Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  She ate that up. “Well, they were several years ahead of Tom and me, but that didn’t stop us from forming a friendship. I only wish we’d known them longer. By the time we moved here, well, we only had the pleasure of knowing them for a handful of years.”

  In other words, they died. Why did people avoid stating that simple fact? Everybody dies eventually. Some people die sooner than others. No need to use euphemisms or sugarcoat it.

  “They had a lot of good friends out here,” I said, just to say something, because I was starting to feel a little awkward about having a conversation through my van window. What was the proper etiquette?

  Was I a host of sorts? Should I offer her a Coke and some potato chips? Also, I was a little worried that the woman in the Jetta might choose this particular moment to leave Pierce’s place, and I’d have to say a quick and possibly rude goodbye to ol’ Emma.

  “This area just isn’t the same anymore,” Emma Webster said. “This used to be out in the country—you know that—but there’s been so much growth, all these new subdivisions, and nobody knows their neighbors like they used to. Like this Pierce boy. Brian Pierce. As I said, I knew his grandparents, Larry and Faye, but they’re gone now. Things change, I guess. I’ve run into Brian a couple of times when I was out on one of my walks—sometimes I catch him when he’s out checking his mail—but he doesn’t have any interest in talking to an old woman. Or maybe talking to anyone. I think he’s a bit of a loner.”

  I nodded toward Pierce’s driveway. “That guy is? Pierce?”

  “He’s young and single, so when he first inherited the place, we were worried there’d be some late-night parties. Lot of distance between our houses, but you’d be surprised how sound carries. Not to mention drunk drivers. Young people don’t always use common sense. But we rarely hear a peep from his direction. Hardly ever see any strange cars coming and going from his driveway. Just his truck, a big white thing.”

  I realized now that Emma Webster didn’t fit the role of a retired principal after all; she was, instead, an enthusiastic neighborhood gossip. Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched. I was starting to wonder how long she’d go on.

  “Sounds like a recluse to me,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. He does have a very nice home, with a large back patio that would be perfect for entertaining, but, well, I guess it’s really none of my business. I just know that when I was his age I was a lot more sociable. My friends and I were always doing something. Always getting together for this or that.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I’ve never even seen Brian with another person. Always by himself. I’d get lonely living like that. Although there was the one time I saw Brian with a little girl in his truck.”

  16

  A couple of years ago, I was having trouble catching one particular fraudster, so I wore a wire into a bar and struck up a conversation with the guy. I posed as a house painter—same profession as him—and we hit it off well. I was drinking ginger ale, pretending it was something stronger, and pretty soon we got around to bitching about our jobs. Damn hard work, wasn’t it? Long hours. Crappy benefits. Dangerous. Fumes that could slowly damage your brain. Sure didn’t want to be doing this when we were sixty years old. Then, after about his eighth beer, the guy grins and tells me he’s on workers’ comp at the moment because of a back injury. Fell off a scaffold—but not really. He was faking it. Taking some paid time off. He deserved it, didn’t he? Perfect. That’s all I needed. I was literally seconds from sliding off my bar stool and walking out the door when he said, “Something else I haven’t told anybody…” Hard to resist a line like that. So I said, “Yeah?” and he leaned in closer and said, “I’m not proud of this, but one night last fall, I was a little bit buzzed, but driving anyway, and I hit a guy on a bike.”

  Whoa.

  That moment was similar to this one with Emma Webster, in that both of them had blurted out something big and unexpected. Hell, this wasn’t just big, this was enormous. I wanted to say, “Wait a sec, Emma, what did you just say?” But I played it cool, even though my heart rate immediately jumped up a notch.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “A little girl?”

  Emma Webster said, “I was walking by just as he was pulling into his driveway. I could see her on the passenger side. Probably five or six years old. Little blond girl. No car seat, and that’s what bothered me.”

  “This was recently?”

  “Oh, let’s see. Probably February or March. A few weeks later, I saw him again out by his mailbox. So I stopped and casually mentioned the little girl. I said something about a child that young needing a car seat. You know what he did?”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He denied having that little girl in his truck. Said I must have been mistaken. I mean, I can understand him being embarrassed or feeling guilty for not having a car seat, but there’s no reason to lie about the situation. Just own up to the mistake and have a car seat the next time. If there is a next time. I never did figure out who that little girl was. Brian has never been married, and he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so it wouldn’t have been a niece.”

  By now, I could hardly control my expression or even sit still. The growing doubts I’d had about seeing Tracy Turner at Pierce’s house were quickly receding. “Maybe he was babysitting for someone,” I said. Did my voice sound odd? It did to me, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I wouldn’t know who, but I suppose that’s possible. Anyway, I don’t mean to go on and on—you probably think I’m a terrible busybody—but I saw you parked here and I wanted to be on the safe side. I didn’t mean to come on so strongly. But it’s been wonderful to meet Jim and Beulah’s grandson.”

  She was preparing to leave, but before she left, I needed to make sure she wouldn’t blab to her neighbors about what I was doing down here. Word might eventually get to Pierce, and now, more the ever, it was important that he not know I was watching him. I figured the best way to keep Emma quiet was the actual truth.

  So I said, “Emma, I’ll tell you a secret, if you want to hear it.” Hook, line, and sinker, all rolled into one.

  “What’s that?”

  “It is Brian Pierce I’m investigating. See, he claims he injured his arm at the restaurant where he works—and he probably did—but my clients hire me to check those kinds of things out. Make sure everything is on the up and up.”

  To me, this was boring, everyday stuff, but I could tell she thought it was juicy.

  I continued. “What I normally do is follow the person around discreetly and see what they do. See if they take part in some activity that they shouldn’t be able to do because of their injury.”

  She was intrigued, probably because she considered us to be kindred spirits. We both kept tabs on other people. “So you sneak around after them,” she said. There was definitely some amusement in her voice.

  “Well, yeah, but I’m sure you can understand why. When a guy like Pierce commits insurance fraud, the rest of us pay higher costs. Anyway, I felt like you deserved to know what I was doing out here, and why I might be here tomorrow, and maybe for several more days.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “And here I thought you might be a burglar.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Glad I didn’t call the sheriff.”

  “Me, too. And I really need you to do me a favor. I need you to promise that you won’t tell anyone why I’m parked here.”

  Emma Webster made the familiar my-mouth-is-zipped motion and didn’t say another word. I figure, for her, that would be a monumental undertaking. I hoped she could live up to it.

  After she continued on her walk, I stayed parked where I was. The sun fell and the woman in the Jetta never left, and if she had, it probably would have taken me a minute to snap to, because my mind was racing.

  Brian Pierce had been seen with a little blond girl a few months ago. Then he denied it. This was, to put it mildly, a cause for alarm, at least it w
as for me. Who was the little girl? Where had she come from? I hated to even wonder it, but was Pierce a serial child abductor with a predilection for blond girls?

  I tried to remember any headlines from February or March about a missing girl, but I didn’t recall any. So I jumped online and started searching various news sites. Didn’t take me long to determine that there hadn’t been a case like that in the Austin area. Of course, Pierce could’ve made a road trip, so I cast my net wider and searched a public database of missing children on the website for the Texas Department of Public Safety. They operate a very user-friendly site that allows you to narrow your search by age, gender, height, weight, date of birth, race, and so on. Which means it’s easy to get quick results. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a missing girl in the entire state that matched up with this blond girl Emma Webster had seen.

  I visited Pierce’s Facebook page again and began to scroll downward, back in time. I paid particular attention to his status updates from late winter and early spring. I’d reviewed these postings before, but I wanted to check them again in light of this new information.

  There was only one comment that interested me, but it would be a stretch to say that it was significant. On March 3, Pierce had simply written: Love comes from a lot of unexpected places.

  Kind of odd, considering that none of his other posts were in the least bit philosophical, and considering that he didn’t appear to have a girlfriend or boyfriend, nor did he seem to date regularly.

  Could mean anything. On the other hand, it could be disturbingly creepy. It would be nice to have some context, but none of his updates before or after that one seemed to relate, and none of his friends had commented.

  There weren’t many times when I’d stay on a stakeout all night, but I decided this would be one of those times. I ate a cold ham sandwich, drank a Coke to keep me awake, and along about midnight, my tenacity paid off. No, I didn’t learn anything about Brian Pierce, the blond girl, or the woman in the Jetta.

  What I learned came once again from the media. This time, a talk radio program was reporting that Patrick Hanrahan—Tracy Turner’s stepdad—had agreed to, and failed, a lie-detector test.

  Twice.

  17

  “I feel like I’m on a seesaw,” I said. “One minute I’m sure Brian Pierce had something to do with Tracy Turner’s disappearance, the next minute some strange development happens with the parents.”

  “What about what you said the other day?” Mia asked.

  “My rant about the parents always being the first suspects? Well, the mom ending the interview was one thing, but this…I guess there comes a point when you have to start to wonder.”

  “I’ll be honest. My money’s on the parents. At least one of them, but maybe both.”

  “One covering for the other?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You could be right.”

  “The mom won’t talk and the stepdad is lying to the cops. Something is happening there.”

  We were having brunch in a little café called Cypress Grill in South Austin. Sort of a Louisiana type of place. Saturday morning at eleven. I had managed to remain in the church parking lot on Thomas Springs overnight, until about two hours ago. Nothing had happened. Never saw Pierce. Or the woman in the Jetta. Or a deputy. Or even Emma Webster. Eventually you have to give up and try again later. That’s when you wish you weren’t working solo and that you could trade shifts with someone, because it was easy to feel that I’d wasted the better part of a full day. There were also a couple of times when I dozed off in the wee hours, but I was clever enough to point my video camera at Pierce’s driveway and leave it running, just for those occasions. If someone had come or gone—which, as I said, nobody did—at least I’d have known about it, even if I would’ve missed the chance to follow them.

  “The most likely scenario,” I said, “if we’re speculating wildly with no solid evidence at all, is that the stepdad killed Tracy and the mom is in denial. She suspects what happened, but since she didn’t see it with her own eyes…”

  We were both keeping our voices low, because the tables were fairly close together and there were plenty of families scattered around the café. I had caught several of the dads sneaking glances at Mia when they could. I didn’t blame them. I was glad I didn’t have to sneak my glances. I could look all I wanted.

  “Or maybe she knows exactly what happened,” Mia said, “but doesn’t want him to get in trouble. You hear all kinds of twisted stories.”

  That was an understatement. Parents murdering their kids. Or selling them. Locking them in basements for years and using them as breeding stock. Just about any scenario was possible, no matter how horrid and nightmarish. Accidentally or intentionally killing a child, then covering it up—with the full cooperation and participation of the other parent—was becoming an all-too-common phenomenon. But, as much as I wanted to defend the parents, based solely on what I went through myself, it was looking more and more like something along those lines had happened in this case. This morning, the cable news networks were buzzing that Patrick Hanrahan had hired a lawyer, and the lawyer was claiming that Hanrahan hadn’t failed the polygraph tests, but that the results were simply inconclusive. Happens all the time. Doesn’t mean anything. But Mr. Hanrahan didn’t appreciate the insinuations, no sir, so he was joining his wife in no longer speaking to the authorities.“Either way, it wasn’t Pierce,” I said. I took a big bite of my bacon, lettuce, and avocado sandwich. It was what I usually had, and it was always excellent, but it wasn’t quite hitting the spot this morning. Don’t know why. Mia was having French toast, which looked pretty tasty.

  “You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself,” she said.

  “I do?”

  “Yep.”

  Our waiter came by, refilled our mugs, then scooted away.

  I said, “Well, I mean, it is weird, what Emma Webster told me. But it obviously doesn’t have anything to do with Tracy Turner. Maybe Emma didn’t see what she thought she saw.”

  Mia paused with her fork in mid-air. “Wait, now come on. What are the odds that both of you thought you saw Pierce with a little girl, but you’re both mistaken?”

  I groaned. “Don’t do this to me. I’m tired of going back and forth on this.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, I’m not saying there’s anything going on with Pierce, other than maybe he’s committing fraud. As far as the little girl, there could be a logical explanation for that. In fact, I’d say there probably is. Probably the little girl you saw is the same one Emma Webster saw. The descriptions match.”

  “Some other little girl. Not Tracy Turner.”

  “Right.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Got me. Doesn’t matter. A friend’s daughter or something. I realize that young, single men don’t usually do a lot of babysitting, but it’s possible. Seems a lot more likely than Pierce being a sicko who has never gotten caught.”

  “I am definitely paying attention to what you are saying,” I said. An intentionally clumsy reference to her remark from Thursday afternoon, since she hadn’t mentioned the apologetic note I’d left for her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Point is, you can follow the process of elimination, right? It doesn’t matter whether Emma Webster saw Pierce with a little girl or not. If there wasn’t a missing little girl matching that description back in February or March, well, that gives you your answer, doesn’t it?”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “But you still seem like you’re waffling.”

  “Waffles, damn it. That’s what I should’ve ordered.”

  “You want the rest of this?” She slid her plate forward. “I’m done anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  So I did. We sat in silence for several moments as I scarfed down the rest of her French toast.

  “I have to be at work in
one hour,” she announced.

  She didn’t know it, but I was about to spring something on her—a proposition prompted by what she’d just said. Something that had been running through my mind for quite some time.

  “I have an idea I want to run past you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a big idea, so brace yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m always braced when I talk to you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. First, let me ask you something. You want to work in that bar all your life?”

  She frowned, puzzled, wondering why I was asking. “As a matter of fact, yes. I want to be serving drinks to horny, drunk guys when I’m sixty years old. That’s my life’s dream. By then, my ass will have been groped roughly ten thousand times, so how could I not be fulfilled?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. So here’s a thought. Ready? Come work with me.”

  That definitely caught her off guard. She hadn’t been expecting it. Her eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Then finally she said, “Work with you?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. I need some help.”

  “Really? But—I’m not qualified at all. I can’t do what you do.”

  “Sure you can. You’re a fast learner. I can teach you a lot of stuff. You’ll pick up the rest.”

  “Don’t you have to be licensed or certified or something?”

  “Nope. Private investigators do, but legal videographers don’t. Any nutcase like me can do it.”

  I was having a tough time gauging her expression, but she appeared to be intrigued—at least a little bit. What I was hoping for.

  She said, “Okay, the first thing that pops into my head: I’m not sure I could handle being your employee. We’re friends, Roy, and I don’t want to—”

  “Partners, Mia. That’s what I’m talking about. Fifty-fifty. I don’t want to be your boss. Hell, you’re smarter than I am. I couldn’t be your boss.”

  She was too surprised to even offer a snappy comeback agreeing with my assessment. “What brings this on? The Pierce case?”