Finders Keepers Losers Die Page 3

  I glanced at the table again—no jewelry. Maybe I should get out while I still had my cover. "Lulu? There must be some mistake." I held up my hands and backed away. "I work for Mona. Isn't this The Paradiso?"

  "The Grotto," said Lou.

  Mad Max kept coming toward me muttering, "Wrong girl, wrong place, wrong place, wrong time."

  I backed into the door and fumbled for the handle. "Ah, well there you go, like you said, wrong bar." The goddamn door wouldn't open and Mad Max kept coming and coming. I pulled harder but it wouldn't budge.

  Fuck!

  Mad Max leaned over me and I gagged at his whisky breath. His shaking fist descended. I turned my face away, bracing myself and preparing to scream, hoping the muscle downstairs would hear. Hoping he would care.

  But Max didn't touch me. He reached past me and opened the door. I raced down the stairs, nearly falling over my own feet in my hurry to get away. My heart beat so loudly I couldn't hear what the security guy said to me as I rushed past.

  Clutching my bag close to my chest I headed toward the front door.

  "Hey, Gina!"

  I kept walking.

  "Gina Formica!"

  I turned to see Scarface still sitting on his bar stool. He had company. A pouty, top-heavy blonde woman tapped long nails against her cocktail glass. She wore a knee-length, red leather jacket, red high heels and a portable stereo system sat at her feet. The stripper. He'd delayed her for me. I nodded thanks and left.

  Outside, I breathed in the clean night air and jumped into my Civic. I drove off but only got a block away when I stopped.

  What the hell was I doing? The night wasn't over. I could still tail Lou. Neither he nor his friends knew what sort of car I drove or what I was really doing at The Grotto. My cover was intact. And I'd be in the car. Safe.

  I headed back to The Grotto and parked where I could see the front door. I turned off the engine and swapped the high heels for the comfortable Docs. Then I waited.

  And waited.

  ***

  Bang bang bang. "Hey, you!"

  My eyes sprang open and I jumped in my seat, hitting my head on the car roof and my knee on the steering wheel. "Fuck." In the moonlight, I could just make out the face of the man peering through my window. Lou Scarletti!

  Fuck!

  "Hey, you're that stripper. Mona's girl," he yelled through the glass. "Hey, how about a show." He laughed and a splash of spit hit my window. Eeewww.

  No way was I hanging around for a friendly chat with my drunk target. I turned the key in the ignition.

  Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. Don't fail me now, Hondie.

  "Missing something?" Lou held up a wire and grinned.

  He'd stolen my…thingamy! While I was sleeping, he must have popped the hood and pulled out a wire so my car wouldn't start. And he thought I was a stripper for hire. No need to bust a brain cell figuring out what he wanted.

  A moment before, I'd felt panicked. Now I was pissed. What kind of pervert was he? Just because I was supposed to be a stripper, he had no right to hold me captive. Okay, so I could have run off if I wanted to, but there was a principle involved, damn it. I hated bullies.

  I opened my door and Lou stumbled backwards before regaining his balance. "Hey," he said. "Careful. Don't spill my drink." He held up his glass, sloshing some of the liquid over the sides.

  "Put that wire back in my car."

  He threw it through my open door.

  "I meant, inside the hood."

  "What do I look like, a mechanic?"

  I tried to remain calm, practicing the breathing techniques I'd learned on the set of The Avengers. "If you don't get my car working in five minutes, my boot will be so far up your ass you'll be walking like a cowboy for a week."

  His gaze shifted past me and his jowls dropped. Oh yeah, the look on his face was worth every cent I paid for the Doc Martens.

  "Everything all right here?"

  I spun round to see who had the nerve to steal my thunder. Scarface. Now that he was standing, I could gauge his full height. He was tall, about Will's height, but not as solid. That didn't make him any less intimidating. In fact, I bet every inch of him underneath the snug black jeans and black T-shirt was packed with hard muscle.

  Lou must have agreed with me, going by his reaction. He meekly retrieved the wire and handed it over, shrugging an apology. "She was asking for it," he said without much conviction.

  I rounded on him. "Asking for it! I was sound asleep in my car, you asshole. The only thing I was asking for was your fat, ugly face away from me."

  He held up his hands, spilling some of his beer. "Hey, sorry, little lady."

  I hate it when men use condescending words like little. Cute's another one that drives me nuts. I really hate cute. I'm not a goddamn kitten!

  Scarface opened the hood of my Civic and disappeared under it. A moment later he dropped it back into place and dusted off his hands. "All done. Now, if you two don't mind, I've got business to attend to."

  "Thanks," I said. It sounded pathetic considering he'd just helped me out, so I added, "A lot."

  "No problem." He locked his one-eyed glare on Lou for a few beats then sauntered off.

  I gave Lou a glare too then got into my car. But I couldn't resist a parting shot. "You're scum."

  He smiled. Something about that smile unnerved me. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but then I realized. It wasn't lopsided or accompanied with spittle. In fact, he didn't sway either.

  "And you're a liar," he said in a measured tone. Not a slurred syllable in sight.

  He wasn't drunk.

  "Stop following me, Girlie," he added.

  My shaking fingers fumbled the keys. The hesitation gave Lou a chance to shove his face through my window. "Who do you work for? My stupid, frigid wife?"

  Stop fucking shaking!

  Lou laughed. "Yeah, she'd be dumb enough to employ someone as crap as you. Well, let me tell you something about that bitch—"

  I turned the key and thanked the God of Automobiles when the Civic spluttered to life. I pressed my foot to the accelerator and shot out of there as fast as she would go.

  All the way home, the chant he knows he knows he knows echoed through my head like the chorus to a bad song.

  After I checked all the locks on the doors and windows of my apartment, poked a broom handle under the bed and stashed a knife under my pillow, I climbed under the covers, even though it was too warm for anything more than a sheet.

  When sunrise seeped through the bedroom curtains, I turned off all the lights and finally fell asleep.

  I awoke around eleven and screamed. I was so late for work. Will was going to kill me. Or fire me. I grabbed the phone and dialed the office. "Carl? Is Will in?"

  "Cat? Are you sick?"

  "No. Yes!" I coughed. "Really sick. Don't think I can make it today. Please tell Will—"

  Muffled noises came from the other end. "Tell me what?" Will sounded grumpy.

  "Hi, Will. Look, I'm not feeling well today. Got a major headache and I've been throwing up all morning. It might be stomach bug. I don't want to give it to you or Carl."

  "Oh. Okay. Better get yourself to a doctor, Cat. Get better soon." Wow, he actually sounded sympathetic, kind. "We need you back here ASAP. This place is a mess and I want to go through the accounts with you. There's some discrepancies." So much for Mr. Sympathy.

  I hung up and stepped into the shower. Was he blaming me for the incorrect accounts? Huh. It seemed I was lazy when I was in the office and incompetent when I wasn't. Although he couldn't blame the discrepancies on my accounting skills. When I started at Knight Investigations and actually did some work to clean the place up, I'd noticed a few things didn't add up. There were a lot of petty cash receipts for stationery. If the receipts were to be believed, the office would be wall to wall staples, pencils and sticky notes. I'd mentioned it to Will but he'd been too busy to discuss it. Eventually I gave up pestering him. It didn't seem to matte
r to him, so why should it matter to me?

  Those discrepancies couldn't be pinned on me. It must have been his last incompetent secretary. I smiled into the streaming water. Ah yes, the perfect Tanya—that's pronounced Taaarnya—his on again off again girlfriend.

  I'd met her several times when she'd visited Will. We'd smiled politely, mentally compared outfits, and joked about how mean Will was to work for. Despite her smile and her wiggly finger wave, I'd never warmed to Tanya. And it wasn't just the way she reminded everyone how to pronounce her name or that she was now a model. It was her entire attitude. Or should I say her perfection. Her snow blonde hair didn't have a kink in it, her nail polish was never chipped and her toothy smile was as white and as fake as some of the Hollywood stars I'd worked with.

  It'd be fun to see Will's face when I told him the discrepancies were all from the time Tanya was his secretary. Just to see her crown slip a little in his eyes would be oh so sweet.

  According to Gina and Carl, he worshipped her, although their relationship was tumultuous at best. It wasn't surprising they were so on/off. Will was way too busy to devote the sort of time that a high maintenance woman like Tanya demanded.

  I turned off the shower and wondered what I was going to do with my free day. I couldn't visit Gina's in case Will or Carl saw me, and shopping was out because I had no money. There was always my mother…

  Or Lou Scarletti.

  Shudder. After the fiasco at The Grotto, a sensible woman would steer clear of any place Lou hung out, but no one ever accused me of being sensible. Especially my very conservative ex-cop-turned-P.I. father. He'd be reaching for the antacid tablets if he were alive. He always said worrying about me would kill him one day. In fact, I think it was my overnight stay in a jail cell that finally did kill him. Not that I was a criminal or anything. I was never charged, thanks to Dad's contacts and my lies.

  I'd been involved in a minor scuffle at a protest march and my knee had accidentally hit a policeman in the groin. He could never prove it had been my knee. I think it was around that time that Dad's health took a nosedive.

  I'm nothing like him. I inherited my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants attitude from my mother. She was always trying out the latest fad and changing with the times the way a chameleon blended into different environments. In the Seventies it was macramé, in the Eighties it was the share market and in the Nineties she signed up for every adult education course going round, and in the Noughties she blogged. That was the great thing about Mom. She might have been bad at something—don't get me started on her attempts at hairdressing—but she never gave up.

  I suppose I've got that dogged attitude too. I wasn't giving up on Roberta because of a fat liar who got a kick out of intimidating women. But even I had to admit my unwillingness to give up on this case had more to do with my curiosity about Lou Scarletti than my sympathy for his wife. Where had I heard his name before?

  Lou knew my Civic, so following him in that was out. I could borrow Mom's car, or maybe her motorcycle, but I wasn't sure tailing him around the city was the way to go anyway. It wasn't like he'd lead me straight to the jewelry box. And anyway, chances were he kept it close.

  Maybe I could pay him a visit and plant the bugging device I'd borrowed from work right under his bulbous nose. Then all I had to do was listen in—

  Oops. I'd kind of forgotten about the receiving piece. Oh well, I could hide the little sucker first and do the listening part later. Once I learned how.

  Mom would know, and if she didn't, she'd know how to find out. A crash course in bugging devices and other detective gear might be useful anyway.

  I dressed in a short denim skirt and a tight T-shirt, then switched the skirt for a pair of jeans and put on sneakers. It might be hot outside but I needed something practical for climbing through windows. I put my hair up in a ponytail and didn't bother with makeup. On my way out the door, I grabbed a banana and ate it as I drove to Mom's.

  I lived in a one bedroom, Sixties style apartment in an up and coming area of Renford. That's what the rental agent told me anyway, but I was waiting for the suburb to arrive. That could be decades away. Around the time my apartment was built, a whole lot of century-old houses were torn down to build functional accommodation for the middle-class masses. Unfortunately those same boxy, brown buildings became a blight on the streetscape, and the middle-classes moved to the outer suburbs and squeezed monstrous houses onto quarter acre blocks. So my area became home to students and pensioners, a strange mix which seemed to work most of the time. I moved in when I returned to Renford from L.A. six months ago. I liked the eclectic feel, although I'd gladly have traded my tiny apartment for one of the few remaining houses nearby.

  Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at Mom's. She still lived near the Knight's office in the same three bedroom, weatherboard house my brother and I grew up. Apart from the color, it hadn't changed much. It had been plain cream with blue trim once but after Dad died, she painted it canary yellow. In front was a rose garden and out back grew a herb garden with every medicinal plant known to exist.

  I opened the screen door and walked in. "Hey, Mom, it's me."

  "Cat girl! I'm in the kitchen. Come see my new toy."

  I followed her voice into the new, white kitchen. She leaned against the bench, an instruction booklet in hand and shiny stainless steel coffee machine in front of her.

  She wore the same paint splattered overalls she always wore around the house, ever since her Modern Art class. She said it allowed her freedom to move. Her hair was tied loosely in a bun on the top of her head, the gray streaks framing her fine-boned, pretty face. I used to tell her to color it back to her natural brown, but she refused. "I like it this way," she'd said and left it at that.

  "It makes twelve different types of coffee plus hot chocolate. Isn't it gorgeous! Look at all these buttons!"

  Mom loved things that lit up, made a noise or performed several functions simultaneously. It didn't matter if she never used those functions. She just loved knowing they were there. The bells and whistles appealed to the geek in her.

  She gave me a hug and offered to make a cappuccino. "But I haven't got to the part about the froth," she waved the booklet, "so you'll have to drink it without."

  Four attempts later, we sat at her rickety wooden kitchen table sipping frothless cappuccinos.

  "So, why aren't you at work?" The question came out of left field. Just when I thought we were having a nice mother-daughter moment, she turned all strict on me. That used to be Dad's role.

  "Research for the agency. I need your help."

  She eyed me over her glasses in that universal way mothers have when they know you've done something wrong. I felt like I was in high school again, licking my palms to make them clammy and coughing my tonsils up so I could stay home when there was a biology test.

  But she didn't say anything. Good old Mom. She knew I was lying but she didn't make me go to school. Um, work.

  "What do you know about bugging devices?" I asked her.

  She paused, mug half way to her fuchsia lipsticked mouth. "Like the ones you have at work?"

  I nodded.

  "The same ones your colleagues would know how to use?"

  "I sort of can't ask them."

  "Why not?"

  Mom would understand my need to help Roberta. She was a woman. But if I mentioned Roberta then I'd have to tell her the whole story and she'd put two and two together and come up with illegal breaking and entering. I didn't want to worry her so I just said, "I want to learn the business but Will won't teach me. So I'm taking the initiative." That should work. Mothers love it when their children show initiative.

  Her gaze held mine for a beat and I stopped breathing while I concentrated on not looking guilty. I must have passed because she nodded. "I just bought a book on surveillance gear because I thought you might be interested. Your father never bothered with How To books, but I find them useful." She stood and left the kitchen.

  I followed her i
nto the living room. Walking into that room always made me feel like I was entering a secondhand bookshop. It was crammed with books. Paperbacks squeezed into the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined three of the walls; hardcovers stacked on the floor and used as coffee tables or footstools; cookbooks resting open on armchairs. It was an anal librarian's nightmare but my mother could put her finger on any title in seconds. She went straight to Tools of the Trade: Private Investigators lying on the top of a three-foot high pile beside the couch.

  We sat on the couch and bent our heads together. It took an hour and two more cappuccinos before we knew everything we ever wanted to know about cameras, listening and recording devices, night-vision equipment and other paraphernalia PIs couldn't do without. We then moved to the computer and found an internet chat room on everything detective related. We asked a couple of weirdos a couple of questions. They had to be weirdos—who else would get online and chat about that stuff for Christsakes?

  When we logged off, she turned to me and said, "You're working on a case, aren't you?"

  Uh-oh, the jig was up. "Will said I could help—"

  "I doubt it. Tell me the truth, Cat." Boy, could she look scary when she glared like that. The Spanish Inquisition could learn a few things from her.

  "Okay. I'll tell you. But you have to promise not to tell Will."

  She lifted one shoulder. "We don't keep in touch, so I suppose that won't be a problem."

  "Okay. This woman, Roberta Scarletti, came into the office today. Will wasn't there so I spoke to her." I told her about Roberta's jewelry, the ex-husband and how I needed to bug his house. "If I can overhear Lou talking to—"

  "Lou Scarletti?" Mom dropped the book. "Did you say Lou Scarletti? Oh my God."

  CHAPTER 3

  I picked the book up and handed it to Mom. "Yes. Do you know him? Because the name sounds familiar."

  She nodded. "I know the name too." She rubbed her jaw and I had to prompt her to continue. "Your father put him away just before he left the police force."