by Matt Coyle
“Are you Cahill?”
The speaker was at least six four and must have come through the door sideways or he would have gotten stuck. His head was square like his body, evenly leveled by a crew cut. He had a few years on me and they looked like they’d been spent pumping iron. Gray sweats, stretched well beyond XXXL, clung to his body.
His partner was as tall but not as wide. He had unkempt blond hair and a faint goatee anchored his angular face. Metal rings pierced both eyebrows and stair-stepped up his ears. He wore a lazy Generation Y grin and lounged against the cutting table. A black leather coat and baggy jeans filled out the attitude.
Those two weren’t there to make dinner reservations.
“I’m Rick Cahill.” I dropped the meat on the table. “What can I do for you?”
“Where’s the girl?” The bigger one was in charge. His voice had an edge to it and a faint Brooklyn accent.
Looked like my friends from last night’s car chase had finally caught up to me. I liked it better when I couldn’t see them. And, when they couldn’t see me.
“What girl?”
“Don’t be a hero, pal.” He tugged on his sweat top with his ham-hock right hand. “Melody, the drop-dead Filipina. We just wanna talk to her. Where is she?”
Some of the edge had rubbed off his voice. It was almost weary, like he’d done this so many times before that he was tired of the routine. His partner didn’t look tired. He’d snapped out of his slumping attitude and was poised like a puma ready to pounce.
My morning crew wasn’t due for another twenty minutes. It was just me and them.
“That sounds like a woman who had dinner here last night. But I don’t know where she is.” True, but now I had competition if I wanted to find her. Double-barreled competition. I sank my weight into the balls of my feet. “Why don’t you leave me your names and phone numbers, and if this Melody comes back in, I’ll have her call you.”
“Still playing the hero.” The big fella took a step toward me, and I spring-loaded my body.
The kid beat him to me. I let him get close, then grabbed the lapels of his coat and spun him into his partner. The big one took the impact like a concrete pillar. The kid bounced off him and slammed against the stainless steel wine refrigerator. His boss loomed in front of me filling up my vision, a crooked smile below hard pebble eyes.
Adrenaline pulsed in the place of blood. I eyed the knife block on the meat-cutting table two steps away.
“Hey!” A voice boomed from the other side of the kitchen.
Everyone turned to see Thomas “Turk” Muldoon standing in the doorway. My partner, my best friend, and the toughest man I knew. He’d put on a couple pounds around the middle since his linebacking days at UCLA, but most of him was still hard and agile. He held a meat mallet in his right hand. Used to tenderize meat. Sometimes the two-legged kind.
The concrete pillar worked his eyes over Turk. “You interrupted our little talk.”
“By all means, let’s talk.” The whites grew around Turk’s pale-blue eyes. I’d seen that look before. So had a drunk who once insulted Turk’s sister. Right before unconsciousness.
The head tough moved his eyes from Turk over to me and finally rested them on his partner. “Let’s go.”
The younger one held his ground for a second and then walked toward the kitchen door, eyeballing Turk with each step. The leader followed him, but stopped at the exit and turned to face us.
“You two be careful, now.” He grabbed a water glass off the shelf opposite the dishwasher and held it with his palm over the top. He squeezed and it exploded into shards and crashed down onto the cement floor. “Life can be dangerous. Even in La Jolla.”
He gave us one more tough-guy look and then went through the door.
Turk followed him through the restaurant like a controlled avalanche flowing down a mountain.
I rode his wake.
It wasn’t the first time Turk had covered my ass. Back in the early days after Santa Barbara, there were always a few latent frat boys brave on booze who wanted to test the “murderer.” I tried to hide in public under a low profile. The first year back, I even grew a beard. But when challenged, my anger was quick and punitive. I rarely needed Turk’s support, but he was always there. No matter what.
After the tough guys left, I closed the front door behind them. The backsplash of adrenaline twitched in my hands.
“What the hell was that all about?” Turk sat down on the couch in the hall and ran his hand through a tangle of red Chia Pet hair that hadn’t felt a comb since the ’80s.
“They were looking for a woman who had dinner here last night.” I sat down next to him and let go a sigh.
“They had a funny way of looking.”
I replayed the night for him, leaving out the sex and Stone wanting to buy Muldoon’s. The former was between Melody and me. The latter would come out soon enough.
“So, those two assholes were Stone’s boys?” His eyebrows rose.
“So, you know Stone.” I stood on my anger and waited for Turk to come clean.
“Not personally, but I know of him. Everybody does.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t you ever read the newspaper?” He looked at me like I was the dumb kid in school.
“Not in the last eight years.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He squeezed my shoulder with his massive hand. “Sorry.”
My anger throttled down. Turk was the man who’d given me a life after my old one had died. No one would hire me after SBPD pushed me off the force. Not in Santa Barbara, not down here. Then Turk called and offered me a job as kitchen manager at Muldoon’s. He took some heat for it in the local paper and sales dipped for a time, but he never blinked. I handled the back of the house while he handled the front. After about a year, I was general manager of the whole restaurant and he was a semi-absentee owner off rock climbing in Joshua Tree, Yosemite, or Grand Teton.
I’d first worked at Muldoon’s as a fourteen-year-old kid prepping veggies for Turk’s father. The money I made on weekends made a difference to my family after my dad had lost his job with the La Jolla Police Department. Turk was an all-city high school linebacker with scholarship offers from all over. But he took the time to show me the restaurant ropes and became a big brother to me. And my best friend.
“So, tell me about this Stone guy.” Maybe Stone had been lying to me about buying Muldoon’s just to get under my skin.
“Breakfast first.”
Turk walked down the entry hall and made a left at the hostess stand into the lounge. He stood behind the bar under a set of Irish bagpipes mounted on the back wall. The uilleann pipes bore the Muldoon family crest. They were Turk’s prized possession. A family heirloom his father brought over from the old country. Every St. Patricks’ Day, Turk would pull them down and play “Danny Boy” just like his father had before him. A collector once offered him $10,000 for them, but he turned him down. One night in a quiet moment over too much Jameson, Turk confessed that he hoped to someday hand the pipes down to a son.
After he finally settled on one woman and quit playing on the sides of mountains thousands of feet in the air.
I sat on a stool and watched Turk concoct his version of breakfast. He pulled a banana, an orange, a lime, two eggs, and some cranberry juice from the under-counter refrigerator. After he peeled the orange and banana and tossed them into a blender, the raw eggs and cranberry juice followed. He topped everything with a few squeezes of lime, ran the blender on high for a few seconds, then poured in a pint of our house dark amber from the beer tap.
“You want some?” He set an empty glass down in front of me.
I just stared at him. He shrugged his shoulders and took a swig directly from the pitcher. Dirty foam hung from his three-day growth of mustache.
“Which route did you climb on Half Dome?”
“Regular Northwest.”
“That’s the one we did that time, right?” My only trip to Yosemite, rock-climbing M
ecca, way back in college. I remembered Turk ascending nature’s monument, heaven just out of reach and a view of the granite valley below. His movements were sure and fluid like an orangutan swinging through the trees. I fought my way up behind his lead, muscling against the rock instead of working with it. But somehow I made it to the top.
“You should come next time.” Turk took another gulp of his breakfast, then came around the bar and sat down next to me.
“I don’t think my knee or your restaurant would allow it.” I rubbed my left knee that had been shredded in a college football game. “So tell me about Stone.”
“He was part owner of a casino in Vegas before he moved out here. Back when the mob still had a piece of the action. I think it was the Starlighter, before they blew it up and built whatever the hell they put in its place.”
“What brought him to San Diego?”
“Evidently he was forced out of the casino.” Turk took another slug of breakfast and made a sour face. “He got into real estate out here. Owns a few hotels. Now he’s a big time philanthropist. He’s clean and shiny like Vegas never happened. He just donated a pile of cash to put a new wing on the La Jolla library.”
“Does he own any restaurants?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“He told me he was interested in Muldoon’s and that you should give him a call.” The anger welled up in me like steam in an overheated radiator. I tried to keep the cap on. “Said his realtor told him it was listed for sale.”
Turk shook his head and glanced down at the bar. When he looked back at me his eyes were squinted and his mouth closed tight.
“Yes, the restaurant is listed.” His voice had a little snap in it. “You could have just asked me and I would have told you.”
“Or you could have volunteered it.” I bit the words off harder than I expected to.
“I’d never sell without telling you. I’m just testing the water to see where the market is. If I do sell, you’ll get back what you’ve invested.”
“I don’t want my investment back.” Stone’s entitled arrogance, Melody’s abandonment, and now Turk’s betrayal boiled up in me and the cap blew off. I shot up from the barstool. “I want the restaurant. That was our deal!”
“Our deal? You gotta be kidding.” Turk planted catcher’s-mitt hands on the bar and leaned toward me. “You’re giving me seven fifty a month. That’s barely enough to get you a minority share. The rate you’re going, we’ll both be dead before you own this place.”
“We had a deal.”
“It was contingent upon you getting a loan.” His voice was low, like a father explaining life to his son. “It’s been two years.”
“Any other buyers?” I lowered my voice and tried not to sound like a petulant son.
“None right now, but you need to come up with some real money soon. I can’t wait forever.” His eyes showed friendship with a hint of pity. “Have you talked to any new lenders lately?”
I’d talked to plenty of lenders, but there wasn’t a bank who’d give me a loan with only a 2006 Mustang GT as collateral. All I had was seven years of sweat equity in the one place I felt at home. Until now.
I left the bar without answering.
Muldoon’s
CHAPTER SIX
Eleven forty-five a.m. I left Muldoon’s and headed south on Prospect Street instead of north toward my car. Turk and Stone were still rattling around in my head, but I had a more immediate concern. Melody.
The muscle I’d met that morning didn’t seem like the kind to give up the chase. I was afraid of what they might do to Melody if they found her. I had to get to her first. It was time to convince her to put the police between her and Stone and his hard boys. A call to her cell phone would have been the easy way. If I’d had enough sense between sex and snuggle time to get her number.
One thing I did mange to absorb was that Melody’d mentioned she was staying at a motel that she later called a bungalow. I knew of only one place that fit that description. Shell Beach Motel. It was just a few blocks away, down by the ocean.
The sun was hiding behind a gauze of morning fog when I hit the narrow alley that sluiced down a hill toward the sea. The motel was a series of small bungalows opposite the beach and sat on Coast Boulevard, a winding strip of seaside paradise. The bungalows were weather-beaten and could only generously be called quaint, but they did have an ocean view. Today the low gray sky smothered the ocean, leaving a gunmetal gray reflection on the water. Even paradise had its off days.
I angled over to a brick three-story building on the south side of the alley that housed the front desk. Maybe someone in there could help me track down Melody.
I was about to enter when a cop car blurred by on the street and then hot-rubbered to a stop on the north side of the alley. I walked down to the corner and looked. Three other squad cars and two slick tops were parked haphazardly in the street blocking any would-be traffic. A uniformed patrolman stretched yellow crime-scene tape around two bungalows and part of the parking lot. A plainclothes detective squatted in front of a Hispanic woman seated in the one of the unmarked brown Crown Victoria cop cars. The woman was crying and wore blue latex gloves against her white smocks. A maid who’d seen something horrible.
Melody?
Had I been too late? Had the two thugs found her while I was arguing with Turk? An image of Melody lounging naked on my couch flashed in my mind. Then she morphed into Colleen laid out on the coroner’s table. My face burned hot and sweat beaded my hairline. Had I failed again? I had to find out what happened. And who it happened to.
A crowd had gathered outside the tape, pushed back onto the sidewalk by a couple of uniforms. Wet-suited surfers, sweat-suited geriatrics, and a small group of German tourists craned their heads to get a better view. I slipped into the middle of them. There wasn’t much to see. The door was opened on a bungalow fronting the street and a woman in a white lab coat brushed black fingerprint powder on the doorknob.
Members of the crowd murmured to each other, and I heard the word “dead” a couple times. The number of cop cars suggested as much. But nobody knew for sure. I heard another vehicle pull up and glanced over and saw a coroner’s van. My stomach knotted tighter. All doubt now erased, I was just left with the “who.”
On the far left-hand side of the parking lot, a woman talked to a detective up against the crime-scene tape. She had her back to me, but something about her was familiar. Designer jeans, powder-blue sweater, natural brown curls. The detective was short, but made up for it with attitude and attire. Herringbone jacket, tan slacks, slicked-back hair, and an ’80’s porn mustache. He said something and the reporter laughed and flicked her hair away from her eyes. I guessed it wasn’t the first time they’d been together at a murder scene.
The woman turned, stuffed a notepad in her leather shoulder bag, and hurried across the parking lot.
“Heather?” I said.
She looked over at me and flashed a high-wattage smile under big brown eyes. Heather Ortiz, San Diego U-T food reporter. She’d done a story a few years back on family owned restaurants versus the big chains. Turk had talked on the record for the story. Afterward, Heather and I’d had a couple of drinks in the bar that had ended with breakfast in her bed. Seemed she’d moved up the food chain to the cop beat.
“Rick? I never took you for a Lookie-Loo.”
“What happened in there?”
“You’re white as a sheet.” She put a hand to my forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. What happened?”
Heather examined me with reporter’s eyes looking for a scoop. She must have read my desperation, and realized I had more than the normal prurient interest in whatever had happened inside the bungalow. She looked over my shoulder at the crowd and then took me by the hand and led me over to a red Mazda Miata convertible parked on the street.
“What’s going on, Rick? Do you know someone who was staying in that room?”
“I know someone staying here, but
I don’t know what room she’s in.”
“Your friend is probably all right.” She rubbed my hand. “It’s a he, not a she, they’re about to zip up in a black bag.”
I let out a sigh, louder and longer than I could control.
“She must be someone special.”
“A friend.”
I wasn’t sure yet whether or not Melody was special. I wasn’t sure of anything about her. Except that sometime between stepping out of the shadows last night and disappearing from my bed this morning, Melody’d become my responsibility. I hadn’t realized it until the two toughs tried to beat her whereabouts out of me. There was no reason to it, although I’m sure some shrink would tell me I was trying to make up for past sins. Responsibility didn’t need reason. It only needed commitment. Now I just had to find Melody.
“Well, I trust her stay was more pleasant than the DB’s.”
“DB?” I smiled. “You’ve really taken to the cop beat, haven’t you? You just need a fedora with a press badge under the hat band.”
“I left it at home. Right next to my Turner Classic movie collection.” She sighed and her eyes went skyward. “I wish it were that exciting. This is my first dead body in weeks.”
“Yeah, it must be tough with the San Diego murder rate dropping. I’ll bet the DB is happy he could spice things up for you.”
“Smart ass. It’s not all that spicy.” She dropped her voice and I had to lean in to hear her over the waves whooshing on the beach, the mutterings of the crowd, and the squawks from the police radios. “The inside scoop is that it looks like a drug overdose, not a homicide. You can read all about it in the U-T tomorrow morning.”
“A lot of cops and crime-scene tape for an overdose.”