Bingo Barge Murder (2 page)

Bright sunlight streamed inside
the garage, blinding me. My eyes struggled to adjust to the abrupt glare. An indistinct form filled the doorway and a familiar voice boomed, “What the hell are you two doing shut up in this filthy place?”

The voice belonged to Edwina Quartermaine, the sixty-three-year-old-going-on-sixteen force of nature who owned the multi-story Victorian that housed the Rabbit Hole. My apartment was directly above the café, and her two-level living space took up the rear of the century-old building.

Edwina, my mother’s best friend, lived next door to us when I was a kid. I’d called her Eddy instead of Mrs. Quartermaine ever since the day my mom’s car was broadsided, nearly killing Eddy and me. Eddy saved my life, but my mother and Eddy’s youngest boy, Neil, weren’t as fortunate. I was seven years old, and my world—both our worlds—were ripped to shreds. Eddy helped piece mine back together, and she’s been my life glue ever since.

Relief washed me like a monsoon, and for the second time in five minutes, my knees threatened to give out on me.

Coop crept slowly from the depths of the garage and explained his dilemma one more time.

After digesting the information, Eddy insisted we calm down with some of her infamous hot chocolate, a unique concoction of cocoa, booze, and some top-secret ingredient that tasted like a cross between anise and cinnamon. She was all about thinking things through before we made any (in her words) bonehead moves.

The late fall day had turned into a bittersweet reminder of the summer past, mixed with a chilly harbinger of things to come. We tramped across the drive to the back door of Eddy’s apartment, and I hoped the crispness wasn’t any kind of cosmic indication of what was destined for Coop.

Once Eddy had us settled at the worn table in her vanilla-scented kitchen, she whipped up her sure-fire remedy. The homey scene did little to calm me, though. We were going to need a whole lot of her spiked hot chocolate to fix this problem.

Short and slightly plump, Eddy had smooth, dark-brown skin, a ready smile, and salt-and-pepper hair trimmed close to her skull. She was more persistent than The Little Engine That Could. She steadfastly refused to grow old and was as spry and energetic as a woman half her age, regularly outlasting me on our almost daily jog around the neighborhood. It helped that she was always an on-the-go kind of gal who thought nothing of heading up to the Boundary Waters and camping for weeks at a time during the summer. Before she retired, her job as an inner city elementary school counselor kept her on her toes and in touch with the changing times.

A year earlier, on my thirtieth birthday, I dared Eddy to go skydiving with me. But the joke was on me when she took me up on it; I was terrified that the woman who’d practically raised me would clock-out during freefall. Not only did she not have a coronary, the crazy woman decided to do it again.

“Alrighty,” Eddy said. “We need to think about this problem like they do on
Law & Order
.” You could call Eddy a crime show fanatic. “Nicholas—” Eddy always used Coop’s given name— “first, think about who might have wanted this Kinky dead.”

Coop swirled his mug and stared as the liquid spun. “About every customer on the Bingo Barge at one time or another.”

Eddy scowled. “Young man, that’s not helpful. We need some solid suspects. Haven’t you seen or heard Kinky—Sweet Jesus, I can’t call a dead man ‘Kinky.’ What’s this poor man’s real name?” The crease between Eddy’s eyes was on the verge of becoming cavernous.

“Stanley,” I supplied, attempting to stop the corners of my mouth from turning up in amusement. If she could read my thoughts, Eddy would surely give me a whack for disrespecting the dead.

“Okay, who has Stanley been having words with lately?”

“He’s always in someone’s face about something,” Coop said, “but I haven’t been around the last few days to see who he pissed off lately.”

We sat sipping in silence, the only sound the occasional plunk of water dripping from the kitchen faucet. A thought occurred to me, and I sat forward, leaning on my elbows. “Coop, what about Rocky? He’s always around, his ears are wide open. I bet he knows who Kinky was clashing with.”

Coop brightened, his head bobbing slowly. “You might be right.” Then his face fell. “But he’s a night owl. And once he’s on his feet, he’s always with people, either at the Bingo Barge or hanging out on the block outside his boarding house. If I try to talk to him, someone’ll see me and turn me in for the huge reward I’m sure the cops are already offering up on
America’s Most Wanted
. I can see it now. ‘Nick Cooper, wanted dead or alive’.”

“For goodness sake, stop being so morbid.” Eddy shifted her gaze to me. “Shay, do you know this Rocky?”

“Yeah.” Coop and I bought Rocky lunch at Popeye’s on Lake Street once in awhile, and we sometimes played catch with him afterward. We always teased him that he should be pitching for the Twins with his wicked, deadly accurate fastball.

The munchkin man was an odd duck, and his mind didn’t work like a regular person’s. No one knew exactly what made Rocky tick the way he did. He had to be autistic or a savant of some kind. At any rate, he was high functioning and lived on his own. The man had numerous personality quirks, with communication one of the biggest. Would he talk to me without Coop around? If he didn’t know someone, he’d barely speak, and if he said anything at all, he’d cough up only the very basics. If he was pushed, he locked up like a bank after hours. But once Rocky chilled and got to know you better, he wouldn’t shut up. Who knew where I fell in his conversational spectrum.

Eddy poked me in the shoulder. “You’re going to go look for Rocky and have a word with him.”

Coop said, “You aren’t going to find him till after five or six. If you find him at all.”

“You hush, child.” Eddy patted Coop’s hand. “Shay, wait till after the supper rush when the café’s settled down. If you don’t have anyone coming in for the night, Kate can cover for you, or if she can’t, I will.”

Kate McKenzie was a good friend and my business partner. We’d gone to college together, after which we’d each tried to fit into conventional nine-to-five life and failed abysmally. Eventually we pooled our resources and, with Eddy’s donation of business space, opened the café. Five years later we had a couple of employees and a fairly successful enterprise. No one was getting rich, but we weren’t begging for change at the corner of Hennepin and Dunwoody either.

“We have someone scheduled for the evening shift,” I said.

Eddy turned her attention back to Coop. “You need a place to hide out. I know I should tell you to turn yourself in, boy, let the wheels of justice churn you out in short order, but I know better than to believe in that nonsense. I’ve seen too many good people get run over by those wheels and left for dead. ’Course most of the time, things turn out fine, but sometimes it’s better to take matters into your own hands.”

Coop swallowed hard. Emotion was getting to him, and he struggled for composure. He cleared his throat. “Eddy, thank you for believing me.”

She waved her hand. “I’ve helped folks deal with far worse in my lifetime. We’ll get it straightened out. First things first, though. Let’s get you into the loft.”

I looked sharply at Eddy. “What loft?”

“The loft above the garage.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like I said, what loft? You said there’s only an old attic full of crap in the garage.” Then my other eyebrow rose to meet the first. “Oh. There’s no attic full of crap.”

“No attic full of crap.”

Coop watched our exchange, his head moving between Eddy and me. “What on earth are you guys talking about?”

Eddy smiled mysteriously. “You never know who might need a safe place to hunker down. The attic is actually a loft that has been used for a long time by good people who needed safe refuge. People just like you.”

_____

Eddy bustled Coop away while Kate and I spent the next few hours making drinks and bullshitting with customers. Kainda Hannesen popped in, a professor who’d been coming to the Hole for the last few years. Kate had the hots for her in a bad way and was frustrated as hell that she couldn’t put a Kainda notch on her belt.
Kainda was tall with thick, almost-frizzy-it-was-so-curly black hair and skin that was perpetually golden. I myself felt a twinge of interest now and then, but I wasn’t about to go toe-to-toe with Kate. And anyway, I tried to make it a policy not to see women who forked over dough to keep our establishment running. Good thing one of us felt that way, or we’d be out of business at the rate Kate went through ladies.

I cleaned what needed cleaning, and then cleaned what didn’t. Time is a funny thing. Sometimes minutes and hours fly by at supersonic speed, and other times you wonder if the clocks went on strike and stopped working altogether. This was definitely an on-strike moment.

The Rabbit Hole was not sizable, but it was cozy. The café was off Hennepin Avenue on 24th Street in Uptown, not far from Sebastian Joe’s Ice Cream Café, a place I frequented.

Inside the coffee shop, eight round tables with French café chairs were scattered in front of a glass counter filled with sandwiches and sweets. In two corners we’d arranged four overstuffed armchairs.

A big stone fireplace took up one wall, and the huge hearth was a popular place to hang when the temperatures fell and the nights darkened prematurely. Aromatic coffee blended with the fragrance of the I’d Tell You My Recipe But Then I’d Have To Kill You cinnamon rolls Kate regularly supplied. The walls were painted warm, swirling yellows, browns, and reds.

Lost in thought, I hunched over one of the tables and scrubbed at a particularly sticky mocha-caramel latte spill, wondering for the fifty-seventh time if not telling Kate what was going on was the right thing to do. Knowing her love of gossip and her sometimes endearing, sometimes crazy-making tendency to speak before thinking, I convinced myself that keeping my trap zipped was best for now. My clashing thoughts vanished in a blink when someone, or actually two someones, hovered directly in front of me.

A dark-skinned black man, almost as tall as Coop but with a Schwarzenegger build, stood a half step behind a woman who exuded an Outta My Way or I’ll Kick Your Ass attitude. Indigo-
colored jeans hugged her curves in interesting places, and a lightweight, fawn-colored leather jacket covered her navy t-shirt. A few strands of chestnut hair had worked their way loose from her rough ponytail and floated around her face. Sunglasses rested atop her head, and rich, deep-brown eyes assessed me.

My inner “who’s-this-babe” meter gave a thrumming jolt until my eyes came to rest on the police shield secured in the leather wallet in her hand. I snapped my gaze back up to her face. Recognition dawned as she flipped the badge closed and pocketed it.

I slowly straightened, hoping I had enough air to speak, and shot a glance toward Kate, whose eyes were on the woman staring at me.

“Detective Bordeaux,” I said. Breathe. “Been awhile.”

The corner of her mouth quirked. “It has. Shay O’Hanlon, this is Detective Tyrell Johnson.” She jerked a thumb at the man next to her.

I nodded. My mind bounced around like a super ball in a tin box.

Minneapolis Detective JT Bordeaux had been a regular in the Hole for many months, up until a little over a year ago, when she’d gotten transferred from Vice to Homicide. Both Kate and I had admitted to a certain fascination when she first started frequenting the café. Despite some rather enjoyable flirtation, I’d never acted on my impulses, keeping my self-imposed touch-no-customer rule well in hand.

Kate, however, with her insatiable thirst for conquering an intriguing romantic challenge, had put JT on top of her priority list. Try as she might, she hadn’t gotten any further than perfecting JT’s favorite drink and scoring big in the tip department. Her quest had been abruptly cut short when the detective’s transfer came through and she stopped coming by for her caffeine fix.

I quickly tamped down an inappropriate primal response that hit me low in the gut, and frankly, surprised me. I guess it’d been a long time.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions about Nicholas Cooper.” JT’s voice was honey, her dark eyes granite.

Holy hell in a hand basket. I needed to refocus, fast.

“Questions?” I finally managed. Too many angles were floating through my mind, and my brain took the easy way out by simply shutting down.

“About what?” I asked, as my attention redirected itself to our current problem and I concentrated on putting a polite, blank look on my face. My tripping heart began a steady slam in my chest. The rag I’d been using to wipe the tables dripped as I squeezed it hard, trying to hide my trembling hands. “Has something happened to Coop?”