RING TOSS A John Ceepak Mystery Short (The John Ceepak Mysteries)

by Chris Grabenstein

  Her eyes widen.

  “My door was ajar. It was open!”

  “Had you locked it when you left?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t remember. I had to go downstairs to get coffee because this hotel is so chintzy there’s no coffee makers in the room and Billy had brought a couple beers with him when he dropped by at 4 a.m. so I was kind of muzzy-headed this morning, you know what I mean?”

  I can relate. One time, after a night of highly competitive beer pong, I left my apartment wearing one sneaker, one sandal, and one sock.

  “I looked everywhere for the ring. I swear. The bedside table, the drawer, the dresser, on top of the TV. I even crawled under the bed!”

  “And this was what time?” asks Ceepak.

  “About an hour ago. I ran outside and started screaming, ‘Call 9-1-1, call 9-1-1.’”

  Which, obviously, somebody did.

  “So,” says Ceepak, “the ring went missing sometime between four A.M. when your fiancée requested that you remove it and eleven A.M. when you realized it was missing. A seven hour window. Tell me, does Billy have a key to your room?”

  Connie nods. “They gave me two when I checked in. Don’t tell my parents. Please?”

  “I will not volunteer any unsolicited information. Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to talk to Billy.”

  We sure do. Billy may not have enjoyed being upstaged by his mother-in-law to-be in the diamond department. Maybe he took the Galuppi diamond with him when he made his early morning escape so the engagement ring he gave his future wife wouldn’t look so ridiculously tiny for the rest of their married life. Either that, or he needed to finance his upcoming honeymoon.

  There’s a small bar out back of the Mussel Beach motel. It’s actually a blue wedding tent attached to a shed where Becca’s dad keeps the booze. I remember Becca and I snuck in one winter when we were fourteen and played Piña Colada with the blenders.

  It’s noon and the cranky bartender (Becca’s cousin Bernie) is serving beer to his only customer. Billy. He’s sitting in an aluminum patio chair with blue and white vinyl straps.

  “Sir?” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  Billy gestures to the empty chairs circling his table. “It’s a free country, dudes.”

  Ceepak and I sit.

  “You guys need a drink?” asks bartender Bernie from inside the serving hut, which is like a double-wide garden shed.

  “No thank you,” says Ceepak.

  “Danny?”

  “I’m good.” Hey, even my code says you don’t drink when you’re on the job; especially if the job includes carrying a loaded sidearm.

  “Billy,” says Ceepak, “we know you were with Ms. DePinna last night.”

  “Really?” He gets this cocky look on his face. “Which one?”

  “Connie,” I say. “Your fiancée.”

  Now he winks at me. “We ain’t married yet, bro.”

  “Meaning what?” asks Ceepak.

  “Meaning I may be engaged but I’m not dead!” He wheezes up a laugh. “Her sisters are pretty hot, too. So’s that chick at the front desk. Becky.”

  “Becca,” I say.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” says Ceepak.

  “You should tell her to, you know, put some cucumbers on her eyes or something. Dude -- she looks like she hasn’t slept in a week.”

  Probably because she hasn’t.

  Ceepak cuts to the chase. “When you snuck out of Ms. DePinna’s bedroom this morning at four A.M., did you take her diamond ring with you?”

  “What? No way. I gave it to her.”

  “We mean the other one,” I say.

  “Oh. Right. Nah. I don’t wear much jewelry. Just the one ear ring.”

  “You are aware, of course, of the diamond’s value?” says Ceepak.

  “Sure I am. I bought it.”

  I jump in again: “The other one!”

  He shrugs. “Couple hundred bucks, I guess. Maybe a thousand.”

  “Guess again,” says Ceepak.

  “Really?”

  Ceepak nods. “A similar heart-shaped diamond weighing two carats and of comparable color and clarity has a list price of $28,300 on the Tiffany web site.”

  Ceepak. The man does his homework.

  “Dude!” is all Billy says. Then he says it again. “Dude!”

  Ceepak looks at me. “Danny?” He head-bobs left, indicating we should leave.

  Because Billy is obviously way too dumb to realize that he snagged his hair on close to thirty thousand dollars last night.

  Billy attacks the keys of his cell phone with blazing thumbs, no doubt texting all his dudes and brohs to let them know that, as soon as he’s married, he’s going to hock his wife’s heirloom and buy a new truck.

  It’s time for Ceepak and me to talk to the sisters.

  Donna and Jackie DePinna are parked poolside with their kids, about six of them, even though it seems like more because the dark-haired terrors are midget-sized maniacs who enjoy screaming, splashing all of Becca’s water out of the pool, and bopping each other on the butt with tubular floatation devices.

  “Knock it off, Little Tony,” says Jackie.

  “Is Tony your son?” asks Donna.

  “Fine. You tell him.”

  “He’s a boy. He needs to burn off energy.”

  “Like your husband?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. But I saw how he was looking at that waitress last night.”

  “What waitress?”

  “At Pinky’s Shrimp. The one with the big bazoombas.”

  Donna straightens up in her chair. “He doesn’t have to leave home if we wants to look at that.”

  “He does if he wants to see real ones.”

  A girl screams. Somebody chokes.

  “Hey, little Tony! Cut that out. Don’t drown your cousin. Come over here and drown your aunt.”

  Ceepak clears his throat. “Ladies?”

  Jackie slides her ski-goggle-sized sunglasses down her nose, squints at us over the top of the frames. “What?”

  “We need to ask you both a few questions.”

  Donna coyly pulls her knees up to her chest. Her bathing suit top sloshes the way a waterbed does when you sit on it. “Are you two trying to find our baby sister’s ring?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Ceepak.

  Jackie shakes her shaggy Troll hair. “Connie is so immature. She always loses everything.”

  Ceepak turns to Donna. “Your sister mentioned that she saw your husband, Thomas….”

  “Tommy. No one calls him Thomas, only his mother and only when she’s mad at him.”

  “Like when he’s leering at eighteen year-old waitresses with enormous chumbawumbas,” snipes Jackie.

  Donna twirls in her recliner. “Your husband’s no saint. He was staring at her rib bumpers, too!”

  “Prove it.”

  “What? You think I snapped pictures of him drooling in his shrimp basket?”

  “Ladies?” Ceepak sounds like the referee at the Roller Derby. “Your sister Connie tells us she saw Tommy on the second floor terrace right before she discovered that her ring had gone missing. He was carrying an ice chest.”

  “Because the ice machine upstairs was out of ice so he had to come down here and that machine was out of ice, too.”

  “Our husbands both went fishing with our father,” says Jackie. “Like always, the men abandoned us. Went off to have their fun, left us here to deal with the mess.” She flicks her hands toward the assorted children. “So when exactly do we get our vacation, huh?”

  “Mommy?” a girl screams from the pool.

  “What?” Donna screams back.

  “I think Joey pooped his pants.”

  “So sniff his diaper.”

  “Gross.”

  “I didn’t poop,” hollers a boy in Sponge Bob water
wings. “I just peed.”

  Now Donna waves her hand dismissively. “He just peed.” No big deal.

  I’m wondering how much chlorine Becca has to dump into her swimming pool on a daily basis to stop it from turning into a crystal blue community cesspool.

  “Ladies?” says Ceepak, trying to regain their attention.

  But then a girl with a headless baby doll starts screaming while this boy runs around the pool holding the hairy little plastic head in his hand.

  “No running!” shouts Ceepak.

  “Are you telling my children what to do?” snaps Jackie.

  “The tile is wet. He could slip.”

  Right on cue, the boy slips. Bangs his head on the concrete.

  Now he’s bawling, too.

  Ceepak snaps open a cargo pocket on his pants leg, whips out a miniature first aid kit. He rushes to the howling boy.

  “Minor abrasion,” he announces, patting the wound with gauze. “Nothing serious.”

  “Ooowww!” the boy bellows anyhow, turning on the waterworks.

  I’m kneeling beside Ceepak. The girl with the headless doll is wailing up a storm and then the other girl, the one splashing like a paddle wheel in the pool, makes an announcement: “It is too poop! Joey pooped his pants!”

  “Man,” I mumble. “It’s a good thing Mr. Ryan isn’t out here -- he’d be calling in another complaint.”

  Ceepak looks up from the kid’s minor cut. “Come again?”

  “Ryan. The guy who called us out here the first time.”

  Ceepak leans back. Sits on his heels. “Of course.”

  He has this look in his eye. My mindless mumbling has, apparently, helped his big brain make some brilliant deduction. It’s why we make a good team. I mumble. He cracks the case.

  But first he examines the boy’s head wound one last time. “The bleeding has been staunched. You should not require stitches. Have your mother affix this Band-aid and stay out of the pool for the remainder of the day.”

  “Okay,” the kid says. “Can I swim in the ocean?”

  “Negative. Come on, Danny. We need to talk to Becca.”

  “About the ring?”

  He shakes his head. “Mr. Ryan.

  Becca hands Ceepak a sheet of paper.

  “That’s a copy of his driver’s license. My dad makes me Xerox the license of whoever is charging the room to their credit card.”

  “Might I borrow your fax machine?” says Ceepak.

  “Sure. Where do you want to send it?”

  Ceepak jots down a phone number on a Mussel Beach message pad. “Denise Diego. SHPD.”

  Diego is the Sea Haven Police Department’s resident computer geek. She can search a data base like nobody’s business.

  “Kindly include this message,” Ceepak says as he rips off the top sheet with the number on it and starts writing out a note full of instructions. “I’m asking her to run Mr. Ryan’s driver’s license through LEADS -- the Law Enforcement Automated Data System -- to ascertain if Sean Ryan is a known alias for any individual with a criminal record.”

  “Alias?” I say. “Who do you think Ryan really is?”

  “Someone else,” is all Ceepak offers because, I can tell, the hamster wheels inside his head are spinning like crazy. He hands Becca the note. She tapes it to the photocopy of the driver’s license, feeds the sheet into her fax machine, and punches in the number for the SHPD machine.

  “When did Mr. Ryan check out?” Ceepak asks as the fax makes that Darth Vader static noise to signal that the connection has been made.

  “First thing Sunday morning. I guess he was mad that we didn’t evict the DePinnas on Saturday night, like he wanted us to.”

  “And when did he check in?”

  “Last Friday,” says Becca. “Around one or two in the afternoon.”

  “When we were with you last Saturday, you called Mr. Ryan a ‘walk-in.’”

  “That’s right. He didn’t have a reservation, just showed up in the office. Fortunately, I had a vacancy. The people in 202 had to go home early. Their daughter back in Brooklyn was having a baby. Early.”

  “Ryan was in Connie’s room!” I say. “202!”

  “Precisely,” says Ceepak.

  “Jim was with me when I asked Mr. Ryan to change rooms,” says Becca.

  “Come again?”

  “Jim. Officer Riggs.”

  “He’d come by for coffee,” I add, wiggling my eyebrows up and down to let Becca know that I know what was really on the menu first thing Saturday morning.

  She, of course, ignores my eyebrow waggles.

  “Jim was in his police uniform,” she says, “because, well, later he had to go to work. With you guys. On the night shift.”

  “Roger that,” says Ceepak.

  “But, it was only like eleven in the morning, so he had a ton of time to kill. He hung out with me while I made my rounds.”

  “Eleven o’clock is check-out time,” I say.

  “Jim and I went up to 202 because Mr. Ryan hadn’t come down to the office. When he checked in, he originally told me he only needed the room for one night.”

  Ceepak nods. “Then he apparently changed his mind.”

  “Right. Said he had to meet some friends who had been delayed. So I offered him the room downstairs.”

  “And when you made this request, you, more or less, had a police escort.”

  “Yeah. Jim was right there. Looking big and tough in his uniform.”

  Scary is probably a better adjective. The Gigantor body builder usually wears these wrap around sunglasses that hug the sides of his shaved scalp.

  “Maybe that’s why Mr. Ryan didn’t give me any guff,” says Becca. “He just grabbed his bag and followed me down to the first floor.”

  “One bag?”

  “Yeah. A small one, too. Like a gym bag, you know?”

  “Curious,” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah. Usually, I have to help people lug all sorts of suitcases and ice chests up and down those steps.”

  “Suggesting that Mr. Ryan was not here for the purposes of vacationing.”

  “Guess not. Oh, this is weird: When he was checking out, he told me he needed to go back up to Room 202 to look for his electric razor which he forgot to pack when Jim and I ‘gave him the bum’s rush.’”

  “Did you let him?”

  “Of course not. The DePinna girl was in that room Sunday morning. I told him if the maids found his razor when they were cleaning, we’d work out a way to ship it to him. We always do that. You’d be surprised what people leave behind in motels. One time, I was cleaning rooms, found somebody’s dentures in a plastic party cup.”

  “We need to talk to Connie DePinna again,” says Ceepak.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “We need her permission to search her room.”

  “You think we can find her ring?”

  “Perhaps. That or whatever Mr. Ryan left behind.”

  “We’re looking for his electric shaver?”

  “No, Danny. I suspect it was something much more valuable.”

  We march out of the motel office.

  Connie and Mrs. DePinna have joined the other females of their family poolside.

  “Miss DePinna?”

  “Yes?” says Connie.

  “We’d like your permission to search your room.”

  “Go ahead. I already tore the place apart.”

  “Do you have the pass key, Becca?”

  “Yeah.” She reaches into her pocket. Hands us the cardkey.

  Then she gasps.

  “What. Is. That?” She’s pointing at the pool and what looks like a bloated jelly fish made out of bright blue plastic decorated with cute yellow fish, red seashells, and green dolphins.

  It’s floating on the surface of the water.

  “Looks like little Joey’s swimming diaper,” says Mrs. DePinna, very nonchalantly. “You should probably get it out of the pool, Ms. Adkinson.”

  Donna agrees. “It’s not very
sanitary. Do you have a net or something?”

  “It’s disgusting,” adds Jackie.

  I can tell: Becca so wants the DePinnas to leave. But, she doesn’t say anything. She simply sighs and stomps off to retrieve the aluminum pole-and-net deal from the tool shed.

  “We’re sending a letter,” says Mrs. DePinna. “To the BBB. This motel is repulsive.”

  “The rooms smell,” adds Jackie.

  “They were all out of chocolate-covered doughnuts in the lobby at ten.” This from Donna.

  “And,” says Connie, “they really shouldn’t hire Mexican maids who steal diamond rings out of people’s rooms. I mean it.”

  Mercifully, that’s when Ceepak’s cell phone rings.

  “This is Ceepak. Go.”

  He nods a few times. “Roger that. Thank you, Officer Diego.” He snaps his clamshell shut. Turns to Connie, who is slathering her skin with some kind of cocoa butter.

  “Miss DePinna? We’re going upstairs to search your room now.”

  “Whatever.” She’s too busy rubbing oil on her thighs to care.

  We bound up the steps.

  “What did Denise dig up?” I ask.

  “Sean Ryan is a known alias for one John ‘The Jeweler’ Reynolds. He has major underworld connections and is often called in to verify the value of stolen gems prior to their resale.”

  “He stole Connie’s ring?

  “Doubtful, as he checked out several days ago and the ring only went missing this morning.”

  “Oh. So what are we looking for?”

  “Whatever else Mr. Reynolds left behind.”

  We use the keycard Becca gave us and enter room 202.

  “I’ll check the dresser and closet,” says Ceepak.

  “I’ll check the air ducts,” I say because in the movies, that’s where the bad guys always hide stuff.

  “Danny? There are no air ducts in this room. All the HVAC functions are supplied by that single unit under the window.”

  The rattling air conditioner.

  Ceepak and I both stare at it for a second.

  “Well done, Danny!”

  We rush over to it. Lift off the front panel.

  There’s a small Nike duffel jammed in under the fan motor.

  Ceepak pulls it out. Works open the top.

  The black bag is filled with jewelry. Diamonds, emeralds, necklaces, rings, watches, brooches, bracelets -- an entire display window full of sparkly stuff.