Inspector Specter (17 page)

Josh Kaplan scoffed at the idea that I'd been acting like a baby when I'd called and asked him to come with me to meet a drug dealer because I was wary of . . . everything. “A baby would have just gone and met the drug dealer,” he said. “They don't really have that much experience to fall back on.”

Speaking of babies, I had not considered for one second bringing Oliver along on this trip. I might consider Jeannie a little overenthusiastic in her parenting and perhaps a hair overprotective, but taking a child along to meet a known drug dealer I suspected of involvement in at least one murder was a little extreme even from my laissez-faire point of view. I'd dropped Oliver off at my mother's house, and Mom had said she'd bring him back to the guesthouse in time for the afternoon spook show, then stay to make dinner. Dad, waiting to get a Ghosternet message from Paul about following Maxie, was hiding out at Madison Paint.

“Do me a favor and don't say anything like that when Jeannie and Tony get back on Sunday, okay?” I said. “Tony will think it's hilarious, but . . .”

“. . . but Jeannie will never let me exist in the same room as her child again, I know.” Josh was wearing his work clothes with spots of paint on them and driving the Madison Paint van. I'd agreed to let him drive because the air-conditioning in his van actually works, which puts it one up on my Volvo. And his scruffy clothes might actually work to our advantage in this instance.

Martin Ferry had told me to look for Lay-Z, whom he described as “looking like a giraffe with a shaved head,” working at a frozen custard stand on what is left of the Seaside Heights boardwalk.

They'd finally dismantled and removed the Jet Star, the roller coaster that had been blown completely into the ocean during Sandy. The absence of all that twisted metal in the surf was something of a relief after all these months, though weirdly, the damaged coaster had in fact become a sort of strange tourist attraction of its own in the area, as visitors came to take pictures of it to show how badly our shore had been battered and how people's lives and businesses were wiped away in a day and a half. I'm in the tourism business, and I think that's just beyond strange. Then, not long after the storm and just as people were recovering, came the fire in Seaside Park (started, ironically, at a different frozen custard stand), which had spread here to Seaside Heights, and most of the work that had been accomplished was wiped out. Re-rebuilding was once again on the agenda.

The one plus was that Snooki and her reality-TV gang had vacated Seaside Heights before the storm, so we didn't have to worry about them coming back and doing . . . whatever it was they were doing there.

Some of the boardwalk had been replaced with a modern-looking facsimile, made out of recycled material that had wood grain and probably no wood in it. It was a grayish white and, I knew from previous visits, did not threaten to impale your feet with splinters, which made me wonder how much fun it could really be.

“I feel bad about taking you away from the store,” I said, determined to prove to Josh that I was in fact a bad girlfriend. “You have a business, and I should respect that more.”

“You respect it fine. Sy is happy to stay for a couple of hours, and besides, the contractors all came and went by seven this morning. They're in even earlier when it's this hot, so they can quit at two in the afternoon.”

Sy Kaplan, Josh's grandfather, is in his nineties and had recently given up his stake in Madison Paints, but continued to hang around in the store because it was where everyone he knew “who's still alive” congregated to talk and joke around. Actually, a bunch of guys who weren't still alive liked to gather there, too—in fact, my father was there today, always happy to join in with the gang until he was needed to tail Maxie.

Josh pulled the van into a parking space about a block from the boardwalk. The very fact that you could find parking a block from the boardwalk, at what was typically the height of the tourist season, was a testament to how not everything was quite the same at the Jersey Shore.

Josh and I walked up to the boardwalk and started strolling around, pretending it wasn't close to a hundred degrees out. There were some hearty sunbathers on the beach, and a good number in the water. It was the only sane thing to do in Seaside Heights on a day like today. Miniature golf here in August would take more out of you than a marathon in October.

We passed by the restored game booths but didn't even stop to make believe they weren't rigged or that I actually wanted Josh to “win” me a stuffed cloth monkey wearing a “Restore the Shore” T-shirt.

“There,” I said, pointing. At the end of the boardwalk was a beaten-up frozen custard stand, an original, something that hadn't been replaced after bad luck had messed with the place. Homes came and went, roller coasters tried to swim to England, but Mickey's Frozen Custard had weathered the storm and showed every dent it had sustained from the wind, smoke and rain.

“Suddenly I'm in the mood for a custard,” Josh said. He was wearing sunglasses, dark ones, so I wasn't really sure how his eyes looked, but his hand around my arm, which was already sweating, tightened a little.

We got closer to the place, which had not one customer in front of it (there were four Kohr's, the better-known custard place, locations operating on the boardwalk, and if you had a choice between those and Mickey's, well, that wasn't exactly a choice), and looked around for someone who might fit Ferry's description of Lay-Z.

He wasn't hard to spot, even from a distance: At least six feet three and weighing approximately seventy-eight pounds soaking wet, the kid—there was no other word for him—behind the counter at the custard stand had a shaved head and a neck that looked like it should have had handrails on either side. He was maybe nineteen years old and was still in need of a good acne medication, and gave the appearance of someone of normal proportions who had been grabbed by the head and feet and stretched by someone who didn't like him much.

“Put yellow and brown spots on him and he'd fit in at a safari theme park,” Josh said.

There was no one else around, so we approached the stand and caught the eye of our prey. I had to look up pretty severely to do so.

“Welcome to Mickey's how may I help you,” he said in what would have passed for a single breath if he'd seemed that animated. The script had been written, and he was reciting it; they weren't paying him enough to pretend he was interested.

“Are you Lay-Z?” Josh asked, forgoing the pretense of ordering. Just as well; if I wanted a custard (and I did), I'd be better off at Kohr's anyway.

There was a glint of something in the kid's eyes that might have been wariness, anger or panic. “I'm just doing my job, man,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Variety was not his forte.

“Sure you do,” I said. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

This really confused him; he looked us over carefully. Josh had enough paint splashed on his clothing to qualify as a Jackson Pollock canvas, and I looked like, well, me. You could put me in riot gear and I wouldn't seem threatening.

“I don't know anything,” the kid said after a pause.

“We're not police,” I assured him. “I'm a private investigator, and I'm looking into a matter that you might be able to help with.”

I thought his eyes would leap out of his head. “You're a private eye?” he said.

After a thought, I shrugged. “Sort of.”

“And who's he?” He pointed at Josh.

“I'm her enforcer,” he answered. I gave him a look, and he said, “Okay. I'm her boyfriend. But frankly, we thought you'd be scarier than this.”

Lay-Z drew himself to his full height (threatening to bump his head on the ceiling of the custard stand) and snarled. “You don't think I can take you, dude? I have a piece on me, and I'm not afraid to use it.”

“Calm down, mad dog,” I said, breaking the staring contest between Josh and our skeletal acquaintance. “Nobody wants to do you any harm, and we prefer that none be done to us. I just want to ask you about Martin Ferry.”

Working on the boardwalk had given our host a very nice tan, but it lightened when he heard Ferry's name. “I didn't off him, man,” he said to me, exhibiting a really poor assessment of my anatomy. “Anybody who says so is lying. Did that lady cop put you up to this?”

“What lady cop?” I asked. I described McElone to him and added, “
That
lady cop? She was here asking?”

“Yeah, but not here,” the kid said. He was almost incensed at the mention. “She came to my
house
three days ago, on Monday. My mom heard everything, you understand? I don't care what she told you, I didn't kill Ferry, okay?”

“We don't think you did,” I said. I questioned him a little more about McElone, but he seemed stuck on the idea that she'd questioned him within earshot of his mother. Josh, less concerned about a violent outbreak than he probably had been when we approached, dropped back a bit to let me do the talking. “But I think you might be able to help me.”

Lay-Z, whose real name I had decided was probably Leroy or Larry, suddenly found the custard machine (which looked like it had last been serviced when people wore “bathing costumes” to the beach) fascinating. He picked up a wet rag from a sink behind him and started to wipe it down. “I can't help,” he mumbled. “I don't know anything.”

“Nobody's trying to get you in trouble, or at least we're not,” I goaded him. “But I know that you took some things out of Detective Ferry's apartment after he died.”

His back went stiff. He turned to me so fast he could have been auditioning for the Bolshoi Ballet. “You're lying,” he said. That seemed to be his go-to explanation for things he wasn't crazy about discussing.

“I'm not. I know you took his laptop and a DVD of
Weekend at Bernie's
.” I hadn't told Josh that part; it was obviously difficult for him to stifle a laugh, so he pretended he had to cough.

The Geoffrey Giraffe lookalike behind the counter, however, was not amused. “How can you know that? Nobody knows that.”

“I have sources,” I said. I considered for a nanosecond telling him that Ferry had seen the burglary and told me about it but immediately dismissed the plan. Having Lay-Z think I was Cray-Z wouldn't have been all that helpful.

“I'll give back the DVD,” he said. “I have it at home.” He'd probably have to sneak it by his mom on the way out.

“I don't want the DVD,” I said. “But I would like to know who told you to go there and steal his laptop. Who'd you give it to?”

His face closed, a cold expression I hadn't seen before. I sensed Josh getting a little closer behind me. “Nobody,” he said. The kid couldn't ad-lib to save his life, but if he kept on this path, at some point he'd be doing just that.

“Was it Buster Hockney?” I asked.

Suddenly Lay-Z looked like an old Little Orphan Annie cartoon: His eyes were wide, favoring the whites, and his mouth was a perfect O. If he'd put on a curly red wig, the effect would have been perfect.

“I don't know no Buster Hockney.” His words couldn't have been more unconvincing if his nose actually grew while he was speaking. “Go away.”

“I'm trying to help you,” I said, although helping Lay-Z was actually about sixty-third on my list of priorities. “I know you were working for Buster. The real question is what he wanted with Martin Ferry's laptop computer.”

“I don't know,” the poor kid whined. “He didn't tell me that. He just said to go and get it.” Suddenly his eyes widened as he realized what he'd said. “But I didn't.”

“Yes, you did.” Josh stepped forward, his voice sounding soothing and compassionate. Probably the opposite of the image I was projecting. “But nobody is interested in prosecuting you for that. What we need to know is how to find Buster and get Detective Ferry's laptop back.”

I had no intention of looking for Buster Hockney, nor did Josh. He was trying to see what information we could get from Lay-Z that might be passed on to the cops in Seaside Heights or Harbor Haven that could be useful in finding McElone.

“I don't know where Buster is,” the kid said. “Honest. I don't find him. He finds me.”

“Every time we asked you a question, you started by saying you didn't know,” I reminded him, hoping to put a gentle tone in my voice. “And every time, it turned out you did.”

“No, straight up,” Lay-Z said. “Buster sends somebody to find me whenever he wants me.”

Josh looked at him and folded his arms. “Who?” he asked.

“This guy Vinnie. And that's all I know, okay? Go away.” Lay-Z was already looking around, as if he expected assassins to be stalking the place as we spoke.