by Mike Faricy
“There, happy?” Jimmy said and turned down the sound just as the lone guy seated at the far end got up and walked out the door. “Jesus, thanks, Dev. See, you’re chasing away all my business.”
“I don’t think that guy even touched his beer, you can just serve it to the next poor soul that comes in.”
Jimmy looked like he was considering that option.
“I should probably head home, too,” I said and tossed a couple of bucks on the bar.
“You’re gonna leave me with those two?” Jimmy said.
I turned to look at the couple in the back booth just as she drained her wine glass and gave the finger to the guy seated across from her. He slid out of the booth grabbed her glass and walked up to Jimmy.
“Another for my wife, I’ll just have a coke,” he said and slid the wine glass across the bar. Jimmy slid a coke back to him, then filled a relatively clean wine glass and slid it across.
“Keep the change,” the guy said and tossed a ten on the bar.
“There you go, see, things are looking up,” I said.
* * *
I got a phone call on my way into the office the following morning.
“Haskell Investigations.”
“Mr. Haskell, please.”
“Gemma?”
“Is this you, Dev?”
“Yeah, how are you doing?”
“I’m surviving, under the circumstances. You didn’t happen to see the news last night, did you?”
“You mean the report about the explosion?”
“Yes, was that Joan Dillon person the woman he had been seeing?”
“I believe so, but I think there had been a lot of cosmetic work done between the time that photo was taken and the woman I met.”
“It was her, I just know it. I’ve been in touch with the police, it’s going to be another day or two, but as soon as they’ll let me, I’m going over to Royal’s office and review his files. I wonder if we might meet after that, by the way, I should be getting an invoice from you.”
“I don’t know what I’d charge you for, Gemma. Besides, given the way things turned out….”
“Nonsense, I won’t hear of it. Send me an invoice and I hope to talk with you later in the week, fair enough?”
“Very, I’ll wait for your call.”
“Thank you, we’ll be in touch,” she said then hung up.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Gemma phoned three days later and I set out to meet her at Royal Baker’s office. Just like before, Marilynn came down to the lobby and escorted me up to the office. She looked a lot less formal, seemed a lot more relaxed and even made a casual comment about the nice weather as we rode up to the executive suite.
“She’s in her office, you can just go in,” Marilynn said then sat down at her desk and opened a Vogue magazine. I noticed there was a vase of fresh-cut flowers on a side table against the wall next to a plate of cookies. Her hair was styled in a shoulder length sort of way that actually looked rather nice.
Gemma was seated at Royal’s desk talking on the phone. She waved me in and pointed at one of the two chairs in front of the desk, then signaled she’d be finished in a moment.
“Dev, thanks for coming in, please tell me you brought that invoice,” she said as she hung up the phone.
“I did, a little love letter,” I said and handed her the envelope with my invoice.
“Thanks,” she said, opened the envelope then looked up at me. “This is it? Are you sure you’re covered?”
“Yeah, it’s just fine, really.”
“Well, okay, let me just get a check cut for you, hang on,” she said and got up from behind the desk.
As she walked out the door I noticed the framed photo of her and Royal had been removed, in its place were two photos. One was just Gemma, smiling, sipping a glass of something on a veranda or balcony. A large body of water with a setting sun was behind her. The second image was she and Marilynn, at least I thought that’s who it was. Her hair, Marilynn’s, was different, short, bobbed and I was thinking I’d seen her somewhere besides this office, but couldn’t place it.
Gemma came back into the office with the plate of cookies. She sat down at the desk and handed a check to me. “Did you try one of these?” she said and pushed the cookies toward me.
“Oh, thanks I better not.”
“More the chocolate cake type?” she said and raised an eyebrow.
“Exactly.”
She handed the check across the desk. “I hope this is all right, I told my mom to add a little bonus, I really appreciate your effort, Dev.”
“Your mom?”
“Yeah, Marilynn, I’m sorry, I thought you knew. You mean Royal never mentioned it?”
“She’s your mother? Marilynn? No, I had no idea. Is that her, there in that photo? The two of you. I didn’t recognize her.”
She glanced at the image. “Yeah, we were in Tuscany, two summers ago. Absolutely gorgeous. That’s one of her casual wigs.”
“Wigs?”
She leaned forward and almost whispered, “Androgenetic alopecia.”
The blank look on my face must have spoken volumes.
“She suffers from hair loss, pretty severe thinning all over. She is so concerned about her appearance, I bet I haven’t seen her without a wig the last ten or twelve years,” she said then glanced at the photo and smiled. “I’m really lucky, we’ve always been pretty close.”
“So, is she going to help you close the business, maybe find a buyer?”
“What? Oh no, it will take me a while, but she’ll help me to get up to speed. Remember, I’m a programmer, by way of training. Probably a little rusty, but mom will stay on until I’m able to fly solo. After all, this was where Royal and I met.”
“You’re going to take over and run the business?”
She smiled and nodded, but her eyes looked cold. It suddenly dawned on me where I thought I’d seen Marilynn, her mother. She’d been wearing that short bobbed wig, although I’d had no way of knowing it was a wig at the time. She was carrying a bakery box into the hotel just before the explosion that killed three people, one of whom was her boss and son-in-law, Royal.
“If there isn’t anything else I should probably get back to work. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, years’ worth,” Gemma said as she stood.
“Yeah, let me get out of your way. Thank you, Gemma. Again, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, I guess we’ll just have to move forward,” she said sounding like she already had.
“I guess so, thanks again. Please give me a call if I can be of any service.”
Gemma nodded then sat back down. By the time I reached the door she had begun clicking keys on her keyboard.
“Marilynn, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you, can you escort me down?”
“Oh, you know the way, not to worry. Gemma’s brought a breath of fresh air to the entire office.”
“Yeah, I had no idea she was your daughter.”
“Yes, she is,” Marilynn said then she gave me the exact same smile with the cold eye stare that Gemma had given just a moment earlier.
“I’ll let myself out, thank you.”
I was trying to think on the way to my car, but that wasn’t working very well. Gemma and Marilynn, the woman with the bakery box, Ashley, Royal, that jerk Tony, it seemed to be adding up to Gemma maybe knowing a lot more than she had let on. I sat behind the wheel of my car for a good five minutes before I called Aaron. Surprisingly he answered.
“What?”
“Hey, I might have something on that explosion that killed Royal Baker and those two other people.”
“Have something?”
I went on to explain the mother daughter thing, the wig, the box, my suspicions.
“Wrong, as usual.”
“What?”
“We went through the hotel security tapes. We’ve got the escort’s husband taking the elevator up to the room with what looks like a cake box. That fits with the foren
sic analysis the BCA has, at least the preliminary results.”
“A cake box, you mean one of those white things from a bakery, right?”
“Yeah, brought it up to the room where your pal Royal was hosting that escort, the other guy’s wife.”
“Ashley.”
“That seems to have just been her stage name, off stage she was Joan Dillon.”
“So they were married, I thought he was maybe just pimping her.”
“He was pimping her, she just happened to be his wife, too. We’ve got indications she was going to leave him, she had a nest egg built up that he probably didn’t know about. It looks like he was gonna leave the box there, get the hell out before they opened it. Unfortunately, they had probably already worked up an appetite and they opened the box, ruined his day along with theirs and that’s pretty much it.”
“What about Gemma Baker?”
“You mean your other client? I’m not sure what you’re basing that on. We can’t seem to find anything.”
“There was apparently a computer in the Baker home that had access to Royal’s calendar and other aspects of the business. Its how she knew they were getting together at the Venture Inn.”
“They had a home computer like just about every other home in the western world. We checked, nothing like a calendar on it, no access to the business that we could find, we went over it pretty thoroughly.”
“She’s a programmer and she happens to have some egghead degree in chemistry she could have deleted the business stuff and built a bomb, maybe….”
“Along with a million other folks, meanwhile Anthony ‘Tony’ Ceccio did time on a federal weapons charge a few years back. Not a big leap to place him in touch with someone who could build a device like the one that took out that hotel room. And, not a huge leap to have him stupid enough to still be in the room when the bomb detonated.”
“But, I think it was Gemma Baker’s mother who delivered that box to the hotel.”
“Her mother? Is this the same woman who was Baker’s second in command? She’s gonna kill her son-in-law so her daughter can what, go back to work?”
“What about insurance money?”
“Yeah sure, but then why file for divorce? She stood to make more money getting a divorce settlement over the next twenty or thirty years with no risk of arrest. So why plant a bomb? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
“What if she was so pissed off with his ongoing affair she just wanted to get even?”
“Any proof? Any witness? God forbid, anything like evidence?”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“Yeah, that’s why we’re going with this Tony dunce with the federal weapons rap. You get something concrete, give me a call. But, the sense around here is we got this dead to rights, no pun intended, so if you call, it had better be good.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
I was stretched out on the couch and on my third Mankato Ale. The twins were down by four runs and it was only the top of the sixth. In between watching failed opportunities on my flat screen, I was obsessing about Gemma’s mom Marilynn delivering a bomb to Tony who then promptly ran it up to Royal’s room. The way I had it figured Tony was probably the one stupid enough to open the box and take all three of them out.
I slowly came awake at the sound of the doorbell. Then took my time as I slipped my shoes on and made it out to the front door. I just barely caught a pair of taillights racing away from the curb and heading up the street. Not to worry, the bakery box sitting on the porch floor gave me a pretty good idea of who it had been, either Gemma or her mother, Marilynn.
I phoned Aaron and ended up leaving a message. So I called 911 and explained the situation, they transferred me to someone who answered the phone “Bomb Squad.” I pictured some guy in a tiny office who’d been waiting for weeks to hear the phone ring. Or, maybe hoping it wouldn’t.
The first to arrive was the fire truck from Station 5, just about a mile away. I heard their siren from about the time they left the station. I’d gone out the back door, moved my car across the street and was waiting on the front sidewalk when they pulled up, siren wailing, lights flashing. When I explained the situation and referenced the hotel bombing that sort of put a damper on their enthusiasm and they pulled the fire rig down the street and waited.
Two police squads arrived a few minutes later. They didn’t seem in any rush to check out the box on the porch, either. The police bomb squad arrived shortly after that along with a sergeant who got the two squad cars to move a growing crowd of gawkers back a hundred feet in all directions. The sergeant strolled over to La Grolla, the restaurant across the street and had them evacuate all sorts of folks in the middle of their dinner.
Aaron showed up sometime later. The bomb squad was in the process of suiting up some poor guy who’d drawn the short straw, hanging about a hundred pounds of olive drab protective gear on him.
“Someone pay you a visit?” Aaron asked.
“Yeah, but by the time I made it to the front door all I caught was a glimpse of the taillights heading up the street?”
“You got any idea what kind of vehicle?”
“Yeah, fast.”
“You have any interaction with Mrs. Baker?”
“I told you before, I saw her today, along with her mother. She, Gemma, asked me to meet her at the Tri-Cort Services office with an invoice. I called you after that and you said not to call you unless I had something good. Well,” I said and nodded to indicate the growing crowd, three squad cars, a fire truck, the bomb squad, and the white box on the front porch.
We watched as the guy in all the protective gear was led up the front walk toward the porch. He knelt down behind some armor plated sort of protective wall with a thick window in it and sandbags piled all around. He began to work a remote control device.
One of the bomb disposal guys walked over and said, “You need to move now, Lieutenant.”
We walked behind the bomb disposal truck. There was a guy in the back of the thing monitoring a screen and talking into a headphone I guessed he was probably patched into the poor sucker up near my front porch.
I glanced around and saw a news truck pull in down the block. A cameraman and a woman climbed out and quickly headed toward us.
“Oh shit,” Aaron said looking down the street. Then he focused on me. “You left their office on good terms?”
“Yeah, they offered me cookies. Marilynn, the mother, even let me take the elevator down on my own, said I didn’t need an escort. Hell, they cut a check right away and in fact, added on a hundred buck tip.”
“You are so buying dinner next time.”
Two of the bomb disposal crew jogged to the back of the truck then crammed in around the guy with the headphones, all three were completely focused on the monitor screen.
“That means he’s starting to probe, they’ll try and get a reading as to what’s in there first before they even attempt to move the thing.”
“Christ I should have grabbed my new flat screen out of the den,” I said absently.
Aaron looked at me, but didn’t say anything.
Another news van pulled up and two guys unloaded, they spoke to one of the cops at the end of the block then nodded back and forth and started walking toward us. The three bomb squad guys were suddenly in an animated conversation with one another until the guy with the head phones signaled for quiet.
“What’s up?” I asked Aaron.
He just shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
My phone rang a moment later, I was going to ignore it until I saw it was Heidi calling. “Yeah, Heidi.”
“I’m watching a breaking news story please tell me that’s not your house.”
“‘Fraid so.”
“God, Dev, are you okay?”
“We’re just waiting to see what the bomb squad guys come up with.”
“Oh my God, I was just over there.”
“What?”
“I felt so bad after I blew you off the
other night. By the way, I was meeting a girlfriend.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you called, the lecture, green futures.”
“Green futures?”
“Hello, anyone home? Yeah, anyway I was just over there and you didn’t answer the door so I just left a little treat on your porch. Look, I’m back in my car and heading over right now,” she said and I could hear the alarm on her car begin to beep as she stuck the key in the ignition.
“No wait,” I said, but she’d already hung up.
One of the bomb squad guys looked toward us and said, “Detective,” then motioned Aaron over. They seemed to confer about something, then all three of the bomb squad guys nodded in unison and everyone turned to look at me.
“Get over here, you moron,” Aaron said.
I hurried over. The bomb squad guys didn’t look too happy and Aaron was shaking his head. “Dev,” he said then sort of stepped off to the side so I’d be able to get a better view of the monitor screen.
It was a hazy sort of black and white image. I expected to see sticks of dynamite and some sort of fuse mechanism so I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking at. “Jesus, they hid the thing inside a cake?”
“It is a cake, and that’s all it is, a God damn cake for Christ sake,” one of the bomb disposal guys growled. He had a shoulder patch on his uniform, blue background with silver thread that said Bomb Disposal then a wreath sort of thing around what looked like the kind of bomb you’d drop from a plane.
I must have had a blanker than usual look on my face because another of the guys said, “It’s a cake, douche bag. God knows why, but someone was just being nice and dropped off a cake on your porch. Hope you enjoy it, probably going to be pretty expensive by the time they add up all the costs involved in getting everyone out here on a false alarm. Not to worry, they’ll be sure to send you the bill.”
