“Where else could I spend all day getting smacked on the butt by feisty little old ladies?”
“Beth Mary MacKenzie?”
“She called me Nibs.” Dylan shook his head. “Is that some kind of kinky sexual reference I don’t know about”
Why was he asking me?
“No, she called dibs. Which means technically you’re off limits to the other residents of the Wildoh. She has her eye on you.” I feigned sympathy. “Sorry, Dylan.”
“All in the line of duty.” Forking, twirling, and scarfing down the last of the spaghetti. Dylan set his plate down, walked over to the bed and opened the small night table drawer. Tucked in under the hotel bible, he pulled out a folded square of tissue.
“But this, I did find at the Wildoh,” he said. “It pays to vacuum.”
So they say.
It looked like the worlds smallest golf club. Or maybe the world’s smallest hockey stick (yes, I do know the difference! One’s for clubbing the bad guys and the other’s for smacking them). This looked like something from another dimension. Too small for a child’s toy. It might have been a dental pick, but was definitely on the dull side.
“Know what it is?” Dylan asked.
It was the way he asked it. I huffed. “So you don’t either.”
Dylan sat down on the bed beside me. “But it feels like something, doesn’t it. You know?” He looked right into my eyes. He wasn’t being funny. He wasn’t being condescending. Dylan was being dead serious. He trusted my intuition more than anyone. Maybe more than me sometimes. And apparently, he was trusting his own a bit.
And he was right. This did feel like something. It was connected with the case. Somehow it had to be.
Enough to call Deputy Nutless and tell him I’d solved the crimes? Or Cotton Carson and tell him not to bother showing up for the bail hearing? Hell no. But enough to trickle some hope.
“Where did you find it?”
“Complex C. In the small lobby off the front doors.”
That was mostly the staff complex. And also where Frankie Morrell was renting his bachelor apartment. There were extra storage rooms, utility rooms, and a few bachelor apartments. One of which was Roger Cassidy’s.
The police had placed Frankie Morrell’s place ‘off limits’. Yellow tagged the door. But I had every confidence Dylan was around other places. Short of break and enter, he would have done some snooping. And he would have done some discreet questioning. Finding physical clues/potential clues was one thing — but finding out about people — whole ‘nother ball game. And Dylan was becoming damn good at it.
“Roger Cassidy is hands-down the cleanest guy I’d ever met,” he reported. “I just happened to be in the hall when a courier stopped by to pick up a parcel. Roger was cleaning the peephole in the door. Windex and everything! Later on, he was cleaning the door knob. From what Big Eddie tells me, the police had a hell of a time finding fingerprints there. Like, any fingerprints!”
And so certainly not my mothers!
“But they didn’t find incriminating fingerprints at any of the break-ins,” I said. “The only incriminating evidence that there even had been a break in were the scratches around the locks.”
“Right,” Dylan said. “According to Big Eddie, Deputy Almond got lock experts in. Those locks were most definitely picked.”
I chewed on all this for a moment.
“Think Roger is OCD?”
“I think maybe. But it’s not a ‘germ’ thing. I mean, he shook your hand. Shook my hand. Plays cards all the time with Mona. Maybe he’s just a clean freak.”
I’d heard of those — clean freaks. But I’d thought they were just a myth — like Big Foot and the Abominable Snowman and Size Doesn’t Matter. My mind drifted back to my own abode back in Marport City for a minute — socks under the bed, dust on the ceiling fan….
“Eddie, on the other hand,” Dylan continued, “is a slob. The biggest slob ever.”
That kind of surprised me. Big Eddie was an ex-military man. You’d think he’d be all about order. Precision. “You were in Eddie’s apartment?”
“No, I was in his storage room.”
“Did you snoop around?”
“Dix! What do you take me for?”
“Oh, good.” I was tired. My back was sore. I lay down on the bed while Dylan talked, punching the pillow for emphasis as I did. “What’d you find?”
“Big Eddie keeps a lot of crap in there. Nothing spectacular, though. Few dozen girlie magazines tucked in with the golf mags. Golf balls, of course. And all kinds of paint, including that butt-ugly color they used for the hallway Big Eddie has me painting tomorrow. Brushes, lawn feed, garden hoses, crack fill, sealant, plaster. You know, standard repair stuff.”
“Seems Edward Baskin is a regular jack of all trades,” I said.
“Yeah, but nothing gets done.” Dylan snorted. “He’s a slack Jack.”
“Find out anything else of interest today?” I said this through a yawn. A powerful one. It had been a late night, I’d been woken up early. And, well, just the running around and tension and mental alertness the day had required.
“Nothing concrete. Nothing absolute….” He pulled a hand over his stubbled chin. He looked down at his hands then back to me again. Whatever it was, Dylan didn’t want to tell me. Which meant, of course, it had to be bad news.
“Come on. Out with it.”
“You’re mother’s been selling off the rights to your father’s songs. She sold the rights to six in the last four months.”
My eyes shot wide. My jaw dropped. It was one thing for mother to get royalties for songs, but to out-and-out sell the rights? This didn’t sound like Mother.
I had heard a remake of one of Dad’s old songs on an FM station about a month ago. I hadn’t liked it. And I hadn’t mentioned it to Mother for it was always my understanding that she approved or disapproved who performed his work.
And why hadn’t she told me about it? At least it explained the big deposits to her bank account Dylan had discovered.
“Another thing. Everyone thinks your mother is guilty.”
“Everyone?”
He shrugged. “Nearly. Not Mona Roberts. But nobody else has a kind thing to say about your mother. No one. Harriet Appleton is especially nasty toward her.”
“Fuck.” I shook my pillowed head. “What is it with people? Why are they so quick to jump on a bandwagon? To gang up and kick someone when she’s down? Well, I’m just going to have to do a little kicking myself. You just—”
“Sshhh! Quiet, Dix.” With a roll off the bed and a thump of his feet on the floor, he was standing between the motel room bed and the window. He gave a quick nod to the bedside lamp and I quickly snapped it off, then joined him at the window.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear….
But Lance-a-Lot with net in hand, skimming the pool for debris. Only, not the Lance-a-Lot I was expecting. Gone were the happy Speedos. Instead, Lance was wearing loose fitting cargo pants, a sweatshirt two sizes too big hanging low. He even donned bug-eyed glasses. Oh my God, and Velcro shoes!
Two young women walked by him. I recognized the first — Rosie Sinatra — the gal who’d been at the desk when Dylan checked in the other night. Her friend I didn’t recognize, but she wore the same beige shorts and pink short-sleeve blouse as Rosie, so I assumed she too was on staff at the Goosebump Inn. The girls walked by Lance. But they didn’t just walk by. They gave him a hella wide berth. Lance didn’t so much as glance up at either of them.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to Dylan.
“Ah, you recognize him too! I thought you might not, considering the change in his….”
“Attire?” I offered.
“Yeah, we’ll go with that.”
“So, Lance-a-Lot, aka Lance Devinney, has himself another job, huh? Cleaning pools on the side.”
“Yeah, Rosie says he does a shitload of pools around. Freelances. She says he’s kind of creepy. Never says a word. Never looks at anyone. Just comes in, does his job, and drives away.”
The fact that Lance cleaned pools in addition to his diving work didn’t strike me as strange, but the rest of it did. “Why would he compose himself so differently?” I asked. “Why act so differently in the two places? Why dress it up for the ladies at the Wildoh and dress down so for the younger crowd?”
Dylan shrugged. He dropped the curtain back into place. I sat down on the bed. “Maybe he’s just into older women.”
Oh, fuck me!
“Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that,” Dylan sputtered. “I mean, a younger man and an older woman. Not that you’re older as in ‘older’ older. Just thinking maybe Lance liked the really old ones. Not the … older ones. Not that you’re, like, older….” He cleared his throat.
Cleared it again (and oh I bit down on the you’re-off-the-hook grin that threatened to break).
“So,” he said, changing the subject by the best means on earth. “Let’s get to work on this.” He withdrew the white board from the pile of supplies in the corner. Of all the handy dandy gadgets we’d brought, this — a tool for our minds — was still the one we turned to most.
And so we did again.
Hours later, we had six dozen stick people, lines crossed in and crossed out, diagrams that got down right rude by times (well, Dylan was the one who handed me the marker). We’d drawn up a dozen scenarios. Tens of possibilities. A few possible theories.
It was a start. A damn good start.
“Sleep over, Dix.”
Normally, this would have gotten a jolt out of me. But when Dylan muttered the words at around two in the morning, the look in his bleary eyes told me sex was the farthest thing from his mind. And mine, by this point. Plus, I knew I’d wake Mrs. P up if I went back to Mother’s. She’d told me to sleep over here. And she did pack my PJs….
He nodded to a clunky looking chair in the corner. “I’ll sleep there if you’d feel more comfortable.”
I glanced over to the world’s most uncomfortable looking contraption. Dylan wouldn’t get a wink of sleep on that, and I sure as hell wouldn’t sleep there.
“We can share the bed.”
“You sure?”
My heart sped. My mind shifted in a hundred different directions at once. Then braked in safety. “But like you said, Dylan … it’s complicated.”
“I said it’s complicated right now.”
Yeah, he had.
I grabbed the PJ bag and headed to the bathroom. You know, Mrs. P is tough as nails. Make no mistake about it. But sometimes she can be kind of, well, nice. Like taking the spaghetti over to Mona. Packing a goodie basket for Dylan. Packing my toothbrush and toothpaste and….
A see-through teddy! I could picture her now sitting on the couch, laughing up a storm.
I slept in my clothes. Uncomfortably.
Dylan was the perfect gentleman — he kept to edge of the bed, and I took my stretched-out place on the middle. God, we both must have been tired. Dylan was gently snoring before I was asleep, and it wasn’t ten minutes until I was in dreamland.
To no surprise, my REM sleep disorder kicked in. And dreamland was wild.
I had that dream I was standing on stage with my high school glee club and I was the only one in my underwear. I dreamed Noel Almond was wearing spaghetti and a pack of Labradoodles was hot on his heels. I dreamed of cheesecake, and sticky buns and golf balls and crib boards. I dreamed of a giant frog and a blue-haired hooker.
I dreamed of Peter Dodd.
When I awoke, every sheet and blanket was off the bed. The lamp and clock radio were placed safely on the floor. Dylan knew I had the sleep disorder, but had never truly seen it first hand. Until last night, apparently. My assistant was currently hunkered down on the chair in the corner with the bedspread tucked around him.
Under normal circumstances, I might feel half bad about that. But this was no normal circumstance. For I also awoke knowing damn right well who’d set up my mother for the jewel thefts. And I was betting my bottom dollar, this might just lead us also to good old Frankie Morrell.