Fat Cat Spreads Out

TWENTY-FOUR

Chase left the butter building. Her side trip had been a bust as far as finding a great suspect. Carefully sipping her coffee, which had no cover and was cooling rapidly, she headed toward the Bar None. The coffee vendor had only two sizes of cups left and no lids. She feared she and Anna might run out of paper bags for the individual sales. They made a lot more of those here than in the Dinkytown shop.

Madame Divine was standing in front of her own booth. Fewer people than usual were strolling the midway right then. She was probably trying to attract customers.

Patrice said hello to Chase. “I hope business picks up,” she said, adjusting her gold turban. Her earlier tears were gone and she looked serene.

“Who knows? It’s the last day. Shouldn’t we be swamped?”

“I don’t know. They have all the contests and the butter sculpture judging today. People might not be that interested in the booths.”

“Have you done this fair before?”

“Oh yes, plenty of times. The last day is sometimes good, sometimes not. It’s a toss-up. I have a feeling today won’t be that good.” She poked at her turban again.

It struck Chase that a small diamond-studded cat collar could easily be concealed in that headdress.

Two giggling teenage girls walked past, zigzagging their way down the midway. One of them jostled Chase’s arm, and her coffee sloshed onto the hem of Patrice’s purple caftan.

“Hey!” Patrice snatched her robe and stepped back, giving Chase an alarmed look. “Look what you did.”

The two teens were long gone. “I’m sorry, Patrice. One of them jiggled my arm.” She nodded her head in the girls’ direction.

Patrice bent over to inspect her garment. Her gold turban tumbled off her head, onto the dirty walkway. “And now look what you’ve done!” She grabbed the turban and swished into her booth.

There had been no jeweled collar inside the turban. But there was plenty of room for one.

The coffee was mostly gone, so Chase pitched it in a barrel and continued past the travel agency booth. The short redhead was arranging pamphlets on the table at the front of her booth. She kept glancing anxiously up and down the midway.

“Are you looking for someone?” Chase asked.

“Oh yes, my partner isn’t here yet.”

“Sally, right? I’ve met her.”

“Yes, I can’t imagine what’s happened to her.”

“My name is Chase. I’m in the booth next door.”

“Oh yes, sorry. I haven’t ever introduced myself. Holly Molden.” She took Chase’s hand. “I’m terribly worried about Sally. I can’t get her on the phone, and she’s not answering my texts. I hope nothing’s happened to her. She said she would be in extra early this morning.” She stuck her forefinger between her teeth and Chase saw that her hand was trembling.

“Has she been here at all?”

“It doesn’t look like it.” She lifted a new box of pamphlets, slammed it onto the table, and dug some out. “It’s not like her at all to be late and not call.” Her hands continued to shake, and she was blinking back tears. Some fell past her lashes and spilled down among the freckles on her cheeks.

“I hope so, too. Let us know when she turns up,” Chase said as she went toward her own booth, wishing she had some more hot coffee.

Holly seemed overly dramatic, going to pieces because her booth mate was a little late. Still, the blonde wore a lot of bling. Maybe all of it wasn’t fake. Maybe she’d been mugged for her jewelry. Chase had the idea in the back of her mind that, if the woman loved diamonds, she might have been tempted to steal a diamond collar. At any rate, Chase hoped nothing terrible had happened to Sally.

She peeked in at Harper’s Toys. The curmudgeon was putting his finger puppets into a box.

“Leaving early?” she asked.

He squinted at her and screwed up his mouth. She backed up a step, afraid he was about to spit. He refrained, however, and shook his head. “What business is it of yours?”

“None. Sorry. Just wondering.” She fled to her own booth next door.

The day did start slow. Patrice may have been right, Chase reflected.

Soon, a crowd began to gather in front of the butter building. Eventually, some fair security personnel came along and organized them into a line. Chase watched the proceedings, wondering if she and Anna should take time off to see the judging.

“I’m not interested,” Anna said when Chase asked her. “You go ahead if you want to see it. You could look in at the exhibit hall, too. That’s where Inger said she’d be, right?”

“Right, but I didn’t see her there when I peeked in just now.”

“We ought to try to keep track of her.”

Chase considered that. “Inger’s a big girl. She might object if she knows we’re trying to babysit her. I guess I don’t need to see the actual butter judging. It will all be on display for the rest of the day.”

She heard a familiar voice next door, at Harper’s toy booth. Detective Olson was there. He kept his tone low, and she couldn’t make out his words.

Soon, though, he walked into the Bar None booth. He was followed by two uniformed policemen. “We’re doing one last search for the missing artifact,” he said, sounding strict and official.

“I need to tell you a couple of things,” Chase said softly, coming up beside him.

He gave her a doubtful look but stood still to listen.

“I was thinking that Madame Divine’s turban could be a good hiding place for the collar.”

“We had the same thought a few days ago. She was quite upset we made her unwind it.”

“Oh.” They had been more thorough that she would have been.

“Any more ideas?”

She leaned even closer. “The travel agents next door? The blonde one, the tall one, loves jewelry, and she’s missing.”

“What do you mean? Has anyone made a police report?”

“No, her partner said she hasn’t shown up yet. They have a jumble of boxes at the back of their booth. Those would make good hiding places.”

“Believe me, we’ve been through every box and searched all the exhibitors.”

She remembered the quick search of their own boxes and the pat-downs. “I know. It’s just . . . We need to find that collar.”

“I would like to. But I would like to nail the murderer even more. Do you have thoughts on that? Any new ones?”

She wished she did.

The crowd disappeared from the midway as the queue was gradually let into the butter building. After half an hour or so, she heard clapping.

“They’ve awarded the prizes,” Anna said. “Maybe one of us should have gone. I wonder who won.”

Had Detective Olson gone to the judging? Would knowing who the winner was provide any leads?

There were three browsers in the booth, eyeing the Harvest Bars. Anna could handle those. “I’ll go see,” Chase said. She ran toward the door of the building. People were streaming out, so she had to wait to the side for them to clear. She could have asked who’d won, but she wanted to see with her own eyes.

She wandered back toward the booth beside the butter building, the jewelry booth, intending to browse their wares. Instead, as she reached the opening between the two, Detective Olson brushed past her with two uniformed policemen and a fair security guard, into the opening. They disappeared behind the jewelry booth. They had all been so intent, in such a hurry, she wasn’t sure Olson had even seen her.

No one else seemed curious, but she had to see what was going on back there, behind the booths. The opening was barely wide enough for an average-size person. Someone hefty would find it difficult to squeeze through. Every other booth was set up with a similar passage. The Bar None booth was up against the travel agency booth, with an opening between Bar None and Harper’s Toys.

When she reached the back of the jeweler’s, she stopped. An official-sounding murmur came to her. She stuck her head around the corner. Detective Olson was kneeling on the ground beside someone. He looked up at one of the policemen.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Strangulation?”

The policeman nodded.

Then Olson saw her. He was at her side in two seconds. “Chase, get out of here.”

“Is someone dead? Murdered?”

“Get out of here. This doesn’t concern you.”

She left, but not before peeking around him and catching a glimpse of blonde hair fanned out on the grass and a gleam from the rings on the travel agent’s outstretched hand.

Then she ran, blindly, until she was at the food court. She stumbled to the window of the nearest vendor.

“Are you all right?” the avuncular man asked, concern on his face.

She realized that tears were streaming down her face. “Something to drink, please.” Her words came out in a strangled tone. With shaking hands, she paid for a cola, then sat and sipped it until her breathing and heart rate returned to normal. Poor Sally.

There was another murder! And this time the victim had been strangled. Her mind worked furiously. Were the two related? Who would murder both Larry Oake and Sally Ritten? Had they even known each other? She didn’t think so. It was a stretch to believe that there were two murderers at the Paul Bunyan Fair, though. It had to be the same killer. Didn’t it?

Slowly, she tossed her half-empty cup into the trash and started walking.

She got back to the midway and saw that the crowd exiting the butter building was thinning. Paralyzed by indecision, she didn’t know whether to hurry back to tell Anna what she’d seen or to go ahead and find out what had gone on in the sculpture contest. One thing she definitely did not want to do was to let Holly know what had happened before the authorities did. She couldn’t bear to be the one to tell her. She would zip into the contest, then get back to the Bar None booth. Maybe, by then, Holly would have been told what had happened to Sally.

Another consideration was whether or not she and Anna were in even more danger now. She would have to be very careful for the rest of the day. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief that today was the last day of the fair. There would be safety in the crowd at the butter contest, so she moved toward that building quickly.

She squeezed inside between two people who were coming out the door. For the first time, the door was propped open. A small cluster of spectators remained, taking pictures, around the woman with the beautiful North Star. Chase smiled. She was glad the woman had won and that she’d come to the butter building after all. She would get back to the booth as soon as she could to warn Anna, but first she wanted to stick around to see if she could find out anything else. It shouldn’t take long. Chase slipped past some other contestants on her way to congratulate the winner.

However, she found she had to pause at the Minskys’ table on the way. Mara stood quietly weeping and trembling as her father gouged chunks out of their sculpture and flung them into a trash barrel.

“Daddy, don’t. Please don’t,” she whispered.

Chase watched, horrified, as the man seemed to grow more and more angry, hurling bigger and bigger pieces of their creation into the garbage. She looked around to see if any other sculptors were destroying theirs. The man who had carved the lifelike gopher was taking pictures of his. The man who had carved the Vikings football team was walking away. She caught him.

“What happens to the sculptures?” she asked.

“The maintenance people will clean up,” he said. He frowned at Karl Minsky. “At least that’s what most of us do: leave them here to be disposed of.”

Chase steered around the Minskys on her way to the North Star woman. The anger radiating off the man was almost palpable. It was frightening his daughter, and it frightened Chase almost as much.

On an impulse, she stooped and picked up a bit of the straw with a tissue, then stuck it into her pocket.

Once again, she admired the detailed work on the woman’s sculpture. A blue ribbon had been pinned into the butter. She wondered what it would be like to create something like this, to work so hard, and to have it turn out so well, then to see it destroyed. Or to know, from the beginning, that it would be. Butter sculptures couldn’t last long, she was sure. She snapped a cell phone picture of it, just because everyone else was photographing it.

Several people had gone around to the back of it and were taking pictures there, too, so she followed suit and took a few of the back side. She was sure Anna would like to see it.

The detail there was equally as exquisite. While the front captured the route of the Mississippi through the state, the back depicted the Twin Cities with the most prominent buildings in relief. The IDS Tower shot up next to the Capella Tower, with its distinctive round top. The Wells Fargo Center nestled between them. The waterway between the two burgs was sketched in, and the state capitol building stood by itself near the big river bend.

Chase’s cell beeped for an incoming text message. She glanced at it. The message, from Mike Ramos, read, “So s.” He must have started to send something and gotten interrupted. She turned her attention back to the contest winner.

The sculptor, whose name tag said she was Astrid, beamed and posed beside her creation. She didn’t look like she would tire of this any time soon. Chase couldn’t blame her. That amount of prize money would have made her glow for a few hours, too.

A man came in pushing a cushioned cart and wheeled it up to the North Star.

“It’s time,” he said. He pulled on a pair of gloves and reached for the statue.

“Where’s it going?” Chase asked him.

“Big building,” he said, jerking his head in that direction. “So everyone can see it and take pictures. We’ll display it there on a tray table to catch the drips until it starts to melt too much, then we’ll cart it away.”

So this was the beginning of the end for the prizewinner.

Elsa and Eleanor were standing outside when she left the building. Chase couldn’t believe her luck. She said hello to them and walked closer.

“Who won?” asked Elsa. “We don’t dare go in to find out.”

Chase would see if that was true. She fished the tissue out of her pocket and waved it near her nose, taking a tiny swipe at a nonexistent itch. A couple of straws of hay fell out of her pocket with the tissue.

The twins sneezed in unison.

Elsa started sniffling and Eleanor’s eyes began to water. “Do you have another tissue?” Elsa asked, her voice choked.

“No, sorry. This one is used.” She stuck the tissue back into her pocket with the straw. Yes, the sisters were definitely allergic to it. “Astrid, the woman who carved the North Star, won.”

“Thank you,” Eleanor said, choking. They both hurried away.

That answered Chase’s question about the allergies once and for all. She didn’t think Elsa could have entered the room long enough to kill her husband.

Chase hurried back to the Bar None booth. Anna was waiting on a few stragglers. Chase turned back to where Holly Molden, the redheaded travel agent, was standing in the back of her booth, chewing her fingernails. Holly raised her eyebrows to ask Chase what she wanted. Chase opened her mouth but couldn’t tell her about Sally. Someone official should do that.

She returned to the Bar None booth. Anna was the only one there now.

“Where is everybody?” Chase asked.

“I think they’re all watching the judging of the contests today. We had a handful right after you left, but no one to speak of for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Anna,” she whispered, so the travel agent wouldn’t hear her. “I just saw the most horrible thing. Our neighbor is dead.”

“The toymaker?”

“No, Sally, the tall travel agent. I saw her body behind the booths. Detective Olson and some other official people are there. He told me to leave, but I heard him say he thinks she was strangled.”

“Strangled?”

“Shh.” Chase tilted her head toward the next-door booth. “She doesn’t know yet. Anna, if she was murdered, we’ll have to be very careful. I have no idea what’s going on around here.”

Anna glanced around at their empty booth. “Do you want to close up now and watch some of the contests, then? There will be more people there.”

“Have you noticed the time? I think we’d better do it and get Quincy ready for his big moment.”

Her cell beeped again. It was the same puzzling message from Mike except without any spacing between the letters this time: “Sos.”

Why wouldn’t he just call? Or text something more intelligible? She was going there soon to pick up Quincy. She’d ask him when she got there.

“Anna, do you know what this means?” She held the screen out.

The older woman took the phone and frowned. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Holly came into the booth as Anna set down the cell phone and started scooping up the few dessert bars that remained unsold.

“Wait, I want to take some of those home,” Holly said, pointing her stubby fingernails at the Almond Cherry Bars. Her nails looked raw and ragged. Almond Cherry was the flavor Sally had bought.

“Do you know anything about your partner yet?” Chase asked. Somebody should tell this woman soon.

“No.” She pursed her lips and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I don’t know what to do.”

Anna came around the table, gave her the goodies, and hugged her. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

Holly collapsed into her arms, sobbing, for a few minutes. The she raised her head, took a deep breath, and gave a tentative smile. “Thank you. I’m sure she’s just stuck somewhere with a flat tire and a dead cell phone.”

Chase almost gasped at how wrong that was. It was upsetting she hadn’t been told about her partner’s death yet, but Chase didn’t want to be the one to tell her. She barely knew the woman. Quick, she thought. Change the subject. “Have you heard anything new about the missing diamond collar?”

She gave a nonanswer. “Maybe.” After she paid for the bars, Holly started to leave. She got to the midway and then came back.

“You know the toymaker on the other side of you?” She spoke in a whisper, glancing around to make sure no one overheard.

Chase nodded. She’d noticed that he was still packing up. His booth was nearly empty.

“He says he saw someone run out of the sculpture building right before the veterinarian went in.”

“Did he tell the detective that?”

“No. Sally heard him tell his smelly friend. His friend said he should tell the cops, but Harper said he doesn’t like the police. Judging from some of his tattoos, I’d say he’s had some bad run-ins with the legal system.”

That had been mentioned earlier, but Chase had failed to see the significance. Now she did. Sally knew Harper had been in prison and Harper might know who murdered Oake. Harper was a link, a connection between Oake and the dead agent. And a killer? Now there was another suspect!

“Did he say who he saw?”

“Sally didn’t hear that part, she said. From what she overheard, she thinks that he does know who it was. But she told me she was going to try to convince Harper to go to the police.” Holly sniffed, another tear dropping down her cheek. “And she would if he didn’t.”

“You don’t think he would do anything to Sally, do you?”

“He looks like a rough man. I don’t know what he’d be capable of.”

Could Harper have killed Sally? It was more likely someone would want to kill Harper for what he was saying he’d seen.

Holly went back to her booth holding her head high, trying not to cry.

Chase had to find out who Harper saw. She would be very careful. But she had to know.