Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake Read online

  I mean, any more than we already had. “Come on, Ellie, let’s go,” I said while she stood staring at the body some more.

  Today’s cheesecake ingredients were all stowed in her carryalls, fortunately, and she’d left those out front. “We’ll call Bob Arnold and then lock the place until he gets here,” I added.

  Bob was Eastport’s police chief. “Probably Miss Halligan’s calling him right now,” said Ellie, hurrying to catch up with me. “You know how she likes to be in charge.”

  I did know, and she was excellent at it, too. So I decided to let her do the cop calling: for one thing, we still had all those cheesecakes to bake; and for another, the presence of a dead man—even a chocolate-covered one—was beginning to feel oppressive.

  “Ellie?” I said. She was looking back over her shoulder at the guy again, an odd expression on her face. “You okay?”

  But of course she was; Ellie might’ve resembled a fairy-tale princess, but she was as tough as an old boot.

  “Fine,” she replied. Still, I wondered about the expression in her eyes, a flash of dislike aimed squarely at the dead body. Her look faded so fast, I could almost pretend I hadn’t seen it.

  Almost. “The cheesecakes,” I reminded her.

  She nodded slowly. “We’ll have to bake them at your house.”

  Right, because the Coast Guard auction waited for nobody. One year it rained so hard that the winners wore hip boots and snagged their sodden prizes with boat hooks, but the sale went on.

  I only hoped the cops would agree to interviewing us while we baked. If not, we’d be auctioning off store-bought Twinkies, and those wouldn’t even begin to pay for the holiday fireworks.

  “Come on,” I said again, and Ellie followed me outside.

  She knew who the dead guy was, I could tell. Knew, and didn’t much mind finding him that way, either. We’d been friends for a long time, and I could have just about guaranteed it. But she would tell me when she was ready, I knew that, too.

  Besides, sooner or later they’d wash the chocolate off his face and then we’d all find out, wouldn’t we?

  * * *

  The kitchen in my big old house has antique hardwood floors, old pumpkin-pine wainscoting, an old butler’s pantry, and old . . .

  Well, you get the idea. The cabinets are varnished beadboard, the countertops vintage linoleum. The tall double-hung windows all face south, so potted geraniums grow there with wild enthusiasm, and across from the woodstove and the old soapstone sink there’s a huge butcher-block table with a knife rack built into it.

  Shortly after we found the body in our bake shop, Ellie set her carryalls down on that table and began emptying them while my housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, watched skeptically, her ropy arms crossed over her flat chest.

  Bella was gaunt and hawk-faced, with big grape-green eyes and high, angular cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on. A firm believer in the germ-killing properties of hot soap-and-water, she ran my old house with the firm, clear-eyed purpose and whip-crack organizational style of a crusading military general. When we arrived, she’d been down on her knees scrubbing the baseboards with a toothbrush.

  “We’ll clean up afterward,” I promised, carrying a pile of round, shiny-metal springform pans in from the pantry and stacking them on the soapstone sink.

  “Mmm,” Bella said, unconvinced. Then, swiping back a hank of her henna-dyed hair with a work-roughened hand, she went on:

  “You know, that father of yours is just about the stubbornest man alive.”

  I did know, actually, and even more so now that he was stuck in a hospital bed.

  “This morning he called a taxi and was just climbing into it when the nurses caught him,” Bella went on exasperatedly.

  Ellie got the mixing bowls out; luckily, I am a fan of church fairs, and had collected a lot of them from the sale tables, where items like Crock-Pots, popcorn poppers, and George Foreman grills complete with instruction booklets were available for a dollar.

  Sadly, there were no instruction booklets for handling my father. “Jacob Tiptree,” Bella pronounced darkly, “is lucky I promised ‘for better or worse.’ ”

  That’s my dad’s name, and yes, I’m named after him. Bella grabbed a paper towel and began furiously polishing the doorknobs, to emphasize her point. But she didn’t mean it; the truth was that she adored my father and it was her lingering fear over his recent cardiac event that was making her so testy now.

  Well, that and us messing up her nice, clean kitchen. Time to change the subject. “Guess what, Ellie and I found a dead guy this morning.”

  Still polishing, Bella rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’ve heard all about that already. Matt Muldoon, it was, stone dead with his face in a pot of chocolate. Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “Really,” I said, startled until I realized: Miss Halligan must’ve recognized him just as Ellie had, and the gossip wire in Eastport worked so fast and accurately that if you got a bee sting at one end of the island, minutes later somebody was getting a pair of tweezers and some baking soda out for you at the other.

  So of course word was getting around. Ellie said nothing, busy cracking eggs into a bowl; she’d never liked Muldoon, but her dislike had turned to fury when he began complaining loudly about cleanliness issues in our shop.

  Which was nonsense. We had no sanitation issues at the Moose. On the contrary, Bella did all our cleaning for us (she insisted) and as a result you could have run your tongue over any surface in the place and it would come up tasting like rainbows.

  But that hadn’t stopped Muldoon. First it was insects, then animal hair; for weeks, now, the accusations had kept coming. As soon as we managed to disprove one, he’d presented us with another, threatening to shut us down by reporting it to his friends at the Maine State Health Department.

  According to him, he visited them often at their offices in Augusta, yet another of his claims that I didn’t believe. In fact, where the Chocolate Moose was concerned Matt Muldoon was nuttier than a chocolate-dipped pistachio; I didn’t know why.

  But as Bella finished with the doorknobs and started on the cabinet latches, I already had a feeling that he was going to be even more trouble to us dead than he’d been alive.

  “Anyone home?” called a voice through the screen door, and Bob Arnold came in.

  With his round, pink face, thinning blond hair, and rosebud lips always seemingly ready to curve into a smile, Bob didn’t look like the kind of cop who could walk into a bar fight, separate the combatants, and minutes later have the aggressor placed safely in the backseat of his patrol car, thus ending the battle.

  But Bob was a master of law enforcement persuasiveness, and if that didn’t work, he had a head-swat maneuver that did. Now he seated himself on a stool at the butcher-block table, frowning.

  “So you found him?” Muldoon, he meant, and he already knew that we had.

  “Me,” I said, getting the rest of the butter and cream cheese out of one of the canvas carryalls that Ellie had brought with her and arranging them on the table. “I found him.”

  Ellie went on cracking eggs one after another, and I figured it would be best to let her keep quiet for as long as possible. After all, her well-known dislike of the deceased wasn’t exactly going to simplify our day, was it?

  And it definitely needed simplifying; just for starters, my oven here at home wouldn’t hold very many cheesecakes. Two, maybe; so even if all went well, we’d be baking until the wee hours.

  “All going well” also being an idea that was fast fading into the sunset. “Okay, here’s what happened,” I said.

  Bob listened with interest as I went through the morning’s events: the call from Miss Halligan about the Moose’s front door standing open, the new lock from Morris Whitcomb, the odd scratches in the door frame, and the kitchen lights not going on.

  “But then they did,” I added as I measured out sugar and used a wooden spoon to begin working it into the cream cheese.

 
; “And that’s when you found him.” Bob let Bella put a slice of day-old mocha sheet cake on a plate in front of him.

  It was yet another thing Matt Muldoon had complained about: that we brought home unsold things and ate them or gave them away, and this caused some dreadful contamination that he couldn’t be specific about.

  Most likely that was because, like the rest of the things he fussed over, it didn’t exist.

  “That’s right,” I told Bob. “I was out there in the dark at first, but I only saw him when the lights went on again. I didn’t know who he was, but . . .”

  Bob licked mocha buttercream off his fork. As usual, for his small-town peacekeeping duties—despite being Eastport’s police chief, he took his share of patrol shifts like everyone else—he wore his blue uniform and black leather duty belt, complete with keys, handcuffs, baton, whistle, radio, and pepper spray canister.

  And his weapon, of course, neatly holstered and with the safety strap fastened. “And you, Ellie,” he inquired, “what do you think about Matt Muldoon getting killed in the Moose?”

  Before she could reply, he added, “I ask because the state cops surely will. And it might be, you know, that you should think a bit about your answer before you give it.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Ellie was about as likely to commit murder as I was to jump off a building and fly. Still, Bob had a point: the state cops wouldn’t know that about her, would they?

  “Ellie,” I began warningly; Bob was our friend, but that wasn’t why he was here. She, though, was in no mood for prudence.

  “I’m not one bit sorry about it and I don’t care who knows it,” she told Bob flatly. “Good riddance is my whole feeling about him.”

  “You can stop now,” Bella told me quietly, and when I looked down, I saw that I’d been beating the ingredients in my mixing bowl so vigorously that not a bit of sugar remained un-creamed. Any more and I thought the spoon might be in danger of splintering.

  And wood chips in the cheesecake really would have given Matt Muldoon something to complain about, wouldn’t they? That is, if he hadn’t already been as cold as a mocha chip refrigerator cookie.

  “They should talk to his wife,” Ellie said as she began punishing the eggs in the bowl very severely with a wire whisk.

  “Sarabelle’s the one behind the nonsense he’s spouting,” Ellie added. “And who knows what else she’s been up to?”

  Like me, Sarabelle Muldoon had been a city girl until she and her husband moved to Eastport a year earlier. A public-relations woman who’d specialized in luxury-goods clients, she’d run special events in Manhattan for high-end makers of luggage and jewelry.

  Now, though, I didn’t know what she did. “She might even have killed him herself,” Ellie went on. “Maybe she wanted him to shut up as badly as we did.”

  Like everyone else in town, Bob Arnold was well aware of what my son Sam called Muldoon’s smack-talking about the Moose. We’d called it slander, and we’d even gone so far as to ask Bob what we could do about it.

  But slander was a civil matter, lawsuits are expensive, and after years of old-house repairs, I had almost no money left from the little stash I’d brought here.

  But back to the matter at hand: “How’d he die?” I asked.

  “Medical examiner’ll say for sure. But probably it was a stab wound.” Bob looked grim as he went on:

  “Just from a quick glance I took before I called up the state homicide people, I figure it was from the little hole I saw in the back of his neck. Not much blood, though. Most of the bleeding was on the inside, I’m guessing.”

  I squelched the clear mental picture that Bob’s remarks summoned while he looked at Ellie, still beating the eggs to a froth.

  “You notice anything missing from the shop? Barbecue skewer, maybe a long-tined fork, anything like that?”

  “Nothing was missing,” I told him firmly. “We don’t use any skewers, and anyway we keep all our tools on the Peg-Boards. So I’d have noticed.”

  “Um,” Ellie put in unhappily, “I’m afraid that’s not quite true.”

  Bob nodded minutely, fingers tented over his coffee cup, eyes alert. He’d already known this, too, I realized suddenly. I’d been right about why he was here.

  A similar thought seemed to dawn on Bella. “We shouldn’t be talking about any of this,” she said sharply. “You shouldn’t be here telling us about it, either, so why are you?” she demanded of Bob.

  With her jutting jaw full of yellow teeth and her henna-red hair snaking out in frizzy corkscrews from the hairnet she always wore, Bella didn’t resemble any benevolent household goddess that I’d ever heard of.

  But she’d have stepped in front of a train for me and Ellie, and now she was scared for us. Me too, because it didn’t take a genius to figure out which way this particular train was heading.

  Outside the kitchen windows, the midmorning sun made jewels of the purple irises and pink poppies that Ellie and I had planted the previous autumn. Nearby the sheets billowing freshly from the clothesline would come in crisp and smelling sweet.

  And everything inside was in apple-pie order as well. In fact, there actually was a pie cooling on a rack in the windowsill, right this very minute.

  Raspberry, I thought. Still, my heart thumped anxiously. For no reason, I hoped. But something about all this felt bad to me.

  Really bad. Then Ellie began to speak.

  * * *

  “He came down to the shop late last night. Matt Muldoon did, I mean.”

  Bob Arnold sat with his clean, well-kept fingertips pressed together over his coffee cup, saying nothing. Bella and I stayed silent, too; this was Ellie’s decision, and she was making it.

  “It was exactly eleven-forty,” she said. “I was just putting the walnut cookies in,” she added to me, “that’s how I know.”

  Bob looked a question at me. “The cookies take twelve minutes in our oven,” I replied. “And after what happened with the éclairs, we don’t trust the oven timer.”

  Everyone recalled our first try at making éclairs; you could smell their charred carcasses all over town.

  “So you looked at a clock just then,” Bob concluded correctly to Ellie; nodding, she went on.

  “He came stomping in, all mad about something as usual,” she said. “That frown of his, like someone was poking him with pins.”

  Matt Muldoon was sixtyish, with steel-gray hair that he wore slicked back like a painted-on helmet. The corners of his small, slitlike mouth were always turned down, and his beady gray eyes were always darting around meanly.

  Ellie went on: “So he starts out all huffy with me, telling me I certainly shouldn’t be there baking while the shop is closed, because people ought to be able to walk right in at any time.”

  She gave the eggs another few whips. “So they could see what I might be up to,” she said, her tone conveying what she thought about that.

  “He walked right in,” Bella pointed out reasonably. “Matt Muldoon did, I mean.”

  Ellie poured the beaten eggs from her bowl into the mixture in mine.

  “No, I unlocked the door and let him in,” she corrected as she measured out the vanilla extract, the dark liquid’s aroma wafting up pungently.

  “He kept standing out there, fuming through the window at me, waving and mouthing words, and I knew he was going to stay there until I did let him in,” she said.

  “So I figured I might as well get it over with,” she added as I began stirring the eggs and vanilla extract into the sugar and cream cheese.

  “He didn’t make you nervous?” Bob asked. “There in the shop alone with him late at night, when you already knew he was angry?”

  Bob spoke mildly, but his words sent a zing of fright through me. It sounded like maybe he was trying out arguments for lesser charges: self-defense, for instance.

  But she didn’t go for it. “No. He didn’t scare me.” A faint smile curved her lips: Oh, come on.

  “Yeah, I figured as much,” he
said. If you wanted to scare Ellie, you needed something more than Matt Muldoon’s bad temper to do it with. A bazooka, maybe.

  “What happened then?” Bob asked.

  I couldn’t stand it. “Ellie, are you sure you want to go into it all right now?”

  But Ellie merely began grating lemon peel, scraping the tiny bits into a pile on the cutting board. The sharp, tangy smell of lemon zest drifted into the room.

  “It’s okay,” she told me. “Bob’s trying to help.”

  Right, I knew that’s what he was trying to do: getting the lay of the land before the state cops arrived, then maybe guiding their investigation away from her if he could.

  Like I say, he was our friend. Over the years we’d introduced him to his wife and promoted their courtship, despite his shyness, and later via our snooping activities we’d hauled her off a sharp hook that a spiteful local prosecutor had been trying to impale her on, for instance.

  Bob, in return, had hauled my inebriated son Sam home more times than I could count instead of transporting him to the drunk tank at the county jail, and he’d turned a semiblind eye to a lot of Sam’s other youthful behavior as well.

  So we had history together. Still, friendship could only go so far; what Ellie said now could create problems for her later, if it came to that.

  As I suspected it would. “He’d had a few drinks, it seemed to me,” Ellie said. “I could smell it on his breath.”

  I kept stirring. The mixture in the bowl started out gloppy and slimy, but soon it gathered itself into a thick batter.

  “And maybe because of that, he was even worse than usual,” she added, “telling me he intended to put us out of business, that we didn’t deserve our shop, that she . . .”

  Sarabelle, Ellie meant. “. . . wanted a bakery of her own and he’d make sure she got it, no matter what.”

  She looked up at all of us. “And since Eastport’s too small to support two specialty bakeries . . .”

  Oh, brother. Now I understood why he was such a pain. Never mind that Sarabelle Muldoon couldn’t bake a potato if you turned on the oven and shoved it in there for her. She’d seen how cute the Chocolate Moose was and decided she wanted it for herself.