Gnarly New Year (Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #2) (3 page)

“I found the suit in Willow’s shack. It was on the floor in the mess left behind after someone trashed her place. I guess it's one of Opie’s suits he used to wear to sneak his stolen goods out of the cove and through the resort area. When I hustled down to the dock, I could see the cops hauling off guys they had picked up in the cove. One of them was that nasty dude who had pointed a gun at Willow—that guy who worked for the resort. Another one I had seen before bringing packages in from boats tied up in the cove. Nobody seemed to notice, but there were other guys in the crowd that I thought might be runners, too. Since I wasn’t sure, I kept quiet and mingled with Santas from the resort. Once I knew you two and Willow were okay, I doubled back, ditched the Santa suit, and went to see what was going on in Opie’s secret hiding place in the cave near where that rescue boat picked you up.”

“You knew about that cave, too?” Brien asked.

“Yeah, sure—that guy didn’t fool me with all the spear-fishing. The fish Opie brought back was onolicious, but I knew he was doing way more than that.”

“The cops were all over that cave by then, weren’t they, Mick?”

“Like gulls on garbage.” Not a pleasant image, but effective. “That’s where I found out they were hunting for Opie’s GPS. Some police officer was barking orders—you know the one with the big, bushy mustache?” Brien and I both nodded.

“Mitchum,” we said in unison. Speak of the devil! His name comes up only minutes after Brien, and I both confessed we had reached out to the man.

“Mitchum, yeah, sure, that’s him. He was bellowing, telling them to look for a marine GPS device. As far as I could tell from where I was hiding, nobody found it. They hauled a ton of stuff out of there, but it was getting dark, and the tide was coming in, so they gave it a rest. I figured they wouldn’t be back until the next day, so I got up there early and went to look for it myself.”

“Are you saying it was in there after all?” Anticipation shone on his handsome face like Brien was enjoying Mick's story. I just wanted Mick to get to the point.

“No, Dude! That’s the thing it wasn’t there!” A wave of disappointment hit me. I had felt so sure that Owen Taylor had hidden that device in the cave. Owen had regarded that cave as a place of special significance for him and Willow, his girlfriend until she gave him the boot for refusing to renounce his scheming ways. My frustration with Mick had returned.

“I don’t get it, Mick. The next day you left a message for Brien saying you knew where it was. You called Willow, later, and told her you would bring it to her.”

“Yeah, that’s all true. That Opie was trickier than I thought, but I found it.”

“Geez, Mick, if it wasn’t in the cave, where was it?” My voice had moved up in pitch, headed toward a whine or a rant.

“Oh, it was in there all right—in the chamber of heinousness.”

Brien and I stopped eating and looked at each other. Was this guy looser than we had ever dreamed? Or was he playing some mind game, taking us down the proverbial primrose path? A path I knew all too well since I had walked down it numerous times courtesy of the loathsome “player,” Mr. P. I was about to tell Mick to stuff it when the phone in our room rang. Brien ran to answer it.

I peered out at the horizon. The mighty Pacific Ocean roared from a distance. It glistened as waves rolled into Corsario Cove, beckoning. I wished Brien, and I were out there surfing rather than trying to make sense of the story being told to us by an off-the-deep-end, self-appointed surf-tribe leader, beaten to within an inch of his life.

Were we getting any closer to knowing what he had been up to since he ditched us on Christmas day? No matter what he said about where he found that GPS device, he didn’t have it now. Was he lying? What did we know about this guy? The rant in my head was building, and naughty Kim was fantasizing about Santa taking that shortcut off the balcony to the lobby level, again. Brien interrupted my troubled thoughts.

“That was Mitchum. He’s on his way over to talk to you, Mick. The police have found a dead guy.”

4 Joe Schmo

“A dead man? Honestly, Brien? Not wearing a Santa suit, I hope.” I’m not sure why that mattered.

“No Santa suit, but a couple of bullet holes, and he was beaten up, too. Just like Mick, here.” Brien nodded toward Mick as he said that. Mick was staring back at him like a tree full of owls.

“Hey, don’t look at me—I didn’t do it. I was too wasted to kill anyone.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “Sorry, Mick, but being drunk as a skunk is not an alibi.”

“That wasn’t my fault either! They made me do it—poured booze down me. That’s how my Santa suit got soaked in it. They were going to dump both of us off the boat. I dove over the side before they could shoot me like they shot that Joe Schmo. Once they figured out the GPS device was in my bag, they were done with both of us. It ticked them off that it had been right under their noses for days. I’m surprised they didn’t shoot me first. When I dove off the side of that boat, I grabbed my bag and took it with me.”

“Hang on, hang on. Who is Joe Schmo?” I asked.

“If I knew his name, would I be calling him Joe Schmo? He was the owner of that bar in San Albinus where Opie used to work. That’s all I know.” My head spun almost like that Linda Blair chick in the Exorcist. My neck snapped in the process as I made eye contact with Brien.

“Oh no! Is the dead guy the owner of Corsario’s Hideaway?” Brien nodded his head slowly, acknowledging the sad truth.

“Yep, that’s what Mitchum said. He wondered if we’d gone back there. I told him no.”

“Why did he ask that? Are we back on his list of suspicious characters? After all we did for that man!” Brien shrugged.

“I don’t think so, but he is interested in the fact that Mick happened to reappear, looking like he’d been in a fight, right before a dead guy washed up on the beach not too far from here.”

“That's a shame. Opie thought he was an okay guy until he fired him. Nobody told me his name, or if they did I forgot it with all the booze and drugs,” Mick said, holding up his coffee mug for me to refill it. Sober now, he didn’t seem all that upset about the poor man’s death. I got up and took the breakfast plate from Mick. Then, I handed him the coffee pot.

“Pour it yourself. You’d better finish that story of yours before Mitchum gets here. I’d be very surprised if he doesn’t cuff you and haul you off to the San Albinus jail.”

“Whoa, Kim, we don’t know that. You’re right, though, that Mitchum doesn’t supper fools.”

“What?” I asked interrupting Brien. I stared at Brien as blankly as Mick did, still in hoot-owl mode.

“You know, put up with fools—like we do. Feed them, even.” Brien’s face and voice radiated that struggling-to-communicate ardor. I melted at the sight and tried to address his misstatement in a gentle way.

“Suffer fools, Brien, not supper them.”

“That makes no sense. We all suffer from fools. We don’t all give them supper—or breakfast like we just did.” Brien stopped talking realizing that the fool he referred to was still staring at him. The black rings enveloping Mick’s unblinking eyes made him look more like a raccoon than an owl.

“I’ll explain it later, Brien. What you need to do, Mick, is finish telling us your story. Maybe we can help sort this out before Mitchum shows up and gives you the third degree.”

Mick’s hands that had already been a little shaky were worse now as he tried to pour coffee. I felt bad, took the pot from him, and filled his empty mug. As I filled our cups, I faced the fact that he wasn’t the only one shaken by another murder and the imminent arrival of a homicide detective. My level of tension rose as Mick continued his story. When he had finally worked his way back to that moment when he banged on our hotel room door this morning, I took a deep breath. Some of what he had told us seemed impossible to believe.

“We’re going to need more coffee,” I said. “Let’s get this cleaned up before Mitchum gets here.”

“I’ll do that, Kim, if you order the coffee. Mitchum sounded pretty worked up when I told him about Mick being here, and the condition he’s in. He says we should have taken him to the ER and called in a team of police to collect evidence before we cleaned him up.”

“Oh come on, Brien. Who’s he kidding? If we had called him, he would have chewed us out for bothering him about a drunken surfer friend who got beat up in a barroom brawl. Not to mention Mick took that swim after diving off the boat. We've bagged his clothes but how much evidence could there be after that?"  I smiled at Brien, and fully exhaled that deep breath I had taken moments ago. "I hear what you’re saying about Mitchum. I’ll see if they have cookies or some other treat to go with the coffee. Maybe that’ll sweeten him up.”

That’s a trick I had learned from Bernadette, Jessica’s sidekick. Bernadette’s not only a primo baker but a skilled soother of the savage beast. She manages the Huntington estate and has amazing skills managing people. That includes the surly detectives Jessica attracts like magnets attract iron.

Not that Mitchum was always surly. The detective could be affable enough, but he also had an unpleasant side to his nature when he got antsy. Somehow Brien and I made him antsy. As far as I could tell, for Detective Mitchum "not suffering fools" pertained to minimizing contact with most of the non-police-force population, including us. An occupational hazard, maybe. In a job where you’re always dealing with mean, stupid people doing mean, stupid things, pretty soon you see stupid everywhere and get a little mean yourself.

“I bet you’re right, Kim. Mitchum probably would have told us to bug off if we'd talked to him about Mick before that dead guy showed up. Especially since we don’t have that GPS device, even though Mick claims he found it.”

“What do you mean
‘claims’
? I had it. I just don’t know what I did with it.”

“Brien’s point is, Mick, that you can say whatever you want, but Mitchum’s not going to care unless you deliver the goods! I’ll be right back. I’m going to order the coffee and something that will appeal to Mitchum’s sweeter side. What do you think he’d like?” I looked at Brien, and it was as if our brains became one.

“Donuts,” we said, in the same breath.

“I bet they have some awesome holiday donuts at this place, Kim.”

“Coffee and donuts it is, Moondoggie. What cop could resist that?”

I hate to admit it, but that body on the beach made it easier to believe the story Mick had told us. Parts of it. I was still a little skeptical that he had found the GPS device since it was not in his possession. Where he claimed to have found it was even harder to accept. Supposedly, he had located the device the day after Christmas. Mick had no better luck than the police locating the thing in the cave until a bolt of inspiration struck him.

“It was cold and wet, and I was getting hungry, so I gave up. I went back to my shack and fixed some grub. That’s when I remembered seeing Opie step out from between some bushes up near the cliff top one day—right across from this tall tree with a black scar from a lightning strike. At the time, I figured maybe he had dropped something and went in behind those bushes to get it back. He didn’t have anything in his hands though. So I started thinking, what if he was hiding something in those bushes? I went up there and poked around. That’s when I found another entrance to the caves.” Then his story took a truly bizarre turn—even for a guy like Mick.

“It was dark, damp, and slippery. Steps cut into the rock led down toward the cove. I was wearing my reef booties, so I thought I could handle slippery, but not the dark. I went back to my shack, again, and got this heavy duty flashlight. It was still spooky and seemed dangerous. Those steps were narrow, and the ceiling was low in places. I banged my head once or twice. I kept going, though, down tons of steps before I found it. I would have missed it if I hadn’t started worrying about what would happen to me if I slipped and fell." I rolled my eyes.

"Please, move this along, will you?"

"That’s what I’m trying to do. What I’m saying is that no one knew I was in there. What if I fell and hit my head or broke something? I’d be a goner. I put one hand on the wall, leaning against it and feeling for roots or anything to grab onto in case I slipped. It's like I was that Indiana Jones dude, on his way to the Temple of Doom. No snakes but the walls were closing in on me. Then I got paranoid. What if the cove-runners Opie messed over were waiting for me when I got to the place those stairs were leading? I didn’t hear anything, but what if they planned to catch me and lock me in there? I got dizzy, and my mouth was dry. Crazy, huh?”

"Hell, yes," were the words on the tip of my tongue when my sweet and patient Brien spoke up.

“Sounds like a spell of cleithrophobia, Bro.”

“Don’t you mean claustrophobia?” Used to correcting Brien’s malapropisms, I was shocked when he corrected me!

“No, I don’t think so. It could be a fear of tight places like claustrophobia. What Mick’s talking about, though, is more like the fear of being locked in a closed space. That’s a little different.” Mick and I both stared at Brien. I think my mouth was hanging open, in fact.

“I could be wrong, but I’ve been studying phobias, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got it straight.” Now I was puzzled. It was beside the point, and we needed to keep Mick moving on his bizarre tale, but I just had to know.

“Why are you studying phobias, Brien?”

“So I have exciting stuff to talk to Peter about that’s above brow. You know how he gets on my case saying I go on and on about burgers and beer or surfing.”

Brien’s boss, Peter, was directly involved in a lot of Brien’s security training. That had included what Peter called “ride-alongs,” with Brien accompanying Peter to carry out surveillance activities. During those long periods of confinement, Brien’s chattiness got on Peter’s nerves. Brien had missed the point. It wasn’t so much the subject matter, but the relentlessness of his chatter that got to Peter. Now wasn’t the time to go into all that. I couldn’t let the above brow thing go by, though.

“I get it, Brien, but I’m pretty sure that the proper term is highbrow not above brow. You can look it up later. I appreciate you setting me straight about the claustrophobia thing. It's great when you teach me new things.”

Brien smiled. I meant that. Brien has a unique vision of the world and often delights me with an observation that completely changes the way I see something.  Mick, of course, immediately jumped to conclusions, and was smirking at us both.

“I bet you can teach him a few things too, huh, Gidget?”

“Never mind, Mick. You’re walking down rock steps. It’s dark and spooky, yadda-yadda-yadda, and you almost missed ‘it.’ ‘It’ what?”

“The chamber of heinousness,” he responded. Chamber of heinousness? Oh, no! A wave of dread hit me about Mitchum’s impending visit. Had Mick gone off the deep end?