by Jan Dunlap
I told him my two new motive theories. “So if any MOBster has a history of psychiatric care, don’t you think that’s worth looking at again?”
“At this point, I’ll look under rocks if I have to,” Pacheco said. “My niece is a murder witness.” He spoke quickly into his radio. “I should hear back in a few minutes. I’ve got our researcher on it right now.”
We got out of the car.
“Where’s Pearl?” Rosalie cried, running to Pacheco as soon as she saw us.
I looked around for Luce, but didn’t see her. I dug my cellphone out of my pocket to see if she’d called or left a message, but there was nothing.
“Where is she?” Rosalie demanded. “My Pearl. Tell me she is all right!”
Pacheco put his hands on his mother’s shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Mom. Pearl is fine. She’s safe. She’s at the police station. She’s giving a statement.”
I was impressed: Pacheco was an excellent liar. If I hadn’t been there and seen with my own eyes that he’d left Pearl at Rosalie’s home, I never would have guessed the man was lying through his teeth about his niece’s whereabouts. Under the circumstances, I decided Pacheco’s deception was probably the most effective way to protect Pearl. As long as no one knew where she was, there was no chance anyone—in particular, Birdy’s killer—could find her.
Protect… protection…
Protection racket!
That was it—the phrase I’d been looking for when I was thinking about mobsters collecting money in the old movies. Mark had said “collection,” but it was “protection,” as in Chicago-land mob honchos sending thugs to shake down shop owners for money, or else they beat up the owners with their saps and wrecked the store.
That was the phrase I’d been trying to remember, but now it didn’t seem quite the right fit for whatever it was that was trying to break into my consciousness. I was certain I was getting closer to some piece of information that would point to Birdy’s killer, but I just couldn’t bring it into the sharpest focus.
I walked into the garage to find Luce.
“Bob!” Pacheco called to me from his car. “I got a call back. We have a hit!”
I gave him a thumbs up sign, but before I rejoined him to find out who our hot suspect was, I found Paddy Mac and asked him if he’d seen Luce.
Paddy flashed his big Irish grin. “Schooner took her inside the house after you left with the chief. He offered to sit with her until she heard from you.”
He looked pointedly at my hands. “No cuffs. Luce said you were innocent. She told us that the kiskadee did it.” He smiled again. “So who is he, Bob? Who killed Birdy?”
I decided to follow Pacheco’s example.
I lied.
“We have no clue, Paddy.”
At almost the same moment, Chief Pacheco snagged my shoulder and turned me to face him.
“It’s Schooner,” he said. “He’s our hit.”
I ran for the door into the house.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Luce!” I shouted as I burst into a polished oak hallway inside the garage door. “Luce!”
Voices came from the end of the hall, sending me at a run in their direction. I skidded through a doorframe and into a kitchen.
Luce was standing in front of a stovetop that was about five feet long, stirring something in a pan. I could hear sizzling noises and the aroma of roasted chicken and chili peppers hit me like a cresting ocean wave.
She looked up and frowned. “Are you all right, Bobby? I figured it was just a matter of time until you were able to convince the chief he was wrong about you, and you’d be back. Rosalie got me started on this taco filling to help me pass the time. She said she made it for Birdy for last Valentine’s Day. Isn’t that sad?”
Valentine’s Day.
Why did that suddenly seem so important to me? Somewhere in my head, a bell was ringing.
Luce laid down the wooden spoon she’d been using and came to give me a hug. “Are you all right?” she repeated. “You don’t look so good.”
I didn’t feel so good. There was a bell ringing in my head, and I’d just found my wife—my newly pregnant wife—calmly cooking chicken when I thought she might have been grabbed by a psycho killer. I guess I got a little concerned.
Like maybe my pregnant wife was going to get killed.
I kept Luce firmly enfolded against me for another minute.
“I love you,” I whispered in her ear, relief and the adrenaline drop making my knees wobble beneath me. I kept holding on to her until I was sure I stopped shaking.
Luce pulled away in my arms and searched my face. “What is going on?”
“Where’s Schooner?” Chief Pacheco demanded. He stood inside the kitchen door, his hand on the butt of the gun in his belt holster.
Luce looked from me to the chief.
“I’m right here,” our fellow Minnesotan said, walking into the kitchen from an attached four-season porch. “You want me for something?”
“Yes,” Pacheco said. “I need to ask you a few questions. After you.” He motioned for Schooner to walk ahead of him back to the garage. “Let’s go sit in my car for privacy.”
The two men exited the room, and Luce left me to check on her chicken.
“We think there’s a chance Schooner might be involved in Birdy’s murder,” I told Luce after I heard the door into the garage shut down the hallway. “Pacheco just found out that our MOBster from Duluth had some psychiatric problems in the past. It might explain why Birdy and Eddie were targeted if Schooner had some kind of—paranoia—about the drones.”
Luce stirred the cooking meat and shook her head. “Schooner isn’t psychotic, Bobby. He had PTSD when he came home from his combat duty tour in Vietnam back in the 1970s. He’s had to get counseling and treatment over the years. He’s a vet, like Birdy and Buzz. He told me all about it while you were gone.”
She paused in her cooking and looked up at me. “It made the time go fast, especially since I had no idea what was going on with you and the chief. And I have a whole new appreciation for what some of our soldiers experienced in that war, Bobby. Schooner had been in those underground tunnels where the Viet Cong were hiding. He had to learn to move soundlessly, he said, or else he was risking having his head blown off.”
“So he could certainly have snuck up on Birdy,” I gently pointed out to her. I knew my wife: once she befriended someone, she was loyal to a fault. I didn’t want her to kick herself later when we found out that Schooner’s mental health problems had turned him into a killer.
“And if he was a soldier in combat,” I reminded her, “he had hand-to-hand combat skills. The chief is doing his job, Luce, and the sooner he can identify Birdy’s killer, the easier we can all breathe.”
She laid the spoon down again and put a hand on her hip. “Didn’t you guys go after Pearl and Mark? Pearl’s a witness to a crime, isn’t she? She’ll be able to tell the chief who killed Birdy and shot at Eddie and tried to kill Gunnar.”
For a moment, I was confused. I’d assumed that none of the people who’d seen me leave with the chief knew what had really happened in the garage with Mark and Pearl.
“How did you know it was Mark in the kiskadee costume?” I asked her. “And who said Pearl was a witness to a crime?”
“I did,” Poppy Mac said, her head popping out from around the doorway into the four-season porch. I could hear the excitement in her voice. “Pearl knows who the killer is. That makes her a witness.”
Witness.
The ideas tumbling around in my head suddenly fell into place and clicked together.
Protection.
That was it!
That was the odd piece of information Gunnar had given me, but he’d assumed it was a joke: Paddy Mac once said that he was in the witness
protection program.
And, as far as I knew, only two types of people qualified for those programs: innocent people who needed protection from criminal retribution for their witness, and guilty people who got immunity from the law because they helped put guiltier people in prison. Poppy had told us they’d moved around a lot, and she’d never gotten to know the neighbors.
And that Paddy used to work in collections, and that they had plenty of money.
Enough money, in fact, for Paddy to buy a ticket for a seat on the first commercial space ride for his wife as an early Valentine’s gift.
A seat that had just opened up.
A seat, I realized now, that had belonged to Birdy Johnson, according to that framed news article I’d read in Fat Daddy’s dining porch. Birdy and Buzz were going to be on that flight with the first passengers.
But now Birdy was dead, and his seat was going to someone else.
Poppy Mac.
What a coincidence.
I looked at Poppy’s animated face, my adrenaline kicking back in.
I had a really bad feeling Paddy Mac was not the innocent type of witness protection person, and that his former job in collections wasn’t about museum curating, as we had stupidly assumed.
Crap.
I got it now.
Paddy Mac had been an enforcer for a real mob, collecting protection money.
“Poppy,” I said, sliding in front of Luce, all my instincts focused on protecting my wife and our newly unborn child. “The ticket for the spaceship that Paddy gave you—you were the first person on the waiting list, weren’t you?”
Poppy nodded. “Yes! How did you know that?”
“He didn’t, darlin’. I’m thinking he just put it all together, didn’t you, Minnesota?”
I turned around to see Paddy Mac standing in the doorway to the hall.
He held a small gun pointed at my heart.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I’ve always been much better with close-up work than long distance,” he said, “so don’t you be thinking I’ll miss my shot at this close range the way I missed your friend Eddie, because I won’t.”
“And what then?” I asked him, mentally willing Luce to run from the room screaming for help. “You kill me, and then you’re going to have two murder charges against you. Chief Pacheco is on to you, Paddy. He’s got your sap and he’s going to trace it to you with DNA. He’s going to know you killed Birdy.”
Yes, I lied. Again.
So sue me.
I bet if you were staring down the barrel of a gun, you’d lie, too.
Get out of here, Luce, I kept trying to message her.
What a time for her to forget to read my mind.
“Chief Pacheco has nothing on me,” Paddy said, patiently, as if he were explaining something to a child, “and he’s not going to find anything either, because Poppy and I have been in the witness protection program a long time. More than thirty years now, isn’t it Poppy?”
I kept my eyes on his gun, but I caught sight of Poppy out of the corner of my eye. She was leaning against the far side of the kitchen island that stood between Luce and me and the four-season porch. She was clearly unconcerned that her husband held a gun in his hand.
“A little more than thirty, yes,” she replied, tucking a strand of too-red hair behind her ears. “We’ve had so many moves since you testified against the mob. It’s hard for me to keep track of the years, anymore. Let me see, after Chicago, we—”
Paddy cut her off.
I was almost grateful to him. The woman could talk you into a coma.
Maybe that was the real reason Paddy Mac refused to replace the bad batteries in his hearing aid. He didn’t have to listen to his wife talk, because he couldn’t.
Sometimes technology really is the solution, I guess.
“Poppy, be quiet, darlin’,” he told her gently, his eyes and gun still locked on me. “You know, I thought it was funny, telling Gunnar the truth, because I knew he’d think I was joking.”
I nudged Luce behind me with my elbow.
“Just goes to show you, you can’t trust a man when he’s drinking beer with you. You never know when he might remember what you told him.” Paddy shook his head. “You should have gone home when I told you to, Minnesota.”
“You left the note on our door,” Luce said from behind me, her tone more angry than accusing.
No, no, no, honey, I cautioned her in my head. Don’t upset the nice old man with the gun in his hand. That would not be a good idea at this particular moment.
“Why bother threatening us, Paddy?” Luce probed. “Why didn’t you just shoot us in our bed at the Birds Nest if you were so worried we might figure out that you killed Birdy?”
Oh, great, I thought. My wife is giving advice to a hit man. Not only was she not reading my thoughts for once, but she was questioning a killer about his decisions.
I tried harder to mentally telegraph her.
What are you thinking, Luce? Get out of here!
Obviously, my wife was thinking about a lot of things, because the next words that came out of her mouth were: “And why did you shoot at Eddie if you killed Birdy for a seat into space? What did Eddie have to do with that?”
Paddy looked at my wife with surprise on his face.
“I was trying to clean up the mess I made,” he said.
Ha! I was right. Again. The killer was a neat freak.
Not that it made me feel any better, at the moment. Especially since the neat freak killer still had a gun pointed at me.
“I heard someone coming in the woods, and didn’t have enough time to pull the canoe all the way over Birdy’s foot,” Paddy explained. “I’d picked up the bottle the night before when Eddie left it at the garage. I stuck it in my pack, thinking I’d return it to him when I saw him again, but then I decided I could put it to better use if I left it by poor Birdy. I thought if I left the bottle, Eddie would take the rap.”
A tiny squeak came from down the hall behind Paddy. I checked for a reaction in his eyes, but there wasn’t any.
He didn’t hear it.
His hearing aid hadn’t picked it up.
Thank God for bad batteries.
“But if that was the plan,” I asked him, hoping to gain precious seconds for whoever was, I had to believe, coming to our rescue, “why try to kill Eddie? You’d be ruining your own frame-up.”
Paddy cocked his head to one side. For a split-second, I couldn’t breathe.
Had he somehow sensed that there was someone creeping up behind him? Was I going to get a bullet in the next second?
No. Not yet.
Paddy Mac was smiling at me.
“I decided I’d rather frame Schooner,” he said. “The man was a sharpshooter in Vietnam, you know, and I figured when the chief ferreted out that little piece of information, he’d figure Schooner was after both Birdy and Eddie. I had a little birdie of my own—make that a Poppy of my own,” he amended, giving his wife a wink, “drop the hint that Schooner was involved with drug dealing. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump then for the chief to conclude that Schooner had a motive to kill those other two—he was trying to end the drone project to protect his own illegal business.”
“Oh, no,” Poppy said, from the far side of the kitchen island. “I was supposed to say it was Schooner? I thought I was supposed to say that Mark was the one involved with drugs. You told me to say it was Mark, Paddy, so that’s what I told Bob and Luce here at the gift shop. You mean I got it wrong?”
Paddy shot her a glance, but the gun in his hand remained trained on me.
“Why would you say it was Mark, when I distinctly told you to say Schooner?”
I heard another squeak in the hallway. Help was getting closer.
Paddy wa
s still oblivious, and I needed him to stay that way for just a moment longer.
So for once in my life, I decided to not break up a fight.
I stopped being a counselor.
“Why did you say Mark, Poppy?” I asked her, my eyes still on Paddy’s face. “Why didn’t you do what he told you to do?”
“I did!” Poppy insisted from behind me. “He didn’t tell me to say Schooner, he told me to accuse Mark!”
Paddy turned his head to yell at his wife. “I said to accuse the mark, woman! Schooner was the mark, not Mark!”
As soon as Paddy’s attention left me for his wife, I whirled, shoving both Luce and myself around the edge of the kitchen island and taking us to the floor. I heard a gunshot and then another.
“Paddy!” Poppy cried out.
I could hear scuffling near the stovetop, Poppy crying, and the sound of jostling bodies.
“Minnesota, are you all right?”
I looked up from where I was covering Luce with my body on the floor to see Schooner standing over us.
“We’ve got Paddy,” he said, extending a hand to help me up. “You’re safe. Both of you.”
“You were the one coming down the hall,” I guessed, standing up and pulling Luce upright and into my arms for a smothering hug.
“I love you,” I whispered into her ear. I turned to Schooner. “Luce said you knew how to move soundlessly and, man, that was exactly what we needed. Thanks.”
“No problem,” Schooner nodded in acknowledgement. “Some things you never forget,” he said. “It’s nice when one of those things turns out to be helpful, and not just one more recurring bad dream.”
He smiled then, moving the conversation on and away from what I suspected involved his PTSD history and his memories of war.
“Although,” he said, “those couple of squeaks in the hallway sounded like sonic booms to me. Anyone other than Paddy would have heard those squeaks. All I could do was pray he hadn’t replaced those bad batteries yet.”
On the other side of the room, Chief Pacheco and two deputies were cuffing Paddy and Poppy Mac. I thought I heard Poppy apologizing fervently to Paddy for getting her instructions mixed up, but Paddy was ignoring her.
