Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Hilary, what are you doing?” Duke grumbled. “Seriously. Why are you standing out here taking photographs?”

  “I’m looking for interesting tidbits to go with my feature story about the sticky-fingered toddler and you just gave me the perfect photograph. Seriously, Duke. You cannot imagine how thrilled my readers are going to be to see a private investigator throwing a uniformed officer out of the Moonrise Theater.” Hilary stepped out from behind the pillar and looked thoughtful. “Maybe I should do a two-parter. The first one can be called “The Sticky-Fingered Toddler” and the second one is “The Fall of Moonrise.” You know, all about corruption and brutality toward the uniformed officers of the law who are trying to force the theater back into code or something like that.”

  “For pity’s sake, is that the crap you write?” Duke wanted to slap his palm against his face and groan out loud. “I can’t believe that stupid paper is what has Titus so up in arms every single morning!”

  “What?” All of the joking and sarcasm left Hilary Allenwood’s body language and voice. “What did you say? Are you telling me that Titus reads my paper?”

  “He reads the paper. I would assume he’s reading the Branson Register because his big complaint is that his paper gets peed on by the neighbor’s dog right after it gets delivered and I don’t think the Wall Street Journal gets hand-delivered in the Branson West area.” It occurred to Duke after he provided this long-winded explanation that he had no idea why this made any bit of difference to Hilary. “Why? What do you care about Titus’s reading habits? If he really is reading your paper, I’m going to be making fun of him for the next six months just because the Register has obviously let the bar fall incredibly low on its quality control.”

  “Shut up.” Hilary sounded clipped and not in a mood to spar verbally or otherwise. “You don’t know anything about anything. You’re nothing but a hired chunk of brawn. I think you’re probably the stupidest employee that Rock Wolf Investigations has ever hired.”

  “And yet I’ve been there the longest,” Duke drawled. “Uh huh. This condemnation from a woman hiding there behind a pillar in hopes of what? Catching a glimpse of some customer running out of the theater shrieking that they’ve just had their purse snatched? Come on, Hilary. Why are you following this case? There’s nothing to it and you know that.”

  “Are you really going to handle this all by yourself? Where’s your boss?” Hilary prodded. “Does he think this is beneath him? That’s the story I want. How Titus Holbrook is so conceited that he doesn’t think he can sully his hands with a case at the aging Moonrise Theater so he sends his idiot sidekick down here to pretend to do it for him.”

  Duke reared back in surprise. Her words were filled with a venom, which surprised him. There was no reason for that. No reason at all. “I don’t know what crawled up your ass. Titus will probably be here tonight. It’s still in the early days yet, Hilary. We took the case yesterday. And that’s after the police department stated there wasn’t a case. So, get off our backs. We’re just trying to do our job. That means taking the customer’s word for it even when the local cops don’t believe her.”

  “Oh, I see,” Hilary said mockingly. “You’re just humoring poor little Olivia Houghton because her ex-fiancé Mathias won’t give her the time of day. Well, good for you.”

  “You’re a mean, spiteful woman, Hilary,” Duke told her irritably. “You should really go find some other job that makes you happy. I can’t imagine it’s good for your health to be this bitchy all the time. Don’t they have supplements for that?”

  “If I’m bitchy it’s because you and your male cohorts are all such jackasses.” Hilary gazed at him for a long moment as though she were looking for something in particular, a reaction or something he was going to give something away by reacting to her words. “It’s like each and every one of you are so in tune with your inner dog that you can’t even remember you’re supposed to be human.”

  “Inner dog?” Duke snorted and shook his head. “You’re making it sound like you’re just another bitter woman incensed at the entire male population because of one bad egg. Sorry you got screwed over, sweetheart, but maybe you did something to bring it on. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

  Hilary’s face began to turn red. Being a redhead anyway, the woman could blush like nobody’s business, but this was more. She was turning scarlet. Her anger matched her hair. It was bright and frizzy, ready to explode.

  “How. Dare. You!” She spat the words as though she were trying to spear him with them. “You have no right to say that about me!”

  “Oh, I see.” Duke wasn’t about to let her pull this poor me, abused woman routine on him. “You can stand here and say that the entire male population is made up of nothing but assholes and how I’m a terrible person because I’m in touch with my inner dog, which is basically you just telling me that I’m not even good enough to act like a decent human being, but the second I say you sound bitter, you’re all over the idea that I’m the one being unfair.”

  Hilary balled up her fist and waved it at him in a gesture that was as amusing as it was disturbing. Her anger was a palpable thing. A living, breathing, and soul-sucking beast. “You just wait! You have no idea what you’re dealing with here, Duke Dunbar. You think you know, but you don’t!”

  With those final words, she stomped away leaving Duke standing there with no other choice but to watch her go and feeling as though the two of them had been having a conversation, but had been discussing different topics.

  “Wow, you must have really pissed her off,” Olivia murmured as she came to stand beside Duke.

  He glanced down at Olivia and gave a shrug. “I’m not sure. Honestly, I’m not even sure I know what we were talking about.”

  “The show business community doesn’t like her.” Olivia wrinkled her nose and gave an elegant little snort. “She’s rude and she would rather paint your show or your act or your theater or whatever she can in the most negative light possible. Even when you call and ask the paper to send a reporter around to do a positive feature because you’ve got something new you want to advertise to the public, if Hilary shows up, you might as well forget it.”

  The entire thing seemed a little odd in Duke’s mind. If she was such a horrible person and nobody in the local community liked her, then why would they keep her employed? “Why doesn’t the Register fire her then?”

  “Well,” Olivia mused thoughtfully, “either the owner of the paper is afraid of what Hilary might do or say or write if he fires her, or the paper keeps her around because she sells the news. People like that negativity. Don’t you think?”

  Olivia certainly had a point. He tried to shake his brain back to the moment at hand and the task he was supposed to be handling. Turning back toward the front doors of the theater, Duke gestured to the entrance. “Shall we go back inside so we don’t melt in this heat?

  “Funny, but I hadn’t even noticed the heat until you said something. It just kind of creeps up on you. Don’t you think?”

  “There is nothing creeping about over eighty degrees plus humidity that just clings to your skin like a water suit,” Duke told her wryly as he opened the front doors of the theater and held them open for her. “It’s more like a flash grenade that leaves you rolling around on the ground unable to think or see or hear.”

  Her giggle was unexpected and rather adorable. Duke could not help but smile right back at her. She was an interesting woman. Definitely not his type, but interesting. He wasn’t entirely sure why he kept repeating that to himself. She was not his type. Not his type. He liked an athletic woman with curves. He wasn’t into the thin girls who looked like they needed a few good meals. Besides, he was going back home to find a farm girl when he was ready to settle down.

  Settle down where?

  “Duke? Are you all right?”

  “Huh?”

  He turned to find Olivia staring at him. They were standing in front of the spiral staircase that led up to th
e catwalk. He had only come down because of Mathias. He had been able to hear every word of their argument. Duke needed to go back up the stairs and prepare himself for the task of keeping an eye on an entire room full of people at the same time. He should have brought binoculars.

  Duke flashed Olivia a wry smile. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of just cutting this part of your show short, right?”

  “Cutting it short?” She looked confused.

  “Just funneling people out of the building as soon as the show is over and totally eliminating any opportunity for mingling with an outside thief.” Duke was already anticipating the answer, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t hope for a sensible one instead.

  “Are you kidding me?” She looked dumbfounded. “Do you know how much money we would lose on the merchandise if we did that? Not to mention the traffic to our website and our Facebook page because of the photobombing drawings.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know what a photobomb drawing is.” Duke sighed and started up the stairs. “I already knew the answer. I just thought I would ask. You know, in case you had decided it was better just to eliminate opportunity instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  She grinned up at him. “I have faith in you, Duke Dunbar. You’ll figure it out.”

  Duke wished he had as much faith in himself as she apparently did. That would have made things a whole lot easier. Or at least he would have been certain of the outcome. As it was, he barely made it up onto the catwalk before the doors opened and people burst out of the theater as though they were in a race to get to the gift shop.

  The sight was like some bizarre observation of humans in their natural habitat. At least humans who were determined to get the best deal on the souvenir they wanted. Kids ran behind their parents as they tried to keep up with mom and dad’s much longer strides. The gift shop was packed within seconds and Duke had a passing thought that they needed to install some security cameras in the foyer and the shop. It would be a good idea to have them in the shop anyway. There was absolutely no way half a dozen employees could keep track of a packed crowd wandering through the area looking at the merchandise. Who knew how many wandering, grubby little hands had robbed the place blind over the years.

  That made Duke chuckle. He spotted Riley Saunders at the far end of the foyer entering the fray from the backstage area. Riley waved and began going through the same song and dance routine he’d done before. Lots of posing, lots of making silly faces behind people’s backs while they were trying to get a decent picture of the sarcophagus.

  “Photobomb!” Duke muttered. “Right. Now I get it. How in the hell do you get a drawing out of that?”

  Duke kept his eyes on Riley for a moment. He told himself what he needed to be doing was watching everyone but Riley Saunders. But the guy was so distracting that it was really hard for Duke to keep his mind on the rest of the guests. He was too busy watching the ridiculousness that made up Riley Saunders’s stage persona.

  The guy would squat behind someone and flap his arms like a duck. Then he would bump their legs over and over again as though he were a wind-up toy that had run up against a wall. He tripped one young woman so hard that she nearly toppled over and had to grab onto her friend to stay on her feet. Of course, the crowd loved it. They were laughing and pointing and whispering to one another.

  Riley grabbed a woman’s purse strap and pretended to hang himself with it. He literally twisted his narrow body into the space between her arm and her side and stuck his tongue out to make a grotesque face as though he had just been hanged on the gallows.

  And that was when Duke noticed the veteran stage actor and comedian slip his hand into the woman’s purse as though he were searching for something. Duke felt his face go slack with shock. Seconds later, both of Riley’s hands appeared again as though nothing had occurred. There was no jewelry or wallet or anything hanging from his fingers. It all looked normal, as though Duke had just imagined what he had thought he’d just seen.

  Except he hadn’t. At least he didn’t think he’d imagined it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The afternoon crowd had dispersed and the staff was doing their best to take a break and relax a bit before the regular seven o’clock show began. Noon and seven. Noon and seven. Sometimes Olivia felt as though she wanted to change the schedule just to see something other than the noon and seven o’clock time stamps on their tickets. Except changing the tickets would cost a ton of money. They usually did a bulk order once a year to get a massive discount.

  Olivia snickered as she imagined how lame it would be to start using a marker to black out the time on the ticket in order to hand write in a new one just to have something different. Talk about cutting off the nose to spite the face. Perhaps it was all just about being in the rat race for too long doing the same thing day in and day out. The show changed—sometimes—but the task of running the show did not.

  “Hey, can I have a word?”

  Olivia glanced up from her desk and spotted Duke leaning on her doorway. Spotted Duke. That was a joke. The man was a mountain blocking the entire doorway with the sheer breadth of his shoulders. You did not “spot” Duke Dunbar, you saw him coming for miles. She waved him in. Even the sight of him made her smile. Maybe that was just because he was different. She certainly wasn’t used to looking at pleasant scenery like Duke Dunbar on a regular basis. He was like a treat. All except the reason he was there, but she could ignore that for a moment or two.

  “We need to talk about your uncle.” Duke sounded more than hesitant. He sounded careful.

  Olivia felt her heart beat starting to speed up as she watched him sit down with almost exaggerated movements in front of her desk. It was like he was buying time or something, or like he needed to find the right words because she wasn’t going to like what he needed to say.

  “What about Uncle Riley?” Olivia pressed. She swallowed and found that her mouth had gone cotton dry.

  Duke spread his hands. “Keep in mind that I’m just telling you what I observed. All right? I’m not making any accusations and I’m not suggesting that this is really what happened. It’s just what I observed.”

  “My word.” She had to whisper because her throat had gone suddenly tight. Olivia cleared her throat and tried to find her sense of normal. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I was up on the catwalk and, I’ll admit, I got pretty distracted by your uncle’s whole pester-the-public routine. He’s funny. So, I was watching him interact with the customers and I think I even figured out what a photobomb is.”

  Olivia felt her lips twitch, but she didn’t smile. “Okay. So, what else did you see?”

  “I saw him grab a woman’s purse and pretend to get his neck caught in the strap. He wasn’t necessarily tugging on her. You could see she thought it was funny, as if it wasn’t really hurting her. Then he slipped his hand into her purse while everyone was watching him make faces at her.”

  There was a long silence. Olivia felt it stretching on and on and on and still didn’t know what to say. Her uncle had put his hand inside some woman’s purse? Why would he do that? Riley knew there was a potential pickpocket hanging around the theater. Why would he risk setting someone off for no purpose? It didn’t make sense. In fact, she didn’t believe it.

  “No.” Olivia spoke in a quiet and very deliberate voice. She narrowed her gaze at Duke and silently dared him to argue. “Riley would never do that. He knows we’re having some serious problems with pickpockets. And I’m sure it was just a coincidence. Like his hand slipped or something.”

  “Oh, and it just happened to slip into the woman’s purse?” There was a definite note of snarkiness to Duke’s voice.

  “No! I don’t know. You said you weren’t accusing,” Olivia shot back. She didn’t like the way this was making her feel right now. Like she needed to defend her uncle when he hadn’t even done anything.

  Duke held up his hands. “Look. You’re right. I’m not accusing him. I’m tell
ing you what I saw so you can go to him and ask what happened. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it was just an accident. A slip of the hand. Literally. But you might want to ask. Don’t you think? Don’t you think it would be appropriate to ask him what was going on?”

  “Yes!” Olivia exploded. She pointed to her door. “Just get out. Okay? Just leave. I need some time and I’m sure you need to find a second set of eyes so that you and your colleague can stand up there on the catwalk after the show and watch my uncle to make sure he’s not stealing from his customers!”

  Duke started to say something else, but then he stopped. He held up his hands, pursed his lips, and then turned and left her office. The door smacked shut and Olivia was suddenly alone inside that space wondering what she could possibly have missed. Was her uncle really doing that sort of thing? Surely not.

  Feeling sorry for herself wasn’t exactly classy, but Olivia couldn’t help it. She had spent three thousand dollars for a private investigator to turn up no good information on these thefts but to point the finger at her uncle just because there was nobody else to blame. Maybe Duke Dunbar wasn’t as good at this job as Olivia had assumed. Perhaps this was common enough. That he looked for the bad guys in obvious places and when that turned up nothing, he threw the good guys under the bus just to make sure he didn’t lose face.

  Another knock at her door. If Duke was back to try to present more proof against Uncle Riley, Olivia was going to wring his neck. No. She was going to fire him. Yes. Fire him. And she wanted her money back, too.

  “What?” Olivia snapped, her voice aimed at the door. She had no idea who was on the other side, but she didn’t want to deal with it.