Last Call

by Allyson K. Abbott

  We disconnected our call, and I spent another hour or so in my office, finishing up the paperwork I had to do—payroll, financial statements, and ordering. When I was done, I headed back out to the bar and saw that lunch hour was in full swing. It was busy, and everyone was hustling. They seemed to have things well under control, so I decided to pay a visit to the Capone Club room to check in with whoever was present for the day.

  Climbing the stairs without the encumbrance of my cast and crutches was a treat, and I realized how ironic it was that the elevator would be done soon, now that I didn’t need it so much. But I didn’t regret the decision to put it in. My time as a somewhat handicapped person made me realize how necessary it was. It would be a good and valuable addition to the bar, and it would bring me into better compliance with all the rules and laws created by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

  When my father’s girlfriend, Ginny Rifkin, was murdered a few months back, I was shocked to discover she had left me an inheritance—a quite generous one, in fact. I had used some of the money to buy the building that adjoined mine so I could expand the bar. It allowed me to increase my overall seating area on the main floor, as well as to create a stage and dance floor. My future plans included live music, though I planned to start out with a DJ to see how things went. On the second floor of the new addition, I had added several rooms, including a meeting room I could rent out to groups for a little extra income or use for overflow seating, and a game room that had since been dubbed the Man Cave, though plenty of women used it. I also added a second bar area and a small kitchenette that could be concealed behind a drop-down door when not in use. These would make it easier to wait on people on the second floor when we were busy. I should have thought of putting in the elevator back when I did these renovations, but it hadn’t been on my radar then.

  The other room I created on the second floor of the new section was one designed specifically for the Capone Club. It was cozy, with cushy chairs, movable tables, a gas fireplace—a feature that had seen a lot of use lately with the bitter Milwaukee winter—and bookshelves. I’d furnished the bookshelves with a few tomes—some Sherlock Holmes novels and a couple of other mysteries I found lying about my apartment—and the members of the club quickly expanded the collection with their own additions. Now the shelves sported several types of nonfiction books related to crimes and crime solving: evidentiary processes, fingerprinting, the psychology of killers, blood analysis, and methods of murder that ranged from poisons to weapons.

  When I entered the Capone Club room, I saw that the core group was present. Joe and Frank Signoriello were in their usual spot, as close to the fireplace as they could get without combusting. Cora was there, too, her ubiquitous laptop in front of her and her current paramour, Jurgen “Tiny” Gruber, seated beside her. Tiny, whose nickname was the ultimate irony because he stood six-and-a-half feet tall and weighed around three hundred fifty pounds, had brought us one of our first cases: the unsolved murder of his little sister, which had occurred more than a decade earlier.

  Carter Fitzpatrick, who was as much of a regular as Cora and the Signoriello brothers these days, had become one of the de facto leaders of the group. Carter had been a part-time waiter and wannabe writer when he first joined the group. The Capone Club had been very kind to him in the pursuit of his writing career, as he had managed to segue several of the cases the group had investigated and solved into book deals with a New York City publisher that produced a line of true crime books. As a result, he had given up his waiter job to focus on his writing full time, and he spent a goodly portion of his day at the bar in the Capone Club room. His girlfriend, Holly Martinson, worked at a nearby bank as a teller. She, along with a friend and coworker named Alicia Maldonado—the girl with the big crush on Billy—joined the group as often as they could and were typically here every weekend, most evenings, and most lunch hours.

  I was surprised but delighted to see one of the founding members of the club present because he had been missing from the group for the past two weeks. Tad Amundsen, a local investor and tax adviser to some of the area’s richest residents, had been married to a wealthy woman named Suzanne Collier. It wasn’t a happy marriage—Tad’s role was primarily that of a trophy husband—but things had changed dramatically when Suzanne was murdered on New Year’s Eve in my bar. Suzanne had been the primary perpetrator behind the whole letter-writer scheme. Her death, while sad, had solved a thorny problem for me and the police. Suzanne’s wealth and connections, and the general lack of usable evidence we had against her, would’ve made it difficult, if not impossible, to actually convict her.

  I’d spoken with Tad a couple of times since that terrible night. He’d been busy with the funeral arrangements and the investigations into Suzanne’s death and the letter-writer thing, but he was getting through it. It didn’t help that there was some speculation that Tad knew what Suzanne was up to the whole time, but in my talks with him, I became convinced that was not the case. And apparently, the authorities eventually became convinced as well, because Tad was exonerated.

  Tad had been genuinely shocked by the news of his wife’s deadly obsession. Over the years I’d known him, I often got the sense he was searching for a way to escape his marriage and not lose the financial comfort that went with it. He got his wish in the end, but Suzanne’s death had hit him harder than he expected. It was lucky for him that Suzanne’s murderer had been caught because Tad would have been the likely suspect otherwise. I don’t know if he ever loved Suzanne, but he did care about her and he was grieving, though the fact that he was about to inherit a very large sum of money would likely help soothe things over for him.

  Tad’s motives for marrying might not have been the purest, but I liked the guy and was happy to see him back here with the others. I wasn’t sure if he was ready to deal with the sometimes-grim discussions of death that typically took place among the group, but I trusted him to leave if things got too uncomfortable for him.

  The bigger issue was that I wasn’t sure all the other group members were as confident as I was in Tad’s innocence, and I knew things were likely to be awkward for a while. Adding to all this tension was the fact that Suzanne Collier hadn’t been working alone, and her partner had turned out to be one of our own, a trusted member of the club.

  That betrayal hit the group hard, changing the dynamic. There was an underlying uneasiness I’d felt every time I entered the room since that fateful night, and it was there regardless of which club members were present at any given time. It was something I hoped would fade away over time, but for now, everyone seemed afraid to trust themselves or anyone else.

  In addition to the core group of regulars on this particular day, there were a couple of newer members present as well, members who had joined within the last month: Stephen McGregor, a physics teacher at a local high school; Sonja West, the owner of an upscale hair salon named Aphrodite’s located a few blocks from my bar; and Clay Sanders, an investigative reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. There was a time when I had thought of Clay as my nemesis, but he had since proven himself to be a very valuable ally.

  There were others who attended the club on a semi-regular basis but were missing at the moment. Karen Tannenbaum, or Dr. T, as we called her, was an ER physician at a nearby hospital whose long and irregular hours sometimes kept her away for days on end. Kevin Baldwin was a local trash collector—though he preferred the title of sanitation engineer—who stopped by whenever he could. And there were a couple of members from the local police department who also dropped in on occasion when their shifts allowed: Tyrese Washington and Nicodemus “Nick” Kavinsky, the cop Miguel Ortega had mentioned.

  The Capone Club was a diverse and fluid group of people with varied backgrounds, resources, experiences, and degrees of knowledge. That made for an odd mix at times—people who might never otherwise know or cross paths with one another—but their shared love of mysteries and crime solving brought them together and made it not only work but
work well. While the crimes we’d recently solved had been largely credited to me, they had all been group efforts. Recent events had threatened to undermine the group’s enthusiasm and cohesiveness, and I felt determined to make sure that didn’t happen. I needed to get them back to doing what they loved—crime solving. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that because I didn’t know how much, if any, of today’s crime scene I could share with them, but as it turned out, the group took care of that problem themselves.

  Chapter 12

  My entrance to the room was heralded by the usual chorus of routine greetings, but things ramped up quickly.

  “Mack, your cast is gone!” said Carter.

  This led to a chorus of kudos and congratulations, a couple of backslaps, and a whole lot of smiles. I’d been sporting the cast long enough that some of the newer members didn’t know me without it.

  “Yes, my cast and crutches are gone,” I said in a celebratory tone, hoping to maintain the high spirits in the room for as long as possible. I grabbed a chair from a corner and moved it closer to the others. Such a simple task had been more or less impossible for me over the past five weeks, and my new independence was liberating. “The doctor surprised me today,” I said as I sat down. “I thought I was going to be stuck with the cast for another week or two, but he said the bones were healed well enough for it to come off. I have to say, I don’t miss it at all. And my staff had better be on the alert because this means I can kick butt again.”

  Everyone laughed, and more congratulations followed. When they died down, I sensed a palpable awkwardness in the room. Determined to keep spirits high, I decided some liquid spirits were in order. “I think this calls for a celebration,” I said. “Free drinks and food for all of you. I’ll get Debra up here, and you guys can order what you want. Today, lunch is on the house.”

  My announcement seemed to do the trick as the group started discussing menu items and drinks, some giving and some asking for recommendations. I got up and went downstairs long enough to find Debra to ask her to come up to get our orders.

  “Is the elevator working yet?” she asked after I explained what I wanted.

  “It is, but I don’t know if it’s safe to use,” I told her. “I think the dumbwaiter might be, though.” In addition to the elevator, Mal had suggested—quite wisely, it turned out—that I also install a dumbwaiter that ran from the downstairs kitchen to the one upstairs. “I can open the upstairs kitchen for you if you want,” I told Debra. “And, of course, I can also help you.”

  “No need,” Debra said. “Missy and I can handle it. You go join the group and I’ll be right up.”

  I was about to argue with her refusal of my help, but she spun away from me so fast I didn’t have a chance. Instead, I went over to the basement door beneath the stairs and hollered down to the O’Reillys with a request.

  “We can do that,” Connor said after I told him what I wanted.

  Satisfied that I had made everyone a little happier, I went back upstairs to the Capone Club room. Debra showed up right behind me, and over the next five minutes she took down everyone’s orders. I placed one for myself and then told her the good news.

  “The elevator is functional, and you and Missy are to be the first people to use it. Connor is waiting for the two of you by the first-floor elevator door, and when you’re ready to bring our stuff up, you can christen the elevator and make it officially open for business.”

  “Sweet,” Debra said. She tried to downplay things, but I could tell she was tickled by the idea of being the first person to “christen” the elevator.

  I felt good about how things were going and the overall mood of the room until Alicia asked, “Mack, where’s Mal?”

  I should’ve anticipated this question. Mal and I had pretended to be a couple to everyone here in the group for several weeks while we investigated the letter-writer case. The two of us were seen together a lot, so much so that we were given the nickname M&M, and we had been dubbed inseparable. Most of the Capone Club group had no idea Mal was a cop. They thought he worked in construction and I met him on a blind date. The only people who knew the truth in the beginning were Cora, Joe, and Frank. Cora’s beau, Tiny, had been let in on the fact that my romance with Mal was a fraud, but he didn’t know Mal’s true occupation. Tyrese was eventually brought into the loop, and Clay, smart reporter that he was, had figured it out on his own.

  Once the letter-writer case was resolved, we revealed the relationship as a ruse to everyone, though Mal’s true occupation still remained a secret. Even though it was now known that Mal and I weren’t really a couple, everyone was so used to seeing us together, they often asked where Mal was whenever I entered the room alone.

  “Mal probably won’t be around for a while,” I told the group. “Between my elevator installation and his regular job, he’s working a lot of extra hours. Speaking of extra hours, did I mention I had my first official consultation case yesterday?”

  My distracting ruse worked, though it left me in the position of having to hem and haw about the details of the case because I wasn’t sure yet how much I could share with the group. In negotiating my contract for this consulting work, I had requested that the Capone Club members be allowed to hear details about cases because they were a large part of my ability to interpret things correctly. Not unexpectedly, that was met with a great deal of resistance. In the end, we reached something of a compromise. I could discuss my specific reactions to specific elements I had been exposed to at a crime scene, but only if Duncan okayed it first. And Duncan, as well as the detective in charge of any particular case, would have the right to declare any specific detail of a crime scene off-limits.

  The group grilled me about the case and the scene, and I shared a few generic details with them, as well as some of my synesthetic reactions to certain things. I avoided any mention of who the victim was, Mal’s connection to him, and the discovery of Felicity. The group wasn’t so easily put off, however, and they continued to probe and prod me for details until my relief arrived in the form of Debra and Missy, who were pushing a cart loaded with food and drinks.

  “That elevator is freaking awesome!” Missy said.

  “It is pretty nice,” Debra agreed with a big smile as the two of them started dishing out the goods. Once everything was handed out and the group was focused on eating and drinking, I was desperately trying to think of another topic to discuss that would keep spirits up in the room, but not be about the Janssen case. Fortunately, Carter did it for me.

  “Sonja brought us something interesting,” he said to me. “We were talking about it right before you came in. It’s not an official murder, at least not yet. I’ll let her explain.”

  I looked over at Sonja, who sucked in her lower lip and gave me an equivocal look before she spoke. “I might be making a mountain of a molehill here,” she began, “but I can’t shake the feeling that something bad has happened, and no one knows it.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “I think one of my clients, a woman named Caroline Knutson, might have gotten away with murder,” she said in a near whisper. “She’s been complaining about her husband, Oliver, for well over a year now, stating how much she hates him and can’t stand living with him. Her protestations have gotten more and more vociferous with time. Then yesterday, he suddenly turned up dead.”

  “It could be coincidental,” I said.

  “I know, but my gut tells me no,” Sonja said, looking less certain than she sounded.

  As someone who operated on gut instinct myself much of the time, I didn’t feel like I could dismiss Sonja’s suspicions outright. But I also knew we’d need more than her gut feeling if we were going to get the police involved.

  “We’ve been playing devil’s advocate,” Holly said. “Hate is a strong motive, and a common one, but there are far easier ways to escape someone you hate. So we asked Sonja if there was any other motive.”

  “And there is,” Sonja said. “Money. Lots of it. Oliver K
nutson is . . . was quite wealthy. Once, when Caroline was complaining about him, I suggested she should simply leave him, divorce him. But she told me that prior to marrying him, she signed an ironclad prenup. The money she would get if she tried to divorce him would be a pittance.”

  “And in addition to the money she would inherit as his wife,” Alicia said, “there was apparently a rather large life insurance policy as well.”

  “I can see why you’re suspicious,” I said, “but if she killed him, I’m sure the police will figure it out.”

  “Not if she did it in a way that doesn’t arouse suspicion,” Carter said pointedly. There was a gleam in his eyes, one I recognized all too well. Others in the room had the same look. They were on the trail, and they weren’t going to give it up easily.

  Resigned, I asked, “When did you say he died?”

  “Yesterday morning,” Sonja said. “That’s what’s so odd about it. His wife was in my salon yesterday evening asking for ‘the works.’ She wanted a complete makeover: a massage, a spray tan, a mani/pedi, a new haircut and color . . . pretty much every service I offer. She was in a very chipper mood. Then I heard on the news this morning that her husband had died yesterday.” Sonja paused for dramatic effect, and then in a low voice added, “She never once mentioned it to me while she was in the salon. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  “Maybe the woman is tactless,” I said. “Or maybe she was in shock. None of that means she’s a killer, though. What evidence is there?”

  Sonja frowned and shrugged. “I don’t know, of course.” Then her expression lightened. “I thought maybe you could run it by Duncan to see if the police are investigating the case at all. I was going to ask Tyrese or Nick to look in to it, but they aren’t here.”