with the professor had been frowned upon by the administration unless several students were in attendance, but Brad had found ways around the rules. Hannah had gone to his office for several student-professor conferences. After he’d told her that he thought he was in love with her, she’d wound up at his apartment, sneaking through the lobby at eleven at night with the hood of her parka obscuring her face. That night, and the nights that followed, had been memorable. Hannah had discovered that sex was a lot more fun than she’d thought it would be. But the last night she’d spent with her handsome professor had been memorable in a way she’d never anticipated. His fiancée had driven in for a surprise visit, Brad had panicked, and Hannah had been forced to vacate his bed by way of an icy fire escape.

  Hannah had broken it off and told herself that she was wiser for the experience, but that hadn’t made it any easier. Seeing her former lover stride across campus with a gaggle of young, impressionable girls in his wake had been almost too painful to bear. It had come as a relief when Andrea had asked her to leave college and come back to Lake Eden to help settle her father’s affairs. That didn’t mean that Hannah had given up on men. She was just taking a breather, waiting for one she could love and trust to come along. In the meantime, she had her family, her work and her loyal cat. And if her bed was lonely and she sometimes wished that she had someone without furry paws to cuddle, she could deal with it.

  The phone rang and Hannah reached out to answer it. “Hi, Bill. It’s about time.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Who else could it be? Mother never calls me this late and Andrea told me she was going to bed an hour ago. Did you find out anything new about Ron?”

  “Not a thing.” Bill sounded depressed. “Ron had no known enemies, he didn’t owe any large amounts of money, and there were no deposits to his bank account that couldn’t be explained. I’ve got zilch.”

  Hannah was quick to commiserate, “Me, too. I talked to the manager at the casino and I think we have to eliminate the bouncer as a suspect. His name is Alfred Redbird and you should check with the hospital. His wife had a baby that morning. If he was with her the whole time, he couldn’t have shot Ron.”

  “Okay.” Bill sounded even more discouraged. “I’m fresh out of leads, Hannah. If we had a motive, we’d have something to go on, but we don’t even have that.”

  Hannah’s eyes were drawn to the television screen. Klute was still playing and that gave her an idea. “Maybe we do have a motive. What if Ron saw something that morning, something that could incriminate his killer in some way? That might be why he was shot.”

  “And Ron was murdered before he could implicate his killer in another crime?” Bill was silent for a long moment and Hannah knew he was thinking it over. “You could be right. But how do we find out what Ron saw?”

  “I’ll go back to my source, the one with the pink lipstick. She can tell me if anything unusual happened that morning.”

  “Okay.” There was another long silence and then Bill sighed. “Maybe you’d better warn her to be careful. If you’re right and she saw what Ron saw, the killer might come after her.”

  “He won’t. I’m the only one who knows who she is and she’s sure that no one spotted her with Ron. If the killer wanted to murder her, he would have done it by now.”

  “Maybe.”

  Bill didn’t sound convinced and Hannah frowned. For Danielle’s sake she certainly hoped that she was right.

  “You’ve been a big help, Hannah. By the way, did you know that your mother saw Ron pulling away from Norman’s dental office right before she went in for her appointment?”

  “Norman told me about it. I questioned him, but he said that Ron was only in his chair for twenty minutes. He gave Ron a shot of Xylocaine for his cracked tooth and Ron was supposed to come back to get it fixed. I’ll get back to you as soon as I talk to my source. I’m sure she’ll be at the Woodleys’ party. And if you want to talk to Norman, he’ll be there, too.”

  “Andrea told me that you were going to the party with Norman. Is it serious?”

  “Serious? With Norman?”

  “I was just teasing you, Hannah. I’ll see you at the party and we can compare notes.”

  Hannah hung up and flicked off the television. She scooped up Moishe, carried him into the bedroom, and deposited him on the pillow she’d designated as his on the first night he’d spent in her condo. Then she went back for her wineglass and flicked off the lights, taking a seat in the old wing chair she’d placed in front of her bedroom window. The snow was still falling and it created lovely halos around the old-fashioned streetlights that lined the brick walkways between the units. It was a perfect winter scene, worthy of Currier and Ives. According to her college art professor, people who lived in warm climates loved winter scenes with their glittering expanses of unbroken snow and yellow light spilling out from the windows of snug, cozy homes. Minnesotans who bought scenic art usually avoided winter scenes. Hannah didn’t find that surprising. Minnesota winters were long. Why would they want to buy a painting that would constantly remind them of the bone-chilling
cold, the heavy snow that had to be shoveled, and the necessity of dressing up in survival gear to do nothing more than take out the garbage?

  Hannah had finished the last of her wine and was about to rouse herself to climb in under the covers when she noticed that one of the cars in the visitors’ parking lot was idling, its exhaust pipe sending up plumes of white against the dark night sky. Its headlights were off and that was odd, unless someone was taking a very long time to say goodbye to his date. She could see only one occupant, a bulky figure behind the wheel that she assumed was a man. As she watched, she saw a reflection glinting off two round lenses in front of his face. Binoculars? Or eyeglasses? Hannah couldn’t tell at this distance, but the fact that no one else was in the car made her nervous.

  Hannah stared at the car, memorizing its shape. It was a small compact in a dark color, but it was parked too far away to identify the manufacturer. The roof looked lighter than the body, and Hannah assumed that it was covered with snow. This car had been parked for a while and the driver appeared to be watching her building.

  There were only four units in her building. Phil and Sue Plotnik lived below her and there was no earthly reason why anyone would sit in a parked car to watch their place. Phil was home tonight. She’d seen his car in the garage when she’d driven in and she’d heard their new baby fussing softly as she’d climbed the stairs to her unit. Hannah’s other neighbors were equally unremarkable. Mrs. Canfield, an elderly widow, had the bottom unit next to the Plotniks. She lived on her husband’s retirement money and gave piano lessons during the week. Above her were Marguerite and Clara Hollenbeck, two middle-aged unmarried sisters who were very active at Redeemer Lutheran Church. As far as Hannah knew, there wasn’t a breath of gossip about them, except for the time they’d washed the altar cloths with a red blouse of Clara’s and they’d come out pink.