Then just as she was sipping her latte, Angie looked up, startled, and Ritchie turned his head to see the cop, Detective Sandra Bolduc, walking up to their table and saying, “Just the person I was looking for.”
Angie said yeah, but the cop looked at Ritchie and said, yeah, “The tour bus pulled out in the middle of all that commotion last night, but you weren’t on it.”
Ritchie could see Angie relax, just a little but enough for him to be happy for once in his life to be the object of a cop’s attention, and he said, “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Ritchie didn’t say anything and then Angie said, “Oh, do you want to join us, have a cup of coffee?” Bolduc said no, but then she said, “Okay,” and sat down and said, “but I don’t need any more coffee this far past noon.”
Ritchie said, “They don’t have any doughnuts but they have muffins,” and Bolduc said, “That’s okay.”
Then she said, “That was quite a shock last night when that bomb went off,” and Ritchie said, “I didn’t know it was official yet — I thought they were still calling it an ‘incident,’” and Bolduc said, yeah, “But you were there.”
“I wasn’t there,” Ritchie said, “I was in the hospitality suite,” and he looked at Angie and she nodded and looked at the cop and said, “Yeah, so was I.”
The cop said, “What about Barry Nemeth and Cliff Moore? Were they in the hospitality suite, too?”
Ritchie said, “Barry and Cliff?”
“Yeah.”
Ritchie said, yeah, they were, and Bolduc said, “After?” and Ritchie thought about it, remembered seeing Barry and the chick he was with, the young hooker with the bruise on her face, and yeah, they were in the suite when they got offstage but he couldn’t remember seeing them when everybody came back after going out back and watching the fire department and the ambulance and all the cops showing up, and he said, “Huh, you know, I don’t know.”
“Neither one of them?”
And again Ritchie said, “Barry and Cliff?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. They were loading up the bus right after the show. I guess they both got on.”
Bolduc said, yeah, okay, and Ritchie said, “It’s true — they were hanging around together on this tour, I never would have expected that.” Bolduc said, no?
“They never liked each other — well, none of us were what you’d really call friends. If we hadn’t started playing music at the same time we never would’ve talked to each other in high school. Hell, I remember when I’d started playing with Dale, just the guitar and the drums and Cliff showed up saying he could sing and it turned out he actually could, we still weren’t sure we wanted him in the band.”
“And Barry?”
“Barry’s brother had a bass, showed him a couple things, walking blues, ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ the usual. We never thought he’d stay in the band when we started to get serious and he had to work at it.”
Angie put her hand on Ritchie’s arm and said, “Rich, he never did get any good at it,” and Ritchie said, “Well, not good good, but he’s all right.”
Then Bolduc stood up and said, well, okay, “If you hear from Barry can you let me know?” and she put a business card on the table.
Ritchie picked it up and said, “And what about if I hear from Cliff?”
Bolduc looked around and then said, “Toronto cops went to talk to Cliff this morning, found his body in his condo.”
Ritchie said, holy shit, “His body?”
“I guess the bus got into Toronto just after midnight last night and he went home. Girlfriend went to see him this morning,”
“And Barry?”
Bolduc shrugged and said, “Is nowhere to be found.”
“Holy shit.”
“It’s really up to the Toronto cops — I’m just asking around. Apparently they went to see Frank Kloss while they were here.”
Ritchie said, “Old friends,” and Bolduc said, “Like the old friends in the band?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Bolduc said, okay, “Well, if you hear from him. Do you think you’ll be around here much?”
They hadn’t really talked about it, but Ritchie said yeah. He looked at Angie and said, “No one really knows what’s going on — Frank and Felix were the top two bosses here. Angie’s going to hold the fort till they send someone to take over.”
“If,” Angie said, “they send someone.”
Bolduc said, “What a mess,” thanked them for their time, and walked out of the coffee shop.
Ritchie just shook his head and then Angie said, “Someone killed Cliff and Barry,” and Ritchie said, “I wonder what took so long,” and Angie slapped his forearm, but playfully, and said, “You’re bad.”
“So who’s in charge now?”
Angie said, “You mean the bikers or the mobsters?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t know. You think we should stick around and find out?”
Ritchie said, yeah, “We might as well. It’s nice up here, quiet now that the bombs have stopped going off.”
Angie took his hand and looked at him and said, “Yeah.”
Then they went to Frank’s office to pack up his stuff and found the hockey bag with the half million dollars in it, and they decided not to mention that to anyone.
About the Author
JOHN McFETRIDGE, author of Dirty Sweet, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and Swap, became fascinated with crime when attending a murder trial at age 12 with his police officer brother. McFetridge has also co-written a short story collection, Below the Line, and wrote for the CBS/CTV television series The Bridge. He lives in Toronto with his family and blogs at johnmcfetridge.blogspot.com.
copyright © John McFetridge, 2012
Published by ECW Press
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McFetridge, John, 1959-
Tumblin’ dice : a mystery / John McFetridge.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-094-3
also issued as:
978-1-77090-095-0 (PDF); 978-1-55022-977-6 (Print)
I. Title.
PS8575.F48T85 2012 C813’.6 C2011-902911-1
Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan
Typesetting and Production: Rachel Ironstone
The publication of Tumblin’ Dice has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
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John McFetridge, Tumblin' Dice
Tumblin' Dice Page 23