Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  My neck was hurting again, and I absently tried to rub it through the Styrofoam collar. It wasn’t actually Styrofoam, it was softer. But after a full day it felt like a thick coffee container was twisted around my neck. Worse, the fool brace was wrapped in a soft plastic that held in moisture which itched after awhile.

  I reached back and ripped away the Velcro connectors and pulled the damn thing off. I was suddenly bathed by cooling air. Maybe a salty sea wind.

  Or, inside a breezy refrigerator.

  “Why do you have your collar off?”

  “Oh, you startled me, Matt.” He’d snuck up behind me again, one of his favorite tricks. In response my neck muscles clinched.

  Perfect.

  Matt pressed up against me from behind and whispered in my naked neck.

  “Does this mean you’re healed? Does this mean we can have rough sex again?”

  His hands were exploring the front of me as if for the first time--my favorite of his many tricks.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, if you’re ready I was thinking we could use this new position I heard about in court this week.”

  ‘One of your divorce cases again?”

  He ignored my hidden warning.

  “It’s called the belly-bottom, but it requires enormous flexibility.”

  “Who’s enormous flexibility?”

  “For both of us.”

  Wisdom groaned and slunk through the open sliding door and into the living room where he dramatically threw himself on the rug. It was his signature disapproving act. I called it moan, drop and roll.

  Meanwhile, Matt and I moved as one grasping organism down the deck to the bedroom sliding doors. We wriggled inside. The phone rang.

  Shoot.

  With a sigh almost as noisy as Wisdom’s groan, Matt reached for it and pressed it against my ear. I guess he was all talked out for the day. He disappeared into the bathroom.

  I listened.

  “Is that you Rachel or am I listening to the air?”

  “Hi Luis, how’re things?”

  (Marvin) Luis Lewis, LIRI apprentice number two.

  “Not so good.”

  “Oh.” I waited.

  “It’s Sandra. We just had another, uh, discussion, about me being a private investigator. I don’t know, Rachel. She’s really frightened about my work.”

  “You’re the IT guy.” I was feeling my wine, demonstrating my exceptional wit.

  “Not all the time.”

  Matt snuck up behind me again. I was thinking the increase in temperature was an indicator he’d taken his clothes off. Yup. Now he was taking mine off.

  “Maybe if she learned a little more about your work she’d feel better.”

  A sense of guilt stole over me. I dismissed it, but it snuck back.

  “Yeah, but…”

  I needed to end the call. Quickly.

  “As in, why don’t you bring her over for a cookout tomorrow? We’ll barbecue some Yak, drink some wild boar milk, discuss the best ways to take down a charging bull elephant.”

  “Uh…well…did I get you at a bad time Rachel?”

  I ignored the question. He really needed to let me go.

  “How about around four?”

  “Yeah. Sure. But just hamburgers would be fine.”

  “Yak hamburgers it is,” I teased. Luis Lewis was young and I guess I scared him a little. He hung up without another word. Maybe it was the throaty growl under my voice.

  Or he was mocking my silent hellos.

  Chapter 24

  It was eleven ten, Saturday night, and Matt was still off chaperoning a father at his daughter’s wedding with Wild Willie.

  Wild Willie is William Townsend, and he is LIRI’s apprentice number one. Number one apprentice has two computer IDs, Wild Willie and Towns’ End.

  We call him Will.

  A big bruiser of a guy, in his forties, with a narrow beard, Will had come to us from the famed Deacon Harks agency in Los Angeles somewhere around a year ago, about halfway through his apprenticeship program with Harks.

  It wasn’t unusual for an apprenticing PI to switch mentors midstream, in fact it was encouraged. The more agencies you worked at during your three years of required on-the-job training the broader your knowledge of all things PI would be.

  But that was also when Will had earned the scar the beard covers.

  He’d just begun the beard when he joined us and we could see the angry looking red line through the thin stubble. Will had been in an LA knife fight with some gangbanger out of his head on crystal meth.

  He never told us the details. Will was a private sort of guy.

  In fact, Will was so private that I suspect he has a deep dark secret hidden behind that beard as well.

  I have no proof, yet.

  I stroked Wisdom’s ear-fur as I sat contemplating, a unread book open in my robed lap. Wisdom changed positions so I could rub his favorite spot—his rump. I obliged.

  A night chill was diffusing its way through the glass of the closed sliding door to my left reminding me that fall was here early this year, and winter might arrive even earlier. But at least it wasn’t raining tonight.

  The front door slammed open scaring the beeswax out of me.

  “Matt! Do you always have to be so dramatic?”

  “You won’t believe,” he said, completely ignoring my remark and throwing his jacket over the chair by the door. He stomped toward the kitchen.

  I climbed out of my comfortable seat to find out what I wouldn’t believe.

  Wisdom was already checking out his master for possible snacks when I caught up with him. Matt ignored him too, so I reached in the “bone closet” as we call it, and pulled out a chicken strip for him. The dog collapsed on the rug with a satisfied harrumph. They were both dramatic.

  Matt was behind the bar. He retrieved a beer from the beer fridge, took a long drink, and sat on his stool to begin his tale.

  “She called the cops.”

  “No.”

  But I wasn’t really surprised. Phyllis Schwartz was an ‘Angry Bitch’. And Earl Schwartz was her favorite victim.

  “Tell me from the beginning.”

  He put his beer down on the bar, freeing up both hands so he could speak in Italian. Matt wished he’d been born Italian--they cooked way better than the Irish (his father) and Polish (his mother).

  “His disguise was masterful. Will did a perfect job. Earl (the father of the bride) wore a blond wig so convincing even I thought it was his own hair, and a slightly grayed blond mustache. I don’t know where Will gets his stuff, but he’s missed his true calling. He should have been a makeup guy for one of the studios.”

  “Maybe he was. Maybe that’s his deep dark secret.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” I waved my hand over my teacup dismissing the interruption. “Go on with your story.”

  “Okay. So…where was I.”

  “Disguises.”

  “Right. Jesus, I’m tired. Anyway, we got to the wedding reception a little after eight. It was beautiful. Phyllis had rented half the La Jolla Grande Especial hotel overlooking the Pacific from a cliff. I mean, waves were crashing on the rocks a few feet away from the cake table. I have to take you to this hotel. It has a great restaurant.”

  “When?”

  He grinned. “So we get there and Earl and I stroll through the front door, all dolled up of course, looking very much like we belonged. Will stayed in the car so we didn’t have to use their valet service. Besides, he didn’t have a tux.”

  “So you could make a quick get away.”

  “Right. So Will is parked…”

  “I think we should start calling him William.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yes, yes. Ignore me, I’m tired too.”

  “Okay. So we enter with a small crowd of other guests a
nd no one checks IDs, no one even wonders who we are. But then the wedding was in the center of a public hotel…which by the way Earl paid a fortune for…so there were plenty of gawkers, and Earl was so well disguised, I didn’t think his daughter would even recognize him.”

  “Who took her down the aisle?”

  “Earl calls him ‘Shit-Head’. I think his real name is Shyller. Dean Shyller. Anyway, the poor bastard has to stand on a balcony overlooking his daughter’s wedding ceremony and watch his ex wife’s live-in boyfriend walk their daughter down the isle. I mean, I almost cried for him.”

  “No you didn’t. Earl’s a jerk.”

  Matt ignored me this time, maybe because I mostly whispered my editorial comment.

  “After the wedding itself, Earl and I just sort of wandered around the reception trying to look invisible. That was when his daughter Amy spotted him. So at least he got a smile from her.”

  “Earl won’t pay child support.”

  Matt stopped and frowned at me. “No. Earl won’t pay alimony. The children are all well into their twenties and thirties…

  “All five of them.”

  “…and Phyllis has been living with Shit-Head for about ten years.”

  “Because if she married Shit…Dean, she’d lose much of the money Earl should pay to support his wife and five kids. And to make up for boffing a blond wannabee starlet with big boobs. Who he has since married.”

  “You want to fight or you want to listen?”

  “Will we have sex after we fight?”

  He didn’t grin. He was into telling his story. Besides, we’d just had sex and we weren’t that young anymore.

  “Okay, okay. Go on.” Matt reached for his beer and took a sip.

  This taking both sides thing that Matt and I do, him taking the side of the man and me taking the side of the woman, is one reason why we get involved in so many divorce cases. Matt represents the guy’s side. I represent the gal’s. Of course, we don’t always meet most of these warring couples. We work for their lawyers.

  “Okay. So, it’s like ten fifteen, and the party is going strong, and Phyllis spots Earl. I mean, you would have thought she’d spotted a bomb-wrapped terrorist. She starts screaming and pointing, and finally swearing at the top of her screech owl voice…”

  I giggled. “She sounds like a screech owl?”

  “Yeah, like a nine months pregnant screech owl in the final throes of hard labor. That is how ballistic she went.”

  I snorted and said, “Owls lay eggs.”

  Matt was grinning from ear to ear. His audience loved him.

  “Earl froze. Like a deer in a truck’s headlights. I guess the poor sucker thought since he paid for the wedding she was gonna’ cut him some slack. But then she whips out her cell and one finger dials and talks. She has the cops on auto dial!”

  I was laughing so hard I almost wet my pants.

  “So I grab him by the elbow and yank him away. We made it to the front door, I’ve got Will on my cell, and I’m thinking I hear sirens off to the north. The cop station must be a block away. Will pulls up, but Earl is protesting. He’s enraged now, yelling about how it’s his wedding. He paid for it. He couldn’t even bring his wife! And he breaks free from my grip and races back inside. I have to run in after him. I picked up the wig and fake mustache on my way in. Earl had decided to expose himself.”

  Matt was yelling, and now I was guffawing. I was sure we’d probably woken the giraffes.

  Wisdom put his head in my lap and whimpered. He was worried.

  “Then…then, well this part is sad. It’s all sad, of course. But anyway, when I catch back up to Earl he’s standing once again at the top of the balcony above where the wedding had taken place, staring down.

  “I didn’t say, but the hotel is built into a hill, and the wedding was actually one story down from the entrance level. Anyway, I looked over the railing and saw screech owl Phyllis was now yelling at their daughter Amy, who was yelling back. ‘It’s over. I’m leaving. You’ve ruined my wedding mom. You and dad, the two of you.’ She then turned and pointed an accusing finger up at the poor sap. Right in front of the whole wedding party.”

  “No.”

  We weren’t laughing anymore. That was a painful image.

  “Yes. Amy finally lost it. Mrs. Amy whatever-her-name-is-now lost it all over her battling parents. And then she ran off toward the elevators crying.

  “I realized the sirens had arrived and were shutting down, and I whispered in Earl’s ear, ‘So you want to go to jail? Is that what you’re telling me?’ That woke him up, and I finally got him out a side exit and into the truck. (That would be our fire engine red pickup truck I refuse to drive to the grocery store, it’s so garish.)

  “We pulled off just as the cops arrived. Five cars full of them. I don’t know what she said into the phone, but the cops were there in record time.”

  “Maybe she told them there was a bomb-wrapped terrorist at the wedding.”

  Matt looked at me appraisingly. Whoa.

  That was illegal, right? Falsely claiming there were terrorists around?

  We started laughing again. And then we moved to the bedroom.

  Chapter 25

  Sunday morning around eleven I was back outside slaughtering weeds by the bucketfuls.

  A cold wind drew my attention to the sky. Clouds were once again threatening us. I really couldn’t believe the amount of rain we were getting lately. Here it was only October twenty-sixth and we’d already suffered through a three week long drenching. And now it was building for another.

  Usually California was dealing with Santa Ana winds and the threat of fires this time of year, a seasonal phenomenon that had moved itself to September.

  Must be some kind of El Niño thing.

  Pretty soon we’d be on the lookout for mud slippage ordinarily experienced after Christmas. We were definitely not in Southern California anymore, Toto.

  Yes, two weeds at once.

  “It’s useless.”

  He was talking about weeding.

  “It isn’t.”

  “It’s worse than house work.”

  I two-armed a particularly offensive specimen.

  “How would you know?”

  He sighed.

  “Listen, I’m thinking, now that Abigail Pustovoytenko is going back to school maybe I should ask Townsend to do some surveillance over at the high school.”

  I stopped my green labors and looked up at him.

  “Why?”

  “Just some stuff I’m hearing.”

  “Like…?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Okay. Then why not Luis?”

  “Because of Sandy. I don’t want to aggravate a complicated situation.”

  “But Luis makes more sense. He looks like a high school kid. Will looks like a middle-aged wrestler. He’d be noticed.”

  “Yeah, maybe. We’ll see how Sandy is this afternoon. What time are they coming over?”

  “They’re due around four. Why?”

  “I thought I’d go hit a few.”

  Golf again.

  “Okay, just be back by three to help with dinner.”

  He left and I bent to my endless project, pondering the mysterious ‘stuff’ he was refusing to tell me about. The phone rang or I might have chased him down and beaten the answer out of him.

  My cell said it was Abigail.

  “Hey Abby, how are you doing today?”

  I took off my garden gloves, weeding was over for the day.

  “Fine, but…I have a request. My mom and I need to talk. She said maybe at lunchtime, if you could take me over to the hospital. She’s working again, of course.”

  On a Sunday morning. This poor woman never stopped working, it seemed.

  My immediate reaction was to doubt what she was telling me. But in the background I could hear a friendly chatter in what I assumed was Ukrainian.

  “Your mom is expecting you?”

  I heard her say, “I’ll be back on
time for your dinner, grandma. Don’t worry.”

  She returned her attention to me.

  “So will you take me?”

  I felt Grandma’s silence was indirectly confirming that Abigail indeed had a meeting planned with her mom, but decided to be certain I would deliver her in person to Gloria.

  Better to be sure and not risk Abigail taking a detour to visit with her new school friends, whoever they were--the ones that were keeping her out until after five after school.

  Besides, I was happy to facilitate a conversation between her and her mother. Maybe we could avoid the ugly meeting on Monday after all.

  She told me she was expected at twelve and I glanced at my watch. I needed to get moving.

  I hustled back inside, but before I could select a casual but business-like outfit for my outing the phone rang again.

  This time it was Hannah, catching me up on the latest about Eddie. Apparently the Cherry Valley Gang, as someone was now calling Eddie and his group of anti-casino agitators, were not just highly political. Last night they’d included a couple of mercenaries at their meetings in the form of motorcycle gang members with criminal records. I reminded myself I needed to get on line and research this group and the events taking place out there in New York State. Then Hannah told me Eddie’d been given a firearm.

  Great.

  Just what the world needed, an armed probable psycho.

  Chapter 26

  I tried to reach Gloria for the third time but she was always busy. I left messages, on her cell, with hospital staff. But she never called back.

  I was flying blind here, and I knew it. I hoped at least I could connect with Nana in some way to be certain I really had Gloria’s permission to take her daughter out of the house. I still wasn’t certain Gloria even knew I had taken her daughter to the mall.

  But Nana didn’t make an appearance this time.

  I picked up Abigail around one and we drove mostly in silence toward Cleveland Central Hospital. I parked on the third floor of the hospital’s multi story car park--just like the last time I’d been here.

  That had been when Gerry, Hannah and I had driven up the mountain to meet with Gloria P. so she could show us Ada Stowall’s medical records. We’d met her outside ICU number one which held her offices.