Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle
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“Look at me.” He pointed at his face. His finger trembled. “Do I look like I made this up? This has festered inside of me for two decades. A week after I accidentally killed my cousin, my family is wiped out. Four people dead in the space of a week, one of them my fault, my dad blamed for the others. I have enough pain in my life. Why would I make this up?”
It did seem a pretty elaborate excuse for what he had done to Amanda. Only it didn’t excuse him. And the way he told it, he wasn’t looking to be excused. He just wanted to explain. I supposed I could temporarily believe his story while cautiously waiting for the next lie.
Not that it mattered, because Eddie might have solved his own case without even realizing it. “It couldn’t have been easy on your parents to cover up a homicide.”
“Of course not. The only one who didn’t have a sack full of guilt to lug around was my little brother. He’d been with a babysitter that night. He had no idea what had happened.”
“That kind of guilt can change a person.”
“We’re back to that, huh?”
“You have to see some kind of connection. Your dad’s stability—”
“Why would he do that to my mom? To Scotty? Maybe I could see him committing suicide because of his guilt. I know it probably drove him crazy holding a secret like that in. And have me there every day to remind him of it.” He sliced the air with an open hand. “But he would never hurt Mom and Scotty. Never.”
I wasn’t going to get into a debate on abnormal psychology. But Eddie had made one good point. We were back where we had started. Soiled by the dirty back story, but nevertheless no closer to getting at this person harassing Eddie by claiming to be his parents’ killer.
I watched him for a handful of seconds. He looked back at me. Both of us held our thoughts in check like a pair of gunslingers waiting to draw at high noon.
I drew first. “I need to sleep on it. I’ve got some other problems I have to deal with. But I’ll do a little more digging when I get the chance. No promises though.”
“But you’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you? I can tell.”
I had no reason to lie. Besides, we’d dealt with enough lying to last a lifetime. “What you did to Amanda wasn’t rational. You cared for her, but because you were so distraught, you harmed her. Badly. The same could be said for your dad.”
“But what about the phone calls? Someone out there knows what really happened.”
“The only thing you have that didn’t make it to the papers is a ripped Guns N’ Roses sticker. There’s a reason the cops didn’t worry about that.”
“But how could he know?”
My back ached from sitting so long on a chair that felt made of bones. I stood. My knees cracked, my backed popped. Christ, I sounded like my grandpa used to when he got up to change his oxygen tank. “That’s why you hired me, remember?” It occurred to me that hire might be the wrong word, considering he wasn’t paying me. “To find the con man.”
His eyes narrowed. “You keep changing your story. What happened to someone targeting me and those I care about?”
The theory sounded ludicrous now. I was embarrassed I’d ever brought it up. “After the story you just told me,” I said, “I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.”
“What?”
“Your luck flat out sucks.”
Chapter 17
For the first time since I had the High Note rebuilt after the explosion, I played hooky and did not go to the bar after Eddie left. I went back into the music room, ripped the drape off the piano, and flung open the cover over the keys. The ivories grinned at me mockingly. I hadn’t touched a piano in a long time. I gave voice lessons to a friend of mine, but I used a guitar as accompaniment for those sessions.
Not that I had any intention of playing. But I wanted to stare this thing down. I knew it was responsible for drawing me into this room in the first place. It represented so much of what had fallen apart in my life. The music. The damn music that had hounded me from the day I could almost speak to this very moment, staring at a vile creature that anyone else in their right mind would either revere or think of as innocuous. When could a piano ever be sinister?
When it reminded you of your dead parents who you never had a chance to reconcile with. Parents who had died believing you had hated them, though what you had always hated was not them, but what they wanted to make out of you.
See that? A piano could be pretty fucking evil.
“What am I doing,” I muttered. I closed the piano and spread the drape roughly the way I found it. From there I went to the kitchen with my gun. I spent the next hour cleaning my gun and daydreaming. One of the things I kept visualizing was finding Hersch and shoving my gun barrel up one of his nostrils. I even spent time debating which nostril, and ended up deciding on his left for no better reason than I’m right handed, which would correspond with his left nostril when he faced me.
After that, I ran out of things to occupy me with any sense of accomplishment. The thought of going to be made me tired, but not tired enough to even think about sleeping. I had transformed magically into a hamster on his wheel, running hard and getting nowhere.
I hated that.
So I took stock. I couldn’t do much for Eddie. Didn’t really want to think about him at all. I’d maxed out my Eddie intake level for the day with some to carry over to the next. Besides, I had my own mystery stalker con man. He knew a lot about me, some things he couldn’t know if not for the help of Sheila. When a con man milked an unsuspecting friend or family member, they could appear positively psychic until you realize they got their info the same way any good investigator did.
I looked down at my gun as if it had been privy to my thoughts and just made a snide comment about stating the obvious.
“Screw you. You’re a gun. You wouldn’t have thought about it if I hadn’t first.”
The gun, thankfully, did not answer. I could put off my stay at the local psych ward’s luxury suite.
I kept talking, though, aware that the gun was my version of Tom Hanks’ Wilson in Castaway. “Friends and family members,” I said. “Sometimes they know things we don’t know they know.” I waggled my eyebrows at my genius.
My gun was not impressed.
The jolt I got from peeling up another one of those proverbial corners (and Eddie’s case must have come in an octagonal box with all the corners it had) made sure I would never sleep that night. My blood pulsed as if I’d slammed a double espresso chased with a handful of chocolate covered coffee beans. I wanted to jump back in right away, get a hold of Eddie, or do some more digging on the net. But I had to put it off. As much as I would have liked to pretend I didn’t have anything else on my plate—like, oh, a sociopathic con man out to find my daughter before I did—I couldn’t drop everything to focus on his case. I had more pressing matters as they said in stuffy old British movies.
First stop, the home of one Harold Fennimore Zelinski (a.k.a. Hal).
While technically Hal’s house had an address on the north side, it sat in a subdivision at the end of a fingerlike curl than dropped down along Hawthorne’s western border, dipping into southern territory. The houses were nice two story deals stacked together like pieces on a chess board, less than a porch’s worth of grass for backyards. It was one of those family neighborhoods where the air conditioner and heater made up for any urge to go outside into the shadows of the oppressive neighboring houses. I think they called it suburbia.
Hal’s place blended well with those on either side of him. Even if I had arrived during the day, I would have been hard pressed to tell the difference between the three homes beyond the house numbers. Yep. Definitely suburbia.
I parked across the street and down a few houses. I had no idea what to expect. Maybe Hal would answer the door when I knocked. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t stop there. I’d let myself in. Then I would either find Hal passed out asleep, absent, or…well…no need to get melodramatic.
The feel of my
gun against my side in its shoulder holster provided a little comfort. But I didn’t really get off on shooting people. So walking into dodgy situations armed unnerved me as much as it empowered me.
Most of the houses on either side of the street had porch lights on, or some kind of illumination from inside, even if only the blue flicker of a television. On his front lawn, Hal had a lamppost with a lamp made to look like an old fashioned gas light. It sat a half-dozen feet from the edge of the driveway. It was the only visible light on anywhere in or outside of his house. I didn’t think I was going out on a limb assuming the light was either on a timer or had a sensor that turned it on at nightfall. The lone light gave the house behind it an isolated feel, as if it stood alone in space rather than a few paces from the house on either side.
As I entered the circle of light cast by the lamp, I hunched into my coat to obscure my face with my collar. I should have worn a scarf, but I had been in too much of a charged rush. Not only would it have kept my face from going numb, I could have made certain no one could ID me if I ended up having to perform my own B and E.
Not that anyone was looking out their window, watching Hal’s place. The snowfall was light, but steady. A few diehards would brave the cold night to shovel their driveway when more than an inch collected, but most folks would stay bundled inside. The day was done, night had come, and most people had no compelling reason to leave the toasty comfort of their abodes.
I strolled up the approach to Hal’s front door, drawing tracks with my feet in the several inches of unmarred snow. No one had shoveled here in a while. Nor had anyone walked to or from the house.
Not good signs.
Quite being paranoid. Even bad karaoke singers dressed like Tom Jones can take vacations.
That inside voice that likes to argue with me didn’t sound so convinced.
When I reached the doorway, I pulled a glove off and knocked on the door with my bare knuckles. The snow dampened silence that followed my knock’s wake had a thickness to it, like humidity. Each breath I took tasted like ice.
I poked the ringer with my thumb and started at the sound that rang through the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised—the opening bars of “New York, New York” played in an electronic series of tones, Muzak brought down to the lowest common denominator. An old mini Casio keyboard had better resonance.
Even good old digitized Frank didn’t summon Hal to the door.
At that moment I realized I was playing right into Hersch’s hands. He had me running after Hal while he kept on with his race. But I couldn’t keep from checking on Hal after the threat Hersch had placed in my home. Surely, he knew that.
Damn, that bastard had skills. Too bad he used them for the power of evil.
A quick glance around to make sure no eyes gazed in my direction, as far as I could tell anyway. Then I took off my other glove and withdrew my set of lock picks. A little rusty with the picks, it took me long enough to lose feeling in my hands. When I finally did get the door open, I found little relief from the cold inside.
I quickly shut the door behind me, yanked my gloves back on, and shivered like a crack addict in need of another fix. Not only had the path out front gone undisturbed for several days, the house couldn’t have hosted a living person for any length of time. The only thing that made the house warmer than the outside was the walls blocking the wind and the roof shielding the snow.
His front door opened to an open living room with a set of spiral stairs leading up to a short mezzanine enclosed by an iron fence with bars that looked better suited across a window. The doors to the upstairs rooms stood visible behind the bars. The lack of a full floor above the living room and the vaulted ceilings gave the whole house a sense of spacious luxury. It might not have been a rich man’s home, but Hal had a pretty nice pad, certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
The open floor plan also made the initial search easy enough. After scanning the living room, I only had the kitchen and the master bedroom on the first floor to check. Kitchen first, and nothing to report. I did check his fridge. That curiosity again. I don’t know what I expected. Old takeout cartons and empty pizza boxes? But the inside of his fridge looked like a miniature supermarket. He had the beverages—from apple juice to bottled water—in alphabetical order. Condiments stood lined up like soldiers in bright uniforms—yellow mustard, red ketchup, green salsa verde—in the shelves on the door. The only thing a little less than perfect in the fridge was a package of chicken breasts. The meat looked a little gray around the edges and, even sealed in the plastic, cast off a funkish smell that tainted the whole fridge.
Hal the neat freak. Unbelievable.
I swung the door shut on the fridge and checked the master. Bed neatly made. Clothes all folded neatly in dresser drawers and hung smartly (and grouped by color) in the closet. I recognized a lot of the outfits. What I did not expect were the collection of plain old, normal business suits. I started to wonder if our beloved karaoke regular had a split personality.
The master bath sparkled so clean I squinted when I turned on the light. The only toilet and tub I’d ever seen that clean was still on display at Lowe’s.
So far my search had told me a lot about Hal I didn’t know. It did not, however, uncover any evidence of harm to Hal. Before I started congratulating myself, I took the spiral stairs to the second story. Four doors to four rooms. Two of them were open. One was a small bathroom, cleaner than the master, if that were possible. The other open door led into a guest bedroom that looked like it had never been used and had a smell to back that up.
Door number three I had to open. I felt like little Danny in Stephen King’s The Shining, standing at the door to room 217, compelled to enter, frightened to know what waited on the other side.
Good thing I didn’t believe in ghosts.
I flung the door open to…not really a surprise—in fact, it made perfect sense—but it took me back a second as I realized what I had stepped into. Sound proofed walls lined the small room. A recording mic hung from a boom attached to the ceiling. One corner of the room held a sound booth no bigger than a modest walk-in closet. Black cords snaked across the floor. A candy apple Fender reclined in a guitar stand. Hal had himself his own recording studio.
“Wow.”
My house had one of those in it. I hadn’t stepped foot in there since leaving Hawthorne for LA. It sat in a far wing that I seldom had to enter, thus it remained out of sight and out of mind. This reminded me of it, though. Like the music study with the baby Grand, my parents’ recording studio cradled much of their waking hours.
I’d learned my lesson, though. I would not make any unplanned trips into the studio.
One more door left to go. I had no idea what to expect. Seemed like every door in Hal’s house opened to some strange corridor of his personality that led to places I never imagined I would find with him.
This last door was no exception.
My heart skipped a beat at the sight. Something about the room resonated inside of me. The reason was obvious, of course. The race car bed. The gaggle of stuffed animals crowded at the headboard. The jet plane mobile hanging from the ceiling. Shelves packed with books by the likes of Dr. Seuss and his many imitators. Bright blue walls with a stenciled border along the ceiling of cavorting zoo animals. Like the guest bedroom, this little boy’s room looked untouched, like a museum display. The only sign of any sort of attention was the lack of a dust coating on the furniture.
Nothing I could do made this connect with my image of Hal. Beyond that, this room didn’t connect with the rest of the house. It was like he had borrowed a room from another house, another life. Was Hal a father? At almost eighty it seemed hard to believe he could have a son at an age fitting the room. Grandson maybe?
That resonant twang I felt when I first opened the door vibrated again in my chest. Obviously, it made me think of my daughter. I realized that even if I eventually found her, even if I could somehow integrate her into my life, I had missed out on th
is stage of her life. Instead of the racecar bed, she might have had a small four-poster with pink canopy. Unicorns instead of jet planes. But the other items in the room wouldn’t have to be changed. This could have been her room. A room I would never get to see.
I shook off those thoughts. They wouldn’t help me find Hal. Though the hell if I knew what would. I had to make a more detailed search now. This was the tedious part of my job. In many cases it’s made easier when someone has a den or home office. Most of the good stuff goes in there for your local snooping sleuth to find. But Hal had a recording studio instead of a study. I doubted he kept any important documents in there. Except some sheet music.
The kid’s room tempted me, but what did I expect to find in there? I’d done enough catering to my curious nature. If I tracked down Hal, I could ask him about the room.
When all else fails, the place where a person sleeps is the best place to look for pieces that might answer questions, or give answers you never had a question for.
Downstairs and back in the master bedroom, I took a moment to turn in a slow circle while standing in the center of the room. This time I was looking for smaller details, not necessarily artifact of his everyday life, but those things that hinted toward the latest moments in a person’s life. Receipts, letters, new photographs, journals or diaries—the holy grail of a PI’s search, providing an easy picture of past and present.
Once I had the landscape of Hal’s room scanned, I moved into the detail work. I checked drawers, his closet, found a box on the top shelf full of signed photos from various musicians, including Sinatra, Dean Martin, even Jerry Lee Lewis. My parents had a number of similar pictures hanging on the walls of the High Note, including several contemporary artists who had visited the bar. A good many of those pictures were destroyed in the explosion and resulting fire. The ones that survived I had taken up to my office and hung there. I might not have wanted to be one of those musicians, but I could never deny my reverence for them. Much as I hated to admit it, music flowed through me as thick as blood and twice as hot. Who knew that a passion for music could pass through the genes?