Tandem Demise

by Duffy Brown

  “Hi, guys.” I flashed my best innocent, just-happened-to be-walking-by smile and added a little wave. “I stopped by to leave a note for Sutter that I have his award at the bike shop so he can pick it up and—“

  “WowamIgladtoseeyou!” Molly jumped up from behind the desk, grabbing the phone and nearly pulling the whole thing onto the floor. She thrust the receiver in my hand. “We wanna go look at the moon.”

  “Is that code for necking?”

  “Could be.” Luca blushed and Molly added, “This stupid phone has a cord. Do you believe we live in a place that has cords on their phones? Duh! What year is this?”

  “On Mackinac, nobody really knows.”

  Luca was tall, dark, and handsome, the nicest guy ever, and the youngest member of the Detroit ‘family’, if you know what I mean, who now graced Mackinac’s sunny shores. He was an accountant. I guess he kept track of the family books and other stuff I didn’t need to know about. That he dated a police officer seemed a bit problematic, but he and Molly and the IRS were making a go of it so who was I to judge.

  Molly held the receiver with the cradle dangling

  below, the whole thing looking like somebody had shot it and strung it up to display. “It won’t reach all the way outside and now you’re here to man the desk or, in this case, woman the desk. We need ten minutes alone, okay? Just ten.”

  “Maybe fifteen.” Luca blushed again.

  “You’re the best.” Giggling like a schoolgirl, Molly shoved the receiver in my hand and the two lovebirds raced outside with the door slamming closed behind them.

  “No, you’re the best especially right now,” I said to the closed door. Pumping Molly for info wasn’t going to work, but there were other ways to get the skinny on what was happening around here.

  I reassembled the phone and unhooked the purple paperclips from my fleece. I counted to ten to give the lovebirds time to get moonstruck while I straightened the clips. Then I headed down the hall, my footsteps echoing through the quiet. Jail cells that were more Pottery Barn than black hole of Calcutta sat in the back with a meeting room to the right. On the left side was a wooden door with a top half of frosted glass and Chief of Police Nate Sutter scripted in black. Looked like Helvetica font. Personally, I would have gone with the classier Courier New.

  I hunkered down in front of the door, jabbed the two wires into the lock, poked around hunting for the barrel and pins, and then gave a jab and a flip. The lock clicked. Feeling a little like Sherlock Holmes and a whole lot lucky, I stood, turned the handle, and walked in, leaving the office door open in case the phone rang.

  Here’s the thing. For sure Molly was a good source of island scuttlebutt, but Sutter’s office was the Holy Grail. I turned on the banker’s lamp with a brass base and a green glass shade. The desk was completely organized with pencils in holders, papers stacked in trays, computer shut down, and chair facing forward. Even the coffeepot sat on a pewter tray with six white mugs, their handles pointing in the same direction. Next to the pot was a stack of napkins spiraled out in a fan display. I’d seen this side of Sutter before. Nobody arranged flowers better than our police chief and there was no drippy paint can with notes taped to it in sight. How’d the man get anything done?

  Anyone who fanned napkins and arranged pencils by size would have their laptop password protected, so any info there was safe from my prying eyes. I rummaged through the In box finding local business stuff and a stack of flyers announcing the Cop-For-A-Day raffle to raise money for the fort wall. I opened the top drawer to... a total disaster?

  Pens, Post-Its, a wood ruler, a letter opener, and other office supplies were strewn everywhere. It looked as if someone threw in a grenade and shut the drawer quick. When Sutter was a kid and his Mom told him to clean his room, did he kick everything under the bed? Not that I would ever do such a thing.

  The middle drawer was more of a mess with envelopes, tape, scissors, and the like. The bottom drawer contained files turned every which way looking as if someone had danced the tarantella on them. I pulled out the one marked Larry Corrigan/John Bernard and opened it on the desk.

  Okay, so our guy’s name was Larry Corrigan aka Larry Leadfoot aka John Mason Bernard, six feet tall with brown eyes and brown hair. What was with the Leadfoot? Race car driver? And he had a Detroit address. Latest record of employment was with Marquette Shipping as a coxswain and stevedore. I knew stevedore was a deckhand and coxswain sounded a little dirty but that was probably my mind doing a fast slide into the gutter. I pulled out Sheldon and snapped a pic of this page before flipping to the next.

  The cause of death was blunt force trauma - two blows to the head. Pinewood fragments were found in the wound. Maybe from a board pulled from a shipping pallet? Pallets were cheap pine. John had some minor drunk and disorderly offenses and an impressive number of speeding tickets. The king of pedal-to-the-metal leading to Leadfoot? The list of personal effects included the champagne, money clip, watch, knife, and wallet with its contents. A generic photo of John, probably from his employer, was stapled to the folder, and a phone number was clipped to the top sheet. I took pictures of everything, clicked off the desk light, and then stopped dead, staring into the dark. I turned around, clicked on the light, and opened the top desk drawer again.

  Chapter Four

  I picked up the wood letter opener, except it wasn’t a wood-handled letter opener. It was a closed knife lying on top of a letter opener. The knife was exactly like the one we found on John and it had the same date inscribed... Maybe? I snapped a picture of the knife. See, here’s where Sherlock Holmes and I parted company. Sherlock would have noticed the date on John’s knife when we were on the dock and remembered it. I had forgotten what I had for lunch or even if I had lunch.

  The information in the folder included the knife but not the inscribed date, so I couldn’t compare the two. John’s stuff was locked up in the evidence room. If the two dates matched, the odds were good that Sutter and John had been in the same wedding. This meant that they for sure knew each other, just as I suspected.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was more than one wedding on any given day. I got that. But what were the chances of more than one wedding on the same day giving the same gift to those in the wedding party? I turned to the closet behind me where Sutter locked up evidence and probably his chocolate chip cookie stash since many in town had been known to swipe their fair share...or so I heard.

  I had to get inside the closet, locate the evidence, check the date on John’s knife, and it was my duty to take a cookie or two to help preserve Sutter’s muscles and his nice butt. Brandishing my two paperclips, I walked over to the evidence closet and stopped dead. Sutter had a Yale lock on that door, and it was no run of the mill Yale lock! This one was thick, serious, of the heavy-duty variety, and out of my league, which was Lock Picking 101.

  Molly and Luca were due back and it would probably take me about three weeks to figure out how to pick the Yale. I had to get out of here now. If Molly found me snooping she’d tell Sutter and he’d have me in his crosshairs wondering what I was up to next. I hooked my paperclips back on my fleece, turned off the desk lamp, and headed for the reception desk just as the lovers moseyed it hand-and-hand.

  “Thanks, Evie,” Molly hummed without looking at me. “I owe you.”

  “Ya know, I’ve been thinking,” I said in my best casual voice, not that Molly or Luca would notice the world coming to an end in their present enamored state. “There was a knife on that guy John we found on the dock last night. It had a date inscribed on it.”

  “Sure thing.” Molly smiled up at Luca.

  “The date inscribed looked familiar and I think we might have been at that same wedding. And maybe,” I pushed on, “I ran into the dead guy somewhere. Or maybe we knew some of the same people and they might have an idea why someone would be out to knock him off. Could you get that date for me?”

  “Sure thing.” Molly wrapped her arms around Luca’s waist.

  “The kn
ife is probably locked up in the evidence closet.”

  “Sure thing.” Luca wrapped his arms around Molly.

  “And don’t say anything to Sutter,” I tossed in. “I don’t want him to think I’m on to something if I’m not and ... the jail is on fire and Captain America is coming to put it out and maybe we should call Spiderman just in case.”

  “Sure thing,” Luca and Molly said together. Molly giggled and kissed Luca and any chance of Molly or Luca remembering anything I said or me getting any information vanished into thin air.

  I headed for the door, closed it behind me, and started for the Stang. Maybe Fiona had had better luck and found something out about John on her delivery rounds like how could he possibly know Sutter? Sutter was a cop and John was a deckhand and even if he had another job in Detroit, what could possibly bring these two together? There was no mention of a criminal record in John’s file so it’s not like Sutter had arrested him. But Sutter knew John as Larry and no way was it mistaken identity and…

  “Praise the Lord and light the candles! Wait ‘til you see what I found!” Fiona gushed as she yanked me onto the Stang porch, nearly crashing into three patrons coming out. “You won’t believe it, Evie. This is really terrific, I mean like the best thing ever to happen to me in a long time, maybe ever.”

  “You got proof Sutter knew John?”

  “John who?” Fiona waved her hands in the air as if shooing a fly. “I had to come out here to cool off. I’m having a hot flash, the good kind.” She fluffed her blouse to catch the evening breeze then grabbed the front of my jacket and pulled me close. “I think I’m in love.”

  “I didn’t even know you were seeing someone.”

  “Well, I have been for about twenty minutes now. You can tell a lot in twenty minutes.” Fiona opened the red door, took my hand, and hauled me past the juke box blaring Brown-Eyed Girl, past the big yellow airplane propeller hanging on the wall, and turned me around to face the jam-packed noisy bar area. “Look at him. Isn’t he yummy! I think I’m going to faint.”

  “Which yummy are we talking about?”

  “Sexy as hell, right there,” she said over the din. She nodded at a table underneath the picture of the P-51 Mustang fighter plane that the original owner flew in the Korean War.

  “He’s old.”

  “Forty is not old.”

  I gave her a hard look.

  “Okay, maybe forty-five-ish and he’s lean and fit and drop-dead gorgeous and has the best smile ever. Just look at that wavy hair all mussed up like he doesn’t care and he has blue eyes. I adore blue eyes. We’ve been talking and he’s the one, my one. And he keeps giving me the look.” Fiona put her hand to her heart to catch her breath. “I want you to meet him but I’ve got dibs so don’t try anything cute to win him over, okay?”

  “Full moons should be outlawed. So,” I rushed on, “did you find out anything about dead dock guy and Sutter?”

  Fiona ogled the new guy in town, a little drop of drool at the corner of her mouth. “Who cares about a dead guy, I got myself a live one! Let me introduce you. I told him we were friends and that I went to school with Nate. He’s Mr. Friendly, he wants to meet everyone.”

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  “Gives me more time alone with my man. He’s here to visit Nate and he’s going to some fancy wedding at the fort with period dress, soldier reenactments, and cannon blasts and I’m going with him and did I mention I’m in love?”

  “You hate reenactments.”

  “I need a dress. Something old, something blue. Sounds like a wedding dress. My wedding dress.”

  “Since when have you been interested in getting married?”

  “Since about twenty minutes ago.” Fiona fluffed her short bob again and sashayed her way over to the table. I headed for the bar and asked Scooter for a Miller Lite. What I really wanted was a vodka something to help deal with everyone else being all hormone happy and not having two gray cells to rub together and me getting nowhere fast on the dead guy/Sutter case. I asked Scooter if I could use the landline sitting at the end of the bar and he gave me a thumbs-up.

  Scooter was a thirtyish come-here like me except he was trying to escape a scheming mom who wanted him to be a surgeon and marry an heiress. Amazing what you find out about people over brews and a plate of fried green beans. My mother, on the other hand, bribed my fiancé to not marry me, had a law office behind the bike shop, and thanked the heavens every day I was not a lawyer since my cloud and I considered everyone guilty until proven innocent and I couldn’t lie for beans.

  I hitched up onto a barstool, pulled out Sheldon, and flipped through my pictures until I got to the ones from Sutter’s office. I dialed the number from the folder. Using a landline I had a fighting chance of connecting. I slid Sheldon in my jacket pocket and took a sip of beer while listening to the phone ring. I craned my neck around the burly tourist guy sitting next to me to get a better look at Fiona’s latest heartthrob. Yep, he was fit - I had to give him that - and good-looking and he was taking his phone from his pocket. He answered it at the same time “Finn here” came over the phone in my hand.

  What the heck! Did Fiona’s guy just say Finn here into his phone the exact time I heard it on my phone? Finn looked at me, I looked at him, and holy freaking cow Finn was now heading right for me. He stopped in front of my stool and held up his phone with Mustang Lounge and the phone number right there on the screen.

  “Caller ID?” I gulped.

  “When calling from a landline the name of the business shows up. Don’t you love modern technology?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  There was a twinkle in Finn’s blue eyes. “So, who are you, why are you calling me, and how’d you get my number?”

  Okay, this guy had to be a suspect. I mean, why else would Sutter have his phone number attached to the folder? But Finn didn’t have to know he was a suspect. If he found out, it could ruin Sutter’s case and my chance to find out who the heck this guy really was and his connection to John. Think, Evie, think. Where did people get random phone numbers?

  “Bathroom wall,” I blurted. “Your number was on the bathroom wall under Life of the Party.” I slid off the stool just as Sutter came into the Stang saying, “Hey, Finn. Sorry I’m late.”

  With Finn distracted for a split second, I hustled outside onto the porch and tried to ignore the footsteps following right behind me. I spun around to find … Scooter?

  “Hey, just thought you should know that the guy you were talking to, the one with Fiona? He’s a cop. Detroit. I saw his badge when he opened his wallet to pay for drinks. You looked kind of rattled and I thought you should know.”

  “He’s here for a wedding.”

  Scooter gave a little shrug. “Maybe. The island isn’t exactly where cops come for R and R even if he does know Nate. There’s something going on with him besides brews and backslapping.”

  I stepped closer. “Did you know the dead guy found on the freight dock? Did he ever come in here?”

  “Once or twice. He was looking for some dude. Had a picture of a groomed metro sexual with a blond-streaked ponytail and fake tan wearing a white dinner jacket.”

  Scooter raked back his shaggy hair, his brow knit in thought. “He said the two of them worked the docks together but anyone that prissy would get the crap kicked out of ‘em on a loading dock so that’s bogus. You know, the face looked kind of familiar but I couldn’t place him. It’s been bugging me.”

  “Did he mention champagne?”

  Scooter laughed. “That goes with the prissy look for sure, but the Stang isn’t a champagne kind of place. I am experimenting with some small-batch brews to add to our drinking pleasure. Mackinac Moonlight, a pale ale, and Hops and Horses, more of a lager.”

  “What about Cycles and Sinners?”

  “You’re on. Going to print up my own labels with Scooter’s Brews right on the front.”

  “No surgeon?”

  “That’s the only profession
where you can stick knives in people legally.”

  Yuck! “Small batch is a great idea.”

  Scooter hustled back inside and I stepped off the porch and waited for a taxi to trot pass. Scooter was right. What was a Detroit cop doing here at this particular time? The wedding? Maybe, but he didn’t have a date with him. My guess was that Finn had something to do with Sutter and Dead John and the wedding was a cover. Why did Finn need a cover? Why did Sutter?

  I turned onto Main as a group of fudgies bolted out of Horn’s Bar laughing and running full-out for the docks trying to make the ferry. That’s the thing about an island. You miss the last boat and you’re stuck here ‘til morning unless you’re really good at the backstroke.

  Up ahead, strollers ambled though Marquette Park and a not-so-great jazz quartet warbled in the gazebo. I turned into Doud’s Market, the island’s answer to the mall, and got a slice of pizza for me and two cans of Fancy Feast to prevent an evening gripe fest of meowing by poor, mistreated felines. I may own the bike shop plus residence, but truth be told I knew who ruled the Bloomfield roost and it sure as heck wasn’t me.

  It was well past six, the time my cardboard clock on the door said I would return. Two bikes were parked on the porch with notes from customers saying they’d be back tomorrow to get their deposits. I unlocked the door and flipped on the lights to find Bambino and Cleveland sitting on the pool table with beady eyes, twitching tails, and accusing sneers. Fiona and others got sweet purring kitties and snuggles; I got judgment at Nuremburg and feed me mow.

  “I know I’m late,” I said while scooping gross-smelling smooshy stuff into bowls by the workbench. “And you’re right, I did crash the bike, but the bike is okay and look,” I held up my arms. “No scrapes – well, no new ones - and I am getting better. I missed the concrete and landed on the grass and I brought you dinner so enough with the stink eye.”