Full House

  FULL HOUSE

  Ten Short Stories

  by Edgar Award Winning Mystery Writer

  David Housewright

  Compilation Copyright 2014 by David Housewright

  First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Down and Out Books, LLC

  3959 Van Dyke Rd, Ste. 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  http://downandoutbooks.com/

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover art and design by JT Lindroos

  For Renée

  The author would like to gratefully acknowledge his debt to Carl Brookins, Gary Bush, Chris Everheart, Anne Frasier, Pat Frovarp, Ellen Hart, Steven Horwitz, William Kent Krueger, Otto Penzler, Julie Schaper, Gary Shulz, and all the others who helped edit and publish these stories.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Kids Today

  The Sultan of Seduction

  (aka “How to Trick a Woman Into Having Sex”)

  A Domestic Matter

  Mai Nu’s Window

  Miss Behavin’

  Last Laugh

  Obsessive Behavior

  Time of Death

  A Turn of the Card

  The Blackmailer Wanted More

  Bio

  Other Titles by David Housewright

  Other Titles from Down & Out Books

  Preview of Lono Waiwaiole’s Wiley’s Lament

  Preview of J.L. Abramo’s Chasing Charlie Chan

  Preview of Jack Getze’s Big Money

  Author’s Note: This was my very first short story and features Holland Taylor, the traditional trench coat detective that appeared in my first three novels—PENANCE, winner of the 1996 Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America; PRACTICE TO DECEIVE, 1998 Minnesota Book Award Winner; and DEARLY DEPARTED.

  Kids Today

  There were two stiffs on the floor and two kids soaked with blood standing over them and all the Minneapolis homicide cop wanted to know was: “What were you thinking, taking a teenage girl for a client without permission from her parents?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I told him.

  He looked the girl over. She had cradled her dead father until the cops pulled her off and his blood had stained her blonde hair, her cheeks, her shirt, her shorts, her long willowy legs, yet she remained impossibly beautiful.

  “Yeah, I bet,” the cop said and grinned.

  “It was because she couldn’t go to her parents that I took the job,” I insisted. Only he wasn’t listening. He knew my kind, sure he did. An over-stimulated, middle-aged private eye perfectly willing to risk license revocation for the opportunity to engage in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor; happens all the time. Only that’s not the way it was and I wanted him to know it. Course, in my defense I could have mentioned the ten Ben Franklins she had dealt face-up on my desk blotter—a thousand bucks—but I didn’t.

  “Tell me about this,” the cop said, gesturing toward the bloody scene. The mechanism that is a homicide investigation was in high gear and humming along. Officers in plain clothes and blues shot photographs, took measurements, examined blood stains and asked questions while the ME examined one of the bodies; I’d bet he couldn’t wait to get to the other. In the opposite corner, two officers were standing on either side of a twenty-year-old white male, his blood-stained hands cuffed securely behind his back.

  “I got the call about an hour ago,” I said.

  “From your client...” the cop inserted.

  “Yeah, Rachel Hartman.”

  “The seventeen-year-old girl,” he said, emphasizing seventeen.

  I took a deep breath, chose to ignore the insinuation, continued.

  “She told me she was afraid,” I said.

  “And you dropped everything and rushed right over,” the cop said.

  I nodded. A police woman was now at Rachel Hartman’s side. She gently took the girl’s elbow and ushered her away from the bodies to a chair on the far side of the living room.

  “What was she afraid of?” the cop wanted to know.

  “She wasn’t clear. Something to do with her father and a gun.”

  “This gun?” he asked, holding up a 9mm Glock in a clear plastic bag.

  I shrugged.

  The cop’s gaze drifted from one body to the other.

  “Which one is her father?” he asked.

  “They both are,” I told him.

  “Really,” he said, expressing about as much surprise as if I had told him the Twins had dropped another one. “Care to introduce me?”

  “This is Rachel’s step-father, Steven Palke...” I said, pointing to the body on the far side of the room, the one whose face and chest had been turned to jelly by the shotgun.

  “The millionaire computer entrepreneur,” the cop added, expressing the unofficial title that would probably be attached to Palke’s name in the obituaries.

  “Uh huh. And this gentleman,” I said, gesturing toward the older man with three ugly bullet holes in his chest, “is Rachel’s birth father. Abe Hartman.”

  The cop’s eyes widened. He knew Hartman’s unofficial title, too.

  “Abe ‘the Cleaver’ Hartman?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The gangster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yikes.”

  “You know, I said the very same thing when I was told.”

  “What the hell is going on?” the cop wanted to know. So I told him.

  Earlier that day Rachel Hartman came through my office door like she had expected me to be waiting for her.

  “Are you Holland Taylor, the private investigator?”

  That’s what it said on the name plate so I doubted she’d believe me if I told her I was Robert Mitchum; probably wouldn’t know who Mitchum was anyway. She was dressed for business in black pumps, black hose, black skirt, black blazer and white shirt with notched collar and she was wearing her blonde hair up the way some office matrons do. But there was no disguising her youth. She reminded me of a little girl playing dress up. A very pretty little girl.

  “Exactly how old are you?” I asked.

  “I’ll be eighteen in a couple of weeks,” she answered without hesitation—I would have guessed younger. “Only please don’t say you can’t help me until you’ve heard why I’ve come.”

  Rachel’s request came in a voice that made me guess others of my profession had already given her the bum’s rush, as well they should—minors are not legally bound by contracts and working for them can be both ethically and financially dangerous. But I liked the way she came into my office alone; the way she met my eyes without turning away; the way she stood with feet apart and hands on her hips as if daring me to throw her out. You don’t often see that kind of self-assurance in America’s youth these days so I nodded my head, gestured toward the chair in front of my desk and told her to talk to me. Besides, she was cheerleader pretty and I was enough of a dirty old man to appreciate it...

  The homicide cop gave me a knowing guffaw. Yeah, he knew my kind.

  “I want you to investigate my stepfather,” the girl told me.

  That was different. Usually young women come to me for background checks on their boyfriends.

  “Isn’t love grand?” the homicide cop asked.

  “You want to hear this story or don’t you?”

  “Sorry, sorry. Go on.”

  “Why?” I asked her.
“Why investigate your stepfather?”

  “He wants to adopt me,” she said. “He wants me to take his name.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not necessarily,” she admitted. “He loved my mom. At least he always treated her like he did. She died two months ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “She had a brain tumor.”

  I winced at the thought of it. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  Rachel sighed and bowed her head like it was a subject she had lingered over too often for too long. I changed the subject.

  “How does he treat you?” I asked.

  “Like his most important asset,” she answered, her head coming up. “My stepfather uses business terms in casual conversation. Mom was his partner. Their marriage was a merger. And he said acquiring me was the best part of the deal.”

  She smiled briefly; I nearly missed it.

  “Anyway,” she continued. “After Mom’s death, my stepfather said he wanted to adopt me; make it official; give me his name; make me his heir. He said he wanted to make sure I’d never have to worry about money or anything else. You probably know his name. Steven Palke? He was in the news just a couple of days ago.”

  Familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  Rachel said, “Nine months ago Steven bought eighty percent of a computer software start-up that was on the verge of bankruptcy, a company that was trying to develop a more efficient browser for the Internet. Last week these guys in Washington—the state, not the city—bought the company AND the browser system for seventy million dollars; I think they want to keep it off the market. Steven earned fifty-six million on the deal and was hailed as this financial wizard.”

  I did some quick recapping: “Your stepfather loves you, treats you well, he’s worth fifty-six million bucks and he wants you to become his heir. I don’t see a problem here.”

  Rachel took a deep breath. She answered with the exhale.

  “I was kidnapped nine months ago,” she confided. “It wasn’t in the papers; the police weren’t notified; it happened during the Thanksgiving break so none of my friends or teachers knew I was missing...”

  I started to take notes.

  “A dark-colored van pulled up next to me while I was on my way home from school. A man wearing a black hood jumped out, grabbed me, pulled me inside. I screamed but I guess no one heard me. They blind-folded me, tied my arms and legs and drove to a house with an attached garage, a split-level way out in the suburbs with white tile in the kitchen and new carpet.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  “They didn’t do a good job with the blindfold,” Rachel answered. “They left a crack at the bottom.” She placed a finger a half inch below her eye to show me. “I could see what was beneath my feet.”

  “I meant that the house was in the suburbs.”

  Rachel hesitated, then answered, “We drove for an awfully long time. At least an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She took another deep breath.

  “There were two of them,” she continued. “A man and a woman. I think they were married because they called each other ‘honey’ and ‘dear’—they never used proper names. They were very kind to me, believe it or not. They never threatened me; never said they were going to kill me or anything like that. Also—and this is where things get goofy—they always referred to my stepfather as MISTER Palke. It was Mr. Palke this and Mr. Palke that. One time the man was feeding me soup and the woman said, ‘It’s time to call Mr. Palke,’ and the man said, ‘Mr. Palke can wait’ and the woman said...”

  Rachel leaned forward on her chair so I would have no trouble hearing her.

  “The woman said, ‘We don’t want to make him mad.’ Do you believe that? They kidnap his stepdaughter but they don’t want to make Mr. Palke angry?”

  It didn’t sound right to me, either.

  “Anyway, what happened was the kidnappers demanded one million dollars in ransom and gave my stepfather forty-eight hours to raise it—I could hear them talking on the phone. Two days later the kidnappers got their million bucks and I was dropped off at Minnehaha Falls, near my home in Minneapolis.”

  “So your stepfather came up with the money,” I assumed.

  “No, sir,” said Rachel. “He could only get half of it on such short notice. I found out later that the rest—five hundred thousand dollars—came from my father. My real father. You have to understand that at the time I was just thrilled to get home okay and then later my mom... Anyway, I didn’t give much thought to any of this until I read the newspaper articles about Steven.”

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “They pointed out that he earned the fifty-six million dollars on a five hundred thousand dollar investment—an investment he made only three days AFTER the kidnappers released me.”

  “And now you think that the kidnapping was a scam,” I said, putting my highly-honed deductive abilities to the test. “You think that your stepfather staged the kidnapping to defraud your real father out of the five hundred thousand dollars that he later put into the computer company.”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I think so, but... Could you find out for me? For sure, I mean? Before I agree to be adopted? Steven has already changed his will and his lawyers are working on the adoption papers; he wants to file after my eighteenth birthday so my real father can’t challenge it. But I don’t want to be Steven’s daughter if he’s a thief and a kidnapper.”

  I was thinking that for fifty-six million bucks Saddam Hussein could adopt me. But then I’m old and cynical. Rachel was not and for a few moments I prayed that she never would be.

  I cast aside all my reservations about working for the chronologically-challenged and did what later turned out to be a foolish thing.

  I said, “Okay.”

  After hustling the girl out of my office, I turned to my notes. I was struck by how casual the kidnappers had seemed in Rachel’s narration. They hadn’t even bothered to use an outside phone. They were not afraid their calls would be traced; they were not afraid that they would be caught. This supported Rachel’s suggestion that her stepfather might have arranged everything. And, I reasoned, he might have used a telephone to do it.

  I had a hunch. If the kidnappers drove for an hour or more after they snatched Rachel, they not only might have driven outside the city, it’s possible they had driven outside the local area code. If so, any calls Steven Palke made to them would be long-distance and listed on his telephone records.

  I turned to my computer. I’m not hacker enough for major spoofs, but the telephone company is easy; the telephone company is about as secure as a box of corn flakes...

  “Wait a minute,” the homicide cop interrupted. “Are you telling me that you broke into the telephone company’s computers!”

  “Off the record, right?”

  “Jesus Christ, Taylor,” the cop muttered.

  An hour later I was studying a laser print-out. The Palke’s had made seventeen long-distance telephone calls from their home in the month of November—eight to a Cambridge, Minnesota number during the days leading up to and immediately following the kidnapping. Cambridge is an hour’s drive north of the Twin Cities.

  I punched the number.

  “You’ve reached Don and Judy Strickland,” a machine answered. “We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, we’ll get back to you.”

  It took me ninety minutes to find the Stricklands’ home using the phone book and an Itasca County map. I parked in the driveway. It was a split-level with attached garage—just as Rachel described—that had been built when they still put windows in garage doors. I peeked inside. There was not enough light to determine the exact color, but sure enough the garage contained a dark-looking van.

  I walked around to the front door. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say when the Stricklands answered my knock. “Are you the couple that Steven Palke hired to kidnap his stepd
aughter?” Something like that. Only they didn’t answer my knock or the low screaming of the doorbell. It was five-forty PM by my watch. Perhaps they hadn’t yet arrived home from work, assuming they still lived there. I wouldn’t if I had a million bucks. I tried the doorknob. It gave.

  Something was terribly wrong. My heart didn’t stop and my blood didn’t suddenly run cold but I felt it just the same; felt it in a way that made me wish I was carrying a gun. I leaned on the front door and it swung inward slowly. A wave of cold air washed over me as I stepped across the threshold. The air conditioner was on high even though the weather was pleasant for Minnesota in August, seventy-five in the shade. I began to shiver.

  I stepped into the living room. The carpet beneath my feet was new. So was most of the furniture; the place looked like it had been recently remodeled and refurnished. I called out.

  “Hello! Anybody home?”

  The kitchen was separated from the living room by a wide arch. I took three cautious steps toward it.

  “Anybody home?” I called again.

  I took another step, looked beyond the arch and got my answer.

  What was left of Don and Judy Strickland was sprawled across the kitchen floor. Someone had torn their bodies apart with a sawed-off at close range.

  A sound like rushing air filled my ears and muscles clenched in my neck, shoulders and legs. But I didn’t panic. I closed my eyes and swallowed the air sound away; six or seven deep breaths quieted my heart and steadied my pulse rate. I had been a homicide cop in St. Paul and I knew how to do it, how to switch off my emotions and force myself into a kind of dispassionate mind set in which dead bodies become little more than props in a stage drama, a work in progress. Only I must have lost the knack during the four years since I pulled the pin because when I opened my eyes again the kitchen had become distorted: the walls and floor tile were now white light without borders, the splattered blood seemed to glow and the bodies shimmered like a heat mirage on an asphalt highway. I shielded my eyes with my hand. In the distance I heard a sound like a barking seal. It was me retching. I turned away and walked deep into the living room. I tried again to de-sensitize myself to my surroundings. It took a long time. I couldn’t get past the image in my head that Don and Judy Strickland were holding hands when they died.