Bar None (A Piper Harris Mystery, Volume 3), page 4
Gran nodded and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, she almost got the name and license number of the cab driver for us in case something happens to her.”
In a more normal circumstance, I would have laughed. “That’s Edie for ya.”
Gran looked me intently in the eye while she took a swig of her beer.
“What?” I asked her while I was drawing a beer for Cap Guy.
“What’s going on?” Gran asked me as if she already knew something was wrong.
There was no use. Gran knew me best. Sometimes I thought Gran knew me better than I did myself. Of course she did. She was my mother and my father all in one.
I handed Cap Guy his beer and he tipped his head at me. I moved over to Gran and said to her in a lower voice, “I can’t talk here. Later.” I couldn’t wait for my shift to be over or for somebody to find the dead guy and call the cops; all I wanted to do was go with Gran somewhere to talk in private.
“Okay, then I’ll wait here until your shift is over,” Gran said calmly.
But we didn’t have to wait until my shift finished. Just as expected, about one hour later, we heard police sirens outside. Gran instantly cut her eyes to me. Then it was me who intently looked into her eyes. We kept this stare for a few seconds longer. It was like having a conversation with Gran without using any words. When she heard the sirens, I could tell she knew something was wrong and that it had to do with my behavior after I took out the trash. But she didn’t flinch one bit. She was waiting to see what would happen, I was sure of that.
Just as I was. Or at least I was trying to act like nothing was wrong. Like I was just working behind the bar, without seeing anything and without finding any dead guy stabbed in the alley.
We heard commotion outside, but the other patrons weren’t paying that much attention to it either. I guessed this was normal in this part of town.
A couple of minutes later the cops came inside. Two of them came through the front door and I heard a loud bang on the metal back door.
Okay, it was showtime.
I ran to the back and opened the metal door. Two cops were standing there, and I could see a crime scene forming over their shoulders. I let the cops inside and I feigned surprise. “What’s going on here?” I asked.
“Ma’am, we’d like to talk to you and also with the owner—” He stopped short when he saw me. “Wait, aren’t you the woman who lives at the retirement complex here in town? The younger one?”
Oh goody. This was one of the cops I had dealt with in the other two murders. Soon I was going to need one of those bonus cards that you could put stamps on. Collect ten stamps and get one corpse for free.
I said, “Yes, I am. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I had nothing to do with it.”
Over the next hour and a half, I gave the cops my statement. Which was barely anything. I told them I was working behind the bar on what appeared to be a normal regular evening around here, but I didn’t see anything suspicious. I had to tell them I took out the trash because the other patrons in the bar saw me going out. When the cops asked me if I’d seen anything outside in the alley, I fed them a convincing no.
I found out it was a staff member from the bowling alley next door who also took out the trash and found the body. It was a twentysomething-year-old guy who totally fell apart from seeing a dead body.
The cops banged on the owner’s apartment upstairs until he was up. We had to close the bar sooner because of all the commotion. The cops took statements from everyone inside, including Gran. But she got lost in the sea of the other patrons. She had nothing interesting to report. I was guessing the bar’s clientele was as reluctant to talk to the cops as were we. Paddy, the owner, kept scratching the back of his neck and had a look on his face like he couldn’t wait to get back into bed. He seemed totally unfazed. I had the feeling this was not the first time a dead body was found near his bar.
He made his way to me. “Piper, you okay?”
I nodded. “I’m fine, Paddy. Guess I’m going to be low on tips tonight.”
Paddy forced a smile and scratched his head. “Yeah, you could say that. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“One of these days they’re gonna shut us down for good,” a voice from behind me said.
Ginny appeared by Paddy’s side and didn’t look happy. I had met her briefly a couple of days ago. I kind of liked her. She had blonde hair and wore it in a big, messy beehive. She was of Italian descent, so the hair was dyed. Her thick eyebrows were still dark brown. But it suited her somehow.
She wore a bathrobe that she probably just threw on when the cops banged on her door. Funnily enough, she wore as much makeup as she did during the day, when I met her. But tonight, she had on a nice, delicate gold necklace around her neck with the initials GS hanging down. Ginny Snyder. Which made me think about my own name. My own fake name, that is. I didn’t think I would ever be able to wear jewelry with those initials.
“How often does this happen?” I asked.
“More often than you’d think,” Ginny said, shaking her head.
Paddy looked defeated. “Yeah, that’s unfortunate.”
A cop waved Ginny and Paddy over. I nodded as they shuffled back to him.
I was feeling kind of antsy that the cops would discover something on the dead body that would lead them to me, although I did a thorough search of the guy. Well, as thorough as you could get in the semidarkness.
The panic I felt inside, I had to hide on the outside. It took a lot of my mental strength to do that. Paranoid scenarios kept popping into my head, like the Falcons showing up at any minute now with their guns drawn to kill Gran and me.
When nobody was looking, I poured a shot of Jägermeister and gulped it down. It was the end of my shift, so who cared?
When we were done with our statements, Gran and I called a cab. Our car was wedged in between two cop cars. We were silent on our way back to her house. Even the cab driver seemed curious seeing all the squad cars and the paramedics on the street. “Ha, another rough night on Amherst Street?” he asked.
“You could say that,” I replied. “It seems the solution for a lot of people is to murder other people.”
“Oh, a murder?” the cab driver asked. “Huh, hadn’t had one of those here in a long time.”
“Awesome, you have one now,” I said.
About twenty minutes later we rolled by the sign that said Welcome to Till the Bitter End Independent Living. Where your tropical dreams come true.
Oh, home sweet home.
We entered Gran’s house and, as soon as I closed the door behind me, she said, “Okay, lay it on me.”
Chapter Four
The next day I was sipping coffee at the kitchen table in the dining nook. It was about nine in the morning and Gran was showering. She had snuck out earlier and took a cab back to Amherst Street to retrieve our car. I was glad Edie hadn’t seen her from her house, or else she would have already been here asking questions.
I had the matchbox I gave to the dead guy and the piece of paper with the names on it, right before my eyes on the table. I kept glaring at the two items while sipping my coffee. One item had my fingerprints and the other one my name on it.
I let out a sound of disgust and tried to look away. The matchbox and the paper only reminded me of my own bad luck. It was like the universe hated me. But what to look at? The ugly brown couch? The ugly green drapes? Or the super-ugly light-yellow carpeting?
It appeared that interior design wasn’t in the WITSEC handbook rules when you were relocated. The decor in Gran’s house looked to be from the seventies. Complete with the CRT television set that made your eyes bug out. The place came furnished but I’d rather have had it bare naked.
I felt a knot in my lower back. Probably because I slept like hell. And this time it was not only because of the most uncomfortable couch in the world, it was recalling the event from last night. I kept dreaming that the Falcons would ram in the door and kill Gran and me in our sleep. I dreamt that Brett Dillon, the US Marshall who had been appointed to us for our relocation, discovered that the Falcons had found us, so he relocated us again. Ugh. Which would mean starting from scratch again. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make another start.
I told everything to Gran yesterday and she managed to slightly calm me down. She was alarmed as well but she also knew the dead guy couldn’t have been the Falcons’ hit man. Their MO was just different. First of all, a hit man would have known who I was. They wouldn’t have come to the bar with another woman and order drinks from me and pretend not to know me. What would have been the point of that? Secondly, they wouldn’t have provoked me. And then his wuss-like reaction to my five-finger fillet game . . . No, the Falcons would have never hired someone like that for a kill.
A hit man didn’t play games. A hit man took one shot, and the job was done.
Nonetheless, it was extremely worrisome why that guy knew my name. Gran and I googled him last night and found an address here in Bitter End for a Mortimer Hix-Tucker, fifty-five years old. Having a unique name like that made it so much easier to find information about him. At least that was easy.
Clearly, Gran and I planned on driving to his place today to see what we could find out there. I was so anxious, I would have driven there in the middle of last night. The only thing that held me back was the probability the cops would search his place right away after finding his body. I had no idea how fast or how slow they would work on this case—heck, maybe they’d found the culprit already—but I needed to be careful about them.
I dreamt about the cops as well. That they found another connection between this Hix-Tucker guy and myself. I dreamt that the cops showed up at our place and arrested Gran and me. And arresting us meant that we were out of the witness protection program and totally on our own.
Funnily enough, my thoughts swirled around a possible connection between Hix-Tucker and Gran and myself. It was only an afterthought that the guy was murdered. Well, I didn’t know the guy, so I didn’t really care. But what if we did have a connection to his murder per se?
I leaned in my chair and looked up to the ceiling. Then I let out a long breath. Who would have ever thought that WITSEC meant stumbling over a lot of dead bodies? My former life was so different than the one I had now, and even then it wasn’t this bad. Talk about irony. I was supposedly living the good life now, still living on government money with no rap sheet whatsoever, which was like the ultimate gift criminals could ever get, and here I was, dealing with murderers and corpses. Only this time around, I was somehow connected to it and had no idea why.
I had to find out the reason.
There was a knock at the front door. I got up but stopped short in my tracks. I went back and grabbed the matchbox and the piece of paper from the table, then looked around me for a couple of beats. I needed to hide them somewhere. The matchbox lying around wasn’t an issue, only the paper was the problem. But in my mind they already went together.
My eyes landed on the cupboard. I opened the door and threw the items inside. There was a second, much louder bang on the door.
“Hold your horses, I’m coming,” I said, more to myself.
I headed over to the door and looked through the peephole although I already knew who it was. I saw a lot of white curls and a lot of polka dots. It was Edie.
I swung the door open, and Edie immediately said, “Piper, are you okay?” She had a look of concern on her face as she marched past me inside. We were way beyond the regular politeness stuff. “Is Dorothy okay?”
“Yes, we are okay,” I said as I went back to the table. “Why wouldn’t we be okay?”
Edie plopped down next to me at the table. “I was just informed they found a man in the alley next to the bar where you’re working, and the guy is dead.”
Oh yeah, I forgot how gossip worked in this town. And that sooner or later—more like sooner—it would get to Edie.
“Your information is correct,” I said to Edie in a neutral tone. Then I waited for her reaction.
Edie blinked twice. Then she threw her hands up in the air. “Again? Another dead person? I already know by now you’re totally unfazed by being around dead people, but what did I tell you last night? I told you to be careful out there because it’s a dangerous area. And you totally dismissed me. But see? Now they found a dead person on the same night. Murdered even!”
“Well, it’s not me or Gran who’s dead,” I said and took another sip of coffee.
Edie shook her head. “Your humor has me really worried sometimes.” She sighed, got up, and poured herself some coffee in a mug. She seemed to be searching for something on the counter, then she turned and looked at me. “What, no Irish today?”
I shrugged. “We drank all the whiskey already.”
Edie sat down with her coffee. “So did you see this person yesterday? Why didn’t you tell me anything?”
“What was I supposed to do?” I asked. “Come and bang on your door in the middle of the night to let you know a person we don’t know was found dead?”
Edie looked at me like I had just asked the stupidest question in the world. “Um, yes.”
I smiled. “Oh yes, I forgot who I’m dealing with here. Scared of her own shadow in a dive bar but wants to know as soon as possible about a murder being committed. One that has nothing to do with her.”
“Well . . . I like to be informed,” Edie said.
I laughed. “I know you do.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Edie said and frowned as if she were already afraid of my answer. “Did you see that person?”
Unfortunately, I had to do my best lying with Edie as well.
“Did I see . . . Of course not. Don’t you think I would have reported it to the police otherwise? And that you would have found out I was the one who reported it?”
Edie glanced at me with a look of insecurity. “Hmm. I guess you would have.”
“How did you find out about it anyway?” I asked.
“Hank was at the bowling alley yesterday when it happened and told us about it,” Edie said.
I looked at her questioningly. “Hank? Who’s Hank?”
“You know Hank,” Edie said. “He lives here at the complex. He’s always wearing a tie. Even when he doesn’t have a suit on.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering. “The weird tie guy. I’ve seen him around at the dining hall. What is up with that tie of his?”
Edie shrugged. “No idea. I don’t think I ever asked him about it. It’s like he’s using that tie as his own blankie. I really don’t have the patience to listen to whatever story lies behind it.”
“I get that,” I said, nodding my head vigorously.
“So anyway, Hank was there yesterday, and he told Otto about it and Otto told Maude about it and so on, until I got the phone call just this morning.”
I studied Edie and smiled. “And you’re pissed?”
Edie pursed her lips.
I smiled wider. “You’re pissed the news didn’t get to you sooner, aren’t you?”
Edie folded her arms across her chest. “Well, yeah, I am. I mean, I like to be kept in the loop about the goings-on around here.”
“But this particular going-on didn’t go down here at the complex,” I said and sipped some more coffee.
“Yeah, but still,” Edie said.
“And remember how scared you were last night just being on Amherst Street,” I said. “I wouldn’t think you’re interested in the goings-on in that part of town.”
“You’re right about that part too, I guess,” Edie said. “But since you work there now, I am more interested in what happens there too. Please tell me you’re going to quit your job after this.”
I frowned. “Quit my job? Why would I do that? Because a dead body appeared in an alley? Puh-lease. That would be a really stupid reason for me to quit. Weren’t you the one who said I was going straight into semipermanent unemployment at this rate? You should be glad I have a job now.”
“But not a dangerous one!” Edie said.
I leaned over and squeezed her hand. “Listen, I appreciate you worrying about me, I really do, but I can take care of myself. You know that.”
Edie’s eyes got moist. “Fine,” she said. “I’m going to stop bugging you. For now.”
I laughed. “For now is good enough for me.”
Edie stood and poured herself more coffee. “You know, maybe we can make this coffee Irish without whiskey. I know you always have rum here. It wouldn’t be an Irish coffee then, it would be . . . Caribbean?” Before I could say anything, she opened the cupboard and started rummaging inside. Ordinarily, I’d find it amusing that looking for rum could indeed be considered as rummaging—but my heart clenched as I saw her moving the matchbox and the piece of paper to the side. She didn’t seem to pay attention to the items as she moved her hand to the rum bottle, but then she stopped and touched the one corner of the paper. I stiffened as Edie took it out and unfolded it.
“Interesting,” Eddie said, frowning. “Did you write your name down in case you forget it?” Then she took a better look. “What is this? Who are those other people and what’s with the dollar figures?”
I was just about to rack my brain for a good lie in record time when Gran decided right then to come out of the bathroom. She was wrapped in towels and stopped short when she saw Edie. Her gaze went to the paper in Edie’s hand.
“Great, you told Edie about the dead body last night and the paper you found on him,” Gran said.
My jaw almost hit the table while my eyes went wide.
I let out a grunt and rubbed my temples. “No, I didn’t, but you just did.”
Edie whipped her head toward me and her perfectly arched curls bounced. “You did what? What is going on here? What did you not tell me?”
Gran lowered her head. “Damn it.”
I couldn’t believe this was happening. How the hell did Gran slip up like that? I looked at her in disbelief.
She immediately realized and put her hands up in defense. “Well, sorry, but it did look like it.”
