* * *
Next morning I headed down to Hammett’s as soon as I got up, knowing I needed to fuel up for a long, physical day. As I walked in, a few of the early regulars gave me friendly, desultory waves, and I instinctively checked my hair in the big wall mirror to see if I had remembered to brush it. I had, but sometimes I forget, to my embarrassment. I sat down by the window in a lumpy brown booth that felt and looked like it had been there for the seventy-five years the place had been open. It was the same booth where Betty Huckleston and I had sat when she visited because I tended to sit in the same place. I could just relax, and let Vicki take care of things.
Vicki Sinclair, a fixture at Hammett’s, had known me for years—for the good, the bad, and the ugly. I knew there had been plenty of mornings in the past when I had arrived in pretty bad shape, reeking of the night before, or maybe of that morning. Steeped in self-pity, full of morose stories of betrayal and lost love—I was going down the tubes one drink at a time. Vicki Sinclair always listened, always brought coffee. She’d also witnessed my renewal and listened to my much better stories of gratitude and abundance. She and I had never really talked about my sobriety, but early on, during one conversation or another, she had given me a look that said she knew I was going to make it.
Vicki strolled up, a sardonic smile on her face. “Been working? Or at least busy?” she said, one eyebrow up in ribald suggestion as she put down coffee and water on the table. “The usual?”
“Yep, the Dash, green, no sour cream.”
“You got it,” she said and went off to place the order with Jean Georgopoulos, daughter of Stannos, and now the irascible owner and day cook. Jean had been known to change an order to whatever she felt the person should have that particular morning, or, more likely, what she needed to get rid of while it was still edible. All within the limits of quality food, of course, but still, her substitutions were sometimes odd.
The Dash—a breakfast special named for Dashiell Hammett—was a mound of fried potatoes and bacon, smothered with green or red chile, and topped with jack cheese. No eggs. This behemoth ranked in my top three breakfasts, the green chile being the key, and I sometimes wondered if Jean put something in it to make it so addictive; there was a spice I couldn’t quite identify. Whatever it was, it had me.
I sat with my coffee and newspaper and tried to work things out in my mind. What was the deal with this trunk? Did it have anything to do with Shannon besides it being her trunk? Why was getting it immediately—at the risk of being caught at two break-ins—so important? Was Nephew the one that was trying to get it? Who the hell was Nephew, anyway?
Vicki brought more coffee. “Say, what’s this I hear about your place being broken into? Were you there? You okay?”
“Yeah, a little shaken up, I guess. The alarm going off in the middle of the night is enough to take five years off your life, though.”
“Middle of the night?” asked Vicki Sinclair. “I heard it was yesterday afternoon. Police came to your place. Willard told me about it.” She pointed with her chin at one of the regulars sitting at the communal table. Willard Franklin, night watchman and stocker at Northern Feed and Grain down the street, nodded at us when he heard his name. “How ya dogs doin’?” he called with a grin. I was a regular customer of the feed store across the road from my house for the 50-pound bags of dog food, and Willard couldn’t resist giving the dogs big, rough hugs every time they came in with me.
I told Vicki about Shannon’s trunk and about the two instances, and this time both of her eyebrows went up in concern.
“What is going on?” she wondered.
“Hell if I know.”
She went off to get my order with a perplexed look on her face. Vicki Sinclair prided herself on knowing just about everything that went on, and I could see that she took it almost as a personal affront if trouble surfaced in her neighborhood. She brought my breakfast, exactly the way I had ordered it—thank you, Jean Georgopoulos. As I tucked into the piping hot green chile, Vicki leaned against the booth, wanting to discuss her questions about the intrusions. Her clothes smelled faintly of the cigarettes that made her voice low, husky, and familiar.
“The nephew’s involved, or an associate of Nephew, right? I can’t figure out who else it could be. Bernice? Nah, I can’t see that scenario,” Vicki said as she tried to imagine the poor old woman breaking and entering. “She didn’t seem to be much interested in the trunk, did she?”
“Oh, she mentioned it, at the beginning, but I got distracted, and forgot all about it. When I called Bernice the day before about dropping the trunk off, she said Nephew had been upset that she didn’t have the trunk with her after she’d returned from Shannon’s place in Gilcrest. Maybe he freaked out even more that afternoon when he returned to Bernice’s and found I had left without delivering the trunk.
“He didn’t know I planned to return with it,” I continued. “I guess he found me from the information I’d given Bernice on the phone, either overhearing the conversation or seeing the slip of paper she’d kept with my name and business on it. Easy enough.
“After blowing his chance at the trunk the first night, he must have watched my place the next day and saw that I went out early with all my tools and trailer. So maybe he thought he may have a chance in broad daylight. Maybe he thought he could get away with a smash-and-grab quickly enough after the alarm went off, since he’d be prepared for it. But the alarm didn’t go off ’cause I didn’t set it. Well, I helped him there, didn’t I?” I said ruefully.
“But nothing seems to be missing. Why risk breaking in and not take anything? Or did he not find what he was looking for?” Vicki asked. “And why break in in the first place? He could have just rung the bell and asked you for it.”
“I know! It seems pretty stupid,” I said. “Breaking in to steal the trunk puts the whole thing in a more significant light, doesn’t it?”
But Vicki agreed with me that the police probably had few resources to commit to an alarm report and a call about a broken window with nothing stolen. The paperwork for just that probably took more time than they had available, and they had no extra money in their budget. With lower tax revenues due to the recession, the town had had to make all sorts of cuts. Soon Vicki and I were off-subject, discussing the economy, before she went off to refill coffee cups at Willard Franklin’s table.
Vicki Sinclair went back to the counter to retrieve some other orders—Jean had now banged twice on the ringer to get her attention. “Order up, by god! What does it take? You gonna take these orders out, or am I gonna have to? By god!” yelled sweet Jean, peering out the order window at Vicki.
That was the usual way Jean Georgopoulos communicated with just about anybody, and Vicki didn’t seem to pay attention to it. I’d finished scraping up the last of the green chile on my plate, so I paid the check at the table, knowing the tab by heart, and waved good-bye to Vicki, and to Jean, who scowled back. They were an incongruous pair—the squat and swarthy Jean and the lithe, red-haired Vicki—but they seemed to have found comfortable working grooves with each other. Most people couldn’t handle Jean shouting something inappropriate at them every other minute, but Vicki easily ignored her while doing whatever she pleased.
No wonder this place had such a homey feel to it.
CHAPTER FIVE