“What do you think?” I asked Bob. “Who has the jewelry?”
Bob didn’t have any ideas, and I didn’t have any ideas, so we went to the car and sat there for a while. I called Nutsy but he didn’t pick up and his mailbox was full. No surprise there.
“Obviously I need to talk to Nutsy, and it’s my bad that I didn’t do it sooner,” I said to Bob. “I’m not buying into the I can’t tell you my big dangerous mystery thing. I don’t mind if you listen in, but I didn’t want to force him to talk in front of Lula. Lula has a tendency to lose focus. I was afraid in the middle of Nutsy’s confession, Lula would have asked a clown question.”
I didn’t want to go home to Nutsy’s mess on my living room floor, and I didn’t have any good reason to go to the office, so I took a leisurely drive back to Sissy’s house. I thought there was a good chance that at some point in the day, Nutsy would show up to retrieve the things he’d left behind in his rush to get to Maine.
I drove down the alley behind Sissy’s house. The garage was still open and empty. No Yamaha.
“We have to be sneaky,” I said to Bob. “If Nutsy wanted to talk to me he would have called back. He knows Ranger’s SUV, so we won’t hang out here.”
I parked on Orchid Street, one block away, and Bob and I walked down Sissy’s alley and found a comfy place to wait behind Sissy’s garage. An hour later I heard the Yamaha putt-putt down the alley and park in Sissy’s backyard. Luck or dogged persistence, whatever you wanted to call it, was still working for me.
Bob was immediately on his feet, happy to see an old friend. I released his leash and he rushed at Nutsy. Nutsy was happy to see Bob, not so much to see me.
“Do you have a key?” I asked him. “I don’t think Sissy is home.”
“She’s at her sister’s house. She goes there for lunch and then she stays and plays with her niece and nephew. It’s a Sunday ritual. And yes, I have a key.”
I followed Nutsy into the house. We walked through the kitchen and living area, into the guest room.
“We need to talk,” I said to Nutsy.
“I don’t want to talk,” Nutsy said, picking clothes up off the floor, throwing everything onto the bed.
“We can have a friendly conversation, or I can bring Ranger in, and he can encourage you to talk,” I said.
“Ah, Ranger,” Nutsy said. “I know about Ranger. Everyone knows about Ranger.”
“Really? What about Ranger?”
“Tough guy. Smart. High-tech security expert.”
Yep. That was Ranger.
“I can’t help you if I don’t know the problem,” I said. “Let’s start with the bag of jewelry. Where is it?”
“I have it,” Nutsy said.
“Wow.”
“Yeah, well it’s not exactly what it seems.”
“How about if you start at the beginning.”
“It’s hard to tell what’s the beginning,” Nutsy said. “The beginning was when I decided to write stories. But that’s not the beginning of the bad stuff. Writing stories was good. It was like being a clown. When you’re a clown you’re trying to entertain, to tell a story. And you’re in disguise. You aren’t yourself. You’re the clown. When you write a book it’s sort of the same thing. You give the world a piece of you. You write a story that you hope will entertain and enlighten. And you can do this in disguise by using a pseudonym. A pseudonym is like clown makeup. It protects you from the pain of rejection. So, I started to write these stories and I acquired a small group of readers online. It was perfect. I had a day job at Plover’s. I didn’t need to sell my stories. I just wanted a couple people to read them and enjoy them.”
“And one of the readers was Duncan,” I said.
“I don’t know how he ambled onto my site, but he became a regular. After a couple months, we met for coffee, and we became friends. His life intrigued me. He made sure that the buttons were round and perfect. He was happy with this. At least I thought he was happy. We decided to write a story together about a guy like him who turns into a guy like David Niven in the old Pink Panther movies, a master jewel thief. I told you this before.”
“It doesn’t matter. Keep going.”
“Okay, fast-forward to the day of the robbery. I was standing at the door, half-asleep because the job was so boring, and all of a sudden Duncan comes in. He’s dressed in black, he’s got a gun, and he calmly walks over to Plover and says, ‘Stay very calm. This is a robbery. No one will get hurt if you put all of the jewelry in this bag.’ And he hands him a large black plastic garbage bag. He’s wearing a stupid black mask like Zorro, the kind that kids wear at Halloween. It’s obviously Duncan and I’m dumbfounded. I don’t know if Duncan is pranking me, if I’m dreaming, or if this is real. It all goes very fast from here. Plover panics and starts shoving all the jewelry into the bag. In minutes the shop is cleaned out, Duncan nods at me and smiles and walks out of the store. Meanwhile, Plover has pushed the button under the counter to call the police.
“Poor Duncan gets out of the store and has a moment of sanity and thinks, ‘What the holy hell did I just do?!’ So, he drops the bag and runs. He gets into his car and is in a blind panic trying to get away, hoping it was all a bad dream and didn’t really happen.”
“So how did you get the bag of jewelry? Did you just pick it up off the ground?”
“No. This is where it gets complicated.”
“This is where it gets complicated?” I said.
“Yeah. Plover was pissed off that he was robbed. He said I just stood there like a dope and did nothing. And he was right. I just stood there like a big dope. Anyway, he fired me. I couldn’t blame him. The next morning, he reported the missing tray of diamonds and he accused me of taking it.”
“Did you take it?” I asked him.
“No! The police came to question me and after they left, I decided I’d go talk to Plover. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t take the diamonds and that I’d like to have my job back. I thought I’d wait until he was closing up for the night. He had a routine. He hung the Closed sign in the front door and then he went into his office in the back and did paperwork for an hour or so. I thought this would be a good time to talk to him, so at nine o’clock I parked my bike in the alley. Plover’s back door was open, and the lights were on inside. I went up to the back door and saw that Plover was arguing with two homeless guys. I sort of knew them. They hung at the corner all the time, harassing people for money. One of the homeless guys was standing back, close to the open door, and he was holding a big black garbage bag. The other homeless guy was yelling at Plover. He said if he didn’t get a million dollars, he was going to expose Plover and go to the police with the jewelry.”
My voice went up an octave. “He was trying to blackmail Plover for a million dollars?”
“Yeah,” Nutsy said. “So Plover shot him.”
“Are you serious?”
“Swear to God. Plover pulled a gun and shot the homeless guy. The one holding the bag sort of stumbled back, and Plover shot at him and missed.”