Off You Go

by Benjamin Blackmore

  Dewey got back to his place around seven, eager to find out if the Hungry Hippo had responded. Still in a bluegrass state of mind, he put on Church Street Blues and let Tony Rice get after it for a while.

  With little hope, Dewey opened up Gina’s computer. “I don’t even know why you’d still be checking this e-mail unless you have some other women on the line. I guess I won’t put that past you. It’s a slippery slope, my friend.”

  He got to her account. The Hungry Hippo had replied. “How about that!” Dewey yelled. He clapped his hands. “How about that!”

  6

  The e-mail read: Oh, my God, baby. Is this really you? What did you do? I’m so happy. Can we meet tomorrow at 11 a.m.? Same place as last week? I can’t get away until then. Are you still in Charleston? Be careful. He didn’t sign his name.

  Dewey read it several times. “How the hell am I going to figure out where you met the last time?” he asked. Dewey pulled a smoke from the deck of Spirits and put one in his mouth. No smoking inside but he liked to let one dangle sometimes. Without thinking much more about it, he replied to the e-mail in the affirmative, figuring he worked best under pressure. He now had fifteen hours to figure things out.

  He pulled up Gina’s calendar, thinking that was a good place to start. Maybe she had written the meeting spot down, though it was unlikely. Matter of fact, judging by what he’d heard about Gina—the way she’d floated through life, how she had never even tried to find a job—Dewey guessed she wasn’t that organized or busy enough to need a calendar. He was right. The calendar had never been used.

  He dialed Faye. She wasn’t able to give him any leads, but she said she’d e-mail him Gina’s credit and debit card statements for the past few months. Without wasting any time, he called Gina’s best friend, Sandra Wyatt. He’d gotten her name and number from the list Faye had given him when they first discussed the case. A woman answered.

  “Hi, my name is Bob Tooman,” Dewey said, offering a fake name. He didn’t want to leave a trail. “Is this Sandra?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Gina’s mom hired me to help settle her affairs, and she told me that you’d be happy to answer some questions. Is there any way I could meet you somewhere? It’s nothing to be concerned about. I’m trying to return a few things to their rightful owners, make sure everyone is aware of her passing, that kind of thing. It’ll just take a few minutes. I can come to you.”

  “Anything to help. I’m at Pearlz Oyster Bar with some friends.”

  Dewey promised he’d be there in thirty minutes and let her go. He could have asked the questions over the phone, but that would have been lazy detective work. It’s always best to get in front of them. To let them see you’re human—and to catch them in any lies.

  Dewey called Sandra on his cell as he arrived at Pearlz, and she came out and met him. Sandra was a dark blonde with light blue eyes. A Louis Vuitton handbag hung from her shoulders and a sign on her forehead said she was a former sorority girl through and through. Dewey had a love/hate with her kind. They took a seat outside at one of the empty wrought iron tables lined along East Bay. It was windy and warm, a nice combination.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Dewey said. “I know this isn’t easy to bring back up.”

  “No, it’s not.” She was sipping a Cosmo but appeared sober.

  “Did it surprise you?”

  “Yeah, absolutely. She didn’t seem that broken up to me over anything. I know she had some problems in the past, but I thought they were over.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “We met at the College.”

  “The College of Charleston?”

  She smiled. “Yes, the College of Knowledge. I guess this was…ten years ago. We were both Tri-Delts.”

  Ding! Ding! Yep, he was right. Yo, ho, ho, a sorority life for me! Dewey loved and hated sorority girls, especially Tri-Delts. His first broken heart was a Tri-Delt at the College of Charleston, back when Gina and Sandra were in diapers. This girl had ripped him apart, and he was still thinking about it.

  A young man in a mustache approached the table and asked if Dewey wanted anything. Dewey almost said that he’d love a half-liter of vodka and a dozen oysters shooters, but he held his tongue and shook his head. Being at a bar surrounded by alcohol was not easy business for him, but that was part of the drill. He had to get used to being the only one without a drink in his hand.

  Looking back at Sandra, he asked, “So you didn’t pick up any sadness last time you two hung out?”

  “Not at all. She was on top of the world.” Sandra frowned. She suddenly seemed suspicious. “What does this have to do with cleaning up her affairs? What did you say your name was again?”

  “Bob Tooman. These are standard questions. It helps if I understand things.” This girl had read too many mysteries. “Do you know who Gina was seeing? I have some of his stuff I’d like to get back to him.”

  “Mrs. Callahan already asked me that.”

  Dewey tried a more sympathetic approach. “Sorry, I didn’t know that. I haven’t gotten much out of her. She’s pretty torn up.”

  “Yeah, I know. She and Gina were really tight. Anyway, I don’t know if she was seeing anyone. She hadn’t told me about it. Could have been a one-night stand. It wouldn’t have been the first. I’m sure the guy will show up if he really cares about his things.”

  “You’re probably right.” Dewey lit up a Spirit and blew the smoke off to the side. “I think Mrs. Callahan is hoping I might find some answers while I’m poking around. That’s between you and me, of course. It’s something that usually comes with the territory. You learn a lot about someone going through all their things and meeting their friends and family.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Dewey noticed her tensing up, and he knew he needed to back off the interrogation. “Did you get a chance to spend any quality time with her before she died?”

  “We worked out together Thursday, the day before she…you know. She was supposed to come to dinner with a bunch of us to celebrate my birthday but she said she couldn’t. Even though she’d already promised me. That wasn’t like her. And then she was dead. I guess she had already decided on killing herself, but it seemed weird to work out the day before.”

  “She didn’t tell you why she was cancelling?”

  “She is the queen of vague. She said something personal was going on and didn’t elaborate. I called her a bitch and walked away.” She took a deep breath. “That’s the last thing I ever said to my best friend.”

  “That’s tough.” Dewey had an urge to argue with her and try to show that she had nothing to regret. People never know when someone is going to die, and arguments are a part of life. But Dewey held back, knowing that sometimes women just want to vent. Yes: Dewey, the Woman Whisperer. He encouraged the venting by saying, “If you could only take it back, right?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Good job, Dewey. Now go in for another question. “What time was it that y’all left the gym?”

  She wiped her eyes. “We always go from seven to eight, just before I have to work.”

  As the tears began to fall, Dewey’s success in getting anything more out of her dwindled. After about fifteen more minutes, he wished her well and hit the road.

  Dewey drove back over to Gina’s. Candice was sitting on the porch just like last time, her legs kicked up on the table, her eyes on her book.

  “Still hooked?” Dewey asked.

  “Hey, there. Yes, I’m hooked badly.”

  Dewey kept walking to Gina’s door, trying to indicate he was in a hurry. “No one came by?”

  “Not that I’ve seen. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “No, thanks. I’m in a rush.”

  “What a shame,” she said with disappointment.

  Was she hitting on him? He dropped the key twice before finally getting it into the lock. Why hadn’t they done that when he was young and single
?

  Making it inside unscathed, Dewey went straight to the trash can in the kitchen. He’d seen something that had stood out in his mind the last time. Trying not to inhale too much of the odors, he began digging. Finally, after several dry heaves, he pulled out a receipt from Common Ground, a coffee shop in Beaufort, South Carolina. It was time stamped at 11:32 a.m. the Thursday before, not too long after Gina had left the gym in Charleston. The day before she jumped. What most interested Dewey was that she’d bought two coffees.

  He was building a theory in his head and her going to Beaufort fit into it nicely. Judging by the secretive nature of the relationship, it looked like she was sleeping with someone she shouldn’t have been seeing. Was he married? Was he older? Was he high-profile? She hadn’t even told her best friend about him. What else could it be? So they were having some kind of discreet affair and they were meeting out-of-town. Beaufort made a lot of sense. It was a sleepy, romantic little town that was what Charleston was fifty years ago. The kind of place you might have a nice sultry affair—as long as you were careful not to run into any other visitors from Charleston that you might know.

  Dewey looked at his phone. Faye had sent Gina’s financial statements. He ran through them, having to squint to see the numbers. What he found got him fired up, in a geeky, Sherlock kind of way. Two months earlier, Gina had bought something at a gift shop in Beaufort. Three weeks ago, she’d filled up at a gas station in Beaufort. Something special was down there. Dewey had no doubt that she’d rendezvoused with a lover there—most likely the Hippo—but was this where they’d met the last time?

  Dewey went with it. They had to have met Thursday morning somewhere in between her leaving the gym and the coffee shop in Beaufort. They would have spent the evening together—an easy assumption after reading their racy correspondence—and then gone their separate ways Friday, where she went on to kill herself. This is where the guesswork came in. If they’d met in Charleston before the drive down, Dewey had no hope of finding out where by 11 a.m. He didn’t even have a clue. They wouldn’t have met at her house, he concluded. Hopefully, they wouldn’t have risked leaving a car somewhere, and they had decided to drive separately. And that was if the Hippo was from Charleston.

  There was enough evidence indicating they’d met down in Beaufort to at least give it a shot.

  Dewey made small talk with Candice as he left but got out of there before things got too spicy. As he climbed into the truck with a butt dangling from his mouth, he looked at the picture of his wife and girls next to the speedometer. The three most beautiful human beings on the planet. He wasn’t interested in anything else.

  7

  Dewey got up early the next morning and hit the road. He’d almost driven down the night before but decided to save the money on a hotel. Beaufort was about an hour-and-a-half drive from downtown Charleston. Before driving into town, he stopped at the gas station that she’d been in a few weeks before. As he suspected, it was a futile attempt, and he continued on.

  Timeless in its disposition, Beaufort only stole the good ideas from modernism like craft beer, local food sourcing, recycling, and good coffee houses. Otherwise, the town seemed unfit for cars and more hospitable to horse-drawn carriages that mosey up the streets carrying dapper men and done-up women to the local theater to watch Porgy and Bess.

  Dewey parked on Bay Street and walked down a back alley into Common Ground, the coffee shop Gina had stopped in. He ordered the biggest coffee they had, and walked out the back. Coffee and cigarettes…the recovering alcoholics lifeline. The back door opened up to the stunning waterfront park that pushed up to the bay. Perfectly manicured grass stretched for blocks, and the flowers along the borders were in bloom. The benches and swings were full of people staring out over the marsh grass to the water. Lighting up a butt, he sat on a concrete wall circling a tree and assessed his surroundings. “I’m onto you…I can feel it.”

  He ran through the events of the Thursday before, the day they possibly met there. Gina and the Hippo had been at the coffee shop at 11:32 a.m. She’d left the gym at 8 a.m. Probably went home and cleaned up. Matter of fact, she probably spent a little more time than usual primping herself, preparing for her hot date. She had to pack, unless she’d done that the day before. “I bet you were out of your house by nine at the earliest, which would have put you here by ten-thirty. Not much time to do anything else. You either met in the park, in the coffee shop, or somewhere nearby. What to do? What to do?”

  He walked back into the coffee shop and said hello to the barista. “Were you working last Thursday by chance?”

  She thought about for a second and said, “Yep. Sure was.”

  He handed her the photo Faye had given him. “Do you happen to remember seeing her? She’s my daughter.”

  She analyzed the photo. “No, sorry. I see so many people.”

  “Were you the only one working?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dewey thanked her and walked out the other door toward town. He pulled out his iPhone. There were quite a few bed-and-breakfasts in Beaufort. Dewey put himself in the Hippo’s shoes and said out loud, “You could rent a house, stay at a hotel or motel, or a bed-and-breakfast. I’d go B&B if I was romancing someone.”

  Dewey had brought Erica down to Beaufort a few times, and they’d stayed at a couple of the B&B’s that came up on the Google map on Dewey’s phone. First stop was the Beaufort Inn, which was a couple blocks inland. Surrounded by gardens that had been host to countless weddings and debutante functions over the years, the Beaufort Inn was the quintessential antebellum mansion. It was painted pink in the great pastel traditions of the Caribbean, something that Beaufort and Charleston had taken as their own a couple hundred years before.

  Dewey trudged up the steps, knowing perfectly well that getting info from a B&B would be at least as—if not more—difficult than getting it from a hotel. The accommodations business followed strict rules in protecting the privacy of their clients. He’d learned that the hard way about six months earlier, while trying to find out if a man was cheating on his wife.

  With his head held high and a certain air of confidence, Dewey straightened his plaid fedora and approached the young lady sitting behind the desk. “Good morning,” he said. “That’s a lovely brooch you’re wearing.”

  She touched the dragonfly pin on her shirt and smiled. “Why, thank you. It was my mother’s. How can I help you?”

  Dewey handed the picture of Gina to her. “Did this woman stay here last week?” It was the good ol’ honest approach.

  The courteous and gentle smile of the young woman disappeared faster than butter in a hot pan. “I’m sorry. We don’t share information regarding our guests.”

  Dewey took out his private investigator’s license and showed it to her. “This is official business. She died last week, and I’m trying to find out about her last days.”

  She looked at the license. “You’re a PI?”

  With a bit of pride, Dewey responded, “Yes, I am.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Oh, I thought I would just ask first.”

  “A private investigator. So you’re not even a cop?”

  Dewey visibly deflated. He was dealing with a smart aleck.

  The young woman smiled dryly. “I’m sorry, but I certainly have no obligation to share private information with a PI. If you were a real law enforcement officer, I’d be obliged to, but alas…” She sat straight up. “You are not.”

  That was more than Dewey needed so early in the morning. A couple walked in the front door, breaking up the uncomfortable silence.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” she asked, trying to move him along.

  Trying the compassion angle, Dewey put his hands on the desk and said sotto voce, “Please. I’m trying to help this woman’s mother find out why she died.”

  “Sir, we’re finished here. If you wanted a little more respect, perhaps you should have gone to the Police Academy.” She looked
past him. “Next.”

  “You are a mean person,” Dewey said. “Just a mean, mean person. And you’ve hurt my feelings.” With that, Dewey turned and marched out of there.

  He fired up a butt on the way down the steps, wondering what the heck had just happened. He had a knack for getting things out of people…but that woman was just born difficult. You can’t be fragile in this business, Dewey. Don’t let her get you down. Easier said than done.

  He tried four more B&Bs to no avail. None of the staff were as mean, but they were certainly equally unhelpful. Now it was quarter ‘til eleven, and he hadn’t gotten anywhere. His only strong lead was about to burn out. He went back to the center of town and found the clothing boutique Gina had spent fifty bucks in two months before. No luck. He popped into other stores, showing her picture and flexing his charm. After a couple more clothing boutiques, a stationery store, two antique shops, and a bookstore, he started to lose hope.

  At a little after eleven, he swung by his truck, grabbed his camera, and returned to his seat on the concrete wall in the waterfront park by the coffee shop. It was even more crowded than before. With no other options, he began shooting people with his Canon Rebel and zoom lens. For thirty minutes, he shot photos of any male over ten years old that entered the park alone. He continued back on Bay Street, shooting any potential Hippos. Dewey Moses was on a safari. No one stood out, but that was okay. Maybe Faye or Sandra or another of Gina’s friends or family would recognize someone.

  A church bell chimed at noon, and Dewey decided to grab a bite. He cut through a side street heading toward Wren, his favorite restaurant in town. He was singing a song T.A. Reddick, his banjo-picking friend had written, when, suddenly, something crossed his field of vision in a blur and he felt a loop settle around his neck. Seconds later, he was being pulled backwards by what he later figured was a belt into an empty doorway.

  The attacker threw Dewey to the ground and fell on top of him, pulling the belt tighter. He was much stronger than Dewey and cut off his air with ease. Dewey tried to roll away, but the attacker only pulled tighter and pushed a knee harder into Dewey’s back.