“And the blood thrown on the constable and the others when the ghost was in the yard?” Hatch went on.
“Was from a dog. A test I made in the drugstore showed that. It was a desperate effort to drive the villagers away and keep them away. The ghost cat and the tying of the watchman to his bed were easily done.”
All sat silent for a time. At length Mr. Weston arose, thanked the scientist for the recovery of the jewels, bade them all good-night and was about to go out. Mechanically Hatch was following. At the door he turned back for the last question.
“How was it that the shot the constable fired didn’t break the mirror?”
“Because he was nervous and the bullet struck the door beside the mirror,” was the reply. “I dug it out with a knife. Good-night.”
MESSAGE IN THE SAND, by John L. French
They wait until just before the sun goes down, when most of the swimmers and sunbathers have gone in and all that’s left on the beach are a few surfers hoping to catch a decent wave or two. It’s then they come out, old men mostly, equipped with sand pail shovels and plastic cups, a hip pack around their waist, and most importantly, a metal detector, the magic wand with which they hope to find buried treasure.
For some it’s exercise, a way of taking a walk without it seeming a waste of time. For others it’s a way out of the condo, their time alone without the bother of the wife and grandkids, a peaceful time between the activities of the day and yet another round of miniature golf. But some have bought into the dream, the fantasy that somewhere buried beneath the sand amid lost keys, soda cans and dropped pennies lies a real find, something worth, well, maybe not a fortune, but a thing to show off, a story to tell about how one day they found something marvelous.
Each one has his own idea of what that marvelous object would be. To one it’s a rare coin, carried by someone as a good luck piece until he lost it, and the good luck waits to be passed on to the finder. Another’s on the lookout for jewelry—a necklace or a ring. For George Balinski it was a watch. Not just any watch, but a Rolex. One day, he would think as he walked barefoot in the sand, one day I’d like to find such a watch. I’d clean it up and put it on, and it would run perfectly. And whenever somebody saw it on my wrist, he’d say, “Nice watch,” and I’d say, “Found it on the beach, just lying there waiting for me.”
But George was realist enough to know that fantasies were meant to be enjoyed for themselves alone, and not because they’d one day come true. When he was younger he’d had lots of fantasies—of what kind of job he’d have, what kind of wife and house. None of them came true either, but he was happy nonetheless.
What George forgot was that sometime wishes do come true. He and the wife had had the condo for two years now. It was a nice place on 40th St. with two bedrooms and a foldout sofa in the living room, plenty of room for everybody. And of course, everybody was there. And to get away from them all—the wife, the kids, their kids—George started taking the metal detector out in the morning as well.
On the day it happened, George was just walking along, enjoying what to him was quiet—the cry of the gulls, the sound of the surf, the occasional ping that told him his detector was working. Two nice looking young women passed him on the beach. One of them smiled at him. And just as his thoughts of buried treasure gave way to a different kind of fantasy, the pings of his metal detector got louder and more frequent. He’d found something. George stopped, got out his shovel and dug into the sand.
Never had George expected to find anything of real worth in the sands of Ocean City, Maryland. And he certainly never expected to actually find a Rolex. But sometimes a wish comes true, and on that day, it did for George. But you have to be careful for what you wish, and how you wish. For even though George had always dreamed of finding a Rolex, he had never imagined that when he did, it would still be attached to the arm of its former owner.
And it was just the arm, the left arm of an adult male. At first it was thought that arm had come from the victim of a boating accident or shark attack, but no accident had been reported or any shark sighted. It was only when the investigator from the Medical Examiner’s Office observed that the arm appeared to have been severed by a very sharp blade that the State Police crime scene technician said aloud what everyone had been thinking.
She looked first at the spot from which George had exhumed the arm, then up and down the beach, then at the spot again. And then she asked, “If the arm was buried here, where’s the rest of him?”
Despite closing the entire Ocean City beachfront for the first time in recorded or remembered history, despite bringing in body-sniffing dogs, sophisticated sonar and ground radar devices, despite a massive sand-sifting endeavor, the rest of the victim never did turn up.
The next day, fingerprints identified the arm as belonging to a Peter Bondello. This ID created another flurry of activity, since Bondello was a prominent organized crime figure, a very active member on the Baltimore mob scene.
I know, Baltimore’s not supposed to have a mob, not in the criminal syndicate sense of the word that is. But the Outfit is everywhere, and anyone who thinks his city is immune from its influence is just fooling himself. There’s a branch in every decent sized city—supplying product to the drug runners, organizing loan sharking and prostitution, and sinking hooks into legitimate businesses under the guise of “protective services.”
The identification of the arm as Bondello’s brought in the FBI, DEA, ATF and assorted other alphabet agencies. Brenda and I arrived in Ocean City a week after they did.
I wasn’t there for Bondello. I’m just Matthew Grace, a simple PI from Baltimore. Looking for newly one-armed gangsters is not on my list of job services. I knew about the Baltimore mob, of course. Its head man had even hired me once or twice when he needed a job done legally (mostly) by someone he could trust. I’d also worked against the mob on one or two small matters, managing to get the jobs done with no hard feelings. (Well, there was that warning shot fired through my office window, but that may have been an old girlfriend.)
No, I was in Ocean City for a more prosaic reason. I’d been hired by Mike and Betty Tauber to find their daughter.
In addition to being Baltimore’s favorite vacation resort, Ocean City is often a teenager’s first real taste of freedom and responsibility. Fresh out of high school, he goes down the ocean (or as we say in Baltimore, “downy oshun”), finds a job and a place to stay, and is on his own for the first time in his life. In a very short time, he learns about paying bills, cooking, cleaning, getting along with roommates and what it’s like to work for a living. Not the little after-school and weekend jobs he had while in high school, but a real, forty hour a week job, one that leaves him too tired at the end of his shift to hit the beach or clubs like he thought he’d be doing before he drove the 150 miles from home.
Some of these kids handle the pressure and by the fall are more than ready for college. Others can’t take it, and run home to their old protected lives. Others just quit their jobs but stay in OC, getting by however they can.
Smart, blonde and attractive, Darlene Tauber drove down to Ocean City with three of her friends just two weeks after graduation. They’d rented a place together, a walk-up apartment on Caroline St, just a few blocks off the ocean. Her one friend, Tiffany, knew somebody who knew somebody who could get all of them jobs flipping burgers or making pizza at Friendly Bob’s—one of many such carry-out places that line OC’s Boardwalk.
Darlene called her parents as soon as she got settled in her apartment. She called again the next day, and the day after that. But soon the calls started coming every other day, and sometimes every third day. But when a week went by the Taubers started getting worried. That’s when they came to see me.
“Did you try calling her?” I asked the worried couple as they sat in my office.
“Yeah,” Mike Tauber said as his wife nodded. “Thursday night. Her roommate said she hadn’t seen her for a few days. Said she didn’t know where she was.”
“What did you do when you heard that?”
“Drove down there myself. Betty stayed up here in case Darlene called. I took the cell so she could let me know if she did. When I got there, her things were still in her room. Checked with where she was supposed to be working, but her boss said she’d quit two days after she started. After that I didn’t know what to do. I got a room and just walked around looking for her—the beach during the day, the Boardwalk at night. When I came back Sunday Betty and me talked it over and figured it was time to call in a pro at this sort of thing.”
“Did you call the police?”
The anger Tauber had been holding inside came to the surface. “Of course I called the police,” he yelled, “I’m not stupid.”
“Michael.” His wife put a calming hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off. There was a rage inside him that had to come out.
“Of course I went to the police, first thing after leaving her place. Do you know what those bastards told me?”
I knew. It was what I’d probably have to tell him in a week or two.
“They told me there was nothing they could do. When I gave one of them her description, you know what he said, ‘Female, eighteen, blonde and good-looking. Yeah, she’ll stand out down here.’ Then that son-of-a-bitch suggested that she’d probably moved in with her boyfriend and that she’d call after ‘the thrill was gone.’”
That was a possibility, but you don’t suggest to an angry father that his sweet little girl is shacked up with some guy. I’d ask Mrs. Tauber later, or better yet, Darlene’s girlfriends when I got down there.
They gave me a picture of Darlene and we came to a financial arrangement. Tauber wasn’t happy when he learned that he’d be paying for my motel stay. “Money for this has gotta come out of Darlene’s college fund,” he grumbled. I stayed quiet as he wrote a check for my first week’s fee and expenses. I promised to leave the next day and report back as soon as I had news, or in a week if I came up dry.
“So when do we leave?”
That was the first question Brenda asked when I called her at home to tell her about my new case. I’d known Brenda for several months, met her on a roving husband case that turned into a lot more. We’d been dating ever since.
“What’s this ‘we’ stuff?”
“We, as in you and me. You’re getting a free stay down Ocean City. Any room you get will come with a double bed. Get the picture?”
“I’ll be working. This isn’t a vacation.”
“It will be for me. I’ll be tanning.”
“All day.”
“Same here.”
“And maybe all night.”
“That much I knew—double bed, remember?”
How could I say no? Brenda drove down with me.
I checked in with the Medical Examiner’s Office before we left. No unidentified females matching Darlene’s description had been received. Same story with the Eastern Shore hospitals and police departments. I also checked with the Delaware cities of Rehoboth and Bethany Beach. Plenty of blondes picked up on charges ranging from DUI and public indecency up to and including assault with intent to maim. All of them identified, none of them Darlene.
We checked into a moderately priced hotel on 1st St. Brenda wasted no time changing into the few bits of cloth she called a swimsuit and hitting the beach. I already had on my OC work clothes—jeans and a polo shirt—so I decided to visit Darlene’s apartment to see if maybe her roommates would tell me something they weren’t willing to tell her dad.
After calling ahead to make sure one of them would be there I took the bus down to Caroline St. (Ride all day for two dollars—beats trying to find a parking space). It was a second floor walk-up over the Swim-n-Surf, a store where you could buy boogie boards, suntan lotion, swimsuits and other beach necessities for twice what you’d pay in Baltimore. Tiffany, the girl who’d organized the whole thing, met me at the door and, after carefully checking my ID, let me in.
The apartment wasn’t much—a small living room, smaller kitchen and two closets someone forced mattresses and box springs into and called bedrooms. Unlike the place I stayed in when I was eighteen and on my own, everything was clean and orderly. But then, four girls were staying here and not three guys whose idea of doing laundry was to go for a walk in the rain.
“Tiffany,” I said after the preliminaries were over, “I know you told Darlene’s father that you didn’t know where she was, but maybe she’s someplace she doesn’t want her father to know about. He doesn’t have to know.”
“You mean, like, with a guy, or something, Mr. Grace?” She shook her head in the way that girls her age do, the way that drives boys her age to distraction, the deferential way she called me “Mr. Grace” only serving to remind me how far away I was from being that age. “No way, she wasn’t like that. And if she was, she’d tell me, we’re almost best friends. And after her father left, I’d have called her and, like told her, call home or something; give ’em a story and let ’em know you’re okay.”
“Darlene have a cell?” I asked. According to her mother she didn’t, but she might have picked one up.
“Don’t know. If she does, I don’t know the number. Or it might be in there.” Tiffany pointed to some copier paper boxes in a corner. One of them had Darlene’s name on it in blue marker. “Not much storage space,” she explained. “We keep our things in there. Clothes we leave in our suitcases or in the closet.”
I went over and took a quick look in the box. I didn’t see a cell phone but there were several cameras there, a well used Nikon and several disposable ones.
“Like, if you want to take that with you and look through it I guess it’s okay, you working for her father and all.”
The Nikon was empty. The disposable cameras hadn’t been used yet. There was nothing else of interest in the box. I was hoping for some pay stubs.
“I’d like to look through her clothes.”
“Eh, sure,” Tiffany said and showed me which coats in the closet and which suitcase were Darlene’s. “Eh, I sort of borrowed this top from her. Do you need it back?”
“I’m not going to take them, Tiffany, I just want to go through the pockets to see if can find a name, phone number, address—anything that could tell me where she might be.” I started looking through the pockets of Darlene’s jackets. “When did you first notice she was missing?” I asked as casually as I could.
“I didn’t. I really didn’t know until her father called. With her working a different job, and with me on all kind of hours at Friendly Bob’s, we really didn’t see each other that much. I thought we each kept missing the other.”
“Where’s she working now?” I was coming up empty with Darlene’s coats and starting to get a bad feeling. I opened her suitcase. There seemed to be too many clothes for a girl who may have moved without notice.
“Don’t know. She didn’t stay at Bob’s long. Her hours sucked—three p.m. to eleven. The work’s so hard you’re too tired to do anything after, and you’re still tired in the morning so you sleep in. You wake up in time for work but not the beach. Darlene left Bob’s and got a job at a pancake house. That was all morning work so she had time at night. But the tips weren’t that good and she missed going to the beach. Last time I talked to her she said was going to quit there too, that she’d found a job perfect for her. But she didn’t say what it was.”
I finished with the suitcase. The bad feeling was getting stronger. “Tiffany, do me a favor. Go through Darlene’s things—closet, suitcase, that box and her bathroom stuff. Let me know if it’s all there, if there’s anything missing except what she might have been wearing the last day you saw her.”
Tiffany did, starting with the box and finishing in the bathroom. “It’s all here,” she said when she came out, “clothes, toothbrush, hair dryer, make-up. Why would she leave without taking … oh no!” Suddenly Tiffany had that bad feeling too.
“She’s probably okay,” I quickly lied. “And wherever she is, I�
�ll find her. That’s what I do.” That’s what I was being paid to do. It didn’t mean I’d succeed. I gave Tiffany one of my cards. “If you or your friends see her, or hear about her, or remember anything that could help, call my cell.”
Tiffany nodded, on the edge of tears as she started to imagine all the wrongs that could have happened to her friend, wrongs that the Taubers were no doubt imagining as well. She’ll blame herself, I thought, for not noticing sooner. I started to tell her not to, then realized it wouldn’t do either of us any good. Instead I took the easy way out and said a quick goodbye.
The on-duty manager at Friendly Bob’s didn’t remember Darlene.
“Maybe,” he said when I showed him her photo, “So many kids come through here. Some of them are hard workers, putting in as many hours as they can get, trying to make as much money as they can before college. Others,” here he shook his head, “others come thinking it’s going to be one long vacation. They’re shocked when they learn they’re actually expected to work.” He handed back the picture. “Sorry, I can’t help you, but feel free to ask around.”
I did. One of the waitresses, a girl named Lauren, remembered her. “She worked with me the first day or two. After that she never came back.”
By the time I got to the pancake house it was closed. It was strictly a breakfast and lunch kind of place. I’d try the next morning, both there and back at Bob’s. Darlene’s other roommates were scheduled to work then and might know something. Somehow I doubted that they’d be able to tell me anything more than Tiffany had.
I was right. Like Tiffany, neither roommate had even realized that Darlene had been missing. “She was in and out all day, working some kind of crazy schedule,” one of them told me, but working where she couldn’t say. I had the same kind of luck at the pancake house. Like at Bob’s, Darlene had come and gone so fast she didn’t leave behind any impression.
After that it was a long day down the ocean. Darlene hadn’t opened an account at any of the local banks. The police had no record of her filing any kind of complaint or being charged or detained for anything. I was left with going store to store, showing her picture, saying her name, hoping that sooner or later I’d find the place she’d gotten her perfect job.
The Detective Megapack Page 16