5 A Sporting Murder (10 page)

With the mercury climbing incrementally during the morning, a
steady drizzle replaced the flurries. I held the umbrella for Jill but got a
freezing shower before I could make it behind the wheel. We found the Bull and
Boar Steakhouse in a building with a rustic look hardly reflective of pictures
I’d seen of the plush interior. A couple of dozen cars already occupied the
parking area. The first thing that caught my eye was a dark blue Cadillac
Escalade sitting at the right of the restaurant’s entrance. When I pointed it
out to Jill, her lips parted and her face took on a look of total dismay.

“There’s a black one in that row of
cars over there,” she said, pointing.

Complications. Even more
disturbing, as I viewed the car in the daylight, I didn’t feel all that certain
this was what we had seen on Chandler Road Sunday night. I was aware, however,
that first impressions usually turned out the best.

A couple of animated young women at
a table set up near the entrance got us registered, collected our money, and
gave us badges with “Greg” and “Jill” in large letters. We wandered into the
dining area, where a group of men and women clustered around tables of snacks, mostly
of the chip and dip variety. A waitress approached us and asked for our drink
orders.

“I’ll have a Scotch and soda,” I
said. “What about you, babe?”

“A Coke will be fine for me.”

Most of the people appeared younger
than our age bracket, some wearing typical business attire, others more casual.
Jill checked the crowd to make sure Louie Aregis wasn’t among them. Before we
reached the snack tables, a smiling young man in a dress shirt and tie but no
jacket intercepted us.

“Hi, Greg and Jill, I’m Bob.
Welcome to Contacts Nashville. I don’t believe you’ve been with us before.
What’s your business?”

“McKenzie Investigations,” I said.
“We’re private investigators.”

“Great! I think you’re the first
ones we’ve had from that field. Circulate around, introduce yourselves, and see
if you can’t drum up some business. You may already know some of the folks.”

I had been checking faces and
comparing them to the mental picture of Fred Ricketts I had stored up after
studying a photo we’d found online. I turned to Bob.

“Is that Fred Ricketts from P and S
Software in the gray suit with the wine-colored tie?”

He looked around. “Right, that’s
Fred. Want me to introduce you?”

“Sure, if it isn’t too much
trouble.”

“Trouble? You jest. That’s what
we’re here for. Come on.”

We followed him to where Ricketts
stood beside a table, swishing a chip through a bowl of pale green dip. As I
expected, the young man was an imposing figure, even larger than Arnold
Wechsel.

“Fred,” Bob said, “meet a couple of
new folks, Jill and Greg McKenzie. They’re in the private investigation
business.”

“Nice meeting you,” Ricketts said.
He dusted his hand with a napkin before reaching out to shake ours. “Don’t
believe I’ve met a PI before. I’m afraid all I know about your profession is
what I’ve read in mystery books.”

“Then we probably don’t fit the
picture you have,” I said with a grin. “It isn’t nearly as exciting and
glamorous as the mystery writers would have you believe.”

“You’re in the software business,”
Jill said. “We do a lot of our work on the computer. Databases are our bread
and butter.”

The youthful looking executive
nodded. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’m sure you’re right. Maybe I
should look into developing PI software.”

The waitress arrived with our
drinks. Jill accepted hers and turned back to Ricketts. “You’d find plenty of
competition out there. We subscribe to several different databases.”

I handed the waitress a ten-dollar
bill as I took my glass. “The ones we use have millions of facts about millions
of people. You’d be surprised at how much information there is out there, even
on people who try hard to leave no trail.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “Some
of my hacker friends in college could dig out about anything you were capable
of imagining. And from places you wouldn’t think it possible.”

I had been sizing up the young man
as we talked, and I was impressed. He had alert blue eyes that left the
impression they would miss nothing. He seemed to absorb every word and run it
through his mental computer in search of a correlation with something that
already dwelled there. With the humility of a monk, the smooth delivery of an
actor, and the casual familiarity of an old friend, he could have charmed a
Scrooge. If this was the man who had stalked us, we faced a formidable
opponent.

“I heard you had a passion for auto
racing,” I said. “Are you involved with the Nashville Superspeedway?”

“No. My interest is solely with IndyCar
racing. I’m part-owner of a car on the circuit. We haven’t won the Indy 500
yet, but we’re hoping.”

“I understand that’s a pretty
pricey sport.”

“You’re right about that. But it’s
a thrill a minute.”

“Have you done any race driving?”

“Just enough to get hooked on it. I
had a friend in college who owned a dragster. I raced it a few times.”

I grinned. “That must have really
stirred your juices.”

He nodded. “Did you know a top fuel
dragster can go from zero to 320 miles an hour in under five seconds?”

Jill stared, her eyes widening.
“That’s unbelievable.”

“It’s faster acceleration than
you’d get in a space shuttle launch,” he said.

“We read where you were involved in
this effort to bring an NBA team to Nashville,” Jill said. “That must be
exciting, too.”

He shrugged. “We still have a lot
of hurdles to jump. I’m excited about the prospects, though. Tell me about what
you folks do. What kind of cases do you get involved in?”

I held up my fingers and ticked off
a few things. “We handle insurance fraud, particularly involving disability, do
background investigations, look for missing persons or missing heirs, work on
digging up evidence for attorneys.”

“I’ve always heard PI’s went around
snooping on cheating spouses.”

“We don’t get involved in domestic
relations,” Jill said. “There’s enough bitterness in this world without us getting
involved in perpetuating it.”

“Somehow I find that refreshing,”
he said as a big man with as big a voice as Ricketts stepped up to greet him.

The newcomer monopolized the
conversation, and after a few minutes we moved on to join another group. It was
soon time for lunch. Our table proved productive as we met a contractor and a
retailer who turned out to be business prospects. We swapped business cards and
talked about ways we might be of help, like doing background investigations or
tracking down missing property. During the conversation, I mentioned our chat
with Fred Ricketts. One of the men told us he was a close friend and had worked
with Ricketts on a project for Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

“Fred knows how to get those kids
laughing,” he said.

“How does he do it?” Jill asked.

“He’s something of an amateur
magician.”

“What kind of tricks does he do?”

“Simple stuff. Sleight of hand.”

“Nothing fancy?” I asked.

“Not with the kids. Now if you want
to see fancy tricks, you need to go out to his farm.”

“Where’s that?”

“Over in Wilson County. He lines up beer cans on the fence and goes down the line—bang, bang, bang! And with a
pistol. In the military he’d be a sharpshooter.”

I filed that away for future
reference.

When the session ended, Jill and I
lingered inside until Fred Ricketts headed out to his car.

As we watched, he hurried through
the rain straight for the new-looking black Escalade.

Rather than mess with the umbrella, I dashed out to the car,
winding up with a good dousing in the process. I started my Grand Cherokee,
which, by comparison to Rickett’s Escalade, didn’t appear nearly so grand, and
pulled up to the covered entrance for Jill.

“Do you think we should add Fred
Ricketts to our suspect list?” she asked as she buckled her seatbelt.

“He’s a troubling fellow,” I said
as I headed toward the street. The wipers clacked noisily. The drizzle had mutated
into a real shower, and I was surprised it hadn’t turned back into snow. “If he
was intent on convincing us that he’d never heard of us before, he did a great
job as far as I’m concerned.”

“I’d have to agree. What about the
Cadillac?”

I steered toward the interstate. “As
I’ve often said, I don’t believe in coincidences. On the other hand, I’m
reluctant to tag him as a suspect based on only one questionable sighting.”

“How about the race car angle?
Could it have any connection with Arnold Wechsel?”

“I doubt it. Arnold was obsessed
with NASCAR. These Indy cars are in a different league. I read where they cost over
a million bucks.”

“That should separate the men from
the boys.”

“It would certainly separate the
men from their money.” I flinched as an eighteen-wheeler passed on the left,
kicking a dense shower of water our way. I felt like I was like driving under a
waterfall. “The one thing I found troubling was the tale about Ricketts’
prowess with a pistol.”

“That’s certainly a concern,” Jill
said, “but I’m more bothered by how much credence to put into that casual
attitude. Ricketts could’ve been intentionally misleading us, you know. He’d
have made a great Pied Piper. He struck me as a smooth operator in the same
class as his colleague, Louie Aregis.”

She could be right, but I’d
withhold judgment until I had more to go on.

Back at the office, Jill got a call
from Wilma Gannon. In contrast to her conversations on our home phone, Wilma
always kept it short when using our business line. Jill soon hung up and turned
to me.

“We’ve been invited to dinner at
the Gannons.”

I looked across at her with a diabolical
grin. Since Sam was not the type to put on weight, Wilma never worried about
calories.

“That’ll be three nights out in a
row,” I said. “We’re on a roll.”

“Don’t get your mind set on candied
yams and yeast rolls and Wilma’s chocolate cake. This is a one-night stand. I’ll
have you back on your low-fat diet tomorrow.”

I knew it was time to let that
subject drop and turned instead to Nikki Columbo. Since we’d had no word from her,
I suggested we head for her Green Hills apartment and have an in-person
confrontation. We needed to find something concrete to move our investigation
forward.

Before we were ready to leave, however,
the phone rang. Red Tarkington.

“I talked to the man I told you
about this morning,” he said. “The one who says Aregis gypped him out of a lot
of money. He found out about it not long before Aregis moved Coastal Capital
Ventures up there. The guy, name’s Quillen, is still pretty steamed and wants
to talk to you. Said he’d be in Nashville tomorrow. I gave him your number.”

“Thanks, Red. We’ll be looking for
him.”

We traveled through a cold, steady
rain all the way to Green Hills. Nikki’s address took us to a vine-covered
brick building on a quiet side street. This was an area of older homes in a
fashionable section of town that attracted a mix of upwardly mobile young
people, successful business types, and retirees. A high-rise for retired
teachers was located not far away. I wondered if the vintage structure where
Nikki lived might be owned by Zicarelli Properties.

A red Mazda Miata sat in a parking
space outside the door to Nikki’s apartment.

“It looks like she’s here,” I said,
pulling into an adjacent space. “I’ll wait until I see you’re inside, then I’ll
drive over to a coffee shop on Hillsboro Road and wait for you. Call me when
you’re ready to leave.”

“No doughnuts,” she said. “Just
coffee.”

I gave her a peevish frown. “You
know you could be charged with cruel and inhuman treatment? You’re lucky I
don’t rat on you to the UN.”

She looked like she didn’t know
whether to laugh or backhand me, but she got out and raised her small,
collapsible umbrella. I watched her ring the doorbell. After a moment, the door
opened and Nikki Columbo looked out. They exhanged a few words. Following a bit
of hesitation, Nikki opened the door wider and Jill stepped inside.

I had high hopes. In situations
like this, Jill displayed a motherly demeanor backed by a sincere and
understanding attitude that caused people, particularly women, to pour out
their hearts. She wasn’t judgmental, and she knew when to listen and when to
talk. She had been a great interviewer in previous cases.

I found a small coffee shop,
ordered coffee and a Danish, a low calorie one, at least in my imagination. I
took it to a table that faced a TV tuned to an afternoon news-talk show. A
couple of characters with hearsay knowledge of the military argued vehemently
about the war on terror. Listening to them, I could almost feel my blood
pressure rise.

I was about ready to throw my
refill at the TV when the cell phone rang.

“Found your man Izzy,” Phil Adamson
said.

“Where?”

“One of our guys, Eddie Bledsoe,
has an interesting pastime. He drops in on libraries and looks around at who’s
using the computers. You’d be surprised at what he turns up occasionally.
Anyway, this morning he visited the Main Library downtown, and who should he
see but Izzy Isabell, pecking away at the keyboard.”

“I wish the detective could’ve
gotten on there after Izzy,” I said, “and checked out what he’d been doing.”

“Hey, if we tried something like
that, the librarians would be on us like a flock of mother hens with claws
bared.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Detective Bledsoe is a sharp guy,
though. He noticed Isabell was writing notes on scratch paper beside the
computer. He hung around until the guy got up and left, taking his notes with
him. Bledsoe saw a couple of sheets of blank scratch paper lying there. He grabbed
them as he followed Isabell out to the parking garage. Made a real score. Got the
license number off the truck and turned the note paper over to forensics to see
if they could get impressions from what your guy was writing.”

Detective work like that was music
to my ears. “Gotten any results from it?”

“Not the notes. The Kentucky plate was registered in another name. Hasn’t been reported stolen. We’ve asked Louisville to look into it.”

“Let me know what they find,” I
said. “Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye out for Izzy. I have a crow to pick with
him.”

I told Phil about the glaring
scratch across the side of my Jeep and the note I’d found.

“Too bad they didn’t leave a name,
so you’d have a witness.”

“That’s probably not the worst
he’ll do. From what the parents said about him being on drugs, he’s probably
gone back to his old habits.”

Phil agreed. “I passed along info
on him to the folks in narcotics.”

When I snapped the cover shut on
the phone, I got a missed call alert showing Jill had tried to get me while I
was talking to Phil. I called her back.

“I’ll be ready by the time you get
here,” she said, not sounding too pleased.

I hurried out to my Jeep with what
coffee was left in the Styrofoam cup and headed for Nikki Columbo’s apartment.
They must have been near the door when I arrived since it opened as soon as I
knocked. Jill stood beside the young woman whose downcast look resembled that
of a chastised teen.

“I’m sure everything will work out
fine for you,” Jill said. “This was a terrible tragedy for everyone. We intend
to find out who’s responsible. Right, Greg?”

I had no idea where this was going but
nodded soberly. “You can count on it.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed
you,” Nikki said.

“Call me when you feel like it,”
Jill said. “Anytime. Bye.”

I hurried around to the driver’s
side to escape the rain. After we were both seated, I looked across at Jill.
“That didn’t sound too promising.”

She gave a deep sigh. “I’ve never
run into one quite like her. When it came to a subject she didn’t want to talk
about, I couldn’t budge her with the sweetest honey in the hive.”

“I trust that means you didn’t come
up with anything startling.”

“That’s for sure.”

“What did she have to say about Arnold?”

“They hadn’t been dating for long.
They met at the restaurant, as you suspected. He was by himself and looked very
lonely. Nikki struck up a conversation and learned that he was from
Kaitserslautern. She had studied German in college and spent some time at the University of Tubingen, which is in the state next to the one where Arnold lived.”

I drove toward Hillsboro Road,
which would take us back to I-440.

“I imagine Nikki knowing his
language helped draw him to her,” I said.

“I’m sure it did. And she was quite
impressed with him. She said Arnold was a determined young man and had his
heart set on landing a job in auto racing. There was a school in North Carolina he wanted to attend and was saving his money for it.”

“Was that why he wanted an extra
job, to earn money for school?”

“Apparently. But she wouldn’t talk
about his job. She got real defensive, said it was something personal.”

“With a background in German
studies, I presume she’s had a problem finding a job in her field. That why
she’s working at a restaurant?”

A pickup truck roared out of a side
street and slashed across three lanes of traffic in front of us. I hit the
antilock brakes and gave thanks we didn’t go into a skid. My first thought was
Izzy Isabell, but the truck wasn’t blue. If it hadn’t been for the seatbelt,
Jill would’ve gone airborne. She reached out to the dash to steady herself.

“What an idiot! And in this rain.”
She exhaled like a hiss of steam. “At times like this I have to agree that Nashville drivers must be the world’s worst.”

I waved a hand. “I’ll not argue the
point. But let’s get back to Nikki.”

Jill pulled her seatbelt tighter.
“She said Villa de Este was a temporary job until she could find something that
would make use of her German abilities.”

“What did she say about the Zicarelli
connection?”

“She started to deny knowing
anything about it until I told her we knew her mother was Belinda Zicarelli. I said
I imagined she had relatives here. She didn’t want to talk about it but slipped
up once and mentioned ‘Grandpa.’ I presume it would have to be Grandpa Zicarelli
as there are no Columbos around here.”

“Did she exhibit any of that fear
we saw last night?”

“Not so much fear as a deep concern
about giving out personal information. She’s definitely holding something
back.”

“Hopefully we can figure a way to
get it out of her. It sounded like you parted on a friendly basis.”

“I was very sympathetic about her
loss and tried to comfort her. She’s a confused young lady at the moment.”

As I merged into the traffic on
I-440, known locally as the Outer Loop, I got a strange feeling that we were
being followed. I searched the mirror for any familiar vehicles. With the
afternoon’s thick clouds leaving a darkened haze and poor visibility from the
rain, it was a difficult task. Nothing raised any alarms, but I couldn’t shake
that odd premonition.