The Dead of Winter (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  “Does Diane live in Denver?”

  “No. San Diego. She and her children have been staying with Angela for the past few days, but I believe they’re flying home tonight.”

  “Could Stephanie be staying at her sister’s house?”

  “Dear God, no,” he said. “Diane wouldn’t keep that a secret from her mother. Especially not now.”

  I tended to agree. Still …

  “Do you have Diane’s address?”

  “I believe I do. If you’ll excuse me.”

  He stood and left the room.

  For a few minutes I was alone. My eyes were drawn to the opposite wall and its large wooden crucified Jesus. It reminded me of a time as a kid when my parents—particularly my mother, God rest her soul—had placed me in a parochial school. The older kids told us snotnoses that if the nuns got mad at us, that’s what would happen—crucifixion. Barely two weeks later I’d gotten my homeroom nun so angry that she took me to the monsignor. He’d left me in a room similar to this one. I’d sat trembling, waiting for him to return with the nails.

  Father Carbone returned with a slip of paper. I stood to take it. He didn’t sit down, so neither did I.

  “Diane Eastbridge,” I read.

  “Her married name. Although I’m afraid she’s divorced.”

  I put the paper away. “Father, some of Stephanie’s teachers told me she seems different from last year. Did you notice anything like that?”

  “Different? I don’t know what you mean.”

  His eyes moved away from mine for an instant. Some priests make poor liars.

  “Different in any way,” I said. “Apparently her attitude seemed to change between spring and fall. During summer vacation.”

  His face had become sad. He sat down. So did I.

  “There is something, isn’t there?” I asked. “Something you know about Stephanie.”

  He nodded. “Stephanie came to me about six months ago, the end of May or the first of June. She was deeply troubled. It was something she was afraid to discuss with her parents.”

  I waited.

  “You have to understand, Mr. Lomax, she came to me in confession. I am bound by an oath of silence.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  He gave me a pained look.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I meant no disrespect. But if it could lead me to where Stephanie is …”

  “It can’t,” he said firmly. “Besides, the trouble has … passed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Stephanie told me. This was early in September.”

  “And this ‘trouble’ changed her?”

  “It changed her profoundly. That and …” He looked uneasy. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lomax. I can’t say any more.”

  “Father Carbone, if you could only—”

  He stood abruptly.

  “Mr. Lomax, please. I’m as concerned about Stephanie’s well-being as you are. Perhaps more so—I’ve known her all her life. But I cannot, I will not, break the seal of the confessional. In any case, what she told me during her confession could have no bearing on her present whereabouts. Trust me. If I had any idea where she was, I’d bring her home to her mother myself.”

  There was nothing more to say. He showed me to the door.

  When I stepped out on the porch, he asked, “Are you assisting the police in finding Joseph’s murderer?”

  I turned to face him. “No, I’m not.”

  He nodded, his jaws clenched.

  “When he’s finally caught,” he said with suppressed fury, “I pray to God his justice will be swift and terrible.”

  He softly closed the door.

  CHAPTER 5

  I FIGURED I NOW had three leads, none of them great.

  There was the sister, Diane, in San Diego. Although I considered it unlikely that Stephanie was staying with her, I had to be sure. I’d have to go there. Besides, maybe Diane could shed some light on the “trouble” that her sister had had during the summer.

  There was the hunk, Ken, at the Lion’s Lair. It was possible that he knew things about Stephanie that her family did not. I’d find out tonight.

  There was the business partner, Sal the barber.

  Salvatore Mangieri had been on the list of names Bellano had given me. He’d caught my attention because he was one of the last people to have seen Stephanie before she’d disappeared. I wondered how he was getting along these days, cutting hair and making book all by himself. Probably well. After all, now he didn’t have to share the profits with Bellano.

  I checked my hair in the rearview mirror. Dark brown and not too long. But I could do with a trim.

  Bellano’s shop was on Thirty-second Avenue near Lowell Boulevard. It was a barbershop. Not a hair boutique.

  There were no hanging plants or FM music or trendy magazines in wicker baskets. There was no chilled Chablis in the refrigerator. There was no refrigerator.

  And there were no women.

  It wasn’t that Joseph and Sal were chauvinists—well, maybe a bit. It was that neither of them knew a damn thing about cutting women’s hair. Much less perms, styles, or tints.

  A barbershop.

  In the middle of the black-and-white tiled floor were two chairs of chrome and red leather, with pump handles and dangling razor strops. A shelf stretched behind the chairs. It was crowded with colorful bottles, narrow necked and smelling of bay rum and witch hazel. Against the opposite wall was a long padded bench with smudged chrome legs. Beside it squatted a barrel-sized floor-model ashtray that stunk of dead cigars. A battered table rested in the corner of the room, its top littered with yellowed copies of the Police Gazette and Sports Illustrated. There was a TV on a shelf near the ceiling. It had a squashed picture and no sound.

  When I walked in, a bell jangled over my head. The mirrors on opposing walls reflected my image a thousand times.

  Sal was working on a guy in his chair. The other chair was covered with a white sheet.

  Sal nodded at me. I sat on the bench and waited my turn.

  When it finally came, Sal had to lower the chair a few inches to get to my head. I was big, and Sal was not. He was in his sixties, with clear blue eyes and thick white hair combed up in front and parted straight and sharp on the side.

  “Just a trim,” I told him. In a shop like this you don’t go into details. You say “trim” or you say nothing at all.

  Sal wrapped a tissue-paper collar around my neck and covered me with a blue pin-striped sheet. Then he shook a faint-smelling liquid—maybe just water in a tainted bottle—on my head and rubbed it in with blunt, hard fingers, making me nod back and forth. Sal loved his work. When he was done, he combed it all straight down, jabbing my ears with the comb. Then he started snipping away with long, cold narrow-bladed scissors.

  “My name is Jacob Lomax,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you.” Snip snip.

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “Oh?” Snip.

  “I was hired by Joseph the day before he died.”

  No snip. “Hired?”

  “To find Stephanie.”

  “Has she turned up?”

  “Not yet. I was hoping you could tell me something about her that would help.”

  “Me?” Snip snip snip. “I don’t know hardly anything about her. I don’t think she ever came in here before last Friday. At least not since she was a little girl. The only other times I ever saw her was Christmases. Over at Joe and Ange’s.”

  “You saw her, though, the day she disappeared.”

  “Sure, like I said, last Friday.” Snip. “Right after Joe got himself arrested.” Arrested was a venereal disease to Sal.

  “Can you tell me what happened that day?”

  “Sure I can. I was here, wasn’t I?”

  I waited. Sal snipped a few more hairs. When he spoke again, his tone had softened.

  “You’re still looking for little Steph, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it you want to kn
ow?”

  “Just tell me everything that happened that day.”

  Snip. “Oops, damn.” He rubbed the back of my neck with his knuckles. “Couple of days it’ll grow back, you won’t even notice. Let’s see, Friday we hadn’t been open more than twenty minutes when in come the cops. They took Joe away without even letting him finish the guy he’s got in the chair. Can you imagine that? I mean, I gotta finish the guy, and I was already busy as hell, it being Friday, which is our second busiest day, next to Saturday.”

  “What time did Bellano get back?”

  “I’m getting to that part, okay?” Sal continued his work—comb, snip, comb, snip snip—now cutting each hair about a thousandth of a millimeter.

  “Like I was saying, it’s real crowded and Joe’s not here and everyone’s asking about him. Some of them aren’t so much bothered that he’s in jail; they’re bothered that they can’t place a bet.”

  “Couldn’t you take care of that?”

  Sal stopped, his scissors and comb poised behind my head. We faced each other in the mirror across the room.

  “I’m a barber, pal,” he said heatedly. “Not a goddamn bookie.”

  I believed him. I wondered, though, how he’d managed to work with a man who was a bookie. For twenty years, no less. And all the while holding back his anger and not blowing up.

  Blowing up?

  “When did Bellano get back here?”

  “Noon,” he said, still mad. He laid the scissors along the bottom of my sideburns and snipped, jabbing the point into my temple. Thanks, Sal.

  “When he came in, it was like he was a hero or something,” Sal said bitterly. “Everybody was having a good laugh about it, especially Joe. Until Stephanie came in.”

  “What time was that?”

  He jabbed my other temple to even things out.

  “Around one, I guess. Anyhow, she came in upset as hell. She was crying and yelling all at once. I guess Joe had never seen her like that, because his mouth was hanging open. Then he was smiling like he thought it was a joke or something. But he stopped smiling when she didn’t let up.”

  “What exactly did she say?”

  “She was going on about how she’d always believed he was strong and pure and good, and all the time he’d been betraying her trust. She said he was nothing but a criminal, just like the others.”

  “The others? What others?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Anyhow, Stephanie said she was disgusted that he’d been raising a family on illegal money and that he’d been lying to her and that he was a fraud, and on and on. Joe was trying to calm her down, but it was no good. Then Stephanie said something like ‘I don’t want anything you’ve paid for with your dirty gambling money, especially not my car,’ and she threw her keys at Joe. They landed behind the bottles back here. A couple of guys laughed at that, which I think made Joe mad. Then she says something which even makes me mad. She says, ‘I hope all of you end up in prison, because that’s where you belong.’”

  “All of you?”

  “I think she meant Joe and me and the customers.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because she figured everybody in there must be in there to bet on games.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I don’t even gamble,” he said with feeling. “I don’t believe in it.”

  “Right. So Stephanie said she hoped you all went to prison. Then what, she ran out?”

  “Well, not right away,” Sal said. He put down his scissors and pulled his comb through my hair a few times. Finished.

  “Did something else happen?”

  “Not exactly happen. It was Stephanie. All of a sudden she looked scared to death.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Someone in the shop, what else?” Sal whipped off my paper collar, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  “Wait a minute. You said she came in upset and angry—”

  “And crying.”

  “And crying. And she and Joseph were talking back and forth and—”

  “Mostly she was yelling and blubbering and he was talking, trying to calm her down.”

  “And suddenly she’s scared of someone in the shop?”

  “See, it was like she didn’t even see anyone in the shop when she first came in. As far as she was concerned, it was just her and her father. Then when she said this ‘prison’ business, she kind of looked around. Then she looked scared. Then she ran out.”

  Sal brushed hairs from my neck with a whisk.

  “Did anyone else notice her being afraid?”

  “Joe did. Of course, he figured she was scared of him. He said something like ‘Did you see that? She finally realized what she was saying to her father. She’ll be apologizing to me tonight, you wait and see.’”

  “But you don’t think it was Joseph that frightened her.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  He whipped off the sheet and shook hairs onto the floor. Then he used his whisk on me again.

  “Because that’s not how she acted. She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the customers. Each one of them, face-to-face. Some more than once. Something about them scared her bad. At least one of them did.”

  Sal put aside the whisk and got his push broom and started cleaning up around the chair. I stood and dug out a few bills. In spite of Sal’s care, hair slivers had fallen down my neck. They itched.

  “Who was in here, do you remember?”

  “Probably,” he said. He rested his chin on the end of the broom handle and stared at the ceiling. “I was cutting Stan Fowler, and Joe was cutting, let’s see, I can picture his face, but I can’t think of his name. And—”

  “Stan Fowler, the appliance guy?”

  “That’s him. And there were two customers sitting on the bench. One was Gary Rivers. The Gary Rivers. And the other was a”—Sal glanced at the door, then lowered his voice—“a two-bit punk named Johnny Toes Burke.”

  “You’re certain those were the customers?”

  “Positive. When Stephanie first came in, we were all looking around at each other, trying to figure out what was going on.”

  “Who was the fourth guy, the one in Bellano’s chair?”

  “I’ve seen him a hundred times. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  I gave Sal a card.

  “When you remember him, give me a call.”

  He looked at both sides of the card, then slipped it in his breast pocket.

  “I’m telling you, she was scared,” Sal said. “Scared to death.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I DROVE HOME.

  I’d been wearing my dark blue suit since Bellano’s funeral this morning, and the shirt had gone limp. And itchy from tiny hairs. I showered, put on slacks and a sweater, and opened a Labatt’s.

  Stephanie had run away, all right, but perhaps not from her father. Not according to Sal. She’d been scared off by someone in the barbershop. Stan Fowler or Gary Rivers or Johnny Toes Burke or the fourth customer, presently unknown. Sal didn’t know which one had frightened her. Had Bellano known? Somehow I doubted it, or else he would’ve told me.

  And maybe it wasn’t just one man Stephanie’d run from. Maybe it was all of them together, or some combination of the four. I knew a little about the three Sal had named. None of them seemed too scary. At least not to me. One or more of them, though, had scared the hell out of Stephanie.

  Perhaps that was why she hadn’t returned after her father’s death. She was still scared. Hiding. Perhaps with good reason.

  For now, though, I was more concerned with where she’d run than why. I hoped Ken, the hunk, could give me a lead on that.

  First, though, food.

  I hadn’t eaten since my sack lunch with Rachel Wynn. I fixed a sandwich with slices of ham, cheddar, and red onion, also some salsa. It went in the oven, and I waited for the cheese to melt. Maybe I should invest in a microwave. It would be faster. Although this way I had time to drink another beer
before dinner.

  The Lion’s Lair was a few miles west of Loretto Heights, on Wadsworth Boulevard near Hampden Avenue.

  It was middle-class pretentious glitz. You could tell by the parking lot. Most of the cars had X’s or Z’s in their last names.

  There was a bouncer at the door. He didn’t look like Tom Cruise, though, so he probably wasn’t the guy Stacey O’Connor had described to me. This guy looked more like Deane Cruz, a guy I’d gone to college with. Deane had been a defensive lineman—strong as a steer and nearly as smart. This bouncer was probably smarter, though, because he didn’t have to check my ID to tell I was old enough to drink.

  I walked into smoke and dim lights and raucous sounds.

  There were as many women as men filling the tables and crowding the bar and rustling around on the small dance floor to some unidentifiable taped noises. It seemed pretty crowded for a Thursday night. Or maybe I was just being old-fashioned. The average age, not counting me, was mid-twenties.

  I found an empty stool at the bar next to a couple of college-age girls. I ordered a beer in a bottle. When the bartender brought it, I asked him if Ken was here tonight.

  “Ken who?” He knew eighty or ninety Kens.

  He was a big guy wearing a short-sleeve white shirt and a tie. From the looks of his arms he spent a lot of time in the weight room. In fact, he looked a bit like Janet Cruz, Deane Cruz’s older sister, who’d attended college with me and Deane and who’d been voted, though not to her knowledge, or Deane’s, either, to be the ugliest person on campus, men included.

  “That’s the funny thing,” I said. “I don’t remember his last name. A guy who makes the women sigh. He works as a bouncer sometimes. I think he owns a piece of the place.”

  “Ken Hausom.”

  “That’s him. Is he here?”

  “Look around.”

  “That’s another funny thing,” I said. “I’ve never met him.”

  He cocked his head and looked at me with one eye. “What do you want him for?”

  “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “Well, okay. I’m from NASA, and we want to hire some of the geniuses he’s got working here.”

  He blinked once. Then his jaw muscles bunched up. He turned and stomped toward the end of the bar, right past a pair of waitresses waiting at the station.