Secondhand Stiff

by Sue Ann Jaffarian

  With the business of Red’s death dispatched, Kim indicated the young woman. “This is Tiffany Goodwin, my assistant.”

  Bingo!

  “When the auction is over, please pay her.” Kim followed with a rundown of the rules, following a script similar to Red’s.

  I studied the young woman by Kim’s side and wondered how long she’d been employed by Acme Auctions. Did she go there right after quitting her father’s shop? Fehring never mentioned she also worked with Kim, just that the two women lived together. I pulled out my phone and texted Greg: Tiffany Goodwin! Even though he was standing next to me, I didn’t want to whisper to him and alert anyone to my interest in Tiffany. He texted back: Yeah, caught that.

  Kim announced that there were three storage units up for auction today. She also informed us that two of the units were originally up for auction on Monday but had to be postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. Talk about an understatement. She made it sound like they’d been postponed due to missing paperwork.

  “Is another body up for auction today?” A tall, skinny guy in flannel yelled out from the back. Everyone tittered nervously. “If so, that’s the one for me.” More laughter.

  When an Elite Storage worker cut the lock and raised the door, I held my breath, just in case. I expelled it when I saw the unit was corpse-free and packed with miscellaneous goods. There weren’t a lot of items, and they appeared to have been thrown in helter-skelter. Many were automotive. There were rims and tools. To the left was a heap of greasy rags. Some beat-up boxes lined the back wall. The stuff looked abandoned and without much value.

  “Not a very good locker,” I whispered to Greg.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. Those tools could fetch a nice price. Good tools are very expensive, and so are those rims if they’re in good condition. It all depends on what type of items you’re looking for.”

  While the serious auction-goers stepped forward with their flashlights to examine what they could of the unit, Greg and I eased back into the crowd.

  With a sigh, I texted Greg again: Blnd blk jkt Linda.

  He texted back: Got her.

  You ? her. I’ll take Kim/Tif.

  Linda struck me as the kind of woman who might respond better to questions from a handsome man, although if she decided to make a break for it, Greg would not be able to pursue her. Then again, neither could I, considering my size and age matched against hers. We also needed to divide in order to conquer. When the auction at Elite was over, the non-winners would probably clear out quickly, either on to the next auction location or back to their businesses.

  Greg texted back: OK. Then followed up with: Tell Dev re Linda?

  Not exactly sure what he meant in his last text, I glanced over, trying to read his face. Then it dawned on me. The police were trying to locate Linda. If they had already, no harm done except we would tip our hand that we were pursuing information on our own. But if the police hadn’t located her, we needed to give them a heads-up. It might help Ina.

  I quickly texted back: I’ll tell Fehring. Yeah, I’d tell her…once we got what we came for.

  Since getting a smartphone, I’d become quite adept at typing with one index finger. Some people were great with their thumbs. I tried that for a bit, but my messages were so loaded with errors, no one could read them.

  While the auction was in progress, I located Fehring’s number on my cell phone directory. It was the number she’d given me several months earlier, and I hoped it was still good even though she’d changed police departments. I plugged in the message: At Elite. Linda Mac here. Also Tiffany. The message drafted, I did not send it.

  The auction got underway, and the bidding was lively. Linda McIntyre was the only woman in the thick of it. Kim kept the bids moving at a good speed but not with Red’s fast-talking frenzy. As bidders fell off, the speed slowed until there were only two bidders—Linda and the man from Otra Vez. The bids continued climbing in steady, reasonable increments until Linda bumped the price with a very large bid. The next bid was to Roberto Vasquez. He hesitated, looking between Linda and the items in the locker, weighing whether it was worth another raise in price. In the end, he waved a hand at her in disgust, letting Kim know Linda could have it.

  As soon as the auction was over, Linda closed the door and slapped her own padlock on it. As the crowd moved toward the next locker, she turned away and started speaking in a low tone into her earpiece. I pretended to drop something and edged closer. Before she noticed me and moved farther away, I caught her saying, “Got it.”

  “What’s that all about?” asked Greg when I returned to his side.

  “Ina said Linda comes to these things to bid for other people. Could be it’s a client on the phone. Whoever it was, she was telling them she’d won the locker.”

  I studied the closed unit door. “Honey, didn’t that seem like a very high bid, even for those tools?”

  He shrugged. “It did to me, and by making that last huge jump, Linda showed everyone she was determined to get it, no matter the cost. Maybe her client had given her an order to buy lockers with tools and car stuff.”

  We hung back, concerned that Linda might decide not to participate in the next auction or that her client, thinking the last purchase broke the budget, decided one locker was enough for today.

  “What do you think?” asked Greg. He kept an eye on the crowd as it moved away and glanced back at Linda, still hanging behind. “Should I stay with Linda while you go to the next auction?”

  “Something is telling me we should both stick with Linda. Kim and Tiffany aren’t going anywhere until the auction is done, and then they’ll have to come back this way. We can cut them from the crowd then.”

  “Did you contact Detective Fehring?” he asked.

  “Not yet. If I do, she and the cops might be here in a flash, giving us no time to talk to Linda or Tiffany. But it’s ready to send.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Following my lead, Greg rolled alongside me as we approached Linda McIntyre. With each step I braced myself, ready for the barrage of rudeness sure to come.

  “You speak to her first,” I told my husband. “Butter her up.”

  If Wainwright was our family’s star charmer, Greg was his understudy. Seamus and I battled for last place.

  seventeen

  “Hi,” Greg began, getting close to Linda as soon as she ended her call. I hung back a couple of steps. “You Linda McIntyre?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’d like to speak to you a moment if I could.”

  Linda McIntyre turned to look Greg full in the face. As she took in his rugged good looks and his wheelchair, her face softened from stone to newly poured concrete.

  “What do you want?” Her voice was scratchy, like a zipper, and not as steady as it had been during bidding. She turned and studied me from behind her sunglasses before taking them off for a better look. Her face turned to granite again.

  Greg moved closer. “I’m Greg Stevens. This is my wife, Odelia. My cousin is Ina Bruce.”

  Linda’s lip curled into a sneer. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.” She started to turn away.

  Undaunted by Linda’s rebuff, Greg pushed on. “Please. We’re not interested in getting you involved. We just want to help Ina. You may not like her, but I think you know her well enough to realize she’d never kill Tom, even though they were having problems.”

  “Jealous women do a lot of things you’d never expect them to do.”

  I moved up next to Greg. “Are you speaking about yourself?”

  “Are you saying I killed Tom?” Linda squared her shoulders. It made her sizeable boobs and buffed arms stand at attention and ready for defense. “Tom and I were together. Ina was old news. Tom was even going to buy out her half of their business so we could run it together.”

  Now there was some new inf
ormation to consider. It made me wonder if the money Ina had taken from the bank was the buyout money, but I doubted it. If Tom had bought her out, Ina would not have had a reason to go to that auction. Then again, why go to the auction at all if she was going to leave town? None of that made sense.

  “But,” I said, moving as close to mad dog Linda as I dared,

  “I thought you were going into business with Mazie Moore.”

  “More old news,” Linda said. “Mazie and I decided to go our separate ways.”

  “Before or after Tom Bruce was found dead?” asked Greg.

  Without answering, Linda elbowed roughly past me. “I’m outta here.”

  “Don’t you have to pay for the locker you won?” I pointed over to the locker Linda had just padlocked.

  She stopped short and looked back at the rows of storage lockers. We couldn’t see the auction going on, but we could hear the lively bidding. After that, they would move on to the third and final locker. Linda swiveled her head to look up the row of units in the other direction, which led back to the front gate. It was clear she wanted to bolt rather than speak with us, but she’d bid a lot of money for that locker. I didn’t know the exact rules of storage auctioneering, but I doubted you could walk away without making the cash payment immediately. And if you did disappear, were you still on the hook for the money or did you get penalized? And if Linda had purchased that unit for her clients, they might be pretty upset if she did walk away.

  “They’re in the middle of an auction,” I told her, “and there’s another after that. You have a little time to talk to us before Tiffany’s available to take your cash.”

  “I don’t have to say nothing to you.”

  “What about Buck Goodwin?” I pushed. “We heard you two were an item before you took up with Tom Bruce.” It was a bluff. We had no concrete evidence she had ever been Buck’s girlfriend. It was simply a possibility.

  Linda threw back her head and laughed. “Me and old man Buck? That’s a laugh. Buck may look like a badass, but he prefers women his age or older. Less drama, he claims.”

  “Then maybe Buck killed Tom to protect Ina. We also heard she was close to Tiffany and like a daughter to him.”

  Linda pointed an index finger in my direction. She was in bad need of a manicure. “Now that’s a good possibility. Buck was very protective of Ina, and he and Tom had gotten into it good a few times about how he treated her. Why don’t you go bother him and leave me alone.”

  “We’d love to talk to Buck Goodwin,” Greg responded, “but he’s disappeared. You heard what happened to his store in Torrance, didn’t you?”

  Linda hesitated. I couldn’t tell if she was using the time to consider the question or to fabricate a story. “Of course I did.” She snapped the words like a crocodile snagging dinner. “Saw it on the news. The ass probably did it to his own store to cover his tracks on Tom’s murder.”

  Greg tried another question. “What about Red Stokes? Do you have any theories on that murder?”

  Again, hesitation. When she finally did speak, her words were noticeably softer. “Red was a nice man. His death was something that didn’t need to happen.”

  After mentioning Red, Linda became noticeably edgier. For some reason his death had hit a nerve that mentioning Buck had not. I pushed her on it. “Why do you think it happened?”

  Linda seemed lost in her thoughts, forgetting we were there. Off in the distance, the bidding noise had stopped. The group must be moving on to the final locker up for grabs. I decided to nudge her. In my hand my cell phone itched, just waiting for me to hit the send button and notify Fehring.

  “The news said Red was killed in a gang shooting. Why would a gang target Red? Was he involved in dirty dealings?”

  When Linda looked up at the sky, lost in her thoughts, I looked down at Greg. He was watching the cell in my hand. He looked up at me and gave an almost nonexistent nod, suggesting it was time to get the cops involved, but I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to see if we could squeeze something more out of her first.

  When Linda’s thoughts returned to the here and now, she resumed her nasty stance. “How the hell do I know what Red was involved in?” This time her tough words were coated with a false, shaky bravado that I didn’t believe for a minute. Dollars to donuts, Linda knew something about Red’s murder, and maybe a connection to Tom’s. I hit the send button on my phone and prayed Fehring saw the text ASAP.

  Mustering my own swagger, I faced Linda. Problem was, hers was real; mine was only trotted out from time to time, like fragile holiday decorations. If she called me on it, I’d crumble like spun sugar. “There’s something stinky about this whole mess. I think you know more than you’re letting on—a whole lot more.”

  Next to me, Greg placed a firm hand on my arm in warning. Tough or not, Linda was a woman. Greg could clean most men’s clocks in a tussle, and although he’d come to my assistance if needed, I knew he would be hesitant to mix it up with a female opponent.

  “You have no clue, lady.” Linda spat the words at me like expelling tobacco juice. She seemed unperturbed by Greg’s presence. Maybe she sensed he’d have a moral dilemma with her gender or maybe she thought he wouldn’t be capable. She stepped forward and lowered her head, going almost nose to nose with me.

  “Ah, but I do have a clue.” Determined to pick at her until she bled answers, I didn’t back down, even though my legs were starting to feel like jelly. “Lots of clues that I’m going to piece together.” I shook a finger in her face. “And something tells me, Linda, that I’m going to find you smack in the middle of this mess, leaving poor Ina to hang for something you did or something you know about. And, trust me, Greg and I will never allow that.”

  “You’re nuts.” Linda sneered, showing off dull teeth. “Probably going through that menopause shit. I hear it turns people crazy.” She took a step back. “Go home and knit something before something bad happens to you.”

  Determined to keep her unbalanced, I pushed again. “You know what happened to Red. I can see it in your eyes—they’re full of fear. Maybe you’re worried the same thing will happen to you. Who knows, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, someone will drive up next to you on the freeway and open fire. No place to go. Nowhere to hide. Just you, a moving vehicle, and a bullet with your name on it. Red didn’t stand a chance. And you won’t either.”

  She measured me with her eyes, weighing what I’d said, probably wondering if I was bluffing, perhaps worried I had information to back my bluster. She was definitely dirty and involved in some way; I’d bet my next mac and cheese on it. She glanced down at Greg, then back to me. For a moment, I thought she might forget about her unit and make a run for it. I hoped not. I really wanted to hand her over to Fehring and Whitman for questioning. Under their pressure she might spill information that could lead to Ina’s innocence.

  The fist came at me like a wrecking ball. I lay on the rough pavement, stunned. A few seconds that felt like minutes morphing into hours passed, and then the pain hit me. My nose gushed blood. It felt like it had been used as a chew toy by a pit bull. I never saw the punch. I never even felt it until I shook off the initial stupor. I clutched my bleeding nose with one hand and sat up. My ears rang like church bells.

  I tried to yell to Greg to stop her, but all that came out was a gurgled cry of pain. But I need not have worried. Greg was on the job. He had grabbed Linda by her arms and was trying to pin them behind her back. She thrashed around, kicking back with her legs, connecting with the wheelchair that Greg used as a block, but it was no use. Even with her buffed biceps, Greg was much stronger than Linda.

  As Linda struggled with Greg, the back of her jacket came up, exposing a gun tucked into the small of her back.

  “She has a gun,” I yelled, but I wasn’t sure the words came out clear enough to be understood. I was relieved when Greg spied the weapon and tightened his grip on her arms.


  “Hey, what’s going on?” someone yelled.

  I turned to see someone running toward us. It was a man wearing an Elite Storage shirt, and he was yelling something into his phone. I braced myself against the pain in my face and slowly got to my feet, hoping he’d see we were the attackees, not the attackers.

  About the time he reached us, Fehring and Whitman came around the corner from the front of the complex. When she saw the struggle, Fehring broke into a run.

  eighteen

  My nose did not appear to be broken, but the paramedics told me I should get it x-rayed just in case. They stopped the bleeding and offered to take me to the nearest emergency room, but I turned the offer down. “My husband will take me if I think I should go.”

  I always keep ibuprofen in my bag and now pressed it into service. I swallowed two, washing them down with bottled water offered by the paramedic. I swallowed two more two minutes later. Something told me this was going to hurt even more in a few hours. The paramedic told me I might even get a black eye. Great.

  Once again we were giving the auction-goers a memorable day, but at least a dead body wasn’t involved. While the paramedics took care of me, Fehring was questioning Greg. I didn’t like not being part of that little party, but I had no choice.

  Whitman was with Linda, who was now in handcuffs and more subdued. Fehring had ordered Greg to let her go, but he refused until someone removed Linda’s gun. As soon as Fehring saw the weapon, she took it into custody. Like Ina, Linda wasn’t licensed to carry a concealed weapon. She was calmer now but still agitated. Uniformed cops had been called. I looked over just as Whitman handed her off to a patrolman. As she was being led to a squad car for a trip to the station, her eyes caught mine and she grinned. It took me aback. Was she smirking because she’d hit me or because she wasn’t worried about being arrested? She certainly didn’t seem concerned about a police record. Then again, she probably already had one, so what’s a little thing like a weapons charge?