Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4)

by Phillip DePoy

  “Yeah.” He was watching me work on the tape. “That Detective Huyne sure is mean.”

  “Pointed a gun at me.”

  He looked up at my face then. “Yeah. You know, he’s done that to me too.”

  “That why you set his stuff on fire?”

  “Naw,” he said, then looked at me. “W-what are you talking about?”

  “Is Dane inside?”

  He looked up at one of the windows on the second floor, the only one in back that was lit up.

  I had just gotten Joe’s other arm freed when the night was ripped apart by a long, loud blast from Dally’s car horn.

  I jumped off the gazebo and was halfway around the house before I heard heavy footsteps on Dane’s front porch. I was all the way around to the front yard when I saw Dane running, as best he could, for his Mercedes in the driveway.

  Dally was nearly across the street, yelling at Dane to stop.

  I was yelling at Dally to get down, because Dane had a hunting rifle pointed right at her.

  “So.” She turned my way for a second, her face set in a hard smile, and hollered out, “You don’t think that maybe one little bullet could bounce off me too?”

  Before I could even think what to say, the gun erupted. Lightning shot out of the barrel, there was a metallic crunching noise, and Dally went down in the street.

  I flew through the air, wrestled the gun away from Dane, and bashed his forehead as hard as I could with the butt of the rifle. I hoped I hit him hard enough to kill him.

  33. Smoking Gun

  I was in the street kneeling next to Dalliance before the gun on the ground had even stopped smoking.

  “Hi.” She stared up at me. “Come here often?”

  “You’re okay?”

  “He missed me by a mile, didn’t you see where he was pointing that thing?”

  “All I saw” — I stared down at her — “was that it was pointed at you.”

  “In my general direction, maybe.” She managed to sit up, then turned to her car. “But take a gander at my rear fender.”

  It had a new hole in it, and the tire was hissing.

  Dane groaned.

  I stood, helped Dally up, and we both took the ten or so steps to Dane’s side. I pointed the rifle down at him, but it wasn’t really necessary.

  “My head.” He was clutching his temples like he was trying to make sure nothing would fall off.

  “Why don’t you just lie right there, Mr. Dane?”

  He squinted up at me. “Mr. Tucker? Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked over at Dally. “You’re all right. Thank God. That damned rifle.”

  “What?” Dally shifted her weight to one leg.

  “I was certain I had it pointed to the ground, but you startled me.” He was still holding his head. “Did I shoot myself?”

  “No,” I told him. “I whacked you in the head.”

  “You did?” He was still trying to focus on my face. “Why?”

  “Because you shot at Ms. Oglethorpe.”

  “The gun went off. I didn’t shoot … my God, you don’t think I’d shoot at … what did you hit me with? A brick? A truck?”

  “Your gun.”

  “I think I need to go to the hospital.” He was trying to sit up.

  “I think” — I knelt beside him and spoke directly to his face — “you’ll just be going to the police. Your head’s okay.” I got closer and whispered, “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you, you son of a bitch. You ever point so much as a finger at Dalliance again, and that’ll be your last second on this earth. I promise.”

  “Ohh,” he moaned, squeezing his head between his hands. “Could you please stop shouting? And why do you have to be so angry with me? I told you I didn’t mean for the gun to go off —”

  “Shut up.” I interrupted. “You pimp your own niece, then kill her because she wants out, and you throw in some poor art student who never did you any harm at all. You are one sick cargo, and I’m sorry I ever thought anything good about you.”

  Dally laid her hand on my arm. “Easy there, big fella.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dane’s eyes were wild, and he struggled to get up. “I don’t know what makes you think I could kill my niece, but you couldn’t be more mistaken. I loved her. She was family, for God’s sake.”

  I didn’t offer to help him up. “You’re saying you didn’t have a Website with her photographs?”

  He let the question hang there for a long moment. Then: “You know about that.” He finally made it to a standing position, took a step back as if he were about to fall down again, then steadied himself. “That’s what I was doing upstairs when I heard the noise down here.”

  Dally and I looked at each other, then back at Dane.

  He blinked. “I was purging everything from my hard drive. I didn’t want any embarrassing questions when I took Adder to the police.”

  My turn to blink. “You were taking Joepye to the police?”

  He nodded. “I have to sit down.”

  He stumbled to the front porch steps. We followed. “I’ve got him tied up out back. I had to keep him here while I took care of my computer. He killed Beth. And that other poor girl.”

  “All by himself?” I tried to fill the phrase with as much skepticism as possible under the circumstances.

  “Yes. He did it to scare me.” He looked up at me, white as the moon. “It worked too.” He closed his eyes. “He killed Beth and then tried to blackmail me about the … the Website.”

  “He knew about the —” I began.

  “I don’t know how,” Dane interrupted,“but he knew all the details. When you told me he’d been an electrical engineer at Tech, it made more sense. That’s part of the real reason I hired you in the first place, to find out what really happened, get some real information about Adder. Still, I don’t know how a person in his current condition would even have access to a computer.”

  “Well” — I took in a deep breath — “assuming I buy any of this, which is a big assumption to begin with, I could tell you that Joepye has odd jobs all over. He cleans up at the Midtown post office. He does small handyman jobs sometimes in business offices. And he visits the police station on a regular basis. Everyone takes him for granted. He might have computer access at any one of those places.”

  “But how would he ever know about my site?” Dane held his temples. “It didn’t make sense to me. It’s very well hidden. Still. He came to me the night you and he found Beth’s body, told me he’d killed her, and wanted money to keep quiet about the … site.”

  “Joepye Adder,” Dally threw in, “told you he killed Beth Dane?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed him?” I shook my head.

  “The more he talked over the days, the more it was obvious he knew all about Beth’s death … and then the other murder … murders. Did you know, for example, that the girls were killed with toxins stolen from the CDC before they were hanged?”

  “He told you that?” Dally shot me a look.

  Dane nodded. “And he told me some wild story about a French surrealist who’d killed himself in the same way the girls were killed — or seemed to be killed, I suppose. What was that all about?” He closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to pass out.” He leaned over and put his head between his legs. “Go ask him. He’s out back in the gazebo.”

  “Um … I hope he is.” I looked at Dally. “I might have turned him loose.”

  Dane looked up, stunned. “What?”

  “He told me you’d tied him up back there. What was I supposed to think?” I took Dane’s arm and started around the house to the backyard. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”

  He made an awful noise standing up, and I nearly had to drag him around the house. By the time we made it to the spot where I’d found Joepye only moments earlier, Dane was completely winded. And there was nothing in the gazebo but a lot of torn-up duct tape.

  34. Ghost Dancer

&n
bsp; Back in the house, we called the Midtown station house right away and found Huyne still there. Dally talked to him, told him where we were, and why we were there, and what Dane had told us, all in about three well-chosen sentences. It was very elegant.

  He must have left the place before she’d hung up the phone because I’d swear he was pulling up in the street out front inside of five minutes.

  I met him on the porch. “I left the gun, the one that Dane used to shoot at Ms. Oglethorpe, in the front yard there. It’s got my prints on the barrel housing, but not the stock or the trigger.” I nodded at it with my head. “Dally can fill you in on the rest.”

  Two officers moved past us in the shadows on the porch and into the living room, where Dane was lying on the sofa, a cold towel on his head.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Huyne stood to block my way off the porch.

  “Look,” I told him tersely, “I think I know where Joe went. He went to his home base. It’s not that far from where you were staked out, under the bridge in the park. I let him loose. Maybe he is what Dane says he is, or maybe he’s just a little goofball like I say. Whichever. I have to go get him. You can see that.”

  “He’s a suspect in a very big murder case.” Huyne shook his head. “This is a police matter.”

  I ground my teeth. “Okay, then send one of those uniforms with me, and they can do the driving. They can arrest him. Call me an informant. I’ll take the nice policeman to a place where he can find the suspect. Okay?”

  He could see how tightly wound I was. He only took a second to consider what to do.

  “Gainer!”

  That almost made me smile.

  Officer Gainer appeared in the doorway. “Yes, sir?”

  “Would you please take Mr. Tucker here over to the park? He thinks he might be able to tell you where to apprehend a suspect.” He looked at me. “If this all works out the way Ms. Oglethorpe described it to me on the phone … and you really do get Adder — some of which I still doubt — but I say if this is righteous … this actually could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship … Louis.”

  “Hey, Mr. Tucker.” The kid lit up.

  I smiled at Huyne. “So, you did get that after all. And by the way, I know that you’re only doing this so that you can be alone with Ms. Oglethorpe.”

  “That’s right.” Huyne smiled back. “Alone with her — and Dane, and the other officers —”

  “But I won’t be here.” I nodded.

  “I’ll see her home. Time to go now,” Huyne told Gainer, still smiling. “Watch out for Mr. Tucker, hear?”

  I didn’t know if he meant the kid was supposed to look after me or to make sure I didn’t do anything wrong.

  I don’t think Gainer even heard it. He practically shot past me. I took one last look into the living room where Dally was talking to the other officer, then shoved off the porch toward the waiting prowler.

  *

  By the time we’d made it into the park the back way, I’d filled the kid in on the strange details.

  “You don’t think that Joepye Adder could actually have been blackmailing Mr. Dane.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t. I still maintain that Joepye couldn’t blackmail a doughnut out of the counter help at Krispy Kreme. Still, the little guy’s involved in this thing some way, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” he told me, but he obviously didn’t mean it.

  He’d turned off the lights a block away from the park entrance, shut off the engine, and coasted to a stop. We got out of the car and barely closed the doors. He checked his gun.

  The air was cold and heavy as lead.

  As we got to the edge of the park, I began to feel little needles stinging my face and hands.

  “Ice storm,” the kid whispered. “They said it was coming.”

  He followed me on around the perimeter of the woods until we were at the edge of an embankment about twenty yards north of the bridge where the fire had been earlier in the evening. In just the time it had taken us to make it there, the trees were already frosted, and the distinctive sound of sleet was clinking on the limbs and the ground all around us. When you looked out at the streetlamps, you could see a billion little white dots drifting almost silently in the light. It was going to be a heavy storm.

  I put my head close to his and pointed down the slope. “I think that’s where he stays, down there.”

  “In weather like this?” Officer Gainer whispered back.

  “I know it doesn’t seem likely.” I smiled, thinking about my most recent visit to dreamland and the image of Joe playing three-card monte in the woods. “I’ve just got a hunch.”

  “Okay,” he nodded. “That’s good enough for me then.” God love him.

  We started slowly down the bank, trying not to make any noise.

  The ground was already slippery from all the moisture in general, but the ice on the leaves was really making it hard to keep steady.

  After we’d move about halfway down, I saw a flash of movement almost directly in front of us, about thirty yards ahead through the thick trees. Then a spark of light from the same direction caught the kid’s attention too. He shot a look at me. I nodded.

  We stopped. He pulled his gun and motioned for me to go right and that he’d go left. I nodded, and we moved.

  As I got closer, I could see two figures. One was seated on a small crate or an overturned bucket or something. The other one was standing up, holding something in front of the seated figure.

  Then the standing one flicked a lighter — the spark we’d seen before — and I could see that the one sitting down was Joepye. He looked to be crying, or maybe his face was just wet with the sleet. The other figure had his back to me, but I could see he was holding out a bottle, taunting Joe with it.

  I’d lost sight of the kid, but I had to get closer in. I had to get a look at the other guy and hear what he was saying to Joe.

  Just as I made it around a big sycamore, I heard Officer Gainer cuss loudly, followed instantly by his gun going off. I still couldn’t see him, but I figured he’d slipped and fallen. There were lots of tricky little rocks and holes all over the bank, and it was slick as a slide. The guy standing in front of Joe turned wildly around in the direction of the noise, and I used the distraction to hustle in and get as close as I could to Joe. I had it in mind to tackle the other guy and wrestle him to the ground.

  But Joe saw me before I could get close enough to him, and he called out. “Flap! Help! She won’t give me my wine back!”

  The other guy spun around, still clutching the wine bottle in his hand, and it turned out it wasn’t a guy at all. Even in the black of night I could see that it wasn’t a guy.

  It was Beth Dane.

  35. Box Step

  “You don’t want that wine, Joe,” I said when I’d recovered my voice, which took a moment.

  “Oh, yes, I do, Flap,” he insisted. “I need a drink in the worst way in this world.”

  “Not this bottle, pal.” I smiled at the girl. “This one’s got rabies in it.”

  Just a guess, but it hit the mark. She set the bottle down on the ground — extremely carefully — and corked it hard.

  Then: “How’d you know that?” She stared over her shoulder. “And who the hell is that over there shooting at me?” Sudden panic rising. “Is it my uncle?”

  “No, Beth.” I tried to sound calm, staring at the ghost. “It’s the police.”

  “He called the police? That son of a bitch, I’ll wreck him! I’ll spread his dirty little secrets all over the world!”

  “He didn’t get the police.” I tried inching toward her. “The police got him. They already know his dirty little secrets.”

  “You did this!” She spun around to Joepye. “You geeky little zip, I’ll kill you twice!”

  “Joe didn’t tell either.” I was almost beside her. “I did.”

  She finally realized that I was almost on her, and she started to shift away and run, but the groun
d was worse than she’d expected, and she sloshed her way a few steps until she saw Officer Gainer stepping carefully her way with his pistol pointed at her.

  “Damn!” she hollered at the top of her lungs. “Why does everything happen to me?”

  “That’s just about what your uncle said” — I smiled at her — “when we caught him.”

  She shot a look back my way, but her eyes were wild and unfocused. “Who the hell are you?”

  Joe answered before I could. “That’s Flap, Beth. Remember I told you about him?”

  Now that I was up close to her, I could see that she was heavily conked. I was guessing speedballs, a zippy little injection of cocaine and heroin. The coke gives you enough bounce to stay alert so you can appreciate the skag and not nod off right away. It was a known cocktail of choice among some of the area’s working girls.

  She could barely focus on my face. “Oh. Right. You’re Flap Tucker. Big deal. What do you want?”

  Officer Gainer had made it down to our little party and was standing there staring at the girl.

  “It’s Beth Dane,” was all he could say. Then he looked at me. “She’s not dead.”

  “Doesn’t look that way.” I nodded his way, then turned back to her. “And I’ll tell you what I want most in this world, Beth: I want some answers.”

  “To what?” She was just about to fall down. The panic and the drugs were colliding.

  Where to start? “You hung those bodies. You and Joepye. You killed the girls and hung them up on a lamppost.”

  “Not me.” She shook her head loosely. “Joe did it all.”

  He stood. “I did not.”

  Like they were arguing about marbles.

  Joe looked at me. “Honest to God, Flap. I didn’t kill nobody.”

  I nodded. “You just hoisted them up the pole.”

  “Well.” He shrugged. “Yeah …”

  “He stole the germs” — Beth took a step in my direction — “and he helped me give it to them. And he did all the stuff at the police station.”

  I finally had to defer to Officer Gainer, who was obviously dying to comment.