Becoming a PI may involve firearms training, learning what’s legal and what’s not and mastering all the smooth moves of the PIBOT, but in twenty-first-century America, even the supersleuths Humphrey Bogart played would be pretty much shit out of luck without first-class Internet skills. As I often admit to Rik, I learn more there than I do on the street.
Like I told Pops, finding a guy named Koob in Pittsburgh is not a challenge. I leapfrogged from the Pennsylvania Public Information List—which is basically voters’ records, containing must-have nuggets like name, sex, date of birth, party (Koob is an independent), residential address and mailing address—to the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds and the Allegheny County database of property ownership and assessment, and then to several online services where you use all of that information to pick up stuff like cell phone numbers. Along the way, I acquired some mildly surprising info. Koob has gone by several names—Koob Xie, Koob Hsieh, Koob Shay and even Cooper Shay. Even more startling, crazy Mrs. Xie, who calls herself Melinda Shay, seems to be a well-established real estate lady.
I depart from Highland Isle in the Cadillac at about eight p.m. on Saturday, when I can just blast along the interstates, and by six a.m. Sunday I am parked down the block from the house Koob owns on Wightman Avenue. The neighborhood of Squirrel Hill North lies within the city of Pittsburgh and is frankly the kind of place where I could see a grown-up Pinky settling, in a different life. It’s very hilly, with a lot of beautiful old houses—colorful frame Victorians and hulking Tudor-style places with heavy brown beams on the upper stories surrounding the windows and tracing angles on the white stucco facades.
As for Koob’s house, which I guess is Mrs. Koob’s these days, it’s older, in an architectural style I can’t name. Set a good twenty feet above the street, the place just screams out suburban substance, which comes as no surprise given what Koob said about his upbringing and never feeling like he belonged to any community. I’m sure the big-ass house gives him a sense of being rooted. It’s redbrick, with the steep gables of a Victorian, a single triangle with a window on the high point of the third floor. On the ground, an enclosed screen porch wraps around the house. Within a large sloping lawn, two sets of concrete steps with iron railings help a visitor climb the hill to the front door.
Having gotten this far, I am not quite sure how I’ll actually find Koob. My operating assumption, given everything he said about how loony Mrs. Xie is, is that he stopped by to see his kids but isn’t putting his head on a pillow here. So I prepared something that will make Mrs. Xie point me in the right direction.
Around 8:15 a.m., after I stroll by and see some figures moving through the dimness of the first floor, I return to the CTS and grab a cardboard box—a one-foot cube—and a clipboard, both of which I brought from Highland Isle. I carry them with me up the two separate concrete staircases. The bell is on the outside of the porch, but the tooled oak door within, leading to the house proper, flies open, and a woman, who I recognize as Mrs. Koob from brokerage company headshots on the net, advances to the screening.
It seems way too early for the Sunday open houses, at least it would be around Kindle County, but Melinda is already dressed for success. She has on a tailored white linen suit, and her blonde hairdo might as well have been shellacked in place. Given the way Koob talked about her, I was expecting one of those characters in soiled rags who wander around like zombies in movies about nineteenth-century madhouses. This woman, credit where due, is totally put together and damn attractive, if that’s your kind of thing. Her manner is cold and instinctively angry, but definitely not out of control.
“Ace Messenger,” I say. “We have a delivery for Cube—” I squint at my clipboard. “Zee?”
“Here,” she says as she pushes open the screen door. “I’ll take it.”
I lift the clipboard. “He’s gotta sign.”
“Hold on,” she says and zooms back through the heavy front door, calling out, “Koob!”
Oh. I can feel my heart taking on some added weight. In general, even for a one-nighter, I stay away from married people, with occasional exceptions for supposedly straight women who have a secret thirst a dude could never fulfill. Gay or straight, though, somebody living with their spouse inevitably views their thing with me as something extra on the down low. I always end up with the feeling that there are three people in bed, which is not that much fun when one of them is someone you didn’t invite. As in so many things, the cheating men, generally speaking, are worse than the women. I’ve been through enough of these guys that I now recognize a type, like Primo DeGrassi, who says he’s going to leave, just as soon as blah blah blah, which might as well be when the universe stops expanding. But I didn’t see Koob as one of them.
But here he is, emerging from the doorway into the house that his wife went through thirty seconds before. He’s in running shorts and shoes with an old Carnegie Mellon T-shirt, and he’s about two strides from the screen door when he finally looks up and stops cold. I’ve seen a lot of different moods on Koob, but I’ve never watched his smooth face shrink with what is almost certainly panic.
He comes the rest of the way to the door and whispers, “I’ll meet you down the block.” He hitches his head slightly in the direction where I’d parked.
“When?”
“Two minutes.”
He turns away until I whisper, “Better take the box, man.”
He wrenches the screen door open and grabs the parcel, retreating inside.
I go about a hundred feet down the street and watch his house from the other side. He emerges a couple minutes later, in the same outfit with the addition of a fanny pack belted around his waist. He looks directly at me for one second and then, in a flash, is in a dead run in the other direction.
I say a bad word and fly after him. I am not in Boot Camp shape, like he is, and I realize after the first few strides that I’ll never have the endurance to keep up with him. On the other hand, even in military-style footwear, I might gain ground on him in a dead sprint. I am really fast. Once I’ve halved the distance between us, I yell his name. He looks over his shoulder and kicks it up another gear. I keep pace only for another block. After two more, I’m falling behind, and after another quarter mile, involving a hard slog uphill, I have completely lost sight of him when I reach the crest. Best guess is that he took a left into an alley that cuts in midblock. I jog up there but see no sign of him, although he could be crouched behind any of the garbage and recycling cans. I take a second to think. He must be figuring that I’ll spend time searching for him, checking various possible hiding places.
Instead, I double back, jogging, and wait at the mouth of the alley that runs behind his house. I amble in a few paces and take up a position on the other side of a detached brick garage, so he won’t be able to see me from the corner. I am pretty sure he’s got his cell phone in that fanny pack, but if he wanted to talk, he wouldn’t have taken off running, so I squelch the idea of giving him a call.
I wait there for quite some time. Initially, I’m glad to rest. It’s a great summer day, and I’m sweating hard. Eventually, I pull my pants legs up to the knees and sit down on the walk to enjoy the sun. I check my phone and remember to contact Pops. ‘Still alive in Pittsburgh,’ I e-mail him, then drop a pin in a map app and text that to him, too, knowing that he probably won’t find a single person in the Aventura Center for Advanced Living who can make heads or tails of it.
A little before 9:30, Koob saunters by, cooling down from his run, his tee completely sweated through. I wait until he’s gone past me, then I step into the alley and call his name.
What happens next I don’t expect. In a Special Forces move, he hits the pavement as he’s reaching behind him to the fanny pack. He rolls once and ends up on his belly with both hands on a semiautomatic pistol that is pointed at me.
“Whoa,” I say, and raise my hands halfheartedly. “Don’t shoot, cowboy.” I have the two-shot derringer in my shoulder holster, which is under the open blouse I’m wearing over a tank top, but he is freaked out enough that drawing on him might make him pull the trigger. He stares at me for a second, then gets to his feet slowly, still in firing position, his arms outstretched, one hand bracing the other.
“Go away,” he says.
I’m too shocked by this whole thing not to be Pinky.
“I thought you didn’t own a gun.”
“I bought one,” he answers.
“Why is that?”
“It enhances my credibility. I told you I don’t need a girlfriend.”
“Hey, man. That’s not why I’m here. I’m working. I just need to talk for a minute.”
“And what work is that?”
“Frito Blanco died the night before you left. Maybe murdered.”
There’s a small hitch before he says, “And who’s Frito Blanco?”
He’s got to be lying—we talked about Blanco for quite a while—but I go with it and say, “He was the last cop to testify against the Chief. The one who came up with that photograph.”
“Sounds like you ought to talk to the Chief about what happened to him.”
“Well, I’m here to talk to you. Are you telling me, old pals and all that shit, you don’t know anything about Blanco’s death?”
“What I’m actually telling you,” he says, “for a second time, is to go away. Now.” He reaches behind him to stow the weapon and then turns and heads down the alley toward home.
I check a restaurant app and walk downhill three blocks to Murray Avenue, where there’s a Tudor-style strip of stores, including a café where I stand in line until I can get in for brunch and a chance to use the facilities. This is the second time someone has pointed a gun at me—the first time was when I was investigating for Rik on a divorce case—and I can now say for sure that whenever that happens, it’s a crazy high adrenaline experience. I sit with a mixed sparkling water and lemonade, trying to calm down, so I can figure out what the hell is going on.
First off, using a handgun to get rid of some chick you want to forget is pretty extra. So either he thinks talking to me will expose something life-threatening, or he’s totally tripped out about someone else.
Second, there is no way I’m just gonna fuck off. Maybe what’s spooking him has nothing to do with Blanco. Maybe it has to do with the shit he turned up about Vojczek. But the Ritz is the man behind the curtain on the Chief’s case. Overall, Koob’s act in the alley makes me pretty sure he knows stuff I need to hear.
There’s a nice park nearby, where I wander after eating. Eventually I take a seat on a bench to call his cell. Maybe the phone will be less threatening to him. I’m slightly amazed when his number turns out to be disconnected, since it came up on several sites.
More thinking. I return to the CTS. There’s a space open right across the street from Koob’s house, and I park the Cadillac there. I want him to know I’m not leaving.
About six p.m. a text arrives. It’s very cute since it comes with no return number, meaning he masked it, which also makes it clear he’s got another phone or SIM card. ‘I WILL hurt you, if you come near my family again. Go away. I will never talk to you.’ My best guess is that he’s upstairs peeking out a window to see how I’m going to react, and I unfurl my middle finger and hold it out the car window for a minute.
After dark, I sneak out the passenger door so I can go back down to the shopping area to buy something for dinner. I’ve just settled back in the passenger seat to eat my Chinese when my cell buzzes. It’s Tonya.
“Girl!” I say.
She starts right in. “Where are you? I came by your place last night to talk to you and stopped there again on my way to work this morning.”
“I’m out of town,” I say. “On a case.”
“This case?”
“I’m not sure. It might connect. I don’t know.”
“Is this a lead you got from the Chief?”
“Not completely. Something I more noticed on my own.”
“At Frito’s?”
“Completely independent. Probably nothing to do with Blanco.”
“Listen, boo. I’m not digging you dodging my questions. I’ve told you a lot of shit I maybe shouldn’t have, and like the only excuse I have is that I’m trading information, okay? I’m telling you because you’re telling me. Get it?”
“Okay.”
“So what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to talk to a dude who has some stuff on the Ritz.”
“Explain.”
“I can’t. And I’ll never be able to. Any chance I get this guy to share, I’ll have to guarantee it’s on a double super-secret tip-top DL basis. He’s totally scared. He already pulled a gun on me. There is no way he’ll even breathe the same air as me if he thinks I’m going to repeat one word he’s saying to the cops. And he’s hip enough to ask.”
“Well, whatever you get, I have to hear about it.”
I think.
“What if it’s like a CI situation, maybe?” I ask. “No names. Nothing to identify him.”
“Well, I can’t enroll him as a CI. I don’t even know who he is.”
“Okay. Then enroll me.”
She takes a second to think that through, and as it turns out, we both like the idea. If I’m carried as a confidential informant on the Highland Isle PD records, she won’t have to give up my name to the FBI. It also offers her a little cover on what she’s told me, since it can be called part of a CI exchange. And I wouldn’t have to give up anything that would endanger Koob, so long as I make the limitations clear now.
“So I have no obligation to tell you anything I’ve learned from our client,” I say.
“Naturally. But I have to hear everything to do with what happened to Blanco. You can’t pick and choose.”
“Okay. Like I say, it’s a dream this guy will even talk to me.”
“Is this the dude you were seeing?”
“No,” I say. Simple excuse: It’s none of her business.
Toy can flip the switch to angry in a second, and I can hear her breathing into the phone and reeling herself back in.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” I ask.
“We interviewed Mrs. Blanco last night. Marisel.”
“General background?”
“Sort of. We’re still looking for Blanco’s phone.”
“The lawyer didn’t have it?”
“Nope. Said Blanco wouldn’t hand it over even to her. So we thought maybe he left it at home. But no on that. We wanted to sit down with Marisel anyway. She’s positive he was offed.”
“Why?”
“Well, you remember she walked out of the courtroom when Frito was on the stand?”
“Sure, but I thought the sex stuff about Blanco and the Chief was getting to her.”
“Well, she says what bothered her was that Frito was fibbing a whole lot.”
“About?”
“That ring for one thing. She’s never seen it before. And the uncle for another.”
“There was no uncle?”
“He did have an uncle. But the guy died in prison. And he didn’t finish high school. And she was like, ‘There’s no way Fabian would lie under oath, unless someone was threatening him.’”
“Well okay. So maybe there was a lot Blanco wasn’t sharing with Mrs. Blanco, right?”
“Apparently. But she’s positive someone was forcing him to lie.”
“The Ritz?”
“She has literally never heard Moritz Vojczek’s name.”
“Cornish?”
“She remembers Walter. Blanco liked him. Kind of a friend.”
“Did she know anything about that apartment?”
“I didn’t tell her. You know, she’s got enough going on right now. But when I asked about Frito’s habits, like what he did or where he went when he was chilling, she said all he did was work super hard and spend time with his kids.”
“And any feedback from the Bureau on the computer in the apartment?”
“My Bureau guy says there’s nothing on it. Apparently, Frito was using it to read a thumb drive or memory stick. Some form of external media. That’s all they can say right now. The people in the spook section, the FCI guys”—foreign counterintelligence—“they have some tricks, you know, shit they get from the code writers at Microsoft that would let them drill into the metadata left on the machine, but it’s not for sure they’ll do it, especially since we can’t say it’s a murder case. I mean, the Bureau, they have some rules, man. Rules and rules. Every second you’ve got to be paranoid you’re going to step in shit. But they have amazing resources. I’ll give them that. They actually have a bug guy at HQ who flew in to talk to me yesterday.”
I’m hearing a funny note in her voice.
“Toy, what’s this stuff about you and the Bureau? Are they trying to recruit you?”
“You know the patter. Always a place for a BIPOC woman. They could be playing me, making me think I can join their team so I give them everything they want.”
I can tell right now she’s thinking about this seriously. ‘FBI’ would definitely work for her parents. It would change the sound of ‘queer’ in a city minute.
“And what did the bug guy say?”
“He said the insect squashed on the bathroom door is a tiger mosquito.”
“A tiger mosquito?”
“Tiger, right.”
“You mean it’s got like stripes?”
“Jesus, Pinky,” she says. “Where do you come from? I wasn’t asking what kind of fit it was rockin.”
“Well, what did you ask?”
“I listened. Tiger mosquitoes are known to bite the same person several times. So maybe we get lucky and with DNA we identify somebody who was with Frito in the apartment. The bloodstain was definitely twenty-four to thirty-six hours old. And it’s not the Chief’s or Frito’s, they’re both O positive.”
“Fabulous, right?”
“Maybe. The tiger mosquito typically travels about three hundred feet in one day, meaning the blood inside it could have been extracted from anyone in the apartment building. You know, like it bit somebody on the third floor and floated in through that open window looking for more.”
“But the stain’s A positive, you told me.”
“Yeah, so are thirty-five percent of the people on earth. Also possible it’s a mix.”
“Okay.”
A second passes.
“So like we’re straight, right?” she asks. “Whatever you get, wherever you are, you’ll tell me everything this dude knows about Blanco, whatever he saw or smelled.”
“Deal,” I say. I promise I’ll call her tomorrow.
I’m sleeping in the passenger seat of the CTS, fully reclined and pretty comfy, dreaming that Koob has moved into the Aventura Center for Advanced Living, when the harsh feel of light on my lids and a strange knocking wake me. When I come to, there’s an intense LCD beam burning out my eyeballs, and I cover my face and squirm around. The light is lowered but the rapping continues. It’s a uniformed cop, young, Latino maybe. But he doesn’t look ready for war.
“Miss,” he says when I roll down the window.
“Officer?”
“We had a report of a woman asleep in a car. One of the neighbors called it in. Said it looks like you’re young and violating curfew. Maybe a runaway.”
“You’re makin my day,” I tell him and hesitate, just as I start to reach for my wallet. I had put it in the glove box so I wasn’t sleeping on the lump, and I explain where it is and what I’m doing so he can say okay before I open the glove compartment. I press the button and lift my hands as the box drops open and he runs his light over the interior.
“Okay,” he says.
I hand over my wallet—not so smart, but I’m still groggy.
He looks at my license and shines the flashlight back in my face, then helps himself to a look at the other cards in my wallet.
“PI?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not licensed here, so don’t tell me you’re working.”
“Okay.”
He hasn’t gotten to the concealed carry permit, which could be real trouble if he figures out I’m strapped, since I have no permission in this state to be hiding a gun, which right now is under the driver’s seat. But instead, he hands the wallet back.
“I think maybe you should move on, Miss Granum.”
“Officer, I’m not trying to be a dick, but what am I doing wrong? I checked the signs. It’s not a no-parking zone.”
“Public vagrancy?” he asks.
“You mean a homeless person can sleep in a cardboard box on the street and I can’t take a nap in a Cadillac?”
The guy seems to have a sense of humor, and his eyes narrow as he tries to decide whether to smile or go hard-ass.
“Miss Granum. I don’t think you drove ten to twelve hours from Highland Isle for a vacation, at least not one where you sleep in your car. You’re staked out on somebody. And we already agreed you’re not licensed to work as a PI in this state. So make it easy and move on. There’s a public parking lot down on Murray. Well lit. You’ll be safer there.”
This is where I can hear Pops’s voice. Let Koob win this round. Any answer but yes and the cop will get me out and frisk me and search the car and find the derringer.
“Okay,” I say. I hop across the center console to the driver’s seat and start the car, and pull out carefully.
But I’m back in front of Koob’s by eight a.m. This time I see his daughter head out, maybe for a summer job. She’s one of those girls, pretty and graceful, I used to hate because everything seemed so easy for them. There’s probably a lot that bothers her, but she still moves like nothing can touch her. Then Melinda drives off in her BMW. Once they’re gone, I walk up to the front door and ring the bell. I ring it about twenty times before I hear voices in the house—Koob yelling at his son, I think. I hear the dead bolt being opened and Koob emerges, still looking back over his shoulder and exchanging words with the boy. When he turns, he sees me and the derringer that I have in my hand at hip level.
I use one finger to indicate that he should come closer. He complies, walking about halfway to the screen door. I speak in a voice a little bit above a whisper.
“Your turn to listen,” I say. “I drove ten fucking hours to talk to you, instead of just dropping a dime on you to the cops and the FBI, which was my other choice. But have it your way. I’m sure both agencies will have a lot of interest when I tell them you have been doing all kinds of super-weird stuff for a couple months and that I saw you install a NoDirt behind the Vojczek office. And that you totally vaporized within hours of Blanco’s death. So you don’t need to explain it to me. You can explain it to them.”
He thinks, but when he answers, he doesn’t say what I expect.
“She just went to pick up a prescription and will be back in five minutes. If she sees you, she will go nuclear.”
“I don’t care about your f’d-up domestic situation. I’m going back to the public lot on Murray Avenue. And if you’re not sitting in the passenger seat in my car in the next fifteen minutes, I’m calling Tonya Eo, who’s the detective sergeant in HI who’s working Blanco’s case, plus whoever she tells me to contact at the Bureau. You can run from them, or talk to them, or hire a lawyer, I don’t care, but I’m done making you my problem. I’m your best choice by a million miles. But be stupid or whatever. I don’t care.”
His eyes move a little as he tries to take in what I said.
“How is that? How are you my best choice?”
“I’ll explain it when you’re sitting in my car. It’d take too much time now and like, God forbid I upset Melinda.”
I shake my head, just to show how little I like what I’m finding out about him, then go back down the walk.