The Mysteries of Max: Books 31-33

by Nic Saint

  “We have to talk about the wedding, babe,” said Chase as he steered the car along.

  “I know,” she said.

  “This can’t go on like this.”

  “I know.”

  “Look, you know how much I love you, and how much I’ve been looking forward to getting married to you.”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “But if there’s something you wanna tell me, you better do it now.”

  She looked over. “I want to get married to you, Chase. I really do.”

  “So what’s the problem? Your mom told me you had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown this evening?”

  She shook her head. “I just don’t see how I can go through with it,” she said, starting to tear up all over again, just as she had before. “The whole thing is just so…” She put a hand to her throat and mimicked being suffocated.

  Chase’s jaw tightened. “I see,” he said.

  “I’m not saying it’s you—or even the wedding. It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “It’s just too much. The whole thing’s gotten way out of hand.”

  “You mean—even more than before?”

  “As of a couple of hours ago, we’re officially at nine hundred.”

  He blinked. “Nine hu—you mean the wedding, not the reception, right?”

  “The wedding and the reception and the wedding dinner… and the party.”

  His jaw dropped. “Odelia!”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Mom talked to the caterer, and they’re very upset. They’re not equipped to handle such a large crowd, and already have been making alternative suggestions, like cutting down on the menu so they can seat and feed more people, or even splitting people into groups, sitting them down for dinner at different times. Also, there’s a problem with the reception. They didn’t order nearly enough champagne for such a large crowd, so…” She sighed and buried her head in her hands. Once again she started hyperventilating a little at the thought of such an enormous undertaking.

  “Let’s call the whole thing off,” said Chase curtly.

  “No, wait, what?” said Odelia. “Chase, we can’t—”

  “It’s obvious this is going to turn into a complete disaster. Nine hundred people, and who knows who else will show up. We’re looking at a thousand or more. If this keeps up we’ll have to talk to your uncle about organizing crowd control. Bring in barriers. Except your uncle is also one of the people on the guest list, and so are all of my colleagues.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I guess we all got a little carried away.”

  “It’s all right, babe,” said the cop as he placed a hand on Odelia’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I know you wanted the wedding to be perfect, and you wanted to share it with as many people as possible. But clearly we’re at a critical juncture here.”

  “It’s too much,” she agreed. “Mom talked to Father Reilly, and he’s also overwhelmed with all the interest. He says never in his career has he been accosted by so many people asking when the wedding is going to be, and expressing an interest in showing up on the day. He’s going to put up big screens outside so people can follow along.”

  “Big screens, huh?” said Chase with a smile. “Like a Justin Bieber concert. Which would make you Hailey Baldwin.”

  Odelia grinned. “Or maybe I’m Amal Clooney and you’re George.”

  “I don’t think George and Amal had this many people at their wedding.”

  “No, they were smart about it,” said Odelia ruefully.

  “Look, I don’t want to disappoint anyone either,” said Chase, “so I suggest we call off the wedding and…”

  “And what?” she asked, giving him a look of trepidation.

  He shrugged. “We’ll find a solution.” He glanced over. “We have to.”

  They’d arrived at the hotel, and Chase parked the car across the street. Two police cars had already arrived, and Odelia saw that her uncle’s squad car had jumped the curb.

  “All right,” said Chase. “Are you ready to do this?”

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Chapter 29

  The room where Lord Hilbourne had been staying was very nice indeed. It was the hotel’s Presidential Suite, and wasn’t merely extremely spacious, but also very cozily appointed. In fact I wouldn’t have minded staying there myself. When we entered, in the wake of Gran and Scarlett, who’d managed to overrule the objections of the receptionist, and also of the cop standing sentry outside the suite, it was obvious some kind of skirmish or scuffle had taken place there: furniture had been overturned and a glass had been dropped to the floor, a liquid soaked into the thick carpet, which felt like a pity, as it was nice and white and now had a dark spot, which I reckoned would be hard to remove.

  Then again, stain removal probably wasn’t high on the hotel’s list of priorities right now. Finding the missing Lord Hilbourne was.

  “So what happened here?” asked Gran as she bustled into the suite.

  A cop whom I recognized as Sarah Flunk, one of Chase’s colleagues, looked up in surprise. “Are you supposed to be in here?” she asked.

  A rhetorical question, as Gran is always supposed to be wherever she happens to be.

  “The guy at the front desk mentioned blood?” Gran asked, blatantly ignoring the officer’s outburst.

  Sarah Flunk, a copper-haired, fine-boned officer, hesitantly said, “Yeah, we found traces of blood over there on the carpet.”

  “A lot of blood?” asked Scarlett, clearly fascinated by this glimpse into a different world: the world of crime and detective work, of which until now and in spite of the fact that she’d been part of the watch for a while now, she didn’t have much inkling.

  “Smells like blood,” said Harriet as she took a tentative sniff from the spots of crimson on the floor.

  “Looks like blood,” Brutus added.

  “So very likely it is blood,” Gran murmured as she studied the spots.

  There was indeed quite a lot of the stuff, though probably not enough to warrant the receptionist’s suspicion that Lord Hilbourne was bleeding to death as we spoke.

  “Any sign of the culprits?” asked Gran.

  Officer Flunk still seemed reluctant to humor her boss’s mother, but since Gran was, indeed, her boss’s mother, she couldn’t very well stonewall her either, so she said, “It looks like the kidnappers came in from the next room.”

  Just then Uncle Alec came bursting in, followed by more officers, and as he took in the scene, he frowned and said, “What are you doing here?”

  He was addressing Gran, of course, who took the comment in stride and said, “Scarlett happened to notice that Johnny Carew is staying here. Isn’t that right, Scarlett?”

  “Yeah, I saw him glancing out of one of the windows on the third floor earlier today.”

  Uncle Alec’s frown deepened. “Johnny Carew? Here?”

  “Yup,” said Scarlett, inordinately pleased that she was able to supply such an important clue.

  Things were getting a little crowded, for close on the heels of Uncle Alec, Odelia and Chase came walking in.

  “Only the people who are supposed to be here, can stay,” said the Chief, who was getting seriously annoyed. “That means Chase and Odelia. You, you and you—out!”

  The first you referred to Gran, and she didn’t look happy about being excluded like this. The second you, Scarlett, looked equally unhappy, and the third you, which was a collective you indicating the entire contingency of cats, showed their unhappiness with this state of affairs by breaking into loud and plaintive mewling.

  “Is this a crime scene or auditions for The Voice!” Uncle Alec bellowed as he pressed his hands to his ears. “Okay, the cats can stay, but only if they don’t contaminate the scene. Odelia—I’m holding you personally responsible!”

  And so it was decided: we all got to stay and sniff around for clues, while Odelia and Chase handled the investigation. G
ran’s neighborhood watch, meanwhile, was relegated to the sidelines—i.e. the corridor, where they could lament to their heart’s content.

  And as Brutus and Harriet took up the inspection of the suite, Dooley and I moved through the connecting door into the next room, where we found, much to our surprise, that two people had decided that the best way to spend an evening was to go and hide in the bedroom closet. Our well-developed sense of smell had immediately taken us there, and as we sat and meowed, Odelia and Chase quickly came over and opened the closet, revealing two men, trussed up and with rags shoved into their mouths. They were giving us piteous looks.

  I recognized them. They’d been part of the waitstaff at Charlene’s big ‘keys to the city’ shindig, where they’d provided the guests with canapés and other amuse-gueules.

  It was but the work of a moment to free them of their restraints, and then they both started talking simultaneously. Only after being advised that it was always better for one person to be the spokesperson of the team, did a thickset man with bristly white hair start relating the story of his ordeal. More specifically how they’d ended up in the closet.

  “Two guys came bursting in here and locked us up!” the white-haired man complained.

  His friend, who was thin and who had a full black beard, confirmed his fellow closet inhabitant’s words and said, “They knocked us out, too,” and pointed to a spot on his head where presumably he’d sustained a knock on his noggin. I could see that he had a bump, which looked very painful.

  “What did they look like, these men?” asked Chase, though I had an idea that I already knew what was coming.

  “One was big and strong, the other short and skinny,” said the spokesperson.

  “Did the short skinny one have a face like a ferret?” asked Odelia.

  The spokesperson leveled a look of surprise at our human, and I could tell that for a brief moment he wondered if she was psychic. “How did you know?”

  “Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale,” said Odelia, grim-faced.

  “I should have known,” said Chase.

  From yet another connecting door, this one leading to one room over, Dooley said, “Better come and have a look at this, Max!”

  So I moved over there, followed by Odelia and Chase, and when we passed through we found ourselves in a room probably as messy as any I’d ever seen. There were food wrappers all over, and clothes strewn about, and wet towels on every available surface.

  “It smells a lot like Johnny and Jerry,” said Dooley.

  “So…” said Odelia, processing this information. “Johnny and Jerry were probably holed up in here for the last couple of days, judging from the detritus, until they decided to knock out their two neighbors, so they could get into Lord Hilbourne’s suite through the connecting door. There was a fight, they grabbed Hilbourne, and took off with him.”

  “Question is: where did they take him?” said Chase, then glanced down at us. “Can’t your cats sniff out their escape route?”

  “Max? Dooley?” said Odelia. And for a moment I thought she was going to say, “Fetch!” But luckily she remembered just in time that we were cats, not dogs. Without further ado or instructions we moved back into the next room, where Johnny and Jerry’s first burst of violence had expended itself, then into Lord Hilbourne’s suite, where we found Harriet and Brutus. And as we transferred the mission we’d just accepted, we all started sniffing around, until we met up near the window, which led to a balcony, which led to… a fire escape. Odelia, and Chase, who’d followed our progress with keen interest, now stood gazing down the fire escape.

  “Thanks, you guys,” said Odelia. “I think we’ll take it from here.”

  Chapter 30

  “What are they going to take from here and where are they taking it, Max?” asked Dooley.

  “It’s just an expression, Dooley,” I said, though I was equally curious where our humans were going to take the investigation. Then again, obviously it was no longer our concern. They would, I assumed, now organize what is commonly termed a dragnet, at which point the crooks would be caught, and hopefully Lord Hilbourne would still be in one piece.

  “They could be anywhere,” said Brutus. “Probably halfway down to Florida by now, or maybe New York. They could be in the Adirondacks, holed up in a cabin in the woods or high up in the mountains. They could be there for months, undetected, until Lord Hilbourne’s family decide to pay them the millions they want for his safe return.”

  “This is all very stressful,” said Harriet. “People keep getting kidnapped and ending up dead…”

  We all shared a worried glance. “You don’t think Johnny and Jerry are the same ones who kidnapped and killed Bob Rector, do you?” I said.

  “Could be,” Harriet allowed.

  “I bet it was them,” said Brutus. “What are the odds of two kidnappings taking place within a couple of days? I’ll bet those two felt that seventy-five thousand wasn’t enough to retire on and they found themselves an even bigger target in Lord Hilbourne. A target they couldn’t pass up without taking a crack at him.”

  We glanced down at the blood on the carpet. “You can take that literally,” I said. But then I shook my head. “This doesn’t sound like the Johnny and Jerry I know. They’re crooks, sure, but they’re not killers. I can see them kidnapping a person, but killing him in cold blood? I don’t think so.”

  “It’s the theory of escalation in crime,” said Brutus, who seemed to have read up on the subject while I wasn’t looking. “Most crooks start off with petty theft and other small stuff, then gradually get in deeper and deeper and finally get into the heavy stuff, like extortion and even murder. I guess Johnny and Jerry have succumbed to their worst instincts and have become a menace to society. Hampton Cove’s most wanted.”

  “Poor Johnny and Jerry,” said Dooley, earning him a look of rebuke from both Harriet and Brutus.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Harriet. “They’re gangsters and they probably killed Bob Rector, and Lord Hilbourne, too. They killed him and now they’ll try to make us believe he’s still alive so they can collect the ransom. Same way they did with Bob.”

  “I like Johnny and Jerry,” Dooley confessed. “I know I shouldn’t, but they’re goofy.”

  “Goofy!” said Harriet. “Didn’t you hear what Brutus just said? They’re Hampton Cove’s most wanted criminals.”

  Obviously Odelia and Chase wanted them bad, for they’d disappeared down that fire escape, presumably in hot pursuit. And since Uncle Alec had disappeared as well, that dragnet I just mentioned was probably being put in place as we speak.

  “Mark my words. They’re in the Adirondacks,” said Brutus. “Hiding in one of those mountain cabins.”

  “And burying Lord Hilbourne in a shallow grave,” Harriet added with a touch of morbidity.

  Since there wasn’t all that much we could do there, we kinda drifted off. The two men staying in the room next door were being questioned. One was called Wim Bojanowsky and the other Suppo Bonikowski, and it turned out that they were cousins, vacationing in Hampton Cove. At least that’s what I learned from listening in on their conversation with Officer Sarah Flunk, who’d been left to do the honors.

  “They stole my laptop,” said Suppo, the thin one with the face fuzz.

  “And my watch,” said his cousin somberly. “It was a family heirloom. If you could please do what you can to get it back for us?” he added.

  “Of course, sir,” said Officer Flunk. “What else did they take?”

  “Just the watch and the laptop,” said the one named Wim.

  “And our dignity,” Suppo added, as he carefully fingered the bump on his head.

  “What are you doing in town if I may ask?”

  “Oh, just visiting,” said Wim. “We like the Hamptons. It’s always a nice experience.”

  “The hotel receptionist said there were three of you staying in this room?”

  “That’s right. We arrived here with our cousin.”

  “B
ob Rector,” said Suppo.

  Officer Flunk stopped writing in her notebook and looked up in surprise. “Bob Rector?”

  “Yeah, the three of us decided to come down here together,” Wim explained.

  “But…”

  “Oh, the name,” said Wim. “Okay, so Bob’s mom’s sister is my mother.”

  “And my dad is Wim’s mother’s brother,” said Suppo.

  Officer Flunk was blinking, and so was I. “So… the three of you…”

  “Decided to spend some time in your lovely little town, yeah,” said Wim.

  “Always fun to spend some time together,” said Suppo. “And the beaches are amazing, of course, even this late in the season.”

  “You do know what happened to your cousin, right?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah—yeah, we know,” said Wim, making a face.

  “So do you think Bob was abducted by the same people who knocked us out and abducted Lord Hilbourne?” asked Suppo, as he cut a quick glance to his cousin.

  “It’s entirely possible,” Sarah conceded. “You’d never seen these two men before? Johnny Carew and Jerry Vale?”

  “No. No, I’d never seen them before in my life,” said Suppo. “You, Wim?”

  “No, I’d never seen them before either. They asked us to change rooms yesterday, and weren’t very nice about it, I thought.”

  “Wait, they asked you to change rooms?”

  “Yeah, they were in here yesterday. The big one claimed he suffered from vertigo, and wanted to change rooms as this one doesn’t have a balcony and theirs does. We said no, of course.”

  “We told them to ask the receptionist for a different room if they weren’t happy with theirs,” said Suppo.

  “And then what did they say?” said Sarah, scribbling furiously in her little notebook.

  “Nothing. They left and we didn’t see them again. Until they broke the door down and locked us in the closet,” said Wim ruefully.

  “Maybe we should have changed rooms after all,” his cousin added.