The Chocolate Bridal Bash (11 page)

I stood there, staring at the snow and stewing until my nerves had turned into needles and were poking holes in my skin. I barely acknowledged Rollie’s good-bye, and when Joe joined me by the window, I clutched at his sleeve as if I were grabbing a lifeline.

“Joe, is there any kind of a sensible lie we can come up with?”

“What do we need to lie about?”

“About why we went into Carl Van Hoosier’s apartment. Neither of us ever met the guy before.”

Joe grinned. “I’ll play the city attorney card. Maybe it will work.”

“You can’t claim you were on any kind of official business!”

“I know. But they’ll be polite.” He gave me a onearmed hug. “Relax.”

A few more minutes went by, and the bald nurse came through the lounge. When he saw us, he came over. Joe stuck out his hand in shaking position.

“I’m Joe Woodyard,” he said. “This is my fiancé, Lee McKinney. We didn’t exactly get a chance to introduce ourselves in there.”

The tall nurse shook hands with both of us. “Elmer Priddy,” he said. “Thanks for waiting around.”

Priddy looked troubled, as well he might, I guess. He was around an inch taller than Joe, but thin, and had a square jaw. I guessed his age at midfifties. His head had been shaved, rather than being naturally bald, and I could see the five o’clock shadow that marked the boundaries of where his hairline would have been. Most guys who shave their heads are almost bald anyway, I’ve noticed. They apparently just decide to give up the fight. But Priddy’s hair grew down low onto his forehead and when he ducked his head I saw that the five o’clock shadow looked even all over his skull.

“I’m a lawyer,” Joe said. “I’ve been involved with a couple of murder trials. I’m far from expert, but I didn’t like the way that apartment looked.”

Priddy shook his head. “If it weren’t for the eyelids, I might have said natural causes. And then I found that bump.”

Joe went on. “I guess the doctor agreed with you.”

“The administrator doesn’t like it, but there’s going to be an autopsy.”

“That’s smart,” Joe said. “Even if it shows natural causes . . .” We all nodded wisely.

“Any idea when he died?” Joe sounded idly curious.

“According to the body temp . . . I’d be guessing. But CPR wouldn’t have helped him.” Priddy looked at us closely. “You weren’t relatives of Van Hoosier’s?”

“No. We didn’t know him at all,” Joe said. “I’m city attorney over at Warner Pier. We were looking for a little information about an old case.”

Priddy’s head snapped toward Joe, and his eyes grew wide. But it was a moment before he spoke. “He probably wouldn’t have remembered,” he said. “I guess I’d better get back to work.”

He walked back the way I’d seen him come, down the hall that led to the nursing wing.

A few more minutes later one of the sheriff’s deputies came out. He checked with the receptionist first, consulting the check-in sheet we’d signed as we arrived. I felt relieved as I realized we had some sort of proof of when we got there.

Then he came over to talk to us. Joe’s prediction turned out to be fairly accurate. The deputy merely asked for our names and addresses. We each gave him a business card and told him we weren’t relatives of Van Hoosier’s. He seemed to assume that we’d dropped by on a social visit.

Joe fished for more details. He explained that he’d spent some time as a defense attorney and without saying too much made it clear that he’d recognized the symptoms of violent death in Carl Van Hoosier’s apartment.

“The furniture turned over,” he said, “and the eyelids.”

The deputy nodded. “Yeah, the doctor . . .” Then he apparently decided he was saying too much to witnesses, and he broke off. “But we won’t know anything until there’s an autopsy. You guys can go. We know where to find you.”

I hardly had to say a word, but I still managed to goof it up. “Good lie,” I said. “I mean, good-bye!”

The deputy blinked, but he let us go.

By then it was past six p.m., and the Michigan winter night had arrived. It was with great relief that I walked across Pleasant Creek’s brightly lit parking lot and climbed into Joe’s truck.

“I hope your friend Mac McKay isn’t a teetotaler,” I said. “I could sure use a drink.”

Joe laughed and put the truck into reverse. He backed up, then suddenly hit the brakes. A horn blasted.

A ramshackle pickup truck, its bed loaded with plastic garbage bags, was behind us. The driver was shaking her fist at us and her lips were moving. I assumed she was cursing.

In the bright lights of the lot, the driver was easy to see. She wore a white knit cap with a bright red pom-pom. It was Lovie Dykstra.

Joe and I watched as she drove away. “I guess Lovie’s got the concession for Pleasant Creek’s aluminum cans,” Joe said. He turned out of the parking lot and went on toward Dorinda.

Dorinda is a pleasant little town filled with Victorian houses. We went through a nice little business district which clustered around the courthouse. There was a bank, a small supermarket, a hardware store, a mom-and-pop restaurant, a drugstore, an everythinga-dollar store. Signs indicated that Warner County’s lawyers had offices above the bank and in one renovated professional building. Then we crossed the railroad tracks and passed a fruit warehouse, a cannery—shut down for the winter—and a farmer’s co-op building. There was almost no traffic at six thirty on a Wednesday evening.

Superficially Dorinda had some resemblance to Warner Pier. Most of its buildings dated from the same era, for example. But the cultural divide was wide. Dorinda was definitely a farming community. In comparison, Warner Pier was Sophisticated City. While Warner Pier was not any more lively than Dorinda in the winter, our business district was larger and was lined with art galleries, bookshops, gift stores, snazzy clothing boutiques, winery outlets, and a shop that made and sold fancy chocolates, businesses of a type Dorinda lacked completely. True, Warner Pier had a hardware store, but it featured more barbecue grills than plywood, just as our marine salesrooms offered more cabin cruisers than fiberglass fishing boats.

Joe and I had driven only thirty miles, but we’d crossed a tribal boundary.

Mac McKay lived in a pleasant house that sat on a little knoll in a nice neighborhood. The house was painted light gray, with neat black shutters, and Mac McKay himself was waiting at the door.

I loved him on sight. He was a small man—he came about to my shoulder—with a few wisps of white hair. His eyes twinkled and his smile beamed, and he greeted Joe with obvious pleasure. He took my hand with real warmth.

“Welcome, Lee! You look as if you’re as wonderful as Joe claims you are.”

“You look wonderful, too, Mr. McKay. Could I give you a hug?”

“Only if you’ll call me ’Mac’ afterward.”

“Of course! Anybody I’m on hugging terms with gets called by their first name.”

The hug turned out to be a joint effort, and Mac stood on tiptoe to give me a kiss on the cheek. He called out to someone in the kitchen, then hung up our coats and led us into a living room where a cheery fire burned. I seemed to raise myself further in his esteem by oohing and ahing over the handmade tiles that surrounded the fireplace. Each showed a different Michigan wildflower.

“My late wife made those,” Mac said. “She was quite an artist.”

A Hispanic housekeeper brought in a tray of canapés and a bottle of wine. Mac fussed about, pouring wine for me and scotch for Joe. Joe hates scotch, but he took it with a small grin. To a lawyer of Mac McKay’s age, scotch was the only suitable drink to offer a fellow attorney.

Mac made sure I was seated close to the fire; then he sat in a wing chair facing us, raising his own glass of scotch in a wordless toast. He leaned forward.

“What’s this about you two finding that old reprobate Carl Van Hoosier dead?”

I gasped, but Joe only laughed. “So you’ve got a mole at Pleasant Creek.”

“My former secretary lives there now. Ellen Thoms.”

“I didn’t see her. Why didn’t she speak to me?”

“Vanity, my boy. Vanity. She’s rather gnarled by arthritis these days, and she doesn’t like to be caught using her walker. But what happened to Carl? Ellen said our current sheriff was there. In person.”

Joe quickly sketched the scene we’d found when we dropped in on Van Hoosier. When he described how Nurse Priddy had examined the dead man, Mac raised his eyebrows.

“I’m surprised he didn’t simply declare it a natural death,” he said.

“I was surprised, too,” Joe said. “I think the administrator recommended that finding, but Priddy stuck to his guns.”

“Priddy said something about his throat,” I said. “And he looked at his eyelids.”

Mac nodded like the former prosecutor he was. “Strangulation or suffocation—the first one almost always crushes the windpipe. And either cause of death leaves tiny little broken blood vessels in the eyelids.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I thought I spotted the red specks.”

“Maybe the nurse didn’t think he could cover it up after you’d seen them.”

“I think he’d made his mind up before he knew I’d seen the specks,” Joe said. “Anyway, they’re going to do an autopsy.”

“It’s poetic justice,” Mac said.

Before we could ask him to explain, the housekeeper came in and said dinner was ready.

“We’ll analyze Carl later,” Mac said. He led us into the dining room for a delicious dinner of beef stew, salad, and crusty rolls. While we ate, Mac made sure we kept the conversation general. He obviously was interested in a wide range of subjects, and he’d kept in touch with his former profession, displaying an up-to-the-minute knowledge about changes in the Michigan law on zoning, for example. The food was upper-Midwest home cooking, with a luscious
tres leches
cake for dessert as the only nod to the housekeeper’s ethnicity. She left before we finished, so Joe and I cleared the table, but Mac insisted on loading the dishwasher himself. We took our coffee to the living room, and Mac put another log on the fire.

He sat in his easy chair looking expectant. “So, just what did you want to know about Carl Van Hoosier?”

Joe answered. “Why did he get bounced out of office?”

“Did one too many favors for my rich relatives.” Joe raised his eyebrows. “Then you
are
related to the McKay family who has the big place over at Warner Pier?”

“I’m a poor relation. My grandfather was a brother to Benson McKay, the great-grandfather of the current head of McKay Chemicals, Quinn McKay.”

Joe looked confused, and I spoke up. “So you and the guy who’s always giving Warner Pier grants are second cousins once removed.”

“You know your genealogy, young lady. Not that the relationship matters to me. We’ve never had Thanksgiving dinner together or chatted at a family funeral. The connection is extremely remote. And after my round with Carl Van Hoosier, I assure you that the rich McKays want to keep it that way.” Mac rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“When you were county attorney,” Joe said, “you usually tried to get along with citizens, even citizens who were just summer people. Why do you feel differently about the McKays?”

“They got too blatant, Joe. They had bought old Carl, and maybe that wasn’t a big deal when it came to a few speeding tickets or some extra security when they had a party. They’d been paying Van Hoosier off for little favors like that for years. But when it came to vehicular homicide, I drew the line.”

“Who killed whom?”

“It was the father of Quinn, Benson the third. He was driving his Porsche, drunk, with a girl from another of the summer families along. Ben always liked young women, as the age of his widow testifies. She’s just a year older than Quinn. Anyway, Ben hit a tree on Lake Shore Drive. Ben survived. The girl didn’t.”

“Rough on the girl and her family.”

“Rough on the girl. I didn’t have much sympathy for her family. Within a week of the funeral, they were giving signals that a major cash settlement would ease their grief substantially. But I thought Ben should stand trial. When I heard that Carl had lost the blood sample we needed to convict, I guess I lost my temper. From then on it was war between Carl Van Hoosier and me.”

“How did you manage to win the war and get him out of office?”

“I got the state police behind me, subpoenaed Carl’s bank records. Looked at property transfers. The McKays had sold Carl some property way below market value, and he resold it immediately. Made a killing.” Mac shrugged. “I might never have convinced a jury, but I was able to put enough pressure on Carl to get him to resign. Besides, the public had had enough by then. And ol’ Carl had made a big enough pile to retire on, so he went fairly quietly.”

I leaned forward. “How about the rumor that he would—well, exploit courting couples?”

“Handcuff the boy and rape the girl?” Mac frowned. “I know every kid in Warner County believed that, but I could never pin it down. I finally concluded it was a sort of Warner County folk tale. Especially when the rumor continued after Carl left office. And after his successor left office.”

Joe nodded. “I admit I heard it when I was in high school, but I hadn’t realized until recently that it was a continuation of the tale my mother had believed. So Van Hoosier’s main problem was doing too many favors for the summer residents?”

“And accepting money for it—though we never proved exactly where the money came from. But pandering to the summer people is a stupid thing for a county official to do. The summer people don’t vote here.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “And the locals resent special treatment for them.”

“Right. I wasn’t able to send my second cousin to prison, but he managed to stay out of trouble until he died a couple of years later.”

“Was this the father of the McKay who was kidnapped?”

Mac scowled. “Quinn,” he said. “I’ve always wondered if Benson was sorry he turned up alive.”