The Claudia Hershey Mysteries - Box Set: Three Claudia Hershey Mysteries

by Laura Belgrave

  “So what’ll it be? Romance? Mystery?” He steered her through the aisles, pointing out books that other customers swore were wonderful. When she didn’t linger, he led her further back. “Got some nice nonfiction here, too. Gardening books. History. Biography. True crime.” He coughed for a while, then sneezed viciously. “Damn candy went down the wrong pipe.”

  The door jangled up front. Martinlow peered around a rack. “Give me a second, hon,” he said to Claudia. “Might be a live one up there.”

  As soon as he was out of sight she tried to peek through a gap in the blue-almost-black curtain. It was too dark to see squat. She heard the rumble of Martinlow’s voice up front, but it seemed intentionally muted. She repositioned herself so she could watch undetected, then slowly moved closer so that she could hear, too.

  She didn’t catch much. Martinlow sounded agitated, though, and she heard him say “not now” and then “. . . later, when . . . store’s empty.” The customer was tall, stooped and so thin his shirt billowed from him like a sail. But his back was to her and she couldn’t make out anything he said. She edged closer and saw him pass cash to Martinlow. The store owner whisked a trio of plastic containers from beneath the counter and handed them over. They vanished beneath the customer’s shirt. A second later he was gone.

  Claudia smiled. She headed to the front, randomly plucking a paperback from a shelf on her way.

  “Ah, good. You found something,” Martinlow said. He took the book from her and glanced at the title. “Romance, after all. Two bucks plus tax.”

  Claudia handed him a ten. He opened a scarred metal cash box and made change. She asked for a receipt and a bag. Martinlow chuckled indulgently, but wrote the title, price and date on a blank sheet of paper. He stamped it with the store name and handed it over. Then he slid the book into a used paper bag and gave it to her.

  “I don’t know how you manage a living from this,” Claudia said conversationally.

  Martinlow shrugged. “I’m retired. Bought the place about a year ago to keep me busy and youthful enough to catch a nice lady every now and then.” He showed her a full set of dentures with his smile. “Any time you’re lookin’ for more than a good read, you just let me know.”

  Claudia smiled back. “Matter of fact, I am looking for more than a good read, Mr. Martinlow.”

  “‘Boxer’” he corrected her, his smile broadening. “Just call me Boxer.”

  “I don’t think so.” She held up her ID.

  “Whoa.” Martinlow stepped back.

  “Whoa is right.” Claudia leaned forward. “Now let’s talk about what’s behind the blue curtain, shall we?”

  He popped a candy in his mouth, buying time to think. Then he crossed his arms. “Uh-uh. No can do.” He gave her a smug look. “That part’s private, so unless you got a warrant we’re done doing business. Them’s the rules.”

  “Well, now, that’s a disappointing attitude,” said Claudia. “But wait.” She snapped her fingers as if she’d just had her own flash of insight. “I believe I have something almost as good as a warrant.” She held up the bag with the romance inside. “I’ve got your fingerprints. I bet when I run them they’re going to tell me a story better than anything on your shelves. Cooperate with me now and I might be inclined to accept an abridged version. Don’t cooperate and . . . well, I’m sure you know how ‘them’ rules work, too.” She spread newspaper photos of Bonolo and Hemmer on the counter. “Let start with these guys.”

  Martinlow’s response was delayed by a coughing fit. Probably closer to a nine than a seven on his personal scale. But when he caught his breath again, he nodded. Yeah. He knew all about the rules. And maybe he knew a thing or two about the pictures on his counter.

  * * *

  Carella was unwrapping a homemade sandwich when Claudia got back to the station. “Brown-bagging it today?” she said.

  “Yep. I figured I’d mostly be strapped to my desk with phone calls and records checks,” he said brightly, never happier than when he could do his policing from an air-conditioned room. He held up half his sandwich. “Want half?”

  “Thanks, but that’s not enough to feed a rabbit, Emory. If I were you, I’d chew slow. Make it last.”

  “It’d be hard not to chew slow. We’re talking peanut butter and jelly here. I wasn’t awake when I packed the girls’ lunches for day camp this morning. One of them’ll be horrified to find a fat roast beef on rye in her lunch box and I’ll be hearing about it tonight.” Carella faked a little girl voice. “‘Oooow, Daddy, dead animal on bread.’” He shook his head fondly. “It’s some kind of phase they’re going through. Last month it was toxins in housecleaning supplies.”

  A wave of loneliness flooded Claudia. Robin would be gone for another week. There were no men in her life, no close friends in her life, and she’d slammed Sydney out of it. She wondered how much smaller her universe could shrink before she’d be invisible. Suddenly the sandwich looked good. She picked up the second half and mumbled through a mouthful of peanut butter that she’d order a pizza later.

  Carella told her that the chief was at a Rotary luncheon. Moody was on a funeral detail.

  “Tell me you’re joking,” Claudia said. “The chief could’ve sent anyone to coordinate traffic.”

  “I know, I know, but he’s in a pissy mood and Mitch happened to be drumming his fingers on his desk when the chief walked through. We have one guy out on personal time, another on vacation, and Peters was jammed up.” Carella licked a spot of jelly from the corner of his mouth. “I’m just lucky he didn’t spot me first. Mitch had to listen to the chief’s lecture on limited resources.”

  Claudia thought guiltily of her own neglected work. Nothing but the Hemmer matter screamed for attention, but that didn’t mean it was her only case. She was also the loosely defined training officer for the department, which mostly meant making sure rookies didn’t screw up. Carella tore his napkin in two and gave her half. She wiped her mouth and sighed. If nothing else, she needed to review Richardson’s trespassing reports before the day was done.

  “I take it there’s not much new to report,” she said.

  “Uh-uh. I finally got a fax from the Miami temp agency where Addison last worked, but nothing interesting leaps off the page.” He shuffled through some papers and handed it over. “It’s just a listing of company names and dates. I’ll try to find out more about them.”

  Claudia scanned the fax. The agency had sent Addison on twelve clerical jobs in an eighteen-month period. Some of them lasted no more than a week. She’d worked for an ad agency, three real estate offices, a holding company, a parts supplier, a bank, a law firm, an import company, and three doctors’ offices. None of the names on the fax sounded familiar.

  She handed the fax back. “All right. Let’s talk fingerprints. Anything yet?”

  He shook his head. “That’s why Mitch looked like he was lost in space when the chief walked through. He’d just hung up from the lab. They told him to check back after two. Think they’re sandbagging us?”

  “I’m not quite that paranoid yet,” she answered. She fumed at the delay, but Bonolo’s beer cans weren’t a smoking gun. She filled Carella in on her visit with Dell Martinlow. The bookstore owner didn’t need much of a push to talk. He’d seen the inside of a cell before and he’d serve up his own brother to prevent a repeat stay. He’d given Bonolo’s name within five minutes, verifying the hunch that had brought Claudia back to the shopping plaza.

  “Bonolo’s his brother?” said Carella.

  “No, no,” Claudia said impatiently. “I was being figurative. Stay with me here, Emory.”

  Bonolo had been running porn videos through Martinlow’s store for nine months. To hear the bookstore owner tell it the porn distribution was a small operation, and he swore he didn’t know Bonolo by that name until after the Hemmer situation. Previously, he knew him simply as “Fred,” and Fred regularly came by to drop off a small collection. Martinlow sold them at outrageous prices to people on a “
select customer list.” He got a cut of the action, enough to buy himself expensive jewelry and feed his lottery habit. What Bonolo got—or Fred or whoever—Martinlow didn’t know, and didn’t much care.

  “So you believe Martinlow’s story about not knowing who Bonolo was?”

  “Nah. They probably have a history together. But Martinlow’s an ex-con. His instincts are to hold out on whatever he thinks he can get away with.”

  Claudia told Carella that according to Martinlow, Bonolo made drop-offs every other Friday. Normally he came by around noon, conveniently timing his visits to coincide with legitimate deliveries to the liquor store. But he’d called Martinlow last night and told him he wouldn’t be by today until eleven-thirty, long after the bookstore closed and an easy hour after the dollar theater’s last show let out. The plaza would be dark and vacant.

  “Bonolo told Martinlow he’ll park around back,” she said. “He told Martinlow to park there, too. There’s a narrow alley there for truck deliveries to the stores. It doesn’t show from the front. Naturally, we’ll be there, too.”

  “Changing his timing like that—someone’s gotta be tipping Bonolo there’s some real heat on this thing,” said Carella. “Martinlow might warn him off about tonight. He might do a disappearing act himself.”

  “Maybe. But he’s an old guy. He’s not lying about wanting to stay out of jail. He says he’s done two stints, one for dealing in stolen property and another for selling porn.” She smiled. “There’s a shocker, huh? Anyway, he claims he’s been straight for the last six years and would’ve stayed that way until Bonolo made it too easy for him not to give it another whirl.”

  “What’d you deal him?”

  “If Bonolo shows, we bust them both, but I soft-pedal Martinlow to the state attorney’s office and he’ll probably walk without hard time. Meanwhile it’ll look to Bonolo like they were both taken by surprise, like Martinlow had nothing to do with it.”

  “The chief won’t like this.”

  “Probably not,” Claudia agreed. “But we’ve got Bonolo tied to the porn. We’re a hair from showing that he planted the video in Hemmer’s home office. We still don’t know why, but we’re on our way to finding out.”

  Carella worked his tongue to prod peanut butter from the roof of his mouth. He chuckled. “I love the idea of the blue curtain. Blue movies. Blue curtain.”

  “You ready for this? Martinlow never kept the videos back there. He kept them under his sales counter, not even locked up. There’s nothing behind the curtain but a tiny desk, boxes, roach turds and a crapper you wouldn’t use even if you were desperate.” She arched an eyebrow. “What he said? He doesn’t even carry Playboy or Hustler. Afraid they’d offend his ‘lady customers.’”

  Carella hooted.

  “Forage into Martinlow’s past. Let’s see what his jacket really shows. I’m going to grab an hour to catch up on some other work. We’ll get with Mitch and the chief when they return.”

  She was halfway to her office when she heard Carella call her name, telling her not to forget about the pizza. She pretended not to hear, but deftly pivoted in time to catch the balled-up sandwich paper he lobbed at her. She threw it in the air and batted it into a trash can ten feet away. Carella whistled appreciatively. Then he looked at her. She looked at him. They took turns making baskets until she had him six out of ten. When they were done, she felt like her universe had expanded just enough to carry her through the day.

  Chapter 24

  Officer Ryan Richardson was twenty-two-years old and had finished academy training a whopping two weeks before he joined the Indian Run Police Department. His idea of law enforcement came from one-hour police dramas on TV, which always included exciting chases and excluded the tedium that made up the bulk of most officers’ days. He was a city boy from Pittsburgh and never would’ve left if not unexpectedly smitten by a Florida girl visiting a cousin there. She had lush dark hair and Julia Roberts lips that rewarded him in his dreams before he’d ever touched them in real life. The girl, Marietta, likewise fell hard for Ryan. But she didn’t fall hard enough to want to abandon her immediate family, all of whom resided on the outskirts of Indian Run. Richardson caved. He moved south, married Marietta and eked through the required testing and training that would allow him to drive a patrol car with flashing lights. Suggs hired him because he favored local folks, and although Richardson wasn’t local, Marietta was. Good enough.

  The first time Claudia read Richardson’s two trespassing reports, one written Monday night and the second yesterday, she’d paid scant attention except to be annoyed at his poor grammar and spelling, fuzzy description, and wild conclusions. Now, as she zeroed in first on his Monday report, her irritation only mounted. The location he’d noted in his narrative was so vague she’d need a compass to find it:

  “Property where trespass allegedly occurred is an abandoned Parcel with overgrown weeds and some trees on a chunk of Land in north-most reach of town (zone 8) which cannot be acksessed redily. Officer discovered dirt entryway off of unmarked Road where it curves a mile or so north of farmers market and drove through. No trespassing perpetrators were found. There was some signs of digging on Property, which officer believes to be of animal nature due to how animals seek pray for food.”

  Claudia stopped. Florida law required sworn police officers to hold at least a high school diploma or its equivalency. How had Richardson managed it? She shook her head and read on:

  “Complainant (Mrs. Evans) is a woman who lives behind chunk of Land and who believed she saw from her upstairs bedroom window some lights where normally it is only dark at night. She concluded the lights were flashlights and that is why she called, but officer saw no flashlights or evidence of flashlights, just the signs of digging which has already been explained as of an animal nature. Officer will advise complainant of same.”

  A cigarette to stem her annoyance would be nice, but Claudia shoved the thought aside along with Richardson’s first report. She began to read the second, recognizing it as the trespassing call mistakenly routed to her portable radio the day before. Richardson mostly worked nights, so he’d apparently pulled a day shift to catch the call—no doubt covering for the absence of Moody and Carella. The report droned on in a fashion jarringly similar to the first, though Claudia sat up straighter almost immediately. She glanced back at the first report, then swore out loud. In less than a three-day period the idiot had responded to the same general complaint from the same woman—a detail that screamed to be noted. In fact, the report form specifically included a box for officers to check if they believed the call they took might signal a trend. Richardson hadn’t checked the box. He hadn’t flagged his second report in any way.

  While she fumed she read the rest of Richardson’s report. The only difference on the second call was the time and the woman’s claim that she saw two men acting suspiciously. Richardson didn’t indicate why the woman thought they appeared suspicious, but worse, incredibly, was his conclusion that the Evans woman might have “mistooken” large dogs for men.

  Claudia shot out of her chair. She wasn’t sure with whom she was most furious—Richardson for his sloppy work, or Peters and herself for not paying enough attention to it. Granted, the trespass calls sounded like snoozers. And two did not automatically spell a trend. Probably didn’t. But that wasn’t the point. Carelessness was. Cultivate carelessness on the small stuff and you could find yourself dead when something big came along.

  Claudia told Carella he could reach her on her cell phone, then asked Sally to raise Richardson and get his location. The Hemmer case was at a standstill and she could use a diversion. Richardson had just handed it to her.

  * * *

  The rookie didn’t look happy to meet Claudia, perhaps because of the way she was leaning against the Imperial with her arms stiffly folded when he pulled up in his patrol car. She was waiting for him at a tire shop in Richardson’s patrol zone because she had no idea where the rookie’s “unmarked road” was. She’d been b
iding her time for ten minutes, and while she watched him get out of his patrol car she vowed that if he learned nothing else today, he would learn how to render a location that a blind man could follow.

  He approached her slowly, a wary smile on his face. “Hi, Lieutenant,” he said. “Hot one, no?”

  “Get your hands out of your pockets,” she snapped.

  He complied instantly, blushing. “I didn’t even realize they were there,” he said.

  “There’re a lot of things you apparently don’t realize, Officer Richardson.” Claudia slapped his reports on the hood of her car. “Explain these to me.”

  Richardson bent over the reports. He studied them as if he’d never seen them before. Then he shook his head. “They’re 51s?” he said, giving her the code number for a trespass call.

  “I know what they are, Officer. I asked you to explain them. Tell me why the second wasn’t flagged. Tell me why I can’t determine the location of these trespasses by reading your reports. Tell me what makes you an expert on animal digging behavior.”

  Richardson’s hands retreated toward his pockets. He caught himself and jammed them under his armpits. Then he rocked back and forth slightly. His bit his upper lip, where a mustache was beginning to take shape.

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he finally said.

  “Are you sure you knew what Mrs. Evans was getting at when she talked to you?”

  “I’m, uh, pretty sure,” he said. His left eyelid began to twitch. “At least I was.”

  An eighteen-wheeler blew by them, kicking up bits of gravel and hot wind.

  “Right.” Claudia sighed. She decided to ease up before Richardson hyperventilated. “Think you can find the location again?”

  “Oh, yes, Ma’am. It’s simple, really. I just couldn’t think of how to write it better.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, let’s go out there, Officer Richardson. We’ll try a little show and tell. You show. I tell. Think you can handle that?”