“Officer Danny Mayfair, please.”
A couple of seconds later her face lit up.
“Danny, it’s Maria.” She paused as the officer talked.
“No, no. I’m not still trying to sell you the condo. Although you passed on a very good deal. The prices are going up, Danny.”
She sat down on one of the plastic chairs and looked up, giving me a very charming smile. The girl liked to flirt. Two guys at once. Officer Danny and me. If James was here she’d probably try to work him in too. He was cute.
“No. Danny, I’m with Skip-” She looked at me inquisitively.
“Moore,” I said.
“Skip Moore. He’s-yeah, you guys interviewed him. Along with me and the older lady.”
Mary Trueblood would not be happy to know she was being referred to as “the older lady.”
“Can you tell me the status of James?”
She nodded, rolled her eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was good news or bad news. I wanted to grab the phone out of her hand and just get to the heart of the matter.
Maria glanced up at me. “Danny says James has been hostile to all of them. Belligerent and what else, Danny? Noncommunicative.” She frowned at me, shrugging her shoulders.
That was James. Described him to a
“The good thing is, they don’t believe he had anything to do with the murder.”
“And?”
“When are they going to release him, Danny?” She waited, waited, and waited. My fists clenched. I needed to know.
“They’re going to release him in about an hour.”
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I couldn’t wait to tell Mary Trueblood. And then I reconsidered. The lady hadn’t shown any compassion at all about her former employee being knifed to death. She probably wouldn’t care about James’s incarceration.
“Can you ask him who the dead guy is?”
She nodded. “Danny, can you release the identity of the dead man?”
She giggled. “Of course I’m not going to call the press. It’s between you and me.”
Standing up, she kept a distant look in her eyes, like she was focusing on someone who wasn’t here. Maybe this Danny character.
“Okay. I’ll keep it very quiet.” She nodded emphatically as if the person on the other end of the phone could see her.
“I still love you, big D.”
She stuffed the black phone back in her pocket.
“Big D?”
She blushed. “Well, he’s kind of big.”
Then I blushed. “Did he tell you who the dead guy is?”
“He did.”
Big D. An ex-boyfriend.
“And?”
“Well, you heard me, I promised not to tell.”
“Maria.”
“But I’ll tell you, okay.”
“Please. Who was the victim?”
“A guy named Peter Stiffle.”
“Stiffle?”
“Stiffle. Peter.”
“You’re sure? Peter Stiffle?”
“I’m not sure. Danny is sure.”
Big D was sure the cadaver had previously been a living, breathing Peter Stiffle.
Things just got weirder and weirder.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One hour was still one hour. There was time to do a little investigating and I took advantage of it. Maria offered to drive, handed me an extra helmet, and with a throaty roar from the engine she shot out of the parking lot like a bullet, full speed ahead toward Dr. Malhotra’s Vein Care Center. It took all of about fifteen seconds for me to realize I should have stayed at Pelican Cove.
The lady raced through traffic, moving at breakneck speeds as I hung on tight, dangerously close to touching off-limit areas of her body. She’d lean to the left, lean to the right, slipping between cars, and there were two or three times I thought we were going to lose it altogether.
As we pulled into the parking lot, I’d felt the hot stinging Florida sun burning my wind-whipped face. When we stopped, the roaring from the Harley engine still rang in my ears.
“You’re sure this is where the old hotel was located?” I shouted. I couldn’t hear anything.
A white stucco building fronted the narrow highway, three dark windows and a door the only breaks in the plain vanilla surface. Two signs hung on a rusted metal post planted in the parking lot. The first was a weather- beaten wooden sign that simply said VEIN CARE CENTER. Below that hung a much larger plastic sign with raised letters.
JAMES O’NEILL ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY
SPECIALIZING IN TOTAL JOINT REPLACEMENT SURGERY
“I’ve always been told that this was where the Coral Belle was located.”
I checked my watch. James would be free in about fifty minutes. I could go inside, ask a few questions, and I’d still make it back to pick him up when they released him. I knew James didn’t want to spend any more time than he had to at a sheriff’s office.
“I’m going to go in. See what they know.”
She lifted her denim-clad leg, dismounted, and smiled at me, still flirting. If I was about five to ten years older-
“You’re still not going to tell me what you’re looking for, are you?”
“I will. Right now. I will tell you exactly what we’re looking for. But, I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Really?” Excitement in her voice.
We’d already lied to her about the plumbing business. And we hadn’t been entirely truthful about our search.
A noisy truck rolled by about twenty feet from us, followed by an old Chevy with a really loud muffler. I could smell the exhaust.
Give her the partial truth. It was the best I could offer. “Mary Trueblood asked us to find out what we could about her great-grandfather. One of the last places she can trace him to is right here, at the site of the Coral Belle Hotel.”
“And you were pretending to be plumbers in disguise? Why? Because you were looking for family history? I don’t think so.” She put her hand on my arm, a plea for the truth. “Because you were looking for a great- grandfather? Was that the reason you lied to me?” She folded her arms over her ample chest and smiled at me. “Skip, don’t insult me, please. I’m already deeper into this thing than I want to be, and I don’t even know what this thing is.”
She had me.
“Seriously, Skip-”
I shrugged my shoulders as I walked up to the door and entered, not bothering to hold it open for her. I didn’t tell lies well.
