Eighty-eight
Once again, I made like a rocket, shooting past the parking garage and flying into the loading dock where the killer had pulled Esther. The dark, deserted driveway went back at least twenty-five feet.
In the shifting shadows, I heard scuffling, rushed toward the sound, and saw the tall, ski-masked figure with one steel arm encircling Esther’s throat. She was clawing at the arm with both hands, desperately trying to free herself, but the killer continued to choke the life out of her while dragging her deeper into the shadows.
If I didn’t do something right now, she could die in a matter of minutes!
“LET HER GO!” I shouted, my voice echoing in the darkness of the loading dock’s recessed empty space.
My voice surprised the attacker enough to reduce the pressure on Esther’s throat. She gasped for breath and began to thrash wildly.
That’s when I surged forward with Madame’s pepper spray.
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, ESTHER!” I shouted.
Esther was in the line of fire, but I had no choice and reached for the trigger. Thank goodness she realized what I was about to do and slammed an elbow with all her might into her attacker’s midriff.
He grunted and relaxed his grip enough for her to drop to the ground. As she did, she sucked in a bucket of air and let loose with a deafening scream she must have rehearsed down by the river!
Before the attacker could grab her again, I let him have it. The pepper spray hit him squarely in the face. I feared the toxin wouldn’t penetrate his woolen mask, but I needn’t have worried.
“YAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!”
The booming scream matched Esther’s in decibels. The attacker ripped the pepper spray–drenched mask off, revealing what I’d already suspected: the face of con artist Howard Johnson.
Howie stumbled backward, slamming into a dumpster. His gloves were equally polluted with the burning substance, and he ripped them off, too.
“You bitches!” he raged, fighting the fumes that choked him. “The perfect con and a pair of glorified waitresses screw it up!”
Esther was gasping and coughing on the ground as fumes of the pepper spray reached her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and I dropped down to help her.
“GET UP AND RUN!” I urged her.
That’s when I realized the pepper spray had rattled Howie but failed to put him down. He was coming toward me fast, and there was something shiny in his hand—a knife? No, a hypodermic! With one thumb, he popped the safety cap off to expose the deadly needle.
“You like espresso shots, bitch?” he rasped at me. “Well, I got a shot for you!”
A vision of Mason Dunn’s corpse flashed through my mind, and I knew that was not the way I wanted to go. I hit the trigger on the pepper sprayer again, but after a tiny sputter, it died.
Howie laughed and lunged toward me.
Suddenly, a flying figure body-slammed the man, sending Howie and his poisonous needle soaring in opposite directions.
“DON’T YOU DARE HURT MY FRIENDS!” Tucker cried as he pinned Howie face down on the concrete.
In the struggle, Esther’s messenger bag, which Howie had slung over his back, burst open. A number of items spilled out—red gummies, keys, and two thick spiral-bound notebooks.
The first was the one Esther found in our shop after Mr. Scrib’s mental breakdown. The second displayed the words TRUTH REVEALED in large cursive letters on its cover.
I reached for the TRUTH, just as an army of uniformed cops appeared on the scene. Tuck had called 911 before he jumped into action, and the police seized everything they found, including the notebooks.
I was told that the property would be returned to its rightful owners eventually. Right now, it was evidence—and away it went, along with the answers I’d been searching for.
After paramedics on the scene treated us for pepper spray exposure, we gave our statements to the police. Mine included some theories for the detectives to consider that would answer a few puzzling questions, like…
Why was Howie wearing Tony’s vest? And why did he choose an area full of security cameras as a murder site?
Ultimately, both questions would have the same answer. With the ski mask hiding his face and hair, Howie had planned to frame Tony Tanaka for the murders of Lachelle and Dina. After he killed the two women, he was going to put the vest and gloves back on the corpse in the car, fabricate poor Tony’s suicide note, and use his phone to put it on social media.
In the days following Howie’s arrest, I learned more about that evidence found in Esther’s stolen messenger bag. There were leftover toxic gummies from the batch he’d fed to Tony, after visiting him in his car for a “friendly chat.”
Police also found the keys to Tony’s car and Mr. Scrib’s apartment. The latter were found to be stained with Joan Gibson’s blood. More of Howie’s DNA was recovered from under Joan Gibson’s fingernails from the fight she put up during her strangulation.
In a confession that Howie made as part of his plea bargain, he claimed Joan’s murder was not premeditated. They’d argued in Mr. Scrib’s apartment when Joan (as I suspected) had blabbed too much to Howie about the details of her blackmailing scheme.
He demanded a bigger cut. She arrogantly insulted him, and he decided to find the notebook himself and extort a big payoff from Addy. After he strangled Joan, he set up Ethan, “the passed-out drug addict” in the apartment across the hall—and it would have worked, too, Howie whined, except for that “nosy coffee lady” at the Village Blend.
During the plea bargaining process, police even uncovered the real story of the Queens con man. Howie had been in on the theater troupe con from the start, just as I’d guessed in my taxicab confession to Tucker.
When Howie’s partner stole the money in an attempt to cut Howie out, Mr. Side-Hustle caught up with him, and reacted the same way he did when he learned about Joan Gibson’s blackmail scheme. Howie strangled his treacherous former partner, just as he’d done with Joan. But instead of finding someone like Ethan to frame, he hid the man’s corpse in the subbasement of the theater they’d rented to con the community.
Of course, we didn’t know any of this on the night of Howie’s arrest. As we commiserated at that loading dock behind the Minskoff Theatre, Tucker was devastated by Howie’s betrayal.
“I brought a killer wolf into our cozy fold, and it almost destroyed the Village Blend.”
I assured Tuck that it was not his fault, that Howie conned everyone.
“Look at me, Tuck. I was so convinced that he was an asset—with a capital A—I was ready to offer him a full-time position.”
“I still feel guilty,” he said.
“You shouldn’t. In the end, your body slam saved the day.”
Then I gave him and Esther a hug and reminded them of the most important dictum of the service industry and a truth even more universal:
“Good help is hard to find.”