by Elaine Viets
“It’s as cold as—” Helen began as the arctic air blasted her face.
“It’s a rolling igloo,” Gus said.
Helen knew her car had been named.
“I have the only igloo in South Florida,” she said.
Phil gave Helen a warning look, then said, “Before we hit the road, Gus, I have to ask you a question about your brother’s gun.”
“The .22?” Gus said.
“No, the Mauser the cops found in his car.”
“Mark never had a Mauser,” Gus said. “He had a little Walther P22 pistol he kept for protection.”
“Maybe your dad brought a Mauser home after World War Two,” Phil said.
“My dad served in Korea,” Gus said. “He never had guns. My brother bought a little .22 pistol for protection.”
“When?” Phil said.
“When he started hanging out with that wild crowd,” Gus said. “The grip was so small I could hold it and shoot it using two fingers and a thumb. Only had a five-inch barrel. I asked him what he was doing with a lady’s gun. He said the .22 was accurate and easy to conceal.”
“Are you sure?” Phil asked.
Gus was clearly steamed. “Of course I’m sure. I know the difference between a Mauser and a .22. Just because I fix cars doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“Whoa!” Phil said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. But the police didn’t find a .22 in Mark’s car. They found a blue steel Mauser .32 automatic.”
“It was not Mark’s gun,” Gus said. “We lived together in an apartment so small there wasn’t room for the roaches to hide. He never owned a Mauser.”
“Gus, did you ever wonder if your brother might have been a drug dealer?” Phil said.
“No!” Sweat poured down Gus’s face.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Phil said.
“I’m not upset,” Gus said. His clipped words and stiff body said otherwise.
“Where did Mark get all that money?” Phil asked. “It had to be drugs. Mark probably peddled a little coke at parties.”
“That couldn’t be,” Gus said.
Helen thought he was really saying That’s not what I want it to be.
“Where did you get the money to keep this garage going?” Phil asked. “You said Mark steered exotic-car owners your way. You spent major money restoring Boy Toys in the eighties. How did you keep going until your income picked up?”
“Mark found an anonymous investor to lend me two hundred grand,” Gus said.
“Did you pay back this investor?” Phil asked.
“No. Only Mark knew the name. I waited for the guy to come forward after my brother died, but he never did.”
“There was no investor,” Phil said. “Mark gave you that money. He was dealing.”
“No! I built this shop through hard work.” Gus wiped more sweat off his forehead, leaving a dark oil smear.
“I know you did,” Phil said. “I didn’t say you were a dealer. But I think your brother was. I’m guessing Mark was a small-timer. He gave you the money and called it a loan. When his bipolar problem kicked in, he started sampling his product and wound up behind in his payments to Ahmet.”
“Maybe,” Gus said, his face sullen.
“Your brother owed Ahmet three thousand dollars when he died,” Phil said gently, as if his softer voice would make those words easier to swallow.
“I might have heard something like that,” Gus said. “Maybe. I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything.”
Helen wished Phil would stop talking so they could leave. Gus was getting upset.
“You asked me to talk to his friends,” Phil said. “One of them said Mark rescued your sister from Ahmet’s house. Ahmet kept Bernie prisoner there. Mark had to kick down the door to get her out. She hid at your apartment, too afraid to leave.”
“Bernie never said anything like that to me,” Gus said. “Mark didn’t, either. Why are you telling me this?”
Because you insisted you wanted to know, Helen thought. But she didn’t say it.
“Because it means you were right: Mark was murdered,” Phil said. “I think Mark went to Ahmet’s business to kill him. Instead, the drug dealer shot him.”
Rivers of sweat cascaded down Gus’s forehead and drenched his shirt. His shoulders were bowed.
“I didn’t know any of this,” he said. “All I know is I love Mark and Bernie.”
CHAPTER 20
Helen fell in love with the Igloo on the ride back to the Coronado. The white PT Cruiser rolled coolly down the highway, encasing her in a lovely chilled bubble. The car had lots of legroom and a cargo cover, so she didn’t have to worry if she left something valuable inside. Her neighborhood had suffered a rash of car break-ins. The thugs smashed windows with a spark plug and went after laptops, iPods, purses, even pocket change.
Helen admired the Igloo’s retro dashboard clock. The temperature gauge told her it was a sizzling ninety-six degrees outside. She waved at Phil, following in his open Jeep, his long silver hair tied back in a ponytail. The man wasn’t even breaking a sweat.
Helen was still shaken after their scene with Gus. He was clearly hurt by their new information, even if it did bolster his belief that Mark was murdered.
At the Coronado, she parked in the spot where the Toad used to squat. The Toad was an ugly green monster she’d driven when she’d worked at the Superior Club, a not-so-superior country club. The Toad had been junked long ago, but the miserable creature had leaked nasty body fluids in the lot, a permanent memorial to a moody, bad-tempered car.
A purple cloud drifted to the gate. Margery, in a gauzy eggplant caftan and lavender sandals, lifted a chilled glass of white wine in a salute. “Like the new ride,” she said. “Gives my white car some company. How is the Cruiser?”
“Cool, in all senses of the word,” Helen said.
Phil kissed their landlady on the cheek and said, “You look like a glamorous hostess in a magazine.”
She kissed him back lightly and said, “You’re sweet.”
Margery flirted outrageously with Phil. Helen wondered if her husband would have married Margery if she’d been thirty years younger. Their landlady was glamorous at seventy-six. She must have been devastating in her forties.
“You two want to join me in a drink?” Margery asked.
“We’ll take a rain check,” Phil said. “Helen’s gym is closed tomorrow while the crime scene unit goes over it. We want to make some progress on Gus’s case.”
They retreated upstairs to the Coronado Investigations office. In the kitchenette, Phil poured Helen a glass of wine, opened himself a beer, and pulled a bright orange bag out of the cabinet.
“What’s that?”
“Spicy snack mix,” he said. “Jalapeño cheese crackers, hot pretzels, salsa-flavored corn chips and more.”
“More what—heartburn?” Helen asked. She thought Phil had a touching faith in the promises on junk food labels.
“More ingredients,” he said. “It also has spicy SunChips. Those are multigrain, so they’re good for you. So are the peanuts. The spicy snack mix has no trans fat and sixty percent less regular fat.”
“Than a can of Crisco?”
“Than other potato chips,” Phil said. “You’re always after me to eat healthier. Then when I try, you make fun of me.”
He tilted his head like a puzzled pup. Helen laughed and kissed him. “I love you,” she said. “I’m glad ‘for better or worse’ doesn’t mean eating your snack mix.”
Phil kissed her back and Gus’s case was forgotten for more than a half hour. That old-fashioned desk was surprisingly roomy.
“We have to get serious now,” Helen said, straightening her black dress. “No more newlywed breaks.”
“We had to christen that desk,” Phil said. “That’s why shamuses hang around leggy brunettes. Now we have to figure out who shot Mark.”
“With a gun his brother says he didn’t own,” Helen said. “Is part of that police report missing?
Do we need to go back and check for more of it?”
“By we, I assume you mean me,” Phil said. “Sure. It won’t be the first wild goose I’ve chased. I need to poke through those old records anyway. I have a hunch there’s more in those files. Those cops loved filling out forms.”
“They were better paper pushers than investigators,” Helen said. “I didn’t realize how hard it would be to tell Gus what we found out.”
“We haven’t confirmed it yet,” Phil said. “We’re just repeating old stories.”
“I think on some level, Gus believes them,” Helen said. “Can we conclude that Ahmet shot Mark?”
“For now,” Phil said. “Unless someone else in the drug business killed him. Mark was hanging around with a dealer. He bought a gun for personal protection. He was scared and doing something dangerous. Ahmet had the most likely motive for Mark’s murder: Mark was acting crazy. He’d insulted the drug dealer and broken into Ahmet’s house to rescue his sister. Ahmet couldn’t tolerate a challenge to his authority like that. He had to send a message. Mark was shot. Shortly after that, Ahmet quit dealing and became a solid citizen.”
“He became a real estate dealer,” Helen said. “Not sure how solid that is.”
“He became a rich real estate dealer,” Phil said. “I know that for sure. He’s living on four acres of waterfront property on Hendin Isle. That’s several million for the land alone. And he’s not sleeping in a double-wide. His house has eight bedrooms, a tennis court, pool and private dock.”
“Now, that sounds like a Miami Vice drug dealer,” Helen said.
“I think Ahmet got scared out of the drug business.”
“Can he just leave like that?” Helen asked.
“On his level, yes,” Phil said. “It’s not the mob. You’ve seen too many movies. You’re still thinking about those two Colombians meeting in a parking lot with a suitcase full of cash. Drug dealing is a business. There are six or seven levels before the drugs reach the actual consumer. Nice white kids buy drugs from their nice white friends. Middle-class people do not go into the ghetto. They get the drugs from other middle-class people.
“Ahmet was probably at level four or five. Mark and his friends were at level six or seven. Mark made a lot less money because he was so far away from the source.
“Drug dealing is a business, like Kmart, Home Depot or McDonald’s. The dealers set up a surprisingly corporate structure with a regular chain of command. There’s a CEO at the top, far removed from the street sales. The lower levels have lots of employees. Ahmet was like the manager of a McDonald’s, and Mark was a lowly burger flipper. He’d be wearing a hairnet at Mickey D’s.
“Dealers usually let the low-level players walk away. They can’t kill them without a good reason. A death invites too much attention. Drug dealing breeds in the dark, like vermin.”
“Gus insists his brother didn’t sell drugs, even as a low-level player,” Helen said.
“Gus doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Phil said. “Dealers do not hang around with users. Ahmet wouldn’t have let Mark near him if he’d only been a user. Mark was selling drugs first, then fell nose-first into the snow and became a user. Most of those guys eventually wind up dead.”
“Like Mark,” Helen said.
Phil took a long sip of his beer. “I hate drug cases. Hate them.” His blue eyes flashed with anger, and Helen wondered if he was thinking of Marcie, the lost girl from Little Rock. His first case and his first failure. Marcie had been buried as long as Mark.
Helen tried to bring Phil back to their case. “So we’ve got low-level Mark selling drugs, asking people if they want fries with their coke. Why did he need a gun? Was he afraid someone would shoot him when he hung out in the projects?”
“Mark? Selling in the projects? Not a chance,” Phil said. “People like Mark would not go into that neighborhood. He doesn’t belong there. He probably peddled coke at parties.”
“I’ve never been to any parties like that,” Helen said.
“Yes, you have, you just didn’t know it,” Phil said. “You were probably drinking or dancing in the main rooms. The drug users congregate in a basement, a rec room or a bedroom. They use coded language like I’m really stressed. I need to relax and mellow out. Or I need some energy. That’s the cue to bring out the drugs.”
“That’s just middle-class drug use,” Helen said and shrugged.
“Drug dealers are businessmen, Helen, and the middle class has lots of those. The good dealers are smart businessmen. They have to be.
“In the eighties, it seemed like everyone was either using coke, selling it or both. Ordinary blue-collar guys were stashing drug money in their closets. The handy ones built secret compartments in the bedroom closet. The cops always knew where to look. They’d lift up the carpet on the closet floor, and the secret was revealed. Or the cops would see some cheesy door cut into the sheetrock closet wall with boxes of Christmas decorations piled in front of it. Obvious as hell. Once the small-timers were caught, they usually folded.”
Phil paced up and down on the terrazzo floor, trying to work off his anger.
“Rob and I were offered a chance to bankroll a couple of drug dealers in St. Louis,” Helen said. “They promised we could make fifty thousand dollars. It was presented as an investment opportunity.”
“And you turned them down?” Phil said.
“Of course. Rob wanted to go for it. He thought we could make one big score and quit. I was too scared.”
“You were too moral,” Phil said.
“No, I knew I’d get caught.”
“You might have,” Phil said. “But you’d be surprised who got away with dealing. A lot of respectable businesspeople got their nest egg selling drugs. They got in, made some money and got out. When I was on that drug case, I kept hearing, ‘I’m just in this until I can buy a house.’ Sometimes it was a restaurant. Or a boat. Or a flashy vacation. They had a goal. They wanted to make a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand. Enough to open the restaurant, take the luxury cruise, or start their dream business.
“The ‘buy the restaurant’ guy was more likely to quit when he reached his goal. Some small-timers did that in the eighties. They scored and got out of the business. Or something happened and the middle-class ones got frightened back into being so-called good citizens. The ones who didn’t either died or got busted.”
“Behind every great fortune is a great crime,” Helen said. “And behind many small fortunes are small crimes.”
“You’d be surprised how many comfortably off people are living off a small, tainted fortune,” Phil said.
“Or their brother’s dream business,” Helen said. “Poor Gus. Do you really think it’s better that he knows everything?”
“Maybe if he quits idealizing his brother,” Phil said, “he can live with the memory of the real Mark.”
CHAPTER 21
“Helen!” The telephone could not hide Kathy’s cry of primal fear. Helen could hear her sister’s anguish a thousand miles away in St. Louis.
“Kathy, honey, is that you?”
“Of course it’s me,” Kathy said, but Helen could hardly understand her sister, her voice was so distorted by tears. “Tom’s taken the kids out for ice cream. Are you alone so you can talk?”
Helen heard Phil whistling in the shower. “For a little while.”
More tears. “He called, Helen. He promised he’d go away, but he called.”
“Who?”
Anger spiked in Kathy’s voice. “The blackmailer, that’s who. That dirtbag—” Kathy stopped to calm herself. “The one you paid five thousand dollars a month ago. Now he wants twice as much—ten thousand dollars—or he’ll ruin Tommy’s life. He knows Tommy killed Rob. He saw it. He must have. He asked me how it would feel to be the mother of the Killer Bat Boy.”
More tears. Helen’s gut squirmed like a basket of snakes. She could see the sensational headlines now: KILLER BAT BOY WHACKS UNCLE. Tommy had swung at Helen’s worthles
s ex-husband with his aluminum bat, and Rob had died soon after. Rob had refused to go to the hospital. He’d laughed when Kathy had suggested it. Right before he died.
“Tommy didn’t kill Rob,” Helen said. “I did. Rob woke up again, and I bopped him with the bat.”
“I told the blackmailer that. He laughed. He said he’d tell the police he saw Tommy swing at Rob and his mother and Aunt Helen bury Uncle Rob in the church basement. He said it would make a touching story about families working together—mother, aunt and the Killer Bat Boy. The blackmailer said you could say what you wanted, but that title would stick to Tommy like Velcro. For the rest of his life, my boy will be known as the Killer Bat Boy.”
“No, he won’t,” Helen said. “I’ll FedEx you the money.”
“You can’t. There isn’t time. He wants the cash tomorrow night or else. It’s eight thirty in Fort Lauderdale right now. The FedEx pickups are over.”
“I can wire transfer the money to your bank account,” Helen said.
“No!” Kathy sounded crazed with terror. “Tom will find out. My Tom. He’ll go to the police. You know he’s a straight arrow.”
So is Phil, Helen thought. Her new husband was whistling his Clapton favorites. He’d switched to a slightly out-of-tune version of “Layla,” the Clapton song about hopeless love.
“Then I’ll hop on a plane and bring the money myself,” Helen told her sister. “I still have that St. Louis bank account. I have to tell Phil about the blackmailer, Sis. He can help us. He’s a detective. I don’t like lying to my husband.”
“You don’t like lying?” Kathy said. “What about me? What if Tom finds out his boring suburban wife buried a body in the church basement? Bringing Phil into this mess will make it worse. You promised, Helen. You promised not to tell.” Her sister’s voice rose to a panicked shriek.
“Take it easy, Kathy,” Helen said. “What if Tom and the kids walk in and hear you? Take some deep breaths. Fix yourself a soothing cup of tea.”
“Tea, hell,” Kathy said. “I want a glass of wine.”
Helen spoke slowly, as if she were talking her sister off a ledge. “Good. You do that. Do you have a bottle open?”
