Fat Cat At Large (A Fat Cat Mystery) (14 page)

“Vi, I’m worried about you. What’s the matter?”

Vi sat straighter and flashed her saleswoman smile at her boss. “Everything’s fine. Nothing’s the matter. It’s you I should be asking about. I know you hurt your back the other day.”

“Never mind that now. Where’s your car?” The truth was, her back didn’t feel very good at the moment.

The starch went out of Vi and she slumped, bowing her head until it almost touched the lemonade glass. “I . . . lost it.” She sounded forlorn.

“It’s stolen?”

“No. Not stolen. I missed too many payments.”

“Why didn’t you say something? We could have helped you out. A loan, maybe.”

Vi sat silent for a good long while. Then she raised her head and seemed to make up her mind about something.

“Ms. Oliver, you and Anna
have
given me a loan.”

Chase wrinkled her brow. Had Anna given her money? Then her eyes widened with comprehension. “
You’re
the one filching cash from the drawer.”

Vi looked down at her lemonade and nodded.

Chase struggled to contain herself. “Why? Why did you do that?” Chase pictured how easy it would be for Vi to stash the money in her huge tote bag that she kept under the counter that held the cash register.

“I needed to pay for things. My car, my apartment, things. Clothes, shoes.”

“You’re buying things you can’t afford. I thought you must have a lot of money from your family, the way you live.”

“No. My family doesn’t give me anything. They don’t have anything to give. I’m making my own way.”

“This isn’t how to do it.”

Chase slid off her stool and went to fetch Anna from the front. There were no customers. “Anna. Please come into the kitchen. I don’t know if I can talk civilly to her.”

“To Vi?”

“Just come back here. I’ll keep an ear peeled for the front door.”

Anna joined Vi at the counter. “What’s going on, Violet?”

Chase didn’t let Vi answer. “She’s the one who has been taking money from the cash register. It’s Vi!”

“I don’t have enough money,” Vi wailed. “I can’t make my car payments. I can’t buy any new clothes. I didn’t know what to do. I was being evicted. I was going to be homeless.”

Anna took Vi’s thin, cold hand. “Would you like us to help you set a budget?”

Vi gave Chase a wary sideways look. “Maybe.”

“You’ve lost your car,” said Chase. “Do you still live in the expensive apartment?”

“For now. I’ll probably be evicted at the end of the month.”

Chase and Anna exchanged a look. Chase decided to let Anna handle this since she was about to explode with anger.

“We’ll think of something,” Anna said. “Let’s find a place you can afford, and maybe a secondhand car.”

“I have one. I got a used Hyundai in White Bear Lake. But I don’t know how I’ll make the payments on it either. My credit cards are maxed out and I can’t get any more. I don’t know why. I’ve sent in some more applications, but they won’t give me any more cards.”

The poor girl knew nothing about supporting herself, about budgeting, about living within her means. “We have to sit down and do a budget for you. The next time you have a payment coming up, let me or Charity know. Don’t just take the money from the drawer.”

“I was going to repay you.”

“How?” Chase demanded. Anna was right. They should fire Vi. Maybe Laci, too.

Vi shrugged and squeezed her eyes shut. “I had some money coming.” Her eyes flew open and there was white-hot anger in them. “I was
promised
that money.”

“What happened?” Chase asked.

Vi’s face turned ugly. “It, well, it fell through. And the job . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Chase put her face close to Vi’s. She wanted an explanation for her actions.

Anna gave Chase a look that said
back off
. “Do you want me to help get that stain out of the pretty blue blouse you wore yesterday?”

“No. I can do that much myself.”

Chase didn’t think Vi was going to let either of them help her with budgeting either.

“My break time’s up,” Vi said, slipping off the stool and hurrying to the salesroom.

Oh brother, thought Chase. What
now
?

“I
wonder how she thought she was going to pay us back.” Anna said. The three women had gathered at Anna’s place after closing on Friday for a confab. She lived on Nokomis Avenue, an easy drive from the Bar None. Her modest white clapboard house had pastel blue shutters on the first-floor windows and two dormers poking from the roof on the smaller second story. Anna loved the location, a very short walk away from Minnehaha Creek, Lake Hiawatha Park, and the walking trail around the lake.

“I tried to get her to tell us, but after you warned me off—”

“Did I really?” Anna asked.

“You know you did. That look you gave me. I didn’t bring it up again before she said her break was over.” Chase stood at the tall double windows, watching a neighbor’s red pickup truck go past as dusk fell. “She rushed off to return to the sales floor.”

“Poor girl. I guess this is what’s been eating her up.”

“I’m not sure we can help her, Anna.”

“I’m not sure you shouldn’t prosecute her,” Julie said. She’d come from the kitchen and joined them for the discussion of what to do about Violet Peters. She sat beside her grandmother on the pale blue couch, sipping the light white wine she’d brought along after work. Anna’s preference for vibrant colors in her clothing didn’t carry over to her decorating tastes. She chose pale blues and mint greens for every room in her house.

The dessert bars from the shop that would expire the next day were stacked on a plate and the three women picked at them. Business was slowing down to the extent that there were enough leftovers for the homeless shelter and a few for them, too.

“You think so?” Chase paced the room, too agitated to sit, let alone drink the wine. “That wouldn’t help get the money back.”

“Now we know who took the money, Grandma.” Julie nudged Anna gently with her elbow.

“I could never press charges against poor Vi.” Anna bit her bottom lip and gazed at Chase with tears in her eyes. “I thought you had stolen the money, Charity. I don’t know how I could have even entertained the idea for a minute.”

Chase stopped pacing and saw the stark emotion on Anna’s face. Her own eyes teared up. “You know what’s crazy? I thought you might have taken it, too.”

Anna bolted up from the couch and the two women hugged, long and hard.

“We have to trust each other, Anna. We’re in this together,” Chase mumbled into Anna’s soft gray hair.

They separated after a final squeeze. “I know,” Anna said. “You are absolutely right.”

“I’m beginning,” Chase said, “to agree that we should look for new employees.”

Anna chuckled. “And just when you’ve convinced me we should keep them.”

“So when are you going to tell me the rest about you and Doris Naughtly? It might be ancient history, but it’s still affecting you, when you don’t want to be in the same room with her.”

Anna grabbed her wineglass and took a healthy swig before answering, “It’s Bill.”

“Bill? Your future fiancé?” Chase sat in Anna’s large, comfy, green striped chair and set her wineglass on the round marble-topped table at her elbow.

“Did you know we went out for a bit in high school? I didn’t tell you that part. Doris dated him after me. We were never very serious. Doris dated him for a time, and she treated him so badly, I felt sorry for him. After I left for college, he married his first wife.”

“On the rebound?” Chase said.

“Maybe. After Doris stole Bill away from me, she dumped him. He took it hard. Bill asked me out again, but I had fallen, hard, for Allan. I don’t think Bill was happy with his first wife at all. I’m not even sure he was happy with his second wife, Marvin’s mother. Her children were always such a trial for him.”

Anna shook her head, recollecting the old history. “Doris was just never a nice person. She was always attracting guys with her cleavage and her flirty ways, then dropping them flat. Now that Bill and I are dating seriously, I’ve heard more about Doris. She really did wrong by him. She’s even making another play for him. She shops for canaries every week and has never bought one. He sees through her by now, so it won’t do her any good. But it still upsets me, for his sake.”

Chase covered Anna’s worn hand with hers. “I’m sorry.”

“Marrying Allan and opening our sandwich shop was the best thing that could have happened. I feel bad for anyone who has never known what we had together.”

Anna took another sip of her wine after that long discourse. “That’s the whole story. She’s an evil woman and I’d rather she didn’t shop here. And I’d very much rather she didn’t stop in at Bill’s shop every day, not that he would give her the time of day.”

“Did Doris start making a play for Bill before or after her husband was murdered?”

“Before, but not long before. I think they separated soon after she started sashaying around Bill’s shop acting like she wanted to buy a pet, flirting just like in the old days.”

Chase wondered if wanting to renew an old flame, whom she had dumped, would be a motive for getting rid of her husband. She’d sure like to know what they were quarreling about when he threw tomato sauce on her.

As she drove home later, she realized they hadn’t made a decision about Vi. They couldn’t fire her right away, for the simple reason that they didn’t have anyone else to work the salesroom.

•   •   •

Chase was ready
for bed very early after a strawberry-scented bubble bath that soothed her frazzled nerves somewhat and eased her aching back. She pulled her duvet up and climbed in with a Bookmobile Cat mystery by Laurie Cass. Even though Chase had never seen a bookmobile, she liked the concept, and loved Eddie the cat.

Before she’d read five pages, Mike Ramos called.

“I’ve been thinking about you.” That voice, so deep and rumbly. If she’d never seen his handsome face, she could have fallen for that voice over the phone. “How are you holding up with everything that’s going on?”

“My back is a little better, but I’m awfully nervous about not knowing who is killing people around here.”

“Would it help to know I’m a little worried, too?”

That was sweet of him to say that. After all, he wasn’t nearly as involved as she was.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

A vision of Mike rubbing her back, soothing her sore muscles, relaxing her, flitted through her mind. Something inside her tingled. “I will, I promise.”

They chatted a bit about the murders and the suspects, then hung up. But now that she’d thought about a massage, Chase wanted one right away. She would work on that.

•   •   •

After her chat
about suspects with Mike, Chase decided to organize her thoughts more clearly, if she could. She wrote out two names in pencil at the top of a piece of paper: Gabe and Torvald. Unfortunately, for her and for Torvald, he would have been the first named suspect in Gabe’s column, except he was dead, too. She chewed on the pencil. Did the fact that he was dead mean he didn’t murder Gabe, though? Could he have killed him, then could someone have killed Torvald because of that? Maybe Doris? Or Ted? Or Gabe’s tattooed mistress? That mistress was a shadowy figure. Chase assumed she existed, but had never seen the woman herself.

All right, then, time to get down to business. She refused to put her own name anywhere on the paper. Under
Gabe
, she wrote
Doris
and
Ted
. Not knowing the mistress’s name, she wrote just that:
mistress
. She repeated the same three names in Torvald’s column, in case Torvald killed Gabe and someone exacted revenge on him.

She stared at the names for a moment. The shadowy mistress brought to mind the shadowy young man Vi had talked to in the parking lot last Saturday. She wrote down
young man
. It had looked like they were arguing. Chase had never seen him again, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a killer.

That’s ridiculous, she told herself. You can’t suspect people just because you don’t know who they are. She erased the young man from both columns.

Quincy noisily protested the fact that she was ignoring him and that his next meal was late. Chase rose to feed him, but she was so absorbed in her task that she didn’t look to see whether or not he ate.

Lacy had connections with the Naughtly family, all of whose names were on the lists, but Chase couldn’t see her way to putting Laci’s name down. Violet had even less connection.

But there was Shaun Everly. She had seen him get into Torvald’s car. Did he have business dealings with Torvald? Gabe had, and Gabe was dead. There must be a tangled connection there somewhere. She put Shaun’s name in both columns.

Except that Torvald’s name was only in one column, the suspects were identical. This was getting her nowhere. She crumpled up the paper and got up to toss it in the kitchen recycle basket.

In the kitchen, she noticed Quincy hadn’t touched his food. No wonder—she had forgotten to add the homemade treats. She mixed in the Kitty Patties and watched Quincy empty his bowl in record time.

Then she made herself a cup of herbal tea and carried it onto her balcony. She wrapped herself in a soft blanket and, watching the Friday night parade pass on the sidewalk below, she sipped her tea and stroked the contented cat in her lap, humming “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from
Annie
.

•   •   •

Hilda Bjorn didn’t
take long to collect on the dozen dessert bars Chase had offered her. She came in Saturday morning, right after opening.

Chase heard her voice in the front and came out to greet her.

“Vi,” she said, turning to her clerk, who was more like her suave, confident self today. Her buttons were rose gingham against a purple satin blouse. “I want you to let Hilda choose a dozen, on the house. She helped corral Quincy the other day.”

“Sure thing, boss.” Vi beamed her golden smile on the old woman. “Would you like to taste anything?”

Chase left them to it, glad that Hilda was following through.

The customers were steady throughout the morning, but dwindling from the huge crowds of the week before, much to Chase’s relief—and Anna’s, too, since she could ease up on the incessant baking.

Vi asked to go out for lunch, so Anna clerked while she was gone. There was no reason not to let her go, with the amount of business they were doing.

Soon after Vi returned, Laci Carlson came through the rear door. Chase was surprised to see her there.

Anna reacted much more, though. “What on earth are you doing here, child? Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I’m rested, Mrs. Larson.” Laci’s smile made her look as lighthearted as Chase had ever seen her. “It’s been nearly a week. I’m bored.”

“What does your doctor say?” asked Chase. “Should you get a clearance to come back to work?”

Laci pouted like a four-year-old. “Yes, I’m supposed to.”

“Did you think we wouldn’t ask about that?” Anna’s tone was gentle, solicitous. “Tomorrow is Monday. We’ll be closed Monday and Tuesday. Maybe you can get in to see your doctor and come back to work on Wednesday.”

“I guess so. I mean, I do have an appointment on Tuesday.”

“That’s settled, then.” Anna pulled out a stool. “Have a seat and I’ll get you a Peanut Butter Fudge Bar.” They were Laci’s favorite. Chase flinched. They’d been Gabe’s favorite, too.