Stocks & Blondes
20
Into the dark scary hole
I’M NOT PARTICULARLY AFRAID of the dark, or spiders, or rats, or slimy mold, or… But if you put them all together, maybe I’m just a little creeped out.
The vault
I set up a search routine on the main computer so I didn’t have to look at all Georgia’s sex tapes. Gross! But I wanted to know where she posted them and how she got paid. I figured indexing the files on all six computers according to my own list of keywords would speed the search and I wouldn’t have to watch her prostitute herself.
As soon as the bank opened in the morning, Cinnamon drove me down and I got a safe deposit box. I deposited all the jewelry. We went to the office next. I don’t like entering the office in disguise but with Cinnamon guarding the front door, I closed and locked mine so I could open the vault.
I still remember the first time Dag opened the vault in my presence. I knew we had servers someplace, but I had always thought they were offsite. Dag punched numbers in on his television remote control and a wall beside his desk opened, revealing a room bigger than my reception area/office. The room is temperature controlled with a dozen high-power servers, hard drives, laptops, and a safe. It might seem like overkill to have a safe inside the vault, but with a million dollars onsite, you get a little protective. No, it wasn’t cash. I had one hundred $10,000 cash cards, a retainer from Simon after I pulled him and Angel out of Croatia. I’d discovered Dag had other things in the safe as well. There were letters he was holding for his cousin in Finland, for his almost daughter the Hollywood actress, and a list of his accounts in a Swiss Bank. There were also six $100,000 bearer bonds issued by a bank in Mexico City. I wish I knew how he got hold of those! Dag kept a handgun in the safe and I wondered if he’d ever carried it. Now the safe also had the key to a safe deposit box with a potentially priceless piece of jewelry in it.
It would have been nice if Georgia had put the jewelry in a safe deposit box herself and only put the key in ice cubes. But her method worked, I guess.
When I was done stowing the key and had closed the vault, I sat in my chair for a few minutes just feeling like I was home for a while and could relax. Then Cinnamon drove me back to the house and I faced up to my squeamishness.
Storm cellar
There were no bodies or body parts. For that I am eternally grateful. But the experience was unpleasant all the same.
“I’m right behind you, Sugar,” Cinnamon said. “Don’t be scared.”
“Gee, thanks, Cinnamon.”
Armed with a flashlight and dressed in a sweatshirt and latex gloves, I led the way down into the low-ceilinged basement. I’m not sure you can actually call this a basement. It was more like a deep area in the crawlspace that only extended under the kitchen. At some time in the distant past it was used as a fruit cellar for canned goods. A shelf held a series of canning jars, covered with layers of dirt but full of unidentifiable foodstuffs. They all had paper labels on them that were pretty much unreadable. The one thing I managed to read when I wiped off one of the jars was “1958”. This was seriously old stuff. Since no one else had ever seen fit to clean the place out, I felt no responsibility for it.
Cinnamon screamed.
I spun around, ready to defend us against… I didn’t know what. She was cowering at the foot of the stairs, frantically waving cobwebs away from her hair with one hand while she pointed with the other. I pointed my flashlight over into that corner and a rat jumped up from the floor to the top shelf and disappeared through a hole in the wall.
“I’m sorry,” Cinnamon whined. “It just went over my foot from under the stairs and I thought something was… attacking me.”
“Something is,” I said calmly and reached to flick an enormous black spider out of her hair.
“Can we go now?”
“Yes. No. Wait.” Next to where the rat scampered up the wall was the first shiny object I’d seen down here. A new-looking fuse box was attached to the wall. An electrician had been down here? Something just didn’t seem right. The white wire that came out of the bottom of the box looped up behind the floor joist of the kitchen and disappeared. I nearly slipped on the slimy floor when I leaned over to see where it went.
It didn’t.
It just ended and was tacked up out of sight from the door. I opened the fuse box and instead of a row of breakers, I saw a plastic freezer bag with an envelope in it. I picked it up and turned to Cinnamon.
“Now we can go.”
Date night
By the time we found the envelope, the bank was closed since this was Saturday. I had Cinnamon drive me back to the office and I put it in the safe in the vault. The next big question was whether or not I should go back to the house. Tom called, but I ignored the call. I just wasn’t ready to face him yet. And it would take hours to get ready. On the other hand, when Deon called and offered to pick me up to go to the bar, I decided to have a go at it. I wanted to see if I could spot who was spiking drinks and get a good look at the people who showed up. Cinnamon dropped me off at the house and then parked in a place where she could see the door and the lights. I figured I’d call her in a couple of hours to pick me up or she’d call me if something was happening at the house.
I almost missed the date because I got involved in finding and breaking Georgia’s online account codes. Deon picked me up at eight and I rode quietly to The Circle bar with him. He has a mellow, smooth voice that you could listen to for hours. It’s mesmerizing. Every so often I had to remind myself that he was one of my chief suspects. He could be so nice, reassuring, and calm. He blew it, though, when he asked if I’d found his car keys.
“I didn’t know you’d lost them,” I said. “Are you using a spare set?”
“Oh, not this old junker,” he said. “My Mercedes is parked in Georgia’s garage. She didn’t have a car, so she let me park mine in her garage for the winter. She has the keys in there somewhere. It’s no real hurry. I don’t want to drive it in the kind of sloppy stuff we’ve been having here the past month or so. But I figure you have to empty out everything and I should take my car somewhere else as soon as the keys surface.”
“Did you tell me about this before?” I asked.
“Oh yes, last weekend. We had quite the chat. Glad to see you are all recovered. Better stick to soda tonight.” He was still pretending that I’d been drunk last weekend. WTF? Well, maybe he doesn’t know I know I was drugged. I’ll have that car towed to an impound lot if it’s his. We’ll see how good he is at getting it out.
“I don’t remember much from last weekend,” I said truthfully enough. If I hadn’t started writing stuff down in my stupor, I probably wouldn’t have remembered any of it. “But you are right, it’s just soda for me tonight.” Soda served in a can or bottle I personally opened, I pledged to myself.
We sat at a table in the bar with what I assumed were the same people I met last week. Now I knew something different about them, though. We made small talk and each one asked about some article of clothing, piece of jewelry, or other bit. I get the feeling these women and maybe the men, too, are in the same business. I memorized their names and faces this time: Dolly, Marcie, Jenni, and Abby. Each had been caught on my recordings on Wednesday when they searched the house. It seems they all had something they’d loaned Georgia and wanted back. And leading the search was my date for the night, Deon.
The first time he touched me, I got up and left. I went to the ladies’ room, sent an SOS to Cinnamon and walked straight out and into her car five minutes later. I was sure of it now. Deon was their pimp.
Cinnamon drove me straight to the airport hotel to shower and get me out of this makeup. I thought the basement was bad, but the bar made me feel filthy. I needed to hang up Peg for a while and be myself.
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