by J. D. Griffo
“I’m not sure that’s possible, bad luck seems to be sticking around,” Veronica said. “Two more waitresses quit, so I’m working double shifts and the ladies’ room is still out of order and won’t be repaired until tomorrow. With all the police activity, I’m the last business to get fixed.”
“Does that mean I have to use the men’s room?” Alberta frowned.
“Sorry, yes,” Veronica said. “I put a lock on the door so you can lock it when you enter and at least have privacy among the urinals.”
“Be right back, girls, time to see how the other half pees,” Alberta said.
Locking the door behind her, Alberta quickly surveyed the men’s room and couldn’t remember the last time she was in one. She thought back to when her son, Rocco, was a toddler and he refused to use the ladies’ room while they were having lunch at a neighborhood restaurant. She’d had to have one of the waiters she knew stand guard at the men’s room so she could take Rocco in to do number one. She laughed at the thought and realized it had been too long since she spoke with her son; she’d have to rectify that tonight, but for now she had some other business to attend to.
She walked toward the first stall and was about to open the door when she noticed two feet visible through the opening at the bottom.
“Mi scusi,” Alberta gasped. “I thought it was empty.”
Alberta turned to leave, but realized the man inside the stall didn’t respond in any way to hearing a female voice in a men’s room. She called out again, but still no response. Standing in front of the stall, she noticed the door wasn’t locked, so with one finger she pushed the door open and gasped in horror at the sight. Dominic was sitting on the toilet, his head hanging forward lifelessly, resting on his chest.
The door continued to swing all the way open and banged into Dominic’s knee. The action jostled the man’s body and caused him to lurch forward and fall to the ceramic-tiled floor.
This time Alberta shrieked because Dominic was not only identical to his sister in life, but also in death. He was lying face down on the floor, and Alberta saw that a butcher knife had been plunged into his back.
CHAPTER 14
Non puoi fidarti dei tuoi stessi occhi.
For the second time in less than two weeks the police were summoned to Veronica’s Diner, and not to partake in a late-night cup of coffee and slice of blueberry pie. They were called to investigate yet another murder. One that was almost identical to the first.
“Looks like we have a copycat, Vin,” Alberta declared as Vinny entered the diner, followed closely by Tambra and a team of detectives.
Vinny scrunched up his forehead and lifted his right eyebrow higher than the left as he stared at Alberta. If the situation weren’t so dire he would’ve laughed in her face. What did she know about a copycat killer? Then he realized his former babysitter probably knew just as much about copycat killers as he did.
“How did you come to such a conclusion, Alfie?” Vinny asked.
“See for yourself,” she replied, leading Vinny to the men’s bathroom, where Dominic was sprawled out, face pressing against the tile floor, butcher knife still rising from the depths of his back.
Vinny pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Looks like we have a copycat, Alfie.”
“Gram already told you that,” Jinx said, standing behind them in the entrance to the men’s room.
“It’s not the knife that killed Teri Jo, of course, but it looks exactly the same,” Helen added.
“Also too, the corpses are identical,” Joyce added.
“What are you talking about?” Vinny asked, looking at the three women huddled together in the doorway.
“Look at his face,” Alberta instructed.
Bending on one knee, Vinny lowered himself until he was face-to-face with Tranquility’s latest homicide victim. He could only see the left side of Dominic’s face, but it was enough for him to understand what the ladies were talking about. It also was enough for him to understand that this was not a random killing, this was the result of a serial killer, and it was absolutely connected to Teri Jo’s murder. There was no question about that. The only question racing through Vinny’s mind was, Who in the world was this man that he was looking at?
“He could be Teri Jo’s twin,” Vinny exclaimed, sitting back on his haunches.
Alberta fought the urge to smile. Not because Vinny was finally coming to the conclusion that she already had come to, but because his expression reminded her of how he looked when they were kids. Innocent, yet filled with curiosity and passion. Despite the tragic circumstances, she was delighted to see that her friend had maintained his sense of wonder after all these years.
“Not could be,” Helen corrected. “That’s exactly who Dominic is.”
“You know the victim?” Vinny asked.
“Sure, don’t you?” Joyce replied. “It’s Dominic Ri—”
“Linbruck,” Alberta interrupted. “Dominic Linbruck, Teri Jo’s twin.”
Standing behind Vinny, Alberta looked at Joyce, her eyes wide as she shook her head from side to side and drew a line with her finger underneath her chin. It was the universal sign language which meant, “Shut up immediately and don’t say another word.” Joyce got the hint.
“The resemblance is uncanny,” Joyce said. “Who else could it be?”
Vinny looked at all the faces staring at him and he had a nagging suspicion that they weren’t telling him the truth, but when he bent down again to get another look at Dominic’s face, he couldn’t find a reason to doubt them. This man looked exactly like Teri Jo.
Identifying a physical resemblance was one thing, being 100 percent certain that the corpses were related was another.
“Explain to me how you’re certain this is Teri Jo’s brother,” Vinny demanded. “And do not tell me it’s because they look alike.”
“We’re detectives, Vin,” Alberta replied. “It’s our job to find out things like this.”
Vinny rested on his haunches again, but this time he seemed deflated and weary. “What exactly did you find out?”
Alberta chose her words carefully so she could explain how they came to know Dominic and Teri Jo were related, but leave out what family they were related to. She shared with Vinny that Dominic was the intruder who threw the sundial into her kitchen and that with some digging they found out he had an affiliation with an airport in Texas and tracked him down there. The last they heard from him he was on his way back from Connecticut and was going to tell them who killed his sister and why. He never got the chance because he was murdered in the same way and almost the same spot as his sister.
“You went to Texas?” Vinny asked.
“That’s your takeaway from the story?” Helen countered. “My sister handed you prime clues you didn’t have, and all you’re worried about is our flight schedule.”
“I think your sister is handing me a bunch of malarkey, but I know better than to ask questions I’m not going to get the answers to,” Vinny said, standing up. “What I do want to know is did Dominic say anything that could point to a motive or to the killer?”
“No,” Alberta replied. “He said he knew both and he was going to tell us everything, but he never showed up at my place last night, and we didn’t see him again until I had to use the ladies’.”
“But you didn’t,” Vinny said.
“Well, no, I never did get to go because I found a dead man in the bathroom stall,” Alberta explained. “It put the kibosh on any urge I had to tinkle.”
“No, Gram, that’s not what Vinny means,” Jinx said. “You never got to the ladies’ room because you had to use the men’s room instead.”
“Veronica!”
Vinny’s rough cry made the women jump. His voice bellowed out of the men’s room into the diner itself, but produced the results he was after. In a few seconds Veronica was standing in the doorway, almost afraid to enter the men’s room. Alberta couldn’t tell if she was fearful of the dead body lying on the floor or the questions
Vinny was about to ask.
Alberta noticed that despite Veronica’s attempt to appear put together and normal, the layers of makeup on her face couldn’t hide the stress and anxiety that lay just underneath. She noticed something else clinging to Veronica’s face. Anger.
At first this startled Alberta. Shouldn’t she be saddened that another dead body was found on her premises? Shouldn’t she be scared that her diner was turning into a satellite morgue? Then Alberta looked at it from a business owner’s perspective. One dead body is bad for business, two dead bodies within a week means the GONE FISHING sign will permanently hang from the front door. Veronica wasn’t only looking at another dead body, she was looking at the death of her livelihood.
“Do you know who he is?” Veronica asked.
“It’s Teri Jo’s twin brother,” Helen said.
Veronica’s eyes blinked several times, but that was the only change to her expression. “She had a brother?”
“A twin,” Jinx clarified.
“You weren’t aware of that?” Vinny asked.
Veronica maintained her stoic expression, the only change was that her eyes moved to look from Jinx to Vinny. She was like a statue, devoid of any emotion. She either wasn’t feeling anything or was doing a superb job of concealing her emotions.
“No,” Veronica replied. “I didn’t know Teri Jo had any family. She never spoke about her personal life, other than to say she had had it rough. I got the sense that she didn’t want to talk about it, so I never pried.”
A believable response and yet few in the room believed her.
Vinny, for one, was less concerned with the specifics of Veronica and Teri Jo’s private conversations or with Veronica’s knowledge of Teri Jo’s personal life. He wanted to know about the inner workings of the diner.
“How long has the plumbing been a problem?” he asked.
“About two weeks, I guess, maybe a little longer,” Veronica replied. “It’s the sewer line, and it’s affected everyone on the block.”
“That’s exactly what Owen told us, Berta,” Joyce added.
Once again Alberta gave Joyce a look that shut her up immediately. Alberta was surprised by Joyce’s slips of the tongue since her sister-in-law was usually quite savvy and understood the power of silence. Possibly being in the presence of her second dead body in a short amount of time had unsettled her. Alberta was getting used to finding fallen corpses littering her path; for Joyce it was a relatively new occurrence, so perhaps she hadn’t gotten used to it yet.
Just as Vinny turned to face Alberta, Joyce gave her a look that said, I’m sorry. Alberta was unconcerned. She had handled Vinny when he was a boy and she was his babysitter, she could handle him now.
“You were next door at the Tranqclockery?” Vinny asked, although his tone made his question sound more like an accusation.
“I guess the cat’s out of the bag,” Alberta replied. “I was looking for a gift for my sister. Sorry, Helen, it was going to be a surprise.”
“You were going to get me a clock?” Helen asked.
“Like the cuckoo clock we had as kids,” Alberta explained, hoping her sister would go along with the ruse.
“The one with the little Swiss girl on the swing?” Helen asked, her eyes lighting up at the faux memory.
“Yes!” Alberta exclaimed, then continued the trip down liar’s lane. “The one Daddy said came from some relatives in Sondrio.”
“I don’t remember you having a cuckoo clock in your house,” Vinny announced.
“Because you’re not a very good detective,” Helen snapped. “Have you even noticed there’s something sticking out from underneath that dead body?”
Everyone in the room looked down at Dominic’s body, and for the first time they saw that he was lying on top of a piece of paper or possibly a magazine. Vinny took out a pocketknife from his pants and pulled out a pair of tweezers.
“Ah Madon!” Alberta exclaimed. “Do not tell me that’s the army knife you had when you were a boy?”
“One and the same,” Vinny declared. “I got it for passing my wilderness survival test in the Boy Scouts.”
“It must’ve been an easy test,” Helen said. “Hoboken wasn’t known for its forestry.”
“My troop spent the weekend at Camp Hope in Ringwood, smarty pants,” Vinny said. “Father Donato, our scout leader, gave me this knife and told me if I took good care of it, it would never let me down. The good father was right.”
Using the tweezers, Vinny grabbed hold of the item lodged underneath Dominic’s body and pulled it out. It wasn’t a magazine, but a comic book.
“It’s the same kind of comic book that was found in my backyard,” Alberta said. “Why would a grown man be reading about Archie?”
“Comic books are super popular, Gram,” Jinx said. “Freddy reads them all the time.”
“Doesn’t he read the ones about superheroes and caped crusaders?” Joyce pointed out. “Not the kids in Riverdale.”
Before they could engage in an in-depth conversation about what type of comic book was appropriate for an adult man, Veronica changed the subject by almost fainting. She leaned to the side and didn’t fall to the ground only because she reached out to grab on to a sink.
“Sorry, I haven’t eaten today and I guess I’m light-headed,” she explained.
Quickly, Vinny placed the comic book on the floor and grabbed Veronica’s arm to steady her. He called for Tambra and instructed her to get Veronica something to eat and to stay with her until she felt better. When Veronica left the room, all thoughts of comic books and superheroes were a thing of the past, and they concentrated on the matter at hand, namely the dead body in the room.
“I think Dominic was the real target of the first murder and not Teri Jo,” Alberta declared.
“How’d you come to that conclusion, Gram?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Alberta asked. “The poor girl got in the way.”
“How did she do that?” Vinny wanted to know.
“Because she must have used the men’s room instead of the ladies’ room, which was still broken the morning she was killed, and that was a fatal error,” Alberta explained. “If she went into the men’s room and someone was already in there waiting to kill Dominic, the killer could have easily killed Teri Jo by mistake.”
“That’s entirely possible, Alfie,” Vinny agreed. “If you were to look at either of them quickly it would be difficult to tell the two of them apart. They have the same slim build, and Teri Jo’s pixie haircut wasn’t much longer than Dominic’s crew cut.”
“Plus, Teri Jo was wearing her waitress uniform that day, which not for nothing, is just as unflattering as my old work attire,” Helen stated.
Helen was right. Teri Jo’s uniform consisted of a men’s white, long-sleeved shirt, black slacks, and black sneakers, hardly a frilly, feminine look. From behind she could easily have looked like her brother.
“Non puoi fidarti dei tuoi stessi occhi,” Alberta muttered.
“I learned that a long time ago, Alfie,” Vinny said.
“Learned what?” Jinx asked. “Sorry, the more I learn Italian, the more I learn I need to learn more Italian.”
“Say that five times fast,” Helen quipped.
“I said that you can’t trust your own eyes, lovey,” Alberta translated. “The murderer had to work quickly and thought he was killing Dominic when he only managed to kill Dominic’s sister.”
“This is all speculation though,” Joyce declared. “We never actually saw Teri Jo go in or come out of the men’s room, we just saw her stumbling down the aisle until she fell.”
“But, Joyce, the diner was so busy that morning and we were talking. We could’ve easily missed it,” Alberta said. “Just like we could’ve missed someone else enter the men’s room.”
“Someone like the killer, you mean?” Vinny asked.
“Exactly,” Alberta replied.
“That’s because the killer didn’t enter the men’s room from inside
the diner, he entered from outside,” Jinx announced. “Through the window.”
They all looked at the closed window at the far end of the bathroom and came to the same conclusion that Alberta and Jinx had determined earlier, that it was large enough for a man to enter—not a man of Vinny’s size, but a man the size of Dominic would have no problem entering.
“If someone entered the bathroom from the outside, killed Teri Jo thinking she was Dominic, he could’ve then escaped unseen by the same route that he used to enter the bathroom,” Vinny described.
Shaking her head, Jinx disagreed. “I don’t think that’s how it happened.”
“What do you mean, lovey?” Alberta questioned. “It makes perfect sense.”
“It does, but if you look at it from a different angle, it doesn’t,” Jinx replied cryptically. “Remember when we went snoop . . . I mean, investigating, around the back of the diner? The men’s room window was closed.”
“Because the killer closed the window behind him when he left,” Vinny said.
“Possibly, but think about it from the point of view of the murderer,” Jinx said.
Walking toward the window, Jinx positioned herself underneath it and turned to face the group. Jinx held out her hand, mimicking what the killer looked like moments before plunging the knife into Teri Jo’s back.
“He just stabbed Teri Jo, and there’s a good chance he realized he killed the wrong person because Teri Jo didn’t die immediately,” Jinx said. “If the killer panicked, even slightly, don’t you think he would’ve looked for the quickest exit to escape?”
“It’s a lot easier to leave through the front door than to climb back out the window,” Alberta said.
“But you said the window was shut,” Vinny repeated.
“That’s right,” Alberta replied.
“The killer shut the window after he crawled back through it,” Vinny deduced. “It was still an active crime scene when you two were snooping around the back, so if the window was open the police would’ve left it that way.”
Suddenly, Alberta shuddered. She grabbed for the gold crucifix around her neck and made the sign of the cross.
