3 The Case of Tiffany's Epiphany Read online

  “Calm down,” I plead with her. “You have to calm down.”

  Tiffany is almost in tears. “Mr. Sherlock, this is awful. Every time I look in a full-length mirror I see myself in red. I hate that color!”

  “Tiffany, relax.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Have another latte,” I suggest. A truly stupid suggestion once I think about it.

  Tiffany takes a deep breath.

  “Why don’t you go visit your spa? You can get a massage, have your nails done, your hair cut, get a facial, order a nice dinner, see a movie, take two aspirin, and call me in the morning.”

  “I don’t get up in the morning,” she reminds me.

  “Call me whenever. I just want you to feel better,” I assure her.

  “Well, okay,” she says. “You talked me into it.”

  ---

  I walk over to the Zanadu Club. I figure I better start earning my keep.

  Gibby Fearn, who is busy supervising the added decorations being put up over the dance floor, sees me enter. “What do you want?” he calls out. He’s a little surlier than the last time we met.

  “Big night tonight?” I ask coming up to where he stands directing traffic.

  “Record release party.”

  “Hip-Hop, rap, or regular?” I ask.

  “Who cares, as long as they drink a lot of booze,” Gibby tells me.

  Two workers are hoisting a banner with a picture of some SRW (singer/rapper/whatever), I’ve never heard of. The guy flashes an ear-to-ear smile with a set of diamond-encrusted braces on his teeth.

  “Is Mr. DeWitt in?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “No.”

  This is the longest string of responses from Gibby that aren’t questions in return to my questions.

  “You don’t know where your boss lives?” I repeat, in case he didn’t hear me the first time.

  “Who said he was my boss?” Damn, he breaks his streak.

  “Then what is he?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Are you always this helpful?”

  “What difference would it make?”

  I’d hate to see Gibby when he’s being evasive.

  Before I can come up with my next query, Gibby asks me, “What have you learned so far?”

  “That people are their own worst enemies,” I answer without hesitation.

  “I meant about Mr. DeWitt,” he says, but the way he says it, I get the idea he’s fishing.

  “He seems like a nice enough fellow who has lots of friends, is a good dancer, and cleans the lint trap after each load in the dryer.”

  Gibby stares me down with his cold, beady eyes. “What about his problem?” he clarifies.

  “That’s what I need to discuss with him,” I tell the VP of Operations.

  “I know,” Gibby says. “What?”

  “Gibby, has anyone ever mentioned you can be difficult to converse with?”

  “Who’d want to do that?”

  “Well, let me tell you,” I tell him. “In any good conversation, you have to give a little to get a little back.”

  “That goes for you, too?” he asks.

  This is a perfect example of what I’m complaining about. “Yes,” I say exasperated.

  “Fine,” he says.

  “Bruno the bartender.”

  “What about Bruno the bartender?” Gibby throws it right back to me.

  “No, now it’s your turn, Gibby. Tell me about Bruno.”

  “I fired him.”

  “Why?”

  “He quit showing up.”

  “When?”

  “Week ago.”

  “Did you fire him in person?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “You fired him over the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say when you fired him?”

  “Nothing.”

  I want to interject into our conversation what an excellent job he’s doing answering my questions, but I figure I better not risk it.

  “You said, ‘You’re fired,’ and he just hung up?” I ask

  “I didn’t talk to him,” Gibby says. “I texted him.”

  “What?” I’m aghast at even the thought of it. “You can’t fire somebody with a text.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you just can’t,” I argue. “Getting fired is personal. You have to bring him in, sit him down, and ‘let him go,’ face to face. It’s the American way.”

  “No,” Gibby says. “Texting’s much easier.”

  I can’t believe this. What is the business world coming to?

  “Okay,” Gibby says, “I answered a lot of questions. Now, it’s your turn. What’s Bruno got to do with Mr. DeWitt?”

  “Bruno didn’t take his firing very well.” I’m making good on my half of the bargain.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, dead.”

  “He’s dead because he got fired?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” I admit.

  Gibby is quiet for a few moments while he processes what I hope is new information. “I wonder if I have to still pay him two week’s severance?” Gibby’s a consummate manager.

  “I can assure you he won’t be lining up at the bank to cash his check.”

  The workers hoist a huge, overflowing treasure chest of what I suspect is fake bling onto the temporary stage set up for tonight’s event. The chest will be a good place to put the SRW’s diamond braces after his teeth straighten out.

  “How’d he die?” Gibby asks, as if he’s now making small talk.

  “A headache,” I tell him. “A really bad headache.”

  “Too bad,” Gibby says. “He brought in a lot of business.” Gibby offers his suggestion for the epitaph on Bruno's tombstone.

  A new set of workers come in, wheeling two carts filled with hundreds of small gift bags, Gibby directs them to a table adjacent to the stage.

  “What’s in the bags?” I ask.

  “Swag,” Gibby answers.

  I have no clue. “They’re bags of swag?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s swag?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Swag stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’ll ask Tiffany. She’ll know.

  Gibby gets busier, as more and more people show up to put on the finishing touches for the upcoming festivities.

  “You like your job?” I ask him.

  “Most of it,” he says. “The Zanadu wouldn’t be the Zanadu if it wasn’t for me.”

  “What would it be without you?” I ask.

  “Certainly not as profitable.” Gibby directs a few more workers then turns back towards me. “You like your job?”

  “No, I hate it.”

  “So, you’re one of the mass of men who leads a quiet life of desperation?” Henry David Thoreau. Apparently Gibby is well-read.

  “No, I tell everyone I hate my job,” I say. “The problem is nobody ever listens.”

  As I speak, a group of party set-up people comes over for more direction and I doubt if Gibby hears my final sentence.

  As Gibby is engulfed with management duties, I get lost in the shuffle and make myself scarce. I wander over to the back of the bar, find the hallway behind it, and make my way to the stairwell door. For some reason, it’s propped open. This must be a sign. Fate tells me to go right on through. I do so, down a couple of flights of stairs to the floor with the old light bulbs. I listen carefully for a whoosh/plop sound, but nothing. I proceed down the same dusty hallway to the speakeasy door. I very carefully grip the knob, but it won’t move. I listen for sounds from inside then take out my lock pick set and have the door open in two minutes.

  The room is ma
ybe 15x15, with a long table, three chairs, and a small refrigerator off to the left side. On the table are two, top-of-the-line adding machines, the ones a CPA would use. Running above my head is the metal tube that I saw out in the hallway. It ends in this room. There is a slide opening at the cap end of the pipe. I open it and see two round six-inch containers. I reach in and pull one of them out. It screws open, just like a thermos.

  I will no longer be up nights wondering what the whoosh/plop was all about.

  The only other item of note is a small potbelly stove on the back wall of the room. Its stack runs up to the ceiling, then straight across, and up and out to the east side of the room. No way in hell this venting system would ever pass any Chicago building codes. There’s no woodpile, but an old metal trashcan sits to the left, half-full of grey ashes. I’ve seen enough. I remind myself that this is the bar business, and what I’ve seen isn’t anything abnormal in this milieu.

  I re-lock the door on my way out, another trick I learned from my burglar friend Shervy Reckless. I’ve always been surprised by the fact that more thieves don’t lock up after they leave a job. It makes sense if you ask me, but nobody ever asks me.

  Upstairs, on the main floor, the party is ready to begin. All that’s missing is the crowd. I walk to the edge of the floor and position myself to see the windows of the penthouse office of Mr. D’Wayne DeWitt. The curtains are open and the lights are on. Gibby was either lying or DW 2 just arrived. Whatever. It’s time to visit the boss.

  I push the door open as soon as it buzzes and enter the office. Mr. DeWitt is behind his desk. On the couch are two twenty-something girls, barely dressed in micro-mini skirts, high black leather boots with four-inch heels, and dripping with gold jewelry. I wonder if they got their bling from the bag of swag.

  I gulp when I see the pair. “Did I come at a bad time?”

  “No.” Mr. DeWitt motions me to come towards him.

  “One of your employees has been murdered,” I tell him. “I thought you might want to know.”

  “Who?” he asks, not moving a muscle past his lips.

  “Bruno Buttaras, the bartender.”

  “That Mudda,” one of the blingsters on the couch comments. “He never fills his martinis all the way to the top.”

  “Thank you,” I turn and tell her. “That was a motive I didn’t consider.”

  Mr. DeWitt picks up the desk phone, pushes one button, and says, “Who is our PR person?” He waits for a moment. “Get her on the phone.”

  “You’re not sending out a press release, are you?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” he says in all seriousness. “Who’s the cop on the case?”

  “Detective Neula Noonan.”

  “Fat?”

  “Yeah, that’s her,” I answer.

  One look to the couch would tell you the boss isn’t into plus size women.

  The phone on Mr. DeWitt’s desk rings. He picks it up, “DeWitt.” He listens for two seconds, and asks, “Did you hear one of our bartenders got iced?” He listens for one second and says, “Keep it that way.” And he hangs up. Being a fly on the wall during a conversation between Mr. DeWitt and Gibby would be a waste of time.

  “Mr. DeWitt,” I sit in the chair across from him, to make this meeting more businesslike. “In order for me to investigate who may be attempting to harm you, it would help if I knew a few things.”

  “What for instance?”

  I press on. “Like, where you live, where you hang out, what you like to do in your spare time, and has anyone ever tried to kill you in the past?”

  “Why?”

  “Knowledge is power.”

  “Not always,” he says.

  Both girls on the couch light up cigarettes. I’m amazed how many young people smoke. I would have thought that after thousands of news stories about the health hazards of tobacco, the warning labels on the packs, and all those the PSA’s that star people with holes in their throats, the message would have gotten through. Apparently not, the girls puff away like chimneys.

  I’m not really sure what to say next and the silence becomes uncomfortable. So, I tell him sincerely, “I’m only trying to do the job you hired me to do.”

  He puts his fist to his chin, rubs the flesh on his upper neck, and says, “I live in a condo, I hang out here,” He points at the girls. “I do them in my spare time, and if someone did try to kill me, they missed.”

  My four questions have been answered, but I don’t feel any more knowledgeable, and certainly no more powerful.

  “You should be able to find out everything you need to know right here,” Mr. DeWitt says in the manner of closing our conversation. He pulls out his money clip, peels off another hunk of bills, and hands them my way. It’s difficult, but I hold myself back from jumping for joy.

  “Could I get the run of the place?” I ask. “So far, the people around here have made me feel about as welcome as a Muslim at a Tea Party Rally.”

  “Talk to Fearn.”

  I am about to ask, “Do I have to?” But I don’t, not wanting to upset my best customer ever. I walk to the door, passing the girls on the couch. “You really shouldn’t smoke. It’s not good for you,” I tell them in fatherly tones.

  “You smoke when youse was twenty-two?” the blingster on the left asks me.

  “Yeah, but only when I wanted to look older.”

  The one on the right looks me up and down. “And youse sayin’ that we dumb?”

  Point well taken.

  Downstairs, the partiers are starting to trickle in. It’s early, around dinnertime. I don’t want to go home, because it’s best I do some investigating around the club tonight. Investigating what and who, I don’t know. All I know is I have a few hours to kill. I call “Wait” Jack Wayt.

  “Want dinner?” I ask before Jack can tell me his latest ailment.

  “As long as it’s gluten free.”

  ---

  “Wait.”

  “What, Jack?”

  “You know anything about irritable bowel syndrome?”

  “No. And I don’t want to.”

  Jack shifts uncomfortably in his chair. We sit. He has a cocktail. The waiter takes our orders. We chat until the food arrives.

  “Anything on Bruno?” I ask.

  “Small time hood. He did a couple of stints. Once for assault and once for pushing weed and a few pills,” Jack says. “Probably carried his old business into his new career.”

  “You know,” I tell Jack. “It used to be you went to a bartender to find out the best place to eat, now you go to him to score some weed.”

  “You smoke enough weed, you don’t care where you eat as long as you get to pig-out on a lot of food.” Jack slices a hunk of rib-eye, bathes it in its own juices, shoves it in his mouth, and masticates the meat like a cow chewing her cud. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the fast-food industry is behind the legalization of pot.”

  “Did Bruno have any connection to DeWitt, when DeWitt was working the street?” I ask.

  “Not that we found.”

  “It’s all connected somehow,” I say to Jack, as I nibble on my free-range chicken breast. “From Tiffany, to Bruno, to Mr. DeWitt, to the guy with the pony tail.”

  Jack puts another slice of steak in his mouth before he swallows the one he popped in before it. “You know in eighty percent of doping cases, the bartender has something to do with it?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “If you’re going to be in the business, Sherlock, you got to keep up.” Once a mentor, always a mentor.

  “They do it for their own benefit or for the benefit of somebody else?” I ask.

  “Both.”

  “A dumb crime if you ask me,” I speak my piece. “For a couple hundred bucks a guy risks his job drugging some woman so some other idiot can have sex with her while she’s comatose?”

  “It’s not like he’s a brain surgeon putting his medical practice on the line,�
�� Jack tells me between chews.

  “There’s something more here,” I tell him. “I can feel it.”

  “I can feel something too,” Jack says gripping his gut. “It might be gastroenteritis.”

  The pain can’t be too bad, because he finishes every morsel of his steak.

  We spend the rest of the meal talking about people we know, people we knew, and people we don’t want to know anymore. Jack is a good guy. I enjoy his company.

  “You might as well know,” he says finishing his coffee. “We got a lot going down in the next ten days. City Hall is screaming about all the kids killing each other.”

  “Shouldn’t they be happy the gangs are thinning out their own herds?”

  “Politicians are never satisfied,” Jack says. “If we wiped out every crime ever committed, they’d complain we used too many cops to do it.”

  I pick up the tab for dinner. After this C-Note disappears, and I pay next month’s alimony, child support, and rent; plus put a very small dent in the overdue balance on my one credit card, I’ll be back to almost being broke, a situation in which I have had entirely too much practice.

  ---

  The party at the Zanadu was for Bobo Bling, a rap artist whose latest CD, Bang Dat Big Black Booty, would be available to download starting tomorrow. I did learn from overhearing a conversation that the diamond-laden braces on his teeth are known as his grill and considered the epitome of bling. I consider it the epitome of stupidity.

  I’m off to the side of the club listening, or having no choice but to listen, to Bobo sing of bashing butts and bling. I quickly tire of hearing the MF word put into his alleged lyrics so many times, the words almost lose their disgusting flavor. And the music is so loud, the people couldn’t hear an air raid siren if one went off. I’m in the middle of a society I have no business even being near. I feel like an abacus in a roomful of computers.

  But the sociology of Zanadu fascinates me. The patrons are between the ages of 25 and 35. White, Black, a few Hispanics, but no Asians. Most are straight, well-dressed, carry expensive cell phones, and text one another constantly. The Blacks hang in groups at the edge of the dance floor or up against the stage if someone is performing. The Whites inhabit the bar area. Everyone shares the dance floor.

  The Black girls are the best dancers, followed by the Black dudes, followed by the White chicks. The worst dancers are the White guys, no question. White girls will dance with other White girls and Black girls will dance with other Black girls, but guys never dance with each other. Way too gay.