AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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 theI can’t tell you my big dangerous mysterything. I don’t mind if you listenin, 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 Yamahaputt-puttdown 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 oldPink Panthermovies, 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.”
