Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5)

by Phillip DePoy

  “Danny,” I interrupted, “leave the nice policemen alone and come on inside now.”

  “Okay.” He hoisted himself up and stood on the curb. “Good night, boys.”

  The two men stared straight forward. I figured they were rookies — no sense of humor about their jobs. They wouldn’t last in stakeouts, I was thinking, without a sense of the absurd.

  Dan and I beat it inside.

  “You know, Flap,” he told me as he sat hard on the sofa, “we haven’t really talked about this Ronnard Raay character. You know he was kind of a sick package — if you’ll excuse that phrase — under the right circumstances.”

  “Espresso?” I gave him the patented wry smile.

  “Naturally.”

  I headed to my own little galley kitchen, straight for the espresso maker, and ground the beans while Dan shouted from the living room, over the noise.

  “He was known to be into bad stuff upon occasion, I mean.” Dan’s voice rose.

  “I know.” The noise of the grinder stopped, and the house seemed like a tomb for a second. I started the espresso machine and joined Dan in the living room. He’d turned on the lamp beside the sofa, and there was moonlight pouring in across the windowsill.

  “I’ve got to find out more about Dally’s marriage — and I don’t know how I can do that, since nobody alive except her knew anything about it.” That’s all I could say.

  And all Danny could do was nod.

  After a couple of minutes of ocean noises from the kitchen, our brew was ready.

  I fixed it and brought it in.

  Danny stared forward the way he always had when he was about to say something he knew the other person wouldn’t like. I’d seen that look before once on a guy Daniel was supposed to shoot, and I’d have to say it worried me to see him looking just that way in my living room.

  “Flap,” he began slowly, “you know you have to see all sides of this story, right? I mean, you have to take everything into consideration.”

  “Okay.” I had no idea where he was going.

  “Did you ever consider” — he went on staring, his voice barely above a whisper — “that what with all the threats and secrets — did you ever consider the possibility that the reason this is all so weird is — that Dally killed her husband?”

  35. Threats and Secrets

  The problem with being a southern-fried Taoist is that you have to try to look at all phenomena as just that: an occurrence, devoid of any meaning except the one you impart to it — that particular instance in that exact moment. But then, you ask yourself, where’s discernment, where’s moral choice, where’s social responsibility in all that? If you say God’s in everything and everything is holy, then how do you explain the Holocaust?

  I’m saying that philosophical questions of that magnitude were blossoming in my head because of Danny’s question. And because of all that, I found that I actually did have to consider the possibility that Dally had killed her husband. That would certainly explain everything, even her accusing me of same. Dally was the smartest person I had ever known, and she would have figured out that if she wanted to throw me off the scent of a thing like that, there would have been no better way to do it than to accuse me — because it would have knocked me down and stomped on me hard. As it, in fact, had.

  Danny was right with me. “See, you might have detected odd things about her when the body showed up, so if she threw you way off your game — by insinuating to you that she thought you were the killer — you’d lay off her.”

  “None of this,” I began, “remotely fits into my knowledge of a person I’ve known most of my life.”

  “Everybody’s got secrets, Flap.”

  “Not me.” I shook my head. “Not from her.”

  He sighed. “You told her all about your band days?”

  “I told her I had the occasional bump from a fan and the odd brief encounter, sure. Our relationship, mine and Dally’s, it goes way beyond that kind of stuff. You know that.”

  “You told her about Lorraine?”

  Oh. Well. Lorraine. That was another story.

  She’d been a fan. She loved Daniel’s playing. None of the other girls could get around him when she was there. She was all over him. When he found out that she was married to a rich lawyer who was running for state senate, he really got inventive with his coke habit. He even talked to me about popping the husband, setting up a big score so he and Lorraine could beat it out of the country and live like robber barons in Costa Rica. He even talked to me about my going in on all of it with him. That’s when I had to whack him in the head with my philosophy stick.

  “Dan, you will now get off the dope and on the wagon,” was my line, “not to mention getting far away from Lorraine, who is the worst news since Pearl Harbor.” There was a tussle involved, but he finally saw it my way.

  In retaliation, Lorraine spent a few wild moments spreading it around town that she and I had been involved. It wasn’t remotely true, but it wasn’t the kind of rumor a guy like me can have wafting about the city. So: “No,” I told Dan. “I have not told Dally everything about that. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Just saying …” He trailed off.

  Further thinking on the subject was interrupted by the harsh pounding on the door.

  One of the things about all this that I really didn’t care for was the nearness of all these policemen. I didn’t mind hanging out with people like Daniel, or Mug Lewis — even Chuckie and Rimshot, when it came down to it. But having rookie policemen around me all the time made me feel ill at ease; downright unsafe.

  “Mr. Tucker?” The one standing squarely in the doorway was the one who had been in the driver’s seat of the car downstairs. Could have been the city cousin of Denny Martin from down-home way.

  “Yes?” I smiled.

  “Detective Huyne would like to see you. Would that be all right with you? You’re not under arrest, or anything. You’re not even wanted for questioning. He’d just — like to see you.”

  “And I’d like to see him,” I answered. Then I turned away from the cop to face Danny, still speaking to the rookie. “Can my friend come too? He likes policemen.”

  Daniel grinned. It seemed to make the poor kid nervous.

  “No.” The cop shook his head. “I don’t think so. Just you this time, okay?”

  “Sorry, Dan.”

  Dan was affable. “I’ll just stay here, then, if that’s okay by you. I’d like to finish my espresso, catch up on a little reading, that sort of thing.”

  “What’s mine is yours,” I said, shifting my eyes to my little memory pad that I’d left sitting on the coffee table.

  He barely flashed his eyes and then he smiled bigger, mostly to throw the cop off, I thought.

  So I turned and headed out the door. “Bye, then.”

  Danny didn’t answer.

  As I followed the cop down the stairs, he suddenly stopped and turned back to look up at me.

  “That was pretty good, giving us the slip like that earlier.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  “The slip? Is that what I gave you?”

  “It won’t happen again.” He squinted hard, trying, I thought, to look a little like Clint Eastwood.

  “Fine by me.” Never rile a rookie, especially in the middle of a celebrity impersonation. That’s a law of nature.

  We were down onto the sidewalk before he spoke again. “Detective Huyne has the idea that you know more than you’re telling him. That’s why he wants to … talk.”

  The sound of his voice was another clumsy attempt at intimidation. But since we were out in the open air where I had a better shot at moving out of the way in case he tried to pop me, I thought I’d whistle back.

  “Well,” I told the guy, “as it happens, I always know more than Detective Huyne, and it gripes him.”

  “Is that so?” He didn’t even look back at me as we were crossing the street.

  “Yeah,” I said quickly. “It’s like a little game
we play. I solve his problems for him, and he takes credit.”

  “Get in the car.” That’s all. He was done playing.

  The ride to the station house was silent, thank God.

  *

  Huyne’s desk was a mess. He looked up long enough to make a sour face, and then went right back to the pile of papers in front of him.

  “Sit.” He didn’t even look back at me.

  “What is it?” I wasn’t irritated with him even though he was so perfunctory. I could tell something was up.

  “I’m worried about Ms. Oglethorpe’s husband.”

  “No need.” I tried out my best Baptist minister: “He’s past worry now.”

  “Shut up.” He looked up then. “I mean I’ve gotten some odd news about him.”

  “Okay.” I sat.

  “At the time of his death, he wasn’t tied up and he hadn’t been drugged — not that way, anyway — not knocked out. I mean, he was loaded with coke, but it seems to me that would have made it even harder for him to sit still while somebody else shoved a knife into him.”

  “You mean the killer was standing right there with the knife pushed up in poor Ronnard’s chest, and Ronn didn’t seem to object. That brings up questions in your mind.”

  “How did the killer get that close? Why didn’t Higgins struggle? You understand. It doesn’t make sense. From what we know, it looks like this Higgins was, on occasion, a bad citizen — drugs, wild temper, rich-boy poor behavior …”

  “… rotten penmanship …” I flexed my eyebrows, looking at Ronnard’s notes on Huyne’s desk.

  “… and my mind wandered,” he finished for me, “to some very uncomfortable conclusions. I was saying that Higgins was no good. He was tough, he might even have knocked off a few people in his travels. We know he absolutely roughed people up over the drugs — especially when people didn’t pay him. Coming, as he did, from a wealthy family, he had a rich guy’s greed — no compunction about getting the dough any way he could. His favorite instrument was a tire iron, they tell me. He was apparently some sort of virtuoso with it.”

  “Not the sort of person who’d sit still while someone stabbed him.” I looked down. “And incidentally, you don’t have to go out of your way to convince me to dislike the guy, but the fact is, all I’ve heard about him is that he was charming. So the tire iron thing …”

  “… just tell me what I want to know.” Huyne’s voice got too calm for me.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Somehow convince me,” he said, not making eye contact, “that I’m an idiot for thinking that Ronnard Raay Higgins might sit still like that for his wife.”

  36. Penmanship

  I felt a little sick to my stomach for a second, and I thought maybe the poker face had let me down, because Huyne was staring a hole in my forehead. But after another moment or so, I glanced down at the papers on his desk.

  “Not likely in this case.” I was hoping I sounded something like breezy, whatever that would be. “When our Ms. Oglethorpe gets letters like those you’ve got there on your desk, she’s not the type to hide her feelings. Ronnard would have seen her coming a mile off. She wouldn’t even have gotten into the building with him. She’s loud, she’s not subtle when she’s mad, I’m saying. All the world knows her disposition.”

  I saw absolutely no point in letting him in on the fact that I’d been thinking how Dally might just stab a man in the heart if she had the right motivation and the stars were lined up just so. And I thought it best not to even bring up Lucy and her friend Fang, so I was even afraid to ask what kind of blade had done old Ronnard in.

  “Well that’s another problem,” Huyne went right on — even though I was pretty sure he hadn’t completely bought my act. “These letters — they could be from several different people.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, look.” He turned one my way. “The handwriting is maybe from two different guys — different penmanship, different spelling skills. They look completely separate.”

  “They do?”

  He looked up at me. “You get an eye for that sort of thing if you’re any kind of detective.”

  “Ah.” I cocked my head at him. “I see. Very informative. But could I just tell you that, for example, I write a lot differently sober than I do when I’ve had more than half a bottle. When I’m mad I press down hard, when I’m not I’ve got a different touch. When I’m in a hurry I don’t always check grammar or spelling the way I do when I’ve got the time. This stuff? It’s all up to rampant interpretation.”

  “Is that so?” He leaned back in his chair. “Well, it happens that we’ve got a team of rampant interpreters to tell us that these notes came from, at the very least, two different people.”

  “I see.” I folded my hands in my lap. “That is impressive. But I remain a skeptic.”

  I was trying to lead him as far as I could from thinking that Dally had anything to do with bopping Ronnard — but every time it slipped back into my mind, I was tense at the neck and had a little twitch in my left eye.

  Huyne finally looked at me hard and pronounced, “You look tired.”

  “You know how it is” — I smiled at him — “when you’re slipping away from your police tails and consorting with criminal types. That’s not the kind of thing that happens during ordinary business hours.”

  “Flap …” he began.

  “… okay.” I stopped him. “I actually do have my suspicions about something, but I need more time and a little less police escort, if that’s okay with you. At this point, really, you don’t think I had anything to do with Ronnard’s getting dead.”

  “Anything to do? I didn’t say that. I don’t think you killed the guy, that’s true. But I think you’ve got something to do with this mess, all right.” He sniffed. “Still. I guess — given the nature of our relationship — I can cut you loose a little.”

  “Our relationship?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t call me within twenty-four hours and tell me something I want to know,” he told me plainly, “I’ll have those two kids — the ones who were supposed to be on you when you gave them the slip — I’ll have them throw you in the trunk of their car and drive around in circles until you feel like talking to me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That relationship.”

  37. That Relationship

  Back out on the street, I headed up toward Easy once again. Maybe it was because Huyne had thought the same terrible things I had, but for some odd reason, I was feeling a little more steady than I had in a while. I thought maybe I wasn’t going nuts after all.

  In fact, I felt so steady that I thought I’d try again to talk to Ms. Oglethorpe one more time.

  Isn’t it just the funniest thing ever the way the human mind works?

  By the time I was crowding the doorframe at Easy, I was downright giddy. I nodded at Hal as I walked past him toward the office, and he smiled big. He reached under the bar. I nodded. He poured. That’s the kind of relationship everybody wants: one where words are only a nice accessory — thoughts are the true coin. Hal and I? We had a single mind about the important things: wine, music, and his boss.

  I walked in on Dally. She was staring blankly into space. A rare idle moment. I found myself watching the blink of her eye and thinking that in a single blink you can lose something you need to have in order to live. And in another blink, you can get it back. That’s just how funny the human mind is.

  “Hey.” I stood my ground.

  She looked up. “Flap?”

  “That’s right. And don’t bother calling for Hal. He’s on his way in already.”

  “Oh.” She looked down. “Sorry about that. You don’t know …” But her voice weakened and she didn’t finish her sentence.

  Hal broke our silence. “Here you go, bud. Next to the last glass of this bottle, so savor.”

  “Will do.” I smiled at him.

  He took one look at Dally, then a glance back at me, winked, and split.

&n
bsp; So.

  “Mind if I sit down?” I moved toward the chair on the business side of her desk.

  The lamplight was sepia like from an old photograph, and for a second I felt time slip and decades mesh.

  She looked up at me and just stared.

  I sipped and stared right back for a while.

  Then: “Dally? We really need to talk.”

  “I know.” She broke her gaze.

  “It’s come to me that you don’t really think I killed Ronnard Raay — and can I just say that it’s a whole lot easier to talk about a dead guy if he’s got a funny name?”

  She didn’t see the humor. “It’s possible that you didn’t kill him.”

  “Good. But I already knew that, like I said. It’s come to me that you only said that to throw me off. So I had to ask myself why you would want to throw me off.”

  “Well.” She looked up. Her eyes were narrow and her voice was hard. “Barely takes a Blue Ribbon chef to cook that up. I’ve been lying to you about myself for a really long time, and it’s something really big, and I thought if you pried into the matter enough, then you’d find things out. Things about me. Things you wouldn’t care for.”

  “I understand.” I tilted my head once. “You had a crisis of faith. Me too, welcome to the club. And could I just say that I didn’t much care to be handling your dead husband? That right there would have been enough of an evening for me — that would have been enough of a thing, I’m saying, to find out. But no, I had to pry, as you mentioned — and sure enough: I found out things. Things about you. Things I didn’t care for. And what do you know? I don’t give a damn about them. I only give a damn about you. I only give a damn about I love you.”

  Well, there was a sentence absolutely as filled with grammatical misgivings as it was with surprising results: Dally started crying.

  “The last time I saw you cry,” I told her, only baffled, “was at a water fountain in Rich’s about a hundred years ago when we were kids.”

  She shot her hand up and flicked a tear. “I’m not crying. I’m just tired and my eyes are a little watery.”