Slugfest db-4

by Rosemary Harris

  “I had drinks with Connie at her hotel. When Guy arrived, I got a glimpse of their relationship. Talk about a thin line between love and hate.”

  “Were the Anzalones funny?”

  “Shut up. This is serious. The husband may be involved in some not quite legal activities. And he’s got these two—I don’t know, goons, flunkies—at his beck and call.”

  “Fat Frank and Cookie, I remember. There’s legal and there’s illegal. Just what does he do?”

  “He lends money. Maybe takes bets. Is that illegal or just unsavory?” Rolanda didn’t know. She hadn’t taken that class yet.

  “If my cop friend is right and greed, lust, and revenge account for most of the crime in this world, chances are we can eliminate the Bagua Lady on all three counts. Cindy Gustafson could have revenge on her side of the ledger if Garland knew her sister and something bad had gone down between them. The Anzalones are at least two for three—they have money and there’s a beautiful woman involved. It doesn’t please me to say this but we may need to put them on the Possibly Involved list.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Rolanda said, looking over my shoulder. “Guess who just walked in?”

  Forty-five

  Rolanda slid all the way over to hug the inside of the booth and stay out of sight of the new arrivals. I did the same.

  I felt, more than heard, the couple sit down in the booth behind us. First one thud then a softer one that gently rocked the booth Rolanda and I were sharing. Brian came over to take their drink orders and would have asked if we needed refills, but the look on Rolanda’s face and a slight move of her index finger sent him away without his saying a word. She mouthed something I couldn’t understand and repeated the action three times before I realized the name she was saying—Kristi Reynolds.

  I was mildly curious to know what Kristi had said to the cops, especially if she had implicated Jamal Harrington and the other student gardeners because of the trade show mishaps, but I had no reason to hide and didn’t particularly care who she was getting cozy with, so Rolanda’s precautions puzzled me. But the future cop saw or knew something I didn’t, so I kept quiet and stashed the makeup bag.

  They spoke softly, but I picked up snatches of the conversation, especially when the man spoke. He had a hearty salesman’s delivery and his speech was peppered with excruciating clichés like “Whatever floats your boat” and “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” They were the kind of lines that all but ensured his back wasn’t getting scratched any time soon. I didn’t know how Reynolds stood it.

  “What we have here is a symbiotic relationship,” he said, his tone getting warmer.

  I started to wonder if we should do the sisterly thing by saying hello and giving the poor woman an escape strategy when she dropped the bomb.

  “Listen, pal, what we have here is a temporary arrangement. Very temporary. We both know I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire if you hadn’t accidentally seen something you weren’t meant to see. So you can stop pretending that we’re going to be picking out china patterns anytime soon. The minute this weekend is over, I’m going to make a nice little bonfire with your flyers, your business cards, and that ugly shirt you gave me.” Kristi Reynolds spoke the words slowly and, if I had to guess from the tone, they were delivered with a smile, so no one watching from a distance would ever imagine they weren’t a happy, flirtatious couple out for a predinner drink. It was eerie.

  “Here’s the list and a map so you don’t screw it up. Thirty-five locations. Make sure you stay away from these ten. Is that clear? If you concentrate on the top five, we should get the response we want.”

  She instructed the man on how to proceed. Refusing to take the hint, the man still tried to turn the business meeting into a social one and suggested they’d celebrate together when the job was done.

  “If that pudgy wet thing on my leg is your hand, remove it now before I stick a fork in it and you never get to date Mrs. Palmer and her five daughters again.” She laughed at the end as if they were having a fabulous time and she’d just said something wildly amusing.

  Dang, the woman had a way with words! Why didn’t I ever come up with lines like that? My bon mots generally came at four in the morning, long after the moment to deliver them had passed.

  Kristi excused herself and walked to the bar for another drink.

  “That was fast. Hard drinker?” Rolanda whispered.

  “I think she wants to get away from him before she goes too far. She still needs him for something and she’s giving herself time to ratchet down. That’s what I’d need to do after the fork comment,” I said. “I’d be hyperventilating.”

  On her way back, mixed drink in hand, Kristi looked at Rolanda—out of uniform—and couldn’t quite place her. Then she came a step closer and saw my exhibitor badge. The three of us nodded politely, and Rolanda and I feigned surprise, as if we hadn’t known she was there. I didn’t think she bought it.

  The next ten minutes passed quickly and Rolanda and I didn’t hear much. Obviously Kristi had advised the man to keep his voice down. Was she getting a kickback from his sales or giving him leads? Whatever it was, they were in bed together, figuratively if not literally. I took a page from Kristi’s book and went to the bar for a beer but really to see who it was she had been emasculating.

  He was about forty years old; thick, dark blond hair; a little pasty; probably ten years and ten pounds past his prime but still the kind of guy your mother’s friends would refer to as “a good catch.” He wore a sport jacket over a polo shirt and khaki slacks. Kristi and her male companion kept the conversation to a minimum, and after what she must have considered a reasonable amount of time, they got up to leave. I went out of my way to say good-bye, hoping the man would turn around and I’d get a better look at him, but he didn’t bite. At their abandoned table were a few crumpled dollars and Kristi’s untouched second drink. She recoiled as the man attempted to put his hand on her shoulder, and they left the bar.

  “I had a date once that lasted forty-five minutes,” I said. “And that was with dinner. Big mistake—knew it right from the get-go. But twenty minutes? That’s got to be a new record.”

  “If the magic’s not there, the magic’s not there.”

  Neither of us really thought Kristi and the man in the polo shirt were on a date.

  “That color reminded me of something,” Rolanda said. I’d thought the same thing the minute I’d seen it.

  “Ya think? It’s all over the SlugFest booth. I’m guessing that was Scott Reiger.”

  Once Kristi and her friend left, I showed Rolanda the literature I had taken from the SlugFest booth. It was long on marketing speak but short on details. The bio pic looked ten years old, but the man Kristi had been duking it out with was definitely Scott Reiger.

  “I also made a copy of his meeting schedule.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone once told me you can’t believe everything you read. You have to read between the lines. Let’s look at that directory again.”

  In addition to the brief company description, BioSafe, the company that made SlugFest, had taken a four-color full-page ad on the inside back cover of the book.

  “Probably not cheap,” Rolanda said.

  “Especially for a brand-new company with no track record and limited distribution. They do say self-promotion is key for start-ups and newbies.”

  “More likely Kristi Reynolds threatened to break his kneecaps if he didn’t take it.”

  I took my laptop out of my backpack.

  “Eighty percent battery. That should last for a few searches.” SlugFest was first. The BioSafe Web site mirrored the booth, the ad, and probably the man—a few catchphrases; not many details on scientific credentials, ingredients in the product, or how it worked but lots of salmon-colored images that someone must have decided were a warm counterpoint to the less attractive but necessary slug pictures.

  As the founder, Scott’s bio was the first and the longest. He h
ad an extensive sales and marketing background but not in any gardening-related businesses. Nine months earlier, he’d left an executive position at a well-known pharmaceutical company to start BioSafe. On paper he was the male equivalent of Kristi—aggressive, successful, and single-minded. They’d make a great couple if she didn’t stick a fork in him.

  “So what does he need her for?” Rolanda asked. “Entrée into the gardening community?”

  The way to Kristi’s heart was through her balance sheet. All he had to do was write a check for that to happen. Maybe she’d needed him. I googled Kristi next, and the Big Apple Flower Show popped up. She’d been at the helm for two years, taking over from Allegra Douglas. The jury was still out on her performance.

  An article in The Trentonian made it sound as if she was single-handedly bringing the event into the twenty-first century. A less flattering piece in a New York paper cited the exodus of numerous long-term employees, exhibitors, and community supporters. Referred to as “the always outspoken,” Mrs. Jean Moffitt was quoted as saying, “Kristi Reynolds has shaken up our neat little world, but perhaps we were getting too fusty. Too unimaginative. To whom will we pass the torch when all the old-timers like me are planted in the ground if not to the young innovators? Some of her methods may be unorthodox, but if she can sustain us through these few difficult economic times, then I applaud what she’s doing.”

  But not everyone felt the same way about Kristi, including her predecessor, the snarky, chain-smoking Allegra Douglas.

  Forty-six

  By the time I left El Quixote, the streets were slick with the first drops of rain. Traffic had slowed to a sluggish crawl and people with a single arm raised appeared on every corner. I’d never get a cab. I considered the bus but had no change and no idea what the fare was these days, and I knew better than to go into a store or restaurant and ask for change. In New York this is almost as welcome a thing to say as “This is a stickup.”

  It’s a fact of life in the city that the four-dollar umbrella man is never there when you need him. I turned my collar up, tucked in my hair, and tried to make a twenty-minute walk take ten. The rain had picked up. I was trapped at a light between two better-prepared pedestrians, the shoulders of my wool blazer catching the runoff from both their umbrellas. When the light changed, I stepped off the curb to the furious honking of someone attempting to make a right. Jeez, give me a break—you’re in a warm, dry car and I’m in a monsoon. Relax yourself.

  The honking continued even after I’d crossed the street. What a jerk.

  That’s when I noticed the driver had double-parked and his window was sliding down. “Paula! Ms. Holliday, let me give you a ride.”

  The rain was coming down pretty hard and I had trouble seeing. I moved closer to the curb and shielded my eyes with my hands. It was John Stancik, looking very inviting. “Have you been following me?”

  “That sounds a little paranoid. Of course not.”

  I jogged back across the street and opened the passenger’s side door. I checked the backseat.

  “All alone. You trust me?”

  Why not? Didn’t my mother always tell me to trust a policeman? Stancik moved the cardboard tray that was on the floor of the passenger’s side.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Station house is five minutes from here. I just got off duty and picked up some coffee. I saw you about two blocks ago.”

  “But you thought you’d let me get really wet before offering me a lift?” I got in the car and John handed me a stack of paper napkins from the coffee shop.

  “I was trying to decide how much I felt like sparring after putting in a long day.” That was fair.

  I put on my seat belt, and we pulled away from the curb. “Where’s your friend—out looking for a club that still has a disco ball?”

  “Give him a break. He’s a lot older than you think. He’s just very well preserved.”

  I never knew any cops when I lived in New York. There were thousands of them, anonymous until one of them did something heroic or illegal, or was accused of the same. Most of time they faded into the mosaic of the city. You didn’t see them until you needed them. Then, unlike the umbrella vendors, they materialized. Which was a good thing.

  In Springfield, I knew them all by name. And their wives’ names and their pets’. Some of that had to do with the size of the town; some had to do with my reputation as an amateur sleuth, a fact I kept to myself on the short drive to Lucy’s.

  The next block was one-way, heading north. Stancik drove farther west, where he’d be able to make a left and go south. We caught one of the red lights.

  “Do you know where I’m staying?” I asked, suspicious.

  “Wow, you are paranoid.” Either he had an excellent memory or when we met this morning he’d filed it for future reference. A chill went through my wet clothes.

  Without asking he turned the heat on. “Let me know if it’s blowing too much. I got two coffees. You want one?”

  I lifted the cardboard tray he’d wedged between a large briefcase and the hump in the back of the car.

  “Real or decaf?” I asked.

  “I got one of each—take your pick.”

  “That’s a strategy,” I said. “One for now and one for later?” I took the cup marked regular and popped off the lid.

  The light changed and John took the left. After a block, he pulled into an empty metered spot and put the car in park.

  “All right. I saw you in El Quixote and thought I might catch up with you when you left. I got one of each to be on the safe side.”

  My heart started to beat faster and it wasn’t from two sips of coffee. Did everyone have that reaction when they talked to cops, or was it only people who worried they’d done something wrong? Had he seen me with Rolanda? Did he know what we were up to? He wasn’t saying.

  “So were you spying on me?”

  “Complete accident.”

  We made small talk, occasionally blowing on our coffees, although it was more like something to do than an actual safety measure, until the subject returned, as I knew it would, to Jamal Harrington. He proceeded carefully, not wanting to make his offer of a ride seem like a quid pro quo—more information for a warm, dry vehicle and a hot beverage—but it did. Soon after, we pulled up to Lucy’s building without my having said much. He left the engine running.

  “Apart from your prime suspect—a seventeen-year-old A student with no motive and no record,” I said, “how’s the case going?”

  “Not an A student,” he corrected. “B plus. Looks like somebody whacked Mr. Bleimeister on the head a couple of times with a brick or bricklike object, then dumped him in the river. Might have survived the blows if he hadn’t drowned.” It was a ghastly thought.

  “If he was a little slimmer we might not have found him for days.”

  “What are you saying—heavy people float better? I would have thought the opposite was true.”

  “You would have been wrong. If we hadn’t found him so soon after his death, we might not have connected it to Otis Randolph’s.”

  “Another brick to the head?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “M.E. says the two men died within an hour of each other, and the marks on the victims’ heads were remarkably similar. Two hours later and there would have been a shift change. Might have gone unnoticed. Randolph stank of alcohol, but there was none in his blood. And it’s a million to one that falling down the escalator and hitting his head—even if he’d been an epileptic—would have been enough to kill him.”

  “Was the wound—?”

  “About the size of a brick with some indentations on it, and above the brim.” He looked up from his coffee cup. “That means the top of the head. Not easy to fall and hit the top of your head, unless you’re jumping off a diving board into an empty pool,” he said.

  “And even then you’d have to be an Olympic medalist to hit the very top of your head. Nobody noticed this when Otis’s body was found
?”

  “Cause of death was listed as undetermined.”

  Poor Otis. What did he know or what had he seen? And what possible connection could Garland Bleimeister and Otis Randolph have had—a sixtysomething-year-old handyman from Harlem and a college dropout from—how did Labidou put it—Smallville, Pennsylvania?

  “We know Jamal Harrington was acquainted with Otis Randolph from statements given by Wagner employees, and he was seen talking with Bleimeister on Wednesday. He’s a link, that’s all. We just want to talk to him. No one’s calling him a suspect.” The word yet hung in the air.

  “Isn’t that just semantics? Look, I only met him a few times and doubt I’ll ever see him again. Show’s over tomorrow and I’ll go back to my sleepy Connecticut town and plant pansies or whatever it is you think suburbanites do.”

  Stancik placed his coffee cup in the holder, fished two business cards out of his wallet, and gave them to me.

  “What’s this for—in case I lose one?”

  “I like pansies. One’s for Jamal. The other is in case you decide to call me after you get back to Springfield. It’s not that geographically undesirable.” Very smooth. Had I said I lived in Springfield? Right, he was a cop.

  “Thanks for the lift. I’ll be thinking of you at three A.M. when the caffeine kicks in.”

  “Feel free to give me a call.”

  I turned up my collar and dashed across the wet street into the vestibule of Lucy’s building. A note was taped to her mailbox.

  Stop in whenever you get home. J. C.

  I’d started the day with J. C. Why not end it with her? I’d catch her up on what Rolanda and I had learned, and with any luck there’d be good leftovers.

  My shoes squirted water with each step up to J. C’s apartment. I slipped out of them and shook off the rain before ringing her doorbell. Just as my finger hovered near the buzzer, J. C. opened the door, having seen me through the peephole. She looked paler than usual and wore the expression of a disapproving teacher. I wasn’t greeted with the smell of a welcoming dinner and Moochie and Bella didn’t dash out as they usually did.