The Baby Blue Rip-Off

22

“Damn it, Mallory,” Brennan said, “you ought to have enough sense not to come butting in down here.” Harsh words, but considering the source, not much of a reprimand. Brennan was pleased with me, for a change, and pleased with the haul I’d helped him make. Behind him the garage door of Tony’s Used Auto Parts was up, and visible in there were the boxes and crates containing the ripped-off goods from Mrs. Jonsen’s, waiting patiently to be confiscated and marked as evidence. Not so patient was the uniformed cop keeping watch over the stuff, hand on holstered gun, ready to blast the first box that blinked; he’d be better when the chief and chief’s inspector showed up to get the red-tape ball rolling. Another uniformed cop was sitting behind the wheel of a blue-and-white parked up on the sidewalk in front of the shop half of the building; in the backseat, sulking, was the pale, dark-haired woman who’d shown me a sliver of face when I knocked on the upstairs door earlier that afternoon, and she was prettier than you might expect of a woman who lived with Hulk (aka P. J.). Brennan was standing beside his own unit, which was nosed in behind the blue-and-white. Mine was across the street in that parking lot behind the Little League ballpark-my blue van, I mean. I was there to pick it up. I told Brennan so.

“That’s no excuse for coming down here. You should’ve waited till later, when things died down. You want to blow the whole thing?”

I didn’t understand why I would blow the whole thing by being here, after I handed the thing silver-platter-style to him and his friends in blue. But I didn’t bother mentioning that to Brennan, instead saying, “Come on, walk me over to my car. I got something I want to tell you.”

He said okay, and we picked our way through the heavy five o’clock traffic flowing by Tony’s. On the way over, he explained that when the warrants were filled in, I’d been listed as “long-time, reliable informant,” a designation that carried with it certain rights of anonymity, which in turn carried with it a vagueness beneficial to rule-bending, underhanded police activities. And if I came around and tipped to somebody (like that pale girl in the back of the police unit) that I was the “long-time, reliable informant” who had gathered his information via breaking-and-entering, well, then….

But I didn’t care about any of that; I was still preoccupied with working on the new information given me by the Cooper sisters. All the way down here in the back of the taxi, I’d been going over what I had so far, my mind sorting slowly through the various file cards, wheezing and clanking like the world’s oldest and most inefficient computer. Picking up the van hadn’t been my only reason for returning to Tony’s, of course. More important was my telling Brennan about Frank and Sarah Petersen.

“Who?” Brennan said.

We were leaning against my van now. Across the way the dilapidated, ill-formed building with its black-painted windows provided a surreal backdrop for the rush-hour traffic flowing by.

“Frank and Sarah Petersen,” I said. “They have an antique shop outside of town a ways….”

“Oh yeah! Used to be old man Benson’s for years. These Petersens-are they the young couple who bought the place last spring?”

“Right. Brennan, I’m positive Frank Petersen is the organizer behind the break-ins. Remember, I heard P. J. and the two others mention the name Frank, and the antique thing is a perfect front; they even have a barn out there, which surely serves the same purpose the garage at Tony’s does.”

“That’s pretty thin to risk a warrant on. Lots of guys in the world are named Frank, you know, and there’s no law against antique shops, or barns either.”

“Let me get the rest of it out, will you, Brennan?” But I hesitated, not knowing how much to say about Debbie Lee and her husband Pat Nelson.

Damn! Even now I separated them in my mind… Debbie Lee and her husband Pat Nelson… but could there be any doubt that Debbie had suckered me in, sucked me in, fucked me in, led me into screwing her when she was really screwing me, keeping me busy for her husband while he and his fellow rip-off artists got their shit together and got out of town… helping convince me, with that drunken husband story and that stairwell confrontation, that Pat was just a jealous hot-head, a paranoid yes, but certainly not one of the bastards who robbed and killed Mrs. Jonsen… because after all, if Pat was one of those people, would he have risked fighting me and pulling a knife on me and all? The brazenness of that was calculated to make me rule Pat out-even if his red-white-and-blue GTO had been at the scene of the crime-rule him out for the time being anyway, and since they were planning to split soon, the time being was plenty; because the time being would be filled with me staying at Debbie’s side to protect her from her drunken, violent husband. “We got him covered,” they’d said this afternoon. Covered was right: under the covers with Pat Nelson’s wife. Yes, Debbie Lee had done it to me again. Damn.

But I didn’t tell Brennan about that. I wasn’t ready. And anyway, I had plenty more to tell him. Like that Frank and Sarah Petersen were the Hot Supper couple who had preceded me on the route that included both Mrs. Jonsen and the Cooper sisters.

“That’s it, then!” he said, excited. “We were right about them using several different sources of information. The Hot Supper thing was one, and another was Bill Morgan’s travel agency.”

“What? What travel agency did you say?”

“You know. You commented yourself that it was the only agency in town. Bill Morgan, the attorney, owns it.”

William Morgan. The attorney that Debbie said she worked for. I had assumed she was his legal secretary, which I should’ve known was ridiculous, considering her lack of training. She had, no doubt, worked not in his law office, but in his travel agency. I told Brennan. Told him I had good reason to believe that the leak in Morgan’s agency was a woman named Debbie Nelson.

“And,” I said, “she and her husband are good friends of Frank and Sarah Petersen. As a matter of fact, I saw Debbie Nelson and Sarah Petersen together just this morning.”

“This Debbie Nelson… she isn’t….?”

“She is. Pat Nelson’s wife. The same Pat Nelson whose GTO, license number three, was outside of Mrs. Jonsen’s that night. And something else.”

“Don’t stop now.”

“That van. That green van. It had the words ‘GARDENING SERVICE’ on its side. Evidently, one of the ways they’ve kept from raising suspicion on daylight break-ins is by posing as gardeners.”

“I already have an APB out on the van. I’ll have that added to the description.”

“Good, but wait a minute; I’m still not through. Pat Nelson works for a nursery, and that means the gardening bit could be more than just words painted on a van.”

“Sure,” Brennan said, nodding. “It could be another source of information. A regular gardening service would have access to plenty of information as to when people are and are not going to be home. You wouldn’t happen to know which nursery Nelson works for?”

I thought for a moment. “I believe a guy named Chet Richards runs it.” That was the name Debbie had told me, anyway.

“Are you kidding?”

“Of course not.”

“Hell, Mallory, you know who Richards is?”

“No. Who is he?”

“Well, for openers, that pale little girl in the backseat over there is Felicia Richards. Chet’s her brother.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not, Mallory. We’ve had run-ins with Richards and his sister before. I tried to nail him for pushing dope last year, and word is that nursery of his is an investment made from several years of pushing. And he was pimping, too. Used to sit down at the Old Mill Bar and pimp for guess who?”

“Who?”

“Felicia. His sister.”

“Nice, I like a family business.’

“Well, Mallory, looks like it’s all fitting together. Looks like if I can collar these people, we’ll have a case against them.”

“Looks that way.”

“Mallory, I want to tell you something.”

“Go ahead, Brennan.”

“I want to tell you thanks. Thanks for-well, damn it-thanks for not paying any attention to me when I told you to stay out of this thing. You’ve done a lot.”

“Not really. Most of it came from these people knowing me and worrying that maybe I’d recognized them, or maybe start poking my nose around. They blew their cool, probably because they hadn’t planned on anything like murder entering in.”

“Just the same. Thanks.” He put his hand out.

“Why shouldn’t I shake hands with my best friend’s father?” I said. And did.

He turned and crossed the still busy street and walked over to the cop in the blue-and-white and gave him several minutes of instructions. Then he got in his own unit, turned his siren on, and cleared a space in the line of traffic; once in, he switched off the siren and headed out of town, south: out toward the antique shop run by Frank and Sarah Petersen.

I wished I was going with him, in a way.

And in another way, I was glad I was out of it. Glad it was over for me. My gut tightened when I thought about Pat Nelson and the mentality that let him callously rip people off, rob them of their property, from their prized possessions, like antique Christmas plates, to that most prized possession of all: life.

And Debbie? It would be a while before I could even think about her at all, even in a negative way. She had always been a scarred area on my psyche, but nothing severe-more like a shallow pit on your skin where you once popped a pimple when you were thirteen. But this time, her wound had cut deep, and when scar tissue finally covered the area over, it would leave an ugly place.

I got in my van, anxious to get home, to crawl back into the wonderful solitary confinement of my ancient silver trailer, to drink a six-pack or two of Pabst and fall into oblivious, drunken sleep that would, I hoped, be dreamless. But the traffic was thick and snail-paced, and I had to head up West Hill to avoid it, through residential districts; then I could cut down Second Street and on up East Hill and home. The West Hill detour took me past Mrs. Fox’s place, and I slowed as I drove by, glancing at her stately but now declining two-story gray nineteenth-century home, wondering how the nice old gal was doing. Parked on her slanted, well-tended lawn, backed up to the side entrance of the house, was a van.

A green van with the words GARDENING SERVICE on the side.