Casey Daniels - Dead Man Talking

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” I caught my breath and apologized, grateful I didn’t have a full-scale mutiny on my hands. Theoretically, I suppose I deserved one. “I never should have suspected you. Not any of you. I never would have. But back when we found the coin, I didn’t know you as well. I’m sorry.”

“You think one of them rich ladies did it?” Reggie’s eyes glowed at the prospect.

“I think it’s a possibility. If they caught wind of the fact that we found something unusual at Jefferson Lamar’s grave, they might want to hide it. You know, so we couldn’t reveal it on the show. They’d know that would make our section look too interesting.”

“And they wouldn’t want us to look too smart, neither.” Sammi crossed her arms over her chest and puffed out a breath of annoyance. “They got a lot of damned nerve.”

“Well, we don’t know if they’re the ones who did it,” I cautioned. “We won’t know. Not until we can get a look in those picnic baskets. They bring them every day, and it’s logical that the coin might still be in the basket. It’s not like they would have taken it anywhere or sold it or anything. They just want to keep it away from us.”

Absalom rubbed his beefy hands together. “So what are we going to do?”

“Create a diversion, I suppose.” It was as much of a plan as I had. “If we can get them out of their section, somebody can sneak over there and take a look in those baskets.”

“And I got just the diversion.” Sammi stalked over to where I stood and raised her voice. It was as shrill as a train whistle and in the quiet of the afternoon, it carried plenty far. She propped her fists on her hips. “Say what? Say what? You know what you can do with these frickin’ maps of yours…” There was a stack of cemetery maps on a nearby headstone, and she picked them up and waited for her opportunity. The moment Greer, her cameraman, and all the members of Team One came running to see what the commotion was all about, she side-handed those maps across the section.

It was perfect, and I joined right in. What did we fight about?

I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter, anyway.

Sammi yelled, and I yelled right back. She screamed, and I screamed louder. We pointed fingers in each other’s faces. We snapped and scowled. We kept it up until Delmar slipped away and came back a couple minutes later, and when he did, there was a grin on his face. Just as I hoped, when Sammi and I stopped fighting, our audience disappeared. Delmar explained that he’d found the box exactly where we thought it would be, in one of the picnic baskets that belong to Team One. He handed it over, and I checked to be sure the coin was still inside it, then tucked it in my purse. After high fives all around, my team went home for the evening.

And it wasn’t until they were gone and I was going around picking up those maps Sammi tossed that I realized just how good all that yelling and screaming felt.

I guess I’d been pissed for a long time and I never even knew it.

Why?

Let me count the ways.

I was pissed at Sammi for being a royal pain, and specifically for ruining that new gold cotton tunic of mine and bruising my neck.

I was pissed at Quinn for not calling, and pissed at my parents for calling, especially my dad, who, as long as he was at it, left one message asking if everything was OK and another saying he really would like to see me one of these days.

I was pissed about being stuck restoring a cemetery when I should have been working on proving that an upstanding guy like Jefferson Lamar shouldn’t have had to die in prison while whoever framed him sat back to laugh about it.

While I was at it, I might as well admit that I was plenty pissed at the universe in general, too, for allowing a kid like Vera Blaine to get murdered in a dumpy motel while she was wearing jelly bracelets.

When he was young, Robert Oates was a tough-talking punk who made a name for himself on the Cleveland streets by stealing cars and overseeing a couple small-time heists. He spent the better part of his formative years in and out of a variety of boys’ homes, reform schools, and jails, and by the time he was twenty-four, he graduated to bigger and better things. He went out to Nevada, where he earned the Reno nickname, and worked as an enforcer for a variety of crime bosses. By all accounts, he had a vicious streak, and he added hard drinking, heavy gambling, and high living to his resume. It’s no surprise that he made plenty of enemies, or that he was forced to come back to the city of his birth when things got a little too hot for him out west.

By the time he masterminded the bank job that got him sent to Central State, he was middle-aged and desperate for a big score. The bomb he said he had when he stuck up that bank was his idea of a joke. Nobody was laughing.

All this information I’d found online about Reno Bob went through my head as I drove through the suburbs west of Cleveland, looking for the address he had given me when we talked on the phone. I found it, finally, down a quiet side street in Parma, a blue-collar sort of place filled with mom-and-pop stores, churches, bars, and tiny homes.

Reno’s house was a small, neat bungalow with white aluminum siding, blue shutters, and a shade tree on the front lawn. He told me that if I rang the bell-I did-and he didn’t answer-he didn’t-he’d be over at the park across the street, so I moved my car over there, parked in a newly blacktopped lot, and walked past a wooden swing set and a sandbox where someone had left a flattened spare tire.

I’d like to say I wasn’t nervous, but let’s be frank: I’d heard so many bad things about Reno and his temper, my knees were knocking together. They kept it up, too, right until I saw that the only other person in the park was a tiny old man wearing baggy denim shorts, a green and yellow Hawaiian print shirt, and enormous tortoise-shell glasses. Temper or not, if this was Reno Bob, I knew I could take him.

He didn’t look at me when I walked up to him. He was busy working on the canvas he had set up on an easel in front of him.

He was painting a picture of the maple tree about thirty feet from where we stood. The painting included the small lake beyond and the couple ducks and Canada geese that floated by. Art history degree aside, I’m not an expert, but I knew the painting was better than just good, even though the old guy’s hands shook with every stroke.

I waited until he finished adding the last bits of green to the leaves on the tree. “Reno? I’m Pepper.”

“Nobody’s called me Reno in a long time.” When he finally turned to look at me, I saw that his face was as lined as an old blanket. Reno’s arms were stick-skinny and his knees were knobby. He was wearing a brand-spanking-new pair of Nikes that were so clean and white, they made my eyes hurt. “You said you wanted to see me. You didn’t say what you wanted.”

Of course, I expected him to ask-that was the whole point-but I shrugged like I wasn’t sure. “I’ll bet plenty of people want to meet you and talk to you.”

“About the old days?” Reno wiped his hands on a rag he pulled out of his pocket and got to work cleaning up his painting supplies. “Not so much anymore. I used to have a following, you know.”

I saw my opportunity and jumped on it. “Back when you tried to rob that bank with the bomb.” I nodded. “I hear back then, you were like a god or something.”

Behind his glasses, Reno’s eyes glittered. “They all wanted to interview me, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace and even that other guy, that Geraldo. Oh yeah!” He lifted the canvas off the easel. It was almost as big as him, but he didn’t have any trouble slipping it into a wooden carrier. “I was something, all right. They all came down to Central State to talk to me. Even got a couple fellows visiting from Hollywood. They wanted to make a movie about me, you know.”