MURDER on the ROCKS (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 2)

MURDER on the ROCKS

Allie Griffin Mysteries, Book 2

L E S L I E    L E I G H

Copyright © 2015

Published by: Rascal Hearts

All Rights Reserved
. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

PART I: STONE CUTTING

Part II: FISSURES AND BREAKAGE

PART III: SHAPING

              Taking Main Street all the way west out of Verdenier, Allie Griffin reached the point referred to by natives as "no man's land" and referred to by tourists as "where in hell are we?" Just before she reached the border, she saw the signs for the Verdenier Granite quarry, which meant that she'd be approaching the Flamingos Bar any time.

              She almost drove past it; the bar's neon sign had changed.

              Instead of the buzzing, outdated, semi-script "Flamingos,” there was now a buzzing, outdated, semi-script "Dougie's" in its place.

              "Huh," said Allie Griffin.

              It was four o'clock on a Tuesday in early May and the lot was full of cars.

              "Huh," she said again.

              Entering the bar for the first time since she'd first been there, Allie surveyed the crowd. They looked like a crowd of quarry men for sure. Country music was playing on the juke, and the smell of booze and sweat and chalk and dust permeated the place.

              Allie Griffin was the only woman.

              She looked over at the bar through the sea of revelers and saw Dougie the bartender. She gave him a wave. He flashed a distance-friendly smile and waved her over.

              "As I live and breathe," said the bartender, a burly man with a pockmarked face and watery eyes. "A celebrity in my joint."

              "Oh stop that," Allie said with a dismissive wave. "So what's with all the people? I thought this place didn't fill up until after five."

              "Half day today. Some inspector from the state is here so the guys got off early."

              Allie tried not to show her disappointment. She'd come here to get away from people. Solving the murder of Tori Cardinal had indeed turned her into something of a local celebrity. She'd been profiled on the local news, and the AP wire had picked it up, and then there was that little piece of viral video leaked by a disgruntled cameraman that caught her telling off Detective Harry Tomlin of the Verdenier Police Department. Folks knew Detective Tomlin from his days as a sergeant. Rumor was that he'd issue his own grandmother a ticket given the chance. Variations on that rumor depicted Tomlin engaged in that very act, sometimes embellished with a short scene of the old woman pleading for want of a delayed social security check. Tomlin had responded to the video not by humbling himself in the slightest, but by smugly bolstering his own cause – saying that everyone's got a dirty little secret, and if the town knew the "truth" about Allie Griffin, they wouldn’t be celebrating her as a local hero. He'd missed libel by a nose.

              So Allie had some company today. Looking around, she quickly realized that having a drink at Dougie's with a crowd of quarry men was just as good as drinking alone. No one, save for the bar's namesake, seemed to notice or care that Allie Griffin had walked into the place.

              "So how've you been," Dougie said jovially, his watery eyes lit with star-struck admiration.             

              "I've been holding up. You look different. Did you dye your hair?"

              "You like it? The wife likes it. Says I look like Roy Scheider."

              "Roy who?"

              "Roy Scheider. The guy from
Jaws
."

              "Never seen it. Anyway, you look great." She took a seat and tapped on the bar. "Gin and Fresca on ice with lime, my good man, and be lively."

              The bartender frowned. "Uh, you see, there's a problem there."

              "You don’t have it? You told me on the phone you got a shipment of Fresca."

              "Yeah, well, it's like this." Dougie scratched the back of his ear. "There was a guy in here one day about a month ago. Name Reilly. Good guy. Works as a quality control manager in the quarry. The workers don’t care for him. They call him 'The Clipboard' on accounna he's always walking around with a clipboard under his arm, not to mention he makes six figures doing it. Anyway, Reilly's got his wife with him because the boss wanted to meet her, and there's rumors about that, you know, maybe Reilly's wife and the boss? But I don’t say anything because it's really none of my business. So Reilly comes in and orders a Johnnie Walker Green Label – expensive stuff – and his wife doesn’t know what to get. Now I just happened to have the TV on and there you were. And so we got to talking about you and the case. And I ask Reilly's wife what she'll have and she still doesn’t know because she says she doesn't really drink often. So I mentioned that you once came in to my bar and asked for a gin and Fresca on the rocks with lime. And she says ok, she'll try it. So I make one for her and wouldn’t you know it, she said it was pretty good."

              "Wouldn’t you know it."

              "Yeah. And so Reilly tries it and he says it's pretty good. Then he keeps grabbing sips of it. He finishes his Johnnie Green and orders a gin and Fresca while his wife has a ginger ale and complains about my clientele – they don't measure up to her standards, you see, she's got expensive tastes too. Anyway, next thing I know, other quarry guys are coming in asking for the drink. But not all of ‘em cuz they know The Clipboard drinks it so it can’t be any good. But then I put it on the menu, see, and I name it the Rock Hammer. And I put it on special and say they're secret ingredients and so forth. I keep my back turned when I'm mixing 'em, right? Pretty soon, the Rock Hammer's the drink of choice for these guys, and so..."

              He held up his hand to indicate the sea of workers all around. Allie swiveled around to have a close look at them. Virtually every one of them held an old fashioned glass.

              "You're kidding me," she said. She looked over to her side and, sure enough, there was another quarry man nursing an old fashioned glass. She squinted her eyes at it. "Is that what I think it is?"

              "Yeah, it's a piece of granite I throw in there for garnish. One of the guys got me a whole bunch. My own little touch. Makes the drink, you know, a little more manly."

              "So," Allie said, "bottom line is, you're telling me—"

              "We're out of Fresca."

              "Terrific. What was that drink you made me last time?"

              "A grapefruit gin fizz?"

              "One of those."

              Dougie gave her the thumbs up and sprang into action. It gave Allie a chance to observe the crowd. Here was the pulsing lifeblood of Verdenier that she rarely got a chance to see. Here were the folks whose ancestors had founded the town, grew it as best they could. Now their descendants kept things afloat anonymously from the edges of society. It was a strange feeling for Allie sitting here; she actually felt at home.

              "Excuse me," said a man to her right who seemed to have snuck up beside her. He was a small man with a shock of curly hair cropped close to the scalp. He was dressed well, yet looked as though someone had thrown the clothes at him at great speeds, for his suit hung on him to the point where it nearly swayed on its own when he moved.

              "Are you Allie Griffin?" said this human hanger.

              "I'm afraid so," she said with a smile.

              A smiled brightened on the man's clean-shaven face. "I thought so. Listen, my wife is in the ladies room right now; she would love to meet you. Is it alright if I introduce her when she comes out?"

              There was the fleeting thought that crossed her mind of telling the man she had some serious case of something awful, anything that would render her unfit for social interaction. Allie Griffin's better angels won, as they did often in these cases.

              "Sure," she said.

              He offered his hand. "Name's Bennett Reilly."

              "Please to mee—, did you say Reilly? The Cli— ? Do you work here– I mean, at the quarry?"

              "I do indeed. Has someone been talking?" He shot a glance over at Dougie, who'd just turned around.

              "Well son of a gun," bellowed the bartender. "Speak of the devil. Your ears must have been burning. How was the inspection?"

              "Piece of cake. We just have to make sure the paperwork's clean. Get me a club soda for the wife." He nodded toward the end of the bar and added dryly, "And it looks like you have other customers." With this one curt phrase, Allie could see what it was the workers didn’t like about Bennett Reilly.

              Dougie got him a soda and left to tend to his patrons. Bennett watched him for a moment, then turned back to Allie and spoke quickly.

              "Listen, there's a reason I'm glad to meet you here. I was going to try and contact you sooner. After seeing you on the news and reading about you and your..." he searched for the word, "... talents, I realized you may be just the person to help me. I...have a problem, and it concerns my wife."

              "Ok," said Allie cautiously.

              "She'll be out in a second and I don’t want her to know I've been talking to you, I mean about this. Here. Take my card. Call me, please, at your earliest convenience. I'll set up a time and place when we can talk." He suddenly raised his voice to an oily, sing-song professional tone. "Ah, here she comes now!"

              The woman who cut through the crowd from the back of the room may very well have been the one person Allie would have bet her house and all its possessions, including the cat, was
not
married to Bennett Reilly. It was a study in perfect mismatching. She towered over Bennett by a good five inches. She wore a glowering smirk on her face that would have been a bemused smile were it not for the contempt that twisted it. She walked as one would through a tunnel with dirty walls: arms in, her body stiff and straight. She was dressed for a weekend at a ski lodge, in a style Allie called "Vermont formal" – a.k.a. designer fleece.

              "Honey, honey, I'd like you meet someone. This is Allie Griffin. Allie, my wife, Honey Reilly."

              The woman took the glass her husband offered and untwisted her smirk for a phony moment. "Well, now, delighted."

              "Hello... um, Honey," said Allie, thoroughly uncomfortable with the greeting. A few seconds of terribly awkward silence followed, broken only by a burst of raucous laughter at some punchline a few tables down.

              Honey Reilly turned her head toward the sound and took a sip from her glass. "Usually I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this. So uncouth. A bunch of dirty quarry rats that smell like blackboard erasers. At any rate, I don’t even drink often. A glass of pinot noir once in a blue moon. Did you know it's supposed to be good for the heart?"

              "I've heard that," said Allie.

              "Mmm. Well, it's poppycock. Show me any guy or gal who guzzles the stuff by the gallon, and you can be sure they're not running any marathons. At any rate, I don’t smoke either. Never ingested anything of the sort."

              "I see."

              "Not many people can say that I bet. Ugh! These men are truly horrific." She handed her glass to her husband. "And this is flat. Can we please not linger here? I feel like I'm going to catch something."

              Bennett Reilly smiled a bogus smile. "Well, you heard the woman. Very nice to have met you."

              Mrs. Reilly extended her hand. "It was charming to say the least."

              Allie watched them as they left the bar; Honey first, her husband right behind. He shouted a goodbye to Dougie with a quick, "You look different."

              Dougie answered, "Two weeks ago."

              "Really! How did I not notice?"

              Honey Reilly walked on ahead without a word and Bennett scurried behind her, extending his arm to the breaking point holding the door open for her from his subordinate position in back.

              Dougie the bartender sidled over, the remnants of a shared laugh with his patrons still burbling out of his throat. "So, whaddaya think of the Reillys?"

              Allie held up her glass to him. "They're an interesting couple, I give 'em that."

              "Yeah," said Dougie, broodingly swabbing the bar with a wet rag. "Some wife he's got himself there, huh?"

              Allie took a swig of her drink followed by a hard swallow. "She's thoroughly passive aggressive, with an accent on the aggressive. And she's a liar to boot."

              "Why do you say that?"

              "She said she never smoked or drank. Did you see the way she held her glass?"

              "How do you mean?"

              "Like this." Allie demonstrated by taking her glass with her thumb, ring finger, and pinky, leaving her first two fingers that extended in the air. "Perfect for holding a cigarette. Men puff with their left hands and drink with their right. Women usually hold the cig and the drink in the same hand. It looks classier."

              "Now ain't that something?"

              "She's still holds her fingers in that position, like it's vestigial or, you know, leftover from an old habit, or whatever— this is strong stuff."