Rolling Thunder (John Ceepak Mystery)

by Chris Grabenstein

“Yeah. It’s the recipe for Big Kahuna’s secret sauce.”

  She smiles.

  “Good night, Danny. I really do love you.”

  There she goes again with the “L” word. I hear it but don’t knee-jerk it back.

  Then she kisses me. Big mistake. Our slimed lips taste worse than they smell.

  9

  FIRST THING SUNDAY MORNING, I’M AT BEACH BODS GYM, because I know that’s where Ceepak will be.

  Since becoming a full-time cop, I’ve actually joined Beach Bods and hit the gym whenever I can. At least once or twice a month. Sometimes. If, you know, there’s nothing good on TV. Or it’s raining.

  Beach Bods is tucked into a strip mall on Ocean Avenue at Yellowtail Street, where its neighbors are Teeny’s Bikini’s, the Paradise Nail Spa (where nails go to get a facial or take a sauna, I guess), Chunky’s Cheese Steaks, Beachcomber Hair Salon, and The Octopus’s Garden florist shop.

  I usually hit Chunky’s after the gym. Figure I’ve earned it. I’ve yet to sign up for the gym’s “Holistic Health and Nutrition Class.” I’m not a big bok choy boy.

  I pull into the parking lot. I can see people in gym clothes jumping up and down on the other side of the plate glass windows. Must be an aerobics class. I wouldn’t know. Never took one. Ceepak comes out the front doors, toting his gym bag. His muscles look more pumped than usual because I guess they are.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “Good morning, Danny. Didn’t expect to see you here so bright and early on a Sunday.”

  “Yeah. Me neither. Something’s come up.”

  Ceepak cocks an eyebrow. He’s all ears.

  “It’s your dad. He’s back in town. I don’t know how he got out of jail so early.”

  “Time off for good behavior, no doubt,” Ceepak says as sarcastically as he can. “I understand the State of Ohio recently passed a Prison Reform Bill. Something to do with budget problems.”

  “He’s working at Big Kahuna’s.”

  “The nightclub?”

  “Yeah. Sam and I saw him last night. Then we went out back to check out his car. Well, his truck. His red Ford pickup truck.”

  Ceepak whips the cell phone out of his civilian cargo shorts, which look a lot like his uniform cargo shorts only they’re khaki instead of dark blue. He thumbs a speed dial number.

  “Rita? John. As anticipated, my father has resurfaced. Here. In Sea Haven. Right. Danny did the leg work on this one.” He covers the mouthpiece. “Rita says, ‘Way to go, Danny Boy.’”

  I blush.

  “Honey?” Ceepak says this to the phone, not me. “Stay alert. It seems it was my father’s truck that slammed into our Toyota yesterday. Danny and Samantha figured that out last night as well.”

  He covers the mouthpiece again.

  I quickly say, “Tell her thanks.”

  He nods. “Danny says, ‘Thanks.’ Right. Indeed. He is rapidly growing into an excellent young detective.”

  I work my toe into the asphalt in the classic aw-shucks-’tweren’t-nothin’ move.

  “I’m on my way home,” says Ceepak. I notice his bicycle chained to a rack on the sidewalk in front of the gym. “No. We should stick to our plans. I refuse to give my father the satisfaction of thinking he can upset us or our routine. Roger that. Will do. Don’t worry. It’s all good.”

  Well, not really.

  His father is an asshole. No way can that be considered remotely good.

  “Love you, too.”

  Wow. Ceepak’s saying it in public. Then again, he’s married.

  He closes the phone.

  “Rita would like to invite you and Samantha to join us this afternoon for a round of miniature golf.”

  “I think Sam has to study.”

  “Commendable. T.J. as well.”

  “You guys sure you want me tagging along?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Cool.”

  “For the golf. Not dinner afterwards.”

  I smile. “Where you taking her?”

  “Stefano’s.”

  “Really? Very romantic.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “By Rita?”

  He nods. “Repeatedly.”

  “So, where do you guys want to play? Congo Falls? Dinosaur Gulch?”

  “We thought we’d hit King Putt. That way, we could express our condolences to any members of the O’Malley family who might be working and share the news from the medical examiner.”

  “We got the preliminary report?”

  “Roger that. As we initially suspected, Mrs. O’Malley died from a heart attack.”

  “Did the M.E. find anything, you know, hinky?”

  “Negative. Dr. Kurth hypothesizes that Mrs. O’Malley had some sort of undiagnosed heart disease, perhaps an abnormal rhythm or a blockage in her coronary arteries, and her rising heart rate, brought on by the stress of the roller coaster ride, and its coincident inducement of a fight-or-flight rush of adrenaline, caused her myocardial infarction.”

  In other words, she scared herself to death because she had a bum ticker to begin with.

  “It’d be good to see Skippy,” I say. “I’m sure he’ll be there. His dad makes him work Sunday to Sunday during the summer. Won’t give him a day off. I hope he can go to his mom’s funeral on Friday.”

  “I feel certain Mr. O’Malley will want all his children there.”

  And that’s when another one of the O’Malley boys walks up the sidewalk.

  He’s with a friend.

  A guy friend.

  It’s Peter O’Malley. The gay sheep of the family.

  10

  “HEY, PETER? PETER O’MALLEY?”

  He stops. Sighs. Gives me this look. “Yes?”

  “I’m Danny Boyle, friend of your brother.”

  “Which one? I am blessed with so many.”

  “Skip.”

  “Congratulations.”

  His friend—this macho, macho man with a shaved head, handlebar mustache, wearing a sleeveless leather vest—smirks at me. I peg Peter to be a year or two younger than Skippy. His mustachioed friend? Hard to tell. He has that ageless bad boy biker look.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” says Peter, “we want to take a body sculpt class.”

  “You have our condolences on your loss,” says Ceepak, tucking his bike helmet under his arm.

  “Yes,” says Peter, “it’s a very unfortunate turn of events. So many people wanted to wring my mother’s neck. Now they’ll never get the chance.”

  Biker Boy snickers. Jostles his hip to the left, which sends the chain attached to his wallet swinging.

  “I take it you had issues with your mother?” Ceepak says to Peter.

  “No, officer—she had issues with me.”

  “Come on, Peter,” says his leather-loving friend. “Class is starting. You want to look buff in your funeral suit, don’t you?”

  They hold hands and head for the door.

  “Maybe we could kiss in front of her coffin,” says Peter, “give mommy dearest another heart attack!”

  The glass doors whoosh shut behind them.

  “Interesting,” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah,” I say, as I watch Peter and his leathery friend through the plate glass windows. “So far, we’re two for two.”

  “Indeed. The two O’Malley children we have spoken to both seem happy that their mother is dead.”

  “You sure about the M.E.’s report? Maybe Peter or Sean poisoned Mrs. O’Malley, gave her a drug that just made it look like she had a heart attack.”

  “Doubtful,” says Ceepak. “And, as you recall, Peter was nowhere near the roller coaster yesterday morning.”

  “True. But maybe he used some kind of slow-acting poison that mimics a heart attack.”

  Ceepak gives me his double-eyebrows-up, extremely skeptical look. “Are you suggesting that, some time prior to ten A.M., Peter O’Malley administered a lethal dose of a drug perfectly timed to kill his mother during the inaugural run of the R
olling Thunder roller coaster?”

  “Well, what if it was time-release, slow-acting, heart-attack-mimicking poison?”

  Hey, if I’m going to stretch logic, I might as well stretch it till it snaps.

  “Then, Danny, we should’ve asked the M.E. to do a tox screen for such a poison. As you know, tests for specific toxins must be requested or they won’t be done. As a sidebar—I know of no known poison with all the properties you suggest it might possess.”

  “I guess I just don’t like all these O’Malley’s saying bad things about their dead mother.”

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I suspect they were saying these things long before she died.”

  Ceepak straps on his helmet, hops on his eighteen-speed bike, and heads for home.

  I’m supposed to meet him and Rita at King Putt at three P.M.

  Figures Ceepak would schedule an outdoor activity involving physical exertion for the hottest part of the day.

  I decide to head into the gym. Hey, I paid my monthly membership fee so I figure I should step inside Beach Bods at least once during the month of May, which is almost over.

  I show the girl behind the front desk my I.D. card.

  “Are you interested in Chi Gung Yoga or the Total Body Sculpt class that just started?”

  “Nah,” I say. “I just thought I’d lift a few weights. Grunt a little.”

  She hands me a towel. “Enjoy your workout.”

  Yeah. Right. Like that’s going to happen. I enjoy a cold beer. A hot slice of pizza. I do not enjoy voluntary artificial exertion.

  I head over to the dumbbells and grab a pair of ten-pound weights to do a few bicep curls in front of the mirrored wall. I figure I could save my gym fees by going back to the Acme and lifting a few ten-pound sacks of sugar. Work my way up to the pet food aisle and those fifty-pound bags of kibble.

  Behind me, in the mirror, I see Gail Baker over on a blue rubber mat where some people do stretches and stuff. She’s wearing what looks like black Spandex underwear: a sports bra and sporty short shorts.

  One of the Beach Bods trainers, a guy with a chin dimple goatee and Tibetan tattoo sleeves on both arms, has one hand on the small of Gail’s back, the other on her extremely taut stomach, to coach her through a series of deep knee bends.

  I stroll across the gym floor and pretend like I’m interested in the Smith machine, this piece of equipment that has a barbell fixed inside steel rails so you can slide the weights up and down to do your squats or bench presses without dropping everything on your head. I load it up with two twenty-pound disks so I can be closer to Gail.

  You gaze at her incredible body, you want to look better naked.

  While I’m slipping the weights onto the bar, I hear Gail tell her trainer, “Anyway, I can’t slack off. Need to keep looking good.”

  “Then we’ll work extra hard today.”

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  She does a few forward lunges.

  Mike steps back, admires her form.

  “Hey,” he says, as Gail switches lunge legs, “if you’re free this week, we should hang out.”

  “Maybe,” says Gail. “Sounds like fun.”

  She stands up. Mike moves in and massages the top of her shoulders.

  “I’d stretch you out afterwards. Give you a deep-tissue massage.”

  Gail laughs.

  “So, when can we, you know, hook up?”

  Gail does a flirty sideways twist so her breasts brush against muscle man’s biceps.

  “Like I said, I’m free any night or day this week. After that, I’m fully committed till July.”

  “Let me check my book. See if I can fit you in. Okay, on your back. Time for crunches.”

  I can just imagine these two having sex. Probably do three sets of ten reps. Probably have mirrors on the ceiling and all the walls. Probably wouldn’t sell me a video of it.

  I put in a good half hour. Okay, twenty minutes.

  I do some lat pull-downs, seated rows, hamstring curls, and assisted chin-ups on this machine where you can set a counterweight so you’re only pulling up about twenty pounds of body weight but it looks like you’re doing a manly-man chin-up, something I could never do in P.E. class, something Ceepak does whenever he has some spare time and sees a convenient horizontal bar.

  Then, to work on my abs, I sit on one of those Swedish balls and try not to roll off it.

  I’m toweling off some sweat when I see the dentist from the bar at Big Kahuna’s swing open the front doors. He marches to the desk. Flashes the check-in girl his card.

  She scans it. Scans it again.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s being rejected.”

  “What?” The dentist strains to look over the desk and see what bad things the computer monitor is saying about him. “Look up Hausler. Dr. Marvin Hausler.”

  Computer keys clack.

  “You haven’t paid your dues in two months.”

  “What?” Now he reaches over, grabs the monitor and tries to swivel it around, only it’s not on a lazy Susan type deal so it only budges an inch or two. “Let me see that.”

  I toss my towel in the wicker laundry basket and amble toward the counter.

  My cop sense tells me we’re about to have an incident.

  “I really can’t let you see the computer screen—”

  “This is fucking unbelievable,” fumes Hausler. “I come here every weekend.”

  “They updated the membership rolls late last night, told us to double-check everybody’s cards today—”

  “This is total fucking bullshit. I paid my fucking dues.”

  “If you’d like to put the charge on a credit card—”

  “What? So you can double-bill me? Fucking forget it!”

  I’m about to butt in when Gail comes out of the women’s locker room in her street clothes, which, by the way, are just about as skimpy as her gym clothes. Up top she has on this tight little yellow-and-red Sugar Babies tee—looks like the vintage logo from a bag of Sugar Babies. I swear she bought it at a store for newborns, it’s that small.

  “Hey, Marvin,” she says.

  The dentist backs away from the counter. Stops acting like a spoiled brat.

  “Hey,” he says, his voice all silky and deep. Maybe he studies Luther Vandross CDs. “How’s it going?”

  “Great.”

  “Missed you last night.”

  “What?”

  “The date we didn’t have. How’s your grandmother?”

  “Huh? Oh—better. Thanks!”

  “Good. Glad to hear it. Hey, I got Leno tickets for down in AC. Interested?” Dr. Marv is leaning one cocked arm against the counter now, putting on his suave ‘n smooth moves.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We could take your grandmother with us. If she gets sick again, I could write her a prescription.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Hey—I just want to be close to you.”

  I can’t believe this. Dr. Marvin Hausler, DDS—whose face reminds me of the glasses-wearing chimp you’d see on a monkey calendar—is using recycled Carpenters’ lyrics from 1971 to hit on Gail Baker? What do they teach these guys at dental school?

  “I told you, Marv—I can’t. Not anymore. Not right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, okay?”

  “Because why?”

  The dude sounds like he’s two years old.

  “Anyway,” says Gail, flashing her dazzling white smile, which, I guess, Dr. Hausler had something to do with, “thanks for the invite. Have a great workout!”

  Gail bounces out the door like a jiggling pack of Sugar Babies with only two candies left in the bag.

  “Whoa. Wait up, Gail …”

  Dr. Hausler storms off after her. Maybe he wants to give her a few flossing tips.

  I turn toward the floor-to-ceiling windows and watch their sidewalk scene play out.

  Gail, of course, keeps her cool. Keeps on smi
ling and looking hot as hell.

  Dr. Hausler, on the other hand, is fuming. Waving his arms up and down like a sixth grader throwing a temper tantrum when he finds out his gorgeous teacher won’t even consider dating him because, well, he’s a kid and she isn’t.

  Rabid spittle is flying out of his mouth now.

  I wonder why guys do this.

  Do they really think girls will hop in the sack with them if they act like screaming meemies? That they’ll suddenly say, “You know, I find your loud threats and obnoxious antics strangely attractive. Let’s go have sex.”

  Ain’t gonna happen.

  Gail leans in and gives the dentist a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” she says, I think. I need to take a class in lip-reading.

  “Fuck you,” says Marvin—his lips are much easier to read. Especially because he keeps repeating himself: “Fuck you!” This time he adds “Bitch!”

  Then he storms off to his sports car.

  Gail bops up the sidewalk. I figure she has an appointment at that nail spa. Probably needs to get the white tips repainted so they keep looking good against her golden-brown tan.

  Me?

  I need to hit Chunky’s Cheese Steaks.

  I earned it.

  “So long,” I say to the girl behind the front desk, who’s on her cell phone.

  She waves so she doesn’t have to interrupt her phone call.

  “I know,” she says to whoever she’s chatting with, “the guy is, like, such a total jerk. No way would I ever let him drill me.”

  I smile.

  A dirty mind is an eternal picnic.

  A little before three, having taken Samantha a Chunky’s Cheese Steak to help her plow through her law books, I head up Ocean Avenue to King Putt Mini Golf.

  You can see the T-shaped pylon sign topped with a bright orange ball from half a mile away. At the base of the pole stands the Bob’s Big Boy of Ancient Egyptian Golf: a six-foot-tall resin cartoon of the chubby Boy King himself. Instead of the classic staff of Ra, Tut totes a putting iron.

  The miniature golf course itself is actually pretty awesome. Mr. O’Malley spent about a million bucks landscaping its curving hills, water hazards, “Sahara Desert” sand traps, fake palm trees, and carpeted putting greens. You can arc your ball over a sleeping camel’s humps, try to shoot it through the Sphinx’s legs, or see if you can jump it all the way across the bright blue (like Sno-Cone syrup) River Nile, which, in some spots, is two feet wide.