by J. A. Jance
“What is that exactly?” Jamison asked. “And would you mind spelling it for me?”
I dictated the spelling and then explained, “It’s a convention for mystery writers and readers.”
“Which are you,” he asked, “a writer or reader?”
“A reader so far,” I admitted, “but I’d like to be a writer someday.”
“A mystery writer?”
“Yes.”
“As in a murder mystery writer?” From the way he verbally underscored the word murder in the question, I could tell exactly what he was getting at.
“I don’t know of any other kind,” I told him.
I did, actually. There are a lot of different kinds of mysteries, and I’ve read them all, from cozies to police procedurals, from thrillers to true crime, but it’s usually always murder. Right that moment, however, I didn’t feel like giving Detective Jamison an overview of crime fiction. He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who spent a lot of his time reading books of any kind, much less mysteries.
“What do people do at this convention?”
“Chat with each other, listen to authors,. go to panels, visit the booksellers, get autographs.”
“What kind of panels?”
The panel entitled “Murder and How to Get Away with It” had been top on my list of must-sees. The room had been packed—standing room only. I had also enjoyed the interview session with the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, which turned out to be less of a how-to book and more of a history of the birth of forensic science. I attended both of those, but the thing about Bouchercon is, there’s no official sign-up sheet for any of the panels or events. They give you a list of the programs and then you attend the ones that interest you. Once you show up, if there’s enough space, you sit. Otherwise, you stand or go somewhere else. It occurred to me that, under the circumstances, I probably shouldn’t mention my having attended the panel about getting away with murder.
“I went to several panels,” I said, ticking them off one by one. “ ‘Agents: Why You Need One,’ ‘Is Traditional Publishing Dead?’ ‘How to Win the E-book Wars,’ ‘Humor and Murder Do Mix,’ that sort of thing.”
“Which hotel?”
“The convention was at the Bohemian on the far end of the Strip,” I said. “By the time I signed up, I was too late to get the convention price there, so I stayed at the Talisman a few blocks away. One of my customers had recommended it and given me a coupon for one free night.”
“Anyone with you on this trip who could verify your whereabouts on the evening in question? Girlfriend maybe, or maybe a gal pal you picked up somewhere along the way?”
I knew what he meant. Jamison was wondering if I had picked up a hooker to keep me company. I hadn’t.
“I went by myself,” I told him. “Drove up on Friday evening, came back late Sunday afternoon, with no gal pals in the mix at all.”
“You drove across Hoover Dam?”
I nodded. Ever since 9/11, they’ve installed all kinds of security on that road, along with plenty of surveillance cameras, too. If someone went to the trouble of checking the tapes, they’d be able to find me eventually, creeping along in the miserable traffic and driving back and forth in my old beater Honda all by my lonesome. Some day they’ll open up that new bridge they’re working on—a bridge that crosses the whole canyon. Until they do, crossing the Colorado River at Hoover Dam takes for-damn-ever.
“You said you stayed at the Talisman?”
Recalling the place, I cringed. My customer’s idea of “great” and mine don’t exactly jibe. The Talisman isn’t a hotel I’ll be visiting again any time soon.
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s a few blocks off the Strip, which means it’s less expensive, but it was also close enough for me to walk back and forth to the convention. That way I didn’t have to pay for parking.”
“Do you remember which room you were in?”
“Do you remember hotel numbers weeks after you check out?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”
“Me, neither,” I told him. “Check with the desk. They’ll be able to tell you which room I was in. The Talisman is a low-rise hotel. My room was on the second floor, with the swimming pool down below.”
“How much did you lose?” Jamison asked.
“I didn’t lose,” I said. “I went to a convention. I don’t gamble in Vegas. The house always wins.”
“I mean, how much did you lose when your wife left you?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I lost everything.”
And that was the simple truth. I’d had a restaurant off Michigan Avenue. It was called Uptown. At the time, it was a going concern. I had money in the bank, a cool condo close to downtown, and a sizable retirement account. Faith and I also had cars—a late model BMW for me and a Volvo for her. Taken altogether, it added up to more than a mil, including the equity in the condo. When Faith took off with the goods, there wasn’t ever any hope of my getting it back. If she and Rick had deposited the money in a bank somewhere, maybe I might have stood a chance of recovering some of it. Instead, it all went up in smoke—literally. It doesn’t take long to go through that kind of money when you and your druggie pals are all doing cocaine.
“So how’d it happen?” Jamison asked.
He didn’t say, How could you be so stupid? He didn’t have to. I’ve said it to myself countless times, but I never saw it coming. Not at all.
I took a deep breath before I answered, remembering back to the first day I ever laid eyes on her.
“Faith showed up in my restaurant one day. She came in at lunch with a guy in a suit and came back later that evening alone. It wasn’t long before one thing led to another. She was beautiful as all get out, smart, and charming. I fell for her hook, line, and sinker. She claimed to have an MBA from Fordham, which, I found out later, was bogus, but even without that degree, she knew way more about accounting than I did. After we were married, she was only too happy to take over the bookkeeping and accounting jobs at the restaurant. That’s how she met Rick Austin. He was my financial advisor and also my best friend.
“Once they hooked up, the two of them managed to drain my bank accounts—all of them. The first I knew anything at all about it was when I wrote a check to pay the next month’s rent on the restaurant, and the damned thing bounced. That’s about the time both the IRS and the Illinois tax collectors came calling. Even though I had dutifully signed all the tax forms Faith handed me every year, she hadn’t bothered to file them, or to send along the taxes that were due, either.
“By the time I wised up, she had slapped me with a restraining order so I couldn’t even go home to get my clothes, couldn’t even get into the building to get my car. It was February in Chicago. I had no vehicle, no money, no working credit cards, and the tax men breathing down my neck. Fortunately, I was wearing the sheepskin coat I had bought two years earlier when we went to Vail on vacation. I ended up walking to the building where my former maitre d’ lived and crashed on his couch.”
“So after she wiped you out like that, I take it you hit her?” Jamison asked. “You were violent?”
“I was not,” I replied hotly, feeling my blood start to boil all over again. “I never so much as raised a hand to the woman, not once, but that didn’t keep her from claiming I had. She went crying to a local domestic violence shelter with some cock-and-bull story about how I had beaten the crap out of her. They helped her do the paperwork to take out a restraining order and helped her find a shark of an attorney to come after me. I ended up being ordered to pay five thousand a month in temporary support while she and Rick got to stay on in our condo. Of course, with the restaurant shuttered, I couldn’t make the support payments. That’s when she had me served with papers taking me to court for nonpayment.”
“What did you do?”
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bsp; “The night I got served was the night I hit bottom. I was completely busted. I had gone from having everything to having less than nothing, and here she was threatening to take me to court for not sending her monthly support checks? What kind of deal is that? To drown my sorrows, I drank far too much of my former maitre d’s easily accessible booze and very nearly threw myself off his balcony. Ten stories up would have been more than enough to do the job. Luckily for me, I passed out before I could make it happen.
“The next morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover to the sound of a ringing telephone. Grandma Hudson always claimed to be psychic, and maybe she was, because she called me that morning when I was at my lowest ebb. When I had nowhere else to turn, she offered me a lifeline. She told me to wipe the slate clean—to put it all behind me, come to Arizona, and start over. I think it’s the best advice anyone has ever given me.”
“So that’s what you did?” Jamison asked. “You came here?”
“I left town, came to Arizona, and started over from scratch.”
“Never tried to get your money back?”
“That would have taken lawyers, and lawyers cost money, which I didn’t have. Besides, there was no point. From what I could tell, Faith and Rick had run through most of it by then anyway. Instead, I went to work with my grandmother here at the Roundhouse and lived rent free with her in the apartment upstairs. I filed bankruptcy to get out from under the credit card debt Faith had run up, but that didn’t fix my back taxes problem. Grandma Hudson found someone here in town, a retired IRS agent, who helped me cut a deal with the tax man. It took every penny I made for the first three years I was here to pay off the back taxes.
“The restaurant I’d owned before—the Uptown—had been more of a fine dining establishment. Grandma taught me the basics of running your ordinary blue-collar diner. When she died a few years later, she left the restaurant to me—lock, stock, and barrel. By the way, I’m still driving the car she left me, too—an early nineties vintage Honda with very low mileage.”
“And when’s the last time you saw Kather . . .” Jamison hesitated and then corrected himself. “When’s the last time you saw Faith?”
“The day the divorce was final—seven years ago, October thirty-first. It always seemed appropriate that we got divorced on Halloween. I was living in Arizona then, and she’s the one who filed. I flew into Chicago the morning of the court appearance and flew back out again that same night. On Halloween, I always allow myself a single trick-or-treat toast in the witch’s honor.”
“Faith maybe cleaned you out, but it looks like you landed on your feet,” Jamison suggested. “After all, you’ve got all this.”
He sent a significant glance and an all-encompassing gesture around the bar, which was starting to fill up. A group of golfers—several foursomes, boisterous, loud, and fresh from some local course—had turned up and were busily making themselves at home by ordering drinks all around, wings, and platters of nachos.
“I already told you. My grandmother owned the Roundhouse, and she left it to me when she died. You may not realize this, but inheriting a restaurant isn’t what I’d call ‘landing on my feet.’ It’s called landing in a pile of work. The whole trick about running a restaurant is making it look easy. It isn’t. It’s like that duck gliding effortlessly across the water without anyone seeing that, below the surface, he’s paddling like crazy. By the way, that weekend in Vegas was my first weekend off—my first days off—in months.”
“At the time you went there, did you know Faith was living in Las Vegas?”
“I had no idea.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother had known all about it. I think I mentioned earlier that she and Faith had always been chummy, and it chapped my butt that the two of them stayed friends, especially after what Faith did to me.
“You took your cell phone to Vegas?”
I noticed the sudden shift in direction. “Of course,” I answered.
“Did you use it?”
“Some, but on Saturday afternoon I noticed it was running out of battery power and realized I had forgotten the charger back here in Peoria. I called the restaurant, let them know that my cell phone was out of commission. I told them that if they needed to reach me, they’d have to call the Talisman or the people in charge of the convention. At the convention, they post messages on a bulletin board near the registration desk. After that, I shut my cell off and left it off until after I got back home.”
I’m not stupid. I could see clear as day where all this was going. Jamison thought I had shut off my phone so it wouldn’t ping anywhere near the crime scene. That’s how the cops are able to catch the occasional killer these days—by following the bad guy’s cell phone signals. That way they can place the crook at the scene of the crime without his ever having made a call.
“My phone records will bear that out,” I added.
“I’m sure they will. So did you use the phone in your room to make any calls?”
“No, not that I remember. Besides, who would I have called? Other than the people I met at the convention, I didn’t know anyone in Vegas.”
“What about the pay phone down by the swimming pool at the Talisman? Did you use that?”
“If there was a pay phone there, I didn’t notice, and I certainly didn’t use it.”
“Who all knew you were going to that particular convention?” This was the first time the other cop, Detective Shandrow, had asked a question.
“The people at the restaurant knew I was going to Vegas,” I corrected. “I doubt I mentioned anything to them about the convention. What I was doing in Vegas wasn’t any of their business. You know the old saying, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’ ”
My attempt at humor fell flat, at least as far as Detective Shandrow was concerned. He grimaced. “So you’re saying that none of the people who work for you are aware that you’re building up to writing the great American novel?” His sarcasm was duly noted.
“It’s not something I talk about. People don’t like it when they think you’re standing with a foot in both worlds. They get nervous. I have a good crew working here at the restaurant, and I need to keep all of them.”
“Unless you decide to sell,” Jamison said.
That took me aback. The truth was, for months there had been considerable interest from a company hot to trot to build a hotel in order to cash in on Peoria’s burgeoning Spring Training gold mine. The developer, a guy named Jones, had bought up most of the real estate on either side of me, purchasing the buildings on the cheap from the landlords who had raised the rents enough that their longtime small business tenants—engaged in a life-or-death struggle with big box stores—could no longer afford to renew their leases. Their former landlords were only too happy to make a quick buck and go on to bigger and better things. Now, months later, I remained the sole holdout.
Grandma Hudson was nobody’s fool. When she bought the Roundhouse, she bought the whole thing—both the building and the parking lot, right along with the previous owner’s collection of model trains. Once I came on board, I bought more trains, and better ones, too. Unlike some of the other businesses in the neighborhood, I still had a going concern. I also didn’t have a money-grubbing landlord trying to bust my balls in order to get me to leave. I hadn’t taken the bait at the developer’s first offer or even at his second or third.
So yes, I was hoping to sell eventually—at my price—but it wasn’t something I discussed out in the open. For one thing, if my crew figured out that I might sell, they’d be gone before the next dinner service, and I’d find myself stuck being chief cook and bottle washer along with having to do everything else. Still, the fact that Jamison and Shandrow knew about my possible real estate dealings meant the two detectives had been hanging around Peoria asking questions for some time, long before they set foot in my restaur
ant early that afternoon to order their two bottomless cups of coffee.
“Who told you I might be interested in selling?”
Jamison shrugged. “Word gets around,” he said.
“I’ve had some inquiries,” I acknowledged. “So far there haven’t been any offers out there that I couldn’t walk away from. If someone’s going to buy the business out from under me, they’re going to have to make it worth my while.”
“I notice you have a pay phone back there by the restrooms,” Jamison said.
This odd observation was completely out of context, but it was also true. Even though pay phones are thin on the ground these days, the Roundhouse has one, and I do my best to keep it in good working order.
“A few of the planned communities around here aren’t big on watering holes for the old guys who still like to tipple a bit,” I explained. “Some of my regulars are disabled vets who arrive in those handicapped dial-a-van things or else by cab because they’re too old to drive or their physical condition makes it impossible. The younger generation may have terminal cell-phone-itis, but not all of the older generation does.
“So yes, I have a pay phone back there so those guys can call a cab or a van when it’s time for them to go home. I can also tell you that having a pay phone on the premises is a pain in the neck. When this one breaks down—which it does with astonishing regularity—and stops refunding the change it’s supposed to spit back out, people tend to get crabby. They want me to replace their missing change, and most of the time I do. I figure I can afford to lose seventy-five cents easier than some of them can.”
“Whoa,” Detective Shandrow observed with an ill-concealed sneer. “You’re a regular philanthropist.”
I wasn’t too keen on Jamison, but I liked his partner even less.
“You usually work days, then?” Jamison asked.
“Mostly,” I said, “I generally do the day-shift bartending, but because I’m the owner, I pitch in as needed—including serving as short-order cook on occasion, as I did today. I’m here most of the time anyway because I live right upstairs.”