From the Grave--A McKenzie Novel Page 22

  “We were thinking if you didn’t know where it was that maybe we could, you know, compare notes,” Poyer said. “Try to figure it out. It would be good for everybody. You could take half; we’ll split the rest.”

  The way their heads snapped toward him, I knew that neither Stuart nor Herrman had agreed to Poyer’s plan for dividing the wealth, yet they didn’t debate the issue.

  “In that case, why don’t you grab something to eat and join us?” I said. “They have a steak taco with lime and cilantro—”

  “If I wanted spic food I woulda stayed on the East Side,” Stuart said.

  “That’s why you have so many friends, Moore. Why your neighbors are so happy whenever they see you. You bring joy wherever you go.”

  “Fuck you, McKenzie.”

  Ryan edged past me and circled the picnic table. It took him three long strides to reach Stuart. Stuart started to speak but was unable to get a word out before Ryan slapped him hard across the face.

  He wasn’t wearing gloves, and the sound of skin striking skin was so loud that the guys in the food truck forty yards away looked up.

  Stuart glared at Ryan with such anger that I knew if he had a weapon he would have killed him.

  “Just so you know, my best friend is Hispanic,” Ryan said. “Mexican, actually. His family is from Juárez.”

  “I don’t give a fuck who—”

  Stuart was interrupted when Ryan slapped him again, this time with the back of his hand. He stumbled backward. The expression on his face changed from anger to something else. From where I was standing, it looked a lot like fear.

  “You were about to say something,” Ryan said. “Go ’head.”

  “If you think—”

  Ryan slapped him a third time. Stuart crumbled to his knees and cradled his face. He went into another one of his coughing fits.

  “I can do this all day,” Ryan said. “How ’bout you?”

  Stuart shook his head. There were tears in his eyes.

  Ryan turned and retreated to his place at the picnic table. He winked as he passed me.

  Okay, not a kid. Not even close.

  “Guys,” I said. “You know, it takes a lot longer to heal when we get older. I play hockey—”

  “Do you really?” Ryan said.

  “When I was a kid I’d take a hit and get up the next morning like nothing happened. I take the same hit today and I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. So instead of slapping each other around, whaddaya say we talk it over?”

  Apparently Stuart didn’t like the idea. He stood slowly, turned, and stumbled back toward the car; he looked as if he might die before he got there. The way he kept coughing, I was willing to take bets.

  Herrman turned his gaze to Stuart, to Ryan, and back to Stuart again before he followed after.

  They both passed the fourth man, who simply stood in the parking lot, his arms folded over his chest like a theatergoer wondering if this was it, if this was what he bought a ticket for.

  I know you, my inner voice said.

  Poyer, on the other hand, walked right up to the picnic table where Ryan and I were standing, the table between us.

  “Aren’t you afraid your friends will leave without you?” I asked.

  He patted his jacket pocket where his keys were.

  “My car,” he said. “Ryan, I am sorry. I’m as big an asshole as you think I am. I wish I could go back and change that, but you can never go back, can you? I am sorry, though. As for the money—we didn’t have anything to offer you. No ideas at all. The only thing we could think of was that Leland stashed it at your house, but the FBI searched that, didn’t they?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “We were hoping you knew about secret panels or some shit,” Poyer added.

  “I don’t,” Ryan said.

  “Yeah. We figured you were more likely to help us than we were to help you. I’m sorry. I know I keep repeating myself, but I don’t know what else to say. I hope you have a good life for the rest of your life.” Poyer offered his hand. “I hope you’re happy.”

  Ryan shook Poyer’s hand. “You, too,” he said.

  Poyer turned and walked back toward his car. Ryan and I watched him go. The fourth man waited until Poyer passed him before walking toward us.

  “C’mon, McKenzie,” Ryan said. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  * * *

  We went inside the brewpub. It was loud and filled mostly with people who were fifteen to twenty years younger than we were. We found an unoccupied table, and Ryan ordered a beer made with puréed blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries, which he claimed was the best thing he ever drank. Hell, maybe it was. I had a pint of pale ale that was nothing special.

  It was brighter inside, and it gave me a chance to study Ryan’s face under the lights without him noticing, especially his eyes, mouth, and chin.

  Jesus, my inner voice said. He does look a little like Jackson Cane. Could they really be half brothers?

  Should I tell him? I asked myself. Tell him about Jackson?

  Hell no. Of all the things that are none of your damn business, this has to be number one on the list.

  “So what happens next?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m sure the boys will keep their distance from now on. Especially Stuart. I doubt you’ll ever see them again.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I gestured toward the door. Ryan turned, and together we watched Karl Anderson glancing right and left as if he were searching for his friends. Instead he found us, smiled, and moved toward our table.

  There was a tinge of concern in Ryan’s voice when he asked, “Who’s that?”

  By then Anderson had reached the table.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I got tired of waiting. It’s cold outside, you know?”

  “Ryan,” I said. “This is Karl Anderson. He’s a private investigator working for Hannah Braaten.”

  “The psychic babe?”

  “You know what?” I said. “That’s what they should call the TV show. Not Model Medium.”

  “I agree,” Anderson said. He gestured at an empty chair. “May I?”

  I gestured at the chair, too, and Anderson sat.

  “What TV show?” Ryan asked. “Wait? You work for Hannah? What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you from the store. Actually, I followed the three men who were following you. For a second there, I thought I might have to step in, but you guys seemed to have the situation under control.”

  “But why were you following us?”

  “The money,” I said.

  “Goddammit, I don’t know where the money is,” Ryan said. “Besides, why should you care?”

  “Hannah—” Anderson said.

  “The woman doesn’t take no for an answer, does she?” Ryan said.

  “It’s because of the TV show,” I said.

  “What TV show?” Ryan repeated.

  “They’re hoping to make a TV show about Hannah’s life—”

  “You mean like that woman in New York?”

  “She thinks that finding the money would go a long way toward getting it on the air.”

  “God, it’s like a curse,” Ryan said. “The curse of Leland Hayes. Forget TV. It should be a goddamn horror movie.”

  Just then the waitress returned, and we ordered more beers, including an IPA for Anderson. Ryan wagged a finger at the detective.

  “You’ve been spying on me,” he said. “Stop it.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’ll tell Hannah and Esti tomorrow that this is a waste of man-hours,” Anderson said.

  Ryan sipped more of his fruity beer and glanced around the brewpub as if he were at the Minnesota State Fair and this was the best people-watching he had ever encountered. Finally he turned back to Anderson.

  “What should I do?” he asked.

  Anderson shrugged.

  Ryan turned his eyes on me. “McKenzie, what should I do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a
t the point now where I’m ready to ignore all this nonsense and hope it goes away.”

  “Except now I really want to find all that money,” Ryan said. “I didn’t at first, but after everything that’s happened…” A girl walked past, and Ryan’s eyes followed her as if he had never seen one before. “I’d just like to put a period to it, you know? Slam the door on the first half of my life and get on with the rest, try to make it better. Finding the money and turning it in would help me do that.”

  “I get that, I really do,” I said. “Only, I am fresh out of ideas.”

  Ryan continued to watch the young men and women sitting and standing around us.

  Eventually he said, “I have a thought.”

  “Feel free to share,” Anderson told him.

  “What would you do if the old man were still alive?”

  “I’d probably conduct close surveillance,” I said. “Make sure there was nowhere he could go that I couldn’t follow. And then I’d do whatever I could to rattle his cage.”

  “Why?”

  “Leland wasn’t the trusting type. I don’t mean just trusting other people, I mean trusting the world. He’d want to stay close to the money. He’d want to be able to check on it every once in a while to make sure that it was still there. If you could agitate him enough, make him wonder enough, eventually he’d lead you straight to it.”

  Anderson hoisted his beer. “I like it,” he said.

  “Rattle his cage, then,” Ryan told me.

  “The man’s been dead for twenty-some years. I wouldn’t know how to go about it.”

  “There’s a show I watch on the Travel Channel,” Ryan said. “About ghost hunters. What they do, they set up their equipment at all these haunted hotels and asylums, whatever, and then they try to provoke the ghosts by insulting them, calling them names, questioning their manhood. ’Course, whenever they get a reaction, they start screaming like little girls. No—that’s not fair. Most little girls are way braver then those guys.”

  “Do you think that Leland would respond to that kind of treatment?” I asked.

  “He was a bully. I know bullies. Trust me on this, McKenzie. Most of the men I knew inside were bullies. They had to prove that they were tough every day of their lives. None of them could take an insult.”

  “Do you think insulting him would rattle Leland’s cage?”

  Ryan shook his head as if he weren’t sure of the answer.

  The three of us sat drinking quietly for a few minutes. Ryan spent most of them watching the young people around him. He was so engrossed that he didn’t notice the waitress approach and ask if he wanted another beer.

  “Sir?” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Sir?” She pointed at his near-empty glass. “Another?”

  “Umm, no, I’m good, thank you.”

  The waitress moved away.

  “I’m a ‘sir’ now,” Ryan said. “I’m nearly forty and I’ve never been twenty.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

  Ryan finished his beer and set the empty glass down on the table.

  “Do you know what rattles my cage, McKenzie?” he asked. “Pretty girls.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Shelby Dunston tucked her legs beneath her the way she does and smiled brightly.

  “Who is the prettiest girl you know?” she asked.

  “You mean besides Nina?” I said. “Your daughter Victoria, unless Katie’s also in the room, in which case it’s a tie.”

  Victoria called to me from the kitchen, “Good answer.”

  “I remember when you would have said it was me,” Shelby said.

  “It’s time to face facts, Shel—the years have not been kind to you.”

  That’s when she threw a pillow at me.

  “Stop flirting with my wife,” Bobby said.

  “I just called her an ugly old crone,” I said. “How is that flirting with your wife?”

  “Ugly old crone?” Shelby repeated.

  Victoria stepped into the living room and knelt at the coffee table between me and her mother. She had half a dozen sections from a tangerine on a small plate and started eating them one at a time.

  “Personally, Mom, I think you look fantastic,” she said.

  “Thank you, honey.”

  “For a woman your age.”

  “There’s an old saying,” Shelby said. “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Mama ain’t happy.”

  “They’re just teasing you, Shel,” Bobby said. “The truth is, if everyone looked like you do, the word ‘beauty’ would lose all its meaning.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” Victoria said.

  I tossed the pillow at Shelby’s smiling face; she caught it and set it in her lap.

  “I wish I had said that,” I told her.

  “I’m sure you will,” Bobby said. “The first chance you get.”

  “Okay, Mama’s feeling a little bit better,” Shelby said. “But you still haven’t explained what you’re going to do.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About Leland Hayes. How are you going to rattle his cage?”

  “There’s a line that’s been repeating over and over again in my head for at least a week now—‘there is no such things as ghosts.’”

  “I would think that after everything that’s happened, you might have changed your mind.”

  “That’s the thing, Shel—everything that’s happened. Kayla Janas almost convinces me, the way she led us to Ruth Nowak, her sincerity. But what I’ve learned about Hannah Braaten and her private investigators and how her business works makes me think it’s a load of BS like Bobby believes.”

  “Leave me out of it,” he said.

  “What? You’re wavering?”

  “Robert Nowak and Molly Finnegan are in jail today. Yesterday, they weren’t.”

  “Still … My involvement in all of this goofiness began because a couple of psychic mediums said that Leland Hayes would pay his son, and I don’t know who else, a hefty sum of money if they would shoot me. I can’t help but notice that no one has actually tried to do that yet. Except for maybe the guy in the red Toyota Avalon.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Bobby said. “Turns out it was Frank Fogelberg’s ex-wife’s teenage lover who pulled the trigger. We have video of him snatching the Avalon from the Holiday Stationstore and a fingerprint on the back of the car’s rearview mirror. Detectives Gafford and Shipman gathered him up late this afternoon. I’m waiting to hear if he did it on his own or if she put him up to it.”

  “Teenage?” Shelby asked.

  “Old men date young women all the time,” Victoria said. “Why can’t old women?”

  “Good point.”

  “You.” Bobby pointed at his daughter. “You need to pick your friends carefully.”

  “Why is it that every time someone else commits a criminal act, it’s Katie and me who get a lecture? I mean, all of our lives you’ve been doing this.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You couldn’t have told me about Fogelberg when I walked through the door? You had to wait for, what, a convenient time to slip it into the conversation?”

  “Suddenly I’m the town crier?” Bobby said. “I’m supposed to deliver the news?”

  “If Fogelberg’s shooting was a coincidence—how often does that happen, by the way? If Fogelberg’s shooting was a coincidence, that just adds fuel to the fire. Or rather takes fuel from the fire. Is that a thing? The point is, it’s just another reason to leave Leland’s cage unrattled.”

  “Do it for the money,” Shelby said.

  “Hell with it.”

  “The fun, then.”

  “What fun? All I’ve gotten out of this adventure so far is bad dreams.”

  “Bad dreams?” Victoria asked.

  “It’s why your father keeps lecturing you. He doesn’t want you to do dumb things like we did.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” Bobby asked. He knew what I was referring to; h
e just wanted to move the conversation into less painful territory.

  Thank you, Bobby, my inner voice said.

  “The thing is,” I said, “I’m now inclined to agree with Nina that it’s all a load of hooey.”

  “Where is Nina?” Victoria asked.

  “At the club, where else?”

  “What are you going to do?” Shelby asked.

  “About Nina?”

  “About Leland Hayes. You’re not just going to give up.”

  “Give up what, Shel? A ghost hunt? C’mon.” I gestured toward Bobby. “Tell her.”

  He shrugged in reply.

  “Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible,” Victoria said. “Albert Einstein.”

  “You know, there’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good,” I told her.

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Besides,” Shelby said, “what do you have to lose?”

  “My self-respect.”

  “Phfffff.”

  “Okay, letting that slide, even if I did decide to do this, I’m left with the obvious question—pretty girls aside, how do you rattle a dead man’s cage?”

  “The same way you rattle the living,” Bobby said. “You threaten what’s important to them.”

  * * *

  Hannah Braaten seemed pleased to hear from me. Esti not so much. They agreed to meet me in the living room of their home on Mount Curve Boulevard, which was much tidier than it had been the previous time I was there. Hannah sat in a stuffed chair opposite me. She was wearing a short skirt and a tight top, and she kept crossing and uncrossing her long, shapely legs while we chatted.

  Do you think she’s trying to rattle your cage? my inner voice asked.

  Esti sat in a chair positioned at a ninety-degree angle from mine, giving me the unpleasant feeling that I was being outflanked. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and hardly moved at all.

  Karl Anderson was nowhere to be seen.

  “It seems to me that we did not part on the best of terms the last time we spoke,” Hannah said.

  “I’m not entirely sure that’s going to change,” I said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m asking for your help.”

  “Help to do what?”