“Gross.”
“I didn’t poop,” hollers a boy in Sponge Bob water wings. “I just peed.”
Now Donna waves her hand dismissively. “He just peed.” No big deal.
I’m wondering how much chlorine Becca has to dump into her swimming pool on a daily basis to stop it from turning into a crystal blue community cesspool.
“Ladies?” says Ceepak, trying to regain their attention.
But then a girl with a headless baby doll starts screaming while this boy runs around the pool holding the hairy little plastic head in his hand.
“No running!” shouts Ceepak.
“Are you telling my children what to do?” snaps Jackie.
“The tile is wet. He could slip.”
Right on cue, the boy slips. Bangs his head on the concrete.
Now he’s bawling, too.
Ceepak snaps open a cargo pocket on his pants leg, whips out a miniature first aid kit. He rushes to the howling boy.
“Minor abrasion,” he announces, patting the wound with gauze. “Nothing serious.”
“Ooowww!” the boy bellows anyhow, turning on the waterworks.
I’m kneeling beside Ceepak. The girl with the headless doll is wailing up a storm and then the other girl, the one splashing like a paddle wheel in the pool, makes an announcement: “It is too poop! Joey pooped his pants!”
“Man,” I mumble. “It’s a good thing Mr. Ryan isn’t out here — he’d be calling in another complaint.”
Ceepak looks up from the kid’s minor cut. “Come again?”
“Ryan. The guy who called us out here the first time.”
Ceepak leans back. Sits on his heels. “Of course.”
He has this look in his eye. My mindless mumbling has, apparently, helped his big brain make some brilliant deduction. It’s why we make a good team. I mumble. He cracks the case.
But first he examines the boy’s head wound one last time. “The bleeding has been staunched. You should not require stitches. Have your mother affix this Band-aid and stay out of the pool for the remainder of the day.”
“Okay,” the kid says. “Can I swim in the ocean?”
“Negative. Come on, Danny. We need to talk to Becca.”
“About the ring?”
He shakes his head. “Mr. Ryan.
Becca hands Ceepak a sheet of paper.
“That’s a copy of his driver’s license. My dad makes me Xerox the license of whoever is charging the room to their credit card.”
“Might I borrow your fax machine?” says Ceepak.
“Sure. Where do you want to send it?”
Ceepak jots down a phone number on a Mussel Beach message pad. “Denise Diego. SHPD.”
Diego is the Sea Haven Police Department’s resident computer geek. She can search a data base like nobody’s business.
“Kindly include this message,” Ceepak says as he rips off the top sheet with the number on it and starts writing out a note full of instructions. “I’m asking her to run Mr. Ryan’s driver’s license through LEADS — the Law Enforcement Automated Data System — to ascertain if Sean Ryan is a known alias for any individual with a criminal record.”
“Alias?” I say. “Who do you think Ryan really is?”
“Someone else,” is all Ceepak offers because, I can tell, the hamster wheels inside his head are spinning like crazy. He hands Becca the note. She tapes it to the photocopy of the driver’s license, feeds the sheet into her fax machine, and punches in the number for the SHPD machine.
“When did Mr. Ryan check out?” Ceepak asks as the fax makes that Darth Vader static noise to signal that the connection has been made.
“First thing Sunday morning. I guess he was mad that we didn’t evict the DePinnas on Saturday night, like he wanted us to.”
“And when did he check in?”
“Last Friday,” says Becca. “Around one or two in the afternoon.”
“When we were with you last Saturday, you called Mr. Ryan a ‘walk-in.’”
“That’s right. He didn’t have a reservation, just showed up in the office. Fortunately, I had a vacancy. The people in 202 had to go home early. Their daughter back in Brooklyn was having a baby. Early.”
“Ryan was in Connie’s room!” I say. “202!”
“Precisely,” says Ceepak.
“Jim was with me when I asked Mr. Ryan to change rooms,” says Becca.
“Come again?”
“Jim. Officer Riggs.”
“He’d come by for coffee,” I add, wiggling my eyebrows up and down to let Becca know that I know what was really on the menu first thing Saturday morning.
She, of course, ignores my eyebrow waggles.
“Jim was in his police uniform,” she says, “because, well, later he had to go to work. With you guys. On the night shift.”
“Roger that,” says Ceepak.
“But, it was only like eleven in the morning, so he had a ton of time to kill. He hung out with me while I made my rounds.”
“Eleven o’clock is check-out time,” I say.
“Jim and I went up to 202 because Mr. Ryan hadn’t come down to the office. When he checked in, he originally told me he only needed the room for one night.”
Ceepak nods. “Then he apparently changed his mind.”
“Right. Said he had to meet some friends who had been delayed. So I offered him the room downstairs.”
“And when you made this request, you, more or less, had a police escort.”
“Yeah. Jim was right there. Looking big and tough in his uniform.”
Scary is probably a better adjective. The Gigantor body builder usually wears these wrap around sunglasses that hug the sides of his shaved scalp.
“Maybe that’s why Mr. Ryan didn’t give me any guff,” says Becca. “He just grabbed his bag and followed me down to the first floor.”
“One bag?”
“Yeah. A small one, too. Like a gym bag, you know?”
“Curious,” says Ceepak.
“Yeah. Usually, I have to help people lug all sorts of suitcases and ice chests up and down those steps.”
“Suggesting that Mr. Ryan was not here for the purposes of vacationing.”
“Guess not. Oh, this is weird: When he was checking out, he told me he needed to go back up to Room 202 to look for his electric razor which he forgot to pack when Jim and I ‘gave him the bum’s rush.’”
“Did you let him?”
“Of course not. The DePinna girl was in that room Sunday morning. I told him if the maids found his razor when they were cleaning, we’d work out a way to ship it to him. We always do that. You’d be surprised what people leave behind in motels. One time, I was cleaning rooms, found somebody’s dentures in a plastic party cup.”
“We need to talk to Connie DePinna again,” says Ceepak.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“We need her permission to search her room.”
“You think we can find her ring?”
