by Nina Wright
For a real big time
Kept me up all night long
Enlarge your demands
Compared to Chester or Brady, I had little computer savvy. But I knew that if I right-clicked the sender’s name, I should be able to see “properties”; i.e., the sender’s email address. Curious, I pointed my cursor at “E.Z. Manning” and clicked.
Imagine my surprise when I recognized the email address. Or, to be accurate, the domain. It was none other than mattimoerealty.com. But the bigger shock was what came before the @ sign: a name I didn’t know at all. Someone calling himself [email protected] was sending porn spam. Or something that looked like porn spam. And for some reason Tina Breen was reading it. Saving it, too. Another question bloomed in my brain.
I clicked on her “sent” files. Yup. Tina was not only reading this crap; she was replying to it. Well, not exactly replying, if by that we mean saying something. Tina’s replies were blank. And there were many of them.
Back to her inbox. When I checked the properties of “Rod Wunderly,” I uncovered another mattimoerealty.com address. Not rocco this time, but stuart. Trembling, I right-clicked all the porn spam senders. Every single one featured my company’s domain, yet each sender had a different name before the @ sign. I didn’t know any of them.
I returned to Tina’s sent files. She had answered every porn spam message with a blank message. What the hell? Knowing Tina, I wondered if this was her weird way of fighting back, of trying to make the world a cleaner place. Bored at work, had she decided to waste the spammers’ time and cram their inboxes? That might make sense if these were real spammers. But they couldn’t be. To paraphrase that classic horror-movie line, “The emails were coming from inside the house!”
Who were the senders, and what were they up to? What was Tina up to? Maybe this was nothing more than an innocent game played during dull work days by an employee or two who knew more about computers than I did. Someone who had figured out how to set up several email accounts for the purpose of cheap laughs.
But for me that didn’t wash. The Tina Breen I knew wouldn’t deign to play with smut. Not even make-believe smut.
So what the hell was going on?
I glanced up at the sound of the front door clicking open. There stood the potential answer to my question. If the potential answer was in a mood to cooperate. Since she was holding a gun, that seemed unlikely.
Pushing with my feet, I rolled the desk chair as far back from the computer as I could. As far from Tina Breen as I could. And I raised my hands in the universal sign for “I surrender.”
“That gun’s not real, is it?”
I stared at the weapon she held in her shaky right hand.
“I’m warning you, Whiskey. Don’t make me use this thing.” Tina’s voice cracked.
I kept my eyes on the small metal revolver. It was either a snub nose 22 or a toy. I decided to believe it was a toy. Totally bull-shitting, I said, “Come on Tina. I’ve seen Winston and Neville playing with that thing!”
“No, you haven’t!” she snapped. “I would never let my boys play with guns. Not even a toy like this.”
She winced and reluctantly dropped the replica into her handbag. It took a long moment for her to regain a sense of menace. Then she approached her computer screen and scanned it to see what I’d been reading. Her next comment caught me completely off guard.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Me?! How about you? Why did you come in here with toy gun blazing?”
“If you’re half as smart as I hope you are, you’re going to pretend none of this happened,” Tina snarled. “You never pried into my email. And you didn’t see me this morning when I came in to clean out my desk.”
“You’re quitting? I thought you couldn’t afford to lose this job! Friday you got down on your knees and begged me not to let my business fail! You said you and Tim were at the end of your rope-“
When I mentioned her husband’s name, Tina’s right eyelid pulsed. Then her upper lip twitched, and her breathing turned ragged.
“I never wanted him to do it!” she hissed. “I would have stopped him if I could! But you know how men are, Whiskey. They gotta fix things their own way. Even when things aren’t really broken!”
“Do what? Fix what?”
Was she talking about Tim? Or a Mattimoe Realty employee who had been sending fake spam?
“Oh, darn it, Tim wrecked everything!” she said.
Although Tim Breen had never worked for me, Tina would know how to set him up with an email address, or several email addresses, at my business domain. But why would she? What had he done? And did she really intend to quit? If so, I probably wouldn’t need to replace her immediately. Not 'til Odette started selling Big and Little Houses on the Prairie.…
This was not the occasion to mentally review my payroll.
“Tina, you’d better level with me. What kind of trouble are you and Tim in?”
“Oh god,” she moaned, sinking into a lobby chair. “All Tim wanted to do was be the breadwinner again. Being the laid-off stay-at-home dad made him feel like less than a man!”
“So he started sending email porn spam?” I asked, trying to find the connection.
“No! He talked to MacArthur about doing the same kind of work he does.”
“Being a Realtor? Tim should have come to me about that!”
“Not a Realtor, Whiskey! A cleaner! And now you know why I can’t stand that man. MacArthur turned my husband into a criminal, just like he is!”
“MacArthur’s not a criminal…“ I wished I could have been more specific, but I really wasn’t sure how to defend him.
“Oh yeah?”
Tina had a crazed look that made me want to put my hands on my cell phone. Subtly, I reached toward my sweatpants pockets.
“Somebody you know hired Tim as a cleaner. To make their problems disappear,” Tina said.
“Somebody I know?”
Nothing in my pockets. Damn. Then I remembered: I’d left my phone in my purse. In the bathroom.
“Oh yeah,” Tina said. “You know this person. It’s one of your super-rich friends.”
“I have no super-rich friends, Tina. Just a few super-rich former clients. Who do you mean?”
Tina shot straight up from her chair. “I know what you’re doing, Whiskey! You’re stalling for time, hoping somebody else will come by and stop me from doing what I gotta do!”
“What do you gotta do?” My heart thumped.
“I’m really, really sorry, but I gotta take whatever cash you got in the safe. Then the boys and I are going to meet Tim. We’re going underground. The four of us gotta disappear-“
Her voice dissolved into choked sobs.
“What does Tim’s ‘cleaner’ business have to do with spam?” I said.
“That’s not spam!” she sputtered. “Those are Tim’s notes to me about how he was doing. We had kind of a code. If I understood what he was telling me, I replied with a blank message. If I didn’t understand or needed more information, I didn’t reply at all. Then he’d try again. Tim said sending emails on his Blackberry would be safer than making calls! He didn’t think anybody would read them if they looked like spam.”
I glanced at the email message that I’d left open onscreen.
“’Enlarge your demands’? What did that mean?”
“Tim wanted me to ask you for a raise. You, of all people, were never supposed to get shot!”
Chapter Forty-Three
“Tim shot me?” I said when I could find my voice again.
Red-faced and sniffling, Tina nodded. “He kept trying to catch Abra-for ransom. But you kept getting in the way. He said you were as big a nuisance as your dog.”
I didn’t know which was more amazing, that Tim Breen had shot me, or that he had thought I would pay ransom for Abra.
“He only meant to scare you,” Tina said. “Shooting from a moving truck is a lot harder than you might think.”
I pictured the silver pickup with the splintering windshield. MacArthur had said he couldn’t identify the driver. Was that true or false? How much did he know about what Tim was up to?
“Since when does Tim have a truck?” I said.
“He doesn’t. He ‘borrowed’ it from our neighbor who’s on vacation.”
My head spun faster than a yoyo. If I hadn’t already been sitting, I would have immediately sought a chair. As it was, I wanted to slide all the way to the floor.
“Are you saying… Tim shot everybody?”
Tina arched her back. “Not everybody! Just four people involved in that dog show.”
“Two of them died,” I said.
“By accident,” my office manager declared. “Tim had instructions to hurt those two. But… they moved.” She shrugged. “Mitchell Slater wasn’t supposed to take that last step. As for Matt Koniger, well, you know what they say about a shot in the dark? Poor Tim. It’s really hard in a blackout to hit the target but not kill him.”
“How about Ramona Bowden?” I said. “Was Tim supposed to hit her or miss her?”
At that instant my front door clicked open again. Seeing our chief of police, Tina let out a cry of either surprise or relief; I couldn’t tell which.
To me Jenx said, “That’s where it gets interesting. Ramona Bowden was Tim’s boss.”
“No way!” I said.
“Way,” sighed Tina. Then she took a deep breath, stood up, and extended fisted hands, palms down, toward Jenx.
“What are ya doing?” the chief said.
“Go ahead and cuff me. I’m an accessory.”
“Shut up and sit down,” Jenx said. Tina obeyed.
I waited for Jenx to make the next move, but all she did was stare at Tina.
“Isn’t this the part where you read her her rights?” I said.
“If I was planning to bust her, yeah,” Jenx said. “But I think there’s a chance we can keep Tina out of this.”
“Her husband killed two people!” I exclaimed. “And shot two more, including me!”
Jenx nodded. “He also kidnapped a valuable show dog. And your dog, assuming Abra didn’t go willingly.”
“Abra always goes willingly.”
Tina raised her hand like she was in school. “I threatened Whiskey with a toy gun and told her I was going to rob her safe. Does that count?”
“Did you rob her safe?” Jenx asked.
Tina shook her head.
“Then let’s all play Whiskey’s game,” Jenx said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Denial. We’ll all three pretend nothing weird happened here.”
Jenx pointed Tina toward the door and told her not to do anything stupid. I considered those instructions much too vague.
It turned out that Jenx hadn’t known about the Tim-and-Ramona connection 'til she followed up on the pickup truck reported by MacArthur. When she drove to the house where the truck was registered, she found Tim in the garage, cleaning broken glass from the dashboard.
“The son of a bitch ran when I pulled in the driveway,” she said. “I got so pissed off my magnetic compass went out of whack! Everything electrical on the block started arcing.”
Jenx wasn’t a superhero although her geomagnetic powers were the stuff of local lore. Magnet Springs happened to be built on a highly charged electrical field. Spikes and surges have always been commonplace here. Records dating back to 1820 note that the occasional grazing cow keeled over when it wandered into the wrong part of a wet pasture. A few farmers did, too. But fertile soil and sweeping views of Lake Michigan kept most settlers from moving on. Then along came the Jenkins clan with a genetic predisposition for channeling energy, especially when riled. Don’t piss off the chief. She’s got a weapon nobody can make her register or put down.
Jenx continued, “A power line snapped loose and fell next to Tim, spraying sparks! I swear, he jumped a foot in the air. Stood there bawling like a two-hundred-pound baby. So I marched him to my cruiser. He spilled everything before we got to the station.”
“Everything” turned out to be this: After Ramona’s second husband died, and she inherited yet another small fortune, she decided the time had come to pursue personal satisfaction regardless of cost. Personal satisfaction in the form of revenge, that is. Ramona kept score. She wanted payback for Mitchell and Matt having publicly rejected her in front of her dog-show cronies. She wanted to spite Susan, too, for carrying on high-profile affairs with the same two men. Ramona intensely resented Susan’s easy egotism, her conviction that-and I’m paraphrasing-her own shit didn’t stink. Her dogs’ shit, either.
Ramona told Tim that Susan had schmoozed her for one reason only: to access her excellent breeding stock. Susan’s kennel would have been unremarkable without it.
Why did Ramona do business with Susan? Probably to be able to say that she did. If there’s guilt by association, the same holds true for glamour. That was Jenx’s theory, anyhow. Susan and her dogs got national attention because she was rich, beautiful, and sexual. On that scorecard Ramona was one for three. And resentful as hell about it. Through a paramilitary listserv she placed a discreet ad seeking a “personal assistant capable of confidentiality and excellent marksmanship.”
“We know this much,” I said. “Tim padded his resume.”
“We also know he bought supplies through that listserv,” Jenx said. “Including night-vision goggles and a chemical designed to disguise his scent. Ramona didn’t want anybody killed. Her goal was to scare the crap out of ‘em. But her marksman screwed up.”
“He shot his own boss!” I exclaimed.
“By accident. Tim was supposed to shoot at her in order to draw suspicion away from her. But he got nervous because she kept yelling at him. It was Tim who Ramona phoned just before she got shot. He was on a cell phone that Ramona had ‘lifted’ from Kori, just to confuse things.”
Although I didn’t know Tim well, I knew now that he was the man I’d seen in silhouette leaving the exhibit hall after the lights went out. And his was the voice I’d heard shouting at people to stay still.
“Was Brenda in on this, too?” I said. “She drives a big black car. The hood was hot when MacArthur talked to her!”
“She’d just come back from the carryout down the road,” Jenx said. “I interviewed Brenda by phone-after her attorney sprang her from the local slammer. She got busted for driving drunk. But she had nothing to do with Ramona. In fact, Brenda was the victim of another crime.”
“Let me guess. Sandy Slater accused Brenda of wanting Matt dead because he was blackmailing her!”
“Matt and his mama were squeezing money out of Brenda,” the chief said, “in exchange for not telling her snooty friends and fellow breeders about her sexual preferences. Brenda also had the hots for the Two L’s.”
“We still don’t know whose Cadillac picked up the dogs,” I sighed. “If it was a Cadillac.”
“It’s a Cadillac, all right,” Jenx said. “A Seville, not a DTS. Your Amish teen was full of crap, like teens everywhere.”
“How did Ramona learn to drive so aggressively?”
“Practice. She’s had a slew of citations for speeding and driving without due regard.”
“Where is she now?” I said. “And where’s Silverado?”
“We assume they’re together. There’s an APB out for her and her car. It’s just a matter of time 'til somebody sees her.”
I comforted myself with the knowledge that Ramona raised dogs, so she wouldn’t hurt this one. Tim Breen had told Jenx that Ramona paid off one of the Two L’s to get her other dogs safely back to Grand Rapids. She’d also hired Kori to make sure Silverado ended up in her motel room when he took off after Abra. And to “pull the plug” during the final round of judging.
I said, “So Kori was involved! I knew it!”
Jenx shook her head. “Kori thought she was participating in a nasty practical joke on Susan. That’s all.”
“You talked to her?”
<
br /> “Not yet. But I believe Tim. He’s way too scared of me to lie.”
“What about MacArthur? Tina blames him for getting Tim into this business. If that’s true, then MacArthur knew what Tim was up to. And he ratted Tim out when he gave you the license of the pickup.”
“I don’t know what MacArthur knows about Tim,” Jenx said. “I haven’t been able to find him.”
“He drove me home last night, like you told him to, and then he and Chester went back to the Castle.”
“MacArthur cleared out of there,” Jenx said. “Packed up his shit and left after he put Chester to bed and hired a sitter to watch him 'til Cassina and Rupert come home.”
Chapter Forty-Four
I could have believed a lot of things about MacArthur: that he cheated on Avery, turned in Tim, and was inclined to bend the law. But I couldn’t believe he would walk out on Chester. Over coffee at the Goh Cup, MacArthur and I had often discussed Chester’s need for a father figure. Rupert the Sperm Donor, his frequently absent, usually stoned, sorry excuse for a dad, didn’t even try to be paternal. I had assumed MacArthur saw himself filling that role for Chester.
“And then he goes and abandons the kid!” I fumed.
“He didn’t abandon him,” Jenx said. “He left him a note and got him a sitter.”
“He took off! Adios. Sayonara. Have a nice life! How is Chester handling it?”
“I think he’s-“
My ringing cell phone interrupted Jenx’s reply. Caller ID said The Castle.
“That’s Chester now,” I said. “I hope I can come up with something comforting to say!”
“Just be yourself,” Jenx said.
“’Myself’ babbles nonstop when things go wrong.”
“Perfect,” she said. “That should distract him.”
“Hello?” I answered coolly. My strategy was to pretend there was no such thing as Caller ID. Or a gossipy police chief in my office.
