Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle (22 page)

The metallic scent slapped me the second I stepped through the door. The animal part of my brain recognized it before my conscious mind, raising my hackles like a cornered cat. I used my foot to swing the door closed, instinct telling me not to touch anything with my hands.

A steady spray sound, muffled, came from the hall off the living room

I followed the scent and sound through the living room and into the bathroom. Eddie lay naked in the tub, face down, his back arched unnaturally because the length of the tub did not accommodate his height. Watery blood swirled into the drain as the shower spray rained over him. Hot fingers of steam rose off of him.

I crouched low, trying to see where the blood was coming from. I had to stand back up and lean over his body to see the dented gash in his skull. The blood roiled pink from the wound as the water washed it out.

I wanted to cut the water. The sound of it pelting his limp body cut at my ears like fork tines scraped against a blackboard. The steaming spray also seemed to heighten the butcher block tang in the air rather than wash it off.

I backed out of the bathroom and returned to the living room. I took a deep and shaky breath while my thoughts chased in circles like a terrier after a rabbit. It was the smell of marijuana in the air that brought those thought back into focus. Somehow I had smelled the blood through its haze first. Now that instinct had given way to conscious thought, I could note the woodsy smoke stink, much thicker than when I had first noticed last Friday when I had agreed to take his case. This wasn’t the stale leftovers of an earlier toking. This smelled fresh. Recent.

I didn’t know how that mattered, but I knew that it did.

My hands tucked in my armpits to make sure I didn’t accidentally leave a print anywhere, I moved through the apartment looking for any signs of foul play. Because, despite what it looked like, I knew Eddie hadn’t slipped in the tub and cracked his crown. This wasn’t Eddie’s curse.

This was murder.

Chapter 23

I didn’t find anything, not that I could do much of a search without using my hands. When I’d finished, I pulled my sleeve over my hand so I could let myself out the door. I left the door unlocked. In the hall I called Palmer. I explained to him what I found, tweaking the story just a bit by saying I had found the door unlocked.

“So he slipped in the shower? I appreciate your…is it faith in me? But that’s the kind of thing you dial nine-one-one for.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

“That’s not how you made it sound.”

“Because I only explained what I had found. But what I found and what I know don’t jive.”

“There will be an investigation. We don’t just toss bodies into the morgue and say ‘Too bad he fell in the shower.’”

“They’re not going to find anything. Not with the kind of look they’ll give it. Whoever this guy is, he’s been killing off Arndts for years and making it look like an accident every time.”

I could hear the grumpy in his voice. “Is this how it’s going to be with you? Because I’m looking into early retirement if you keep bringing this crazy shit to my door.”

“It’s not my crazy shit. I’m just the one most likely to step in it. If Hawthorne had another PI, we could spread the shit between us.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“It’s a crime scene. It needs to be processed like one. I even let the water running so your guys would find it exactly as the killer left it.”

He grunted. “And how does this tie in with your con man?”

My gut folded into itself. “It doesn’t.”

But I had assumed that it did. The big, neon gilded fuck up at the center of all this. I had assumed Eddie was getting conned because
I
was getting conned. Even though I had that brief moment where I thought it could be more than a con, I went back to the default position. I had projected my own problem onto Eddie’s.

You couldn’t have known
, I tried telling myself.
The idea of someone stalking and killing all the members of one side of person’s family sounded too ridiculous to be true.

But it was true. And despite all of Eddie’s warnings and pleas, I had let the killer get his last victim. From what Eddie told me about his family tree, he was the last of the Arndts.

I paced in the hall while I waited for the cops and techs to show up. Palmer had said he would get them to treat it like a crime scene and we could worry about making it fly with the lieutenant later. This is why, despite his agitated manner, I kept in touch with Palmer. Though I hadn’t exactly earned it, he trusted me—no matter how much I annoyed him.

When they showed up, a uniformed officer kept me in the hall, taking a statement that I would have to repeat ad nauseam before the night was through. While Palmer had helped mobilize this effort, he was not the detective assigned.

She introduced herself as Detective Shanks. I had never met her before, which was a serious loss on my part. Her cocoa skin shined. Her full lips looked like they could send me into a warm coma with a single kiss. Beautiful, large brown eyes. She wore a pinstriped pantsuit, usually not one of my favorite looks for a woman, but the tailoring on hers complimented every inch of her body. Not that I ogled her or anything. Not for very long anyway.

She had her hand out to me and raised an eyebrow when my gaze came back up to her face.

Flushing around my neck and up my cheeks, I shook her hand and introduced myself. “I’m surprised we haven’t met before.”

“I’m new to the department. I came up from Detroit vice.”

“From Detroit to Hawthorne? That’s an odd switch.” Not the least of which was that Hawthorne, even on the south side, did not have many people of color. Not much could claim to be as white bread as Hawthorne, except for Wonder Bread.

She must have seen in my eyes what was going through my head. She smiled—and it was an amazing smile. “A little bit of culture shock, but everyone’s been very welcoming.”

It occurred to me that Detective Shanks had filled the gap on the force left by Tom Fortier. Her pleasant manner also suggested she hadn’t been with the department long enough for the others to paint their ugly picture of me for her.

Enjoy it while it lasts. She’s going to hate you soon enough.

“Have you been standing this whole time?” she asked with—unbelievable—honest concern. Not even Tom, my friend, had been this nice to me. If the circumstances were different, if I didn’t have a murdered client and an old partner out to wreck my life, I would have asked for her number. Granted, dating witnesses on a case spoke to a conflict of interest, but I was willing to wait until she’d closed this one.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I have strong legs.”

“We need to find a place to sit.”

I have strong legs? Did I really just say that?

She glanced around then tilted her head toward the stairwell. “Thought I saw a couple chairs in the downstairs lobby.” She led the way.

She went through the regular motions with me, getting my initial story, then peppering me with questions. The whole while, she remained polite, never once treating me like a suspect. I could tell, though, that she didn’t believe there was any foul play. Even as I explained the details of the case, the calls from the killer, the pattern of unnatural deaths on the Arndt side, culminating in the extinction of that side of Eddie’s family.

She didn’t, however, laugh in my face, which was a nice change from the usual treatment.

“I know you’re upset about your client,” she said. “But we have to go by the evidence. At least with Eddie, we’ll take the closer look his other relatives didn’t get. But there won’t be much will in the department behind what looks clearly like an accident.”

“There’ll be even less will when it gets around I’m involved.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I heard about you. You don’t seem at all like the ass-dipped prick they say you are.”

I laughed. “Ass-dipped prick?”

“It’s a good one.”

“I might have to borrow that.”

Her lips kept their smile as she flipped through her notes on the moleskin pad in her hand. Then she nodded. “I’m going to let you go home now. I have your number, I’ll keep in touch to let you know if we find anything.”

After we stood, I turned to her. “Thank you, for looking into this. Even if you don’t find anything, I appreciate it.”

The way she looked at me turned my stomach into a Ferris wheel. I felt like a freshman at his first school dance who had finally worked up the nerve to talk to a girl, right down to the clammy hands.

She opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated, changing her mind about whatever she meant to say. Instead, she held out her hand again and as we shook, she said, “It goes both ways. You find anything, let
me
know.”

Well, shoot. Not even the usual
Stay out of this while the real detectives investigate
routine
.
If I didn’t know any better—I suppose I
didn’t
know any better—I would have thought she had wanted me to continue investigating.

Since I never expected payment from Eddie anyway, I saw no reason to stop.

The cops will do this.

I sat in my car outside Shawn’s squat, ranch style copy of every other house on the street. My eyes felt sticky and wanted to glue themselves shut whenever I blinked. My lungs took air, but without any enthusiasm. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed.

I stared out my window at Shawn’s shadowy porch. Inside he and his wife—maybe kids; Eddie hadn’t said anything about having nephews—sat in there, maybe watching the nightly news, or curled up with a bowl of popcorn and a movie without too many explosions for her; easy on the weepy scenes for him. A happy family. And here I’d come to stomp on it with bad news.

The cops will do this.

But did I really want to leave this to the cops? I felt I owed Eddie at least this much for letting my drawn conclusions leave him open to a killer. Besides, I wasn’t only here to notify next of kin.

I grabbed the sketch of Bobby off the passenger seat and forced myself out of the car. Momentum eventually took over, and I made it to the front porch without falling asleep on my feet.

The porch light came on, momentarily blinding me as my eyes had grown used to the dark. A woman in her mid-twenties at most answered the door. She wore a Metallica t-shirt and not much else from what I could see. Nice legs. I did some quick calculations in my head and figured Shawn would have to have fathered a child at ten or eleven years old in order for this to be his daughter. Based on the dress code, I ruled out babysitter. Which meant Shawn had robbed a cradle to get hold of his wife.

“Mrs. Wagner?”

She looked me up and down as if I were a piece of furniture that might fit well in her living room. “That’s me.”

“Is your husband home?”

She shouted over her shoulder, “Shawny.”

Shawn shuffled into view wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Guess it was a pajama party. Unlike his scrawny cousin, Shawn could get away with the stripped down look. While he wasn’t a big guy, he spent regular time in a gym based on the hard muscle in his arms and the six-pack abs. He probably ate pizza all the time, too. Guys like that always ate whatever they wanted and stayed buff because of their mega metabolisms. Bastards.

He stepped up behind his wife looking sleepy and scratching an armpit. “What’s up?”

“Mr. Wagner, I’m Ridley Brone. I—”

“The private investigator Eddie hired. He told me about you.”

Now was the time to ease him into the bad news. But I held off because I also had a chance to get some answers before his cousin’s death made it hard for him to hear the questions. “Did you speak to him today?”

“He wanted me to come over. Said it had something to do with a con man?” His eyes narrowed and he scratched at the scruff under his chin. “He didn’t give me details, but from the sound of it, you’re a real piece of work.”

Based on the bored disgust in his voice, I couldn’t in any way interpret his words as a compliment. But I could pretend. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”