The Big Cat Nap Read online

  “You’ve answered my question. You were close, so I dropped in without calling. I apologize.”

  “No apology needed after all we’ve been through. I just heard that Willa’s cancer has returned.”

  Willa Reisman was a member of their cancer support group.

  “Oh, no.”

  “She made it four years, but damned if a spot hasn’t been found in her lung. That’s the thing: Those cells can travel. She had breast cancer, as you know.”

  “Think they found it in time?”

  “Hope so. She begins treatment next week. You know how viruses for computers are encrypted in something else, something that seems innocent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I think cancer does. Malware. God, I hate this disease.”

  “I do, too.” Harry sighed, then changed the subject. “Do you think Victor at ReNu is a good businessman?”

  “One of the best.”

  “He hired a slacker for the front desk. I gained access to the garage during lunch break by slipping Kyle some money. So I’m thinking about that, you know. Victor is penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

  Franny played with her earring for a moment. “I guess we all are, to a degree. I know Victor very well, and he also respects mechanics. He probably doesn’t think too much about the front desk.”

  “But you hired a good person.”

  “The front desk is your face to the public. It’s the first employee of your company most people meet. You’re damned right I have a good person, but I’m selling. Victor isn’t. When the squashed car comes to him with the blown radiator or whatever, Victor already has the job. Still, you’ve given me something to think about.”

  “What?”

  “How sharp you are and how you rush in where angels fear to tread. Once you’re in a mess, you miss very little.”

  “I’m not really in a mess. I just discovered Walt’s body, along with Herb and Susan.”

  “Harry.” Franny lifted an eyebrow. “Why are you asking me all this?”

  Harry shrugged. “Dunno.”

  Franny shrugged, too. “Whatever this was about—could have been anything, an outraged husband, a deal gone sour—I personally am not going to worry unless tire dealers go missing.”

  Back in the truck, the animals stayed silent until they reached the farm. Murphy and Pewter spilled out of the truck, ran around the yard and to the barn, glad to be away from all those machine odors. Pewter sashayed to the house.

  Pewter sat under the enormous walnut tree next to the house. Matilda, the huge blacksnake with glittering eyes, silently crawled down the tree—bark easy for her to grip—until she reached the lowest branch, about ten feet up. Wrapping her tail around the thick branch, she swung down above the gray cat’s head. While she wasn’t near enough to touch, the blacksnake was close.

  “S-s-s-s.” She flicked out her forked red tongue.

  Pewter, ears so good, looked up. She let out a scream, ran through the screened-in porch door, which had an animal door in it, and then through to the kitchen itself.

  “Ha.” Matilda was full of herself.

  Mrs. Murphy, sitting in the center aisle, saw Pewter run, then saw the source of the dash.

  “Hey, Tucker. Come here.”

  The dog joined her feline friend, who gave her the story. They watched the large snake swing back up onto the big branch.

  “She has an evil sense of humor.” Mrs. Murphy laughed.

  “Should we go into the kitchen? Pewter will be very upset.” Tucker did love the gray butterball.

  “We’ll need smelling salts.”

  The two laughed uproariously.

  Flipping hay flakes into the stalls, Harry heard the meows and little barks, then saw her animals leaning on each other and thought about how love knows no boundaries.

  For that matter, neither does hate.

  The next day, Franny Howard, almost always the first person at work, unlocked the door to the showroom. The immaculate garage behind the showroom had three large drive-in bays where tires could be put onto vehicles. Franny ran a tight ship.

  Fresh morning coolness brushed her too-rouged cheeks. No sooner did she hear the click, click of the large lock than she sensed something wrong. Opening the door, she looked at the long countertop, the desks behind that, and her own office behind that. Everything looked to be in order. She checked the counter, the shelves underneath. Nothing amiss. She turned on each of the three computers, punched up information she considered sensitive. Nothing had been stolen that she could discern.

  Then she unlocked the door to her office. Again, everything was as she’d left it last night before meeting friends for an intimate dinner at Keswick Sports Club.

  Hands on hips, she breathed in. Why did she feel such unease? Turning on her mid-height heel, Franny walked out from her office to the front of the long polished counter, then opened the door into the garage just as Mackie Rogan hit the button to roll up one of the doors to a big bay. He turned to face the inside of the service area at the same time as Franny stepped into it.

  Both of their mouths fell open.

  “What the hell?” Mackie finally gasped.

  Franny hurried over to the area where the various brands of tires were kept, each clearly marked. “Goddammit! Goddammit to hell!” she cursed, a rarity.

  Mackie, now next to her, intoned as though reciting a litany, “Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3, empty. Continental ContiSportContact 2, empty. Yokohama ADVAN Neova AD07, empty. Michelin Pilot Sport PS2, empty. All of them.”

  Arms across her chest, trying to assess the damage, Franny nodded. “Whoever cleaned us out knew tires and was a high-performance freak. A real high-performance freak.”

  “Boss, this is terrible.” Mackie cast his eyes over their remaining inventory. “They left the Hankook Ventus, the Toyo Proxes, the Pirelli PZeroes, the Dunlops SPs. Damned good tires.”

  Swiftly calculating, Franny shook her head. “Mackie, I tote up about twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  He put his big hand on her thin shoulder. “Yep. They’ll be on the black market by tonight.”

  Not one to fade during a crisis, Franny patted his hand. “I’m glad you were the first one in the service area. You can keep your wits about you. Check the security system. I’ll call the sheriff. And, Mackie, let’s see who notices when they arrive for work.”

  Mackie’s dark eyes widened. “You don’t think one of the boys did it, do you?”

  “No. We have a good team. But what I’m curious about is how long it takes our guys to notice and what happens when they do. It teaches you about people.”

  Mackie nodded, as always impressed by Franny’s shrewdness. He briskly walked to the metal door that enclosed the expensive security system.

  Franny hurried back into the office to call the sheriff on a landline. Put it on a computer, call from your cellphone, and it was out in the world, never to be recalled. One could never control the new technology, despite loud government and corporate protests to the contrary. All this whirled through her mind as she dialed.

  No sooner had she spoken to the sheriff’s department than Mackie opened the door into the front area. He was a large man, and she recognized his heavy tread. Emerging from her office, she smiled at him. She trusted Mackie; they’d worked together since she founded the business in the mid-eighties, a time when it was not terribly easy for a divorced woman to get a business loan.

  “Our security system was disabled. Whoever did this knew about more than tires,” Mackie told Franny.

  “How’d they get the door open?”

  “I think with a tiny welding flame. Just sliced clean through the lock. I checked the regular door into the service area. M.O.”

  “Mackie, can I get you a drink?”

  He smiled. “No. Tell you what, it was a shock.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him imploringly for a moment. “Why do people steal? It takes so much knowledge, so much hard work. Wouldn’t it be easier to be upright?�
�

  He shrugged. “Greater profit, no taxes, I guess. And if this is a large operation … well,” he fumbled, “there must be some sort of protection if the thief is caught.”

  “Yes, yes. You always see things I don’t.” She flattered him, but it was the truth. “Stupid criminals act on impulse. Intelligent ones plan and protect one another.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too.” She smiled at him, remembering how young he was when she hired him, her first hire. “But we’ll get through it. We always do.”

  “We will,” he said with conviction.

  With Rick at the wheel on their way up Route 29, Cooper took the dispatcher’s call. The sheriff decided they could go to ReNu after this. He wanted to question the mechanics at ReNu himself, and Coop wanted to walk through the garage to see if she or anyone else had missed anything. Given the variables at a crime scene, especially murder, things could go overlooked. But Franny’s call required immediate attention.

  Once there, both sheriff and deputy reached the same conclusion that Mackie had: This was the work of professionals.

  Rick took notes while interviewing the other employees of the tire company as they arrived. Cooper listened intently. She was an excellent listener.

  Rick respected Franny and spoke plainly to her. “This is going on all over America. One of the biggest tire heists was a few months ago in Reno.”

  “Why there?” Franny motioned for the front-office girl to simply sit down when she walked into the scene. Isabelle, a bit frightened, did just that.

  Coop looked over at Isabelle and said, “No one was hurt. We just need to ask you and everyone a few questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the diminutive young woman replied.

  Rick leaned toward Franny. “These operations have big warehouses. Huge business. Cheap storage, dry conditions. They set up near a good airport so things can be easily shipped all over. It’s easier for some companies to use those huge storage units for inventory than to take up space at the factory or, worse, build.”

  After Rick and Coop left, Franny sat down to write a preliminary summary of her investigation so far. Never hurt to put it on paper. Making lists, checking inventory—tasks that often bored others—helped her think. As she pulled up her inventory on the computer, she reviewed how many computer systems she’d gone through since starting up. Then she recalled a squib she’d read in The Kiplinger Letter, saying that the number of small businesses started by women was growing 50 percent faster than the number of businesses started up by men. She was especially pleased that one of the fields booming with female ownership was construction.

  Franny felt no particular competitiveness against men, but she rejoiced when women succeeded in male-dominated fields. One thing life had taught Franny was that most reasonably intelligent men knew where their economic self-interest lay and put their energies into those businesses that would turn a profit.

  In a tiny way, she felt that young women wanting to steer their own ships was her little victory, too. Now, if she could just encourage women to take more risks, for Franny well knew that greater risks meant greater profits.

  Then she came back to the present. Seemed she had run risk enough in her youth. The funny thing was Franny, like most people, thought life would get easier as she got older. It didn’t. She just got better at handling the crises.

  He was a brilliant mechanic. Not that the other guys are bad, but they plug in the cars to the computers. They’re very dependent on technology. Walt was, too, but he had a feel. Computers don’t.”

  “How long had you known him?” Cooper asked.

  As she conducted the questioning, Rick sat in the squad car using his computer to get statistics on the splatter pattern of dashed brains. Information like that could be helpful in determining just where the assailant stood.

  Victor Gatzembizi leaned back in his comfortable office chair. “A long time, actually. He worked for a big Chrysler–Dodge–Jeep dealership in Richmond. When disaster struck Chrysler, he figured sooner or later he’d be fired, the dealership would close, or both. I hired him. Hadn’t opened the shop here yet, but I wasn’t going to let anyone that good go. As it was, I had this place opened three months after I hired him.”

  “No troubles?” Cooper also leaned back, then sat upright. She was tired and needed to stay sharp.

  “No.”

  “It would appear he wasn’t popular with the other men.”

  Victor’s dark eyebrows rose. “No one complained to me.”

  “Would it have done any good?”

  This caught the handsome forty-one-year-old man off guard, so he paused. “If the complaints piled up, had some commonality, I would have listened. Officer, you’ve probably not run a business.”

  “No.” She didn’t take offense.

  He smiled. “You get some people who like to work, take pride in their work. You get slackers and those you need to fire right off. But most men fall into the middle; they might like what they do well enough, but it’s all about that paycheck. They live for the weekends. Walt loved cars, loved engines, loved working on them. If anyone spoke badly of him to you, I’d be willing to bet there was a tinge of jealousy, resentment there—maybe because I favored him, made him the floor boss.”

  Cooper silently noted that none of the mechanics had mentioned this. “I see. I’m hoping you can help me, and these questions might seem tangential, but emotional relationships nine times out of ten can point us in the right direction to solving a crime. This one was brutal. A great deal of emotion may have been involved.”

  Victor grimaced. “I can’t imagine anyone out back”—he motioned with his head toward the rear of the building, as they sat in his well-appointed office—“hated him that much. And, I repeat, I heard nothing. You’d think I would have heard some grumbling. Kyle’s quick to pick up crap like that. If anything, he revels in it.”

  “Troublemaker?”

  Victor shook his head and laughed slightly. “No. Kyle’s young, and he’s one of those people who pounces on the negative.”

  Victor was right about that, Cooper thought to herself, but mostly what Kyle had pounced on was Victor himself. The young man, without launching a frontal attack, snidely characterized his boss to Cooper during questioning as a pompous rich ass fond of flashy cars, jewelry, and (he hinted) women, despite Victor’s marriage.

  “Have you ever suffered any kind of robbery here?” Coop asked.

  “You’d know.”

  “Not if it was only a slight imbalance in the till, not enough to call in our department. A muffler missing here and there. That kind of thing.”

  “No, I have honest people here. Although I do know that toilet paper and paper towels occasionally have gone missing, as well as far too many ReNu tablets and pens.” He shrugged. “That’s any business. Employees think they’re entitled to those items, especially since we do give out pens and tablets to customers. But it can add up quicker than they imagine. One year I had a stationery bill of three thousand some dollars. I let everyone know I was pissed.”

  “Would scare me,” she teased him.

  Coop, good at questioning, read people fast and accurately. Some needed to feel safe, others needed to be knocked down a peg, some feared that revealing information would cost them their jobs—and, depending on the information, it just might. Others feared physical reprisals, especially with certain types of murder, and Walt’s carried a hint of that. Anyone who would bash out someone’s brains with a tire iron either possessed a hair-trigger temper or didn’t much mind hurting someone. That could include anyone who got in the way while they covered up the first murder. Victor liked congeniality. Cooper provided that, and her good looks certainly assisted the process.

  He smiled at her mock fright. “Oh, you’ve dealt with a lot worse than myself, Deputy.”

  Her turn to laugh. “Mr. Gatzembizi—”

  “Call me Victor.”

  “Victor.” She waited a moment. “Have you received th
reats concerning your business?”

  “No.” A cautious note crept into his voice. “But ReNu is a relatively new firm, founded here in 2007, as you know. I also have shops in Richmond, Virginia Beach, Alexandria, and Norfolk.” He brightened. “Norfolk—all those sailors. The young ones get loaded on the weekends and it’s one fender bender after another. Perfect for me.” He grinned broadly.

  “No threats at all?”

  “You mean from a disgruntled customer or from another business? No. Well, this sounds like so much hype, but I don’t have disgruntled customers. I fix their cars. If there remains a problem, I do any further work gratis so they don’t have to keep dealing with their insurance companies. That’s where the real problems are. By the time the client gets to me, he or she has been exhausted by all the people they’ve had to talk to—the claims adjuster, et cetera. It’s a bit better if they deal locally. Tell you what, Officer, don’t get in an accident.”

  “I know that. You get a lot of business.”

  “There are a lot of accidents in Charlottesville. As you know, hey, anywhere there’s a college, there are plenty of accidents.”

  She flipped through her notebook. “The various insurance companies cite you as providing reasonable rates for repairs.”

  “Yes, I have a good relationship with all of them. And I can usually undercut other shops. I’m more efficient. It’s not rocket science.”

  “I see. You don’t think one of those other shops—let me put it this way, someone would try to harm your business?”

  “The way to harm my business would be to offer quality work cheaper than I do. It would be pretty stupid to kill my best mechanic. Better to steal him away, pay him more.”