5 A Sporting Murder (9 page)

Flurrying snow swirled about the next morning on our way to
the office. The forecasters predicted no accumulation. Though the stores
weren’t open yet, it was looking a lot like Christmas, now only three days off.
A woman sauntered away from her car toting a large shopping bag with colorful
packages peeping out the top. Probably getting ready for a party at the medical
clinic down the way. It reminded me that I hadn’t bought anything for Jill. Not
surprising, since I’m a Christmas Eve shopper.

Inside the office, a call from
Terry Tremont awaited us.

He got right to the point. “Did
that Columbo business bear any fruit?”

I told him about our conversation
at the restaurant. I also related the information Sam had picked up from his
basketball-playing friend at the YMCA.

“We’ve talked to a lot of people,
and I’m convinced there’s a scandal out there somewhere,” I said. “We haven’t been
able to put a face on it, though Aregis is looking more like a possible
candidate.”

Terry replied in an edgy voice. “I
hope you can give me some answers soon, Greg. From what that Dollar Deal fellow
told your friend, it sounds like they may be a lot further along than we
thought. I’ll have to pass this on to the Preds folks. Gordon Franklin told me
yesterday that you all had been by to see him. You still plan to talk to Mack
Nolan?”

“When we can pin him down. Franklin wasn’t much help. Said he left all the details up to Brad Smotherman and Nolan.”

“Probably true,” Terry said. “I met
with the three of them originally, but Brad is the key man. Franklin is highly
regarded in the accounting field, and he’s obviously an avid hockey fan. He
doesn’t seem too interested in getting involved with the nitty-gritty of this
campaign, though. He wanted to know what I thought of your investigation.”

“I hope you weren’t too hard on
us,” I said.

“I relayed some of the information
you gave me yesterday and assured him you were working hard on the case. I
expected you to have something definitive soon.”

“That’s certainly our intent.”

When I put the phone down, Jill
brought my cappuccino with a questioning frown. “We haven’t been fired yet?”

“No, but we’d better start getting
some results. Maybe a check into Nikki Columbo’s background would yield
something.” I took a sip from my insulated travel mug and grimaced. “Wow,
that’s hot. I think I’ll let it cool a bit while I go get some extra batteries
for our spy gear.”

“Take your time,” Jill said. “Those
cups hold heat like the cone of a volcano.”

Flurries of snow twisted in the
swirling gusts, peppering my face with needle pricks as I trudged along the row
of shops, tightening my grip on the collar of my jacket. The battery store was next
to the café on the opposite end from our office. About halfway down, a pickup
truck caught my eye. A light blue Ford F-150.

I slowed my pace and casually
looked around the area. The vehicle was empty. I saw no one else along the
sidewalk.

The truck was parked in front of a
store that sold women’s handbags. I walked in and looked around.

“Can I show you something?” asked a
small woman with graying hair and a friendly smile.

“I was looking for someone,” I said.

“Unfortunately, you’re my first
customer today. Or almost customer.”

“Sorry,” I said, returning her
smile, “but I’m not in the market for a bag. Is that your truck out front?”

“Oh, no. I drive a small car. The
truck was there when I came in.”

I walked out across the parking lot
where I could see the license plate. It was a Tennessee plate, not Kentucky. Maybe it meant nothing, but as I turned toward the battery store, I wrote the
number in my ever-handy note pad.

Back at the office, my cappuccino
tasted great after coming in from the cold. I had just settled back into my
chair when the phone rang and the caller ID showed R.T. Investigations with an
850 area code, meaning Pensacola, Florida.

“Hi, Red, you must have found an
office,” I said.

“I’m in business. Already have a
couple of referrals.”

“Great. Are you making any progress
on Louie Aregis?”

“I’ve run into a few smoldering
guns but no smoke. I intended to call you sooner, but I got tied up getting
moved in.”

“What sort of smoldering guns?”

“The Better Business Bureau has some
complaints. They appear to be mostly from people who didn’t make as much money
off their investments as they thought they should’ve.”

“Sore losers.” I sipped on the
cappuccino as Red replied.

“Mostly, but there was one who says
Aregis cheated him out of a big chunk of change. I haven’t been able to get in
touch with him yet. I also found a recent employee who wasn’t very
complimentary. He says his former boss is a megalomaniac who thinks he’s God’s
gift to the financial world. Aregis will exaggerate his importance at the drop
of a celebrity.”

“That’s the impression Jill got
when she interviewed him yesterday.”

“She did? Good move. I trust he
didn’t know she was a detective?”

“Hardly. She posed as a writer for
a sports magazine. Our case involves a plan to bring an NBA team to Nashville.”

“Sounds like you’ve brought her up
to speed on social engineering,” he said with a chuckle.

That was a term used mostly by skip
tracers to cover methods of getting information out of subjects by pretending
to be someone else. “I think it helped that she did a little acting in school,”
I said.

“This ex-employee told me about the
basketball deal. Said it was why Aregis left Pensacola. The guy wasn’t invited
to go with him. Claims he wouldn’t have gone if he had been. He said Coastal
Capital lost some big clients recently and wasn’t doing as well as Aregis would
have you believe. He doubted his old boss had the cash to put up a big chunk
for the NBA franchise.”

“Then where would he get the money?”

“One of his current clients,
probably.”

“Aregis told Jill that he had some Nashville clients, but he wouldn’t give any names. Do you think your guy would have any
information on clients from up here?”

“I’ll ask him. It may take a couple
of days, though. He was going to Tallahassee for a meeting of some state
agency.”

“Okay. Let me know if you get any
names. Our folks are getting antsy. Anything else we should know?”

“He said dealing with Aregis could
be risky business. While he’s normally all smiles, glad-handing everybody he
meets, he hides a nasty temper that can explode if he’s crossed. He’s the get
even type.”

“Thanks, Red. We’ll keep that in
mind.”

Could Arnold Wechsel have learned
something about Louie Aregis that would have prompted the venture capitalist to
commit murder? Was it the information Arnold intended to pass along that would
blow my mind? We had heard nothing to indicate the young man even knew Aregis.
Clearly, we had a lot more digging to do.

I found Jill at her computer
scampering about the web. I looked over her shoulder and saw the name
“Columbo.”

“What have we here, babe?”

“I’m onto Miss Nikki’s trail,” she
said. “I should have something shortly. What did Red have to report?”

I told her about the former Coastal
Capital employee’s comments.

“Sounds like I had Aregis figured
out pretty well, huh?”

“You did good. Now if Red can identify
some of Aregis’s Nashville clients, we should have some decent leads to check
out.”

She typed in a new search term and
looked around. “Are you thinking one of them could be the black sheep in this
deal?”

“It’s a possibility.”

I went back to my desk and a few
minutes later Jill dropped a sheet of paper in front of me.

“Nicole graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis. It’s a small Presbyterian school, used to be called
Southwestern. Her parents are Vincent and Belinda Columbo. He works at the FedEx
headquarters in Memphis. Haven’t found anything yet on mom.”

“Why would a girl who graduated
from college in Memphis come to Nashville to work at a restaurant?” I asked.

“We need to ask about that, if she
agrees to talk to us.”

“If she doesn’t volunteer to talk,”
I said, “Mother McKenzie may have to put on a full court press.”

Jill went back to her computer, and
I put through a call to Jeff Price at Ramstein Air Base. He had just come from
interrogating a kid caught with a stash of cocaine.

“You’d think they’d know better,”
he said. “The Germans are a little lax about marijuana, but they won’t tolerate
coke.”

“Some things don’t change, Jeff. I
called to let you know what we’ve come up with on that Saint Christopher’s
medal. We tracked down a girl named Nikki Columbo who’s admitted to being the N. Columbo engraved on the back.”

I told him about our encounter at
the restaurant.

“Arnold’s mother got a letter from
him today that was mailed the day he died,” Jeff said. “He told her he’d met a
girl recently that he had really fallen for. He gave the name Nikki. But he
added that a problem had cropped up he hoped wouldn’t ruin things for them.”

“Did he elaborate on the problem?”

“That was all he said.”

“It may be why Nikki was reluctant
to talk to us.”

“Think she’ll open up under
pressure?”

“We may have to find out. PI’s
don’t have the same leverage as OSI agents, though. We have to go about it with
a little more finesse.”

“I’ll bet you can finesse the devil
out of ’em, Colonel.” The cackle he let out was so loud I had to pull the phone
away from my ear.

Jill looked across at me when I finished
the call. “That was some laugh. I could hear it all the way over here.”

“Agent Price has a distinctive
manner of demonstrating his glee, that’s for sure. But he also provided some
interesting news.”

I relayed the message Arnold had written home.

“I also have a bit of news,” she
said. “Nikki Columbo’s mother was Belinda Zicarelli. There are some Zicarellis
in the Nashville phone book.”

That gave me an idea. “Let’s look
into that restaurant in Green Hills. I’ll see who owns it. You check on the real
estate.”

A couple of years ago, I had an
all-too-brief tenure as an investigator for the District Attorney. It ended
disastrously after my off-the-record comments about a Metro Murder Squad
detective wound up on page one of the morning paper. I still had several good
contacts around the courthouse, however, and it didn’t take long to learn that
the restaurant was owned by a corporation headquartered in Orlando.

I walked over to Jill’s desk. “No
local connection on the ownership.”

She looked up. “Well, according to
the county property records, the real estate is owned by Zicarelli Properties.”

“There’s our connection.” I folded
my arms with a satisfied grin. “Now we need to find out who is behind Zicarelli
Properties and what relation they are to Nikki Columbo.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,”
Jill said.

I agreed. It was all part of that
basic gumshoe work that I had alluded to in our talk with Brad Smotherman. But
something else about this investigation was bugging me, something that lay
hidden back in a dark corner of my mind. I couldn’t spring it loose. That was
one of the hazards of creeping up in the senior citizen ranks. Forgetting
little details became easier and easier. I was confident something would
trigger the memory. I just hoped it would happen sooner rather than later.

The phone rang, and Jill answered
it.

“Hello, Phil,” she said, then,
after a moment, “Well, if you run across any bodies this morning, they should
be well preserved. It’s cold as the dickens out there.”

As she listened, her expression
grew more serious. “That’s awful,” she said. “Pity the poor mothers. They’re
always hit the hardest. Here, let me put Greg on. He can tell you what we’ve
learned.”

I took the phone. “What’s awful?” I
asked.

“Couple of kids shot over around Jefferson Street. Drug related, as usual. What was Jill talking about?”

“We found the girl who gave the
Saint Christopher’s medal to Wechsel.”

“Who is she?”

“Nicole Columbo, a Memphis girl who works at a restaurant in Green Hills.”

“Was she able to shed any light on my
case?”

“We haven’t been able to sit down
with her yet. That’s on our agenda for today.”

I probably should have told him
about the local connection, but I didn’t want him scaring the hell out of
Nikki, maybe driving her farther into her shell. I had high hopes that Jill
could break down her defenses. Anyway, I knew he wasn’t telling us all he knew,
so why not reciprocate?

“If she knows anything that’ll help
my case, pass it along,” Phil said.

“Will do. Have you come up with
anything new?”

“We did one interview that put a
damper on the gambling theory. Talked to some Superspeedway pit crew guys
Wechsel had been cozying up to. Seems Arnold had mentioned something about
gambling on the races. They warned him he could be barred from the pits if he so
much as talked about gambling around there. According to the guys, he apparently
took it to heart and never mentioned it again.”

Maybe so, as far as gambling on the
races, I thought. But Dick Ullery had talked about other kinds of gambling.
What had Arnold Wechsel really been into?

After I checked the phone book and
found no Zicarelli Properties, or anything close to it, I called a Realtor
friend and asked about the company. She’d never heard of it, either. She said
the account might be handled by a property rental firm. She’d ask around and
let me know.

In her earlier data search, Jill had
found Nikki Columbo’s address at an apartment in the Green Hills area. When she
looked for a telephone, she turned up a blank, either listed or unlisted. We
guessed Nikki used only a cell phone, as we’d discovered many young people did
these days. We tried a database where you could find cell phone numbers but came
up empty-handed. She could have a new phone that wasn’t in the database yet. If
we didn’t hear from her soon, we’d have to try catching her at home. We needed
some answers.