After closing and locking the door, Garner strolled over to a bookshelf and turned on a small Philco radio. As he waited for it to warm up, he studied a photo of a much younger Tiffany, perhaps twelve, with what appeared to be her parents. Outfitted in bib overalls, her father looked every bit the dairy farmer while her mother, with her wholesome attractiveness still evident in her housedress, was a more rural version of her daughter. The picture seemed to verify his hunch that she was an only child. He studied the photo for a few seconds before shifting his attention to the bookshelf’s contents.
Stacked beside the radio were a half a dozen issues of Life, Time, and Newsweek. Lining the shelves were at least two dozen books, all nonfiction and most of them biographies. He was running his finger over a copy of The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers when the radio’s tubes finally warmed up and the strains of the Andrews Sisters’ new cut, “Christmas Island” filled the room. Forgetting the book, Garner adjusted the radio’s volume and walked back across the room to the chair he’d occupied just two nights before. After falling into it, he was content to watch the clock, listen to the music, and wait. Five songs later, his host finally opened her eyes and spoke.
“How did you happen to be on the street?”
He smiled as he looked into her blue eyes, “I was coming to see you. You might have turned down my movie invitation, but I thought I might be able to tempt you with a late supper tonight.”
“So it was luck,” she suggested as she pushed herself upright and leaned against the cushion while still hugging the red throw pillow.
“I don’t really believe in luck,” Garner said. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
“Actually,” she corrected him, “you were ten minutes late! The right time would have been before the big guy tried to grab me and long before I almost became a sacrificial offering for a snow plow.”
He paused for a moment to consider her story. Evidently, he had missed some stuff. “Who was after you?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe it is that Santa thing I’m looking at. I found out some stuff tonight and my source suggested I back off. He thought it was too dangerous to pursue.”
Garner hadn’t expected that angle. Why would someone skimming a few bucks off a charity make Tiffany a target? This was hardly big-time crime; it was just penny-ante stuff. “Who knew you were working on it?”
“Lots of folks around the paper,” she explained. “And I’ve made some calls to officials at the city who put together this fundraiser, so they knew. But who kills someone over a few thousand dollars in charity receipts?”
“There are some who would,” he assured her, “but I can’t buy into it being the reason for what happened tonight. I think this might be more on me.”
She frowned, “Not sure I understand that.”
“Did they just try to nab you?” he asked.
“Well,” she quickly replied, a bit more life now flashing in her eyes. “When I wouldn’t take a ride with them, they got a little upset. Before you picked me up two of them shot at me, too.”
He’d only seen her being chased and this new element ramped up the nature of tonight’s events. She’d gotten into some serious stuff, and it was a much different road than he figured she’d traveled to get into trouble. He frowned, “Okay, scratch my theory.”
“What do you mean?”
It was a good question, and he wasn’t real sure he had a full answer for it. Yet, rather than swallow his tongue, he spilled out a theory he was making up as he went along. “I figured that Delono might have sent his boys out to get you, because they’d seen us together. Thus, the mobster either thought you were the real blonde or knew you were a newspaper reporter and was afraid I’d given you information you might use in a story to hang him.”
“That sounds logical to me,” Tiffany cut in. “These guy acted like torpedoes.”
“It only makes sense,” he explained, “if you were dead.”
“I don’t like the way that sounds,” the woman said, pushing her still slightly wet blonde hair away from her face.
“Here’s what I mean,” Garner continued. “I saw enough of Delono’s hired talent to know his boys are professionals. These guys are good. When they shoot, they don’t miss.”
Tiffany waved her hand, “Then why did he hire . . . what was the name you were using in your role as a hit man?”
“McCoy Rawlings,” Garner answered, “and Delono told me the only reason he hired an outsider to take care of the blonde was that he didn’t want to take a chance on one of his guys being recognized by a witness. While it sounded good at the time, I think that using an outsider was a part of the deal he made with whoever really wanted our mystery woman dead.”
“So,” Tiffany asked, “why did four supposedly amateur thugs go after me?”
“Beyond the Santa deal,” he asked, “Have you stirred up any other hornet’s nest? Are you working on anything else that could mean jail time or worse for anyone?”
She shook her head. “The only other person I’ve talked to is Judge Jacobs.”
Garner pushed out of the chair and walked over to the radio. After he turned it off so he could fully concentrate, he once again studied the family photo. He was still looking at it when he popped a question that had nothing to do with the evening’s events. “Do you ever wish you’d stayed on the farm?”
Tiffany soberly replied, “Not until I was sprinting down that street tonight. It did pop into my mind for a moment then.”
He turned and faced her, “What happened to the kids you went to school with?”
Tiffany looked back toward the front door, “Two of the guys were killed in the war, but most of the others stayed close to home and got married. My closest girlfriend has three kids now.”
“Doesn’t sound like such a bad life,” he suggested.
She looked back at her guest and shrugged. “For Debbie, it’s not. But I’m not cut out for that sort of thing.”
He smiled, “That life’s a lot safer than the one you’re living now.”
Tiffany grinned, “Let me put it this way, until I met you no one ever tried to kill me.” She let her jab land before adding, “Bret, what if this has something to do with Elrod? Maybe I’ve got information and just don’t realize it.”
“I guess that’s possible,” he said as he moved back across the room and to the chair. After sitting down and resting his elbows on the cushioned arms, he added, “But, once again, someone associated with that case wouldn’t have missed when they shot. By the way, when was the last time you talked to Lane?”
“This afternoon,” she replied, “I called to try to get him to help me on the Santa investigation and he cut me off. He had to go out to the river. He said something about maybe finding another piece of Stuart Grogan.”
“That’s a grim thought,” Garner noted. “Have you got anything to drink or eat?”
“Got a couple of Cokes in the fridge and some bacon. I could make us a sandwich.”
“Tiffany, that’s the best offer I’ve gotten all day. We can talk while I watch you cook.”
As she pushed off the couch she bragged, “I’m a farm girl, so I’m pretty good at it.”
“We’ll see,” he announced as he watched the now seemingly energized woman bounce toward the kitchen. She was both durable and resilient. Yep, she was something special.
20
Friday, December 20, 1946
11:35 P.M.
Garner leaned against the cabinet as Tiffany set a skillet on the stove and retrieved bacon from the fridge. After turning on the gas, she dropped the eight pieces of meat in the pan and smiled, “You know, I’m pretty hungry, too. I guess running for your life works up an appetite.”
“If you’ve ever been in combat,” the investigator noted, “you’ll never take eating a hot meal for granted again.”
“You want some eggs?” she asked. “I can scramble or fry them.”
“You got another skillet
?”
“Sure. The first door on your right.”
“Okay, Tiff, I’ll grab that second burner and do the eggs while you work on the bacon. We just might make a pretty good team.”
“Bret.”
He waited until he pulled butter and eggs from the refrigerator and set the pan on the burner before answering. “What do you need?”
She looked over to the man now cracking four eggs into the cast-iron pan. “It sounded like you felt a bit sorry when I mentioned Stuart Grogan. I didn’t expect that. I mean, he was a hood. You know the old biblical saying, you live by the sword you die by the sword, so he got what he deserved.”
“Maybe,” the man sighed, “or maybe not.” As he used a fork to stir the eggs, he explained. “I knew Grogan. I got to know him toward the end of the war when I was transferred over into Naval Intelligence. He was smart and charismatic. The first few weeks we worked together, I thought he had the potential to be a dynamo. I could see him working in Washington or in post-war Europe. But in time, cracks started to show.”
“What do you mean ‘cracks’?” she asked, as she used tongs to flip the sizzling meat.
“Tiffany,” he continued, his eyes still focused on the task at hand, “he was kind of like Lane, except even worse. What happened to him in the war gave him nightmares, even when the sun was shining. At times, he just fazed out and when he did, he’d see things and hear things that weren’t a part of the real world. There were three times I saw him snap and without warning pull out his gun and fire it into a wall. After he did it, he’d be fine again. A couple of other times, when we were out at a nightclub in Honolulu, someone said something that set him off. With no warning, he grabbed the guy and lifted him up by his neck. Then, a few seconds later, as if realizing what he was doing, he let him back down and pretended it was a joke.”
“He sounds like a killer,” she noted.
“Yeah,” he admitted, “why don’t you get a couple of plates and I’ll dump the eggs on them.” As she turned and retrieved the dishes, Garner continued, “Grogan was a time bomb. I saw a lot of men like that in my days in combat. There was always something eating at them that made them that way. So I did some digging and found out more about Grogan. What I discovered wasn’t pretty. He had witnessed his whole unit wiped out early in the war. Somehow, he was the only one who lived, and I guess he blamed himself for surviving.”
“Like a guilt complex?” she asked as she held out the plates. “Give yourself the biggest portion.”
After dumping the eggs onto the plates in near equal amounts, he took the dishes as she dropped five pieces of bacon on one plate and three on the other.
“Why don’t you take those over to the table,” she suggested, “and I’ll grab the bread, mayo, and see if I have any lettuce and tomato.”
“It’s okay if you don’t,” he assured her.
When they were both seated at the tiny metal table set between the kitchen and the living room, Tiffany asked the evening’s most logical question. “If he was crazy, how could Grogan keep his position? Why didn’t they put him in a hospital?”
“I served under generals and admirals crazier than he was,” Garner explained. “In times of war, sometimes crazy is actually something the military loves. I’ve seen crazy men do some incredible things in combat. I guess what I’m saying is . . . sometimes crazy just makes you the perfect killing machine.” After eating a forkful of eggs, the investigator picked up his story. “Anyway, toward the end of our days together, Grogan seemed to calm down. In fact, the day he mustered out he told me he wanted to right wrongs and do something really noble. He said he was looking at going back to college and perhaps even to a divinity school.”
“That’s not the path he took,” Tiffany noted, as she dropped a slice of tomato on her bread.
Garner hadn’t bothered with anything besides the bacon and was chewing on his sandwich when he sadly admitted, “I lost track of him after that day. I mean, that happens when you get out of the service. You swear you’re going to stay in touch, but you don’t. You just get on with your life. In October, I heard he was working for Delono. That just didn’t square with my last conversation with the guy. I figured that he might be acting as a mole. Maybe he was feeding the cops information. If that was the case, I knew he was in over his head. So I blew into town with my cover as a real West Coast hit man to see if I could at least protect him. It seems I got here too late.”
“Who hired you?” Tiffany demanded, as she ate her eggs.
“Well,” he shrugged, “I’d just cracked a big case for an insurance firm, had money in the bank, so, I took this case on myself.”
“That’s not what you told Lane,” she noted accusingly.
“No,” he admitted, “you’re right. But I figured that a trumped-up story would make him actually believe I was working for a client who needed to keep tabs on Elrod’s investigation. He’d like that better than my trying to protect a guy he felt was a real killer. But that’s the strange part about this whole caper.”
“What is?” she asked.
Garner took a long swig from his Coke before explaining. “While he acted tough, Grogan never really killed anyone while he was with Delono. In fact, the reason he was knocked off was due to Delono’s belief that Grogan was actually biding his time until he got a chance to kill him. And in a strange sort of a way, that actually makes sense. Grogan, in his warped mind, might have believed that taking out the big guy and ridding the city of that mobster was a noble act.”
“And you haven’t told any of this to Lane.”
“No,” he admitted.
Tiffany pointed her finger at him and frowned, “You just can’t stand for Lane to know you are on the up and up.”
“Ah,” he laughed, “it works better with him being the good guy in the white hat and me being the misfit. So, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that I gave you a ride tonight.” He paused and glanced back to the family photo. “Now, there’s something that’s been bugging me since I found out your real name.”
“Hold that thought,” she suggested. “Are you finished?”
“There’s nothing left on the plate,” he pointed out.
“Let me put the dishes in the sink and then, Mr. Garner, you can share what is bothering you. Go over there and take your place in what seems to have become your chair.”
The investigator moved to his assigned seat and listened as Tiffany rinsed off the plates. She must have forgotten about having to run for her life, as the entire time she worked she was humming, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” After the last dish had been put up, she returned to the living room, fell into the corner of the couch, grabbed the throw pillow, and pulled it to her chest.
“Now, what is your question?”
He smiled, “How does a farm girl from Wisconsin end up with a high-society debutante’s first name?”
She shyly grinned. “Now we are diving into family history. You sure you want to go there?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, Bret, to make a long story short, I was named after a place in New York where my dad worked.”
His jaw dropped, “The jewelry store?”
“That’s it,” she admitted. “The one at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh. My father was an important part of that establishment for some time.”
“You don’t say,” Garner shot back, as if deeply impressed.
“I don’t like to brag,” she laughed.
“So your father’s farm is just kind of a hobby?” Garner asked.
“Well,” she explained, “Daddy didn’t want me growing up in New York City, so he bought the place in Wisconsin. We moved west when I was in sixth grade. I know he still misses working with diamonds. It was in his blood. I’m sure Mom misses the parties, the shows on Broadway, and the friends she made in all the city’s social circles. But they gave it up just to make sure I had a normal American upbringing.” She raised her eyebrows as she almost sang, “Yes, my life could
have been so much different. But I do understand why they did what they did. Their hearts were in the right place. Still, I miss the Big Apple.”
“Must have been tough,” the investigator chuckled, “to go from the penthouse to the farm.”
“It made me who I am today,” she casually added.
“Tiffany, it’s a great story.”
“What do you mean ‘story’?” she demanded. “It’s the way it really was.”
He laughed. “My dear, sweet almost-debutante, I used my skills as an investigator and did a little homework today. I made a few calls to Wisconsin and then backtracked to New York. While it is true your father once worked at the famous jewelry store in the Big Apple.” He paused and grinned, “He didn’t exactly run the place. He was a night watchman when you were born, and a few weeks later he was fired for sleeping on the job.”
“Why you . . .” She finished her sentence by throwing a pillow directly at her guest. He caught it in his left hand just before it would have struck his face. Standing, she stomped her foot and screamed, “You let me go on all that time knowing the real story! That was cruel even by your fake hit man standards.”
“It’s a good story,” he softly replied. “And, you tell it well. In fact, it’s obvious you have had some experience sharing it over the years.”
Dropping back onto the couch, she pouted and sighed. “I hope you don’t give this information to Lane. He’s believed that story for six years. I couldn’t bear looking like a fool in front of him.”
“I’ll let it be our secret,” he said with a smile.
“That was just mean,” she quietly added.
“Tiff, in my mind, you’re a lot more of a jewel than any diamond in that store in New York.” He allowed his words to sink in before pushing out of the chair, moving over to the couch, leaning down, allowing his lips to briefly brush hers, and then walking to the front door. As he pulled it open, he glanced back and let his eyes linger on the woman still glued to the corner of the couch. She was something else. He wasn’t sure what yet, but he hoped he’d get to find out. Stepping out into the hall, he pulled the door shut and hustled down the apartment building’s three flights of stairs. After studying the seemingly empty street, he walked over and slid into his Oldsmobile. He sat in his car for thirty minutes studying the apartment’s back window until Tiffany’s lights went out. Garner then remained there, huddled in the front seat with the Indian blanket wrapped around him, watching the street for the rest of the night.
The Fruitcake Murders Page 13