Chris Grabenstein - Ring Toss

I jump in again: “The other one!”

He shrugs. “Couple hundred bucks, I guess. Maybe a thousand.”

“Guess again,” says Ceepak.

“Really?”

Ceepak nods. “A similar heart-shaped diamond weighing two carats and of comparable color and clarity has a list price of $28,300 on the Tiffany web site.”

Ceepak. The man does his homework.

“Dude!” is all Billy says. Then he says it again. “Dude!”

Ceepak looks at me. “Danny?” He head-bobs left, indicating we should leave.

Because Billy is obviously way too dumb to realize that he snagged his hair on close to thirty thousand dollars last night.

Billy attacks the keys of his cell phone with blazing thumbs, no doubt texting all his dudes and brohs to let them know that, as soon as he’s married, he’s going to hock his wife’s heirloom and buy a new truck.

It’s time for Ceepak and me to talk to the sisters.

Donna and Jackie DePinna are parked poolside with their kids, about six of them, even though it seems like more because the dark-haired terrors are midget-sized maniacs who enjoy screaming, splashing all of Becca’s water out of the pool, and bopping each other on the butt with tubular floatation devices.

“Knock it off, Little Tony,” says Jackie.

“Is Tony your son?” asks Donna.

“Fine. You tell him.”

“He’s a boy. He needs to burn off energy.”

“Like your husband?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. But I saw how he was looking at that waitress last night.”

“What waitress?”

“At Pinky’s Shrimp. The one with the big bazoombas.”

Donna straightens up in her chair. “He doesn’t have to leave home if we wants to look at that.”

“He does if he wants to see real ones.”

A girl screams. Somebody chokes.

“Hey, little Tony! Cut that out. Don’t drown your cousin. Come over here and drown your aunt.”

Ceepak clears his throat. “Ladies?”

Jackie slides her ski-goggle-sized sunglasses down her nose, squints at us over the top of the frames. “What?”

“We need to ask you both a few questions.”

Donna coyly pulls her knees up to her chest. Her bathing suit top sloshes the way a waterbed does when you sit on it. “Are you two trying to find our baby sister’s ring?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Ceepak.

Jackie shakes her shaggy Troll hair. “Connie is so immature. She always loses everything.”

Ceepak turns to Donna. “Your sister mentioned that she saw your husband, Thomas….”

“Tommy. No one calls him Thomas, only his mother and only when she’s mad at him.”

“Like when he’s leering at eighteen year-old waitresses with enormous chumbawumbas,” snipes Jackie.

Donna twirls in her recliner. “Your husband’s no saint. He was staring at her rib bumpers, too!”

“Prove it.”

“What? You think I snapped pictures of him drooling in his shrimp basket?”

“Ladies?” Ceepak sounds like the referee at the Roller Derby. “Your sister Connie tells us she saw Tommy on the second floor terrace right before she discovered that her ring had gone missing. He was carrying an ice chest.”

“Because the ice machine upstairs was out of ice so he had to come down here and that machine was out of ice, too.”

“Our husbands both went fishing with our father,” says Jackie. “Like always, the men abandoned us. Went off to have their fun, left us here to deal with the mess.” She flicks her hands toward the assorted children. “So when exactly do we get our vacation, huh?”

“Mommy?” a girl screams from the pool.

“What?” Donna screams back.

“I think Joey pooped his pants.”

“So sniff his diaper.”

“Gross.”

“I didn’t poop,” hollers a boy in Sponge Bob water wings. “I just peed.”

Now Donna waves her hand dismissively. “He just peed.” No big deal.

I’m wondering how much chlorine Becca has to dump into her swimming pool on a daily basis to stop it from turning into a crystal blue community cesspool.

“Ladies?” says Ceepak, trying to regain their attention.

But then a girl with a headless baby doll starts screaming while this boy runs around the pool holding the hairy little plastic head in his hand.

“No running!” shouts Ceepak.

“Are you telling my children what to do?” snaps Jackie.

“The tile is wet. He could slip.”

Right on cue, the boy slips. Bangs his head on the concrete.

Now he’s bawling, too.

Ceepak snaps open a cargo pocket on his pants leg, whips out a miniature first aid kit. He rushes to the howling boy.

“Minor abrasion,” he announces, patting the wound with gauze. “Nothing serious.”

“Ooowww!” the boy bellows anyhow, turning on the waterworks.

I’m kneeling beside Ceepak. The girl with the headless doll is wailing up a storm and then the other girl, the one splashing like a paddle wheel in the pool, makes an announcement: “It is too poop! Joey pooped his pants!”

“Man,” I mumble. “It’s a good thing Mr. Ryan isn’t out here — he’d be calling in another complaint.”

Ceepak looks up from the kid’s minor cut. “Come again?”

“Ryan. The guy who called us out here the first time.”

Ceepak leans back. Sits on his heels. “Of course.”

He has this look in his eye. My mindless mumbling has, apparently, helped his big brain make some brilliant deduction. It’s why we make a good team. I mumble. He cracks the case.

But first he examines the boy’s head wound one last time. “The bleeding has been staunched. You should not require stitches. Have your mother affix this Band-aid and stay out of the pool for the remainder of the day.”

“Okay,” the kid says. “Can I swim in the ocean?”

“Negative. Come on, Danny. We need to talk to Becca.”

“About the ring?”

He shakes his head. “Mr. Ryan.

Becca hands Ceepak a sheet of paper.

“That’s a copy of his driver’s license. My dad makes me Xerox the license of whoever is charging the room to their credit card.”

“Might I borrow your fax machine?” says Ceepak.

“Sure. Where do you want to send it?”

Ceepak jots down a phone number on a Mussel Beach message pad. “Denise Diego. SHPD.”

Diego is the Sea Haven Police Department’s resident computer geek. She can search a data base like nobody’s business.

“Kindly include this message,” Ceepak says as he rips off the top sheet with the number on it and starts writing out a note full of instructions. “I’m asking her to run Mr. Ryan’s driver’s license through LEADS — the Law Enforcement Automated Data System — to ascertain if Sean Ryan is a known alias for any individual with a criminal record.”

“Alias?” I say. “Who do you think Ryan really is?”

“Someone else,” is all Ceepak offers because, I can tell, the hamster wheels inside his head are spinning like crazy. He hands Becca the note. She tapes it to the photocopy of the driver’s license, feeds the sheet into her fax machine, and punches in the number for the SHPD machine.

“When did Mr. Ryan check out?” Ceepak asks as the fax makes that Darth Vader static noise to signal that the connection has been made.

“First thing Sunday morning. I guess he was mad that we didn’t evict the DePinnas on Saturday night, like he wanted us to.”

“And when did he check in?”

“Last Friday,” says Becca. “Around one or two in the afternoon.”

“When we were with you last Saturday, you called Mr. Ryan a ‘walk-in.’”

“That’s right. He didn’t have a reservation, just showed up in the office. Fortunately, I had a vacancy. The people in 202 had to go home early. Their daughter back in Brooklyn was having a baby. Early.”