Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery

by Steve Hockensmith

Burby blinked at me.

  “The Former Co-Worker,” I said.

  “Oh.” Burby’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he watched me closely as he went on. “We estimate that Riggs had been dead between thirty and thirty-four hours.”

  I Streeped up a blank face even as I worked out the math—and didn’t like the answer.

  Bill had been killed Sunday night. The night Marsha had slept over.

  I was Marsha’s alibi.

  “So how did you know to come talk to me?” I said to change the subject. “TFCW again?”

  “That’s right. Riggs had mentioned you a few times. He thought you were manipulating his wife—trying to steal her from him.”

  I scoffed. “If he was worried about someone stealing her, he should’ve tried treating her decently.”

  I heard soft, shushing footsteps behind me, and I turned to find Clarice shuffling up the hall in sweatpants, T-shirt, and fuzzy bunny slippers.

  “What’s going on?” she asked me sleepily.

  She looked a lot less sleepy when she got close enough to see Burby. The man might have looked like a skinny high school senior trying on one of his dad’s suits, but Clarice would know a cop when she saw one.

  “William Riggs has been murdered,” Burby told her.

  He was still trying the shock tactics. This time, though, he didn’t get any shock at all.

  “Well, I certainly hope you find the culprit, Officer,” Clarice said. “He deserves a medal.”

  Burby glared at her. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  Clarice shrugged. “Riggs was harsh. Just ask his wife.”

  I widened my eyes ever so slightly, trying to send Clarice a silent message.

  Shut.

  Up.

  She didn’t get it.

  “Hey, now Marsha doesn’t have to bother divorcing him,” she said. “Bonus!”

  Burby jotted something in his notebook, then turned to me and jerked a thumb at Clarice.

  “Who is this?”

  “My little sister,” I said.

  Burby glanced back at Clarice—willowy, tall, black Clarice—then shook his head and scowled.

  “I’m not being a wiseass,” I said. “She’s my half sister.”

  Burby turned to Clarice again. “So you live here?”

  Clarice waved a hand at her bunny slippers. “What does it look like?”

  “And when was the last time you saw Marsha Riggs?”

  “Yesterday morning. She’d spent the night on our couch.”

  “And whose idea was that?”

  “Whose idea was it?” Clarice looked surprised by the question. It was finally dawning on her that Marsha was actually a suspect.

  Too bad Biddle was long dead by the time she’d been born. She could’ve used some of his acting lessons.

  “It was Alanis’s idea,” she said.

  “Just like I told you two minutes ago,” I said to Burby.

  If someone’s going to try to catch me in a lie, I at least want them to be subtle about it.

  Burby ignored me.

  “Did you notice Mrs. Riggs going out anytime in the night?” he asked Clarice. “Or talking to anyone on the phone?”

  “No. I didn’t notice anything. I was asleep.”

  Burby finally turned back to me again. “How about you? Did you see Mrs. Riggs talking to anyone on the phone?”

  “No. And I didn’t see her handing anyone a baseball bat or a briefcase full of small unmarked bills either.”

  The left corner of Burby’s thin lips curled ever so slightly upward.

  He wasn’t appreciating my wit. I was finally losing my patience with him, and he was enjoying it.

  “All right. I think that’s all for now.” He pulled out a business card and handed it to me. “If Marsha Riggs contacts you, call me immediately. And don’t try to contact her. Understood?”

  I took the card but didn’t say anything.

  Burby’s lip curled up even more.

  He turned toward the door, then immediately spun around again.

  “Oh—and one more thing.”

  I’d have thought he was doing a Columbo imitation if he’d been old enough to know who Columbo was. I think he was really just trying to annoy me some more.

  “Do you have contact information for Mrs. Riggs? An address or a cell phone number?”

  “She’s staying at the Desert Breeze Motel in Sedona. Room 254. She doesn’t have a cell phone.”

  Burby scribbled in his notebook, then turned to go again.

  “Detective,” I said. “Marsha Riggs is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable person. Please…go easy. This could tear her apart.”

  Burby didn’t bother looking back at me till he was halfway through the door.

  “Is that a psychic insight?” he said.

  “No. Just common sense. And common decency.”

  Burby looked amused to hear the words “common decency” coming out of my mouth.

  He gave me the verbal equivalent of wadding up my words and dropping them into a trash can.

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  Then he left.

  The second the door was closed, Clarice gave me her one-word evaluation of the man. It rhymed with glass mole.

  “Yeah. A big one,” I said.

  “So…who do you think did it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t know who had brained Bill Riggs with a baseball bat, but I did know who had probably set him up for it.

  Me.

  And so the crusade begins. The conquering hero rides to war atop a mighty steed who is undercover as Batman. But what’s that hanging at the top of our hero’s trusty battle baguette—victory laurels? When nothing’s actually happened yet? It looks like someone’s galloping off with a little too much confidence in himself…and I don’t mean the horse.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  I’d engineered the bust that put Bill Riggs in jail. If he’d pissed off the wrong person there and got himself killed for it, it was my fault.

  I’d framed Bill Riggs for drug possession. If he’d been murdered by some addict who’d come sniffing around for meth the man didn’t have, that would be my fault, too.

  And if Marsha had actually killed the SOB…well, I don’t know if that would be my fault, but I sure as hell needed to do something about it.

  I stepped to the window of the White Magic Five and Dime and watched Burby getting into an Impala that was so boxy, plain, and gray, all it needed was a neon sign on the roof flashing unmarked police car.

  My mouth was speaking before my brain even knew it had a plan.

  “I’m going for a little drive,” the mouth said.

  “No, you’re not,” said Clarice.

  I glanced back at her.

  She was giving me a don’t-kid-a-kidder look.

  I didn’t want to kid her either. Didn’t want to lie or dismiss her. Didn’t want to be my mother. Yet there was only so much I could tell her.

  So I told her.

  “Allow me to rephrase,” I said. “I am going to get in Mom’s Caddy and drive away quickly and do things that would make me a spectacularly bad role model, which is why I’m going to refuse to take you along. That better?”

  Clarice nodded approvingly.

  “Much,” she said.

  I got in Mom’s Caddy and drove away quickly. Quickly enough, in fact, that I caught up to Burby’s gray Impala within a minute. I followed it until it hit State Route 89 and turned south.

  Burby was heading toward Sedona—and the Desert Breeze Motel. For at least the next hour, I could be sure he wouldn’t be in Berdache.

  That was all I needed to see.

  I swung the Cadillac around and sped back to town.

  I found Clarice and Ceecee upstairs eating cereal out of giant mixing bowls. Ceecee wasn’t quite as goth as usual—she had on her usual combat boots and black-on-black-on-black clothes, but she hadn’t bothered with any
black eyeliner or lipstick. There was no need to get so fancy just for an appointment with Cap’n Crunch, and obviously she’d been in a hurry to get to our place.

  I’d been gone less than fifteen minutes.

  “That was fast,” I said to Clarice, with a jerk of the head at her girlfriend.

  “I was about to say the same thing to you,” Clarice said.

  “I’m just passing through. I’ve still got plenty of bad role modeling to do.”

  I headed into my bedroom and opened the closet.

  “We have a theory!” Ceecee called out as I picked out an outfit—sleek gray pantsuit, white blouse, clunky but comfortable shoes.

  It was the shoes that would be the subliminal clue.

  The pantsuit would say “real estate agent” or “attorney.” The shoes would say “cop.”

  Just in case people didn’t get the hint, I grabbed a notebook and a pen and jammed them into a bulky shoulder bag.

  “Hey! Don’t you want to hear our idea?” Clarice said.

  I started getting undressed.

  “Hit me,” I said.

  “Suicide,” said Ceecee.

  “We think Riggs was trying to frame Marsha,” said Clarice.

  That stopped me mid-zip.

  “Suicide?” I said. “By baseball bat?”

  “Oh,” Clarice and Ceecee said together.

  “Is that how he was killed?” said Clarice.

  “So it seems. His head was bashed in.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  I went back to getting undressed.

  “It still could have been suicide,” Clarice eventually announced. “Riggs was a psycho. If anyone could bash in his own head, it’d be him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But was he psycho enough to bash in his own head and then hide the murder weapon afterward?”

  There was another silence.

  This one went on for a long, long time.

  When I came out of the bedroom, I found Clarice and Ceecee pensively eating their now-crunchless Cap’n Crunch.

  Clarice looked me up and down.

  The down brought her to my shoes.

  “And where are you off to, Officer?” she said to me.

  “Do you really need to ask?”

  Clarice thought it over, then nodded and went back to her cereal.

  “Let me know if you come up with any more theories. I like yours better than mine,” I said as I headed down the stairs. “And you two had better be in school when I get back.”

  “Wait. What? I don’t get it,” I heard Ceecee say as I left. “Where is she going?”

  “Thuh thene uh thuh thime,” Clarice said through a mouthful of soggy cereal.

  The scene of the crime.

  1703 O’Hara Drive.

  The Riggs’s home.

  I parked the Caddy across the street and watched the house for a few minutes. There were no police cars or vans out front. The cops and evidence techs had wrapped up and left, leaving no sign they’d been there except for a big X of yellow crime scene tape over the front door.

  I got out of the car and marched crisply toward the house. When I reached the driveway, I began circling around Bill Riggs’s Camaro.

  I pulled out my notebook, flipped over a page, and began writing.

  I’m looking at a car, I wrote. I’m trying to seem official. Sooner or later, a neighborhood busybody is going to approach me. He or she will have questions. He or she will also have answers. La la la. Da da da. Scribble scribble scribble. You are out of Coke, soy dogs, and mustard. Swing by the grocery store when you have a chance. My hand is starting to cramp. I hope the busybody doesn’t take much lon

  I stopped writing.

  There were footsteps behind me.

  I flipped the front page of the notebook back down—no use exposing “scribble scribble scribble” to the world—and turned.

  A thirtyish, bushy-bearded, bespectacled man was coming across the street toward me. He was wearing black jeans and red Chuck Taylors and a bright green cardigan over a plaid shirt. He looked like every hipster tech nerd in every cell phone commercial of the last five years.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “I couldn’t help noticing you out here.”

  I said nothing to that. I just looked at the man expectantly, not friendly but not unfriendly either. All business.

  “Uhhh…are you with the police?” the man said.

  “No,” I told him.

  I could let my shoes say I was a cop, but I wasn’t about to. Because shoes don’t get charged with impersonating an officer.

  The man wilted. “Oh.”

  “I’m an insurance investigator,” I said. Because there’s no law against impersonating an insurance investigator, for people or shoes.

  The man perked up.

  For his purpose—gossip—an insurance investigator would be almost as good as a cop. It’s practically a private eye!

  “I’m Paul. I live right over there.” The man jerked a thumb at a cute little ranch house across the street. “I didn’t see anything, but I’d be happy to help. What happened to Bill, anyway? I heard he’d been in jail for a while. Does it have something to do with that or does it look more like a random crime? A home invasion? We’re not really used to that kind of thing around here. It’s usually pretty quiet.”

  I can tell, I almost said.

  The guy was so desperate for excitement I was surprised he hadn’t brought a bowl of popcorn and a lawn chair with him.

  “The police haven’t come to any conclusions yet,” I said. “What time did they show up this morning?”

  “A little after four. I heard a car pull up in a big hurry, so I got out of bed and looked out the window.”

  Paul glanced down at my notebook, looking disappointed.

  I lifted it up and started writing on it.

  “A little after four,” I said as I wrote.

  “Yeah. Exactly. There was a big, bald lumberjack-looking guy on the Riggs’s front porch. Even from across the street I could tell he was freaked out. He said something, pointed to the front door, then kind of stumbled off into the driveway while one of the cops went inside. The guy obviously didn’t want to see what was in there again.”

  “Why do you say he looked like a lumberjack?”

  “He was in a flannel shirt and jeans and big work boots—you know the look. He wasn’t really a lumberjack, though.”

  “Oh?” I said, as if this was quite the revelation.

  Berdache is in the middle of a desert. There aren’t many lumberjacks around.

  Paul nodded, looking pleased with himself.

  “There was a big work truck in the driveway. A pickup with two-by-fours and stuff in the back. When I went out to talk to some of my neighbors—people started kind of milling around when more cop cars showed up—I noticed writing on the side: ‘Huggins Construction.’”

  That was a revelation.

  Riggs sold timeshares for a golf resort outside Sedona. The management company had one of those generic bullshit names—Excelsior Enterprises Inc. or Superlative Hospitality Industries or something like that. I couldn’t remember what the name was, but I did know what it wasn’t: Huggins Construction.

  “The Former Co-Worker” didn’t seem to work for the same company Riggs had. What kind of co-worker is that?

  I wrote down “??Huggins Construction??” while Paul went on describing the comings and goings at the Riggs’s house.

  Cops came. Then more cops came. Then “some CSI-looking guys” came. Then “a coroner-looking lady” came.

  Then Bill Riggs left. In a body bag.

  Before the cops left, too, they’d spread out to the surrounding houses to ask if anyone had seen or heard anything suspicious the past few days. The neighborhood consensus, according to Paul: nope.

  “Had you ever seen the Huggins Construction truck there before?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “How about a highway patrol cruiser?
Have you noticed one on the block lately?”

  “Come to think of it, yeah, I have. Two or three times this week.”

  “Did the police ask about it?”

  “No. It didn’t come up.”

  “Do you happen to remember the name of the officer who interviewed you?”

  “Sure. Bublé. Or maybe it was Beiber. Something like that, anyway. He looked like he belonged on the cover of Tiger Beat.”

  “Detective Burby.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Paul said. “So was the highway patrol staking the Riggs place out? Do they even do that kind of thing?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss it,” I said.

  Because I didn’t know. But I meant to find out soon.

  “What else did Burby ask about?” I said.

  “Whether I’d seen Riggs’s wife around, whether I’d seen her and Riggs fighting, whether there’d been any trouble with the neighbors—that kind of thing.”

  “And you said…?”

  “No, I haven’t seen Marsha in weeks, and no, I never saw them fighting, though they never looked happy when I saw them, that’s for sure. And yes, there’d been trouble with the neighbors—or one neighbor, anyway. It probably would’ve been more if Riggs wasn’t so standoffish. I lived across the street from him for two years and I don’t think he said more than five words to me the whole time. He was the kind of guy you wave to who doesn’t wave back.”

  “So who was the trouble with?”

  Paul pointed at another ranch house across the street—a drab gray one with a bed of rocks for a lawn.

  “Tom Nord,” Paul said. “He used to let his cat wander around the neighborhood. Riggs would get pissed because it crapped in his yard sometimes. Of course, it crapped in everybody’s yard, but Riggs was the only one to get bent out of shape about it. I guess it was an excuse to stomp over and yell at somebody, so he took it. And Tom yelled right back. And the fourth or fifth time Riggs brought over a bunch of the cat’s turds—he’d scoop these, like, football-size dookies into a plastic bag and try to hand it to Tom—he said if he ever caught that cat, he was going to break its neck.”

  Paul paused for dramatic effect.

  “Then, on Friday, Son of Kong vanished,” he said.

  It didn’t have quite the effect Paul intended.

  “Uhhh…Son of Kong?” I said.

  “The cat.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was big.”