Small Town Trouble (13 page)

I puffed on the tail end of the tail end of my Nat Sherman, knowing fully well I was about to ignore my own advice.

Chapter 27

“Ready for another round?” I had Amy on the horn.

“Round of what?”

“Nancy Drew and George.”

There was a pause like she was thinking it over. “Do you think of me as Nancy or George?”

“Well, neither really.”

“Actually, I never read Nancy Drew.”

“Then you can be Watson.”

“Who?”

“Skip it. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

I grabbed a quick shower, pulled on some clean clothes and told Evelyn not to wait up for me.

Amy’s Terrace Park Tudor was impressive, stately, ivy-covered, classic in every way. I swung left onto Yale Avenue and turned in at the mailbox with
The Smiths
spelled out in gold letters. I pulled into the half-circle drive which was lined on both sides with little white lights and neatly clipped hedges. I parked in front of the garage next to Amy’s Lexus.

The outdoor house lights came on, and, in short order, Amy popped out the front door. She waved to me, slung her purse over her shoulder and locked the door behind her. She hurried down the curvy, brick walk, then hopped into the passenger side of my Toyota. “Hi ya,” she said.

“Hi ya.” I kind of liked
hi ya.
“Gee,” I said, glancing past her at the house, “I was hoping for a tour of the Tudor.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, taking a cigarette out of her purse. She pulled out her Bic. “You mind?”

I motioned for her to go ahead and smoke. “So, is Doctor Smith still at Mommy’s?”

Amy lit her cigarette and dropped the lighter back into her purse. “Don’t know, and don’t care.”

That certainly summed it up.

“Well, okay then.” I backed the car around and aimed us out the driveway.

I backtracked through the expensive woodsy village of Terrace Park, taking in all of the classy, well-kept real estate. This neighborhood was chockfull of well-paid professionals, mostly GE and Procter & Gamble execs. Of course, that was true of any upscale Cincinnati neighborhood.

But Amy had seen it all before. She checked her face in the visor mirror and put on a little lipstick. Her honey-gold hair was pulled back in a braid and she wore small silver loops in her ears. She was wearing a svelte, moss green V-neck shirt tucked into her belted jeans and spendy-looking leather sandals. I wondered again about the possibility of the breast implants.

“Poor Rick Rod,” she said, pushing the visor back into place. “He looked so sad today.”

As it turned out, Amy had been visiting Rick Rod in the county jail while Brother Bobby Lee was presiding over Abbott’s memorial service.

“At least he still has
us
, right?” she said.

Reluctantly, I said, “Right.”

“So,” Amy said, clapping her hands together, “what now?”

I told her about my plan for the evening, which involved the two of us doing some general camping on Jimmy’s Place, Topless Charlene in specific. After all, the police weren’t bothering to look into things any further. They had
their
man and Irvin Upton couldn’t be everywhere.

“Whoa,” Amy said, “a stakeout.”

I’d pulled a few of stakeouts in my security days, mostly sitting on dishonest employees who were overly attracted to the cash register or designer clothes, shoes, jewelry or all of the above. It wasn’t difficult work, really, but you had to be willing to put up with lots of nothing happening for a long period of time and then when something finally
did
happen, you had to be awake to see it and, more importantly, to move on it. It was astonishing how inventive a greedy little salesperson or warehouse worker or store manager could get.

I’d once nailed an eighteen-year-old stock boy with 10,000 bucks worth of stolen Nikes in his van. He’d worked a four-hour shift that day. He was a straight A student. Today he’s probably a terrific criminal attorney.

Then there was the store manager who was bopping the switchboard operator, the customer service manager and the personnel director. He also had a wife and six kids, a very busy boy. When he wasn’t busy fornicating, he was busy ripping off, among assorted other things, store gift certificates, which he fudged through the system and converted to cash when no one was looking. He’d been at all of it for years.

We caught him on video one night. He’d stayed late to get a blow job from the switchboard gal, and after he’d packed her off, he packed himself off with a briefcase full of loot. We had a little chat, which was followed by the police’s little chat, followed by his subsequent arrest and booking. The last I heard, he was selling pellet fireplaces.

“Before we get started on this stakeout,” Amy said, “can we get something to eat?”

Milford is a creaky old town that butts up to Terrace Park. It’s no Terrace Park, but it is home to a number of famous Americans, most notably the irrepressible Charles Manson. This bit of trivia always came to mind when I drove through Milford.

The Frisch’s Big Boy beckoned to us like a fat little Tiki god, and I turned off the highway and pulled through the lot to a space at a drive-in speaker where one could still catch a car hop in action. Amy stared past me at the lit menu board. “God, I’m ravenous. I wanna Big Boy with extra tartar sauce, cole slaw, onion rings and a large vanilla coke, also strawberry pie.” She pulled a bill out of her purse and handed it to me. “And get whatever you want.”

I wasn’t hungry, but I doubled the order anyway. It could turn out to be long night.

Jimmy’s Place was about a twenty-minute ride from the Milford Big Boy and by the time we got there, Amy had put away everything but her strawberry pie. “Maybe I’ll save this for later,” she said, sticking the plastic-wrapped plate of pie back into the Frisch’s bag and stashing it next to my yet-to-be eaten bag of food behind her seat.

I pulled into a rutted, vacant lot across the road from Jimmy’s. Not counting dumped garbage and a car on blocks that had probably been sitting there since Jimmy Carter’s term, we were all alone.

I angled the Toyota around until we were mostly hidden by the brambles that grew between us and the road, but left a decent view of things across the way.

“That’ll work,” I said and cut the engine. I reached into the glove compartment for the pair of binoculars I’d borrowed from Evelyn without asking permission. I tried them out and they weren’t great, but they’d do.

Scanning Jimmy’s lot, I perused the assortment of vehicles. The only car I would’ve recognized was Abbott’s beater Dodge Charger, but chances were excellent he wouldn’t be showing up.

“Did you know that Bo and Luke Duke completely trashed 300 Dodge Chargers?”

“Who?”

“Bo and Luke, the Dukes of Hazzard.”

“That’s so stupid.”

“Cousin Abbott didn’t think so.”

Amy just shot me a peevish look.

“Amy,” I said, focusing in on Jimmy’s front door, “please know that I’m not trying to be difficult when I ask this, but tell me, is there any possible evidence, other than the fact that Rick Rod is your brother, that might rule him out as the killer?” Amy was cute, but if I was going to spend the night in the Toyota, I wanted to go over my
real
motivation one more time.

“I’ve been racking my brain. Unfortunately, because of his deficiencies, Rick Rod makes the perfect scapegoat and he’s got a bit of a police record.”

“Oh?”

“Drunk driving, disorderly conduct, that kind of stuff, nothing
too
serious.”

“He ever hurt anybody?”

Amy lit another cigarette. “I guess he did a pretty good number on a guy once in a bar fight, but he was provoked and that was a long time ago.”

“Rick Rod didn’t cut off the guy’s weenie, did he?”

“No,” Amy said, emphatically. She blew a stream of smoke out the window toward heaven.

“Well, at least there’s
that
.”

She turned to me. “Kim, somebody planted that knife under Rick Rod’s bed. It was wiped clean of prints.”

“But
who
is the question.”

“Yeah, who,” she said, and sighed. “The police were
kind enough
to tell me that there was no sign of a break-in at Rick Rod’s place that night. I’m surprised they even bothered to check it out.”

“Maybe Rick Rod knew his visitor, let him
or
her
in, and, when he wasn’t looking, they stashed the knife under his bunk.”

“Hell,” Amy said, taking a turn with binoculars, “even when he goes out, he never locks his door. Anybody could’ve waltzed right in.”

“Swell.”

“God,” she shivered, “it’s all so creepy.”

I could see that this one was going to be a tougher nut to crack than the Case of the Missing Boatload of Nikes. Of course, given our present list of possible suspects, chances were good that the killer wasn’t a straight A student so we had that working in our favor.

If one removed Rick Rod Delozier from the field of candidates, it was dancing Charlene who currently topped my list. I figured we could work with that possibility until a better possibility came along. Amy was inclined to go along with me on this.

Not counting John Deere and Fat Boy showing up at Jimmy’s with trashy dates, there wasn’t much excitement.

I ate my cold Big Boy hamburger, Amy had her strawberry pie and we took turns with the binoculars. Pink heat lightning flashed now and again on the horizon, and it was beginning to smell like a rainstorm.

What was the connection between my cousin Abbott and Jimmy Jacobs? Obviously they’d both been, at one time or other, the object of Charlene’s affection, but was there something else? And if Charlene was Doctor Death, what had gotten into her all of a sudden? It takes a certain breed of gal to pull off a slashing and wiener removal times two, but maybe Charlene was a girl who, on the right starry, starry night, could pull it off.

But how, if at all, did Larry White and his real estate grubbing fit in?

The police were painting Rick Rod as the deranged, jilted lover. Amy found out that shortly before the murders, Rick Rod had apparently made quite a scene at Jimmy’s Place. One night, on Charlene’s break, he’d offered to buy her a drink. She’d blown him off, and he’d been audibly unhappy about it. Big whoop. That had happened to me a time or two and it certainly didn’t make me a serial killer.

But it got deeper. The night of Jimmy Jacob’s ugly demise, Jimmy had 86’ed Rick Rod for general bad behavior and according to witnesses, Rick Rod had then threatened Jimmy. The way the police figured it, Rick Rod had come back that night at closing and done Jimmy, then liked it so much he went on to do Abbott, just because my cousin was Charlene’s current knight in shining armor instead of Rick Rod. It was too bad that Abbott hadn’t been wearing his shining armor when the killer caught up with him that night.

The police had a tidy little theory that could no doubt put Rick Rod Delozier away for a very long time, like an eternity, but it was a little
too
tidy for my taste. I’d never been a particularly big fan of Lone Nut Killer Theories anyway. Besides, where were the missing winkies?

I didn’t know exactly what I hoping for with a stakeout at Jimmy’s Place other than the unexpected, which might lead to something more concrete than what Amy had come up with so far, but I was hoping we’d get a chance to see what Charlene liked to do after hours. Maybe she liked to party with Larry White.

It was just past midnight when Amy nudged me. “Hey,” she said, “
there she goes.”

Chapter 28

“Gimme,” I said, snatching the binocs from Amy. After all, I was the professional. Charlene was out the front door all right, headed like a high wind for a compact white car. She looked agitated. I couldn’t tell which form of agitation it was. Maybe she was twerked off at somebody, maybe she looked scared. Maybe she was just excited about getting off work.

Charlene wore short cutoff jeans, an ultra-tight T-shirt and sneakers. Her white-blond hair was pulled into a huge, floppy bun.

“What’s she doing now?” Amy wanted to know.

“Looks like she’s punching out for the night.”

In the weird blue light of Jimmy’s Place, I watched Charlene unlock her car door. She jumped in and promptly fired up a cigarette, then started the engine. Before I could say booballabies, Charlene sped out of the lot.

I cranked up the Toyota. “Let’s roll.”

The rainstorm that had been threatening all evening picked an inopportune time to let go. I flicked the Toyota’s wipers into high gear as the huge splotches came harder and faster, all the while trying to keep Charlene’s car in my view finder. I laid well off her tail, a little too well, actually, and we lost sight of her completely for a few minutes, caught back up, then I lost her again. I was definitely rusty in the tailing department.