Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

  Ruby Ballantine was a petite middle-aged woman with a plain, friendly face and shortish gray-blonde hair. She was the only person in the shop, so Laura assumed she was the proprietor.

  “Help you?” she asked in a soft voice. Her face was slightly red, and her eyes a pale blue. She wore a cotton blouse with the sleeves rolled up, capri pants, and sandals. Laura noticed her trim calves and forearms—some muscle there—she was on the slight side but athletic.

  Anthony glanced at Laura, then turned to a shelf full of skulls.

  Laura introduced herself. The woman’s smile faltered, then came back to full wattage.

  “Is this about those kids on the street the other night?”

  “No,” Laura said. “I’m afraid not. I’m sorry to inform you that your brother, Sean Perrin, has been killed.”

  Ruby Ballantine stared at Laura, then stared at Anthony, who had his back to her looking at knick-knacks. She appeared stunned. “Sean?”

  “Yes, Sean Perrin,” Laura said. “Is there a place we can talk?”

  “Yes, of course. Back this way.”

  They followed her through a door to a short hallway leading into a room that was part office and part storage.

  Ruby appeared severely shaken. She offered them chairs, but flustered, she remained standing. “My brother, Sean? Are you sure?”

  Laura said, “He was shot to death yesterday. In Madera Canyon.”

  “Madera Canyon? That was his favorite…” She trailed off, looking into the middle distance. “I saw in the paper a man was killed there.” Paused. “That was him?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “He’s really gone?”

  “Yes, I am afraid he is. Could you tell me a little about him?”

  “Like what?” She seemed lost.

  “Did he ever tell you about anyone who might want to hurt him?”

  “I’m sorry, but he wouldn’t have confided in me. We weren’t very close.”

  “Did he tell you he was coming out here to Arizona?”

  “No. I had no idea he was out here. We don’t talk.”

  “You don’t talk? At all?”

  “We were never close—I’m eight years older than him. I don’t know. He just didn’t like … he and I didn’t bond. It was almost like we weren’t related. Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

  “We’re working on it,” Laura said. She was aware that while Anthony appeared completely immersed in looking at all the great stuff on the shelves, he was listening and keeping an eye on Ruby Ballantine. Watching her reactions. Evaluating how she answered each question.

  “So he wasn’t coming to see you?” Laura asked her.

  “He didn’t call and say he was coming. But it’s possible.” She shrugged, and Laura saw something in the woman’s eyes. Sadness, maybe? Regret? But it was fleeting if it was there at all.

  “Can you tell me anything at all about what he’s been doing recently?” Laura asked her.

  “I think he worked in banking.”

  “Was that something he’d done previously?”

  “I think he mentioned that. Honestly, I hate to say this. I really hate to say this, but he was not on my radar. You must think I’m an awful person.”

  “Not at all. How long has he been in Las Vegas, do you know?”

  “Six, seven years?”

  “And he was in touch …?”

  “Christmas cards. We talked on the phone once or twice. He told me he got married.”

  “Did he send you a photo?”

  “Not of the wedding. But last year he sent me pictures of his wife and kids. It’s on my phone.”

  “May I see?”

  She scrolled through her phone and showed Laura the photos of the two children and the beautiful woman she’d seen in Perrin’s room.

  “The kids are cute,” Laura said.

  “They should be. Those are stock photos.”

  Laura stared at her.

  “I recognized them from an article in The Huffington Post. Something like ‘What’s the best way to cut cholesterol in kids?’”

  They spent another half hour talking to Ruby, but she clearly didn’t know much about her brother, except that he was prone to tall tales.

  Ruby added, “Maybe he wanted to see Dad for one last time.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. He’s not doing very well. I told Sean that six months ago, but it didn’t seem to make an impression, but maybe he changed his mind.”

  “But he didn’t contact you?”

  “No,” She said. “And I didn’t contact him after that. I knew it would be futile.”

  “Yet he did come here.”

  “He went to Madera Canyon, yes. Madera was his favorite place as a kid. But he didn’t contact me.” She added, “Was he there long?”

  “We’re not sure,” Laura lied. In an interview, she tried to give away as little as possible, even to the bereaved.

  This woman seemed more confused than bereaved.

  “I’d like to speak to your father,” Laura said. “Can you arrange that?”

  She smiled ruefully. “I wish I could. But he’s in a coma.” Abruptly, she covered her mouth. “Oh, no. I’ll have to make arrangements for Sean. What do I do? Is he … ?”

  Laura told her he was currently with the Medical Examiner. She wrote down a number on the back of her card. “I’ll try and let you know when he can be released.”

  Ruby turned bewildered eyes to Laura, and then to Anthony. Scanned both their faces.

  “Who would do this to him? Why?” she asked.

  Laura had no answer for that.

  As they walked out into the sunshine, Laura felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach. The man had been surrounded by people, but he was all alone.

  It seemed the only person buying the legend was Sean Perrin himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On The Run

  They split up and Laura went back to Madera Canyon. Anthony was going to see if he could access public records on Perrin’s marriage—although he thought that would be a fool’s errand.

  Laura caught up with the handyman, Robert Waller, who worked off and on for Barbara Sheehey—he lived down in the valley but sometimes spent the night here. “Last night was one of them.” He said it in such a way that Laura realized he wanted her to know that he and Sheehey were lovers.

  Robert Waller had insomnia. He’d heard “one or two” cars go by on the road. None pulled into the parking lot and none drove out—he would have heard that.

  “So by the time you went to bed, Sean Perrin was already gone?”

  “His car wasn’t there when I went into the house.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around nine p.m.”

  Which fit the time frame of the shooting. Still, the connection was tenuous. Laura would have liked to know when he’d left. If he’d driven straight from the cabins to the trailhead up canyon, she’d have a good fix on when he was shot.

  Right now she was going with the idea that Perrin did drive straight up to the trailhead, possibly to meet someone, and had been shot as he waited.

  “Anything else?”

  “He gave me some shit about being a Navy SEAL.”

  “Oh?”

  “I shined him on, mainly because I didn’t want to get into a fight with a paying customer. Kept my mouth shut for Barbara’s sake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wasn’t no Navy SEAL. I know because many, many moons ago I tried out for the SEALs myself. I’m one tough sonofabitch, but Hell Week got the better of me and damn if I didn’t wash out. I said a few things to test him out, and he failed.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m sure. The man must have been watching too many TV shows. I don’t take it lightly, folks saying they’re SEALs when they aren’t. All’s I could do to keep from punching his lights out.”

  Laura walked out to the road, wondering if anything Sean Perrin had told people wa
s true.

  How do you tell what’s important and what isn’t, when you have a whole skein of threads? Which one or ones did you pull out and think, “This might be real?”

  Laura had no idea.

  One thing, though: At least his corpse didn’t lie.

  Barbara Sheehey called out to Laura from the cabin she was cleaning out across the way. “You ought to come and talk to Terry!”

  “Terry who?” Laura called out.

  “Delmonte.”

  A woman popped her head out. She was tanned and on the scrawny side, with long black hair in pigtails. She nodded and smiled as she stuffed a pillow into a clean pillowcase.

  Laura crossed the lot.

  “Terry helps me out,” Sheehey said. “She has some stories about Sean.”

  Laura looked at Terry.

  “You two go on ahead, you can use the office. Terry, you can uncrate those new mugs and tees while you’re talking to the detective.”

  Terry smelled of cigarette smoke. She was also flighty, moving around the office like a hummingbird, never lighting. Fast, efficient, and, Laura guessed, on something like speed. She had a triangular face, hatchet-like features, and crimson lipstick that matched her nails. She talked a hundred miles a minute, but what she said added to the already-crowded portrait of Sean Perrin.

  “He said he was on the run.”

  “He told you that? He was on the run?” This was becoming a common theme.

  “Uh-huh. He said he had trouble in Vegas—bad trouble. Mob trouble. He told me because I’m the kind of person people always confide in, I dunno, it’s just how I am. He said he had to tell someone, he couldn’t stand it anymore, keeping it in like that. He asked me for my advice but there’s no way I could help him—not after what happened to that woman.”

  Woman?

  “Between you and me, I just wanted him to not say anything more, but I dunno, people think of me like a priest at a confessional, seriously. Everybody comes to me with their problems, but nothing like this. You don’t think he told the guy who shot him that I knew anything about this, do you?”

  Laura said, “I don’t know. What is ‘this?’”

  “What he told me. I guess not. If anyone was gonna shoot me too, I figure he woulda already done it. Besides, Sean talked to everybody same as he did me. So whoever shot him would have had to kill everybody in this place. ‘Scuse me, I need a cigarette. You wanna come outside with me and we can talk some more?”

  They went outside onto the rickety back porch.

  “Are you sure he said the Mob?”

  “Yeah, the Mafia. Godfather stuff. At first I didn’t believe him. I thought he was kind of a piss-ant. Always boasting and putting on the dog. Hardly get to know anyone who stays here, but he just made it his business to tell everyone everything about himself. Jabber jabber jabber. No wonder the Mafia wanted to shut him up.” She took a drag and blew the smoke out. Stabbed her cigarette in Laura’s direction. “Thing is, I could tell when he was lying and when he was telling the truth—I come from a whole line of soothsayers. Most of what he said was bullshit but I bet you dollars to doughnuts this was genuine.”

  She told Laura Sean Perrin had “been dipping his doughnut in the wrong cup.”

  “You don’t do that with the Mob,” she said. Her voice holding all the conviction of an expert. “The mobster’s name was Santini. Carlo Santini. That’s what he told me, I know he was full of crap most of the time, but this time I think he was telling the truth.”

  Carlo Santini was “connected” and had interests in several of the casinos. He also had a drop-dead beautiful girlfriend.

  Sean Perrin worked for the casino, “legitimate” work as their financial advisor. “He only touched the legitimate side’s what he told me.”

  “Let me guess,” Laura said. “He and the girlfriend fell in love.”

  “Bingo! Her name was … let me see, began with an “A.” Aurora. That was it. She wanted to get away from this bigwig, Santini, said he beat her up and of course Sean, the knight on the white horse, he gets talked into helping her escape.”

  “Escape?”

  “He decided to take her to Arizona and they would lay low. He said he lived here when he was a little kid.”

  “I thought he had a wife.”

  She shrugged. “I guess he did, but he took off with her anyway.”

  “And?”

  “This is what he told me. He looked me right in my eyes when he said it. I told him, no bullshit, and when he told me it gave me chills. He said, don’t you tell anyone this.”

  But of course she was. Telling.

  “So they lit out of Vegas,” Laura said, adopting Terry’s vernacular.

  “Yup. They hit the road and drove straight to Winslow.”

  “Winslow? Winslow, Arizona?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why Winslow?”

  He said he wanted to stash her down in Tucson, but since they were already on I-40, she told him she wanted to go to Winslow.”

  “Why? That’s out of the way if he was coming down here.” It was a straight shot down I-17 to Phoenix from Flagstaff, and from there another straight shot down to the southern part of the state on I-10.

  “She said she used to have people there a long time ago. She knew the place and thought she could hide out easy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Plus, she always wanted to see the corner.”

  “The corner?”

  “‘Standin’ on the Corner Park.’ The one the Eagles made famous.” She started singing “Take it Easy.” And she was pretty good, too,

  Laura joined in with the next verse.

  “Hey, you know it?” Terry said, her eyes wide.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I dunno. I guess you would.”

  “He told you they stayed in Winslow?”

  “Uh-huh, and that’s where they caught up with them.”

  “Who caught up with them?”

  “Santini’s people. The enforcers.”

  The enforcers. Funny how people loved to throw terms like that around. “What happened then?”

  “He said they spent the night. Told me what a fantastic night of lovemaking they had. Of course he was great.

  “So, the next morning, he got up early. He told me he was an insomniac. So he was up around five in the morning and there was an all-night McDonald's on the main drag, so he walked over and had some breakfast. He took something back to her and … he said he had a bad feeling. He said something made him want to turn around and just run in the other direction.”

  The narrative was unfolding like a movie. Anthony would love this.

  Perrin was carrying a bag containing an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a styrofoam cup of coffee in the other for the lady. The Knight Errant, Laura thought. The motel room was around back of the main drag, facing out onto a parking lot. As he walked past the other rooms, he saw a door was open.

  “His door,” Terry Delmonte said.

  Laura could picture her telling ghost stories to little kids around a campfire.

  “And guess what?”

  “She was dead?”

  “Bingo! The place was all shot up, and Santini’s girlfriend was dead on the bed.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He took off, because he knew they were after him, too. He made a beeline for here. He used to stay here as a kid with his family. But it looks like they found him.”

  Leaving the office, Laura ran into Madison Neville, who was just coming in to settle her bill.

  Laura asked her if Sean Perrin had told her anything about his job in Vegas.

  “Nope. Just that he was a financial advisor and it was dangerous because he worked for a mob figure.”

  “Did he mention Winslow, Arizona, to you?”

  “Winslow?” She compressed her lips in thought. “Nope.”

  “Any stories about his time here in Arizona? Who he knew, where he went?”

  “Just the ones I told you.
He said some mob guy was after him.

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “I thought I told you that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I was pretty upset about Sean at the time.” She turned as Barbara Sheehey came in.

  “You settling up?” Barbara said, an anxious smile on her broad face. She looked like she was already counting the money.

  Laura waited as they completed the transaction.

  When she was done, Laura asked Madison if he’d told her anything about a shooting at a motel.

  “Motel shooting. I kind of remember him talking about something like that. Tonopah, right?”

  “Tonopah?”

  “That’s in Nevada, isn’t it?”

  “Do you know what happened?” Laura felt like the room had tilted—she was trying to catch up.

  Madison shrugged. “He just said he’d come close to being shot to death in Tonopah. His girlfriend was killed, even though he threw his body on top of her to protect her. Kind of a freak thing.”

  Seriously?

  “He said the police suspected him at first, and they questioned him for hours. He told them it was the mob in Vegas—they were after him.”

  “Why would they follow him to Tonopah?”

  “He said he knew all their secrets, being their accountant and all. That’s what I think he said happened. He went on the run and they went after him.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “I dunno. I got the impression it was a while ago. Maybe a couple of years?” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I have to drive to the airport in Tucson, and my flight leaves at twelve-thirty.”

  Laura watched her drive out, thinking: Did this guy ever tell the truth?

  It seemed like Sean liked to recycle his stories with a new twist. Certain themes recurred, maybe because they were tried and true. The Mob in Vegas. A motel shooting.

  She drove out of the canyon to a spot where she could use her phone.

  Anthony answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Still back at the barn. I just talked to Las Vegas Metro PD.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They went into his apartment and saw nothing overtly amiss. Although the place was a little stale. Moldy bread, some leftover takeout going bad in the refrigerator.”