Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle

by Rob Cornell

  “You don’t think…”

  “You’re damn right I do. Rice couldn’t have worked his adoption ring alone. Since he used his own status as an obstetrician to pick up unwanted babies from that old free clinic, it stands to reason his colleagues worked the same way.”

  She covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh, dear God.”

  “Names, Sheila.”

  Her head bobbled as if loose at the neck and susceptible to the wind’s push. “I would have to think about it. Their first names shouldn’t be hard to recall. Last names… I would have to think about it.”

  My teeth hurt. I realized I had my jaw clenched. I focused on relaxing the tension, then said, “Go back to your hotel. Think about it. Write me a list. And don’t fucking share it with anyone.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “He’s going to come on hard and strong. This guy is good. And right now you’re a damn wreck. Won’t take much to break you open.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “That’s lovely. Thank you.”

  “It’s the truth and you know it.”

  Her gaze fell.

  “Now get the hell out of here while I finish with my parents.”

  “But you drove me here?”

  “You got a chauffeur. Call him.”

  I strode back to the graves and stared down at them without seeing them. I listened until I heard Sheila’s footsteps recede behind me. Then I could focus on the ground that held my mother and father.

  “Just when I’m about to forgive you two.” Tears burned in my eyes. I blinked and let them fall. “How could you do this to me?”

  The sound of the traffic over the hill died for an instant. Near perfect silence stood in its wake. The top of my scalp was damp from melted snow, my face wet from tears. Neither had anything to do with my sense of drowning.

  “This is the last time I’m coming here,” I said to my parents. “The last time for a long while.”

  Chapter 10

  I had just started helping Paul set up the bar to open for business when my cell rang. A sick wave rolled through my stomach even though my ring tone—the opening bars of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”—sounded nothing like the digital twitter of my (recently deceased) office phone. I could never imagine living in a monastery. I wasn’t a very religious person. But the prospect of cutting myself off from phones of any kind made the idea tempting all the same.

  I unclipped the phone from my belt and reluctantly answered it.

  “Hey, Rid. Eddie. Just checking in on the case.”

  Oh, yeah. That. “Sorry, man. I got caught up with another thing today.”

  “That’s okay. I know I’m not the only case you’re working on.”

  No reason to burst his bubble on that score. Though I supposed what Hersch had pulled me into was shaping up to look like a case. Another one without a check coming my way. Good thing I didn’t do this for a living.

  “Promise I’ll put in some good time on it tomorrow,” I said.

  “You think that list I gave you will help?”

  His enemy list. Turned out mild-mannered Eddie Arndt had crunched on a few toes in his time. A half-dozen names graced the list of people Eddie thought might want to get at him for one reason or another. His family’s murder predated four of them, but following up on all possible leads was the name of the detective’s game. I could probably wipe out those four names with a few phone calls on each. Then I could get to the other two. Names I remembered from high school. One of them a detention friend—the kind of kid you associate with only during detention because you both ended up there often enough. Wayne Greenberger. Man, that kid loved detention. To him it was like winning recess back from elementary school.

  “I think it’s a start,” I said. I tried to keep an open mind, even though I didn’t think the list would amount to much. High school squabbles usually weren’t severe enough to warrant a lifetime of stalking and killing your adversary’s relatives. “I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”

  “Right, sorry. Didn’t mean to bug you.”

  “Trust the process, Eddie. It may take a while before we find out what’s underneath this corner we’ve peeled up.”

  “The corners. I liked that analogy.”

  “Talk to you later.” I hung up and clipped my iPhone back to my belt. When I looked around me to see what else needed doing before we opened, I discovered Paul had finished it all while I was on the phone.

  He cocked his mouth in his signature sneer-smile. “Please, your Highness. Don’t dirty your hands with the peasant work.”

  “You want a raise, Paul?”

  The smile turned genuine along with the surprise in his eyes. “Sure.”

  “Then stop being such a smartass and I’ll consider it.”

  He puckered his lips and shook a fist at me. “One of these days, Alice. Bang zoom.”

  I smirked. Only Paul could out smart mouth this smart mouth detective. With all the shit smeared through my life, old Pauly was a good guy to keep around.

  Sunday nights were hit and miss at the High Note. Sometimes you got a crowd desperate to string out the weekend for as long as the drinks kept pouring. Sometimes everyone stayed home, steeling themselves for the coming workweek, inoculating against dreaded Monday.

  This Sunday tipped toward the latter. The gloomy weather probably had a hand in that. Nothing made the Monday commute worse than gray skies and icy roads.

  But Hal never missed a night. Or hadn’t before the last two.

  Tonight was day three.

  Despite all the complaining I do about the guy’s cringe worthy attempts at song, I had come to expect him at the High Note as much as Paul, Holly, and my rotating wait staff. I didn’t pay him, but he might as well have been an employee. He was certainly more prompt than most of the rest of my crew.

  Holly sat on her stool on stage, chin in her hand, elbow planted on one knee—the bored version of the Thinking Man sculpture. She had sung a few songs herself when no one entered their names into the rotation. After that, she perched on her stool and waited.

  Only three people occupied tables, each on their own. Two old guys that reminded me of the shredded look Sheila had taken on since she left Hawthorne. The third, a middle-aged man, looked well on his way to joining the ranks of his two elders.

  Not exactly karaoke fans.

  I stepped up on stage and asked Holly about Hal.

  Her bored eyes rolled up to look at me, one shoulder lifted maybe half an inch. “Don’t know.”

  “Three days is a long time for him not to show up.”

  “Three minutes is a long time for him not to show up.” For someone as expressive as Holly was while singing, she sure had the monotone thing down when she spoke. “Why? You worried about him?”

  I realized I was. Which was crazy, considering I had plenty of other things to worry about. Part of me said to just forget it. But Hal was…well…Hal. A goofball? Yes. A travesty to all musical kind? Sure. Still, I saw his devotion to the High Note as more than obsessive compulsion. He believed in the place. Probably more than I did.

  Holly waved a hand in front of my face. “Hey, boss, what’s with the far away stare?”

  “You hear anything about the old guy, let me know, okay?”

  A smile took a chink out of her armor of boredom. “You are worried about him.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.” She paused a minute, as if taking the time now to think about it. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “How much do you know about him?”

  She cocked her mouth. “He worships Frank Sinatra. Dresses like Tom Jones. Knows every song in my book. And he can’t sing worth a shit.” She held her hands out, palms up. “That’s all I got.”

  “Okay. Like I said, if you hear anything…”

  Not moving her chin from the cup of her hand, she gave me a two-fingered salute with her other hand.

  I returned to my booth and a fresh gin an
d tonic. I squeezed the lime in, kicked back, and took a sip. Sure, Rid. Have a drink, worry about Hal, forget your real troubles.

  They’ll still be there in the morning.

  Next morning, on my way to the office, I stopped at an electronics store to pick up a new phone. I grabbed the same model I’d had, then put it back on the shelf and arbitrarily chose another. Best not to remind myself why I’d lost the first phone.

  At the office, I set up the new phone, swept up the pieces of the old, then assumed my position behind my desk. I spread out Eddie’s list, written on a half-sheet of notebook paper, the left edge ragged where it once clung to its spiral binding.

  Ryan York.

  Jason Esquivel.

  Amanda Warbler.

  Dick Kahn.

  And the two that Eddie had pissed off while still in school, before his family’s murder:

  Christian Peacock.

  And last but not least, my detention buddy, Warren Keats.

  A list of names, much like the one I had asked Sheila to put together for me. Lists were nice. They gave you a place to start. Not all lists, however, were created equal. Eddie’s looked more and more useless as I stared at it. Staring at it wouldn’t do much good, though.

  I started with the internet, great bastion of information both accurate and false. I have subscriptions to a few different “people finders.” If I had the social security numbers of the folks on the list, I could probably end this with exactly six searches. Instead, I had to fiddle a bit, sorting through similar first and last names, trying to use the information about each name Eddie had provided to figure out which Ryan York or Amanda Warbler matched the ones on the list.

  First, I kept the search local. The only name I could find still in Hawthorne was good ol’ Warren Keats. He actually lived not far from me. A bit of a shock, since Warren had been a full-blooded south-side kid in high school.

  Pushing the search out a bit, I found Amanda Warbler in a suburb outside of Detroit, but she had switched from a Warbler to a Lanski.

  Ryan York, Dick Kahn, and Christian Peacock had all spread to various parts of the country—Ryan and Christian out west, Dick into New England. Granted, Eddie’s tormenter might have been operating outside the state, but taking into account Occam’s Razor—and a hell of a lot of good that had done me so far—it made sense that one of the two still close by were the most likely to fit. Since only one of the locals on the list was from before the Arndt family tragedy, I decided to start there. Besides, I had to admit to a certain curiosity about how a guy like Warren Keats—one time detention rat from the south side—had crawled his way up to a better standard of living.

  Before I left, I did quick criminal record checks on every name on the list. Amanda Lanski had a nice sheet. Shoplifting. Attempted robbery. Possession of an illegal firearm. And one pop for prostitution. All this fun activity occurred under her maiden name. Apparently, she had shaped up before walking down the aisle.

  Christian Peacock had a couple DUIs and three arrests for possession of narcotics. I’d had a hard time putting a face to Christian’s name until I read his record. This was the dude that had dressed like it was still the ‘60s—even though the closest he’d come to seeing the sixties was Easy Rider and old photographs of his parents in their glory days—and always carried the scent of marijuana mixed with patchouli. Once a stoner, always a stoner, I guess.

  None of the others had sheets.

  Funny. I had expected to find at least something on Warren. Which spoke to my own bias, still ingrained even after all these years, against those from South Hawthorne. The only reason I could recognize the bias was because I had burrowed under my upper crust world and had a dusty lick of what lie beneath that crust. Spending a couple years in Los Angeles, near homeless, could put a person’s life in perspective.

  I made printouts of the information I found and put them in a folder that I assigned to the case. Then I grabbed my coat and went to pay Warren Keats a visit.

  The house—more like a compound, really—had at least a few thousand square feet on mine. That didn’t include the outbuildings glimpsed through the foliage along the iron fence lining the property, which had to stretch a good ten acres or more.

  Fucking A, had Warren moved up in the world.

  My mind raced with questions as I pulled to the gate. A pair of cameras stared down at me from the tall posts on either side of the gate. I buzzed down my window and examined the tarnished brass monolith posted like a sentinel to the side of the driveway. The pedestal had a built in speaker with a quarter-sized red button next to it. The ultimate protection against Jehovah’s Witness—a gate and a buzzer. I thought about getting one for my own pad.

  I pressed the button. Didn’t hear any indication that I’d accomplished anything with the act. No buzz or click. I wondered if it was just a prop, then a voice finally emitted from the speaker.

  No fast food drive-thru speaker, I heard the voice as clear as if a little man hid inside the box waiting to greet visitors. “How may I help you?” asked the refined baritone. I had a feeling if I was driving anything less than a Beemer, I would have been run off.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Keats.”

  Hesitating, the fine fellow’s austere tone cracked a bit. “I’m sorry, who?”

  “You know, the person who lives here. The master of the house. Mr. Warren Keats.” I looked forward to having a good laugh about this with Warren when I finally got through the gate. What kind of people are you hiring, man? Your butler, or whoever the heck, doesn’t even know your name. Har-har.

  Now the voice dropped pretense like a man drops his drawers for his proctologist. “Who is this?”

  “You can tell him it’s his former detention pal, Ridley Brone.”

  The speaker was so good I could hear the quick intake of breath. “Ridley? What the hell are you doing here?”

  With the stuffy out of his voice, I finally recognized it. “Warren?”

  “You are going to get me in serious trouble. Is this some kind of joke?”

  “I thought…” What had I thought? I felt like I must have stopped thinking at least an hour ago. “I thought you lived here.”

  “Yeah. In the servants’ quarters.” I heard some shuffling, then he came back on with his Jeeves act. “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. O’Leary does not tolerate solicitations.”

  “Warren? What the—”

  “Good day, sir.” The speaker snapped, connection cut.

  So much for Warren moving up in the world. Servants’ quarters? Did people really still have those? It sounded so mid-nineteenth century. I liked Jane Austen and all, but I sure as hell didn’t want to live in one of her novels.

  I thumbed the buzzer again. Then again, when no answer came. And a third time. I could do this all day.

  Finally, Warren’s voice came through in a harsh whisper. “You trying to get me fired?”

  “We need to talk, Warren.”

  “Now’s not a good time.” He cleared his throat and came back on with his mock formality. “As I’ve said already, solicitors are unwelcome here.”

  I wondered if he had someone standing behind him with a cattle prod or whip. Even in his professional voice, I could hear the shake behind it. “Come to my bar tonight. The High Note. We can talk there.”

  The speaker clicked and left me with flat silence. I backed out of the drive, hoping he got the message and would meet me. I wasn’t sure how else to speak with him. Did live-in servants have visiting hours?

  Chapter 11

  After lunch, I returned to my office and gave Sheila a call at the hotel, this time giving the room number since I now knew she wasn’t checked in under her own name. The clerk put me through and I listened to the phone ring three times before someone picked up. I say someone, because the voice that greeted me on the other line did not belong to Sheila.

  “Are you there?” the woman who was not Sheila asked when I didn’t respond right away.

  The low roil in my gut came before I co
uld consciously admit what had happened. “Is Sheila there?”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “You must have the wrong number.”

  I hung up before I wasted any more of the woman’s time on my own denial. Face facts, friend. She’s bailed on you again.

  I bounced a fist on my desk. “God damnit.” Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I’m a fucking gullible idiot who thought Sheila was still a friend.

  Why? What did she have to gain or lose by sharing a list of Lincoln Rice’s old cronies? Especially when they might lead to finding my daughter. It was almost like Sheila didn’t want me to find her.

  Another night at the High Note without Hal. Mondays typically sucked, outside of the after-business-hours rush of self-medicating working stiffs. But Mondays, like all days, had never stopped Hal from working the mic.

  I shared a concerned look with Holly. She shrugged and shook her head, telling me she knew as much as I did about the old guy’s whereabouts. I contemplated tracking him down, but I didn’t have much to go on. I didn’t even know the guy’s last name. Maybe I could troll vintage clothing stores that specialized in leisure suits and large-collared shirts, rattling off his description to anyone who would listen.

  Yeah, right. I had enough non-paying cases anyway. Hal was a grown adult, no matter how childlike his zeal for karaoke might have been. For all I knew, he’d found a new place to torture the patrons with his wavering, off-key voice.

  Thoughts of Hal skipped off my brain when I saw Warren come in. Unlike with Eddie, I recognized Warren right away. He still had that shit-eating smirk as his default expression. Wore his hair buzzed close like he had in high school. He’d grown a slight paunch and some meat around his jowls, which reminded me of his appetite as a kid. Warren Keats would eat almost anything that qualified as food. I remembered one detention period where he had lifted a half-eaten slice of pizza out of the trash can. I didn’t know if he still ate scraps, but he did look like his metabolism had caught up with his hunger.