Crunch Time (45 page)

“Somebody turned him in?” Boyd asked.

Tom said, “Yeah. Our guys got good information from the Fort Collins authorities. An anonymous informant called them and gave the names of people Osgoode had sold drugs to. The cops pulled in the users, and they all immediately confessed that Osgoode was their supplier.”

I said, “Please tell me Osgoode gave up the name of his partner.”

“Nope. But Osgoode wasn’t as broke as he made out to Dr. Hopengarten, because somebody paid all his legal bills and court costs.”

“Who?” Boyd and I asked in unison.

Tom shook his head. “Don’t know, and whoever it was didn’t visit Osgoode in jail, either. Only the lawyer came, and he was a high-priced criminal defense attorney who managed to wangle a plea deal. Osgoode got a ten-year prison sentence, suspended, and only spent eighteen months in jail. Apparently the DA figured all those drug users wouldn’t make very good witnesses.”

I shook my head. Tom stood, cleared our dishes, and said, “I need to get down to the department.”

After he left, Boyd and I finished cleaning the kitchen. When he went into the living room to watch the news, I quietly pulled Lolly’s photocopy out of my pocket. Ferdinanda and Yolanda were talking in low tones in the dining room, so I crept down to the basement and loaded pink and yellow photocopy paper into our printer, slipped in Lolly’s paper, and let ’er rip.

Inspecting the result, I didn’t know if they’d fool anybody. But as I scissored away to make the copies look like actual receipts, I resolved that I was certainly going to try.

As I walked back up the stairs with the fake receipts in my pocket, the memory that had disturbed me early that morning resurfaced. The part of Humberto’s house that had been weird was an aspect of the décor.

Lolly had told me Humberto had redecorated the house at a fast clip. It had begun the day after Ernest broke in and stole the necklace. Why redecorate
then
? Okay, he wanted to put in surveillance cameras, but you could do that without painters and a whole bunch of new furniture.

That elusive memory was still flashing, but it was out of reach. I decided to make my first stop the Aspen Meadow Library.

I put four frozen homemade coffee cakes into my canvas bag. Food bribes usually worked if someone balked at helping me, and I couldn’t let that happen. Then I asked Boyd if he would accompany me to my van. When we were walking down the ramp, he asked me where I was going.

Surprised, I said, “Just running a few errands.” He lifted his eyebrows questioningly, but there was no way I was going to tell him what I was really up to.

In the van, I glanced across the street to see if Kris or Harriet was anywhere around. Neither was. I realized I didn’t even know what kind of car Harriet drove. Would Tom be able to find that out, if I didn’t know her last name? Or would he say if I continued to try to snoop into Harriet’s life,
I’d
be stalking
her
?

Ten minutes later, I breezed through the library doors and headed right to the reference desk. I didn’t know the new reference librarian, a young, slender woman who wore a khaki pantsuit and had black hair with red streaks. Didn’t anybody lucky enough to have black hair just wear it au naturel these days? I guessed not.

I offered her a coffee cake for the librarians’ break room, and she gratefully accepted. Then I asked my question, and she brightened. She said she loved a challenge, and I had the distinct feeling that she would have helped me out, food bribe or no.

She moved with alacrity to the website archives of the
Mountain Journal
. I certainly did not know how to search for the articles I needed, the ones that asked, “Can you guess whose view this is?” The following week, the answer was given, complete with a picture of the home’s owner.

Miss Black and Red Hair found the answer by swiftly pressing buttons, and soon I was looking at Humberto Captain’s view, which the librarian had put next to a photo of Humberto proudly pointing to the vista. In fact, I was interested in neither of these views. What did capture my attention was that memory that had been wriggling out of reach. Above Humberto’s head, there was not a light fixture in the shape of a wagon wheel. There was something else entirely.

I thanked the librarian and revved my van in the direction of Frank’s Fix-It Shop, which I thought was the most likely of my receipts to turn up what I wanted.

Frank’s Fix-It, next to Aspen Meadow Bank, looked as run-down as the bank appeared modern and immaculate. I made a U-turn, parked directly in front of the shop, then banged on the door until a heavy young man wearing torn jeans and a scruffy sweatshirt opened up. The scent of marijuana wafted out around him.

“We’re closed,” he said, looking at his wrist that was without a watch. He blinked and slowly turned his head to squint at the bank’s clock, which indicated it was half past ten.

“Your advertisement says you open at ten,” I lied smoothly. The guy looked around for a sign with his hours, but in fact he didn’t have that, either. I figured it was better to play on his sympathies than to piss him off. And wait: If he’d been smoking grass, shouldn’t he have the munchies wicked bad? I pulled another coffee cake out of my big canvas bag. “Would you like to eat a homemade coffee cake?”

The fellow eyed the cake greedily. “Well—”

“Here.” I handed him the cake in its zippered bag. “And, please, please can you help me?” I pulled the pink receipt out of the bag and thrust it under his nose. “My boss says I have to get this today, as early as possible. If I don’t, I’ll lose my job.”

Now the stoner stared at the receipt, his mouth hanging open. Drool trailed from his lower lip as he clutched the coffee cake to his chest. After a few long moments, he said, “We have this?”

“Please help me,” I begged. “It’s your receipt.”

“Awright.” He pushed the door halfway open and lumbered into the darkness of the store. I quickly stepped through and followed him.

The place positively reeked of weed. The wooden floor was worn through to concrete in a number of places, and Frank, or his son, or someone, had sprinkled sawdust on top. The counters were so dusty it was hard to tell if the glass cases actually held anything. But when the guy rounded the corner and ducked behind a curtain, I followed him there, too.

The fluorescent light he turned on did not help. He put the coffee cake on a cluttered table and again gaped at the fake receipt. With more clarity than he had mustered so far, he said, “I have no idea where in hell this is. Or even
what
it is.”

“Oh,
I
know,” I said cheerfully. “Why don’t I find it?”

“I can’t leave you here with the stuff,” he said dully. “We’ll lose our insurance if I do.”

I almost choked at the idea of them even having insurance. “I won’t break anything.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said stubbornly.

We seemed to be at an impasse. But a torn red plastic chair offered a solution to our problem. I said, “Why don’t you sit down while I hunt? Then you can eat the cake and keep an eye on me at the same time.”

“Well, I do got the munchies.”

“Go for it. But may I have the receipt back, please?”

“Awright.” He handed it to me, then made his way to the chair. He sat down heavily, opened the bag, and broke off a hunk of cake. Well, I didn’t mind if he dispensed with the whole utensil thing. I just didn’t want to watch.

I surveyed the vast, untidy storage room. Shelves at odd angles were filled to bursting with dusty articles.
Damn it,
I thought,
why can’t anything be easy?

Half an hour later, I realized I was hungry, too. All I had found in searching through the first two-thirds of the shelves was an assortment of toasters with frayed cords, pots missing handles, clocks without hands, and broken, functionless tchotchkes.

The stoner had finished half the cake, and now he was openly smoking a joint.

Well, great. This was another one of those situations where the fact that I was married to a sheriff’s department investigator did not look so hot. I was unlawfully searching for something that I was pretty sure was valuable but that did not belong to me. Meanwhile, the man entrusted with the care of said article was huffing away on an illegal drug. If a reporter from the
Mountain Journal
came in, I’d be, as they say, screwed.

On the last set of shelves, my hands closed on a large, dirty plastic bag. Inside was what looked and felt like a bunch of dirty rocks. But the receipt number, oh, the blessed receipt number, was the same as the pink one in my hand. And the rocks, I suspected, had been carefully coated with mud, in order to hide what they really were.

“Got it!” I yelled. But the stoner had slipped sideways on the chair and appeared to be asleep.

I tiptoed past him with the bag going
clunkedy-clunk
. He seemed not to notice. I wrapped up the remains of the cake and stuffed it into my catering bag. I didn’t want to leave any trace of myself. Then I picked up both bags and walked out the door, gently closed it behind me, and heaved the bags into the back of my van.

Unfortunately, I caught a glimpse of Kris Nielsen’s Maserati in my rearview mirror. He was driving very slowly up Main Street. I debated whether to stay in my parking space or take off. Had he been watching me all along? I put on my blinker and pulled out. I drove slowly so as to make out what Kris was doing. He maneuvered the Maserati into my empty space. Had he seen me? I still wasn’t sure.

Lovely, tall Harriet-the-model-with-odd-jobs got out of Kris’s car. She said a few words to Kris, then walked into Frank’s Fix-It.
Hmm.

Ahead of me, the streetlight turned. If I didn’t move the van forward, it would attract attention. Still, I strained to observe Kris in the rearview mirror. Was he waiting for her, dropping her off, or what? I really wanted to know, but had no way to find out just then. At the moment, I did not think a return trip to Frank’s Fix-It was advisable.

I
skipped the dry cleaner and the printer, because I was sure I had found what I was looking for. But as I drove home, I wondered
why
Humberto would leave the diamond-laden chandelier at Frank’s Fix-It, even covered with mud, even for a short time. Okay, the place was a jumbled-up mess, like one of those garages full of what the owner thinks is junk. So the owner has a big garage sale, and a lucky customer pays a dollar for a painting worth two million.

As far as I knew, Frank’s Fix-It Shop was not planning on selling off its dusty merchandise any time soon.

Not only that, but if Humberto knew, or suspected, that Ernest was on his trail, maybe even that Ernest was behind the theft of Norman Juarez’s necklace, the last place he’d want to put something valuable was in a safety deposit box or other obvious storage place. He’d want to get rid of Ernest first and then wait for the heat of the murder investigation to cool.

The other reason he’d decided on Frank’s Fix-It was that he’d needed to stash the diamonds somewhere unlikely, while waiting for the big Fort Knox–worthy metal safe to be delivered.

And what if Osgoode had been Humberto’s partner? Maybe Humberto had wanted to hide the diamonds, just in case, and then get rid of Osgoode, in the event he knew anything about the Juarez fortune.

I called Boyd to ask for lookout duty as I returned. Unfortunately, this meant he would see me bringing in a large, unwieldy bag full of clanking stuff, which would mean questions. So when he answered, I asked if he could meet me in the driveway to help me carry in groceries.

“That’s what you have?” he asked when I pulled in, opened the sliding door, and gestured to the dusty giant-size trash bag. “Somehow, it doesn’t look like food shopping.”

“It isn’t. If you’ll take it inside, we can both have a look.”

He mumbled something about keeping his job as he humped the bag up the ramp. I thanked him pleasantly and said how much I appreciated his being a houseguest.

“Oh!” said Ferdinanda when we came through the front door. “What have you got there?” Yolanda, who was reading a cookbook, gave us a curious glance.

“I don’t know yet!” I said more loudly than I intended. “Maybe I can tell you later.”
Like when the police come to get it,
I added mentally. Even if Humberto and Ferdinanda had seemed to be at each other’s throats the previous night, I didn’t want our houseguests to glimpse the contents of this sack, just in case it contained what I hoped and feared it did.

“Let’s go upstairs, Boyd.” I scurried upstairs and stopped in Arch’s room for a pair of wire cutters he’d used for one of his projects. Then I led Boyd into Arch’s bathroom and stopped up the bathtub. “All right, lower it in there, as slowly as you can.”

Boyd did as I asked, then untied the top of the bag and gently pulled out the light fixture by its chain. It was a gigantic chandelier that looked as if it had been sprayed with mud. Well, I thought, it probably had been. I wondered what kind of cock-and-bull story Humberto had used when he left it off at Frank’s Fix-It. Probably something along the lines of, “We need to order parts for this from France, and we’ll bring them in when they arrive, so you can do the repairs.”

“Should I rinse this off?” Boyd asked patiently.

“Carefully.” Once the warm water was running, I reached for a pair of cotton towels.

“Goldy?” said Boyd. “This thing is huge. Is it an antique or something? I don’t want to know if you stole it, because I know you probably did. Is it worth a lot of money?”

By way of answer, I reached in and gently cut the wire holding one of the pendants in place. Interestingly, these teardrop-shaped pieces were not drilled through at their tops, but were in tiny individual nylon nets. Once I’d freed the stone from the wire and the net holding it, I held it up to the light.

The fire and brilliance of the gem hurt my eyes. I tried not to contemplate the magnitude of Humberto’s theft.

“No, Sergeant Boyd, the chandelier is not an antique. But each of these sparkling pieces is a diamond. The whole chandelier is worth many millions of dollars. Humberto Captain stole these gems from the family of Norman Juarez.”