The Chocolate Snowman Murders by JoAnna Carl Read Free Book Online Page B

as quickly as possible, and I used the forty-five minutes it took to get there to worry.
    Mendenhall was dead? Beaten to death with a desk lamp? I found it hard to believe.
    If Joe had told me the death looked like a heart attack, or like an overdose, or like a stroke, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I might have felt a bit guilty for leaving him alone in a motel in a strange city. But I definitely wasn’t responsible if he’d been beaten to death with a desk lamp.
    But however Mendenhall died, there was no reason I should feel responsible at all, I told myself. After all, Mendenhall was a grown man. If he had become ill, he had been alert enough to call an ambulance, or he had been when I left him. And if he chose to drink himself into a stupor, that wasn’t my fault.
    But he’d been beaten to death? How could it have happened? Who could have done such a thing?
    I was in such a state of nerves that I asked myself that question for twenty minutes before I saw the answer that the police were going to jump on right away.
    The cops were going to think I’d done it. Or else they were going to think Joe had done it.
    Yikes!
    I could well be the person to admit last seeing Mendenhall alive, and my husband had been at the motel looking for him later that evening.
    Joe and I were very likely in big trouble. We were certain to be at the head of the suspect list.
    I had dumped Mendenhall at the motel, then called my husband to complain that the man had offered me unwanted attentions, attentions obnoxious enough that I had refused to drive another forty-five minutes with him. I could easily be suspected of using physical force to repel those attentions.
    Hard on the heels of learning that Mendenhall hadn’t exactly treated me with respect, Joe had gone to Mendenhall’s room looking for him. Someone who didn’t know Joe could easily picture him in the classic role of angry husband.
    There was no hiding either situation. The desk clerk had seen me in the truck as Mendenhall went in to rent a room. Later Joe had gone to the desk clerk to try to find Mendenhall. The clerk was almost certain to remember one or both of us. Joe had also checked out restaurants in the area, looking for Mendenhall. Somebody was going to remember that, too.
    To add to the confusion, the crime had happened in a suburb of Grand Rapids, not in our friendly hometown of Warner Pier, where Joe and I were well-known residents. Heck, in Warner Pier the chief of police was my uncle by marriage. Hogan Jones looked on me almost as a daughter, and he and Joe were good friends. He knew us both well enough to feel sure we wouldn’t beat anybody to death—no matter how obnoxious the guy had been.
    But I had a feeling that being related to the chief of police in a town of 2,500 was not going to cut a lot of ice with the police in another, larger city.
    Joe had been a defense attorney. He would know how to handle the situation.
    So the first goal I had as I drove toward Grand Rapids was to talk to Joe. This didn’t turn out to be a simple thing to do.
    When I got to the motel, it was surrounded by police cars, all with lights flashing, and an ambulance was around at the side of the motel, near room 122. My first surprise was that the emergency vehicles had “Lake Knapp” painted on their doors. The motel where I’d dumped Mendenhall was in a city that I’d never even noticed on the map.
    A uniformed patrolman was keeping cars from entering the drive. I finally parked in the lot of the shopping center across the street and walked to the motel through the slush, trying not to fall down in the gutter.
    After I got to the motel, of course, no one had told the patrolmen guarding the drive to expect me. They wouldn’t let me in, even when I said I was there to make a statement.
    I called Joe’s cell phone. It was turned off, but I left a message telling him I was freezing my tootsies outside the motel. I added that