The Missing Dough (A Pizza Lovers Mystery)

by Chris Cavender

  “You just told me that I should call him,” I reminded her.

  “Not that. It’s just that you chewed out someone who might be a very bad man in his own right.”

  I hadn’t even considered that. I was about to answer when my cell phone rang.

  After I answered it, Art asked, “Eleanor, are you all right?”

  “I am, but I need a favor. But before I forget, could you apologize to the man I just spoke to? I’m sorry about the way I treated him on the telephone.”

  Art chuckled. “It’s not necessary.”

  “It is to me.”

  Art paused a moment and then said, “Very well, but I’m not sure if he’s more afraid of you or of me right now. So, what is this favor? Ask, and it’s yours.”

  “Wow, I’m not sure I want a blank check like that. I’m at the Clean Break Dry Cleaner in Cow Spots. A woman named Vivian owns it, and I need her alibi for a murder last night. The only problem is that she won’t give it to me, and she claims that she’s under someone’s protection. Can you help? You know that I wouldn’t ordinarily ask, but this is important.”

  “I assumed that it was about Grant Whitmore when I heard that you had called,” he said. “Tell your sister I’m sorry for her loss.”

  “I will,” I said. “Do I even need to ask how you heard about it so quickly?”

  “Not a great deal goes on in Timber Ridge that I’m not aware of,” Art said. “I don’t know this Vivian directly. Let me make a few phone calls. How long will you be there?”

  “We can wait an hour before we have to leave,” I said after glancing at my watch.

  “Oh, it won’t take that long,” he said and then hung up.

  “Is he going to help us?” Maddy asked.

  “He asked us to wait here. Oh yeah. He also told me to tell you that he was sorry to hear about Grant.”

  “That’s nice of him,” Maddy said.

  We found a bench near the front of the dry cleaner, in plain view of the picture window, and Maddy and I waited for Art’s return call. Vivian pretended to ignore us, but it was hard to do, since we didn’t see a single customer come into the store while we waited. Was the dry cleaner all it seemed to be, or could it be a front for something else? Honestly, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.

  Fourteen minutes after my call to Art, Vivian came out of the dry cleaner and walked toward us. There was a contrite expression on her face, and I didn’t have to guess what was motivating her visit to us. Her words just confirmed my suspicion that Art had already acted on our behalf.

  “I’m sorry if I was rude before,” Vivian said. “I was with a married man named Jack Timbold last night here in town. He’ll confirm that we were together if you ask him. Again, I’m sorry for my behavior.”

  After she went back into her business, my telephone rang. “I trust that was satisfactory,” Art said.

  “Can we believe her?” I asked.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind. Lying is not something she would even consider, given the circumstances.”

  “Then it’s perfect. Thank you for acting so quickly. I’m really sorry to bother you with this.”

  “Eleanor, I am so deeply in your debt that there’s nothing you can’t ask of me.”

  I didn’t have a chance to respond to that before he hung up.

  “So, do we believe her?” Maddy asked.

  “I’m inclined to, unless we learn something otherwise. I have a feeling that Vivian would have a lot more of a problem lying to us, with Art backing us, than she ever would to the police. For now, we can mark her name off our list.”

  “Our list of suspects is looking kind of sparse at the moment, isn’t it?” Maddy asked as we headed to my car.

  “I don’t know. There’s the man from Grant’s mysterious meeting we saw last night, and don’t forget the lead singer and the guitar player from the band. Who knows how many other folks we’ll be able to dig up once we get into this case a little further?”

  “I’ll be happy just as long as Bob isn’t the last name on our list when this is all over,” Maddy said.

  I wasn’t about to admit it, but I was wishing the exact same thing.

  “I’d still like to talk to Jack Timbold just to confirm Vivian’s alibi,” I said.

  “Why? I thought we agreed that Vivian wouldn’t lie to us, knowing that Art was on our side.”

  “I’m sure that someone put the fear of Art into her, but what if she did kill Grant and then tried to give herself a false alibi to the police without talking it over with anyone else? I don’t doubt that she was with this Timbold guy, but I need to hear it directly from him and find out the exact time they were together. We can’t forget that Cow Spots is only twenty minutes from Timber Ridge. She might have set this poor guy up as an alibi after she killed Grant to give herself some cover, never realizing that she might be digging a deeper hole for herself by doing it.”

  “Okay, then we’ll keep him on our list of folks we need to talk to, and Vivian moves to the back burner for now until we do.” As I drove back toward Timber Ridge, she asked, “Do we still have time to go by Sharon’s and snoop around a little?”

  “If the police are finished there, we’ll make the time,” I said.

  “Thanks, Eleanor. I know you don’t really have a dog in this fight. I appreciate you committing yourself to the investigation like this.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said to her. “You need to understand something. Bob might be your fiancé, but he’s my friend, too, and I never let my friends down. I’m almost as eager as you are to solve this case.”

  “I’m glad you said almost,” Maddy answered.

  “Is it going to be tough on you being around Sharon’s things so soon after learning that she is dead?” I asked her as we now headed toward a stop at her former mother-in-law’s address before we made it back to the pizzeria. “I know you cared about her.”

  “I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it, but what choice do I have?”

  “I could go inside alone, and you could wait in the car and keep a lookout for me,” I suggested.

  “Do you honestly think for one second that I could ever do that?” Maddy asked me.

  “No. I realize that’s never going to happen, but I kind of felt obligated to make the offer, anyway.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Sis. In a very real way, I lost Sharon the moment I found out that her son had cheated on me. We kept our friendship alive, but there was always that unspoken tension between us, no matter how hard we tried to ignore it.”

  “I understand,” I said. Joe’s parents had been dead long before we met, and I’d never had the opportunity of having a mother-in-law, good or bad. Sometimes I wondered what I’d missed out on, but mostly, I didn’t think about it. It was tough to mourn something that I’d never experienced.

  We got to Sharon’s house, and thankfully, the police cruisers were gone.

  I didn’t stop in, though.

  “Where are you going, Eleanor?”

  “Think about it, Maddy. What if someone comes by while we’re in there snooping? Even if they don’t, do we really want to advertise the fact to the world that we’re digging around here? I figured that it might be prudent to park down the block a little, in case we need to make a quick escape.”

  “Okay, I can see how that might be a good thing.”

  After I parked, we walked back toward the house like we had every right in the world to be there.

  I just hoped that we could get in.

  If the spare key was still where my sister remembered it had been hidden, Maddy and I were about to do some serious snooping into Grant’s life.

  I just hoped we’d be able to find something that would help.

  Chapter 5

  “Let’s get in before anyone sees us,” Maddy said softly as she opened the front door and stepped quickly inside. Just as she had suspected, the key had been buried in the third window box on the right, and she’d pulled it out of the topsoil and flower
s as though she used it all the time.

  “Lead the way,” I whispered as she closed the door behind me.

  “Why are you whispering?” she asked in her normal voice.

  “Was I?” I asked, but I knew all too well why I’d lowered my voice upon crossing the threshold.

  There was something eerie about a house when its owner had recently died. Some folks believed that it was a lingering spirit, and though I couldn’t say for sure what I believed one way or the other, I knew that there could often be a presence felt in a place, almost as though something was holding on to a spot where it didn’t belong anymore. I would love to be able to say that I’d never personally been in the home of someone who had recently died, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make that claim. During past investigations, Maddy and I had searched quite a few houses, looking for clues about who might have wanted to kill their former owners, and the range of experiences we’d had did nothing to discourage that belief.

  This was a first, though.

  Sharon had passed away recently—peacefully, according to the reports we’d heard—but Grant had been another case entirely. Was it a mixed set of emotions we were going to experience here?

  “Has much changed since you were here the last time?” I asked Maddy as I looked around. The house was decorated in a way that clearly was not to my own minimalist taste, with flowery wallpaper adorning the walls, shelves everywhere covered with teacups of all shapes and sizes, and furniture that looked as though it’d been there for several decades. For a moment I could almost taste the feeling of loss all around us. Man, oh, man, my imagination was running away with me. If I was being honest about it, there was little doubt in my mind that I was just creating these impressions myself, but that didn’t make them any easier to take.

  “Should we search the upstairs?” I asked, hoping that the space had to be less stressful than where we were standing at the moment.

  “It’s my best guess about where we’ll find Grant’s room,” she agreed.

  The odd thing was that there was no evidence that he’d been living in the house at all. We checked every bedroom and the hall bathroom upstairs as well, but I didn’t see a single sign that Grant had been there in the past ten years. Even his boyhood bedroom was covered with a fine layer of dust. “Maddy, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Grant ever lived here after the two of you were married. Could your source on the Internet have been wrong?”

  She frowned. “I’m not willing to give up yet. We still need to check the basement.”

  “Would she make him live down there when all of these bedrooms are empty upstairs?” I asked.

  “If he stayed there, it was most likely Grant’s choice,” Maddy said. “If he was living in the basement, he could delude himself into believing that he had a place of his own. I’m not sure he could live with the idea that he had to come home and live with his mother again. Come on. Let’s check it out.”

  Maddy opened the basement door, and as she did, I could swear I felt a fleeting, cold burst of air escape. The impression lasted just an instant, but it felt real just the same. It was as though the upstairs was filled with Sharon’s spirit, while Grant’s ghost had stayed in the basement, where it belonged.

  “I’m seriously losing my mind with all of this,” I said aloud, trying to break the spell this house seemed to hold over me.

  “I don’t doubt it for one second, but why now in particular?” Maddy asked as we walked down the steps together.

  “This place feels as though it’s haunted by two different ghosts,” I admitted to my sister. “Upstairs was warm and open, but this is downright hostile.”

  Maddy chuckled a little. “Sharon was always complaining that the basement was a little drafty. As for the upstairs, it’s always been too warm for my taste.”

  “So, you think I’m just imagining it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Who knows what happens after we’re gone? Maybe neither one of them was ready to walk into the light.”

  We were at the bottom of the stairs, and I had to look hard at the expression on Maddy’s face to see if she was making fun of me. There was no sign of amusement there, though, something that didn’t really comfort me.

  I probably would have liked it better if I knew that she’d been teasing me.

  Maddy flipped a light switch, and I could see that the downstairs was indeed some kind of subterranean apartment. It had been decorated sometime in the seventies, and no one had updated it since. The walls were painted a mustard brown, and the carpet was a lighter shade of yellow. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find black lights and disco balls hanging from the ceiling, but fortunately, we were spared that. Still, it was no place for a grown man to be living.

  “Vivian must have wiped him completely out to force him to live down here for one day,” Maddy said.

  “After meeting her, can you honestly say that it surprises you? She had that kind of look about her, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t trust her to hold on to my lunch money,” Maddy admitted. “What I want to know is how Grant ever persuaded her to marry him in the first place.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that it was more Vivian’s idea than Grant’s. She must have had her reasons, but I can’t even begin to guess what they could have been.”

  Maddy looked around the space and then noted, “At least there’s not much we have to search.”

  “And I don’t doubt that it’s even less after the police left,” I said. “Still, we’ve found things before that they’ve missed. Kevin Hurley is a pretty good cop, but he lacks something we have when it comes to digging.”

  “What’s that?” Maddy asked.

  “A woman’s point of view,” I answered. “We can see things that he might miss, and better yet, interpret them in a different light.”

  “I just hope we find something,” Maddy said.

  I looked around the room and made an executive decision. “Tell you what. You take the closet, and I’ll take the desk in the corner. The first one who finishes gets to tackle the chest of drawers.”

  “It’s a deal,” she said. As my sister looked into the jammed closet, she said, “I’ll never find anything digging around in here. I’m going to search everything as I pull it out of the closet. Do you mind if I use the bed?”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  As Maddy started investigating the closet, I moved to Grant’s desk. It was an old-fashioned rolltop number with dull brass knobs and a well-worn top, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was left over from generations past, just waiting to be put back into use.

  At least I didn’t need a key. The police who’d searched the place earlier hadn’t found it either, but they hadn’t let that stop them. There were fresh scratches by the latch, as though someone had pried the tambour pull-down free from its simple lock. It was a rather inelegant way to handle the situation, but I knew that sometimes cops didn’t care, especially if they were in a hurry. I shoved the tambour up, hearing it click, click, click as it moved up into the desk, to reveal a dozen tiny little drawers and just as many open cubbyholes.

  It was time to start digging.

  “Did you find anything good yet?” Maddy asked as she walked over to me. I was trying to study Grant’s receipts that I’d pulled from the main drawer, searching in vain to find any particular order to his organization, or lack thereof. If it was present, it had eluded me so far. I had moved a few things from the mess over to one side to study later, but I hadn’t found anything earth-shattering so far.

  I pushed away from the desk. “Was he always such a bad record keeper?”

  “Oh, yes. When we first got married, I had to put some extra money in his checking account to cover his rounding habits, and then I had to open a whole new account at another bank so we could start off together with some semblance of organization. It drove me mad.”

  “I can’t even imagine how you were able to stand it,” I said. “How about you? Were you able to find anything?
”

  She didn’t look particularly happy as she admitted, “I’m just about all the way to the back of the closet, and so far, I’ve pulled four notes from his pockets. Two were written on napkins, one on a pack of matches, and the last one on an old envelope.”

  “Anything there that you think might be significant?” She shook her head. “Not that I can tell so far. Three look like telephone numbers, and the final one appears to be some kind of combination.”

  “He actually has a safe?” I asked as I looked around the room for where it might be hiding.

  “Not as far as I can see,” she said. “What about you?”

  I pointed to the small stack of papers I had accumulated so far. “I have no idea what I’ve got here. I wish we could find his checkbook. The register might be informative.”

  “The police probably took it with them,” Maddy said. “Is his address book anywhere in sight?”

  “I didn’t know he had one. If it’s here, I haven’t come across it yet. What does it look like?”

  “If you can believe it, it’s actually one of those little black books. He keeps everything in it, not just telephone numbers, so if we can track it down, it’s going to be a big help.”

  “I’ll keep digging,” I said.

  “So will I,” she said.

  Three minutes later Maddy said, “Bingo!”

  I left the desk and hurried to the closet. “What did you find? Did the little black book turn up?”

  “No, I wasn’t that lucky, but I did find five hundred dollars in an envelope tucked in the pocket of his best suit.”

  “We aren’t here scavenging for cash, Maddy.”

  She shook her head. “I’m just saying, this must mean something. Grant was notorious for putting everything on his credit card. Why would he be carrying around a wad of cash like this?”

  “I don’t have a clue, but you should put it back where you found it.”

  “Eleanor, I know that we can’t keep it, but couldn’t we use it for expenses while we’re digging into his murder?”

  “I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But I still don’t think that I could feel right about doing it. As far as I’m concerned, it should go into the estate. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a bit of it for yourself.”