They might not be willing to admit, but you have to just know that the proprietors of the Klein Food Mart on Louetta Road just loved it when they would see Pat Janowski pull up in the strip mall parking lot. Like them, you might even not be above giving her some goodies on the house, at least if this report is to be believed.

Police and Cape Software, the Spring woman's former employer, are now saying that the 61-year-old former bookkeeper and secretary, whose net take-home was reported at $3,800 a month, swiped $1.5 million from the Montgomery County company's coffers and shoveled much of it into the slots of video poker machines at Klein Food Mart.

"Family members have said she would stop there on her way home from work and stay there until it closed," said Brad Beers, an attorney representing Cape Software, Janowski's erstwhile employer in The Woodlands. "They (store employees) would give her cigarettes. She was just there constantly."

According to court documents, the Dale Earnhardt fan and Obama-hater managed to swipe roughly $14,000 per month from January through September of last year. In November 2010, company officials finally discovered that Janowski's alleged thievery began back in 2002, a few months after her hiring. The documents state that she was in charge of payroll and "systematically caused unauthorized" transfers from company accounts into her own and disguised them by coding them as payments to vendors.

Janowski is now in two kinds of hot water. Even though they suspect they won't be able to get much money out of her, the company is suing Janowski and her husband in civil court for return of Cape Software's money, and Montgomery County cops have charged her with criminal theft. She posted a $50,000 bond and was back on the streets Wednesday.

Hopefully the Klein Food Mart has sent her a care package -- maybe a carton or two of Virginia Slims would help soothe her frazzled nerves.