Cash & Carry (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 4)
Read Cash & Carry (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 4) Online
Authors: Jerusha Jones
Text copyright © 2015 by Jerusha Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
For more information about Jerusha Jones’s other novels, please visit www.jerushajones.com
Cover design by Elizabeth Berry MacKenney. www.berrygraphics.com
I dropped the ice cream tub on my foot then hopped around on the other foot while valiantly refraining from muttering a few things. Mainly because a sweet six-year-old girl named Emmie with ears like sponges was sitting at the kitchen table awaiting her dessert.
“You going to answer that?” Clarice growled. She’s not sweet or six years old, but she had a point.
I withdrew the frosty phone and gingerly held it to my ear.
“Nora?” The rich, balmy voice of my favorite nurse filled the speaker.
“Give me a minute, Arleta” I blurted. “I’ll call you back. Whatever line rings next, just answer it.” I hung up and tossed the phone back in the freezer. Then I dashed for my tote bag which was hanging over the back of the chair I’d just abandoned.
“Didn’t you give her the number of one of your burner phones?” Clarice asked.
“Forgot,” I mumbled, pulling one of the said phones from my bag. I punched in the number for the Alzheimer’s unit at my dad’s nursing home and listened to it ring.
“Arleta? Sorry about that. I’m working with designated phones now.”
“Is this part of that FBI thing?” Arleta asked, her words barely above a whisper.
“Sort of. They’re still providing security for my dad, aren’t they?”
“Mmmmmm. Special agents all over the place, including one particularly hot number named Antonio Hackett.” I could understand how Arleta’s low laugh would drive a man crazy. I suspected Antonio was enjoying his assignment as much as Arleta was.
“Uh, this call isn’t about personal, strictly after-hours hanky-panky, is it?” I asked, but I couldn’t keep from grinning. Arleta works way too hard. I should know—she cares for my dad. She deserves whatever social life she can get.
“No.” Arleta turned serious. “I left a message for your mother, but she’s still on that Southeast Asian adventure cruise. We’re required to notify family if a patient has a medical incident. Your dad took a tumble today. He absolutely refuses to use his walker, and you know he gets tippy around corners.” Arleta pushed on, correctly anticipating that I was on the verge of interrupting with panicked questions. “We did X-rays to confirm he didn’t break any bones, but he did get a bump on the head. He’s a little—well, he’s actually a little less confused than usual right now.”
“It’s not uncommon,” Arleta continued calmly. “Disruptions in their schedules, medications, any number of things, will often temporarily affect the ability of Alzheimer’s patients to retrieve memories. There’s a lot of fluctuation in their ability to access information. Good days and bad days. It comes with the territory. But he’s asking for you. In fact, he insisted that I call you.” She took a deep breath. “He wants to talk to you. Are you ready for that?”
I was very familiar with my dad’s stubbornness—about not using assistance for walking, about Jell-O brand chocolate pudding, about how his shirts are pressed. So much of his stubbornness from his healthy life had clung with him even through his disease. But for the past year or so he had not been able to consistently remember my name or the fact that I was his only child.
“Okay,” I breathed.
“No expectations, Nora,” Arleta warned. “I don’t know how long this lucidity will last.”
“Okay,” I repeated and sat down hard.
“He’s waiting outside my office,” Arleta said. “I’ll get him.”
It seemed forever, those few minutes of muffled bumps and shuffles in the background. Then the clunk of the receiver and short, raspy breaths and my dad’s voice, weaker than it used to be but unmistakable, “Nora?”
“Daddy.” I squeezed my eyes shut against the tears that immediately sprang up.
“Sweetie, I need to talk to you.”
“I’m right here.” I was clenching the phone so hard my hand hurt.
“They’re listening,” Dad whispered.
“I’m listening,” I replied.
“No, no, sweetie. The feds.”
“Oh.” My eyes flew open. It was a reasonable assumption. I’d made it myself. “I switched phones, Dad,” I whispered. “This one’s untraceable.” It wasn’t worth going into the details with him. I wasn’t even sure he’d understand them since the phones he was most familiar with had cords that attached them to lines strung from telephone poles.
“Find Squeaky,” he said. “There are a few things—you were such a little girl then—you wouldn’t know. But there are a few things. Squeaky will give you the information.”
I moaned. He was already slipping into confusion, his own weirdly fractured reality. “Squeaky?” I murmured.
“Squeaky Simon. The feds won’t get anything from me.” Dad’s voice grew deeper. “I’m sealed up tight. Besides, it was all over a long time ago.”
My dad had been watching too much television. The big screen was always on in the unit’s rec room with several catatonic patients parked in front of it, broadcasting those horrible true crime reenactment shows that are worse than soap operas.
“How’s your mother?” Dad asked.
My breath caught in my throat. “Fine.” How I wished she was in San Francisco so she could rush over to the nursing home and enjoy these few minutes with Dad.
“Off gallivanting?” Dad asked. Forty-seven years of marriage—and still counting—had taught Dad a lot about Mom. They made incompatibility look good.
My chuckle came out like a half sob. “Yes.”
“Give her my love.”
“Okay.” But my answer hit dead air.
My hand was shaking when I set the phone down on the table. I glanced up to find Emmie and Clarice staring at me. Clarice’s face was slack with an astonishment that obliterated all her wrinkles—because she knows all about my dad’s condition.
I slowly shook my head.
“But he knew your name,” she muttered.
And then I slowly nodded with a teary smile.
“This calls for a celebration.” Clarice barged across the room and rummaged through a cupboard until she produced a jar of caramel sauce to top our ice cream.
oOo
I love you.
Why hadn’t I said those three words?
But he hadn’t called in order to listen. He’d wanted to tell me something—something that made absolutely no sense but had been so important to him that it had driven him to insist that Arleta place the call. Dad had never done that before.
I wondered how aware he was of the reason he was surrounded by an FBI protective detail. He probably just thought he had nice visitors in suits with badges and shoulder holsters. His life now was a lot like reliving the same day over and over again because he didn’t remember what had happened the day before. There was nothing in his memory bank that was sturdy enough to build upon in order to establish a history.
Except disjointed snatches of things which he strung together. Most of the time his sentences didn’t make sense because he forgot his topic between the subject and the predicate. Which meant he made a lot of the same incongruous statements repeatedly, like a mantra.
Some activities seemed to trigger the analytical side of his brain in productive ways, like chess and, well, eating chocolate pudding. He was adamant about his chocolate pudding. I could only guess at what kind of childhood experiences had created such a deep groove in his synaptic paths that these particular things had stuck with him this long.
Squeaky Simon. What a funny, alliterate name—definitely not run-of-the-mill. And I was supposed to find him.
I clicked on the light and dragged my laptop onto the mattress beside me. What would we ever do without Google?
I thought I might find a toy from the 1950s or a board game or something. Short of a few videos featuring the helium-enhanced voices of guys named Simon I didn’t find anything.
Maybe it was the goofy moniker of a childhood friend. If that was the case, then my best option was to search my mother’s address book. But she wasn’t due back from her cruise for a couple weeks. Instead, I zipped off an email to her assistant, Hugo.
My mother is not employed. Never has been, as far as I know. But she’s turned social connectivity into a full-time career, with a schedule so busy that she needs someone else to keep track of it. Hence Hugo—who is her anal-retentive antithesis. How he puts up with her I’ll never know, but he probably had all of her contacts sorted in a master database because one of his primary tasks is to send thank-you gift baskets after her pet-cause-of-the-day cocktail party shindigs.
Which reminded me that I needed to figure out who Martin Zimmermann was too. Because Special Agent Matt Jarvis, my FBI case manager, said the man who’d threatened my dad—Sam Tibbetts—was a known vig collector for Zimmermann, who was otherwise known as Mart the Shark. These wiseguys sure love their nicknames.
Zimmermann was also on the list of my husband’s former money laundering clients. Numero Cuatro, in fact, which meant I’d passed a whole lot of his money on to my favorite charities when I’d emptied Skip’s accounts. Just the thing to make a racketeer very angry with me, and by extension, with my dad.
But Matt also suspected the threats from Tibbetts could have been prompted by the recent FBI raid on Skip’s office and home when they finally hauled his computers in for analysis and froze his business assets.
Clearly, we were all grasping at straws regarding motive. Which didn’t change the reality that Dad was in some kind of unspecified danger.
By all accounts, Zimmermann was a socially adept philanthropist-slash-political supporter type of creep. Odds were extremely high that my mother and the Shark had brushed up against each other in the same San Francisco mover-and-shaker circles. There was a chance I’d encountered him too, which gave me the willies.
I’d tried racking my brain before, but I might as well try again, with insomnia being such a great productivity tool.
Either Zimmermann was really good at not having his picture taken or Matt was mistaken because nothing popped up in my searches of the online archives of San Francisco’s two major dailies—the
Examiner
and the
Chronicle
—as well as the prominent English language weeklies, including the
Business Times
.
But then I hit the jackpot—what little there was of it—in the utterly snobby
Presidio Review
glossy quarterly where my mother is frequently featured. The magazine is seventy-five percent advertising, whether overt or covert, and it’s probably where she first encountered the idea of the luxury cruise she was currently enjoying.
Another twenty percent of the magazine is society photos under the guise of charity fundraising events—the see and be-seen galas of the season. But I caught Zimmermann’s name in the caption under an old photo, in the ‘From Our Archives’ section—black and white monstrosities from some bizarre costume ball. There he was in thick, black-rimmed glasses, with his arm around a much taller and gorgeous female escort. Big nose, big ears, and not much hair left although he applied the comb-over method of amplification. He was in extreme middle age back in 1986.
So my Numero Cuatro mobster was a nonagenarian? Terrific.
But that certainly changed the index I used for examining my memories. Had I ever met the guy?
I pulled up the website for Zimmermann’s retail shops which were named, inexplicably, Roman & Bernard Men’s Clothiers. I supposed it was a manly sounding name. But on their page of company info, which was notably missing any mention of the elderly owner, I found the most far-from-manly image possible—a stunningly beautiful woman dressed in a conservative skirt and jacket that were tailored within a millimeter of her curvy frame. Angelica Temple, executive vice president of sales.
I snorted, mostly out of jealousy. In an absence of other marketing incentives, she could certainly stand out on the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board sign and thus inspire a deluge of eager customers.
Better yet, I recognized her. Of course, when I’d seen her before she’d been wearing a strapless, gossamer, gold-filament ball gown and rhinestone encrusted stiletto pumps. At least, I’d been pretty sure they were glass rhinestones because who puts real jewels on shoes? Cinderella would have twisted both of her ankles, tumbled down the stairs, and given herself a concussion if she’d worn those.
In other words, it would have been difficult
not
to notice Angelica Temple, even though I didn’t know her name then. About four hundred other people had joined me in gawking.
And the fussy, stooped, old man who’d been orbiting around her at the San Francisco Opera opening night last fall? Hmmm. Things were starting to click.