Whiskey Straight Up

by Nina Wright

  “That was Brady,” she told me. “You were right about the coat having a label.”

  “And? What does it say?”

  “It’s from a high-end Chicago furrier called Magdalena’s.”

  “Can Brady call them and trace the sale?”

  “He already did,” Jenx said. “The coat was sold in December to a Mrs. Oscar Manfred Gribble the Third. She and her husband checked out of the Bear Claw Casino Resort last night.”

  “Did they have a kid with them?”

  “Officially, no.”

  “Do you know where they are now?”

  “No, but the State Police issued an All Points Bulletin for Mrs. Gribble and two white Jaguars.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Considering that this was late January in Michigan, Saturday morning earned a B+. After the paralyzing ice storm, it arrived like a gift, blessing us with vivid blue skies and temperatures in the twenties. For the snowball battle and the ice-sculpting competition, we wouldn’t have wanted milder weather.

  Reluctantly, I agreed to assume deputy duties at the Jamboree. I would rather have been helping with the hunt for Chester and/or Mrs. Gribble—and I suspected that locating one would mean locating both—but Jenx insisted that I was too close to the case. She did promise me regular updates, however. So I comforted myself with the knowledge that my Jamboree job would be a cake walk without Abra. Deely was welcome to her.

  I was similarly relieved to offload Jeb at the Jamboree, where he planned to make music and money. Fortunately, he had remembered to remove his sales stock of CDs from the Van Wagon before loaning the car to Roy Vickers.

  My amateur police duties consisted of patrolling the festival on foot while wearing what looked like a joke badge. Made of the cheapest tin, it proclaimed me Temporary Volunteer Deputy. The mood of the Jamboree was so exuberant and my job so ridiculous that I was tempted to cross my eyes and fake a limp that shifted from leg to leg. Just to make things interesting. But there might be someone in attendance who wouldn’t appreciate my humor. Someone who’d consider it inappropriate for a person wearing a badge. Someone like federal agent Smith or Jones. If they were on the clock today, earning their good government benefits, they should be chasing after Chester instead of watching red-nosed people sip hot chocolate. Or so I thought. But I thought wrong. The Fibbies were doing exactly what I was doing, minus the cheesy badge. We spotted each other near the concessions stand where I’d seen Dr. David stuff his pockets two days earlier. Did they know what Jenx and I knew about the good vet? That his animal activism bordered on madness?

  “Deputy Mattimoe,” one Fed said by way of a curt greeting.

  “Agent Smith,” I replied and then wondered if I’d correctly matched the name. Both Fibbies wore dark glasses and black wool coats with their wingtip shoes. When he didn’t contradict me, I decided I’d been right.

  “Are you here on business or pleasure?” I asked cheerily.

  Neither agent fielded that question. They must have thought that the answer was obvious, or that they had dressed to blend in with tourists.

  I asked Smith, “Anyone ever tell you that you look like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black?”

  “No,” he said. “That never happens.”

  I was beginning to think that Agent Smith was a cynic. Then I had a revelation.

  “Hey, Men in Black stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones! Smith and Jones, get it?”

  Once again, neither agent replied.

  “May I help you?” The querulous question came from Magnet Springs’ oldest living retailer, Martha Glenn. Well into her eighties and long past her mental prime, Martha had showed alarming signs of senility in recent months. And yet she continued to run Town ’n’ Gown, her upscale clothing store. Most Main Street business operators, myself included, assumed that Martha’s part-time help was really running the business, possibly into the ground. At the moment, she appeared to be minding the concessions stand.

  “How are you, Martha?” I asked.

  She was wearing a pair of post-surgical sunglasses, the ugly kind provided by eye doctors. In response to my question, Martha adjusted hers as if to see me better. Then she said, “I don’t discuss my personal health with strangers.”

  “I’m not a stranger, Martha. You’ve known me all my life. Whiskey, remember?”

  “Never touch the stuff,” she said. Having dismissed me, she smiled sweetly at Smith and Jones. “Would either of you boys care to support our Chamber of Commerce with a purchase? We have all kinds of homemade goodies for sale, including my own famous dog and kitty treats.”

  She gestured toward an empty spot on the counter and froze.

  “Oh, no, not again. Somebody keeps stealing my treats!”

  They were quick about it, but not so fast that I missed the furtive exchange of looks between Smith and Jones. So that’s why they were here: to follow up on Dr. David. What could that have to do with Chester’s disappearance? No way the good vet would harm a child, even if Fleggers believed that pets were as important as people.

  “Tell me about your treats, Martha,” I said.

  “You can’t have any. They’re for dogs and cats,” she snapped.

  “I have a dog. In fact, I have two dogs at my house. They love treats.”

  “Do you see any treats here?” She indicated the space between the homemade brownies and the homemade peanut brittle. “Maybe you need cataract surgery!”

  When I glanced toward the Fibbies, they were gone. Vanished into the crowd.

  More confused than ever, I continued my shoreline patrol. The ice-sculpting event was well under way, so I decided to watch for awhile. It never failed to amaze me how chain saws, hairdryers, and steam irons could be used to turn a block of ice into art. I was engrossed in the proceedings when Brady Swancott sidled up to me.

  “I had to write a paper on this for one of my grad school courses,” he said. “‘Ice Sculpting: Is It a Culinary or a Visual Art?’”

  “Art is art,” I said.

  “Not when you’re in grad school,” Brady sighed.

  “Hey, where’s Officer Roscoe?”

  “He got stuck doing Public Relations: signing ‘paw-tographs’ over by the Main Street Merchants’ Face-Painting Booth. That’s a bust, by the way. Very few colors look good on a cold red face.”

  “What’s the latest with Mrs. Gribble and the APB?” I said.

  “No news yet. But Thomas McKondin has stabilized,” Brady said. “We’re hoping he’ll tell us what happened after he gets some rest.”

  “You think his stabbing is connected to Mindy’s death? And Chester’s disappearance?”

  “Who knows. For some reason, McKondin doesn’t want your name involved. But he hasn’t mentioned anyone else’s.”

  “Where are Deely and Abra?” I asked. “I’ve been here a couple hours already, and I haven’t seen them.”

  “That’s weird,” Brady replied. “I haven’t seen them, either, and Jenx assigned them to cover the Snowball Battle.” He checked his watch. “Uh-oh. That starts in five minutes. We’d better get over there.”

  I couldn’t imagine what Jenx had been thinking. Putting Abra on duty at a snowball fight was like trusting a cat to oversee a bowl of goldfish. The Afghan hound was sure to chase the flying orbs and no doubt knock down a few kids. So I assumed it was for the best that Deely and Abra failed to show up at Vanderzee Park, the harborside playground where a few dozen children were gleefully making stacks of snowballs in preparation for a rule-bound battle. Brady read the rules aloud, but nobody listened.

  As he was reading, I scanned the crowd. There was a good influx of tourists, promising money to be made for local merchants. Despite the disappointments caused by yesterday’s weather, today’s participants were in a buoyant mood, which could lead to extravagant spending. In the distance I heard Jeb Halloran singing the last bars of his Rockabilly standard, “I’ll Park My Gun at Your Door and Lay My Heart at Your Feet.” His audience cheered. Jeb knew how to read a room, or,
in this case, a Jamboree. I hoped they would buy every CD he’d brought to sell.

  Brady had barely finished covering the contest rules when the first snowballs flew. Nobody waited for the starting whistle, just as nobody intended to play by the rules. This was a snowball fight, not a chess game. Who were we kidding? To avoid getting smacked in the face, I stepped back from the action.

  I did get smacked—not by a snowball but by the shock of what I spotted across the ice.

  Zigzagging between the shanties in Fishburg was a snowmobile driven by a woman in an olive-green coat. Her identically dressed passenger had long blonde hair and a Sarah Jessica Parker profile. And a tail.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Brady, look!” I cried, pointing toward Fishburg. Before he could do that, I was knocked sideways by a thwack to the head. A snowball—more likely an illegal iceball—fired at close range sent me sprawling. By the time Brady had helped me to my feet, a bump the size of a tulip bulb was blooming above my right ear. I fingered it gingerly. The snowmobile was nowhere to be seen.

  “This is a free-for-all,” Brady said, ducking just in time to avoid two snowballs colliding in midair. “Nobody’s listening to us, anyhow, and if anybody gets hurt, the parents will take over. Let’s go check out Fishburg!”

  As was the case two days earlier, Jamboree festivities had drawn most Fishburg regulars closer to shore. We found a half-dozen diehards hunched over fishing holes inside their shanties. One was Jeb’s fan and Leo’s former client Bud from the Blue Moon bar. All the fishermen had heard Deely’s snowmobile, but only Bud had received a visitor.

  “She was here and gone again,” Bud said. “Just wanted to ask a question: Did I see anybody who didn’t belong here? I said no. So she left.”

  Bud sounded like every ice fisherman I’d ever known. They all subscribed to a live-and-let-live philosophy. If you don’t ask what the hell they’re doing in their makeshift village way out on the ice, they won’t ask what you’re up to, either.

  All six fishermen said that Deely’s snowmobile had sounded like it was heading up the coast.

  “That don’t mean much, though,” an old-timer said as he checked the bait on his line. “Them machines can turn on a dime. It could be a couple miles inland by now.”

  Brady and I stood on the north edge of Fishburg scanning the landscape.

  “What should we do next?” I said. “It’s not like Deely to disobey a direct order. Why did she skip the snowball battle? And where did she get the snowmobile?”

  “The last question might be easy enough to answer,” Brady said. He pointed to a RENT-A-SNOWMOBILE sign near one of the docks. “Let’s go see if that’s what she did.”

  It wasn’t exactly what she’d done. The skinny teen-age boy running the rental stand said that Deputy Deely had showed him her badge and declared a police emergency. She told him she needed to borrow one of his machines to pursue a fleeing felon.

  I tapped my own tin shield.

  “She showed you this cheesy badge and you gave her a snowmobile?”

  The kid looked confused and frightened. “You’re saying I shouldn’t have done that? You’re saying I should have told the Deputy no?”

  “No, we’re not saying that,” Brady told him. “You did the right thing.”

  “That dog she had with her—” the teen-ager stammered. “Something wasn’t right.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Brady.

  “It didn’t look like a police dog.”

  “It isn’t,” I assured him.

  “It didn’t even look . . . like a dog. When it turned its head a certain way, it looked kind of like . . . a person.”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  The kid added, “In that coat, with that blonde hair and everything—it creeped me out.”

  “She creeps me out,” I confessed. “And I live with her.”

  “What if the deputy doesn’t bring the snowmobile back in time for the cross-country race?” the kid whined. “My uncle will kill me! This is his business. He expects me to rent out every single machine. And the race starts in forty-five minutes.”

  “I’m pretty sure she’ll bring it back,” Brady said. “Aren’t you, Whiskey?”

  I was too distracted to answer. A vaguely familiar guy in his twenties was striding toward me, and he looked pissed.

  “Hey!” He was still at least ten yards away. The aggressiveness of his tone made me want to turn and run. But I didn’t.

  “You owe me a flotation device!” he said. I recognized the What-Would-Jesus-Do newbie helicopter pilot, minus his affable demeanor.

  “Yes I do,” I admitted. “Would you take a check instead?”

  “I’ll take cash,” he said. “My boss doesn’t believe in anything else.”

  “Not even in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior?” I smiled hopefully.

  “Faith will save your soul, but it won’t inflate upon impact. You need cash for something like that.”

  “How much cash?”

  “Two hundred dollars,” the pilot said. “That’s wholesale, by the way. No mark-up. I’m cutting you a break.”

  “Thanks. Could we—uh—do a little business?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  I motioned for him to walk with me. I didn’t want Brady or the snowmobile kid to hear my offer.

  “You need something from me, and I need something from you,” I began.

  “All I know is I’ve got to replace that flotation device before my boss notices it’s missing. Or else he’ll fire me, and I just started this job!”

  “Right,” I said. “Here’s my offer: I don’t have it on me, but if you give me an hour, I can get you four hundred dollars.”

  “I need two hundred dollars—not four hundred!” the pilot said. He was talking to me as if I were senile Martha Glenn.

  “That’s where the what-you-can-do-for-me part comes in: I need you to fly me somewhere.”

  “You mean, like a charter?”

  “Like a micro-charter. We won’t be in the air long, probably twenty minutes or less. I’ll give you the money up front—for the flotation device and the flight. If, when we’re done, you decide that I underpaid, I’ll give you the balance due. If I overpaid, you keep the change. Or donate it to your church.”

  The pilot grinned. “See you back here at 2:15.”

  “Everything all right?” Brady said. He was standing so close behind me that I wondered how much he had overheard.

  “I owe him for the flotation device I . . . uh . . . borrowed. If you can get along without me for awhile, I’m going to get some cash from my office.”

  “No problem,” Brady said, studying my face. “You sure everything’s all right?”

  “Except that Deely and Abra are AWOL on a stolen snowmobile, everything’s fine.”

  I didn’t believe that for a minute, which is why I wanted the helicopter ride. I needed a fresh perspective on my hometown—a panoramic view of the crime scene, if you will. My brief time in the sky with Odette two days earlier had taught me something: What’s familiar is still full of mystery. Big deal that I’d lived here all my life. I didn’t know every corner or every soul in Magnet Springs. In fact, I had a long list of questions and just the vaguest hope that a second aerial view might help me answer them.

  It would take thirty minutes, tops, to get the money from my office and return to the Jamboree. But there was something I needed to do first. And I didn’t relish doing it. Avery had been more frazzled than usual when I left that morning. No one at our house, including the twins, had slept well, which meant that Leah and Leo were both cranky, and Avery’s nerves were frayed. Although laying off the nanny had been Avery’s own foolish choice, I couldn’t help worrying that she was in over her head. On her best day, she probably wasn’t up to the task of managing two infants without back-up or a break. In her current state of high anxiety over Nash’s intentions, she might be dangerously distracted. I flipped open my cell phone. Even though I knew she’d find
a way to blame me for her misery, I felt obliged to check on her.

  Before I could punch in the first digit, I got a call—from my own home number. Avery was on the line, and she was hysterical.

  “They’re gone! They’re gone!” she wailed.

  “Who’s gone? Calm down, Avery. Take a breath.”

  “Damn him! I should have known Nash would do something like this!”

  “What are you talking about?” But even as I asked, I had a sick feeling that I could guess the answer.

  “He stole my babies! My babies are gone!”

  “What do you mean, Leah and Leo are gone?” I asked.

  “Missing! Stolen! Kidnapped! Arrrgghh . . . . ”

  Avery was sobbing and sniffling so hard that her words faded into a choke. At least the phone spared me the aggravation of seeing her blotchy, snot-streaked face.

  “Listen to me,” I said as if talking her in from a ledge. “Avery, I want you to sit down and take some slow, deep breaths.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you want. Nash stole my babies! You helped him do it, didn’t you? I should have known you were capable of this kind of shit! Bring back my babies right now!”

  “I don’t have your babies, you stupid lazy fool!”

  I’d been mentally calling her that for so long that it finally slipped out. Nothing like a crisis to release the repressed goodies. I tried to redeem myself.

  “Avery, I’m doing my best to help you keep your family together. And I think Nash is, too. He wouldn’t have taken the kids without asking you. Now sit down and get a grip. Please. Then we’ll call 9-1-1.” My phone beeped, indicating another call on the line. “Hold on. Somebody’s trying to reach me. Breathe!”

  It was the Coast Guard nanny, a.k.a. Deputy Deely.

  “Ma’am, we have a situation.”

  “I know!” I said. “When did Avery call you?”

  “Avery hasn’t called me, ma’am. This is about Chester.”

  I felt a second wave of the same emotion that was rocking my stepdaughter. Since I worked hard not to let most feelings in, I wasn’t sure how to label the rare ones that grabbed me.