“This ex-employee told me about the basketball deal. Said it was why Aregis left Pensacola. The guy wasn’t invited to go with him. Claims he wouldn’t have gone if he had been. He said Coastal Capital lost some big clients recently and wasn’t doing as well as Aregis would have you believe. He doubted his old boss had the cash to put up a big chunk for the NBA franchise.”
“Then where would he get the money?”
“One of his current clients, probably.”
“Aregis told Jill that he had some Nashville clients, but he wouldn’t give any names. Do you think your guy would have any information on clients from up here?”
“I’ll ask him. It may take a couple of days, though. He was going to Tallahassee for a meeting of some state agency.”
“Okay. Let me know if you get any names. Our folks are getting antsy. Anything else we should know?”
“He said dealing with Aregis could be risky business. While he’s normally all smiles, glad-handing everybody he meets, he hides a nasty temper that can explode if he’s crossed. He’s the get even type.”
“Thanks, Red. We’ll keep that in mind.”
Could Arnold Wechsel have learned something about Louie Aregis that would have prompted the venture capitalist to commit murder? Was it the information Arnold intended to pass along that would blow my mind? We had heard nothing to indicate the young man even knew Aregis. Clearly, we had a lot more digging to do.
I found Jill at her computer scampering about the web. I looked over her shoulder and saw the name “Columbo.”
“What have we here, babe?”
“I’m onto Miss Nikki’s trail,” she said. “I should have something shortly. What did Red have to report?”
I told her about the former Coastal Capital employee’s comments.
“Sounds like I had Aregis figured out pretty well, huh?”
“You did good. Now if Red can identify some of Aregis’s Nashville clients, we should have some decent leads to check out.”
She typed in a new search term and looked around. “Are you thinking one of them could be the black sheep in this deal?”
“It’s a possibility.”
I went back to my desk and a few minutes later Jill dropped a sheet of paper in front of me.
“Nicole graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis. It’s a small Presbyterian school, used to be called Southwestern. Her parents are Vincent and Belinda Columbo. He works at the FedEx headquarters in Memphis. Haven’t found anything yet on mom.”
“Why would a girl who graduated from college in Memphis come to Nashville to work at a restaurant?” I asked.
“We need to ask about that, if she agrees to talk to us.”
“If she doesn’t volunteer to talk,” I said, “Mother McKenzie may have to put on a full court press.”
Jill went back to her computer, and I put through a call to Jeff Price at Ramstein Air Base. He had just come from interrogating a kid caught with a stash of cocaine.
“You’d think they’d know better,” he said. “The Germans are a little lax about marijuana, but they won’t tolerate coke.”
“Some things don’t change, Jeff. I called to let you know what we’ve come up with on that Saint Christopher’s medal. We tracked down a girl named Nikki Columbo who’s admitted to being the N. Columbo engraved on the back.”
I told him about our encounter at the restaurant.
“Arnold’s mother got a letter from him today that was mailed the day he died,” Jeff said. “He told her he’d met a girl recently that he had really fallen for. He gave the name Nikki. But he added that a problem had cropped up he hoped wouldn’t ruin things for them.”
“Did he elaborate on the problem?”
“That was all he said.”
“It may be why Nikki was reluctant to talk to us.”
“Think she’ll open up under pressure?”
“We may have to find out. PI’s don’t have the same leverage as OSI agents, though. We have to go about it with a little more finesse.”
“I’ll bet you can finesse the devil out of ’em, Colonel.” The cackle he let out was so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear.
Jill looked across at me when I finished the call. “That was some laugh. I could hear it all the way over here.”
“Agent Price has a distinctive manner of demonstrating his glee, that’s for sure. But he also provided some interesting news.”
I relayed the message Arnold had written home.
“I also have a bit of news,” she said. “Nikki Columbo’s mother was Belinda Zicarelli. There are some Zicarellis in the Nashville phone book.”
That gave me an idea. “Let’s look into that restaurant in Green Hills. I’ll see who owns it. You check on the real estate.”
A couple of years ago, I had an all-too-brief tenure as an investigator for the District Attorney. It ended disastrously after my off-the-record comments about a Metro Murder Squad detective wound up on page one of the morning paper. I still had several good contacts around the courthouse, however, and it didn’t take long to learn that the restaurant was owned by a corporation headquartered in Orlando.
I walked over to Jill’s desk. “No local connection on the ownership.”
She looked up. “Well, according to the county property records, the real estate is owned by Zicarelli Properties.”
“There’s our connection.” I folded my arms with a satisfied grin. “Now we need to find out who is behind Zicarelli Properties and what relation they are to Nikki Columbo.”
“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Jill said.
I agreed. It was all part of that basic gumshoe work that I had alluded to in our talk with Brad Smotherman. But something else about this investigation was bugging me, something that lay hidden back in a dark corner of my mind. I couldn’t spring it loose. That was one of the hazards of creeping up in the senior citizen ranks. Forgetting little details became easier and easier. I was confident something would trigger the memory. I just hoped it would happen sooner rather than later.
The phone rang, and Jill answered it.
“Hello, Phil,” she said, then, after a moment, “Well, if you run across any bodies this morning, they should be well preserved. It’s cold as the dickens out there.”
As she listened, her expression grew more serious. “That’s awful,” she said. “Pity the poor mothers. They’re always hit the hardest. Here, let me put Greg on. He can tell you what we’ve learned.”
I took the phone. “What’s awful?” I asked.
“Couple of kids shot over around Jefferson Street. Drug related, as usual. What was Jill talking about?”
“We found the girl who gave the Saint Christopher’s medal to Wechsel.”
“Who is she?”
“Nicole Columbo, a Memphis girl who works at a restaurant in Green Hills.”
“Was she able to shed any light on my case?”
“We haven’t been able to sit down with her yet. That’s on our agenda for today.”
I probably should have told him about the local connection, but I didn’t want him scaring the hell out of Nikki, maybe driving her farther into her shell. I had high hopes that Jill could break down her defenses. Anyway, I knew he wasn’t telling us all he knew, so why not reciprocate?
“If she knows anything that’ll help my case, pass it along,” Phil said.
“Will do. Have you come up with anything new?”
“We did one interview that put a damper on the gambling theory. Talked to some Superspeedway pit crew guys Wechsel had been cozying up to. Seems Arnold had mentioned something about gambling on the races. They warned him he could be barred from the pits if he so much as talked about gambling around there. According to the guys, he apparently took it to heart and never mentioned it again.”
Maybe so, as far as gambling on the races, I thought. But Dick Ullery had talked about other kinds of gambling. What had Arnold Wechsel really been into?
After I checked the phone book a
nd found no Zicarelli Properties, or anything close to it, I called a Realtor friend and asked about the company. She’d never heard of it, either. She said the account might be handled by a property rental firm. She’d ask around and let me know.
In her earlier data search, Jill had found Nikki Columbo’s address at an apartment in the Green Hills area. When she looked for a telephone, she turned up a blank, either listed or unlisted. We guessed Nikki used only a cell phone, as we’d discovered many young people did these days. We tried a database where you could find cell phone numbers but came up empty-handed. She could have a new phone that wasn’t in the database yet. If we didn’t hear from her soon, we’d have to try catching her at home. We needed some answers.
Chapter 18
With the mercury climbing incrementally during the morning, a steady drizzle replaced the flurries. I held the umbrella for Jill but got a freezing shower before I could make it behind the wheel. We found the Bull and Boar Steakhouse in a building with a rustic look hardly reflective of pictures I’d seen of the plush interior. A couple of dozen cars already occupied the parking area. The first thing that caught my eye was a dark blue Cadillac Escalade sitting at the right of the restaurant’s entrance. When I pointed it out to Jill, her lips parted and her face took on a look of total dismay.
“There’s a black one in that row of cars over there,” she said, pointing.
Complications. Even more disturbing, as I viewed the car in the daylight, I didn’t feel all that certain this was what we had seen on Chandler Road Sunday night. I was aware, however, that first impressions usually turned out the best.
A couple of animated young women at a table set up near the entrance got us registered, collected our money, and gave us badges with “Greg” and “Jill” in large letters. We wandered into the dining area, where a group of men and women clustered around tables of snacks, mostly of the chip and dip variety. A waitress approached us and asked for our drink orders.
“I’ll have a Scotch and soda,” I said. “What about you, babe?”
“A Coke will be fine for me.”
Most of the people appeared younger than our age bracket, some wearing typical business attire, others more casual. Jill checked the crowd to make sure Louie Aregis wasn’t among them. Before we reached the snack tables, a smiling young man in a dress shirt and tie but no jacket intercepted us.
“Hi, Greg and Jill, I’m Bob. Welcome to Contacts Nashville. I don’t believe you’ve been with us before. What’s your business?”
“McKenzie Investigations,” I said. “We’re private investigators.”
“Great! I think you’re the first ones we’ve had from that field. Circulate around, introduce yourselves, and see if you can’t drum up some business. You may already know some of the folks.”
I had been checking faces and comparing them to the mental picture of Fred Ricketts I had stored up after studying a photo we’d found online. I turned to Bob.
“Is that Fred Ricketts from P and S Software in the gray suit with the wine-colored tie?”
He looked around. “Right, that’s Fred. Want me to introduce you?”
“Sure, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Trouble? You jest. That’s what we’re here for. Come on.”
We followed him to where Ricketts stood beside a table, swishing a chip through a bowl of pale green dip. As I expected, the young man was an imposing figure, even larger than Arnold Wechsel.
“Fred,” Bob said, “meet a couple of new folks, Jill and Greg McKenzie. They’re in the private investigation business.”
“Nice meeting you,” Ricketts said. He dusted his hand with a napkin before reaching out to shake ours. “Don’t believe I’ve met a PI before. I’m afraid all I know about your profession is what I’ve read in mystery books.”
“Then we probably don’t fit the picture you have,” I said with a grin. “It isn’t nearly as exciting and glamorous as the mystery writers would have you believe.”
“You’re in the software business,” Jill said. “We do a lot of our work on the computer. Databases are our bread and butter.”
The youthful looking executive nodded. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’m sure you’re right. Maybe I should look into developing PI software.”
The waitress arrived with our drinks. Jill accepted hers and turned back to Ricketts. “You’d find plenty of competition out there. We subscribe to several different databases.”
I handed the waitress a ten-dollar bill as I took my glass. “The ones we use have millions of facts about millions of people. You’d be surprised at how much information there is out there, even on people who try hard to leave no trail.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “Some of my hacker friends in college could dig out about anything you were capable of imagining. And from places you wouldn’t think it possible.”
I had been sizing up the young man as we talked, and I was impressed. He had alert blue eyes that left the impression they would miss nothing. He seemed to absorb every word and run it through his mental computer in search of a correlation with something that already dwelled there. With the humility of a monk, the smooth delivery of an actor, and the casual familiarity of an old friend, he could have charmed a Scrooge. If this was the man who had stalked us, we faced a formidable opponent.
“I heard you had a passion for auto racing,” I said. “Are you involved with the Nashville Superspeedway?”
“No. My interest is solely with IndyCar racing. I’m part-owner of a car on the circuit. We haven’t won the Indy 500 yet, but we’re hoping.”
“I understand that’s a pretty pricey sport.”
“You’re right about that. But it’s a thrill a minute.”
“Have you done any race driving?”
“Just enough to get hooked on it. I had a friend in college who owned a dragster. I raced it a few times.”
I grinned. “That must have really stirred your juices.”
He nodded. “Did you know a top fuel dragster can go from zero to 320 miles an hour in under five seconds?”
Jill stared, her eyes widening. “That’s unbelievable.”
“It’s faster acceleration than you’d get in a space shuttle launch,” he said.
“We read where you were involved in this effort to bring an NBA team to Nashville,” Jill said. “That must be exciting, too.”
He shrugged. “We still have a lot of hurdles to jump. I’m excited about the prospects, though. Tell me about what you folks do. What kind of cases do you get involved in?”
I held up my fingers and ticked off a few things. “We handle insurance fraud, particularly involving disability, do background investigations, look for missing persons or missing heirs, work on digging up evidence for attorneys.”
“I’ve always heard PI’s went around snooping on cheating spouses.”
“We don’t get involved in domestic relations,” Jill said. “There’s enough bitterness in this world without us getting involved in perpetuating it.”
“Somehow I find that refreshing,” he said as a big man with as big a voice as Ricketts stepped up to greet him.
The newcomer monopolized the conversation, and after a few minutes we moved on to join another group. It was soon time for lunch. Our table proved productive as we met a contractor and a retailer who turned out to be business prospects. We swapped business cards and talked about ways we might be of help, like doing background investigations or tracking down missing property. During the conversation, I mentioned our chat with Fred Ricketts. One of the men told us he was a close friend and had worked with Ricketts on a project for Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.
“Fred knows how to get those kids laughing,” he said.
“How does he do it?” Jill asked.
“He’s something of an amateur magician.”
“What kind of tricks does he do?”
“Simple stuff. Sleight of hand.”
“Nothing fancy?” I asked.
/> “Not with the kids. Now if you want to see fancy tricks, you need to go out to his farm.”
“Where’s that?”
“Over in Wilson County. He lines up beer cans on the fence and goes down the line—bang, bang, bang! And with a pistol. In the military he’d be a sharpshooter.”
I filed that away for future reference.
When the session ended, Jill and I lingered inside until Fred Ricketts headed out to his car.
As we watched, he hurried through the rain straight for the new-looking black Escalade.
Chapter 19
Rather than mess with the umbrella, I dashed out to the car, winding up with a good dousing in the process. I started my Grand Cherokee, which, by comparison to Rickett’s Escalade, didn’t appear nearly so grand, and pulled up to the covered entrance for Jill.
“Do you think we should add Fred Ricketts to our suspect list?” she asked as she buckled her seatbelt.
“He’s a troubling fellow,” I said as I headed toward the street. The wipers clacked noisily. The drizzle had mutated into a real shower, and I was surprised it hadn’t turned back into snow. “If he was intent on convincing us that he’d never heard of us before, he did a great job as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’d have to agree. What about the Cadillac?”
I steered toward the interstate. “As I’ve often said, I don’t believe in coincidences. On the other hand, I’m reluctant to tag him as a suspect based on only one questionable sighting.”
“How about the race car angle? Could it have any connection with Arnold Wechsel?”
“I doubt it. Arnold was obsessed with NASCAR. These Indy cars are in a different league. I read where they cost over a million bucks.”
“That should separate the men from the boys.”
“It would certainly separate the men from their money.” I flinched as an eighteen-wheeler passed on the left, kicking a dense shower of water our way. I felt like I was like driving under a waterfall. “The one thing I found troubling was the tale about Ricketts’ prowess with a pistol.”
“That’s certainly a concern,” Jill said, “but I’m more bothered by how much credence to put into that casual attitude. Ricketts could’ve been intentionally misleading us, you know. He’d have made a great Pied Piper. He struck me as a smooth operator in the same class as his colleague, Louie Aregis.”
A Sporting Murder (Greg McKenzie Mysteries Book 5) Page 10