Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder (3 page)

“Sure do,” he rumbled. “Been delivering here the last year or so. I’ll leave some in the cooler and bring the rest down to that aromatic cellar. You wanna do a count?”

“Nope. Do your thing. Oh—if you don’t mind, stick the invoice on top of the microwave.”

“Can do.”

“Thanks so much for your patience.” I started for the back entrance, but I realized I should probably update JT on the current state of affairs—and the probable state of our vacation if my father didn’t pull his head from between his butt cheeks and materialize.

The humid air of the kitchen blasted me as I stepped across the threshold and blocked the screen door open. A fresh wave of impotent fury fogged my brain. I tried to breathe through the haze while I speed dialed JT. The display on my cell read 5:15 p.m. There was still time to salvage this night.

Cold tendrils of air wafted in from the open back door, swirling around as the delivery guy hand-trucked in his first load. A shiver worked its way up my spine.

I leaned against the stainless-steel counter waiting for JT to either pick up or for voicemail to kick in. The phone rang, and something other than cold air hit my nose. There was that smell again—like a sour, backed-up drain. I took another sniff, scanning the floor for the location of the suspect drain. A bucket of water dumped down the pipe should fix that little problem.

The sound of my girlfriend’s voice jolted me back to awareness. “Babe, hey, I’ve been meaning to call.” JT sounded exasperated and slightly out of breath, and I forgot all about stinky drainpipes.

“Sorry if I caught you at a bad time.”

“No. I’m sorry. Trying to tie everything up so we can head out tomorrow, and things aren’t playing out as easily as they should.”

Here we go. Time to add a healthy portion of guilt to my slow boil. I was truly going to murder my father when he showed up. “Yeah. About that.”

There was a pause on the line. “Uh-oh. What.”

I gave her my thirty-five-cent version of the latest events.

“Shit.”

“You said it.”

“Want me to head to the Lep if I ever get done? At least we won’t have to spend the dawn of the New Year apart.”

“Sure. Thanks. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

JT rang off, and I headed back into battle.

The hands on an old Lucky Strike neon clock above the bar read twenty-five after nine. Still no Pete. He was almost certainly holed up in some dingy tavern, shooting Jack or Jim.

One good thing I hadn’t realized was that my father had actually thought through at least some of the logistics of staffing the Lep for this big-ass holiday. In addition to Jill, he’d scheduled two additional servers to come on at seven. That considerably lightened the work in front of the bar, and Lisa and I had fallen into a comfortable rhythm as we poured beer, popped tops, mixed drinks, and made change.

The reveler’s mass mood was rowdy but congenial, and that made me breathe a whole lot easier, although I still felt edgy that a bouncer wasn’t working the front door. I wondered if that had slipped my dad’s mind or if he’d been planning on handling that aspect of things himself. By unspoken agreement, both Lisa and I were careful to card anyone who looked remotely on the down side of twenty-one. She was an ass saver.

I was in the middle of making a screwdriver when someone thwapped me on the shoulder. I nearly pulled a repeat of the Mr. Happy performance on the thwapper before I recognized the shaggy hair and grinning face of my best friend, Nick Cooper, better known to the masses as Coop.

“Hey!” I leaned forward and stifled a shout of glee. “Thought you were partying with the Beans.” The Green Beans for Peace and Preservation was an environmental organization dedicated to the green cause. Well-intentioned, often jailed.

He hollered, “Heard you were in a spot. Figured there was no better way to ring in the New Year than to hang out at the Lep.” He looked around. “Pete hasn’t shown up yet?”

I shook my head.

“What can I do?”

Music to my ears. “You wanna card the little girls and boys and bounce whoever needs bouncing? First dibs on the hot chicks.”

Coop’s grin grew. In the last year or so, my meek friend had turned from a somewhat wussy pacifist into a pacifist who wasn’t afraid to confront trouble with an appropriate level of ferocity. Since he’d recently split ways—on friendly terms—with his enigmatic ex-cartel-running girlfriend, he was more than happy to cavort with potential playmates.

Into Coop’s ear I said in a somewhat lower register, “Who told you what was going on? Kate?”

“No. JT called and said you might need a hand.”

Oh, but I loved that woman.

“In fact,” Coop said, “here she is.” He stepped sideways and, holy crap on a cracker, there was my girl in the flesh. A purple scarf wound around her neck and was tucked into the front of her navy blue pea coat. Her cheeks were red from the cold.

I couldn’t help but grin like an infatuated teenager. “Hey!”

Coop waved a hand and threaded his way to the front door.

JT wedged herself up to the bar. Wisps of chestnut hair had escaped her once-neat ponytail and floated around her cheeks. “What’s a girl gotta do for some attention around here?”

Unmindful of the audience, I cupped her face and gave her a brief moment of some very appreciative attention. Apparently the crowd was too schnockered to care, because there was absolutely no reaction.

She leaned back with a smile. “Coop heeded my cry for help. I tried to rope Kate and her gal toy in, but they had a better offer.”

I laughed. “Figures.”

A tall, alcohol-deprived carouser sitting next to JT started getting feisty. The woman had on a cone-shaped New Year’s hat and periodically blew a kazoo at me. Prior to JT’s arrival, I might have ripped that kazoo out of her mouth and tried to shove it down her throat. Now instead bringing a potential lawsuit on my father, I finished making her drink, grabbed the kazoo from between her lips, and dumped it in her martini. I handed it over with a satisfied smirk.

She slapped a bill on the bar and, with her kazoo-laden drink in hand, backed cautiously away from the insane bartender.

I returned my attention to JT, who was watching me with an amused grin. “What can I do?”

“Make the rounds? Pick up empties, wipe tables?”

“No problem.” JT pushed back from the bar as she unwound her scarf and shrugged out of her jacket.

I exchanged her winter wear for a bar rag and tossed it to her. She snagged it out of the air and disappeared into the throng.

I was elbowed back to reality by a well-placed shot from Lisa. She yelled, “Who was that?”

“Girlfriend,” I hollered.

“Not bad.” She grinned and moved on to another customer.

For the better part of the next two and a half hours, Lisa and I worked nonstop. As the countdown neared, I tried to keep an eye on the time so we could turn up the volume on the two TVs that were mounted above the bar. We were ten minutes from the New Year, and I finally felt like we might make it to the end of the night.

I handed off the last of the latest round of drink orders to one of the servers whose name had flown in one ear and straight out the other. She was a fresh-faced, college-aged kid with a strawberry-blond French braid who seemed reasonably capable. She shouldered the loaded tray with practiced grace. I wondered what she wanted to be when she grew up.

“Hey!” A hoarse voice shook me out of my very momentary reverie.

I turned toward a balding, narrow-faced man with a bulbous red nose who was crammed like a sardine against the bar. From the look of him, he appreciated his alcohol.

“What can I—” The rest of my query died in my throat when I caught sight of the wallet he was holding out. Instead of showing me his driver’s license, the wallet contained a police shield. In the blink of an eye, multiple thoughts raced through my head, a dead father leading the chase. My jaw snapped shut.

He squinted at me, looking remarkably like Popeye the Sailor Man.

I waited, inanely wondering if he was going to speak out of the side of his mouth and ask me for some spinach. When the words came, they weren’t about spinach. “Peter O’Hanlon here?”

Okay. If my father was dead, would they be asking for him? I had no idea. I quickly scanned the crowd for JT, without success.
I said, “No, he’s not.”

Popeye shifted his eyes from one end of the bar to the other as if he thought I might be hiding my dad in plain sight. His gaze pinned me again. “Know where I can find him?”

I leaned close. “If I could find him right now, I’d probably kill him. What’s going on?”

His breath was hot on my cheek and smelled like a combination of cigarettes and wintergreen. I wondered if he used mints like my dad did to hide the evidence of his lapses.

“I need to talk to him.”

“Don’t know what to tell you. I haven’t seen my father today.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah, Pete O’Hanlon’s my dad. Did you pick him up again?”

Popeye gave me a sharp look. “No. Should we?”

Well, hell. I was too busy to play twenty questions with the law. The clock on the wall read 11:56. If he wasn’t here to break the news to me that I had a dead daddy, I didn’t have time to deal with him. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know where he is. If you find him, please tell him to get his ass back here.” I was about to move on when the man stopped me with a hand on my wrist.

Irritated, I swung back to face him. “What?”

Popeye pulled me toward him and again put his lips next to my cheek. “Your father own a gun?”

A gun? What kind of question was that? My dad used to keep an old revolver under the bar for emergencies, but as far as I knew, he’d never pulled it out. Whether it was still there I had no idea. “He used to,” I answered warily. “Why?”

Popeye flipped his business card at me, like a surly TV detective. “You call me if he comes back, okay?”

I picked up the card. Emblazoned across the top was
Sgt. Robert DeSilvero
followed on the next line by
Saint Paul Police Department
, with
Homicide Division
printed below that.

Holy cow. Homicide Division? My head snapped up to meet Sergeant DeSilvero’s eyes.

“Call me.” He backed up and faded into the masses.

Any further thought I had on what transpired were lost when the floor literally started vibrating from the stomping of feet and thunder of voices shouting down the seconds to the new year.

It didn’t look like 2012 was going to be getting off to a very good start.

It was past three in the morning when JT and I hit the sack. Exhaustion made my body feel heavy and lethargic. JT clicked off the bedside lamp, and the mattress sank down as she crawled in and rolled to face me. She propped herself on her elbow, silhouetted against the window behind her.

“Okay. You’ve been weird all night. What’s going on?”

My emotions were a jumble. Throughout the last twelve hours, too many thoughts and feelings I couldn’t deal with had been whirling through my brain. At some point I’d shunted my misgivings deep into my mental dungeon, a place that was reserved for stowing away the crap I didn’t want to deal with. I had long ago honed the ability to block out everything but the most immediate issues and deal with whatever situation was most dire, but a part of me knew I couldn’t compartmentalize like that forever.

At the Leprechaun tonight, we’d been so busy that I hadn’t had a chance to tell JT about the visit from Sgt. Robert DeSilvero of the SPPD. Or about the letter that was burning a hole in the pocket of my pants. So I cranked up the moat gate and let out some of my confusion and fear. As I talked, JT’s hand settled gently on my ribs, warming the skin through my T-shirt. Her touch often kept me grounded, and it did again now as I haltingly explained things.

“So,” I said, “I have no idea what the cop wanted aside from the gun thing, which I don’t get, and I still have no idea where my goddamn father is.” I blew out an irritated breath, concentrated on JT’s thumb as it traced abstract patterns on my side. “Oh, yeah, and there’s the little matter of a letter I found on Dad’s desk. A note of intent regarding the sale of the Leprechaun.”

JT’s hand stilled its calming movements. “Sale of the bar?”

“Yeah. I had no clue. He never mentioned that he was thinking about selling. I think that’d be something he’d tell me.” I dropped my voice a few octaves, mimicking my dad. “
Oh, by the way, Shay, I’m selling the bar and moving to the Keys where I can live in the mangroves and fish to my heart’s content
.” JT gave a small chuckle.

I pushed my head into the pillow. “You know, earlier this fall, or maybe it was sometime in the summer, I remember Dad mentioning that someone had stopped by—a developer of some kind, I think—and asked if he ever thought about getting out of the business. Dad told the guy to take a hike. Although I suppose he probably used a bit more colorful language that that.” I allowed a small smile. “I know he loves the place. I can’t see him selling out to anyone.”

For a couple of moments we were both quiet. With a yawn, I added, “I wonder if he’s been having money trouble. There were a few past-due bills on his desk.”

It was too dark to make out JT’s features, but I could feel her eyes on me. I reached over and slid my hand lightly across her cheek and tangled my fingers in her hair. She was the rock in my oftentimes one-step-away-from-crazy life.

She leaned into my touch, turned her head, and kissed my palm. “I don’t know what to say about this sale thing, but I can do a little poking and see if I can find out what St. Paul is sniffing around for.”

I yawned again, my eyes watering as I started to unwind enough to feel sleepy. “I’d appreciate it.”

There were still so many unanswered questions. Why was Lisa Vecoli looking for my father, for one? Where on earth was he, anyway? Another thought slithered into my consciousness and I stiffened. “Oh, crap.”

JT’s hand tightened. “What?”

“The B&B we had for tomorrow in Duluth. I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can go right now.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call in the morning. Who knows, maybe your dad is back home sleeping off one hell of a New Year’s Eve.”