The Moonpool

TRIBORO, NORTH CAROLINA

I was wrapping up my day as president, CEO, and chief coffee wrangler at Hide and Seek Investigations when my phone rang. Being a retired bureaucrat, I automatically glanced at my watch, ever mindful of the enduring office rule: Anyone who answers his office phone in the late afternoon deserves to be stuck with the inevitable hairball. Then I saw the caller ID, which displayed the words HOMICIDE BUREAU and a 910 area code. I picked up and identified myself.

“Hey, Lieutenant Richter,” a man said. “This is Bernie Price. Used to work in Triboro. I was city po-lice when you were still with the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office.”

“Yeah, Bernie, I remember,” I said. “D-One, right? How’ve you been? Nine-one-zero-that’s Wilmington?”

“Yes, sir,” Price said. “I’m number two in the homicide bureau now. And we got us a little situation down here.”

“And this involves our snoop posse how exactly?”

Price didn’t laugh. “Y’all got a lady named Gardner, Allison E., working for you?”

I felt a pang of alarm. Had Allie somehow intruded into a homicide investigation? “Yes, we do, and yes, she’s on assignment in Wilmington. She works wayward spouse cases. She’s retired from the Job, too. What’s going on?”

Typical of a homicide detective, Detective Price answered my question with a question. Another alarm bell. “Can you tell me what she was working on here in Wilmington?”

Oh, shit, I thought, leaning forward in my office chair. “Did you say ‘was’?”

Price sighed. “Well, yeah. Was. Sorry to have to tell you this, Lieutenant, but she turned up dead last evening, in a gas station ladies’ room.”

I swore, and my two German shepherds appeared in the doorway to my office, ears up.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet. No smoking guns at the scene. Medical examiner has the remains at County right now. No signs of foul play. She have ticker trouble, maybe?”

“Not that I knew about,” I said. Allie’s dead?

“What was the gig down here?”

“Some Triboro shyster’s wife thought he was stepping out on her. She hired Allie to get corroboration. Nothing dramatic-the wife told Allie where they’d be staying and who the brand-X woman was. She’s apparently got a divorce gunfighter cocked and ready. I think she just wanted pictures.”

“This wife or her husband violent types?”

“Beats me, Bernie,” I said. “But I don’t think so. Like I said, this was beyond routine. The subjects were staying at that riverfront Hilton, as was Allie. She called in yesterday afternoon, said she had the goods. She said she had to take care of some personal business, but then she’d be back today, late.”

“So she wasn’t working any kind of whodunnit?”

“Nope. The lawyer and his girlfriend-I think she’s a lawyer, too-apparently were regulars. Allie said they arrived on schedule, shacked up, and stayed shacked.”

“So this didn’t require Ms. Gardner to go creeping in bad neighborhoods or anything like that?”

“Negative. She sounded mostly bored.”

“And she doesn’t do drugs or bet the ponies, anything like that?”

“Allie? Hell, no. Good cop, solid citizen. No way. Definitely not the substance-abuse type. One glass of wine, she got silly. Two and she went night-night. Drugs would have rendered her comatose.”

“You understand I have to ask, right?” he said apologetically.

“Absolutely. Shit. This is awful. But she never worked anything really dangerous for us. Her own ex ran off with some biker bimbo while she was riding patrol in the sheriff’s office, so when she came to work for me, she specialized in helping women who were facing the same problem. She liked her cases interesting, but this one definitely wasn’t.”

“Is now,” Price observed. “Can you help us with next of kin?”

I had to think for a moment. “Lemme see,” I said. “I think she said she had one old-maid sister who works in the Defense Department overseas school system. She’s in Turkey or Greece, don’t remember which. I can look her up for you.”

“In that case, could you possibly come down here, make the formal ID for us?”

“Well, yeah, sure,” I said, the full enormity of the news finally hitting me. Wilmington was about a four-, four-and-a-half-hour drive from Triboro. “Tomorrow okay?”

“Tomorrow’s fine, Lieutenant,” Price said. “We’re downtown, 115 Red Cross Street, five streets west of Market Street, which you’ll come in on. I’ll position a parking pass at the front desk.” He gave me his phone extension, voiced the pro forma regrets again, and hung up.

Well, fuck me, I thought. I told the dogs to stand down and tried to get my mental arms around the news that Allie was gone. She had been one of the original members of our merry little band of snoops when I first started H amp;S. I wondered why homicide had it, and then remembered: It was an unexplained death.

Running a private investigations firm hadn’t originally been my idea. I’d come off of two decades with the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office under something of a cloud following the cat dancers vigilante case. Sergeant Horace Stackpole, one of the guys who’d worked for me in the Major Criminal Apprehension Team, or MCAT for short, had taken retirement a few months after I had. He and I had gotten together one night to have a drink, and then I had to listen to him bitch about the boring nature of the work he was doing at the time, which was running small-scale investigations for the district court in Triboro.

The honorable Robes and their swarm of courthouse lawyers had a seemingly unending requirement for people who could retrieve information and documents, develop reluctant witnesses, and execute other odd jobs quickly. Ex-cops knew how to do all of that, and they also had the networks to get at people and information even quicker than the active police bureaucracy could, or would, depending on which judge was asking. Anyway, a third guy joined us and suggested that I form a company, hire only ex-cops, and then we could work as much or as little as we wanted to. I’d suggested that Horace start the company, but, as he pointed out, I was the one who no longer really had to work.

So I did, and Hide and Seek Investigations, LLC, stood up a month later, with a condition of employment being that you had to be an ex-cop who had retired in good standing with your department. We’d started with six, with the other five doing most of the work while I dealt with really significant management issues, such as sorting the mail. Our first office had been on the second floor of a bail bondsman company in downtown Triboro. It was pretty Spartan, but it had the advantage of being near Washington Street, so the guys could still hit the sheriff’s office and the metro cops’ watering holes for lunch and afterward. Besides Horace Stackpole, Tony Martinelli and Pardee Bell had joined us from the wreckage of the MCAT. None of us worked full-time, and the money from the contracts went proportionally to the people who put in the most hours. Most of them were filling up 401( k)s, while I took a dollar a year and the biggest office, a massive corner suite some twelve feet square and overlooking a culturally interesting back alley.

The other two of the original “guys” had been women, Allie Gardner and Mel Lindsay. They’d both gone through the trauma of having husbands slide way off the marital reservation, Allie twice, and now did a flourishing business of pre-divorce-court reconnaissance work for outraged spouses. They loved their work, and the rest of us enjoyed their after-action reports, although with sometimes nervous laughter. Of the two, Allie had been the sweetheart. Pretty in a plain way, she arrived every morning with a sunny smile and a positive attitude, which inevitably brightened when she had some stone-hearted, sneak-cheating, low-down, good-for-nothing sumbitch husband in her evidentiary gun sights. She was an expert with photographic evidence and sported a collection of her best pictures in a rogues’ gallery on one wall of her office. She’d bring the prospective client, inevitably an angry woman, into her office and ask: This what you need? It worked every time. She wasn’t a man-hater, per se, but simply one of those women who’d been kicked in the heart enough times by careless men that she no longer cared for their social company. I think the guys in the office were the only men she talked to, and we, of course, didn’t count on her life’s scorecard.

But not anymore, I realized. I looked out the window at the streetlights coming on in the business park we’d moved to from our Washington Street hovel. I wondered now if I should call some of the original six-five now, wasn’t it-and give them the bad news. I decided not to: no point in spoiling everyone’s evening. I’d call a meeting tomorrow morning before leaving for Wilmington.

Allie Gardner was dead? Maybe it had been a heart attack, or one of those artery-bombing embolisms I’d been reading about. She’d been an unrepentant smoker, as were about half the people working at H amp;S. So maybe the cancer sticks had done their evil work. But surely not a homicide. I couldn’t think of a single soul who would want her dead, except maybe one of her two ex-husbands. The truth was that we’d never had any indications of an ex coming back at the PI. They were usually too embarrassed at having been caught in the first place. If they were mad at anybody, it was the ex-spouse for hiring a snoop in the first place.

I’d have to get into her personnel records to find out what family she had left. I vaguely knew about the sister, but Allie had been closemouthed about the rest of her family. I’d gotten the impression that they hadn’t approved of her forgoing college to become a cop in the first place, and that she was estranged from them.

“C’mon, mutts,” I said to my shepherds, Frick and Frack. “I need a drink. Let’s go home.”