Tina Whittle_Tai Randall Mystery 01

by The Dangerous Edge of Things

  “It’s not. It’s Ponce de Leon.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got an idea where he’s headed.” I dragged his folder out of my tote bag and waved it at Trey. “He has a photography studio near Centennial Park. We can catch him there.”

  Trey shook his head. “I don’t think—”

  I held out my hand. “Rock, scissors, paper.”

  “What?”

  “You know this game, right? Winner chooses. On the count of three…”

  He held out his hand. I counted, went with paper, which I then placed on top of Trey’s closed fist. The light turned green.

  “1212 Luckie Street,” I said.

  ***

  From the street, Snoopshots didn’t impress—a small shop front displaying sun-bleached photographs of brides and grooms, their faces sharp and averted like they were fleeing the scene of a crime. It was deserted, in stark contrast to the tan and sandstone squares of Centennial Park, which teemed with tourists. On the nights The Tabernacle held concerts, the street was a chaos of scalpers and music-drunk urbanites. But on this afternoon, the whole block felt like a throwback to Luckie Street’s less lucky—and much less lucrative—pre-Olympic days. Trey parked, but kept the engine running.

  I opened my window and took a picture of the front door. “I remember now—his daddy owns this whole building. Converted it to lofts during the boom. I’m guessing our boy doesn’t pay much rent.”

  “It’s closed,” Trey pronounced.

  “Looks that way.” I put my cell phone in my bag. “So what do you think the best way around back is?”

  I tried to open my door, but it was locked. Trey reached across me and laid his hand on top of mine.

  “No,” he said.

  We froze that way for five solid seconds, neither of us moving a muscle. A family of four passed Dylan’s shop, obviously lost. They all wore New World of Coke visors and carried dark blue plastic bags from the aquarium. The little girl licked a red, white and blue snow cone. The mother’s eyes darted back and forth, like a minesweeper.

  “Fine,” I said. “But can we at least wait a few more minutes? Just in case he shows?”

  Trey removed his hand from mine. He sat back and switched off the engine. “Five minutes. Then we go back to Phoenix.”

  So I watched the doorway. He watched his watch. After exactly five minutes, when there was still no sign of our quarry, Trey shifted the car into first and made a U-turn. I didn’t protest. Dylan Flint wasn’t showing, and I didn’t really want to go snooping. All I wanted to do was go home.

  Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have one, not yet anyway.

  ***

  The first thing I did when I got back to the Ritz was take a bath. A long one. I draped a washcloth on my face and ran the water as hot as I could. The bathroom filled with steam and all I could hear was the rhythmic plop plop of the water dripping from the faucet.

  My brother was still in the Bahamas. Of course I had other concerns, namely that Dylan Flint was stalking me. And that a convicted criminal had been stalking Eliza and possibly my brother and was now MIA, which meant he was probably stalking me too. Janie had dumped about two pounds of backstory in my lap, along with a mess of inconsistencies, and some unknown woman was making creepy phone calls outside a strip club. And the Beaumonts—the freaking Beaumonts—with their cheese straws and press conferences and conveniently Confederate kinfolk. And then there was Garrity, and Trey, and Marisa, and Landon, and some redhead named Gabriella…

  I turned off the water with my toe and sank under the surface.

  ***

  The call came thirty minutes later, just as I was toweling off. I was expecting Rico. I got surprised.

  It was my mystery caller again. “We need to talk. Meet me at the Waffle House out front of Boomer’s. Midnight. And come alone.”

  I made a noise. “Look, I don’t know what kind of idiot you think I am, but I don’t show up at midnight when some stranger tells me to ‘come alone.’”

  “Bring a friend then, just no cops. I smell a cop, you’ll never see me.”

  “No cops. Just a friend.”

  “Midnight,” she said, and hung up.

  My phone said it was five-thirty. I dialed Rico’s number. He answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”

  “Hello, friend.”

  Chapter 24

  Rico wore a red flannel shirt and Doc Martens, and he’d turned his baseball cap around the right way for a change. No medallions. He kept the nose ring though.

  I shook my head. “This is your idea of blending in with the Waffle House crowd?”

  He shrugged. “I do the best I can.”

  Across the parking lot, Boomer’s Adult Entertainment Emporium indeed boomed. I could hear its thumping rhythm even over the prehistoric grind of the eighteen-wheelers constantly coming and going. Rico held the door at the Waffle House, and we went inside. It smelled of cigarettes and syrup and hot strong coffee. A booth of upstanding male citizens gave me The Look as we passed, and I pulled my jacket tight in front.

  “Don’t bother,” Rico whispered. “They’re not looking at your chest, they’re deciding you’re a race traitor. Here, let’s take this booth. It’s by the exit.”

  I sat down, grabbed the least sticky menu. “It could be my chest, you know.”

  The waitress took our order, giving Rico a slow smile in the process. He returned it with equal smolder. I kicked him under the table.

  “What is up with you? You’re not turning hetero on me, are you? Because you can’t do that, you know. I can’t be a girl detective without a gay best friend.”

  “Nancy Drew didn’t have no gay best friend.” He looked around the restaurant, then leaned across the table. “Where’s your mystery chick?”

  “She said she’d find us.”

  He stirred his coffee. It was only a prop to him, just like the pecan waffle he’d ordered and then ignored. I pulled out my cigarettes, then put them back and got a piece of gum instead.

  Rico jutted his chin. “Don’t look now, but I bet that’s your girl.”

  I looked anyway. A young woman walked to the cash register and ordered a coffee to go. She looked barely twenty, a tawny-skinned creature with a mane of ebony hair almost to her butt. She carried herself like a dancer—head up, stomach in—and her body was lush and full, with a thrust of cleavage. She slanted her gaze our way.

  “Uh huh,” Rico said. “Bingo.”

  The woman sat down next to me without a word of greeting. I recognized her as the woman who’d been lying by the pool when Trey and I had visited Beau Elan. She looked very different now, with tight shiny clothes and heavy but expert make-up. She also smelled of strawberries.

  Definitely the stripper friend, I decided. For some reason, all strippers smelled like strawberries.

  “No cops?” she said. Her voice held a slightly Hispanic lilt.

  “No cops. Just Rico here.”

  Rico’s favored her with his slow molasses smile. She hesitated, then smiled back. And then we got down to business.

  Her name was Nikki. She was a friend of Eliza’s. And she had some very definite ideas about who killed her.

  “That bitch sister of hers,” she said. “She hated Eliza, and she hated me worse. Said I was a bad influence.”

  I didn’t argue since I remembered Janie saying those exact words. “Were you?”

  “Shit, no! I didn’t get Eliza back into the drugs—that was Bulldog. She used to buy from him in the parking lot over at Boomer’s until the manager called the cops. But Dylan was the real problem.”

  “Dylan Flint?”

  “Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “Jerk off. She met him at some club one night and thought he was the shit. I told her he was using her, but she didn’t care.”

  “Using her for what?”

  “To get the stuff.” She rummaged in her pocketbook and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. She didn’t ask, just lit up an
d blew out a fierce stream of smoke. I chewed my gum harder.

  “She was selling drugs?”

  “No, trading drugs. He took pictures of her.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “What kind do you think?” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “She sent them to Playboy. Playboy did not call back. She didn’t seem to care, though, just cooked up some new shady something.”

  “Which was?”

  “I dunno. She hauled that boy’s ass everywhere, to all these parties. I’d go too, and he’d take our picture with all these rich white people, and she’d laugh her ass off. It was stupid.”

  “So why do you think Janie killed her?”

  Nikki shrugged. “She hated her. Isn’t that enough?”

  And that, I thought, is a lie. There was something Nikki wasn’t telling me.

  “You have no idea?”

  She shrugged again. “Sister shit, I dunno. You done askin’ about it?”

  Rico watched our conversation from his side of the booth. He’d been silent the whole time, letting me ask all the questions. It was unusual behavior for him, so I wasn’t surprised when he finally joined in.

  “You got the sister, the creepy photographer dude, the meth man,” he said. “Anybody else hanging around your girl?”

  She sucked on her cigarette. “That manager. Always sliding up to us at the pool. Eliza told me she caught him looking in some woman’s window once. But he was easy to work for, didn’t crack whip, you know what I’m saying? So she didn’t worry about him too much.”

  Rico nodded. “I hear you. That it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “So why you got us here? You feeling particularly civic tonight?”

  She stubbed out her cigarette, blew one last flume of smoke into the air. “The cops asked me a bunch of questions and told me a whole lot of nothing back. Don’t return my calls. They still haven’t pulled Bulldog in. That fool could show up at my place any minute now.”

  She looked at me. “Then I saw you and that other guy, the one in the suit, saw you write your phone number down. I waited until the manager wasn’t looking and took it. I figured you weren’t a cop, you might be willing to let me know stuff and not expect me to put myself out there, you know what I’m saying?”

  I knew what she was saying. “Yeah. I’m willing. But if you want me to tell you stuff, I need some way of getting in touch. This ‘meet me at the Waffle House’ crap is crap.”

  She shrugged and gave me a business card. Sinnamon, it read, available for private parties, lingerie shows, etc. My grits had congealed into one solid mass, and the eggs were cold. I pulled off a piece of Rico’s untouched waffle and dipped it into the butter.

  “You were her friend?” I said.

  Nikki didn’t look at me, but she nodded.

  “You cared about her?”

  She stood abruptly, snatching at her purse as she did.

  “Wait, one more question. I heard that Eliza had a bunch of cash in a shoebox. You know where all that money came from?”

  Nikki shouldered her purse. “She told me she had a cake daddy. I didn’t ask about it anymore.”

  She picked up her coffee and took it with her. The truckers at the first booth watched her rear end as she left. I looked at Rico.

  He shrugged. “Even racists can appreciate a fine piece of dark meat.”

  I kicked him hard under the booth. “Stop trying to piss me off. You’re still stuck helping me.”

  We left as soon as I picked all the pecans out of Rico’s waffle and he explained what a “cake daddy” was, which was exactly what I thought it was. As we drove past Boomers, the club’s lights striped the car interior with pink and purple neon bands. The crowd had thickened, and there was an Oldsmobile cop car pulled up at the entrance. I squinted at the figure standing right beside said cop car, hands on hips, looking mean and official.

  Garrity. And he was staring right at me.

  “Oh crap!” I turned my face away and hunkered down in the seat. “Get outta here!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it! I can’t let him see me!”

  “Who?”

  “The cop! I’m not supposed to be investigating, and he’ll be pissed as hell!”

  So Rico drove. I stayed on the floor. He turned the music up. “Hate to break it to you, baby girl, but I think you’re busted. Cop dude’s still watching, and you’re right—he looks pissed as hell.”

  ***

  Back at the Ritz, I sat by the phone like a guilty teenager, waiting for Garrity to call and chew me out. But he never did. And since I wasn’t about to call him, I went to bed around two, feeling like I’d temporarily dodged a bullet.

  The call came at three-fifteen, and the dread returned. Only it wasn’t Garrity—it was an officer with the Kennesaw Police Department.

  “Ms. Randolph?” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Chapter 25

  “What security system?” I said.

  The Kennesaw officer looked perplexed. “The one rigged to the window. Nobody made it inside, though—the burglar bars did the job, and once the alarm started, your perpetrator fled the scene.”

  I took another deep breath. In the shop, a second officer took notes, his shoes crunching on the glass shards that used to be the gun shop’s front window. Somewhere on my floor was a brick. And apparently none of this would have been discovered without the security system that alerted the Kennesaw cops.

  Only one problem. Dexter didn’t have a security system. And I hadn’t installed one.

  I explained this to the deputy. He scratched his forehead. “Well, there was one in there. A surveillance camera too, only it got busted. The perpetrator hit it with another brick. “

  “If you’re talking about the thing mounted on the wall behind the register, it’s broken.”

  He looked at me like I was slow. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you—somebody hit it with a brick and broke it. He had good aim too, whoever it was. Took it out in one shot.”

  I didn’t try to explain. The old camera was for show only, a prop. Not that anyone could tell from looking at it—hence its current bashed-in state—but my real concern was the inventory.

  “Was anything missing?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be. The alarm scared off the perpetrator, and the safe is untouched. But you’ll want to check, of course.”

  He was right about that. There were a lot of things I planned to check out, just as soon as I got ahold of Eric, who still wasn’t returning my calls.

  Luckily, there was another person who was.

  Garrity saw me and made his way over. He carried two cups of coffee, one of which he handed to me wordlessly. It was scalding hot and loaded with cream and sugar.

  “You’ve got to stop calling me in the middle of the night,” he said. “It never turns out well.” He was dressed casually, but I saw the holster under the tan jacket.

  I shrugged. “What can I say? You’re my go-to guy these days.”

  He pulled the lid off his coffee and a tendril of steam curled into the air. “You have any idea who did this?”

  “Nope. You?”

  “Maybe.”

  He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. It was a photocopy of a BOLO on William Aloysius Perkins. I checked out the mug shot—it looked just like the sketch I remembered from my second interview. An ordinary face: dark buzz cut growing out, round eyes, small nose, soft chin.

  “Bulldog,” I said.

  Garrity’s eyebrows rose. “You know this guy?”

  “Janie told me about him. She’s convinced he killed Eliza.” I handed the paper back. “Is he a suspect?”

  “Right now he’s wanted for questioning, but once they get him in a chair, I’m sure he’ll spill. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you know what I mean? The manager at Boomers said he was usually riding the squirrel train.”

  “T
he what?”

  Garrity looped a slow circle at his temple. “High, whacked out, hyped.”

  “You think he has something to do with this?”

  “Maybe. There’s been a lot of camera breakage going on—first Phoenix, now here. And this guy’s got a history of B and E.”

  I hopped down and went to the back seat. “All of this is off the record, right?”

  “For now.”

  I dug inside my tote bag and pulled out the manila envelope with Rico’s illicit info inside. “Here. Have a look at this.”

  Garrity pulled out the materials and read a couple of lines. “Where did you get this?”

  “I forget.”

  “You forget?”

  “Yeah. I know that’s odd.”

  “Not really. You wouldn’t believe the kind of things people forget once they start talking to a cop.” He shut the folder, but left it lying in his lap. “So Eliza was into B and E too. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. I promised Janie I’d keep it out of circulation, but now that it seems like Eliza’s old partner is working my turf, I want it put in the right hands.”

  “Does this have anything to do with why you were at Boomer’s earlier?”

  His eyes would have been really beautiful, I decided, if he hadn’t been forever narrowing them at me, like I was on the witness stand. “Is this still off the record?”

  He agreed. So I told him the truth. Mostly. I left out the part where Nikki had been watching me, kind of de-emphasized the whole “meeting a creepy stranger at midnight” thing, but other than that, my version was right on the money.

  He sipped his coffee. “That was borderline idiotic, you know, the kind of stupid thing—”

  “You’re one to talk. Boomers is a little out of the way for something that’s not even your case.”

  “So? I’m a cop. You’re a civilian. End of argument.”

  “I’m a liaison now, Detective.”

  He gave me the cop eye. “A what?”

  So I told him everything about that—the ball-breaker of a morning meeting, my new position, Trey’s near-pummeling of Steve Simpson, the fact that Landon and Trey and Simpson were all “suspicious” now, the sighting of the mysterious Dylan Flint.