Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

by Suzann Ledbetter

  "C'mon, Phil." She tugged the leash. "You're all show and no ammo, too."

  The dog fell in beside her on the left. Jack marched like an automaton on the right. His hands were in his pockets, his expression pensive, his lips curled under.

  "You know, this heat's giving me an idea," she said.

  "Mmph."

  "I think I'll take off my blouse and bra and go topless the rest of the way home."

  "Mmph." Time check. An odd little spark in his eyes. "Better speed this up, kid. It's about time for me to pick up Yancy."

  The highest consecutive number of words he'd uttered in several hours was about needing Willy Wonk to siphon information on the Simpson brothers reincarnate. Dina had suggested driving the VW to the office for some over-Yancy's-shoulder lessons on data searches. That way, if Harriet needed her, or the process dragged on a while, Dina had transportation home.

  "Not tonight," Jack had said. "Your mom's had to tough it out alone too much lately as it is."

  That unkind cut was intended to piss off Dina. It worked splendidly, until she remembered Yancy's tent-theater troupe had a dress rehearsal this evening, before their debut performance, Saturday night.

  Confronting Jack would generate another lie. Instinct told her, whatever he had planned was risky, if not dangerous. His distracted antsiness hadn't escaped Harriet's notice, either. She'd mentioned it to Dina after dinner, while Jack stood on the patio looking for zoo animals in the clouds.

  Now back at the duplex, Dina let in Phil, then unclipped the leash. To Jack, she said, "Would you mind seeing if his water bowl is full? The poor dog's liable to be dehydrated after irrigating the whole block."

  "I've—" Jack struck whatever he was about to say and strode past Harriet into the kitchen.

  Dina's lifted eyebrows signaled her mother, who was fiddling with a pill bottle at the table. Dina continued down the hall, into the bathroom and shut the door.

  There on the vanity counter was her hobo bag, just as Harriet promised. Distrusting the strap to hold the purse's extra weight, Dina hugged it to her chest and pressed an ear to the doorjamb.

  "Where's Dina?" she heard Jack ask.

  "In the powder room. She'll be out in a minute."

  An extended pause, then, "I'd better go, Harriet. Tell Dina I'll call her later."

  Dina turned the knob and eased open the door a crack, listening for the storm door's rattle. Before the entry door pulled closed, she was running for the patio slider.

  A knothole in the far corner of the fence was like an oval periscope. The Taurus's headlights blinked their remote unlock signal before Jack was in view. Dina squinted through the peephole and waved frantically at the patio door.

  Jack opened the driver's side door and slid inside. Dina squeezed her purse, chanting, "Hurry. Hurry."

  The engine started; the car door closed. Dina glanced at the duplex. Phil stood with his nose smushed against the patio door's glass, as morose as the first out in a schoolyard dodge-ball game. Please, Mom, screamed in Dina's head.

  Jack reached over his shoulder for the seat belt. Dina readied herself mentally to revert to Plan B. He'd told her a professional investigator always had one, if not a Plan C, D and E. As a rank amateur, Dina wasn't confident in her second option, and didn't have a third.

  The Taurus started backing from the driveway. Dina groaned, cursing the not yet darkness. The rear tires were in the street, the front end swinging right, when it stopped. Jack craned over the steering wheel. Scowled. Snarled a one-word curse a small child could lip-read.

  Dina needn't see the porch light to know it was flipping on and off. Harriet, God love her, had come through.

  Jack shifted into Drive and gunned the sedan forward. He leaped out, leaving the engine running, the door open. The instant he rounded the front bumper, Dina's hobo bag thudded on the other side of the fence.

  She boosted herself up like a gymnast mounting a pommel horse. Foot braced on a plank, she cocked under the other leg and jumped.

  A jab at a button on the Taurus's armrest unlocked the rear doors. Burrowing backward beneath the coats and blankets piled on the floorboard, Dina pulled the door shut as quietly as she could.

  21

  Jack's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He tilted it downward and a fraction left. On the backseat, his overcoat and the pillow and blankets under it were definitely jiggling.

  Gravity, he supposed. His mobile closet was stacked almost level with the rear deck. In fact, the overcoat's charcoal-gray sleeve had flopped over on it, as if the invisible man had crawled inside for a snooze.

  Tomorrow, he'd rearrange everything. Tidy up. Divide and conquer.

  If he lived that long.

  "If I don't," he said, "Ms. Pearl can throw the crap in with the rest of the garage sale stuff." He tried on a Bogart leer, then his raspy snarl. "Change the signsh to eshtate shale, shweet-art. You'll make a killin'."

  He tensed. Eased up on the accelerator. Behind him, an SUV's headlights flashed a high-beam obscenity for slowing down. The overcoat was practically fibrillating.

  DeHaven. Jee-zus, get a grip, dumbass. He's too tall to—

  Instantly furious, he bellowed, "Dina, so help me God, you'd better not be hiding back there."

  Silence. The coat stabilized.

  Jack thought about her beeline to the bathroom after they walked Phil. Her still being in the bathroom when he left. Coasting out of the driveway and pulling in again when Harriet flagged him with the porch light. Her saying she was sorry, she didn't want to be a bother, then pressed a dollar bill in his hand and asked him to buy a roll of sugarless mints on his way home.

  "I'd send Dina," she said, "but it's getting dark and since you're going out anyway "

  By the dashboard clock, he should already be in position at the park. No time to turn around. None to wrestle a friggin' Munchkin dog groomer burglar out of the goddamn car and toss her in the nearest Dumpster. "I hope you suffocate back there. By hell, better hope you suffocate back there, before I get my hands on you."

  The clothes humped and heaved. A small, red, sweaty face rose above the seat back. "Humphrey Bogart is spinning in his grave." Dina smeared a flap of damp hair off her brow. "How about kicking up the AC a little bit?"

  "Do not even—"

  "Oh, get over it. Two women outsmarted you. Big surprise. We don't have time for a tantrum." Dina scowled at the mirror. "Where are we meeting deHaven?"

  Jack was still processing outsmarted and tantrum to less than calming results. "Who said anything about—?"

  "You did. The Neanderthal act, the restlessness, checking your stupid watch every fifteen seconds. Plus lying to me about Yancy."

  She grabbed the pillow and shoved it under her. To hell with his very expensive, dry-clean-only overcoat crumpled in a wad. "He told us at the office about tonight's final dress rehearsal and hinted like crazy about us coming to opening night."

  Jack summoned what remained of his pride. "That's no excuse for you to sneak into my car. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I was trying to protect you?"

  "Of course it did." Dina glared at him. "Right before it occurred to me that you're confronting a murderer—alone—with no way to protect yourself."

  He almost lost control of the car when a huge, long-barreled revolver waggled in the mirror. It was practically an antique, but age wasn't relative to a .357 Magnum. Old or new, it'd blow a hole the size of a turkey platter in whatever happened to be in range.

  "Holy shit! Is that thing loaded?"

  "Well, yeah. I didn't bring it along to throw at him." Dina clucked her tongue. "I keep unloading it and burying the bullets in the yard, but Mom must have a case of them stashed somewhere."

  Sweet Mother Mary, Jesus and Joseph. This was not real. There was not, could not possibly be, a four-foot-ten-inch woman in his backseat waving a cannon with a trigger and chatting about planting ammo like tulip bulbs.

  Helluva hallucination, though. Stress. Nerves. Residual payback for a Scotch man
knocking back four beers last night. Come to think of it, that third can had tasted funny. Evidently, oversleeping and waking up hungover and groggy wasn't punishment enough. Now he was imagining Dirty Harry Jr. in drag breathing down his neck.

  If the figment of his imagination would shut up, he'd be fine in a second, but no. As he decelerated for a traffic light, it went on, "Like I said the other day, McPhee. If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be in this mess, and—Oh, my God."

  Just like that, the figment was gone. Poof. Abraca-friggindabra.

  "Dina?"

  A soft but insistent "Shh!" hissed behind and below his right ear.

  The windows were up. Nobody could hear him. Or her, for that matter. Without turning his head, Jack commenced a visual survey for what spooked her into a nosedive. While clutching a loaded .357 whose barrel could at this very moment be aimed in a variety of potentially fatal directions.

  Jack had followed that Audi sedan for at least a couple of blocks. The convertible behind them with four teenage girls in it wouldn't pose a threat, provided Dina could have seen them in the mirror.

  The light changed; both lanes began moving forward as Jack's eyes roved to the black Lexus beside him. The driver's index finger beat time on the steering wheel with whatever was playing on the sound system. Either a cell phone was held to his opposite ear, or the man was singing along out of sync.

  Nice ride, Jack thought as he switched off the dashboard lights. The LS model was much admired by executives, doctors, and luxury-car thieves. Fresh off the showroom floor, it fetched upward of seventy grand.

  He lagged back to the apparent irritation of the teenyboppers behind him. The Lexus peeled off left at the next signal. After traffic swallowed it up, he said, "Olly and all that crap."

  Fright-wig hair, a swath of ruddy skin, then a pair of eyebrows cautiously brooked the space between the Taurus's headrests. Jack reached to boost the air-conditioner to maximum cool.

  "Don't tell me, let me guess," he said. "You hit the deck when you recognized your fence driving that Lexus." He gestured for silence. "No voodoo. Just effect, probable cause and common sense. I should have considered the angle sooner. It explains Gerry Abramson's impatience and why he's been on my butt since day one."

  Dina's expression telegraphed dots connecting and an absence of some crucial ones. "Mr. Abramson came by the office yesterday, as I was locking up. Said he'd fired you, hired somebody else and wanted your report and a refund by five o'clock today."

  "Oops." Jack smiled at the mirror. "The Lexus's driver is Wes Shapiro, National Federated's office manager. Gerry laughed when I mentioned Shapiro as a burglary suspect. He didn't want me diverting down that road. Obviously Gerry thought a fox was in his henhouse, but wanted proof."

  Also clear in twenty-twenty retrospect was the Calendar Burglar's last transaction with the fence: a week ago Thursday. Jack wasn't aware of that theft until Gerry's call on Saturday, but he'd contracted with National Federated on Thursday afternoon.

  Shapiro knew Jack couldn't identify the jewel thief in a matter of hours. Why not buy one final haul for half of the traditional ten percent cut?

  By Sunday night when Jack had Dina try to contact her fence, Shapiro had folded the tent as far as she was concerned.

  "He's worked for Gerry forever. Perfect setup, too, with access to other insurers' clients and policy information. Or Wes could figure out how to get it."

  Memories of his appointment at National Federated clicked bright and clear. Shapiro saying he'd told Gerry for months to contact McPhee Investigations. The snipe about Gerry having the first dollar he'd ever made.

  The first was a lie, the other, an anthem sung by every presumably underappreciated, underpaid employee. Which is why Jack hadn't paid much attention.

  Well, actually he had, but in a different context. When Abramson dismissed Shapiro from his office, Jack felt sort of sorry for the guy, especially considering Gerry's reliance on Wes after Letha Abramson's diagnosis.

  Therein must lay the tipping point. Letha's declining health shifted some of Gerry's workload onto Wes. For a while, Shapiro understood and sympathized. Eventually self-pity whined that he was running the business, but not profiting from it. The insult to compensatory injury was the toll that stress, sorrow and helplessness had taken on Gerry's usual affability.

  Shapiro had two choices: find a less moody, miserly employer, or use insider knowledge to deepen his personal revenue stream.

  "He may have started small," Jack said. "For sure, careful. Avoided mistakes that land other fences behind the razor-wire kind at the state hotel."

  "That's why he used pay phones and prepaid cell phones."

  Jack nodded. "Except if you found him, he's becoming too well known. By volume, if not by name." He glanced in the rearview mirror. "Burglary was your last resort, not a vocation. That friend of a friend of your brother's has to be a regular customer."

  A crease tined between Dina's brows. She wouldn't reveal Randy Wexler's friend's name without persuasion. Jack was a pretty good persuader.

  "Tooling around in a Lexus tells me Shapiro's gone Superman, too. Unless a crook feels invincible, he doesn't drive a vehicle a tax bracket or two above his day-job income."

  The dog-eared unexpected-inheritance story was almost a sure bet, but finite. It explained a few splurges or a boom-to-bust spend-athon. When splurges continue, people start to wonder. If the windfall was that big, or paid continuous dividends, why keep working at a dead-end job you bitch about constantly?

  "So many perps," Jack said, as he approached the west entrance to Shiffen Park. "So little time."

  The compass-point stone gates were patterned after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Bronze plaques embedded in each credited that source of inspiration, a 1902 dedication date, and identified the benefactor as A. N. Onymous.

  A philanthropist with no ego and a sense of humor. As Jack always did, he saluted Mr. Onymous as he drove through the gates. Alas, they just don't build rich people and bas-relief granite arches like they used to.

  The playground and picnic areas were deserted. The prospect of rain and encroaching darkness had discouraged all but a quartet of female joggers and an elderly gent walking a golden retriever.

  "You're meeting deHaven here?" Dina's tone implied a major lapse in intelligence. "He can see you coming a mile away."

  "And vice versa. Except it's a hundred feet at most with all the trees and shrubs."

  The four sinuous entry roads led to the pavilion in the middle of the park. The original bandstand had burned to the ground in the 1920s. Its replacement and four others had suffered the same fate, until a concrete-company owner partnered with a metal fabricator to build a fireproof structure. The lucky seventh bandstand wasn't as large as the first, but its steel rafters and sheet-copper roof had defeated numerous arson attempts.

  Jack parked the Taurus in the open and rolled down the windows. The engine dieseled, then shut down. Mugginess closed in, devouring the lingering coolness inside the car, but Jack needed to hear, as well as watch.

  With century-old walnut trees circling in the distance, he was a sitting duck for a marksman with a high-powered rifle and scope. A shooter with a handgun would have to close much of the gap on foot.

  "Okay, Annie Oakley. I'd be much obliged if you'd hand over that hog-leg—gently—and hunker down behind the seat."

  "But that's—"

  "Dina Jeanne, I do not have time to argue. Give me the damn gun and get your head lower than the window ledges."

  The .357 whomped on the front seat. The barrel pointed at Jack, surely by accident. He turned it over, hefted it, shuddered, then laid it down again.

  From under the seat, he brought out a .38 Police Special bought from a backroom dealer that afternoon. It wasn't registered to Jack or anyone else, hence doubly illegal to carry concealed. If deHaven came armed, they were even in Jack's eyes, though not the law's.

  A queasy flutter in his belly pushed an acrid taste into his mouth. At least
nothing was visible in the rearview, except a shadowy pillow and clothes.

  "Can I ask you something?" Dina whispered.

  "Uh-huh. Gotta answer like a ventriloquist, though."

  "Are you scared?"

  "Shitless."

  Perhaps not the response she'd hoped for, but there you go. Jack was a background checker, a fraud investigator, an adulterer's worst enemy, a skip tracer and a missing-person finder. He'd never confused himself with Doc Holliday and neither had anyone else.