He pulled out his pick tools, and a minute later the door swung open.
His Glock was in a waistband holster. He hoped he had no cause to draw it.
He was here for a number of reasons, but principally because if his father had not killed Sherman Clancy, then his son Pete had a great motive to do so.
Money, or whatever was left of it.
There might be something here that would prove this, starting, hopefully, with a Ka-Bar knife with Sherm Clancy’s dried blood on it along with his son’s prints.
The place was garishly decorated. Every room was overstuffed with furniture, every window overwhelmed with huge drapes, every table bursting with expensive and ugly knickknacks, and every wall covered with oil paintings of questionable taste.
And since Pete was now the master of the house, it was also trashed. Empty beer, wine, and liquor bottles were everywhere. Crusted dishes were piled high in the sink. Bugs scampered over them. The fridge was pretty much empty.
Yet Sherman Clancy had not been dead that long. And the pool and grounds had clearly been left to fall into disrepair for a much longer time. Robie thus assumed a lot of this had been going on while the old man was alive.
Was the pot of gold running out? If so, why? Taggert had said Clancy had been a big spender. Was that the reason? Or was there something else?
The house was large and there were many places to look, and Robie was one to be methodical. After an hour or so he finished with the first floor and headed up the winding staircase. The second floor was all bedrooms and bathrooms. He searched each one and found nothing useful.
There was one more floor to go.
There were five rooms up here. One was a club room with a full bar, pool table, steam and sauna room, and a hot tub that looked like it was actually clean and operating normally. Robie thought Pete might bring some of the ladies up here for a quick steam, sauna, and dip in the hot tub. And probably more than that.
He hoped the chlorine level in the water was set on high.
One room was set up as an office. Robie took his time going through this one. There was a desk lamp with a frayed power cord. Robie turned it on and drew it closer to some paper files he had found, moving a half-full can of Budweiser out of the way.
He took pictures of these files. There was also a computer. It was password protected, but Robie finally hit the jackpot when he typed in “Redneck.”
Pete had evidently been using this computer, because he saw e-mails coming in and out from Pete’s account.
It appeared that since Sherm’s death, his son had been contacting various folks at one of the casinos in Biloxi named the Rebel Yell Grand Palace. As he read through these e-mails, it became clear to him that Pete was angling to replace his father as a business partner with these folks.
That could be a terrific motive to kill the old man.
Robie copied these e-mails to a flash drive he had brought. He also copied other e-mails that he didn’t have time to read but that looked interesting. He would read them later.
The next room was apparently Pete’s sleeping quarters.
It was like one would have expected from a young man living alone.
Disgusting.
Robie wondered whether his tetanus shot was up-to-date as he surveyed the interior of the room. He couldn’t see the floor for all the crap everywhere: dirty clothes, two guitars, magazines, a rifle and two handguns, video game packs, dishes, empty beer cans and liquor bottles, a chin-up bar, some dumbbells. The walls were covered with posters with three basic themes: music, sports, and porn. Over the doorway hung a string of women’s colorful thongs.
Notches in the bedpost, twenty-first century style.
If there was a desk in here anywhere, Robie couldn’t see it under the junk. There was a pair of headphones lying on the bed that Robie had seen before in a store. They cost about a thousand bucks.
Then he saw it. He slipped across the cluttered floor and picked up the laptop with his gloved hand. The same password worked here.
He started going through files and downloaded to his flash drive anything that seemed relevant. He had just finished when he heard a door slam from downstairs.
He hadn’t heard a car drive up. But apparently Pete was home again.
Robie checked his watch. It was nearly four in the morning. Time had moved fast.
Robie stepped to the door and peered out. Pete would probably come up to his room and crash. Or he might not be alone. Then he might hit the hot tub with whomever he had with him.
Either way, Robie had to clear out of this room.
He slipped into the hallway, thinking that he would hide in another room up here and wait for Pete and whoever else might be with him to pass by. Then Robie would make his escape.
He had just stepped into another bedroom on the top floor and eased the door almost shut when he heard the footsteps coming up.
And then he heard the voices.
And with that, everything Robie had planned to do changed completely.
Chapter
30
Pete Clancy indeed was not alone tonight. But on his arm he didn’t have a half-stoned, half-naked girl waiting to get bedded.
There were three others with Pete. And all were men.
They wore slacks and jackets, but no ties. They were large, looked tough and probably were. Two of them were on either side of Pete, who was struggling to no avail.
“Let me go, please, I don’t know nothin’. I swear to God.”
“You’ll be seein’ God you don’t give us what we need.”
This came from the third man who was walking ahead of the other two.
He was a bit smaller than his two companions, and his suit looked more expensive. He also had a colorful pocket square. His face was lined and his hair had a touch of gray, while the other two were in their early thirties. They were obviously the muscle.
“Please, what do you want from me? I don’t know nothin’,” wailed Pete.
The third man turned around and threw a haymaker directly into Pete’s jaw.
Pete slumped, held up only by the men on either side of him.
As Pete began to cry and spit blood from his mouth, the man who had struck him said, “Well, you sure act like you know somethin’, dickhead. You send shit out and act like the big man, which makes it seem like you’re in the loop. So if you’re not, too bad for you, asshole. Lose, lose.”
They dragged him into the office but didn’t close the door behind them.
Robie checked to make sure there was no one else coming up the stairs, and then he slipped out, crossed noiselessly to the office doorway, and peered in.
They had forced Pete to sit down at the desk. The leader of the pack had his hand clamped around the back of Pete’s neck.
“Okay, little Petey, all you got to do is show us what you got. Or what your old man had. And then we’ll leave.”
“You…you mean you won’t hurt me?”
“Nah, why would we? You give us what we want, we’re outta here. No hard feelings. You go your way, we go ours.”
From the young man’s expression Robie realized that even Pete Clancy was not stupid enough to believe that.
Pete blurted out, “You’re gonna kill me, don’t matter what I do.”
“Gee, Petey, you got me there. But there are degrees of killin’, principally fast and painless, or the opposite. Which do you want? ’Cause your old man’s got a copper soaking tub in his ‘master suite’ that’s perfect for slow death by sulfuric acid bubble bath. There won’t be a drop of you left, boy, but you’ll feel all of it until you just can’t stand it anymore. I know ways to keep you conscious till your skin’s almost all gone.” The man slammed Pete’s face down on the desk. “You want that, huh, you little pissant?”