Caruso 01 - Boom Town

by Trevor Scott

  Tony hesitated. “Melanie Chadwick.”

  His brows shot up. “I know Melanie. She sold me my house.

  She’s a great woman.”

  He was beginning to think that everyone in town had bought their home from Melanie.

  The sheriff continued, “She went through a nasty divorce. I’ll have my people check to see if that asshole of an ex-husband is back in town. Could you believe someone wanting to cheat on her.” The cop shook his head side to side.

  Tony wanted to tell the sheriff he was pretty sure Melanie’s ex had nothing to do with it, but he decided to let him go off in that direction. Keep him busy.

  An EMT came over and placed a bandage on Tony’s right shoulder. It wasn’t much of a wound. He’d probably bled more when he fell off his bike as a ten-year-old. The problem was it was a ripping cut through the flesh and would need six or seven stitches or he’d end up tearing it open every time he shifted his truck.

  So the good sheriff ended up driving him to the emergency room. He had no intention of climbing into the back of an ambulance rig with that puny little scratch.

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  CHAPTER 16

  On the ride to the hospital, Sheriff Green started with the questions again. He had a relaxed form of inquiry that was worth examining. It was like sitting down with the family priest and talking about the meaning of life, without the possibility of forbidden sex. Tony almost wanted to answer each question truthfully. If he hadn’t been on guard he might have actually done that.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Caruso?”

  “I’m semi-retired,” Tony said. It wasn’t a total lie, since he was collecting a Navy pension.

  “Military?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I’m a detective.” He hesitated, while he navigated a sharp curve on the winding road down the mountain. “You walk with confidence. Thirty-one inch stride. You’re still relatively young.

  And corporate America doesn’t give many pensions these days.

  You wouldn’t have said semi-retired if you weren’t making some money from that retirement.”

  They came to a stop sign and then continued on toward downtown Bend.

  Tony hadn’t realized he’d given so much away with a simple phrase and his walk. But he was right. Anyone with any knowledge of the military could recognize another who had been there.

  Especially if the person had been any good at it.

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  “I’m guessing you were a Marine,” Tony said. It would have been a compliment for anyone but an Army soldier.

  “Long time ago,” he said. “Recon.” He let the word hang in the air as if Tony should bow down to some unseen God.

  They were in downtown Bend now, stopped at a light. There were two young men in their early twenties, wearing their best snowboarder grunge, walking in the crosswalk in front of them.

  “Take those two,” the sheriff said. “There’s no discipline there.

  They couldn’t find their ass with both hands. A couple of lost souls.”

  Tony glanced at them, thinking they were probably millionaire partners who owned some computer software firm. A little farther to the west and south and they would have qualified for surfer dudes. But Bend had no surf, with the exception of ski slopes with snow boarders, and those were as plentiful as sagebrush.

  They took off and wound through relatively quiet streets toward the hospital on the east side of town.

  “Which service were you in?” he asked.

  “Navy.”

  He smiled, and Tony guessed it had something to do with the rivalry between sailors and marines.

  “Ordnance,” Tony added.

  That took the smile away. He glanced at Tony sideways. “You were one of those crazy bastards?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “When I was doing a little work in Southeast Asia, we came across some unexploded ordnance that our own Air Force had dropped. Anti-personnel mines. Needless to say, we stayed clear and called in the ordnance folks. Those silly bastards walked right down the field scooping up and defuzing the mines like they were picking daisies.” He shook his head. “They didn’t pay those guys enough.”

  Tony was feeling kind of queasy, and it had nothing to do with his bullet wound, which he was sure had stopped bleeding long ago. He thought about the explosion on the tug that had taken part 98

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  of his hearing and the life of his best friend.

  “You didn’t say what else you do, Mr. Caruso. Besides being semi-retired.”

  He’d only been working as a private investigator in Oregon for a year now, but he’d already found a good way to describe what he did without actually saying it.

  “Sometimes people hire me to look into things,” Tony said.

  “Private detective,” the sheriff said, filling in the blanks.

  They pulled in front of the emergency room door and there was a man in scrubs with a stethoscope wrapped around his neck waiting for them. Sheriff Green parked in a restricted zone and shut off the engine.

  “Maybe this shooting has something to do with what you’re looking into now,” the sheriff said.

  Tony started to get out, but stopped. “I didn’t say I was currently looking into anything. Maybe I’m just here for the great skiing.”

  They got out and the sheriff followed Tony into the emergency room, where the nurse set Tony on an exam table behind a curtain and started asking him the normal questions. Pertinent things. Like if he had insurance. Then he actually took Tony’s vitals.

  When the nurse went away for a moment, the sheriff, sitting on a rolling metal chair, scooted closer to Tony.

  “Why don’t we cut the bullshit cat and mouse, Mr. Caruso, and you tell me what you’re working on.”

  Tony still had a few more people to talk with before he started asking him about Barb and Dan Humphrey. But he didn’t want to totally piss him off either, or he’d get nothing when he really needed it. So he decided he really needed a friend in high places in Central Oregon. Not just for this case, but for any future cases.

  “All right...” Tony was cut off by the doctor coming in and kicking the sheriff out of his chair.

  They gave him a tetanus shot in the arm, cleaned out the wound, and then twelve stitches, followed by a fancy new band-BOOM TOWN 99

  age. When the medical people were done with him, they told him to come back in ten days so they could remove the stitches. He agreed and started to leave.

  The sheriff said he’d give Tony a ride back to the condo. They took a different route back. Longer than normal, Tony realized.

  Once they started getting close to the golf community, the sheriff let out a heavy sigh. “You were going to tell me what you’re working on,” he reminded Tony.

  The delay had given Tony time to construct how much he wanted to tell the sheriff. “Do you ever take on a case even though you know it’s totally useless? A complete waste of time?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “You might do it just to make someone feel good,” Tony said.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m looking into the death of Dan and Barb Humphrey.”

  “But—”

  “I know,” Tony said. “Dan shot his wife and then killed himself. That’s what I keep telling the insurance people.”

  “You’re working as an insurance investigator?”

  If he said yes he’d be lying to an official peace officer, which if it wasn’t illegal, was at least unethical. “Let’s just say I’m asking a few questions.” There. It wasn’t a lie. In fact, he’d given the sheriff enough to realize who had probably hired him, considering how vocal Cliff Humphrey had been with the sheriff and the media.

  Stopping at the gate for the golf community, the sheriff powered down the window and waited for a young security guard to get off the phone. Finally the guy came to the sheriff’s door.

  �
�Yes, sir,” the guard said. “What can I do for you, sheriff?”

  “Did one of my guys ask you if you saw a car speed away from here just before they arrived following the shooting?” the sheriff asked.

  “Yes, sir. Deputy Harris. I told him that I was on the phone talking with my boss when the car flew through. At least I think it was a car.”

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  “So you didn’t see it?”

  “No, sir. Afraid not.”

  “Thanks,” Sheriff Green said.

  They pulled away and a minute later settled into the condo parking lot alongside Tony’s truck. Panzer was still in the back.

  Tony got out and started to close the door.

  “Just a minute,” Sheriff Green said.

  Tony leaned back inside.

  “You be careful,” he said. “You play around a rose bush, you’re bound to get poked.”

  Not sure if the good sheriff was talking about his current case or Melanie, Tony closed the door and the sheriff backed out and pulled away.

  As he walked toward his truck, which was still not inside the garage, he thought for a minute about who he’d pissed off enough to make them want to shoot him, and he was coming up with a blank. Certainly not the two rent-a-cops. Or, as the sheriff had suggested, Melanie’s ex-husband. The only thing to do in a situation like this was to keep plugging away. And hope they didn’t succeed in plugging him.

  He opened the back of his truck and Panzer jumped out onto the pavement. The dog immediately ran toward the berm where the shooter had taken the shots, his black body moving back and forth among the manzanita and low junipers.

  By the time Tony reached Panzer, he had stopped, his nose concentrating on a spot of grass.

  “Good work, Panzer.” Tony stooped down and gave his dog a hug with his left arm.

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  CHAPTER 17

  In the morning, Tony got up and took a shower, trying his best to keep the bandage on his right arm dry. His shoulder was sore, and the area around the wound swollen like he’d been stung by a bee the size of a bald eagle.

  Standing naked in front of the mirror, he twisted around to look at his back. The bruises where the rent-a-cop had hit him with his stick were in the yellow-green stage. They didn’t hurt much any more, unless he poked a finger right into them.

  He got dressed and went into the living room.

  His dog greeted him, his tiny tail wagging so hard his entire rear end nearly rose from the hardwood floor.

  “All right, Panzer,” he said, his left hand working a special spot behind the schnauzer’s ears. “Go out and take a good dump. But not on the green. That’s just too much of a hazard for those duf-fers.”

  The dog headed for the door and waited.

  Once that deed was completed and Panzer had gotten some running out of his system and now lay on his pad near the sliding glass door, Tony sat down and logged onto the computer to check his e-mail. Nothing but a few junk e-mails. Then he went onto the web and searched a few companies.

  He started with the Portland company where Frank Peroni worked. The lock company was third in sales behind Schlage and 102

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  Sergeant, but moving up the list fairly fast. The headquarters was in Beaverton, with regional offices in Denver, Des Moines, and Raleigh. Each region had reps like Frank Peroni that covered a couple states out west and maybe a single state in the more pop-ulous east. Peroni, although he worked out of the headquarters, was actually a western regional rep covering Oregon and Idaho.

  Next he checked into the software company out of Palo Alto, California. The one that had made a bid on Dan Humphrey’s company. For Tony, looking at their earnings and capitalization was like trying to understand the tax code. Something he had no real desire to learn. He did understand the stock market enough to know that brokers had high praise for the company, buying up damn near every available share and making heavy profits each quarter over the past few years. Much of this money had been made because of the company’s heavy involvement with internet financing software and their encryption technology. They were so successful, in fact, it made Tony wonder why the company wanted to buy a small firm from Bend.

  His last stop on the web he looked into the Bend software firm, owned exclusively now by one Larry Gibson. Nice earnings.

  Gradual growth until the last year when they went from six employees to twenty-five and moved from downtown Bend to their new facility along the river. Interesting.

  Tony finally had a direction he wanted to go.

  As he left the condo, Panzer at his side, he did what he normally never did. He looked at the name of the lock on his door. It was a Cascade Lock.

  He got outside and wandered toward the garage. He was more cautious than he had been the night before.

  The air was still crisp from the clear sky, not a cloud anywhere.

  It was supposed to reach close to sixty.

  Pulling the truck out, he stopped and turned off the engine.

  Then he got out and walked up the landscaped berm to where he guessed the shooter had stood. Gazing back, and considering the angle, distance, and the lighting the night before, he was amazed BOOM TOWN 103

  he was still standing. He should have been dead, or at least strapped in a wheel chair drinking dinner from a straw. The area had been thoroughly trampled by the sheriff’s deputies. They had found three spent .22 long rifle brass casings. Virtually impossible to trace, considering damn near everyone and his brother and sister in Deschutes County owned a .22.

  He got back into his truck and headed toward town.

  Tony went directly to the county court house. He was always amazed at the kind of information he could find skimming through county records. Public officials nationally might have been puffing their chests proclaiming a need to streamline gov-ernment, but the bureaucracy, in its most negative interpretation, was alive and well on the local level. A damn permit was needed for everything except becoming a parent, and Tony was sure that was coming soon.

  First he checked into Dan and Barb Humphrey. Found their marriage license, their tax records for their home, and Dan’s application, with Larry Gibson, for a business license. There was no record of an impending divorce, which didn’t mean a thing.

  While he was there, he checked into Cliff Humphrey’s land use permit for his destination resort. Going back farther, he found where Cliff Humphrey and a group known only as HGE

  Enterprises had purchased over five hundred acres of rough land.

  What about listing agent? He flipped through to the next page.

  There it was in black and white. Three Sisters Realty. Listing agent: Melanie Chadwick. Now he knew why she might have had Cliff Humphrey’s cell phone number.

  The Deschutes County Sheriff’s office was in the building next to the court house. Tony walked over and stood out in the hallway for a moment, wondering what he wanted to say to the sheriff. It was closing in on noon.

  A busy secretary the size of a Sumo wrestler filed paperwork in the top shelf of a metal cabinet. She wore a dress that could have been the tent for a boy scout patrol. Colorful flowers bursting for freedom. She was stretched out on her tip-toes, her leather san-104

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  dals about to burst from fat, stubby toes.

  When she finally turned to Tony, he was surprised, because her face didn’t match the rest of her body. She had dark hair and eyes like that of an anorexic model.

  “May I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Tony Caruso. Here to see the sheriff.”

  She checked the clock on the wall.

  “He’s probably on his way to Jerry’s Cafe down on Wall Street,” she said. “Eats lunch there every day. Then he walks back along the river to his office.” She laughed gutturally. “Thinks he can burn off his lunch with that little walk.”

  He thanked her and left, checking his truck tires to see if some meter Nazi had marked it with chalk. Nothing.
He looked in the back and saw Panzer sleeping on Tony’s bed, instead of his own pad to the side. Figured.

  Then he walked the four blocks to Jerry’s Cafe.

  Jerry’s was an anachronism for Bend’s trendy cappuccino and pesto bagel new age image. As Tony walked in and looked around, he could have been in Topeka, Kansas in 1975. And the place wasn’t made up to look that way. It had simply gone from 70s modern, survived the 80s and 90s without change, and made it to a place so retro, it had been discovered again in the new mil-lennium.

  The place was filling up fast with the lunch crowd.

  Professionals in casual suits next to students in baggy jeans.

  The sheriff was in a corner booth with red vinyl seats, sipping a cup of normal coffee, and reading a copy of the local daily newspaper.

  When he saw Tony approach, the sheriff smiled and nodded for Tony to take a seat across from him.

  “How you feeling?” the sheriff asked.

  “Like someone shot me in the arm.”

  A waitress came by wearing an actual frilly apron. Tony turned his cup over and she filled it without saying a word, before continuing on down the line of booths and tables.

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  “Nothing extraordinary about the lead we pulled out of the garage door,” Sheriff Green said. “Just your normal .22 long rifle.

  Not your normal choice if you want to kill someone.”

  Not for an amateur, Tony thought. But if he wanted to kill someone without making too much noise, that’s what he’d use.

  It’s almost impossible to trace. And if you hit the guy in the head, the bullet will enter but not exit, bouncing around inside the head like a Ping-Pong ball and making scrambling eggs of the brain. If the victim didn’t die, they’d wish they had.

  The sheriff continued. “Maybe someone just wants to get your attention.”

  “I’m listening,” Tony said. “Problem is, I don’t know who I’ve pissed off this time.”

  The sheriff laughed and then took a sip of coffee. “So you rub people the wrong way sometimes?”

  Tony shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Not to the point of being shot at.”