Tracy Hayes, P.I. and Proud (P.I. Tracy Hayes 2)

by Susanna Shore

  “Except your mark,” he continued. “He has an alibi. Depending on time of death, of course.”

  I nodded. “Jackson can confirm his whereabouts till midnight. I got there a little after seven. That would leave him plenty of time to come here, kill the woman, and then return to the first address.”

  “That would imply that he knew you were following him and would provide the alibi.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Perhaps he was hoping the woman he was with would provide the alibi.” Then I shook my head. “But we shouldn’t suspect the poor man just because he’s having multiple affairs.”

  “He could be here to visit a family member. You can’t actually prove he’s having an affair with more than one woman.”

  No, I couldn’t, because they couldn’t make dumpster lids that would take the perfectly normal weight of a P.I.

  Detective Kelley came over to us, holding an envelope. “She had this in her pocket. Sheila Rinaldi. She lives in apartment thirty-two here.” She nodded at the building I was leaning against.

  “Shit.”

  “Out with it,” my brother said.

  “That’s the apartment my mark went into.”

  Trevor was instantly electrified. Without a word he crossed the street to where the man had been only moments before. But he wasn’t there anymore.

  “Where the fuck did he go?”

  The crowd parted around Trevor, both helping and hindering him as they did. I wasn’t tall enough to see over the heads of the onlookers, but I stood on tiptoes and stretched my torso as if it would help. The streets were wide and straight and you could see well in all directions, but the man wasn’t there.

  “Perhaps he went back in the apartment,” I suggested.

  “That would be stupid of him if he’s the killer,” Detective Kelley said. “Do you have his picture?”

  I dug out my smartphone and opened the photo for her to see. She took the phone and gathered the uniformed officers around her.

  “Listen up! As of this moment, this man is a person of interest.” She circled among the cops so they could take a good look at the photo. “His name is—” She paused because she didn’t know and glanced at me.

  “Larry Williams,” I provided. “He’s only about my height and fairly slender, but wiry muscled, so he can probably outrun everyone if he needs to.” That earned me a few grim smiles. “He’s wearing black slacks and a light-green silk shirt, and has a heavy gold chain around his neck.”

  The approving look Kelley gave me made me feel great.

  She gave the phone back. “Let’s go take a look at the apartment.”

  “Can I come too?” I asked hopefully.

  “Well, I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to the smell already.”

  A steel gray Toyota Camry pulled over outside the main entrance just as we were about to go in and my boss got out. I’d thought he would be here sooner. He lived in Marine Park, which wasn’t far, and Sunday traffic wasn’t exactly heavy around these parts.

  In his mid-thirties, he was a former homicide detective turned P.I. He had a nicely built, long-legged body, a face that seemed average and unnoticeable until it didn’t—he filled it with strong character from the inside—brown hair, neat—now that Cheryl Walker, the agency secretary, had made him have it cut a couple of days ago—and slightly damp, as if he’d recently showered. And his brown eyes saw through all the bullshit you tried to give him.

  He came straight to me, and like everyone else stopped and stepped back a good distance away. The worry in his eyes turned to glee. “I see you left something out of your report.”

  I glanced at my clothes. Now that they’d begun to dry, I could see that they looked worse than I’d originally thought.

  “It didn’t seem important. What kept you?”

  “I was running in the park. Took me a while to get back home.” Hence the shower-damp hair, then.

  “Are you two coming or what?” Kelley asked, and we followed her and Trevor into the building.

  Chapter Three

  “Where are we going?” Jackson asked me as we climbed the stairs to the third floor. No one wanted to share the elevator with me for some reason.

  “To check the victim’s apartment. Which, incidentally, is where I followed Larry Williams to.”

  He shook his head, exasperated. “Why is it that every simple assignment I give you turns into something complicated?”

  “It’s only the second time. And it’s hardly my fault.” The last time, the case of a dog I’d found had led to me being held at gunpoint. Totally not my fault.

  Detective Kelley knocked on the door of Sheila Rinaldi’s apartment and we all waited a few tense heartbeats. No one came to open it. “We need to get in. Someone contact the super for me.”

  “Can I try to open it?” I found myself asking. Three frowning faces were instantly directed at me and I took a step back. “What?”

  “Are you suggesting you pick the lock?” Kelley asked, like she couldn’t believe her ears.

  “Yes,” I said, apprehensive. Maybe it was illegal to pick the lock of a victim’s residence. So many practical things the P.I’s did on TV had turned out to be illegal to my disappointment, and Jackson made sure I stuck to the rules.

  “How would you even know how to do it?” my brother asked. I carefully did not look at Jackson as I shrugged.

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  Jackson stifled a sound—could have been a groan, could have been a laugh—and Trevor glared at him. “I blame you.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with this.”

  “Who then?”

  I gave my brother a sheepish look. “Dad.”

  This time Jackson did laugh.

  Trevor shook his head. “He’s never taught me.”

  Dad was an ex-cop who tended to get bored during the day now that he was retired. It had been easy to coax him into teaching me, although he did give me a lecture every time about how I wasn’t supposed to use it to illegally access places.

  “Maybe he thought you’d learnt how in the police academy.”

  “Yeah, right.” He shook his head. “Well, have a go at it.”

  My gut clenched in nervous excitement. “Okay, but I’ve only been practicing two weeks, so I can’t promise results.”

  “We can always break the door,” Detective Kelley consoled me with a dry voice.

  I dug into my messenger bag and pulled out a thin, palm-sized metal case, and opened it to reveal a set of excellent steel lockpicks organized for their size and shape. My companions inhaled sharply.

  “Where the hell did you get those?” Jackson asked.

  “Dad never got them to you,” Trevor added.

  “Umm…” I stalled by selecting two picks from the case. But they’d all just pester me until I told the truth, so I did.

  “Jonny Moreira gave them to me.”

  Jackson closed his eyes as if in great pain. “Jonny Moreira, the henchman of Craig Douglas, the Jersey drug lord? Jonny Moreira, who held you at gunpoint? That Jonny Moreira?”

  “He apologized for that. And besides, it was Detective Peters who had the gun.”

  “Tracy!”

  “Okay, no need to yell. It’s very simple. He came over to the agency to bring the paperwork for the dog.”

  “What dog?” Trevor interrupted.

  “Misty Morning, the one he adopted so he could pass it as Pippin, the dog I found. Cheryl, our secretary, took her as her own, so he brought the paperwork for her.”

  “He actually promised to do that,” Jackson amended. “But that doesn’t explain the lockpicks.”

  “Well, since he was there, I asked him to teach me how to pick locks.” I’d thought it was a brilliant idea. I’d seen him do it twice with great skill and wanted to learn too. But the looks on everyone’s faces told me they didn’t share my notion.

  “He refused.”

  “Thank God,” Jackson sighed.

  “But then two days later these
were in my mailbox.” I lifted the case for them to see.

  “A New Jersey goon bought you lockpicks?”

  “Yep. I think he likes me.” I smiled, but Jackson looked like he needed antacids. “Now, hush. I need to concentrate.”

  I hadn’t lied when I told them I’d only begun to learn the skill, but Dad was a good teacher and he firmly believed in learning the basics properly. I knew how a lock worked and what was needed to unlock it. A series of pins inside the lock had to align in a certain way for the cylinder to rotate. But theory and practice were different matters entirely, and this lock was different than the ones at my parents’ home that I’d practiced on.

  Everyone fell silent. Amazing really, as I would’ve thought both Trevor and Jackson would’ve wanted to meddle and advise me. The first picks I chose were too thin, so I chose another set. They worked better, but it still took me three tries before I managed to push the pick to the bottom of the cylinder.

  I turned it, and the lock opened.

  “I’ll be damned, you actually did it.” My brother sounded admiring, but Jackson shook his head.

  “You’d better unlearn it, immediately. I don’t trust you with that kind of skill.”

  But I just smiled, full of pride in my accomplishment.

  We all put on disposable gloves—I had an extra pair in my bag for Jackson—and entered the apartment. Detective Kelley took the lead. She and Trevor made a quick search to make sure it was truly empty before Jackson and I were allowed further than the short entrance hallway. He was more patient with the waiting than I was.

  “We’re here on their sufferance,” he reminded me when we were allowed to move. “Do not touch anything.”

  I pulled my hand away from the small statuette I’d been about to pick up.

  It was a small apartment: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchenette, and a bathroom so tiny it barely fit the shower. It was nice and clean, and very feminine, with pink and red throw pillows, flower patterns and extra fluffy rugs.

  And it stank of blood. Even I could smell it and my nose had stopped working a while ago.

  It took Kelley a moment to locate the source: a small rug near the window, deep red so the blot didn’t show. It was still wet when she touched it.

  “I believe we have our crime scene. Everyone out, I want the forensics team in.”

  Jackson and I obeyed, though I more reluctantly than him. I was disappointed I hadn’t been given a chance to snoop around, so I dawdled to take a closer look at the photos on a tall drawer that was on my way to the entrance hallway. They were of Sheila Rinaldi, I presumed: holiday photos, and family snaps with parents. She was a pretty, Italian-looking woman in her late thirties, short and a bit plump. My heart fell thinking she was now dead.

  Then my eyes landed on the photo in the middle, in the place of honor. It was a wedding photo. Of her and Larry Williams.

  “What the hell?”

  My exclamation made Jackson halt and return to take a look too. “Maybe she was his ex-wife?” he suggested, but he didn’t look like he believed his words.

  “There isn’t a woman in the world who would keep the wedding photo displayed after the divorce. Certainly not where she can see it every day.” I knew this firsthand, having burned all of mine.

  Kelley and Trevor came to take a look too. “You’re not suggesting what I think you are, are you?” Trevor asked.

  It was Kelley who answered. “Bigamy.”

  Jackson grinned at me. “Our case just got a whole lot more interesting.”

  “It’s not your case anymore, I’m afraid,” Kelley said, not sounding very apologetic. “Go home. We’ll take it from here.”

  I drew breath to protest, but she silenced me with a glare. “This is a murder investigation. You’ll hand over everything you know about Larry Williams and leave us to handle it. Let’s start with his address so I can send a patrol there. And the address of the woman he spent last night with.”

  I kept my mouth shut as Jackson gave her the requested information. Then he put a hand between my shoulder blades and all but pushed me out of the apartment.

  “I would’ve wanted to participate.”

  “I know, but we’re not legally allowed to unless hired directly by the DA or the legal defense. Let’s just get you home so you can clean yourself up.”

  The crowd had dispersed when we reached the street. The coroner’s van had arrived and a body bag was being loaded into it. I shivered, thinking of the woman I’d seen in the photos, pretty and happy.

  “Do you think Larry Williams killed her?” I asked Jackson when we were in his car.

  “We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report on the time of death.”

  “I already told Trevor we didn’t have his whereabouts for the whole night.”

  His face set in grim lines. “Plenty of time to come here and kill her.”

  “He didn’t look like a killer.”

  “They never do. It’s the perfectly ordinary people who commit crimes most of the time.”

  “Yes, but when I followed him here he looked calm and content, almost happy. Would he have been if he’d killed her earlier?”

  “There’s no saying how people behave after taking a life.”

  I wanted to ask him to elaborate, but his face closed up and I knew better than to pry. He likely had bad memories from his time as a homicide detective.

  The traffic was light and it didn’t take long to reach my building at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Avenue J in Midwood, a fairly new seven-story redbrick near Brooklyn College.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said as he pulled over outside my front door and I exited the car. “Sorry about the smell.”

  He smiled. “It’ll wear off.”

  I didn’t wait to see him drive away. I had to get out of these clothes.

  Chapter Four

  It was almost midday, but I woke my housemate, Jarod Fitzpatrick, when I got in. He was a twenty-one-year-old computer wizard slash hacker—at least when I needed his help to solve a case he was—tall and painfully thin, as I was able to see when he ambled out of his room in his boxers and nothing else.

  I should really ask him not to do that, even if the boxers did have pictures of Doctor Who in them.

  He was enrolled in Brooklyn College for his postgraduate degree, but until the term began he was working for a security firm, preventing cyber threats, day and night. Night, in this case, hence his just-awaken looks.

  I hadn’t meant to take him as my roommate. He’d smelled even worse than I did now when he answered my ad, but he’d looked like a drowned puppy and I took pity on him. Besides, even with a rent stabilized apartment, I needed someone to pay half of the rent and he was good for it. We got along fine, especially since he’d been keeping his recreational pot smoking to a minimum.

  He looked at me from underneath a shaggy mop of dark hair and blinked his brown eyes a bit bleary. “Is this, like, a new look?”

  “I fell into a dumpster.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Mind if I use the bathroom first? I really need to get these clothes off.”

  “Be my guest.”

  It took three rounds of shampooing and soaping before I stopped stinking of dead fish—or maybe it was my nostrils that would’ve needed the scrubbing. I put the clothes into the washer and poured an extra dose of detergent after them. They weren’t my favorites, so if I had to throw them away, it wouldn’t be a disaster, but I had better uses for my money than new clothes.

  When I was dressed and my hair was dry, I felt like a human being again. “What are your plans for today?” I asked Jarod when I sat down at the kitchen table with him, a cup of blessed coffee in my hand.

  “I have to go back to work. Some sort of major crisis.”

  “Shouldn’t you be going, then?”

  “I guess.” But he kept reading his Twitter feed on his phone.

  “Jarod!”

  Considering that he was nearly naked—and half-asleep—he got out t
he door impressively fast, clean and fully clothed. Left alone, I debated my options. I could go to bed and restart the day, or I could go to my parents’ house and have a nice Sunday lunch with them.

  My stomach growled, making the decision for me. Lunch it was.

  My parents lived in Kensington, a neighborhood next to Midwood, to the northwest, only two miles from my home. A short trip if I’d had a car, which I didn’t. I hadn’t needed it when I was waitressing, and while I could really use a car in my current job, I couldn’t afford one. Unfortunately there was no public transportation between our places, so it would take forty minutes to get there whether I walked or took a bus-subway combo—and I’d still have to walk about a mile.

  I wasn’t really in the mood for walking, but I’d have to start exercising sooner or later. The look Jackson had given me earlier when he told me he’d been running hadn’t promised anything good for me. Currently my greatest fear was that he’d show up unannounced at 5AM to drag me off for a run. I’d woken up in cold sweat from nightmares about it.

  That’s as good as exercising, right?

  The late September weather was fine and the walk wasn’t too exhausting. I was feeling great, actually, when I reached my parents’ house, a century-old foursquare with a tiny front yard that could barely fit a car, and a small flowerbed Mom loved. Dad was sitting on the front porch, where the sun was shining nicely, reading a paper.

  He smiled warmly when he saw me. In his early sixties, he was still tall and straight-backed. His Irish black hair had turned almost gray, but it only made him look distinguished, and his blue eyes were as bright as they’d been in his youth. I gave him a hug and sat next to him.

  “Did you walk here?” Dad asked, slightly incredulous when I took half of his paper and began to fan myself with it.

  “Yes, I did.” I felt so proud of my achievement I didn’t even mind his tone.

  He shook his head. “We’ve got to fix you up with a car.”

  “I can’t afford to buy a car.”

  “Didn’t you get the bounty for capturing that fugitive?”

  I’d helped Jackson catch an FTA and he’d let me keep half of the money. “I got a thousand dollars and needed every cent of it. Anyway, I have to start exercising.”