01-A View to Die For (2012) Read online

  “Jake, this is Linda Bukowski,” Megan said before I could open my mouth. “She knew Mike since they were kids.”

  Father started coughing and rolled his eyes at our mother. “I’ll have the special if you girls ever stop yakking.”

  Like most Mom-and-Pop restaurants, the daily specials were written on a whiteboard above the cash register. But unlike most, where the daily specials were written in all capital letters by either a first-grader or someone with advanced arthritis, this was written in beautiful cursive in mixed case lettering. The curvature of the letter m made me think of our waitress, and I wondered if she was married. I really needed to get my hormones under control. Lately, every time I saw a good looking woman, my mind would start to wander.

  “How about you, big boy?” someone was asking. It seems everyone had ordered while I was playing the old Charlie Pride song of “Daydreaming of Night Things in the Middle of the Afternoon” in my head.

  “Sure, I’ll have the special,” I answered, feeling like a kid who was just caught looking at his first Playboy magazine.

  Father brought me up to date on all the events of the last twenty-four hours. The crowd in the restaurant, it seemed, had lost interest in us when there was no new gossip to be heard, and went back to their own conversations. “You couldn’t have found a better lawyer, Jake,” he said, lighting a cigarette without asking if anyone cared.

  “Simons, he’s the judge around here, bought the argument that Mike’s suicide note was real, and the young DA was too eager to make a name for herself.”

  I tried to dodge the cloud coming my way by waving the smoke from my face. “Suicide note?” I asked.

  Megan spoke when our father started coughing again. “Looks like someone needs to bring you up to date,” she said, fanning the smoke back into my face so she wouldn’t have to breathe it. “The autopsy showed Mike had high levels of carbon monoxide in his body. Bennet had jumped to the conclusion that I had slipped Mike something to knock him out, and then put him in the garage with the car running. He said that I must have realized the insurance wouldn’t pay off on a suicide, so I faked Mike’s accident.”

  “But if there was a suicide note, why would they suspect you?” I asked.

  Megan paused long enough to take a drink of her coffee. It was our mother’s chance to add her two-cents. “Because it was written by a woman.” Mom crossed her arms and didn’t try to make it four-cents.

  When Megan saw Mother had no more to add, she continued. “Bennet thought I wrote it to cover my ass after the coroner said Mike was dead long before he hit the water. Mr. Rosenblum got the judge to throw the note out as evidence after he found out the sheriff never did a handwriting analysis to see if it was real.”

  I started to ask about the note when Father’s hacking got worse.

  “Daddy, are you okay?” Megan asked.

  My mother spoke for him. “Take your father out for some fresh air, Jacob. Can’t you see there’s too much smoke in here?”

  Megan followed us outside, leaving our mother in the restaurant. “Do you need your oxygen, Daddy?” she asked. “Jake, would you get his tank from the van, please?”

  Several people had stopped to watch the commotion. Our mother must have noticed from her seat because she joined us before I could fetch the oxygen tank. “Jacob, would you mind going back to pay the bill? We need to get your father in the van before the whole town sees us.”

  Father spoke before I could tell anyone about my empty wallet. “Jesus H Christ. I’m not dying. I just had something caught in my throat. Here, Jake, take this. I heard about your wallet, so consider this a loan until you get back on your feet. And don’t forget to leave that cutie a big tip.”

  When I took the bills he handed me, Mother gave me a look to kill, so I tried to give them back. “Thanks, Dad. But I can pay with my credit card.” He refused to take the money back, so I put it in my pocket. I could see the disgust on my mother’s face, but ignored it and went back to settle the bill.

  After I had paid the bill and went back outside, I was surprised to see Kevin’s Tempo at the curb, waiting for me. My mother and father were nowhere in sight, and then I noticed Meg behind the wheel. “Hop in, Porky,” she said. “What took you so long in there?”

  I limped over to the passenger door and reached inside the window to open it. “I decided to pay with my credit card and hold on to the money Father gave me. Linda accidently ran my card twice, and I had to wait for the manager to fix it. How’d you end up with Kevin’s car?” I said while pretending to buckle up. Like the door and the window, Kevin’s seat belt didn’t work either.

  Megan forced a smile. “Sure, Porky. Did you get a date while you were at it, too?” Then she pulled away from the curb without looking for oncoming traffic.

  “I thought you had a new Jeep,” I answered while tying my belt in a knot.

  Her smile faded to a frown. “Kevin came by while you were dally-gagging with Linda. He needed gas money, which I didn’t have. Mom and Daddy already left, not that I dared to ask after the looks she gave you, so we traded cars.”

  I could sense I needed to change the subject before I felt obliged to split the loan with her. “How far to the vet?” I asked.

  “About a mile down the street, but it’s going to be all day if that fool doesn’t get out of my way.” She was evidently upset that the driver in front was going at the posted speed limit.

  “It does get a little warm in here without the wind. I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be to get Fred and be on my way back to the mountains.”

  She seemed to forget she was behind the wheel of a moving vehicle and turned toward me. “Are you leaving?” She didn’t see the brake lights in front of us.

  “Megan!” I shouted. “He’s stopping!”

  She slammed on the brakes and swerved toward the curb, just in time to avoid hitting the other car. “Well, at least the brakes work,” she said, grinning. The car in front of us swerved too, but for a different reason. There was a turtle crossing in front of him.

  Megan didn’t seem the least upset and waited for the turtle to cross the street before pulling out again. “First a deer, and now a turtle,” I said. “What’s next? A surfeit of skunks?”

  She took her eyes off the road to look at me. “A what?”

  “A group of skunks is called a surfeit. Please watch where you’re going, Megan.”

  “Whatever, Mister College graduate. Don’t you want to go in and get your dog?” she asked as she pulled up to a two-story century-old house that had been converted into an animal hospital.

  I could hear Fred barking in the back-room kennels when we entered the building. When I walked in, the girl at the front desk lit up with a big smile. “You must be Jacob Martin,” she said.

  I had not called ahead, so I was surprised she knew who I was. Just when I was beginning to think her powers of clairvoyance where up there with Nostradamus, she turned to my sister. “Hi, Meg. Sorry to hear about Mike. We’ll all miss him.”

  “Thanks, Katelyn, how’s your mom doing?”

  Luckily I didn’t have to listen to the girls’ chit-chat for too long. A middle-aged man, perhaps ten years older than me, came into the room with my best friend. He could barely restrain Fred. “Mr. Martin?” he asked.

  Not another psychic, I thought. “How’d you know?” I asked.

  “I’m Doctor Miller,” he said without offering his hand. It took both of them to hold Fred back. “Your dog has barely moved since the sheriff brought him in. Five minutes ago, he raised his head like he hears something. First it was tail wagging, and then the barking. I swear these animals have a sixth sense.” And then he let Fred loose.

  When I bent down to hug him, Fred stood on his hind legs and tried to put his paws on my shoulder, so he could lick me to death. “Whoa, boy. Are you happy to see me, big Fella?” I asked before falling flat on my back.

  “And to think I was starting to worry about him,” the vet said. “Looks like he just neede
d his dad.”

  Megan and Katelyn stopped talking to watch the commotion, and then they both broke out laughing.

  I managed to push Fred away from my face and get off the floor. “Anything broken, Doctor?”

  “No. Just a few bruises. He should be his old self in a few more days. No need for a follow up unless he passes blood.”

  I was a little surprised when Doctor Miller gave me some free pain pills, and even more surprised when I paid the bill. The total bill, including two days board, was only one hundred dollars. And Katelyn only ran my card once.

  Although the bill had been a fraction of what it would have been in Denver, I had decided to check my credit-card balance with my smart phone after we left the vet’s. That turned out to be impossible when Megan slowed down at an intersection long enough to glance my way. “I wish you’d reconsider leaving so soon, Porky,” she said, just before she stomped on the throttle to cross the intersection, right before a car on the cross-street could pass. I tried to remember the words to the Hail Mary as the other car kept on coming without slowing down.

  “What an asshole,” I said after we cleared the intersection by inches. “I think he tried to hit us.”

  “How are you going to get home anyway? Have you forgotten you totaled your car?” she asked, oblivious to our near-fatal wreck. “They won’t let you on an airplane or a bus with a dog.”

  “My insurance should let me rent a car until they pay off my van,” I answered, checking the knot on my seat belt. I had tried it that way to keep the warning buzzer from going off. The buzzer seemed to be the only thing in Kevin’s car that worked as it should.

  She glanced at the belt for a second then put her eyes back on the road. “Speaking of insurance, do you think Ira will take my case now that I’m no longer considered a black widow?”

  “Ira?” I asked a little confused. “Oh. The lawyer. No, Meg. And I doubt that your insurance will pay a penny either way. Suicide or murder, either one is all they need to stop payment.” I said while playing with the passenger air-vent. Because the rear windows were held in place with duct tape and couldn’t be opened, I tried to direct the vent toward Fred, who was panting like a rabid hound

  “Not if he was murdered by someone else,” she said. “And I know how to find that someone, but I need your help to catch him, Jake.”

  “Jake? What happened to Porky? You wouldn’t be buttering me up? Would you?”

  Her cell phone started playing a punk-rock tune. “It’s Kevin,” she said without looking at the caller ID. “He programmed it for me to play that when he calls.”

  Kevin must have sent her a text message; I could see Megan trying to read the screen while passing a slower car in front of us. “He’s spending the night at Taylor’s,” she said. “I can’t understand why he just doesn’t call instead of texting all the time.”

  I held back on asking about her Jeep. I knew from experience that she would defend him to the end if I said anything critical. “You were about to tell me how to find Mike’s murderer?”

  “Well, it’s just a theory. That’s why I need my smart brother. You know all about computers, so I thought you might break into his and get the goods on him.”

  “Who, Meg? Get the goods on who?”

  “Don’t you mean whom, Mister Writer?” she asked, while fixing her mascara in the visor mirror, without slowing down for a yellow light. The hot air blowing in from the window had made the mascara start to melt.

  I glanced over at her to see if she showed any sign of seeing the light. “I stand corrected, Miss Grammar.” There was no recognition in her face that she just broke the law, but I did notice she had aged considerably since I’d seen her. Although she was nearly three years older than me, she looked a lot older. As she had since high school, she was still dying her hair blond. I assumed at forty-eight that the red hair she had been so ashamed of was gray by now. She had gained a few pounds since the last time I saw her, and her eyes were not quite as blue as I remembered. But most disturbing was the loss of girlish innocence she used to exude. All the makeup in the Ozarks wouldn’t bring that back.

  Fred was still trying to get some air, so he stuck his head out the driver’s window, knocking Megan’s mascara brush out of her hand. Then he drooled over her when the air hit his face. I couldn’t help but break out in laughter. “I’m sorry, Megan,” I said, trying to regain my composure. “He just needed some air is all.”

  Megan looked at herself in the mirror. The streaks on her face left her looking like a clown with war paint. Then she too began to laugh. “Now I’ll never find another husband,” she giggled. “Not unless he’s blind.”

  Fred must not have thought it was so funny, and he withdrew to the back seat. “Aren’t you going to apologize to your aunt, Freddie?” I asked. Then for some reason, we started to really crack up.

  We were headed down Missouri Seven by the time we regained our senses. I think we both realized it had been a pressure valve type of release more than anything else that had made us laugh. “You were about to tell me who killed Mike,” I reminded my sister.

  “Mike left me with more than a worthless insurance policy. He had a fortune in gold coins, and I need you to help me get them back and put the bastard who killed him in the gas chamber.”

  “Oh?” I answered, not bothering to tell her the gas chamber was no longer in use.

  Then she told me a story right out of a Louis Lamour novel.

  Chapter 4

  Every so often, I could see patches of the lake through the thick trees and brush. I was tempted to ask Megan to stop and let Fred out of the car, but as usual, there was no place to pull over. “I’m not sure how to begin,” Megan said. “Everything was great when we moved here. I didn’t want to move out here in the middle of nowhere, but Mike begged me to just come out and look. Once I saw the house, and the ridiculous low price they were asking, I agreed and gave him the money for the down payment.”

  “I always wondered why you left Colorado,” I said. “But I will be eternally grateful that Mom followed you here. It must have been hell having her live with you until Dad found a place in town.”

  “Tell me about it. Mike and Mom were at each other’s throat every day for months. If he hadn’t been so busy losing all my money, he probably would have left me because of her. I already knew about Mike’s business failure. He had asked me more than once to borrow money that I didn’t have.”

  She turned down a back road that was paved better than the highway. There was a sign every hundred yards warning intruders that the area was off limits to outsiders and was patrolled by armed-guards. The association was either paranoid, or this place had some pretty wealthy residents. “Mike was a dreamer and a loser,” she continued without slowing down, despite the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit. “He had gone into a dock-building business with an old highschool friend by the name of Bill Atkins. They built great docks, but neither one of them had any business sense. They were losing money right and left. They would bid a job only to see the price of steel double before they could finish the dock. When they managed to get a small business loan of fifty thousand, Atkins disappeared, taking the funds with him. The business folded soon after, and Mike was forced into finding real work.

  “Well, here it is,” she said, pulling into a driveway at the end of the road. “What do you think?”

  The house was impressive to say the least. It was three levels built on top of a bluff, with a million dollar view overlooking Lake of the Ozarks. Megan had bought the house during the last down-turn in the economy and had purchased it for half its original value of five-hundred thousand. The two hundred-fifty thousand was a steal, but the down payment took most of what was left of her last husband’s life insurance. The same home in Colorado would have cost over a million – assuming you could find one. Lake of the Ozarks is one of the few large lakes in the country where one can still find lake-front property. And Meg had acres of it.

  After giving me and Fred the nickel t
our of her mini-mansion, Megan led us out onto the second level deck. We waited while she went back to the kitchen for some beer and wine. The beer was for me and Fred; Megan had classier tastes.

  Ever since Fred was a puppy, I would give him some of my beer when we sat on our deck back in Colorado. I would pour a small puddle on the weathered-cedar boards, and he would lap it up, then pester me for more. He especially loved to bite the bubbles. He would sneeze when they went up his nose.

  “Anyway,” Meg continued. “Just when we were ready to put the house up for sale, Mike found a bunch of gold coins. He thought they were hidden there by Jesse James and his gang after the civil war.”

  I wondered if she saw my jaw drop to the deck boards. “That must be some pretty strong wine, Sis.”

  “Let me finish, Porky. It’s true. Really.”

  I poured Fred the dregs of my beer, and opened another. “Sorry. You were saying.”

  She followed my lead and poured herself another glass of wine before continuing. “You can’t see it from here, but there is a cave right below us. We couldn’t get to it, not even from our lift, so we didn’t think much about it. Only a billy goat could have reached that cave. Then Mike saw a show on TV about Jesse James and the Knights of the Golden Circle, and how they hid treasure in caves.”

  “I remember seeing that on the History Channel,” I said. “Some believe Jesse and his gang hid money down in Texas and Oklahoma to fund a new civil war. But I don’t recall them mentioning Missouri.”

  “I didn’t see the show. You know how boring history is to me,” she said as she poured Fred some of her wine. He ignored it and looked the other way. “Like father, like son,” she said.

  “So what happened after Mike saw the show?” I asked.

  “He dug a path with nothing but a pick and shovel to get to the cave,” she answered. “The steep terrain didn’t allow for any machinery, so he did it the old fashioned way. He found the coins when he heard his pick break glass.”

  I wasn’t surprised about the cave. Missouri was called the Cave State because it was built on ancient limestone bedrock. Over the eons, the surface water had seeped into the ground and carved out thousands of caves and caverns. The majority were found along the rivers and lakes.