Tilt-a-Whirl jc-1

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Thank you,” Ashley says. “Mrs. Bright picked it out for me.”

  “She did good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We keep the old dress?” Ceepak kind of whispers it to Jane.

  “No. But we photographed it.”

  “Good.”

  “It's in the trash if-”

  “No. That's okay.”

  Ceepak smiles at Ashley, like he's apologizing for talking shop with another cop.

  “I'm sorry I can't remember more,” Ashley says.

  “Maybe we could make it like a game?”

  “A game?”

  “You ever play Twenty Questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Was it a man or a woman?”

  “Man.”

  “Skinny or fat?”

  “Skinny.”

  The artist starts moving her pencil, swooping it around the sketch paper.

  “Okay. That's good. Was he black or white?”

  “White.”

  “Hispanic?”

  “You mean like a Puerto Rican?”

  “Or a Mexican.”

  “No. He was white-white.”

  “Handsome or ugly?”

  Ashley actually giggles.

  “Ugly. He had this, you know … dragon on his neck.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “Yeah. Like Ozzy Osborne?”

  “And it was a dragon?”

  “I think so. There were flames coming out the mouth. It stuck out from under his T-shirt.”

  “He was wearing a T-shirt?”

  “Yes, sir. With colors all over it.”

  “Was it orange?”

  “No.”

  “Pink? Purple?”

  “No. It was all kinds of colors. Like rainbow sherbet?”

  “Tie-dye?”

  “Yes! It was a tie-dyed shirt!”

  “What about his pants?”

  “Dirty blue jeans. With holes in the knees. I could smell him.”

  “How'd he smell?”

  “Like pee-pee.”

  “Urine?”

  “Yes, sir. Urine.”

  I peek at the sketch. The guy is starting to look like a bum.

  “What kind of shoes? Did you see his shoes?”

  “Yes. He had on boots. Hiking boots.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  Nobody in the room with Ceepak knows why this is so incredibly huge. I do. The Timberland prints.

  “Were they tan hiking boots?”

  “Yeah. Kind of light brownish.”

  The chief slips into the Interrogation Room.

  “Don't mind me, Miss Hart,” he says. “You and Ceepak keep going.”

  “Is that your name?” she says. “Ceepak?”

  “Yes, ma'am. It's my last name but it's what everybody calls me.”

  “You can call me Ashley.”

  “I know. We found your bracelet.”

  “Is it broken?”

  “No. It's fine.”

  “Will I get it back?”

  “Sure you will, honey,” Jane says, patting Ashley's hand.

  “My boyfriend gave it to me.”

  Ceepak smiles.

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  “Kind of. Yeah. I mean, sort of. He gave me the bracelet.”

  Ah, the ID bracelet. The gift choice of cheap boyfriends for decades. Right up there with the J.C. Penney's heart locket. Major bling-bling when you're twelve, thirteen. I can remember handing out a few such baubles in my day.

  “Nice gift,” Ceepak says. “What’s your boyfriend's name?”

  “Ben. Ben Sinclair? His father is the mayor.”

  So now the mayor's son is dragged into this deal. I see the chief's big jaw popping in and out around his ears, like he's grinding his teeth, sanding them down nice and smooth, wondering how much more bad news he's going to get this morning.

  “We were supposed to hook up tonight … Ben and I….”

  “A date?”

  “No. Dad won't … I mean … he wouldn't let me date, even though I'm almost thirteen. So Ben and me just sort of hang out with everybody else….”

  “Let's get back to the sketch,” the chief says, not interested in the whole Tiger Beat Teen Romance report.

  “Yes, sir,” Ashley says.

  Ceepak sort of sighs in a way that says, “I wish you hadn't cut her off, chief.”

  “Remember this morning when you told me about a crazy man with a gun?” Ceepak gently asks the girl.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why'd you say he was crazy?”

  “I dunno. The way he looked, I guess.”

  “How'd he look?”

  “Freaky. Big eyes. Like a bug or something. Like they were going to pop out of his head.”

  “Did he have a beard?” The chief lobs in another lead balloon.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What kind?”

  “I forget.”

  Ceepak tries to help.

  “Was it a big, bushy beard-like Santa Claus?”

  “No.” Ashley closes her eyes, trying to remember.

  “A goatee?” the chief asks.

  “Yes, sir. Like a goat! It was white.”

  “Was his hair white, too?” Ceepak asks.

  “Black and white. Like he was older? You know?”

  “Sure,” Ceepak says. “Was it short? Like mine?” He playfully scratches the stubble around his ears.

  “No. It was way long. And greasy. He looked like a hippie.”

  “A hippie?” Ceepak leans back in mock surprise. “What's a hippie?”

  “I dressed up like one for Halloween this one time. You know- long hair with a bandanna, beads, flower-power sunglasses.”

  “Did the crazy man have on flower-power sunglasses?”

  “No.”

  “What about beads?” The chief seems to want to turn this into a tag-team interview.

  “No … I don't think so … maybe….”

  Ashley's getting confused.

  “Maybe. He could've had beads….” She now looks about to cry. “I can't remember.”

  “That's okay,” Ceepak says.

  Jane pats the girl's hand again.

  “I want to see my mom….”

  “Of course,” Jane says and turns to Ceepak. “We reached her on her cell. She's on the way.”

  “She was in the city,” the chief adds and looks at his watch. “Should be here soon.”

  “Hey,” Ceepak says to Ashley, “are you hungry?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Maybe we should take a little break. We've got some Pop-Tarts and stuff in the kitchen here.”

  “Okay.” Sounds like Pop-Tarts don't really cut it, though.

  “Or,” Ceepak tries again, “we could send a car over to The Pancake Palace. Pick up their chocolate-chip special. With marshmallow sauce if you want. Does that work?”

  She nods.

  “You want to wait in here while we send someone out? Maybe help Shelly work on the picture some more?”

  “Sure.”

  Ceepak stands up from the table. “One order of chocolate chip pancakes, coming right up.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ceepak.”

  “You're welcome, Ashley.”

  Ceepak and the chief head out the door. I meet them in the hall.

  “Sorry about barging in like that,” the chief says to Ceepak.

  “We survived.”

  “Yeah. I'll find someone to run out to the restaurant.” The chief looks at me.

  “I could do it,” I volunteer.

  “You need Danny in the back room?”

  “He's my partner. Second set of ears.”

  “10-4. Stick with Ceepak, kid. And John? I want you to, you know, basically head this thing up.”

  “I'm sure the State boys-”

  “I don't give a damn about the state police. I want you on point. We need to wrap this thing up quick or Mayor Sinclair's going to have another heart attack.”

  Ceepak nods.
I guess you're not breaking any rules if your boss writes new ones.

  “After she eats something,” he says, “I want her to walk us through what she saw. Then, we need to talk to her mother. Find out if Mr. Hart had enemies.”

  “It'll be a long list,” the chief says

  “We'll try to narrow the field.”

  “Check.”

  “We should work out a security detail with State,” Ceepak suggests. “24-hour coverage….”

  “Done and done.”

  It's like they're back in the Army, protecting another innocent kid, hunting down another bad guy.

  Only this time, it isn't a chaplain.

  It's a crazy guy with googly eyes, a goatee, and a gun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The pancakes delivered to Ashley look good. I can see the chocolate chips melting inside the soft, spongy flapjacks.

  The sketch artist is gone.

  They finished the composite of the killer about fifteen minutes ago and are taking a little break before moving on to the rough stuff, the “tell-us-what-you-saw” stuff.

  Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling. It's almost noon and all I've eaten today is about six cups of black coffee. No sugar. No cream. Nada. I'd do some Oreos from the vending machine but I'm all out of loose change and the dollar slot never works, just spits your crinkled bills back at you.

  I saw the sketch before the artist hustled it out the door. Our suspect resembles a roadie for the Grateful Dead who hit rock bottom sometime around 1974. A crazy, aging hippie. A beach bum junkie.

  There's a TV mounted on the wall behind me that's usually tuned to ESPN or one of the other sports channels. Since there are few interrogations, this viewing room is mostly used for catching whatever game is on. Today, however, the set is tuned to Fox, the first network to have “live” coverage of the “Murder Down The Shore,” as they call it.

  The TV guys always like to give disasters snappy titles. I'm surprised this one isn't called “Beach Blanket Bang-o,” seeing how many bullets were used.

  They cut to State Crime Scene Investigator Saul Slominsky.

  This I have to hear.

  I turn up the TV.

  The mayor of Sea Haven, a youngish guy named Hugh Sinclair who owns a bunch of motels, car washes, and ice cream shops up and down the island, is standing next to Slobbinsky.

  I wonder if Hizzoner knows his son is dating the victim's daughter.

  Maybe. He sure looks glum, like people are checking out of his motels in droves now that there's a long-haired, bug-eyed, smack-junkie killer running amok on our pristine sandy beaches. This is bad for business, worse than riptide or pink jellyfish-even worse than that shark in Jaws because, face it, to avoid the damn shark, all you really had to do was stay out of the water.

  Slominsky has about two dozen microphones stacked in front of him. I can tell he finally dragged a comb through his greasy hair and brushed up his moustache. At the moment, no egg is visible anywhere on his face.

  “At approximately 7:15 this morning,” Slominsky starts, trying to sound solemn and serious by lowering his otherwise whiny voice, “Mr. Reginald Hart was the victim of an armed robbery here at the Sunnyside Playland Amusement Park. He was shot seven times at point-blank range in the chest.”

  I'm glad Ceepak's not in here listening to Slobbinsky blow it.

  I'm only a summer cop, but even I know you don't give away all the gory details of a crime when your suspect is still at large. It helps you eliminate the weirdos who'd confess to anything. Doesn't Slominsky watch any cop shows at all?

  “Mr. Hart was pronounced dead at the scene by the Ocean County Medical Examiner. Fortunately, Mr. Hart's thirteen-year-old daughter, who was with him at the time of the murder, escaped and has helped us put together this composite sketch….”

  Oh, great. Now Slobbinsky's telling the perp he needs to find Ashley and gun her down, the sooner the better.

  The kid can ID you, mister.

  Slominsky should hire one of those airplanes to buzz the beach dragging a long banner off its tail: “Hey-Don't Forget To Kill Ashley Too!”

  He holds up the charcoal sketch. The artist did a good job. The guy looks completely scary. Eyes popping out of sockets, long scraggly hair, a stringy goatee, and a dragon tattoo crawling up his neck.

  “Who is this asshole?”

  A woman in a very short skirt has entered my room.

  “The hippie?”

  “The asshole holding up the sketch.”

  “Saul Slominsky,” I tell her. “State Police Crime Scene Investigator.”

  “Jesus. What an idiot. You a cop?” She's looking at my shorts and baseball cap. She's only a year or two older than me, but she's a grownup wearing a short-skirted business suit and I'm sitting here in my playclothes.

  “Are you with the police?” she asks again, with that don't-make-me-ask-again-dummy tone underlining every word.

  “Yeah. Sort of. Part time. Yeah. Cop.”

  What is it about women with long tan legs and tiny skirts that turns me into a mushmouth? If I knew, I couldn't tell you right now, because my mouth is full of mush.

  She's got very strong calf muscles, the kind that could crack walnuts, and this light blue tribal tattoo wrapping around her ankle that lets every man who sees it know that beneath her all-business exterior, she can be a naughty girl, too.

  “I'm Cynthia Stone. Mr. Hart's attorney?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “They told me to wait in here. Is that right?”

  “Uh-”

  I don't know why I open my mouth. She's not waiting for me to answer anything.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  She looks good when she swears like that. She puts her hands on her hips and sticks out her chest, all huffy. She has a big chest and one of those miraculous bras that pushes everything up and makes it all look even bigger.

  “I can't believe this shit. We were down here on business-”

  “You and Mr. Hart?”

  “Yes. Real estate transaction.”

  The way she says it? She's warning me not to even think impure thoughts about the nature of her relationship with her boss, a guy at least thirty or forty years older than her. But then again, Mr. Hart was a billionaire and, hey, what's thirty or forty years between friends when one of them's worth thirty or forty billion dollars?

  “Why the hell didn't they call me? I was at the beach house.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “I'm using the guest cottage.”

  “Sure.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Can't really say.”

  “Because you don't really know?”

  “Something like that.”

  Ms. Stone sits down and crosses her legs, obscuring my view of them. She's shifted her attention to Ashley and Jane and Ceepak on the other side of our window.

  I take in a deep breath. It's been a tough morning.

  Vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood.

  I only know that's what I'm smelling because that's what Ceepak said it was back at the Tilt-A-Whirl when he wondered whether young Ashley purchased perfume at Victoria's Secret.

  Maybe Ashley doesn't.

  But I bet Ms. Stone does.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Malloy's roadblock, we hear, is moving more smoothly.

  Now that they kind of know who they're looking for, they don't need to stop every car on the causeway, just the ones with hippie burnouts riding inside. I figure all VW bugs and microbuses are considered totally suspicious.

  So far, the guys canvassing the beach and streets around Playland have come up with diddly-squat. No witnesses, no one who heard the nine pops go off. Seven bullets hit Hart, two hit the turtle shell behind him. Ceepak told me he got a good look at all nine holes before the State boys showed up. He sounded like he was describing the front end of a golf course.

  The only jogger on the beach at 7:15 A.M. was this guy with his iPod earbuds stuffed in so deep, the music was melting his
earwax. He didn't hear a thing. Neither did my buddy Joey T., the beach sweeper. His tractor makes all kinds of noise when he's out there waking up the gulls.

  Here at the house, Ashley's mother showed up and that means our eyewitness stopped talking.

  “My poor baby!” she said, understandably upset. “I think it might be best for all concerned if I took Ashley home.”

  My visitor, the lawyer, decided- “Hey, if the ex can barge in, so can I.” She just about knocked the IR door off its hinges when she sent it swinging.

  Ashley's mother smiled frostily when Ms. Stone made her entrance.

  “Betty,” the lawyer said, clipping the two syllables with a sharp bite.

  “Ladies?” Ceepak stood up. “We need to ask Ashley a few more questions….”

  “They're just doing their jobs, mommy,” Ashley said.

  “Of course they are, dear,” her mother agreed. “I just think it might be better if we did this at home….”

  “With a lawyer present.” Ms. Stone tossed in her two cents.

  “A lawyer? Heavens. Do you officers think Ashley needs a lawyer?” She smiled again. I'll bet she uses a lot of those Crest whitening strips.

  “It's up to you, ma'am.” Ceepak turned to Ashley. “Would you be more comfortable at home?”

  “Yes, sir. If that's all right with you.” The way the kid said it? Broke my heart.

  Ceepak's too.

  So the ex-Mrs. Hart took her daughter's hand and led her outside to their Mercedes. Two state police cars escorted them home. Ms. Stone told us she was checking into a B amp;B and would be remaining in Sea Haven “for the rest of the weekend.”

  Ceepak said that was swell, or words to that effect.

  Then he and I climbed back into the Ford Explorer and headed south to Ashley's house.

  We still had diddly-squat.

  “Mrs. Hart doesn't seem too upset by the murder,” Ceepak says.

  “Because she hated his guts.”

  A few years back, “The Broken Harts” bumped the Martians and Elvis off the front covers of all the supermarket tabloids. I never buy the gossip rags, I just read them while I wait in the express line behind people who can't count to fifteen.

  I know Hart's ex-wife (she was his third) scored the Sea Haven beach house in the divorce settlement but she didn't score much else. She had signed an “ironclad pre-nup” and all she got as a parting gift was the house and a small monthly allowance (which I'm sure is more money than Ceepak and me make all year-combined).