by Don Porter
I'd been savoring the hot coffee and very nearly choked. I was finally warm, and my wet foot was almost dry, but I hadn't caught up with George yet. “You're going to call the hundred and fifty electronic shops on Oahu?”
“No, just one. You saw the sticker on the door, ‘Protected by Vigilant Alarm’.”
“Oh, sure, them. You think it was their truck that tried to run down O'Malley?”
“Yeah. When the front door stayed open, Vigilant got an alarm, and when no one answered the phone, they sent someone to check. They didn't mention that when their guy got there, he found a bloody corpse lying under their warning sticker because it wouldn't be good advertising. Wouldn't that make a great logo? A picture of a guy with his head beaten in, lying right under a sign that reads, ‘Protected by Vigilant Alarms’? Chances are that whoever installed the alarms knows the missing bodyguards, so I'll set up an appointment to talk to the installer.”
“Fine, and I'll run down and bust O'Malley out of the clink. Maybe I'd better borrow your Glock.”
“Use that slippery lying Irish tongue of yours on Cochran. He'll see the light.”
“So, we have four witnesses who will swear that the victim was already dead when O'Malley got there. We also can prove that O'Malley was not the first, but the second innocent bystander to happen on the body.”
We were sitting in Cochran's office, him leaning back in a swivel chair with his size 14s on the desk, me trying to get comfortable in a wooden chair that was designed to torture visitors during interrogations.
“You guys crossed a police line? I think I can pump that up into a felony.”
“Certainly not. Your police line is where the body was found, but nowhere near the murder scene. That's upstairs in the master bedroom, and all your people did up there was clump around and destroy evidence.”
“And who else so conveniently visited the murder scene and can testify that the body was dead before O'Malley got there?”
“The technician from Vigilant Alarm. If you'll check, you'll find that the original 911 call came from Vigilant, and they not only reported a break-in, but a murder. Their technician was two blocks down the hill, rushing to make the call, when O'Malley got off a city bus. Naturally, the bus driver can confirm that O'Malley, and four other witnesses were on the bus when the technician, who had already discovered the body, went past. I'm sure that you want to get O'Malley out of here before the press finds out how badly your people have bungled the investigation.”
Most of that was the lying Irish silver tongue that George mentioned, but some of it might possibly be true.
“Tomorrow morning,” Cochran dismissed me. “There's paperwork involved.”
“Good enough, but don't be letting him out on the street. I'll pick him up because two more killers are out there waiting. O'Malley can identify one of them, and these guys are real, not your pet FBI agents. Where are the FBI agents, by the way?”
“Gone back to America. They were here to gather evidence for a racketeering sting. When their patsy got popped, they lost interest. Now, I'm stuck with solving another murder.”
“Well, here's a broad hint. You'll find a nick in the plaster in the master bedroom. Whoever swung the pipe missed one time and hit the wall. What's not there are a suitcase full of cash, a black Cadillac, and two bodyguards. If the house seems a little messy, you can talk to your minimum wage minions about that. Those guys are so conscientious that they stay up all night looking for evidence.”
Chapter 19
George had made the appointment, but the technician was already out on a job and had to be called back into the office. They may possibly have gotten the wrong idea. Sometimes when you tell people that you are detective so-and-so calling they leap to the erroneous conclusion that you are with the police. George certainly didn't say that he was police, because that would be illegal.
One thing the alarm companies do is cooperate with the police because their businesses depend on reciprocity. It's not that the cops won't immediately respond to any 911 calls, but maintaining the right relationship makes it less likely that they'll stop for coffee on the way. Our appointment was for 9:30 so we were waiting in the parking lot at Vigilant Alarms. Trucks came and went, but none of the drivers seemed interested in us, and none of the ones that came were driven by our image of an installer. In fact, one driver who slid her truck into the lot and trotted into the office was such a knockout beauty that I looked around to see if someone was making a movie.
She came back out of the office, no cameras following. She leaned against the van she had been driving and gave us a smile.
“Hi, I'm Lydia. I believe you wanted to talk to me?”
She was a whole lot of lovely young woman packed into coveralls and wearing a tool belt. The expression, “big strapping girl” came to mind, but I'm not sure what that means. If this kid had lost the coveralls, shook her black hair out from under her cap, and traded the tool belt for a lei, she'd have been a shoo-in for Miss Hawaii.
The van that Lydia was leaning against had a big logo, Electronic Systems, but close enough to TV Repair, and the sign was black. George made the connection.
“You are the installer who did the job at the mansion on St. Louis Ridge where the murder took place?”
Lydia crumpled. The smile evaporated, and for a moment I thought she was going to upchuck, but she struggled back from the brink. This kid had been traumatized, so getting a load off her chest was therapeutic. Strike that, I was struggling not to think about her chest. That chest had put her into coveralls two sizes too large, and still barely zipped. Let's say she was unburdening her psyche.
“Yeah, and I'm also the one who found that body.” She shivered, and almost lost it again. “I'm an installer, so I don't normally respond to alarms, but I was working late. I had just finished a job three blocks away when the alarm came in, so the dispatcher asked me to stop by.”
“And you found the door open and the body inside?” George asked. He was resolutely meeting her eyes.
“Oh, Lord, it was awful. Brains are supposed to be gray, but these were pink and slimy, and just oozing out all over. I ran.”
“Did you see a group of people getting off a city bus?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess so. I saw the bus, but I was screaming at the dispatcher on the radio, and all I could really see was the image of those brains squishing out.” Lydia was shuddering, and clamped her eyes shut. Apparently that didn't block the image, because she snapped them open again, and there were tears on her cheeks.
George reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. She didn't shake the hand off; she sort of leaned into it, and her trembling stopped. George's way with women always amazes me.
A lean-to behind the office building was just a metal roof attached to the wall, and supported by two 4x4s on the outside corners. It made a shady spot, and had a table and benches, and a coffee pot on a sideboard. That's probably where the employees eat lunch. George led Lydia over to the bench and sat her down, so I grabbed three Styrofoam cups off the stack and drizzled coffee into them. We sat on the bench across the table from her; she sipped the coffee and composed herself.
“You made the installation at the mansion?” George asked.
“Yeah, about a month ago, I guess.”
“Did you get acquainted with the people who lived there?”
“Sort of. I only saw the guy who got murdered a couple of times, but there were two other guys hanging around. They let me in and showed me where they wanted the alarms and stuff.”
“Would you know them if you saw them again?” George asked.
“Oh, sure. They were pretty nice. Their names were Sally and Vinney, and that was sort of funny because they were big bruiser kinds of guys, but those are girls’ names. Anyhow, they called me Chesty, and that made things easier. See, most guys pretend not to notice my chest, like you guys are doing, so there's always a little tension. They just pointed out the obvious, so there weren't any undercurrents.”
“Can you tell us anything else about Sally and Vinney?” I asked. “By the way, their names were probably Salvatore and Vincent.”
“Yeah, I thought it was something like that, because these guys sure weren't swishy. In fact, both of them were wearing guns in shoulder holsters, so I thought they were bodyguards or something.”
George was tapping his cup on the table. That meant that his mind had leapt ahead and he was anxious to move on. “Do you have some vacation time coming?” He asked.
It took Lydia a moment to realize that he wasn't asking her to run away with him. “Why? Do you think I need therapy?”
He laid the truth on her. I'd been dreading that, but it had to be done. “Not therapy. It's almost certain that those two nice guys committed the murder. We think that they're still on the island, and the cops are watching the airport. The problem is that very few people could identify them if they're caught, and you are likely the best witness against them. It might be real smart if you went to Las Vegas for a couple of weeks.”
Her reaction would have been the same if George had slapped her.
“Can't I get police protection or something?”
“Not in the real world, Lydia.” (I think George almost called her honey, but caught himself.) “That's only in books and movies. If anything, the cops will set you up as bait to attract the killers.”
She had gone back to shuddering, but no more tears. “You really think I'm in danger?” She was looking back and forth between us, trying to judge if we were real, but then she looked over her shoulder at the parking lot, so she had got the message.
George was nodding. “I think it is serious enough that we will personally escort you to the airport. Take some time off, we'll go home with you while you pack. In the meantime, try to think of anything you can tell us about Sally and Vinney, scars, tattoos, facial hair, anything that might help us track them down, any place they mentioned hanging out. Did one limp, have a speech impediment, wear suspenders?”
Lydia drained her cup, made a six-foot toss, straight into the garbage can, and marched into the office.
“George, you do remember what happened the last time we sent someone to Vegas for her safety?”
“Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but Vegas is the best place for her to be. These guys don't even mind that the cops are looking for them. They murdered a Family Consigliore, and the Mafia will track them to the end of the earth. There must have been several million dollars involved to make soldiers abscond, but Vegas is the very last place they'll go. I'd bet they're headed for Australia or Singapore.”
Lydia came out of the office wearing a blouse and skirt. She still had the chest, but the truth is that it wasn't so distracting when it was in the proper context with the rest of her curves, which were equally remarkable. Her hair was just as I'd imagined, thick, black, and shimmering, just off her shoulders.
“Two weeks, Vegas. The company is picking up the tab because this is a work-related emergency. Let's get out of here.” We followed her to the parking lot and she stopped beside a white Miata. “Will one of you ride with me?”
George strode over to the Jag, pulled his Glock out from under the seat and let Lydia watch him stick it in his belt. They climbed into the Miata, George's knees up even with his chest and his elbow out the window because there wasn't room for it inside. I followed them in the Jag. She took us to the cubic block of the Marco Polo condominiums on Kapiolani Boulevard. Lydia and George ducked inside, so I stood guard in the parking lot, watching for long black Cadillacs, I guess. It was forty minutes later that they came down, George carrying a suitcase, Lydia wearing heels and hose, short skirt and aloha blouse. George opened the back door, hefted the suitcase onto the seat, and followed it in. Lydia climbed in front beside me and crossed her knees. I almost forgot about her chest.
Lydia's purse played America the Beautiful. She opened the purse and punched a button on a cell phone. She listened for a while, said, “Thanks a bunch, Scarlet,” and announced that she had a first class seat on United if we could get to the airport in forty minutes. I forgot the skirt, and the chest, and got us to the departure area in thirty minutes. George followed her into the terminal with the suitcase; I stayed in the car to fend off the security guards who were threatening to impound me.
When George came out and climbed in, he read my mind, another of his annoying habits. “When is Betty due back?”
“Next week, how is Monica?”
“She got the part in the movie, so she's on location on Kauai this week. Maybe I'll pop over there as soon as you catch the killers, wrap up the case, and figure out who is going to pay our bill.”
“Did Lydia happen to mention where Sally and Vinney are likely to hole up?”
“No, she spent most of her time telling me how jealous her boyfriend is going to be. Seems they had tickets to a concert at the Blaisedell tomorrow night. Sally and Vinney did mention a club. They even invited her to go with them. She thinks it was illegal gambling, but she declined the offer.”
“Oh, goody, that narrows their haunts down to less than a thousand possibilities, unless they went out of town, which makes it five thousand.” The car was automatically headed for 8 Fat Fat 8, and I didn't fight it. George seemed to be in agreement.
“By the way, I gave Lydia our business card and told her to page you if she has any problems or worries.”
“Gee, that's swell, George. She'll probably call the night that Betty gets home.”
“You picking up O'Malley in the morning?”
“Yep, Cochran can't wait to get rid of him.”
“Good, maybe we can set him up as a decoy to attract killers. With Lydia safely in Vegas, O'Malley is the star witness again.”
I swung around the corner onto Beretania and was looking for a parking spot. “O'Malley didn't witness anything helpful in this murder.”
“No, but he can identify either Sal or Vinney in the first murder.”
“Not admissible. That has nothing to do with the current murder.”
“Dick, are you the most gullible sucker who ever lived? Of course it's not admissible, but the D.A. will work it in. The jury will hear it, the defense will object, the judge will tell the jury to disregard, thereby fixing it in their minds forever.”
I found a parking spot just two blocks past Fat Fat.
Chapter 20
I stopped by the cop shop at 8:00 the next morning. Cochran let me cool my heels in the waiting room for thirty minutes before he brought O'Malley out. In the old days, the Police Gazette was the primary source of erotica for America, but now the magazines in the waiting room are all advertisements for computers, digital radios, and Cutty Sark. Cochran didn't even look at me. He gave O'Malley a shove that likely meant, “And don't come back.”
O'Malley caught his balance and followed me outside, down the stairs, and into the Jag in the underground parking lot.
“Where is my family?”
“Relax, we're going there now.”
“Did you catch the murderer?”
“No, and it's plural, by the way. One of them is probably the hood you saw that night on the bridge, maybe the one driving the car. He knows that you can identify him, so keep your head down, but do not take off for Vegas again. When we find them, we'll need you to make the identification.”
“Why me? Why does everyone pick on homeless people?”
“Because you witnessed a crime, stole a money belt, set up a blackmail scheme, conned George and me into very deep kim chee, and ran away. What more do you want?”
O'Malley sat back and enjoyed the sunshine.
I pulled into the municipal parking lot across the street from the Waikiki Grand, half a block from Kalakaua Avenue and Waikiki beach. The first twenty spaces were vacant, but reserv
ed for lifeguards. The next two hundred spaces were full. I waited while an SUV with surfboards on top pulled out. Two quarters into the meter made us legal for an hour. Those meters run twenty-four hours a day, and the cops check them every few minutes.
The receptionist at the Grand had trouble putting her book down. When she finally got her nose out of it, she flopped it on the counter, spine up. It was Atlas Shrugged, and I had to ask. “Enjoying the book?”
“Yeah, Dagney Taggert is just like me. Wha-cha want?”
“The Brunowski suite.”
She dialed a number on the house phone, said, “thank you” to the phone, and “401” to us. She nodded toward the elevator and stuck her nose back into the book.
The family was gathered, sitting on a bed, very much like the scene of the last reunion at the Thunderbird. O'Malley pulled the chair away from the desk and sat, leaving me standing by the door.
“You do have some money left?” I asked.
Bruno patted his pocket, but it was Willie who was the spokesman. “Twenty seven thousand, two hundred and four dollars, and eighty-seven cents.”
O'Malley wrinkled his brow, and Bruno hastened to give an accounting, holding up fingers the size of bananas to make the points. “We put two thousand back in the money belt, and used a hundred and eighty dollars for food, the motel room, and gasoline in Nevada. We used the money that you left on the car seat to get back to Hawaii, but it wasn't enough to cover the tax. We paid five hundred for a week in this dump. That leaves twenty seven thousand, two hundred and four dollars, and eighty-seven cents.”
“You do realize that Uncle Sam will demand half of that?” I asked.
O'Malley spit into a wastebasket. “He'll play hell getting it. I used a phony social security number and a phony name. He's got all he's ever going to get out of me.”
From the vitriol in O'Malley's voice, I guessed that the IRS was the one who had put him under the bridge, and that's probably not unusual. “Okay,” I said, “good luck. Would you like to pay your bill for our detective services? The FBI reimbursed expenses, but you owe us five hundred dollars a day for nine days.”