Crime and Retribution Read online

  “Though you could always play with them,” said Dalton. “So there’s that.”

  “Eww,” said Lucien. “You’ve got such a dirty mind, Dalton!”

  “No, I mean you could play with your own boobs. Like, you don’t need to play with someone else’s boobs, see? Like, they’re right there.” He frowned, apparently having trouble expressing exactly what he meant.

  “You’re a perv, Dalton,” said Brice. “Plain and simple.”

  “Don’t use those words at the dinner table,” said Grandma.

  “But he is! Why would he want to play with his brother’s boobs?!”

  “I don’t want to play with Lucien’s boobs!” Dalton cried. “Eww!”

  “Can you please stop talking about Lucien’s boobs!” Grandma snapped.

  “Dalton made a boo-boo,” Calvin muttered, to much hilarity from Brice.

  “So how’s the investigation going?” asked Lucien, ladling more veggies onto his plate.

  “It’s not,” said Calvin. “We’ve got plenty of suspects, just nothing concrete.”

  “No clues?” asked Rodrick, who was teasing Jerome. The dog was stretched out on the floor next to him, hoping some goodies would drop down from the table, which they invariably did.

  “Not a single one,” I said. “Though, like Calvin said, lots of suspects.”

  “Maybe we need to pay them a visit,” said Brice. “Like, check them out.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “We just interviewed them all.”

  “I mean, pay them a visit.” He glanced at Calvin. “Didn’t you tell her?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Calvin. “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “Sounds to me like it is,” said Brice.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  “As agents, we make house calls,” said Brice. “Check out the suspects.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, in case he hadn’t heard me the first time. “That’s what we’ve been doing these past two days.”

  Brice laughed. “No, you interviewed them. I’m talking about making a house call. Where they don’t know you’re there.”

  I stared at him, my fork hovering in the vicinity of my mouth. I’d just speared a potato onto the tines, and my mouth was open, and not just in anticipation of the potato. “I don’t get it,” I finally admitted, popping in the potato.

  “We’re agents, which means we’ve been given special powers to carry out these investigations,” Calvin explained. “In other words, we can snoop around our suspects’ homes without them ever knowing we were even there.”

  “We can make ourselves invisible?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat.

  “Yeah, not exactly,” said Calvin. “Technically we’re not invisible.”

  “But nobody can see us,” said Dalton. “Which is kinda the same thing.”

  “It’s not,” said Calvin. “They can’t see us, but that doesn’t make us invisible.”

  “Boys, not this discussion again,” Grandma admonished. She gave me an encouraging smile. “For all intents and purposes, you can make yourself invisible.”

  “Cool!” I cried.

  “Way cool!” Rodrick echoed.

  “Uh-oh,” said Brice, glancing down at Rodrick. “You were not supposed to know that, buddy. At least not for another couple of years.”

  “Can I make myself invisible right now? I want to check out Mrs. Gauntlet’s house again!”

  “No, you can’t,” Grandma snapped. “And after what you did to Mrs. Rinsky, you’re going to bed straight after dinner.”

  “What, no TV?” he cried, his face a mask of indignation.

  “No TV for a week! Do you know Mrs. Rinsky could have gotten food poisoning? What did you put in that cake anyway?”

  “Pee,” said Calvin.

  “What?!” Grandma cried.

  “Tattletale,” Rodrick said with an angry look at his brother.

  “You put pee in Mrs. Rinsky’s birthday cake? Are you mad?”

  “Jake and I were just trying to figure out if she’s a witch.”

  “What?!”

  “She keeps talking to herself! It’s a clear sign she’s a witch! The pee was just to expose her to the rest of the world!”

  “Go to your room! Right now! When the school called me and said Mrs. Rinsky complained her cake had a funny taste, I didn’t realize just how funny!”

  “Very funny!” Rodrick cried, and ran from the table, cackling wildly.

  “Oh, that boy is going to drive me crazy one of these days!” Grandma said, heaving up her hands in agony.

  “You said that about all of us,” Brice reminded her. “And you’re not crazy yet.”

  “Yet being the operative word,” Calvin muttered, tongue in cheek.

  “You shouldn’t discuss agent business in front of him,” said Lucien. “He might blab to his friends and then where would we be? In deep doo-doo.”

  “I’ll wipe his mind again,” said Calvin.

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” said Grandma. “One more mind-wipe and that boy won’t have a mind left!”

  “Mind-wipe?” I asked. “What’s a mind-wipe?” They all stared at me, and it dawned on me. “You wiped my mind?”

  “Of course,” said Calvin. “We couldn’t have you turn tattletale on us, could we?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Lucien. “We only wiped the stuff you weren’t supposed to know. Your brain is quite unaffected.”

  “More or less,” said Dalton with a quiet chuckle.

  “Nice,” I said. “My own brothers wiping my memory. So when was the last time you did this?”

  “The week before you turned eighteen,” said Calvin. “You accidentally overheard me and Dalton discuss a case, so we wiped the details from your mind.”

  “It’s all for the best, honey,” said Grandma. “Your brothers didn’t want to burden you with a lot of gruesome stuff you didn’t need to know.”

  “So are we paying a house call or not?” asked Brice, wiping his lips.

  “I guess we are,” said Calvin cheerfully.

  “You can’t,” I said. “You have a date with Marelda, remember?”

  “She canceled,” said Calvin. “Guess she had second thoughts.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” I muttered.

  “Yay,” said Dalton. “I love house calls.”

  “No snooping in the freezer, though, Dalton,” said Calvin.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Last time you ate an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s.”

  “I was just checking for clues.”

  “At the bottom of a tub of ice cream?”

  “You never know where they might have buried the murder weapon.”

  “Behave yourselves, boys,” said Grandma. “You, too, Saffron.”

  “Always,” I said, suddenly feeling excited. I was starting to get the impression there was a lot about this karma agent thing I didn’t know. And I’d suddenly gotten the bright idea I might try this mind-wipe thing on Logan. I could simply wipe this entire kissing episode from his mind. Heck, maybe I could wipe our entire history from his mind. Start from scratch.

  “And no wiping the minds of non-family members,” Grandma said, directing a keen look at me. “And definitely not members of the Happy Bays Police Department.”

  All eyes turned to me, and I said, “Oh, come on!” They all laughed. Except for Jerome, who yawned widely, offering us a different odor than his usual blend, though just as foul.

  Chapter 29

  It was decided that we’d pay a visit to the homes of the suspects without an alibi first. And then, since we were out and about anyway, the suspects with iffy alibis were added to the list. And so it was that we set to pay a house call to Emil and Abigail Piney, as they’d handily supplied each other with an alibi—though I highly doubted they would murder their own son. Next on the list was Tonja Summers. The doctor had indeed confirmed he’d paid them a visit to treat Nuncio, but also that he left at eleven thirty, which gave Tonja ample time
to sneak out and smack her errant ex-husband over the head with some non-identified blunt object.

  Neptune Brunat was also on our list, as my brothers didn’t think the word of his parents a good enough alibi. They wouldn’t be the first mom and dad who supplied their offspring with an alibi simply because they asked them to. Next up was Ada Shelley, who’d admitted to having been home alone that fateful night. Perhaps she’d been enraged enough by the discovery that Mariana had stolen her mother’s hard-earned savings to bash her head in? She certainly had motive. Marelda Morato had told us she was at a party and she hadn’t lied, so she got a pass. And Father Murphy had confirmed that Peggy Wisteria had been helping him out at the church until well after midnight, so she got a pass, too.

  That only left Huppert Bach, aka Mr. Christmas, who’d been out shopping for more Christmas lights, but had unfortunately left the store at eleven, giving him plenty of time to drive back to Happy Bays, and pay a visit to his tormentor Mariana Piney, the woman who’d repeatedly told him he was a joke and a disgrace to the transgender community. Perhaps he’d finally cracked and decided to strike back and have the final word?

  It’s an odd experience to root around other people’s homes in the middle of the night, even if they can’t see you. Most of our targets were fast asleep when we entered their apartments under the cover of darkness, except for Emil and Abigail Piney, who were oddly enough playing pinochle at the kitchen table. From time to time Abigail would take out her handkerchief and blow her nose, while her husband muttered words of comfort. She had a picture of her son placed on the kitchen table, a nosegay of lilies in front of it, and kept darting sad glances at it. Mariano must have been a teenager in the picture. With his spotty face, braces, and short-cropped black hair, holding a baseball bat, he looked very male indeed.

  I actually felt bad for invading these people’s home, and after a brief search, where fortunately we found no trace of a murder weapon or anything to indicate the Pineys were guilty of murdering their only son, we left again.

  “I don’t know if I like this,” I said as Calvin drove us to our final destination for the night.

  “You don’t have to like it,” said Calvin. “This is our job. It has to be done.”

  “But we’re invading these people’s privacy! Don’t they have a right to know that we’re searching their homes? I mean, it just seems… wrong.”

  “Look, one of these people is a killer,” said Lucien, who was dressed in black for the occasion, and had donned a frilly black shirt for some reason. “Don’t you want to remove him or her from circulation? And don’t you think a little snooping around is the lesser of two evils when compared to allowing this killer to walk free—perhaps to murder again?”

  “Well, when you put it that way, maybe you’re right,” I said musingly.

  “Of course I’m right. This is not my first rodeo.”

  “Rodeo?” asked Dalton with a frown. “Where are the horses?”

  “It’s just an expression,” said Calvin. “No horses involved.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Dalton, who was dressed in his usual tank top, displaying his bulging musculature.

  We were all squeezed into Calvin’s Ford Taurus, all five of us. The family owned a second car, as insurance agents have to be mobile, but it was at the shop at the moment. And then there was Grandma’s old Toyota Camry, but none of my brothers wanted to be seen dead in that thing, as it dated back to the eighties.

  We’d arrived at Huppert Bach’s condo, and my brothers whistled approvingly as they got out of the car.

  “Nice place,” said Brice. “And it’s even got a pool. Why can’t we have a pool?”

  “If you install it, I’m sure Grandma wouldn’t mind,” I said.

  “I can’t install a pool,” said Brice. “We should get the pool people in.”

  “You don’t need a pool,” said Calvin. “Why install a pool when you can go down to the beach any time you like?”

  “Because you don’t,” said Brice. “How often do you go to the beach, even though theoretically you could go every day?”

  “I never go the beach,” said Calvin, “but that’s just because I’m not a beach person. I like to stay home and read. You’re a beach person. You should go.”

  “I would like a pool,” said Lucien. “I’m self-conscious about my bod. When you have a pool nobody can see you cringe when you put on your bathing suit.”

  “I would see you cringe,” said Dalton.

  “No, but see I wouldn’t cringe, because there’s only you guys around,” Lucien explained. “And I don’t care what you think about me, obviously, see?”

  Dalton stared at him. “No, I don’t see,” he finally said.

  “Gah, why did I ever get saddled up with a bunch of morons for brothers?” Lucien muttered.

  “Hey, what about me?” I asked. “Do you consider me a moron, too?”

  “No, sweetie,” said Lucien. “You’re not a moron. You’re a blessing.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, taken aback somewhat. I wasn’t used to being paid compliments by my brothers. Any of them.

  We stood in front of Huppert Bach’s condo, and followed Calvin as he casually strode to the front door and… simply walked straight through. We all followed suit, and walked up the second floor, then walked straight through the door and into Huppert’s apartment.

  I stared down at the nice pink ring Calvin had given me for the occasion. The pink quartz changed the molecular density of our bodies’ cells, which was what made us pass through solid objects. It also made us invisible, though Calvin insisted it was a lot more complicated than that.

  “I still don’t get why we don’t do this all the time,” I said. “Why bother ringing the bell and waiting for them to let us in when we can just walk in?”

  “Because most people don’t appreciate it when a couple of strangers suddenly show up in their living room,” said Calvin. “They might call the police and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

  “Saffron would want that,” said Brice with a smirk. “I’ll bet she’d love it for Logan to take her into custody again.”

  We were inside the apartment, and just like we’d done with the previous places, we all spread out and started our search. I noticed that the Christmas lights that had been draped over the archway between the living room and kitchen were out. They looked blackened, as if they’d shorted out.

  “No, I wouldn’t!” I said, indignant. “Besides, Logan is dead to me.”

  “He’s dead to all of us, honey,” said Calvin. “That’s what he gets for calling you a prostitute.”

  “He didn’t mean it like that,” I told him for the umpteenth time while I got down on all fours and checked beneath the couch.

  “I don’t care. He’s a goner. I want him gone. Gone from Happy Bays. Gone from the police force. Gone from our lives.” He made a slashing motion with his hand. “Forever.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked suspiciously. I was mad at Logan, but not so mad I wanted him removed from the planet and shipped to Mars. Or wherever Karma Corps had its headquarters.

  “Don’t worry. I have something in mind for Logan Munroe,” said Calvin, a set look on his face. “And I can assure you he’ll never bother us again.”

  “Don’t do it, Calvin,” I said. “He’s just doing his job. And he didn’t mean what he said about me kissing him to get more information on the case.”

  “He’s a pain in the ass and I want him gone,” said Calvin.

  “Come on, you guys,” I said, casting pleading looks at my brothers. “You can’t ruin Logan’s career just because you don’t like him. That’s just not fair.”

  “It’s Calvin’s call,” said Brice, who was checking behind the TV set. “If he thinks Logan is a threat to this family and our business, I don’t see what else we can do.”

  “I like him, though,” said Lucien. “He’s so handsome. So tall, so strong, so…” He shivered with delight. “He’s just such a scrumptious hunk
man.”

  “What’s a hunk man?” asked Dalton with a frown, staring at the large stuffed reindeer. He gave it a tentative punch. It didn’t budge.

  “A hunk, you know, like, hunkishly handsome. Scrumptious.”

  “All the more reason to get rid of him,” said Calvin. “I don’t like scrumptious hunk men kissing my sister.”

  “For your information, I kissed him,” I said, gently picking up the crib of Baby Jesus and studying it admiringly. Huppert knew his stuff.

  “Even worse,” Calvin grumbled.

  “I like Logan, too,” said Dalton. “I’d love to know what gym he uses. We could be gym buddies.”

  “You’re not going to be gym buddies because he’ll be gone,” Calvin pointed out.

  “Too bad,” Dalton said. “I could use a reliable spotter, and what better spotter than a cop? They’re trained not to drop the ball.”

  “If he becomes your gym buddy do you mind if I join your gym?” asked Lucien. “I can’t wait to catch a glimpse of that fine man walking out of the shower. Mh-mh!”

  “He is handsome, isn’t he?” asked Brice. “Like, movie-star handsome. Hey, if you start dating him, take lots of selfies, Saffron. I’ll put them on my Instagram. Get some eyeballs on my feed. It’s been slacking off lately.”

  “There will be no dating, and no selfies, cause there will be no Logan!” Calvin said, getting worked up now.

  “Don’t you think Saffron should be the judge of that?” asked Lucien. “I mean, she’s the one that’s going to be kissing the cop, and cuddling the cop, and—”

  “No, she won’t!” Calvin cried. “No sister of mine is going to be kissing a cop. Any cop. And that’s my final word on the matter.”

  “Look, if I want to kiss Logan that’s my business,” I said. “And no brother of mine is going to stop me from doing whatever the hell I want!”

  Having searched the living room, we all converged on the bedroom, and stared down at the sleeping form of Huppert Bach, resting peacefully in his Santa sleigh-shaped bed. Even asleep, he was donning his pine cap, but he’d wisely gotten rid of the Christmas lights, which were draped across the foot of the bed.