by James Ross
“Dat Pui can give us some winners. She jus’ do dis fo’ fun. She doesn’t need dis job. Her husband owns Poh Thang Chinese restaurant. We’ve eaten dere befo’.” The dealer smiled. She was small and very cute with jet black hair, beautifully polished nails, and a perfect smile. “He has two more besides dat one.”
“Which other ones does he own?”
“He also own Wong House and Chao Ching.” Pui finished paying off the winners.
“Those are Father Blair’s favorites,” Scottie P said. “We go there all the time. He loves the Emperor Chao Pork with bamboo shoots and pea pods.”
“Dat be numba 65 I tink,” YouWho said.
Pui flashed her smile as the cards came out of the electronic shoot. “Now come on Pui, deal yourself another Pai Gow so we can afford to go to Chao Ching,” Pork Chop said.
The guys and Shari looked at their cards. Captain Jer put his cards on the table quickly and ducked his head.
“What are you doing?” Pork Chop asked.
“Hiding.”
“From who?”
“Fat Peggy.”
“Fat Peggy? Who is that?”
“A flight attendant I dated thirty years ago. I don’t want her to see me.”
“I thought you were a ladies’ man,” Scottie P said. “Get her over here.”
Captain Jer smiled. “Not now. Back then she was good looking. She must live at Poh Thang now. I bet she’s put on eighty pounds.”
“Chinese women stay thin,” Pui said. “She not be living at Poh Thang.”
Shari puffed away. Her rings sparkled in the lights from the ceiling. She placed her cards on the table and turned to Captain Jer, “Don’t you have anything nice to say about anything?”
“Sure I do,” the ex-pilot replied.
“Like what?”
He stared at Shari. “You’ve got a nice rack.” The guys burst out laughing.
“You’re a pig.”
“No, Fat Peggy is.” He slammed down some more beer. “Listen, Sweetheart…”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’ll call you what I want.” His face flushed with color. “Listen, Sweetheart,” Captain Jer let the syllables roll out of his mouth. “I’ve been all over the world. I’ll tell you a little Chinese proverb.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Do you know why girls get big boobs?”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
“According to the Chinese it’s because they let boys touch them.” The guys chuckled. Pui blushed.
Shari was flustered. She reached for her drink and knocked it over, the contents soaking the felt covering, the cards, and chips. “I’m sorry.”
As she reached to pick up her glass a news alert flashed across the TV screen above the table. The sound muted. A picture of a motorcycle with a purple stripe was posted on the screen. A hotline number flashed across the bottom of the screen. Shari and the guys noticed the graphic.
“There’s the first clue,” Captain Jer said.
The pit boss and cocktail waitress scurried to help the clean-up. “Cash me out. I’m not in the mood.” She gathered her chips and left the table.
“Things must be getting hot for her,” Captain Jer said as he watched Shari walk away.
“Why do you say that?”
He nodded toward the TV. “There’s been a break in the 2Dix murder investigation.”
Shari left her car parked in the valet area. She continued to the front desk and got a complimentary room for the night in the hotel. Alone.
Chapter Seventy
It didn’t take long for Detectives Mullen and Basnahan to land on the front porch of Tindra’s home. They rapped on the door and waited. No one answered.
Bazz double-checked the driveway that ran along the side of the home. A car was parked in front of the detached single-car garage in the rear of the home. “Somebody is home. The kids are playing outside.”
“I hear them.”
Lester J knocked again. Still no answer. The pair turned to leave. The door creaked open. “Can I help you?” A disheveled Raul appeared wearing gym shorts and a tank top. He was barefoot and looked as if he just got out of bed. “Oh, it’s you two.”
“Sorry to bother you. We’re looking for Tindra. Is she here?”
“Yes, but she’s busy.”
The detectives’ first thought was that Raul and Tindra had been jostled out of an afternoon liaison. “We’ve only got a few questions for her,” Bazz said.
“Do you have my phone?”
“Yes, we do,” Lester J admitted.
“Can I have it back?”
“Right now, no,” Bazz replied. “After we talk to Tindra we might be able to release it back to you. It depends on what she has to say.”
Raul ran his hand through ruffled hair. His three day beard was filling in. “Let me see if she’s available.” He disappeared leaving the door open by two inches.
“Who is it?” Tindra asked when he entered the bedroom.
“The two detectives. They want to ask you some questions.”
“Did you tell them we were busy?”
Raul nodded. “They said they had a few questions for you.” He leaned against the door jamb. “I don’t know if you should talk to them.”
“I can tell them I have an attorney,” Tindra said as she slipped on a pair of panties.”
“I’ll tell them for you. Don’t talk to them.”
“A few questions aren’t going to hurt anything.” Tindra put on a pair of cutoffs.
“I don’t like them. They’re too nosy.” Raul paused. “The only good that can come out of this is that I can get my phone back.”
Tindra pulled a t-shirt over the top of her torso and looked in the mirror. “I look a mess.” She grabbed a brush. “Do I have the come-F-me-look?”
Raul smiled. “You certainly do.”
Tindra pecked him on the lips. “Let me see if I can say the right things and get your phone back.”
“Get rid of them so we can pick up where we left off. I’ll be waiting.”
She went to the front door and peeked through the opening, partially hiding her body behind it. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry to disturb you this afternoon,” Lester J began.
“We have a couple of questions for you,” Bazz added, “to see if we can get a clarification on some information.”
“I’ll try to help.” Tindra fluffed her hair. “Sorry, I look awful.”
Oh no you don’t, Bazz thought. He shuffled through his notes. “You said that Raul was receiving the threats on your life on his cell phone, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Where was he when he received those threats?
“As far as I know he was everywhere.”
Bazz took notes. “Were you with him when he received those threats?”
“Never.”
Bazz turned a few pages in his notepad. “Hmmmm. How did you discover that he was getting those threats?”
“I’ve already told you.” Tindra got indignant.
“I just want to hear it again.”
“He left his cell phone on the kitchen counter one day and I went through his text messages after an alert sounded. There were a lot of messages from Shari asking him if he would kill me.” Tindra opened the door further. “I asked him about the texts and he confessed that this lady had been texting him at all hours of the day wanting me killed. I reported every one of them to the police.”
“Yes,” Lester J confessed. “You did. So many times that the judge issued orders of protection and Shari spent a night in jail.”
“That’s what confuses us,” Bazz added. “We’ve received all of those texts and examined each one.”
“How could you?” Tindra said in a surprised tone. “Raul told me that he deleted all of them.”
“He did, but we retrieved them from his trash.”
“How could you do that? Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?”
“His cell phone has been entered into evidence. We obtained a search warrant to take it from him.”
“I know that he wants it back.”
“We’d like to give it back to him, but some of the information on it conflicts with what you have been telling us.”
“Like what?” Tindra challenged.
“That’s why we are here,” Lester J explained. “We’re trying to find out from you what happened.”
“I told you.”
Bazz came back at her. “But what you’ve been telling us for several months is different from what we have found on his cell phone.”
“I don’t know how that could be,” Tindra snapped.
“Every time a message is sent, a computerized memory is stored in the recipient’s cell phone,” Bazz explained. “Raul’s cell phone indicated that many of the earlier messages were sent to him by a cell phone registered to you.”
Tindra’s jaw dropped. She didn’t immediately answer. Then a light bulb went on. “Oh, I bet that was when my purse was stolen. I bet that bitch took my purse to steal my phone. I looked all over for it.”
Lester J soothed through the issue. “That very well could be.”
“Then that explains it,” Tindra concluded.
“Not exactly,” Bazz interrupted. “If your purse was stolen, why didn’t you report that before filing all of your complaints?”
“I didn’t think I had to.”
“Don’t you think that would have affected the decision the judge was forced to make in issuing the orders of protection?”
“I didn’t…”
“On top of that, can you give us a good explanation of why all of the messages that were received by Raul came from a location that is either this house or near this house?”
Tindra’s bowed her head. “Coincidental, I guess.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“Can you explain how the texts from your cell phone suddenly stopped?”
“Maybe the battery went dead.”
“But Raul continued to receive threatening texts from what appears to be several prepaid cell phones.”
Tindra kept offering suggestions. “Maybe she had to find another way to send them when the battery went out.”
“But they came from the same location as the others,” Bazz replied.
“How do you know?” Tindra argued.
“The cell phone tower that was sending messages to Raul’s cell phone indicates that all of the texts were being sent from this house regardless of which phone was sending them. All of the texts came from here.” Bazz stopped to gauge her reaction.
“You were impersonating Shari and sending the text messages, weren’t you, Tindra?” Lester J asked softly.
Tindra stood still, looking past them and trying to envision the future.
“We can prove that your credit card purchased the prepaid cell phones and the minutes,” Bazz said as the final nail went into the coffin.
“I was only trying to save my man.” Tears rolled down Tindra’s cheek. “That bitch was taking him away from me and my kids.”
“We’re going to have to place you under arrest,” Lester J said.
Tindra sobbed. “No, please.”
“I’m afraid so. Why don’t you come down to the station with us and issue a statement?”
“Now?”
Both cops nodded.
Chapter Seventy-One
“I told you I didn’t send those texts!” Shari yelled when she received the phone call from her attorney. “What did they tell you?”
On one hand, Seth Montgomery was glad to put this matter behind him. On the other, he saw an opportunity to profit. “They got a confession.”
“Who was it?” Shari asked.
“Tindra Svahnstrom,” Seth answered. “Do you know her?”
“She’s Raul’s live-in.” Shari was confused. “What was she doing?” She paused and answered her own question. “Sending texts to Raul?”
“That was what the cops said. Evidently after they confronted her with their results of an investigation, she admitted sending the texts.”
“How did they find out?”
“They have their ways.” Seth changed the topic. “The good news is that I’ve got your cell phone and you can pick it up.”
“Thank goodness. I’ve felt naked without it.”
“Now we can discuss your options,” Seth said.
“Like what?”
“A civil lawsuit.”
It didn’t take Shari long to get on board. “Let’s go for it. I want to sue the cops for a poor investigation. Let’s sue the county for false imprisonment. Let’s sue Tindra for harassment.”
“Whoa, not so fast. Let me investigate things a little further before we act.”
“What exactly did they get her for?”
“According to the investigators Tindra sent 739 texts over a 5 week period of time to Raul. They recovered each one. Some came from her phone and the others came from two prepaid phones that she had bought and purchased minutes for.”
“Why did she do that?”
“Probably so she wouldn’t be traced,” Seth replied. “They traced the throwaway phones through credit card purchases. On some of the credit card purchases there she was, clear as a cloudless day, on the camera memory bank.”
“They have their ways of finding out everything, don’t they?”
“The texts were vicious. They were evil. They were sexually explicit. They were nasty. No wonder the judge issued an order for protection.”
“Why didn’t they check all of that out before they hauled me into jail?”
“Sloppy police work.”
“Sue them!”
“The prosecutor said that they were simply doing what the judge ordered.”
“Then sue the judge too!”
“Let’s keep a close eye on her case,” Seth advised. “They arrested her.”
“On what charges?”
“She filed nine false police reports. They got her for a multitude of harassment charges with you being the person that was harassed.”
“Sue her!” Shari took a breath. “I want someone to pay me for that night I had to spend in jail and all of this pain and suffering that they have caused me!”
Chapter Seventy-Two
“That’s one down and one to go,” Bazz said as he and Lester J met for coffee the next day. “Pics of the motorcycle have been broadcast all over the local news.”
“Somebody has to have seen that bike,” Lester J said. “We’ll start getting calls on the hotline today.”
“They’ve already fielded some calls,” Bazz said. “It’s going to be impossible to track all of them down. Most are bogus. People are reporting every suspicious motorcycle with a purple stripe on it.”
Lester J played devil’s advocate. “What happens if our person of interest has an excuse or an alibi?”
Bazz agreed. “We still have a ton of work to do.” He blew into the cup of coffee to cool it. “Where’s the weapon? What’s the motive?” He stared at the wall. “None of Richards’ business files turned up anything major. The only thing we’ve been able to find is that he was a hothead with a temper. Lots of guys are like that.”
“That was having an extramarital affair.”
“Like I said…”
“Lots of guys are like that,” Lester J finished.
“Shivetta won’t let us talk to his client.”
“Why did she get an attorney?”
“Flexing her wealth muscle?” Bazz conjectured.
“She stated all along that she wasn’t involved in sending those texts.”
“And she was right.” Bazz grabbed a leftover doughnut from the day before. “Maybe she was pissed off when she found out it was us snooping around again.”
“But why Shivetta? He handles scumbags that commit violent crimes.” Lester J winced. It was true.
“You have to wonder about the connection.”
Lester J theorized out loud. “Okay, we
had her cell phone.”
“Correct.”
“It was analyzed.”
“Correct.”
“What showed up in the text conversations?”
“I assume you want information about Richards.”
“And Raul. They’re the ones that have a common thread in this.”
Bazz thought before replying. “Let’s start with Raul first. It was clear that they were having an affair. It was as if they spoke in code so no one would discover what they were doing.”
“That makes sense,” Lester J admitted. “If she’s getting a divorce she wanted to hide the fact that she was sleeping around.”
“Somewhere along the line I think we found that out and Tyler Cy didn’t care.”
“Or maybe he couldn’t do anything about it.”
“So why would she want to keep it quiet?”
The pair stopped their conversation and racked their brains for more ideas. “Let’s go to the text conversations that she was having with Richards,” Lester J proposed. “What was there?”
“The vibe was that she wanted him to leave her alone.”
“And what did the texts indicate?”
“He wasn’t too happy about that.”
“And what was he going to do?”
“For obvious reasons none of that showed up on the texts that she received from him,” Bazz said. “He wasn’t going to tell her what he was going to do.”
“He probably reacted like any jealous male. He’s a hothead with a temper, remember?”
“So he threatened her. But why and how?”
The pair stopped again to think. A couple of minutes elapsed. Lester J snapped his fingers. “Okay, how does this sound?” He sipped his coffee. “She was having an affair with Richards for what, fifteen years or more?”
“Correct.”
“They obviously had a thing for each other. What do you think he was thinking?”
Bazz thought for a second. “He probably thought that after she got divorced they would run off together and live happily ever after.”
“You got it. That’s what I’m thinking.” The two had solved so many crimes together that they could almost read each other’s mind. “Then what?”
“Along comes Raul.”
