Dead Center

by Bill Noel

  “Has he asked for money?”

  “Not a dime.”

  He said something else, but the roar of a diesel engine from a large truck or bus on his end drowned out what he was saying.

  “Can’t hear you,” I said.

  “Tour bus. We’re meeting Starr Tuesday.”

  “At his office?”

  “Starbucks.”

  “Oh.”

  “You think that sounds fishy?”

  “Do you?” I asked, the best non-answer I could come up with.

  He mumbled, “Yeah.”

  “Be careful, I wouldn’t want to see Heather hurt.”

  “If she fell off the cloud she’s been on since we crossed the Cumberland River, it’d break every bone in her body and her heart.”

  Another country song, I predicted.

  Charles continued, “Speaking of breaking things, have you broke the killer case you’re in the middle of?”

  “Nope.” I filled him in on what I’d learned since he left. I made the mistake of mentioning Dude as a suspect. If he wasn’t so far away, Charles would have smacked me.

  “No, no, no, to Dude killing anyone. Whoops, Heather’s at the door waving for me. No to Dude. Bye.”

  I left the beach and headed home, regretting each step of the way that my best friend was no longer here.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I was a block from the house when Rocky jogged up beside me. I was shocked, first, because I had never seen Dude’s employee move faster than a slug, and second, because he’d stopped when we were shoulder to shoulder.

  “Got a minute?” the sharp-featured, tat-covered, frowning man asked.

  It was the most civil thing he’d said to me.

  “Sure.”

  We moved off the roadway.

  “You’re a damned meddler.” His frown deepened.

  I didn’t have a quick retort so I waited. Besides, I didn’t think he had gone out of his way to tell me that.

  “I like that about you, especially being you’re an old guy.” His facial expression remained unchanged. “You’re not a damned poser like some old farts. Geezers trying to be hip.”

  I knew poser was a non-surfer who acted like one—thank you Charles for that bit of trivia. I still didn’t know what to say.

  “Dude’s like pop to me.” Rocky almost broke a smile. “Maybe like grandpa.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  Rocky looked around, kicked the weed-covered, sandy soil, and faced Bert’s Market, fifty yards away. “I’d do anything for him. Subsequently, I’d do anything for his sis. Blood’s thick.”

  Rocky’s saying subsequently threw me momentarily. What didn’t throw me was his loyalty to Dude. I still had no idea why he had stopped me; stopped me after spending years treating me like I was a splinter in his toe.

  “Dude’s lucky to have you and Stephon with him.”

  “Dude said you were going to figure out who Panella, that malevolent, was out to off.”

  “He asked me to—”

  Rocky waved his tat-covered arm in my face. “Save you the trouble. It was Barb.”

  “How do you know?”

  Rocky cocked his head and smiled. “Old dudes like Panella and you, underestimate guys like me. They—you—see tats, hear surfer talk, watch us ignore geezers, and jump to conclusions. Think we’re stupid, the scourge of society.”

  I wasn’t sure of all that, but was impressed by his vocabulary. He was a cross between Dude and William Hansel, a professor pal of mine.

  “You’re right. What do you know about Panella?”

  “He was a strange one. He came in the shop near dark.” Rocky stared off in space like he was picturing the visit. “Dude was in the office with his sis. Stephon was in back tagging boards. I ignored Panella like I do most old guys. Don’t think he saw me. He started looking at our boards so I figured he may know what he’s looking at so I caved and asked if he needed help. The old guy said he was a surfer and asked what I thought was the best wax. I said Mr. Zogs Sex Wax. He asked why and I started to tell him when Barb came out of Dude’s hangout.” Rocky reared back his shoulders and his head jerked toward the sky. “The old guy almost, umm, defecated a brick. He turned away from Barb and slithered over behind a rack of T-shirts. He tried to be inconspicuous.” Rocky paused and shook his head. “Geezers figure scum like me don’t see things.”

  This was by far the longest, and strangest, conversation I’d had with him, but still wasn’t sure why he’d stopped me.

  “You said you know he was here to kill Barb.”

  He looked at me. His lips turned up almost in a snarl. That was more like the Rocky I had learned to detest.

  “The old guy did everything he could to keep Barb from seeing him. Was like he didn’t want anyone to know he recognized her. Barb headed out the door and the old guy still pretended he hadn’t seen her. I asked him again if I could help and explain why I thought Mr. Zogs was the best. Dude calls that customer service. He says I need to get better at it.” Rocky shook his head. “The geezer fiddled around some more. He was killing time. I gave it one more customer-service try. He looked at his watch and said he didn’t have time to talk because he had to meet someone at their house.”

  “Did he say anything about Barb?”

  “Don’t you get it? The old man was pretending like he didn’t know her since he was going to kill her. He didn’t want someone to tell the cops they were seen together in the shop.”

  “Is that why you thought she was his intended victim?”

  “Sure, but it didn’t come to me until he turned up dead. That’s when I knew he was the hit man and Barb was who he was here for. That’s why I’m telling you. You’re nosy. You’re known to figure out who killed people. Dude trusts you, and I figured if you knew who the old guy wanted to bump off, it’d help you figure out what’s going on. The hit man was dead. It didn’t mean the dude who hired him wouldn’t send someone else to finish the job.” He drilled a stare at me. “Barb’s kin to Dude and that’s good enough for me. You’ve got to save her.”

  Rocky was trying to be helpful so I didn’t want to sluff it off. “Did you tell the police? They’d be interested in hearing about Panella’s activities.”

  “No freakin’ way.” Rocky was more animated than before. “The cops and I have a compound, complex relationship. We don’t see eye-to-eye. Our interactions are like eye-to-ass.”

  The wind off the ocean had picked up and it was getting colder. I resumed my walk toward the house and to my surprise, Rocky tagged along. Something Rocky had said struck me strange and I was trying to recall what it was when he stopped and pointed at my house.

  “Is somebody staying with you?”

  “What do you mean?” I looked in the direction his index finger was pointing.

  “What’s to mean?” He looked over at me like it was a stupid question. “Is someone at your house?”

  “No,” I continued to look, and didn’t see anything unusual.

  “Somebody looked out your front window. Whoever it was saw us and went poof.”

  “Crap, not again,” I said to the space where Rocky had been standing.

  Instead of waiting to hear my succinct analysis of what was going on, he was jogging toward the house. A Honda slammed on its brakes and skidded to a halt, and another vehicle blew its horn as Rocky darted into the stream of traffic, and charged into my front yard. I stopped at the street, waved for the Honda to continue, waited for several more vehicles to pass, and crossed to the yard. Rocky had kicked in the front door and was in the house by the time I reached the yard. The thirty-five year difference in our ages was made clear seeing how much quicker he had made it there.

  I wasn’t anxious to follow him in. I grabbed a three-foot-long, broken limb from the yard and inched the door open. If the intruder was the same person who had already invaded my space twice and clobbered me during one of those times, he wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever he had to do to escape. I looked from side to
side as I entered.

  The rear screen door slammed and I heard a string of profanities coming from the kitchen. I gripped the branch tighter and moved toward the sounds. Rocky was on the floor, leaned against the cabinet by the sink. He had a gun in one hand, and held the back of his head with the other hand. He said damn and a couple of surfer-speak profanities I didn’t know. I caught the drift.

  I scanned the room and rushed to my new friend. He was trying to stand, so I helped him to his feet and nudged him into a chair.

  “What happened?” I continued looking around.

  “Kook slammed me upside the head. I charged in here after him and he must have been behind the door.” He pointed to the door leading into the kitchen. “Didn’t see him. Damned sure felt whatever he hit me with.”

  I saw the cast-iron skillet Bob Howard had given me as a gag gift for my birthday. My Realtor friend knew I couldn’t, and had no desire to, cook, fry, or whatever you do with a skillet. I now knew one of its uses. Bob will find it amusing.

  “Let me call an ambulance?”

  “Nah, I’ve been hit worse.”

  I reached for my phone. “I’ll call the police.”

  Rocky shot up out of the chair and grabbed for the phone.

  “Whoa,” I said. “I don’t have to call them.”

  “Don’t.” He sat back down, and whispered, “Please.”

  I nodded, realized it was the most polite thing I’d heard him utter, and returned the phone to my pocket. I doubted the police would learn anything anyway. They might get a print off the skillet, but if the intruder had been as careful as he had been the other two times, he had worn gloves. I noticed that the back door had been pried open, wood splintered around the lock. If the police came, they would now tell me in addition to better locks, I needed a security system, twenty-four-seven armed guards, a Rottweiler, and a moat with famished alligators.

  Rocky said, “Give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”

  He focused on being fine and I went from room to room to see if anything had been disturbed. The mattress on my bed was turned sideways and the top two drawers of the dresser were pulled open. From what I could tell, nothing had been taken.

  I returned to the kitchen. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Will be.” Rocky rubbed the back of his head. “Why would someone break in here?”

  He made it sound like he was shocked anyone would think I had anything of value. More than likely it was his rude gene kicking in. I didn’t tell him this was the third intrusion in ten days.

  “Don’t know. Could have been a drifter looking for money or something to hock.”

  “In here?”

  He’d saved me from a concussion, or worse, so I refrained from smacking him on his sore head.

  I shrugged and offered him a soft drink.

  “Yes, thanks,” he said in a second burst of courtesy, probably a result of the blow to the head.

  “Did you see who it was?”

  He shook his aching head. “No. Couldn’t tell from across the street. There was a reflection of the sun on the window and I couldn’t get a good look. When I came in here he hit me from behind and boogied while I was wiped out on the floor.”

  He sipped his drink, stood, and looked around the room, and, walked to the living room.

  “Anything else I can get you?” I asked.

  “Nah. Hey man, what the hell you have in here that dude was looking for?”

  An excellent question and one I had no answer for. After one dead body, two friends concerned enough to ask me to try to figure out what was going on, and three blatant invasions of my personal space and my little slice of heaven, nothing short of death was going to stop me from finding out.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rocky left after assuring me he was fine, and once again, I called Larry and told him I needed his hardware store expertise and carpentry skills. Once again he said he’d be right over. And, once again, he arrived with his spouse in tow.

  Larry carried his tool box, gave a cursory look at the splintered wood by the front door’s locking mechanism, and walked through the house and focused his energy and talents on the seriously-damaged back door. Cindy glanced at the door and pointed to the kitchen table.

  She sat across from me, looked over her shoulder at the back door, put both elbows on the table, and stared at me. “Let me guess. Your door stuck when you were opening it and you kicked it with your bionic foot, and the back door was struck by one of those mini-earthquakes that pounce on homes of walking, talking, disaster magnets?”

  “Quick, analytical mind, succinct summation, it’s easy to see why you’re chief,” I said, to inspire a smile. I came close. I proceeded to give her a blow-by-blow description of what had happened. She patiently, patiently for Cindy, waited for me to finish.

  “The same Rocky who works for Dude? The Rocky who thinks kicking canes out from under senior citizens is Nobel Peace Prize winning behavior? You sure you weren’t the one hit on the head?”

  I explained why Rocky had approached me, about his loyalty to Dude, and because of that, why he had been worried about Barb. She started to get huffy about why he didn’t go to the cops with that information and I shared his reluctance.

  She leaned back and said, “Well-founded.”

  “Have you learned anything new about the murder?”

  She pointed to the back door. “You think that has something to do with it?”

  “Yes, but before you ask what, save your breath. I don’t know. Back to my question, news?”

  She shook her head. “The mayor, the mayor pro-tem, the head of the merchants association, and everyone else who has a stake in the economy of the island, has been on my case. Something about a shot-in-the-head visitor puts the kibosh on vacationers clambering to spend their hard-earned dollars on our island paradise. I don’t give a cockroach about that, but I do have more than a hankering to catch the son-of-a-skunk who killed someone on my watch.”

  Cindy had given a broad interpretation to my question, so I tried to limit its scope. “Leads?”

  “No, faux-detective Chris.” She frowned. “That real Detective Adair told me yesterday they were at the end of the line. Ballistics gave them nothing. Their forensic auditor guru said there was nothing in his records to lead them anywhere other than he managed to live quite well off a piddling amount of taxed income. His wife seems as clueless as their pet dachshund. And if the wonderful, loving husband was in fact a gun for hire, there appears to be no way to trace who hired him.”

  “So, there’s nothing?”

  Cindy rolled her eyes and waved both hands in the air. “Danged, can’t slip anything by you.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Adair says unless we find out who Panella was after, there’s not much he can do.”

  “So until whoever hired him hires someone else and that person kills someone here, nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Freakin’frustrating, isn’t it?”

  Frustrating and unacceptable, I thought. “If I’m right and this is related to his death,” I said and pointed to the door Larry was working on, “help me see the connection.”

  “You’re the one who said it’s connected.”

  “I found the body.”

  “So?”

  “So, someone, I’d guess the person who killed him, thinks I found something on the body that could lead me to him.”

  Cindy looked at the table and back at me. “What?”

  “Money,” Larry said, without turning away from his project.

  “That makes sense,” I said, remembering the rumor Cal had heard about me finding a pile of cash beside the body. “Everything you know about Panella indicates he paid for most things with cash, he had little legitimate income, and you said there was five hundred dollars in his hotel room and none in his car.” I hesitated and said, “So, if that’s the case, whoever broke in here wouldn’t have been who killed him but could have been the person who hired him.”

 
Cindy said, “Or he would have found the money on the body after he shot him. There would have been no need to break in.”

  “Whoever did this is taking a big risk. It could be anyone who knew I found the body, but only the person who hired Panella would know about the money. Wouldn’t he want to stay as far away as possible? Why risk getting caught breaking in?”

  Larry put his tools down and moved to a vacant chair at the table and looked at Cindy. “Hon, cover your ears.”

  She rolled her eyes for the second time and looked at me. “He says stupid things like that when he wants to say something he thinks I shouldn’t hear.” She turned back to Larry. “Consider them covered.”

  “From my contacts years ago with folks who, umm, didn’t follow the letter of the law, I heard the going rate for top-notch hit men could top thirty-thousand bucks, and much higher for high profile or hard to get to targets. That was a quarter of a century ago. I can’t imagine that high a profile target here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t around forty or fifty grand.”

  “Breaking in here would be worth it if the person who hired Panella wasn’t busting out with money,” Cindy said. “Would the hirer think Panella had the money with him? He could have left it at Myrtle Beach.”

  “Not if he didn’t get paid until he got here,” I said.

  “That would mean whoever hired him was here before you found the body and may still be here,” Cindy said. “I’ll have my guys check hotel and rental agencies to see if someone who checked in a day or two before you found the body is still around.”

  “The person could be anywhere in the area,” I said. “You can’t check them all.”

  “True,” Cindy said. “I’ll call Adair tomorrow. That’ll give his folks something to do. They can’t canvass each nick and cranny, but maybe they’ll get lucky.”

  I debated telling her about Preacher Burl’s concern about Douglas Garfield. Because Rocky thought Panella was here to hit Barb, didn’t make it so. Douglas was still a strong possibility, but I had told the preacher I would keep his worries away from the police. Larry helped make my decision when he said he had done all he could for the back door and had put a piece of wood over the damaged section of the front door. He told me he and Cindy had better be going. Besides, I had experienced enough excitement for the day and needed to think more about Douglas before breaking my promise to Burl. I asked Cindy to suggest to Adair that he might want to talk to Barb. If Rocky was right, she could shed light on a motive. Cindy said it was on her to-do list.