I took my snubnose .38 from my jacket pocket, where I’d slipped it from the car’s glove compartment where I kept it. As I moved forward, I could hear the slamming of file drawers from behind the door.
Whoever was in there must have used Vickie’s security card, from her purse, to get in to our office.
I opened the door quickly, the snubnose ready.
“It’s Pinkerton who never closes,” I told the thin, middle-aged man in an expensive tan suit, who stood behind the desk, its top covered with files. The man’s hair, which matched the suit, was cut conservatively, parted at the side, with bangs brushing the top of gold wire-framed glasses, behind which beady brown eyes went wide at the sight of me, his hands frozen inside a file he was going through.
“I just want my personal files,” he said, defensively.
I stepped inside the room, gun trained on him. “And what files might those be?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed to slits, and he dropped his hands down to his side.
“Vickie took personal papers of mine when she left Denver,” he said. “I want them back.”
Now I knew who he was: the unethical, untrustworthy Kyle I’d heard Becky mention.
And the person who killed Vickie.
“Put your hands in the air,” I said, with a little gesture of the gun. And he did, but one of his hands held a silenced automatic, which must have been lying on the desk, hidden behind the stacks of file folders.
There was a snick and a bullet missed me by inches, and I dove for the floor, firing back awkwardly, missing him. He was heading toward the office door before I could haul myself up, and I wasn’t up to playing grab-ass with somebody, so I reached out and snatched a hefty stapler off the desk and flung it at him, smacking him in the back of the skull, and he went down like an arcade target. Lights out.
I stood up, breathing heavily. From the look of the blood that was oozing out of his head, he was going to need a few stitches. He was coming around when I said, “Buddy, that’s a nasty gash — I hope to hell you’re insured.”
As impressed as I was with the Polk County Prison, I was more impressed by the smell of the Iowa countryside outside its walls.
Ballistics proved what my father had suspected from the start: the bullet that killed Vickie did not come from my gun, but Kyle’s, and the autopsy report showed the time of death to be earlier than when I arrived at her apartment in a red-hot rage.
Apparently, from statements made, and from what we were able to piece together, Kyle ran the shady insurance business with the full approval of Vickie. In fact, Kyle taught her everything she needed to know about how to swindle a customer. You might say he taught her too well. Because later, perhaps when the partnership began to sour, she started keeping files of damaging evidence on him, to be used later for blackmail.
That cost her life. And nearly mine, and my father’s.
Last week, I hired a new office manager. You can bet I did a comprehensive background check. As a matter of fact, in the interview I gave the poor bastard such a grilling, a big sweat stain formed around his neck. But he’s working out fine. Just the same, every couple of weeks or so, I stay late at the office... and look through the checkbook and files.
The Des Moines Register ran an article on the embezzlement, and made me look like a sap, but Virginia Kafer from People (who wrote that terrific piece a year ago) did a follow-up story, focusing on the betrayal of a best friend, which I thought came out okay.
Anyway, a few days after that People magazine article appeared, I got a call at the office from Sheila, a woman I was friends with in college. She was in town from San Francisco on a business trip and wanted to get together for lunch and talk about old times.
I told her I was busy.
Dead and Breakfast
Laura sat in the front on the rider’s side of the white Transport mini-van in the Holiday Inn parking lot, waiting for her husband to come out of the lobby.
In the back seat, their son, Andy — a dark-haired, round-faced, eleven-year-old boy with glasses — was hunched over, peering into the small screen of his Turbo Express, moving the expensive video toy back and forth in his hands to catch the last fading rays of the sun.
Even with the volume turned down, Laura could hear the frantic tune of the game he was playing: Splatterhouse — a particularly violent one she didn’t approve of (and wouldn’t have allowed her husband to buy for the boy, if she’d been along on that shopping trip). She mentally blocked the sound out, gazing toward the horizon at the picture-postcard sunset descending on lush green trees.
Wisconsin was a beautiful state, and the weather had been perfect; but now dark, threatening clouds were moving quickly in, bringing to an end a memorable summer-vacation day.
She spotted her husband, Pete, coming out of the lobby. He’d only been in there a minute or so... not very long.
It wasn’t a good sign.
“We’re in trouble,” he said, after opening the van’s door and sliding in behind the wheel. The brow of his ruggedly handsome face was furrowed.
“No room?” she asked.
“No room.”
“Let’s try another.”
Pete turned toward her. “Honey,” he said, his expression grave, “according to the desk clerk, there’s not a vacancy between Milwaukee and Minneapolis.”
“But that’s impossible!” Laura said, astounded. “What’s going on?”
Pete started the van. “A country festival, for one thing,” he replied. “And this is the tourist season...”
“Aren’t we staying here?” Andy asked from the back seat.
“No, son,” his dad answered, as he wheeled the van out of the packed hotel parking lot and toward the Interstate ramp. “We have to go on.”
“But I’m tired,” the boy whined, “and there’s not enough light anymore to play my game!”
Annoyed — more with their current predicament than with her son — Laura picked up a small white sack on the seat next to her and threw it to Andy, hitting him on the arm. “Here... have some fudge,” she said flatly.
“I don’t like fudge!” the boy retorted, and threw the sack back at his mom, smacking her on the head.
“Andy!” Pete said sharply, looking at his son in the rearview mirror. “That’s five points! When you get to ten, you lose your Turbo-Express for a week, remember?”
“Well, she started it!” he protested.
“Six,” his father said.
The van fell silent, the air tense and heavy with more than the humidity of the on-coming storm. Big drops of rain splattered on the windshield. The sky was crying, and suddenly Laura felt like crying, too. She stared at the dark highway before her, upset that their wonderful day had turned sour.
“We shouldn’t have stopped at the Dells,” she sighed.
It had to be said, and it might as well be said by her, because she was the one who first suggested the detour to the expensive touristy playground...
A sign on the road advertising the Oak Street Antiques Mall had caught her attention, but Pete and Andy had just groaned.
Then Andy saw the gigantic 3-D billboard for Pirate’s Cove — a 72-hole miniature golf course set in tiers of sandstone and waterfalls that overlooked the Wisconsin River. Quickly he defected to his mother’s side.
Pete, reminding them both of their agreement to make it from Illinois to Minnesota, by nightfall — where a coveted condominium at Kavanaugh’s Resort in Brainerd awaited them — held firm... until he drove over the next hill on the highway.