He stole more of her eggs, and Serena pushed the plate over to him. “Here, be my guest.”
“Thanks!” Curt replied, diving into her breakfast. “How’s the hubster?”
“Lieutenant Stride is fine.”
“Excellent, excellent.” Curt winked at Cat. “How about you, kitty cat? What’s with the sad kitty eyes?”
Cat shrugged. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Oh, yeah? Word is some hotshot was putting the moves on you last night. Everything okay?”
Serena leaned across the table. “How the hell did you hear about that?”
“Aw, give me some credit, Mrs. Stride. Nothing gets past me.”
That was true.
Curt Dickes had his fingers in everything in Duluth. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. He popped up at every city event, usually with something to sell. He blended in like a chameleon all along the social scale, from the rich party crowd to the homeless hanging out in Lake Place Park. He always had money, but it never lasted long. Then he was on to the next scam to earn more.
Curt had been a part of Cat’s life since her days on the street. No matter how far behind she left that world, she always seemed to drift back into Curt’s orbit. It had taken Serena a long time to realize that Cat simply had a perpetual, inexplicable crush on Curt. The girl liked him.
The crazy thing was that Serena liked him, too. She didn’t want him anywhere near Cat, but she also knew that Curt didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Or an honest one.
He was twenty-seven years old but acted like a teenager. His musky cologne usually lingered in the room long after he left. He wore baggy clothes over a beanpole frame, and he sported shoulder-length stringy black hair. Today he had a purple fedora positioned low on his forehead, with multiple gaudy rings on his fingers. His teeth were stark white, and he flashed them as he grinned.
“So what’s the latest scam, Curt?” Serena asked.
Curt slapped an open hand dramatically against his chest. “Scam? Me?”
“There’s always a scam with you.”
“No, no, this is different,” he assured her. “What I’m offering locals and tourists today is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of history! I mean, we are having a big-budget Hollywood movie filmed in our very own backyard. When’s that likely to happen again? Iron Will was all the way back in 1994. You’ll Like My Mother was in 1972, for heaven’s sake. Plus, given that our beloved Lieutenant Stride is practically the star, I knew I needed to commemorate the event.”
Cat giggled.
“Commemorate it how?” Serena asked suspiciously.
“With this!” Curt dug into his pocket and produced a Rubik’s Cube and put it on the table in front of them. Instead of the usual solid colors, this version of the game had photographs on each side of the cube, broken up into small squares. Serena picked it up and saw two pictures of Dean Casperson on opposite sides, two pictures of Aimee Bowe, and a photo of the Duluth lift bridge with the caged girl and the month and year of filming printed across the sky.
When she turned it over, she saw a photo of Jonny — her Jonny — on the bottom.
“Are you kidding, Curt?”
“What? It’s professionally done and a bargain at $39.95. Do you want one? I use Square, so if you’ve got a chip card, we’re all set.”
“It’s also completely illegal. Did you license any of these photos? And where did you get a picture of Stride?”
“I took it myself. He’s a handsome man. You’re very, very lucky.”
Serena sighed in exasperation. Cat picked up the game and spun the segments repeatedly until all the photographs were fragmented around the cube. Then she started trying to put it together again. Having snippets of photos rather than solid colors made the puzzle ten times as hard.
“I think it’s supercool,” Cat said. “Can I have one?”
Curt spotted the look on Serena’s face and grinned. “For you, kitty cat, it’s free. A promotional sample.”
“Neat!”
Serena felt a headache coming on, which usually happened when she was around Curt. “Listen, I didn’t ask you to meet us here for a marketing pitch on your latest product line. I need information.”
“You want free merchandise and free information?” Curt replied. “Wow, you are an expensive date, Detective.”
“It will get even more expensive if I make a call to the film’s lawyers and you have to destroy all of your little pirated cubes.”
Curt nodded. “Excellent point. Proceed.”
“Obviously, you’ve got a pipeline into the film crew.”
“Sure I do. When strangers in our city have needs, I am a one-man tourist bureau.”
“What kind of needs are we talking about?” she asked. “Girls? Drugs?”
“My inventory and contacts are wide-ranging, Serena; you know that. Visitors from Los Angeles do not always appreciate the recreational opportunities that Duluth offers when it’s ten degrees below zero. So they look for alternative sources of entertainment to pass those long, cold evenings.”
“Girls. Drugs.”
Curt groaned and lowered his voice. “Sure. Yeah.”
“Do you supply?”
“No way! I’m just a go-between. People who need people come to me.” Curt glanced at Cat, who’d already solved the puzzle. It had taken her less than a minute. “Holy crap, kitty cat, how do you do that?”
Cat grinned and looked pleased with herself. She scrambled the cube and started solving it again. Serena was routinely amazed by the girl’s brain. It was the emotional side that still had some catching up to do.
“Has anyone approached you for information about the movie?” Serena asked. “I’m thinking about reporters. Tabloid writers. Paparazzi.”
“Yeah, there are a few of them scavenging around and looking for dirt.”
“What about a girl named Haley Adams?” Serena asked.
“Names really aren’t my thing. What does she look like?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. We think she changes her appearance a lot. But she had a spy setup with an expensive telescope next door to Dean Casperson’s rental house.”
Curt drummed his fingers on the table as he thought about it. “Well, I know one girl who was really, really interested in Dean Casperson. Midtwenties. Long, bombshell blond hair that was obviously a wig.”
Serena slid out her phone and found the photograph of the mannequin that Stride had texted her from Haley’s apartment. “Hair like this, you mean?”
“Yeah, just like that,” Curt replied, nodding.
“What did she want?”
“She knew people came to me to round out the guest list at crew parties, if you know what I mean. She wanted a tip-off when there was going to be a big party at Casperson’s place.”
“And did you give her what she wanted?” Serena asked.
“Sure, why not? She paid well.”
“Did she say why she wanted the information?”
“No.”
“When was the last party?”
“Saturday night,” Curt said. “Lots of people.”
“Were you there?”
“I may have put in an appearance, yeah. It’s good to keep up the contacts, you know?”
“Was Haley there?”
Curt shook his head. “I didn’t see her. Although you said she liked to wear different looks, so who knows? But if she had a spy setup, she was probably watching from the neighbor’s house.”
“And would she have seen anything interesting?” Serena asked. “Did anything happen at the party?”
“It was a little wild, but I didn’t see anything that was way over the line.”
Serena frowned. Then she thought of something else, and she picked up her phone again.
“What about this guy?” she asked, hunting down the photograph of John Doe from the traffic accident. “Have you ever seen him before?”