Swamp Santa

by Jana DeLeon

  I started with the bed, searching underneath the mattress, but came up empty. Then I removed the dresser drawers and checked to ensure nothing was taped on the bottom of them or behind them on the dresser. When I pulled out the lowest drawer, I hit pay dirt. A laptop lay on the floor beneath the drawer. I pulled it out and hoped that Cooke hadn’t password-protected everything. I didn’t know enough about him to guess passwords and didn’t have the time to get to know him. And while stealing the laptop would give me all the time in the world, I figured that was a line I couldn’t cross. Not if I expected Carter to ever speak to me again. It was one thing for me to have an investigation parallel to his. It was completely another to hinder his ability to do his job.

  I let out a breath of relief when it booted right up to the desktop. I did a quick check to see what the latest file he’d accessed was and opened it. It was a folder containing Santa shots. They must be the pictures stolen from the photographer’s computer. I scrolled through them, trying to see if something stood out, but they were all your basic kid with Santa. Aside from the level of terror the kids expressed, there wasn’t much difference from one picture to the next.

  I opened the next folder and found candids from the event. I didn’t know any of the people but nothing looked odd. The first twenty or so were taken of a stage production of the Charlie Brown Christmas show. The ones afterward were just a bunch of attendees chatting and eating and seeing to kids.

  I pulled up the next file he’d accessed and found a list of dollar amounts and dates. Ten thousand dollars on both occasions. The last one was the day before our Christmas show. Surely he wasn’t paid ten large just to get pictures of a bunch of kids with Santa. That didn’t make any sense. There had to be something else in those files. Something I’d missed. But as I scrolled through the photos again, I couldn’t see a single thing that gave me that aha moment.

  I checked other recently accessed files and found pictures of Harleys and naked girls on Harleys, and that was all going back four months. I pulled up a web browser and was happy to see the pass code was still logged in, so I accessed his email. There was the usual spam and oddly enough, a daily email from Bed Bath & Beyond, and then I struck gold. An exchange between Cooke and someone with the email handle cashmoney767.

  cashmoney767: Well?

  Cooke: Nothing. He wasn’t there.

  cashmoney767: What the hell, Cooke? You said that was the place.

  Cooke: I said it was probably Mudbug or Sinful.

  cashmoney767: I didn’t pay you 10 grand to give me nothing.

  Cooke: I did my job in Mudbug and you got the photos to prove it. I’ll do my job in Sinful. Just as soon as you send payment. I’m taking a lot of risks here.

  cashmoney767: I’m paying you to take risks. I don’t have to tell you what happens if you’re not successful, right?

  Cooke: I’ll find him. I want my bonus.

  cashmoney767: You better or that bonus isn’t going to be at all what you were hoping for.

  Cooke never replied to the last email, so I assumed he knew what would happen and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. Of course, he’d ended up dead and things couldn’t get much worse, so there was that.

  I emailed the photos and the exchange with cashmoney to a fake email account I had set up for this purpose, then deleted that email. I closed the laptop and stuck it back where I’d found it, unable to help being a little disappointed. Overall, this little visit had been somewhat underwhelming.

  My phone rang and I pulled it out to answer.

  “Carter just pulled into the parking lot,” Ida Belle said. “Get out, now!”

  Chapter Seven

  Crap!

  I’d really been hoping to avoid a second-floor drop from a tiny window, but I should have figured that was the way things would go. I ran into the bathroom and hopped onto the toilet to open the window. The latch moved fine but the window itself didn’t budge when I pushed on it. I gave it a harder shove and still nothing. Then I noticed the paint caked around the edges. Good God. This had probably been painted over ten times, and now it was practically glued shut.

  I pulled out my phone and sent a text to Ida Belle.

  Window is stuck. Create a diversion.

  Her reply was immediate.

  Carter on stairs. Hide!

  Hide? Carter was on his way into the room to search it. Where the heck was I supposed to hide? I rushed back into the bedroom and could hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. I took a running leap onto the top of the dresser, pushed one of the ceiling tiles to the side and pulled myself onto the top of the wall. I’d barely gotten the tile back in place when I heard the door open.

  Where was my diversion?

  I heard Carter talking to himself and the gist of the conversation was that he wasn’t any more impressed with Cooke’s housekeeping than I had been. He started opening drawers and I held my position, praying that the diversion I needed was coming soon because I couldn’t hold this position forever. And since the wall shook if I breathed too deeply, I wasn’t certain the wall could hold position much longer, either.

  Then there was an explosion.

  The boom shook the cheap motel and as I pitched off the wall and through the ceiling of the next room, I heard Carter swear. Fortunately, the bed was below the wall where I broke through so I had a soft landing. Unfortunately, it was occupied. By a naked dude.

  Midthirties. Six feet tall. One hundred thirty pounds. There was more muscle tone on a ninety-year-old corpse. Only a threat if you looked at his blinding white skin.

  We both sprang out of the bed and he stared at me for a second.

  “I ordered a redhead,” he said. “And I’m not paying for that damage. You were supposed to use the door.”

  “Gross!” I yanked the comforter off the bed and tossed it over him to cover all the bright white things I never wanted to see that were in plain view. Then I grabbed a hoodie from the dresser and pulled it on. I cracked open the door to peer outside and saw a crowd of people gathering in front of the office, a debris field all over the parking lot in front of it. Carter was running toward the debris, so I hurried out the door and ran for the railing.

  Worried that Carter would look back and see me running away, I didn’t bother with the stairs. Instead, I hit the rail with my midsection and flipped over it, landing in a bush at the end of the building. I hadn’t seen Mannie’s vehicle out front, so I sprang up and sprinted for the rear of the motel. His SUV was coming around the corner and I yanked the hood off my head and waved my arms. He floored it as he approached and I did a running leap through the passenger window. He didn’t even hesitate before taking off again.

  “Hold on,” he said. “We can’t go out the front entrance.”

  He directed the SUV at a set of hedges lining the back of the property, launched over the curb, and tore right through the bushes. Gertie hooted so loud I thought my eardrums would burst. We had a couple seconds of disarray when the windshield was completely covered by foliage, but then the branches fell off in time for him to make a hard right into an alley, barely missing the sanitation truck. We could hear sirens approaching so he turned away from the motel and tore down the backstreets, slowly working his way back to the service road.

  When we were finally on the highway and doing a somewhat reasonable speed again, I looked over at them and grinned. “Thanks for the diversion,” I said. “I suppose that was a Gertie’s handbag special?”

  “You know it,” Gertie said. “But I picked the wrong one. I just wanted enough pop to get Carter out of the room. I wasn’t planning on blowing that vending machine to bits.”

  “You blew half of it through the front office window,” Ida Belle said. “You could have killed someone.”

  “But I didn’t,” Gertie said. “Instead, a bunch of people got free snacks. At least, the ones where the packaging didn’t explode.”

  “Is that why you have a candy wrapper in your hair?” I asked.

  Gertie reached up and pulled
the wrapper out, then took a piece of chocolate out of it and popped it in her mouth. “Oh, Snickers. I love those.”

  Ida Belle sighed and looked at me. “Why are you wearing that hoodie?”

  I remembered I had the icky boy’s shirt on and tugged it off and tossed it onto the floorboard. I explained my hiding place and my subsequent visit to the room next door.

  “Yuck,” Gertie said. “How come when naked men crop up, it’s never the good-looking ones?”

  “Because that only happens in movies,” Ida Belle said.

  Gertie gave Mannie the side-eye. “Some men have been known to drive in the nude. They say it increases reaction time.”

  “Nice try,” Mannie said.

  Gertie shrugged. “Can’t blame a girl. So did you find out anything? Please tell me I used my good dynamite for a reason.”

  I gave them a rundown of what I’d found. “It’s not much,” I said. “But it confirms our thinking. Cooke was definitely working a job and the pay was really good.”

  “And he’s looking for a male,” Ida Belle said.

  “A male child, maybe?” Gertie suggested. “Since he was doing the whole Santa thing.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “The Santa costume gave him access to a lot of locals in one place and with the benefit of not being recognized. He could have been looking for an adult. He had all of the photos on his laptop—the kids and the candids.”

  Gertie sighed. “You’re right.”

  My cell phone rang and I pulled it out of my pocket.

  “Crap!” I said. “It’s Carter. Everyone be quiet.”

  I tried for a normal-sounding ‘what’s up?’ when I answered.

  “Where are you right now?” he asked.

  “I’m, uh…meeting with a client,” I said. “Why?”

  “I just encountered a random explosion and my train of thought went in the obvious direction. So if I send Deputy Breaux out, he’ll find you with this client?”

  I’d hoped to put this particular discussion off until tonight, but since I needed a cover for Gertie’s overuse of dynamite, it had to come out now.

  “If you send him to Big and Little Hebert’s office he will,” I said.

  There were several seconds of complete silence and I wondered if he’d hung up. Finally, I heard an intake of breath.

  “You’re working for the Heberts?” he asked.

  “Looks like.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to share what you’re working on.”

  “I’m pretty sure that falls under that whole confidentiality thing. Anyway, Gertie is here with me and we haven’t blown up my clients. I’m pretty sure that would hinder our working relationship.”

  “Fine. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He disconnected and I slipped my phone back in my jeans pocket.

  “That went well,” I said.

  “I take it Carter isn’t enthused with your new job,” Ida Belle said.

  “Not even a little,” I said. “And he suspects Gertie for the explosion at the motel.”

  “Why?” Gertie said. “That would mean we’d not only know the identity of Santa, which he hasn’t told us, but also where he was staying, and that’s not exactly easy information to come by.”

  “Carter knows we’re sticking our noses in,” Ida Belle said. “And given the complete randomness of the explosion, it’s not surprising he zeroed in on Gertie. It’s practically habit at this point. And for all we know, he might have had a conversation with the guy in the room next door to Cooke’s.”

  “Surely that guy wouldn’t talk since he was hiring a prostitute,” Gertie said. “That would be the dumbest thing ever.”

  “Well, he did think I had chosen to arrive by falling through the ceiling,” I said. “And his biggest concern seemed to be damages charges and the fact that he’d ordered a redhead, so there’s that to factor in.”

  “So not a rocket scientist,” Gertie said.

  Ida Belle shook her head. “This is getting complicated. And you only have two choices—either you tell Carter the truth and see how the fallout goes or you deny until your deathbed.”

  “I vote for denial,” Gertie said.

  “You live in a constant state of denial,” Ida Belle said. “But if Fortune is going to maintain a relationship with Carter, this is not the first or last time this situation is going to arise.”

  “I’ll use dynamite with less oomph next time,” Gertie said.

  Ida Belle threw her hands in the air. “Not the dynamite part. The lying part.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gertie said. “That.”

  “Look,” I said. “Carter and I discussed this before. I won’t talk to him about my clients or cases because I can’t, and he knows it. He won’t talk to me about his cases because he can’t, and I know it. It’s not like I lied earlier. Big and Little are my clients and we’re here with Mannie, so it’s sort of a meeting.”

  “What about breaking into the motel room?” Ida Belle asked.

  “Anything that Carter can’t prove is something he doesn’t know for sure,” I said. “He can suspect all he wants but I’m not going to volunteer my business to him. If he wants to consider that lying, then that’s up to him. I consider it doing my job.”

  Ida Belle nodded. “As long as you’re comfortable with it, I’m good.”

  “What do you plan on telling Walter about this?” Gertie asked.

  “Not a darn thing,” Ida Belle said. “It’s none of his business.”

  “He might think differently,” Gertie said.

  “Then he’d be wrong,” Ida Belle said.

  Mannie, who’d been silent this entire time, shook his head. “When I’m ready to settle down, I’m going to find a nice boring accountant who knits.”

  “I knit,” Gertie said. “Last week, I knitted sleeves for my dynamite.”

  Mannie glanced in the rearview mirror as he exited the highway, a slightly worried look on his face. Then I realized he was headed for the Heberts’ office.

  “Are we meeting with Big and Little?” I asked.

  “That’s what you told Carter,” Mannie said. “Do you think he’s sending Deputy Breaux to check?”

  I sighed. “Probably. But we don’t have my vehicle or Ida Belle’s. What are we going to do, stand in the parking lot so that he sees us when he drives up?”

  “When the good deputy arrives, I’ll be happy to have him wait by the front door until you appear for display. As for no vehicles, I showed up at your house and insisted you come with me. If the Heberts had pursued hiring you on their own, that’s exactly how things would have played out.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I suppose I can bring them up to date on what we’ve found while we’re there. Which isn’t a lot.”

  “Nonsense,” Ida Belle said. “We know we’re on the right track. We just have to figure out who Cooke was looking for.”

  “Yeah. Starting with all the male attendees at the Christmas gala,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

  “Not all,” Ida Belle said. “Only those with the opportunity to kill him.”

  “But if he was looking for a child, that would mean the killer could also have been a woman,” Gertie said.

  “That still reduces our list to those who were in the cafeteria prior to the show,” Ida Belle said. “We need to talk to Celia’s crew and see who was on cafeteria setup when Santa arrived.”

  “We’ll get as much out of Celia’s crew as we did out of dead Santa,” Gertie said.

  “It won’t be easy,” Ida Belle agreed. “But I have the goods on a few of them. Let’s just hope one of those women was working the setup.”

  Mannie grinned. “You know, you guys and the Heberts have similar approaches to business.”

  I shrugged. “Mafia, government employees, same difference really.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, but the Mafia has way cooler equipment.”

  “And I bet they don’t pay thousands of dollars for toilets,” Gertie said. “You know, I could total
ly equip us as a regime for under 10k. It’s something we should probably consider.”

  “Who are we going to war against?” Ida Belle asked. “Our nemesis is Celia. The only weapon you need to use against her is an IQ over eighty.”

  Mannie was still chuckling when he pulled into the parking lot, but I noticed he adopted his stone-faced look as he got out of the SUV. When one was stepping in front of the boss, it was game-face time.

  I had just finished recounting our efforts to Big and Little and had allowed them a suitable amount of time for laughter and recovery when Mannie informed us that Deputy Breaux had arrived. I checked my watch and realized only eight minutes had passed since our arrival. It hadn’t taken him long to get there. It was a good thing Mannie subscribed to the same school of driving as Ida Belle.

  Mannie escorted us down to the front door, then opened it and allowed Deputy Breaux to step inside.

  “Anything you see in this building, you will not describe outside of these walls,” Mannie said to the deputy.

  Deputy Breaux looked ready to pee himself but managed a nod. I held in a smile. There was absolutely nothing to see in the entry except what used to be a lobby and elevators, doors, and hallways. But I knew Mannie was reminding the deputy whose turf he was on. Basically, the Heberts were doing him a favor allowing him in, so he had to mind his place. Since I was pretty sure Deputy Breaux would rather be having a root canal than be in the Heberts’ office, I wasn’t worried about him getting out of line. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been out of line. He certainly wasn’t going to start there.

  “I’m really sorry about this, sir,” Deputy Breaux said to Mannie. “But Carter insisted.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We know how he is, always thinking we’re up to something. But as you can see, we’re here meeting with our client. Mannie picked us up in Sinful and will drive us back when we’re done.”

  Deputy Breaux nodded as a blush crept up his neck and onto his face. “That’s good, but there’s this one other thing…I really don’t want, that is, I wish I didn’t—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, spit it out,” Ida Belle said. “Carter has ordered you to do something you don’t want to do. We get it. Just get on with it so we can all get back to our jobs.”