Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery) Page 17
“Yes. Now give me five minutes of privacy. Please?”
Curiosity rules this stockbroker’s heart—remember Luis’ letter to his sister?—and when I leave Franny in the sunken bar area, duck out Clooney’s front entrance into the sparsely populated parking lot, I make a sharp left turn instead of heading for my Camry. The air smells of wet sand and decaying seaweed.
The restaurant’s beachfront lights are off because Clooney’s outdoor deck hasn’t opened yet, so when I slip around the building, stand on the sand in front of those floor-to-ceiling windows, I can stare unseen into the lighted restaurant. Clooney’s last diners are asking for their check, and Franny still sits alone at the bar. In the rectangular box of the big windows, it’s like I’m watching television.
For the first time, I notice the late, lingering diners include Mr. Vic’s daughter, Carmela Bonacelli. She’s laughing, showing off that figure in a black dress with tiny straps.
My gaze returns to Franny. She’s digging in her purse, doesn’t see the person walking up behind her, at least not until the new arrival takes possession of my empty stool. Large, dark eyes, long black hair and—like Ms. Strawberry, Franny Dahler-Chapman—this new woman wears a black sleeveless dress. Did everybody come from a funeral?
The new arrival is Gina Farascio, and side by side, Franny and Gina look like salt and pepper shakers, the hair color separating light from dark.
Slowly, like she hates giving her prize away, Franny extracts a thin, square container from her purse and hands the parcel to Gina.
What was that?
Maximillian Zakowsky
Pressing his back against the wall, Max slides down on his haunches to wedge himself into a dark corner of the basement. He needs to make himself as small as possible, but coiled and ready, too—able to jump like a spider.
When he first began working for Bluefish, Max used a more direct manner. He would walk straight up to the mark, tell the man his time was up, then knock him down and finish explaining.
Most times, the mark let Max do whatever Max was supposed to do. Beat the guy up, sometimes break a bone. But often the mark would run, and Max would have to chase him. Max hates to run, Max being too big to run fast for long, plus things always seemed to get in his way. Couches. Cars. Other people. By the time he caught a running mark, Max was usually too pissed to hold back. Twice he killed when he was not supposed to. Also, once or twice, maybe three times now counting that Mexican bartender, the mark actually got away.
Max takes a series of long, slow breaths. His body relaxes, gravity working on his big muscles to drop him even lower into the basement corner. Experience had taught Max to hide and relax. Guarantee yourself surprise and the ability to strike first. His own record was clear: Once Max got his hands on someone—like his dead friend Jerry always said—forget about it.
FIFTY-SIX
The lady’s house ranks as ancient so it’s no surprise the original pine floorboards creak. But do I detect a certain rhythm...as in footsteps? Hope I didn’t make too much noise going through her dirty clothes, finding this DVD.
I sit back on the blood red living room sofa and hold my breath to listen. A grandfather clock tick-tocks in the foyer. The oil burning basement heater pops and rumbles. And yes, there...bare or stocking feet pad quickly toward me down the hall.
I stuff the DVD under my laptop, gasp when she joins me in the living room. Oh, my. And oops. Oh, my because she’s wearing nothing but white athletic socks. And oops because she’s using both hands and all ten red-nailed fingers to grasp a pump-action, single-barrel shotgun.
“You found the DVD, didn’t you?” says Gina Farascio.
“DVD?”
“I know you found it. Wrapped in my black dress.”
My lips move without sound.
“I just checked the bathroom,” Gina says. “You rifled the hamper, found the black dress. So I know you’ve got my DVD.”
I take a long, deep breath.
Gina racks a shell into the firing chamber.
I lift my computer and offer her the DVD.
“Play it,” Gina says. “We’ll solve the murder together.”
I slide the disk into my Mac and wonder if I’m really going to view what the Branchtown Sun calls the “MISSING HOTEL MURDER VIDEO.”
On screen, Ann Marie Talbot cracks open her hotel room door. Gina’s digital image rushes past the startled Talbot, knocking her flat.
I turn from the laptop. “So it was you.”
Gina raises the pump-action level with my nose. “Watch the video.”
I suck an extended breath. Instead of blowing my head off right now, Gina apparently needs a short refresher course in homicide. Okay. Take your time, dear. In fact, I don’t mind studying the course material, too, maybe even take a little Q&A afterward.
Or write a five hundred page essay.
On my computer screen, Gina’s image finally stops kicking a motionless Ann Marie Talbot. And I do mean finally. It must have taken Gina several minutes to release all of her jealousy, her sense of betrayal.
Oh, my. Maybe Gina’s not quite satisfied. On screen, the former Ms. Cleopatra and reining Ms. Shotgun drops a knee onto Talbot’s chest. Her hands lock around Ann Marie’s throat, the throttling action energetic to say the least.
My belly rolls over like sewer backwash. This is worse than ugly. I’m watching a real murder.
Gina pokes me with the shotgun, forcing me to watch her on screen.
I look and see Gina’s image hop through a sliding glass door onto Talbot’s hotel room balcony. She comes back seconds later carrying one of those Japanese-style, cast iron grillers. The barbecue coals inside the hibachi already glow white hot.
The hibachi was never mentioned in the newspapers, but I’ve wondered since Franny showed me that autopsy report. I remember asking myself what a “charcoal burner” was doing in Talbot’s hotel room. Sounds like a basic and serious violation of fire codes.
“Franny was having a barbecue?” I say.
Gina gazes intently at her own image on the computer screen. “Steaks for her and my husband. Although Tony didn’t stick around for dinner.”
I suppose my plan is to delay Gina for as long as I can, pray for the cavalry.
“Wait. Tony knew he was going to see her that evening?” I ask. “And you followed him to the Martha Washington?”
“Yeah. I heard them screwing through the door, then fighting over whether or not he should stay. When Tony left her room, I hid down the hallway so he wouldn’t see me, then went back.”
“You were in a jealous rage, huh.”
“Ann Marie and I are old friends. Screwing my husband was a really shitty thing to do.”
I feel my forehead bunch into wrinkles. “Old friends? You mean that story you told me about Franny being a mob party girl with Ann Marie was really your story? It was you and Ann Marie?”
“All three of us,” Gina says. “We were young, in school, attracted to the bad guys and their big rolls of money. Poker Pals, Tony and his friends called us. We were popular for years, even after a couple of us tried marriage. Tony’s guys knew us well, knew we were smart and could be trusted, so they eventually decided we should have jobs aiding and abetting their businesses, put us on the payroll.”
“Ingenious,” I say. “So Ann Marie took accounting classes, earned her C.P.A. and went to work for the AASD. Franny joined the New Jersey State Troopers after law school. But how about you, Gina? Where did you hook up?”
Her mouth twists into something only resembling a smile. “Tony decided I’d be best suited for something else.”
“What?”
Gina’s finger slides to the shotgun’s trigger. “Keep asking questions, you might find out.”
“You’re a hit-man—I mean, hit-woman? Oh, come on.”
Gina shrugs. “More odd jobs than anything, carrying weapons into places men can’t or surprising people who need some encouragement to repay a loan. Sometimes it’s a combination.”
“Where did the DVD come from?” I say. “And how did Franny get it?”
“I’m tired of your questions. Stand up.”
“Oh, come on, Gina. What’s your hurry? Who was bugging Ann Marie’s room?”
Her big almond-shaped eyes stare at me. “Bluefish put in the recording equipment. Talbot was working for him. They were hoping to catch you screwing her.”
“But I’m single.”
“She’s an AASD official investigating your firm. The potential scandal would’ve made you think about cooperating with Bluefish and his friends.”
“So after the murder, Franny got the DVD from who? Detective Mallory?”
“I don’t know,” Gina says. “Mallory or Bluefish or Max, whoever had it then. I just told her to get it for me.”
I’m almost out of snowballs. “But wasn’t Franny working for Bluefish? Pretending to be after him, indicting him, but really setting things up so he’d be acquitted? Why would she give you the DVD?”
“With Bluefish dead, her only options were me or the cops.” Gina pushes the shotgun closer to my face. “Now stand up. We’re going to walk slowly through the kitchen, down the stairs past the basement and into the cellar. I need you to help me carry something.”
I shake my head doubtfully. “You mean that shotgun’s too messy to use in the pretty basement or the living room.”
She shows me a real smile this time. Nasty and cold, but real. She says, “Stand up.”
I stagger to my feet and head for her kitchen.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Perhaps I perused too much Carlos Castaneda-type mystical literature in my youth, but all I can think about on my way down Gina’s cellar steps is could this be my Last Battle on Earth? Am I prepared to give these moments the attention my life’s purpose deserves? I try to absorb every detail of my surroundings, let loose my inner warrior’s imagination for fight or flight.
Wish I could remember how Castaneda’s Don Juan shaman character created a double. Boy, would I like to be somewhere else.
“Take it slow,” Gina says.
She’s four or five steps behind me on the cellar stairs, yet I can feel that shotgun aimed at my back. My skin senses that weapon like it’s a glowing, white hot poker. The Radiator of Death.
I mean, Gina’s definitely going to kill me. I’ve seen the DVD, asked way too many questions, because, as we all know, those of us with the Gift of Gab never know when to shut the hell up. It’s a universal fact.
I nearly choke over my next assertion. “I can keep my mouth shut, Gina. You don’t have to kill me.”
“It won’t hurt,” she says. “I’ll make it a head shot.”
Ringo and Ginger Baker, my dad’s two favorites drummers, are playing a duet with my heart rhythm—back beat, jump beat, downbeat. Everything all at once. The air grows staler as I pass the basement and approach the dark bottom of the stairs. Gina flips a switch and an overhead light pops on showing dark-stained wood shelves covering three of four cement walls. Typical garage junk fills the shelf space. Beach chairs. Lawn food. Stacks of clay gardening pots. Broken exercise equipment. Discards of suburban life on the Jersey Shore.
“If I let you live, I’d always worry you would hurt me with the information,” Gina says. “Or somebody like Franny would make you talk to save their own ass. I’m sorry, sweetie. You’re a pretty good fuck. But I can’t take the chance or the stress.”
“Why did you bring me home with you last night?” I say. “Why even let me have the chance of finding that DVD?”
“When you came back inside Clooney’s last night, I could tell by your face you’d seen Franny give me that DVD. I had to find out how badly you wanted to watch it, if you knew what it was. I also enjoyed taking you away from her.”
Other than folding Gina up in one of her own collapsible aluminum beach chairs, I see nothing in this cellar that could help me take away that shotgun. I see nothing, that is, until I spin all the way around to face her.
My racing heart almost stops. Max the Creeper is balled up like a spider beneath the cellar stairway. In the spilt second I debate whether I should speak, leap or do nothing, Creeper grabs the initiative. Any action on my part is instantly too late. Talk about fast.
As her white-stocking foot touches the last step, Creeper grabs Gina by the ankle and yanks, dumping the naked, dark haired beauty, screaming, onto the cellar floor.
Ka-boom. The shotgun tumbles loose onto the floor and goes off, blue fire flashing from the muzzle. Gina’s scream and the explosion batter me. Stacks of burnt-orange clay flower pots explode inches from my left hip. A wisp of smoke rises from the shotgun toward the center of the room.
Creeper pounces from behind the stairway—two blurry fast steps and he has Gina by the head and shoulders, his arms around her like tree trunk size constrictor snakes.
I lunge for the shotgun. In the air, a hear Gina’s neck snap.
My chest slams the cellar floor, my outstretched fingers successfully grabbing the shotgun. I roll hard to the right, trying to give myself some distance, but Creeper’s on me like a cave in. His forearms press my arms and shoulders flat against the cold cement. His hands encircle my throat. A sulfur smell fills my nose.
The way I figure it, Austin Carr will be a full-boat dead man in two-to-three seconds, soon as Creeper breaks—what did that autopsy report call it—my hyoid bone?
Though my arm is pinned to the floor, the fingers of my right hand can touch the shotgun. I can barely wiggle my wrist, let alone grip the weapon. But this is my Last Battle on Earth, and I’m about to lose, about to pass on to that other world, that Great Mystery about which we poor humans know so little and worry so much.
I have to try something.
Maybe I can twirl the shotgun a little with my fingers, reposition the barrel so the muzzle aims at Creeper’s knee and leg. Give him a kiss he won’t forget. Yes. There. Like playing spin the bottle.
Creeper’s weight presses on me like a stack of marble tombstones. Impossible to breathe. I’m blacking out.
My thumb finds the trigger.
FIFTY-EIGHT
When my thumb squeezes the trigger, nothing happens. Figures. The shotgun must be jammed. A final and desperate piece of bad luck for Austin Carr.
I try once more, a near-death panic pushing my actions, giving me a miraculous surge of will. Still nothing. No explosion. And this time my furious attempt to fire the weapon makes the gun stock rattle on the cellar’s cement floor.
Creeper’s beady little gaze snaps toward the noise.
This is beginning to look like The End, that often forecasted demise of Austin Carr and his full-boat smile, the semi-orphanization of Elizabeth and Ryan Carr, two school age children who—
Air rushes into my empty lungs. Creeper has decided he’d rather have his paws on the shotgun than my throat. What a strange tactical decision, especially considering the shotgun so recently proved unreliable and I was almost unconscious. Go figure.
Creeper’s poor judgment not only means oxygen for my air-starved lungs, but now that I can breathe, perhaps I can even launch a counterattack, wrestle free of Creeper’s awesome weight and strength. I throw my shoulders and hips to the left, away from the shotgun. I catch Creeper reaching for the weapon. My jerky twist breaks me loose all at once, like a stuck lid on a jam jar.
My newly reacquired air supply tastes even sweeter, and a measure of confidence joins the adrenalin zooming through my blood. It’s a little bit like last night at Clooney’s, when Gina told Franny that I—Austin Carr—would be spending the night in Brooklyn.
I scramble onto my haunches and face Creeper. His ass sits flat on the cellar floor, knees up, feet in front of him, the shotgun between his ox-like thighs and pointing my way. We can’t be more than five feet apart. My gaze looks straight down the shotgun’s barrel.
“That gun is jammed,” I say.
Though even a broken weapon is disconcerting at this proximity and angle—that black hole almost smells like eternity—my tone carries a certain hint of superiority. I mean, I pulled that shotgun’s trigger. It didn’t work. It’s not like I’m bluffing.
Why is he smiling?
“Gun not jammed,” Creeper says. “No shells in chamber. You have to do this each time.”
He works the shotgun’s pump. Clickity-clack.
I knew that. The cellar’s tomblike silence wraps around me like a shroud.
Employing Gina’s working shotgun like a conductor’s baton, Ludwig Von Creeper orchestrates me up the steps, across her stainless steel kitchen, through a screened kitchen door, down wooden back stairs and into Gina’s back yard that faces her next door neighbor.
A one-car garage, square like a mausoleum, rests at the end of Gina’s flower and rock lined cement driveway. Inside is a black Buick LeSabre. The excited chatter of morning birdcalls emanates from the evergreens separating Gina Farascio’s place from her neighbors. The taste of baking bread rides a soft breeze.
Seems ironic I knew the shotgun needed to be pumped, but forgot the facts when they mattered most. By way of excuses, I can only say I’ve never fired any kind of shotgun. Plus, I know I wouldn’t be the first stockbroker to panic in that scary situation. Remember, a lot of us jumped out windows just because the stock market went down. I am a bit disappointed, however. I thought I would do better, perhaps show bravery and calm under fire. I wanted to make Luis proud.
Oh, well.
Creeper urges me toward the LeSabre’s trunk. A single raven squawks at us from the top of a red maple with just emerging leaves. The bird’s oily black coat shines iridescent in the morning’s new sunlight, a dark jewel against the pale bronze leaves.
Creeper makes me wrap my ankles in duct tape, seal my mouth with the same stuff, then stick my hands behind me so he can wrap my wrists. My body automatically leans forward, my first plan in these situations always being cheerful cooperation.