Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (11 page)

“Don’t worry about him,” I said jovially. “He’s in a good mood today. So . . . what were you doing?”

Maroni turned back to look at me. “I was just making sure Toni was okay.”

“Making sure she was okay? By following her?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I looked over at Doc. “Told ya.” Then I turned back to Maroni. “Let me get this clear. You were making sure Toni was okay while she was at the police station, surrounded by like, what, a thousand cops? Just in case, ah . . . in case she needed rescuing . . . from the cops? What were you going to do? Storm the place?”

He looked at me but said nothing.

I stared at him for a few seconds. He stared back, still silent. “Okay. Let’s try a different approach. You’re Enrico Maroni. You’re just out of Monroe, what? Three weeks? You got paroled halfway into a sex offense. And now you show up on Toni’s doorstep? Why?”

He looked at me for a few seconds. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Obvious?” I shook my head. “Sorry, guess not. Not to me, anyway.”

“You’re her boss. I’d think you’d recognize the kind of person she is. I’m going to turn my life around, and I need her help. I’m here to pick up the relationship where we left off.”

“What relationship? The one you left off in high school?”

He nodded. “I didn’t leave it in high school. I never stopped thinking of her.”

“And that was what, like, ten years ago?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been detained.”

I smiled. “I forgot.” I studied him for a moment. He glanced back at Doc, who was still flipping his knife, but he seemed somewhat less intimidated by me now. “Let me ask you,” I said. “You know she and I live together, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I know. You work together. I figure I can get her past that.”

I shook my head and had to fight off a laugh. This guy had a very high opinion of himself. “I think she’d tell you that there’s a little more to it than that.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

I took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. I shook my head and chuckled. “Alright. Let the best man win, right? That kind of deal?”

“Okay by me.”

I nodded. “Okay. Look, man, here’s the way it is. Pay attention: I figure you paid your debt, right? You did your time. And it’s a free country, right? If you want to talk to Toni, reminisce about old times, compare fashion tips, whatever, that’s between the two of you. On the other hand—” Doc was walking toward us, still flipping the knife. Maroni shifted to watch him. “Hey!” I yelled. Maroni jumped and turned back to me. “Don’t worry about him. I’m the one you need to be paying attention to. As I was saying, on the other hand, that only works if Toni’s okay with it. But if she says, or indicates, or even hints that you’re bothering her in any way, well, then this little thing here won’t be up to her anymore. She won’t be able to save you then, because then I will care, and then you’ll be dealing directly with me.”

“Me, too!” Doc called out. “And I already don’t like you.” He caught his knife by the blade in midair and, in a lightning-fast motion, threw it at a telephone post on the other side of the alley. The knife hit, and the blade buried itself an inch into the wood with a loud vibrating kind of
thwing
sound.

Maroni watched the knife, eyes wide.

“Got it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Good. Don’t forget.” I turned to Doc. “Let him go.”

Maroni looked at Doc for a second, then at me. He turned and practically ran back to his car. As soon as Doc pushed the Dumpster back out of the way, Maroni slammed his car into reverse and started backing out of the alley.

“Nice ride,” Doc said. “How’s an ex-con like him come up with wheels like that, being just a few weeks out of the joint?”

“Good question.”

Maroni nearly caused an accident when he reached the end of the alley and backed out onto Pine, seemingly without slowing down and without looking. When he sped away, I turned to Doc. He was pulling his knife out of the telephone pole.

“Nice effect, man,” I said, nodding toward the knife. I shook my head. “How do you always get it to do that, anyway?”

“What? Make it stick?”

“Yeah. Whenever I do that, my knife hits on the side and bounces off. Not nearly the same result.”

He smiled as he yanked the knife out and wiped the blade on his pants. He slid the knife back into its sheath and looked up at me. “It’s in the blood, dude. Sorry to say you’ll probably never get it.”

I stared at him for a second. “Shut up.” He just smiled.

I nodded toward the end of the alley where Maroni had just disappeared. “This guy makes me a little nervous.”

“Yeah. He’s a little squirrel.”

“Maybe. If that’s all it was, then I guess he’d be harmless. But I don’t know.”

“So—what are you going to do about it?”

I thought for a second. “Nothing—at least not for the moment. Guy hasn’t actually done anything wrong yet—Toni hasn’t even brought him up. I guess I’ll just keep my eyes open.”

Two days later was “building search” day. We wanted to get an early start, so we met Mike Lyon at the gallery at 8:30 a.m. He walked us over to the old lobby entrance in the middle of the building off the Occidental Mall.

“We haven’t used this lobby in God-knows-how-long,” Mike said, as he unlocked the door for us. “Our current tenants—all four of them, that is—they all come and go right off street grade, through their front doors. Nobody wants to rent the upper floors where they’d need the lobby, so there’s no reason to heat and cool the space or even unlock the door. We basically just keep it sealed off.” He pulled the door open and then handed me the key. “This is a master key. It unlocks every door in the building except the four occupied spaces.”

We stepped inside, and I was immediately struck by the fact that it was cold—probably about the same temperature inside as out. As I looked around, I realized that at one point, maybe seventy or eighty years ago, this place must have rocked. The floors consisted of big, polished stone squares, mostly dust-covered now. Medium-colored oak paneled the room having craftsmanlike features: wainscoting with intricate detailing and arched entryways with decorative moldings that reached from floor to crown, fifteen feet high. The central stairway, also in oak, consisted of a set of switchbacks, two flights per floor, that ascended in an open stairwell. Landings at each floor led to balconies enclosed with railings that matched the other woodwork.

“Wow,” I said. “This place is fantastic.”

Mike nodded, staring upward. “It sure used to be,” he said, sort of wistfully. “I can only imagine what it was like in its prime, when it was full.” He shook his head. “The whole Pioneer Square area around here took a hit after World War II, when people started moving out to the suburbs in bigger numbers. It started a downward slide that lasted until the seventies. It’s getting better now, but it’s not like it was way back when.”

“You got to look at the glass as half-full, man,” I said. “Nothing stays the same. At least the area’s coming back.”

He thought, then nodded. “Well said.” He turned to us. “Here, I brought this.” He unrolled a tattered set of blueprints. “It shows the whole building. Here’s the gallery on the northwest corner, here’s Natural World Health Foods on the southwest corner.” He pointed to a spot midway between the two stores. “This is where we are right now, right about in the middle.”

I looked at the prints for a few seconds. “This is great. Do you mind if we take them with us?”

He smiled. “That’s why I brought ’em. You guys all set?”

I nodded.

“Good. With that, I’ll leave you gentlemen to your inspection. If you’re not back in a couple of hours, we’ll call in the cavalry.”

* * * *

As we walked up the stairs (no elevator here) and started our search, it became obvious that the area had been undisturbed for years: there were no recent tracks in the dust on the floor. Dust was everywhere—it had to be half an inch thick in some places. It was so thick that our footprints gave the impression that we were walking in snow. Cobwebs covered nearly all the windows, which were covered with so much dust in geometric patterns that the interior light was heavily filtered, leaving it quiet and dim and murky within.

“Damn,” Doc said. “Probably a hundred years’ worth of spiderwebs in here.”

I nodded. “No shit. We’d better move slow and not kick all this crap up. Otherwise, we’ll be sneezing for days.”

Even moving slowly, though, it took only a couple of hours to completely survey all three upper floors—it wasn’t hard, because all we saw were empty offices. Maybe someone else would have noticed something, but I didn’t. There were a few broken pieces of furniture here and there, apparently deemed “junk” when the previous tenants vacated seventy-some years ago. I did find a World War II–era phone book, which was kind of cool. I swept the dust off it and took it with me, intending to ask Mike if it’d be okay if I kept it. Beyond that, though, there was nothing to see.

We even checked out the roof while we were up there. The stairway up was the only place with any tracks at all, but even these looked to be five years old or more, judging by the dust covering them.

“Seen enough?” Doc asked.

I nodded. “Sure have. Let’s move to the ground floor.”

* * * *

The ground floor consisted of six vacant units plus the four occupied spaces. We checked the vacant units, then reported back to Sylvia. She’d already made calls to the tenants, so we decided to hit those next.

First up was the Natural World Health Food and Essential Oils store. Sylvia said a young man named Aaron Cunningham owned the store, and he’d been a tenant for two years. The space was located on the southwest corner of the Lyon Building. We entered, and the first thing I noticed was a fresh, herbal kind of smell. The store was finished similarly to Sylvia’s gallery—bright maple wood floors with windows on both exterior walls. Shelves stocked full of vitamins and supplements filled the place. We walked back to the counter.

“Hi, Abby,” Sylvia said to a young woman with a nose ring and long dress.

“Hey, Sylvia. How are you?”

“I’m good, thanks.” She turned to us. “Abby, this is Danny Logan and Joaquin Kiahtel from Logan Private Investigations. As I explained over the phone, they’re doing some work for us, and I’m showing them around the whole building this morning.” She turned to me. “Gentlemen, this is Abby Roth.”

Abby smiled. “Aaron’s expecting you guys. He’s downstairs bottling up some lavender oil we just got in. Let me take you down.”

We followed Abby downstairs to the basement. The long, rectangular space was brightly lit with white walls and shiny, concrete floors. The exterior walls—those that faced the areaway, were all brick with the window archways filled in with brick as well. The walls not covered up with shelves and boxes were all plastered with either diplomas, Washington State inspection certificates, or, oddly enough, University of Kentucky basketball posters. Four large worktables stood in the middle of the room; at one of them, a young man was using a simple machine to fill small vials with a clear liquid that smelled strongly of lavender.

“Hi, Sylvia,” he called out. “Hang on, I’ll be done here in a second.” Cunningham was a man of medium height with thinning hair. He wore a blue-and-white Kentucky Wildcats sweatshirt.

To my untrained eye, he seemed to work quickly and efficiently. He carefully filled another ten vials before the large container was empty. He screwed little caps on each vial as they were filled and placed them in a tray. When the last one was finished, he turned to us.

“Sorry about that. We just got in a shipment of lavender oil, and we have customers all over town waiting for it. I have to get it bottled and labeled and on the shelf.”

“Thanks for taking time for us,” Sylvia said. “Aaron Cunningham, I’d like to introduce you to Danny Logan and his partner, Joaquin Kiahtel.”

We shook hands. “Good to meet you,” I said. “Sorry about the Wildcats Saturday night.”

“You follow the Cats?” he asked, smiling.

“Nah, actually I follow the Dawgs. I’m a Huskies fan. But I watched the game at home. Florida’s tough this year.”

He nodded. “Yeah, they’re monsters. But I’m proud of my boys. We kept it close.” They actually lost by ten—it wasn’t that close—but I nodded congenially.

“Aaron,” Sylvia said, “I talked to Abby over the phone earlier about Danny’s company—they’re doing some work for Mike and me, trying to figure out what’s going on with the tenant harassment that’s been going on around here. As part of that, they wanted to have a quick look at all the tenant spaces.”

Cunningham rolled his eyes. “Good luck with those guys. They nearly ran two of my customers away last week. I couldn’t believe it. They just stood there right in front of them, blocking the door. Wouldn’t let them pass. And they weren’t going to move, either. I ran over and pounded on the door from the inside, and they finally left, but who’s going to put up with that kind of crap? Fortunately for me, I guess, we’re the only supplement and essential oil dealer in the area, so our customers
do
put up with it, rather than have to drive to Bellevue or something. But it’s not right.”

“Well, hopefully we can sort it out,” I said. I looked around. “This is quite an operation you’ve got here.”

He smiled. “Kind of, I guess.” He turned around and looked at the space. “It’s turned into it, anyway. It’s fun, at least until I have to do all the paperwork. I’m a chemist, not a paper pusher. But I get over it, and it works well for us.” He slapped the table where he’d been working. “This is our bottling table where, as you can see, we take oil from wholesale-size bottles and put it into little bottles for retail. Over there is our supplements table, where we basically do the same thing for dry supplements—mostly herbs and other natural supplements. This table right over here is our shipping and receiving department—we get quite a few sales from the Internet now, and they all get packed up right here. And that table over there is basically just for storing crap until it gets put away, mostly in the closets behind those four doors along the wall.” He looked around. “That’s about it. Not too much, really.”