Hurricane Force (A Miss Fortune Mystery Book 7) (14 page)

Gertie whirled around, her spatula in the air. “Max?”

Ida Belle’s eyes widened. “I have to admit, I didn’t see that one coming.”

I told them my thoughts about Max’s appearance and the strange feeling I had about him having hundreds on him. “I know it doesn’t sound like much. Hell, it doesn’t sound like anything at all, but I have this feeling.”

“Like you did about the money,” Ida Belle said.

I nodded.
 

“Then we check into Max,” Ida Belle said. She cocked her head to the side and studied me for several seconds. “You know, it’s interesting. With the other things we’ve gotten involved in, your instincts weren’t nearly as sharp, until that arms dealing fiasco. I figured it was because you were in a new place with people that weren’t what you normally dealt with. I think I was right.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because as soon as something happened that hit close to home for you, it’s like someone flipped a switch. Maybe you’ve gotten comfortable enough with your environment that your natural state is returning. But it’s interesting that something you’re connected to is what seemed to jump-start it in a big way. First the arms dealing and now the counterfeit money.”

“It’s a psychic connection,” Gertie said.
 

Normally, I’d dismiss something like what Gertie said as nonsense, but in this case, I wondered if she was right. I had gotten that tickle in my belly over the arms dealing, and even though the bad guys were all dead or arrested, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole story hadn’t been told. The money had definitely sent me on high alert. I’d known it was counterfeit long before Harrison verified it. Would have bet real money on it. Now, that same tickle in my belly was telling me that Max had been in this business up to his neck.

“Maybe not necessarily psychic,” I said, “but I agree that I have a strong connection to my work. This case has been my entire existence for two years. It makes sense to me that I might feel a ‘sameness,’ for lack of a better word, about things that are related.”

Ida Belle nodded. “Sameness is a good way to describe it. So where do we start with Max?”

“Electricity!” I jumped up from the table and grabbed my laptop off the kitchen counter. “I couldn’t look up the address on his fake driver’s license last night because we didn’t have power and my phone was a loss on Internet searches. Pray that the lightning didn’t fry my modem and that the Internet provider is up and running.”

I sat back down and opened the laptop. I smiled when I saw full bars for Internet service, then did a maps search for the address on the license. When the address came up, I shifted to satellite mode and zoomed in. Ida Belle moved around next to me and Gertie leaned over my shoulder.

“It’s the Warehouse District,” Ida Belle said.
 

“The Warehouse District?” I said. “Why would he live there?”

“People have been rehabbing those old buildings since before Katrina hit,” Gertie said. “A lot of areas are businesses on bottom, apartments on top.”

“Okay.” I opened a new tab and did a search on the address. “It’s an art gallery.”

“Max always did fancy himself an artist,” Ida Belle said.

I slumped back in my chair. “Any chance he actually made it and that’s where his money came from all these years?”

“I don’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “I’m no art critic, but I never saw anything remotely original in his work.”

“Wishful thinking, maybe,” Gertie said and slid omelets onto the table. “Or perhaps he works there.” She took a seat and reached for the salt and pepper. “I’ll cook the pancakes after we finish this round.”

Ida Belle moved back to her chair and stabbed the omelet with her fork. “I can’t imagine Max having the manners or class required to work at an art gallery.”

I tapped my fingers on the laptop, then closed it and reached for my plate.

“I know that look,” Ida Belle said, “and the answer is no. You cannot go to New Orleans and check out that art gallery. Harrison told you to stay put, remember?”

“He told me to look for the Sinful connection,” I said.

“He meant in Sinful,” Ida Belle said.

“Yes, but he didn’t say I couldn’t follow the connection,” I argued. “Not specifically.” At least, Harrison hadn’t said it. Morrow was a different story.

Ida Belle sighed. “You are as stubborn as they come. If Max is connected to someone buying from Ahmad, then the place may be watched.”

“The FBI only has one address, and Harrison didn’t say anything about it being an art gallery. He said it was a newspaper or something of the sort. If Jamison owns this gallery, it’s buried so well that the FBI hasn’t uncovered it yet.”

I left out the part where Harrison told me Jamison had crews in charge of his separate business ventures. If Max was wrapped up in this, one of them
could
own the art gallery building or even the art gallery, but his living there was in no way proof that they did.

“For all we know,” Gertie said, “Max is renting an upstairs apartment and he picked that location because he liked the idea of pretending he was one of the artists who’d painted work for sale in the shop. It sounds exactly like something he’d do. He always had grandiose ideas.”

“But married Celia,” I said.

“Celia had that inheritance, though, and Max liked what money could buy him,” Ida Belle said. “He probably never imagined being married to her would be so difficult. Men tend to underestimate women in most areas.”

“True.”

Ida Belle lowered her fork. “Gertie is right, though. Living above an art gallery is just the sort of thing Max would have done.”

Gertie nodded. “He’s probably got some of those awful landscapes he used to paint upstairs, pretending he’s the next big undiscovered thing.”

The suggestion made total sense. From everything I’d seen of Max, he’d certainly seemed full of himself, and if he fancied himself an artist, then living above an art gallery was another way to feed his self-delusion. Besides, we hadn’t even established that Max was the Sinful connection, so the entire discussion could be a moot point.

“So if I had a disguise,” I said, “there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to get in and out without anyone being the wiser.”

“The only disguises you’ve worn while you were here were the kind that made you blend at the Swamp Bar,” Ida Belle said. “That same outfit will get you arrested for prostitution in the Warehouse District.”

“I was thinking something more nondescript,” I said. “Like a UPS uniform.”

“Oh!” Gertie’s eyes widened. “That’s a really good idea. People don’t even look at deliverymen…or women.”

“And how do you plan on getting a UPS uniform?” Ida Belle asked. “I don’t think they hand them out just because someone asks.”

“It’s a tan shirt and trousers or shorts. Surely one of you has something we could make work. I can draw their logo on white material and Gertie can sew it on. It doesn’t have to pass inspection at UPS. It just has to be close enough that people don’t look twice.”

“Ida Belle had a safari outfit last Halloween,” Gertie said. “That would work.”

Ida Belle frowned. “I don’t know…it just seems like a big risk.”

“Trust me,” I said. “If I can sorta pull off librarian-ex-beauty-queen, UPS delivery girl is a cakewalk.”

Finally Ida Belle nodded. “I suppose it’s worth a shot, but that’s assuming you’ll be able to get in at all. With Max’s death being a murder, Carter might have asked the New Orleans police to seal off the apartment.”

“Let’s hope he hasn’t gotten that far, or didn’t deem it necessary,” I said.
 

“Hmmm.” Ida Belle narrowed her eyes at me. “If we get there, and police tape is across that door, we’re turning around and coming back home.”

“Of course,” I said as soon as I made sure my ankles were crossed.

“I mean it,” Ida Belle said. “No risk taking. Not on this one.”

I nodded and looked across the table at Gertie, who winked.
 

Game on.

Chapter Ten

Three hours later, we were crammed in Gertie’s car and headed for New Orleans. Ida Belle’s safari outfit had worked perfectly. I’d nailed the freehand of the logo. Unless someone got too close for comfort, no one was going to look twice at me. I even had a small box with a UPS label on it from Gertie. That woman kept everything. Tennis shoes and sunglasses completed the look.
 

I’d told Carter we were making a trip to New Orleans for supplies rather than waiting to order them and asked if we could pick him up anything. He suggested a new toilet would be nice, and since Gertie had been the source of the restroom problems down at the sheriff’s department, I told him we’d see what we could do.
 

We stopped at the hardware store on the way. No one wanted to admit that we were getting the supplies first because things might go wrong and we’d have to make a getaway, but we all knew that was the reason.
 

I had to order the glass for my windows, but that didn’t surprise me. The house was old and the windows were the originals with individual panes. It was pretty but sorta a hassle. If I actually cleaned, I’d probably hate them. As it was, the entire place was in need of a good spring cleaning. I might check into hiring someone as soon as things settled down. Technically, it wasn’t my house as I wasn’t really Marge’s niece, but since I was benefiting from staying there, it only seemed right that I keep the place from falling apart, especially as I’d been the root cause of the recent damage.

We finished up our shopping and carted everything back to Gertie’s car. “I still can’t believe you made me buy this,” Gertie said as she closed the trunk over the new white toilet inside.
 

“It’s the least you owe the man,” Ida Belle said. “You ought to be buying him new clothes and paying for therapy. In less than a ten-hour span, he tackled a toilet and got sprayed with toilet water, then saw you in your skivvies. When you deliver that, it should be with a big bottle of whiskey.”

Gertie waved a hand in dismissal and I grinned as I climbed into the backseat next to bags from the hardware store.
 

“So everyone knows what they’re doing, right?” I said.

“I’m sitting in the car,” Gertie said, “waiting for you and Ida Belle to come out, then I drive back home. It’s not like you’ve set me out to solve the Da Vinci Code or something.”

Gertie was still a little perturbed that she hadn’t been tasked with something more important than driving the car, but I’d finally convinced her that getaway driver was an important role. The unfortunate part was, Gertie was scary as hell as the getaway driver, but I was less afraid of her behind the wheel than inside the art gallery.
 

Ida Belle had borrowed a wig from a friend of hers and pulled it on, checking herself in the mirror. “I’ll enter the art gallery and pretend to shop. I’ll ask about the artists and see if I can determine who owns the gallery and the building. How do I look?” She turned around to look at me.

“It’s amazing what a difference hair style and color makes,” I said. The wig Ida Belle had borrowed was a chin-length bob in a dark glossy brown. It took a good fifteen years off her. “It makes you look younger.”

“Let me see,” Gertie said and looked over at Ida Belle. “You still look old and grouchy to me.”

“You’re just jealous,” Ida Belle said and looked at herself in the mirror. “I suppose I do look a bit younger.”

“Ten years younger than the Walking Dead
,
maybe,” Gertie groused.

I sighed. Thank God we were only a couple minutes from the art gallery. Gertie’s complaining was getting old. When we got back to Sinful, we were going to have to find something special for her to do, or Ida Belle and I would be listening to her go on like this for days.
 

Gertie let me out of the car around the corner and then proceeded past the art gallery and parked at the curb a couple buildings down. I headed up the street with my package as Ida Belle exited the car and entered the gallery. Our hope was that the gallery only had one employee working and that Ida Belle’s distracting them with questions would be enough to keep them from focusing on me.

The gallery was a long, fairly narrow room with paintings hanging on both sides of the walls. Long panels divided the room in two and contained more artwork on each side. Ida Belle was the only patron inside, and she was standing in front of a large painting of the swamp and talking to a young man sporting ear gauges and a bunch of facial piercings.
 

Five feet eight. A hundred forty pounds, including the jewelry. No threat unless he stabbed me with a piercing.

The gallery employee glanced over at the door as I entered and I was happy to note the door didn’t make a sound. No signal for entry or departure worked in my favor.

“Package for Thomas Johnson,” I said, taking on my bored and slightly impatient expression.

“Upstairs,” the young man said and pointed to a staircase at the rear of the building. “It’s the unit on the right, but I haven’t seen him for a couple days. He might not be at home.”

“I don’t need a signature,” I said. “I’ll leave it at the door.”