“Hell, no,” she said. “I wanted to go to Paris. Men are nothing but trouble. You sleep with them and all of a sudden they think they own you. And then they do stupid things like shoot each other. Here’s more free advice. Penises mostly all look and function the same. Ride it until it’s dead and then move on.”
I sighed and thought I might need a third cinnamon roll to get through this conversation.
“Getting back to Elmer—or Frank—whoever he is…” Kate said.
“Like I was saying, Frank charmed the pants right off of me. We only had one night together, but it’s still one of my top five sexual experiences. He was an animal. A real beast. Lordy, it’s getting hot in here,” she said, unzipping her leopard-print jacket.
“What happened? Did he sneak out on you in the middle of the night?” I asked, getting a little worked up myself. I hadn’t had sex in three weeks.
“Of course not,” she said. “No man has ever snuck out on me in the middle of the night.”
Scarlet brought her feet down from the table and leaned forward, staring at both of us intently. I couldn’t help but lean forward myself, waiting for whatever was coming with anticipation.
“The next morning I went to my job as a teller at the bank, and about ten minutes after we opened we were held up at gunpoint. He was masked, but there was something about the way he moved that seemed familiar to me. The hips don’t lie, you know. Somebody famous once said that,” she said, nodding with great wisdom. “Frank waltzed right up and handed me a long-stemmed rose while he pointed the gun at my face and demanded that I put money in the bag.”
“Holy shit,” I said, my mouth hanging open.
“Yep. That about sums up my reaction too. And then he shot my friend Susan right in the face.”
“S
o you’re saying
the Elmer you walked up to in the restaurant is Frank the bank robber?” Kate asked.
Scarlet nodded. “They called him the Romeo Bandit. He always seduced a female that worked at the bank and then gave them a red rose as a parting gift when he robbed them.”
“They never caught him?” Kate asked.
“Never,” Scarlet said. “At the time, he was one of the most wanted men in America. When he robbed the bank in Whiskey Bayou he was already a pro and had been at it for several years. He’d robbed more than twenty banks all over the country and killed more than a dozen people. I never suspected a thing.”
“He didn’t ask questions about the set-up of the bank when you were out together?” Kate asked.
Scarlet laughed and her rheumy eyes brightened, showing a glint of wickedness. “Honey, we didn’t go out together. I never had a chance,” she said, shaking her head. “To this day, I’ve never seen a man as handsome as he was. Maybe Sean Connery in his prime comes close, but that still doesn’t do him justice. He was one of those men that just oozed raw sex appeal. And not to toot my own horn, but I’d been known to have my fair share of sex appeal too. I might have only been seventeen, but when I looked at him I felt like the most worldly of women.”
She sighed and I knew exactly how she felt. That’s how I’d reacted the first time I met Nick.
“It was a Tuesday just before close, and I was drawn to him the moment he walked through the doors of the bank. He came right up to me and asked to open a new account. Lord, Susan was peeved that he never looked twice at her. She told me straight to my face that I exuded trampiness and that’s why men always approached me first.
“Let me tell you, I looked like a lady. And I
was
a lady outside the bedroom,” she said, waggling her eyebrows. “That’s the trick, girls. Men are drawn to confident women who own their looks and sex appeal. And it drives them crazy when they see properness on the outside and can only imagine what might be unleashed in the bedroom. I’m giving you girls all this free advice because I love you like family.”
“I am family, Aunt Scarlet,” I said.
“Then you’re especially lucky I’m not charging you. Family is a pain in the ass. But you remind me a little of me, so I’ve always been partial to you.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“Like I said, he went by the name Frank in those days. Frank DeCosta. And he had proper identification and everything. He deposited two hundred dollars and asked if I was free after closing for coffee. I told him I was available for dinner. He winked at me, and then left the bank. I wondered if I’d misplayed my hand, but when I walked out of the bank that night he was leaning against his car. He had a bottle of champagne chilling in the backseat and a dozen red roses.”
“Smooth,” I said, admiring the play. They didn’t make men like they used to.
“Oh, yes. And if I’d been thinking with the brain in my head instead of my loins I would’ve realized he’d had to prepare all of that before he came into the bank. There was no place close by to get roses or champagne. It was Whiskey Bayou and it was 1943. We weren’t known for our sophistication and class.”
“Nothing much has changed,” I told her.
“It was pure romance,” she said. “We drove around until we found a secluded area, and then we drank the champagne and talked. God, he was easy to talk to. Susan had called me a tramp, but I knew good and well what I was. I was a young woman looking for any way possible to escape my father and get the hell out of Whiskey Bayou. And the only way to do that was to find a man with plenty of money to take me out of there.”
“An admirable goal,” I said. I understood the need to escape Whiskey Bayou. I’d felt the urge to run screaming out of town since grade school, but I guess my goals hadn’t been as lofty as Scarlet’s. I’d never thought of trying to marry my way out.
“I tell you,” Scarlet said. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. If Frank hadn’t robbed me that day and made me lose my job, I never would have been at loose ends and seduced Roger Greene when I went to his law office to apply for secretarial work. And if I hadn’t gotten the job as Roger’s secretary, I never would’ve met Dean Walker when I went to the distillery to order bottles of whiskey for Roger to send to his best clients. Dean had more money than Croesus, but he didn’t know jack squat about lovemaking. Never in my life have I met a man that didn’t know a clitoris from an elbow.”
Scarlet shook her head in pure disgust. “And if I hadn’t taken those men to my bed, they never would’ve tried to kill each other to win me over and I never would’ve gotten sent to Paris, where I met my dear first husband, Pierre, who
did
happen to know an elbow from a clitoris. Of course, he was a spy and dragged me into the whole thing by accident. But it turned out I was pretty good at being a spy, and Pierre got shot while on assignment and I ended up with all his money, so things turned out okay.”
“Yes, I can see how that was all the Lord’s work,” Kate said dryly.
“Anyway, back to Frank. We finished our champagne, and drunk on hormones and expensive champagne, we went back to my place, where he showed great ingenuity by climbing up the side of the house to sneak into my bedroom window. For the next eight hours we didn’t leave that bed. And we didn’t do any sleeping either, if you catch my drift. He left just before the sun came up, and I had to be at the bank at eight o’clock to open up.”
I decided to be brave and speak up. “I still don’t understand how you’re so sure this Elmer guy you met at your retirement village is the Romeo Bandit. It’s been more than seventy years. I’m sure he looks very…different,” I said, thinking that if Elmer had changed as much as Scarlet had he was probably virtually unrecognizable.
“That’s what I’m saying. There are some things that you can’t erase. And one of those is tattoos. It’s how I knew for sure it was him when he robbed the bank. Frank had a tattoo that covered the whole bottom half of his arm. Tattoos in those days weren’t common, especially in visible locations. Especially something as crude as a naked woman. She was a voluptuous thing with dark hair, and I didn’t even know he had it until I got him naked and tied to the bed.”
My eyebrows rose and Kate had chosen that unfortunate time to take a sip of coffee. I pounded her on the back a couple of times until she waved me off.
“So what you’re saying is Elmer has the same tattoo as Frank?” Kate asked after she’d gotten herself under control. “Couldn’t it be possible that someone else could have the same tattoo?”
“I doubt it,” Scarlet said. “It’s very distinct. When I asked him about the tattoo he told me the woman was his wife. She’d died in childbirth a couple of years before and it was his memorial to her. He’d given her a long-stemmed red rose on their first date and he laid one on her casket after she died. He had the rose twined around her body in the tattoo, along with a rosary, so that she might rest in peace.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“Yep, I’m a real romantic at heart, so that story was a little bit of a buzzkill. I almost untied him and suggested we go out for dinner after all, but he turned things around pretty quick. It turns out he didn’t even need his hands to get the job done. That’s talent right there.”
Kate and I both nodded in agreement. That was indeed a talent.
“Frank told me that his wife always called him her Romeo. And the word Romeo was written in fancy script right between his wife’s legs. Not his real wife,” she clarified. “The tattoo of the wife.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
“Do you know what this means?” Scarlet asked. “After more than seventy years, I’ve caught the Romeo Bandit. Do you think there’s a reward?”
I
t turned out
there
was
a reward. A really, really big one. And I was suddenly a lot more interested in the Romeo Bandit’s capture. If, in fact, Elmer was the Romeo Bandit. First we had to prove it.
Kate got her laptop from her desk and set it up on the coffee table. “What’s Elmer’s full alias?” she asked Scarlet.
“Elmer Hughes. He lives in Villa one twenty-seven—three down from mine. He walked me to my door after I asked if I could join him that evening, and he was quite the gentleman. You know what that means?” Scarlet asked with a snort.
“What?” I said curiously.
“It means his plumbing doesn’t work anymore. That thing is useless as a monkey with a meat grinder. He didn’t even try to kiss me goodnight.”
“Uhh…” I said, for lack of anything better.
“Elmer Hughes,” Kate said, breaking in. “Age ninety-two. Permanent residence listed as the Hidden Sunrise Naturist Community.”
“Naturist. What’s that? Like a tree-hugging retirement village?” I asked.
“It’s a nudist colony,” Kate said wryly.
I closed my eyes and shook my head from side to side, trying to clear the images from my mind. “Sweet Jesus,” I muttered.
“Before we go on here,” Kate said. “Are you officially hiring this agency to help identify and capture the Romeo Bandit?”
That’s what I loved about Kate. She was all business, and she would charge her own mother for services. Though knowing the relationship between Kate and her mother, that probably wasn’t the best example. She’d probably charge her double.
“You can have two percent of the finder’s fee,” Scarlet said, her eyes narrowing as she gave Kate the stink eye.
“Ten percent plus expenses,” Kate countered. “If it turns out Elmer isn’t the Romeo Bandit, you just cover the expenses. I’m giving you a discount. This is an exclusive agency. We’re the best and we’re expensive. I can put Addison undercover, and we’ll have this solved in the next forty-eight hours.”
“Hold on just a minute,” I said, looking back and forth between Kate and Scarlet. “You’re going to put me undercover at a nudist colony? Have you lost your damned mind?” Then I turned to Kate and hissed under my breath. “I don’t want to look at a bunch of naked old people. I’ll need therapy. Not to mention I haven’t waxed my bikini line since Nick proposed, and I’ve maybe had an extra hot fudge sundae or two to help me get through this trying time. Nobody wants to see me naked right now.”
“You look great naked,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. “I saw you naked two weeks ago when that spider dropped on your head while you were in the shower. Hell, everyone in the whole office saw you naked and you didn’t have any complaints then.”
“That’s hardly the same thing,” I said primly. “This would be on purpose.”
“You can go this afternoon and get a bikini wax. Put it on your expense report.”
I narrowed my eyes and tightened my lips. This was war. “Oh, I’ll put it on my expense report.” Then I looked back at Scarlet. “The agency gets ten percent of the finder’s fee and I get another ten percent for the indignity of it all. That still leaves a big chunk of the million-dollar reward for you.”
Scarlet chewed on the inside of her cheek and stared me down like a gunslinger. “Yep, you’re a Holmes all right. You’ve got yourself a deal. I’m due for a bikini wax myself. We can go together.”
“Perfect,” Kate said, her smile big and toothy. “Put them both on the expense report.”
“I hate you,” I mouthed.
She scratched her eye with her middle finger and then turned back to the computer. “There’s nothing unusual that I’m seeing here. Elmer made his money from investments and retired about thirty years ago. He’s been living off the residuals ever since.”
“Get a grip, girl,” Scarlet said. “It’s not like you’re going to type in his name in your little machine and an alarm’s going to go off telling you Elmer’s the Romeo Bandit. He’s too smart for that, and he’s been hiding under the radar for a long time.”
“Can you find out anything in the FBI database?” I asked Kate.
Her mouth quirked and she said, “Not unless I want to go to jail. I don’t have access to the FBI database.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” I said. “I’ve kind of gotten used to working with Agent Savage.”
Matt Savage had been playing a hell of a tug-of-war with my morals. I loved Nick, but there were some men that were just really good at muddying the waters. Savage had spent a good portion of the last year muddying my waters. And it didn’t help matters any that he’d occasionally lent me his expertise and the use of his FBI contacts during a couple of my cases.
“I’m pretty sure Agent Savage could’ve lost his job a couple of times falling in with your schemes.”