“That damn Margaret,” Eddy said. “She skipped out on the last few Knitters meetings, told us her arthritis was acting up. Here she’s been playing bingo.” She squinted at the page. “Says here she won two grand.” Eddy shot Coop an accusatory glare. “You knew about this all along, didn’t you, you twerp?”
Coop had the sense to appear sheepish and raised his bony shoulders until they were up around his ears. “Yeah. Margaret swore me to secrecy. Sorry, Eddy.”
Eddy studied the picture again, holding it close to her face. “This photo serves her right. All those wrinkles.” She tossed the packet on the top of the pile. “Guess now she can pay me the poker bucks I loaned her last month.”
A grin tugged at the corner of my mouth and I stooped over to check the bottom desk drawer. Manila files were tucked into goose-poop-colored hanging folders. Most of the paperwork was invoices for various barge supplies. Nothing suspicious. I slammed the drawer shut. The metal of the drawer face hit the desk, and a muffled thunk sounded inside. I stared at the drawer a moment, and then tugged it open again. This time I reached in and dragged all the files toward me. On the bottom of the drawer, beneath the files, two VHS video tapes lay side by side. Each had a handwritten label. The first one read Sonja Sucks and the second Lovin’ Lavonne.
Rocky’s Ms. Lavonne, perchance? More stuff the cops must have decided wouldn’t be of any use to them. Unless, of course, the cops were simply inept. As Eddy often said, you never know.
I held up the two tapes. “Check it out. Kinky really entertains himself on the job.”
Eddy peered at the video cassettes in my hand, and Coop sidled over next to me. He took one of the tapes and flipped it end to end. “Let’s see what’s on them.” He popped one into the VCR and hit play. We watched the gray snow fade and be replaced with the grainy image of a woman kneeling on a loveseat while a man with a very white, hairy ass went to town behind her.
Eddy gasped and clapped a hand over her eyes.
Coop laughed, and then the sound died in his throat. He walked closer to the monitor. “Isn’t that the loveseat … in here?” He pointed to the piece of furniture in question.
Without a doubt, it was identical.
Coop cleared his throat, eyes glued to the action. “That’s Kinky. Jesus. And I think that’s Lavonne Smith—Ms. Lavonne—bingo player extraordinaire. And obviously, woman of questionable morals.”
Disbelief and repulsion fought for priority on his face. “God, I can’t believe I’ve actually sat on that nasty couch.”
Eddy said, “Hey, wait a minute. If that’s this office, where’s the video camera?” We surveyed the room without seeing any indication of a camera.
The entire length of the loveseat and the front edge of the desk were caught in the frame. I walked over to the two posters hanging on the wall opposite the love seat and lifted the first one off its hook. Underneath was smooth, nicotine-colored sheetrock.
Coop came over and pulled Kinky’s portrait off the wall. Sure enough, a tiny hole had been drilled though the plaster behind it. Coop turned the poster over. Another hole went straight through Kinky’s right eyeball.
“Oh God, that is so wrong,” I said, my lip curling in disgust.
“Figures. What a slime ball.” Coop gingerly placed the picture back on its hook.
Eddy said, “What’s on the other side of that wall?”
Coop frowned, and rubbed his chin, fingertips scraping against whiskers well past a five o’clock shadow. “A utility room that isn’t used.”
“Handy. Let’s go have a peek.” I headed for the door, gingerly stepping over the hole in the carpet.
“You two go on,” Eddy told us. “I’ll keep on checking out this damn mess.”
I followed Coop out of Kinky’s office while Eddy muttered under her breath about kinky bastards.
The storage room, no bigger than a bedroom closet, held a crusty mop, a stack of boxes, and a lot of cobwebs.
“This is the wall.” Coop reached over and tapped on the sheetrock behind the boxes.
“What’s inside these?”
Coop sneezed as he pulled the top box down, dust floating around his head as he opened it. “Bingo paperwork, cashier stuff.” He sniffed and looked up at the stack. “No place for a camera.” He pulled another box down and set it aside.
I pulled the third one off the pile and realized it was much lighter than the other two. Sure enough, behind the box was the tiny hole that went through the wall into Kinky’s office. I turned the box around. A cord snaked out the side and was plugged into an electrical socket in the wall. Another side of the cardboard had a perfect circle no more than an inch in diameter carved out of it.
Nestled inside, envelopes and assorted papers lay on top of a mini-camcorder that was secured to the cardboard with electrical wire and duct tape, its lens pressed against the hole in the side of the box. Another wire ran from the camcorder to a metal container the size of a couple of loaves of bread. The container was padlocked shut.
“Well, well, well,” Coop said. “Kinky was making his own porn. It wasn’t another urban legend after all.”
I shuddered, lifted out the papers, and quickly sifted through them. There were a number of rumpled gas receipts and a business card for a storage warehouse off of Washington Avenue in Minneapolis. Interesting. If this stuff were hidden here, it must have some kind of significance.
One of the envelopes contained the title to a 1983 Caddy in Kinky’s name. I’d seen the car in the Bingo Barge parking lot. The behemoth was all big tires, tinted windows, and curb feelers.
“He must have used his video-making hideout as some kind of safety deposit box,” Coop said. I stuffed the business card and the gas receipts in my pocket and we put the rest of the boxes back. Coop carried the video equipment into Kinky’s office. Eddy was still in Kinky’s chair, in the act of carefully ripping off the top two pages of the big calendar on the desk.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Kinky’s not going to miss these where he is. Might come in handy, never know. Could be secret codes in the doodles.”
My hand shot out and stopped her in mid-rip. “Stop! What if the police need these for something? I’m sure they’ve already seen them. You can’t take what’s sitting here in plain sight. They’ll know someone was here.”
Eddy rolled her eyes at me. “Okay, you might be right. But what if one of those doodles holds the dirt we need?”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Fine. Anyway. I’ve decided I can’t call that man by his given name after seeing his goods on the video. ‘Kinky’ damn sure fits the man.” She nodded once emphatically. “So. What’d you find?”
Coop set the box on the desk. “The camcorder and probably a VCR.” He fingered the padlock. Then he pulled out his keys and tried to fit each key into the slot on the bottom of the lock, but none of them worked.
I remembered the key ring in the desk drawer. “What about these?” I lifted out the ring I’d seen earlier and tossed it to Coop, who one-handed them in a jingle of metal. The third key he tried opened the lock with a soft click. Eddy and I crowded around as Coop lifted the lid. A tiny VCR occupied the box. I pulled it out and plugged the power cord into the wall.
“Ah, there’s the power button,” Coop muttered with satisfaction. A humming and a soft grinding came from the machine, and a video tape popped out. “And what do we have here?”
I grabbed the playing-card-sized cassette and turned it over and around. It was unlabeled, and the tape inside was at the start or had been rewound to the beginning. I walked over to the VCR, looked around for some kind of converter. The mini cassette slid into a VCR-sized doohickey that sat next to the player. I popped the carrier into the VCR and pressed play. Familiar gray snow filled the monitor. Then the picture, although still fuzzy, cleared up enough to show Kinky’s loveseat. No one was in the frame. I pushed the fast-forward button. Pretty soon Kinky speed-walked in and disappeared behind his desk. A couple
of long minutes of nothing passed. Then a scruffy-looking man popped in, made some animated movements, and zoomed out of the room.
Coop crossed his arms. “That was Buzz. Buzz Riley.” A name on Rocky’s list.
The tape kept zinging along. Pretty soon Kinky left and then returned, followed by Lavonne of Lovin’ Lavonne. They chatted some, then moved over to the loveseat and proceeded to reenact the scene we’d already witnessed.
Thanks to fast-forward, they finished quickly, then resituated their clothes and stood discussing something. Lavonne appeared mad as a wet cat when she stormed out.
I said, “You don’t think this is from the night Kinky was killed, do you?”
Coop said, “If I show up, you know it is.”
Kinky popped in and out of the picture a few more times, and then another woman appeared, who, thankfully, kept her clothes on. She and Kinky exchanged words.
“God, I wish this thing had sound,” I said.
The woman, obviously agitated, waved a finger with a long, blood-red polished fingernail at Kinky. “That’s Rita Lazar,” Coop said.
Rita and Kinky soon exited.
The tape zipped forward, and Coop flashed onto the screen. He buzzed around the room. At one point he had the legendary, bronzed bingo dauber, tossing it back and forth from one hand to the other. Kinky appeared again, followed by a few moments of very animated discussion. Kinky’s arm went up, a finger pointing to the door. Coop set the dauber on the desk and exited.
“Man, that hurts almost as much the second time around,” Coop said with a grimace.
We’d been standing mesmerized in front of the monitor for several minutes. Suddenly, we were jolted back to reality by the loud sound of shattering glass.
I dove for the light switch. Coop hit the power on the TV and frantically jabbed at the eject button on the VCR. Eddy stood rooted to the floor. Her eyes went wide and round, the whites showing bright against her dark skin.
“What the hell?” Coop whispered. With a rattle and click of the VCR, Coop yanked the cassette out of the player.
It had sounded as if the crash came from the main bingo floor. I whispered, “Where does this hallway go?”
“Past the restrooms and break room. There’s an emergency exit at the end, but it’ll set off the alarm.”
I grabbed Eddy’s arm. “Come on.”
At the threshold, I stopped. Whoever broke in had to hear the hammering of our hearts. We were probably twenty feet away from the main bingo area, and I caught a brief flash of light. It blinked out as fast as it came on, followed by another loud bang.
“Shut the fuck up,” a man said in an ominous, low voice.
Cops wouldn’t break in, so who were these guys?
I dragged Eddy out the door, and Coop followed us. We hustled farther down the hall away from the bingo floor. A door was propped open, and I darted into the room as fast as one can dart with two people in tow.
Eddy flung herself against the wall. I knelt next to the doorframe, struggling to quiet my panicked breathing.
“Oh God,” Eddy whispered, realizing which room we’d landed in from the acrid odor heavy in the air. “I don’t want to die in the toilet. Is this the men’s toilet? I’d rather die in the women’s.”
“Hush!” I poked Eddy with my elbow. She fell silent. My breath stuck in my lungs as footsteps echoed nearer. The interlopers had entered the hallway.
“The office is somewhere here,” the low voice said.
“It damn well better be. Your directions are shit, Pudge,” said another voice, accented and not as deep. Brooklyn, or Jersey, maybe? “Christ. I can’t believe you did that, you dumbass.”
Another oath from the first man. “I said I was sorry. Bastard shouldn’t have done what he done. That’s serious shit, ya know?”
“Yeah, yeah, what-the-fuck-ever. There’s gotta be something here that’ll tell us where those fucking nuts went.” The footsteps stopped, fortunately not in front of our hideout. Probably at the office we’d vacated. “You should have at least made him tell you where the stupid truck is before you did him.”
Nuts? I pressed my head hard against the tile wall, praying they wouldn’t come closer, wondering what kind of nuts would have anything to do with the Bingo Barge and Kinky’s death.
“Here, Boss,” Pudge said.
I hazarded a quick peek around the doorframe. The light in Kinky’s office blinked on. I jerked my head out of the line of sight.
Eddy leaned toward me. “We need a diversion to get the hell off this tub.”
“What do you suggest?” Coop whispered.
“Shh.” I waved a hand at them as the strange voices carried down the hall to us.
“… the hell is this? Some kind of fucking VCR?” asked the Boss.
“I dunno, Boss.” Silence reigned momentarily, and then Pudge said, “What’s on that tape?” More silence. I imagined one of them starting the Lovin’ Lavonne cassette.
After what felt like a very long silence, Pudge said, “Holy shit, it’s Stanley and some ho.”
“And they’re getting it on,” the other man said. A pause, then, “Where’s the cam?”
“I think this thing is it, Boss,” Pudge said. The men went silent, and then metallic banging echoed down the hall.
“There’s a goddamn camera set up so Stanley can get his rocks off watching replays of him banging someone? How long does the damn thing run? Is there a tape in it?” More pounding.
“Vincent, there’s no tape in that machine.” Pudge’s voice pitched up an octave.
“Well, where did it go? If a tape was running when you were in here—oh Christ, Pudge. Do not tell me you’re on camera smashing Long Dong Anderson’s skull in. Why does this happen to me? All I want are my fucking nuts back! There’s got to be some record of what that rat did with them. If I have to tear this goddamn place apart …” Vincent’s voice had begun quietly and ended in a bellow.
“What if the cops have it?” Pudge dared to interject.
“You better hope they don’t fucking have it. Keep hunting.”
Almost as one, Coop, Eddy, and I shifted away from the doorway. The two strange men themselves were fucking nuts. We needed to get out of there before this Vincent, aka the Boss, and Pudge decided they had to take a leak.
Coop leaned into Eddy and me. “I have an idea,” he whispered. “Three of us won’t make it past the office door without being seen. But I think I can. I’ll sneak out onto the floor and turn on the speaker system and the bingo machine. It’s loud, and I’ll stick the microphone close to the balls. It’ll almost sound like gunfire. Then I’ll head out the front doors. You guys do the emergency door. When you hear guns, run!” Coop scooted around Eddy and me. “Wish me luck,” he said quietly, and slipped out the door.
Eddy and I peeked around the doorjamb to watch. As Coop closed in on the office, I saw he’d stuck the tape in his jacket pocket and it was dangerously close to tumbling out. I wanted to warn him, but Vincent and Pudge would hear me. He passed Kinky’s office. As he moved into the shadows, the tape fell to the floor with an incredibly loud clatter.
After that, everything was a blur. Coop scrambled to grab the tape. His foot inadvertently bumped it, sending it skittering down the floor ahead of him. Two shadowy figures raced out of the office. The rubber on Coop’s tennis shoes made desperate squeaking sounds on the cracked linoleum. He propelled himself from the hallway and into the bingo area, the two men tearing after him.
Eddy and I took off like spitballs out of a straw. She hit the emergency release on the door with the heel of her hand and we fled through the opening. Sirens screeched, slamming into my ears with the force of a physical assault. Red lights mounted beneath the walkway roof flashed bright.
A secondary gangway led from the barge, landing at the back of the boat very near where we’d boarded. A Supplies Only sign was attached to the railing next to it. Eddy and I were over the supply bridge in a flash.
We crossed the road and ducked int
o a thick stand of trees between the barge and the lot we’d parked in. I pulled up short, grabbed a tree trunk for support, and struggled to catch my breath.
“You okay?” I gasped.
Eddy nodded, her cheeks puffing as she blew out air. “Where’s Nicholas?”
Sirens still blared from the barge, and the red lights strobed, but we saw no other people. No Coop. No bad guys.
“Come on, child, we need to haul ass out of here.”
I stumbled after Eddy. Real police sirens sounded in the distance, urging us to move our keisters. We burst out of the woods and climbed into Eddy’s truck.
“Where the hell is Coop?” Near the barge, the silhouettes of a short, chubby figure and a taller, heavy-set man scrambled away from the barge. They ran across the street, jumped into a parked car, and rocketed off down the road.
“Boy’s on his own now. Pray.” With that, Eddy put the truck in reverse, hit the accelerator, and executed a textbook one-eighty. She slammed the gearshift into drive and jammed the pedal home.
As the truck’s wheels won the fight and gripped asphalt, a lone figure careened out of the woods at a dead run and launched himself headlong into the bed of the pickup. The truck swayed with the sudden weight as Eddy peeled out of the lot. I twisted around, fingers digging into the headrest.
Coop’s arm stuck straight up out of the bed of the truck, the videotape clutched triumphantly in his hand.
_____
How we made it home in one piece, I have no idea. Coop disappeared the moment Eddy pulled the truck in the garage. I followed Eddy into the kitchen and watched as she spiked hot chocolate with a liberal splash of peppermint schnapps and we regrouped around the table in the loft.
“Thanks for making me ride in the back the whole way home,” Coop said once he settled in.
“I wasn’t about to stop just to let you in the cab. What if those bums were right behind us? No, sir. Once we were cruising, I wasn’t stopping!” Eddy pursed her lips and shook her head. “How on earth did you manage to get away from that mess, Nicholas?”
Bingo Barge Murder Page 5