Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

Bond drinks a Bradford martini, shaken, not stirred. Some shit. Anyway, I’m going to tell him to leave the lady in peace, when I see she’s liking it. She’s laughing like she thinks he’s cute. ‘Who would have told me,’ she says, ‘I was gonna come into a bar in the Bronx and meet a guy who’s an expert on cocktails?’”

I reached in my pocket and pulled out the picture of Tamara Gunthersen. “This the woman?”

He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. “Nah. This chick had black hair cut short and green eyes. That’s the girl next door, cute, nice. But this was a sophisticated woman, smart. She had class, you understand me? She sounded like Deep South, Louisiana, Alabama, something like that. With a real drawl, you know?”

“So what makes you think he saw her again?”

He looked at me with wide eyes and spread his hands. “They leave together!”

Dehan was incredulous and laughed. “They left together?”

“Si, hombre! She’s tellin’ him about her car. Is a classic Mustang, he should see it. Also she is a little scared in this neighborhood alone. And she ask him why he don’t go with her. So they go out together. An’ that is the last time I ever see Danny Schultz. They found his body next morning.” He gestured with his hand. For a moment he looked mad, like it was all wrong and that shouldn’t have happened to Danny. “Twenty meters from here! In the yard next door. Shot through the heart.”

Dehan was shaking her head. “Son of a gun…”

Pepe looked at me for a long moment. “You know, it don’t make a lot of sense.”

I nodded. “I agree, Pepe. It doesn’t. Whichever way you look at it, it doesn’t make sense.”

“But the cops weren’t interested, John. Is just Danny. Who’s gonna miss Danny? So he got shot; he probably deserved it. You know what Chavez says to me? He probably tried to rape her. How can you write off a guy’s life because of what he probably would of done?”

“You can’t.” I threw some coins on the counter. “Thanks, Pepe. Take it easy.”

“Yeah, you too, John, Carmen.”

In the car, Dehan said, “I am not even going to try.”

I nodded as I fired up the engine. “I agree. I need a shower and a good sleep. We’ll come at it fresh in the morning.”

“Who the fuck is this woman now? Every time a door opens, it doesn’t lead us closer to an answer; it lets in another character to make the damn case even more confusing!”

“We’ll dig out Danny’s case. It must be in the cold cases file. We’ll get the lab to compare the two slugs.”

“Steve and Danny?”

I nodded. “We need to get to Geronimo.”

“And Tammy.”

I looked at her. She was right.

I dropped her at her apartment, and she hesitated a moment before getting out. She smiled suddenly. “It’s been fun. We should do it again sometime.”

I laughed out loud. “You’re some kind of crazy, Dehan.”

The smile faded a little. “I mean what I said. If you ever need to talk…”

I punched her gently on the shoulder. “Okay, partner. Good to know.”

As I drove back toward Morris Park and Haight Avenue, I thought about Geronimo dos Santos and Tamara Gunthersen. They were the linchpins in the case. Everything hung on those two individuals. They were the dual keys to understanding the case.

And we knew next to nothing about dos Santos, but we had a superabundance of information about Tamara. Yet as we had discovered this evening, all that information was as good as useless, because the bottom line was, we still knew nothing about her. All the information we had was smoke.

Was she a ruthless sociopath? Or did she have good reason to kill Steve? Was it love that took her running back to him? Or was it some other, darker reason? Was she a victim, or was she a predator, preying on the people around her?

I thought of her house, her books, her scrapbook, her photograph. There was nothing there. In fact, it was the absence of any personality that was most striking about the house. I remembered Iago in Othello: “I am not what I am…”

And Geronimo, about whom we knew, what, exactly? That he was supposedly a Jesuit, that he was supposedly a collector of rare books, that he might be Portuguese or Spanish. That nobody that we knew, aside from Duffy, had ever laid eyes on him.

Which of the two was the most anonymous? Which, the most deeply cloaked in shadows? What did they want? What was their motivation? What was their purpose? Were they working together, or were they enemies?

And then, who was this southern belle, with the black hair and the green eyes, who had hunted down Danny Schultz and killed him for no apparent reason? Was she working for Geronimo dos Santos?

I pulled in outside my front door and sat drumming my fingers on the wheel. There was only one person I could think of who could answer those questions for me.

Baxter.

It was time to pay Baxter another visit. I was going to shake his tree and see which way he jumped.

Fourteen

I had a late breakfast of toast and coffee and called Frank at nine to ask him to make the ballistics comparison between the slug that killed Steve and the slug that killed Danny Schultz. Then I picked Dehan up outside her apartment.

“You got plans for this morning?” she said, as she slammed the door.

“Yeah, I talked to Frank about the ballistics comparison. Now I want to go and shake Baxter’s cage. Why?”

“I was going to say, we need to go shake Baxter’s cage.”

I smiled and pulled away. “After we talk to him, I want you to get