If I Had A Nickel (Roy Ballard Mysteries Book 3)

by Ben Rehder

  She had other questions, which I answered, and then I grabbed my laptop and showed her that Pitts and Cole Dunn were friends, and that Callie and Alicia Potter were also friends.

  She pointed at one photo and said, “That’s Cole?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice-looking guy. Not what I was expecting.”

  “The sense I get from some of these posts is that he was a player and a partier, and he managed to keep it under control until the last few years. That’s probably when he started getting into heroin.”

  “Wait, how do you know he was using heroin?”

  “Ruelas told me. And that’s not even the biggest news. Somebody put cyanide in Alex Dunn’s heart meds. That’s what killed him.”

  “Holy moly,” she said.

  “Land o’ Goshen,” I said.

  “I didn’t see that coming. Isn’t cyanide incredibly hard to get?”

  “Here, yeah, it is. Not impossible, but close. At least we know Serenity didn’t smother Alex Dunn, intentionally or unintentionally. I guess there’s still the possibility that she might’ve poisoned him.”

  Mia said, “That seems so unlikely. If she wanted to steal his coin collection, she probably could’ve just walked out with it. Why kill him? Plus, the fact that this guy Leo Pitts had one of the hobo nickels seems like a big neon sign pointing toward Cole.”

  “And there’s still the chance the murder and the theft are unrelated.”

  I grabbed a second donut and held the plate with the last remaining donut toward Mia. She grabbed it and took a bite. “This might be better than sex,” she said.

  I started to say that if that was the case, Garlen must not be doing it right, but I decided to keep that to myself.

  Instead I said, “Another unknown is that the killer could’ve planted the poison capsule several days or even weeks ago. If they wanted to kill Alex Dunn and it didn’t really matter how quickly it happened, that would’ve been a clever way to go about it. Obviously the killer had to have access to Alex’s meds, and that can’t be a very long list, can it?”

  “You wouldn’t think.”

  “And they had to have a motive—probably money,” I said. “I wonder what his will says. I’m assuming the kids all get a fairly large amount.”

  “But there is that McMansion thing. Alex Dunn ticked a lot of people off. Maybe somebody did it out of pure hate. Then again, it doesn’t seem likely that any enemies from that debacle have access to Dunn’s heart meds.”

  “Unless they broke in,” I said. “Or tampered with his meds when he was away from home. I wonder if he carried the prescription with him.”

  It occurred to me that we were making a mistake we often made—attempting to understand or untangle every aspect of a case, instead of simply figuring out the part we were paid to solve. It was only natural, I guess, but our task was to find the coin collection, or at least determine where it had gone, not to identify who had killed Alex Dunn.

  “I don’t want to go off on any wild tangents or drag any unrelated facts into this investigation,” I said, “but by my calculations, there are eight more donuts in the kitchen.”

  “No, Roy. No.”

  “Then think of it as sixteen much smaller half-donuts.”

  “No, thanks. I’m done. Really.”

  “Okay. I guess I am, too, then. Besides, I have to maintain my girlish figure.”

  We sat quietly for a moment drinking coffee. It was nice. The sitting, not the coffee.

  Mia said, “What if Leo Pitts and Cole Dunn were in on it together?”

  “The murder or the theft?”

  “Either or both. Imagine this scenario. Pitts and Cole are drug buddies, and they constantly need cash because of it. Cole’s daddy has plenty of cash, but he’s cut Cole off, or at a minimum he isn’t giving him enough to cover his habit. So then Cole and Pitts cook up a scheme to kill Daddy Dunn, which means Cole will score a nice inheritance, and they steal the coin collection to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. Cole knows enough about hobo nickels to know they can’t sell them—not without getting caught—but after he ODs, Pitts is desperate for cash again, so he decides to sell one. That was him dipping his toe in the water to see if he could get away with it, except you came along and ruined his day.”

  She gave me a minute to ruminate on that scenario. So I ruminated.

  “There are so many possibilities,” I said. “Maybe Alex Dunn had a habit of giving his kids some of his less valuable coins. Or maybe Cole occasionally stole one to buy drugs and he had nothing to do with the theft of the entire collection. Maybe, at some point, Leo Pitts and Cole were in Alex Dunn’s house, and Leo saw a loose nickel lying around, so he grabbed it, without Cole knowing.”

  “You think Ruelas will try to get a warrant for Leo’s place?”

  “He might. Don’t know if the judge will grant one.”

  “What about Cole’s place?” Mia said.

  “Same. I’m sure the Austin cops had a good look around when they removed his body, but they couldn’t look into drawers and cabinets and so on.”

  “Not legally.”

  “Right. But we might be able to.”

  “Huh? How?”

  Sometimes clichés exist for a reason. Like the one where an attractive woman uses her charms to talk some poor schlub into doing something he might not otherwise do. We’ve all seen that cliché in the movies. I’ve seen it in real life, many times, because when Mia does it, it works.

  Cole Dunn had lived in a small, run-down apartment complex in the northeast part of town, in a neighborhood known for drug-related activity. There were two matching brick buildings in the complex, each with eight units, for sixteen units in total. One of the units served as the manager’s residence.

  We got lucky and found the manager at home—and he was a walking cliché himself. He was maybe thirty years old, average height, with pasty skin and a beer belly. He needed a shave, a shower, and a few more years in the public school system. In short, he was perfect.

  He answered the door by saying, “Yeah?”

  “Hi, there,” Mia said. Big smile. “My name is Mia Madison.”

  She held out a hand. He shook it and took a quick peek at her chest. Couldn’t help himself. “Doug,” he said.

  “And this is my partner, Roy Ballard,” she said, gesturing my way.

  Doug and I shook hands, but it was obvious he considered it no more than a task he had to complete so he could get back to talking with Mia.

  “How can I help you?” Doug asked.

  I’m sure it had been ages since those words had left his lips.

  “Doug, we were hired to find a missing coin collection. It’s sort of a long story, so I’ll try to keep this brief. The coins were owned by the father of one of your tenants, Cole Dunn, who passed away recently.”

  “Yeah,” Doug said. “The cops were here.” The empathy was palpable.

  “In fact, Cole’s father also passed away, just a few days before Cole did.”

  “Heard about that,” Doug said. “Weird.”

  “Unfortunately, that means the father can’t tell us where the coin collection might be. What we’ve been wondering—and this might be a long shot—but we’ve been wondering if maybe Cole was keeping the coins in his apartment for safekeeping.”

  “Safekeeping? In this neighborhood?” Doug asked.

  Hey, who would’ve guessed? He had a sense of humor.

  “The thing is, the coins are valuable, but they’re all unique, so nobody would be able to sell them,” Mia said. “Too easy to identify.”

  She was saying that as a precaution to prevent Doug from thinking he could score those coins himself.

  “At least not without getting caught,” I said, “and implicating themselves in what might turn out to be a murder case.”

  “Cole might’ve been murdered?” Doug asked.

  “No, I mean his dad,” I said. “And nobody knows for sure yet.”

  “Crazy,” Doug said.

>   “So what we’re wondering,” Mia said, lapsing into a pseudo-flirtatious tone of voice, “is whether you could do us a big favor. Is there any chance you’d let us into Cole’s apartment for a quick look around?”

  “Is she pushy or what?” I said, laughing like the request was totally out of bounds. “I told her it wasn’t cool to even ask.”

  “I promise it won’t be more than a minute,” Mia said. “And if we find the coin collection, we won’t even touch it. We just need to know if it’s in there.”

  “The man could lose his job, Mia,” I said. A subtle little jab, implying that he didn’t have the guts to do it.

  “He’s the manager, Roy. He can inspect an apartment anytime he wants.” Then, to Doug: “Right? Isn’t that the law?”

  “Pretty much,” Doug said. “If I have a good reason for being in there.”

  “And there’s no reason we can’t tag along, is there?”

  “Jeez, Mia, give him a break. You’re being a pain in the ass.”

  I was setting the stage for Doug to be her hero.

  “I guess I could say there was a problem with the plumbing,” he said.

  10

  It was a pigsty. Not a surprise. Drug addicts generally aren’t meticulous housekeepers. The living room was littered with dirty dishes and fast-food garbage. The beige carpet had small stains all over it—some of which looked like blood. The sofa and mismatched love seat would’ve been turned away by any self-respecting charity.

  The three of us were standing just inside the front door. Doug did not appear surprised by the condition of the apartment, which meant he might have been in there sometime after Cole Dunn’s body had been removed. Or maybe he had worked in this industry—and in this part of town—long enough to expect this type of treatment from renters.

  “Guess his estate isn’t getting the security deposit back,” I said.

  Doug glared at me. He wasn’t a fan.

  “Why would he have an entertainment center,” Mia said, “but no TV? No stereo or any other electronics.”

  “He was always selling his stuff to make rent,” Doug said. “Or to get high.”

  “You talk to him about that?” I asked.

  “No, but it was obvious he was a user.”

  I moved over to the entertainment center and checked the two drawers built into the base of the unit. They were empty.

  Mia stepped toward the bedroom door, but Doug said, “Let’s all stay in the same room, okay? No offense, but I don’t know y’all.”

  “No problem,” Mia said.

  I looked around and shrugged, because there was no other place in the living room where the hobo coins might be stashed, even if they had been removed from the wooden curio box.

  “May we?” Mia said to Doug, gesturing toward the sole bedroom.

  He nodded and we went in, but there wasn’t much to see. Just a queen-sized mattress resting on a box spring, with no frame or headboard. The sheets and bedspread were all tangled together, and there was a stale, sweaty funk hanging in the air. A sizeable mound of dirty clothes occupied one corner of the room, and more junk-food wrappers were strewn here and there. It was, all in all, a depressing scene. How does a person end up like this?

  “He didn’t even have a dresser,” Mia said.

  “Sold that, too,” Doug said. “I saw a couple of guys hauling it out a few weeks ago. It was a nice piece of furniture. Teak or rosewood or something.”

  I walked over to the closet. The hollow-core door had a fist-sized hole in it. I swung the door open, hoping to see a wooden box on the upper shelf, but I was disappointed. The shelf was empty, and there weren’t more than a dozen items of clothing hanging from the rod. Two large cardboard boxes rested on the floor, but they contained photo albums and various worthless odds and ends. No coin collection.

  Mia pointed at something on the carpet near the pile of soiled clothes.

  “Check it out,” she said.

  It was a tube of lipstick.

  “Did Cole have a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Well, there was this one chick I’d see occasionally. She spent the night every now and then.”

  “How do you know she spent the night?” Mia asked.

  “It’s my job to make sure all residents are on the lease. I’ve gotta keep track of who comes and goes. Plus, my window looks right over at Cole’s door.”

  “Tell me about this girl,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything. Height. Weight. Hair color. Shoe size.”

  “Well, she wasn’t the kind of person you normally see around here, and not the kind I’d expect to hang out with a guy like Cole.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, Cole was okay—you couldn’t help but like him—but let’s face it, he was a druggie. This girl wasn’t from that crowd.”

  “How do you mean?” Mia said.

  “She’s more like a West Austin type. Drives a red BMW and wears expensive clothes. Or they looked expensive to me. I don’t know.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Pretty hot. Probably in her late twenties or early thirties. Skinny. Always carrying a purse. A lot of women around here don’t carry a purse, but she does. She has very black hair that’s, like, lopsided.”

  Oh, man. That sounded familiar.

  “Longer on one side than the other?” I said.

  “Yeah, exactly,” Doug said.

  “Hold on.”

  I took out my phone, opened Facebook, and went to Alicia Potter’s page. I clicked her profile photo and showed it to Doug.

  “Yeah, man, that’s her,” he said, looking at me like I was some sort of wizard.

  “Alicia Potter and Cole?” I said. “I wonder how long that was going on.”

  We were walking back to the van in the parking lot. I saw a few pedestrians shuffling slowly along the sidewalk near the street, but other than that, there wasn’t much activity. A neighborhood like this was busier, and more dangerous, after sundown.

  “Callie would probably know,” Mia said.

  “I agree with Doug—why would Alicia hook up with Cole?”

  “You never know what draws two people together,” Mia said. “Cole was a good-looking guy, and judging by some of the comments on Facebook, he was a charmer. Maybe he was Alicia’s type, regardless of his personal problems. And maybe they didn’t have a serious relationship.”

  “You’re saying she might’ve just been having fun with a party boy?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “That offends my delicate sensibilities,” I said, as we were getting into the van. “I forgot to mention—I sent Alicia Potter a Facebook message yesterday asking if she’d talk to me.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She hasn’t responded. Hold on.” I was checking my phone again. “It says she saw the message, but she didn’t answer it. You’d think she’d at least reply. Now I have even more questions than I had before.”

  I backed out of our spot and pulled out of the lot.

  “Like were Alicia and Cole seeing each other before Alicia divorced Alex?” Mia said.

  “For starters. And did Alex ever know what was going on? If he did, was he mad about it? Did he and Cole have a falling out?”

  “Think Alicia was a drug user?” Mia asked.

  “I’d say there’s a good possibility, even if just recreationally. Birds of a feather.”

  “On the other hand, we’re making a lot of assumptions based on one tube of lipstick and the word of a semi-sleazy apartment manager,” Mia said. “What if he has it all wrong?”

  I was going south on Rundberg Lane.

  “Only semi?” I said.

  I’d given Doug $100 to keep it to himself that we’d entered the apartment. I doubted he would’ve mentioned it to anyone anyway, because what good could come of it? And it wasn’t like we’d taken anything.


  “If we noticed the lipstick,” Mia said, “you can bet the cops did, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but it was a garden-variety overdose and I’m sure that’s how they treated it. They wouldn’t have been looking for clues in a homicide. Remember, Cole died in APD jurisdiction, but his father’s death is with the sheriff.”

  “True. Ruelas, on the other hand, is going to want a search warrant for that apartment. And if he gets one, he’ll see that lipstick and ask Doug the same questions we asked. And then he’ll be as interested in Alicia as we are.”

  As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t our job to solve the Alex Dunn homicide, but figuring out where the coins had gone might lead us to the killer. That, in turn, would make Ruelas look bad—being upstaged again by “some guy with a camera”—and that was just a neat little perk of my job.

  We went back to Mia’s house and brainstormed on our next possible steps.

  Idea number one: Interview Alicia Potter and see what sort of vibe we got. If she’d talk to us.

  Idea number two: Talk to Callie again, and maybe Max Dunn, to see what they had to say about the relationship between Alicia and Cole.

  Idea number three: Focus on Leo Pitts—but do what, exactly? Follow him? Harass him? Threaten him with assault charges unless he gave me some useful information?

  We were debating the pros and cons of these possible approaches when, out of the blue, I found myself saying, “Hey, you know that little house for sale over on Raleigh?”

  I knew she’d be familiar with it, because she routinely drove past it on her way out of the neighborhood.

  “Sure. What about it?”

  “I’ve been, uh, kind of wondering about it.”

  “Really? Like you want to buy it?”

  She knew I’d been tired of my apartment for a very long time. I couldn’t read her face. Was she freaking out?

  “Maybe,” I said. “I mean, it’s just a crazy idea.”

  She surprised me. She broke into a big grin.

  “That would be so cool. We’d be neighbors.”

  “I know,” I said, “and, honestly, I was thinking that might bother you—me being so close. I’m sure you get enough of me during the day... ”