Who had engineered the destruction?
Maybe I needed to start being careful about what I wished for. As I scanned the crowd, my heart bumped to a stop. The used car dealer owner, Bad Dog Raphael, was in the front row, looking as suave as ever in a tux. He lifted his wineglass, and the smile he shot in my direction glistened like the evening light.
I was too nervous to do more than acknowledge him with a tip of my head. And pretty surprised when I realized the reporter Mike Kowalski was standing right behind him. He looked me over like a starving man in line at the local Ponderosa.
My stomach was already doing flip-flops, so I didn’t want to think about what he was obviously thinking about. I looked away-and saw Reno Bob Oates on the other side of the crowd. When his eyes met mine, they narrowed. Reno Bob bit through the finger sandwich he was holding.
Never one to back down from a plan I was convinced was a good one, I pasted a smile on my face and refused to look around further. The crowd quieted and all eyes turned to me.
I waved. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Team Two’s fundraiser. We’ve had a little change of plans. So gather around, grab a glass of wine, and I hope you brought your checkbooks. We’re about to begin…” I paused for a moment to add to the drama, “the first ever Cemetery Survivor bachelor auction!”
That one moment of total and complete shocked silence, and all those opened mouths made me wonder if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. I was about to stammer an apology and tell them all it was a joke when Reggie sauntered up the stairs to stand next to me.
And guess what? The ladies in the crowd went wild.
Three cheers for Reggie. He’d begged, borrowed, or stole (I didn’t want to think which) a black suit for the night, and between that and the tie with a pit bull painted on it (an exact match to the tattoo on his forehead), he looked like a Wall Street broker gone way bad. As I’d said to Ella, there were a lot of women who liked that sort of thing. They proved it, too. Absalom stepped front and center to take over the proceedings, gave the crowd a rundown of the ground rules we’d made up on the fly (like making it very clear how the winner was only paying for each team member as an escort for the rest of the evening), and the bidding started.
“One hundred dollars!” A woman at the back of the crowd called.
“One-fifty,” said another.
“Two hundred dollars!” The voice was familiar, and no wonder; Ella jumped up and down, waving her checkbook like there was no tomorrow.
All for a good cause, I reminded myself, and stepped to the side of the building so that I could grab a glass of wine in peace.
So much for that plan; I wasn’t exactly surprised to find Jefferson Lamar there waiting for me.
“You call this conducting an investigation?” I wasn’t imaging it, his nose really was in the air when he looked toward the front of the building where Reggie was having the time of his life. Reggie strutted and posed. He paraded and pouted. And when he stripped off his suit jacket and tossed it over one shoulder, the bidding shot from three hundred to four-fifty in a heartbeat. “This is tomfoolery!”
“Yeah, whatever. It’s not like I had a lot of time to come up with a Plan B. Besides, nobody seems to mind.” I listened as the bidding hit seven hundred dollars.
“Going once!” Absalom called. “Going twice. Gone!”
Was I surprised when I saw Ella dash out of the crowd and grab Reggie’s hand?
“I can’t spend all my time on your case,” I said, turning back to Lamar. “I’ve got a real job to do, and real people who are going to ask questions if I don’t do it.”
“I know. I know.” It must have been the night for pacing. He marched along the perimeter of the veranda and back again. “You’ve had time, though. You haven’t even gone to see Dale Morgan yet.”
“I worked on the art show twenty-four, seven.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “I can’t do two things at once.”
“You have to concentrate. What about the file you have? The evidence? The newspaper articles?”
This was one place I could use a little one-upmanship, and I didn’t hesitate. “As a matter of fact, I talked to Mike Kowalski. You must remember him. He interviewed you like a million times.”
Lamar remembered, all right. I could tell because his brow furrowed. “Scandalous lies. Yellow journalism.”
“The guy’s like a hero or something,” I said. “He’s got a great reputation, and he wins all kinds of awards. Not the kind of person who would make stuff up. Only…”
Lamar leaned nearer. “Only…?”
“Only something about him gives me the creeps. I mean, something more than just that he’s a creepy old guy, and that’s creepy enough. But he’s…” I shrugged. “I dunno. For a guy who’s supposed to be the second coming of Geraldo, he’s a big zero.” I thought about the way Kowalski’s stomach sagged over the waistband of his khakis. “And I do mean big.”
“And Kowalski, he says-”
“Nothing new, so nothing you’re going to want to hear.” Lamar didn’t take the hint. He stood there waiting for me to say more, and I figured since he apparently wasn’t careful about what he wished for, either, he was about to get what he deserved.
“Kowalski says exactly what he said back then: the desk clerk swears you and Vera were at the Lake View plenty of times.”
Lamar’s cheeks got dusky. “I remember that from the newspaper. It’s preposterous, of course. I told the police that. Why would the man lie?”
“Exactly what I want to know. Only, the thing is…” A roar went up from the crowd and new commotion started when Sammi’s auction was concluded. I don’t think I was imagining it when I saw Virgil race up the steps to claim her. After the fights that had been so prominently featured on Cemetery Survivor, nobody else had the nerve to do much bidding. He got her for a song: three hundred bucks. “The desk clerk never talked to the cops. He never testified. He seems to have conveniently disappeared.”
“And that means…?”
“The hell if I know!” Crazy Jake’s auction was next, and I could see he was having the time of his life taking pictures of the crowd, even if he did go for only seventy-five dollars and the woman who won him looked enough like him for me to figure out it must have been his mother and she knew nobody else was going to bid.
Delmar did a little better and brought in another eight hundred.
I did some quick calculations and hoped my math was right. We were still behind Team One’s five thousand one hundred and twenty dollar total. I hoped Absalom had fans.
Rather than obsess, I concentrated on the case. “I’d like to know which of them was lying,” I said, and big points for Lamar, he was a quick study.
“You think Kowalski made up the quotes from the kid? But why?” He must have seen Kowalski earlier, just like I had, because he scanned the crowd. I looked that way, too, and saw that if they weren’t eagerly participating in the auction, at least most of our guests looked like they were having fun. I didn’t see Reno Bob, but Kowalski was over at the food table, loading a plate. Was it a coincidence that Bad Dog was standing right behind him in line?
I watched them chat and wished I had super powers for super hearing. “You could just like, pop up over there, couldn’t you?” I asked Lamar. “I’d love to know what they’re talking about.”
“Too crowded. Not enough space.” He shook his head. “If I get close enough to hear them, someone will get frozen solid.”