Deadly Illusions

by Chester D. Campbell

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Molly and her brother could be pals like us?”

  She arched a brow. “And what does that mean?”

  “Well, you’ve never heard of me threatening to have somebody work you over.”

  “Do you know why we don’t have problems?”

  “Somehow I suspect you’re about to tell me.”

  “You can’t get away with anything, Greg.” She gave me a smug grin. “I know you too well.”

  That was probably true. But rarely had I tried to get away with anything. Certainly not in the realm of male-female relationships. I had been hopelessly in love with her since the day we met. I sometimes think she must have put her imprint on my testosterone glands. Like Jimmy Carter, I enjoyed a little harmless lust now and then, but I never acquired the soldierly habit of bouncing from one bed to another.

  ———

  Before returning home, I decided to make another try at Heritage Car Rentals. Jill and I got there around eleven. There was no sign of the black Dodge Ram pickup out front, but Art Finley’s red Corvette basked in the sun. Two men stood behind the counter when we entered, one of them the same black guy we had seen four days ago.

  “Is Art in his office?” I asked.

  Both of them nodded and we strolled over to the manager’s door and knocked. Hearing Finley bark a loud “Come in,” I opened the door and followed Jill into the office.

  “Hey,” Finley said, jumping up from his desk. “How’s the private eye business? You still looking into my boy Damon Saint?”

  “We wondered if you had heard from him in the last couple of days,” I said. “He moved out of his house late Wednesday and left no forwarding address.”

  Finley folded his hands and tapped his thumbs. “He never mentioned it to me. Let’s see, he called yesterday and said he wouldn’t be available to work for a few days. Something about a problem his wife was having. Seems she’d had to take a few days off from work because of it.”

  I noticed Damon had not mentioned he was the cause of his wife’s problem. “Did he give any indication where he would be?”

  “No. I didn’t ask. Like I told you before, he doesn’t volunteer much.” He motioned toward the chairs. “You folks want to have a seat?”

  “I don’t believe we have anything else to ask right now, Mr. Finley. But thanks for your help. I’d appreciate your calling if you hear anything else from him. Because of our client’s interest in remaining anonymous, I can’t tell you much about our investigation. But it’s very important that we locate Damon and his wife.”

  I gave him another one of our cards and we left, still completely in the dark as to where Damon Saint had disappeared with Molly. She had led a troubled life, but I doubted she had ever faced anything remotely like this. Damon had lied about his retirement and hidden his past. He had done something in his basement workshop that terrified Molly. And though I had no proof, I was convinced he had burned the house in Antioch to hide what he had been involved in.

  14

  After lunch, Jill headed for the living room to “kick back” on her half of our reclining love seat. Though she enjoyed a siesta whenever she could catch one, her current excuse related to the need to rest up for tonight’s session at King Cole’s. While she napped, I retired to the den, where we had desks with phones and computers for each of us. The room provided as much space and looked a lot neater than our office. I had suggested working out of our home at first. I’m not much on appearances. But Jill insisted if we intended to be professionals, we needed to look like professionals. And that meant hanging our shingle on an office door.

  Sitting down, I began to type up my notes from the interviews with Nick Harrison and Art Finley. In the process, my sleeping wife missed out on the birth of a compositional pro as I channeled my thoughts directly through my fingers into the digital world. Big deal.

  When I finished, I printed out hard copies for the Molly Saint file folder. Then I transferred the computer file to a floppy disk. Next time we went to the office, I would add it to the record in the McKenzie Investigations PC. Confident that I had wrapped up the day’s work, I considered joining Jill for a short nap. But before I had time to make a move, the phone rang.

  “McKenzie?” the caller asked.

  “This is Greg McKenzie.”

  “My wife wants you to drop the investigation.”

  A resonant bass, the voice brought visions of a radio announcer to mind, though the tone sounded more harsh than mellow. I had no doubt who was talking. “This must be Damon Saint.”

  “She doesn’t care about the money. Keep whatever’s left.”

  “Put her on,” I said. “I’d like to hear Molly say it.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Oh? Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t cancel an investigation without direct instructions from the client.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, McKenzie. If you don’t butt out, you’re going to experience your worst nightmare.”

  The line went dead.

  I checked the caller ID. The small window showed UNKNOWN NAME, UNKNOWN NUMBER. I knew that sometimes resulted from a calling card, and not necessarily long distance.

  I’m used to threats. They don’t faze me except to occasionally make my blood boil. I stewed around for a few minutes but soon calmed down if for no other reason than the absence of anything I could do about it. However, if I had held any lingering doubts as to Damon Saint’s evil intentions, they had just been neatly erased. No doubt Molly remained in grave danger. One thing the threat did was take the case out of the normal routine and place it in the category of “watch your flanks.” From now on Jill and I would go armed. I began to get the feeling that Mr. Saint could turn out to be quite deadly, and I intended to be prepared if I had the pleasure of confronting him.

  After what he’d done in Antioch, I considered what he might try at our home. We had taken precautionary measures following the ransacking we’d suffered something over a year ago. A burglar alarm now awaited any intruders. All of the windows and exterior doors were covered, plus motion detectors both upstairs and down. Any breach of the system would trigger an automatic call to our office and cell phones, and the police would be alerted. Thinking about Wayne Marshall’s house, I was happy we had also installed a fire alarm. And if Saint arrived at night, he would be greeted with perimeter floodlights set off by motion detectors.

  By mid-afternoon I decided Jill had rested long enough. I didn’t want to hit her cold with the bad news, so I went in and dropped onto my side of the recliner and snuggled up against her. “Awaken, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming has arrived,” I whispered in her ear.

  She blinked her eyes open and cut them toward me. “Bug out, Prince, before I turn you into a frog.”

  This lady has some way with words.

  “You may be interested to know I had a call from Damon Saint,” I said.

  She sat up with a start. “When?”

  “A little while ago. He was quite brief and to the point.” I told her the gist of the conversation.

  “What do you think he’s done with Molly?”

  “I have no idea. But the man gives off bad vibes. I suggest we drop by the office and back up the files in the computer. We didn’t do that yesterday, did we?”

  She put a hand to her mouth. “I’m afraid not. We were in a bit of a hurry when we left. Do you think he would break into the office?”

  “I think a guy who would burn down the house he just vacated would do most anything.” I showed her the printouts of the interviews. “I need to take these over, too.”

  ———

  With my Beretta in a hip holster and Jill’s .38 in her handbag, we arrived at the office a little after three. Everything looked normal, just as we had left it Friday afternoon. While Jill was working with the computer, I looked through my desk for a report I had pulled off the Internet concerning crime in the restaurant industry. But what caught my eye was that burned scrap
of paper with the phone numbers I had picked up on the Saints’ former lawn. In my rush to recruit folks for the buffet, I had forgotten about calling back to check with the Gold Curtain Dinner Theatre.

  The girl who answered turned me over to the manager. I explained who I was and a hint of the investigation under way.

  “A man named Damon Saint had your telephone number,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be calling about tickets. I wondered if you might know him, why he would be calling there?”

  “Damon Saint,” he said slowly. “Any relation to Eva Marie? Would he be an actor?”

  “I hardly think so.”

  After another pause, he said, “Sorry. That name doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  I was about ready to trash the piece of paper when another possibility hit me. Only a one and a four were left of the number that had been partly burned off. Up until now, I had thought of it as the tail end of a telephone number. But it had been written to the left of the number that was not in service. Could it be an area code?

  I pulled out the phone directory and checked the list of area codes. There were eight with 14 as the last two digits. Listed alphabetically by state, they ranged from Anaheim, California to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, plus Montreal, Canada. I copied all eight of the cities and their area codes and took the sheet over to show Jill, explaining what I had in mind.

  “Looks like you’re going to be on the phone for a while,” she said.

  I dropped the list on her desk. “I have a better suggestion. Pull up our phone search web page and let’s see how many would be legitimate numbers.”

  She tried Anaheim—714—and got nothing. Next was St. Louis—314. The search on the phone number came up with Orman’s Custom Arms.

  “A gun shop,” I said. “I think we’d better try this one.”

  Returning to my desk, I dialed the number in St. Louis. When a male voice answered, I asked the obvious. “Is this Mr. Orman?”

  “This is Ray Orman,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Greg McKenzie. I’m calling from out of town. Do you sell all types of guns?”

  “Everything that’s legal and some that’s questionable,” he said with a laugh. “What are you looking for?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I’m looking for a little information,” I said. “Do you recall having any contact with a man named Damon Saint?”

  Orman didn’t hesitate. “You’re damned right. I had lots of contact with him back in the old days. Don’t know anybody who’s seen him in the last ten years though. I’m convinced the poor bastard’s dead. What’s your interest in Damon?”

  “For a dead man, he’s been stirring things up quite a bit lately. I’m with McKenzie Investigations in Nashville. His wife hired us. Damon has–”

  “Wife?” Orman blurted. “That’s a shock.”

  “Why?”

  “Damon was wounded in Nam where a man don’t want to get wounded. You might say he got his prick shot off. No way that character would ever satisfy a woman in bed. You sure you got the right Damon Saint?”

  “Sergeant, Fifth Special Ops Group?”

  “Damn, man. I can’t believe this. What’s he do in Nashville?”

  “Shuttles cars around for a rental agency. Apparently just works when he’s in the mood.”

  “He sure must have changed,” Orman said. “Damon was always a workaholic. Had to be going somewhere, doing something. Boy didn’t know how to sit down and relax.”

  “But you haven’t seen him in ten years?”

  “Been longer than that since I saw him. Haven’t heard of him in ten years. Ran a carpet cleaning business in Indianapolis last I heard.”

  That made me wonder about something else Molly had mentioned. “I heard Damon was involved in a network, I guess you’d call it. A group of Vietnam vets who come to the aid of each other if one has a problem. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No. Sounds like somebody’s pipe dream. As close as we were at one time, I think I’d have known if something like that went on.”

  When I got off the phone, I turned to Jill with a puzzled look. “If Molly’s husband is who he says he is, we’ve got a real dilemma on our hands.”

  15

  I didn’t think it was a good idea to hang onto the piece of evidence I had taken from the Saints’ yard, so I used a match to finish the job I had no doubt Damon Saint had begun. I copied the Orman’s Gun Shop number in the little black book I carried in my pocket, then ran the area code list through the shredder. I dropped a few notes about the Orman call into Molly’s file and added them to the computer. And after I had burned a CD to back up all of our business files, we headed home so Jill could get ready for work. On the way we talked about what I had learned from the St. Louis gun dealer.

  “Did you get any impression from Molly that her husband lacked any of the tools necessary for a successful marriage?” I asked.

  She grinned. “I like the way you put it so delicately.”

  “I’m trying to avoid those four-letter words you’re always bashing me over.”

  “And I appreciate it. But, no, I didn’t hear anything that would have led me to believe Damon was anything but a normal, fully functional spouse.”

  “From what brother Nick told us, Molly had been known to sleep around. I can’t see her getting into some kind of prickless relationship.”

  That brought a squinch of her eyes.

  “And Orman didn’t make Damon sound like a guy who would sit on his duff while Molly worked,” she said.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think you ought to crank up the Cessna Monday morning and spirit us to St. Louis. Let’s talk to Mr. Orman and compare photos of Damon Saint.”

  ———

  With Saint on the loose, I didn’t like the idea of Jill being out by herself, so I drove her to work. My Beretta rested out of sight in its holster, but she had to leave her .38 at home since it was illegal to carry firearms into a place where liquor was sold.

  As for the King Cole’s investigation, it had reached the point where I figured we could probably wrap things up tomorrow if the buffet produced what we expected. I thought it time to clue the Hendersonville police in on the likely outcome. Logan had protested over the possibility of unfavorable publicity, but I finally convinced him that he should prosecute the offenders. Simply firing people would not do the job. Others would just take it as an invitation to come in and line their pockets for a while, then move on.

  I had made the acquaintance of a Hendersonville police lieutenant during my Nashville DA days and stopped by the police station to inquire about him. Saturday night being a big night in the small town, I found him on duty.

  “Greg McKenzie,” I said. “Don’t know if you remember me. I used to be with the DA’s office in Nashville.”

  Lieutenant Chessly shook my hand. “I remember. You were quite famous there for a while.”

  “Depends on your definition of famous.”

  He grinned. “We had a little problem once with your boy Tremaine. Can’t say he has too many admirers around here. Understand you did a little murder investigating yourself last fall.”

  “Right. It made me decide to get back into detective work.” I handed him one of our cards.

  He read it and looked up. “Your wife been a cop too?”

  “No. She’s new at it. But I found out on that Florida case that she has a real knack for getting information out of people, particularly women. Right now she’s working on a case here in Hendersonville.”

  I told him briefly what we had been involved in at King Cole’s.

  “Why didn’t they come to us?” the lieutenant asked.

  “They’re publicity shy. The regional guy in charge wanted to simply ease people out. I finally convinced him they needed to prosecute the folks who’ve been stealing from them, but I said I’d do what I could to keep it quiet. Anything you can do to help on that score?” />
  “You got enough evidence to prosecute?”

  “We should have after tomorrow.”

  “Bring us everything you have,” Lieutenant Chessly said, crossing his arms in a thoughtful pose. “Put it all down in writing. And we’ll need somebody to swear out the warrants.”

  “No problem. Anything you can do about keeping a low profile?”

  “With all the names and addresses, we can round them up away from the restaurant. Not much else we can do when it goes to court.”

  “I understand,” I said. “As long as you can keep it away from King Cole’s, that should minimize the problem. Jesse Logan is the guy from Atlanta. I’ll have him bring everything over when we have it wrapped up. I really appreciate your help. Anything I can ever do for you, let me know.”

  He laughed. “Just don’t let those boys at Metro get you in any more binds.”

  Regarding that suggestion, I thought, I would be most happy to comply.

  ———

  Arriving home, I punched in the code on our keyless entry system, opened the door, turned off the alarm, and looked around. Everything appeared normal. I switched on the news, which told me more than I really wanted to know about the latest rash of wrecks and murders, legislative tax battles, guns in schools, and spring weather alerts. After shutting off the TV, I sat down with one of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. I had started reading them when I decided to enter the PI business, thinking I might pick up a few pointers. What I picked up on rather quickly was the Boston detective’s inclination to knock his way around when more subtle efforts failed to produce the results he wanted. I could hear my partner’s shrill protests if I should attempt to employ my fists so readily. Now I read Parker’s books purely for the fun of it.