The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) (4 page)

Grandma Hudson always claimed work was the best medicine. “It’s good for what ails you,” she advised me when I came dragging into Phoenix. She must have known how close I was to the abyss. She had insisted that I see a doctor for a checkup, and had seen to it that the doctor prescribed some antidepressants for me as well. Between the two medications—daily doses of hard work and the prescription drugs—I had gradually pulled out of my funk.

That night, the hard work part did the trick again. The Friday night crowd, larger than usual, was more than I had staffed for, and I helped pinch-hit in the bar. Right around midnight a guy I’d never seen before sauntered into the bar and ordered a St. Pauli Girl, N/A—nonalcoholic—the drink of choice for some of those folks who no longer care to imbibe the hard stuff. The new arrival had the nose of a heavy drinker, and the familiar way he settled his hulking figure on the bar stool told me he had spent plenty of time in bars.

“You Butch?” he asked when I brought him back his change.

“You got me,” I answered. “Who are you?”

“Pop told me to look for a bald guy with a mustache,” he said. “Had to be you.”

“Pop?” I asked.

“Tim O’Malley. My father-in-law—used-to-be father-in law.”

There was a hint of regret in that last phrase. I couldn’t tell if the regret came from losing his wife or from losing Tim O’Malley as part of his family.

“Name’s Charles,” he told me. “Charles Rickover. Charlie to my friends. Me and Amy have been divorced for about ten years now. I still stay in touch with Pop, though. He’s a good guy.”

I remembered being introduced to Tim’s daughter Amy at Minnie O’Malley’s funeral. If I’d been told her last name back then, I didn’t recall what it was.

“Yes,” I agreed. “He is a good guy.”

“I used to be a cop,” Charles went on. “Put in my twenty. My career came to an abrupt end about the time Amy left me. Turned out she hit forty and decided she liked women more than men. That was tough on the old ego. I spent some time drowning my sorrows, if you know what I mean.”

Wondering where all this was going, I nodded. Had Tim sent Charles by so we could cry on one another’s shoulders about the women who had done us wrong? If that was the case, I wasn’t exactly in a mood for commiserating.

I had started to walk away when Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out one of those little business card holders. He extracted a card and then lay it on the bar in front of me. When I didn’t reach for it right away, he added. “Go ahead. Pick it up. It won’t bite.”

In the dim light of the bar, I had to pull out a pair of reading glasses to make it out:
CHARLES RICKOV
ER. PRIVATE INVESTIG
ATIONS.
The only other line on the card was a phone number with a 602 prefix. There was nothing else printed there—no address, city, or state, but 602 indicated the business was located somewhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

“Pop says he thinks you’re being framed for murder and that maybe you could use my help.”

I know a little about private eyes—enough to know they don’t come cheap. I wasn’t of a mind to be bamboozled into hiring one.

“Look,” I said, “Tim’s a great guy. As I told him earlier, someone knocked off my ex-wife a couple of weeks ago. A pair of cops came by earlier today and asked me a few questions about it. That’s all. I never said anything about being framed, and I don’t think it’s necessary for me to hire—”

“You’re not hiring me,” Charles said quickly. “I’m doing this for Tim. He stood by me when a lot of other people didn’t. When he asks for something, I deliver. He called me this evening and mentioned the framing bit. I still have friends here and there. Between his call and now, I’ve made a few calls of my own, and you know what? Either you’re the guy who did it, and they’ve got you dead to rights, or else Tim is right, and you are being framed.”

“How so?” I asked.

“An old friend of mine happens to work for the Las Vegas PD, and he did some checking for me. It turns out your ex, Katherine Melcher, had received a number of threatening telephone calls in the weeks preceding her death. She had recorded two of the calls—illegally, of course. The person on the phone whispered so it’s hard to tell if the caller was a man or a woman. With the right equipment, I’m sure a trained voice recognition expert will be able to sort all that out. Voices are like fingerprints, or so I’m told. The most immediate problem is this—the calls all came from a Phoenix area phone number. Wanna know which one? The pay phone you’ve got in your hallway there.” He pointed with the tip end of his bottle. “The one right outside your crapper.”

There was a long pause after that while his words sank into my consciousness. Threatening phone calls to Faith, aka Katy Melcher, had been placed from my pay phone? How could that be?

Charles slammed his empty bottle down on the counter. “Contrary to popular opinion,” he said, “I believe you
do
need my help. Your ex may be the one who’s dead, but Pop thinks you’re the real target, and I tend to agree with him. Given all that, we need to talk. Now where can a guy get a decent cup of coffee around here?”

I walked to the far side of the bar and tapped Jason, my evening and late night barkeep, on the shoulder. “I’m done,” I told him. “Will you close up?”

“No prob,” he said with a nod.

Beckoning Rickover to follow me, I ducked into the dining room and grabbed the most recently made pot of coffee off the machine behind the counter, then I led the way up the narrow stairway to what is a surprisingly spacious apartment. Because the stairway is situated in the alcove between the dining room and the bar, you enter the apartment in the middle as well.

When it comes to “open concept floor plans,” Grandma Hudson was a pioneer. The main room, situated over the restaurant portion of the building, is a combination living room, dining room, kitchen, and office. A master bedroom and bath as well as a guest room and bath are located over the bar. That’s not the best arrangement for sleeping, especially on raucous weekend nights, but Grandma probably figured—and rightly so—that whoever lived here would be downstairs working those noisy late nights anyway.

I turned to the right and led Charles into what an enterprising real estate sales guy might refer to as the “main salon.” I put the coffeepot on the warmer I keep on the kitchen counter and directed my guest past the plain oak dining table to the seating area in the center of the room. The rest of the place may have been decorated to suit my grandmother’s no nonsense, spartan tastes, but the seating area consisted of two well-made easy chairs and a matching sofa. The chintz upholstery may have faded some, but the springs and cushions had held up to years of constant use. With a glass-topped coffee table in the middle, it was the perfect place to put your feet up after spending a long day doing the downstairs hustle.

When I brought the coffee—a mug for Charles and one for me, too, I found him studying his surroundings. “You live here by yourself?” he asked.

I nodded. “Once burned, twice shy.”

He gave me a rueful grin. “Ain’t that the truth. So tell me the story. Pop told me some of it, but if I’m going to help you, I need to hear the whole thing—from the very beginning.”

There’s something demeaning about having to confess the intimate details of the worst failures of your life to complete strangers. For the second time in a single twenty-four-hour period, I found myself having to go back over that whole miserable piece of history, but I didn’t hold anything back. I understood that if the threatening phone calls to Faith had originated from my place of business, then I was in deep trouble and needed all the help I could get. In that regard, Charles Rickover was the only game in town.

He didn’t bother taking notes as I talked. He listened attentively but without interruption as I made my way through the whole thing, ending with a detailed description of my encounter with Detectives Jamison and Shandrow earlier that afternoon. When I went to refill our coffee cups, I returned to find him staring at the office space at the far end of the room. It consisted of an old wooden teacher’s desk that Grandma Hudson had liberated from a secondhand store somewhere in front of a bank of used and abused secondhand filing cabinets.

“Is that your computer?” Charles asked, nodding toward my desk and my pride and joy, a tiny ten-inch Toshiba Portégé. The laptop sat in isolated splendor on the desk’s otherwise empty surface. Having learned my lesson about allowing other people, namely Faith, handle accounting records for my business, I do those functions myself now, on the computer. The Toshiba also holds the first few chapters of my several unfinished novels.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Sure.”

Charles walked over to the desk, slipped on a pair of gloves, and flipped up the lid on the computer. It lit up right away. He leaned over, studied the screen, and then turned back to me with a puzzled expression on his face. “Dead men don’t lie?” he asked.

“It’s a story,” I explained. “Fiction. It’s the title for one of the novels I’m working on.”

“You leave your computer sitting here like this?”

I shrugged. “Why not? I’m the only one who lives here.”

“You may be the only person who lives here, but you’re not the only person who has access.”

That was a scary thought and one I had never considered. Since I was downstairs all day, every day, I never locked the place up except on those very rare occasions when I was out of town.

“You’re saying one of my people may have been coming up here and messing with my computer behind my back?”

Charles didn’t deign to respond. “Tell me about this mystery convention you went to. What’s it called again?”

“Bouchercon.”

“How did you register for it?”

“On line,” I answered, nodding toward the computer. “On that.”

Charles sat down in front of the computer and made himself at home. He typed in a few keystrokes. “Yup,” he said. “Here it is in your browser history, the Bouchercon Web site. What about your hotel? What was that again, the Talisman didn’t you say?”

I nodded. The man may not have been taking notes during my long recitation of woes, but he had clearly been paying attention.

“Is there anything in here about your dealings with your ex?”

I nodded again. “There’s a file called Faithless Faith,” I said sheepishly. “I thought that writing it down would help me put it in the past.”

“Did it?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No such luck.”

“Unfortunately,” Charles said, “Faithless Faith seems to have found a way back into your present. What about your dealings with that developer? Are there any records of your dealings with Mr. Jones in here?”

“Yes,” I replied. “There have been a number of e-mail exchanges about that.”

“In other words, this computer makes your whole life an open book for anyone who cares to take a look-see. Do you happen to have one of those floppy disk drives around here?”

“It’s in the top drawer on the right along with a box of extra floppies. I use those to make backup copies of the business records on the computer’s hard drive. Why?”

“I want you to come over here right now and make copies of all your essential business files and anything else you want to keep, including those unfinished novels. After that, we’re going to reformat your computer. When the cops come back with a search warrant—and I’m saying, when not if—they’ll grab your computer and use everything on it to put you away. Not having your files won’t stop them, but it’ll sure as hell slow them down. Reformatting is the best way to get rid of everything you don’t want anyone else to see. If they ask, tell them your computer crashed and reformatting was the only way you could reboot it. You get busy copying your files. In the meantime, give me the keys to your car.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re caught up in a complicated plot here, Mr. Dixon,” he said, holding out his hand, “and you’re about to go down for it.”

Reluctantly, I fished my car keys out of my pocket and handed them over. It seemed to take ages to go through the computer, copying the necessary files. The whole time I was doing so, I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. If Charles Rickover was right, one of the people who worked for me—someone I trusted—was trying to frame me for killing Faith. So who was it?

Charles came back upstairs a long time later. He was empty-handed and his face was grim. “Just as I thought,” he said. “There’s a bloody bat hidden under the mat in the trunk of your car. I believe I have a pretty good idea about where that blood might have come from.”

“Did you get rid of it?” I asked shakily.

“Hell no,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the murder weapon. I’m not touching it, and neither are you.”

“You mean we’re just going to let the cops find it?”

“Absolutely. In the meantime, you and I are going to do our damnedest to figure out who’s behind this.”

After returning my car keys, he picked up our empty coffee mugs and went over to the counter where he refilled them. By then I was too stunned to play host. Besides, I was still copying files. Working with floppy disks isn’t exactly an instantaneous process.

“Okay,” he said, handing me the cup I assumed was mine. “What’s in the file cabinets? Are your personal papers there by any chance?”

I nodded. “That’s where I keep paper copies of job applications, tax returns, court decrees—bankruptcy and divorce included. That’s also where you’ll find my birth certificate, Grandma Hudson’s death certificate, and a copy of my last will and testament.”

“How often do you open those files?”

“Not often, why?”

“With any kind of luck, I think there’s a slight chance that those file folders may hold some fingerprints that will work in our favor, unless of course whoever is behind this was smart enough to use gloves. And if the prints are there, the only way they’ll work for us is if we can point the cops in the right direction.”

“Fat chance of that,” I said. “If they come in with a search warrant, I’m toast.”

“Not necessarily,” Charles said. “While I was downstairs, I called Pop. You’ve got a guest room here, right?”