“Look,” I said, “Tim’s a great guy. As I told him earlier, someone knocked off my ex-wife a couple of weeks ago. A pair of cops came by earlier today and asked me a few questions about it. That’s all. I never said anything about being framed, and I don’t think it’s necessary for me to hire—”
“You’re not hiring me,” Charles said quickly. “I’m doing this for Tim. He stood by me when a lot of other people didn’t. When he asks for something, I deliver. He called me this evening and mentioned the framing bit. I still have friends here and there. Between his call and now, I’ve made a few calls of my own, and you know what? Either you’re the guy who did it, and they’ve got you dead to rights, or else Tim is right, and you are being framed.”
“How so?” I asked.
“An old friend of mine happens to work for the Las Vegas PD, and he did some checking for me. It turns out your ex, Katherine Melcher, had received a number of threatening telephone calls in the weeks preceding her death. She had recorded two of the calls—illegally, of course. The person on the phone whispered so it’s hard to tell if the caller was a man or a woman. With the right equipment, I’m sure a trained voice recognition expert will be able to sort all that out. Voices are like fingerprints, or so I’m told. The most immediate problem is this—the calls all came from a Phoenix area phone number. Wanna know which one? The pay phone you’ve got in your hallway there.” He pointed with the tip end of his bottle. “The one right outside your crapper.”
There was a long pause after that while his words sank into my consciousness. Threatening phone calls to Faith, aka Katy Melcher, had been placed from my pay phone? How could that be?
Charles slammed his empty bottle down on the counter. “Contrary to popular opinion,” he said, “I believe you do need my help. Your ex may be the one who’s dead, but Pop thinks you’re the real target, and I tend to agree with him. Given all that, we need to talk. Now where can a guy get a decent cup of coffee around here?”
I walked to the far side of the bar and tapped Jason, my evening and late night barkeep, on the shoulder. “I’m done,” I told him. “Will you close up?”
“No prob,” he said with a nod.
Beckoning Rickover to follow me, I ducked into the dining room and grabbed the most recently made pot of coffee off the machine behind the counter, then I led the way up the narrow stairway to what is a surprisingly spacious apartment. Because the stairway is situated in the alcove between the dining room and the bar, you enter the apartment in the middle as well.
When it comes to “open concept floor plans,” Grandma Hudson was a pioneer. The main room, situated over the restaurant portion of the building, is a combination living room, dining room, kitchen, and office. A master bedroom and bath as well as a guest room and bath are located over the bar. That’s not the best arrangement for sleeping, especially on raucous weekend nights, but Grandma probably figured—and rightly so—that whoever lived here would be downstairs working those noisy late nights anyway.
I turned to the right and led Charles into what an enterprising real estate sales guy might refer to as the “main salon.” I put the coffeepot on the warmer I keep on the kitchen counter and directed my guest past the plain oak dining table to the seating area in the center of the room. The rest of the place may have been decorated to suit my grandmother’s no nonsense, spartan tastes, but the seating area consisted of two well-made easy chairs and a matching sofa. The chintz upholstery may have faded some, but the springs and cushions had held up to years of constant use. With a glass-topped coffee table in the middle, it was the perfect place to put your feet up after spending a long day doing the downstairs hustle.
When I brought the coffee—a mug for Charles and one for me, too, I found him studying his surroundings. “You live here by yourself?” he asked.
I nodded. “Once burned, twice shy.”
He gave me a rueful grin. “Ain’t that the truth. So tell me the story. Pop told me some of it, but if I’m going to help you, I need to hear the whole thing—from the very beginning.”
There’s something demeaning about having to confess the intimate details of the worst failures of your life to complete strangers. For the second time in a single twenty-four-hour period, I found myself having to go back over that whole miserable piece of history, but I didn’t hold anything back. I understood that if the threatening phone calls to Faith had originated from my place of business, then I was in deep trouble and needed all the help I could get. In that regard, Charles Rickover was the only game in town.