Deadly Deceptions (16 page)

I handed the bottle to Carmen. “I have to leave,” I said, dropping the tiny white pill into my jacket pocket and hoping the seams were good. Then I produced a business card, newly printed with “Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks—Private Investigations” and my phone numbers. “Could you stay with Mrs. Pennington, Carmen? Overnight?”

Carmen took the card, glanced down at it, considered the question briefly—it was safe to assume she had a life outside the walls of Casa Pennington—then nodded, the set of her face conveying resolve rather than resignation.

“Call me if there are any problems,” I said. “And keep the doors locked. Look through the peephole before you let anybody in.”

Carmen started looking scared again.

I waited for her to cross herself, but she didn't.

I headed for the door, eager to get out before another phone rang, precipitating another crisis. “And Carmen?”

She stared at me bleakly.

“Do you know Dr. Pennington's son, Jack?”

She nodded, still speechless.

“Does he have a key to this house?” I asked.

Another nod.

“Have the locks changed. Today. And get a new security code for the alarm system, too.”

At this, Carmen actually paled. I hoped she wouldn't grab her big purse, rush to her car and boogie for home as soon as I was gone. “Mr. Jack—?”

“Could be dangerous,” I said.

She followed me to the front door, in order to lock it behind me, and that gave me a chance to ask one more question.

“Do you know where Mrs. Pennington keeps her gun?”

“It was stolen, this gun,” Carmen answered very quietly, after gulping once. “She kept it in a wall safe, in her closet.”

I figured it was time to let the poor woman off the hook. As it was, she'd probably try to barricade the door with the entryway breakfront as soon as it closed behind me. “Try not to worry,” I said. “I don't mean to alarm you, but you can never be too careful.”

I slipped out, stood in the brick-paved portico for a few moments.

I didn't like leaving Greer, even in Carmen's care. It froze my blood to know that Jack Pennington had a key to the front door, and almost certainly knew the alarm code. Come to that, he could let himself into the guesthouse, too, if he wanted to.

It was time to shop for that Glock I'd been wanting.

It was definitely time.

 

G
UNS ARE PLENTIFUL
in Arizona, and a lot of unlikely people pack heat—soccer moms, TV talk-show hosts and even preachers. It's that kind of state; the Old West is still part of the collective psyche. There's no helmet law to keep motorcyclists from bashing their brains out on roads, and when it comes to daylight saving time, just forget it. When the rest of the country springs forward or falls back, Arizonans don't adjust their watches.

I drove to a shop in Cave Creek, the kind of joint where they sell postcards, tacky souvenir fridge magnets, mugs and ashtrays, T-shirts, mineral specimens and plastic rabbits with antlers.

Oh, and serious firepower, too, though that's often a sideline.

“I want a Glock,” I told the clerk, who looked as though he might belong to one of those radical patriot groups who gather around pool tables and in detached garages amid rusted-out pickup trucks, where they smoke, drink beer and plot the overthrow of the United States government.

Bubba, who was missing several teeth, needed to wash his hair and had a coiled snake and the words Don't Tread On Me tattooed on his right forearm, straightened behind the grimy souvenir counter and looked me over. I saw recognition register. When guys like Bubba actually think, it startles the rest of their body, and causes a visible chain reaction—twitching, restless fingers, shifty eyes and some foot shuffling.

“I've seen you around Bad-Ass Bert's,” Bubba said. “And on TV, too.”

Media fame can be a burden. I dug in my purse for my wallet.

“Shame about ole Bert biting the dust the way he did,” Bubba went on when I didn't speak. “I heard he left the bar to you in his will. You gonna open it up for business anytime soon?”

“Probably,” I said. The way my P.I. career was going, I'd need the income, but the truth is, it made me sad to think of setting foot inside the saloon again. Russell, the basset hound, wouldn't be around, and neither would Bert. Besides, I'd had some traumatic experiences there.

“Why a Glock?” Bubba asked conversationally.

Because Kay Scarpetta carries one in Patricia Cornwell's books
didn't seem like a good answer. Nor could I admit to the other reason—that my boyfriend, the cop, owned two.

I leaned in, even though it was a rash move, considering Bubba practiced poor oral hygiene and needed a more reliable deodorant product than he was currently using. “Gun of choice for private investigators everywhere,” I said seriously.

“I saw in the papers where you were a dick,” Bubba said, bending, presumably to bring some of his wares out from under the counter for my inspection.

I let the dick remark pass, even though it was rife with possibilities for sarcastic comebacks.

“You know how to shoot one of these things?” Bubba inquired after laying two battered plastic cases on top of the counter.

I planned on getting Jolie to teach me, or maybe Tucker. There might even be a
Damn Fool's Guide
on the subject. Suffice it to say, if I had to do anything technical, like release the safety or slam in a cartridge magazine to qualify to buy the gun, I'd be leaving Bubba's unarmed.

“Yes,” I lied. “Of course I do.”

Bubba opened the cases. The Glocks gleamed inside, one black, compact, with a short barrel, one shiny steel, with a long one.

I went with black, because it looked like Tucker's gun and would be easier to carry in my purse. Plus, black goes with everything.

“Bullets?” Bubba asked mildly.

“Lots of them. Whatever fits. And definitely hollow-point.”

Bubba whistled. “They'll do some damage, them hollow-points,” he said, smiling conspiratorially.

“How much?” I asked, wallet in hand.

“Well, these here guns are secondhand,” Bubba mused. Then he named a price that made me catch my breath. Glocks, alas, are not cheap.

I imagined Jack Pennington possibly abducting and then gunning down his own father in the desert. I'd never met him, but he was active in the community, and I'd seen his picture in the paper a lot.

He might come after Greer—or me, since I intended to dig around in his background a little.

I thought about the caller on Greer's throwaway cell phone.

And I wrote a hefty check.

I wanted to ask if I needed a permit, but that would have revealed my ignorance to a degree even Bubba might notice. At the time, all I wanted was a way to save myself if I woke up some night and found somebody standing over my bed in a ski mask, so I didn't worry about the legalities.

Back in the car, I stuck the Glock under the front seat, still in its case, and sat there in the gravel parking lot, shaking and sweating a little.

Then I got a grip. If Jolie could manage a gun, so could I. No problem.

I'd no sooner gotten that grip when I lost it again, flashed back in time to an August night in my childhood, when both my parents were shot to death at close range. I was five when it happened, but now, at twenty-eight, I could smell the coppery scent of blood, see it lying in crimson pools, reflecting the light.

My stomach seized with a painful wrench.

Good thing it had already ground the sausage biscuit down to nothing.

I drew deep breaths until the memories began to subside.

My cell phone rang, and this time I was glad of the interruption. “Mojo Sheepshanks,” I said.

The caller was Helen Erland. “You can get in to see Vince anytime this afternoon,” she said dully. “Just show up at the jail. His lawyer's already made the arrangements.”

“That's good,” I said, blessing the unknown public defender. “Are you okay?” I could have chewed off my tongue after I uttered that question.
Of course
she wasn't okay. Her daughter was dead, and her husband, who might have been innocent but might also have been Gillian's killer, was in jail.

Still, I was heartened, because I knew I'd be able to tell if Vince Erland was guilty if I could look him in the eye, just the way I always knew when a slot machine was about to pay off.

That's why they called me Mojo.

“Oh, I'm just dandy,” Helen said, and hung up on me.

The phone immediately rang again.

This time it was Tucker.

“Hey,” I said, still feeling a little shaky.

“Hey,” he replied. “What are you doing?”

“Shopping,” I told him, torn between hoping he'd say he couldn't make it to my place that night and hoping he'd offer to pick up dinner on the way. “What are
you
doing?”

He lowered his voice, so he probably wasn't alone. “Anticipating,” he said.

Heat suffused my body, which had been stone-cold and clammy only moments before, and I got a little damp. “Did you check out the Jack Pennington lead?”

Tucker sighed.

“Just asking,” I said cheerfully.

“He's clean, Moje. Pennington's never had so much as a parking ticket.”

I felt discouraged, but the prospect of hot sex with Tucker did a lot to raise my spirits. “That doesn't mean he's not a murderer,” I pointed out.

“Can we not talk business?” Tucker asked.

“We can talk about dinner,” I offered. “What are you bringing?”

He laughed. “I'm in charge of dinner?”

“Unless you want me to cook,” I said.

“Scary thought,” he answered. “How about Chinese takeout?”

“Works for me.”

“Moje?”

He sounded so serious that I was scared he'd been planning to break bad news over the chow mein and kung pao chicken, and had just now decided not to wait. I expected him to say something like “Allison and I have decided to try again” or “I've just been diagnosed with a terminal disease.”

“What?” I asked, barely whispering.

“Don't wear underpants,” Tucker replied.

A
FTER
I
LEFT
B
UBBA'S
, I headed for downtown Phoenix and the jail. Parking was a bitch, but I finally found a spot, locked up the car, went inside and introduced myself at the reception desk, all the while keeping a sharp eye out for Tucker. He was bound to find out I'd been to visit Vince Erland, but I wanted it to be after the fact, when he couldn't interfere, not before, when he could hustle me out of there.

Getting in was remarkably easy. I was almost disappointed, since I'd been all geared up for a bureaucratic hassle of some kind. I was sure they'd say the public defender hadn't called, the paperwork was lost, the prisoner had been carried off by visitors from another planet.

Instead, I was handed a clip-on pass, herded through a metal detector and shown to the visitors' area.

It was right out of a TV movie. Thick glass wall, with a chair and a phone on either side. Graffiti scratched into the counter.

I sat down and waited.

When Vince Erland arrived, wearing the regulation orange jail outfit, I sized him up. He was tall and super-skinny, with a bad complexion and greasy hair, reminiscent of Bubba. His mouse-brown tresses were thinning on top, but the rest of it was long, and pulled back into a ponytail. His eyes were a cold, smoky gray.

He sat down, reached for the phone receiver and said, “I wondered what somebody named Mojo Sheepshanks would look like.” His gaze wandered lazily over me. “Now I know.”

“I'm here to ask some questions about the day Gillian died,” I said.

“Yeah,” he answered, leaning so far back in his chair that I half expected him to slide out of it. “Helen told me she hired you.”

“What happened, Mr. Erland?”

“Vince,” he said, as if we'd met in a bar and he was about to ask me to dance.

Something burned in the back of my throat. “Vince, then,” I replied, sitting up very straight. Then I waited.

“I picked Gilly up after her dance class,” he said. “We couldn't afford the lessons, and after all, the kid was stone-deaf, but Helen insisted she could
feel
the music….”

“Go on,” I said evenly when his voice fell away.

“She wanted a damn dog. It was all she talked about—waving her hands around all the time. So I promised her I'd look into it. That's all I said—that I'd look into it. I figured she'd forget the whole thing eventually. Hell, I've been out of work for six months, and Helen barely makes enough to keep us going.”

Everything inside me soured. Vince Erland might be telling the truth, but even if he hadn't killed Gillian, he was a son of a bitch. “You know sign language?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “But the kid managed to get her point across just the same.”

“She wanted a dog,” I recapped, to get him back on track.

“We stopped off for milk and beer, and I broke it to her that there wasn't going to be any dog. She took off—I thought she'd gone to the bathroom or something, or decided to walk home. I looked all over the store, and then I drove back to the trailer, expecting to pick her up along the way and give her what-for for skipping out like that. There's all kinds of creeps out there.” He cocked a thumb to indicate the outside world, which was ironic in itself, since he was sitting in creep-central. “They'd as soon kill you as look at you.”

My skin crawled, but I managed to project sympathetic detachment. “You didn't call the police or alert the store manager when you realized Gillian was gone?”

Erland went a muddy color that clashed with his jail clothes. “The cops are making a big deal out of that,” he said. “The kid was always flying off the handle, taking off—look at her crossways, and she'd be over to Chelsea's or God knows where else. I thought she'd gone home, or maybe to find Helen. I didn't get worried till I got home and called around a little. Nobody'd seen her, it turned out, so I called the police. Next thing I know, I'm on my way downtown for ‘questioning.' Then it's some bullshit about parking tickets. My lawyer's going to get me out of here, though. They're running out of excuses to hold me, and mark my words, lady, they haven't got
shit
for evidence.”

I wondered what Helen Erland had seen in this man.

Had he killed Gillian?

The mojo failed me. I didn't know.

He was a jerk, that was obvious. But that didn't mean he'd murder a child.

“Helen told me you saw the kid's ghost,” he said. He sleazed upward in his chair, leaned forward and thumped the glass hard with a middle finger. “Listen up,” he went on. “Here's the only reason I agreed to talk to you. Stay away from my wife. She's got problems enough without a bunch of hocus-pocus, I-see-dead-people crap. You got that, Mojo Sheepshit?”

As if
that
was original. I'd heard it on the playground as a kid, and from a couple of Nick's girlfriends, too. I replaced the phone receiver, proud of my restraint, stood up and left.

I was no closer to finding Gillian's killer than I'd ever been. But I knew this much: Vince Erland was still in the running.

 

T
HE
G
LOCK AND
I
HEADED
back north, this time to Scottsdale.

I parked in the lot of an indoor target range, got out my cell phone and called Helen at the convenience store.

“You upset Vince,” she scolded, once she knew I was the one calling.

“Murder investigations are always upsetting,” I said.

“You're fired,” Helen told me.

I sighed. She could fire me—no great loss, since I wasn't getting paid—but I wasn't leaving the case alone until I knew who'd ended Gillian's life that day after the dance rehearsal class. “A little professional advice?” I ventured.

“What?” Helen snapped.

“Get a divorce,” I answered. And then I hung up.

I did some deep breathing to restore my equilibrium, and then, leaving the Glock in its case under the seat, I went inside the range to ask about shooting lessons. The stakes had gone up; I'd just made another enemy—Vince Erland.

The muffled pop of bullets somewhere out back was clearly audible from the reception area.

A side door opened, and a man came through it.

He was good-looking, dark haired and leanly fit. He wore khakis and a navy blue polo shirt that matched his eyes. I pegged him right away for either a former FBI agent or an ex-cop, which says something for my instincts. Turned out he was both, though I didn't find that out until later.

“I want to learn to shoot,” I said, and then blushed, because the way he looked at me made me feel strangely self-conscious. I'd had the presence of mind to leave the guesthouse phone in the car this time, but I wished I'd changed out of the pantsuit.

“You came to the right place,” he replied, and even though he ran his gaze over me much as Erland had at the jail, the feeling was remarkably different. It wasn't attraction, really—I was gone on Tucker, for better or worse—but I knew I
could
be attracted to this guy if I let my guard down for an instant. “Do you own a firearm?”

I don't know what made me lie. Maybe it was habit. Maybe it was common sense—if the Glock under my car seat was illegal, I wanted Tucker to be the one to tell me, not some stranger who might feel bound to call the cops first and ask questions later.

“Not yet,” I said. “I thought I should learn how to handle a gun before I bought one.”

“Good thinking.” He smiled. A long counter stood between us. He put out a hand. “Max Summervale,” he said.

“Mojo Sheepshanks,” I replied as we shook.

A charge jolted up my arm.

Max squinted, still grinning. “I've seen you somewhere,” he said.

“I was on TV a while back,” I answered, hoping he'd let it go at that.

“You're an actress?”

“A private detective,” I said after shaking my head once, hoping he wouldn't ask me to elaborate on how that could get me on the news.

He didn't. But Max was a long time letting go of my hand, and for some reason, I didn't pull free. “I'll need to see some ID,” he told me, “and you'll have to fill out a form. Just a formality. We have guns and ammo inside, and I'll be your instructor.”

“Can I shoot today, though?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” Max said. “Provided your background check comes back okay, of course. I'm sure it will.”

I nodded, a little disappointed. It wasn't as though I had time on my hands; I had detecting to do, and a hot date with Tucker that night. I'd need to keep a finger on the pulse of the Greer situation, Helen Erland had just fired me and Beverly Pennington was expecting me at two the next afternoon.

For a person who wasn't earning a living, I was pretty busy.

“Okay,” I said. I filled out the form, showed Max my driver's license and made an appointment for my first shooting lesson at nine o'clock the next morning.

I left the building, got back in my car.

It was too early to bolt for the guesthouse. If I did, I'd end up pacing, waiting for Tucker and, as I said, I had Things To Do. What I
didn't
have was a plan—just a sense of restlessness, underlain with a hamster-wheel urgency.

So I went to Bad-Ass Bert's, steeled myself and let myself into the downstairs bar.

Sawdust floors.

Pool tables.

A dark, silent jukebox.

The hot-dog cooker on top of the makeshift bar. It had been Bert's pride and joy, that bar. A few barrels, with boards nailed on top, bought at a sale in Tombstone. According to Bert, the likes of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had stood before it, swilling whiskey.

I missed Bert.

Touched the bar stool where Russell the basset hound used to sit. I missed the dog even more than Bert, but I was never going to see either of them again. They were in Witness Protection, along with Bert's girlfriend, Sheila, after testifying in some drug trial, behind closed doors. The details had never been made public, and while Tucker knew the scoop, thanks to his stint with the DEA, he wasn't telling.

I looked around the place. I could sell it—the building was old, but the real estate was prime, right on the main street of Cave Creek. To look at the town itself, you'd have thought it was low income, but there were mansions in them there hills.

The thing to do was let the bar go. If I didn't, the taxes alone would eat me alive, and I knew even less about running a bar than being a private detective, which ought to tell you something.

I lifted my eyes to the rough, weathered board ceiling. My apartment was up there—nothing special, but
mine.

The plain fact was I
couldn't
give the place up—not the apartment, not the bar. I couldn't really explain why, except to say I wasn't through with it yet. Selling Bad-Ass Bert's would have been like leaving a theater before I'd seen the end of a movie.

I would get the liquor license transferred from Bert's name to mine, I decided. Reopen the joint and call it Mojo's. Run my P.I. business out of the bar.

None of that would be easy to do, I knew, but it made me feel better just to decide. I perched on Russell's old stool, propped an elbow on top of the bar and imagined myself serving up brewskies to a lot of pool-playing bikers.

It daunted me, but not as much as going back to medical coding and billing, or applying for a receptionist's job somewhere. I wasn't making any money as a detective, and my cash stash, though in excess of three hundred thousand dollars and drawing serious interest, could disappear overnight if I had to use it to pay for a criminal defense lawyer for Greer.

I needed an income.

I got out Bert's phone book and my cell phone and called the State Liquor Board, first thing. For a fee, I could transfer the license and be selling beer, wine and whiskey within ten days. I scribbled down the Web site address the clerk gave me, where I could download the form.

Buoyed by the unexpected lack of resistance, I called a sign company next. Ordered a blue neon tube spelling Mojo's in cursive, and read the numbers off my ATM card into the phone.

When that was done, I rooted around in Bert's cupboards—
my
cupboards, now—and found a ring binder I'd seen my friend consult many times in the past. It was Bert's supplier list. I carried that out to the car, tossed it on the passenger seat and relocked the doors.

Then I went up the stairs and let myself into the apartment.

This time I wasn't scared.

I stripped off the pantsuit, took denim shorts, a bra and a skimpy top—but no underpants—from the dresser in my bedroom, stripped, adjusted the shower spray and stepped over the edge of my old-fashioned bathtub, pulling the curtain firmly.
Take note, psychos and serial killers,
I thought,
Mojo is
back.