Hanging by a Thread (21 page)

“I know. But if you start thinking you’ve got lots of storage room, next thing you know, you’ll have way too much money tied up in stock.”

“Hmmm.” That was a good point. The temptation was to carry items no one else did. What fun it would be placing an order for some of the real exotica ! But the intelligent way to offer a wider range of products was to expand, to move the deli or the bookstore out and take over the space, so the stock could be out on shelves for her customers to see and be tempted by. On the other hand, she was barely making ends meet in the needlework shop right now, while Jack and Fort were paying their rent every single month. Could she afford to take a big hit while her expanded store got on its feet? Not really. Maybe she should work harder on getting the present Crewel World farther into the black before considering expansion.

Of course, having made that decision, the next two customers each wanted uncommon patterns Betsy didn’t carry. The idea of expansion remained a flickering hope in the recesses of her heart.

 

“Where are we going?” asked Betsy that evening, as Morrie handed her up into his big Wagoneer.

“A place called Thanh Do.”

“Vietnamese food.” Betsy nodded, pleased. She had changed into a royal blue dress he liked on her because, he said, it showed how blue her eyes were. She carried a delicate shawl a shade lighter than the dress in case of drafts, but wore her heavy winter coat for the journey because the forecast was for temperatures to drop below thirty.

He got in on his side and said, “Not just Vietnamese, they do all kinds of Asian food. It’s becoming very popular, and I think you’ll like it.” A true Minnesotan, he just wore a sweater-vest under a wool sports coat.

They drove up Highway 7 to just past Knollwood Mall in St. Louis Park, turned left on Texas and went to Minnetonka, left again and almost immediately turned into a parking lot beside a dry cleaners. The parking lot was narrow but deep and behind the dry cleaners was a two-window storefront with a modest green sign. “Thanh Do,” it read, the A formed by a pair of red chopsticks. A red hibiscus bloomed in one window.

Morrie had made it sound fancier than this, but she didn’t say anything—he was very reliable about restaurants.

They alighted and went in. A significant portion of the floor space was taken up by a life-size gray stone statue of Buddha as a slim young man surrounded by plants and bamboo. A table or altar with lit candles stood in front of the statue and a fat sitting Buddha was on it. The air was fragrant not only with the usual “Chinese restaurant” smells of hot sugar, garlic, ginger and meat, but also of herbs.

A waiter with blond hair and delicate metal earrings took them to a black Naugahyde booth in back. He left them with big ivory-colored menus that noted that all meals were cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients, so customers were asked to be patient.

“What do you recommend?” asked Betsy.

“Well, do you like seafood?”

“Yes, but only on the coasts, where it’s fresh. Why?”

“Never mind.”

Betsy looked and found the item he was hinting about, a teriyaki dish for two called Pacific Blue, containing shrimp, scallops, squid, salmon, and yellow-fin tuna on a bed of steamed vegetables and wood mushrooms. A pair of asterisks warned it was spicy. She was tempted, but the herb-scented air made her decide on single-asterisk Vietnamese basil chicken. Morrie chose a triple-asterisk curry dish and asked them to bump it up to four stars. She ordered a Chinese beer, Morrie a Beck’s Dark.

“So how’s the sleuthing coming along?” Morrie asked while they waited for their food.

“Paul murdered Angela, and I think I’ve figured out how.”

“Tell me.”

“You know he worked in that gift shop called Heritage II, on the comer of Second and Water?”

Morrie nodded.

“Well, Heritage and the pet shop next door and the bookstore next to that are all in one building, with a single basement.”

Morrie’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t mean Sergeant Malloy doesn’t know that.”

“No, he knows it, he even checked on it right away. But there are board walls dividing the basement space according to the shop space overhead, and while there used to be gates between them, they were nailed shut years before the murder took place.”

“Ah,” nodded Morrie. “But you think ... ?”

“Well, first of all, I thought it was odd he didn’t come out to see what the commotion was about when the window of the bookstore was broken. After all, he took that job to keep an eye on Angela, so he’d be sensitive to anything happening outside and nearby. Even a thunderstorm doesn’t make a racket every minute, and he should have at least heard the sirens. I think he didn’t come out because he had to stay dry, so his alibi would work.

“You think he came through the basement spaces?”

“Yes. It’s true, people will tell you, that these gates were nailed shut many years ago. However, if you go look at them, they are
screwed
shut.”

“Screwed, nailed, what’s the difference?”

“I think Paul concluded some while before the murder that Angela and Foster were in love, and that’s why he decided to murder her. Then he waited for several things to come together. One was the storm. Rain or snow, it didn’t matter, but it had to be wet out. I think he pulled the nails on those gates so he could get through to the bookstore, so he’d be bone dry when Mike Malloy went to talk to him after Angela was shot. It’s possible he put the screws in, just in case someone tugged on the gates, but when conditions were right, he unscrewed them. It was Angela’s night to close up, she was alone in the store. Foster had come by to wave at her. Paul went down through the basements, up into the bookstore, and shot Angela. On his way back, Paul screwed the bookstore gate shut—no sound of hammering, by the way—then went down late that night or the next day and screwed the gate between the pet shop and the gift shop closed. He used rusty screws he brought from home—have a witness who saw the jars of screws in his workshop. His cousin, who now lives in his house, described how he kept a very neat shop, with new and rusty old screws and nails and such kept in separate jars.”

The waiter brought their beer and frosty glasses and Morrie poured his professionally, down the inside of the glass, so it wouldn’t form a big head. “I take it you’ve looked at the gates?”

“I looked in the pet store basement and in the bookstore basement. They are screws, not nails; they have that slot in the head. They’re on the pet store side of the gate to the bookstore.”

Morrie looked interested. “And are there, by chance, nail holes beside the screws?”

“No.”

He winced with regret at scoring a point and looked away.

“But,” said Betsy, “I had a shelf fall down in my shop the other day, and Jill told me to use wood screws a size bigger and put them in the nail holes when I put it back up. Paul Schmitt was a good amateur carpenter, he would surely think of that. And, since he used old screws, they weren’t shiny new when Mike went to take a look at the gate. This isn’t proof he murdered his wife, but you see how his alibi isn’t worth spit anymore.”

Morrie thought that over for a few moments. “Well, all right, you’re right,” he said. “How did you get the idea to go exploring in the basement, anyhow?”

She told him about the search for lams, adding, “If you go down there today, you’ll see the pet store has lined both walls with metal shelves crowded with stock—but that happened after the murder of Angela. But I’m not sure if I should go to Mike yet. What do you think?”

“Do you think he’ll listen to you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not. I wish I could convince him I’m just another informant. I’m sure he has informants.”

Morrie grinned. “If you want to be an informant, you’ll have to make him pay you for your information.”

She laughed. “That’s what my problem is, I’ve been giving him information for nothing, and he values it accordingly.”

“What else have you found out?”

“I thought I had come up with an alternative to Foster for Paul’s murder, but it turned out he has a really good alibi, given by a time clock.” She told the story of Alex Miller’s claim of a plot by Paul to ruin his life, and how she’d found out he was at work at the critical time. “So I guess Alex is in the clear, his alibi seems solid.”

Morrie said, “But was Alex right about Paul’s sabotage? That sounds a little elaborate for someone who isn’t operating in a James Bond novel.”

“Well, his middle school teacher remembers that Paul was a born genius at setting others up to take the blame for something he’d done, or getting them to do something against the rules; and Jory remembers Paul loving practical jokes, one of which involved injuring a cat. So that’s why I’m thinking that Paul was killed while trying to frame someone else for Angela’s murder.”

“How?”

“Comfort Leckie saw his ghost in the bookstore the night he was murdered.”

He stared at her. “Ghost? You’re not going to tell me you believe in ghosts!”

“Of course I do, I’ve seen them myself. But listen to this.” She repeated the story Comfort had told of seeing Paul’s ghost in the bookstore.

“You think Paul’s
ghost
planted evidence of some sort?”

“No, no. I think the living Paul did, and Comfort saw him doing it.”

Distracted, Morrie asked, “What kind of a name is Comfort, anyhow?”

“It’s an old pilgrim name, handed down since the seventeenth century to every other generation of women in her family. She’s miffed none of her daughters gave it to one of their daughters. But that’s beside the point. Comfort saw Paul
before
he was murdered, and what he was doing was planting the second shell casing. Mike didn’t find the first one, you know. It went behind a shelf and wasn’t found until they took the shelf down to replace it.”

“Maybe she didn’t see Paul at all, maybe she saw her own reflection in the window. People do that, and call 911 to report prowlers.”

“That isn’t what happened here. He turned sideways and she recognized him. The Monday Bunch thinks it’s a ghost, and they’re all moonstruck about it, saying Paul must have been very deeply in love with Angela.”

“But you think ... ?”

“Can you be married to someone you’re stalking? He tracked her every movement, he even took that job at the gift shop so he could keep an eye on her at work in the bookstore.”

“I see.”

Betsy took a drink of beer and went on, “Mike Malloy searched the bookstore after Angela’s murder and concluded she’d been shot with a revolver because he didn’t find a shell casing. But there were shell casings in Paul’s living room, and the bullets were the same caliber, so Mike went back to search the bookstore again, and this time he found a casing. Obviously, Paul planted it. Comfort saw him doing it.”

He hid a smile behind a big, thin hand. “Hon, you don’t even know it was him in the shop.”

“Yes, I do. Comfort didn’t think she was seeing a ghost, remember. She recognized Paul and wondered what he was doing in the bookstore. It was only later, when she heard about the murder, that she decided it was his ghost. And I’ll tell you something else: I talked with Mike the other day and he said both casings came from the same kind of gun and they all have marks on them that make him pretty sure they were shot out of the same gun.”

He sat back, defeated but still smiling. “All right,
mo chroide.”
Morrie called Betsy by different endearments, trying to find one they both liked. “But why did Paul Schmitt want the cops to know the same gun was used in both murders?”

“Because he was going to frame Foster Johns for the murder of his wife.”

“How?”

“I think he was going to shoot someone else with the gun he used to kill Angela, and since the bullet from Angela’s murder had gone flying out the window, he needed the shell casing for them to compare. But Mike couldn’t find the bookstore shell casing. So he fired the gun and went to plant a new shell casing.”

“But he didn’t shoot someone else, someone else shot him.”

“Come on,” said Betsy, “he didn’t know he was going to end up dead! I think he arranged for Foster to be alone in his office that night so he’d have no alibi. Then he invited another person to come over to his house. I think the plan was to take that person to Foster’s building, murder him there, and leave the gun for the police to find.”

“Or her,” corrected Morrie gently. “Maybe he planned to murder another woman.”

“No, only a man could win a knock-down battle with Paul. Because that’s what happened. He got into a fight and the person took his gun, shot him, and ran away.”

“Who was this person?”

Betsy grimaced. “Since it’s not Alex Miller, I don’t know.”

“Well, consider this. Maybe the person Paul planned to murder was Foster. Maybe Foster’s lying about Paul telling him to wait in Foster’s office. It’s not a very good alibi, you know. I’m sure Foster could have faked it.”

“I know.” She lifted and set down her beer bottle on the white paper table covering, making a series of overlapping circles. “I’ve been thinking the person who fought with Paul was Foster Johns. Except ...”

“Except what?”

“I just don’t think he did it.”

This time he didn’t bother to hide his smile.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she protested, but she was making a rueful, amused face herself.

“I wouldn’t dream of laughing at you, not with your record,” he said. “But I was thinking what my boss would say if I came to him and said I didn’t want to press an investigation because I had a feeling the suspect didn’t do it.”

“But surely you get feelings about suspects!”

“Sure I do. Often. Sometimes I’m sure a suspect did it, and sometimes I’m equally sure a suspect didn’t. Sometimes I’m right. But those feelings are more than instinct, they come from experience. You haven’t been at this long enough to learn if your feelings are always right.”