Blind Dates Can Be Murder (34 page)

Almost.

“I dunno,” Mickey rasped, opening his eyes. “I been at the doctor. They took blood, so we should know better in a few days. Doctor thinks it’s food poisoning, maybe e-coli, giardia, salmonella. Who knows? I just know I been sick for days and getting worse every day.”

“That’s too bad, man.”

Mickey took out a handkerchief and wiped it across his face.

“But enough about me,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought you had another month at least.”

“Sentencing error. Just got out this morning.”

“Well, good for you. Congratulations.”

Chuck couldn’t believe it. Mickey was one smooth fellow. He sat and talked as though nothing was wrong, as though three years ago he and Frankie hadn’t sent Chuck up the river without a paddle. As he thought about it, Chuck could feel an ache radiating from the scar behind his ear.

“Listen, Mickey, enough with the chitchat. We gotta talk.”

“Let’s talk, sure, let’s talk. Here. Want a cigar?”

Mickey opened a wooden box on his desk and pulled out a fat brown Cuban. Chuck shook his head. He didn’t like cigars.

“So how was prison?” Mickey asked. “You look good, ’cept for a couple new scars on the side of your face there.”

Chuck knew Mickey was lying. He didn’t look good. He looked hard. He looked tired. He looked tight, wound up like a top.

“Yeah, sure, only I ain’t got a spleen, and the hearing is gone in this ear.”

“You’re kidding.”

“See, I had a little visit my second week there. Umberto Zabaglione.”

Mickey’s eyes widened.

“The Torturer?”

Chuck nodded.

“He’s doing time? I thought he got out years ago.”

“We overlapped. His people made sure we had a little get-together before he left.”

“That’s a shame,” Mickey said, holding a lighter to his cigar and puffing furiously. “What did he want?”

Chuck pressed his fists down on the desk and leaned forward until he was in Mickey’s face. The old Chuck wouldn’t have known how to have this conversation. The recently incarcerated Chuck, on the other hand, knew exactly how to bulldog.

“You know what he wanted,” Chuck said. “Stop playing games with me.”

Mickey looked genuinely frightened.

“You set me up,” Chuck whispered, leaning even closer into Mickey. “You tricked me into bombing Silver Shield so that you and Frankie could go there later that night after the cops were gone and bust through into the check-cashing place next door.”

“A check-cashing place?” Mickey said. “What are you talking about? Those kinds of places don’t keep a lot of cash around—not enough to justify busting in for. Ain’t like a bank or something.”

Chuck stood up straight and crossed his hands over his chest, fixing Mickey with a steady gaze.

“No, they probably don’t keep a lot of money around,” Chuck agreed. “Unless the check cashing is just a front for the real business in back.”

“Th-the real business?”

“An illegal casino. You robbed the Zabagliones, Mickey. You stole money from their secret casino. And you got through the wall and into their vault thanks to me and my bomb.”

“B-but we—”

“You knew they wouldn’t report all that cash stolen because they weren’t supposed to have that money there in the first place. You got away with robbery, the cops never even knew about it, and the Zabagliones think
I
did it. The Torturer nearly killed me trying to find out where I hid the money. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. What money? What check-cashing place? But right around the time his punch connected with one of my kidneys, I kind of figured it out.”

“Chuck, I swear…”

Mickey let his voice drift off. He sat there, small, pale, sweating. Defeated.

“Sounds like the perfect plan to me, Mickey,” Chuck said softly, stepping away. He returned to his chair, sat, and took a long drink of Scotch. Then he put on the lid, set the bottle down, and looked Mickey in the eye. “But now it’s time to pay up.”

“Pay up?”

“I want my share of the money you stole. I think I earned it, don’t you?”

19

C
huck stared at Mickey, his eyes fixed on the older man’s face, thinking
My, how the worm does turn
. For the first time ever, Chuck had the upper hand in their relationship. He knew it partly had to do with Mickey’s illness, which was making him weak and miserable, but it also had to do with prison. After three years of keeping his back to the wall, Chuck was nobody’s patsy anymore. The world that wouldn’t give him a break was about to start paying out.

“We don’t need to argue,” Chuck said. “You don’t need to pretend. You don’t have to waste time trying to convince me that you don’t know what I’m talking about. You just have to hand over my share. I want half.”

Mickey was quiet for a long moment as he seemed to wither even further before Chuck’s eyes. Sweating, he pulled off his jacket, revealing a cotton ball taped to the inside of his elbow from where he’d had his blood test.

“If I had such money in my possession,” Mickey said finally, pulling off the tape, “then yeah, you could have half. You could have Frankie’s half.”

Chuck sat up straighter and cleared his throat.

“Frankie’s half?” he replied sarcastically. “And what’s Frankie gonna have to say about that?”

Mickey met his eyes then, and for a moment there was a flash of the old Mickey, the one who kept his rage barely under the surface.

“What’s Frankie gonna say about that?” Mickey asked. “Nothing. Frankie’s dead.”

Jo and Danny worked for two hours out on the patio, going through the old letters. It was chilly, but with Chewie there, they didn’t want to move inside. Between the two of them, they had come up with six letters about dye stains, and it looked as though four of the six had been written by the same person, or at least printed on the same printer. Not surprisingly, the questions had become more and more urgent each time. The final one, sent only a month ago, said,
Dear Jo Tulip, I have written to you so many times and you won’t answer my question. But I got to know, how do I get dye out?????? I’ve tried everything and nothing works. I REALLY NEED TO KNOW!!! Signed, Stained in Pennsylvania
.

When they had gone through all of the letters, Jo thanked Danny for his help and loaded the notebooks back into the car. At least her question had been answered: Frank Malone had convinced himself that she could help him. It wasn’t that big of a leap to imagine the author of those letters doing whatever it took to get a face-to-face conversation. Jo knew, if she could turn back time, she would have answered his question in the newspaper and online the first time it had come up. But she received so many questions that she had to be selective about what ended up getting answered. Somehow, getting dye out had never made it to the top of the heap.

There was an awkwardness when Jo returned to the patio to say goodbye. Ordinarily, she would have squeezed Danny’s hand or kissed him on the cheek without thinking twice. Now, however, she was reluctant to touch him, not knowing what kind of signal that would send. Instead, she gave him a smile and a little wave before leading Chewie inside to tell his mother goodbye and thanks again for the lunch.

To Jo’s surprise, Danny’s mother pulled her in for a long hug.

“You’re in my prayers, sweetie,” she said. Jo thought she was talking about the whole mess with the blind date and solving the kidnapping and murder and everything. But then she added, “My prayer is that you’ll find out what God has planned for you in life, and, if it’s His will, that you’ll see Danny as a big part of that equation.”

Jo just nodded, her face burning. She had known Mrs. Watkins since grade school, and this was not a conversation she had ever envisioned having with her!

“Thank you,” was all she could manage to say in return. Then she grabbed Chewie’s leash and got out of there as quickly as she could.

Chuck paced back and forth in front of Mickey’s desk, for the first time starting to lose his cool.

“Let me understand what you’re telling me. Not only was the money unusable, but Frankie’s dead and the cash has disappeared?”

“That’s about it,” Mickey said. He was leaning back as far as his office chair would let him, eyes closed, his breathing labored and slow.

“I waited three years to get out and collect that money, and you’re telling me it’s gone? Why should I believe you?”

Mickey lifted one hand in a gesture of futility.

“Talk to Tank. Talk to Ziggy. They’ll tell you the same thing.”

Chuck paced back and forth several more times and then finally sat again on the edge of his chair.

“What happened, Mickey? I want the whole story.”

Mickey opened his eyes and sat up. He pointed toward the door, which was open a few inches. Chuck walked to it, checked outside to make sure no one was around, and then pulled it tightly shut.

“You want the whole story?” Mickey said in a hoarse whisper as Chuck returned to his seat. “Fine. Sure, Frankie set you up. He got the idea once he heard you had a beef against Silver Shield. Through his connections with the Zabagliones, he’d known for years about the extra cash at the check-cashing place. He figured you could get your revenge and do him a favor at the same time. He only brought me into the deal once things were really rolling.”

Chuck knew Mickey was lying, that he’d been in on it from the beginning. But he let the man talk, eager to hear the details even if some were a bit embellished in the retelling. Mickey puffed on his cigar and then continued.

“The night you did it—late that night, after everything was boarded up and taped off and the cops were gone—Frankie and me, we broke in through the back of the insurance company. It wasn’t hard; we just used a hammer to pry off the plywood and climbed inside. Sure enough, the explosion had taken out part of the interior wall—all but the sheetrock on the other side. We took a sledgehammer and busted through and the next thing you knew we was inside the back room of the check-cashing place. Our idea had worked.”

“Weren’t you afraid there were gonna be people in there?”

“You kidding? The minute that bomb went off next door, the folks in the casino scattered like little ants. We knew they’d be steering clear until they knew for sure the cops weren’t wise to their action.”

Chuck ran a hand down his face.

“What happened then?”

“Well, we had brought our own explosives, to open the vault. Thing was, we didn’t even need to use them. They had all run out of there so fast, the vault wasn’t even closed up.” Mickey laughed, but then he started to cough. “I’m telling ya, there was money still out on the tables. We just walked around like kids at trick-or-treat and scooped it all into our gym bags.”

“What about the vault?”

“We took that money too. Filled three bags total by the time we were done. A million and a half dollars.”

Chuck whistled, long and low. He had known it was a lot. He hadn’t known it was that much.

“What happened?” Chuck asked.

“What happened was dye packs.”

“Dye packs?”

“Rigged cash. Dye packs. Because part of the money in that vault was from the legitimate business, their security system included dye packs hidden in the money. We didn’t know it. Soon as we carried the gym bags out of the vault, we found out. We hear like these little pops, next thing you know, we’re covered in purple ink—both of us and most of the bills.”