by Nic Saint
“Ooh, me too!” said Vikki, quickly joining him.
“And me,” said Vernon. “This is still my motel, Professor. And my investigation. So if anyone should be interviewing potential suspects about other potential suspects it’s me.”
“Good point,” Tom had to admit, and then they were ascending that staircase.
Vikki was humming something under her breath, and it sounded a lot like ‘We’re off to see the Wizard.’
Chapter 23
Dee looked up when first Scott then Maya walked into the room.
“Where have you guys been?” she asked.
“Oh, I just happened to find the murder weapon,” said Scott smugly as he unleashed Ralph and jumped onto his bed. “Well, actually Ralph found the murder weapon. I confiscated it from the dude who stole it.”
“You found the knife?” asked Maya, her jaw dropping.
“Yes, I did,” said Scott, casually studying his fingernails.
“But how?” asked Dee. “And why did you take Ralph?”
“He had to wee-wee,” said Scott, now supporting himself on his elbows as he prepared to launch into his tale of derring-do. “But then I had the most brilliant idea. I told him he could have his wee-wee but first he needed to do me a solid.”
“You tortured our poor dog?” asked Maya.
Scott frowned. “I did not torture him. He loved every minute of it. In fact I think Ralph has got what it takes to be a police dog one day.” Ralph, who must have sensed he was the center of attention, hopped up on the bed and plunked himself down next to Scott.
“So where was it?” asked Dee. “Where did you find the knife?”
“Some loser dishwasher who stole it so he could sell it on eBay. He also took a ton of pictures to sell to TMZ so we’re going to see some ‘Breaking News’ soon on your favorite website, sister dear.”
“TMZ is so not my favorite site,” said Maya.
“That’s right. I forgot. Seventeen Magazine is your all-time fav.”
“You wish,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“So where is the knife now?” asked Dee.
“Gave it to Dad,” said Scott, picking up his phone.
“I talked to Tracy Hall,” said Maya, and Scott put his phone back down. She smiled when all eyes now turned to her. Even Ralph was eyeing her closely.
“Tracy Hall as in the Hallmart heir?” asked Scott, duly impressed. “The richest girl in the country?”
“Yup. I shared a Snickers with her. She’s super cool. Very down to earth for a celebrity.”
“She’s not really a celebrity,” said Dee. “She just happens to have a very wealthy dad and a famous—or infamous—boyfriend.”
“Who’s now famously dead,” said Scott, with a touch of callousness Dee did not like.
“Please show some respect for the dead, Scott,” Dee said.
“Sorry, Mom,” he muttered.
“So what did Tracy Hall say?” Dee asked.
“Did you ask how many billions she’s got?” said Scott. “Or what car she drives? I’ll bet she drives a Lambo. If I had a couple billion in my bank account I’d def get a Lambo.”
Maya ignored her brother. “She reckons Donny told her to meet him here so he could introduce her to Christy and the baby. Donny must have wanted to have one of those big reconciliation scenes before he got married again. Though if you ask me he also wanted his father-in-law to give some money to Christy so she could take good care of her new baby.”
“She said that?” asked Dee, frowning. Tracy’s words confirmed her father’s story. Though that last part about Wilbur Hall giving money to his future son-in-law’s ex-wife was probably wishful thinking on Maya’s part, for Wilbur had not proven himself a big fan of Christy’s. On the contrary. “So who does she think killed Donny?”
“Christy,” said Maya decidedly. “She even told me that Christy once told Donny that she would kill him if she ever saw him again or if he came near her or the baby.”
“Wow,” said Scott.
“And I think she’s right. Christy is the perfect suspect.” She ticked off her fingers. “He was killed right there in their room. He cheated on her with a billionaire’s daughter even though they were high school sweethearts and had been together since they were sixteen. Fame had made him weird and distant.”
“You got that from TMZ,” said Scott with a smirk.
“For your information, I got that from Cosmo, and it’s true. Donny had changed since he became Mr. Hot Gangster. He was hanging with his new rich friends and ignoring the woman who’d supported him all those years, even when he was in jail.”
“What was he in jail for?” asked Dee.
“Possession of a firearm and grand theft,” said Maya, who seemed to have memorized Donny’s entire life history. She continued with the ticking off on her fingers. “So he left her for another woman—younger and prettier and richer—but not before he got Christy pregnant and left her to deliver the baby all by herself, not even visiting her in the hospital.” She cocked her head. “I mean, if I were Christy I might have killed him, too.”
“So you think she lured him over here to the Gateway Lodge and then killed him?” said Dee. “That doesn’t seem right. She must have known she’d be the prime suspect.”
“She didn’t care! All she wanted was revenge.”
Dee thought about this. Christy had told her Donny regretted his decision to leave her and hook up with Tracy Hall. How the upcoming wedding was a mistake. And how he wanted to be with Christy and his new baby. So why would she kill him if that was true? Unless she’d lied to Dee, like Wilbur Hall had indicated. She needed to talk to Christy again. And this time she would take Jacob along. Tough for a new mother to lie to the face of a fellow new mother. At least that was what she hoped. Or maybe she was just being naive.
Chapter 24
“Where did you put the knife?” asked Tom as he knocked on Christy Cadanet’s door.
“In the safe, where it’s safe,” said Vernon.
“Was that blood on the knife, Mr. Haggis?” asked Vikki.
“Yes, it was, Vikki.”
“Omigod,” said Vikki, eyes shiny.
Then the door opened and Christy appeared. Or at least Tom thought it was Christy. He hadn’t had the pleasure of talking to her yet—that had been Dee’s prerogative. “Mrs. Plauder?” he asked.
Christy’s eyes flickered across the faces of the three people standing before her. “I thought you’d never come,” she said. “I called this in hours ago.”
They stepped into the room and Tom’s eyes immediately were drawn to the window where the fateful incident had taken place, then to the spot where Donny had breathed his last few breaths.
“It’s in there,” Christy told Tom. Without waiting for a reply, she strode into the bathroom.
“What’s in there?” asked Tom, following her.
She laughed a hacking laugh. “Funny.” She pointed at the boiler. “Please fix it. I need hot water for my baby.” Then she walked out again and closed the door, but not before snapping, “And don’t come out before it’s fixed, you hear me?” And slammed the door.
Tom stared at the boiler. It was one of those great mysteries of life how those things operated, exactly. He himself had never managed to make the boilers in his own apartment and later his house, tick, and he held out very little hope that he’d be able to bring this particular boiler back from the dead either.
So he tapped the door gently. “Um, Mrs. Plauder? I’m not—”
The door was yanked open again, and Tom found himself staring into the smiling face of Vikki Mammal. “We straightened it out, Professor. You can come out now.”
“I’m not the plumber, Mrs. Plauder,” said Tom.
“You look like a plumber,” Christy insisted, then turned to Vernon. “So where is the plumber? I need the plumber. That boiler is busted. I can’t give the baby a bath in ice water, you know. It’s a health hazard. How would you feel if you rented a room without hot water
?”
Vernon was nodding even as he took out his phone. “I’ll have this fixed in no time, Mrs. Plauder. And please accept my deepest apologies. The Gateway Lodge is a fine motel and this is not the kind of thing we like to subject our clients to.” He made a slight bow and then started to bark into his phone, momentarily removing himself from the conversation.
“Mr. Haggis is a can-do kind of person, Mrs. Plauder,” said Vikki. “He’ll have that boiler of yours fixed in a jiffy.”
“It’s the least he can do. First my husband gets knifed down and now my boiler is busted. This motel is really doing its best to break me.”
“Mrs. Plauder—we know your real name is Cadanet,” said Tom.
“Of course you do,” said Christy, eyeing him nastily, as if she hadn’t forgiven him for not being a plumber.
“We’re here to ask you a few questions about your ex-husband,” said Tom. “We would like you to take a look at some pictures for us. See if you can identify your husband’s associate. The man he was here to meet?” he added when she stared at him dumbly.
“He was here to meet me,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.
“We have reason to believe he was also here to meet an associate and buy a baseball card from a man named Wilfred Dobosh.”
“What are you talking about?” She was starting to lose her temper again.
Tom smiled as ingratiating a smile as he could muster. It was the smile he’d perfected when dealing with the irate parents of students who’d failed to pass an exam. “Mr. Dobosh just explained the whole thing to us. He is a baseball card collector and has in his possession a rare card that your husband expressed an interest in. Which is why he arranged to meet him here so he could take a look at the card and buy it from him—along with his associate.”
“What’s all this about an associate!” Christy now yelled. “Who are you?”
“My name is Tom Kelly. I have taken it upon myself to run a discreet inquiry into the death of your ex-husband.”
Her eyes were shooting sheets of flame across the room, and Tom was starting to feel distinctly ill at ease. No irate parents had ever looked at him quite like this.
“How much?” Christy demanded.
“Pardon me?”
“How much was Donny going to pay this Mr. Hogwash?”
“Dobosh. They arranged a payment of fifty thousand dollars.”
Christy blinked, then her lips tightened. “That no-good piece of lying skunk!”
“I can assure you that Mr. Dobosh wasn’t lying when he told—”
“Not him—Donny! He told me he wanted to meet me because he wanted to get back together again! That he wanted to blow off the wedding and wanted to come back to me! And all this time he was fixing things to buy a frickin’ baseball card?” She was flapping her arms up and down like a chicken now. Her screaming awoke her baby, who opened her throat and started wailing like a fire alarm.
Meanwhile Vernon had returned to the room, the same man in his wake who’d carried Donny’s body from his snowy grave and into the freezer.
“This is Ravi,” said Vernon. “He’ll fix your boiler, Mrs. Cadanet.”
“Oh, screw the boiler!” Christy screamed, picking up her baby.
“I’ll be in there,” said Ravi with a grin as he quickly moved to the bathroom, a toolkit in hand.
“What’s wrong?” asked Vernon.
“Professor Tom just told her about the baseball card,” said Vikki quietly.
“Did you know about that, Mrs. Cadanet?” asked Vernon. “That your ex-husband was trying to swindle a pensioner out of an extremely valuable Mickey Mantle card?”
“He just told me,” Christy said with a sweep of her arm in Tom’s direction.
“That was not a very nice thing to do, Mrs. Cadanet,” Vernon continued. “He was probably going to split that million dollars with an associate, wasn’t he? So did you know—”
Christy’s head snapped up. “Million dollars! Nutty professor over here just said fifty thousand!”
“Well, your ex-husband offered Mr. Dobosh fifty thousand for the card, even though he must have known full well that this card was worth at least a million, a fact of which Mr. Dobosh wasn’t apprised and therefore—”
Christy was bug-eyed now. “Mothersmucker!”
“Mrs. Cadanet, please,” said Tom.
“Son of a bucket!”
Tom cleared his throat.
“Shit on a stick!”
“Mrs. Cadanet,” said Vernon. “Can I call you Christy?”
“Barbra Streisand!”
Vikki laughed, but when Christy turned on her with a furious expression in her eyes, she quickly muttered an apology.
“All this time he was out here to cheat some pensioner out of his money? Gah! He told me he’d changed his ways. Found religion. Babbled on and on about redemption. Begged me to give him a second chance.” She shook her head. “Holy crap am I dumb.”
“I’m so sorry, Christy,” said Tom.
“Oh, go lick a duck,” she said viciously, and turned away, rocking her baby, who was still wailing up a storm, no doubt feeling the strain from being so rudely awakened.
Tom looked at Vernon. Vernon looked at Vikki. Vikki looked at Tom. The three of them looked at Christy, still staring out the window. Tom was wondering how to bring the conversation back around to Donny’s known associates but was momentarily at a loss.
Just then, the door to the bathroom opened and the handyman stepped out. “Boiler’s all set, ma’am,” he muttered, his eyes bright and merry, then quickly stalked off in the direction of the door and was gone. And in from the same door came Dee, cradling Jacob.
She seemed surprised to find a room full of people. Tom was even more surprised, though, but immediately saw what a great opportunity this was. If anyone could talk a woman with a baby down from the proverbial ledge it was another woman with a baby.
He gestured to Dee to come in and so she did. He then gestured frantically to Christy, her back still turned, then gestured just as frantically to the stack of driver’s licenses in his hand and handed them to Dee.
She frowned down at them, then frowned at Tom, then frowned at Vernon, who stood rocking back on his heels, his hands locked behind his back, and Vikki, who was chewing her bottom lip. It was, as any general would have readily agreed, an impasse.
“One of these men is Donny’s associate,” whispered Tom, pointing at the IDs. “The reason they were at the Gateway Lodge was to swindle a pensioner out of a very valuable baseball card. Donny had offered fifty thousand for a card worth at least a million.”
Dee’s eyes widened. “No shit.”
“Oh, will you two stop whispering,” said Christy, turning. “I can hear every word.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” said Dee.
“My husband was not a very nice man,” said Christy, a sad look in her eyes now. She looked up and when she saw Dee cradling Jacob, a mirror image of herself, she seemed to galvanize herself. “So you think he was killed over some stupid baseball card?”
“Yes, I do,” said Tom.
Christy hesitated, then held out her free hand. “Let me take a look at those.”
“Let me hold her for a moment,” Dee suggested.
Christy handed over the baby and the moment she did, the wailing stopped.
Donny’s ex-wife quickly flipped through the stack. “No, no, no, no,” she muttered as she went along. Then suddenly she paused. “I know him. He was at the trial. He and Donny were in the same gang.”
Tom, Vernon and Vikki drew closer and Tom saw that she was pointing at the picture of a square-faced man with a cleft chin, a handlebar mustache and deep-set eyes. The driver’s license indicated his name was Ernie Saddling.
“That’s not his real name,” Christy said, confirming Tom’s suspicions. “I don’t remember his last name but Donny called him Marco. They were friends.”
“So you met?”
“I never ‘met’ any of Donny’s friends
. I saw them at his trial. When he was in that gang we broke up. We only got back together when he promised he’d go straight. A week later he was arrested.” She shook her head. “I should have listened to my dad and stayed far away from Donny. He was a real charmer but he never could stop lying and cheating.”
Tom handed the copy to Vernon, who gave it to Vikki. “He’s in 54C,” said the latter.
“Are you sure?” asked Vernon.
“Absolutely. I never forget a room number.”
Chapter 25
Vernon wasn’t entirely sure about how to proceed. He’d dealt with irate customers before, and even violent ones. When they really turned nasty he usually called in Ravi and Beau, who were big, strong fellows and could handle any would-be brawlers and kick them out on their ear. Only once in his thirty-year career had he been forced to call in Chief Boelk and that was when he’d come face to face with a thief who’d broken into the office safe.
Now, though, he was going up against an actual member of the Bloods—or was it the Crips? A violent man with undoubtedly violent tendencies—maybe even in the possession of a firearm or other weapon he could turn on his assailants in a heartbeat.
“This is the time we call in SWAT,” he told Tom as they gathered outside room 54C.
“SWAT won’t come,” said Tom. “It’s up to us, Vernon.”
“And us,” said Vikki, who’d refused to stand down, insisting instead in taking down this dangerous-looking criminal who’d killed once and was probably ready to kill again.
“Maybe I should get Ralph,” said Dee, who’d returned Jacob to the room and had returned with what looked like a snow shovel.
“Where did you get that?” asked Vernon, curious.
“It was in the shower.”
Vernon gave Vikki a questioning look, but she gave him a look back that said, ‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t put it there, boss.’ Nor had she. Probably one of the guests had dragged it upstairs and the cleaner who’d done the room hadn’t wanted to drag it downstairs again.