Closure: An Eli Quinn Mystery Read online

  “Very.”

  “As in?”

  “Enough to buy a million-dollar home, furnish it to the nines, expensive art, neither of them work.”

  “And let me guess, he had an expensive life insurance policy.”

  “Naturally. Three million. But Delores insists she doesn’t need that money. They don’t appear to have any significant debts.”

  “Money is a great motivator,” I said. “She could have been into some sort of trouble he didn’t know about.”

  “I know. But if you meet her, get to know her, listen to the facts, I don’t know. I think you’ll agree with me that this thing stinks. There’s something more going on.”

  “Not the greatest security up there,” I said.

  “But enough that when people want to break into a house, they usually find one outside the gates.”

  “Like mine.”

  “Like yours.”

  “I’ve never been broken into,” I said.

  “Not a lot of crime in Pleasant.”

  Pleasant. I know. But that’s the name of our town. They have some weird town names in Arizona. Tombstone, Hog Eye, and even one called Why. Pleasant? Why not.

  I said, “But two crime scenes in three days up in the country club, and both at the same house.”

  “And none of the art was taken. I didn’t write that in my article, because here’s this woman living alone with I assume seven figures worth of art on the wall. It didn’t feel right to expose that vulnerability.”

  I thought about all that. Sam let me think. What I figured out was that she had planted the seed she came to plant. It was an interesting seed, I had to admit.

  “Private investigator,” I said. “I don’t know the rules. Probably supposed to pack a gun. You know I don’t like guns. I’d also have to keep a pint of bourbon or something in my right-hand desk drawer, right? I don’t drink bourbon.”

  “You could try wine.”

  “Wine in a drawer sounds like a serious drinking problem.”

  My face softened a little. Not quite a smile, but I managed an audible humph to acknowledge something beyond the darkness I’d been wrapped in. My body relaxed slightly. My brain kept turning things over on its own, circling around the central issue of what to do with the rest of my life. I could feel the thoughts spiraling together, like matter pulled to a center of gravity. It didn’t take long for the decision to become obvious, then inevitable.

  “I suppose that means they’ll call me a … nevermind.”

  “A dick? Not sure they use that term much anymore. But I can call you one if you want. Accurate as often as not.”

  I grinned. Something I hadn’t done much lately. “I’d rather you don’t.”

  “I’ll take the beer now,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  Choi’s Martial Arts was located on the southwest side of Pleasant’s town center, in the older, less expensive part of the gridded streets, south of Tranquil Trail and a block west of Pleasant Way. An auto-repair shop on one side, a small nursery selling native plants on the other. The multicolored adobe façade gave way to a simple, large industrial space with a stained concrete floor and a central sparring mat of interconnecting squares of red and blue.

  I bowed slightly as I entered the building. Removed my shoes and put them in a cubby. Bowed deeply before walking onto the mat. I’d changed at home into the simple white uniform with black trim, black belt with four gold stripes.

  It was early afternoon on a Monday, the dojo empty. Master Choi, at five-foot-five and in his mid-fifties, was probably in his office doing paperwork or napping. He napped a lot, and when he wasn’t napping, he could go from the fully seated position to knocking an apple off the top of the head of a six-foot man with a kick that didn’t muss the man’s hair, all in the space of a second.

  I sat in the center of the mat and stretched. Could almost do the splits, but had never quite achieved it fully. It was about trying, and so I kept trying but not succeeding. I warmed up with some air punches and kicks, a few jumping jacks, some jump squats. Sprinted from one side of the mat to the other, walked back, and repeated that twenty times. Kicked the bag. Ten roundhouse kicks with each leg, in rapid succession without my kicking foot touching the ground, then a series of side kicks with each leg, back kicks, back spinning hook kicks. Rest thirty seconds. Repeat. After twenty minutes I’d worked up a good sweat and forgotten about the outside world. All focus was on the bag. Me and the bag.

  I went to the back room, a cramped space with a full set of free weights. I preferred it to a regular gym. No distracting spandex. No music, no muscle heads showing off, and nobody socializing. Just me and the weights. I did fifteen reps each on a circuit, cycling through the bench, curls, overhead presses, flies front and back, then squats. Old school. No DVD or app required. I repeated the cycle three times. The whole workout took less than fifteen minutes. I was breathing heavily.

  I did the same weight workout three times a week. It kept me strong and gave me endurance. Combined with the running, it made me feel as though I could outrun, or outlast, just about any foe. I didn’t have many foes, but it was a good feeling in case one came along.

  Back in the dojo, I worked through my latest form, the one I’d need to master before I could test for fifth degree. It was harder to do forms after a heavy workout, and that was the point.

  I didn’t see or hear Master Choi step onto the mat and come up behind me. Almost the instant I saw him out of the corner of my eye, I felt and heard the thwack on my arm of the bamboo stick he used to correct positions of arms and legs, hands and feet, sometimes even a chin or forehead. It was loud, and it hurt, a pain I’d gotten used to a long time ago.

  “Lower.” Then another, lighter tap with the stick. “Lower. There.”

  There were two ways to do forms, called poomsae: The right way, and the wrong way. Master Choi didn’t tolerate the wrong way, and it didn’t matter if you were an orange belt or a fourth-degree black belt, he would whack you when you got it wrong.

  “All up here,” Master Choi said, pointing at his temple. “Focus!”

  For the next half hour, I went through all my forms, in reverse order, down to and including the white belt form I’d learned from a different master, in New York, when I was twelve. Master Choi had forced me to relearn them all when I came to his dojo a few years ago as a third-degree black belt. The changes were subtle, the new positions far superior.

  After working with me a year and, best I could tell, trusting my character, he had shown me several additional ways to disarm or kill a man. “Never use, if not need,” he said at the end of every deadly lesson, always held privately. The sessions further built my confidence and respect for the devastation my hands and feet could inflict, if needed.

  After forms, Master Choi made me do some of the most basic kicks, twenty with each foot. It was white-belt stuff, but I didn’t complain. It was part of the taekwondo philosophy: learn, repeat, repeat, repeat. And when you have it mastered, repeat it some more, and then again.

  I finished twenty basic front snap kicks with my left foot, starting each time with the right foot forward. It was the first kick I’d learned, nearly two decades ago. I was getting really fucking tired, and the last two were poorly done.

  “Again,” Master Choi said.

  I willed the exhaustion into a mental box and did twenty more with my left foot, all expertly, if I do say so.

  “Sushi fee,” Master Choi said sharply.

  His command of English was somewhat less than his martial arts skills. I switched my feet, put the left one forward, and executed twenty textbook front snap kicks with my right foot.

  We bowed to the American and Korean flags on the wall. I was fully spent. But for ninety minutes, I hadn’t thought about Jess, Sam, Delores Bernstein, or anything else.

  Chapter 3

  The red Jeep’s top was down, the temperature perfect. Sam Marcos was in the passenger seat, Solo in back, smiling with his head sticking out the sid
e and the wind flapping his jowls at forty miles an hour as we headed up Pleasant Way, toward the suburban part of town around the base of Pinnacle Peak.

  Pleasant was an eclectic mishmash, an Old West town center with apartments above shops in a grid surrounded by meandering suburban streets and adobe-style homes. Wealthy newcomers lived among real cowboys and working-class families that went back generations.

  The deejay on KJZZ with the Barry White voice said the temperature was seventy-four, heading to a high of ninety-five. If life hadn’t sucked so much the past year, I might’ve enjoyed it.

  I turned left into the country club and stopped at the gatehouse. The country club was much like the rest of Pleasant’s, except home prices were higher and access to the private golf course was possible if you paid a big fee.

  The guard was balding and sweaty, a sloppy-looking man with a lifetime of drinking and disappointment creased into his doughy face. He worked for a private security company contracted to keep unwanted people out of the country club.

  The pink-faced man was not menacing. He didn’t look like he would win any fights, but the way he approached slowly, on his time, the way he pulled his trousers up and puffed his chest out, the way he smirked as though it we’d be privileged to enter, suggested this was his gate, and nobody was getting through unless he said so. Solo didn’t move a muscle below the neck, didn’t growl, didn’t give any indication of the aggression he could pour on faster than I could say “attack,” but he never took his eyes off the gatemaster.

  “How can I help you?” the rotund man asked in a voice higher than expected. He looked right past me and eyed Sam. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Nametag on his shirt said “Johnson” under a Dribbs Security label.

  Sam leaned forward. “Visiting Delores Bernstein. I’m Sam Marcos.”

  I watched the gatemaster's eyes flick down to Sam’s chest and back up again quickly.

  “Oh, yes, hi Ms. Marcos. I remember you from before. They find the killer yet?”

  “Nope. Still looking.”

  “Terrible thing. Terrible. Listen. Tinker Bernstein was a nice guy. Didn’t talk much, but a nice guy.”

  Johnson looked down, shook his head and pulled his trousers up over a lifetime of snacks. He ogled Sam again, didn’t have anything else to say, glanced briefly at me as if noticing me for the first time, then back at Sam, and smiled. Finally, he cleared his throat and found some words.

  “Listen, ah, I have to call Mrs. Bernstein before I can let you in. New rules. You understand.”

  “Of course,” Sam said.

  Johnson waddled back to the gatehouse, picked up a conventional telephone, punched some numbers.

  “New rules,” I said to Sam.

  “Yeah, no surprise. Used to be pretty lax. I could get in just because the guards knew who I was—the ones who knew me never asked where I was going. Even when a new guard would come in, I’d just tell him where I was going, and he’d buzz me through.”

  “Probably your sexy outfit.”

  “Yeah, you know me. Miss Arizona. And my secret weapon: I’m naked underneath all this.”

  I looked straight ahead, not a twitch. Refocused on my new job. Eli Quinn, Private Detective.

  Johnson hung up, angled to the rear of the Jeep and apparently jotted down my license plate number, even though they photographed it with a camera mounted on the overhang of the shack. He made his way back to the driver’s door.

  “You Eli Quinn?”

  “Yes, sir.” I had never used the salutation so loosely.

  “Friend of Ms. Marcos?”

  Johnson had lowered his voice, pulled his chin in, hiked his trousers again. I didn’t like the glint in his eye. Half wanted to punch him. Half didn’t, for logical reasons related to the jail time or lawsuit that might result. I held the steering wheel tightly with both hands and held my tongue.

  “Mr. Quinn?”

  “We’re friends, yes.”

  Johnson smiled. I gripped the steering wheel harder. Sam leaned back, cleared her throat in a manner that suggested, easy, Quinn. Solo let loose the absolute smallest of growls, so deep and subtle that Johnson didn’t appear to hear it.

  “Mrs. Bernstein said you’d be with Ms. Marcos. You can go right in. But listen. Make sure you keep that dog on a leash. Looks friendly and all, but that’s the rules.”

  “Will do,” I said cheerily, with no intention of putting Solo on a leash.

  Johnson pushed a button and the gate arm lifted up. “Have a nice day,” he said as we drove ahead.

  When we passed out of earshot, I said: “Interesting they write down your license plate, even though they photograph it.”

  “Yes. Foolproof system, I’m sure.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  We wound through the lazy streets of the country club.

  “Left here,” Sam said, pointing at the next stop sign.

  The farther in you went, the emptier the streets became. Like capillaries off an artery, the streets served fewer and fewer cells. I turned onto Wolf Pack Way, wondering why anyone would name a street that, in a place with abundant coyotes and no wolves for hundreds of miles.

  “You’re quiet,” Sam said.

  “Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “I don’t believe in that possibility.”

  “Yeah, well, I mean, nothing worth mentioning. Sometimes my mind just drifts off into meaningless thoughts. It’s one way to stop thinking about bad things and let my brain rest.”

  “You’re a complex man, Eli Quinn.”

  She motioned another left turn, and I took it.

  “Wife was a suspect at one point, right?”

  “Spouse is often suspected until ruled out,” Sam said.

  “Us detectives know that, of course.”

  “Then why’d you ask, dick?”

  “I make it my business to ask questions, not make assumptions.”

  “Smart. Clearly you’ve been at this a while.”

  “Seventeen minutes, to be precise. And that’s if you count the time it took me to swing by and pick you up.”

  “Sheriff still hasn’t ruled her out,” Sam said. “She—Delores—says she wasn’t home when her husband was killed. She went out to buy a gift for one of her grandkids. When she came home, she took the long way around through the country club to watch the sunset, otherwise she would have been home a few minutes earlier. She says she came home, went in and took a shower. It was a while before she found her husband, and some more time before she called 9-1-1. When the police arrived, she was covered in blood.”

  “She was in shock, went to him, held him, panicked, all that.”

  “Right,” Sam said. “They never found any motive or any other evidence to suggest she did it. I think it’s silly they considered her a suspect.”

  “Except for the clock on the wall.”

  “Except that.”

  “Stopped at 6:59.”

  “Bullet straight through the center of it,” Sam said.

  “Why?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said.

  “You think she did it?”

  “Her story sounds a little screwy, but she tells it convincingly. And she just doesn’t seem like a killer.”

  “They often don’t.”

  Chapter 4

  Solo stayed in the Jeep, under the shade of the mesquite tree. Sam pushed a the doorbell. Delores Bernstein opened the front door. She looked late fifties, had already cut her hair short and curled it, the way older women do. Her faced was wrinkled, and despite wearing makeup well, she looked tired and older than she was.

  “Hi Delores,” Sam said. “This is Eli Quinn.” She tilted her head my way.

  “Please, come in,” the woman said, her voice throaty but crackling slightly like the mother on Everybody Loves Raymond—again, sounding older than she was. She pulled the door open and backed out of the way. She didn’t look like a killer. But you never knew. Neighbors were always sa
ying, “I can’t believe he would do such a thing!” Less frequently were they asked if she would do such a thing. No one ever suspects a woman.

  “Hello Mrs. Bernstein,” I said, nodding with a slight bow, keeping my eyes up just in case she pulled a knife or a gun on me or something.

  “Please. Delores.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She wore a black kimono-sleeve sweater over a long-sleeve white cotton t-shirt, black slacks, expensive-looking leather sandals.

  “Can I get you something? Coffee? Water? Scotch?”

  We both declined politely and were led through the entryway into a grand living room, with nine-foot ceilings, white marble floors, walls painted in the rich colors of the Southwest, expensive, stuffy loud-print-fabric furniture. The gold and green drapes were pulled open to reveal a giant wall of windows opening onto a well manicured backyard that dropped off into a shallow wash, leaving nothing but sky and a perfectly framed Pinnacle Peak. The walls showcased paintings I assumed were not purchased at the mall.

  The house was cold, air conditioning no doubt running up a big bill. Sam and I sat on the sofa, close enough that our thighs touched. I didn’t need that distraction. I moved over a few inches. Delores sat on an overstuffed Queen Ann facing us.

  “Quinn is interested in looking for your husband’s killer,” Sam said.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Delores said.

  I was confused for a moment. I looked at Sam, then back at Mrs. Bernstein. Then realized what she meant.

  “Oh, yes. Well, it’s been a year,” was all I could come up with.

  “You tracked down the killer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you find my husband’s killer?”

  “I don’t know. But I think I’d like to try.”

  “Why?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. This woman had recently lost her husband. Assuming she wasn’t the murderer, she was probably desperate for answers. Like me. The whole time I wondered about Jess’ murderer and worked to find him. Like me, Delores Bernstein probably wasn’t in the mood to be bullshitted.