Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4) (7 page)

On the drive over, Howard tried Colt’s cell phone again to no avail. Still straight to voicemail.

Inside, the condo was on the cool side. I looked at the thermostat—off. Howard threw the untouched newspaper we’d found on the doormat onto a small table next to the front door. “I’ll check bedroom and bathroom,” he said. “You look around out here.”

I sniffed around the tiny kitchen. A bowl with some dried chunks of cereal around the sides rested in the sink. By the looks of it, I was guessing it had been there since the morning before. The counters were clean, the coffee pot had a smidgen of coffee left in the carafe, and a cutting board lay to one side with a knife and one dehydrated piece of apple on top. The refrigerator was what I expected for a single man: nearly empty. A carton of milk less than half full, three Coronas, a chunk of cheddar cheese, and an orange. No taco fixings except for the cheese, but that didn’t really mean anything. He’d probably planned on stopping at the store for those items on his way to our house. The freezer was filled to the brim with frozen pizzas and microwaveable dinners. Now I knew how he ate when he wasn’t at our place whipping up yummy meals.

Howard came out of the bathroom. “Find anything?” I asked.

“Not out of the ordinary. The sink and his toothbrush are bone dry, though. That tells me he hasn’t been here since yesterday.”

I closed the freezer door as Howard scooted around me. He headed into the living area, which contained a sofa, a TV, and a desk with a hutch. Howard went straight to the closed laptop on the desk. He picked up a business card that had been placed on top. I followed him into the living area and looked over his shoulder at the card. It featured a logo with red, sexy kissing lips. Swirling underneath then upward in a black cursive font were the words,
Saturday Night Fever
. Howard flipped the card over to reveal an address scrawled in blue ink: 233 Dusty Pines Place. I knew that road. It was in Rustic Woods not far from Lake Muir. Under the address was scribbled what must have been a date and a time: Nov 6 9:30 p.

“November 6th,” I said. “That’s today’s date. Do you think the p mean’s pm?”

Howard nodded and looked around the room. Then he smiled and looked right at me and grinned. “Uh huh, uh huh. Yup, yup,” he said, bobbing his head up and down.

My husband made a funny. He had a sense of humor after all. I chuckled. “What do you think Saturday Night Fever is?”

“Saw that name on a discussion board last night. It’s a club for swingers.”

“In Rustic Woods?”

He nodded again.

“Get out! Seriously?” I let the oddity of that idea sink in for a minute then voiced some hypotheses. “So either Colt is delving into some...interesting hobbies...or maybe this club has something to do with the job he’s working on.”

Howard’s eyebrows lifted slightly in response as he slipped the card into his back jeans pocket and then opened the laptop. When he worked, my husband was some kind of sexy, I have to say. His reserved but serious attention to detail was turning me on. If I hadn’t been so concerned for Colt, I would have suggested a quickie in the bedroom. Or the living room. Or the kitchen...

I fanned myself to cool down and took to rifling through some envelopes and papers in the hutch but it all looked like bills and invoices to clients. In a small nook of the hutch was a bowl. I reached in and pulled out a key which I showed to Howard. “That looks like the key to his car, don’t you think?”

He agreed while tapping a finger waiting for the laptop to power up. A few minutes of inspection gave us nothing much to go on and Howard was concerned about Colt’s privacy, if in fact, he was just gone for a few days or working on a particularly sticky job, so we didn’t try to access email or documents. Basically, we’d found nothing that told us where Colt had gone or what he was up to.

My cell phone vibrated in my purse. When I pulled it out, the caller ID showed Clarence’s number. I answered. “Hi Clarence.” I tried to sound chipper, but I don’t think it worked.

“Did you get my messages?” His voice, although sort of shaky anyway, was even shakier than usual.

“Yes, I did. We’re at-”

He cut me off. “I got a text. I don’t like it. Guy says it’s bad.”

“Guy is there?” I asked, not really that surprised.

Guy Mertz was the true crime reporter for Channel 10, and the two of them had met when we all found ourselves trying to solve the murder of a boozy movie director. Despite the fact that they now worked for rival television stations, they’d remained quite good friends, which fits since they’re both, well...quirky.

“Yeah. I asked him to come over ‘cuz something just isn’t right here and he’s the crime dude, you know.”

I said to Howard, “Clarence got a text from Colt,” then talked back into the phone. “What does the text say?”

“I think it’s a distress signal,” he said. “Guy says it’s a distress signal. What do we do?”

I could hear Guy in the background telling him to tell me what the text said.

“Do what Guy says, Clarence. Tell me what was in the text.”

“Maybe you should write it down. Do you have a pen?”

“Tell me what the text says, Clarence!”

He recited a set of letters. “S-O-S-N-D.”

Chapter Six

C
larence was too upset to
continue a calm and rational conversation, so I had him put Guy on the phone. Guy informed me that they had attempted several texts back to Colt’s number without response and that their many calls to his cell phone went directly to voicemail without ringing.

“We’re going to try his home phone next,”Guy said.

“You’ll only get Howard or me on the phone if you do that.”

“You’re at his place?”

“Yup. And he is not. It looks like he hasn’t been here since yesterday morning.”

“That’s not a good sign.”

“He’s a single guy. On the surface we’re not sure it’s bad, but we found his car parked on Sassafras Lane—it’s a neighborhood that he wouldn’t be likely to hang out in. And it’s been there since yesterday afternoon. Too many things here aren’t right. We found a key to his car here, so we’re heading back over there now to see if we can find anything important.”

“Anything we can do?”

“You can keep Clarence from having a coronary. He’s too young to die.”

Howard pulled the card from his back pocket and waved it in front of my face. “Oh!” I said, understanding his sign language. “Find out anything you can on a swinger’s club in Rustic Woods called Saturday Night Fever. And let us know right away if you hear from Colt again.”

I could hear him repeating the words, probably while he scribbled on something, “Saturday Night Fever. Like the movie, right?”

“Right.”

“Did I hear that right? You said a swinger’s club?”

“Your ears are working.”

“And why, exactly?”

The phone vibrated in my hand, indicating another call coming in. I peeked quickly at the display and saw the caller was my mother. “I need to take this call, Guy. I’ll explain later, just check it out. Talk to you soon.”

“Over and out.”

I clicked to my mother’s call. “What’s up mom?”

“Is that the way you answer a phone?”

“I’m forty-six years old, mother. Do my phone manners still require your reproach?”

“Even a forty-six year old woman can learn and change.”

“Mom, I’m kind of busy right now. Why are you calling, please?” My jaw was tight with irritation.

“I’m with Alka at the hospital. She had some sort of episode during our art class.”

“You couldn’t have opened with that? What kind of episode?”

“Heart. But she’s in good hands here with a cardiologist on call.”

I was so mad at my mother for preceding the ‘Mama Marr had a heart attack message’ with a rebuke of my phone manners that I did what any mature, sensible, grown woman would do: I hung up on her.

“We have to go, your mother’s in the hospital.”

His face went dark. “Which hospital?”

Darn! That would have been a good thing to ask. Reluctantly, I called my mother back.

“What’s up, Barbara?” she answered.

Oh, I was going to get her good one day.

I gritted my teeth. “Which hospital, mom?”

“Fairfax General. We’re still in the ER.”

Howard called the girls while I ignored all posted speed limits between Rustic Woods and Fairfax General Hospital. What ordinarily was a twenty-five minute drive took us only fifteen. Luckily we weren’t pulled over by a policeman for speeding. If we had been, I would have told him that if he wanted to prevent a true crime, he should follow us to the hospital and intervene before I killed my mother.

Once in the Emergency Room, we were directed to a curtained-off treatment area where we found Mama Marr lying on a partially raised gurney bed, electrodes pasted here and there, wires running to machines that beeped and booped. She and my mother, who sat in a chair next to the bed, were enjoying a mutual giggle.

“Diane,” said Mama Marr, “you know how to make me laugh like a leetle girl.” Her eyes lit up when she saw us and she clapped her hands together merrily. “Sammy! You are here! Barbara! Come, come!”

By ‘Sammy’, of course, Mama Marr meant ‘Howard’. See, Howard grew up with the name Sammy Donato. His father, Mario Donato, was whacked by the infamous Tito Buttaro. Set on revenge and aided by his mother who supported her only son fully, he changed his name to Howard Marr and joined the FBI to hunt Tito down legally. Don’t believe it? Trust me, I had a hard time swallowing the truth too, especially since I discovered all of this after being kidnapped by Tito’s angry, chain-smoking wife and her two goons. Those two goons turned out to be really nice guys and one of them is now my friend, Frankie Romano, who I would trust my life with any day of the week.

Bottom line, Mama Marr wasn’t experiencing dementia, she just slips a lot and calls Howard by the name she gave him when he was born. I’m actually glad he changed his name, because I can’t really imagine being Barbara Donato, wife of Sammy Donato, Mafia Hunter. Somehow I’d feel destined for a reality show or at the very least, a gig on Jerry Springer.

Howard handed me his cane and moved to his mother’s side without a hint of a limp. He kissed her on the forehead. “How are you feeling, Ma?”

“Peaches, peaches!” she said, which, translated, meant “peachy”. “The doctor say I’m healthy as a horsey.” See what I mean about the healthy horse rumors? “Maybe you should just get on my back and ride me out of thees place!”

Yikes, I didn’t like the image that remark evoked. A little too Oedipal.

Howard was unfazed and fully focused on getting some answers. “I’m going to find your doctor. I’ll be back in a minute.”

His dedication to his mother was heartening, but I couldn’t help but reminisce of the birth of our first child when a less attentive Howard spent two hours positioning the chair in the labor and delivery room so it would face the TV at just the right viewing angle. Fine, I’m probably exaggerating. It was probably more like forty-five minutes of chair positioning time. The next two hours were spent, with his back to me, cheering on the Redskins while I lay there, contracting painfully every six minutes and not dilating an iota. Where was his concern then, when I needed ice chips and foot rubs? But no, I’m not bitter.

“Mama,” I asked during Howard’s exit, “what happened?”

“Barbara! Thees is so funny! Your mama and me,” she pointed to my mother whose presence I purposely ignored, “were getting our pencils and pads of paper ready in the art classroom for the drawing of the figure.” She giggled so hard she had to stop talking. Once she regained her composure, she continued, but still very giggly. “Thees figure, is a man, and well, he dropped off his robe and right there this close to my face...” she placed nearly kissing index finger and thumb out for me to indicate the very minor distance, “...was his
prącia
!”

“That’s his penis, dear,” my mother explained.

I cringed and my body tightened, the whole boy-in-the-doctor’s-office trauma flashing before my eyes. I continued to ignore her.

“You’re right, Mama,” I said soothingly, “that is a funny story, but what about your heart?”

“Well, I had this pain, right here,” she indicated her chest, “shooting in me. You know, when I was looking at the
prącia
.”

“The penis,” said my mother, the educator.

The time for ignoring had ended. I spun around so fast that if my head hadn’t been attached it would have flown off and landed in China. “I know what a
prącia
is, Mom!” I yelled.

“It’s true, Diane,” said Mama more seriously now. “She knows the
prącia
. She found one in the woods yesterday.”

Thankfully for my mother’s safety, Howard returned with the cardiologist who explained that Mama Marr had not experienced a coronary episode, but a gastric one, most likely brought on by a combination of the beans and spicy chilies in her burrito bowl from Olé Olé, a popular Tex Mex restaurant on the outskirts of Rustic Woods.

I was incredulous. “You ate Mexican food?”

“Your mama said I should be more for the adventure and I agree. It was very good, this burrito bowl. So, what’s a little gas, no?”

Content that his mother was, in fact, as healthy as a horse, Howard asked if she would excuse him, me, and my mom for a couple of minutes. We convened outside near the nurses desk. “Diane, can you take my mom back home and keep an eye on her for an hour or two? Barb and I have something we need to do.” I assumed he meant rummaging through Colt’s car, since that had been next on our agenda prior to the Mama Marr Tex Mex acid reflux fiasco.