Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder (7 page)

I let out a sharp breath, in both relief and frustration. My eyes were magnetically drawn to the inscription on the stone, and even after all these years, a lump rose in my throat.

Linda Ann O’Hanlon
1952–1986
Loving Wife, Devoted Mother

Every time I saw the words, her name spelled out with such finality on the cold rock, my heart broke again. It felt so impossible. Mom … dead? How could this have happened to us? To me? To her?

The flashbacks started ripping through my mind. The sound of tires skidding across blacktop. Metal screeching, wrenching, twisting. Glass shattering. Screams. From me, or maybe from Eddy’s son, Neal. Maybe from us both. More glass exploding. Something piercing my abdomen, slicing skin and organs deep inside.

After that I remembered very little. I didn’t know until much later that Eddy had dragged me from the wreck. Away from my mother, who’d been driving and was killed upon impact. Away from her only son, whose neck had snapped when his head slammed against the window. Eddy literally held my life in her hands as she desperately tried to keep my innards inside my body until help arrived.

Back in the day, no
one used seatbelts or car seats. That level of precaution wasn’t even on the radar. It was only years later, when they started enforcing the use of safety restraints, that I wondered what might have happened if everyone had been belted in.

After that, all Eddy and I had was each other, and occasionally my father.

The eerie hoot of an owl jarred me back out of the nightmare of my past. I forced myself to breathe deep, to ground myself in the here and now. Maybe I needed some therapy. The flashbacks seemed to be coming more frequently lately.

I shook my head to clear it, and quickly looked around. I was still alone and my father was still not here. Goddamn him for dropping me back into another time and place—a place where I was out of control, again mourning for the mother I’d lost far too young.

Time to check in with Coop and rethink my game plan.

four

“AGH,” I yelped. Blistering
hot cheese and bacon squirted
from between two burger patties to scald my tongue. I gingerly
rolled the rest of the bite around my mouth until I could chew and swallow without further damage.

Elsie’s Restaurant, Bar, and Bowling Center in Northeast produced one of my all-time favorite burgers, the Juicy Brucy. It was a loose cousin to my second-favorite burger, the Jucy Lucy, found at Matt’s Bar in Minneapolis, among others. The Juicy Brucy added chunks of bacon to the molten cheese sealed in the middle of the burger.

“You,” Coop said, watching me grab my ice water and down a couple swallows, “always manage to burn yourself when you eat that.”

The now tender buds on my tongue scraped against my front teeth. I hated the feeling, but I was always too impatient to wait until Elsie’s masterpiece was cool enough to eat. Served me right, I suppose. “I know, I know.” I stuffed another bite in anyway.

Coop took a huge chomp of his grilled cheese, crammed it all to one side of his mouth, and chewed. “So what now?”

“I called the Lep after extracting myself from the cemetery. Eddy assured me that things were running slick as a pig’s greased ass—don’t ask me—and she and Lisa are getting on fine.” I bit into one of my waffle fries. “Man, I don’t know what to think. I mean—Dad disappears, this dead guy shows up in a block of ice, Dad’s handgun is found with the body? The whole thing with being pressured to sell the bar and the threats … ” I trailed off and popped the last of the Juicy Brucy in my mouth.

“I don’t know. But Shay,” Coop leaned toward me, suddenly earnest, “your dad no more iced that guy than I offed Kinky on the barge.” A little over a year earlier Coop’s boss had been killed on a floating bingo barge where Coop had been working, and for a while he thought the police had fingered him as the prime suspect. He wasn’t guilty, but it was quite the endeavor to get things straightened out in his favor.

I drained my water and sat back in the booth. “I also got a hold of Johnny.”

“Barboy Johnny? What’s he doing now?”

Johnny was the steadiest bartender my father ever had. He’d been hired on before he was old enough to drink and had stuck by my father and the Lep throughout years of ups and downs while he went to college. I think my dad felt a little like Johnny was the son he’d never had. I didn’t feel slighted because Johnny was an all-around good guy.

I said, “Remember Johnny graduated from college not too long ago?”

“Yeah. Landed himself a nice job, didn’t he?”

“Yup. But with the unstable economy, they laid him off. He decided to go back to school for his masters in urban planning.” I waved a fry in the air. “I don’t get how some people can keep going to school year after year after year. That would drive me nuts. On the bright side, Johnny’s school schedule has a lot of flexibility, and he’s agreed to help out.”

“Maybe your dad can bring him on again for a while.” Coop pushed his plate away with a grunt. “That was good shit, man.”

“Since there’s no one to replace Whale, that’s a fine idea, Mr. Cooper. I’ll run it by Johnny and see what he thinks. When Dad surfaces, he can deal with that fallout.”

“Hey, thanks,” Coop said to the waiter who stopped by to top off our glasses of ice water.

I turned my attention back to Coop. He grabbed his glass and guzzled the entire thing, using his front teeth to keep the ice at bay. My own teeth ached watching him. He banged the glass down on the tabletop and said, “Let’s go.”

After waiting for Coop to speed-smoke in the bowling alley’s parking lot, I rolled into the Lep about nine thirty with Coop trailing along behind me. I wondered if Lisa had decided to hang around longer than she’d anticipated or if she had checked out. Couldn’t blame her if she had. It’d been a damn long weekend.

The bar was actually quiet. A man and woman were seated in one of the back booths, and other than that the place was dead. I was reminded more of a weekday evening than New Year’s Day. At this point, I was too tired to care very much.

Lisa was still behind the bar, leaning against the back counter with a dark brown bottle of beer in her hand. She looked so natural, like she’d been around the Lep all her life. I was struck by the fact that this woman I barely knew had pretty much taken over tending my dad’s bar and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

What exactly did that say about me?

Eddy sat perched on a stool in front of Lisa, arm raised as she made some important point. I wondered if she’d hit up Lisa yet to hook up with the Mad Knitters. The original purpose of the Mad Knitters—which was mostly comprised of elderly friends of Eddy’s mixed with some young blood (Coop and Rocky)—was to propagate the craft of knitting. Ha, right. Instead, the gang propagated poker. Or dice. Or dominos. Their latest game du jour was Mahjongg. At least it kept them off the streets.

Eddy turned to face us as Coop and I settled on stools alongside her. “You two look like someone didn’t even fill your water glasses half full. Any luck?” She scanned the immediate vicinity with great exaggeration. “Since I don’t see that scoundrel father of yours, Shay, I assume the answer is no.”

“Not one sighting.” I shifted my butt into a more comfortable position. My dad needed to invest in some chairs with decent padding. But in light of his other, more serious issues, new seating was way down on the list. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

“Aggie took ’em home when things slowed down,” Eddy said. “Rocky got the itch to use some serious elbow grease spic-and-spanning that sorry excuse for a kitchen your father keeps. You should see the shine on those stainless counters and sinks.” Eddy’s expression morphed into frustrated consternation. “You know how that boy gets when he puts his mind to something. He wouldn’t stop till he hit every metal surface back there. I took some money out of the till for him, and you should have seen that round face of his beam. And that Tulip, she earned your father some greenbacks twisting balloons into New Year’s hats for five bucks a pop. That little gal is good, conning people into buying them after New Year’s Eve was plumb over.”

When Rocky met Tulip, she was a street urchin working in New Orleans making balloon animals and other fun inflated shapes for both kids and adults. Since she’d come up here to Minneapolis and said the I do’s with Rocky, she’d shifted from working the streets to working the patrons at the Rabbit Hole. She occasionally scored birthday parties and bar or bat mitzvah gigs at customer’s houses.

After the parties, the customers almost always returned to the Hole and raved about Tulip and her special way with kids, especially the kids who were challenged. She connected with young ones dealing with Asperger’s, autism, and Down’s syndrome. Maybe it was because she was like them in many ways. I didn’t know specifically what problems of her own Tulip dealt with other than her brain functioned much like Rocky’s, which meant you never knew what to expect from either of them. I really liked her, and she made Rocky glow.

Coop crinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”

Eddy said, “That stench is coming up from the basement. When more people are in here, it’s not very noticeable, but right now it’s pretty horrid.”

I said, “One more thing for Dad to deal with. I think it’s a cracked sewer line or something.”

Lisa silently watched our exchange and took a pull from her beer. “This year isn’t starting off very well for you guys, is it?”

That was a bit obvious, but I bit my tongue. When I was tired, I was prone to sarcasm. I didn’t think it was a very good idea to lip off to the person who had bailed my caboose out for a second day in a row.

Coop said, “I think we’ve all had better moments. Mind scoring me a Bud?”

Lisa kicked off the counter and pulled a bottle from the cooler. She popped the top, and as she handed it to Coop, she shot me a quick, questioning glance. Somehow I knew she was wondering if she should charge him. I subtly shook my head. She acknowledged with a quirk of an eyebrow.

How the hell had Lisa read me so well? I closed my eyes and let a feeling of odd familiarity wash over me. Had Lisa and I suddenly become clairvoyant, or whatever the hell the term was? I hadn’t had that kind of nonverbal clarity—or maybe it was simple silent comprehension—that fast with anyone. Well, not since I met JT, anyway.

Eddy startled me back to awareness with a pointed jab of her bony elbow. “Shay? Answer Lisa.”

My head snapped up and I met Lisa’s eyes. They were greenish-hazel, depending which way she turned in the hit-and-miss lighting of the bar, and they were currently boring into me.

Oh my god. Were we having a moment? Whoa. Slam on the air brakes a minute. What was I thinking? I cashed in my player’s ticket when I got serious with JT.
Jesus. Get your mind back in the game, Shay.
I felt bewildered and speechless.

Frowning at me, Eddy saved the day. “She’ll have one of those sissy drink-like things. You know, with that syrupy peach cough medicine and some OJ.”

“Fuzzy navel,” Lisa said. The corners of her mouth curled, but she didn’t say anything as she got busy mixing my admittedly girly concoction.

I let out a bark that was meant to be a laugh. “Right. Thanks, Eddy.” I suddenly found the gleaming surface of the bar top highly absorbing. I had no idea what my brain was doing. I should have big red neon letters attached to my forehead that blinked off and on, flashing
Overload Alert.

Eddy again applied her elbow none-too-gently to my ribs. I was going to be bruised after this. “You learn anything we can sink our dentures into?”

I suppressed a grunt and scrambled to pull my jack-rabbiting thoughts together. “Not exactly. Like I said, Dad was nowhere. I checked all the usual spots. Nada.”

Coop tilted his bottle at Eddy and said, “I ran up to the cabin. Locked up tight. Didn’t look like anyone had been around recently. There weren’t any tire tracks in the driveway since at least the last snow.”

We hadn’t been up to the cabin since early winter, so that made sense.

Lisa set the glass containing my cough syrup concoction on a napkin in front of me.

I gave her a semi-stiff, businesslike thank you and said, “JT went in to work this morning, and she called a bit ago.” I wasn’t completely comfortable discussing my father’s potential problems in front of Lisa, but after all she’d done for us, I wasn’t going to kick her to the proverbial curb. She was a big girl, and if she wanted to escape the nut house, she knew where the exit was.

Eddy straightened, shifting her position on the stool to face me more fully. “What’d JT have to say?”

Oh boy. “Nothing you want to hear.”

“Child, what is it?”

This was one secret I knew I couldn’t keep. “She found out that Dad’s handgun was found frozen in a block of ice.”

“Ice?” Eddy asked. “That doesn’t sound too ominous, so why you still have a donkey face?”

Coop momentarily covered his eyes, waiting for the reveal and the inevitable explosion. Lisa looked between Eddy and me and shot a questioning glance at Coop, who shrugged.

I said, “There was a body in the ice along with the gun. And no,” I added quickly, “the body isn’t Dad’s. But the gun is.”

Eddy’s smooth forehead crinkled and one eye got squinty. “A gun? A body? Like one of those department store mannequin things?”

I shook my head.

Lisa’s eyes widened, but she didn’t utter a sound.

“No, Eddy,” I said quietly. “A dead human body. And the cops want to talk to Dad because
his
handgun was in the ice with the deceased. So that makes him a person of interest in the murder.”

“Murder?” Eddy jolted and nearly toppled over. I grabbed her elbow.

“Easy, Eddy,” Coop said.

In the space of three seconds, Eddy’s confusion melted into indignation. There were times she channeled my Tenacious Protector pretty damn well. “There’s no way your father shot anyone. Granted he’s a hothead. But no sir-ee, he’s not a murderer.” She paused a beat, her lips pursed. “I don’t think he’d kill anyone. Unless someone pushed him too far.”

My thought exactly. I could see the gears in Eddy’s head grinding along, interpreting what she’d just uttered. “Um, maybe I better keep my trap shut.”

Up to this point Lisa had followed our exchange without comment. Now she said quietly, “I think maybe it’s time to close up shop.” She pointedly gazed at the two customers in the back booth. “They each only had one drink—Cokes, not alcohol—so their tab should be under ten bucks. Hang on—”

“Don’t worry.” I waved her off. “I’ll take care of it.”

Lisa had a good point. Not the greatest idea to be discussing a potentially homicidal father in front of the clientele, especially when the AWOL parent was the owner of the joint. Subtlety wasn’t always my
strong suit, and god knew my brain wasn’t banging away on all
cylinders right now. Besides, it wasn’t like there was going to be a run on drinks this evening anyway.

I stood and stretched, then ambled over to the couple. They were middle-aged, dressed in somber, dark clothes, and the woman’s eyes looked puffy while the man’s face was grim. I wondered what crisis I’d interrupted as I explained we were closing early.

The man said, “No problem. We’re done.”

I wondered if I’d caught them in the middle of a fight, if maybe I needed to try to get the lady away from the dude to make sure she was okay. I’d done that more than once when I was worried someone was getting heavy-handed with their companion. You never knew, and when you added booze into the mix, it could get ugly in a hurry. Then again, these two hadn’t gotten drunk on a couple of soft drinks.

The gal groped for something on the seat beside her. She pulled up a black handbag and set it on the table. As she rummaged through its contents, she said, “It was nice to find a quiet bar this evening. Our mother passed away today, and this was a perfect place hide to out for a while.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I was relieved I hadn’t stepped into the middle of a domestic thing, but saddened to hear the reason for their distress. It struck me that it could easily be me in their shoes. The fear-fueled ache in my belly flared, along with that horrible feeling of being entirely out of control.