Bingo Barge Murder (14 page)

I shuddered. “What on earth would a woman—who for all intents and purposes is on the moneyed end of the social spectrum—see in Redneck Riley?”

“It’s all about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, babe,” Coop said with a grin. “Maybe he’s got the right equipment.”

I shot him a that’s-way-too-gross-to-imagine look. “Maybe he’s her hired hand, and she’s stringing him along.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt the regularly scheduled programming, but where are we going to search for the nuts now? We’ve got just over twelve hours before our delivery deadline.”

We stared blankly at each other. Dawg shifted on the bed, and a momentary hissing noise emanated from the environs of his rear end.

“Coop, did that dog just fart?”

“I think—” Before he got out another word the odor hit us, and my eyes watered. I fanned the air. “Holy cow, we are
not
feeding that mutt any more Subway sandwiches or ham.”

“Agreed,” said Coop, a hand covering his nose. He got up and opened the trap door. Fat lot of good it did.

“Okay,” I said, trying to breath through my mouth. “We know the nuts are supposed to be shipped down the Mississippi tomorrow, sometime in the evening. Where on the river do barges load these days? Dad hasn’t worked on the river for years.”

“No clue.” He pulled the laptop open and started punching keys. After ten minutes, Coop shook his head. “There’s twenty different shipping terminals on the Mississippi in the Twin Cities area. How do we figure out which one has the nuts?”

I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “What if you narrow the terminal locations by what they ship? Terminal setups that ship edible goods have to be able to handle liquid and dry product. My dad once said some won’t take that kind of stuff at all.”

“Okay.” Coop’s fingers tapped the keyboard rapidly. “I’ll do a search excluding recycling barges, automotive shipping, and terminals dedicated to specific companies, like 3M.”

He waited for the page to load and said, “Let’s see, it narrows the field down to three. Ribau Containers Inc. deals mostly with sugar, sand, iron ore … All dry goods. Packer Industries exports liquid and dry goods. The last one is the Grizzly Terminal & Dock Company.”

I said, “I think it’s time to make a quick trip to see a man about a bear.”

My father, Pete O’Hanlon,
was third generation Irish/American. His granddad arrived at Ellis Island in the late 1800s and
settled in New York until a brother talked him into moving to Minnesota, a land ripe with opportunity for hard-working men.

The Korean Conflict was in full swing when my dad hit seventeen, and he lied about his age in order to follow his best friend into the Navy. I’d always had a sneaking suspicion that his patriotism was an attempt to avoid the rampant alcoholism passed down from generation to generation, all the way from Ireland. As it turned out, my father couldn’t run far enough or fast enough to escape his genes, and the bottle found him anyway. He was honorably discharged with a purple heart, a bum knee, and an unquenchable thirst for firewater.

Often my father didn’t appear inebriated, but it affected his memory. When I was a kid, he’d forget to pick me up from friends’ houses, or from school when I had to stay late. Once, when I was fourteen, he dropped Coop and I off at Valleyfair to ride the rollercoasters for the day and forgot to come back for us. Eddy finally showed up at ten-thirty that night, and boy was she pissed.

He missed birthdays, school activities, and sometimes entire days at a time. He was always very apologetic, and each time he promised to never let it happen again. And it didn’t, until the next time, and the time after that.

After his Navy stint, Dad worked on the Mississippi as an able-bodied seaman, a deckhand on various towboats. That was until his leg got so bad that he had trouble navigating the decks. Then he worked on loading and unloading barges at numerous shipping terminals up and down the Twin Cities corridor.

When he finally quit all together, he bought the Leprechaun, a run-down bar in Northeast Minneapolis. He was in devil’s heaven, his beloved booze surrounding him all day, every day.

My dad worked hard to turn a profit, and he really tried to curb his alcohol consumption … until That Night—as I’d come to think of the horrific evening that ended mom’s and Eddy’s sons’ lives and nearly did me in. I still find it hard to look at the jagged scar that starts near my navel and ends just above my right hip bone. If Eddy hadn’t literally held me together as we waited for help, three people would have died that night. Eddy had been my lifesaver in so many ways.

Dad struggled mightily for a long time after that, juggling single-handedly raising an in turns rambunctious then withdrawn then out-of-control kid while running the Leprechaun. He turned to Eddy, my mother’s closest friend, for help with me and then focused his attention on the bar and the emotional relief he found in Stoli, Jack Daniels, and Brennan’s Irish.

Dad and I have a love/hate relationship. I love him, and he loves me. I hate what alcohol does to him, and he hates the fact that I’m an unrepentant lesbian. We try not to talk about either of those issues; when we do, one of us usually storms off in a week-long huff.

This was one visit where my problems had nothing to do with either touchy topic, and I knew he’d jump at the chance to talk about his days on the water.

Coop and I lowered Dawg to the garage floor near midnight, and we all piled into the pickup once again, Dawg tucked between us.

I pulled up to the curb half a block from the bar and cracked a window for Dawg, who, after a halfhearted whine of protest at being left behind, flopped across the bench seat. We strolled to the front door of the Lep and stepped back into another era.

My father decorated the walls of his bar with items he’d collected from a lifetime on the water, including old buoys, cracked oars, and faded pictures going all the way back to his own father’s logging days. Dark, exposed beams ran the length of the low ceiling, and a hand-carved wooden bar stood along one side. Lights mounted at intervals on the walls gave the interior a comfortable but not quite cozy feel. Tables were scattered throughout, and three booths at the rear were empty. Cigarette smoke and beer had long ago mixed together to form the familiar aroma bars achieve after years of use and abuse. For the most part, the clientele were blue collar, hard-drinking, hard-working, honest men and women.

I’d spent many hours here as a kid and tended bar as an adult, and I was well-known to most of the regulars. As soon as the door shut behind us, one of the men at the bar, a Paul Bunyan with a beard gone wild yelled, “If it ain’t Little O’Hanlon!” He hiked himself off his stool, and squashed me in a bear hug. “How ya doin’?” He ruffled my hair, and in a blink I was twelve again.

“Fred,” I gasped as I pounded him on the back both in greeting and in an attempt to make him put me down. “I’m good. How’s Viva?” His wife was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

I was deposited on my feet. He said, “Mama’s holding her own. The chemo’s done and now the docs are doing radiation. They say things are looking pretty good. She’s a little lopsided, but she’s alive. That’s all that matters to me.”

“You tell her to hang in there. Dad here?”

Another swat of his big paw slammed my shoulder like a sledgehammer. “He’s in back, I think.”

I excused myself and dragged Coop along the length of the bar, past four other customers I didn’t recognize. Johnny, the bartender, was caught up in conversation with two patrons. I led Coop through a swinging door at the end of the bar that opened into a bright kitchen. Seeing no one, I went to another door that led into the main liquor storeroom. A set of narrow, steep stairs descended into a cellar used to store wine and excess booze. I hollered down the stairs, “Dad!”

My father’s voice echoed. “Shay? Be up in a minute, honey.” In less than that, he limped up the worn wooden steps with a case of alcohol on his shoulder. At sixty-five, my father was still a handsome man, and again I wondered why he hadn’t remarried after my mother’s death. But deep down I knew his love for her and his pain over her death held him at arm’s length from any woman who entertained thoughts of ending his bachelorhood.

With a heave my dad swung the case of bottles off his shoulder onto a stainless-steel counter. He hugged me, dwarfing me with his burly body and squeezing me with arms that were still rock-hard. He pulled back and stared at me with wide-set green eyes, mirrors of my own. “What are you doing here at this time of night?”

Before I had a chance to answer, Dad released me and caught a glimpse of Coop standing in the doorway behind me. “Nick Cooper, long time no see. You still a vegetable muncher?”

Coop laughed. He’d always gotten along with my dad, especially in the smoking department. That was his saving grace, because my father usually didn’t have time for what he termed pansy-assed vegetarians, who, in his book, were barely a step above flaming fags, as he liked to call all homosexuals, occasionally including his own daughter.

“Yeah,” Coop said, and gave my father his lopsided grin.

My father’s thick, red-fading-to-white hair was freshly shorn, and I was happy to see he was taking care of himself. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“We were wondering if we could hit you up with some questions about shipping on the Mississippi.”

Hoisting the box of booze back to his shoulder, he said, “Sure. Give me a minute to put this away, and I’ll meet you in a booth in back.”

Coop and I settled ourselves in one of the empty booths. Coop lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. A state-wide smoking ban had gone into effect, but my father couldn’t be bothered with something as trivial as forcing his patrons to smoke outside. I was waiting for the cops to slap a fine on him, and then I’d sit back and watch the fireworks from a safe distance. The old man was hard-headed as hell. Some claimed his kid was the same way, but I was too stubborn to agree.

The low tones of an old sixties classic trickled through the speakers dangling from the ceiling and mixed with the quiet drone of conversation.

Dad spoke with Johnny for a minute, and then my father proceeded to restock the storage area under the bar. Johnny mixed up a Fuzzy Navel I knew was meant for me and popped the top off a Bud earmarked for Coop.

He meandered to the booth with drinks in hand. “Where you been lately, Little O?” Johnny always made me smile. He’d started working for my father before he’d been legal to drink and kept the job as he made his way through college. I told him, “Been busy, you know how people want their caffeine fix. How’s school?”

His brown eyes gleamed at me. “Same old, ya know? Another year and a half.”

I nodded. Johnny was a hard worker and more dependable than most. My dad appeared and slid into the seat beside me with a tumbler of clear liquid I knew was vodka, his late-night drink of choice.

Johnny wandered back to his realm behind the bar. My father lit an unfiltered Camel and exhaled a blue-tinged cloud of smoke. “What do you want to know about the river?”

I cleared my throat, and the end of Coop’s cigarette glowed bright as he took another deep hit. Some help he was. I said, “We’re trying to track down a shipment that’s supposed to be going out tomorrow night. We’re hoping you’d have some insight as to which company would most likely store the goods we’re looking for.”

My father’s bushy eyebrows met in a confused frown as the Camel came to his lips again. He rubbed his other hand on top of his bristly head, and I could hear the faint brush of hair against the palm of his hand. “What kind of stuff’s headed down the river? That’d be the logical place to start.”

“Nuts,” I told him. “Almonds.” I sipped at my drink. It was strong, and it was good.

“What are nuts doing around here? That’s usually a coastal thing. West Coast, I think.”

“We’re not quite sure,” Coop said in a cloud of smoke. Ugh, I was stuck in a pollution sandwich. “We think we have it narrowed down to Ribau Containers, Packer Industries, and the Grizzly Terminal & Dock. At least those are the shipping terminals we could find on the Web that deal with dry goods.”

My dad nodded. “Nice job. Ribau? Probably not. They mostly specialize in grains.” He flicked cigarette ash in the ashtray, picked up the tumbler, and took a swallow. “Packer won’t handle food anymore, only dry stuff like rocks and sand. That leaves Grizzly. They’ve always been a bit shady, and I’m guessing these nuts of yours aren’t exactly a regular shipment, so to speak. Nuts.” He shook his head. “What’s your interest in this?”

Coop and I shot a look at each other. If my father knew what had happened to Eddy, he’d go ballistic. I never knew if it was honest emotion or macho posturing, but if anyone hurt someone close to my dad, he stormed off to confront the source, and sometimes it ended up uglier than it had started. Now that I thought about that, it sounded kind of familiar.

Making things up on the fly was becoming my strong suit. “Coop thinks one of his friends is involved with this nut shipment. The guy disappeared two days ago and no one’s seen him. We’re trying to retrace his steps—before the nuts ship. He told Coop he thought the nuts are being trucked here and then sent off down the Mississippi for resale somewhere else on the black market.”

“Isn’t that a police issue?” my dad asked, stubbing out his smoke.

Tilting an almost empty bottle at my father, Coop said, “Yeah, but my friend ran into some trouble through the Green Beans. He’s on probation. If he’s not mixed up in this, and he’s on a long bender somewhere, great, his probation officer doesn’t need to know about it. If he’s really in trouble, well, I doubt that would go over very well with his PO either. The thing is, he’s really a great guy, big heart, but he’s fallen into some really rough times lately.”

Nice job, Mr. Cooper. My dad could certainly relate to self-
inflicted bad luck.

“Do you know anyone who works for Grizzly anymore?” I asked and held my breath.

The near-empty glass of Stoli rolled slowly back and forth between my father’s palms as he thought about it. “George Unger. He’s in charge of keeping the books now that he’s off the water. I’m sure he’d be able to look up outgoing shipments.”

“Do you think he’d talk to us? Tonight?” I said.

“Tonight?” My father frowned. “It’s almost twelve-thirty.”

Coop said, “Yeah. The sooner we can figure this out for my friend, the better.”

I prayed my father would acquiesce. He stroked his chin, fingertips scraping salt-and-pepper whiskers. “He does owe me from last night’s poker fiasco. Bastard screwed me out of a hundred bucks. It’d serve him right to roust him away from his online poker game. Hell, he’s a night owl.” He stared first at me, and then at Coop. “You sure you can’t wait till morning?”

I said the one thing guaranteed to remove any resistance from my father. “Please, Pops?”