T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril (12 page)

“Yeah, you government agent types are always borderline paranoid.”

I shook my head. “Not paranoid. Cautious and prepared. Big difference.”

Trish jumped off the table, ready to return to the festivities. “Need anything else from me?”

“No.” I followed her out of the blue room, and a burst of shrill laughter greeted us. I almost wanted to join the women. Have some quality girl time and forget about Morgan and Argo’s and the fact that I felt oddly disassociated without Ox in my daily life. I left the Barnes Agency without getting my fifteen minutes on Andy’s table. Driving to the Block, I decided to follow the only leads I had: the list of abbreviated names from Morgan’s safe and the list of dinner reservations I’d taken from the hostess stand. Surely I could find some matches between the two. It would be a start.

I also needed to scope out the autopsy report for Morgan’s mother. If drugs were running through her restaurant, she might have been a user. And if she was using, there might have been traces in her system when she died. Not only that, but I found it too coincidental that two people were dead, neither had apparent health problems, and both owned Argo’s. Ignoring curious looks from neighboring drivers, I rolled down all of the hearse’s windows and opened the sunroof. It was a perfect day for a window-down drive. If only the corpse caddy were a convertible. Wind whipping my hair, I dialed Dirk’s mobile number. “Trade you lunch at the Block for a copy of an autopsy report,” I said when he answered.

“Is this simple morbid curiosity coming from Jersey Barnes? The one who melts down at the sight of a dead body?”

“Doesn’t bother me a bit to look at a picture, Dirk. Just can’t stand to be
near
a dead person. Huge difference. Besides, it’s not politically correct to make fun of one’s phobia. Mine even has a designated name.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “it’s also not politically correct to distribute copies of autopsy reports to civilians.”

“It will be a really good lunch,” I told him. “Or dinner. I’ll even spring for drinks and dessert. You can bring the wife.”

“Kids, too?”

“Yup. All of ‘em. The whole clan.”

“You know that teenagers won’t go anywhere without their friends.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll call it the Dirk Thompson Family Reunion party. Bring your friends and neighbors, too. Heck, bring your whole damn street. Just get me the autopsy report.”

“Wow, Jersey Barnes has a grumpy side,” he said, and paused for a beat as if trying to figure out why. “Give me a name of the deceased and a date.”

I did. “You get anything back on that gun from the Argo’s attempted robbery? Or prints from the safe?”

“The thirty-eight only had a partial serial number. Somebody filed most of it off. We fired a round through it, but no ballistics matches in the system. Dead end. A hunk of metal for the scrap pile. As for the safe, lifted a few clean prints. One belongs to a safe technician. His prints are in the system for a conceal carry, among other things. He’s clean. The other is unidentified. Nothing that leads us to your earless man, the one who
allegedly
tried to rob the place.”

I didn’t argue with his use of “allegedly.” Turning a corner, I passed a Jeep-load of young men with military buzz cuts sitting at a stoplight. Spotting me at the wheel of the hearse, they let out a chorus of catcalls and honked their horn.

“It wasn’t really a robbery attempt, was it,” Dirk said.

“It might have been.” I adjusted the Bluetooth headset hanging over my ear. “He was definitely a bad guy.”

Dirk chuckled, changed the subject. “How’s Spud? We haven’t had any public disturbance calls lately. He sick?”

“Spud is on a self-improvement kick. He’s grown a mustache. And he’s been hanging out with his new girlfriend, Fran.”

“The old lady on the scooter that plowed into his mannequin?”

“Yep.”

“Only in Jersey’s world,” he said, and hung up.

It wasn’t the
same walking into the Block without seeing Ox there. I said hello to a few regulars before climbing the stairs to my home. I beeped myself through the security system to find Spud in my kitchen, staring intently at a ficus tree. Even his mustache was perfectly still.

“You okay, Spud?”

He continued to stare at the plant, as if in a daze.

Alarmed, I moved in to examine him, thinking he might have suffered a stroke. “Spud? Can you hear me?”

“I’m practicing reading an aura, for crying out loud. Do you mind?”

I found a bottle of Dos Equis beer in the fridge. Somebody had been to the grocery store. “Is this for your NAB group?”

My father explained that, yes, he’d learned the skill of aura reading from the New Age Babes. Every living organism had an energy field radiating around it, he told me, animals and plants. Learning
to see the color of the aura was one way to enlighten the mind. A red aura around a person meant they were angry, he said, while a blue aura indicated calm.

“What color is the ficus tree’s aura?” I asked.

His head tilted to the side. “I detect a large aura, sort of a whitish yellow.” He broke his gaze and looked at me. “Healthy plants have a large, bright aura.”

“That ficus tree is fake, Spud. It’s a silk plant.”

“What?”

“It’s not real. So it can’t possibly have an aura.”

“Oh, for crying out loud! I been working on reading the stupid plant’s aura for fifteen minutes now. I thought I finally had it!”

“Better stay calm, Spud. Your energy field might go red.”

He turned the Barnes narrow-eyed glare on me. “Here I was all ready and set to impress Frannie with my new talent, and you go and ruin everything!”

I asked if Fran was a member of the NAB.

“No,” he said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

She’d probably be curious as to where he’d learned to read auras, I told my father. When she discovered his involvement with the New Age Babes—a group of all women—she probably wouldn’t be too pleased. She might even be jealous.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Spud muttered. “She’s the one who told me to join some social clubs!”

“Social
men’s
clubs, Spud. Not women’s clubs.”

“I’ll quit, then. This aura stuff is a bunch of crap anyway.”

“You’re their newly elected president, remember?” I said.

“Oh, right. I shouldn’t quit.” His mustache twitched from side to side. “I’ll get Frannie to join!”

My father, always the deep thinker.

“She’s good people,” he continued. “We might be in love.”

I looked more closely at Spud. I’d never before heard him utter
the L-word about anyone, ever. Not even to me, at least not that I could remember. He may have told me he loved me when I was a toddler or maybe when I’d begun to form whole sentences. But never after I had an understanding about what the word meant. And certainly not before he vanished from my young life.

“I think I need another pain pill,” he said.

So that was it. The pain medicine for a pulled leg muscle. I thought about taking advantage of Spud’s unguarded state of mind. I could ask why he’d left me and my mother. I could take a deep breath and do it, right now. Just ask him. Why.

He saw the question on my face. His wrinkles deepened for a beat, and he appeared much older than his eighty years. What I saw in my father’s eyes was very similar to the emotion I had detected in Ox’s eyes a few months back when I’d asked if he’d slept with his ex-wife:
Don’t ask if you don’t want the answer.

Did I really need to know? Did it even matter now, why my father walked out of my life some thirty-five years ago?

Cracker howled at the sound of a passing siren, breaking the spell, instantly erasing the question on my lips. “Well, if you want to impress Fran with your aura-reading abilities, Spud, you might want to practice on the people downstairs in the Block,” I said. “At least you know they’re alive.”

“Why didn’t I think of that, for crying out loud? I’ll call the boys over so we can all practice together.”

Exactly what my pub needed. A group of crazily dressed geriatrics staring silently at the customers. And I’d put the idea in his head. Stupid me.

Spud found his cane and plodded downstairs. I called the judge. Luckily, she was out of court and answered her personal phone on the first ring. “Jersey, I was just thinking of you! Have you found out what’s going on with my brother?”

Sort of, I answered, but first I wanted to know about Rosemary’s
death. The judge told me that her mother had died of an unexpected heart attack. Those were her father’s exact words. She remembered where she’d been and what she’d been doing when he called her, the judge said. She’d flown to Wilmington for the funeral and spent a week with Garland before returning to Columbia.

“That’s basically it,” the judge finished. “Mom was the picture of health. It was a total shock to hear she was dead. But what does she have to do with anything? And what’s going on with Morgan?”

I didn’t have anything concrete to report, I said. I had to give her something, though, so I let her know that the DEA was looking into Argo’s as part of an ongoing investigation that involved several Wilmington restaurants. I inferred that Morgan was simply caught up in the aftermath of previous happenings at Argo’s. And most likely not in danger. It was a lot of noncommittal double-talk and she knew it. She wanted to jump in her car immediately and make the drive to Wilmington.

“There’s no need for that, Judge. You don’t want to get involved by association. Besides, there’s nothing you can do by being here.”

“You’ll call me as soon as you know something more?”

I said I would.

Two
hours later, Rosemary’s autopsy report arrived in my e-mail in-box. Her heart had stopped beating all right, but not from a heart condition. Five different drugs were detected in her system, and the official cause of death was a drug overdose. Garland chose to protect his wife’s integrity by going with the heart attack story. I wondered if I’d be able to do the same. A small favor for my judge friend was turning into a giant dilemma. Did she—and Morgan—have a right to know how Rosemary died? Was it my place to tell them?

A shrill electronic tone sounded, interrupting my thoughts. I couldn’t tell where it came from.

Spud clamored through the door, Bobby and Trip on his heels. Bobby held a hand to the side of his face. “The old biddy slapped me.”

“We need an ice bag, for crying out loud,” Spud said.

I retrieved a cold compress from the freezer and handed it over. Bobby held it to his forehead.

“A customer slapped you?” I asked.

“She slapped him across the top of the head,” Trip clarified.

“Gave me a headache, she did,” Bobby said. “I was only trying to read her aura.”

“You were staring at her boobs,” Trip said.

I tried not to smile. “Bad idea.”

“You told me to practice reading auras on real people,” Spud said.

The three men looked at me, accusing. Bobby’s headache was my fault. The shrill electronic ringing started up again. I tracked the sound to a kitchen cabinet. A blinking cell phone lay atop a stack of plates.

Spud snatched it. “I been looking for this thing everywhere! Frannie gave it to me.”

The thing continued to ring. Loudly. The sound—similar to that of feedback through an amplifier—made my shoulders hunch up. “Maybe you should answer it, Spud.”

Holding the phone at arm’s length, my father squinted at the faceplate and punched a button. The phone kept ringing. He punched another button. The ringing continued. My father can barely manage a one-touch cooking code on the microwave. He retired from the cops before the age of the Internet and enhanced forensic science. He still hasn’t figured out how to use an ATM.

Spud shoved the phone at me. “How the hell do you answer it, for crying out loud?” The phone stopped ringing.

“You answer it by hitting this green button.” I showed him. “To hang up, hit the red button.”

Spud took back the phone and held it away from his body, as though it gave off an offensive odor. It beeped. “Hello?” he shouted into it. “Hello? . . . Is anybody there, for crying out loud? … Somebody say something!”

The phone beeped again.

“There’s nobody there,” Spud said. “Why won’t it shut up?”

“I believe you have a text message, Spud.”

“What?” A vein popped out in his temple.

“A message, dummy,” Trip said. “You have to open it to read it. Like a letter, but it’s written on the little screen.”

Muttering, Spud punched tiny buttons with a thick, knobby forefinger.

“Your aura is bright red,” Bobby told him.

“Aura this,” Spud said, and gave him the middle finger.

I let myself
into Ox’s place and looked around. Everything was as it should be, neat, tidy, sparsely decorated in man fashion. I mixed a tablespoon of powdered fertilizer in a jug to water the plants. As I was moving past the bath, the familiar scent of his aftershave stopped me. Not sure if it was real or imagined, I filled my lungs and let his nearness envelop me. And then I wondered if somebody else was currently enjoying the real thing, the freshly applied cologne clinging to his skin. A server, maybe, or a camerawoman, or an ESPN associate. The disconcerting feeling might have been jealousy. I didn’t like it.

Shaking off the vision of Ox enjoying his days with somebody else—of course he was spending his time with
somebody
while Lindsey was busy with classes—I finished watering the plants, flushed the toilets, did an exterior walk-around, and headed out to have a one-on-one with a few select Argo’s customers.

I’d compared the safe list with the hostess stand list and found three names that were a positive match with both first names and
phone numbers. I called the first number and made up a story about having a gift basket delivery from a local wineshop.

“You’ve got the wrong number,” a woman said. “I didn’t order anything.”