A Good Man Gone (Mercy Watts Mysteries) (17 page)

“So what’s new?” I said.

“Leave it alone. I’m not fooling around. They are not going to be happy if you impede this investigation, and they will have you charged.”

“They? They who? And what investigation am I impeding anyway? If you think I’m doing something wrong, go ahead and arrest me. In the meantime, get out.”

“Do you have to be so difficult?” Chuck asked.

“Yes. Get out,” I said.

“I think I’ll have some coffee first. If you don’t mind.”

“I do mind. Get out.”

“Nah.” Chuck stood up and stretched. He walked over to me and reached over my shoulder for a coffee cup. His breath smelled like my dad’s, beer and wintergreen gum. He brought the cup over my shoulder then reached for the pot with his other hand. It didn’t bother me at all, I swear. I hardly noticed his pecs.

“Want some more?” he asked.

“I made it, didn’t I?”

He topped off my cup and reached for the sugar over my shoulder again. I slipped under his arm before I did start to notice all sorts of things.

“That’s not very neighborly of you,” he said.

“It would’ve been neighborly to tell me about the website,” I said.

“What for?”

“So I could get an injunction or something before it went too far.”

Chuck stood and watched while I fried an egg, made toast and started to eat. “Won’t work, I tried,” he said softly.

“You tried?” I asked.

“I did.” Chuck moved closer and my anvil got heavier.

“Yeah, well, I still don’t want to be neighborly with you.”

“Yes, you do.” Chuck stood and watched while I fried an egg and made toast.

“Aren’t you going to offer me any?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“So when’s Gavin’s funeral?”

“I have no idea. Straatman’s are trying to strong arm Aunt Miriam over some sort of short notice fee. Gavin’s still at the morgue.”

“Let me know. I’d like to be there and remember what I said.”

“It’s seared into my memory,” I said.

 
Chuck saluted me, gave Aaron a pointed look, and left through the pantry. Aaron watched me eat and devoured three more Pop-Tarts.

“Don’t you have to go to Kronos?” I asked.

“We don’t open until eleven.”

Great
.

I cleaned up, threw my purse over my shoulder. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yep,” said Aaron, but he didn’t move.

I went out the back door and reset the alarm. The day was glorious, blue skies with a couple of white puffy clouds for effect, my favorite kind of day. I walked down the brick walk that I’d spent a significant portion of my childhood weeding and paused to smell the bluebells with their perfect waxy forms and light scent.

I went on, meandering this way and that through the flower beds to the garage. I’d left it unalarmed and unlocked. Dad would kill me, if he knew. Lucky for me he was barfing his brains out thousands of miles away. I got in my truck and twisted around watching the garage door go up. I turned back around, put my truck in gear, and my passenger door opened.

“No, no. What are you doing, Aaron? Seriously?” Aaron climbed in next to me, shut the door and put on his seatbelt.

“Aaron, hello?”

“Morty said you need some watching.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I’m going to fix Dixie’s muffler. You’re going to work.”

“We don’t open till eleven.”

“I don’t need watching. Morty was messing with you.” I banged my hands on the steering wheel with each word.

“I don’t think so. You need help.”

“I don’t need help, really,” I said.

“Which muffler shop?”

Christ almighty.

“I don’t know. I have to get the car first.”

“There’s a good one on I-70.”

“Fine.”

And there it was, short of physically booting Aaron out of the car, I had a babysitter.

Chapter Twelve

GAVIN’S GRAND MARQUIS sat in the St. James Emergency parking lot untouched by the police crime lab techs.

“We can’t break in,” said Aaron.

“We’re not. I have Dixie’s keys,” I said.

I unlocked the driver’s door and popped the trunk. Dad kept his briefcase and any loose material in the trunk. It was harder to get at that way. Gavin did the same. His trunk was neat and organized with a toolbox, jumper cables, first aid kit, a shopping bag with a Nebraska sweatshirt and a cookbook, and his briefcase. The briefcase was new, a birthday gift from Dixie, but it was the same style he carried throughout his career. It looked more like an English professor’s case than a retired cops with soft buttery caramel leather and brass buckles.

I picked it up, shut the trunk, and went up front to Aaron, who sat in the passenger seat chewing a wad of grape bubble gum and smacking his lips.

“What’s that?” he asked as I slid Gavin’s briefcase behind his seat.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Isn’t that evidence?”

“Must not be or the cops would’ve taken it.”

Aaron gave me a smile and blew a huge bubble. He directed me to the muffler shop that he knew well. I couldn’t imagine why. His scooter had its original muffler and it could be heard for miles around. The shop was a mom-and-pop affair with no waiting. Pop recognized Gavin’s car and knew what it needed. He didn’t know Gavin was dead. When we told him, he got quiet and said the new muffler was on the house and he’d get right on it. I walked him out to the car, got Gavin’s briefcase and handed over the keys.

Aaron and I went into the waiting room, a standard automotive repair shop waiting area with dirty cracked linoleum, orange plastic chairs, and multiple vending machines. I bought a can of iced tea with a disgusting lemon additive and found the cleanest seat in the place. Aaron sat down next to me in what looked like an old spill of soda that nobody bothered to clean up. He leaned back, crossed his ankles, and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to go through the case with Aaron watching me, but it was too late. He’d report back to Morty every single thing I did, so I might as well be up front about it.

I unbuckled the case and rifled through Gavin’s stuff. There were two manila folders labeled Sendack, Doreen. The rest of the case didn’t yield anything interesting. It contained a bottle of Tylenol, some tissues and a notebook. The notebook was brand new and didn’t have so much as a doodle. I was surprised that Gavin hadn’t free-handed some notes. I’d filed plenty of his scribblings in the appropriate folders.

“Maybe he had a second notebook,” I said.

“What?” said Aaron.

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

I opened the first of Doreen Sendack’s files. It was the support case Dad mentioned. Doreen was trying to get a line on her ex-husband. He owed thirty thousand dollars for the support of three children he hadn’t seen in over two years. Bart Sendack was a swell guy that ran out on his wife and had been dodging her ever since. Doreen heard through a cousin that Bart was living in Lincoln. Gavin must’ve gone there to check out the lead. Bart’s picture was included in the file. He was thin with a long, narrow face and buzz cut. He’d have been handsome, if he gained thirty pounds and changed the hair.

The second file was for accounting purposes. It denoted Gavin’s mileage and the number of meetings with Doreen. He’d also run a records check on both her and Bart. Doreen came up empty. She had a couple parking tickets, but that was it. Bart, on the other hand, covered all the bases, speeding, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, domestic violence, and car jacking. He’d been out on bail for the carjacking incident when he ditched Doreen. I didn’t see how Doreen expected to get a dime out of Bart. Maybe it was the principle of the thing.

“Anything interesting?” said Aaron.

“Maybe.” I got my own notebook out of my purse and wrote down Doreen’s vitals and Bart’s crimes. Then I slipped Bart’s picture in my purse and put Gavin’s stuff away. Fifteen minutes later the muffler guy came out and said he was finished.

We returned Gavin’s car to the hospital parking lot with his briefcase in the trunk. I drove Aaron to Kronos and tried to persuade him to get out of my truck.

“Come on, Aaron. It’s ten to eleven,” I said.

“I’m off today.”

“No, you’re not. You’re never off.”

“I’m off.”

I said an “Ah crap” under my breath and parked in Aaron’s scooter spot.

We went in and I asked Rodney for a salad at the bar. Aaron followed me to a table and sat down across from me. He replaced his gum with a fresh wad and sat blinking at me like a toad. He needed to be Fiked. Desperately.

“I have to go to the ladies,” I said.

Blink.

“Order me a slice of key lime pie, okay?”

Blink.

I went down the hall to the restrooms, looked over my shoulder at Aaron’s back, and hung a right out the back door. I jogged the three blocks home. I found Dixie sitting in the living room swallowed up in one of The Girls’ afghans. It wasn’t cold in there.

“Hey, how are you doing?” I asked.

“Fine. What do you want?”

“Ah, nothing, um, I had the muffler fixed.”

“Great.” Dixie’s swollen eyes stared at the used tissues scattered over the coffee table. She sat rigid, as if she were expecting a fight.

“Do you need anything?”

“No, I don’t.” She dismissed me without her eyes ever wavering. I left her with the E! network yammering on the TV to keep her company and went up to Dad’s office. His message light was blinking again. There were messages from a couple clients and one for Denny Elliot. I wrote down the particulars for Dad’s records and texted Denny. The second-to-last message was from Mom. She was so pissed at me she could hardly speak. She managed to choke out their flight number and that they expected to arrive in Lambert at five p.m. She didn’t say how Dad was. The last message was from a surly Uncle Morty. He wanted to know if I’d reviewed his information yet. I hadn’t. I’d forgotten all about it.

I booted Dad’s computer and called him.

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Morty.

“So, I got the Sample info.” I logged into Dad’s email account.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I put a return receipt on it. You haven’t opened it yet,” he said.

Crap.

“Now you have,” he said. Of course, Mort was online and got the update the second I opened his email.

Sample lived a boring life on paper except for frequent moves and telephone number changes. She’d had six addresses and eleven phone numbers during the three years she lived in St. Louis. Her credit card usage was average. She didn’t carry much debt and her charges went down considerably in the six months she’d known her fiancé. He must’ve done most of the paying. I like that in a man. There were no recent links to Nebraska in either her charges or phone records. I felt the familiar itch to know how Morty got his information. But if it was too easy, I’d be paranoid for the rest of my life. Better to think of Morty as a genius than find out he was one of many.

Uncle Morty made a hacking noise in the phone.

“Sorry, I was reading,” I said.

“Not much there,” he said.

“No, not much at all. You busy?”

He snorted into the phone. Morty was a bit of a snot when it came to his availability. He liked me and everyone else to think he was up to his eyeballs and would squeeze us in if he could. He was busier than I liked to admit. His alter ego wrote high-fantasy bestsellers, but when he was between books he worked for Dad and bothered me.

“Well, are you or aren’t you?” I asked.

“What do you need?”

“Background on Sample’s fiancé. I’m thinking she was doing a lot through him. A link to Nebraska might show up through his records.”

“Yeah, I had the same thought. What’s the name?”

“Lee something. I don’t remember the last name. It was in the
Post
.”

Snort.

“I can’t do everything, you know,” I said.

“Try doing something,” he said. “Something besides being notorious.”

“I am. It’s not like I wanted to be on YouTube.”

“Then why’d you sign that release?”

I cradled my head in my hand. “I didn’t know what would happen.”

“Really? You didn’t know signing the rights away to your image and likeness wouldn’t have, say, consequences?”

“Fine. I’m an idiot,” I said.

Uncle Morty snorted and said, “Saw you on BBC World today.”

“Just look into Bart and Doreen Sendack again, will you?”

“What do you mean again?”

“You did their backgrounds for Gavin, didn’t you?” I smiled. Morty didn’t know what I was talking about. That meant Gavin used one of his competitors.