Inspector Specter, page 23
I looked at Josh. “There might be a piece of two-by-four in there, too. If you need it.”
Josh stared at me. “You’re serious?” he said.
But there was no time to argue; the doorbell rang at that moment, and Maxie appeared through the wall at the same time. “This one has got to be the bad guy,” she said. She hadn’t seen “Malcolm” before, but I was willing to bet she was right.
“Okay,” I said, “time to let the raging maniac inside.” I gestured toward the open closet door, and Josh sheepishly walked in. I closed it behind him. “Can you hear in there?”
“I can hear fine; the question is whether I can see, and the answer is no.” There is no light fixture in the closet.
“You’re not in there to read,” I said, and walked out of the room toward the front door. “Just absolutely don’t come out unless I say your name. We have a plan. Okay?” I didn’t wait for an answer.
I composed myself at the door. I’d met this man before, but he’d been playing a part, and doing so very convincingly. Now I had to do the same, pretending I wasn’t aware of his true identity and wasn’t starkly terrified of him. I took a cleansing breath and tried to think of people I really liked who reminded me of Vinnie “the Goldfish” Monroe. No one came to mind.
“What are you waiting for?” Maxie asked behind me. “Christmas?”
I declined comment on Maxie’s helpful attitude, put a concerned look on my face that I hoped would be at least a little believable and pulled the door open. The man I knew as Malcolm Kidder stood there, his best tormented-husband expression on. I wondered now why I’d ever bought it; that face looked so phony.
“Malcolm,” I breathed, as if grateful he’d finally arrived. “I’m so glad you’re here. Come on in.”
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s hot out there.” He walked in wearing cargo shorts whose right-hand side pocket seemed to be carrying something just a little too heavy. It bounced a bit. I wasn’t interested in finding out what that might be.
“Yeah. You want a cold drink or something?” I didn’t want Malcolm Kidder anywhere but in my movie room, but if I really did think he was Malcolm Kidder, that’s what I would have said.
“No, that’s okay.” Good. “I’ve been thinking about your meeting with Buster Hockney.”
I looked around as if concerned that a guest would hear. “Let’s go in there,” I said, pointing toward the movie room. “I’d just as soon keep the investigation separate from my guests, okay?”
Let’s-just-call-him-Vinnie-and-be-done-with-it looked down the hallway and seemed to be sizing it up. “That doesn’t seem very private,” he said. “There aren’t even doors. How about if we talk somewhere else, like your room. The guests don’t go there, do they?”
My bedroom was the last place I was going with this guy. “Don’t worry,” I said. “The movie room is far away from the guest areas, and they know I’m renovating in there, so they don’t go near it.” And before he could come up with a reason that wasn’t a good idea, I started down the hallway.
“Nicely played,” Paul said, walking just ahead and above me, but backward so he could watch Vinnie.
“I don’t see why I can’t just hit him with something and tie him up,” Maxie suggested. She was behind me, no doubt sizing up Vinnie and finding him wanting from the tone in her voice.
“Because we need him to tell us where Lieutenant McElone is,” Paul reminded her. “Stick to the plan.”
After one of the longest twenty-foot walks of my life, Vinnie and I were “alone” in the movie room. He pretended to look it over as a courtesy but was probably trying to figure out the best place to hide my body. If it was in the utility closet, he’d be in for a surprise, but the actual possibility of that scenario took some of the fun out of the thought.
I noticed, though, that Maxie had already morphed into wearing her trench coat and Paul was wearing a long pea jacket (in this weather?) so they could “import” any objects they might want while Vinnie was here. That emboldened me. A little.
“So what do you think I should do when I meet Buster?” I asked Vinnie. It was an ironic situation, and there was no reason not to roll with it.
“Malcolm” looked startled. “When you meet Buster?” he asked. “Do you even know how to find Buster?”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot to tell you.” I thought it was going well, but Paul frowned, indicating I was playing the scene a little too frivolously. “I managed to get past the encryption on the lieutenant’s folder and found some files she had on Buster. I assume she got them from Detective Ferry’s computer or somewhere, but she had a list of Buster’s usual haunts, and where she believed his whole operation had its headquarters.”
I could tell that he was trying to keep his emotions from showing on his face. But he definitely had a number of questions running through his mind, not the least of which was whether I was lying. “But you said your laptop was stolen,” he said. “How could you have gotten that information?”
I waved a hand. “You forget,” I said. “Your wife”—and it was a real effort not to punch the word wife, but I managed—“left me all her data on a thumb drive. I plugged it into another computer, and after a while I realized how to get through her encryption software.” I will admit for the record that Maxie was feeding me the line about the firewall; I honestly don’t know encryption software from a Rottweiler.
“You figured out her password?” Vinnie, who no doubt had my laptop in his possession—a major reason it was becoming difficult to keep Maxie from smacking him around with something—would surely want that information (if I’d really had it) so he could get into the same files I was making up.
“Yeah, it was easy. Funny, I never thought ‘Anita’ and I were that close, but once I met you I realized I knew her pretty well. It didn’t take long to get her password. I’m surprised you haven’t been able to do it.”
I walked over to the last section of wall that had needed prepping for stain and blew a little sawdust off the paneling. It was just a question of time . . .
“So what was her password?” Vinnie asked.
Bingo! “Well, what do you think it is? I mean, you’re married to the woman. It should be a pretty simple equation. Think: what are your children’s names?”
Now, that was going to present a dilemma to my guest. I was willing to bet he didn’t know the names of McElone’s children (after all, I didn’t); he’d been very careful not to mention them by name in any of our conversations and had not introduced himself as Thomas McElone, so he might not even have known her husband’s. But I’d just suggested I could break her password using the names of “his” children, and if he made some up, I would know they weren’t right. You could almost smell him thinking furiously.
“Well, the important thing is that you got the information,” he said. “Where does Buster have his headquarters?”
“He turned the tables on you,” Paul said. “Shall we go to Plan B?”
I shook my head a tiny bit; not yet. “Come on,” I said. “Guess the password. Start with your children’s names.”
Understand: The goal here was not to get Vinnie to out himself, although that was coming. The key here was to show him that I was aware of the deception, to gain me some respect. Because what was coming next would be especially effective if he thought I was the person controlling it.
The problem was, Vinnie wasn’t playing along according to plan. Instead of responding, he reached into his cargo shorts pocket and pulled out a small handgun with the alacrity of Billy the Kid drawing on a rival in a saloon. And I was willing to bet his grin was even nastier than Billy’s.
“Okay, Alison, you’ve had your fun,” Vinnie said. “Now give me that thumb drive. It’ll go much easier on you if you do.”
“How much easier, Vinnie?” Might as well define the terms.
Vinnie whispered for effect. “I won’t make it hurt as much.”
Twenty-eight
Paul had not anticipated Vinnie’s aggression coming so quickly, but Maxie is pretty much always ready to smack someone, so she had picked up a metal roller tray from the floor and was wielding it more or less like a baseball bat.
“Hold it!” Paul warned her. “He has a gun on Alison.”
“I know—why do you think I’m trying to hit him?”
“If you don’t knock him out—or even if you do—the gun could fire.”
“Oh.”
I saw the doorknob on the utility closet slowly begin to turn. I had to make sure something happened quickly to keep Josh safe; he’d rush out if he saw the gun trained on me, and he might get hurt.
“See,” I said to Vinnie, “there’s not that much upside in threatening me.”
He took a step closer, the grin still on his face. “I disagree. I’ll get the information I need, and you’ll stop asking everybody a lot of questions that are becoming a problem. I get what I want, and you get dead. Win-lose. That’s the way it usually works with me.”
“You’re forgetting something. Didn’t you see the sign at my front door when you came in today?” That was the signal; Paul went into the library for a chair and Maxie went into the closet—and possibly through Josh—to get a rope.
“The one that says the place is haunted? That’s how you’re going to intimidate me?” Vinnie chuckled. “I’m in the intimidation business, lady. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
The ghosts were in place, so all I said was, “Okay.”
But Paul held up a hand and stopped Maxie from moving. “First we need to get the gun off Alison,” he said.
Maxie shrugged. Thanks, Maxie.
But she zipped herself over to the window—the room is rife with windows, which is going to make watching movies in here something of a challenge during the day—and flapped the curtain. Hard.
Sure enough, Vinnie turned for just a moment, in reaction to the movement. But that moment was plenty of time.
Before he could turn back, a chair had been thrust into the backs of his knees, forcing him to sit down. Then a rope seemed to appear out of nowhere and tied him securely to the chair at the chest and the ankles. The gun was removed from Vinnie’s hand while another rope coiled around his chest. His hands, though pinned down pretty well by the chest ropes, were nonetheless in the process of being duct-taped behind him when he realized what had happened to him.
“How the hell did you do that?” he demanded, staring at me.
“I didn’t.” I gestured toward the ghosts, whom he could not see, just to annoy him. “These are my friends Paul and Maxie. They don’t like it when someone threatens me.”
Vinnie sputtered and sneered at me. “I’m not some rube tourist,” he said. “You can’t sell me on this ghost crap. How did you get me tied to this chair?”
I saw the doorknob on the closet shake just a touch. Josh was conflicted, but he did what I’d asked him to do—he waited to hear his name before coming out.
“If you’re not going to believe me when I tell the truth, would you prefer I lie to you?” I walked closer to the center of the room, where Vinnie was attempting to walk the chair out of the room. Maybe he thought he could walk all the way back to wherever his headquarters really was (I had no idea where that might be). Maybe he thought he could bang the chair against the wall and it would fall to pieces, like the balsa-wood ones do in the movies.
It didn’t matter what Vinnie thought; he wasn’t going anywhere. A canvas bag I’d discovered in my basement appeared out of Maxie’s trench coat and found its way over his head. Disoriented, he stopped moving and yelled a little.
“Believe in ghosts now, Vinnie?” I asked.
Paul brought the gun to me. “Just in case,” he said.
I’m not much for guns. They tend to go off and kill people. They’re heavier than you think they are and, to me, have a very volatile feel to them. I was afraid to breathe heavily.
Men like guns, right? I called out, “Hey, Josh!” Before I could blink, he’d opened the closet door and was heading toward me. He assessed Vinnie’s predicament and let out a quick laugh. “You want to hold this?” I asked him, and then didn’t wait for an answer before handing it to him.
“He doesn’t believe?” Josh asked, awkwardly gesturing toward Vinnie with the gun. Then he realized what he was doing and held it with both hands. Maybe not all men like guns that much.
“No,” I answered. Maybe we could use that to our advantage. “Hey, Vinnie!” I shouted. I don’t know why; the bag over his head probably didn’t affect his hearing all that much. “Let’s start with an easy one: Where’s the laptop you stole from my daughter’s bedroom?”
Vinnie’s voice was muffled, but no less annoying. “Suck eggs,” he said.
“Laptop, Vinnie, or I let Paul and Maxie at you. You don’t want that.”
“I don’t know anything about somebody putting a ladder up to your house and stealing stuff, lady.”
My lord, he was stupid. “Who said anything about a ladder?” I said.
“Alison, the lieutenant is the priority,” Paul reminded me.
I turned toward Vinnie. “You told me the lieutenant was missing before she was missing. What was the point of telling me that?”
Vinnie looked, of all things, annoyed. “I knew she was gonna be missing. Why wait? If I could get you to look for the info she gave you, I could get it back. I could be ‘Malcolm,’ and you’d give it to me because it was, like, an emergency.”
I hated that he was right. If I’d thought it would have gotten McElone back, I would have happily handed over the thumb drive to the man I’d thought was her husband. “Okay, Vinnie. Where is Lieutenant McElone now?”
“I don’t know!” Vinnie’s voice was a little less confident. “Let me out of this thing!”
“You knew she was going to be abducted and you don’t know where she was taken? Come on, Vinnie. Do I have to get dead people to work you over?”
“Take this thing off my face!”
I considered. He couldn’t see ghost stuff if his head was in a bag. “We have your gun, Vinnie,” I said. “If I take the mask off, you can’t be trying to walk your way out with that chair. I need it for guests, and it won’t fit in your car.” I took the bag off his head. Vinnie’s face was red—I’d be embarrassed, too, if all that stuff had happened to me—and his hair was mussed. More than anything, he looked mad.
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with, lady!”
I tossed my hair a little. I’ve always wanted to do that. “Well, neither do you,” I said. “Where’s the lieutenant?”
“I. DON’T. KNOW!”
“I could hit him with the can of stain,” Maxie offered. I shook my head.
“What?” Vinnie demanded.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said.
Vinnie looked at Josh. “Who’s he, a ghost?”
“Do I look like a ghost?” Josh asked.
“How would I know?”
“You pretended to be Lieutenant McElone’s husband,” I said, trying to regain some control of the proceedings. “You knew she was missing, even a couple of days before she actually was missing.”
“I hear things.” Can you swagger while tied to a chair? “I’m a player.”
“Okay, player. I’m going to ask you again: Where can I find her?”
“Which part of ‘I don’t know’ don’t you understand?” the criminal in the room asked.
“Okay, Maxie,” I said. “Hit him with the gallon of stain. Maybe a knee first.”
Maxie gleefully picked up the can and started moving toward Vinnie, even as Paul was telling her, “It’s a bluff; you’re not really going to hit him.”
And sure enough, when Vinnie saw the stain can float past his face and seem to draw a bead on his knee, rising in the air and starting to swing, his eyes got wide and his mouth made a gargling sound. “Hold it,” he managed to croak out. “Hold it.”
I held up a hand dramatically in Maxie’s direction. She giggled as she stopped the gallon can’s swinging. “What do I get for stopping her?” I asked.
Vinnie opened and closed his mouth three times without making a coherent noise, and then managed, “It’s a her?”
Maxie started to swing the can again.
“No!” he shouted. I held up the hand again, and again Maxie stopped.
“What do I get?” I repeated. “Because the next time I’m not going to stop her.”
“I really don’t know where McElone is,” Vinnie said. “But I can tell you what happened to my grandfather.”
Frankly, at this point I didn’t care what happened to Harry Monroe, but it was something. “What did you do to him?” I asked Vinnie.
“I didn’t do anything. I just gave someone a name, that’s all. I didn’t have any interest in getting rid of the Fish. He wasn’t a threat to me.”
“Whose name did you give to whom?” I said. I would like it pointed out that I used proper grammar even under some duress.
Vinnie looked away. Josh gave me a look, eyebrows high, asking. I returned one that said, “Hey, if you have an idea . . .”
“Your grandfather drowned, then was put in his car in dry clothes,” Josh recounted. “That would indicate pretty strongly that he didn’t just have an accident while swimming. Somebody killed him. Alison has friends in the police, Vinnie. You want the killer to be you? Go right ahead and protect the guy.”
Vinnie, perhaps realizing what he’d just admitted to, stopped talking.
“Enough,” Paul said. He floated down to Vinnie with a great air of purpose, pointed his finger and straightened his arm. If he’d been holding a stick and yelling something in fake Latin, he could have been one of Melissa’s friends playing Harry Potter.
But the effect was very much the same. I didn’t see anything come out of Paul’s outstretched finger, but Vinnie certainly reacted as if he’d stuck his toe into an electrical outlet after taking a dip in the ocean: His body stiffened, his eyes widened and veins in his neck stood out.
