Tilt-a-Whirl (The John Ceepak Mysteries)

by Chris Grabenstein

  “I see.”

  “So our junkie friend? He gets extremely lucky. He scurries through the hole and runs up the beach. A few minutes later, Joey T. comes along and covers up his tracks for him. The lady's too. But Jerry saw the lady stub out her cigarette….”

  “Which Joey swept up?”

  “Check.”

  “Which ended up in the Sand Rake's hopper?”

  “Double check.”

  “Which is now in your pants pocket?”

  “Checkmate.”

  “So—why didn't Squeegee see Ashley?”

  “Firstly, he's, as you say, ‘freaking out’ so he's not seeing much of anything except Mr. Hart's bloody body. Secondly, Ashley was hiding behind the turtle. Remember her footprint path? How it went around to the back?”

  Ceepak pulls out his little notebook.

  “I asked her, ‘Which way did he go?’ She answered, ‘I'm not sure. I went behind the Turtle to hide.’ I believe she was telling the truth. About hearing Squeegee in the bushes, maybe even catching a glimpse of him stumble-bumming around. She was scared and hid until she was sure he was gone. Probably heard the fence rattle again when he crawled under it.”

  “You think she lied about everything? To protect her mother?”

  “They're very close. The butler said so. We've observed it ourselves.”

  “And the kidnapping?”

  “An excellent means of expediting the whole probate process. To ensure no one contested the will and Ashley immediately inherited everything—billions and billions of dollars. Surely, the richest girl in the world would share some of her newfound wealth with her mother. I believe Betty Bell Hart cooked up the kidnapping scheme early Saturday afternoon, when she realized Ms. Stone was in a position of power and able to dispose of assets….”

  “So all of a sudden, you think she did it? Did everything all by herself?”

  “Not all of a sudden, Danny.”

  I'm remembering our walk from the bank.

  “And,” Ceepak adds, “not all by herself.”

  “But how would Ashley know to tell us about the crazy man with the buggy eyes?”

  “I believe Ashley and Mom had a quick little chit-chat. After the murder, after the junkie was gone. Miss Bell most probably ran off the beach … around there … to the side … somewhere where they couldn't be seen. Maybe behind another Sunnyside Clyde sign. I suspect she coached her daughter on exactly what to say … and Ashley was scared … covered with blood … horrified … but mom calmed her down … talked her through it….”

  “That would take some time….”

  “Yes,” Ceepak says. “At least fifteen, twenty minutes. But Betty was very clever. She didn't overload her daughter with too much information. Just enough. About a crazy man with googly eyes. I suspect they talked and rehearsed from 0725 to 0745.”

  “Which is when we saw Ashley in the street!”

  “A full half hour after her father died. I never stopped to ponder that lag in the timeline until I talked to Squeegee.”

  “Squeegee gave you a lot of information.”

  “He's our first eyewitness. His testimony, however, would be vigorously contested in any court of law, given his vagrant background and history of drug abuse….”

  “So why'd you shoot him?”

  “Who?”

  “Squeegee.”

  “Danny, did I ever say I shot anybody?”

  “No but … I assumed….”

  Oh, Jesus. My dad was right. I made an ass “out of u and me.” I drank all that beer last night without just cause.

  “But….”

  “Danny, I could not ask you to lie for me when the chief, as I knew he would, asked you what I did inside the hotel. Furthermore, telling everyone the suspected kidnapper was alive might have endangered Squeegee before I had a chance to see if he was telling me the truth.”

  “But—you fired your rifle! I smelled it.”

  “As I knew you would.”

  “I see. So you sort of set me up?”

  “I allowed you to jump to a conclusion. Yes. Sorry.”

  “It's all good.” I actually say his catch phrase back at him because I am totally relieved. “So—who did you shoot at?”

  “No one. I took a little target practice. You know that lighthouse? Where the red paint meets the white?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I nailed it. Right on the line. Split it down the middle. We should run by and check it out … later.”

  “And the hotel burned down because?”

  “I couldn't deactivate the timers.”

  “But you knew when the building would blow?”

  “I used the sniper rifle's telescopic sight to read the digital output on the timers secured high in the rafters of one of the turrets. It's why I encouraged evacuation of the premises in such a dramatic fashion.”

  “You mean firing your pistol into the floor like that?”

  “Affirmative.”

  I feel all warm and fuzzy. The Code lives on. So apparently, does Squeegee.

  Ceepak crouches down near the sand-covered trapdoor.

  “Now then—we never actually checked the bottom of this fence for fibers. If Betty crawled out, perhaps….”

  “Don't touch that fence!”

  A skinny old lady in shorts and a cowboy hat is limping up the beach, yelling at Ceepak.

  “Do not touch it!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “You Ceepak?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Where are your gloves?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “Not doing us much good in there now, are they?”

  “No, ma'am.”

  The old lady is wearing khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and one of those Australian cowboy hats with the flap buttoned up on one side. She's squinting and crinkling her pixie nose because she really should have worn sunglasses. She has Irish eyes and fair, freckled Irish skin, neither of which does particularly well in the sun. The Irish were designed for mist, fog, and bogs—not sand, surf, and sun.

  Ceepak pulls on his evidence gloves.

  The lady nods her approval.

  I think she should have reconsidered her choice on the shorts. She has these white, Bic-Stic ballpoint pen kind of legs with carbuncled knees like Popeye's girlfriend, only this lady's are wrinkled.

  Ceepak is studying her face.

  “Dr. McDaniels?”

  “That's right. Call me Sandy. Like the inside of my shoes. Come here.”

  Ceepak moves closer so the little lady can lean against him with one hand and use her other to shake out the sand in her tennis shoe. She has short-cut white hair that might've been red once and blue eyes that twinkle, like she just told herself a dirty joke.

  “You work out?” she asks Ceepak while she's balancing against his bicep.

  “Some.”

  “I could tell. You do more curls than anything else.” She slips the shoe back on her foot. “So what we got?”

  “First, Dr. McDaniels, I want to thank you for coming out so early….”

  “Save it. I'm just sorry I was on vacation Saturday. I hear Slobbinsky royally screwed the pooch.”

  “Not too badly. Fortunately, the rest of your team did a fantastic job….”

  “They always do. Slobbinsky sat next to the dead guy and ate a greasy sandwich, hunh? Figures. With him, a sandwich is not a sandwich unless big globs of grease drip out from between the bread slices. I can always tell what he's had for lunch by studying his tie. Soup. Chili. Chicken fingers with honey mustard sauce….”

  I put two and two together. This is the fabled Dr. Sandra McDaniels. The legendary Crime Scene Investigator.

  “So you talked to Chris Morgan?” Ceepak asks.

  McDaniels nods. “He's good people. For a Fed. We've worked together before.”

  “He mentioned our peculiar situation?”

  “Yep. Nobody knows I'm here. Hell, I think I'm still on vacation. My plane lands sometime a
round noon. Unless, of course, I caught an earlier flight because an old FBI pal called me late last night….”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Don't get all mushy on me.” She knuckle-punches Ceepak in the arm. “So, find anything interesting in the garbage this morning?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  Ceepak pulls out two evidence envelopes.

  “This was swept off the beach Saturday morning.”

  McDaniels looks at the clove cigarette butt.

  “Ah, Djarum Black Kretek,” she says. “An Indonesian import. It is widely believed that the name Kretek derives from the crackling sound that cloves make when burned—‘keretek-keretek.’ As you see, I share Sherlock Holmes's fascination with tobacco products.”

  “Indeed,” Ceepak says.

  Man, I can so see these two nerding out in front of the TV with milk and cookies, thrilling to Forensic Files.

  “This,” he tells her, holding up the second evidence bag, “comes from the suspect's home.”

  McDaniels peeks in the bag.

  “Looks like a perfect match. We'll run it through the lab. How'd you secure it?”

  “I asked politely.”

  “Oh. You're a sneaky one, hunh?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  McDaniels puts the envelopes in her cargo pockets. I guess that explains the shorts: lots of pockets. Not as many as Ceepak, but almost.

  “Can I borrow your magnifying glass?” she asks him, just assuming the big guy lugs one around with him at all times—which, of course, he does.

  “Thanks.”

  She grunts as she bends down to study the twisted tips at the bottom of the fence.

  “Oh, yeah. This fence is like a cat brush.”

  She pulls out her own tweezers and a stack of evidence bags and starts plucking fibers I can't see.

  “So,” she says, “this is where it all went down?”

  “Yes, ma'am. That car there….”

  Ceepak points to the Tilt-A-Whirl.

  “Second turtle from the left,” she says without looking. “I know. Morgan E-mailed me the whole file. Of course, the skinny guy? This homeless bum with the goatee? You know he didn't do the kidnap.”

  “Yes, ma'am. I know.”

  “You do?” I'm sort of startled here.

  Dr. McDaniels chuckles.

  “Officer Ceepak—please explain to the class how you know what you know.” She looks up at me. “I love to torture my students.”

  “We know Squeegee was not the kidnapper,” Ceepak says, “from examining the boot impressions left in the sand behind the Hart beach house.”

  “Go on.”

  “The tread marks matched those we found on the Tilt-A-Whirl...”

  “But?” Dr. McDaniels arches an eyebrow.

  “But the boot prints on the beach were deeper.”

  “Ergo?”

  Now she's using Latin like Batman sometimes did on that old TV show.

  “Therefore,” Ceepak says, “the kidnapper weighed more than the man who walked across the Tilt-A-Whirl platform.”

  “How much?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How much did the kidnapper weigh?”

  Ceepak drops his eyes like he forgot to study that chapter.

  “Sorry. I didn't calculate the exact weight.”

  “273 pounds,” she says. “Big guy. A big galoot of a guy.”

  “How can you be certain?” I ask, impressed.

  “Hey—I wrote the book. Besides, my guys took your plaster cast back to the lab and made some measurements.”

  “So it was kind of a trick question?” I ask.

  “Yeah. That's my favorite kind. So, you know—watch your back, kid.” This time, she knuckle-punches my shoulder. It stings.

  My partner's smiling. He likes this feisty lady.

  “I need another number,” he says.

  “Shoot.”

  “More precise time of death.”

  Dr. McDaniels shakes her head and sighs.

  “I'll re-check his eye jelly numbers, but you know we can't be precise. There is no way to nail it … not with one hundred percent certainty.”

  Okay—I have to ask.

  “Eye jelly?”

  “Officer Ceepak?” the professor once again calls on the smartest kid in the class to explain.

  “The vitreous humor is a transparent jelly that fills the eyeball,” he says. “Potassium levels are low in the vitreous humor of a living eye, but rise at a known rate after death. If we measure that potassium level, we can calibrate a more exact T.O.D.”

  “It's the best I can do,” Dr. McDaniels says, staring up into the crime scene, slowing turning her head, scanning it all in like she's one of those disposable cameras that gives you the panoramic view. “We can't pinpoint a precise time, but I'll give you my tightest interval of confidence.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I always like to see the crime scene. Photographs only tell you so much. Now that I've seen it, I need to leave. Even though I was never actually here.”

  “Roger that.”

  “If you need me? I won't be in my office.”

  I think that means she will be. She walks up the beach toward the access road, stopping once to lean against the fence and shake more sand out of her shoe.

  “Oh, Ceepak?” she hollers back.

  “Yes, ma'am?”

  “You need more evidence to nail these bastards.”

  “I know.”

  “So solve the first crime to solve the second.”

  “Solve the murder to solve the kidnapping?”

  “No, dummy—the first crime. Capisce?”

  Ceepak gets it. I don't know what it is, but he's nodding his head.

  “Will do. Thanks for the tip.”

  “What tip?” she says over her shoulder as she walks away. “I wasn't even here, remember?”

  He smiles like he's just met his favorite movie star.

  “Come on, Danny,” he says when she's gone.

  “Where to?”

  “Boardwalk Books. I promised Squeegee I'd pick him up a compilation of Ginsberg poems. I believe the bookstore also has a fax machine.”

  “So I've heard.”

  We're riding up Ocean Avenue.

  The tourists are coming back. Traffic is snarled and slow and I see lines outside some of the better Monday brunch places. People go to brunch on Monday down here because they're on vacation and they can go to brunch all week long if they want to.

  Ceepak's staring out his window and rubbing the top of his head, thinking. His hand makes a raspy sound when it scrapes over the short stuff on the back of his neck. He lets go with a big, gaping-mouth yawn. I don't think he's had any sleep in days.

  Too bad. I have more questions.

  “Why the Tilt-A-Whirl?” I ask when we hit a red light.

  “I suspect Betty told Ashley to take her father there. Gave her precise time coordinates. That would explain why Ashley was rushing everyone out of the house on Saturday morning.”

  “Did Ashley know what her mother was up to?”

  “I hope not. I think Ashley did whatever her mother, the ‘stern disciplinarian,’ told her to do.”

  “And mom went to the ATM because?”

  “She'd seen enough television news coverage of fugitives on the lam to know that ATMs photograph and time-stamp every user. Giving her a rock-solid alibi for 7 A.M.”

  261

  “So,” I say, putting three and three together this time, “you're hoping Dr. McDaniels does her eye-jelly magic and pegs the time of death closer to 7:20?”

  “Well done, Danny. We need to account for that stroll from the bank to the beach.”

  “Gotcha.” This is pretty cool. Like working a math problem or jigsaw puzzle or the Jumble in the morning paper, which I only do if somebody else starts it for me. I mean, it's cool if you forget you saw Reginald Hart's body with all those bullet holes in it. If you remember that? The cooln
ess sort of goes all lukewarm on you.

  “As Dr. McDaniels indicated, we need more hard evidence. I'm basing too much on conjecture….”

  “So we ask at the bookstore? We flash the clerk Betty's mug shot?”

  “Roger that.”

  “When do we tell the chief what we know?”

  Ceepak turns to look at me.

  “The chief?” he says. “That big galoot?”

  Oh, Jesus.

  Time to put four and four together.

  “How much would you estimate Chief Cosgrove weighs, Danny?”

  My mouth goes kind of dry.

  “Oh, I dunno,” I croak. “273 pounds?”

  “Yeah. That's what I'd figure, give or take a pound. 273.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I used to go to Boardwalk Books when I was a kid, to buy comics and sneak a peek at the artsy-fartsy photography books that usually have a picture or two of naked women sprawled across their glossy pages.

  I'm hoping they have a fresh batch of nudie books for me to flip through today. Might help take my mind off the fact that my boss, the chief of police for Sea Haven Township, is probably moonlighting as a co-conspirator in a grisly murder/kidnap scheme.

  The bulk of the books for sale in the small shop are paperbacks—fiction of the airport variety, my favorite genre. I learned that word from a college girl I took to the movies. “Genre.” It means you're watching a film, not a movie. I prefer movies. We only went on that one date. It was a film. An old one in black and white about a foreign guy playing chess with Death, a guy who wore a creepy black robe and spoke Swedish.

  Boardwalk Books also sells a lot of road maps and navigational charts, which are like road maps for the ocean because they tell you how deep the water is, which way the current flows, where you might bonk into a buoy, stuff like that. I never knew the ocean had maps until one day, on my lunch break, the chief showed me on a chart where he was going fishing that weekend.

  In his boat.

  Suddenly, I'm feeling queasy again and, this time, beer has nothing to do with it.

  The boat that pirated Ashley away from her mansion? I have a funny feeling Chief Cosgrove was the skipper.

  I'd tell Ceepak what I think but I believe he is, at least, two or three pages ahead of me.