Hide and Snake Murder (2 page)

On the short ride home, I mulled over the events of the last hour. From the sound of it, Baz dug himself deep this time. And may have gotten someone shot. That would mean murder, if it were true. Even as a kid, Baz made stuff up all the time trying to gain attention. Was he making up murder now? Regardless, something serious seemed to be going on.

A thought occurred to me then, and I caught my breath. If I gave Baz the information to the hotel where Eddy, Agnes, and Rocky were staying, and these two thugs threatening Baz got a hold of it, they could be in real trouble. I gripped the steering wheel tighter and glanced at the digital clock on the dash. It was eight thirty.

I pulled up to the garage and parked in the alley behind the Rabbit Hole, the coffee shop I co-owned with by business partner, Kate McKenzie. Kate was a pixie-like force of nature, a tiny tornado that didn't stop. Petite with a backbone of iron, she didn't put up with crap. She endeared herself to everyone she encountered, myself included. We'd gone to college together, and when the nine-to-five life didn't cut it for either of us, we collaborated and opened the Hole. We were lucky enough to lease the front half of Eddy's large Victorian house in the Uptown neighborhood.

Dawg followed me through the gate into his newly fenced-in backyard and scooted off to one corner to take care of business.

In Eddy's kitchen, the scent of her latest potpourri—vanilla and nutmeg—swirled in warm welcome. She lived in the rear half of the house while I bunked in a small upstairs apartment.

Eddy's carefully printed itinerary remained safely tacked to the corkboard on the wall. I snatched it down and jotted the hotel phone number on a scrap of paper, replaced the note, and stuffed the number in the pocket of my jeans.

Even if Baz the Spaz was lying, it wouldn't hurt to touch base with the travelling troupe and make sure everything was okay. I keyed the hotel number into my cell. After a transfer to their room, voicemail kicked in. I left a message after the babble of the electronic voice. Knowing Eddy, at nearly nine o'clock, they were probably out raising the roof in some French Quarter bar.

I decided it was time talk to my best friend, Nicholas Cooper, known to most as Coop. If I were straight, I'd have married him years ago. Coop was kind, considerate, and loyal to a fault. Coop, Baz, and I had gone through school together, so Coop was familiar with the craziness that accompanied Baz like the dust ball that trailed after Pig Pen. He'd have some interesting insight on this.

Two

The traffic along westbound
I-394 thinned as I left Minneapolis in my rear-view mirror. Coop had fallen into the world of online role-playing games like Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons, and he had recently translated his interest from the screen and applied it to the real world. A few months back, the Hands On Toy Company started holding various role-playing game tournaments at their store in Minnetonka. Coop had turned from a curious player into a serious junkie. He'd lost a few of his peace-loving ways last fall when he thought he was a murder suspect in a crazy mafia and stolen nut mess. Since then, he'd become a lot more aggressive. Coop was still Mr. Peace & Love, but he was now willing to mix it up if shove came to punch. He even joined a co-ed broomball league over the winter—an ice sport much like hockey but played with special sticks and a small, soccer-like ball—with Kate and me. His first penalty was for roughing.

I pulled into the brightly lit parking lot. “You hang here,” I told Dawg. He settled down on the front seat with a toothy yawn. The pooch was more likely to sleep through any nefarious goings-on than guard against them.

The building that housed the Hands On Toy Company and Game Room was so colorful it practically hurt your eyes. A New York sidewalk artist designed and painted the exterior. Eight multi-colored dragons soared thirty feet into the air on either side of the front doors and appeared to leap onto incoming patrons. The entrance itself, constructed out of lumber from defunct Iron Range mines, looked like the portal into an Indiana Jones movie. Hundreds of vividly colored splotches of paint flung haphazardly onto the walls completed the rest of the exterior.

The owner of Hands On, Fletcher Sharpe, was a generous Twin Cities philanthropist. He made his start in a rundown strip mall in Bloomington in the late Nineties, and eventually evolved the enterprise into a 70,000-square-foot heaven-on-earth for kids and the kid-like. Hands On was a very appropriate name because every toy and game available for purchase was on the sales floor ready for experimentation.

Inside, bright banners and swaths of neon-colored, gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. A wide yellow, maroon, and purple-striped path wound through two-thirds of the store, curving through toddler toys to 'tween novelties into the teen games. Total distraction for the entire family. The last third of the building housed the Dungeon Game & Tournament Room and Café Hobbitude, an enclosed eatery designed to look like Frodo Baggins's Hobbit hole.

For once, I paid little attention to the assault on my senses as I followed the winding trail and emerged between the entrances to the Hobbitude and to the Dungeon. A regular-sized, round Hobbit door led the way into the eatery. Two huge blackened-wood medieval gates with heavy metal hinges and a lowered drawbridge protected the entry to the Dungeon. Suffice it to say Fletcher Sharpe dealt in multiple realities.

The air in the Dungeon was cool. Body odor, coffee, and Doritos drifted into my awareness. The only light in the Dungeon, other than the flame-like glow from torches on the walls, came from lamps recessed above groupings of two to four tables.

I caught sight of Coop at one of the tables with two linebacker-sized guys and a girl with long, stringy hair.

Play or Die
was screen-printed on the back of his faded black t-shirt. He was wearing a bright-yellow Rabbit Hole baseball hat backward over short, bristly hair. He'd had to shave his shaggy, dirt-blond head after a run-in with some sticky pine pitch during one of his Green Beans for Peace and Preservation tree sit-ins. The group was trying to stop the removal of some pine trees for more probably unoccupied retail space somewhere in the Metro. If I remembered right, the Green Beans didn't succeed. But they sure tried hard.

The Green Beans were a group of dedicated tree-huggers who advocated peace instead of war. They were good people with honorable intent, but sometimes their good intentions got them into some tight spots. A number of members, Coop included, now had criminal records for trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and other various charges. Coop did try to avoid the cops as best he could. However, since I'd started seeing Detective JT Bordeaux, steering clear was sometimes hard to do. Thankfully, he'd finally gotten past his fear that she was going to haul him downtown for simply breathing.

I waited for the chatter to fade as the group became aware of my presence. Coop looked up, surprise on his face when he realized who was interrupting them.

“Hey, sorry. Coop, I need to talk to you.”

“Sure, I was about to blow outta here out anyway.”

Coop gathered his gaming paraphernalia and bade his co-players adieu. We were out the front door in a matter of minutes.

Coop, ever the card-carrying environmentalist, relied on his bike for transportation regardless of rain, sleet, or snow. He retrieved his ride from a rack next to the building. As we crossed the asphalt parking lot to my truck, he said, “So what's up?”

I bleeped the doors unlocked and Dawg's head popped into view. “I don't know what to make of this. You remember Baz, Basil Lazowski?”

“Baz the Spaz. Who could forget? Last time we saw him, his ass was pointed skyward, remember?”

“Hard to forget.” I allowed myself a half-grin.

Coop hoisted his bike into the bed of the pickup and hopped in the passenger seat. Dawg greeted him with a slurp, then crawled into the back, panting happily.

I buckled my seatbelt. “Wait'll you hear this.” I relayed my very strange middle-of-the-sculpture-garden meeting with Baz. “So a stolen stuffed toy, a possible murder, and Eddy and crew maybe involved without their knowledge. Which leads us to Sebastian Joe's,” I finished.

Coop's jaw worked hard on a piece of gum he'd popped into his mouth. He was trying to quit smoking. Dawg rested his big head on Coop's shoulder and groaned as Coop rubbed the side of his face. “So Baz needs to talk to Agnes and see what, if anything, she did with the snake.”

“And if Baz has the number, the bad guys could pry it out of him and figure out where Agnes, Eddy, and Rocky are. I'd rather not hand him the number, honestly. I'm probably being too paranoid, but they did theoretically shoot a hole in someone.”

Sebastian Joe's Ice Cream Café on Franklin Avenue was an Uptown fixture. They'd been busy creating unusual, homemade flavors since the early Eighties. The place was my favorite ice cream joint, hands down.

I managed to parallel park in an open spot across from the store. After a sad whine of appeal from the backseat, Coop and I left Dawg and headed into the shop.

Sebastian Joe's always made my mouth water. The air was heavy with a mix of sweet ice cream and the tang of freshly brewed coffee. I gazed longingly at the bucket of Pavarotti-flavored deliciousness behind the glassed-in freezer as I passed by and followed Coop down a short hallway to the seating area in the back.

Baz was at a table in the corner with a bowl of at least three scoops of ice cream, stuffing his mouth as fast as he could swallow.

“Jeez,” I said, “slow down or you'll choke to death.”

“I'd be a lot happier dying doing something I love.” He shoved another load in his mouth and mumbled, “Hey, Coop.”

“Baz.” Coop's face froze in a grimace of distaste. He didn't like ice cream and he didn't care much for the man eating it, either.

Baz took a breath. “You have the number?”

I said, “Why don't I give them a buzz? If Eddy or Agnes answer, maybe we can wrap this whole thing all up now.”

He spooned another mound of ice cream into his mouth as he considered my words. “Dial.”

Eddy, Agnes, and Rocky were staying at the Hotel St. Margaret. This time a man with a syrupy southern drawl answered. I asked him to put me through to Edwina Quartermaine's room.

As the phone rang, I watched Baz noisily scrape the bottom of his ice cream bowl with his spoon. I had a flashback to third grade, when h
e
'
d simply stick his face in his plate and lick it clean.

Voicemail kicked in after the fourth ring. I left another message asking one of them to call me, even though I hate leaving voicemail messages. Life was sure easier when people had cell phones. I wasn't to the panic stage yet, but the lack of response to my calls made me uneasy.

Coop, intently folding a postcard-sized advertisement into a paper airplane so he wouldn't have to look at Baz, said, “Why are these guys are after the snake? What makes it worth ‘killing' someone over?” He floated quote marks in the air with his fingers.

“It's a stupid six-foot-long, neon-green stuffed animal. It's not even all that soft.” Baz clattered his empty bowl on the tabletop.

I handed him a napkin with barely disguised disgust. He had a smear of chocolate on his cheek and a white drip of ice cream on his chin.

Coop aimed the plane over the top of my head and let it sail. It soared nicely until the wall behind me downed it. He said to Baz, “Who'd you swipe the snake from?”

Basil scowled at Coop's choice of words, making his small, close-set eyes even beadier. “I only intended to borrow it.”

Right. Borrow, my ass.

“I did the duct job a few days ago, already turned in the paperwork. I have no idea whose house it was. Nice, I remember that.”

Coop said, “That's the key. If you find out whose house it is, you'll know who's after you.”

“Baz,” I said, “maybe you should go have a chat with the cops.”

“Forget it,” he said flatly. “I'm on probation. If they find out I lifted something, it's right back in the slammer.”

“Right where you belong,” Coop said under his breath.

“Okay,” I said. “We'll wait for Agnes or Eddy to call, and I'll see what they have to say. I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

Baz said, “Aren't you going to give me the contact info?”

“No way. You think I'm crazy? Like you said, if your playmates visit you again, I'm not taking the chance you'd hand the info over to them.”

Coop barked a laugh. “I bet Baz would cave after being poked in the eye.”

I caught Coop's gaze. Sadly, he was right. We left Baz staring morosely at his empty ice cream bowl and headed to the counter.

After Dawg enthusiastically welcomed us back, I gave him his small to-go cup of vanilla ice cream. He had that sucker slurped out in five seconds flat. After giving him some water to chase the sweet stuff, I pointed my truck toward Coop's place.

I glanced over at Coop, then back at the road. “What do you think?”

“I think the man's a complete jackass.”

“He is. What should we do?”

Coop shrugged his thin shoulders. “Not much we can do. Wait and see what Eddy or Agnes have to say.” He looked out the window and we rode in silence for a couple of minutes. “Give me your phone and I'll try the hotel again.”

Coop waited in silence, then left another message. He hung up and handed my cell back. “How does that idiot manage to get himself into situations like this?”

“I have no idea. I figured after being socked around by that ex-WWF wrestler for stealing his heavyweight championship belt and landing probation instead of jail time he'd have curbed his habit.”

Coop laughed. “Until someone chops off a few fingers or cuts his tongue out, he's not going to change.”

“True enough. Thanks for tagging along.”

“Any time.”

I dropped off Coop with a wave and drove home.

Dawg and I trudged up the stairs to my place over the Rabbit Hole. The small one-bedroom unit fit the mutt and me pretty well. If we added anyone else to the mix, quarters became cozy, which I quickly realized when JT and I began seeing each other on a regular basis. JT had been at Quantico for the past six weeks attending the FBI's Law Enforcement Specialized Training Academy. She and I had been an item for a record-breaking five months. Up until she left, Dawg and I'd been spending an increasing number of nights at her house, which was far roomier and had actual pictures of interesting things hanging on the walls.

I opened the front door and stepped into the living room. A TV on a homemade wood-plank stand, a glass-topped coffee table, and an on-its-last-legs couch that had a tendency to poke unsuspecting sitters in the butt made up most of my living room. The two pieces of furniture I was rather fond of, my mom's antique roll-top desk and wooden swivel office chair, sat in front of the window.

Dawg followed me into the quart-sized galley kitchen, and waited patiently while I whipped up a peanut butter sandwich for him and a turkey sandwich for me. He gave me his patented “I'm a pathetic, hungry dog” look, upper lip caught on a lower tooth. Drool dripped from the corner of his mouth in a long string, slowly making its way to the floor.

After our respective snacks and one more visit to the backyard, I brushed my teeth and hit the sheets. Eddy still hadn't called back, so I tried one more time. If I didn't know her as well as I did, I'd have been worried. But she probably had Rocky and Agnes at some questionable Bourbon Street pub happily playing cards in a sleazy back room.

I clicked off the light. The mattress bounced as Dawg hopped aboard for the night. He plopped his heavy head on the pillow beside me, and the last thing I heard was his loud yawn.