Hammered

by Ruth Bainbridge

  “Get him!” Lyddie screamed as she gave Sam a push towards the man dashing to the door.

  Sam waited, timing it just right.

  The metal bonged off the back of his noggin, causing him to cry out in pain. Best of all, the contact was solid and the boink took the steam out of him. He staggered into the hallway, his one hand gripping the banister as his legs gave way. The soon-to-be-back-in-the-slammer bad guy collapsed, rolling down the staircase as a loud banging started up at the front door.

  “Open up! Police!”

  It was Jennings yelling; Sam would recognize that bull moose bellow anywhere. She exchanged a look with the ex-acquaintance looking none the worse from being awakened in the middle of the night.

  “Come on,” Sam called out before the two girls trotted down the stairs and stepped over the body splayed on the bottom landing. Sam flipped on the overhead light, letting in the crowd outside her door.

  Jennings, Petrovich, two backup officers, and a cadre of EMTs burst in.

  “You two all right?” Detective Death inquired.

  “Yeah,” Sam replied.

  “No thanks to you!” Lyddie added.

  The hazel eyes flashed an evil look.

  “Hey, I’m the one that told you and your friend to stay out of this!” he retorted.

  “Acquaintance,” Lyddie corrected.

  Sam dove in the turbulent water.

  “My ex-acquaintance is right! You’re the one that let Swayzie out, hot shot! Our staying in or out of things had nothing to do with you making that mistake!”

  “We don’t get to decide who gets bail, Ms. Powell. The DA only recommends what we think. Then the judge does whatever he wants. But your response is what I’m talking about,” he added before rubbing the corner of his downturned mouth.

  Detective Death put away his gun in the handy-dandy shoulder holster and went over to the body of the man who’d begun groaning.

  “Stomach sleeper,” Lyddie remarked as she sidled next to the man Sam was most likely to push under a bus. “That’s why he landed that way.”

  It was Sam’s turn to groan.

  Random comments like these were what made her doubt ever talking to the girl whose slippers were sequined to match the shorty-short sleepwear.

  Momma did like to get her sexy on.

  With all eyes on the former star quarterback, Jennings followed through on his dour mood.

  As if it were Sam’s fault Lee Spider Swayzie showed up with guns a’blazing.

  Detective Death went into a crouch not dissimilar from the one in the dream and cuffed Swayzie’s hands behind his back.

  “S-w-a-y-z-i-e, huh?” the cocky detective drew out as his eyes locked on Sam for what would be considered a pregnant pause. And there was that dismissive look again.

  “Yes, Swayzie!” Lyddie confirmed more emphatically. It wasn’t often that the cords on her neck popped out, but this was one of those times. But the audacity of Detective Death was palpable. The sneer didn’t go with what was being said. There was something there … something Sam was missing, but what?

  Eureka!

  How dumb could she be?

  “It’s not Swayzie,” she mumbled as her ex-acquaintance shot her an evil look of her own. Even without make up, it was effective.

  The smirk was back on Jennings’ petulant mouth. He put one of his football-throwing hands on one half of the broad shoulders and flipped over the man regaining consciousness.

  “It isn’t Swayzie,” Lyddie concurred, stating the obvious. “It’s—”

  “Roger Connors … my freakin’ landlord.” Sam said in an extended exhale.

  “How long did you know?” Jennings asked.

  “Just figured it out,” she retorted, angry that she’d just admitted she’d been wrong. But it was part and parcel of the onus of a Double Virgo always telling the truth.

  Almost always.

  With the prisoner secured, Jennings left the grunt work of evaluating and carrying off a very groggy murderer to the medical professionals.

  He faced Sam with elbows akimbo.

  “Always a day late and a dollar short, huh? That’s why I told you to stay out of this. My partner and I had this handled from the beginning.”

  “As if!” she snorted, crossing her arms.

  “Have no idea what you’re talking about,” he countered. “But what you told us yesterday was nothing we didn’t know. We knew about Peter Dengrove sharing space with Jenkins Tilbert, but what we knew and you didn’t is that Swayzie and Tilbert were worried about the money being discovered. That’s why they enlisted Dengrove. He was set to be released on a technicality his attorney came up with. Since he was from Mountain Valley, and his wife held the lease, they had easy access to the stashed loot and brought him in on the plan.”

  “Ha! You’re only repurposing what I said last night to suit this new theory, but we were both wrong!” Sam exclaimed.

  Jennings shot another evil look as Petrovich and her ex-acquaintance ignored Sam’s remark.

  “But that would mean splitting the cash, no?” Lyddie addressed to Jennings, the man she’d tackled in Sam’s dream.

  If only dreams came true.

  “Yes, but having nothing to split was worse than sharing a piece of the pie,” Jennings continued.

  “But where does Connors come in?” the blonde queried as if Sam weren’t in the room and hadn’t said what she did.

  “The way we see it,” Jennings pontificated, “is that Connors comes in as being a little too smart and a lot too aggressive. He knew about the robbery, and when Kwani Langford came out with his book, he learned more details of Drossider’s operation. The security guard’s son let spill that the haul was more than suspected. So Connors plan was to gut the place, but he needed to—

  “Get rid of Doris first,“ Lyddie blurted. “That was why he was going to jack up the rent. She couldn’t afford it, tried to plead her case, but he never wanted her to stay.”

  Petrovich rewarded the analysis with a nod and a smile.

  “So while you had some of the pieces, Ms. Powell, you got it wrong and—”

  Slow burn.

  “Why do you not listen?” the girl in another pair of boy shorts snapped.

  Both Jennings and Petrovich gave her a blank stare while Lyddie poked her—hard.

  “Ouch!” she exclaimed while rubbing the spot on her upper arm that was going to bruise. “What was that for?”

  “For being rude!” Lyddie shot back.

  “That’s what happens when a dunderhead doesn’t listen—especially when he’s wrong, wrong, WRONG!” she spat out.

  Taz backed away under a table. He never liked when his hoo-manz got this upset, so he took refuge to work out who to kill first.

  The two detectives relaxed in their superiority, adopting smarmy smiles. It was so disheartening that Mr. Warm Siberian Nights was playing on the wrong team.

  “So now you’re contradicting yourself?” Jennings taunted.

  “Not contradicting—evolving! I just said we both got it wrong, but I’ve got it right now, while you’re entrenched in manure.”

  “I see,” he remarked, scratching his chin and exchanging a wry look with his partner. “Why don’t you go ahead, Nancy Drew. You tell us what your pretty little head is thinking. We’re only cops who do this thing for a living, so please … edumacate me.”

  Oh, that frying pan was tempting and calling NoBo’s name.

  “Fine! I will! The money buried was never from the robbery—it was from Dengrove! The loot was what he embezzled, Sherlock!”

  The smug demeanor was wiped off Jennings’ face. She was large and in charge and only getting started. Taz responded by crawling out from under the table and planting himself by his hoo-manz. Purring, his tail batted the bamboo flooring lazily as Lyddie sensed the tide turning and sidled to Sam’s hip.

  The hazel eyes were hunting bear. Detective Death dug his hands in his hips and closed in, trying his best to intimidate her, but she shook it off
.

  “That’s extremely creative, Ms. Powell. Then what happened to Drossider’s money? Two bags of cash couldn’t have just disappeared?”

  “They could if they never existed.”

  “What?” Lyddie gushed.

  “Yes, Lyddie. Kwani is what is known as an exaggerator. A publishing company specializing in true crime contacted him with a proposal for a new angle on the Drossider heist. He took what his dad said and mixed it with rumor and came up with a fairy tale.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because Merrimack Casino didn’t exist when the heist was pulled. It was only in the planning stages and didn’t open until at least two years later. I remember my parents discussing which way they were going to vote on the referendum. You can check it out yourself, Detective Jennings, even though you should have done it before you came here!”

  He refused to give ground, but Mr. Siberian Nights did.

  “Is there more?” Petrovich asked.

  Was there!

  Much to his surprise, she dove in.

  “You mean besides Kwani seeing a way to make a little extra money and taking it? Of course! But even if there weren’t, what you said makes no sense,” she remarked to her favorite punching bag.

  “How so?”

  NoBo bit and was dangling on the hook.

  “You’re saying that Connors wanted Doris out. You’re forgetting that she did leave! She vacated the premises! So if that’s what he wanted, why didn’t he tear up the floors and get the money? Instead, he rents out the place … to me … and compounds the problem,”

  “He did that because he already had the money. You’re forgetting the floorboard. He must have looked around and discovered where Doris hid it and there was no need to go further,” Jennings explained.

  “The floorboard that was taken up after I moved in? You’re telling me that he snuck in and removed it when I was a tenant and could have walked in on him? Then why was Doris there? To say hello? And who broke in? It couldn’t have been Connors, since he had a key. So Doris broke the lock on the back door? And waited until around the time I opened when she could have broken in when Matt closed? She’d have had eight hours to look around, so what you’re saying makes no sense!”

  “What does?” Petrovich asked, inching away from his partner. Jennings shot daggers and fumed at his partner’s interest in her theory.

  “That it was Peter Dengrove’s money under the floorboards. He had the money he embezzled all along. He’s too shrewd to have spent it—or lost it. He most likely hid it in offshore accounts. It would keep just fine until his sentence was up. But his ship came in when his lawyer discovered that loophole and was going to have the judgment against him vacated. It meant he’d be out of jail and reconnecting with the money sooner than he thought possible. But somehow—most likely through his attorney—he discovered his offshore accounts had been bled dry by someone he knew—his wife.

  “While Doris had no part in the Ponzi scheme, she wasn’t the scapegoat that Dengrove had her pegged for. She was onto what he was doing and tracked everything—including those accounts he set up. With him in prison, it gave her the perfect opportunity to drain him dry. After all, what could he do? She never figured on a shrewd lawyer doing the impossible.

  “But with some of her husband’s victims still suspicious, she couldn’t just disappear with the money and expect to spend it. Those victims were heavy hitters and would have known that money doesn’t fall off trees. That was why she opened Cunningham’s. It afforded her a cover story for the source of the money. All she had to do was bide her time and bleed her husband’s accounts dry a little at a time. It’s what she did, but she panicked when she learned about the early release.

  “That’s what Doris’ mother was alluding to, Lyddie. Patricia Cunningham thought her daughter was upset about paying off the debt. She assumed that when Dengrove’s attorney started calling Doris, but he was calling about the emptied offshore accounts. After all, Dengrove couldn’t call her directly.”

  The detective she most wanted to be snowbound with took a step closer.

  “So while Dengrove’s attorney hammered Doris, Peter Dengrove did the unthinkable. He blabbed to his cellmate about his conniving wife. The woman he thought naïve and gullible bested him, and he made the mistake by venting to the wrong people.”

  “Swayzie and Tilbert!” Lyddie gasped.

  “Exactly. And when he bragged about getting out, they acted quickly. There is no honor among thieves and it was that mistake that cost him his life.”

  “They killed him?” her blonde ex-acquaintance asked.

  “Yes. One down and one to go, but there was that pesky thing called a prison sentence they had to serve, but Doris didn’t know that, did she? She was thrilled when she learned of her husband’s death. It got him off her back, and also got his lawyer to go away. It’s not like the attorney could do anything without telling the authorities he was involved in intimidation. So Doris was free—or thought she was.

  “She’d planned on taking the money and running, but with him dead, she decided to stay where she was. After all, she checked and was confident that Swayzie and Tilbert weren’t getting out anytime soon, so she hung tight to her master plan of taking out a little at a time, but the unexpected happened when the city passed new rent guidelines. She hadn’t allotted for the rent increase and wasn’t the business whiz her mother made her out to be. Her business was constantly in the red, but by dipping into the kitty, she made ends meet. She’d been able to cook the books and fly the money laundering under everyone’s radar, but she’d never be able to account for that much—not every month she couldn’t. So she takes the bull by the horns and comes on to Connors sexually.

  “He took the bait but wouldn’t let the fun interfere with his business decisions and ended up asking to see her financial records. She showed him the faked books and thought it would be the tipping point in him not insisting on the increase, but it did the opposite. Connors instantly saw that there was no way she could have afforded paying for the property—not with the losses she was racking up. She tried to explain it away by saying her mother was helping defray the debts, but that didn’t make sense either. Patricia Cunningham couldn’t have kept the house and been supporting her daughter’s enterprise, so he pressed her for an explanation. Her response was ending the affair.

  “It convinced him that Doris was the beneficiary of her dead husband’s embezzlement scheme. And when he dug further, he found out about Swayzie and Tilbert. He thought that maybe Doris was in cahoots with them, but still didn’t know where the money was kept. It could be in an account, but that made no sense if she’d been skimming. There would have been bank records. Plus, she’d been so desperate to hang on to the restaurant that she’d slept with him. The money had to be somewhere on the property. It was the only thing that made sense. That was why he had her evicted.”

  “He did?” Lyddie exclaimed.

  “Yes, he did. That’s why Doris couldn’t get to the money. And he’d begun watching her. But when she saw Swayzie in town, she panicked. His presence assured her husband had talked too much. She had to get to the money before Swayzie did. She took a chance and broke in, but Connors was ready. He’d followed her and used the hammer out of her toolkit. He most likely used the satchel she’d brought along to transport the money, which left only Swayzie to deal with. If Swayzie were in town, he knew and that’s why Connors—”

  “Made the calls! He wanted to make it look like Swayzie was threatening you, and that would be enough to get him thrown back in the slammer! Sam,” Lyddie continued, her eyes glowing with admiration, “You’re a genius!”

  Grabbing Sam’s resolute chin between two fingers, she planted a kiss on both cheeks. Taz observed, making sure his hoo-manz was into the affection.

  She was.

  “Thanks!” she said, accepting the compliments and happy that her frontal cortex was being appreciated.

  Two EMTs lifted the gurney Connors wa
s on and carted him out.

  Detective Death approached, getting in her face. Taz’s back arched as his tail wildly banged the ground.

  “You played a dangerous game, Ms. Powell. Parading all around town like a peacock. Connors probably heard about what you were doing—”

  “From us,” Lyddie supplied. “He overheard Sam and me talking this morning.”

  “And so you made yourself a target, which pretty well says it all,” Jennings clipped.

  What exactly was the penalty for trying to strangle an ex-acquaintance under the watchful eye of two homicide detectives? Did it count that she’d betrayed Sam in her own home? Probably not, but then, most laws didn’t go far enough to cover extenuating circumstances.

  She swiped at the spots on her cheeks that those treacherous lips had touched.

  “You’re welcome,” she taunted as her brain closed up shop.

  Petrovich latched on to his partner’s arm and prevented him from getting any closer to the girl who just yanked that chain.

  “Come on, Noah. This isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  A big exhale. The red flush in Jennings’ cheeks was quelled.

  “Fine,” he squeezed out between his teeth as he turned his attention on the girl with the humongous cat in her arms. “We’ll leave you to finish your sleep, Ms. Powell … Ms. Wexler. But I want you both to stop by the precinct tomorrow morning to give your statements.”

  “What a grumpus,” Lyddie whispered as the two hunkadoodles made their way out the door. Sam slithered behind, sneaking out on the porch and listening in to another private conversation.

  “By the way, it was Agnes,” NoBo remarked to his partner as the two paused on the walkway.

  “So you were right in suspecting her of throwing that surprise party,” Petrovich responded.

  “Yeah? Who else would it be,” the man with the hazel eyes answered as they resumed their walk away.