Matryoshka Blues (The Average Joe Mysteries Book 1) (5 page)

8

J
eff Sandecker lives in a gated community surrounding a country club and golf course, but as soon as I give the name Tully listed me under to the guard in the cozy little bungalow outside the main entrance, I’m waved right through. Personally, I didn’t think she would have that kind of pull, especially this late at night, but apparently I don’t know jack shit about anything, Jon Snow.

The house is somewhere around the tenth hole of the golf course. I know this because the street is called 10
th
Hole Court. Trust me, even a blind monkey with diphtheria and a peanut allergy would be able to figure that one out in a snowstorm.

Shit. Now I sound like Tully. Don’t mind me. It’s been a long night. Forget I said anything.

Sandecker’s home is a three-story stone monstrosity, a modern ode to first-world overkill. I’ve seen hotels in Las Vegas smaller than this. The driveway is a half-moon shape, and I pull through it and park on the exit side. This part of the house has a huge bay window on the ground floor, wide panes of glass giving what should be a roughly one hundred forty-degree field of view from whatever room is on the other side.

The house is dark, but it’s coming up on midnight so that’s not surprising. But the outside is dark as well; not even a porch light burns bright. It took forever for Tully to pick me up and take me home so I could drive over here, mainly because I argued with her all over again about the dangers of her coming along, so maybe Sandecker went to bed before he remembered to turn everything on.

I get out of the car and walk to the front door. It’s open a crack. A dark house, with the front door improperly closed? Horror movies have started with less. The shittier ones never go beyond that, of course, but this is real life here.

Though I certainly wouldn’t mind a nubile coed running around half naked right about now, just as stress relief.

Wow. Yeah, that’s inappropriate. Forget I said anything. Sorry about that. The mind wanders.

Nothing greets me when I enter the massive foyer: no snoring, no barking dogs, no televisions telling me scores and highlights or trying to sell me a pill for whatever ails me. There’s only silence.

Shit. I should call the police. I won’t, naturally. But I should.

The foyer has a round table large enough to build a fucking Caribbean resort on, topped with a collection of gaudy vases for some stupid reason. Is Sandecker married? What kind of single guy in his thirties has something like this in his home? It makes no sense to me. I grab a vase with a lid and put the front door back the way I found it, propping vase and lid precariously against it. Then I search the house.

Wait—do vases have lids, or does that make it an urn? And who decides stupid shit like this, anyway? Don’t they have more important things to do with their time? I’d rather see a solution to the hot-dogs-in-packages-of-ten-but-hot-dog-buns-in-packages-of-eight debacle sometime before I croak than a clear delineation between a vase and a fucking urn.

I find Sandecker in his office on the ground floor, seated in a modern black office chair facing away from a massive executive-style desk. I can’t tell the kind of wood. I mean, I’m not Norm Abram or a fucking beaver or whatever. But the desk is reddish and overly ornate. Lots of intricate trim work. It looks heavier than shit.

Harsh light from a streetlamp on 10
th
Hole Court floods in through the bay window I saw from outside, filling the room with a ghostly overexposure, like a demonic flashbulb. As expected, I’ve got a commanding view of the street, save for the far end of the half-moon driveway. At this end I can see the back of my car jutting out from behind a cluster of bushes.

Sandecker’s still alive, for the moment. Good thing, too. He’s been beaten to within an inch of his life. The gunshot to his abdomen carried him the next five-eighths. It’s pretty gruesome, especially with the eerie lighting, and for a second I see Scotty, my stomach churning with fear and hate and revulsion and
holy fuck, my brother is dead
.

In a blink I’m back on Main Street: the dead of night, Scotty’s car stopped at the light, driver door wide open, engine running. I got there hours after the fact, but nothing had changed from the moment he got jumped. And I remember every goddamn detail as if it happened yesterday.

This scene in Sandecker’s home isn’t even remotely similar, so far as staging goes, but tell that to my guilty conscience. I shit you not, I may puke on the man.

Insult, say howdy to injury.

He’s fading fast, and my gut tells me he’s hopping on that express elevator to Heaven any second now. But my gut is wrong. I’m inches from his face when his eyes flutter open, lips parting with a quiver.

“Not—” he gasps.

I squeal like a damn scaredy cat and take a step back.

Sandecker stops, and I almost kick him in the leg to rev him back up. Not what, man? Not going to give me up? Not going to take it anymore? Not going to eat those Thin Mints in your freezer, so I should feel free to take them?

Seriously, dickhole—speak up. I’m not a fucking mind reader here.

Goddamn it, now I want Thin Mints. Where’s a Girl Scout when you need her?

Holy fuck, that came out wrong.

Sandecker’s not looking at anything—not in the physical realm, at least. His eyes are half-glazed with death’s toxic sheen. Twenty bucks says he doesn’t even know I’m in the room with him. He probably sees his high school crush, or his puppy from when he was six. Anything but the man physically standing over him trying not to vomit and/or steal his cookies.

“Not…giving…that bitch…a raise,” he says quickly.

Well, quickly for a dying man, at any rate.

I nearly piss myself when he talks again, so sure that he had up and died on me. But nope, he had more to live for.

Good for him. Always nice to have goals.

“Sandecker, what in the name of—”

It’s all I get out before the vase-urn thingamajig in the hall crashes to the tile floor. I spin around to look, but when I turn back to ask Sandecker where the rear exit is all I see are two vacant eyes staring at nothing.

Sorry, dude. Very few people deserve a long, drawn-out death. You may very well have been one of them, but still—sorry.

Damn. This’ll be tough to explain.

Something falls from his hand, bouncing off one of the chair’s wheels with a soft
ting
before landing on the rug. I scoop it up and ease into the hallway, retreating expeditiously from the footsteps heading in my direction. I find a back staircase and climb to the second floor.

I don’t have much time, unless the person downstairs is San-decker’s killer, and they’re coming back to dispose of the—

Shit. My car’s out front. Smooth move, dumbass. You can stage a booby trap for the front door, but it doesn’t occur to you to hide your car down the street.

See? This is why private investigators are better suited for crap like this. They think about hiding their cars; I think about stealing fucking Thin Mints. If I were as capable as them? Oh, the possibilities.

Speaking of possibilities:
“Not giving that bitch a raise.”

That tells me Loretta Turnbill had a hand in this. Was she the one who killed him? He lied to Tully and me about the exchange, so he could have lied to her as well. Perhaps that was his plan all along, and she found out. Maybe Sergeant was his insurance; an attempt to throw everyone off the trail. That leaves Sandecker free to toddle off to God knows where and scoop up the prize all by his Brooks Brothers-clad self.

Or, maybe Turnbill was, pardon the pun, turned, forced to rat him out by whoever else was looking for the box. Hang on—
whomever
? Hell, I don’t know. Anyway, she might be an unwitting dupe in her boss’s homicide. If I was the unknown person tasked with beating a man to semi-death before shooting him in the gut, I might be enough of a dickhole to blame the whole thing on the one person the soon-to-be dead man trusted, whether she was involved or not. I mean, at that point, what does it matter? I’m already a douchebag. May as well get my licks in while I can.

Bottom line, Turnbill is now either a suspect or a victim. Will her body be the next one I stumble across, or is she at this moment attempting to skedaddle beyond the reach of state and federal law enforcement?

There’s no noise from the ground floor, and I hear nothing coming up either the front or back stairs. Is my interloper still down there? I never heard a car pull up, and I didn’t see one, either. Must’ve driven up with the lights off, or they walked in from somewhere else.

Thank God I set up a warning system. Would’ve been highly embarrassing to be caught standing over a dead body in someone else’s home as a stranger walked in to return fucking Tupperware or something.

“Oh, hi. Don’t mind me. I’m just here because this man lied to me and owes me money. Is that the FreshSav 9000? I didn’t know it came in chartreuse!”

I mean, maybe. How would I know? Like I know shit about Tupperware.

I open my hand and look at what Sandecker dropped.

“Huh,” I say out loud.

What I’m thinking is,
Fuck me
.

9

I
t’s a key. Sandecker dropped a key, and it could literally be to anything.

Okay, not
literally
. It can’t be to a turnip, or a bottle of Jack Daniels, which I desperately fucking need right now. It’s definitely not to a TARDIS, and that’s a damn shame. Really would love to rewind this day and tell Tully to kiss my ass.

Or would that create some kind of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, world-ending paradox or something? Damned if I know. Stupid science-fiction shows and their addicting technobabble bullshit. I love you all, and I hate you all.

The key’s smaller than a door lock, but that still leaves safes, secret cubby holes, and a veritable one hundred twenty-six gallons of shit I can’t for the life of me conjure at this precise moment.

If you were with me on that, then good job. Well remembered.

In the silence of the night, even at the rear of Sandecker’s house, I hear a car start up out front. It’s the chest-pounding roar of a 440 V8. I race to a window facing the street in time to see a 1971 Charger—black, maybe blue or dark gray, and in mint condition—disappear down the street. Its peel-out marks start at the far end of the half-moon driveway and run past my car.

How in the world did that masterpiece pull up outside this house without me hearing it? Even in neutral that gorgeous brute would rattle the glass in Sandecker’s bay window downstairs or echo through the partially-open front door. Was I really not paying attention? The scene downstairs reminded me of Scotty, so maybe I wasn’t. Of all the things capable of distracting me, that’s number one on the list by fucking light years.

I shove Sandecker’s key in my pocket and run downstairs to his office. He’s still dead in the chair, his vacant eyes in an eternal staring contest with Death.

This blows. I really did want to like the guy, given the short amount of time we knew each other. Guess
all-American
doesn’t mean shit anymore. Sure, he lied to my best friend and used her to bring me into whatever shell game he was running. And yeah, this whole thing is a dark shade of crooked, but so am I half the time. Well, maybe three-quarters. We can still be good people, can’t we?

Going all quasi-existential for a moment, when exactly does the line get crossed? Is it when the act occurs, or when the bill comes due? Does the goodness in our hearts outweigh the blood soaking our hands? I’m hoping so, because otherwise I’ll have a lot of explaining to do when Saint Peter stands before me at the Pearly Gates, tapping his foot like Gandalf telling me I shan’t pass.

Shut up. Of course I’m going to Heaven. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never slept with another man’s—

No, hang on. Shit. That’s a lie. Several times over, in fact.

Okay, I’ve never taken the Lord’s name in—

Goddamn it. That’s wrong too.

Wait, so what are the others? Something about honoring thy parents? Yeah, that was never going to happen. To be honest, I can’t remember ever honoring
anyone’s
parents.

Man, that’s strike three, isn’t it? Guess I’m out. Sent back to the minors.

Screw that. If a priest can diddle a toddler and still ride the Heavenly Express to eternal salvation, then a lowly wanderer with an uncontrollable urge to say
fuck
and
shit,
and a knack for standing over dead bodies he didn’t create, should garner the same consideration.

I mean, really. There’s hypocrisy, and there’s outright stupidity. And while the debate over religion’s place in that argument will be forever raging, God himself—or herself; no need for inherent sexism here—is not to be drawn into it.

So sayeth me. Amen.

I check the bay window for more surprises before pulling out my phone, angling away from Sandecker’s empty eyes. Whatever he’s staring at, I don’t want him looking through me to do it. It’s creepy, and it makes me feel cheap and dirty—and not in the fun way.

Tully answers immediately, like she’s been staring at her phone for hours waiting for someone, anyone, to call her. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Damn, maybe she should be out guessing fat people’s weights as they suck down corn dogs and funnel cakes.

“Yeah, and it’s not pretty.” I glance at the body as if to verify this isn’t ground zero for the zombie apocalypse or some shit. “Beaten all over, then shot in the gut.”

“Fuck. Did he say anything?” I tell her his final words. “Guess we know what that means.”

“I’d say so. You know where she is?”

“Not at the moment, but I’ll find out.” Her voice sounds funny, like she’s in the bathroom or something. I can’t place it. “What are you going to do?” she asks.

I feel Sandecker’s mystery key in my pocket, burning its imaginary flame against my skin.

“Look for a needle in a pile of long pointy things,” I say. A shrill wail floats in on the night through the open front door. Sirens. Police cars are coming. Damn, that was quick. “I need a ride,” I tell Tully as I leave the office and jog to my car.

“What happened to yours?” she asks with a healthy dose of surprise.

“Circumstances beyond my control.”

The guards at the main entrance have my car and plates on file. They also know whose house I was visiting. If I leave as the cops are arriving, they’ll assume I had something to do with Sandecker’s death. That would be bad for me, while simultaneously being good for both the police department and the local news channels.

In the event of a tie, I choose being selfish. Don’t judge me.

I come up behind the car and stop dead in my tracks. It’s leaning to the driver’s side.

Son of a bitch.

“Oh,” I tell Tully, “and my tires were taken out.” Shit. I just had those fuckers balanced.

“Ouch,” she says in my ear. “Didn’t you just get those balanced?”

And now you know why we’re friends.

A knife would’ve taken too long, but a gun with a silencer would work for one quick shot to each tire. They don’t muffle the sound nearly as much as they appear to in the movies, but I was upstairs when the Charger drove off, and could have easily missed it under the roar of the car starting up and speeding off.

Whoever was driving that beauty wanted me stuck here.

Damn it. Is it a
silencer
or a
suppressor
? I keep hearing it both ways, and no one seems to have reached an accord on that.

Son of a bitch. Have you ever had one of those days where you feel like the least intelligent person on the planet?

I open the passenger door and with one hand remove anything and everything that can immediately identify the vehicle as mine. The other hand presses the phone tight to my ear as I scan the street for nosy neighbors.

“ETA on that pick-up?” I ask Tully.

“Where are you?”

“Right now? Outside Sandecker’s house like a moron. But in about four minutes I’m going to be as far from here as my flat feet and crappy sneakers can carry me.”

“There’s a direct entrance to the country club on the north side, by the clubhouse. No guard booth; only a wall and a gate. I’ll meet you a quarter mile west of it.”

She knows way more about Sandecker’s neighborhood than I think she should, and I almost want to ask her how. Then I realize I really, really don’t want to know.

“Done,” I say.

She doesn’t bother telling me to be careful before she hangs up. Why would she? If neither of us were careful we’d have never made it this far in life. If it hadn’t been for Scotty, we wouldn’t have met at all, even in our small-ass hometown. And by now both of us would be long dead. So careful isn’t something we have to be told to be—it’s something we’ve been ever since our first breath in this shit-stain world we were brought kicking and screaming into.

I shove all the paperwork into a back pocket and return to the house. Tully gave the guards a false name, backed up with the matching identification I gave them when I arrived. But the cops will eventually figure out who I am through the car. I know for a fact the VIN doesn’t match my registration, but there are other ways to track a person down, and I can’t block all of them.

I’ve learned that if you try too hard to remain hidden, you end up looking even more suspicious. Better to have enough about you be real to make you appear legit. The rest can be explained as ghosts in the bureaucratic machine.

If I’m lucky, I have maybe three minutes of searching ahead of me before I have to get the hell out of here. If I’m not lucky…well, I have three minutes of searching ahead of me that will amount to jack shit. Any way you slice it, I have three min—

Okay, now I have two and a half minutes because I’m standing here debating how much time I have left. Fuck me. I need help.

Sandecker’s facing the wall of maple-oak-ahogany built-ins behind the desk, the chair pressed against the desk, rather than away from it. My guess is he was facing the built-ins, attacked from behind, then knocked or thrown into the chair, where it rolled into the desk. If he’d been sitting at it, working perhaps, and someone attacked him that way, he’d have rolled into the built-ins.

Is my deductive technique foolproof? Of course not. But what do you expect in two minutes and change? If you want Sherlock Holmes, go watch PBS.

Actually, you should be watching PBS anyway. That’s quality, publicly-funded programming right there.

Since it’s probably where Sandecker was facing at the time of his assault, I start with the built-ins, beginning with the top shelf and working my way down. I find nothing, followed by nothing, with abso-fucking-lutely nothing bringing up the rear.

Until I reach the next-to-last shelf.

I’m on my hands and knees, crawling around like I’m not too old for this shit. In the middle of the shelf, wedged between an encyclopedia set and a copy of Stephen King’s
The Stand
—the uncut edition; nice job, Jeff—is a short, thick paperback called
Safe House
. Never heard of the author before, but the cover highly insinuates that it’s a bodice-ripping love story with espionage underpinnings, all set in some version of Victorian England where women have big boobs to rival comic book heroines, and men have eight-pack abs and day-old scruff.

Really? A cover like that and you call it
Safe House
? In what fucked-up alternate reality do those two go together?

It doesn’t strike me as something a blue-collar boy like Jeff Sandecker would ever read, much less keep in a home office in a starch-white world with lidded vases on tables, possibly to read while lounging in a hammock or in an inflatable chair in the pool on a lazy Sunday.

Looks right up my alley, though, so I stuff it into my other back pocket to take with me.

What? Jeff doesn’t need it anymore, and Saint Gandalf the Ultimate Bouncer is already giving me the stink eye, so why the hell not?

Sirens are almost on top of me now. Neighbors will be waking up left and right, hoping it’s not their house under siege. When they find out it’s Sandecker’s, they’ll be tripping over themselves to get a front-row seat, sushi rolls and chardonnay in hand, all so they can gossip about it later over racquetball and stock prices.

Is that what people do in country clubs? Sit around in sumptuous leather high backs, downing mint juleps and thousand-year-old Scotch by the bucketful while doing their best
Pinky and the Brain
try-to-take-over-the-world shtick?

No, I’m seriously asking. I have no idea here. Closest I’ve ever come to the inside of a country club is getting chased out of a parking lot by some lawyer who thought I slept with his wife. I mean, I
did
sleep with her, but how he happened to know that remains a mystery to me.

That dude was scary, too, let me tell you. One hell of a runner. Thankfully, I know how to hotwire a fucking car.

Side note: if you ever plan on stealing a car, I highly recommend a Mercedes Benz. Smoother than a baby’s butt on ice.

But I digress…

The book was hiding something. I knew it was out of place. I find a switch, recessed in the back of the bookcase.

Hell yeah, I flicked it.