Rick took my hand, and we walked back toward the lobby, leaving Hershel standing there.
Hershel might have been staring angrily at our backs, hands curled into fists. He might have sat back down and put his head in his hands. Or he might have checked his watch and discovered maybe he was late for another poker game and rushed off to hold 'em and fold 'em. One thing I was pretty sure of, from what he'd said, not only was Hershel Goldberg the operator of an illegal gaming business, he also had a gambling problem himself—and the one thing he couldn't do was take Kenny Rogers' advice and walk away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Rick had to leave to take Freddy and Dolly Lancaster on an Eco tour of the island, but promised to be back in time to stop and pick up supplies for our barbecue that afternoon. He was doing chef duty over the coals since most of my cooking experience involved opening packages and pushing buttons on the microwave.
We were standing outside the travel agency door, and before he left he took hold of both my hands. "You gonna be okay?" His concern was sincere.
"I'm fine."
I took a few minutes repeating what Hershel had told me about the blackmail.
Rick didn't say anything but pushed my bangs off my forehead with his fingertips. That tender gesture made me hyper-emotional.
"Gabrielle, I'm asking that you don't put yourself in a position to be alone with Hershel Goldberg again. He isn't a good guy."
"I see that now," I said. "I'll be more careful."
Skepticism clouded his eyes.
"I'll be careful." I raised two fingers—scout's honor.
"Good." He leaned in for a quick and tasty kiss then turned away. "Gotta run, Princess. Slater gator."
I watched him move quickly away in that unique way he had of taking long purposeful strides that were somehow still loose-hipped enough to make it look like he wasn't in a hurry at all. Watching Rick made me feel good, really good—really really good. That four-letter word popped into my head, the one neither of us had said to the other. Not yet. It wasn't the first time I'd thought about that word as it related to Rick, and on previous occasions, I'd promised myself I'd tuck away the notion of its legitimacy for closer inspection at a more convenient time—just like I did then.
The confrontation with Hershel Goldberg was eating at me, and there was something I wanted to do. Hershel kept denying that he had anything to do with the beachboy's death. But I had trouble believing him.
Seeing Rick walk away was always great entertainment, so I stood there watching. Then I whispered, "Slater gator." When I couldn't see him any longer, I pulled my cell phone from my pants pocket and dialed Detective Ray.
The phone conversation was brief.
I told him everything I'd learned about what Hershel Goldberg had been doing the night of Val Markson's murder, as well as how he'd gotten so chatty when he was doing the intimidation act on me and how badly he despised the beachboy. I spilled it all, right down to the gambling ring Hershel said he ran in Chicago, the money laundering, the tax fraud, and the blackmail.
Detective Ray didn't say a word while I reeled it off.
When I'd finished, he conceded that if it would get me off his back, he'd look into the matter of Hershel Goldberg. Then he said, "Miss LeClair we've had this conversation before. And I'm hoping this is the last time I ever have to tell you to keep your unofficial nose out of official police business."
While I didn't say I would, I didn't say I wouldn't. I just said, "Aloha for now, Detective," and disconnected.
I looked up to see Hershel the Bully pounding through the lobby toward the front entrance, texting madly. Another hot game maybe? I walked over to where I could see out the wide-open front entrance as a familiar Honda minivan pulled up. Uber. Virginia. Hershel got in, and she pulled away from the resort with Hershel Goldberg riding shotgun.
I had a sudden brainstorm and turned toward the wide auxiliary hallway that led to the gift shop, meeting rooms, and side entrance.
I pushed open the side entrance door and headed along the walkway past The Lava Pot where hops-scented cool air and strains of the soundtrack from Disney's Moana wafted from the darkened interior, on past the koi pond, and around to the bungalows, specifically Bungalow 15-B—the Goldbergs' temporary island domicile.
I knocked on the door and waited a bit before Sarah Goldberg opened it.
"Oh, no, Sarah," I cried out when I saw her.
"Mm-hmm," she said. "You'd think I'd have known better."
Sarah was naked save for a short terry cloth towel wrap. Every ounce of skin I could see was bright red except for two thin white stripes that climbed upward from the top of the wrap and disappeared around her neck. I thought back to the swimsuit top she'd worn on the snorkeling excursion yesterday. The white stripes on her skin matched it.
Her lobster-red skin was slick with what might have been aloe vera. Her arms were consciously held out away from her body; her legs were spread. She must have been miserable.
I gritted my teeth as sympathy rolled through me. "Yesterday? No sunscreen?"
"You think?" Stiff legged as a toddler mastering those first steps, she slowly turned in a circle, being careful not to let her arms drop.
"I'm so sorry, Sarah. You should have said something. I had sunscreen, loads of it. With this skin, I'm never without it. Janet had it too. Even the boat captain—"
"I had some in my bag." She shrugged then winced at the movement. "I was excited about the snorkeling adventure and what I might see. I hardly ever get excited about anything, and don't seem to be able to hold things together very well when I do. I just forgot about it."
"Oh." Man, it was a really bad burn.
"Do you want to come in, Gabby?"
From the way she was shifting her feet, I understood that she wanted to go back to suffering alone. So I got right to the point.
"I just had a"—I searched for a word—"discussion with your husband."
"Discussion?"
I told her I knew she'd been covering for him when she said they'd stayed in together the night of the murder.
She motioned me inside and shut the door behind me.
"What else do you know?" she asked tiredly.
I told her everything then asked, "Was your husband on the level with me…about that night? About the blackmail? If he was, then why should I take him at his word that he didn't harbor enough hatred to drive something sharp into the base of Val Markson's neck?"
She shuddered. "What?"
"Could Hershel have killed Val?"
Sarah moved slowly across the room, perched gingerly on the edge of the bed, tossed a couple of Tylenol into her mouth, and washed them down with a swig from a can of Diet Coke.
"You seem like a nice girl, Gabby. Under other less bizarre circumstances, excluding the socio-economic gulf between us of course, we might have been friends. But I'm beginning to see a definite flaw in your personality—mainly that you're a busybody and won't stay out of things that don't concern you. You can't seem to help yourself, which makes you a bit like Hershel in that regard. Not healthy."
I was startled. Like Hershel? Really? Now that was a thing to think about. More—there was a thing to do something about.
"Ordinarily, I'd tell you to buzz off. But because I don't feel well, and I'd just like to be shed of your curiosity, I'm going to set you straight and hope you'll stop poking around in my and Hershel's business."
That seemed to be the way things were going today. Nobody wanted me around, and in order to get rid of me they were talking to me. Maybe being persona non grata was the key to getting information. I waited, resisting the urge to prompt her.
Sarah began. "Yes, my husband is a gambling addict, and yes, he runs an illegal gambling circuit in Chicago. He started it to support his habit, but it proved so lucrative, it sort of took over our lives—just like his gambling has taken over our lives. He likes to win, and he cheats his own customers. The games he runs are rigged. And yes, there was a blackmailer. But it wasn
't Val Markson."
It wasn't what I expected to hear, and I just sat there staring at her. "Not the beachboy? I don't understand."
"How could you?" She sat very still. When she spoke again, she sounded different. "I barely get it myself." I was no longer hearing Sarah Goldberg upper class society dame. I was hearing Chicago Sarah, a woman who sort of swallowed her words, flattening her As and Os, and sharpening some of her consonants—a woman who'd learned to mask who she was and where she came from in order to become someone else, in order to fit in.
"Hershel has money, Gabby. I'm talking big bucks. It's pretty nice to be Mrs. Sarah Goldberg. Oh, sure, he gets a little mouthy sometimes. And yeah, it does hurt my feelings. But most of the time it's pretty much okay. I get whatever I want, whenever I want it.
"A while back we took a break from each other, and I got a taste of what it would be like to go back to being Sarah Lipski. Hershel cut me off when we weren't together. I eventually ran out of money, and I didn't like it, so I cozied up and played nice, and Hershel took me back. But he holds it against me and keeps threatening to throw me out and leave me penniless. I hate him for that."
She reached for the tube of aloe vera on the nightstand, squeezed some out, and rubbed it on her shoulders. "Takes the heat out of the burn."
I nodded. "It's good stuff. Had to use it a time or two myself since I moved here."
"You see, Gabby. Eventually Hershel's luck is going to run out. The law will catch up with his criminal activity, freeze his assets, and I'll be left high and dry. I don't intend that to happen. So I found a way to get money from Hershel. Val felt so sorry that I'd had to go back to my crappy husband that he even covered for me when Hershel confronted him once about the money. I've been pigeon-holing it until I have enough to make a clean getaway from him and not have to live like"—she sort of sneered—"the great unwashed masses. I never told Val about Hershel's crooked gambling setups. Not about the money laundering or tax evasion either. Val didn't have a clue. I lied to Hershel about that. Yeah, my husband said he hated that I'd supposedly narked him out to Val. But whether he realized it or not, I'd given Hershel a gift. You see it was one more thing he could hold over my head, and Hershel loves holding things over my head. I also told him that once Val knew those things, he'd come up with the blackmail scheme. But it wasn't Val's scheme at all. Hershel's been giving me fifteen thousand dollars a month in cash to pay off Val. And now I have a secret bank account with over a quarter of a million dollars in it."
I didn't know what to say, but in the end, I didn't have to say anything.
Sarah summed it all up. "Hershel believes it was Val who was blackmailing him. But it wasn't. It was little Sarah Lipski—Sarah from the South Side."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I'd provided ledgers and business plans to Janet who was scheduled to meet with the members of the consortium that afternoon. I couldn't believe with all that had happened those people were still on track to vet Gabby's Island Adventures, but they were.
"Guess I won't be much help to you today," Janet had said. "You know, in case you needed help with the investigation."
"That's okay," I'd told her. "You take care of this stuff. It's your job, and we don't want you to have any work-related problems."
When the meeting was over, Janet came down to the travel agency.
"Well…" She shrugged. "They still don't know what they want to do."
"That's okay," I said. "Neither do I."
As evening approached, Janet and I took Brute the Awesome Shuttle back to my place and made a pitcher of sangria with some luscious fruit from the trees in back of the house—ah, yes, island life. We opened up the back door to the late afternoon breeze, sat on the lanai sipping the cold sweet wine, and discussed how the mystery surrounding Val Markson's murder was rounding the bend from unusual to downright bizarre.
"Blackmailing her own husband. Wow." Janet shook her head and munched on a wine-soaked ice cube.
That was when Rick and Ace showed up, and Janet and I were able to forget about the murder—at least for a while.
I'd gone to the kitchen with Rick, our chef for the day, to help him prep. My guy had cooked burgers for me on my little backyard grill before, and the recipe he'd learned when serving in the Middle East was terrific. The way he talked about his time of enlistment, I'd always figured Rick thought of the army more as home than he did any of the fosters he'd lived in.
His burger recipe was a concoction of ground beef, ground sirloin, eggs, a little mayo, bread crumbs, Worcestershire, and garlic. But they were, bar none, the best hamburgers I'd ever eaten. I didn't even mind ooey-gooeyness of mixing it together for him, especially when Rick came up behind me to nuzzle my neck while my hands were busy squishing it in the mixing bowl.
I caught my breath and stopped my hands.
"Keep going," he said beside my ear. "And so will I." His smooth lips went to work planting a collar of soft kisses along the back of my neck.
The kitchen window offered a twilight view of Janet and Ace in the back yard. She was propped on her side on my chaise, her elbow supporting her head as she listened to one of Ace's tall tales. Ace could spin some great stories, even if half were probably fabricated.
He sat in a lawn chair next to her. From their facial expressions and body language, they were enjoying each other's company. Ace and Janet were two of my favorite people in the whole world. Seeing them together made me happy.
"Look at them." Right away I was sorry I said anything when Rick stopped his sweet attention to look around me.
"Yeah, cute couple," he said. "They go together like burgers and fries."
I laughed. "Or cake and ice cream?"
"Hot dogs and mustard."
"Wait," I said. "Not mustard. Hot dogs and ketchup."
He laughed. "Ketchup? Really. We need to have a serious talk, woman."
We took the patties, buns, and other goodies outside to the table. While Rick grilled the burgers along with some pineapple slices and sweet Maui onions, the rest of us sat around talking.
The meal was really good, made better by the easy conversation and simpatico company.
Since Rick had done spatula duty, Janet, Ace, and I took charge of cleaning and clearing and sent him in to find a movie for us to watch. We all settled down in the living room to Blue Hawaii—Rick was a sucker for old movies. Janet was a sucker for Elvis, and Ace was a karaoke addict who I knew would be singing along to most of the songs.
We'd barely started the movie—Elvis was just getting off the plane—when Ace remembered he'd left his drink outside on the patio table and went out to get it.
"Hey," he hollered back. "Who's this?"
I got up and went out to see what he was talking about. Ace stood on the top lanai step looking down at a smallish brown-black-and-white beagle mix sitting at the bottom.
"Oh, that's just Five-O," I said.
"Your dog, Gabby?" Ace asked.
"No. Well, sort of. He's the neighborhood stray. We all kind of take care of him. Consequently, Five-O kind of spreads himself amongst us. He doesn't like to show favoritism and sleeps around a lot."
Janet came up behind me. "So he's come to spend the night then?"
"He doesn't stay here. He doesn't get along with Hercules. They got into it once, and I don't think Five-O's forgotten it. I know Hercules hasn't. Five-O probably smelled the barbecue and came around hoping to partake in the leftovers."
Ace went down the steps, out to the table and retrieved his glass. On the way back, he stopped to give Five-O a rub behind the ears.
"Say, boy, what's this?"
The dog easily gave up what he had in his mouth, and Ace came up the steps. "What do you think?" He showed it to me.
I took it from him and walked back into the light of the kitchen to have a look.
"Easy one." Janet stood at my side.
"Yep." I looked up at her and smiled.
What I held was the broken heel off an exquisite pair of Christia
n Louboutin black patent stilettos. The signature red heel lining made it that brand without question. Janet and I were both die-hard shoe gals. Dog saliva and caked-on mud aside, there was no doubt in either of our minds that's what it was.
"Where's the rest of that sweet baby?" Janet laughed. "What good's the heel all by herself?"
The thought that popped into my head made me cross the kitchen and lay the heel on a clean kitchen towel lying on the counter.
Rick padded barefoot into the kitchen. "What's up?"
I turned to him. "Five-O. He came to barter for some supper. He brought this." I moved aside so he could see the shoe heel. "I was wondering if maybe that heel broke off when someone smashed the shoe into…" I couldn't finish.
Rick stared at it then looked back up at me. "You're not thinking…?"
"I am," I said. "It's sharp, and long, and could easily have been used to—you know."
Janet caught on right away. "No," she said. "A woman would have to be a monster to defile a pair of Loubies like that. I mean, come on, girl. Even Val Markson wasn't worth ruining a pair over. No man is." She looked at Ace and shrugged. "No offense."
He smiled. "None taken. But are you all thinking that beachboy who was killed a few days ago might have been…?" He made a stabbing motion that would have gone perfectly with that screeching sound you always hear relative to the Hitchcock movie Psycho.
Janet and I nodded, and Rick said, "Maybe."
I picked up my cell and dialed Detective Ray. From the background noise, he was at home watching TV—from the laughter, a sitcom or game show. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about the cryptic cop. Was he married? Single? Divorced?
"Detective, it's Gabby LeClair," I began. When I heard his heavy sigh, I got right down to it. "The neighborhood stray brought a broken shoe heel to me tonight. While I can't say for certain, it occurred to me that a five-inch stiletto heel could be a possible weapon if used in the right way. What do you—"
"I'll send someone," he said. "Stay there, and try not to contaminate it any more than it already is." He hung up.
Beachboy Murder Page 12