by Nancy Martin
Tonight she was methodically checking the chambers of a rack of handguns. She took each one out, slammed the moving parts around, and peeked into chambers—all with the aplomb of a woman flipping burgers at a griddle.
“Irene.” I took off my gloves. “I forgot you worked here.”
“I sure do.” She didn’t break rhythm. Her voice echoed from behind the bulletproof protection. “What can I do you for, Roxy?”
She was dressed in jeans and a puffy down vest that made her shoulders seem broader than ever. A set of muffling earphones was slung around her neck. She’d pulled her brown hair back with a no-nonsense rubber band into a ponytail. In the holster at her hip, though, I could see the butt of a sidearm. I was willing to bet she didn’t carry the weapon when she drove her mother to the church bingo hall.
“I talked to Zack a few minutes ago. He said he needed a ride home.”
“He’s with a client at the moment. He’ll be done in ten minutes or so. I thought maybe you came to shoot some targets.”
“Me? Nah, I don’t carry.”
“No kidding?” She plunked the last weapon into the rack and leaned her elbows on the counter. One odd tic was that Irene didn’t blink much. “Why not?”
“It’s just not something I think is necessary in my line of—okay, to tell the truth, guns make me nervous.”
She grinned. “I never took you for the nervous type.”
From her tone, I got the impression she was needling me, but I shrugged. “I get nervous all the time.”
I didn’t know Irene very well, but she’d always been around the edges of my life, I guess. Her family owned the neighborhood bakery where I stole the occasional cannoli, and her mom was one of the bossy ladies behind the scenes at St. Dom’s.
She said, “That surprises me. I didn’t think Abruzzos were scared of anything.”
“Not much,” I agreed. “You going to Shelby Martinelli’s wedding this weekend?”
“I don’t know yet.” She stretched her arms overhead, and her puffy vest opened just enough to show she was wearing Kevlar protection underneath and a handgun on her belt. “Shelby’s mother is my mom’s cousin, so I should probably go. But I may have to work.”
“This place is open on Saturday night?”
“One of our busiest nights. Where do you think all those single guys go who can’t get dates?”
“Sounds dangerous for you.”
She shrugged. “If I got worried every time some jagoff pointed a gun at me, I’d be in a mental hospital by now. Hell, last year, a guy almost took off my earlobe, see?”
She pulled back her hair and showed me her ear. Sure enough, part of the lobe was missing. I couldn’t help noticing a couple of long scratches down her neck—the kind Rooney sometimes gave me when he got carried away.
I said, “You must save a bundle on earrings.”
“I never thought of it that way.” She laughed with a weird hiccough. “I stopped in to visit your uncle Carmine yesterday. I took him some of my mom’s soup.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He hasn’t been feeling well.”
“Yeah, Carmine puts out that bulletin when he needs a favor done. Brings everybody running.”
From inside the shooting range, a series of muffled gunshots had been steadily kapowing while we talked, but finally the shooter was out of ammunition. A minute later, two guys pushed through the steel door—both of them pulling earplugs out of their ears. The first was Zack. The second was a burly man wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants with a Windbreaker. Wedding ring, tassel loafers. He looked like your average suburban insurance agent except for the shoulder holster.
“Good job today, Mr. Glick.” Zack twirled his ear protection. “Best score yet.”
“Thanks, kid. Hey, Irene. See you next week.”
Irene waved through the glass. The customer gave me a warm once-over before he went out into the parking lot.
Irene said to Zack, “Did that creep try to impress you with his new Python?”
Zack shrugged into his coat. “He’s pretty excited about it.”
Irene rolled her eyes. “Big man needs a big gun, I guess.”
“Right. See you, Irene.”
“You want some extra hours? I could use you Saturday.”
“Sorry. Can’t.”
“Let me know if you change your mind.”
I almost dragged Zack out of there by his ear. When we reached the parking lot, I said, “Man, she’s a weird chick.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Why doesn’t she ever blink?”
“She asked me about you when I got hired.”
I missed a step. “Really? What did she want to know?”
“I forget. Just if you were still in business, I guess.”
I found myself frowning. “Exactly why did you get this job?”
Zack zipped his coat against the cold. “Because she needed somebody who could handle firearms, I guess, and she heard I just finished the police academy.”
“You and forty other guys, right? Out of all of them, why you?”
“Maybe she heard I was the best on the gun range.”
I snorted.
“Well, it’s true!”
We climbed in out of the wind, and I started the engine.
“How’s Sage?” Zack asked.
“She’s skipping school with that Brian kid.”
“I knew it!” Zack kicked the dashboard. “I knew he was going to be trouble.”
“Worse yet? He’s taking her on a ski weekend this Friday.”
“Like hell he is. I mean—” Zack turned to me. “You’re not going to let her get away with that, are you, Mrs. A?”
“Why didn’t you do something about this situation before it got started?”
“What was I supposed to do? Punch the guy in the nose?”
“Surely you could be more creative than that.” I pulled out of the parking lot and headed back toward the Parkway and the city. “Get in the moment. Envision something.”
Zack turned to me on the seat. “What kind of envisioning?”
“You hang around with cops, for cripesake. You can’t pick up a few pointers from them?”
“You mean, something sneaky?”
“There are lots of ways of slowing down a guy like Brian.”
Zack said, “Why don’t you do it?”
“Because I’m Sage’s mother. If I get caught, it’s a world scandal. But if you get caught, it’s no big deal. And besides, wouldn’t it feel good?”
Zack mulled over whether or not he’d be happy to have Sage’s new squeeze out of the picture. “I want to be a cop. I need a clean record.”
“If you can’t think like a criminal, what kind of cop can you make? Jeez. What do I have to do? Lead you around by the nose?”
“Okay, okay, I get it.” He slumped in his seat, staring ahead without really seeing the road. His brain cells cooked for a while. “What should I do?”
I sighed. “Nothing dangerous. Drive him crazy a little. Every time he gets near Sage, put a banana in his tailpipe. Or siphon the gas out of his tank. Get some weed killer and use it to write a rude message on his old man’s yard. Or—hey, you know what’s a good trick? Go buy one of those birthday cards with the electronic song inside. Throw the card away, but stick the little music thing under the hood. It’ll play for hours. Very annoying.”
“Wow, really. You have a lot of ideas for pranks.”
“Now that I’ve jogged your imagination, when do I get the return favor?”
“Huh?”
“I need information.”
“Okay, sure.”
“The Crabtree murder. What does your dad have to say at the breakfast table?”
Zack Cleary’s father—a former colonel in the United States Army, a Gulf War veteran, and a local cop who climbed the ranks by virtue of an immaculate record and a rumored interest in becoming a political candidate eventually—was the city’s newly appointed chief of police.
He looked good on camera and supposedly ran a tight ship. So far, he hadn’t presided over any police scandals, although it had been a near miss when two undercover cops arrested a high school honor student a few months back. The kid’s family claimed he had been arrested for nothing more than Walking While Black, but later it came out that he’d been running drugs into a local high school and was the baby daddy of no fewer than six toddlers, so the scandal blew over before it turned into the kind of mess that took down chiefs of out-of-control undercover cops.
Zack said, “I heard him on the phone when he left the house this morning. They think one of her husbands killed that lady.”
“What’s their proof?”
“I didn’t hear anything about proof. He said they were going to lean on both husbands today and see which one breaks first.”
That would be a toss-up, I thought. Neither one of Clarice’s husbands seemed particularly strong-willed to me. “What about an autopsy?”
“Uh–it was pretty obvious she died from two gunshots.”
“Yeah, but what caliber?”
“This morning was too early for those results. They’ll know by now, I suppose.”
“Can you call your old man?”
Zack looked anxious. “Mrs. A, I really, really want to get a job on the force. I think the department will take a dim view of me blabbing about police business before I’m even sworn in.”
“Okay, okay.”
“There’s one interesting thing I did overhear,” Zack said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“The Mitchell guy. One of his friends heard him on his cell phone the afternoon before his wife died. He was having a hell of a fight with her.”
“About?”
“Money. Maybe that’s nothing new, since most married people seem to fight over money, but—”
“Was he mad because his wife didn’t want to pay for any more skating lessons?”
“I don’t know.”
If Mitchell was as obsessed with his daughter’s future in ice-skating as I thought he was, I wondered if he might be moved to murder to keep financing the kid’s expensive lessons. But then, why kill the cash cow?
18
It was very dark by the time I dropped Zack a block from his home. A sharp wind had kicked up and blew a few snowflakes against the windshield—not enough that I needed to put on the wipers, but I could feel the temperature dropping fast. I stopped at the yard to pick up Nooch and take him home.
I checked on Rooney before I left. He was still green, but his paint job didn’t seem to bother him. He was still focused on his bone. I left the dog to guard the yard and took Nooch home for his dinner.
I took Penn Avenue out through the Wilkinsburg and Churchill neighborhoods, then hopped on the Parkway East just long enough to hit the suburb of Monroeville. As I drove, I sang along with Dooce’s recordings, listening to the way he built a song, changed key when the emotion shifted, hit the usual pop crescendo, but then sustained the song’s musical motif long into the sound bleed. He made good use of his backup singers, too, unlike most rockers. The women’s voices added another layer of sound, but also an emotional cadence—like a good gospel group. Sometimes the backup singers were the dominant vocals, carrying the melody while Dooce used his raw, shouting voice to embellish.
I could hear the part Deondra would want in most of the songs. A contralto, she had the biggest and most trained voice of the three of us who sang with Stony, and she was a local star in urban gospel churches. If it were up to me, I’d give her the lead backup. I was better at the screaming stuff. Kate had a lyrical soprano for the high notes. Deondra, though, she had the chops to lead.
The Monroeville traffic slowed me down considerably. I remembered the Miracle Mile being one of the first strip malls in the city, but now it was jammed with hellish traffic, no miracles. Fast-food joints, car dealers, and four lanes of bumper-to-bumper vehicles with traffic lights jamming up everybody in both directions was my idea of satanic city planning.
I stopped at a gigantic Sheetz convenience market to get some gas and asked a guy at the next pump where Kenyon Road was, and he gave me typical Pittsburgh directions—all landmarks.
“Make a right at Lowe’s, go past the Outback Steakhouse, through the light at the Exxon station, then past the high school and hang a left. Go past the second church and the house with the tropical Christmas lights. Kenyon is on your right.”
I followed those directions easily. The roads dipped and curved in the dark. Most of the houses were decorated for the holidays with lights and lawn ornaments. As I drove, I wondered whatever happened to icicle lights. Used to be, all these suburban houses had icicle lights dripping from their gutters, but not anymore. Too bad. Icicle lights are pretty.
I ended up parked in front of a modest two-story house with brown vinyl siding. In the front lawn was a blow-up Christmas decoration that looked like a giant snow globe. Inside, a mechanical figure skater twirled in jerky circles–as if she’d had a couple of wine coolers.
I shut off the Monster Truck’s engine because it was loud, and this neighborhood was disconcertingly quiet. No traffic, no buses. I could see families moving around inside the houses and the blue gleam of television screens. Their cars were neatly parked in driveways. Their dogs were safely behind backyard fences. Taking it all in, I sat in the truck and thought about where we might have been if Flynn hadn’t gotten into heroin and I hadn’t come from where I did. Would Sage be attending some white-bread suburban high school, dating lots of kids like Mr. Squishy with the Escalade? Would we be taking her to skating practice? Coming home to a split-level house with curtains in the windows? Somehow, I couldn’t make any of the three of us fit that picture.
Only one other car was parked on the street. It was a couple of houses down, facing me. I saw the interior lights flash on as the driver popped open his door and got out. Then he crunched up the street toward me, hands thrust into the deep pockets of his coat, his head bent against the wind. He opened the door and got into the passenger side of my truck.
“Hi, Bug. Sorry about missing lunch.”
“No problem,” he said. “I got tied up, too. What are you doing here?”
“Hoping to give Mitchell my condolences on the death of his wife. Unless he killed her himself. In that case, I’ll withhold my sentiments. Is he here?”
“He arrived about half an hour ago. We questioned him most of the afternoon. Now he’s alone.”
“Where’s his daughter?”
“After her skating lesson, he dropped her off at the mall. I’ve got an officer watching her at the Clinique counter. Mitchell’s alone in the house.”
We both looked. The curtains were pulled, blinds drawn, blocking any view of the inside. We could see only thin slivers of light beneath some of the blinds.
I said, “You think Mitchell’s the one who killed Clarice?”
Bug got comfortable in the seat, stretching out his legs and leaning his head back against the headrest. “I don’t know. He seemed genuinely upset about losing her when I interviewed him today. Unless he’s a heck of an actor, I think he’s sorry she’s gone. But the night she died, he had dropped their daughter off at a skating lesson and disappeared for a couple of hours. Enough time to kill his wife and dump her body.”
“Is he smart enough to get away with murder?”
“Well, nobody got away with it. The body floated up right in the middle of the three rivers. Even a moron would’ve known to tie a concrete block to the carpet, right?”
“So, by reason of his low IQ, you’re putting Mitchell at the top of your list.”
He sent me a wry smile. “Are you questioning my deductions, Watson?”
I smiled, too. “You know what I’ve been thinking about? The way the carpet was tied around Clarice. Nice and neat.”
“Like a pork loin.”
“Exactly. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in a while, but, yeah, I was thinking of the way Loretta ties up her roll
ed steak. Does one of the husbands cook?”
“Mitchell does. Eckelstine sends out for a lot of pizzas. I checked on the cord. It’s an ordinary kind of rope you can buy at Home Depot and Lowe’s. We’re checking to see if anyone bought some recently, but it’s something lots of people would just keep in the garage. Tell me about Eckelstine. I heard you were at his house today.”
Damn that reporter. He’d seen me at the house and blabbed to the cops.
Bug said, “Did you talk to him? Or do something else?”
I turned sideways in the seat to get a better look at Bug. “Is that your Boy Scout way of asking if I had hot, satisfying sex with Eckelstine?”
Bug didn’t meet my eye, but kept up his surveillance on the Mitchell house. Attempting to sound uninterested, he asked, “Did you?”
I had to make a conscious effort not to grit my teeth. “I gave that up.”
He shot me a glance. “I know a lot of guys who say they’re going to give up beer, but then a game comes on the TV and the refrigerator calls. It’s tough changing an ingrained behavior.”
“What the hell would you know about that?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Forget I brought it up.”
I had worked up some temper to argue with him and was surprised that he waved the white flag already. “Is this how you fight with Marie? Float your opinion and give up when she goes into attack mode?”
“I don’t fight with Marie. She always wins. I’m a wuss.”
I smiled at the thought of family strife in the Duffy household. Bug seemed happily married, with the sweetest kids who never got in trouble.
His thoughts must have strayed in the same direction, because he was quiet for a minute, then said, “How is it going with you and Flynn and your daughter? I mean, is she getting used to having a dad on the scene after all these years?”
“She’s adapting. Already, she’s trying to play us against each other.”
Bug gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, I know how that works.”
“Flynn’s doing okay, though,” I said. “He’s trying to do things right—checking with me before he takes a position, you know?”