Something was up.
Fritz employed three men. Clayton Mills, in his late sixties, had worked for the previous owner, and lived alone now that his wife of thirty-two years, Molly, had passed away. He lived frugally, and he never struck me as a viable suspect. Nor did Joseph Calvelli, about ten years younger than Clayton, with a wife and a grown son who ran an investment firm.
Very quickly, I zeroed in on Tony Fisk, twenty-seven, married, with two kids, aged five and two. It was his wife, Sandy, I’d seen drive up to the back door and wait for Tony to pop out with a green bag that he pushed through her window before running back into the store. This had happened at a time when Fritz was not in the shop.
“What have you got for me?” Fritz asked as he settled his nearly three hundred pounds into the chair at his desk in the tiny office.
I’d brought along a small laptop, onto which I had transferred some photos, and video.
“Mr. Brott, I watched your place for two days and based on what I’ve seen, you don’t have anything to worry about where Mr. Mills and Mr. Calvelli are concerned.”
He waited. He knew where I was going.
“Tony,” he said, pursing his lips. “The son of a bitch.”
I opened the laptop and set it on his desk. “This is yesterday afternoon. Just before five o’clock.”
His eyes narrowed. “When I was out. Getting my truck fixed.”
“That’s right.” I had clicked on PLAY to start the video. “You see this car pulling up here?”
Fritz nodded.
“I checked the plate to confirm. This car is registered to Anthony Fisk. Behind the wheel is his wife, Sandra. They call her Sandy.”
“Yeah, I know her. I know that car.”
“You can’t quite tell in the photo here, but there are two children’s safety seats in the back. I believe, although I can’t confirm, that she had their two children with her in the vehicle.”
Fritz was stone-faced. “Okay.”
“She stops the car right by the back door. She’s got her phone out now, and she’s using her thumbs, so it looks to me like she’s sending someone a text. Now she waits a few seconds...”
Fritz’s jaw tightened as his eyes stared at the screen.
“And out comes Tony, with the garbage bag. Hands it off to her and runs back into the shop. She takes off.”
“Go back.”
“Hmm?”
“You can go back and frame-freeze this?”
“Freeze-frame, sure.” I fiddled around with the mouse pad, took the video back about fifteen seconds, then started advancing it again.
“There. Stop it there.”
I had to go back a fraction of a second. Fritz wanted to get a look at the bag. He appeared to be studying the shape of what was inside, tracing its outline with his finger, half an inch from the screen.
“Can you blow that up?” he asked me.
“Sure.” I moved my finger on the mouse pad, clicked. “There you go.”
“Shoulder roast,” he said.
I smiled. “I guess you would know.”
“The son of a bitch,” he said.
“I can try to get hold of the text message his wife sent him. But all it would probably say is she’s there. It’s not likely she’d type out ‘bring out the meat’ or anything. If you’re going to bring the police in and have him charged, they can probably get the transcript.”
“You think I should call them?”
“That’s up to you. You asked me to find out if someone was stealing from you, and I believe this answers your question. What happens next is your decision. Is he a good employee?”
Fritz nodded sadly. “He’s worked three years for me. Does his job. Does what I tell him. I treat him good. Why would he steal from me?”
“He’s maxed out on his credit cards. And his wife just got cut from four days a week to three at Walmart.”
The sorrow that had washed over Fritz’s face a moment ago was transforming into something else. “There were days I didn’t think I’d be able to keep a roof over my head, back when I first came to this country, but I never stole from anybody.” He pointed his finger into the air. “Not once.”
He stared down at the top of his desk, shook his head, then trained his eyes on the closed metal door like it was made of glass and he could see Tony right through it.
“I went to his kid’s christening,” Fritz said.
“It happens,” I said.
“I let him stay, what’s it say to the others? It says ‘Hey, you steal from Fritz, he’ll forget about it. He’s a softie.’ That’s what they’ll think.”
“Like I said, it’s your call. I’ll write you up a formal report of my investigation, my hours, what—”
Fritz waved his hand. “Fuck that. I know.” He pointed to the laptop, the frozen image of Tony clutching the bag of meat. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“You’ll get a report, just the same,” I said, “when I invoice you.”
His eyes were still boring into that door. I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking, and what he was going to do next, but hoped I was wrong.
“Tony!” he bellowed. I was right. In the tiny office, it was like a cannon going off.
I’d have preferred that Fritz waited until I was gone before he acted on what I’d found out for him. I gathered information. I didn’t hang around to mete out sentences. I could handle the confrontations if they developed, but they weren’t what I was paid to deal with. I wasn’t a counselor, God knows. I just found stuff out.
This was never more true than when I handled cases involving cheating spouses. You watch TV detective shows, especially back in the sixties and seventies, you’d think a lot of investigators are above that kind of work. In the real world, those kinds of detectives have to rely on food stamps. When you worked in private investigations, saying no to divorce work was like opening a donut shop and refusing to sell coffee. When I found out a husband was sleeping with his secretary, I didn’t tell his wife she should kick the guy out, pour gasoline all over his Porsche and light a match, drill a hole in the bottom of his boat. If she wanted to forgive him, look the other way, didn’t matter to me one bit.
I didn’t care what Fritz did with Tony, just so long as he did it without my being there.
Wasn’t working out that way.
The door swung open and there stood Tony in a bloodied apron, a blood-smeared cleaver in his right hand. He looked like he’d just stepped off the set of a horror movie. All that was missing was the severed head grasped by the hair with his other hand.
“Yeah, Fritz?” he said.
“How long?”
“What?” A look of puzzlement. Feigned, no doubt, but it looked genuine.
“How long you been stealing from me?”
I’d never taken any employee relations course, but there had to be a rule somewhere that you shouldn’t accuse one of your people of theft when they’re wielding a meat cleaver. If Fritz was worried about it, he gave no sign.
He planted his hands on the arm of the chair and pushed his considerable bulk to a standing position, then came around the desk on the far side from where I’d been sitting. But now I was on my feet, too, and the three of us had formed a little triangle.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony said.
“Don’t lie to me,” Fritz said. “I know what you’ve done.”
I kept my eyes on the cleaver. The thing looked like it weighed ten pounds if it weighed an ounce. And Tony’s arms were evidence that in his hands the tool was light as a feather.
“What?” he persisted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Fritz swung the laptop around, pointed to the screen, the paused video of Tony running out to his wife’s car. Said nothing.
Tony blinked a couple of times, looking at it. “What’s that?”