Rolling Thunder (John Ceepak Mystery)

“We need to get inside that damn house!” I overstate the obvious because it’s what I do best.

  “We also need to reexamine the shower stall.”

  “How come?”

  “If Ms. Baker was drowned and, therefore, killed somewhere else, why was there so much blood splattered on the walls?”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” says Bill Botzong when we contact him at nine A.M. “We need to be inside. Now.”

  Botzong and the entire State Police MCU crew spent the night in their van at number One Tangerine Street. I can hear the crick in his neck over the radio.

  “Your warrant will be signed within the hour,” Ceepak assures him.

  “Good. We’ll hit the bathrooms first. Look for discolored toilet water.”

  “We’ll see you at nine thirty,” Ceepak says to the radio.

  “Bring some coffee,” says Botzong.

  “Roger that.” Ceepak cradles the radio mic back into its bracket. I’m behind the wheel as we cruise down Ocean Avenue toward town.

  “Let’s swing by The Rusty Scupper,” says Ceepak as he stares out the window. I can tell: He’s piecing together the jigsaw puzzle in his brain.

  I take the next right, head west to Bayside Boulevard. The greasy spoon where Gail Baker used to waitress is open for breakfast and we still have an hour before we can enter the so-called Sugar Shack on Tangerine Street. Ceepak’s probably figuring we can talk to Gail Baker’s co-workers, maybe eat a slippery egg with a ketchup-encrusted fork and crunch on some burnt bacon. We can also grab Botzong and his team some coffees—the kind with oil slicks skimming the surface.

  Yep, the Scupper does breakfast even worse than they do lunch.

  We cruise over to the public pier on the bay side of the island because that’s the restaurant’s main attraction: It’s close to the water and the boats. The stench of the barnacles on the pilings helps cover up the foul smells from the kitchen.

  Now, when I call The Rusty Scupper a restaurant, I’m using the term loosely. It’s really just this four-table grease pit with a grill. The décor is simple: red-and-white vinyl tablecloths with tomato-red rings wherever a dirty-bottomed ketchup bottle has recently resided.

  The place is totally empty. No one’s sitting in any of the wobbly chairs. At one table, there’s stack of laminated menus polka-dotted with unidentifiable food splotches.

  “Let’s grab some chow while we’re here,” suggests Ceepak, gingerly picking up a menu with his thumb and forefinger. We’re going to need Purell after we order. “No telling when we might have another chance to eat today.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I say.

  We sit down. First Ceepak wipes the clumps of scrambled eggs off his chair, the seat of which is ripped and torn so you can see the spongy yellow foam inside the cushion.

  I’d probably drink some of the tepid water sitting above my bent spoon, but I’m sort of allergic to lipstick when it’s rimming the top of a dirty plastic drinking cup.

  “What’re you two eating?” a guy in leather pants and a sleeveless leather vest (no shirt) says when he comes out of the kitchen to our table. He sports a shaved head, handlebar mustache, nipple rings, and a filthy apron splattered with egg yolks and coffee stains. Well, I hope they’re coffee stains. The apron doesn’t really match his black leather pants, but I guess, that without Gail, they’re going with a whole different look.

  “We’d like some eggs and some information,” says Ceepak.

  “Do I look like a library?”

  Actually, now that I examine his tattooed arms, he looks exactly like Peter O’Malley’s boyfriend. The biker boy.

  “You’re Peter’s friend,” I say. “Peter O’Malley.”

  He shifts his weight. A hip rises. Bare abdominal muscles ripple. “So?”

  “We’re investigating the death of Gail Baker,” says Ceepak. “She used to work here.” He hands the man his card.

  Biker boy takes it. Flicks it under his nose. “Is this you? John Ceepak?”

  He can read.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Thomas.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance. I take it you are a waiter here?”

  “Chef. We’re a little short-staffed this morning. I have to work on the floor and in the kitchen.”

  And probably on the kitchen floor, too—which is where, I have a hunch, they cook their eggs to make ’em so gritty.

  “So, Mr. John Ceepak,” Thomas asks shifting his weight so he can flash his washboard abs again, “do you work out?”

  “Some.”

  “Some? You look like you’re ripped under that shirt.”

  Great. Even the gay short-order cooks want to flirt with my partner.

  “Was Gail a friend of yours?” Ceepak asks, choosing to remain oblivious to Thomas’s manly advances.

  “More like an acquaintance. You know—when things were slow, we’d grab an empty table and a cup of coffee. Swap stories about our O’Malley men.”

  “She told you she was intimate with Peter’s father?”

  “Uh-hunh. And …” Thomas glances around to make certain no one is eavesdropping, which they’re not because, like I said, we’re the only ones in the joint. “Gail had also been with two of Mr. O’Malley’s sons. Wild child Sean last winter and, a couple years ago, the one they named after the peanut butter.”

  “Skippy,” I say.

  “Is that really his name?”

  “I think so.”

  “Anyway, this one day, Gail and I had an absolute hoot comparing certain O’Malley familial similarities.”

  He leans on the words like we should catch his double meaning. I don’t.

  “The boys’ physical attributes?”

  I’ve still got nothing.

  “You know—the Irish curse? A red nose and a short hose? All potatoes and no sausage?”

  Thomas blinks a lot. Grins.

  “What about Kevin O’Malley?” Ceepak asks, somewhat abruptly. “Did Ms. Baker have any sort of relationship with Kevin O’Malley?”

  “I doubt it. That boy is his father’s favorite. No way would he jeopardize that by chasing after his father’s hot little toddy.”

  “Any thoughts about why Kevin is the only son the father seems to include in his business affairs?” Ceepak asks.

  “He’s the first-born man-child,” says Thomas. “In an Irish Catholic family, that automatically makes you the heir apparent. The other three sons—Peter, Skip, and Sean—all have issues with their dad. Even the sister, Crazy Mary, doesn’t like the old man very much. Guess he never took her to a daddy-daughter dance at the loony bin.”

  I get the feeling Thomas doesn’t like Big Paddy O’Malley very much, either. Probably still bitter about his boyfriend being uninvited to last weekend’s grand opening at the Rolling Thunder.

  “Of course, both Peter and Sean also had problems with their mother—may God bless that tubby old witch’s soul. Skippy, on the other hand, Skippy loved Jackie O’Malley. Absolutely adored her. Frankly, between you and me, I think Skipper is gay—he just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “An interesting hypothesis,” says Ceepak, probably so the guy will shut up.

  “You wait, John.”

  Ceepak flinches. Nobody calls him John, except his wife and the chief.

  “It’s just a matter of time before that boy comes skipping out of his closet in something skimpier than a chariot skirt. He’s a straight man and he loves cats? I don’t think so.”

  “Do you have any idea,” asks Ceepak, “who in the O’Malley family would gain the most if Mr. O’Malley went to jail?”

  “Is that going to happen?” Thomas asks eagerly.

  “We don’t know. But if it did, who, in your opinion, would benefit the most?”

  “Easy. Kevin. With the mother dead and the father in jail, the golden boy would take over everything.”

  28

  WE’RE BACK IN THE CAR, HEADING SOUTH AND EAST TO Tangerine Street.

  “You t
hink Kevin killed Gail and then made it look like his dad did it?”

  “It’s a possibility, Danny.”

  “Guess it would explain why there’s so much evidence pointing to Mr. O’Malley as the murderer.”

  Either that, or he is the murderer. Sometimes a duck is a duck, or however that saying about quacking and waddling goes.

  Ceepak flicks on the car radio, I guess for a quick update on the news. Maybe the weather. After all, T.J. has that golf outing this morning. The radio is tuned to WAVY.

  “This is the Skeeter buzzin’ in your ear. I’m on the Boardwalk where we’ve set up shop inside the loading shed at Sea Haven’s brand-new, all wood, all-wild Rolling Thunder roller coaster. We’re counting down the minutes till ten, when Big Paddy O’Malley will come in, head over to the control room, and bop the button that will send the first train rollin’ and thunderin’ around the track. Stop by and say hey. Be the sixth caller and you could win an all-day, all-access pass to ride all the rides on Bruno’s Fun Time Piers—including the all-new Rolling Thunder!”

  Ceepak snaps the radio off.

  He doesn’t make any commentary.

  He doesn’t have to.

  We’re on our way to search Bruno Mazzilli’s other Fun Time enterprise.

  As we near the house at nine twenty-nine A.M., I see that the State MCU team has called in a few more vans. People are milling around in white Tyvek clean suits. They look like envelopes on a coffee break in a FedEx drop box. I also see a guy in khaki pants and a polo shirt handing a sheaf of official-looking documents to Detective Bill Botzong at the edge of the driveway to number One Tangerine.

  “Judge Rasmussen was as good as her word,” says Ceepak.

  The warrant has arrived. The troops are going in.

  Picture a frat house for rich old farts.

  Only instead of furniture collected off the street, these guys have an Ethan Allen showroom of stuffed chairs and shabby-chic sofas. The kitchen has all sorts of stainless steel gear lining the Italian tiled walls. Refrigerators, grills, trash compactors, beer coolers with windows in the doors so you can keep an eye on your designer brewskis. Everything’s done up in chrome and black and marble.

  In the living room, I see a fully stocked bar with a big mirror behind the bottles and a battalion of cut crystal tumblers and fancy beer glasses. No mugs.

  Speaking of mirrors, when we check out the first floor bedrooms, there seems to be a mirror hanging over every bed. I think I’m gonna have nightmares about Bruno Mazzilli’s ape-hairy back jiggling on the ceiling for the rest of my life.

  “They wired these bordello rooms with video cameras,” says Carolyn Miller, the CSI tech, as she points to a small lens hole in a piece of furniture I think you call an armoire if you have five thousand dollars to spend on a TV cabinet. The hole is aimed at the bed.

  “Find the videos,” barks Botzong. “Look for photo albums. Any kind of souvenirs or trophies these guys kept of their conquests. It’ll help us ID the bastards when they start lying about it in front of their wives.”

  “Here’s a bathroom,” says Ceepak.

  He, Botzong, and I poke in our heads. We don’t want to walk in—not until Ms. Miller crawls across the floor and reveals its secrets: footprints, hairs, fibers. But, gazing through the door, I can tell even the bathrooms were designed to be romantic in that gaudy Donald Trump sort of way. Claw-foot tubs. Gold fixtures. Candles everywhere.

  “The toilet water is uncolored,” reports Ceepak.

  Yeah. Guys hang out here. They left the seat up.

  “Carolyn?” says Botzong. “Clear the bathrooms for us first. If you find any kind of blue toilet cleanser—in the bowl or under a sink—give me a holler.”

  “Boss?” a CSI guys calls from the kitchen.

  “What’s up?”

  “I think I found the shoe polish.”

  Miller goes into the bathroom, the rest of us hustle back to the kitchen.

  “It was in a plain white bag under the kitchen sink,” says the tech, who, in addition to his hermetically sealed suit, is fully gloved and handling the evidence with forceps like it’s a rod of radioactive uranium. “Kiwi. Liquid Magic Scuff Cover,” he reads the label for us. “‘Polishes in one easy step for all smooth leather shoes with scuffs that need covering.’”

  Scuffs or blood stains.

  “Says it’s ‘water-resistant,’” the tech reads off the back of the label.

  Handy. Especially if your bloody scuffs are on a shower stall wall.

  “Six bottles of Kiwi, all empty. Four bottles of Stride Rite, one still half full.”

  “Any receipt in the bag?” asks Ceepak.

  “No, sir. Just this.”

  “What?”

  The tech forceps a crisp white rectangle out of the plastic bag.

  “A business card. Big Paddy O’Malley, Shore 2 B Fun Enterprises. Lists an address on Ocean Avenue.”

  “He dropped a calling card into the bag?” says Botzong incredulously.

  “It’s possible someone is attempting to frame Mr. O’Malley,” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah. Either that, or this guy is the dumbest killer in history.” The lead detective turns to a young blonde in a blue windbreaker. “Okay, Reiss. Hit all the local shoe stores, drug stores, Kmarts and Wal-Marts. Anybody who might have this much white shoe polish on hand. Somebody buys a dozen bottles, maybe a cashier remembers them. If they do, Bunny, dig for security tapes.”

  “Will do,” says the CSI named Bunny Reiss. She heads out the front door and, yes, hops into her sedan at the end of the driveway.

  That’s when I see Sean O’Malley parked out front in the street.

  “Ceepak?” I say. “Sean’s back.”

  “Then let’s go have a word with him, Danny—let these folks do their jobs.”

  “Yeah.” I’m already strolling out the door.

  Something about smug n’ chubby Sean has rubbed me the wrong way since grade school. Okay, everything about him. As we head down the walkway, I can hear the radio blaring inside his car. Cliff Skeete and WAVY.

  “Nine forty-five in sunny, funderful Sea Haven on WAVY, the crazy wave of sound for Sea Haven and the shore, and we’re just fifteen minutes away from thunder rolling across the sky.” The crowd whoops a whoo-hoo in the background. “Hey, if you want to ride the thunder and feel the rumble of Sea Haven’s first all-wood roller coaster, you need to hurry on down. The place is packed—”

  Sean clicks off his radio. Smirks at us.

  “What the dilly yo, po-po?”

  “Why are you here again, Mr. O’Malley?” asks Ceepak.

  He shrugs. “Yo, didn’t you hear the man? It’s a sunny, funderful day. Figured I should chillax on the beach.”

  “You cannot park here for beach access. This is a residential street.”

  “But that be my boss’s hizzle.”

  “Come again?”

  “Number One Tangerine is his boss’s house,” I translate.

  “Aw-ite, Danny Boy. You got it goin’ on. Anyways, the big man want me to keep an eye on his shit.”

  “You work for Bruno Mazzilli, is that correct?” says Ceepak.

  “At’s ite. He owns the boardwalk, brurva. My old man? He just be renting space.”

  “Well,” says Ceepak, “you can tell Mr. Mazzilli that any items removed from his house as evidence will be returned to him at the conclusion of any and all legal proceedings. This area is now considered a crime scene, and I must ask you to move along.

  “My old man in trouble?”

  “Move along, Mr. O’Malley.”

  “You dudes takin’ him down?” he asks gleefully. “You find some incriminating shit in there? Everybody know he be boning the Baker biatch.”

  “If you do not move your vehicle, sir, we will be forced to call a tow truck and have it moved for you.”

  “’Course, I banged her, too. Gail ‘Da Ho’ Baker. Big Paddy had to settle for sloppy seconds. My big bro Skipperdoodle never did tap that pooty. Crashe
d and burned, big time. His loss. Girl had her a bumpin’ booty—”

  “So, Sean,” I say, because I’m afraid he’ll say tooty-fruity or kooty next, “don’t you have a butt to go kiss? Mr. Mazzilli probably wonders where you are.”

  “Yeah.” He cranks the ignition. “You’ll see. Mr. Mazzilli gonna put me in charge of the Rolling Thunder when Daddy goes to jail!”

  Ceepak rests both hands on Sean’s rolled down window.

  “I thought your brother Kevin was the designated heir for all your father’s business affairs.”

  “That’s what Big Paddy like to see happen. But Bruno ain’t gonna deal with Kevin. Calls him a sanctimonious piece of shit on a regular basis. That roller coaster? That baby’s gonna be mine, brurva, I guaran-damn-tee it. Later!”

  The cocky kid peels wheels and tears up the road because he knows we’re way too busy to write him up.

  Especially since he just made himself another suspect in Gail Baker’s murder.

  “You think Sean’s the one framing the father?” I say.

  “It is yet another possibility, Danny. However, I consider it a remote one at best.”

  “How come?”

  “Young Sean strikes me as rather incompetent.”

  True. I can’t imagine him taking the time to orchestrate the whole deal. He’s too busy memorizing hip-hop slang.

  “Furthermore, I feel he has an exaggerated sense of his own worth to Mr. Mazzilli, who is brilliant and ruthless when it comes to business. It is highly unlikely that he would turn—”

  “Guys?”

  Detective Botzong is at the front door, signaling for us to come back in.

  “You’re gonna want to see this,” he says.

  We double-time it up the walkway.

  “What did you find?” asks Ceepak when we hit the front door.

  Botzong leads the way. “Potassium chloride. In the first floor-medicine chest.”

  Uh-oh.

  Potassium chloride is one of the drugs used for executing criminals with a lethal injection.

  It stops the heart from beating.

  29

  WE COME INTO THE KITCHEN AND SEE CAROLYN MILLER hovering over a row of glass vials lined up on the marble island in the center of the kitchen.