Sticky Fingers

by Nancy Martin

  Then Dooce put his hand between my thighs and groaned with pleasure for the crowd. I let it pass. No big deal. He was a rock star, after all, not Mr. Rogers.

  “I love Pittsburgh!” he crowed to all of us. “I’ll jam with you anytime.”

  “Let’s go, Dooce,” Jeremy urged. “The bus is waiting.”

  But he hung around. In a minute, I realized what kept him in the greenroom, and it wasn’t Flynn’s food.

  It was Jane Doe. Dooce had zeroed in on her, and within minutes he slipped one arm around her waist and pulled her with him as he spoke to everyone else.

  He even scooped up her daughter, carrying the little girl over to the buffet to find a treat for her. Whether it was all for show, or he really did dig Jane Doe, I don’t know. But he acted like a courtly gentleman with her.

  Jane Doe looked starry-eyed.

  Jeremy headed my way—probably looking for his payoff for letting me into the building. I braced myself. When I got him alone, I intended to ask how he knew the Crabtrees.

  But Flynn appeared. He took me by the wrist and pulled me away. In my ear, he said, “Police are here.”

  “Shit.”

  “Take the kids. Nooch has the keys to your truck. Use the exit through the kitchen.”

  24

  Sage didn’t ask questions. Neither did Richie as we dashed through the service kitchen and out the door into the night.

  But Sugar complained the whole way about giving up the laptop she’d appropriated.

  Nooch finally picked her up like a sack of potatoes and carried her through the maze of tractor-trailers parked outside. Already, Dooce’s crew scurried around opening the trucks and rolling handcarts toward the arena, preparing to tear down the stage and haul it to their next concert venue.

  We spotted two police officers standing guard beside the Escalade.

  I skidded to a stop, holding the kids back. “Can’t go that way,” I muttered.

  Richie said, “We left your truck in Section D.”

  “Let’s go.”

  But our path was barred by two more officers who stood watching the rowdy crowd of concertgoers head for the parking lot. The last thing I wanted was to end the evening getting arrested for car theft. One of the officers turned our way.

  I realized we were standing beside a bus. I reached for the door handle and found it open. I shooed the kids and Nooch inside.

  We found ourselves in what must have been Dooce’s travel bus. A driver sat behind the wheel in a big captain’s chair. He was reading a paperback and smoking a smelly cigar. He wore a vintage Dooce T-shirt that didn’t do his belly any favors.

  “Hey.” He took the stogie out of his mouth and glanced at the backstage credentials around our necks. “Dooce send you?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation.

  “Wow. He always goes for the girls with kids, but you take the cake. Three, huh? And all grown up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s the muscle?” He pointed at Nooch.

  “Bodyguard.”

  The bus driver shrugged. In his world, bodyguards were normal. “Okay. Well, there’s drinks in the fridge while you wait.”

  Sage and Richie looked at me with big eyes. I gave them a throat-cutting gesture to keep quiet, but Sugar wasn’t taking any orders—silent or otherwise.

  “Put me down,” she said to Nooch. “Before I kick you in the teeth.”

  Nooch hastily obeyed.

  “I want to get out of here,” she said to the bus driver. “Take me to a hotel.”

  The driver grinned. “The Ritz or the Waldorf?”

  “One with room service and a computer room.”

  “Oh, yeah? Your mom have anything to say about that?” The driver winked at me.

  “My mother is dead,” Sugar said.

  That information startled the driver into dropping his cigar.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “Very funny, Sugar. Now, come over here and get yourself a Pepsi.”

  “I don’t poison my body with sweets.”

  The interior of the bus was set up like a standard recreational vehicle with a living room and kitchen combo behind the driver’s seat. A laptop sat on the fold-out table. Sugar headed straight for it.

  Toward the back, a doorway led, I presumed, to a bedroom and bath. What caught my attention in the front of the big vehicle, though, were the heavily framed shadow boxes on the walls. Dooce didn’t display his gold records on the bus.

  He displayed bones.

  Big bones.

  Big animal bones.

  Leg bones, skulls, tusks, teeth. All kinds of bones.

  “Wow,” I said to the driver. “This is an interesting collection.”

  “Oh, yeah, Dooce loves this stuff.” He retrieved his cigar and waved it at the framed boxes. “Picks up items all over the country. You should see his house. He’s got a whole dinosaur in his basement.”

  “No kidding.”

  “And he’s working on a whatayacallit—a woolly mammoth now.”

  I said, “That must be an expensive hobby.”

  “Oh, you know. These guys all make a fortune on tour. They gotta spend it somewhere.”

  “Does Dooce have any help? Doing his collecting?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You know—Jeremy. He seems to help out a lot. Does he have a hand in Dooce’s collection?”

  “Nah. Jeremy’s just a glorified maid. He opens car doors, picks up the hamburgers. That’s about it.”

  Richie had been staring at the bones on the walls. When he turned to me, I saw tears on his face.

  I put my arm across his shoulders. “It’s okay,” I said.

  “But my mom,” he began.

  “I know.”

  “Did she—?”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said.

  “She was in contact with Dooce. I know she was. She talked to lots of celebrities, but she always said it was because they wanted to meet her. I heard her on the phone a lot. But I didn’t think…”

  Sage had been peering out the windshield of the bus. Over her shoulder, she called, “Boy, there sure are a lot of people out there.”

  I got the message.

  “C’mon, kids.” I grabbed Sugar’s hand and dragged her away from the laptop. “It’s time to go home.”

  “Hang on,” the driver protested. “Dooce should be here any minute. You should wait.”

  “That’s okay. I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.”

  “Hey, Dooce ain’t no creep. He just likes to show kids all the dinosaur stuff. Kids go crazy for dinosaurs.” He winked. “Nothing too raunchy for the moms. He has a wife and kids at home.”

  “Right. Well, sorry, we’ve got to be going.”

  “Good thing your kids saw the bones, I guess, huh?”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Good night.”

  We bailed out of the bus. I figured Jane Doe was on her own with Dooce. She’d probably be safe enough—especially if there were any chairs handy to hit him with.

  The mob waiting for Dooce outside had quadrupled. Our backstage passes got us past a security guy who appeared outside the bus, and then we found ourselves plunging into the crowd that had gathered around. The people carried signs and waved T-shirts. Already, Dooce’s guitarist was among them, mingling with the fans, signing autographs. Cameras flashed. Kids shouted. Somebody played a Dooce song on a tinny radio.

  “Let’s hit the road,” I said to the kids.

  We blended into the huge crowd and slipped past the police. In a few minutes, we found the Monster Truck and piled in. Stuck in the traffic exiting the arena lot, I pulled out my cell phone and checked the screen.

  Six missed calls from Bug. Two from Loretta.

  It was Loretta’s attempts to contact me that puzzled me. Instead of calling her, I passed my phone to Richie. “Call your dad. See if he’s home yet.”

  If Eckelstine had been arrested for murdering his wife or for breaking into a museum without
authorization, I didn’t know what I was going to do with the kids. But fortunately, Eckelstine picked up, and he told Richie to come home. Half an hour later, I dropped off Richie and Sugar.

  I grabbed Richie’s sleeve before he bailed out of the Monster Truck. “Thanks, kid. The clothes are great.”

  “No problem.” He took a steadying breath and finally looked up at me. “Those bones in Dooce’s trailer? Those came from my mom, didn’t they?”

  “Some of them, probably.”

  “She sold them to him?”

  “Looks that way to me.”

  “That’s how she paid for everything, right? Selling Rhonda.”

  That was the way I figured it. Clarice had been selling off her father’s important paleontology discoveries to pay for Richie’s dressmaking hobby and Sugar’s astronomical ice-skating expenses. She’d kept it secret because selling to collectors was bad form among the scientific set.

  But Richie looked shaken by the idea.

  I said, “Parents do whatever they can to make their kids happy. Sometimes they make mistakes, but— Look, kid, your mother wasn’t my favorite person in life, but she really loved you. She wanted to help you become whatever you want to be.”

  Richie struggled to hold back his feelings, but the dam broke. He hung his head and cried. I’d been there, at the moment when I knew my mother was gone—the woman who gave me life, but tortured me, too. The loss mixed with terror. The fear of being alone fought the relief of seeing the end of someone who frightened me in life.

  I hugged Richie, and he let it all out, sobbing hard against my shoulder.

  Finally, he sighed and sat up. He wiped his tears with both hands.

  I gave him a gentle shake. “You’ll be okay, kid. You’re amazing. I meant what I said before. I’m grateful for all your help. If you can make me look good, you’re obviously a genius. And Nooch? Hell, what you did for him was miraculous. You’re going to be a star.”

  He smiled wanly. “Maybe.”

  “I’m sure of it. I just…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to know if I can wear this dress to a wedding tomorrow.”

  Richie regained his composure. “Is it Mick Jagger’s wedding?”

  “No.”

  “Then the answer is no.” He shook off my hand and slid across the seat to exit the truck. But then his mood softened and he glanced back. “Okay, take off the belt,” he coached. “It looks too S and M for a wedding. And add a slip. Do you own a slip?”

  “Of course I do,” I lied.

  “A bra would help, too.”

  “Good suggestions,” I said. “Thanks, kid. Keep in touch.”

  Sugar slid out of the truck and turned back long enough to say with a sneer, “I hope I never see any of you ever again.”

  I opened my mouth to make a wisecrack, but Sage elbowed me in the ribs.

  “You’re welcome,” I said to Sugar after Sage closed the truck’s door. I didn’t know what to think of Sugar, but she sure as hell wasn’t normal.

  Sage said, “That chick is definitely screwed up. You should have heard what she said about her mother earlier.”

  “What did she say?”

  Sage shrugged. “Rotten stuff. How she hated her. How she finally got her wish.”

  “Her wish?”

  “That her mom’s dead, I guess. She’s a real creep.”

  I agreed. Sugar was one young lady destined to grow up alone, with her tech gadgets to keep her warm. And she seemed to prefer it that way.

  We dropped Nooch off next. I noticed he had a new bounce in his step as he headed into his grandmothers’ house.

  “I guess clothes make the man after all,” I said to Sage.

  “He’s cute,” she replied with a yawn. “Everybody had a good time, Mom.”

  “That’s good, because it felt like corruption of minors a couple of times,” I said. “I’m going to drop you a block from Loretta’s house.”

  “Why? Aren’t you coming with me tonight?”

  I saw the anxiety in her face and soothed: “You’ll be perfectly safe. There are probably half a dozen cops watching Loretta’s place.”

  “I’m not scared for myself. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Hey, no worries. I’ve got some business to take care of, that’s all.”

  “With Dad?” Her eyes twinkled.

  No. But it seemed cruel to tell her otherwise.

  I gave Sage a kiss and told her she was wonderful. And that she should set her alarm clock for seven and spend the weekend filling out college applications. The reminder about the applications put a cloud back on her face as she slid out of the truck. I waved good-bye, turned the truck around, and watched her walk away in my rearview mirror. When she turned the corner onto Loretta’s street, I pulled away. But not before seeing a police car ease around the same corner. Sage would be safe.

  I, on the other hand, put my leopard-print stiletto on the accelerator and floored it.

  I cruised past my salvage yard, but the police presence there looked like somebody had set the national-security alert on neon red. I felt bad about Rooney not getting his supper, but maybe the cops were feeding him doughnuts. He’d be okay until morning.

  I figured it was crazy to go across the river to my own house for the night. The streets were too narrow there, and I’d get trapped by the police for sure.

  But I was tired. All the adrenaline I’d burned up that day was making my eyes itch and my brain feel fuzzy.

  So I drove up into the dark and quiet neighborhood of Stanton Heights and parked in front of a nice little brick house that even had a picket fence out front. I pulled a packing quilt from the back of the truck. Wrapping up in its smelly folds, I stretched out on the front seat and went to sleep thinking about who most wanted Clarice Crabtree dead.

  I woke in the morning when somebody tapped gently on my window.

  I opened one eye and saw Bug Duffy holding two cups of coffee.

  I groaned and fought my way out of the quilt to unlock the truck. He climbed in and closed the door. He was wearing a police department sweatshirt over a pair of flannel pajamas and the kind of slippers guys like him probably received on Father’s Day.

  He handed me one of the coffee cups. “You could have knocked on the door. Marie would have made up a bed for you.”

  “I didn’t want to frighten your kids.”

  “Thanks.” Bug eyed me cautiously. “What exactly are you wearing?”

  I used one hand to open the quilt to flash him. In daylight, the dress Richie had made for me looked even more bizarre. Kind of like a shedding snakeskin. Tight except for the wispy bits. “I’m told it’s couture.”

  “Wow. Looks scary.” He sipped his coffee. “But a little sexy, too. By any chance, did you wear that getup to the Dooce concert last night?”

  I took a tentative sip, too. Steaming hot and sweet. The caffeine went straight to my heart. Not the same kick as my usual morning Red Bull, but good enough. I figured I should dodge his question. “Marie makes a great cup of coffee.”

  “On the weekends, I make the coffee. I’m only asking because we found a stolen Escalade in the parking lot of the arena.”

  “I’m glad to hear you found it. The owner will be grateful. Maybe even drop the charges. Did you catch the thief?”

  “Not yet,” he said darkly.

  “How’s Mitch Mitchell?”

  “Alive. Not talking yet. But he’s going to make it.”

  We drank a little more coffee. A goofy-looking Labrador retriever waddled over to the gate of the picket fence, and stood there watching Bug and wagging its tail. The dog had a pink nose and carried an extra ten pounds.

  “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Bonnie.”

  Bug let me wake up, and we sat in silence for a minute or two. I sipped a little more coffee and finally said, “I think I know who arranged to get Clarice kidnapped.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s a crazy idea,
but I think I’m right.”

  “Eckelstine?”

  “No. Sugar Mitchell.”

  “She’s just a kid!”

  “A kid who knows her own mind.”

  Bug shook his head. “You’re right, Rox. That’s a crazy idea.”

  “Hear me out. The thing she wants more than anything is to be a famous ice-skater. She took the most expensive lessons. Her father drove her everywhere and made her the center of the universe. He is more like a groupie than a parent. Her mother paid big bucks for everything, but finally shut off the monetary spigot. Sugar thought her ice-skating days were over.”

  “So she hired somebody to kill her mother? Rox, she’s only—what? Twelve?”

  “Fifteen and a computer genius. She could have found Uncle Carmine’s name by doing a simple Google search for organized crime in Pittsburgh. The note I saw definitely looked like something a teenager would make. She knows all about cell phones and tech stuff, so she could have managed the logistics. Thing is, she has no feelings for other people—not even dear, devoted Daddy. I’m telling you, she could have done it.”

  “She hated her mother that much?”

  “She loves herself a lot more.”

  Bug stared out the windshield, thinking. “Somebody from the museum called me yesterday. He had a story about Clarice maybe stealing museum property and selling it to collectors.”

  “To pay for Sugar’s skating expenses.”

  “Why did she stop? Did she get worried she was going to be caught?”

  “Maybe. Or she was running out of bones.” I thought of the last bone left in her freezer—the one Rooney stole. “What matters is that Sugar’s cash stream ended.”

  Bug looked unconvinced. “You really think the kid did it?”

  “Either way, she needs a shrink,” I said. “Last night, I watched her with her cell phone and computer. She was fixated. But most of all, she’s completely self-obsessed. Put her alone in a room with a smart psychologist, and I’ll bet she confesses. In fact, she’s probably proud of herself. What have you got to lose?”

  “But,” Bug said slowly, “if Sugar hired the killer, who actually did the killing?”

  “I’m guessing it’s somebody in Carmine’s organization.”

  “Who?”