Dying to Tell (17 page)

thirty-eight

It was three in
the morning when Bear pulled his cruiser into the parking lot at Three-A West at the Hunter's Ridge Garden Apartments just outside Winchester. He climbed out of his cruiser, stretched, and breathed in the crisp, cold December air. For a second, it invigorated him, but that lasted only as long as it took him to feel the ache in his back and exhaustion everywhere else.

When he reached the sidewalk, footsteps behind him sent alarm bells off. Other than old man winter, there was no one awake at this hour. As he moved toward his apartment, the footsteps synced with his. They stopped as he did at his stoop. They stopped again when he reached his front door.

He spun around, pulled his handgun, and peered into the night. “Who's out there? Come forward—easy.”

A dark,
long-coated
figure stepped from the shadow of a tall spruce tree and into the stoop's light. “A little jumpy, aren't you, Bear? Afraid of little ol' me?”

Lee Hawkins?

The thermometer hit 100 and climbed.

“What are you doing here, Lee? Trying to get shot?”

She giggled and closed the distance. She carried two heavy, handled paper shopping bags and handed one to him. As she did, she pressed herself into him, kissed his cheek, and lifted the other bag.

“You left the Kit Kat at one thirty. Where have you been?” She smiled a smile that made him fifteen years old again. “I've been waiting an hour.”

“Waiting?” Bear holstered his gun and fumbled for words to overcome the uneasiness rising inside. He found none. What was it about her? She was pushy and forward—a strong woman who put him on his heels and made him feel awkward. But she was beautiful and alluring, and above all,
interested
. That combination hadn't slapped him in the face—or kissed his cheek—in a very long time. The last woman to cross his stoop was almost killed by a madman. That attack sent her hundreds of miles away never to return.

Now, Lee's smile cut through the night like a beacon.

“Waiting for what?” he asked. “It's three a.m. You said lunch.”

“I changed my mind. Now it's breakfast.” Glass clinked against glass inside her paper bag. “Or dinner, whichever. You never finished yours and Calloway paid for it. So I brought it—for two, of course.”

“Calloway?” He rolled his eyes and dug his house key out of his pocket. “Look, you should go home, Lee. I can't do this. I'm tired, and you're involved in my case. So you better go home.”

Her face fell and her lips formed a pout. “Go home? Detective Theodore Braddock, since I was sixteen, no man has told me to go home at three in the morning.”

“I'll bet that's true.” Bear unlocked his door and opened it. “Sorry, Lee. Maybe after this case. Please, it isn't a good idea. Good night.”

“But …”

“Good night, Lee—I'm sorry, really.” He shut the door and realized he still clutched her shopping bag.

What was she thinking? More importantly, why was she thinking it? In all his years, he'd never been good with the ladies, least of all a lady like
her—
beautiful, successful, and, well,
beautiful
.

His doorbell rang. He groaned and opened the door. “Come on, Lee, I said …”

She pushed past him and strode into the living room. She set her bag on the small oval coffee table strewn with gun magazines and
days-old
takeout containers. Then she turned around, peeled off her Moncler coat, and tossed it on a chair. Gone was her sexy, satin dress that had earlier made his eyeballs bleed. It was replaced with tight jeans and a
button-down
silk shirt that was open to
oh-my
-God. She leaned down and took a bottle of Dom Perignon and two crystal champagne glasses from her bag. When she did, she had little beneath the silk but his imagination—and that was not a requirement.

“Three things, Detective Braddock.” Her eyes melted his reticence and sizzled the air between them. “First, I've said I haven't been sent home in quite a while. Second, I have two wonderful filets and two lobster tails in this bag, buster, and this bottle of Dom is chilled just right—I should know, we've been chilling outside your apartment for an hour.”

Bear peeked into the paper bag he held and found a rolled white cloth, some plates, and silverware. “What's all this?”

“You look like a guy without a maid—or plates.”

He laughed. “You'd be right.” He found her eyes again, unable to hold them, unable to break free. “You said three things.”

With champagne and glasses in hand, Lee floated across the room. “Did I?” She crushed into him and kissed him—long and soft like he hadn't been kissed in a very, long time.

Without removing her lips from his, she whispered, “Third, I'm fragile, so be gentle with me.”

thirty-nine

“Looks like they're having
a ball, doesn't it?”

Ollie walked up the attic stairs and stopped in front of the table. He looked down at the photograph of Keys Hawkins, Willy Mendelson, and their friends.

“Yes, it does, Ollie. Why didn't you tell me you knew Keys and William?”

“Slipped my mind.” He tipped his ball cap back. “And Doc said—”

“I was a little slow, yeah, he's mentioned it.” I tapped the photo. “I can't ask questions about something I don't know about.”

He smiled. “Noted. I'll try to remember to fill you in as we go.”

“So, you knew Keys and William. You obviously know what this is all about, right?”

“Well, one thing doesn't always mean the other.”

Holy shit, word games were a family curse. “And what does that mean?”

“It means, grandson, that those four in the photo are important. Yessiree. The question for you, though, is important to who? You or me? Or both of us?”

Huh? I picked up the other photographs that had spilled out of the folder. One was of a
two
-s
tory
house sitting on the water—a houseboat of sorts. On the street were Middle Eastern men in fezzes and turbans and long thobes. The other two photos were different street scenes at cafés and clubs with dozens of Middle Easterners and Westerners sitting around tables. I recognized one of the photos, too. It was of the Shepheard Hotel in Cairo. In fact, all the photographs were of Cairo.

“You were in Cairo, Ollie? I didn't know the US was in Cairo during the war.”

“Oh, some of us. Not many, though.”

“Why were you there?”

He walked around the table and sifted through several other photographs and papers. He pulled out a folded piece of newspaper and two photographs. He laid them on the table.

“I was OSS, kid. Remember? The Army had a few people there—mostly command staff and support groups for the Brits. And the Army Air Force flew combat missions and cargo in and out of there, too. I was there to keep the Krauts from mucking things up for them. And boy oh boy, the Krauts were trying.”

The newspaper clippings looked up at me and I bent down to read. They were decades old. One was the story of a mysterious murder in Washington DC. A body found off River Road just across from the Congressional Golf club.

“Cy Gray? One of William's war pals was murdered in 1954? That's a long time ago, Ollie.”

He nodded. “They never found the murderer, either. Keep reading, kid. It gets better.”

The article went on to say Gray's body was found along the roadside in a ditch. His throat was slit and he'd endured a vicious beating. His wallet and belongings were untouched and the police were baffled as to the motive.

When I looked up, Ollie gestured to another clipping on the table. I opened it and read out loud. “‘The body of Claude Holister was found yesterday in the Shenandoah National Park on the Appalachian Trail, along the Clarke County line. Holister, a World War II veteran of the Army Air Force, died at the age of
forty-seven
of an apparent
self-inflicted
gunshot wound.'”

Things were tingling my brain. “Okay, so, Holister committed suicide. That was in 1969. What are you doing with this article? Doc and you were—well, I hate to remind you, Ollie—but Doc and you were already dead. How come …”

“Your dad, kid.” Ollie lifted his chin and a thin smile cracked his lips. “He carried this on, too.”

“Carried what on? What's this all about, Ollie?”

“All right, I'll give you this one. You know, a consolation prize.” He went to the filing cabinet where I'd found the album and returned with something in his hand: a short, purple ribbon with a gold and purple heart at the end. In the center of the heart was a relief of George Washington. It was a military medal—the Purple Heart, given to those wounded in combat. “I got three of these in the war, kid. One of them in Cairo. It ain't like watching the flicks. I remember the first one. I got it in Algiers chasing this Kraut spy through the streets …”

He held the medal out to me, and when my fingers closed on it, the lights went out along with another war story …

The desert air was arid and smelled of charcoal fires and charred meat. The night was alive with rhythmic music and the clacks and creaks of carriages and trucks. But those sounds grew dimmer as the darkness ebbed—only a little—and I stood on a dirt street outside tall, pale stone-walled buildings. The music drifted with the dry breeze that brought little relief in the sweltering darkness and the sounds of Cairo's nightlife just blocks away.

Only darkness greeted me on my street.

There was no one but for a single
horse-drawn
flatbed cart being pulled down an alley. There were no lights. No sounds. Nothing that I could see. The cart stopped and a single man climbed down and went inside the house.

Ollie was nowhere around, and absent any clue for my visit to Cairo, I crossed the street and ventured toward the cart. The emaciated mare was startled and pressed backward, nudging the cart against the curb. She tossed her head and stomped the stone street, uncertain of me.

“Whoa, there, girl. Easy.”

The mare settled down just as a light flickered through a window behind the cart. Inside the building, a man's voice called out in Arabic. Something crashed and shattered. The man's voice grew angrier and louder. More crashes.

The man yelled in Arabic again, then in broken English, “Swine! Get out! Out of my house!”

I tried to enter the house through a side door beside the cart but could not. My body refused to move from the curb and I was frozen in place. The mare became more agitated with each violent outburst inside and twice nudged me with her muzzle and reared back.

A shot. The rumble of struggle. Another shot. Silence.

Inside, the light snapped dark and a moment later, the side door banged open. A man emerged dragging a large chest and struggled to load it on the cart. He checked the street and returned inside. Moments later, he emerged again and loaded another chest. When he looked back at the house, the light inside flickered on and he stopped.

I couldn't see the man on the street well—just a silhouette in the darkness—but I could make out his long, traditional Arab thobe and a scarf around his head. The darkness and his attire concealed his face. As a wail rose inside the house, the man bounded onto the cart and snapped the reins. The mare started forward, slowly at first then increasing her gait to the cracks of the reins. Moments later, the cart disappeared down the street and faded into nothing.

Another voice called out inside the building—a woman, I think—and her voice beckoned from room to room inside the shutters.

I drifted away now. The darkness swallowed the street around me and the sounds of nightlife had already disappeared. The building darkened and the inside light was no more than a wisp in the distance as I returned to my attic.

As I lost sight of the dusty street, the woman's wail flowed out from the darkness like a gathering storm. “
Laa, laa, laa! Youssif, laa, laa!”

I did not speak Arabic. I didn't have to. The grief was enough—I knew what she had found. Her pain bridged the darkness between the 1940s and my time now. It explained my trip to Cairo at that late hour in the desert heat.

I was a witness.

A witness to a
seventy-plus
-
year-old
murder—Youssif's murder.

“Who is Youssif, Ollie?” I asked when attic eaves returned over me. “And where the hell were you just now?”

Ollie stood exactly where he was before I left—his Purple Heart outstretched to me. “So, kid, that's how I got my first medal. Lucky, huh?”

My trip to World War II Cairo had taken but an
eye-blink
. I repeated, “Where were you just now?”

“I wasn't needed.” He shrugged. “And I wasn't there when it happened, now was I?”

My head spun. “Tell me what it means. And don't give me any of that
Tucker-family
doubletalk, either.”

“I don't know what it means. Not yet.” He stuffed his hands into his bomber jacket pockets. “Why do you think I came to you? If I had all the answers, why would I need you?”

“Because that's how this works, right? You guys on the
dead-side
cannot do things on the
live-side
. I can, through Bear and Angel. You all come to me to solve your problems, right?”

He laughed and folded his arms. “You got it all figured out, eh, kid? No, that's not always it. I don't have anything figured out. And neither do you. I just figured two heads are better than one.”

Well, that was different—one of my relatives just gave me a straight answer. Even if he didn't offer any answers. Like who Youssif was and what it had to do with William Mendelson.

“Okay, Ollie. What now?”

He glanced at the photographs and newspaper clippings on the table. “You're looking into that Mendelson fella's murder and his pals, right? Seventy years ago, them fellas were in Cairo at the Kit Kat Club. Now they're here—a couple of them, at least—at the Kit Kat Club …
again
. There was a murder back then and a lot of other stuff, too. Now there's a murder here and a lot of other stuff.”

“It's all connected.”

“You have a way with the obvious, you know that, kid?” He picked up the photograph of the four men with the belly dancer. “She was sure a dish, wasn't she?”

She was and I told him so. “Did you know her?”

“She was the big name at the Kit Kat back then. The war raged just outside Cairo but those Brits didn't let it stop them from having a party every night in the clubs. And a few of our boys led the fun, too.” His eyes went smoky—he was back there, in Cairo. He looked up and saw me watching. “Yes sir, they knew how to have a good time.”

“But, who was she, Ollie—the belly dancer? A girlfriend?”

He laughed and slapped my shoulder. “Yeah, sorta. She was one of the most famous belly dancers in Egypt—hell, maybe even the world back then.”

“Really?” I could only imagine a young Ollie Tucker loose in Cairo, far from home, befriending a sexy, slinky belly dancer. I wonder if Frannie found out. “How well did you know her?”

“Oh, she was a good dancer, don't get me wrong.” He lifted the photo and his face brightened, admiring the young woman dressed in veils and gemstones. “But, that's not what made her famous. In fact, fame found her much later.”

His grinned. I missed something. “Okay, tell me the rest.”

“Her name was Hekmet Fahmy and she was pals with a guy named Hussein Gafaar.” He held the photo up. “Mean anything to you?”

Yes, it did. “I saw a Hussein at the Shepheard Hotel yesterday after I touched that bug scarab thing in William's office.”

“One and the same.” He cocked his head. “Hussein's real name was Johann Eppler and he was with the German Abwehr. Hekmet worked with him.”

He lost me. “The German Abwehr?”

“Kraut military intelligence, kid—Johann was a German spy.”

I looked at the belly dancer frolicking at the Kit Kat with Cy Gray, Claude Holister, Keys Hawkins, and Willy Mendelson. “So, if Hekmet Fahmy the belly dancer was pals with Johann and she hung around with these guys …”

He winked. “Then she was a German spy, too.”