Whiskey on the Rocks (9 page)
Read Whiskey on the Rocks Online
Authors: Nina Wright
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Women real estate agents, #Michigan, #General, #Mattimoe; Whiskey (Fictitious character), #Mystery fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Fiction
Chester peered at me through smeary lenses.
“She still has a love-hate relationship with performing,” he explained.
“Well, she’s a novice.” I patted Abra’s blonde head.
“I meant Cassina. That’s why she gets weird sometimes.”
“Oh, sure. That makes sense.” It didn’t, though, and we both knew it.
“Will I live with you while she’s on her World Tour?” Chester wrapped an arm around Abra, who nestled against him. They both looked at me hopefully.
I swallowed. “I probably can’t afford you. How much is this training costing me, anyhow?”
“Don’t worry about it. Open the envelope,” he said.
As I stared at the contents, Chester said, “Let me guess. . . . Three days’ care and accommodations, plus the guilt of forgetting me and failing to return your calls. I’m going to say Cassina paid you . . . twelve hundred dollars.”
I gaped at him. “Chester, I can’t take this.”
“Everybody else does.”
“But I’m not a nanny. Or a sitter. I’m not what your mother seems to think I am.”
“You’re taking care of me, aren’t you?” He produced a brush and began grooming Abra. She always ran away when I tried that.
“Well, sure. But this was . . . an emergency.”
“That’s the only reason you let me stay?”
“Of course not,” I lied.
“Why else?” he asked. Abra emitted a low moan of pleasure as he brushed her throat.
“Well, Abra adores you. And we know she needs training.” I was stalling. “But you can train her without living here. Right?”
Chester grinned, and I noticed he had lost another tooth.
“You’re missing a canine—I mean, an incisor.”
“It was loose. Abra knocked it out while we were playing.”
“I hope you didn’t swallow it.”
“Abra did. It happened last night when we shared the burger. She already passed it. Want to see?”
“No thanks.” I sat down to match his eye level. “I can’t keep your mother’s money, and I can’t keep you. But I do want you to work with Abra.”
He said, “Give Cassina’s check to charity. She won’t take it back. You might as well make somebody happy.”
Leo used to say that.
Good-natured Brady Swancott forgave me for bringing Chester to the police station the next morning. He’s a family man, after all.
“I have a son just your size,” he said, patting Chester’s white-blonde head.
“Is he six?” asked Chester.
“Yes he is!”
“I’m eight.”
“Oh.” Brady looked at me, unsure what to say next. “Well, you’ll catch up.”
“Probably not. I was a preemie. But I’ll always be smarter than your son.”
Wordless, Brady patted Chester’s head again.
“Please don’t do that,” Chester said.
Brady didn’t approve of the greasy fast-food breakfasts I had brought.
“Definitely not regulation canine-officer chow.” He arced the paper bag into the waste basket. When Abra dove in after it, he said, “I guess we can make an exception.”
Always busy on Saturday mornings, Mattimoe Realty thrums in Leaf-Peeping Season. When I arrived at 8:15, Odette was on the phone, and two other agents were chatting with eager-dreamer tourist families. Odette tossed me the Magnet, our local news weekly. The headline read: “Magnet Springs Murder: Canadian Widow Slain While Looking Into Husband’s Sudden Death.”
“They say all publicity is good publicity,” Odette said.
I closed my office door and sat down to read. Who needs caffeine when you can contemplate a fresh unsolved murder? The article was thin on details, for which I was grateful—especially since the missing facts included my name and my firm’s. I had barely finished my second read-through when I heard Odette’s rapid-fire three-tap knock.
“It’s already started,” she announced. “The new traffic pattern at Shadow Point. Carol Felkey called to say that she can hardly get in or out of her driveway! The story’s on every TV station in the tri-state area. People yell out their car windows, ‘Is that Murder House?’” Odette rubbed her hands together. “I smell money waiting to be made!”
Then Jenx called.
“Let’s hope history won’t repeat itself. Dan Gallagher’s widow is on her way to Magnet Springs. She wants to know what happened to her husband.”
“Well, she can’t stay at Shadow Play,” I said.
“I should warn you, she’s a Fundie. On the phone she asked me to pray with her. Something tells me she won’t be happy at our house.”
I offered to put the widow up at Vestige if nothing else could be found.
“There’s a room at the Broken Arrow,” Jenx said. “Our fake Heather Nitschke never came home. Glad I kept that crime scene tape on the motel-room door. I’ll tell the desk clerk to expect Mrs. Gallagher.”
Jenx asked if I’d ever heard the name Holly Lomax. I hadn’t.
“Her prints were all over Shadow Play and the motel room: She’s twenty-nine years old with at least that many arrests for prostitution.”
“And you thought the Broken Arrow Motel was reformed.”
“Lomax failed to check in with her parole officer in Grand Rapids last week.”
I said, “Grand Rapids was Dan Gallagher’s hometown. Coincidence?”
“Most of life is.”
Jenx invited me to join her and Mrs. Gallagher for coffee later.
“Her husband died on your turf. She might want to meet you.”
I pointed out that Noonan owned the massage table.
Marilee Gallagher was nothing like the late Ellianna Santy. She wasn’t Canadian or blonde or beautiful. She also wasn’t a bitch. When I stopped by the police station, I thought Jenx’s office was empty. The door was ajar with no one in sight. Then I heard whispering. Stepping cautiously inside, I glimpsed a puffy brunette hairstyle bobbing low on the far side of Jenx’s desk. A moment later, the attached face and body appeared. Marilee Gallagher struggled to her feet.
“Oh!” she exclaimed when she spotted me. “I was just on my knees having a word with the Lord. I’ll bet you’re looking for Chief Jenkins. She’s checking her fax machine.”
Marilee Gallagher gave me a radiant smile. A large woman with lovely dimples, she possessed a perfect heart-shaped mouth and sparkling teeth.
I thanked her, turned to go, and crashed right into Jenx.
“Mrs. Gallagher, this is Whiskey Mattimoe, a local real estate broker.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Mattimoe.”
I asked her to call me Whiskey, but she was uncomfortable saying the word since her church outlaws liquor.
“Why would your mother do that to you?” she asked, her eyes shining with sympathy. “Was she . . . an alcoholic?”
I explained that the nickname was based on several weird factors, beginning with my real name. My dear mother is a teetotaler. Nothing stronger than decaf for her. Sweet Irene Houston christened her baby girl Whitney. She chose the name after reading it in a romance novel. I never liked it, and eventually it became a joke. I’m not black, I was never beautiful, and I have no musical talent whatsoever. What I do have is the raspy voice of someone who lives in a bar. Or someone with a three-pack-a-day habit. Never mind that I rarely drink the hard stuff, that I haven’t lit up since I turned thirty, and that I’ve sounded this way since I hit puberty. That’s when a kid named Jeb Halloran dubbed me Whiskey, and the name stuck. A few years later, I married Jeb Halloran. That didn’t stick.
Marilee Gallagher still wasn’t “at peace” with my nickname. So Jenx sadistically encouraged her to call me Whitney—the birth name I loathe as much as Jenx does hers.
“Why don’t we all use our first names then?” I said brightly. “Chief Jenkins loves to be called Judy, or—even better—Judith.”
Jenx’s eyes narrowed as if prepared to fire lasers.
“My sister’s name is Judith,” chirped Marilee. “I always wished my mother had saved that name for me.”
Suddenly, she shrieked and went spinning away from us as if flung by an unseen dance partner. At the same instant, everything made of metal on Jenx’s desk jumped, and all the phones at the station started ringing. I glanced at the acting police chief, whose eyes now bulged.
“Easy, Jenx,” I whispered.
“Oh my,” Marilee said again, from the corner where she had landed. “I do believe I felt the Holy Spirit in me!”
What she had felt was a disturbance in our local magnetic fields. Such occurrences are legendary, dating back to the earliest days of Magnet Springs’ history. In recent years, though, the phenomenon has been linked exclusively to Jenx. I’d never seen her so exercised about her birth name and said so.
“It’s not about that,” she hissed.
“I haven’t felt like this since the tent revival in Kalamazoo,” Marilee cried. “Let us pray!”
“Let us not,” said Jenx. She handed me the paper she had been holding when I ran into her. The fax from the New Brunswick Department of Transportation, Motor Vehicles Services, featured the photocopied driver’s license of Gordon David Santy, age thirty-four, of Fredericton. Although the driver’s photo was blurred, I recognized him at once. Gordon Santy was Edward Naylor.
“What happened to the driver’s license you took off the corpse?” I asked Jenx.
She glanced at the widow across the room. “Released to next of kin. Presumed next of kin.”
Jenx exhaled loudly, and I felt a shift in magnetic pressure.
“Careful,” I whispered.
When Marilee Gallagher said, “Amen,” we moved toward her. She smiled, radiating pure good will. How the hell could we tell her?
“Your husband’s dead,” Jenx blurted, helping Marilee to her feet. “And his remains have left the country.”
“I thought it was something like that,” she said calmly.
“Why?” I had to ask.
“The Holy Spirit filled me with Truth and Light.”
Jenx said, “What can we do for you, Mrs. Gallagher?”
“Call me Marilee, please. Well, first I’d like to see your reports. And then I’ll need a word with the medical examiner.”
“Anything else?”
She poked around inside her purse and came up with a business card. “Please call my insurance agent and find out how the heck I’m going to collect Dan’s life insurance when you’ve lost his body.”
A few minutes later, I was sipping instant cappuccino and contemplating a plate of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. Marilee likes comfort foods. The cookies and coffee mix had come from her handbag.
“This will cheer us up,” she declared. Her fussing, clucking and purring made me feel like I was the new widow. I offered my condolences.
“I’m sure it hasn’t quite sunk in,” she said. “The Holy Spirit took away my pain. Cookie?”
Jenx returned with a fat manila folder and a legal pad.
“Whiskey has a dog,” she began.
“Let’s leave her out of it,” I said.
“High-strung and contrary,” Jenx continued. I wondered if she meant me or Abra. “But I think she can help. Being recently widowed, she knows what you’re feeling.”
Marilee turned to me. “Your dog is a widow?”
“No. I am.”
Then it hit me: maybe Abra felt like a widow, too.
Jenx said, “Whiskey lost her husband last spring. She’s having a real hard time.”
“I’m handling it just fine!” I said.
“Shall we pray?” said Marilee.
“No,” said Jenx.
“But thanks for asking,” I added.
I wanted to know how Jenx thought Abra could help. She reminded me about the training session in progress with Officers Swancott and Roscoe. Then she reviewed the Crime Scene Report following her call Tuesday to Noonan Starr’s Star of Noon Massage Therapy Studio.
“Dan was having massage ‘therapy’?” Marilee asked. I started to explain, but she asked me not to.
When Jenx showed her the photocopy of the driver’s license found on the corpse, Marilee gasped, “I took that picture of Dan at his birthday party!” She observed that his height and weight statistics were wrong. “Didn’t the coroner measure him?”
“Of course I did.”
We turned to the rotund bald man filling the doorway.
“Such discrepancies are routine,” he said. “People self-report personal statistics at license bureaus. And people lie.”
“Thanks for coming, Dr. Crouch,” said Jenx.
“It’s my job, Officer Jenkins.”
“Acting Chief,” she reminded him as he waddled past.