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CLIFF STOOD IN FRONT of the car in shock, his hands handcuffed in front of him, his waist tied to a small, wooden chair. Seconds later, he dropped to the ground.
We scrambled out of the car and rushed to his side.
Gertie patted Cliff’s face. “Wake up, Cliff. Wake up.”
I tried to unhook the thick straps connecting the wooden chair to Cliff but found that it was secured with a padlock. “It’s locked.”
“Get my pick set from my purse,” Gertie said.
I ran to the car and rummaged through her purse. Several times in the past I’d seen Gertie unloading it, but this was the first time I actually saw the insides close up. How that small woman walked without falling over was beyond me. I tossed out some of its contents on the car seat: one set of Chinese stars, several pairs of handcuffs, three pairs of broken sunglasses, a bottle of Gas X, hand sanitizer, and a cellophane-wrapped box of bright-yellow Easter Peeps, probably with an expiration date of several hundred years into the future. Finally, I pulled out the lock pick set and ran back to Cliff. He was starting to come out of his shock, and Ida Belle and Gertie were helping him sit up on the wooden chair that he was already attached to.
He looked up at Gertie, dazed. “My Angel.”
“Who did this to you?” Gertie asked.
Cliff shook his head. “All I remember is the beginning of our wedding ceremony. I had a sharp pain in the back of my neck and then everything just went black. I woke up in a shed somewhere, tied to a chair with my hands in these cuffs. Then I noticed a long piece of metal on the floor. I happen to know a thing or two about picking locks—”
“I bet you do,” Gertie said, glaring at him.
“Well... I own a chain of locksmith booths. I did tell you that, didn’t I? Anyway, I was able to unlock the door, but then I dropped the little piece of metal and lost sight of it. I didn’t want to stay there any more than I had to, because I didn’t know who had taken me and when that person would be back.”
I picked the lock and unwound the strap that was holding Cliff to the chair. We helped him stand, and he held out his hands to us, expecting us to free him from the cuffs.
The three of us just stared at him.
“Is there something wrong?”
“We’re keeping you cuffed,” Ida Belle said.
Cliff turned to Gertie. “Gertie, my little peach blossom, tell your friends to take the cuffs off.”
“You’re lucky we freed you from the chair.”
“Babycakes.” He held up his hands. “Someone tried to kill me and then kidnapped me. Your future husband. What’s going on?”
“Who wants you dead, Cliff?” I asked.
“Who doesn’t want him dead?” Ida Belle asked.
Cliff looked at Gertie. “Buttercup, I think we need to talk about your choice of friends. This one is not really friendly,” he said, flicking his head toward Ida Belle.
“What’s going on is you’re a gold digger,” Gertie said. “You swindled tens of thousands of dollars from women and then just left them. That’s what’s going on.”
He furiously shook his head. “Oh honey, dear, my little fluff bunny, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but whatever you’ve heard is just flat-out wrong. This is me, Cliff, the man you said, ‘I do’ to.”
I grabbed Cliff’s shoulders. “What do we do with him now?”
“We’ll take him back to Gertie’s and interrogate him there,” Ida Belle said.
“Interrogate?” Cliff cocked his head at Gertie. “Gertie, boo-boo face, your friend here has just crossed the line from not nice to psycho.”
Gertie shoved him toward the car. “Oh, shut up and get in the car.”
We stashed the chair behind a tree and belted Cliff into the backseat. I slid in next to him as Ida Belle and Gertie took their places in the front seat. Gertie turned the engine over and continued down the road. I took out my handgun and pointed it toward Cliff.
“I wouldn’t make any sudden moves.”
Cliff’s jaw dropped. “What kind of women are you?”
Cliff leaned forward and knocked his head on the back of Gertie’s seat. “Hey, kitten, I think you have me all wrong. Tell you what, why don’t we skip the wedding in Louisiana? Let’s go to the Caribbean. You said you had a private island. Why don’t we just drive on down to the airport in New Orleans and go there now? We’ll even let your hostile friends come. Might do them good. We don’t have to go home and pack. We’ll buy everything we need there. What do you say, honeybunch?”
“I don’t own a private island in the Caribbean.”
“But you said—”
“I was lying. I’m not rich, Cliff.”
“What?” His eyes grew wide. “Now who’s the gold digger?! You wanted to marry me for my money!”
“Oh please,” Gertie said.
“It’s okay, I forgive you. But we can still leave the country. I hear Australia’s nice this time of year. But I think they might have taken my wallet, so if you can just put the trip on a credit card, I’ll pay you back.”
Gertie looked in the rearview mirror. “Feel free to shoot him for me, Fortune.”
Cliff held up his cuffed hands to protect his face. “No, no, no need to do that.”
“You took something that belonged to a friend of ours,” Ida Belle said, casting her steely gaze at him. “You shouldn’t have done that. Because then we checked you out and found that you stole from a lot of other women. We want all you took. Money, cars, jewelry. You need to give everything back.”
Cliff slowly lowered his hands, staring at the gun I held. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Gertie, honey, I thought we had something going on. You, me. We had chemistry.”
Ida Belle opened her purse and tossed me a roll of duct tape. “Let’s keep him quiet and drive home in peace. I have some ways to make him talk. But right now, he’s just giving me a headache.”
I tore off a piece of tape and slapped it over his mouth as he was pleading with his love monkey, Gertie, to save him.
* * * * *
WE PULLED INTO GERTIE’S driveway about 30 minutes later. Gertie clicked her garage open and drove in. Once the door was securely closed, I yanked Cliff out of the car, shoved him through the kitchen and down the hall into Gertie’s back guestroom.
“Whoever secured him before was stupid enough to let his hands stay out in front,” Gertie said as she followed us in. “They underestimated him because of his age. But there’s only one way to keep a man from running. And that’s to hogtie him.”
“Not spread eagle on the bed?” Ida Belle asked. “Or we could go for a classic cloverleaf tie-down.”
Gertie thought a moment. “Cloverleaf’s fun. Almost as much fun as the Circular Saw tie-down.”
“I don’t know the Circular Saw,” Ida Belle said.
“It’s my own creation. Modification of the Shrimp Fry combined with the Elbow Grease. But I think we should stick with the classic hogtie.”
Ida Belle shrugged and tossed me a look. “What do you think?”
“I’m wondering how you two know so many different ways to tie men up.”
“Best not to ask.”
We kept the duct tape secured over Cliff’s mouth as we hogtied him and left him in the middle of the room. Then the three of us retired to the living room with a pot of coffee to weigh our options. A call to Myrtle revealed that Carter was back in Westlake testifying in traffic court, so we decided to leave Cliff in the bedroom and turn him in once Carter returned. We never considered the option of calling Special Agent McKenna. There was still something about her I didn’t trust, and I would prefer Carter get the credit for bringing Cliff in than handing him over to the FBI.
Gertie cooled her coffee down with a splash of cold half and half and took a gulp. “Lord that man is tiring.”
Ida Belle dropped her head onto the sofa back and rubbed her eyes. “By now I should be in there getting a confession from him. But he works my nerves like nobody’s business.”
After two cups of strong French roast, we were ready.
Ida Belle stood up from the couch. “You have your old iPod and earphones handy?”
“They’re in my purse,” Gertie said.
Cliff yelped when Ida Belle yanked the duct tape from his mouth.
“Now we’re going to get down to business,” she said, tossing him an evil grin.
Cliff’s eyes drew wide. “Business?” He turned his head toward Gertie. “Snuggles, I’m not that kind of man. Yes, I have gotten down to... business with several ladies at once in my younger days, but this one...” he said, casting a glance at Ida Belle, “I think she’ll play a little rough with your old Cliffy.”
Gertie’s face screwed up. “We don’t want to have sex with you!”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like it’s an unpleasant thought,” Cliff said.
“It is an unpleasant thought!”
“But we are going to get rough with you,” Ida Belle added.
I pulled a pair of latex gloves from my pocket and slipped them on slowly, drawing a yelp from Cliff. He flinched as I snapped the latex tight. “We found three keys back at your rental hidden behind the baseboards. We want to know what storage facilities they belong to. You can tell us where they’re located—”
“I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Or we can get it out of you the hard way.” In truth I had no reason to put on the latex gloves other than for intimidation purposes. Yep, something about snapping on a pair of latex gloves and sneering like a drunken fool breaks even the toughest man. And based on the fear in his eyes, I’d say it was working.
Cliff began to sweat. “Please don’t ask me any more questions about all that.”
The latex gloves hadn’t sealed the deal. Whatever secret Cliff was hiding was way worse than the fear of what I could do to him by snapping on a pair of latex gloves. He must be working for someone else. But who?
“Okay, we’ll do it the hard way,” Ida Belle said. She nodded to Gertie, who pulled the headphones and iPod from her purse.
“Trust me,” Cliff said, “the less you know the better.”
Gertie handed them to Ida Belle, who placed the headphones over Cliff’s ears.
“What are you going to do?” Cliff asked.
Ida Belle plugged the headphones into the iPod and scrolled through the menu. “What am I looking for?”
“Click on the folder marked, ‘torture sounds,’ right below Tina Turner.”
Ida Belle smiled. “Baby crying. That’s a good one.”
“It’s really Babs,” Gertie said. “That’s one of her many talents. She can also bark like a Chihuahua. Try the mashup I made combining Babs’s baby cries with her impression of a dog licking its backside. Then if you want to go totally all in, I mashed all that up with a loop of Gangnam Style and It’s a Small World.”
Ida Belle grinned. “I feel like going all in.” She tapped the iPod and turned the volume wheel a couple turns.
Cliff screamed.
I shook my head. “I’m not even going to ask how often you use the ‘torture sounds’ file.”
“Not often enough,” Gertie replied wistfully.
“Okay!” Cliff shouted. “Okay, I’ll talk!”
Ida Belle yanked the headphones off Cliff’s head.
He looked up at Gertie. “I’ve done some bad things, my little marshmallow.”
“Would you stop calling me those kinds of names? I am not your sweetheart. I don’t even like you.”
“Maybe in time you could learn to love me,” he said with pleading eyes.
I turned his head toward me. “What kind of bad things, Cliff?”
“Well... I may have taken something from a woman.”
“A woman? Try a horde of women. We know that.”
“But you don’t know all of it. There’s something else I did that, well, kind of borders on bad.”
“Like what?” Ida Belle asked.
Cliff swallowed hard. “A couple of months ago I was approached by two men. They had photos of me with several different women.”
Gertie winced. “What kinds of photos?”
“Oh, not like you’d think. They were taken at several of my weddings.”
“Your weddings? You mean your gold-digging scams?” Gertie asked.
“You call it scams, I call it giving a woman that dream wedding she always wanted.”
Gertie twisted his ear. “And then leaving her and taking her money.”
“Ow! Okay, I may have accepted money and gifts from a lot of women, but you know, they all offered things to me. And, for the ones I actually married legally, if we’re married, what’s theirs is mine.”
“Not if you’re married to more than one woman at a time!” Gertie screamed. “And not if you used different names!”
“How many women are you married to, Cliff?”
He drew in a breath, thinking. “Well, I’d have to look at my wedding calendar. I can’t quite remember them all.”
Gertie raised her hand. “Mother May I kill him?”
“No, you may not,” Ida Belle said.
I thwacked Cliff on the head with my knuckles. “Okay, so going back to the two men. Who were they?”
“Russians.”
“Of Russian ancestry, or... real Russians?”
“Real. They blackmailed me into working for them.”
“As in the Russian mob?” Gertie asked.
“No. Spies. As in Russian spies.”
Ida Belle, Gertie and I sat dumbfounded as Cliff told the story of how the spies wanted access to a certain woman.
“Clotille in Mudbug,” he said. “She has a son who developed security software used by the CIA for their internal communications.”
My pulse started racing.
“They somehow found out about me helping women fulfill their dreams of marriage—”
This time all three of us thwacked him on the head.
“Ow! They threatened to go to the authorities about me if I didn’t help them. They wanted me to start dating Clotille and marry her. She was close to her son and sometimes she spent several months at a time with him in Florida where he was a professor, and he would stay with her during his off time. They wanted me to gain his trust and learn about other new things he was working on. And, Clotille used to work with computers, so they were thinking I might overhear them talking shop.”
I balled up my fist. “Cracking this software code could help them discover who the CIA operatives are and what missions they’re on.”
“I guess that might be the end result.”
I couldn’t help it. My balled-up fist went straight for him, and I would have clocked him in the side of the head if Ida Belle hadn’t anticipated my move and grabbed my arm.
“We need him!” she said, holding my arm.
“I didn’t go through with it,” Cliff said. “I mean, I actually found something. An old notebook in Clotille’s closet, dated around the time her son created the code. Just a bunch of numbers, but there were notations referencing some of the other notebooks. When I told the Russians about it, they said it might be important. They wanted that notebook.
“We arranged for a drop point, but in the meantime, I ran into Bernadette. She’s a gal who lives a block over from Clotille. We dated when I first came to Mudbug, before the Russians got hold of me. Anyway, I was starting to get cold feet about dealing with the Russians, see, so I told Bernadette I was having second thoughts about marrying Clotille and wanted to run away with her instead. I remembered Bernadette talking about this cabin she owned in Mississippi and thought it would be a good place to hide out. But she turned me down. Then she kissed me and said we were through. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Clotille saw us kissing and went berserk. So, on the one side I had dangerous Russians, and on the other I had a peeved Clotille. And you don’t want to get Clotille peeved.”
Gertie folded her arms. “You’re forgetting the part where you stole thirty thousand dollars from Bernadette.”
“Thirty thousand dollars? I never stole from her!”
“And the money you took from Clotille to buy her a wedding ring,” Ida Belle said.
“Well...” Cliff tried to shrug. Not an easy thing to do while hogtied. “I guess I’m a creature of habit.”
I snorted. “The Russians didn’t give you enough to buy a ring?”
“Yes, they did. But I just thought I might need that money in case it got too dangerous and I had to bolt. And I’m glad I did, because after Clotille went berserk and said she wasn’t marrying me, I thought the Russians would no longer have any use for me and kill me. So, I took the notebook, morphed into one of my other identities and came here.”
Gertie thwacked him on the side of his head again. “Where you stole from our friend, Marie.”
“Please stop doing that. You know, in a way this is all your fault.”
“How so?”
“I left evidence that made it look like I was hiding in Miami,” Cliff said. “But no, you three had to go snooping and let everyone know where I really was.”
I cast a glance at Gertie, then Ida Belle. Cliff was absolutely right. It probably was our snooping that alerted the Russians. If he was being honest about all this. And that was a big “if.”
“Where’s the notebook?”
“Under a loose floorboard in the back bedroom. Near the closet.”
“One last question,” I said. “We ran into two men at a storage facility who were looking at the same numbered units that matched the keys we found at your place. How’d they get a set of keys?”
“I have two sets. One I hide behind the baseboards and a set I keep handy.”
“In your tux pocket?” Gertie asked.
“I like to keep the keys close to my body. Anyway, I kinda lied to you when I said I woke up alone after being abducted.”
“Why are we not surprised?” I said.
“When I woke up, two men were there. The Russians. They threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell them where the notebook was, so I gave them the location of the wrong storage facility to buy me some time. After they left, I escaped.”
We tied Cliff up in a more comfortable position (Gertie referred to it as “the Barcalounger”) and slapped tape across his mouth, then retired to the living room to plan our strategy.
“Do you believe the story about him working for Russian spies?” Ida Belle asked. “Seems a bit farfetched.”
I shrugged. “Actually, it could be true. There are thousands of Russian spies operating in our country now.”
“But if we did alert the Russians by revealing our plans to all those women,” Gertie said, “that can only mean one thing.”
I closed my eyes and nodded. One of the women we spoke with was also working with the Russians.