Sticky Fingers (9 page)

“My parents once kept a vast wine collection.” She ran one finger down the edge of the racks, then looked at the dust with distaste. “But it was my mother’s interest, really. After she died, Dad just drank it all. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he had a bottle with dinner every night for twenty years—so the collection dwindled to nothing.”

The family tragedy didn’t interest me. “Well, the racks look in good shape. I know a restaurant that’s looking to make some upgrades. These might appeal to the owner. I can offer you a couple hundred bucks.”

“That’s all?”

“If they were carved or imported or something, I could offer you more. But these are nothing fancy. See? Even the joints don’t match. You could ask around, try to find somebody else who will offer you more. No skin off my nose.”

“Oh, never mind. I’m just glad to be rid of them. I’d like all of this mess out of here as soon as possible. And a check, of course.”

“You want me to pay you now?”

Clarice checked her watch. “I have an important meeting this evening, and I don’t want to be late. Can you send it to me? To this address?”

“Yeah, sure. I could write you a check now, if you want. I just have to go out to the truck and dig out the checkbook.”

“No, I’m in a rush.”

“Okay, I’ll send the check. Where are you headed?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Whatever you say.” I shrugged. “You don’t have to stick around to supervise. If you’ve got big places to go, go. I’ll get the racks out of here tonight, put a payment into the mail tomorrow.”

She hesitated. Either she needed the dough or she didn’t trust me. I was willing to bet on the trust issue.

I said, “I’m bonded. Go to your meeting. Just—when you leave, send my guy down here. He’s waiting in my truck. Can you do that?”

She turned briskly. “Yes. There’s nothing worth stealing in the house, by the way. And I have your business card, if there’s anything out of order when I return. Turn off the lights and lock the front door when you leave.”

She left and went up the steps. I considered making a spitball and hitting her in the butt with it, but she was already gone.

It was only after I heard her footsteps cross the floor upstairs that I realized I hadn’t gotten around to warning her.

That’s when Rooney reappeared from the darkness. He jumped up and put his front paws on the freezer. He clawed at the lid and gave me a hopeful woof.

“Now what?” I asked him.

He barked again and smiled at me, his big tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

“You want something inside?”

I looked at the freezer. Maybe all those weird animals had made me jumpy, but all I could think about was stupid heroines in horror movies who were always stumbling around in dark basements, opening doors that should have stayed closed. But the freezer beckoned. Rooney clawed at it some more.

Gently, I lifted the lid on the freezer.

Preparing to find a dead zombie, I peered inside.

But all I saw was a heap of colorful frozen vegetable bags sitting alongside various sizes of packages wrapped in white butcher paper—probably meat. A soup bone sat on top. A really big one.

Rooney jumped up and leaned his head into the freezer. The interior light glowed up on the wrinkled features of his face. Snuffling eagerly, he tried to climb into the freezer to get at the bone. But his hind legs couldn’t quite get enough traction to make it over the edge.

I figured the old man had moved out of his house, and what were the chances of his bitch of a daughter wanting to eat his frozen food? Plus she’d said she was going to empty out the house in time to show it to a realtor. So I grabbed one of the white packages and hefted it. Maybe five pounds, I guessed. I ripped open the edge, and inside it looked like beef to me. With considerable freezer burn.

But Rooney stretched his nose closer to the huge bone sitting across the top of all the white packages.

I dropped the meat and reached in to push the bone closer to Rooney’s jaws. It weighed a ton, but he wrestled it out of the freezer and dragged it onto the floor. There, he crouched down and immediately fell to gnawing on one knobby end.

“Enjoy it,” I said. “With Clarice’s compliments.” I closed the freezer. “Where the hell is Nooch?”

Either he’d been sidetracked—which happened a lot—or Clarice had forgotten to deliver my message.

I went upstairs to find him myself. Rooney grabbed up his big bone and followed. The bone clunked against the walls, and he had trouble getting it through the doorways, but he managed.

On the front sidewalk in the dark, Rooney pushed ahead of me, then stopped dead and growled.

I couldn’t see much, but I trusted the dog’s instincts and froze. The wind hissed in the trees overhead. A distant siren wailed. Rooney dropped his bone on the sidewalk, and I grabbed his collar. I could feel the hair on his neck bristling.

I glanced up the street, my heart skipping. The streetlights weren’t much help. No traffic.

Then a car door opened somewhere in the darkness and slammed a second later. I steeled myself, thinking fast about a weapon. Should I turn the dog loose? Or prepare to use my fists?

But it was Nooch who pushed through the Crabtree gate.

I expelled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Where have you been?”

Nooch halted in his tracks in the act of muffling a yawn with one hand. “In the truck, like you said.”

“Didn’t Clarice Crabtree tell you I wanted you downstairs?”

“Who?”

“The lady who came out of the house a few minutes ago.”

“Nobody told me nothing.”

I glanced over at the driveway. Clarice’s car was still parked where she’d left it. The interior lights were on. Nobody was sitting inside. I could hear the bing-bing-bing of a key in the ignition, though. I headed over to the car.

“What’s going on?” Nooch ambled after me.

I reached the station wagon and peered inside. No Clarice. But the keys dangled from the ignition, and the car kept binging. I leaned in the open door to get a better look and saw her purse half hidden under the seat. Careful not to touch anything else, I snagged it off the floor.

“What are you doing?” Nooch asked. “Jeez, you’re not purse snatching, are you?”

“I’m checking her stuff. You fell asleep, didn’t you?”

“Aw, Rox, don’t yell at me. I started visualizing a nice plate of gnocchi, but I must have dozed off for a couple of minutes, that’s all, and—what are you doing?”

I had already pulled my cell phone from the hip pocket of my jeans. “I’m calling the cops.”

Nooch’s eyes bulged. “All I did was fall asleep!”

The first squad car arrived in less than three minutes. In half an hour, the street was crowded with cops and their vehicles. I guess it was a slow night for crime fighting. After the initial rush, Bug Duffy finally showed up.

7

Bug flashed his detective’s shield at the cop who’d been assigned the job of keeping sightseers away. He spotted me perched on the porch railing with Nooch. Shaking his head, Bug limped across the small yard toward us. He’d done something to his knee a few weeks back, and it looked as if he’d thrown away his crutches a little too early. He wore his rumpled jacket and corduroys with hiking boots, and he carried a big flashlight in one hand, turned off.

He said, “We didn’t believe it was you who called in a car with keys in the ignition. Are you the new neighborhood watch?”

“You mean I should have stolen the car?”

“That would have been easier to handle than the homicide we’re working in Homewood. Drug bust turned into a shoot-out, thirteen-year-old kid killed. Depressing as hell. I had to get away for a while.” He looked down at Rooney. “That’s some bone.”

The dog lay on the ground at my feet. He must have sensed Bug was referring to his prize, because he kept his teeth clamped on his bone, rolled his eyes up, and growled.

“Easy, Rooney,” I said without moving from my spot on the railing. “Nooch, how about putting him in the truck before he starts thinking somebody’s going to steal his new toy?”

The last thing I needed was my dog attacking a cop.

“Sure,” Nooch said amiably.

When Nooch was out of earshot, Bug said, “What’s this I hear about you giving up your religion?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bug leaned against the porch railing. He tried holding back a smile. “I hear you’ve taken a vow of chastity.” He turned on the flashlight, and the glare hit me in the eyes. I put up my hand to cut the pain, but he kept it on me. I heard barely suppressed laughter in his voice. “Is it true? You’re on the straight and narrow?”

“Mostly straight, rarely narrow,” I said, avoiding the light. “It’s a little less exciting than I’m used to, that’s all.”

I hadn’t expected my life-changing decision to make the headline news at police headquarters, especially during a big homicide investigation. The fact that even Duffy knew my business was a little embarrassing, I guess. For some reason, I didn’t mind everybody knowing I liked a quickie now and then. But now that I was trying to control my impulses, I felt kinda foolish.

Maybe Bug noticed, because the flashlight went dark. “Less exciting can be a good thing.”

“Is that the attitude in your marriage, Detective Duffy?” I asked. “How are Marie and the kids?”

Full of affection, he said, “Driving me crazy. Your daughter?”

“Pretty much the same.”

Bug was the kind of name that stuck, especially to a skinny kid who’d worn huge eyeglasses right through high school. But somewhere on his life’s trajectory, Bug Duffy had filled out in the shoulders, gotten some Lasik done on his eyes, and grown into a not-bad-looking guy with a steady job, a nice family, and a couple of citations for bravery. We’d been acquaintances in high school. I wouldn’t call Bug a friend, exactly, but he tended to look me in the eyes, not any other part of my body, which elevated him in my esteem.

How Bug felt about me, I wasn’t sure. Mostly, he seemed amused.

“This neighborhood doesn’t usually have much crime.” He thumbed the switch again and pointed the flashlight’s glare on the station wagon. “Whose car is it, do you know?”

“Isn’t this where the city’s finest technology comes into play?”

“The city can barely afford telephone service, let alone fancy technology. To me, this looks like somebody walked away from their car, that’s all. What’s the big deal?”

Nooch had come back, and was standing at the edge of the sidewalk. “I don’t feel so good.”

Bug trained the flashlight on Nooch’s orange belly. “What’s the matter, big guy? Queasy?”

“Hungry,” Nooch said. “I didn’t have no dinner yet.”

I got to my feet and pulled the truck’s keys from my pocket. “Mind if I take him home? He’s on a quest for fulfillment, and he needs food.”

“Send for a fulfilling pizza instead.” Bug lost his sense of humor. “So what’s the story, Rox? You wouldn’t call 911 without a good reason.”

“A lady named Clarice Crabtree was here a while ago, but she seems to have disappeared. That’s her car. She said she had some important meeting and took off in a hurry, but when I came upstairs, here’s her car, lights on, keys in the ignition, purse on the floor.”

“Who’s Clarice Crabtree?”

“The homeowner’s daughter.”

“Where’s the homeowner?”

“She mentioned a nursing home.”

Bug flicked his flashlight up to get a better look at the dilapidated house. The nursing-home story made sense to him. People in Pittsburgh took good care of their homes, unless they were poor or too old to climb ladders.

He swung the flashlight around and spotlighted the station wagon. “Anybody have a look inside the car yet?”

“I might have taken a peek while your buddies first searched the house.” I decided it wasn’t worth mentioning that I’d taken a quick look through Clarice’s handbag and found the usual junk women seem to collect. Lipstick, a scrip for Prozac, wallet with credit cards, eighty-two bucks in cash. The only interesting tidbit was that she had two valid driver’s licenses—each with a different home address. Maybe she had recently moved. Bug would find those on his own.

Bug flashed the light into my face again. “Why are you so worried about this lady? Your level of concern seems out of character.”

Explaining that I knew somebody had plans for Clarice didn’t seem like a good idea. So I said, “I owe her two hundred bucks.”

“That’s it?”

“And … Clarice went to high school with us. Don’t you remember? I think she graduated the same year you did.”

He dropped the light. “I think I’d have remembered somebody named Clarice. But I don’t.”

Bug had been in love with Marie back in high school. Even then, he hadn’t looked at other women.

A shout from behind some bushes drew everyone’s attention, and Bug pointed his light in the direction of the commotion. A moment later, one of the uniformed cops pulled a man out from behind a hedge.

He was a rangy old guy in pajamas and a blue corduroy bathrobe. I pegged him at once. Professor Crabtree. Had to be.

Maybe he’d had a dignified bearing in the past, but tonight he shuffled out of the bushes looking like a scarecrow in a pair of too-large rubber boots. A couple of days’ worth of grizzled beard bristled on his chin. Mud spattered the hem of his bathrobe.

“Hey!” Nooch called to him. “Be careful. You should have some better shoes.”

Bug kept his flashlight trained on the man’s confused face. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Professor Crabtree,” I guessed, already on my way down the porch steps. “The aforementioned homeowner.”

It took two uniformed cops to drag the old man out onto the grass, and he resisted every step.

“I’m not going back,” he was saying. “Let me go! Get away from me.”

“Take it easy,” I snapped at the cops. “He’s just a harmless old guy.”

Behind me, Bug said, “Don’t agitate him, fellas.”

The professor stopped short and glowered at me. Peevishly, he said, “I want to go home.”

“Right,” I said. “This is your home. You’re Professor Crabtree, aren’t you?”

At the mention of his title, he pulled himself together. “Yes, indeed. I belong here. I have to check on Rhonda.”