Lex Yarnell, one of the DART members who’d hauled me out of the Wolf Run, and then fetched my borrowed shirt with a long stick, chauffeured me around for what remained of my working day. First stop was the Nurse’s Station, where Wendy Stafford, R.N., didn’t like the way my eye looked. “For all we know, that kid could have stepped in wolf piss,” she muttered to Lex, after ordering him to take me to San Sebastian General Hospital’s Emergency Room. “If I was a doc, I’d shoot her up with antibiotics.”
To me, she said, “There’s a full moon tonight, so have Sheriff Joe keep you locked up, just in case.” She winked.
I didn’t wink back, my usual winking eye being covered with gauze.
When Lex and I arrived at the ER, the doc—Rosalind Widdows, internal medicine, an old friend of mine—did shoot me up with antibiotics, but guffawed at any possibility of my turning into a werewolf. “The last known werewolf died in Romania in 1890. He was replaced by Cthulhu.” Shots and smart-assery duly delivered, she gave me a couple of prescriptions and a sterile eye patch. “They have silk pirate patches at the pharmacy. Dressier, if you care for that sort of thing.”
From the ER, Lex drove me to CVS, where the pharmacist issued me more antibiotics and a two-yards-long receipt. On the way back to my truck, I called Walt MacAdams at the harbor, and told him what I needed to do.
When Lex deposited me back at my truck, I headed for Gunn Landing Harbor, where the unlikeable Cliff Flaherty had met his untimely end. Sore eye or not, I still had an investigation to conduct.
Walt stood waiting for me on the deck of his Running Wild. “Do what you need to do,” he told me, “and I’ll keep an eye out. Like I said on the phone, none of the cops have gone near Scribbler since the day after Cliff bit the big one, but who knows when one of them might drop by for another look-see? If you get caught, leave my name out of it. I don’t want your husband more pissed at me than he already is. Hey, what’s wrong with your eye?”
“Just got something in it, no biggie,” I answered.
As we walked past the Running Wild toward Cliff’s Gulf 32 Pilothouse, Walt added, “If you wanted to look through his Mercedes Gullwing too, you’re out of luck. The cops towed it away yesterday, probably afraid some car enthusiast would steal it. Gave this end of the harbor some class.”
Scribbler’s cabin was locked, of course; the detectives had made certain of that by replacing Cliff’s ancient Yale with a new Schlage. This was disappointing. Once in the not-too-distant past I’d heard Cliff swear at the old Yale—his boat wasn’t far from mine—then take a wrench and whack at the thing long enough that the two brawny boaters now living in Hawaii on their Wipe Out yelled for him to be quiet or they’d come over and do the same thing to his kneecap. I’d then watched in amazement as Cliff bypassed the cabin door and its recalcitrant lock by sliding into the cabin through a loose window in Scribbler’s pilothouse.
After making certain no one was looking, I did the same, the dried-out facing only slightly skinning my hip as I slid through. Compared to what I’d already experienced today, it was nothing. But as my rump landed on the cabin floor, I realized that Walt’s last words had stirred up something I’d been puzzling about.
Why had a man who wrote my mother’s charity a large check last week, and owned a ’57 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing worth well into a million bucks, been living on a boat as sad as this?
In its heyday, Scribbler must have been beautiful, but not anymore. The spacious pilothouse had once been light and airy, but now the salt-encrusted windows dulled the sunny day to a swamp-like gloom. The varnish had been rubbed away from the teak fittings, and the cover on the full-length settee on the port side was ripped and stained. From crime techs looking for drugs? Or from a man who neither cared about people nor boats? Probably the latter, since flies buzzed around the dirty dishes in the sink, and unless I was wrong, a family of mice had made their home in one of the galley’s open drawers.
The only item that appeared halfway clean in this hellhole was an eight-by-ten framed photograph screwed to the galley wall. The glass had been Windexed to a fare-thee-well, so that even after six days of being abandoned, I could still make out the images of a beaming Cliff Flaherty, a luminous Lauren, and a grinning Dylan, who appeared to be around eight years old.
For some reason that photograph hurt my heart, so I turned away and began looking for…for I didn’t know what. I gave the cabinets and drawers—those without mice in them, anyway—a good going-over, then rummaged through the tiny closet. The dead man hadn’t been exactly dapper; most of what I found were ancient slacks and shirts that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Midnight Mission. The single exception was a startlingly expensive-looking indigo silk suit that resembled an Ermenegildo Zegna, a brand my elegant stepfather was fond of. It looked brand new.
“Yep,” I muttered to myself, checking the label. “Zegna.”
After frisking the Zegna’s pockets and finding nothing, I started going through the pockets of everything else, including the crumpled clothes that lay moldering on the floor. The jeans were the worst. Dirt- and oil-encrusted, they could have stood up on their own, but in my first pass-through of their pockets, I found nothing. When I tossed them back down, though, I thought I heard a papery rustle, so I went through them again.
This time I steeled myself to stick my entire hand into the front right pocket, and was rewarded with the scratch of paper. Whatever it was had slipped through a hole in the lining, and now rested stuck between denim and the lining fabric. Maybe that was why the CSIs had missed it. I pulled the paper out to find it crumpled on one end, flat on the other, as if it had been hurriedly shoved into the pocket. It was an invoice for a rebuilt Suzuki outboard motor. Not only that, but it was a third notice, threatening repossession of the Scribbler—which had been used for collateral—if payment wasn’t rendered in ten days. The warning was dated the day before he’d died.
I frowned. Here was Cliff Flaherty, living in a hellhole, writing large checks to charity while dressed in a three-thousand-dollar suit and driving around in a million-dollar car—all the while his floating home was under threat of repossession.
It made no sense.
* * *
With Joe still at work, Lauren back in her hotel room (or wherever goddesses go to kill time), and Colleen and Dylan and the kids in the granny cottage, the house was unusually silent when I made it home from Gunn Landing Harbor. This suited me fine. My eye still throbbed, and all I wanted was to take a shower, and a Tylenol and go to bed. However, this was the perfect time to clear up a few things that had been bothering me about Dylan’s story, so after paying DJ Bonz, Fluffalooza, and Miss Priss the attention they were overdue for, I changed out of my baggy but lifesaving uniform and into jeans and a tee. Then I headed for the granny cottage to grill my stepson.
Dylan was sitting on the floral sofa with the kids, the leg of his jeans hiked up far enough that I could see his electronic ankle bracelet. Colleen sat across from him in the matching chair, finishing up that old Irish joke about a broke priest attempting to cadge a loan from a leprechaun. “So that’s why you can’t borrow money from a leprechaun, because they’re always a little short.”
Dylan groaned. So did I.
Tonio pretended to laugh. Bridey just looked puzzled.
After catching sight of my eye patch, Colleen cried, “Teddy! What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Kid at the zoo kicked me. No problem, since it’s been treated, but I need to talk with Dylan. Privately.”
Concern replaced by suspicion, she frowned. “Anything you say to Dylan you can say in front of me.”
“I’d rather not. Especially not with the kids around.”
“Then you’re not talking to him.” Colleen folded her arms across her ample chest.
“It’s important.”
“I said you’re not…”
Dylan entered the fray. “Hey, you two! Don’t I have any say in this?”
“Your attorney said you’ve already talked too much to too many people,” Colleen snapped.
Her intransigence irritated me, possibly because my eye had started throbbing again. “Do you want me to help him or not?”
She took a moment to ponder that, then her body slowly relaxed, and Fierce Granny became Plaintive Granny. “Now? But we were all having such a nice time. And by the way, aren’t you home early?”
“I take it you weren’t watching TV today.”
Resuming her Fierce Granny persona, she sniffed, “I’ve had better things to do.”
“For your elucidation, some zoo-goer filmed my striptease in the Wolf Run—more about that later—and she also got a great shot of me getting kicked in the eye,” I explained. “Being a self-styled reporter, which everyone is these days, she sent it to KGNN. They’ve been running it on and off all day.”
Colleen shot me a baffled look. “Wolf Run? But what does that have…?”
I grinned, even though it hurt. “At the end of the story they reported that Aster Edwina Gunn wanted me out of the public eye for a while, so she made me take a week’s vacation, starting today. I’m going to use it to find out who killed Cliff Flaherty. Like you, I’m convinced it wasn’t Dylan.”
“Thank you for that vote of confidence, Stepmom,” Dylan said. The first part of his sentence sounded like the usual teenage snark, but by the time he made it to the end, his voice was shaky.
Turning to Tonio and Bridey, who had been closely following our squabble, Colleen ordered, “Kids, go into the bedroom and watch Sesame Street.”
“I’m not watching that kiddie stuff,” Tonio sniffed.
“Then Tippy-Toe & Tinker. I think the episode airing today is the one where they introduced Poonya, the red panda. You know, the character played by Jocelyn Ravel.”
Upon hearing his lady love’s name, Tonio perked up and took Bridey by the hand. “C’mon, Squirt, let’s go watch your kiddie show,” he said, leading her out of the living room.
Once they were gone, I asked, “Dylan, what do the police have on you? You’re not wearing that ankle bracelet simply because of some old grudge against Flaherty. There has to be some hard evidence linking you to his death, and I need to know everything if I’m going to help.”
Dylan suddenly found something interesting on Colleen’s sage green carpet. I looked down and didn’t see anything, other than the fact that the carpet was the exact same shade as the leaves on Colleen’s matching sofa-and-chairs suite. Rose and green, green and rose, the color theme carried throughout the small cottage. When it came to décor, Colleen was nothing if not traditional.
Dylan didn’t answer my question, so I nudged, “C’mon, kid. What do the authorities have on you?”
“Dunno. And stop calling me kid. I’m eighteen.” Still looking at the carpet.
“Did it have anything to do with those scraped knuckles of yours?”
“I was working on my car.”
“There’s no grease under your nails.”
“Why do you keep nagging me? You’re worse than my mother.”
“You got into a fight with Flaherty, didn’t you?”
He finally met my eyes. “He started it.”
Bingo. “Where’d this fight happen?”
His knee jerked up and down for a few seconds, and just as I was about to repeat my question, he took a deep breath and said, “When I first arrived in town, I stopped by the Circle K to get a Polar Pop, and he bumped into me as I was leaving. Hard. Almost like he’d meant to do it. He made me spill the whole drink, and didn’t even apologize.”
“And?”
“So I called him on it. ‘Hey, man, you owe me another Polar Pop, I said. Then he shoved me again, even harder, and called me a little fu… Uh, a nasty world. That’s when I just kinda hit him. Well, it was really sorta accidental, because I was, um, trying to get around him to my car.” Knee still jerking, and he returned to looking at the carpet. Talk about a lousy liar.
“Did you know who he was?”
“Not right then.” He met my eyes again, which convinced me he was telling the truth.
Now we were getting somewhere. “Before your arrest, did you tell the police about the incident?”
“Why would I do something stupid like that? I mean, it wasn’t really much of a fight. Once he was down, I tossed my empty cup at him and got into my car.”
“You actually knocked him down?”
“Like I told you, I didn’t mean to hit him that hard, but sometimes I don’t know my own strength. It’s not like I gave the guy a concussion or anything. He was back on his feet and cursing at me by the time I left the lot, so I just drove to a 7–11 down the road and bought me another drink. So it was all good.”
Colleen, who had been sitting quietly during this, exploded. “All good? You’re recorded knocking a man down, a man who’s found murdered hours later, and you say ‘It’s all good’? What the…”
She quieted down when I put a finger to my lips. But she was right. Dylan might not think there was much to the fight, but the detectives would have checked for a transfer of DNA—Dylan’s to Cliff, and Cliff’s to Dylan. The kid might even have left a hair or two. Still, the authorities must have had even a stronger reason to arrest him than that one incident, so I persevered. “When you met with your attorney, what did he say?”
He gave me a sour look. “He told me not to tell anyone what I just told you.”
“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean to include me. We’re family.” I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile, but as I was learning, when your eye is bandaged, it’s hard to smile without hurting yourself. Who knew the eye was connected to the mouth? “What else might the police have on you, Dylan? There must be more.”
A sigh. “As far as I know, just the surveillance camera thing. And, uh, the DNA. But like I said, it was no big deal. It would have shown him getting up. I mean, he wasn’t dead or anything.”
“You told the police this?”
“I didn’t tell them anything!”
There was a bit of a disconnect here. “When they asked you about the fight, what did you say?”
“Nothing. I’m not crazy. And… And when this other cop told me I got caught on a different camera down at the harbor, I didn’t say anything about that, either.”
I tried not to react to what he’d just said, but Colleen stood up and yelped, “A camera at the harbor!? The same harbor where Cliff Flaherty was found dead?”
Sounding more like ten than eighteen, Dylan said in a small voice, “Well, yeah, I guess. If you want to put it that way. How many surveillance cameras do they have around here, anyway? Isn’t that against our civil liberties or something?”
“What were you doing at the harbor, Dylan?” I asked.
“Uh, I just wanted to, um, see the boats.”
Frowning, I said, “Try again.”
“No, really! I like boats!”
“Tell me the truth or I’m walking away from this. What were you doing at the harbor?”
He sighed again. “Oh, all right. When I was driving away from the Circle K, in my rearview mirror I saw the guy I’d been in the fight with getting into a Mercedes Gullwing. I hadn’t ever seen one of those other than in a car museum, so I followed him. When I saw him getting into that ratty old boat, I was really surprised, but what the heck, it gave me the chance to get up close and personal with that Gullwing. Geez, what a beauty! Teddy, it’s got…”
I waved away his enthusiasm. “That’s how you wound up on the harbor cameras.”
Colleen groaned. So did I.
Our twin groans worked where my words hadn’t. Dylan finally got it. With a face suddenly morose, he said, “I’m screwed, aren’t I?”
I was trying to figure out a way to reassure him, when Tonio returned to the living room.
“No Tippy-Toe today,” Tonio said. “Just some old Sesame Street rerun.”
Dylan took advantage of the reprieve. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said to his half brother. Then, milking the moment for all it was worth, he shifted around on the sofa so his back was to me, and said, “Say, Tonio, what’s your favorite subject in school? At your age, mine was social studies.”
When Tonio started yammering about the immense wheat fields in Georgia—the one in the former USSR, not the U.S.—Dylan pretended rapt interest, and I knew our interview was over, at least for now. But that was okay. The lull made me realize how exhausted I really was, so I returned to the empty house, gave the dogs and cat some more attention, then fell asleep on the sofa, with DJ Bonz, Fluffalooza, and Miss Priss snuggled around me.
I didn’t wake up until Joe came home and I had to convince him all over again that, no, regardless of the wolf “incident”—which he had seen on the five o’clock news—I was not going to quit my job at the zoo. When he made a disgruntled comment about my striptease, I also told him that if taking off my clothes would keep me alive anywhere, especially in the Wolf Run, then bring on the stripper pole. And, by the way, I was keeping the Merilee, too. I didn’t care how many corpses floated by.
So there.