If Tony was trying to finger Shirley, like she said, why was he creeping around the hospital trying to collect information?
Tony? Angie? Shirley? We had some serious credulity going on here. I was pretty sure I’d used my word for the day incorrectly, but no one heard, since it was just a head thought.
After Tony drove away, George and I waited in the hospital parking lot while a casket was loaded into the back of the hearse. Then we walked over. I flashed my law badge. “Undercover,” I muttered.
“We ain’t talking to you,” Hostile Boy said.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said to the heavy set woman. She nodded.
George strolled over to talk to the hearse driver. His job was to find out which one of the gang members was in the coffin. Kent Miller from the Soo? Or Bob Goodyear from Detroit? I had a pretty good idea judging by the speech patterns coming from the angry one.
Dialects are another thing a good private investor should be able to distinguish between. When George held up two fingers I knew I was right. Bob Goodyear. The shoe-less dead guy George and I had found behind my truck. The one wearing the Kromer who had picked off his own partner.
“Were Kent Miller and Bob good friends?” I asked, directing my question at the woman who must be Bob’s mother.
“I told your people already. I never heard of that other guy.”
“He wasn’t no real Orange,” Orange Shoe said.
“He was wearing your colors when he went down,” I said, rearranging a loose blond curl and readjusting the Blublocker sunglasses hiding my eyes.
“He was nobody and nothing. You have to concentrate you efforts on things that count. We wants to know who did Bobby.” He shoved a stiff finger into my shoulder and brought his face close to mine. I smelled fear and I was pretty sure it was mine. “We take care of our own. We be back.”
“Your guy killed Kent Miller. I saw him fire.” I could see the pores in his face.
“That was Bobby’s business. Not mine or yours. Bobby was set up. Come on, Ma, let’s get outta this place.”
Ma! I caught the connection between the dead man, the hostile Orange gang member, and the heavy set woman. “I didn’t get your name,” I said.
But Bobby’s brother had turned his back on me.
Chapter 22
“THIS IS THE DETROIT BANK calling,” I said into Walter’s phone. “Which one? Uh…Detroit Savings and Loan. I need to talk to Dave Nenonen. I’ll hold.”
Walter leaned against the kitchen sink drinking his version of a latte-half bottom-dregs coffee, half brandy. Five o’clock on Monday afternoon must be the start of happy hour at the Laakso household. Kitty had gone back to the hunting trailer to put pasties in the oven. Cora Mae was studying Walter’s dirty kitchen table for creepy crawlers.
“Mr. Nenonen,” I said when Dave came on the line. “I’m calling about Angie Gates. She has applied for a position with our bank. Can you give her a good reference? Um…that’s right. You didn’t know she was leaving? Well, this is awkward. Yes. Thank you.”
I hung up. Dave thought she was coming back to work on Thursday. As I suspected, she was slipping out of town without a goodbye party.
“Aren’t we supposed to be working for Shirley?” Cora Mae said. “Instead we’re tailing her and verifying the truthfulness of every word she utters.” Cora Mae studied her new manicure, the French thing with white tips. “Lyla does a nice job with nails,” she said. “And she’s got troubles at home again.”
“Happy ever after didn’t last too long,” I commented.
“Lyla thinks Tony found out she put us up to watching him.”
“Impossible,” I said, sheepishly remembering when the local warden had outed me in the woods right near Tony’s turkey blind.
“She thinks he was being nice to her just so she would call off the dogs.”
“Is that what she called us? Dogs?”
Cora Mae nodded.
I glanced down at Fred, who was lying at my feet, licking a paw. I decided to take that as a compliment. We could have been called much worse.
“Are we rehired?” I asked. That would be a bonus. We were trailing him anyway. Two paychecks for one job. One from Lyla, one from Shirley. I’d like that. We’d have the best fingernails in Stonely and have the money to pay for matching pedicures.
“No,” Cora Mae answered. “She says she doesn’t want to know what he’s up to. She’s fed up and thinking of leaving him.”
Serves the dallying fool right. Poor Lyla, though. Realizing you’re married to a cheating spouse has to be tough.
Walter had finished his second latte when he said, “Think I’ll go down to Herb’s Bar for awhile.”
Cora Mae, Fred, and I went to the trailer and sat down to dine on steaming hot pasties. Fred had one too.
“While Cora Mae had her nails done,” Kitty said, splashing ketchup on her pasty and handing the bottle to me. “I talked to Star.”
My baby girl. I had forgotten her in all the excitement. She must be worried sick about me.
“She says hi and will you hurry up and solve this case so she can quit babysitting Grandma Johnson.”
So much for family loyalty and concern. “I hope you didn’t tell her where we were,” I said. “She’d probably turn us in. I’m thinking Star might have more of her grandmother’s genes than she should.”
“‘Course I didn’t tell her. Star’s been to the jail to visit Blaze. So far he’s happy locked up. He’s bossing Snell around, trying to run the show. Blaze told Star a few things he overhead about the murders.”
“Like we can believe anything Blaze says,” Cora Mae added, truthfully. My son hadn’t been a natural born liar before the brain disease struck.
“It depends,” I said, ready to defend Blaze. I can say anything I want about him, good, bad, or terrible, but that doesn’t apply to other people, even friends. “You can judge by what comes out of his mouth. If he’s a five-star general in search of blue diamonds, or if he’s showing you his new dog and you can’t see the dog because it’s invisible, that’s made up.”
“In other words,” Kitty said. “If it’s far-fetched, don’t believe him.”
“Right,” I agreed. “So what did he hear?”
Kitty added more ketchup to her pasty. “The Detroit guy on the roof was wearing Onni Maki’s Kromer.”
“I thought the guy’s headdress was strange, considering he came from Detroit,” I said. A troll doesn’t usually wear a Yooper hat. I had rolled the stolen hat idea around inside my head earlier.
“He took it out of Onni’s car.”
Cora Mae made a face when she heard the name. Onni Maki is seventy years old. He wears gold chains around his neck, a pinky ring, and wraps his hair over a big bald spot. He’s also a widower and thinks he’s the hottest thing in the U.P. He was one of the first men in the county that Cora Mae rejected after only one date. Onni had made Cora Mae pay her own way. “Pond scum,” she said under her breath.
Kitty scraped her plate and looked around for more pasties. She knew there weren’t any left. It was just wishful thinking. “Onni was part of the posse outside the credit union. Bob Goodyear was trying to disguise himself with the hat.”
“Instead it made him stand out.”
“Blaze said Dickey’s been tracking the Orange Gang. I guess they’re a tough bunch. But none of them knows the first guy, the robber. Bob Goodyear must have hired Kent Miller to go in. Dickey thinks he shot him because the robbery went wrong and he was worried about being identified.”
“That’s the only reasonable part of the whole thing,” I said. “Bob and Kent decide to rob the credit union. Kent goes in, wearing orange shoes. He steals a pillowcase filled with paper. Angie, who is really Shirley, sounds the alarm. Bob kills Kent to conceal his identity. Then someone kills Bob just for grins. And, of yes, the credit union has been robbed, but at a different time than the robbery, and that money is still missing.”