by Nora Kane
“Everything all right, Mrs. Nelson?” he asked.
“Yes, how are you doing today?” Rose replied.
The security guard didn’t answer her question. Instead, he looked at Margot’s car. “Does this vehicle belong to your friends?”
“It’s mine,” Margot told him, “is there a problem?”
“No problem, I just like to keep track of who’s coming in and coming out.”
“You check out every car you don’t recognize?”
“If I have time, which I usually do. It’s pretty quiet around here. They pay me to keep it that way.” He looked back to Rose and said, “One of your neighbors seemed to think you were arguing with some people who came to your front door. These people specifically.”
“As you can see, we’re fine now. Just a little misunderstanding.”
“Which neighbor complained?” Margot asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Did they call you? Or did you just run into them while on patrol?”
“Does it matter?”
“I’m just trying to figure out who on this empty street told you there was a problem.”
“I’m just doing my job. There’s been a lot of complaints about rather aggressive salespeople canvassing the neighborhood. I thought you might be one of them.”
“I can assure you, they didn’t try to sell me anything,” Rose told him.
“Old friends?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’m fine, Ronnie, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“If you say so, Mrs. Nelson.”
“Thanks, Ronnie. They were just leaving,” Mrs. Nelson said.
Ronnie nodded and then said, “You all have a blessed day,” and then got back into the dark sedan and slowly cruised away.
“That was a tad aggressive,” Cassie remarked as they watched him leave.
Margot looked back at Rose. “The look on your face doesn’t make me think he’s making you feel safer.”
“It doesn’t?” Rose asked as she forced a smile. “I guess I was thinking about something else.”
“Were you thinking about something that scares you?”
“Scares me?”
“You looked scared.”
“Well, we were just talking about a friend of mine who was probably tortured and murdered during a time in my life I did a lot of things I’ve come to regret so, yeah I was.”
“If you say so. I’m with Cassie though, that was a tad aggressive.”
“He’s just doing his job, and he wasn’t the only one being aggressive. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so hard on him.”
“I don’t like being lied to. Are any of your neighbors even home right now?”
“It doesn’t matter. He wasn’t totally wrong. I was seconds away from calling myself when you first showed up. Look, I really do have somewhere to be.”
“Fair enough, thanks again for your time.”
As they were driving away, Cassie said, “Is it just me that got a creep vibe off of that security guard?”
“No, although, some of those guys do take their job too seriously.”
“Why do you think he lied about a neighbor complaining?”
“He needed a reason to justify showing up and checking us out. I would tell the same lie when I was a cop. That’s probably why it bugged me.”
“Do you think Rose is right about it being a mistake? That Strickland was actually the real target? I mean, it wasn’t that long after that someone shot Strickland, was it?”
“I’d have to look it up, but it was probably over a year later.”
“Then it worked? At least, until he screwed up again?”
“Maybe. She hesitated big time when I asked if Strickland and Armstrong had a beef. I don’t think she was being honest about that part.”
“Why would she lie? It’s not like she would need to protect Strickland.”
“I don’t know.”
Margot’s phone buzzed and she answered.
“Since you did me a solid, we can talk but not on the phone,” Dean Stone told her.
“Where do you want to meet?” Margot replied.
“I’ve got a buddy who has a condo on the beach. If I text you the address, can you be there in an hour?”
“Yeah, see you then.”
“Who was that?” Cassie asked as Margot hung up.
“Some more background for your show.”
“Cool.”
“Where do you want me to drop you off?”
“Nowhere. I want to come along.”
“Sorry, not for this one.”
Chapter 5
“Long time no see.”
“Yeah,” Margot told him as she came into the condo and found Stone sitting on the sofa with a tumbler of brown liquid in his hand. “No offense, but I was hoping to keep it that way.”
“Yeah, I get that, but you called me. Did you miss me?”
Margot sat down in the chair across from him and ignored his question. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“I haven’t actually said anything yet. Depending on what you ask me, all I might be doing is telling you to get the Hell out.”
“I’m not looking to get you in any trouble.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“I’m not a cop anymore. This isn’t even a real case. I’m doing it for a YouTube show.”
Stone laughed. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m still going to tell you to get the Hell out if I feel the need.”
“Fair enough.”
“Can I get you a drink while things are still friendly? You still a Makers on ice girl?”
“I am, but...”
“But nothing. If this is going to be a friendly conversation then we’re drinking.”
Margot didn’t want to argue so she said, “Okay, I’ll take one.”
Stone finished his drink in a couple of gulps and then went to the kitchen. He came back with two tumblers filled with whiskey on ice.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Steven Armstrong.”
“Never heard of him. I guess we can enjoy our whiskey in peace.”
“Strickland.”
“Is that the asshole who got popped in front of an elementary school?”
“That’s the one.”
“Is Armstrong the guy that popped him?”
“No.”
“Okay, why are you asking me about him?”
“The rumor is, before he met his end, he worked for you. So did Armstrong.”
“I’ve employed a lot of people over the years.”
“Yeah, but only so many who got shot picking up their kid from school or had someone mail his wife his eyeball.”
“That was Armstrong?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t think I had anything to do with either of them, do you? I mean, I’m no saint, but I’m not mailing spouses body parts or shooting guys in front of their kids.”
“Sure, you wouldn’t, but sometimes the help gets overly enthusiastic.”
“Not mine. Look, speaking purely hypothetically, if I were to hire somebody to do that kind of thing, I’d be pretty discriminating. You know, prisons are full of assholes who hired the wrong guy. It doesn’t matter in either of those cases. I had no reason to want either of those guys dead.”
“Strickland had a big mouth. Rumor is, he was talking to the cops.”
Stone laughed. “Telling them what?”
“You tell me.”
Stone laughed some more. “Again, speaking hypothetically, if Strickland did work for me, the only person he could have ratted out was himself, or maybe his pal, what was that guy’s name?”
“Armstrong?”
“No, wait, that wasn’t it.”
“It wasn’t?”
Stone paused a second and then said, “Actually that was it. He went by ‘Muscles’ back in the day. A play on his name—you know, ‘arm strong’—and the fact he had a pair of guns under
those shirtsleeves. He knew it too; always wore a shirt at least a size too small to show off the arms. He would have said it was to show off his tattoo, but everybody knew he was showing off the biceps.”
“That’s a lot of details for a couple of guys you don’t know.”
“Well, it is hypothetical. Anyway, neither of them were exactly the kind of guys you hire to handle sensitive information. There’s a reason I’m not in jail, Margot. If I trusted guys like that I would have never gotten this far.”
Margot had a feeling there was some truth in what he was saying.
“Is it possible,” she continued, “hypothetically, that they were working for you the day he disappeared?”
“No.”
‘That was emphatic for two guys you hardly remember doing something a long time ago.”
“That’s because if Muscles had gone missing while working for me, I’d have seen that as an attack. I would have looked into that shit, and I would have looked hard. I couldn’t afford in my line of work to look weak and letting some asshole mail my people’s body parts back to his wife puts out the wrong image. Strickland would have had to answer some questions too.”
“Could they be working for somebody else in a similar capacity?”
“It’s not impossible, but I frown on that kind of thing. Muscles didn’t seem like that kind of guy, hypothetically.”
“Strickland?”
“Yeah, I could see it, but I didn’t. Otherwise, he and I might have had some hypothetical problems.”
“Anything you remember about them? Hypothetically?”
“No. If they hadn’t suffered horrible fates, I wouldn’t remember them at all.”
“How about a girl named Rose?”
“I knew a stripper named Rose back around the time Muscles and Strickland were doing some miscellaneous jobs on my behalf. Now, she was memorable.”
“Tall brunette?”
“Her hair was jet black then. What does she have to do with anything?”
“If it’s the same girl, she was dating Strickland.”
“You sure?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Huh, I was thinking she was seeing Armstrong, but maybe my memory is off. It was a while and to be frank, I didn’t really give a damn who she was seeing once she made it clear it wouldn’t be me.”
“The file indicates Armstrong, or ‘Muscles,’ was a bit flaky.”
“Really?”
“That’s what his wife said.”
“Nah, not Muscles. I don’t hire people like that not if I can help it. Strickland, yeah I could see it, though I never did.”
“Rose described him as a stand-up guy.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t dispute that. If he hadn’t gotten himself killed, I think he could have gone beyond just being muscle.”
“Why would his wife say that then?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“I just might do that.”
Chapter 6
Margot left Stone’s condo without learning anything more other than that Stone was lonely these days. She saw she’d got a text from Shaw asking her to come back to the office right away. She texted back that she was on her way.
She came in to find Radcliff and his new partner standing in the lobby with Shaw.
“The gang’s all here,” Shaw said. “Shall we talk in my office?”
“Sure,” Radcliff said. He didn’t offer any greeting to Margot and seemed to be going out of his way not to.
“What’s up, guys?”
Daniels, Radcliff’s new partner, took a business card out of his jacket pocket, held it up, and turned to Margot. “Is this yours?”
“Has my name on it, so, yeah.”
“We found it on a dead guy about an hour ago,” Radcliff told her.
“Okay, I don’t know who I gave this particular card to, but I guarantee he was alive at the time.”
Radcliff suppressed a smile. Daniels put the card away and then said, “Does the name Marshall Mattis mean anything to you?”
“It does. I met with him around lunchtime at Layla’s West.”
“Was he a client?”
“No, just someone who claimed to have information.”
“Was this about Cassie’s show?” Radcliff asked.
“Yeah. Is he the dead guy?”
“Let us worry about that—” Daniels began but Radcliff interrupted, saying, “Yeah.”
Daniels gave him a dirty look.
“We live together, and even if we didn’t, she’d figure it out. She’s a detective.”
“Can you talk about what you guys were discussing?” Daniels asked, turning back to Margot.
“Normally, I’d say no, but since we were doing it for a show, I guess it's not exactly confidential. He claimed to have information on Steven Armstrong.”
“Did he?”
“Yes and no. He led us to the last person Armstrong talked to. What happened to him?”
“Let us worry about—”
“—Two to the back of the head while he was sitting in his car,” Radcliff said. “Small caliber so most of the mess was inside of his skull instead of on the windshield. It seems like the shooter was in the backseat so they were either sneaky or Mattis knew them. Could he have told you something that would get him killed?”
“No. I mean, he found a witness in an old case, but it’s not like he named the killer. I’d say look into Rose Nelson, but it sounds like I was with her when he got shot.”
