Рита Браун - The Big Cat Nap

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.

H e 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 threats 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.”

“Yes, it would.” She again agreed with him.

“Officer, I’m a successful businessman in a difficult time. Really. Every time I turn around it’s a new law, a new ruling, a new tax. I hire good people, which is half of success. I’m always looking for better ways to provide service, and that isn’t always easy, especially given the materials cars are made out of now. Entire bumpers fall off. In the old days those bumpers were made of steel. Used to be pretty simple to repair carburetors. Fuel injection is a wonderful thing, but it’s more expensive when something goes wrong. If I undercut my competitors, it’s their own fault. But, still, to kill one of my people—I can’t believe it.”

Coop had let him ramble a bit. Often people revealed far more than they intended to if you let them go on. It wasn’t necessarily facts but a sense of the situation and a strong sense of who that speaker was.