Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery

by Steve Hockensmith

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  Eugene filled me in as I stood there in the parking lot.

  Burby had found incriminating Internet searches on Marsha’s laptop. She’d used keywords like “hit man” and “assassin” and “kill for money Arizona,” and then she’d done more than Google killers: she’d hired one.

  When Burby asked her if she’d been in contact with a hit man, she didn’t say no. She said, “Yes, but I hadn’t actually—”

  That was as far as Eugene got. In the distance I heard a muffled voice barking out unintelligible words.

  “Here we go again,” Eugene groaned. “That was my bathroom break, Alanis. Burby wants me back in the interview room for round two with Marsha.”

  “Thanks for being there for her, Eugene.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. My specialty is estate planning. If you wanted Matlock, you’ve come to the wrong guy.”

  “I’m sure you’re doing great.”

  “Well, Burby seems to hate me, so I must be doing something right.”

  “Tell him I’m coming to see him.”

  “He’s already counting on it.”

  “And tell Marsha everything’s going to be okay.”

  There was a pause. Then a sigh.

  “I’m not sure how you do business, Alanis,” Eugene said, “but I never lie to my clients.”

  And he hung up.

  I had Victor drive us back to Berdache. I wanted my hands free to wring and my mind free to brood.

  “Is this when you finally tell me what the hell this is all about?” Victor said as we pulled out onto the highway.

  “This is when I was going to, yes.”

  Victor glanced over at me expectantly.

  We went by a billboard letting us know that we’d just passed paradise: Oak Creek Golf Resort and Estates was one exit behind us.

  A minute later, we passed the sign letting us know it was two exits behind us.

  Victor was still waiting for an explanation. “Alanis…?” he prompted.

  “How about if I said it’s complicated and you should just trust me?”

  “I’d say, ‘What kind of fool do you take me for?’”

  “And I’d say, ‘A really nice one whose help I deeply appreciate.’”

  “And I’d say, ‘Stop trying to butter me up and just tell me the truth.’”

  “And I’d say—”

  “Good god, Alanis!” Victor roared. “Do you really think this is an acceptable way to behave? Is this normal to you?”

  I thought it over. “Now that you mention it, I never saw the Bradys do it.”

  “I’m not joking!”

  “Neither am I. My mother was a sociopathic con woman, Victor. Watching The Brady Bunch alone in a hotel room was as close to normal as I got growing up.”

  “Well, I hate to point out the obvious, Alanis, but you’re all grown up now and your mother isn’t here.”

  I’d been slumped in the passenger seat, but now I suddenly sat up straight. It felt like someone had just attached electrodes to my toes and given me a jump start.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked Victor. But part of me knew already.

  “It means if you expect me to keep dancing around for your amusement like some mindless puppet, doing whatever you want without any thoughts or questions or feelings of my own, that’s not on your mother. That’s on you.”

  Victor’s words gave me another jump start. If I sat up any straighter, my head would pop through the roof.

  Goddamn that goody-two-shoes tightass. How dare he judge me. And how dare he be right.

  “I’m sorry, Victor,” I said. “I haven’t been very…respectful, have I? I guess I was afraid if I told you everything up front, you wouldn’t help me.”

  Victor gave me a surprisingly warm, gracious smile. Just like that, all was forgiven.

  “It’s all right, Alanis. Just tell me what the trouble is.”

  So I took a deep breath and told him. Not quite everything—there was no reason for him to know how I’d set Bill Riggs up to get arrested—but it was enough.

  “Meth?” he said when I told him what the cops had found in Riggs’s car.

  “Murdered!” he said when I told him what had happened to Riggs.

  “Hit man!” he said when I told him what Eugene had just told me.

  His smile disappeared fast, and I could tell from the way he clenched his jaw and gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead at the ribbon of blacktop winding through the desert that I’d been right about him in the first place.

  He wasn’t going to help me.

  The rest of the ride back to town was very, very quiet.

  Victor dropped me off at the police department and told me he’d leave my car at the White Magic Five and Dime. There was no talk of him coming inside with me.

  I knew I could trust him to leave the Cadillac at my place. I’d probably find it washed and vacuumed.

  Victor was a good man. A nice man. A law-abiding man.

  Which was why we had no future.

  Burby didn’t keep me waiting long when I told the cop behind the glass at the reception counter that I was there to see him. I’d barely settled myself in one of the waiting-area chairs when the door by counter opened and Burby waved me through it.

  “In my office,” he said.

  I followed him through narrow halls underlit by fluorescent lights, checking every door to see if it was the one Marsha might be behind. We didn’t pass an interview room or holding cell, though.

  We did pass several uniformed officers. Their stares ranged from merely hostile to downright murderous.

  My reputation doth precede me.

  Finally Burby led me into a small room and closed the door behind us. The walls were bare, the floor clean, the desk free of clutter. It was obvious the office hadn’t been Burby’s for long.

  He walked around the desk and plopped into the seat there. He didn’t invite me to sit, but I took the chair across from him anyway.

  “The Fixer,” Burby said.

  “The Fixer?” I said.

  Burby nodded. “The Fixer.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “The Fixer?”

  Burby narrowed his eyes. “The. Fixer.”

  “Are you saying I’m the Fixer?”

  “Are you the Fixer?”

  “I don’t know. What the hell is ‘the Fixer’?”

  “So you’re saying you’re not the Fixer.”

  I repeated myself. “What the hell is ‘the Fixer’?”

  Burby leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers and regarded me coolly. He was trying to appear wily and enigmatic, I think, but his bland baby face ruined the effect. It looked more like he was about to launch into a Dr. Evil imitation.

  “You know what?” he said. “I believe you.”

  “I haven’t told you anything.”

  “It’s the way you haven’t told me anything that I believe.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes.

  “Look,” I began.

  “You’re about to tell me that I’m making a terrible mistake, am I right?” Burby cut in.

  “About that, yes. You are making a terrible mistake. I mean—you arrested an abused woman for murder because she googled ‘hit man’? The DA’s gonna have you busted down to crossing guard.”

  Burby smiled faintly.

  “We’ve got more than Google searches. We’ve got emails, too,” he said. “Your friend Marsha paid someone to murder her husband.”

  “That’s bullshit. Marsha Riggs wouldn’t ask someone to swat a fly for her, let alone kill Bill.”

  “Well, I guess that settles it then. If an upstanding citizen like you is willing to vouch for her character, I suppose we should just release her right now.”

  “You know she’s flat broke, right? How do you think she was going to pay this supposed hit man?”

  Burby’s smile turned into a smirk. “I think maybe a friend was going to give her the money.”
>
  He practically waggled his eyebrows at me.

  The little shit was determined to make me an accessory one way or another.

  “Michael LoTempio,” I said.

  “Michael LoTempio?” I expected Burby to say.

  “What about him?” he said instead.

  Suddenly the bombshell I’d wanted to drop was looking more like a firecracker. But I had to try dropping it anyway.

  “He’s the state trooper Riggs had a fight with,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah—I know,” Burby said impatiently.

  “Some of the neighbors saw a state patrol cruiser hanging around the Riggs’s house last week. And LoTempio doesn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder.”

  The bit about the alibi was a stretch. Easy enough for the guy to lie to his wife about working late. Happens all the time.

  Only this time, it hadn’t.

  “LoTempio not only has an alibi, it’s the best one anybody in the world could possibly ask for,” Burby said. “At the time William Riggs was murdered, Officer LoTempio was answering highway patrol calls twenty miles away.”

  “But all he’d need is half an hour to drive to Berdache and—”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a dash cam, McLachlan?” said Burby with the sneering self-assurance of someone who’d personally checked LoTempio’s dash cam video. “I might look young,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “All right, then. What about Harry Kyle?”

  “Harry Kyle?”

  “Bill Riggs’s boss. They didn’t get along, and—”

  “You’re clutching at straws, McLachlan.”

  “Kyle—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “If—”

  “We’re through here.”

  “Please—”

  “You’re free to go.”

  “Burby—”

  “Go.”

  “But—”

  Burby pushed his chair back and stood. He looked ready to step around his desk and take me by the arm and drag me down the hall. To the door, maybe, or to a cell.

  “Go.”

  I went.

  Burby hadn’t wanted to talk to me, hadn’t wanted to listen to me. He’d just wanted an answer to one question. And when he thought he had it, he’d thrown me out.

  It was a pisser but not a total waste of time.

  Now I knew the next question I needed to be asking.

  The Caddy was parked behind the White Magic Five and Dime, as promised. The keys were inside the store. Clarice jingled them at me when I walked in. Ceecee was with her behind the counter.

  “What did you do to Mr. Castellanos?” Ceecee asked as I took the keys. She’d redone her hair since the last time I’d seen her. It was even more blue than usual.

  “I told him the truth.”

  Clarice winced. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

  “No. But enough.”

  Clarice and Ceecee looked at each other.

  “No wonder he seemed so pissed,” Ceecee said.

  “What were you and him doing this afternoon, anyway?” Clarice asked me.

  “Trying to help Marsha.”

  “It didn’t look like he’d be helping you much anymore,” Ceecee said.

  “He won’t be. I don’t think Victor has the biggest comfort zone, and being around me took him way out of it.”

  “Awww. Too bad,” Ceecee groaned.

  “You are such a shipper,” Clarice said to her under her breath.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Fortunately, I’ve got other people I can turn to for help.”

  “You do?” said Clarice.

  I gave her and Ceecee a long look.

  “Oh! Us!” she said. “It’s about time! What do you want?”

  “I need you to use those Internet skills of yours to find somebody.”

  “Cool,” said Ceecee. “Who?”

  My answer had their eyes popping wide.

  “An assassin,” I said, “called the Fixer.”

  Hanging around upside down is for the bats, though your cat has taken to it pretty well. You, solid fire queen, can handle it—or at least you think you can. You’ve been the first to rush in and help in a crisis, the first to offer guidance…and also the first to become bitter and cynical when everything goes topsy turvy. You’ll probably also be first to get a massive migraine from the blood rushing to your head. Maybe you should just hang out a while in that comfortable (though upside-down) garden of yours. But then again, that’s probably a wasted suggestion, since you’re much better at giving advice than receiving it.

  Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing

  I explained the situation to the girls—Burby’s accusations about a hit man and Marsha’s supposed confession—and they had the same initial reaction as me.

  No way.

  “Then we’ve got to find this Fixer guy so he can tell Burby that Marsha didn’t hire him,” I said. “Assuming he even exists.”

  “The Fixer,” Ceecee mused. “Sounds like a Batman villain.”

  “If he’s real, we’ll find him,” said Clarice.

  She swiped the laptop off the counter, and she and Ceecee raced off up the hall toward the stairs to the second floor. They were obviously excited by the weirdness and intrigue. It would have been cute if Marsha’s life weren’t on the line.

  Oh, didn’t I mention?

  Arizona has the death penalty.

  I went to the window to turn off the open sign and wondered if I should ever turn it on again. I’d been so sure I could take over the White Magic Five and Dime and just flip its karma like a pancake: turn wrongs into rights, help instead of hurt, make amends for all my mother’s crimes. And the result: Bill Riggs in a morgue and Marsha Riggs in a jail.

  Maybe I’d been fooling myself. About Marsha. About everything.

  I wasn’t even totally sure Marsha was innocent anymore. I used to think I was the perfect judge of character because I’d been well trained by someone who had none. But what if Burby was right? What if Marsha’s helpless innocence was all just an act—one I’d been all too eager to believe because it had made me feel like some kind of hero?

  It might depend on who this Fixer was. Burby hadn’t come right out and said the Fixer was the hit man, but it was obvious he’d been testing me when we first started talking. He wanted to see if the name meant anything to me.

  It didn’t, but I was still a stranger here. If I were a local with friends in low places—like the Grandis, say—I might know all about the Fixer. It even occurred to me that it might be a Grandi. I had a good candidate in mind, too, given the nickname. But I wasn’t about to stroll down to Anthony Grandi’s bail bonds office and ask where he’d been the evening of October 3.

  Then I remembered that I did have a friend in low places—or an acquaintance anyway.

  I went to the small office at the back of the building and opened a drawer in the desk there. Sitting on top of a box of paper clips was a folded piece of paper I’d put there the day before.

  I took it out, unfolded it, and picked up the phone.

  Nrrrrrr. Nrrrrr. Nrrrrr.

  Click.

  “Hey there! You have reached the voice mailbox of GW Fletcher. If you’ve got something nice to say, wait for the tone. If you don’t, do us both a favor and hang up now, asshole. Ha! Just kidding, Mom! You can go ahead and leave a message, too.”

  Beeeeeeeep.

  “It’s Alanis McLachlan, Fletcher. I need to know if you’ve ever heard of someone who calls himself the Fixer. He might be some kind of hit man, he might be a plumber—I don’t know. Either way, I need to find out everything I can about him. Sorry if that doesn’t qualify as ‘something nice.’ How about…you don’t seem to smell bad? Hope that’s nice enough for you.”

  Cli-beep.

  “You don’t seem to smell bad”?

  It occurred to me that my flirting skills were more than a little rusty.

&nb
sp; Then it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be flirting with a guy like GW Fletcher at all.

  And then it occurred to me that if Marsha had paid the Fixer to murder Bill, I might be digging up the very proof that would get her the death sentence.

  I couldn’t stand by and do nothing, though. I had to keep my faith in my friend’s essential goodness and hope for the best.

  Somewhere deep inside me, my mother heard that and laughed.

  I went upstairs to check on Clarice and Ceecee’s progress. They’d made more than I was expecting.

  A lot more.

  “We found him!” Ceecee reported cheerfully.

  “Already? That was fast.”

  “He made it easy,” Clarice said. “He’s got an ad on Greylist.”

  “It’s like Craigslist but skeevier,” Ceecee explained.

  I chuckled as I walked up to look at the laptop, which was on the kitchen table in front of the girls.

  They were looking at a Greylist page. A blue headline ran across the top.

  PRIVATE CONTRACTOR WILL FIX YOUR PROBLEMS—PERMANENTLY (AZ)

  I stopped chuckling.

  “Wait…you weren’t joking about the ad?”

  “Huh? Joking? No,” Ceecee said.

  “It’s totally real,” said Clarice. “The Fixer advertises in the same place as, like, hookers and guys looking to get together in rest area men’s rooms.”

  I leaned in closer to read the ad.

  If you’re having trouble with someone, I am the solution. I provide killer service. It’ll be a hit, man. Assassing the results afterward, you will be very pleased. Discretion guaranteed. Reasonable rates. Discounts for seniors. Reply to TheFixer@greylist-responses.com.

  Clarice pointed at the screen. “‘Killer,’ ‘hit man,’ ‘assassin.’ They’re all in there. So if you do a search on any of those, you’ll find this ad.”

  “It’s pretty smart,” Ceecee said. “If he’d put ‘Want someone killed? I’ll do it for money!’ even Greylist would take the ad down. But this way, no one notices unless it’s exactly what they’re looking for.”

  I read through the ad a second and then a third time.