Hell Hole

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Fascinating,” says Ceepak. He taps the last line on the poster: For immediate attention please see manager.

  I don’t get it. “What?”

  “Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that this was not a suicide.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say someone lured Corporal Smith into the men’s room.”

  “To murder him?”

  Ceepak nods. “They knew they had almost an hour to get away—more if they could make certain that there was no need for ‘immediate attention’ and, therefore, no reason for the janitor to disturb the occupant seated in stall number three.”

  Now I get it.

  No immediate attention required.

  No blood on the floor.

  9

  If Somebody shot Shareef Smith, made it look like a suicide, and then wiped up any blood that dripped down to the tiled floor, they might’ve had an hour or more to get away.

  “Perhaps even longer,” says Ceepak. “Let’s suppose the murder took place prior to a shift change. The new janitor coming on duty would not realize that the shoes indicating the presence of a patron in stall number three had been there for over an hour.”

  We’re in my Jeep. Driving back to Sea Haven.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Somebody in that bathroom should’ve heard something. Seen something.”

  Ceepak nods. “Perhaps.”

  “Hey, if I was in one of the stalls next to Smith’s, I would’ve known if two guys next door started doing something weird. Even if I didn’t hear the shot because the pistol had that silencer, there had to be some sort of scuffle. And when the bad guy bent down to wipe up the floor, I would’ve seen that.”

  “You raise valid points, Danny.”

  Yeah. I do that every once in a while.

  “But,” Ceepak says, “we know the handicapped stall to his right, let’s call it stall number four, was unoccupied.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes, Danny. That’s where Slominsky’s people found Smith’s drug kit.”

  “They said he kicked it over there. Or dropped it.”

  “From his left hand.”

  “Yeah. Because the pistol was in his right.”

  “That would be some bounce,” says Ceepak.

  He’s right. Out of the left hand, down to the floor, and over to the stall on his right? The little leather pouch had to have legs or a skateboard.

  “If someone had been there,” Ceepak continues, “they would have reacted when the drug kit came sliding across the floor and hit their foot.”

  And, if a wrapped-up satchel of hypodermics and heroin bags smacks into your shoes, you usually tell somebody about it. You might even summon a janitor for some of that immediate attention.

  “‘It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap,’” mumbles Ceepak. More Springsteen. “Born To Run.” I think the Boss was singing about escaping his boring hometown. Ceepak, on the other hand, is thinking about a toilet on the Garden State Parkway. A death trap someone wants to turn into a suicide rap.

  “Should we call the Burlington County prosecutor’s office?” I ask.

  “Not yet. It’s all speculation at this point. We have no hard evidence.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Tell me again about the burglarized car.”

  “They ripped out everything. Radio. Air bags. Stuff in the trunk.”

  “How was the trunk opened?”

  “Can’t say for sure but it was dinged and scratched up pretty bad. Like somebody in a hurry went at it with a crowbar.”

  Ceepak glances at his watch.

  “Rita doesn’t need us at the party site for another two hours. Let’s head out to Feenyville.”

  Oh-kay. That’s kind of random.

  Feenyville is this scuzzy trailer park up on the north end of the island. It’s run by a nice old guy who doesn’t have a clue what the riffraff he rents to are doing instead of going to work or leading respectable lives. Fred Feeny opened the “RV Park and Boat Basin” forty years ago and calls himself the mayor of Feenyville, which, nowadays, is basically sixteen mobile homes sitting on cinder blocks in a scraggly patch of crushed seashells.

  In the old days, Feenyville was like a KOA. A place for families to park their campers, dock their boats, and enjoy the ocean. Nowadays, it’s … well … it’s a trailer park. Guests from the Jerry Springer show stay there, if you catch my drift.

  We cross the bridge into Sea Haven.

  “It might be prudent to discuss this matter with the Feenyville Pirates,” says Ceepak. “As you recall, the crude use of a crowbar to gain illegal access is one of their favorite m.o.’s.”

  The Feenyville Pirates is what we all call this bunch of scallywags who currently rent parking spots from the tolerant Mayor Feeny. Six or seven scruffy guys and their equally scruffy significant others who are responsible for a lot of the petty burglaries that take place on the island—particularly in the off-season. Last winter, we caught a couple of them breaking into an empty McMansion just off the beach. They had dented and scraped the bejeezus out of a storm window trying to pry it open. We busted them, confiscated their crowbar. Guess they swung by Sears and shoplifted a new one.

  “As it happens,” says Ceepak, “last Tuesday I tailed one of the pirates to that same rest area.”

  “Was he carrying a crowbar?”

  “Roger that.”

  “Which one was it?”

  “Mr. Nicky Nichols.”

  “He’s the big dude, right?”

  Ceepak nods.

  It’s hard to forget Nicky Nichols. He’s nearly seven feet tall and looks perpetually stupid due to his cartoon-dog eyes and open-mouth breathing habit.

  “Nichols parked his vehicle next to an empty station wagon,” says Ceepak. “A Volvo with a DVD entertainment system mounted into the ceiling above the backseat.”

  Kids today. They never have to stop watching their Disney movies.

  “He walked over to the Volvo, raised its hood, and bent over to fiddle with the engine. When I approached and asked him what he was doing, he told me that the station wagon, which had Missouri license plates, belonged to a neighbor at the trailer park and he had come down to jump-start its dead battery. I asked if he’d like to borrow my jumper cables, since the only tool he was carrying was that crowbar.”

  “You think he was going to steal the battery?”

  “No, Danny. The air bags.”

  We crunch into Feenyville.

  It’s set off from the road by a sun-bleached stockade fence. A teenager in a terry cloth halter top pedals past on her bike, the tires slipping sideways in the powdery mix of sand and shells. We crawl past the first trailers. Their undercarriages and PVC plumbing are hidden behind skirts of pressure-treated latticework. Some trailers fly the American flag off their TV antennas, one has a Jolly Roger flapping on a rusty pipe. Pirates are brazen that way. Most of the aluminum homes have dented chairs set up in circles around corroded grills. These are Feenyville’s backyards.

  Up ahead, I see two guys hunkered under the hood of a 1980-something pickup truck. One guy is standing on an upturned cinder block to make him tall enough to tinker with the engine. The other guy doesn’t need any kind of booster block. It’s Nicky Nichols, all seven feet of him. Bent over like that, he can probably scrape his knuckles on the ground underneath the driveshaft. Now I hear music. Rap. Thumping bass. Angry chants.

  Ceepak and I climb out of our car.

  The pirate mechanics remain oblivious to our arrival. The rap song is loud, like syncopated thunder.

  “You got a wrench?” Nichols shouts to his friend.

  “What?” the other one pops up. Bangs his head on the hood. “Fuck!”

  I recognize him too. Mr. Shrimp. Guess it’s a pirate name—like Mr. Smee from Captain Hook’s crew. However, if “Mr. Shrimp” was my handle, I think I’d sign up with some other bunch of buccaneers with tougher-sounding nicknames. Mr. Shrimp is, or course, short. Not exactly a dwarf, but
Napoleon short—like five-two. He has this bushy white beard and a red bandanna that makes him look like one of those coconut-head pirates they sell at the Treasure Chest. He also wears glasses, which, if you ask me, sort of ruins the whole pirate look. An eye patch, maybe. Corrective lenses? Not so much.

  Nichols sees us. I can tell because he’s standing there frozen. Dumbfounded. Straining to remember who we are. When he tries to think like that, the circular O of his mouth shrinks down into a wrinkled pucker.

  Now Nichols crosses both arms over his chest genie-style and attempts to say something threatening.

  “What do you want?” is the best he can manage.

  “Yeah,” adds Mr. Shrimp. “Whattayawant?”

  “We’d like to ask you two gentlemen a few questions,” says Ceepak.

  “You’re cops!” The fifteen-watt refrigerator bulb in Nichols’s brain clicks on. “Last winter. You arrested me.”

  “That’s right. I’m Officer John Ceepak. This is my partner, Officer Danny Boyle.”

  “Where’s your badges?” inquires Mr. Shrimp. He puts a lot of head bobs and shoulder twitches behind every word.

  “We’re off-duty today.”

  “So what’re you doin’ here?”

  “We’d like to talk to you about air bags.”

  “You in the market to buy some?” asks Nichols.

  You look up dumb in the dictionary, you’ll see this man’s mug shot.

  “Nicky?” snaps Mr. Shrimp.

  “What?”

  “We’re not here to make a purchase,” says Ceepak. “We’re looking for an air bag that someone illegally removed from a Ford Focus parked at the exit fifty-two service plaza on the Garden State Parkway last night.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Shrimp jiggles his shoulders. “Well, we was right here, all night.”

  “Yeah,” adds Nichols. “Except when we went out.”

  “Nicky?”

  “What?”

  Mr. Shrimp doesn’t say it; just mouths the words: Shut. Up! He could’ve added, You. Idiot.

  “We know you two gentlemen are actively engaged in the business of selling replacement air bags to unscrupulous auto-body repair shops on the mainland,” says Ceepak.

  Now Nichols looks offended. Well, as offended as he can given his limited range of facial expressions.

  Suddenly, the rap song ends and a new song starts. Heavy metal. The CD player in the old truck must have a shuffle mode—one of those six-CD changers people bolt inside their trunks.

  Like Shareef Smith had bolted inside his Ford until somebody ripped it out!

  I recognize the tune: “Cum on Feel the Noize.” Quiet Riot. The same heavy metal anthem Dixon and his troops were blasting out the windows of their party house last night.

  10

  “That’s Echo Company’s theme song!” I say to Ceepak. “They were playing it at that party we broke up! The ten-forty-three!”

  Ceepak nods.

  “I’ll bet that’s Smith’s CD changer!” I’m pretty jazzed. “They stole it out of the trunk and it was loaded with Smith’s CDs!”

  “No way. That’s my music, man!” says Mr. Shrimp. “I didn’t steal that shit from anybody.”

  “Shit” seems like an extremely appropriate descriptor for the fuzzbox power chords currently ringing out of the truck’s gigantic speakers.

  “You like Quiet Riot?” I ask.

  The Riot singers strain to be heard over the chugging drums. Fortunately, the words are all pretty much the same: Come on feel the noise. Over and over. And then a guitar solo. The kind Wayne and Garth used to diddle in the air.

  “You actually like an eighties hair band?”

  Mr. Shrimp puffs out his chest. “You got some kind of problem, Officer?”

  Well, yeah. The song sucks.

  “It’s a free country!” says Nichols.

  I guess so. Especially if you steal everything. Then, yeah, it’s all pretty much free.

  “This is America,” adds the short guy, who’s hurling all of his tough-guy machismo in my general direction because it’s obvious that Ceepak, the six-two tower of power standing to my left, could peel and eat Mr. Shrimp for breakfast. “We can listen to whatever we want!”

  “You stole that CD changer from Corporal Shareef Smith,” I reiterate my point. Loudly. It’s the only way to be heard over the cascading guitar riff. “That’s his song. His CD! His CD changer!”

  “You got any proof?”

  “Yes,” I say and try to think of something I could offer as evidence besides my hunch. But then I see Ceepak shake his head.

  “He’s right, Danny. We have no proof.”

  This is when I wish Ceepak’s code allowed us to tell a lie every now and then. I wouldn’t do it all the time, mind you. Only when it was important or, you know, convenient.

  “See?” says Shrimp. “You two ain’t got nothin’ !”

  Nichols tries to chuckle. “Heh. Heh. Heh.” It comes out slow—a dying lawn mower huffing out fumes as it runs out of gas. Mr. Shrimp leans into the cab of the truck. Yanks up on a wire. The music dies.

  “However,” says Ceepak, “this does not mean we intend to let this matter drop.”

  Nichols’s face shifts slowly from amused to puzzled.

  “I suspect Officer Boyle’s instincts are correct. I suspect you stole the CD changer from the trunk of Corporal Smith’s vehicle. I further suspect that you two forgot to exchange his CD collection for music of your own. However, my suspicions and suppositions aren’t enough. We will need to gather more evidence if we hope to convince the Burlington County prosecutor to proceed with a criminal case against you two.”

  “Good luck,” taunts Shrimp.

  “We won’t need luck,” says Ceepak. “We’ll simply need access to all the evidence surrounding Corporal Smith’s trip to the rest stop last night and his supposed suicide.”

  Ah-hah.

  Long live the code.

  Ceepak just found our angle. Possession of stolen property here in Feenyville is definitely within our jurisdiction, so Saul Slominsky may be forced to share his forensic evidence with us. Who knows? Maybe these two knuckleheads are the ones who did it. Maybe they killed Smith then staged it to look like a suicide. Motive? I don’t know. Heavy metal envy.

  Okay. It’s a flimsy case. But, we officially have our foot in the door, or, more correctly, the toilet stall.

  “Thank you for your time, gentlemen,” says Ceepak.

  “Somebody’s dead?” asks Nichols, his brain still locked in that time lag mode.

  “Yes,” says Ceepak. “The man whose CD player we suspect you stole.”

  “Suicide?” says Shrimp.

  “So someone would have us believe.”

  The way Ceepak says it? It sounds like Mr. Shrimp might be the someone he’s talking about.

  “Do you think they did it?” I ask when we’re back on the road, heading down Ocean Avenue toward the center of Sea Haven.

  “I suspect everybody until the last minute,” says Ceepak. I guess he’s been reading mystery books again. He does that in his spare time when he’s not watching forensic shows on the Discovery Channel or helping Rita run the catering business or coaching his stepson’s baseball team.

  Or sneaking around town in his wife’s car after 1:00 AM.

  We’re heading over to Kipper Street and Beach Lane. The party house. Ceepak made a few calls and found out from his state trooper pals that Smith’s vehicle was towed over to the rental house around noon. Since Slominsky figures it was a suicide and that Smith killed himself in the men’s room, not the front seat of a Ford Focus, the car is no longer of any interest to anybody connected to the case.

  Nobody, of course, except us. We need to investigate that trunk some more. See if Nicky Nichols and Mr. Shrimp left any evidence behind when they tore out the dead man’s CD changer. Maybe a curly hair from the little one’s beard. Maybe DNA-rich drool from Nichols’s droopy lips.

  “We’ll need to look at video footage
from the parking-lot security cameras,” Ceepak says as we turn off the boulevard and cruise down the residential side street. “Try to locate witnesses.”

  “When do you think Nichols and Shrimp broke into the car?”

  “When Smith went inside to use the restroom.”

  “So our witnesses might also be witnesses to whatever really happened in that men’s room?”

  “Roger that.”

  Awesome. We’re on a parallel path. Our investigative duties will just happen to coincide with whatever went down when Smith stepped into that toilet stall. Maybe some of the people we talk to will just happen to mention whatever they saw in the bathroom. Especially if we just happen to ask them about it.

  11

  Smith’s small car is parked on top of the dancing dolphin mosaic in the driveway of the party house at 22 Kipper Street.

  The soldiers are in the fenced-off backyard grilling steaks. I can hear meat sputtering. I also hear beer tabs popping free. The PVC fence railings have been turned into a laundry line for wet swimsuits and damp towels. Guess the guys went boogie boarding earlier. Guess the customary mourning period for their fallen comrade is over.

  We climb out of my Jeep and walk past the overflowing recycling bins. Dixon tosses the ball of tin that used to be his beer can over the fence at the open Rubbermaid barrel. He sees us.

  “Officer Boyle! Where’s young Officer Starky?”

  “She works nights,” I say.

  The guys behind Dixon give me a major league “hoo-hah” on my she works nights comment.

  Dixon eyeballs Ceepak. “Who’s your new girlfriend?”

  I think he means Ceepak.

  Ceepak cracks a smile. Takes a step toward the gate that opens into the backyard patio.

  “John Ceepak. I served with the One-oh-one.”

  Dixon moves to the gate. Doesn’t open it. “How many tours?”

  “First wave.”