T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 01 - Southern Fatality (18 page)

“Because, my friend Hal’s water pressure is so damn lousy,” Spud was gesturing with the cane when I came back in, “that he can hardly get the shampoo out of his hair. But he don’t even have any hair, except a teeny row around the back of his head and it’s thinner than a cheap potato chip. He shouldn’t even spend money on shampoo.”

Walton stared at Spud with a half-stoned, half-confused look on his face. I thanked him for use of the phone and continued leading the tour. We ended up in the garage, which was really just a closed-in space beneath the house. Spud opened and closed some windows while I changed the topic of conversation back to the Citadel.

Walton said he wasn’t ever going back to the military academy and didn’t give a rat’s ass who knew it. He was just staying at the beach house until he found a place of his own, he explained. And no, he wasn’t working anywhere, but that didn’t matter. I
wondered why it didn’t matter. Everyone had to earn spending money somehow.

I nodded to Spud to let him know I was finished with the kid.

“Ah, I don’t know,” Spud muttered after looking inside a storage room that was built into the oversized garage. “I think this pad might be a little too big for me. Tell your daddy when you see him that I’ll get back to him.”

We were pulling out of the driveway when Walton realized that he’d forgotten something. “Hey,” he called. “What’re your names, anyway?”

Spud mumbled something unintelligible that ended in “-field” and we drove off.

I gave Spud a squeeze on the shoulder. “You did good, Spud. Bill ought to get you an acting job!”

“Thanks.” He patted my knee. “You and the twins did pretty good yourselves.”

I scolded him with a sideways look.

The sun was sinking gracefully and had metamorphosed into a deep golden yellow with startling streaks of orange, giving the sky a lazy, late-afternoon glow. One of the most incredible things about living in Wilmington is watching the sun materialize over the ocean and watching it disappear into the river.

“I don’t think that kid’s elevator goes all the way to the top,” Spud announced.

“He’s having a tough time living up to the senator’s expectations and he’s angry at the world.”

“Hiding something, too,” Spud said.

“Yep,” I agreed.

“But it ain’t the rich boy, least not inside that house.” Spud had been very thorough during his pretense of shopping for real estate. He had searched every possible space where a person could be.

“Nope.”

“You think he’s smart enough to have written the computer virus? He had that big computer setup and all.”

“People are smart in different ways. Walton doesn’t appear to have an ounce of common sense, but he could be a genius like Soup on the computer. Hard to say.”

We picked up a twelve-pack of beer and a box of fried chicken with biscuits for Spud’s poker game.

“Thanks for your help today,” I told him when we pulled into the Block.

“No problem. But next time you say you’re retiring, remind me to laugh, for crying out loud.”

The countdown readout
my head was revolving much too quickly and there were only five days left until our patch of earth rotated into the consequential calendar square of July first. I couldn’t help but think of it as an execution date for someone, most likely Jared Chesterfield. Not to mention the momentous occasion when the biggest cybercrime in history would occur, if Soup didn’t stop it.

With nothing better to do at the moment, I made an appearance at the Barnes Agency. Although Rita bitched and moaned about the heavy workload since I retired, she appeared to be handling things just fine. I’d driven Spud and Hal—who was still blessed with a driver’s license—to pick up the Chrysler at J.J.’s Repair Shop and stopped at the agency afterward. Rita shot me a
don’t-you-feel-sorry-for-me
face. I almost heard weepy violin music playing in the background.

Our secretary had a baby boy, she told me, and it weighed seven pounds, seven ounces. She couldn’t tell me what Suzie had named the kid, but Rita knew its weight. Baby Seven-Pound-Seven-Ounces received a blanket and a sport stroller compliments of the Barnes Agency.

Looking like an excited kid with a new toy, Rita sat at her desk testing a gadget. It looked like an ordinary fountain pen but contained a radio-frequency detector and would alert her with a slight vibrating mechanism if someone within a ten-foot radius was wearing a wireless microphone. The pen was a much more subtle way to tell if someone was wearing a wire than patting them down. Surprisingly, it was an actual ink pen encased inside a Montblanc shell. You could write a note or sign a restaurant tab with it.

Trish had borrowed the agency’s surveillance van for a few hours and, through an office window, I saw her pull into the driveway. She was one of the few people I allowed to use the van for jobs other than my own, but she was good with the electronics and smart enough to stay out of trouble. The agency also allowed her to run a tab for use of the van, and she paid it off by working for us when we needed her. It had been a pretty good setup for both of us.

“Hey, Jersey,” she said, breezing through the door and tossing the van’s keys to Rita. “What are
you
doing here? You miss the place?” Trish is petite and usually wears her waist-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. When sitting in the driver’s seat of the big Chevy van, she could pass for sixteen.

“The boss came by to check up on me,” Rita answered. “I think she feels guilty about dumping everything in my lap.”

“What are you working on?” I asked Trish, ignoring my partner’s barb.

“The usual. This lady’s pit bull lawyer hired me to get some skinny on the husband, who filed for divorce. He’s an orthopedic surgeon and graciously offered to let her keep the Beemer and the beach house,” Trish explained while folding a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth, accordion style. “Thanks to me and your clunker of a van, Pit Bull is now armed with audio and video of the good doctor bumping bellies with another woman. Even better, the girl is only seventeen and a patient of his. She’s the star of her high school tennis team. He scoped her knee last year.”

“You’re calling my van a clunker? I’ve been through a lot with that van. She’s a classic.”

“She’s
twelve years old and backfires at the most inappropriate times. By the way, you owe me for an oil change. Six quarts and a filter. Labor was free. My boyfriend said the oil hadn’t been changed in so long, it had the consistency of chocolate syrup with coffee grounds mixed in.”

I pulled a twenty out of my wallet. “Chocolate syrup? He must’ve been hungry, thinking about food when he was draining the oil pan. Don’t you feed the poor fellow, like a good little missy?”

Trish took the twenty and pocketed it. “No, he feeds me,” she retorted. “I dumped the dentist. This is a new one. He’s a mechanic
and
he knows how to cook. A biological male miracle. I’m in heaven.”

Trish had a knack for attracting boyfriends whose particular skills she just happened to need at the time. She claimed it was coincidence, but Rita and I knew differently. In the past year, she’d dated a carpet distributor, a building contractor, and a dentist. She now had brand-new berber carpeting throughout her condo, a screened porch addition behind it, and laser-whitened teeth that blinded you when she smiled.

I asked Trish to keep tabs on the senator’s beach house during
the next two days. If my visit had frightened the kid, Walton Ralls would make phone calls and stir things up. I wanted to know what, or who, surfaced when he stirred. Since he wouldn’t want the calls on the phone bill that his father paid, he would most likely do his calling from the wireless phone that now had a tracker in it.

“I want to know when someone else is in the house besides the kid—friends, delivery people, whatever,” I said. “They’ll probably spend time on one of the outside decks. Use the directional zoom and let me know if you hear anything interesting. Also, there is a tracker on the kid’s wireless. Number three.” Trish needed to know which tracker I’d used so she’d know which preset phone number to dial in on. Since it was a residential neighborhood with a lot of beach home rentals, she could slap on the fake flooring company or locksmith door magnets and the clunker would blend right in.

“No problem, Jersey. I really enjoy doing your shit work,” she said and took the keys back from Rita.

“You’re well compensated for doing my shit work.”

“You mean use of the clunker? That’s good compensation?”

“How much did you earn from Pit Bull? You always work on a fee-plus basis. How much ‘plus’ will you get for the skinny on the surgeon doing the tennis star?” I challenged.

Her lips stretched into a sly smile. “Yeah, yeah. I know. I couldn’t have gotten what I did without your clunker. In fact, I’ve grown quite fond of the van. When I leave it here at the agency, I get separation anxiety.”

“Why don’t you just make yourself a set of keys?” I said, ignoring her sarcasm. Between jobs for us and her own, Trish had possession of the surveillance van more than Rita or I did. Neither of us liked to do surveillance, but it was a necessary evil and Trish was good at it. Plus, she had something I didn’t—a lot of patience.

“Sure,” she said, dropping the van keys into a handbag that was slung canteen-style over her body.

“While you’ve still got the mechanic boyfriend,” I added, “why don’t you see if he’ll give the old girl a tune-up? I think she needs a new fuel filter, too. And the tires are probably due for a rotation.”

Trish produced a smirk and aimed it my way. “I’m not dating him for his mechanical abilities.”

“Sure you are,” Rita and I replied in harmony.

“What does your Honda need?” I said.

She looked sheepishly at the floor. “He’s fixing the air conditioner and installing a power sunroof.”

“You go girl,” Rita said, waving her pen in front of a desk chair that was wired with a microphone. I couldn’t see or hear the pen’s vibration, but Rita motioned me over to check it out. The pen vibrated just enough for my fingers to detect the movement.

“Where’d we get this?” I asked.

“From Steroid. I traded him some stuff we don’t use for the pen and a really cool digital camera. It’s smaller than a pack of chewing gum,” Rita bragged.

Steroid, so named because he has no neck and more bulges of muscle than any man ought to, is in the gadgetry business. Rita loves to drop in on him and haggle, like other people get off bargain hunting at Saturday morning garage sales.

“Hey, can I borrow the camera sometime?” Trish wanted to know.

“Sure,” I said. “But if you’d dump the mechanic and date Steroid,” I told her, “you could probably get your own camera. Maybe a vibrating pen, too.”

Her middle finger went up. “Vibrate this.”

“Actually, dating Steroid might not be a bad idea, Trish,” Rita
said. “Then you could talk him out of a wiretap and return the one you borrowed back in January.”

“Crap,” Trish said, smacking her gum. “I thought you forgot about that.”

Rita never forgot anything. She shook her head from side to side, once, in answer.

“Listen, I’ve got to scoot,” Trish told us, smart enough to realize when it was time to vacate. “Retirement agrees with you, Jersey. I dig that paisley shirt. You blend right in with the geriatric crowd.” She smiled brightly and closed the front door behind her.

I updated Rita on the Chesterfield case and she updated me on her two cases in progress. Although she pretended otherwise, I think she enjoyed being in charge. As if to prove that nobody—not even the founder of a business—was indispensable, everything flowed smoothly. The bills were being paid, the new business was coming in, and the existing clients were happy. Plus, Rita was relaxed, at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because she’d made good on her threat to hire a masseur instead of a clerical temp. I knew because his massage table was set up next to the coffee machine.

“I guess you’ll be glad to get the Chesterfield thing wrapped up,” Rita said, “so you can get back to the business of retirement.”

“Absolutely,” I answered, puzzled by a tinge of regret. I was definitely ready to be on the boat with a hunky man and without phones, responsibilities, or guns. Well, maybe one gun. But I’d expected to be missed at the agency, at least a little bit. I asked Rita how the search was going for a new partner.

“Haven’t found anyone worth talking to yet. But we’ve got some feelers out.”

“Good,” I told her. “Stay in touch.”

I went out the way Trish had and stepped into a sunny morning. The air was crisp and the birds sang. It was the type of day to
get things done. Not wanting to disappoint Mother Nature, I got busy.

I was in my car heading to the Bellington Complex when Soup called with the skinny on Barb Henley. I pulled off the road, put on my wireless headset, and found a pen and notepad.

He gave me the name of her doctor when Jared was born and the name of her current doctors. She had eight of them. Either she had some major health problems or she was a hypochondriac. Or, she might have been addicted to prescription drugs and found it necessary to rotate doctors to keep herself in ample supply.

Soup gave me her previous three addresses and her current address. She worked part time at a retail store and I wondered why, if she was in such desperate need of money, she didn’t work full-time. A late-model Porsche 911 Turbo was registered in her name and her driving record revealed two speeding tickets and one DUI. A person with a history of drinking and driving shouldn’t be behind the wheel of that much raw power. And since she was toting herself around in a new Porsche, she either had very good credit or she had a source of funding other than the petty cash she was blackmailing from Jared.

“Get this,” Soup said, saving the best for last. “She had a condition called tubal infertility. Both of her fallopian tubes were blocked up. Even though everything else worked fine, her eggs couldn’t get through. So there’s no way she got pregnant by Chesterfield having sexual intercourse with her.” He paused to slurp something.