Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_01 Page 17

  Betsy wished suddenly she had turned down that invitation to go out that evening. She would have been at home with Margot, and the murderer would not have dared to try anything with both of them there.

  Say, there was a new thought. Was it possible the murderer knew Margot was home alone?

  Who knew Betsy was going out that night? Jill did, Margot did, Shelly did. Did one of them tell Joe?

  Without thinking, Betsy put a hand out and opened the door to Crewel World.

  “How’d it go?” came Godwin’s eager voice.

  “Oh!” said Betsy, who, amazingly, had forgotten she was the bearer of bad news. “Not good, I’m afraid. I can borrow against the inventory, he said; and we’ll have the insurance money from the burglary claim. And Margot had a life-insurance policy, Mr. Penberthy mentioned it, but I guess it’s not very large. We’re going to have to work very hard and make this shop pay, not only for itself, but for me, too.”

  She looked at Godwin’s disappointed face. “Sorry,” she said, and then she noticed the dark-haired lady standing beside the desk. Irene Potter.

  “I brought you something to look at,” she said, and unrolled a piece of cloth across the desk.

  Betsy came to look. It was a picture of the sun coming up over hills and a river.

  “You should get that framed,” said Godwin.

  It was a stunning work of art, with many subtle changes of color. “Incredible,” breathed Betsy. “Tell me, how did you get that misty effect?”

  Godwin said over her shoulder, “Oh, my God, she did the entire thing in half cross!”

  Betsy looked closer; it was true, instead of the X of cross-stitch, here Irene had used only one leg of the cross—and in places, less than that, half of one leg. The colors shifted constantly, it even appeared that some of the stitches contained more than one color.

  “Didn’t you get headaches?” asked Betsy.

  “Sometimes,” Irene admitted. She turned and stared at Godwin until he walked away, then leaned toward Betsy and muttered, “I hear Mr. Mickels told you he was at a business meeting the night your sister was murdered.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Irene hesitated, then lied badly. “I don’t remember, exactly. But if that’s true, he must have held the meeting on his rowboat. And had a for-real battle with his board of directors.”

  Betsy stared at her. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I saw him walking up Minnetonka Boulevard that Wednesday night with a broken oar in his hand.”

  Betsy frowned at her. Irene nodded several times. “That’s the street that goes out past the old Excelsior Park restaurant—where the Ferris wheel is?”

  Betsy nodded wordlessly. You could see the Ferris wheel a long block away from the front porch of Christopher Inn, which was itself barely more than a block from Crewel World.

  “What time was this?”

  Irene thought briefly. “I’d say around ten-fifteen.”

  “Could it have been earlier?”

  “I don’t think so. I started out from my house right about ten, and it usually takes me about ten minutes to walk to the lake. I wasn’t walking fast, as I was enjoying the weather. It had stopped raining, and was dark and cool and misty, and as I was coming up the street, he kind of loomed up under a streetlight. He was wearing one of those old-fashioned black rubber raincoats and his hat had the brim turned down, and he was carrying a broken oar. I thought for a second I was seeing a ghost, but then I saw the silver whiskers and I realized it was just Mr. Mickels. I think he saw me the same time I saw him, because he suddenly ducked into the parking lot and went behind this big car.”

  “A broken oar … ?” Betsy prompted.

  “Yes, you know.” Irene nodded. “The paddle part was gone.”

  “So how do you know it was an oar?” thrust in Godwin, back like a bad penny. “Without the paddle, it’s just a stick, isn’t it?”

  Irene drew herself up. “The oarlock was still on it.”

  “Oarlock?” echoed Betsy.

  “Yes, you know, oarlock.” Impatiently, Irene took up a phone message pad and drew what looked like a capital U with a stem growing out of the bottom of it. “You stick the bottom part into a metal holder on the boat so you can row.” She looked at Betsy without seeing her, thinking. “Or maybe it’s the holder that’s the oarlock. Whatever, that’s what he was carrying, the handle part of an oar with that metal part dangling. And the paddle part broken off.”

  Godwin sniggered. “I bet that was a hell of a meeting with his board of directors. I bet they still have headaches.”

  Betsy cast a quelling look at him and asked, “You’re sure this happened last Wednesday?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. It had been raining off and on that evening and there was a light fog. Just the right kind of a night to see a ghost. But it wasn’t a ghost I saw; it was Mr. Mickels.”

  “Maybe he didn’t duck out of your way,” said Betsy. “Maybe he just went to his car.” She turned to Godwin. “What kind of car does Joe Mickels drive?”

  “Some big old yacht, like a 1973 Cadillac or something.”

  “See?” said Betsy.

  “Is it one of those old cars that has fabric on the roof?” asked Irene. “An imitation convertible. Because this car was like that. And it had a hood ornament, too.”

  “N-no,” said Godwin. “It’s a real dark green, I think. And not two-tone, just one solid color.”

  “This car wasn’t two-tone,” said Irene. “And it might have been green, though I thought it was black. Those streetlights make it hard to see colors.”

  Godwin gave Betsy a triumphant look over Irene’s head.

  “But it did have fabric on the roof,” she said. “I know it did. I was there, I saw it.”

  “Wait a minute, I thought you were at home all that night,” said Betsy.

  Irene’s triumphant glare at Godwin faded abruptly, and her breath snagged in her throat with a sound almost like a snore. “What?”

  “I said, I thought you told me you were home, working on a needlework project.”

  “I was, I was home all evening. But I got hungry, I hadn’t had any dinner. And I just love to walk when it’s all misty and foggy, so at about ten o‘clock I decided to walk to McDonald’s and have a hamburger, and I was almost there when I saw Mr. Mickels. And he ran away and hid when he saw me coming.”

  Betsy looked at Godwin, she couldn’t help it. And his face showed he was thinking what Betsy was thinking: I, too, would have ducked into a parking lot rather than encounter Irene Potter. Her face must have shown her thoughts as well, because Godwin simply bloomed with amusement, and he turned quickly and walked away.

  “That man is so rude!” said Irene.

  Betsy got her face under control before Irene turned back. She said, “Did you see anyone else while you were out walking?”

  Irene thought. “Not close up. And not anyone I recognized. Not many people were out that night. And I wasn’t looking around, I was just enjoying the misty night air. I came down Water to Second, and up Second to Excelsior and up Excelsior to McDonald’s.” She paused in the act of rolling up her wonderful cross-stitch picture. “You know, if I had gone one block more, down to Lake, and come up that way, I might have seen the open front door of this shop, and it might have been me who found your sister’s body. Isn’t that interesting!” She tucked the roll of cloth under her arm. “You will let me know if you want to display this, won’t you? I’ll get it framed if you do.”

  “Thank you, yes, I’ll do that,” said Betsy, and watched her march out. That woman, she thought, has no instinct for self-preservation at all.

  The next day, Jill, Shelly, Godwin, and Betsy sat at the worktable in Crewel World. Betsy was knitting—her fingers moved more swiftly now, but not so swiftly that people might suspect her needles were getting warm from the friction. Shelly, who was supposed to be at a teachers’ conference, was needlepointing an angel as a Christmas gift; and Godwin was doing some very elabor
ate needlepoint stitches on a sampler.

  Jill was in uniform, on duty, and so didn’t have anything to work on. She was drinking coffee and tickling Sophie under the chin. Sophie, purring loudly, was draped in luxurious ease over a cushion on what Betsy had come to realize was her chair. Jill had come in to have a private conversation with Betsy, but the other two were determined to miss nothing and Betsy couldn’t think of a task that would take them to the back of the shop, out of ear-shot.

  “I heard someone saw Joe Mickels near the store carrying the murder weapon,” said Shelly.

  “Who told you that?” Betsy demanded.

  “Heard it at the Waterfront Coffee Shop; that’s where you go to get the good gossip.”

  “But it’s not true,” Jill said firmly. “In the first place, no one knows what the murder weapon is. In the second place it probably isn’t an oar.”

  “A broken oar,” corrected Godwin, who had decided this fact was of great significance. “If you could have seen the way Joe behaved toward Margot, you wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Betsy’s suspicions—or the story Irene came in here with. She said he saw her coming and he ran and hid behind his car so she wouldn’t see who he was.”

  “What have you got against Joe Mickels, Goddy?” asked Jill.

  “Me? Nothing, but he was downright mean to Margot, you know that. He was very angry about her thwarting his big-time plans. He bought the two lots behind this building, you know, so whatever he wanted to build here was going to be big, really big. Probably another condo.” His expressive blue eyes glanced out the front window, toward the gray condo complex across the street, then at Betsy. “Margot just hated that thing, you know,” he said softly.

  Betsy said, “So you think it was in part to keep Joe from putting up another condo that made her glad she could thwart Joe’s plans?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows what Joe plans to put up on this site,” said Jill.

  “Well, that’s true,” Godwin conceded. “It could be a business block. It could be a vertical mall. But whatever it was, it was going to be a lot bigger than the current building.”

  “How do you know Joe bought the property behind this building?” asked Betsy.

  “Because my sister’s brother-in-law owned the gas station up behind here. Joe bought his place nearly two years ago, and is renting it back to him on a month-by-month basis, so he’s been planning this for at least that long.”

  Shelly remarked, “You know, holding on to all this property all this time may have given Joe cash-flow problems. I mean, he was all set to start building this spring, but Margot wouldn’t vacate.”

  “If Joe is going to put up a big building on this site, he can’t be short of cash,” said Jill. “Besides, he’s collecting rent from all three shops—and the other two don’t have leases, so he’s getting more from them.”

  “But big-time financiers are always getting into trouble when they have to delay their plans,” Shelly argued. “It has something to do with cash flow.”

  Jill made a dismissive noise. “Like you know anything about big-time financiers.”

  “I may not be rich, but I read,” Shelly retorted. “And the Strib has stories all the time about big companies and rich people who get into trouble because they bite off more than they can chew, or they start in doing something big and there’s a delay or a glitch. It’s like one day they’re rich and the next day they’re bankrupt.”

  There was a cozy little silence as everyone contemplated Joe Mickels filing for bankruptcy.

  “How far would someone like Mickels go if all that stood between him and making a lot of money was Margot?” asked Godwin, serious again.

  “And if not doing what he planned meant going broke?” added Shelly.

  The sober mood was broken when the shop door opened. Standing in the door was Mike Malloy in a brown tweed suit too warm for the seventy-five-degree weather. “What are you doing off patrol?” he said to Jill in a hard voice.

  Jill stood, flushed a faint pink. “My coffee break,” she said.

  “Hit the road,” said Malloy.

  “Yes, sir.” Jill glanced at Betsy, but Betsy was keeping her wary attention on Malloy. Jill brushed by the detective and he closed the door after her.

  “I need to talk to you, Ms. Devonshire,” said Malloy in that same hard tone. “Alone,” he added with dramatic emphasis, just like on television. He even shrugged a little bit inside his coat as if to adjust, or loosen, the gun in an armpit holster.

  That worked a lot better than Betsy’s hints; Shelly and Godwin immediately put down their work and went to make busy noises in the back of the shop.

  Malloy yanked out a chair—the one Sophie was in. She half fell, half jumped out of it and went square-wheeling off to join Shelly and Godwin, giving Malloy a look over her shoulder that made it clear she wasn’t afraid of him.

  Malloy sat down, leaned toward Betsy, and said in a deadly monotone, “What the hell do you think you are doing, accusing Joe Mickels of murder?”

  “What makes you think I accused him of anything?” Betsy managed to keep her voice cool and calm, but she knitted when she should have purled.

  “He came in and told me. I asked him if he wanted to file a formal complaint, and he said no, not if you stopped spreading it around that he’s a murderer.”

  “I haven’t been spreading it around. As a matter of fact, I didn’t accuse him of anything. All I did was ask him where he was the night my sister died.” She looked Malloy right in the eye. “And he lied to me, he said he was at a business meeting in—”

  She tried to think. Some town with a funny name, like a fake saint.

  “St. Cloud,” came a voice from the back of the shop.

  Damn and bless Godwin’s sharp ears!

  “St. Cloud,” she confirmed. “But Irene Potter told me just a little while ago that she saw him in town about ten o‘clock that night, and that he hurried into a parking lot when he saw her coming. She said he was carrying a broken oar with an oarlock attached to it.”

  “I thought you just told me you haven’t been accusing Mickels of murder.”

  “I haven’t. Irene was the one with the information. And she came in all on her own and volunteered it. If you want to accuse someone of spreading rumors about Joe Mickels, I suggest you talk to her. But I suggest you also talk again to Mr. Mickels.” Again Betsy dared look the cop in the eye. “I haven’t accused anyone of murdering my sister, Detective Malloy. But just because Joe Mickels is a rich man doesn’t mean he’s also an innocent one.”

  “Mr. Mickels was out of town; if Irene Potter says she saw him, she’s lying.”

  “No, she isn’t,” said Shelly, loudly, from behind the shelves at the back of the store. “She’s a little bit off center, but she doesn’t lie.”

  “All right, so she saw him down by the lake with an oar in his hand. How does that make him a murderer?” demanded Malloy.

  Betsy went back to her needles, purling where she should be knitting. “It means he hasn’t got an alibi, Detective. He wanted my sister to relocate her shop so he could tear down this building and make a million dollars selling space in a new and bigger one. And when she refused to move, he started looking for legal ways to evict her, harassing her, not holding up his end of the lease. Talk to Mr. Penberthy, her lawyer, about the times Mickels hauled Margot into court with some stupid writ. Maybe he just got tired of it, maybe there was some kind of time limit he was operating under. You can find these things out. Why don’t you go do it?”

  Godwin spoke, startling them both. He was standing by the edge of the table, having come on noiseless feet up to it. “And it seems murdering Margot didn’t fix things for him, Detective Malloy. Because Margot had incorporated her business, and named her sister Betsy as an officer of the corporation. So guess who stands between Joe Mickels and his big plans now?”

  Betsy gulped and dropped a stitch. She hadn’t thought of that.

  But Malloy turned on Godwin. “In my opinion, Joe
Mickels is an honest man. You can think whatever you want, you even have the right to speak up about it. But if Mickels is what you two think he is, quick to use the law for his own ends, then you maybe should worry about the libel and slander laws in this state. He was sure enough breathing fire about you, Ms. Devonshire, when I last saw him. If I was a Jeannie-come-lately thread peddler or her”—Malloy hesitated just long enough—“employee, I’d bite my tongue.” He stood and suddenly his attitude gentled. “You’re an amateur, Ms. Devonshire, and you’re new around here. You have no idea what you’re getting into, messing with Mr. Mickels. I think it’s interesting that he doesn’t have an alibi, and I’ll check into that, but I don’t think it will turn out to be important. I repeat, you would be wise to stop making accusations against him without real proof, okay?”

  All Betsy could reply to that was, “Yes, sir.” Malloy nodded sharp approval of her meek tone, and left.

  When the door had closed on his brown suit, Godwin huffed, “He’ll be sorry if he finds you dead in the middle of another fake burglary!” He sat down with a snort to resume work on his sampler.

  Betsy started to laugh; she couldn’t help it. When Godwin looked up at her with that innocent, limpid gaze, she laughed even harder.

  But she couldn’t make Shelly understand what was so funny.

  15

  “I apologize for the short notice,” said the voice of Mayor Jamison in his heavy Midwestern twang, “but things got bollixed up when Margot died. So now we have to get really moving on this thing. Can you come to Christopher Inn this evening? You’ll get a free supper out of it again.”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Betsy into the phone. “What time?”

  “Seven o‘clock. See you there.”

  Betsy didn’t know of what use she would be to the committee; Margot was the driving force, she was only one of the driven. But it did occur to her to ask Shelly to stay awhile after closing and help her find the slash jacket Margot had promised to donate, since Betsy wouldn’t have known a slash jacket if it jumped up and bit her. Which from its name it might.