Sticky Fingers

by Nancy Martin

  Me, I was holding a wad of fast-food napkins against my bleeding mouth and wondering if I might lose a tooth.

  “Hey, Gary.” Bug put out his hand to the uniformed cop. “How come you’re not at the concert venue, learning how to protect the life of a rock singer?”

  Gary shook his hand. “I don’t need the overtime. You?”

  “I don’t need the aggravation.” Bug took a slug of coffee and eyed me over the rim of the cup. “What’s with the blood, Roxy? You getting too slow to duck a punch these days?”

  I said, “You’re just worried about the paperwork. Well, cool your jets, Detective. I’m not pressing charges.”

  He nodded once. “Okay, that makes my morning simpler. What’s the story here?”

  Gary gave Bug the lowdown, and during the telling, Bug glanced from the Eckelstines to the Mitchells and finally back to me. I held his gaze while Gary finished up the story.

  “A woman bigamist,” Bug said finally. “There’s a switch.”

  “Must not have been getting enough attention from the first team,” I said. “She needed a second string.”

  “And what are you doing here, exactly?” he asked. “Again?”

  “You mean before I was assaulted? Just watching the bomb squad have their fun.”

  “Did they let you push the detonator?”

  “Darnit, no. Did you find Clarice Crabtree yet?”

  “I haven’t been looking. We’ve got the Homewood homicide on the front burner at the moment. And she’s not even officially a missing person.”

  “But…?” I prompted.

  Grimly, he said, “I’m thinking maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get a jump start on things. I’ll go talk to the husbands. Which one looks the guiltiest?”

  “They both seem pretty shaken up,” Gary observed.

  Bug sighed. “My money’s always on the husband in these disappearance cases. But this time it’s a crowded field.”

  Gary said, “I’d go after Mitchell first. The pretty boy with the bleeding knuckles. What do you bet he has a girlfriend on the side?”

  “Libido’s not a motive for making your wife disappear,” I said, surprising myself.

  Bug raised one eyebrow. “I think I’ll talk to Eckelstine first, give Mitchell time to get nervous. Maybe you ought to go use your feminine wiles on him, Rox. Get him to confess.”

  “Or maybe he’ll just hit me again.”

  Bug smiled and strolled over to talk with the Eckelstines.

  Mitchell worked up the courage to get out of his car and come over to me.

  “I’m sorry about hitting you.” He almost managed to look contrite. “I was upset.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Considering the circumstances, I hope you won’t press charges.”

  I glanced past him at his daughter. She had pulled a cell phone from her jacket pocket and was listening to a call. And sobbing softly.

  My heart twisted at the sight of tears streaking down her cheeks. “Yeah, okay,” I said to Mitchell. “No harm done.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation for all this.” Mitchell wagged his head in disbelief. “Clarice will be able to straighten everything out as soon as we locate her. I’ve been trying to reach her since yesterday, but she’ll call soon. Clarice always keeps in touch.”

  I remembered the two cell phones Clarice clipped to her belt. “She’s a good communicator, huh?”

  “Yes. Usually, I know where she is at any time—even making a speech in California, maybe, or working at the site in Siberia.”

  “Siberia?”

  “Yes, she travels to important digs.” Mitchell looked surprised at my ignorance. “That’s where we met, working together.”

  I remembered my discussion with Tito. “Digging up dinosaur bones?”

  “Not dinosaurs. Later mammals.”

  “Megafauna.”

  “Exactly. We worked on the site where her father discovered all those woolly mammoths. We had some great success there. It’s where we married. And adopted Sugar, too.”

  I couldn’t help glancing at their daughter one more time. “You got married and started a family all at once, huh?”

  “Yeah. Clarice ran across Sugar in the village where we had a base camp. She’d been orphaned, and Clarice wanted to help. It’s impossible not to fall in love with Sugar.” Mitchell glanced back at his daughter and glowed with pride. “Even back then she was obviously something special.”

  “So you married Clarice and adopted the kid before you left Siberia?”

  “Yes. And since then, she’s made my life complete.”

  “Daddy?”

  Sugar had gotten out of the car and come over. She tugged at her father’s sleeve. “Daddy, I need to get to practice. My coach says we only have the rink reserved until eleven.”

  Mitchell checked his watch. “We’ll leave as soon as we get some answers, sweetheart.”

  “But, Daddy—”

  From the curb, Eckelstine’s teenage son mocked her in a falsetto singsong. “But, Daddy!”

  “Shut up, kid,” I said to him.

  “Make me,” he shot back.

  “I could make you eat that face jewelry you’ve got on.”

  “You try, you’ll eat something else, too, bitch.”

  “Give it a rest, jagoff,” I said.

  Which was enough to get his father on his feet and swinging a punch at my face. He missed and hit Mitchell instead. Sugar screamed. The Eckelestine kid burst out laughing. Mitchell made a fist and swung for Eckelstine. He missed, too.

  And hit me again.

  This time, I hit him back.

  11

  When the brawl ended, Bug loaded me into the back of his cruiser, and we headed downtown for me to be booked for disturbing the peace, which was totally bogus. I sulked in the backseat.

  I also thought about Mitch Mitchell and his angelic daughter, and Eckelstine and his snotty son. How did Clarice fit into those family portraits? And why did she feel the need to have two whole families? Wasn’t one set of problems enough?

  Boy, there was a lot more to Clarice than I first thought.

  That’s when Bug took a cell phone call. Then he drove down to the bank of the Ohio, where I saw a river patrol boat bobbing offshore, and the forensic cops standing over a rolled-up carpet. Bug got me out of the car, and we went over to check out the scene.

  “Hell,” Bug sighed after we established that the body in the carpet was that of Clarice Crabtree. He looked up at the sky for a while and finally said, “You going to stay out of my way while I work this case?”

  I didn’t feel so good.

  Clarice was definitely dead. Not kidnapped. Dead.

  To Bug, I said, “Why would I get in your way?”

  Maybe I sounded too flip. Or sarcastic. But suddenly he was angry, and I was the nearest target.

  “How about this for a reason?” He got right in my face, his voice going up a notch. “I talked to my wife this morning. She has a better memory of high school than I do. She says you and Clarice not only knew each other back in the good old days, but you hated each other’s guts.”

  I tried to rouse my temper to match his. “What does that make me? Your prime suspect now?”

  “All I know for sure is you’re probably lying about something.”

  “I did know Clarice,” I snapped, “and okay, we didn’t get along. But until last night, I hadn’t seen her since Mrs. Strohman’s sixth-period science class. So back off, Detective.”

  Bug’s face was dark. “You notice me using a nightstick on you?”

  “I was handcuffed in your car a few minutes ago!”

  He threw up his hands. “How else am I supposed to calm you down? Besides, I’d have cuffed your hands behind you if I’d been serious. You’re a heck of a lot easier to handle when you’re tied.”

  “Is that supposed to be suggestive, Mr. Clean?”

  “Shut up.” He blew a sigh of frustration. “You’re just— You could trust a perso
n once in a while, Roxy, that’s all I’m saying. I’m trying to be your friend here.”

  “I don’t need any more friends,” I shot back.

  “You just don’t know how to handle a man who doesn’t care about getting into your pants.”

  “Maybe we ought to climb into the backseat and get off a quick one,” I said. “It might establish who’s in charge.”

  “Shut your dirty mouth.” He flushed, and for the first time I thought he might lose his temper in a big way. “Why do you make it so hard to get along with you? I can see why Mitchell and Eckelstine popped you in the mouth.”

  “You want to try it yourself?” I stuck my jaw out to be socked.

  “Cut it out.”

  I saw, finally, that Detective Duffy wasn’t cool with dead bodies the way TV cops seemed to be. He was a little green, in fact. Unhappy. Maybe feeling just as sick as I was.

  I turned away from the carpet and its awful contents. “Okay, sorry. It’s been a bad day.”

  “You got that right,” he muttered, turning to glare at the river.

  “For those kids, especially,” I said. “Who’s going to tell them their mother’s gone?”

  “Not me, that’s for sure.”

  “That daughter of Mitchell’s—the girl—she— Did you see her? Talk to her? This could really screw with her head, you know.”

  The words stuck in my throat after that. I felt a tsunami of sympathy for Sugar Mitchell. She seemed like a sweet kid. She didn’t deserve what was coming.

  Bug’s face softened. “Sorry. I should have seen this from your point of view. I know how your mom died, Rox. With you there, a witness to everything. That probably messed you up for life.”

  I don’t know what I hated more—the sympathy people were always trying to give me, or the painful hole that seemed to widen inside when the subject of my mother’s murder came up. I liked things better when I didn’t feel anything.

  Voice harsh, I said, “Yeah, well, buy me an ice-cream cone and I’ll be fine.”

  Bug sighed.

  We stood for a moment, staring at the river, trying to forget what was behind us. Out of the blue, I said, “You know anything about Mr. Squeegee?”

  “Who?”

  “It’s an ice-cream chain or something.”

  “Mr. Squishy.” Bug sounded tired. “It’s frozen custard. My kids love that stuff. The Oreo swirl is pretty good.” He dug into his pocket and came up with a pack of gum. He peeled off a stick and offered it to me.

  I took it and unwrapped the stick. “My daughter’s dating the heir apparent.”

  “Did she meet him scooping butter pecan for his father?”

  “She’s not working at any damn ice-cream parlor. She’s going to get an education, dammit.”

  Bug popped his stick of gum into his mouth. “Trouble at home, huh?”

  “It’s not trouble yet. I’m going to try to visualize Sage in college. Learning to make something of herself. Do you believe in that visualization stuff?”

  “Not so much.”

  “Me neither. Look, can’t I say something about Clarice’s kids without triggering a sapfest? What happened to me is long buried.”

  “Whatever you say, Rox.” He sighed again. “Hang around, okay? You’re still in my custody.”

  He turned away and walked over to the crime-scene team.

  I hung around for a while, freezing my ass off. Getting mad, calming down, feeling sick, then pulling myself together. Wondering about Clarice. Thinking about her daughter, then out of nowhere wondering if Sage was somewhere safe. I shoved the mental images of my own mother’s dead body as far down into the darkness of my soul as I could manage.

  Seemed like I’d spent the whole day watching cops work at a glacial pace.

  Finally, I’d had enough. I waited until Bug was on his phone, and then I walked away, stopping by the cruiser only long enough to grab my cell phone from the front seat where Bug had put it after taking it away from me. While I was there, I took Bug’s police parking medallion from the dashboard, too. Might come in handy someday. You never know.

  I walked up to the casino, cut cross the parking lot, and went past the weird statue of Mr. Rogers putting on his sneakers. As usual, there were some tourists taking pictures of their kids sitting in the statue’s lap. The kids didn’t think the statue was weird. For a few minutes, I lost myself in the crowd to be sure the cops hadn’t decided to follow me.

  Nobody came looking, so I kept walking.

  I dialed Nooch on my cell phone. I’d left him in charge of Rooney and the truck.

  When he picked up, I said, “Come pick me up in front of the baseball stadium, by Willie Stargell.”

  “What are you doing there?” he asked. “It’s not baseball season.”

  “Just come get me.”

  I tried Marvin’s phone again. I wanted to know everything about the kidnapping job he’d offered to me. Because obviously somebody else took the job, and it had gone very, very wrong. But he didn’t answer.

  I reached the baseball stadium within a few minutes and hung around the statues of long-gone players, waiting for Nooch and thinking about Clarice and how she must have died. My teeth chattered in the cold, and I kept my arms folded across my chest.

  I considered all the guys who did favors for Uncle Carmine over the years. But my memories were dim. Most of the colorful old hit men were gone now—half out of commission in nursing homes, the other half buried in Catholic cemeteries all over the city.

  The Monster Truck pulled up, and I almost screamed.

  Somebody had pelted the windshield with eggs. And smashed in one of my headlights. Nooch had turned on the wipers, and the yellow egg mess was now streaked all over the glass and leaking down across the hood. Even Rooney hunkered down in the seat to avoid my wrath.

  I grabbed the passenger door and yanked it open. Nooch sat behind the wheel, holding a Pepsi can against his swollen face. Seeing him hurt made my heart jerk.

  “What happened?” I demanded.

  “It was Gino Martinelli,” he said. “I’m sorry, Rox, I really am. I wasn’t going to hit him, but—”

  “You hit him?” I tried not to panic. “What happened to positive energy and all that jazz?”

  “I dunno,” he moaned. “I went a little nuts.”

  “It’s understandable.” I pulled myself together and climbed into the truck, pushing Rooney out of my way. “Next time we see him, you can beat him into hamburger.”

  “No kidding? Usually, you—”

  “Just kidding,” I said. I gave up trying to be calm for Nooch’s sake. All of a sudden, I was really tired. Exhausted, almost. “Don’t go hitting Gino, or you’ll get arrested for busting your parole. What happened?”

  Nooch took a deep breath. “I was getting myself a hoagie in Bruno’s. Ham and capicola with provolone. My favorite. I was gonna share with you, Rox, honest. But when I came out of Bruno’s, there was Gino kicking in your headlight.”

  “He kicked it in?” My voice cracked.

  “Well, he tried,” Nooch said. “I picked him up—you know, to stop him from doing any damage, and he started swinging at me. He hit me in the face with his elbow, see?” He stuck out his cheek for me to see the blotchy welt there.

  I clenched my teeth. “Yeah, I see.”

  “Anyway, I kinda tossed him onto the sidewalk. Then I lost my balance.”

  “You fell?”

  He blushed. “It was me who broke the headlight, Rox.” He pushed up his knit cap to show me the bruise swelling on his forehead. “I’m really sorry.”

  What bugged me more than anything was seeing Nooch with all his positive energy drained like somebody had pulled a plug. That son of a bitch Gino had picked on Nooch because he was too chicken to come at me instead.

  I rubbed my face, trying to hold on to my temper. “That Gino is a scamp, isn’t he?”

  “What are you going to do, Rox?”

  “I’ll figure out something. When I get a minute to think st
raight. A lot has happened. I need to cogitate a little. How about driving me over to the Wainwright Hotel?”

  “On Sixth?”

  I turned up the heater, buckled my seatbelt, and flopped back against the headrest. Gino was like a boil on my butt, but the real problem was Clarice. Now that she was dead, things had really changed. While Nooch drove, I said, “Tell me more about the limo you saw the night Clarice disappeared.”

  “What limo?”

  “You said you saw a black limousine outside the Crabtree house while you waited in the truck. You said it sat there, but went away after a couple of minutes. Did you get the license plate?”

  “No.”

  What was I thinking? Of course Nooch hadn’t memorized the plate number. “Was it a Premier Limo? Premier has the little star decal on the back bumper. Visualize. Do you remember any little star?”

  Nooch squinched up his face. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe it was from that company that has the little flags on the antenna? Was there any little flag?”

  Nooch shook his head. “I’da remembered a flag.”

  “What about Anderson Transportation? Their cars always have the A-1 magnetic sign attached to the—”

  “Yes!” Nooch bounced in his seat, causing Rooney to growl. “Yes, there was an A on the trunk!”

  “See? Now we’re getting somewhere. All of your positive crap is paying off.”

  I directed Nooch to pull under the canopy in front of the Wainwright Hotel—one of Pittsburgh’s refurbished landmarks. A couple of taxis were letting off passengers with suitcases. I bailed out of the truck and told Nooch to sit tight.

  Alongside the hedge sat an Anderson limo, engine running, driver sitting behind the wheel reading a magazine, waiting for a passenger. I hustled over and knocked on the window. The window hummed down, and the face that looked up at me was none other than that of Pam Anderson herself, daughter of the company’s owner. She was wearing a black suit with a white shirt underneath, very professional. Pearl necklace, pink nail polish, matching lipstick. Nothing like the way she looked when she enjoyed her favorite pastime—her roller derby team. Pam was famous around town as the Bumper—a ruthless member of the Burgh Bombers.