Stalking Steven

by Jenna Bennett

  “Nothing I know of,” Mendoza said, “but I don’t work vice.”

  “Different department?”

  “Special investigations,” Mendoza said. “Narcotics, gangs, gambling, and organized prostitution. In criminal investigations, we mostly deal with homicides and missing persons.”

  “Like Steven.”

  “More like missing persons we don’t assume are in bed with someone other than their spouses.”

  Right. “What about kidnapping and ransom notes? Who handles that?”

  “In this case,” Mendoza said, “me. Usually, that’s a federal crime. The FBI takes over. But since it’s connected to the homicide I’m working on, it’s mine.”

  Lucky him. “And Zachary?”

  “Is mine, too,” Mendoza said, “by virtue of being connected to the homicide I’m working on.”

  “So for you, does it all come back to Mrs. Grimshaw?”

  He hesitated. “Not necessarily. I have a feeling it’ll turn out to come back to the girl. But I can’t be sure.”

  “Did Araminta Tucker give you the impression that she’d be capable of driving to Crieve Hall to shoot her sister-in-law?”

  Mendoza’s lips quirked, and a dimple made a quick appearance in one cheek. My stomach swooped. “Araminta Tucker gave me the impression that she’d be capable of pretty much anything. She propositioned me.”

  That didn’t even surprise me. And not only because it was Araminta Tucker. “That probably happens to you a lot. Doesn’t it? The blonde news reporter yesterday…”

  “Not in old folks’ homes,” Mendoza said. “Can we get this conversation back on track?”

  I wasn’t aware that it had left the track, but if he wanted to talk about Zachary, I’d talk about Zachary. “I think we should talk to the guy down there, with the cigarette.”

  “Why?” Mendoza said.

  “Because he’s been watching us since we drove into this alley. And because he’s a couple doors down from where the… from where Zachary was dumped. He might know something.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Mendoza said.

  “Me?” He wanted me to go talk to the guy? When I’d said that I thought we should talk to him, I’d really meant that I thought Mendoza should.

  “You’re the one who said that people might not want to talk to a cop,” Mendoza said. “And you’re the one with the PI license. If you’re going to investigate crimes, you’re going to have to get used to talking to people.”

  “I wasn’t planning to investigate crimes,” I said. “I was planning to investigate cheating spouses.”

  “Surprise,” Mendoza answered.

  Right. I glanced down the alley and took a breath. “Wish me luck.”

  He didn’t, but he nodded. I could feel his eyes at my back as I headed down the alley toward the rear of the store where the guy was hanging out, smoking.

  He watched me approach with dark, expressionless eyes. I smiled brightly. “Good afternoon.”

  He didn’t answer. “My name is… um… Nancy.” Probably better not to give him my real name, come to think of it. “Do you work here?”

  He sat just to the left of a steel door. There was no sign on or above the door to indicate what kind of business it was. The only ornamentation was a small buzzer next to the door. I guess if you were back here, and you pushed the button, it was because you knew what kind of establishment you wanted to get into.

  I also deduced that it probably wasn’t the kind of business that took deliveries of any kind. If they did, the back door would have been more clearly marked. The discount tobacco store proclaimed, in big letters, what it was, even here in the rear.

  The man didn’t answer. He just kept looking at me with unblinking, dark eyes.

  “I’m looking for information about what happened last night,” I said. “My son,” the lie came more smoothly this time, “was beaten up and left outside the back of the tobacco store.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Were you here last night?”

  He shook his head. So at least he understood what I was saying. I guess that was something. “What about this morning?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re here now.”

  He stared at me. I gave up. “Thanks for your time.” I turned on my heel. Thanks for nothing.

  He watched me trudge back up the alley. Unlike Mendoza, I was pretty sure this guy was looking at my butt.

  The detective was waiting where I’d left him. He arched his brows at me. “Anything?”

  “No. I don’t know whether he can’t speak, or just didn’t want to speak to me. But he said—or I asked and he shook his head—that he wasn’t here last night. Or this morning.”

  Mendoza glanced down the alley. “So he knows nothing.”

  “Or won’t share what he knows.” If he did know anything. “I told him Zachary’s my son. So if you decide to go talk to him, or you come across him again, keep that in mind.”

  “If he wouldn’t talk to you,” Mendoza said, “he isn’t going to talk to me. Let’s go.” He headed for the car. I followed.

  We drove down the rest of the alley, and around to the front of the building. In case I haven’t mentioned it, it was a strip mall. A long row of stores stuck together. The discount tobacco store was toward one end. The storefront the guy had been sitting outside turned out to belong to a dry cleaner. There was also a Radio Shack, a Chinese restaurant, and the ubiquitous Great Clips hairdresser.

  “Did you say there’s a Russian grocery around here?” Mendoza asked.

  I nodded. “That’s what Zachary said.”

  “Any idea where?”

  I didn’t. “But if you’ll hold on a few seconds, I’ll look it up.”

  Mendoza held on while I accessed Google on my phone. “A quarter of a mile that way.” I pointed right. Mendoza turned the car in that direction.

  Two minutes later, we pulled to a stop outside the Russian market. Mendoza cut the car engine. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re coming in?”

  “I’m going to talk to whoever’s here,” Mendoza said, “and ask whether they were open late enough last night that Zachary might have stopped by. And if he did, if he said anything. You can look around. You probably think more like he does.”

  I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I was twenty years older than Zach, and female. Mendoza was only thirteen or fourteen years older, and male. Chances were that he thought more like Zach.

  But he was the detective, and he had the badge and gun. I had neither. So when we walked into the store, he headed for the cashier and I started wandering, trying to see the store through Zachary’s eyes.

  It was pretty interesting. I’ve been in ethnic grocery stores before. Mexican and Asian, mostly. The more mainstream ones. This one carried some things I didn’t expect to see. Like caviar in tubes. The kind you squeeze. Like a tube of toothpaste. And they had several kinds of caviar, both red and black. Until I saw it, I hadn’t had any idea that red caviar was even available. Or for that matter, tubed caviar.

  There was also a healthy selection of Eastern European beers, and an even healthier selection of herring in jars and tins. By itself, in tomato sauce, in mustard sauce, in wine sauce or cream sauce. Pickled herring. Fermented herring. Herring in aspic.

  Then there was the canned beef. Including meatballs in sauce. Made from reindeer.

  Up near the checkout registers, there was the usual assortment of candy. Russian candy. There was also a bulletin board, with some pieces of paper stuck to it. I wandered in that direction. A few yards away, Mendoza was busy charming the woman behind the register.

  In addition to the usual fliers for lawn care and moving services, there was a schedule for the Nashville Ballet pinned to the corkboard. Maybe not so surprising, as Zachary had told me the owner of the grocery store was a former ballet dancer. There was also a calendar turned to the current month. (October, in case you wondered.) The picture above the calendar showed a buildin
g topped by several onion domes. The Kremlin? Or maybe they’re more like our church spires, and occur mostly on places of worship?

  I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about Russian culture. I know that the domes are uniquely Russian, or at least Americans associate them with Russia, but I don’t know enough to know whether they only occur on certain types of buildings.

  It was a pretty photograph, anyway: a brick building topped by a tower (with a tiny, golden onion dome on top), and several, much bigger onion domes. A white and blue stripe, a yellow and green swirl, a red and green checkered and swirled pattern, a red and white zigzag…

  St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, the tiny script below the picture said.

  I stared at it, rapt, for a full minute—how did they do that?—before I remembered what I was doing here, and turned my attention to the rest of the services on offer.

  A business card for a local vet was tucked into the corkboard frame, along with a couple others. A seamstress or tailor with an Eastern European name. A liquor store; maybe they specialized in vodka.

  Or maybe not.

  A club. Stella’s.

  Music. Dancing. Girls.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Nobody answered. I looked over my shoulder. Mendoza had his elbow on the counter and was dimpling at the girl behind it. He seemed to have settled in for the duration. She looked dazzled, as well she should.

  “Hey!”

  He straightened. The girl gave me a look of concerted dislike.

  “Never mind,” I said, since I had realized that what I was doing was stupid. Much better to leave Mendoza to be charming—he did it so well, and if there was anything to get out of the girl, he’d get it. Meanwhile, I’d just take the business card out of the frame of the corkboard and stick it in my pocket.

  I did just that, and headed for the front door. “I’ll wait for you outside,” I told Mendoza on my way past. I think he nodded, but I didn’t look over my shoulder to be sure.

  It was another five or ten minutes before he finally sauntered out. By then, I’d had time to inspect the business card in detail—there was nothing on it that I hadn’t already seen—and look up the address of the club on Google maps. It was within a mile of here, not too far from the funeral home where I’d held the services for David last month.

  “What?” Mendoza wanted to know when he came out the door.

  I gestured to the car, and he opened it. When we were both inside, I told him. “I found something. What about you?”

  He turned the key in the ignition. The sedan purred to life. It wasn’t much to look at—incognito police vehicles rarely are—but it drove well. As he reversed out of the parking space, he said, “She worked last night. She remembers Zachary. He looked around for a minute, and then he asked her if she knew a girl named Anastasia.”

  “Not very diplomatic.” Or smart.

  Mendoza shook his head. He was watching the traffic on Thompson Lane, and when he spotted a gap, he punched the gas. We shot across four lanes of traffic and into the far lane that would be going south at the intersection with Nolensville Road. I swallowed a shriek as we came close to being creamed by an oversized SUV coming up behind us. The driver lay on the horn. Mendoza flipped a switch on his dashboard, and blue lights flickered in the sedan’s rear window. The SUV fell back, and Mendoza flipped the switch off. “Works every time.”

  I hid a smile. “So what else did the girl say? Her name wasn’t Tatiana, was it?”

  He shook his head. “Susan.”

  “And did she know Anastasia?”

  “She said she didn’t,” Mendoza said, and took the turn onto Nolensville Road without slowing down. “To me and to Zachary.”

  “And?”

  “He asked her if there were any other Russian or Eastern European businesses where Anastasia might work. Or where they might know her. She referred him to the bulletin board.”

  I pulled out the business card I had appropriated. “Ta-dah!”

  Mendoza squinted at it.

  “Eyes on the road,” I told him. “It’s a club called Stella’s. They’re advertising the old cliché: women, wine, and song.”

  Mendoza arched his brows and I added, “Music, dancing, girls. I’ll let you see the card, but not while you’re driving. I want to get there in one piece.”

  “Tell me where to go, then.”

  I did. “It’s just below the entrance to the zoo. On the other side of the street.”

  The car zoomed down Nolensville Road, past Boling & Howard Funeral Home. We were already almost back to Southern Hills Hospital. The entrance to the zoo was coming up on the right.

  “You said you talked to Araminta Tucker earlier,” I said.

  Mendoza nodded.

  “Did you happen to bring the conversation around to Edwina?” If Araminta was Griselda Grimshaw’s nearest relative and heir, chances were Edwina’s fate was in her hands.

  I tried to imagine Edwina living in the fussy living room with the big screen TV. Those big bat ears would probably take a beating from the volume. The poor thing would go deaf in no time.

  “She doesn’t want Edwina,” Mendoza said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s a pet free zone. And she wouldn’t want Griselda’s animal, anyway. She said to take her to the pound.”

  My jaw dropped. “Surely not?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “You aren’t going to, are you?”

  He shot me a look. “I planned to tell her that the dog’s taken care of. If she chooses to believe that I took her to the pound, then she can believe that.”

  “Thank you.”

  After a second I added, “So you’ll let me keep her?”

  “I thought I’d give you first refusal. If you don’t want her, I’ll find someone else. But I’m not taking that sweet little dog to the pound.”

  Good. “I’ll keep her,” I said. “I didn’t realize I wanted a dog. Or… I didn’t want a dog. But I kind of like having a dog.”

  It was nice to share my bed with another warm body, even if this one was around twenty pounds and not good for much except licking my feet.

  Mendoza nodded. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

  “I won’t change my mind,” I said. “And if something happens to me, I’m sure Rachel will step up. Or Zachary. Once he gets out of the hospital.”

  The nightclub was coming up on the left, and I pointed it out to Mendoza.

  He flipped on his turn signal. “It might be a while until he’s ready for active duty again. You’ll have to go easy on him.”

  “No undercover assignments for a while?”

  Mendoza’s lips quirked. “Better not. And don’t expect him to walk the dog for you. It’ll be some time until his lung is healed and he can breathe as well as he did.”

  He slotted the car into a parking space outside Stella’s.

  “I feel terrible about what happened,” I admitted.

  Mendoza put the car in park, twisted the key in the ignition, and turned to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I sent him out to look for information.”

  “He’s an adult,” Mendoza said. “And if I know him, he was probably excited about it.”

  He had been. But— “If I’d realized what would happen…”

  Mendoza nodded. “You wouldn’t have done it. That goes without saying. But you couldn’t have known. It isn’t logical that someone would do that to him just for asking questions.”

  “So maybe he did something else. Hit on someone’s girlfriend or something.”

  “Zachary?” Mendoza said. “I don’t see that happening. Do you?”

  I didn’t, now that he mentioned it. Zachary is cute and freckled, and a nice kid, and smart and funny with a lot of other good qualities—plus, he’d saved my life—but I didn’t see him as any kind of a Don Juan.

  “Maybe there’s something about the girl we don’t realize.”

  “That’s what I
’m thinking,” Mendoza said. He pushed his door open. “Are you coming in, or staying here?”

  I looked at the building. It was large, and looked like it might be an old mattress warehouse or something, that someone had morphed into something else. The exterior was painted black with purple trim, and next to the steel door was a mural of three scantily clad women dancing among shooting stars. It looked weirdly familiar, but it took me a full minute to place it. Then it clicked.

  “Xanadu!”

  “Bless you,” Mendoza said.

  “No, no. Xanadu. The movie. It looks like the mural from the movie.” Somewhat. Enough that the comparison had struck me.

  Mendoza looked at it. His face stayed blank.

  “You’re too young,” I said, disgusted. “It probably came out a decade before you were born.”

  He shrugged. “Coming?”

  I opened my door. “Yes.”

  From the outside, at least, it didn’t look like a strip club. The women in the mural were scantily clad, perhaps, but they wore more than pasties. And there wasn’t a pole in sight. At least not in the picture.

  Mendoza led the way to the door and twisted the knob. Nothing happened.

  “I guess it’s before business hours,” I said.

  Zachary and Rachel had both said strip clubs stayed open twenty-four/seven, but this one was clearly locked up tight.

  “Let’s check the back.” Mendoza was already moving. I trailed behind him around the corner of the building, looking left and right. The parking lot was pretty much empty aside from Mendoza’s sedan. Zachary’s car was nowhere to be seen, but of course that didn’t mean he hadn’t been here last night.

  “There’s the back door.”

  Mendoza headed for it. I followed.

  It looked a lot like the service entrance to the dry cleaners on Thompson Lane. Another steel door with a buzzer next to it, and nothing else. Mendoza put a finger on the buzzer and leaned.

  Nothing happened. We couldn’t hear anything through the steel door and the cinderblock walls, but I assumed that somewhere, a bell was ringing. Or a light was flashing, or something was happening. Something to indicate that there were people out here.

  Nobody answered, though. The door remained stubbornly shut.