Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped

by Sandy Gingras

  “I know,” she says.

  “What do you think?” I ask her.

  “I think you better study for that test,” she says.

  “It’s hard,” I reply.

  “I know,” she says, “I took it.”

  I look at her. She says, “Go on, get going.”

  “Did you pass?” I can’t resist asking her.

  She looks at me. I shrug. I go into my office and call information and ask for Feather’s number. I call and ask her the name of her Tarot reader. She’s remarkably agreeable. “He does regular Tarot readings. And he does energy work,” she explains.

  “My secretary just wants a reading,” I explain. I don’t think she wants her energy messed with. My secretary—the Private Investigator, I think. I shake my head.

  “Oh, he’s good,” Feather tells me blandly. She evidently doesn’t remember anything about our conversation yesterday. I wonder if she remembers anything about anything. “Good luck,” she says, “tootle-oo.”

  “Tootle-oo to you too,” I say.

  I bring the name and number out to Squirt. She’s wearing a black suit today, with a black shell underneath. She looks a little like her stapler. She takes the piece of paper. I almost hear her brain go “chomp” as she clamps onto it. “I’ll make us an appointment,” she says smiling.

  Joe calls my cell phone . He says, “Marie and I found something.”

  I drive right over to Marie’s house.

  “What is it?” I say when I get into Marie’s trailer.

  “Well, we’re not sure,” Joe says. “I came over about fifteen minutes ago to check on Marie. We were having a cup of coffee. And it struck ten o’clock. The bird came out of the clock and it pinged ten times.”

  I wait.

  Joe says, “For some reason, I actually looked at the clock.”

  “Uh huh,” I say.

  “It’s a birdhouse,” he says.

  “Oh!” I say looking up at it. There it is right over the kitchen sink plain as day. “Did you take it down and look at it?”

  “Marie wanted to call the detective, but I said we should wait for you.”

  “So you haven’t looked?” I ask. I can’t believe it.

  They shake their heads. “How ’bout,” I say, “Marie you call the detective, and Joe and I will take the clock down.”

  She bites her lip. “We…ll,” she says.

  “Do you have rubber gloves?” Joe asks Marie.

  She hands them out from under her sink.

  He puts them on, climbs on her step stool and takes the clock down. My chest is pounding and Joe’s yellow rubber hands are shaking. I love this job.

  Marie is quickly calling the detective. “Don’t tell him we’re looking,” I tell her.

  But of course, the first thing out of her mouth is “Lola the Private Investigator is here and Joe and they are looking at the birdhouse right now.”

  “Sheesh,” I say to Joe.

  He smiles at me.

  “The detective says don’t touch it or he’ll charge you with tampering with evidence,” Marie says.

  I pause. “Will he, you think?” I ask Joe.

  He shakes his head. How should he know?

  “We’re just peeking,” I tell her.

  I can hear the detective’s voice coming from the phone: “No peeking.”

  She hangs up. “He says he’ll be right here.”

  “I wonder if he’ll use a siren,” I say.

  Joe smiles.

  “Do you have some tweezers,” I ask Marie.

  “But…,” she says.

  “We just want to be ready when the detective gets here.”

  When she leaves the room, Joe and I really look at the clock. It’s a simple enough birdhouse. Ernie put some clock and spring mechanism inside that he probably bought at a craft store. There’s a clean out drawer at the base of the house. The knob is a heart. “Aha” I tell Joe, pointing. I like to say Aha, and I don’t get to say it very often.

  When Marie comes back with the tweezers, she gives them to me. I try to get the drawer open with them before she can say a word, but something’s bunched up inside and the drawer won’t open.

  Marie says, “You shouldn’t…”

  “It won’t open anyway,” I say.

  We sit back and wait for the detective.

  “Do you think that’s what whoever hit me on the head was looking for?” Marie says.

  “Could be,” Joe says.

  “What do you think is in there,” she says.

  “You won’t let us look, remember?” I say.

  “Well,” she says.

  “I think it’s a photograph,” Joe says.

  “Maybe,” I say. “It felt fatter than that when I tried to get the drawer open, and it crunched a little like paper.”

  There’s a knock on the door. BOOM. BOOM. Resounding.

  Marie lets Detective Johansen in. He got his little kit for fingerprint dusting. He’s got plastic gloves and his own pair of tweezers. He smells really good, like fresh air and aftershave. Crisp.

  He pauses. “I should take this back to the lab,” he says.

  “The lab!” I say appalled.

  “But I’ll open it here,” he says.

  “The drawer,” I tell him pointing.

  He looks at me.

  “I’m just helping out,” I say.

  He tries to open the drawer just like I did, but it sticks.

  “I tried that,” I say.

  He looks at me again.

  “Ssshhh,” Joe tells me.

  The detective wiggles and jiggles the drawer. Nothing. He grabs the heart pull with his gloved hand and tugs. The drawer comes out, and there’s a folded up sheet of paper springing up out of the drawer. Maybe two or three sheets from the bulk of it.

  He unfolds the sheets. We all lean in to look. The first page is filled with figures. It looks like some sort of list of investments: “Bought ITN Dec. 6 at $2.00 sold Jan 15 at $6.50”… like that. There’s a title at top: “Capital Advisors.” There are two pages of this.

  “That’s Dick and Richie’s company,” Marie says pointing at it. “That’s the statement they sent me a week ago. I gave it to Ernie because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “You have money invested with them?” the detective asks.

  “I had an IRA that my husband made me start years ago, and when it matured, I just stuck the money in the bank. It was hardly making any interest. It isn’t a fortune, but it helps me live nowadays.

  “Richie told me he could make me twenty percent if I invested it with him. And he did! In one month, the $500.00 I gave him became $600. So I gave him more money, this time for two years. He said I could make even more if I did the long term investment. He had a two or a five year plan. I picked the two year. Who has five years to wait when you’re this old?”

  “But why is it in Ernie’s birdhouse like some kind of secret?” I ask.

  Chapter 34

  There’s a Ciccone’s accounting firm right next to a Soft-Tee ice cream place in a strip mall. Marie told me that this is the place Ernie visited the day he died. I ask the receptionist if I can see the same person as Ernie saw, that Ernie had recommended him. She says walk-ins always take the next available representative. Otherwise, I’d need to make an appointment. “How ’bout if I just wait?” I tell her.

  She sighs, “It’s not our policy.”

  I tell her, “Let’s make an exception for a murder case, okay?” It would be nice right about now to whip out my P.I. license. If I had one.

  She sighs again. “Take a seat.”

  The seats here are plastic form uprights with metal legs. It’s not comfy. After thirty minutes, my butt hurts. After an hour, and many people coming and going, I’m ushered into a back office and introduced to Mr. Phillips. Mr. Phillips is very, very young. But it says CPA on his desk, so I gotta believe he’s had enough schooling.

  I tell him I’m here investigating Ernie’s death, and am checking to
see if Ernie really was here that day from 2:00 to 3:00.

  “Yes,” he tells me, referring to his appointment calendar.

  “And you helped him to do his taxes?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss what we worked on.”

  “Why not? He’s dead. Can you just tell me if you did work on his taxes, or not?”

  “I guess I could tell you that we did not.”

  “No?” I say.

  “He had another matter he wanted to consult with me on.”

  “What?”

  “Listen,” he says, “I told the cops this a couple days ago. It was all a joke.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “He was playing a joke?”

  “No. The investments were a joke. He had some papers that, I guess were his sister’s, and they said, for example, bought ITM Dec 6 at $2.00, sold Jan 15 at $6.50, when anyone knows that ITM trades over 30 and has for years. It listed all the cash assets in Mutual Liberty Fund. But Mutual Liberty has been closed to cash assets for a year. And there were some companies I had never even heard of.”

  “They were new?”

  “They were fictitious. Mr. Stank wanted to know what it all meant. I told him the same thing I’m telling you. It was a joke.”

  “You mean none of that investing was actually happening.”

  “Nope.”

  “So what did this company do with his sister’s money if they weren’t investing it?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  I call Detective Johansen. “You already talked to the accounting people?”

  “We traced all of Ernie’s movements on the day he died.”

  “What are you going to do about the phony investment thing.”

  “We’re checking it out.”

  “Ernie found out Richie and Dick’s investments were phony. He probably confronted one of them, and one of them hit him on the head with the putter.”

  “It has occurred to me, but there’s no evidence of that.”

  “Are you still focused on the cow hairs?”

  “We have a system that we use. We gather evidence. When we get enough, we act. It can often seem from the outside as if we’re doing nothing,” he says blandly.

  “I knew that,” I say.

  “I would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything as this is an ongoing investigation.”

  “Oh, all right,” I say. He hangs up on me.

  I figure it can’t hurt though, to go talk to Susie or Gladys, see if I can find out anything. I try Gladys’ trailer first. I ring her bell. It goes BLING BLING TRILL TRILL in a hollow way. Cheerily ominous. Gladys opens the door in a bathing suit and cover-up.

  “Oh hello,” she says. “I thought you were Susie. We’re heading to the pool.”

  “Beautiful day,” I say. “I just stopped by to get one of the prospectuses from Dick’s investment business.”

  “Come in,” she says. “I’ll get one for you if I can find one.”

  Their trailer feels almost like a house it’s so big. Their décor IS mauve. The furniture is all swirly and dolphin-y. Fish seem to be frolicking everywhere. I think I’d be seasick if I lived here. Gladys pulls out a rattan stool for me at the breakfast bar and disappears down the hall.

  Boy, would I love to get into Dick’s office. I bet Ernie had a field day in there. I wonder what Dick is really up to, earning twenty percent yields. Trouble is I wouldn’t know what to look for. It’s a weakness in me this financial gap in my knowledge base. Actually, there are many gaps. But this one is Grand Canyon big. You could fit all the investments in the world in my gap. I wonder if Ernie knew anything about accounting. I’ll have to ask Marie, but I kinda doubt it.

  Gladys comes back empty handed.

  “I can’t seem to find any,” she says. “He probably has them in a box somewhere…”

  “That’s okay,” I tell her. “Maybe Susie will be able to get me one.”

  Gladys says, “I think Susie knows about as much as I do, which is not much.” She laughs.

  “Your husband sounds like he knows what he’s doing though. They’ve been very successful.”

  She shrugs.

  “How many people invest with them, do you know?”

  “I don’t. Just a few started and then they got so much money back so quickly that they told their friends, so a lot more signed up.”

  “Just people here in the park?”

  “No, there are people from the marina where we keep our boat and people in Richie’s bowling league. It just spreads by word of mouth.”

  There’s a knock and the door opens. It’s Susie, and she doesn’t seem happy to see me.

  “Hi,” I say cheerily.

  She nods and half-smiles. “Are you ready, Gladys?” she asks.

  I tell her, “I was just here for a prospectus. I’d like to find a good investment firm in Florida, put my IRA and some other monies in there. Twenty percent sounds right up my alley. Do you know if your husband has a prospectus?” I ask her.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  These two are not exactly walking advertisements for their business. I decide to prod a little more.

  “Someone told me your husband lost his license to practice,” I tell Gladys.

  She glares at me. “He’s just an advisor really. Richie owns the company.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Dick is good at the social part, getting the clients. Richie runs the business,” she says, shifting all the responsibility over.

  “So then maybe, Susie, you know how many clients Richie has?”

  “I don’t know,” Susie says. “A couple hundred?” she guesses.

  I gulp. Really?! I think. “So is this mostly people’s retirement money he’s investing?”

  She taps her foot. “How should I know?” she says. “Listen, we really need to get to the pool. The Aqua Babes class is in fifteen minutes and we need to get a good spot in the pool. I don’t want to be treading water in the deep end.”

  Chapter 35

  I’m parked one house down from Dorothy Bull’s house. She’s the one having an affair with Mr. Drainage. She’ll probably keep her own name if they get married, is my guess. Although, it’s kind of a toss up. Her house is navy blue clapboard with purple trim, lots of gingerbread around the peaked rooflines. It’s faux Victorian, and out of place in the neighborhood. It’s a very nice neighborhood, but all the rest of the houses are pink and beige stucco low slung houses with Spanish tile roofs that back up to a lagoon. Even her landscaping is strange. There’s a sod lawn with trim box hedges and geraniums in clay pots. It’s very un-Floridian.

  It’s 4:30 and I’m waiting for her to come home from work. I called Joe earlier to see if he had heard anything about William. He said that William wasn’t charged with anything, and after a couple hours the cops released him. George said William read the bible instead of responding to the police questioning. He called a church elder instead of a lawyer.

  “Kooky-ville,” I tell Joe,

  I see Dorothy Bull drive by in her white Jeep. I have a picture of her, and she looks just like her picture. She’s got strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail, large white teeth and a weak chin. She whooshes into her driveway. She gets her briefcase out of the backseat briskly, and no-nonsense clippity-clips into the house on her sensible heels. Her pant suit is powder blue and it flaps around her legs. She’s got teacher written all over her. I feel like checking the papers on the seat next to me to see if I’ve gotten all my homework done.

  I get out my binoculars. I can actually see right through their front windows and out their back windows to the lagoon beyond. I love open floor plans. There’s one palm tree in the decked backyard. Wow, I think, a little reality.

  The whole downstairs looks like one big room: living/dining/kitchen. It’s kind of dollhouse-y Victorian inside, a lot of wallpaper, maroon and forest green and powder blue color scheme, lots of patterns, stripes and cabbage roses, especially. It makes me a little dizzy. The furniture i
s dark and traditional. My guess is that Dorothy Bull didn’t want to move to Florida. Her house screams of denial. Mostly it screams: take-me-home.

  I know from Mr. Drainage that Dorothy Bull’s husband is a lawyer. His company moved him down here three years ago from New York, and he’s been rising steadily up the corporate ladder.

  I watch Dorothy make herself a gin and tonic. She slices herself a lime. Then she neatly sits down in front of the TV. Twenty minutes later, her husband pulls up in a BMW convertible. He’s got this apologetic gee-whiz way of walking that makes me smile. His suit hangs a little on his narrow frame like maybe he’s lost some weight recently. He’s got brown curly hair and freckles.

  I love these little binoculars. I can see everything. I can see how they greet each other politely from across the room. I can see how he puts his briefcase away in some other room, how he loosens his tie. I can almost see the tension between them.

  Mr. Bull goes outside onto the back deck and walks around a little, kind of inspecting his deck. Then he comes back inside and gets a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, then goes back out on the deck and plops himself down in the single deck chair and looks at the water. His arms dangle out of his chair and his long legs shift restlessly. Dorothy Bull is still sitting very still, except for one finger that keeps changing the channels.

  I’m only giving them till 6:30, then I have to pick up Joe and Dreamer and go over to Tweenie’s diner. It’s 5:00 now. “Do something,” I say to them. I say it more loudly than I mean to, and my voice sounds hollow in my car.

  My cell phone rings. I jump. It’s Ed.

  “Thanks for the papers,” he says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The divorce papers. I got them from your lawyer.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I was going to tell you.”

  “No, I think getting them in the mail is the way to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought it would take her longer.”

  “Well, it didn’t. What, does your whole family hate me now?”

  “No…,” I say.

  “I guess I have to get a lawyer too,” he says. “Too bad I don’t have a cousin.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Why’d you marry me anyway if you were going to go and do this?”