Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle

by Rob Cornell

  I waited him out. Nothing like an awkward silence to make someone start talking.

  “I’ve always wondered,” he said. Then he stopped, as if that answered everything.

  “You’re gonna have to give me more than that.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Same difference Liz made. And the sticker made. The radio. Maybe nothing. Maybe something.”

  “There’s no special reason,” he said. “I heard you were a detective and I figured now would be a good time.”

  “I’ve been licensed for two and a half years.” I leaned forward, planted my elbows on my knees. “You’re lying, Eddie.”

  “So what if I am? Not everything in my life is your business.”

  “What’s the big deal? Why can’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Which makes me think it’s that important for me to know. Do you want me to look into this or not?”

  He clenched a fist. His pallor turned from sickly yellow to a mottled pink. “I just want to know the truth.”

  “Then tell me the truth. Why now, Eddie?”

  “Because,” he shouted. “Because he called me.”

  His edginess had infected me again. My pumping heart made my breath come out in halted puffs. “Who called you?”

  “The killer.”

  Chapter 5

  I was into my third gin and tonic, wondering where the hell Hal was, because I needed a good laugh. It wasn’t like him to miss a Friday night at the High Note, our busiest night of the week, where he could regal the locals with his ability to make up for his tone deafness with his amazing stage presence.

  Besides Hal, the rest of the regulars—and a good amount of new faces—swarmed the place. The girls ran through their usual standards: “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Summer Loving” from Grease, and even “Baby Got Back.” For some reason the girls loved that song, despite its obvious misogyny. Guys, on the other hand, never selected that number. Karaoke is a strange land with some of the most alien terrain.

  The guys picked their standards as well: “Just a Gigolo,” “Margaritaville,” “Achy Breaky Heart.” I hated most of these songs long before I had to hear them hundreds of times a month. Now, their lyrics lay scattered across the floor of my mind, impossible to clean up. I have no idea how my parents endured this for so long. Not just endured. Freaking loved every minute of it.

  Ugh.

  My only solace from the consistent off-key crooning broken occasionally (very occasionally) by real talent taking the stage was Eddie Arndt. The man with the worst luck I’d ever met. Who had dropped a serious bomb in my lap.

  Because he called me.

  Who called you?

  The killer.

  “You’re being conned,” I had said to him, not three seconds after his telling me this supposed killer had dialed him up on the phone.

  He had given me a look like I had sneezed on his breakfast. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s funny. I got a similar phone call this morning. He claimed to be someone I’d very much like to meet…and throttle. But he’s a con man.”

  Now he looked like he might eat his breakfast even after I sneezed on it. “Are you sure? Maybe this guy killed my parents and did…whatever happened to you.”

  Desperation had a way of making the most absurd connections. I shook my head. “You ever hear of Occam’s razor?”

  “I graduated from U of M. I’m not dumb.”

  “Fine. Then you know the simplest answer is the most likely.”

  “Most likely, but not for sure.”

  “I can’t stop you from telling yourself that, but I think my theory’s better.”

  He launched up from his folding chair. All that bundled nervous energy had finally overloaded his system. The pacing started. I noticed his path ran along a thinner section of the carpet. Must have been his pacing place.

  “This is insane,” he said. “Insane. I’m going crazy.”

  “Con men know how to manipulate hope. It’s their greatest power. Find out what a person wants more than anything, then charge them for the magic solution.”

  He came to a halt, jammed his hands in his pockets. “He knew things.”

  “So did my guy.”

  “And you think they might be the same guy?”

  “Same, or a partner maybe.”

  His breath hissed out his nose like a pierced steam pipe. “How does he know this stuff about us?”

  What felt like boiling swamp water rose in my throat. I had to force my words through my teeth. “A friend of my—former friend—got friendly with a grafter and let some things slip about me. If this is the same guy…”

  I tried to remember last night, when Eddie showed up at the door. Who was sitting close by? Who might have been listening to the conversation? But, like most nights, all I could remember was the hacked up excuse for singing bellowing out the speakers. There weren’t that many in the place. I would have noticed anything strange. Except I wasn’t looking for it. Had no reason to.

  “He might have overheard us at the bar. Maybe my guy was there to get more info about me and got lucky hearing your story.”

  “Over all that music?”

  If you wanted to call it that. “It’s the only thing I can think of right now.”

  “What if my caller isn’t a con man? Maybe this is just a coincidence.”

  “Occam’s Razor.”

  He rolled his eyes and went back to pacing. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, he looked like a cartoon police detective worrying over an escaped evil doer. I hoped to God I never looked like that when I thought through a case.

  He stopped, some light dawning in his eyes. “Our phones are bugged.”

  “Have we ever discussed your case over the phone?”

  His shoulders sagged. He hung his head and shook it. “No.”

  “Could be this guy got your story from somewhere else. There’s still a whiff of coincidence there. A grifter hitting two guys in the same area that just happen to have—” I snapped my fingers. “When did your guy call?”

  “Four days ago.”

  Okay. I closed my eyes and tried to sort out the timeline. Eddie’s call came on Sunday. Mine came this morning, Friday. Sheila told me about her lover, Hersch Olin, this afternoon. But the way she made it sound, he came up from Florida—or called me from there?—to hit me up with the stuff he knew, spinning his sick little tale to flip my switches and make me vulnerable so I would give him money for whatever info he had. Had this guy really stopped to con Eddie before he got to me? Then how did he know about Eddie if he called him first?

  Jesus, had Occam failed me? Was this really the biggest coincidence in world history?

  “This doesn’t make sense.” I thought I’d said it in my head.

  Eddie dropped back onto his chair and leaned forward like a greedy miser spying a Leprechaun’s treasure. “What? What are you thinking?”

  I couldn’t tell him. My thoughts chased their tails, too fast for me to pin anyone single one down for long.

  He waited, rubbing at the knuckles of one hand so hard his skin turned a raw red. “You look like you just swallowed a hairball…or an entire cat.”

  I shot him a look, surprised. That was something I would say. Maybe I was rubbing off on Eddie. Poor soul. “I feel something like that, too.” I threw up my hands and eased back on the sofa. “It’s crazy, but I think it really is a coincidence.”

  “Which means…” His voice cracked as if he had regressed back to puberty. He cleared his throat. “Which means my caller might really be the killer.”

  I cut a hand through the air. “I didn’t say that. Most likely, yours is a con, too.”

  “Even if he is, I still know my dad’s innocent.”

  That morning’s headache came by for another visit. Why had I taken this case again? Oh, right. To distract myself from some dude calling me up, claiming he had my daughter. How’s that working out for you, buddy-boy? />
  “I think we need to take a step back,” I said. “Let’s pretend I never got a call—”

  “But you did.”

  I held up my hands, palms out. “I said, ‘Let’s pretend.’”

  He didn’t like the idea. He wanted the Grand Conspiracy. He wanted to tie loose ends of two different sweaters together and who cared if neither of them fit afterwards. I’m not a mind reader. But you didn’t have to be a detective either to see this written from his head to his pant legs.

  He did concede, though. With a sigh and a nod, he folded his hands in his lap.

  “Your caller is a con man.”

  His folded hands broke apart. “We don’t know that.”

  “Let me tell you how this works, Eddie. We run through possibilities. We talk it out. Get our thoughts out of our heads and in the air. So shut up and listen a second, will you?”

  He did that thing with his mouth again. I started to see Eddie as a fish with crooked lips when he did that. His cheeks even puffed a bit.

  “So, let’s pretend your caller’s a con man. What sort of things did he know about you and what happened with your family?”

  “He knew where they…they were in the house. He knew about my dad’s gun, where he kept it. He said he had put the gun in Dad’s hand after killing them.”

  “Let’s stick with what he knew, not what he claimed he did.”

  Eddie swallowed, his throat clicking. “He said he knew I’d be at school. He knew exactly how they were killed, down to the number of shots fired and where…” He squeezed his eyes shut and one tear skated free down the side of his face. “He knew all of that.”

  “So do I.”

  He opened his eyes and glared at me. His breathing wheezed heavily through his nose.

  “All of those things ended up in the papers. On TV. Anyone could have looked that information up.”

  His face crumbled. He drooped forward until his head was almost between his knees, his hands curled into his hair. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “No. You wanted to believe him. That’s how these guys operate.”

  He straightened back up and looked at me with a new determination. “I still want to hire you. I want you to find this son of a bitch.”

  I almost asked, Then what? But I could so easily put myself in his shoes, I had a pretty good idea what he’d like to do. And if I found the guy, I just might let him.

  I ran through that whole conversation in my head as I raised a hand to signal Paul to bring me another drink. I hoped gin and tonic number four might have all the answers in its liquid loveliness. If not, at least I’d get a good buzz out of it.

  Paul brought me the drink. I sipped while listening to the karaoke host, Holly, take the mic and give everyone a break from the ear scratching amateurs. She took it down a notch, treating her throaty alto to “The Very Thought of You.” An otherwise perfect song became marred to me as it brought up thoughts of Autumn.

  How long would it take me to get over her?

  Too long already.

  Halfway through my drink, I had the buzz, but no answers. Just a lot of confused speculation. Two con men. Two different cons. Both marks who had recently connected over a case that tied into the first con.

  Really? I mean, Really? What kind of messed up shit had I stepped in?

  I’d have to sleep on it. Tomorrow I could head back to the library, look at the research from a grifter’s perspective.

  I hadn’t expected a morning visit to slow me down.

  Chapter 6

  The pounding woke me up from a perfectly good and dreamless sleep. A rare commodity ever since I learned I had a daughter out in the word somewhere, sold like a discount appliance. I thought the pounding might be my head. But I didn’t have a headache. I felt pretty well rested, in fact.

  When the pounding came again, I figured it out. Why, I wondered, couldn’t people learn to use the doorbell? I could sleep through that.

  I threw on my pants and did the wobbly walk of sleepiness down stairs to answer the door. I had forgotten what month it was. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and the winter wind sent a shock of cold straight through me, doing a better job of waking me up than chewing on raw coffee beans would.

  I jerked back from the open door and wrapped my arms around me. Only after that initial blast of freeze, did I take note of my guest. Eddie. He had himself bundled in a parka, a snow crusted scarf, and a knit cap pulled down so low it covered his eyebrows. A swirl of snow blew in behind him.

  “Jesus Christ,” I shouted. “Get in here.”

  He stepped in, and I swung the door shut, shivering like a hype in need of a fix.

  While Eddie stamped the snow off his boots, he said, “Aren’t you cold?”

  Well, duh. I rubbed my arms, trying to work back some feeling. “Is it storming out there?”

  “Supposed to get six inches today.” He pulled his cap off and began unwinding his scarf. Clumps of snow dropped to the runner at his feet. “Roads already suck.”

  “I’m going to get a shirt on, maybe some thermal underwear. Then you can tell me why you’re here.”

  Like I said, I don’t use too many rooms in the house. I led Eddie back to the kitchen, where I ate most my meals and, more importantly, kept the coffee pot. My parents left me with this fancy Bunn coffee maker. At first, I looked at it askance. Then I discovered how fast it could brew a damn good cup of Joe.

  I used the heavy stuff that morning. The darkest blend I could find in the cupboards. Nothing like a caffeine shock to the system to help get you through a cold, blustery day.

  Coffee brewed, I offered some to Eddie, but he refused. So I poured myself a cup and was about to sit down when—

  “He called me again.”

  I jerked to a halt. A wave of hot coffee rolled over the top of my cup and splashed my hand. I used some of the more choice curses in my arsenal while I set the cup down and rinsed my hand in cold water.

  “You okay?” Eddie asked.

  “Not the most coordinated guy in the morning.”

  “You do realize it’s ten o’ clock.”

  “Still morning, right?”

  He flashed a smile, not very convincing. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Turn everything into a joke even when everything sucks.”

  “Takes practice. Tough making new friends, though. I doth quip too much.”

  He shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted or amused. Didn’t matter.

  I eased into my chair at the table. “Your con man called again?”

  “I don’t think he’s conning, Ridley.” He stared me in the eye, his eyes rimmed red with dark circles underneath. “I really don’t.”

  “We’ve been through this. All the details he knows were in—”

  “He knows about the sticker.”

  The smell of my coffee turned bitter. The inset lighting along the kitchen’s ceiling grew too dim. I craved sunlight. Great big blasts of genuine UV. Wasn’t going to happen in the midst of a typical gray Michigan winter. “Did you ever tell anyone else about that?”

  “Just the police.”

  That didn’t sit well with me. I’d had my trouble with the local cops after one of their own—and an old friend of mind—was killed in a trap meant for me. I didn’t want to consider one of them had decided to use Eddie’s case as a quick buck. Most of the guys working back then were probably retired by now. Could one of them have decided their pension wouldn’t provide the cozy living he wanted for his golden years?

  Farfetched, but you had to go where the facts took you. “No one else? You’re certain?”

  “No one. I hadn’t even thought about that sticker until you questioned me yesterday.” He picked at the table, gaze askew. “I’ve been thinking. Why would anyone con me? I don’t have anything to give. I’m broke. I can barely pay my water bill.”

  The whole grifter angle had crowded my mind—after all, if I had a con man, shouldn’t everybody?—I had overlo
oked that one obvious detail. “Maybe he’s not after money.”

  “What else could he possibly want?”

  “You’d have to tell me. Anything you’ve held back, or didn’t think to tell me because you didn’t think it was important at the time?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  I leaned back and digested this, glancing at my coffee, which had stopped steaming. The gurgle of the coffee maker refilling its tank of preheated water sounded like a growling stomach. Or maybe that was my stomach, asking for breakfast. “What did the guy say when he called back?”

  “He said if I had any doubts he was who he said he was I should think about the sticker.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it. He hung up on me.”

  I wrapped a hand around my coffee mug. The ceramic had already turned cool. I pushed the cup away. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Isn’t it obvious,” Eddie said. “He’s telling the truth. He killed my family.”

  I told Eddie I needed time to process this new turn, saw him out, then went up to my bedroom to my computer and pulled up my internet browser—I told you I was weird about using other rooms in the house.

  The idea of heading out to the library in the middle of a snowstorm did not appeal. The internet would have to do. I logged into the library’s periodical database, but discovered what I’d expected. Most of the articles from twenty years ago weren’t available digitally. I tried another tactic, surfing over to the Tribune’s website and accessing their archives. Again I hit the same dead end. The online archive only went back three years. I could have called the paper and asked if they could rifle through their on-site archives for the stories I was looking for. Unlike the PIs on TV, I didn’t have a special source at the paper. Calling up and asking a stranger if they could go through all the articles pertaining to the Arndt murder/suicide to look for any mention of a torn sticker…well, they would think I’m even more nuts than I actually was.

  Faced with the ugly reality that I’d have to slough through the snow if I wanted to get anywhere, I bundled up and headed out.

  I looked for two things while scanning the same articles I had the day before. First, any information about next of kin, friends of the family, reporters that seemed to have more information than others—anyone who might have had a connection to Eddie back then that, if I were a grifter, I could target for more information. I also looked for any mention of that sticker. An insignificant detail to the cops, but it might provide the dramatic flair to a reporter’s narrative about poor Eddie Arndt, the victim of the hour, who they would all forget about after a few news cycles.