Happy Hour

by Anina Collins

  Derek understood my jab and nodded, as if to say he knew he deserved that. Turning to face Alex, he said, “I remembered something I think might be helpful to your case. Mind if I crash the party?”

  “Sure. Join us. I think we still have some iced tea left,” Alex said as he moved over to let his chief sit down between us.

  I opened the picnic basket and took out the last ham and cheese sandwich. Handing it to Derek, I said, “Please, eat something too.”

  He looked down at the wax paper square I held in my hand and then looked up at me. “Did you make this?”

  Dropping it in front of him, I said, “Yes. Don’t act so surprised. It’s a sandwich, Derek, not duck a l’orange.”

  “I’m just not used to this Poppy McGuire. You’re practically Betty Crocker.”

  Alex chuckled at Derek’s ribbing of me, but that was okay. I could handle the chief.

  “It’s a sandwich. Don’t get yourself all turned around. Ham, cheese, and mustard on bread is nothing that incredible. I have far more impressive skills you never notice.”

  As Derek stuffed his face with the sandwich I’d made for our picnic, Alex quickly said, “On that note, let’s talk about what you remembered.”

  “I think he’s occupied right now,” I joked as Derek tried to swallow the giant bite of ham and cheese he’d just taken.

  Downing a big gulp of iced tea, he said, “I knew you’d ask me something as soon as I started eating. Okay, I remembered something from the Tyne-Touring case this morning in the shower that I think might be useful. She was seeing someone else when she was seeing Marcus Tyne, a guy named Frank Mitchell. Interesting thing is, Frank is a mechanic over in Millville.”

  Alex and I looked at each other like we’d just heard the answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question. “A mechanic?” I asked as he jotted down the man’s name and details in his notepad.

  “A mechanic,” Derek answered with a grin. “Mechanics work with antifreeze, don’t they?”

  “They do,” Alex said as he stood up and began cleaning up the remains of our picnic.

  I tugged on the tablecloth to get Derek to move, but he waved me off. “Leave it. I’m going to enjoy a few minutes of this beautiful day. Let me know what you find out.”

  The sight of him lounging out in the middle of the day in the park dressed in his black police uniform made me smile. Derek certainly knew how to handle the stress of his job the right way.

  “Okay. I’ll get the tablecloth later. Do you want us to leave the thermos? I think there might be some iced tea left.”

  Alex handed it to me, but Derek shook his head. “No, I’m good. I’m just going to sit here and watch that kid tear up the grass.”

  I turned to see the little boy had cleared out a patch of lawn nearly a foot wide in front of him and wondered if having a policeman watching him now would end his destruction of the park since nothing his mother had said had done it.

  “Try not to scare the kid to death, Derek,” I said as we began walking to the car. “You don’t want to scar him for life.”

  He didn’t bother answering me, instead choosing to lean back on his elbows and close his eyes to bask in the sun of the early May day.

  After a few phone calls between Alex and Craig back at the station, we learned that Frank Mitchell worked as a mechanic at Millville Motors. We rolled up to the garage that sat at the end of a dead end street eerily named Cemetery Street despite the fact that a quick glance around the area showed no cemetery anywhere nearby.

  The building, an old cinderblock structure with three garage doors in the front, had cars parked haphazardly all around it. Some looked like they’d been there since the disco era. I saw a rusted pale blue Ford Pinto with black and white fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror parked alongside an old black pickup truck that resembled something Dorothy’s uncle drove in the Wizard of Oz.

  “No cemetery for people but maybe the name refers to this junkyard they’ve got here,” Alex said with a smile as I pointed at the cars parked on the side of the building.

  “Weird. It’s like the original kind of hoarding. Guys with cars. I don’t get it.”

  “That’s because you’re not a car person. The Pinto isn’t much to think about, unless you want a car that catches on fire and explodes, but I bet there’s a gem somewhere in the middle of that mess,” he said as he craned his neck to see further into the lot of dead cars.

  “You’re not like that, though. You’ve got your Mustang, but it isn’t like you keep cars parked on your front lawn and work on them every so often.”

  Alex chuckled. “I could be that kind of guy, I think. It would just have to be in the backyard.”

  I stopped as we reached the door to the building, horrified at the thought of a junkyard anywhere near any house I lived in. “You’re kidding, right?”

  With a wink, he moved around me and opened the door without answering my question. I filed away my concern about his car hoarding tendencies and walked into the garage to find the junkyard outside was nothing compared to the mess inside.

  “Whoa,” I mumbled as I stopped short near the door and turned to look at Alex. “How does anyone work here? Do they just drop them from the ceiling into their spot every morning?”

  Everywhere auto parts lay strewn across the floor. Next to the outer walls, parts sat in boxes stacked on top of one another, some piles ten and more high. Alex pointed toward where a makeshift path had been created and motioned for me to follow him.

  We stepped carefully around car parts until we reached the middle bay where a big burly man in greasy brown coveralls and a dingy white t-shirt stood under a car perched above his head. He didn’t notice us approach him, and as we moved closer to where he worked, he cursed loudly and threw a wrench down onto the floor.

  “Son of a bitch!” he barked as the tool went skidding into a nearby pile of auto parts.

  Alex cleared his throat to alert him to our presence and said, “We’re looking for Frank Mitchell. Can you tell me where we can find him?”

  The man wiped his greasy hands on his chest and then touched his unkempt beard as he sneered at us. “You’re looking at him. What do you want?”

  I couldn’t help notice his fingernails. Filthy like he hadn’t washed his hands thoroughly in ages, they instantly made me think his thick fingers and big hands could hurt someone. Maybe even kill someone.

  Alex flashed his badge and told him who we were like he always did, except he added where we were from this time since we were in Millville. Frank Mitchell’s response set the tone for what I had a feeling would be a difficult discussion.

  Shrugging, he shot Alex a look of disgust and then turned to look at me with an even worse look, like he detested my mere presence there. Then he bent down to pick up the wrench he’d slammed into the floor and returned to working on the exhaust of the car above him.

  “We’re here about the death of Marcus Tyne. Do you know anything about that, Mr. Mitchell?” Alex asked far more politely than the man deserved.

  Frank’s hands stilled and he turned to look at us, his eyebrows lifted in surprise. “So that son of a bitch is dead? I guess what they say is true. What goes around comes around. Good.”

  With that, he returned to twisting the wrench and mumbled something about Karma.

  “You don’t seem very broken up about it. Is that because Angela Touring was dating Marcus at the same time she was dating you?”

  Frank sensed the edge I heard in Alex’s question. His entire body stiffened and then he slammed the wrench into the frame of the car. “If you’re saying she was cheating on me, you got it wrong. I left her, so take your theories and stick them—”

  I cut him off. “So she was cheating on Marcus with you?”

  Furious at what I said, he barked, “Angela wasn’t cheating on anyone. I left her, so your timeline is wrong, lady. She was free to date whoever she wanted to. She wasn’t my problem anymore. She was his.”

  Jotting notes in his t
ablet, Alex asked, “Where were you all day Monday, Mr. Mitchell?”

  Calm again, Frank shook his head. “Right here. All day. Until around nine at night. So now that you know that, you can leave.”

  “Is there anyone who can vouch for that time frame?” Alex pressed.

  Frank pointed the wrench toward the office a few feet away. “My boss. He’ll tell you exactly what I just told you, so go talk to him.”

  And with that, Frank Mitchell turned away and the interview ended. I wanted to ask more questions, but Alex stopped me with a gentle touch to my arm.

  I followed him to the office and said, “I had a few more things to ask him. Why did you stop me?”

  Alex stopped outside the office door and shook his head. “There was no point, and I didn’t want you to get hurt. Frank there is a bit volatile, and I don’t relish the idea of fighting him because he’s a hothead.”

  “You underestimate me,” I said with a smile. “He’s big, but I bet he’s slow compared to someone my size. He’d probably get tangled up in car parts and fall right on his ugly face. And then you’d get to arrest him.”

  Alex rolled his eyes. “You’re going to give me cardiac arrest talking like that. How about we avoid as much violence as possible, Poppy? I like you in one piece, just the way you are. My getting to arrest him wouldn’t make up for what may happen to you.”

  He was so cute. I winked at him, charmed by his chivalrous attitude. “Always my hero. Okay, we’ll do things your way. I’m not a big fan of broken bones anyway, although I do have to admit I like the image of Frankie boy there taking a tumble onto a floor full of metal parts.”

  After knocking and hearing a man yell for us to come in, we walked into a smaller version of the garage area we’d just left. An old wooden desk sat back toward the wall, surrounded by more boxes of auto parts. Only the space in front of the desk remained free of the piles of parts, but there were no chairs for anywhere to sit like in most offices. We met Frank’s boss, an equally big and burly man named Ralph Burns. I expected him to be like his employee in temperament too, but to my surprise, he only resembled Frank on the outside.

  “Mr. Burns, I’m Officer Alex Montero and this is Poppy McGuire, my partner. We’re here about a murder that took place in Sunset Ridge. I need to know if you can verify what your employee Mr. Mitchell said about when he worked this Monday.”

  Ralph Burns spun around in his chair to grab a time card from a shelf behind him and set it down on the desk in front of him. “I can’t imagine Frank being involved in anything like murder. He’s just not that kind of guy.”

  Neither Alex nor I replied to his defense of the angry man we’d met a few minutes earlier. For me, I’d already begun formulating a theory that included Frank Mitchell as the main suspect in our case. The guy clearly had anger management issues, and just the mention of Angela Touring had made him practically foam at the mouth.

  Ralph scanned the time card and then looked up at us. “He punched in at seven am and didn’t punch out until nine pm.”

  Alex wrote down the times and looked at him in disbelief. “Is that a normal workday? It seems like a long time to spend under a car.”

  Ralph nodded. “It is. He’s got house and car payments now, so he’s working all the overtime he can.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t leave this building during that whole fourteen hour period?” Alex asked as I replayed Ralph’s answer in my mind.

  “Yep,” Ralph said with a nod.

  I jumped on his use of the word now in regards to Frank’s mortgage and car loan. “What do you mean now he has those payments? Why does he have to work so much?”

  “Because his soon-to-be wife likes nice things,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  Both Alex and I looked at each other with intense curiosity, and Alex asked, “Who is his fiancé?”

  “Angela. Angela Touring. They’re supposed to get married in July, assuming they don’t break up again.”

  As Alex feverishly jotted down Ralph’s answers, I asked, “When was the last time they broke up?”

  Ralph sighed like the answer he had to give was something exhausting to him personally. “Saturday. He came in here screaming and yelling about her wanting things she shouldn’t want that night. When I saw him on Monday morning, he was no better. Still ranting on about how Angela thought she was someone better than who she really was. I think things are better now because on Tuesday afternoon he was back to talking like they were two bugs in a rug.”

  I nudged Alex as he finished writing and whispered, “Two bugs in a rug. Did you see an engagement ring on her hand the other day?”

  He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he thanked Ralph Burns before hurrying me out of the building to the car, practically pushing me out the door. I suspected he didn’t want me asking Frank’s boss any more questions, but why?

  “What’s with the bum’s rush?” I asked after the door to the garage closed behind us.

  “Nothing. Get in the car. We have somewhere to go,” he said, again rushing me.

  I did as he commanded, but he needed to give me more than nothing as an answer. When he didn’t say anything else within a few minutes, I turned toward him and said, “So we’re sticking with nothing. Okay. Want to share with the class where we have to go?”

  “I’d rather hear what you think of everything that happened back there, to be honest, Poppy.”

  “Well, for starters, I think Frank Mitchell could easily kill someone considering his temper. He’s a nasty guy, and having a woman cheat on him wouldn’t sit well with someone like him.”

  “Agreed,” Alex said in a low voice as he turned onto the road back to Sunset Ridge. “Definitely not a nice guy. I’m not sure he’s a murderer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, although I can see him beating the hell out of someone rather than poisoning them.”

  “Hey, why didn’t you ask about the antifreeze while we were there? You didn’t ask Frank or his boss.”

  The corners of Alex’s mouth hitched up slightly into a sly smile. “Because I didn’t want to tip them off so they’d have time to get rid of evidence.”

  “Why would they have time to do that?” I asked, confused.

  Alex looked over at me, tilting his head and giving me a look that said he thought I should know the answer to that question. “Because I didn’t have a search warrant. If I brought up the antifreeze and couldn’t do anything about it other than ask questions, if Frank’s guilty, he’d get rid of any evidence as soon as we left.”

  “Ah. Okay. So are you thinking Frank is a suspect?”

  “Maybe. I’m guessing you think he is?”

  I had to laugh. Of course I did.

  “Yep. I think Angela and Frank both had something to do with Marcus Tyne’s murder. I’m guessing when she and Frank broke up over the weekend, she turned to Marcus and Frank found out.”

  Alex turned the car toward Angela Touring’s house and smiled. “Then let’s see if we can find out if you’re right.”

  Chapter Twelve

  My hunch about Angela and Frank seemed entirely plausible, even if Alex appeared skeptical. That’s just the kind of detective he was. I respected that, but for me, I preferred to go with my gut.

  That it meant jumping to conclusions drove him crazy, although he’d been getting better with my flights of fancy in the past few months. It was true they often didn’t pan out, but nobody got arrested simply on my hunches, so it wasn’t like anyone got hurt.

  Except my ego every so often when Alex chose to rub it in that my guess as to who the guilty party was turned out to be completely misguided. That didn’t matter to me, though. Each of our cases served as another chance for me to hone my detecting skills, so making mistakes didn’t faze me in the least.

  And if Alex had a good laugh at my theories, at least it meant I got to see him happy.

  We pulled up to Angela Touring’s house and saw her car in the driveway. “Good, she’s home. I want to find out about this engagement o
f hers to Frank Mitchell,” Alex said as he shifted the car into park.

  “I wonder why she didn’t mention that the first time we spoke to her,” I said as we walked up the sidewalk to her front door.

  “And why didn’t she have on an engagement ring,” Alex added.

  He knocked on the front door as I tried to imagine Angela Touring with Frank Mitchell in any kind of romantic way. The thought boggled my mind. One look inside her house told anyone with working eyes that she liked her surroundings neat and tidy. I couldn’t fathom how someone like that could tolerate those filthy fingernails of Frank Mitchell’s and that disgusting beard of his.

  I shivered just thinking about him putting his hands on a woman, and Alex turned to look at me. “You okay?”

  “Just thinking about Angela and Frank together. Yuck.”

  “Yuck?” he asked with a chuckle. “That doesn’t sound very professional, Poppy.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, how does revolting sound? Repulsive? Nauseating?”

  As he considered the alternatives I’d offered to describe the two of them in bed together, Angela opened the door and stared out at us with a frightened look in her eyes. “Hello, Officer Montero. This really isn’t a good time.”

  Alex opened the screen door slightly to let her know we wouldn’t be run off that easily. “This won’t take long, Miss Touring. We just want to clarify a few things we’ve found in our investigation so far.”

  She hesitated for a moment and then finally relented. “Okay, come in, but I am in a hurry.”

  We walked into her spotlessly neat house and followed her to the dining room where we’d all sat together the last time we were there. Beside the table were two large pieces of black luggage and a smaller matching bag.

  So that’s why she was in a hurry.

  “Are you leaving to go somewhere?” Alex asked with a glance down at the bags.

  “I just need to get away for a little while,” she said sheepishly, avoiding meeting either of our gazes.

  “Is this because you’re in mourning over Marcus Tyne’s death?” he asked sharply.