Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (6 page)

Nick looked up at Alicia. “I’ll never be able to do this on my own.”

“Sure you will. I’ll teach you.” Alicia spent a moment showing Nick what she’d done so he could repeat the process tomorrow. “See? Just pluck at it. Easy peasy.”

“If you say so.” He turned to me. “Don’t blame me if I look like some type of circus clown in the morning.”

Armed with my mousse, wax, and hairspray, Nick left, giving me a good-bye kiss at the door.

Once he’d gone, I turned to Alicia. “I’ll have to stay at an apartment for a while to maintain my cover. Would you take care of the cats for me?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’d be happy to.”

“Thanks, Alicia.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “That’s what friends are for.”

“And don’t worry,” I told her. “I won’t let anything get in the way of your bridal shower this weekend.”

We were expecting over a dozen women, including Alicia’s mother, her future mother-in-law, friends of Alicia’s from her temple, and several of our favorite coworkers from Martin & McGee, the accounting firm where Alicia was employed and where I’d worked, too, before leaving to join the IRS.

“Good,” Alicia said. “Because if I don’t get some of your mother’s pecan pralines very soon I just might go into withdrawal.”

My mother was famous for her pralines. And her spicy cornbread. And her blueberry pie. Seriously, there was nothing my mother couldn’t make that didn’t taste delicious. Unfortunately, I’d inherited none of her talent in the kitchen. That’s why she was driving in from my childhood home in east Texas on Friday night to help me with the shower.

Alicia put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye, her forehead creased with worry. “Be extra careful on this case, okay?”

Overcome with emotion, all I could do was bite my quivering lip and nod.

Alicia stepped toward me and gave me a tight hug.

It’s good to have friends.

chapter seven

T
aken for a Ride

I entered the federal building Tuesday morning with my new flaming red hair. After Nick had gone home last night, I’d colored my hair, too. I felt a bit conspicuous with my vibrant locks, but figured the new shade must work on me when the usual guards at security gave me a “Damn, girl!” and a “Wow!” If I didn’t see these guys every morning, I might’ve taken their comments as harassment. But given that they’d been nothing but professional in the past, I accepted their assessments as compliments rather than come-ons.

“It’s not too much?” I asked them.

Damn, Girl! cocked his head. “It’s just the right amount of too much.”

I continued on through the lobby to discover three older men near the elevators. One of the men wore gray dress slacks with a white short-sleeved shirt and shiny white buck shoes. He had thick glasses that distorted his eyes, making them appear huge and making me feel like I was looking at a fish in an aquarium. Despite being painfully thin and stooped, he was nonetheless pushing another man, who sat in a wheelchair.

The man in the wheelchair was dressed in baby-blue pajamas, a zebra-print fleece blanket tucked around him. The limp arm on his lap told me he’d suffered a stroke. His mouth hung slightly agape, though the side that wasn’t paralyzed was curled up in a smile. The half-smile said that while his mouth might not work quite right anymore, his mind still functioned just fine.

The third man had his hands on the side bars of a metal walker with yellow tennis balls on the bottom of each foot. He wore elastic-waist nylon athletic pants, a matching jacket, and a pair of high-tech hearing aids affixed to the outer shell of his ear like a Bluetooth headset.

Goodness. They were like those “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys.

As Hear No Evil leaned forward in his walker to take a look at the building directory posted on the wall, I stepped up to them. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

“You sure can,” he said. “We need to find the IRS criminal investigations office.”

“I’m going there myself.” I punched the elevator’s up-arrow button. “You can ride up with me. Do you have an appointment with an agent?”

“No,” said See No Evil. “Do we need one?”

“Depends on what you’re here for,” I said.

“We want to meet with that woman who shot the drug dealer,” See No said.

That would be me. Although my name hadn’t been revealed in the newscasts or papers, the reporters had noted that it was a female special agent who’d shot and killed a member of the drug cartel. Got him right between the eyes from across a dark field. It was something I was both proud of and, admittedly, a little sickened by. I’d saved the lives of several undercover agents that night, including Nick’s, but knowing I’d put an end to a life, even if it was a worthless one, still gnawed at me sometimes. Is the fact that I’d shot a person to death what defined me now? I hoped not. I’d like to think that I was a complex person, with all sorts of facets, and that I was more than one act taken on one day.

“Why her?” I asked as the elevator doors slid open and we stepped, and/or rolled, inside. If they wanted me to shoot someone for them, they were out of luck. I was a federal agent, not a mercenary for hire.

“’Cause we need her to find a con artist who took us for a ride,” Hear No told me, “and she obviously doesn’t take any crap.”

My lips curled up in a smile. Okay, so I was flattered by that particular comment.

The doors slid shut and the car began to ascend.

“You know her?” See No asked.

Very well.
“I
am
her.”

The standing men’s mouths gaped along with their sitting friend’s.

“No kidding?” See No said.

“No kidding.”

He looked me up and down. “But you’re just an itty-bitty thing.”

“I’m taller than you.” I put a flat hand on top of my head and moved it out in a simulated salute to show that he didn’t quite reach it. “See?”

“That’s only ’cause I can’t stand up straight anymore,” he said. “I used to be six feet two.”

Yikes.
Better add more calcium-rich kale and broccoli to my diet.

The elevator bell dinged as it stopped on my floor.

“Come with me.” I motioned for them to follow me as the doors opened. “We can talk in my office.”

We stepped off the elevator and started down the hall, the tennis balls on the feet of the walker giving off a soft thump with each step. As we approached my boss’s office, she looked up from her desk. Lu’s strawberry-blond beehive was coiffed to perfection today, standing tall and proud atop her head, shellacked with her contraband hairspray. Her thick false eyelashes and bright orange lipstick gave her an almost doll-like appearance, despite the fact that she was over sixty. She wore a lemon-yellow dress that, over her full, round figure, made her look like an oversized Peep.

Hear No Evil stopped mid-thump and let loose with a wolf whistle. “Who is that beauty?”

See No squinted behind his lenses. “Is she pretty? I can’t tell.”

From his wheelchair, Speak No issued a moan that said he agreed with his hearing-challenged friend. He offered Lu his best half-grin.

It was clear the men meant no harm and Lu looked more pleased than offended, her face blushing as pink as her cotton-candy-colored hair.

“She’s my boss,” I said. “Luella Lobozinski.”

Lu stood from her chair and came out of her office. She smiled at the men and turned to me. “Who do we have here?”

“Um…” I realized I had no idea of these men’s names.

The man with the hearing aids and walker released the bar and held out his hand. “Jeb Proctor,” he said. “Mighty pleased to meet you, young lady.”

Lu took his hand and gave him a coy smile. “I’m hardly a young lady. And I’m old enough to know better than to fall for some pickup line.”

“You’re young to me,” he said. “I’ll be eighty-nine in two months’ time.”

I chimed in now. “They told me someone ripped them off. I’m taking them down to my office to get the details.”

“I’ll come, too,” Lu said, “see if I can be of any help.” She eyed my flame-colored hair. “Love the new look, by the way.”

Of course she would. The crazy color was on par with her own pinkish-orange locks.

“Thanks,” I replied. “I’m still getting used to it.”

We led the men down the hall to my office. When Nick looked up from his desk and realized I had several people who needed seating, he brought his two wing chairs from his space to mine.

My eyes went to his hair. Though his spiky style today wasn’t quite as well coiffed as Alicia had managed to accomplish last night, he’d done a respectable job.

His eyes went to my hair, too, and a sexy grin played about his mouth. “I knew Burning Embers would be a good choice.”

“I got two thumbs-up from security,” I told him, “and compliments from Lu.”

Our new hairstyles addressed, he moved on to more pressing matters. “I’m heading out in a few minutes to meet with the leasing agent.”

Good.
We needed to move the mobster case along as quickly as possible.

“How ’bout I pick up pizzas for lunch?” he offered.

The team of agents who’d be working the Fabrizio case planned to gather at noon in my office to get started. Surely they’d appreciate being fed. “That would be great, Nick. Thanks.”

Once Nick had gone and the three men and Lu were seated, I plopped down in my desk chair.

The man with the glasses introduced himself as Harold Brinkley. “This is our buddy Isaiah.” He hiked a thumb at their friend who was listing in the wheelchair. “We’re all residents in the Whispering Pines retirement community.” He straightened his buddy and went on to tell me and Lu that not long ago, all of the residents had received a postcard mailer advertising charter van trips to various vacation spots. He reached into the pocket on the back of Isaiah’s wheelchair, pulled out a postcard, and held it out to me.

I took the postcard from him. It featured a photo image of a slot machine with a red number seven in each of the three windows and silver quarters streaming from the coin dispenser. The text read:

TAKE YOUR NEXT GROUP TRIP WITH TRIPLE 7 ADVENTURES!

TRAVEL IN LUXURY TO CASINOS IN OKLAHOMA AND LOUISIANA

CALL (214) 555–5729 FOR DETAILS

www.777Adventures.com

“None of us can drive anymore,” Harold said, “and we don’t get out much, so we thought it would be fun for a bunch of us to get together and go on a gambling junket. One last hurrah, you know?”

Jeb waved a hand. “Pshaw. We’ve got lots more hurrahs.”

I suspected Jeb was right. Despite his age, he seemed to have a lot of life left in him.

Harold went on. “We called the number on the card and the man who answered said he could come by and show us the van and make arrangements for us to take a trip. He said we’d need to pay him half down in cash to reserve the van, but that he’d provide us with a receipt.”

Harold reached into the wheelchair’s back pocket again and pulled out three pages folded in half. He handed those to me also. I opened them to find three handwritten receipts on preprinted paper with the same image from the postcard and the Triple 7 Adventures logo. According to the information written on the page, each of the men had paid $250 down for a package that was supposed to include transportation to and from the Choctaw Casino Resort in Durant, Oklahoma, as well as two nights’ stay in the resort’s Grand Tower, a daily buffet, and the guest’s choice of spa service. The receipt was dated two months ago, in early March. The purported travel date was to occur in late April.

“I was looking forward to that massage,” Harold said. “I’ve got a hitch in my giddyup.” He put a hand on his hip to show us where the problem lay.

Jeb wagged his eyebrows at Lu. “I was going for the full-body sea salt scrub.”

She wagged a finger right back at him. “You’re a naughty boy, Jeb.”

“When the man came to Whispering Pines,” Harold continued, “he brought the van with him, even let us climb inside and see how nice and comfortable it was. It had comfy seats and a DVD player and everything. He said he’d even throw in a bottle of champagne for free.”

I jotted a few notes on my pad.

Lu cocked her head, her beehive now leaning precariously to the left. “When did things go south?”

“When he didn’t show up on the date of the trip,” Harold said. “All fifteen of us were standing out front waiting with our luggage but he never showed. We called the phone number but it had been disconnected. Tried the Web site, too, and it was down. We phoned the Choctaw Casino. They said they’d never heard of Triple 7 Adventures and had nothing to do with the man who’d come to Whispering Pines.”

Fifteen victims at $250 apiece meant the con artist had pocketed nearly four grand in a matter of minutes. The fact that he’d preyed on elderly victims, who generally tended to be more trusting, was especially egregious.

Jeb banged a fist on the arm of his walker. “We’re not going to take this lying down.” He glanced over at his friend in the wheelchair. “Sitting down, maybe. But not lying.”

Nearly ninety and he hadn’t lost his wit. I hope I could say the same someday.

“Any chance one of you got the van’s license plate number when he came to Whispering Pines?” I asked.

“We didn’t think to look,” Jeb said.

“How about security?” Lu asked. “Does your community have video cameras?”

Harold’s eyes narrowed in thought behind his thick lenses. “I believe there might be one over the front door. Is that right, Jeb?”

Jeb raised a shoulder. “Could be. Can’t say for sure.”

“What did the man look like?” I asked.

The men exchanged glances. Jeb shrugged.

“All I remember,” Harold said, “was that he was wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses.”

I mulled things over for a moment. “I might be able to track the guy down through the phone number or Web site, but there are no guarantees. I’ll do my best, though.”

“That’s all we ask,” Harold said.

While Lu chatted with the men in my office, I trotted down the hall to the copy machine and made copies of the receipts and postcards.

When I returned to my digs, I handed the original paperwork back to Harold and obtained contact information for both him and Jeb. Isaiah was asleep so I didn’t bother getting his phone number. “Lu and I will walk y’all back to the elevator.”