Ceepak bolts upright on the sofa. His eyes go wide. I’m thinking he is having a stroke or something when he finally speaks:
“Of course!” He kisses Rita full on the lips. “Thank you!”
I’m about to say “What?” when, on the TV, live, Soozy K is screaming “Omigod, omigod!”
Ceepak, Rita, and I turn to the screen, where Soozy is blubbering and staring at her cell phone.
“What is it?” someone-maybe Layla-asks from behind the camera.
“A text message,” says Soozy. “From the killer!”
She shoves her phone toward the camera. The lens zooms in. We read what is written on the phone screen in pixellated type:
“TOMORROW NIGHT. THE SHOW WILL BE LIVE..
YOU WILL BE DEAD.”
34
We’re in Ceepak’s Toyota.
He’s behind the wheel because he, unlike me, has not been imbibing beer.
He’s also remarkably calm.
“It’s all part of his play,” he says.
“Who?”
“Mr. Martin Mandrake.” He reaches down to his belt, unclips his cell phone, and hands it to me. “Danny, could you please press speed-dial fourteen?”
“Sure,” I say. Since New Jersey has a handheld-cell-phone law, no way is Ceepak dialing while driving. “Who is it?”
“Christopher Miller.”
The FBI guy.
“You want me to put it on speakerphone?” I ask after pressing the speed-dial digits.
“Roger that.”
And that, my friends, is how you make a hands-free cell-phone call without tearing apart the interior of your car and doing a bunch of fancy wiring.
“Hello?” A little girl answers the phone.
“Angela, this is your father’s friend, John Ceepak.”
“Hello.”
“Is your daddy home?”
“Yes.”
“May I speak with him?”
“Okay.”
And we wait. We hear the Miller family phone clomping to the floor or a very hard kitchen counter, and Angela, who’s probably ten, screaming “Daddy? It’s Mr. Pea Pack.”
Kids. I guess they’re cute when you’re not in a hurry to find out why your partner said “Of course!” and kissed his wife after she said we should have a profit-sharing deal with Prickly Pear Productions.
“You have your badge?” Ceepak asks while we wait.
“Yeah.” It’s in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Put it on.”
We hit a stoplight. Ceepak slips his shield into this nifty badge-holder he pulls out of the storage bin near the gearshift. He hangs the necklace around his neck. I pin my badge to a belt loop on my shorts. Ceepak and I are now, officially, plainclothes cops!
“John?” Christopher Miller comes on the phone. He’s a big, hulking African American guy, a little over fifty, who still works out every day. He and Ceepak could be cousins if, you know, one of Ceepak’s uncles had been black. “What’s up?”
“My partner and I are on our way over to see Martin Mandrake.”
“The producer on your TV show?”
“Roger that. We need anything and everything you might have on him.”
“John, as I’m sure you’re aware, we don’t normally keep files on innocent citizens.…”
“We suspect that Mr. Mandrake may be implicated in the murders of Peter Paul Braciole as well as Thomas Hess, a.k.a. Skeletor, the drug dealer.”
Miller hesitates. “Care to elaborate?”
“Certainly. But not right now. We are currently en route to the Prickly Pear production office.”
“Okay. I’ll see if we have anything on him. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he cheated on his taxes.”
“Appreciate it.”
“You on your cell?”
“Roger that.”
“Let me make a few calls. Get back to you.”
“10-4. Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
And the phone call ends because, I can tell by the tone of his voice, Miller is already thinking about who he should call first.
I thumb the OFF button on Ceepak’s phone.
“So,” I say, “we think Marty did it?”
“The possibility looms large.”
Okay. Usually he just says “It’s a possibility” when considering a suspect for whom we haven’t nailed down the means, opportunity, and motive.
“I think I get the motive,” I say. “He used the killings to bump up the ratings for his show.”
“Correct. And, as you recall, his career was in serious jeopardy prior to the success of Fun House.”
True. Layla called him a “washed-up old hack” and “Marty The Old Farty” on numerous occasions.
“What about the means and opportunity?” I ask.
Ceepak sighs slightly as he makes the turn that will take us to the production trailer. “Admittedly, Danny, I am playing a hunch here. However, remember that Mr. Mandrake is a producer. He knows how to put together the people he needs to get a job done.”
“So, what, he hired a team of professional hit men to take out one of his stars to guarantee that Fun House would be a ratings hit and save his career?”
As we pull to the curb, Ceepak purses his lips and nods grimly. “Such is my supposition, Danny.”
Wow. I think about this as Ceepak yanks on the emergency brake and I undo my seat belt.
Would Marty Mandrake really murder people to make sure his show was a hit? Maybe. The network bigwigs are already signing him up for more shows next year. He’s gone from being a washed-up has-been to the next big thing, making millions because, all of a sudden, he has refound his Midas touch, the ability to turn crap into gold.
And all it took was a pair of dead bodies.
As soon as we’re up and out of the car, Ceepak’s cell phone chirps.
“This is Ceepak. Go.” He listens. “That was fast. I see.” Now he gets an earful. “Thanks, Chris. I owe you one.”
He folds up the phone.
“Well?”
“Chris Miller knew exactly who to call.”
35
“And?”
I hate when he keeps me hanging like that.
“As I suspected,” says Ceepak, “the FBI has quite an extensive file on Mr. Mandrake. It was first opened in 1971, the year he made his award-winning antiwar documentary about the Vietnam conflict. Apparently, the president at the time was not a fan of Mr. Mandrake’s Nixon Lies, Who Dies?”
“So what can the Fibbies tell us?”
“That Mr. Mandrake likes to gamble.”
“Right. We knew that. He was down in Atlantic City the Friday Paulie was murdered. Said he goes down there a lot.”
“Indeed. However, Danny, even with all that practice, he is not very good at it. In fact, the FBI suspects he is deep in debt to certain members of the Lombardo crime syndicate.”
Okay. That’s a non-Creed crime family. I think. Those were the Pelagatti and Squarcialupi.
“The Lombardo people could help Mandrake hire two contract killers,” I say. “Easy.”
Ceepak nods. “Especially if he offered to pay back all that he owed on his gambling debts plus a substantial interest payment.”
“Which he can do,” I say. “Because the network paid him that bonus and hired him to produce a bunch of new shows.”
“Exactly.”
Okay. I would’ve kissed Rita, too, if I had figured all that out and, you know, been married to her.
Ceepak and I head up the steel staircase attached to the production trailer. Somebody’s inside: I can hear laughter, the kind you hear outside a bar on a Friday night. Late.
When we enter, I’m gonna let Ceepak ask most of the questions because, when we turned into plainclothes cops, we were at his house, so he was able to strap on his Glock before we took off. My sidearm is secured inside the lockbox in my clothes closet, where it sleeps whenever I go out to grab a beer.