Howard and I eyed each other. “Are you sure it was his?” asked Howard.
“Dad,” she sighed in her teen-aged grown-ups-are-so-silly voice. “How many 1969 red GTOs are running around Rustic Woods with a ‘Here comes da Judge’ bumper sticker? When I asked her mom if they knew Colt, she said no, but the car has been parked there since yesterday afternoon.”
Howard stopped at the door. “Is it right in front of their house, or a neighbor’s house?”
“Their house,” she said.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“If the car was parked in front of a neighbor’s house, he might be visiting someone else. That still may be the case.”
Luckily, Callie had stepped into the house, so I didn’t have to whisper the next question. “You’re thinking he had a date and stayed the night?”
Howard shrugged. He was diving into his quiet, unresponsive thinking mode. I might not hear from him for a while. We went into the house just long enough for me to check on all three girls and leave instructions for Callie to be in charge. We were going out.
“To check out Colt’s car?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Probably not,” I answered as believably as I could.
She called out to me as I was walking toward the door. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get shot at again, okay?”
Ah. How sweet. She does care.
Callie and Isabella Fetty had been friends since the first grade so I knew exactly where she lived and it only took us a few minutes to get there. Just as Callie had said, Colt’s car was positioned at the curb right in front of the Fetty’s house on Sassafras Lane. Both doors were locked. Peeking inside the windows, we saw some papers strewn on the floor of the passenger’s side, what looked to be an empty soda cup on the passenger’s seat, and a camera and pen in the backseat.
“Do you know Isabella’s mom?” Howard asked.
I frowned a little. “Yes, and so do you. She’s been to our house so many times I can’t count.”
“What’s her name?”
“Christina.”
“Is she the tall one with short blond hair and glasses?”
“No, Sherlock. She’s short with long brown hair, no glasses.” I sighed. “How did they let you into the FBI anyway? On your good looks? Because it sure wasn’t for your observation skills.” I patted him on the back to let him know I still loved him even though he probably couldn’t pick The Queen of England out of a lineup. “Christina’s nice, but she bobs her head a lot when she talks.”
“Got it. Let’s go talk to her.”
I knocked on the door and immediately heard the deep bellowing of two large dogs. I’d forgotten about their Great Danes, Frank and Stein. Should have warned Howard.
The door opened and Christina smiled at us both.
Too late.
“Barb!” (head bob) “Howard!” (bob, bob) “What brings you by? Did Callie forget something?” She dropped her smile for a moment while she reprimanded one of the horse-dogs. “Sit, Frank, sit!” Frank didn’t sit, but her smile reappeared anyway when she turned her attention back to us. She stepped back and opened the door wider. “Come in, come in.” (bob, bob, bob)
Howard motioned for me to go first. I wasn’t sure whether that was a show of gallant manners or a healthy respect for the beasts inside. I knew that Frank and Stein were both sweet dogs, so Howard didn’t need to fear an attack. On the other hand, they had very inquisitive noses.
Once we were standing in the foyer of their split-level home, I proceeded with our inquiry while the canines proceeded with a little investigation of their own.
“We’re not here for Callie,” I began. “She noticed that our friend’s car was parked out front, and we’ve actually been a little worried about him.”
Christina’s head bobbed throughout my explanation while Frank nosed Howard’s crotch. Howard tried to push the animal’s nose away with his free hand, but Frank’s radar was locked on target.
“Yup, yup,” said Christina bobbing. “Uh huh, uh huh. The car has been there since yesterday.” (bob, bob) “Uh, huh, yup. Yesterday.” She glanced down at Frank as if just realizing that he was probing Howard’s gonads. “Frank! No!” She yanked on his collar, but Christina was small and Frank was the polar opposite of small. Frank did not move. Meanwhile, Stein had been circling Howard like a vulture, seemingly to choose his sniff with more calculation. Christina tugged harder on Frank’s collar, yelling, “Sit!” This time he fell back on his haunches as ordered.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized to Howard. “They’re really sweet dogs, they’re just so darned big! So why are you worried about your friend?”
At that very moment, Stein determined that Howard’s rear end was where he should land his cavernous nostrils. And he did. I think Howard actually squealed. Frank, probably not wanting to miss out on the fun, left his sit-position and shot straight for Howard’s crotch again.
I’d been the turkey in a Frank and Stein sandwich before, so I did feel sorry for Howard, but I wanted to get my information on Colt. I pressed forward, leaving my husband to fend for himself. “He’s been missing for almost twenty-four hours now,” I explained, “and his son is concerned because he missed an important meeting today. It’s just not like him—his name is Colt. Did you happen to see him?”
Her head bobbed once, twice, three times. “Uh huh, uh huh. Yup, yup.”
“You did?” I asked with hope.
“Oh! No! No.” Now she was shaking her head vigorously. “No. I was just listening to your story. I never saw who parked the car there, I’m sorry.” Her eyes suddenly blazed in horror. “Oh, Howard! Lordy, I’m so sorry! Frank and Stein seem to really like you a whole lot, don’t they?”
Poor Howard was attempting, without much success, to put his buttocks out of sniffing range by shoving back against the corner between the wall and front door. He could have done some damage with his cane if he’d tried, but to his credit, he resisted temptation.
“Isabella!” shouted Christina up the stairs. “Would you come get your dogs off Mr. Marr?”
Isabella was down in a flash and with some struggle, pulled them to the back of the house and out the sliding glass door to the fenced back yard.
Thankful, Howard brushed himself off and asked a line of questions I never would have thought of. “Do you know most of your neighbors?”
“Yup. Uh, uh. Yup, yup. All of them, yup. Why?”
“Are any of them single women, not married?”
“Oh! Nope, nope. Not here. Families all around. Or married couples with grown kids. Uh huh, uh huh.”
“Thank you,” he said with a very officious tip of the head. I think he was quietly savoring the moment. “We appreciate your help. If you do see anyone getting in or leaving in the car, would you call us?”
“Sure, Uh huh, uh huh. Sure!”
We made a quick getaway from the Fetty house, but she waved as we headed back to our own car. “I hope your friend is okay!”
“Maybe Colt broke into their house and the dogs ate him,” Howard grumbled.
“They’re not vicious,” I laughed. “Just curious.”
We hadn’t learned much except that Colt was unlikely to have spent the night at one of the other houses on Sassafras Lane. In my mind, this was more reason to accept the fact that his text was a call for help. When I expressed this worry to Howard, he didn’t disagree. Next stop was Colt’s condo. We had decided to hold off calling Clarence until we had better information—so far we didn’t have much except the location of the car and the alarming text.
On the drive over, Howard tried Colt’s cell phone again to no avail. Still straight to voicemail.
Ins
ide, the condo was on the cool side. I looked at the thermostat—off. Howard threw the untouched newspaper we’d found on the doormat onto a small table next to the front door. “I’ll check bedroom and bathroom,” he said. “You look around out here.”
I sniffed around the tiny kitchen. A bowl with some dried chunks of cereal around the sides rested in the sink. By the looks of it, I was guessing it had been there since the morning before. The counters were clean, the coffee pot had a smidgen of coffee left in the carafe, and a cutting board lay to one side with a knife and one dehydrated piece of apple on top. The refrigerator was what I expected for a single man: nearly empty. A carton of milk less than half full, three Coronas, a chunk of cheddar cheese, and an orange. No taco fixings except for the cheese, but that didn’t really mean anything. He’d probably planned on stopping at the store for those items on his way to our house. The freezer was filled to the brim with frozen pizzas and microwaveable dinners. Now I knew how he ate when he wasn’t at our place whipping up yummy meals.
Howard came out of the bathroom. “Find anything?” I asked.
“Not out of the ordinary. The sink and his toothbrush are bone dry, though. That tells me he hasn’t been here since yesterday.”
I closed the freezer door as Howard scooted around me. He headed into the living area, which contained a sofa, a TV, and a desk with a hutch. Howard went straight to the closed laptop on the desk. He picked up a business card that had been placed on top. I followed him into the living area and looked over his shoulder at the card. It featured a logo with red, sexy kissing lips. Swirling underneath then upward in a black cursive font were the words, Saturday Night Fever. Howard flipped the card over to reveal an address scrawled in blue ink: 233 Dusty Pines Place. I knew that road. It was in Rustic Woods not far from Lake Muir. Under the address was scribbled what must have been a date and a time: Nov 6 9:30 p.
“November 6th,” I said. “That’s today’s date. Do you think the p mean’s pm?”
Howard nodded and looked around the room. Then he smiled and looked right at me and grinned. “Uh huh, uh huh. Yup, yup,” he said, bobbing his head up and down.
My husband made a funny. He had a sense of humor after all. I chuckled. “What do you think Saturday Night Fever is?”
“Saw that name on a discussion board last night. It’s a club for swingers.”
“In Rustic Woods?”
He nodded again.
“Get out! Seriously?” I let the oddity of that idea sink in for a minute then voiced some hypotheses. “So either Colt is delving into some...interesting hobbies...or maybe this club has something to do with the job he’s working on.”
Howard’s eyebrows lifted slightly in response as he slipped the card into his back jeans pocket and then opened the laptop. When he worked, my husband was some kind of sexy, I have to say. His reserved but serious attention to detail was turning me on. If I hadn’t been so concerned for Colt, I would have suggested a quickie in the bedroom. Or the living room. Or the kitchen...
I fanned myself to cool down and took to rifling through some envelopes and papers in the hutch but it all looked like bills and invoices to clients. In a small nook of the hutch was a bowl. I reached in and pulled out a key which I showed to Howard. “That looks like the key to his car, don’t you think?”
He agreed while tapping a finger waiting for the laptop to power up. A few minutes of inspection gave us nothing much to go on and Howard was concerned about Colt’s privacy, if in fact, he was just gone for a few days or working on a particularly sticky job, so we didn’t try to access email or documents. Basically, we’d found nothing that told us where Colt had gone or what he was up to.
My cell phone vibrated in my purse. When I pulled it out, the caller ID showed Clarence’s number. I answered. “Hi Clarence.” I tried to sound chipper, but I don’t think it worked.
“Did you get my messages?” His voice, although sort of shaky anyway, was even shakier than usual.
“Yes, I did. We’re at-”
He cut me off. “I got a text. I don’t like it. Guy says it’s bad.”
“Guy is there?” I asked, not really that surprised.
Guy Mertz was the true crime reporter for Channel 10, and the two of them had met when we all found ourselves trying to solve the murder of a boozy movie director. Despite the fact that they now worked for rival television stations, they’d remained quite good friends, which fits since they’re both, well...quirky.
“Yeah. I asked him to come over ‘cuz something just isn’t right here and he’s the crime dude, you know.”
I said to Howard, “Clarence got a text from Colt,” then talked back into the phone. “What does the text say?”
“I think it’s a distress signal,” he said. “Guy says it’s a distress signal. What do we do?”
I could hear Guy in the background telling him to tell me what the text said.
“Do what Guy says, Clarence. Tell me what was in the text.”
“Maybe you should write it down. Do you have a pen?”
“Tell me what the text says, Clarence!”
He recited a set of letters. “S-O-S-N-D.”
Chapter Six
Clarence was too upset to continue a calm and rational conversation, so I had him put Guy on the phone. Guy informed me that they had attempted several texts back to Colt’s number without response and that their many calls to his cell phone went directly to voicemail without ringing.
“We’re going to try his home phone next,”Guy said.
“You’ll only get Howard or me on the phone if you do that.”
“You’re at his place?”
“Yup. And he is not. It looks like he hasn’t been here since yesterday morning.”
“That’s not a good sign.”
“He’s a single guy. On the surface we’re not sure it’s bad, but we found his car parked on Sassafras Lane—it’s a neighborhood that he wouldn’t be likely to hang out in. And it’s been there since yesterday afternoon. Too many things here aren’t right. We found a key to his car here, so we’re heading back over there now to see if we can find anything important.”
“Anything we can do?”
“You can keep Clarence from having a coronary. He’s too young to die.”
Howard pulled the card from his back pocket and waved it in front of my face. “Oh!” I said, understanding his sign language. “Find out anything you can on a swinger’s club in Rustic Woods called Saturday Night Fever. And let us know right away if you hear from Colt again.”
I could hear him repeating the words, probably while he scribbled on something, “Saturday Night Fever. Like the movie, right?”
“Right.”
“Did I hear that right? You said a swinger’s club?”
“Your ears are working.”
“And why, exactly?”
The phone vibrated in my hand, indicating another call coming in. I peeked quickly at the display and saw the caller was my mother. “I need to take this call, Guy. I’ll explain later, just check it out. Talk to you soon.”
“Over and out.”
I clicked to my mother’s call. “What’s up mom?”
“Is that the way you answer a phone?”
“I’m forty-six years old, mother. Do my phone manners still require your reproach?”
“Even a forty-six year old woman can learn and change.”
“Mom, I’m kind of busy right now. Why are you calling, please?” My jaw was tight with irritation.
“I’m with Alka at the hospital. She had some sort of episode during our art class.”
“You couldn’t have opened with that? What kind of episode?”
“Heart. But she’s in good hands here with a cardiologist on call.”
I was so mad at my mother for prece
ding the ‘Mama Marr had a heart attack message’ with a rebuke of my phone manners that I did what any mature, sensible, grown woman would do: I hung up on her.
“We have to go, your mother’s in the hospital.”
His face went dark. “Which hospital?”
Darn! That would have been a good thing to ask. Reluctantly, I called my mother back.
“What’s up, Barbara?” she answered.
Oh, I was going to get her good one day.
I gritted my teeth. “Which hospital, mom?”
“Fairfax General. We’re still in the ER.”
Howard called the girls while I ignored all posted speed limits between Rustic Woods and Fairfax General Hospital. What ordinarily was a twenty-five minute drive took us only fifteen. Luckily we weren’t pulled over by a policeman for speeding. If we had been, I would have told him that if he wanted to prevent a true crime, he should follow us to the hospital and intervene before I killed my mother.
Once in the Emergency Room, we were directed to a curtained-off treatment area where we found Mama Marr lying on a partially raised gurney bed, electrodes pasted here and there, wires running to machines that beeped and booped. She and my mother, who sat in a chair next to the bed, were enjoying a mutual giggle.
“Diane,” said Mama Marr, “you know how to make me laugh like a leetle girl.” Her eyes lit up when she saw us and she clapped her hands together merrily. “Sammy! You are here! Barbara! Come, come!”
By ‘Sammy’, of course, Mama Marr meant ‘Howard’. See, Howard grew up with the name Sammy Donato. His father, Mario Donato, was whacked by the infamous Tito Buttaro. Set on revenge and aided by his mother who supported her only son fully, he changed his name to Howard Marr and joined the FBI to hunt Tito down legally. Don’t believe it? Trust me, I had a hard time swallowing the truth too, especially since I discovered all of this after being kidnapped by Tito’s angry, chain-smoking wife and her two goons. Those two goons turned out to be really nice guys and one of them is now my friend, Frankie Romano, who I would trust my life with any day of the week.
Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4) Page 5