“Yeah?”
“We need to talk to Billy.”
We sure do. Billy may not have enjoyed being upstaged by his mother-in-law to-be in the diamond department. Maybe he took the Galuppi diamond with him when he made his early morning escape so the engagement ring he gave his future wife wouldn’t look so ridiculously tiny for the rest of their married life. Either that, or he needed to finance his upcoming honeymoon.
There’s a small bar out back of the Mussel Beach motel. It’s actually a blue wedding tent attached to a shed where Becca’s dad keeps the booze. I remember Becca and I snuck in one winter when we were fourteen and played Piña Colada with the blenders.
It’s noon and the cranky bartender (Becca’s cousin Bernie) is serving beer to his only customer. Billy. He’s sitting in an aluminum patio chair with blue and white vinyl straps.
“Sir?” says Ceepak.
“Yeah?”
“We need to ask you a few questions.”
Billy gestures to the empty chairs circling his table. “It’s a free country, dudes.”
Ceepak and I sit.
“You guys need a drink?” asks bartender Bernie from inside the serving hut, which is like a double-wide garden shed.
“No thank you,” says Ceepak.
“Danny?”
“I’m good.” Hey, even my code says you don’t drink when you’re on the job; especially if the job includes carrying a loaded sidearm.
“Billy,” says Ceepak, “we know you were with Ms. DePinna last night.”
“Really?” He gets this cocky look on his face. “Which one?”
“Connie,” I say. “Your fiancée.”
Now he winks at me. “We ain’t married yet, bro.”
“Meaning what?” asks Ceepak.
“Meaning I may be engaged but I’m not dead!” He wheezes up a laugh. “Her sisters are pretty hot, too. So’s that chick at the front desk. Becky.”
“Becca,” I say.
“Friend of yours?”
“Yes,” says Ceepak.
“You should tell her to, you know, put some cucumbers on her eyes or something. Dude — she looks like she hasn’t slept in a week.”
Probably because she hasn’t.
Ceepak cuts to the chase. “When you snuck out of Ms. DePinna’s bedroom this morning at four A.M., did you take her diamond ring with you?”
“What? No way. I gave it to her.”
“We mean the other one,” I say.
“Oh. Right. Nah. I don’t wear much jewelry. Just the one ear ring.”
“You are aware, of course, of the diamond’s value?” says Ceepak.
“Sure I am. I bought it.”
I jump in again: “The other one!”
He shrugs. “Couple hundred bucks, I guess. Maybe a thousand.”
“Guess again,” says Ceepak.
“Really?”
Ceepak nods. “A similar heart-shaped diamond weighing two carats and of comparable color and clarity has a list price of $28,300 on the Tiffany web site.”
Ceepak. The man does his homework.
“Dude!” is all Billy says. Then he says it again. “Dude!”
Ceepak looks at me. “Danny?” He head-bobs left, indicating we should leave.
Because Billy is obviously way too dumb to realize that he snagged his hair on close to thirty thousand dollars last night.
Billy attacks the keys of his cell phone with blazing thumbs, no doubt texting all his dudes and brohs to let them know that, as soon as he’s married, he’s going to hock his wife’s heirloom and buy a new truck.
It’s time for Ceepak and me to talk to the sisters.
Donna and Jackie DePinna are parked poolside with their kids, about six of them, even though it seems like more because the dark-haired terrors are midget-sized maniacs who enjoy screaming, splashing all of Becca’s water out of the pool, and bopping each other on the butt with tubular floatation devices.
“Knock it off, Little Tony,” says Jackie.
“Is Tony your son?” asks Donna.
“Fine. You tell him.”
“He’s a boy. He needs to burn off energy.”
“Like your husband?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. But I saw how he was looking at that waitress last night.”
“What waitress?”
“At Pinky’s Shrimp. The one with the big bazoombas.”
Donna straightens up in her chair. “He doesn’t have to leave home if we wants to look at that.”
“He does if he wants to see real ones.”
A girl screams. Somebody chokes.
“Hey, little Tony! Cut that out. Don’t drown your cousin. Come over here and drown your aunt.”
Ceepak clears his throat. “Ladies?”
Jackie slides her ski-goggle-sized sunglasses down her nose, squints at us over the top of the frames. “What?”
“We need to ask you both a few questions.”
Donna coyly pulls her knees up to her chest. Her bathing suit top sloshes the way a waterbed does when you sit on it. “Are you two trying to find our baby sister’s ring?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Ceepak.
Jackie shakes her shaggy Troll hair. “Connie is so immature. She always loses everything.”
Ceepak turns to Donna. “Your sister mentioned that she saw your husband, Thomas….”
“Tommy. No one calls him Thomas, only his mother and only when she’s mad at him.”
“Like when he’s leering at eighteen year-old waitresses with enormous chumbawumbas,” snipes Jackie.
Donna twirls in her recliner. “Your husband’s no saint. He was staring at her rib bumpers, too!”
“Prove it.”
“What? You think I snapped pictures of him drooling in his shrimp basket?”
“Ladies?” Ceepak sounds like the referee at the Roller Derby. “Your sister Connie tells us she saw Tommy on the second floor terrace right before she discovered that her ring had gone missing. He was carrying an ice chest.”
“Because the ice machine upstairs was out of ice so he had to come down here and that machine was out of ice, too.”
“Our husbands both went fishing with our father,” says Jackie. “Like always, the men abandoned us. Went off to have their fun, left us here to deal with the mess.” She flicks her hands toward the assorted children. “So when exactly do we get our vacation, huh?”
“Mommy?” a girl screams from the pool.
“What?” Donna screams back.
“I think Joey pooped his pants.”
“So sniff his diaper.”
