Fun House (John Ceepak Mystery) Read online

  “The American Skin Cancer Prevention Fund wants to make sure everybody tans safely.”

  “I’m president of the local chapter,” says Becca.

  Of course she is. Tanning is her life.

  “Mike, Vinnie, or Jenny will also be playing for a favorite charity,” says Marty Mandrake. “That is, if your votes put them through to the final round.”

  I wonder what charity Jenny Mortadella picked. The Italian Deli Meat Anti-Defamation League?

  “Now, to play it safe,” Mandrake says, “the network and I have reached a unanimous decision: Soozy K will receive immunity in next Thursday night’s show. She’s going straight to the Friday finals, which will be broadcast live from the Sea Haven boardwalk behind a ring of steel; the tightest security ever thrown up around a network TV show! We’ll make it fun, but we’ll keep it safe!”

  More applause.

  I shake my head.

  Mandrake sounds like a condom commercial.

  30

  “THEY’RE PUTTING HER THROUGH?” SAYS THIS GUY WHO JUST walked into the motel lobby, toting a cardboard carton.

  “Yeah,” says Becca.

  “That means only the other three compete next Thursday?” The guy puts his box on the counter.

  “And two of ’em get cut,” says Becca who, apparently, watches Fun House religiously. “Because they already did that immunity deal for the funeral show, so two heads have to be on the chopping block.”

  The guy nods, pulls out his cell phone.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Tomasino,” says Becca with a big, bright smile. “Mike’s going to make it to the finals, too. He’s got my vote!”

  “Thanks, Becca.” Now he looks up from his phone, realizing that there are two police officers in the room with him. “You two with the SHPD?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Ceepak.

  “Thanks for all you’re doing to keep our kids safe and the show on the air.”

  “Actually,” says Ceepak, “I had recommended that the show be cancelled.”

  Mr. Tomasino shakes his head. “You heard the mayor. We do that, the terrorists win. Thanks again for your service.”

  He heads out to the parking lot where the cell reception is better. As I watch him walk into a sunny spot of asphalt, I glance over to Eric Hunley, who’s still sitting on his bike, eyes closed, holding open the sides of his vest so his chest can soak up the sun.

  “You guys seen enough?” asks Becca, remote aimed at the tiny TV.

  “Roger that,” says Ceepak.

  Becca presses the “OFF” button. Marty Mandrake and his smiling goatee shrink down into a tiny white dot.

  “That was Mike Tomasino’s dad,” says Becca. “They live in Philly, so Mr. T rented a room with us for the show’s final week.”

  So, I guess even The Mussel Beach Motel is making money off Fun House.

  “Are you guys gonna like bring me more suspects to check out?” Becca asks, flicking her blonde head toward the window and the biker outside. “Is this what they call a line-up?”

  “Actually, Mr. Hunley is here to help us conduct an experiment of sorts.” Ceepak gestures at the five-foot-tall stuffed Batman propped up against the front window. “Becca, if you don’t mind, we’d like to borrow your Batman doll.”

  “Um, okay. Oh, can you ask Mr. Tomasino what he wants me to do with his inflatable Ab Balls?”

  “Come again?”

  “Mr. Tomasino and his son, Mike, they’re marketing these inflatable Ab Balls. I guess if Mike wins, they’ll be huge.” She pulls a limp orange, white, and yellow striped beach ball out of the box. On the white panels there’s a screen-printed logo: “Mike Tee’s Hard Body Ab Ball.”

  “Is that a beach ball?” asks Ceepak.

  “I guess. Mr. Tomasino calls it a ‘prototype.’ He’s been sending them out to investors. Very important people in New York and Hong Kong and Las Vegas.” Becca puts the floppy vinyl wad back into the box. “The cool thing about this kind of exercise equipment? Extremely portable. You can like put it in your purse and exercise anywhere you go.”

  I just nod.

  Ceepak, on the other hand, wraps his arms around Batman and hoists the caped crusader up off the floor.

  “What’s up?” I ask as he lugs the doll out the front doors and heads past the NO VACANCY sign for Hunley and the motorcycle.

  “One minute,” he says when we reach Mr. Tomasino.

  “Don’t worry,” we hear him say to whoever is on the other end of his phone call. “Call China. Up the order. Mike’s going to make the finals. It’ll be him and Soozy. They have like a pact.”

  Finally realizing that we’re standing right there, Mr. Tomasino cups a hand over his cell. He also sort of sizes up Ceepak, who is standing there hugging a giant Batman snuggle toy.

  “Can I help you, officers?”

  “Yes, sir. Ms. Adkinson asked us to remind you that you left your box in the office.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks.” He glances at Ceepak’s gut, even though it is partially obscured by Batman. “You guys work out?”

  “Some,” says Ceepak.

  “A little,” I add.

  “You want a free Ab Ball? I can hook you up.”

  “No, thank you,” says Ceepak.

  “They retail for $29.99 on TV.”

  Really? I think, because, at Wal-Mart, cheap inflatable beach balls cost like three bucks.

  “It’s against our code of conduct to accept gratuities of any kind, no matter how generous the offer,” says Ceepak, giving Mr. Tomasino the best two-finger salute he can without dropping Batman on his padded butt.

  Mr. Tomasino nods like he gets it, returns to his phone call, and strolls back into the office.

  “So, what exactly are we doing with Becca’s Batman?” I ask.

  “Something has been bothering me, Danny, ever since I watched the CSI team lower Thomas Hess’s body out of that lifeguard chair.”

  Ceepak adjusts his grip on the dummy. Hikes it up a couple inches.

  “Mr. Hunley?”

  The sun-worshipping biker snaps to.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Would you mind dismounting?”

  “Sure. No problem.” He swings his leg up and over, hops off the scooped seat.

  Ceepak lowers the Batman doll onto the back of the bike.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How tall would you say this doll is?”

  “About five feet.”

  Ceepak nods. Hefts the dummy up and down a few times. “And I’d say it only weighs twenty, maybe thirty pounds.”

  Yeah, I think, unless your girlfriend makes you lug it up and down the boardwalk all night, then it weighs more like a ton.

  “Shoot,” says Ceepak.

  “What?”

  “Could you run back inside, Danny, and ask Becca if she has a roll of duct tape we might borrow?”

  “Um, okay. Can I ask why?”

  “Of course. In the death of Paulie Braciole, we have, thus far, assumed that the killer positioned his lifeless and, therefore, limp, body—a body much taller and heavier than this one—onto the back of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle seat, strapped his shoes to the footposts below, then, somehow, kept the dead weight of Mr. Braciole’s body from flopping sideways while climbing aboard, and, finally, wrapping the dead man’s arms around their waist while, simultaneously, unrolling more duct tape to secure Mr. Braciole’s wrists in front of their belt buckle.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Well, Danny, I would like to see if I can do all that without any assistance from an accomplice.”

  31

  HE CAN’T.

  And if Ceepak can’t do it, neither can anybody else.

  Batman keeps sliding off and flopping down to the parking-lot asphalt.

  Eric Hunley is enjoying the show. Laughing. Saying “Dude!” a lot.

  First, Ceepak has to figure out how to steady the torso of Batman’s body while he bends down to wrap the duct tape around his bootie
s to secure them to the footposts. He finally figures out he has to pre-tear the tape strips, line them up on his sleeve, and then hoist the “dead body” up into its sitting position.

  I start chuckling the third or fourth time Ceepak tries to steady Batman’s head with his left hand while making a very graceful, almost balletic, backwards move that sends his right leg swinging up and over the motorcycle seat so he can hop on.

  When he lets go of the head to quickly reach down and grab for both of Batman’s wrists for the waist embrace, the stuffed superhero slumps into a spine-bending tumble off the back of the bike. Ceepak would have to be the Flash to strap Batman in.

  And not even the Flash could do it with a real dead body.

  A couple cars cruising past the Mussel Beach Motel toot their horns. They’re enjoying the show, too.

  “So,” I say, when Ceepak finally gives up, “you think Paulie was killed by two people?”

  “At least,” he says.

  “But you don’t think it was Soozy and …” I do a subtle head jab toward Eric Hunley, who’s hunkered down near the rear wheel of his Harley because he volunteered to clean up the gummy duct tape residue Ceepak’s experiment left all over his rear footposts.

  “Highly doubtful,” says Ceepak. “Neither of them, to the best of my knowledge, is a skilled enough marksman to pull off the single-shot execution technique described by the CSI ballistics expert.”

  Yeah. Hunley would probably point to his pistol and say “Yo, dude, check it out” before firing his first round.

  “What about Skeletor?” I ask. “Thomas Hess. Was that a team killing, too?”

  “Most likely. The assassination technique was the same. Also, transporting Hess’s body from wherever he was slain to the lifeguard chair would, once again, take at least two people to pull off.”

  I glance back at the motel.

  “So, one guy killed Paulie, most likely right after he climbed into Mandy’s Mustang on the back street behind her place, when Paulie out of camera range.…”

  Ceepak nods.

  “The killer then, what, got in the car and drove it over here and waited for his partner on the motorcycle to show up?”

  “Such is my supposition,” says Ceepak. “Undoubtedly, they were in radio or cell phone contact, coordinating their movements, keeping to a predetermined timeline.”

  “Okay. So that first door opening that Becca heard, that’s the shooter-driver getting out of the Mustang …”

  “Roger that.”

  “… and the second door is them hauling Paulie’s body out the passenger-side door.”

  “So it would seem,” says Ceepak. “The driver-shooter then helps the motorcyclist secure Mr. Braciole’s body to the back of his bike.”

  “And walks away.”

  “Or walks to a second car he has parked somewhere down the street.”

  “And Becca is up on the sundeck after that guy is already gone, when the second guy is getting ready to take off on his Harley.”

  “Such would be my conjecture.”

  Ceepak’s conjecture gets an unanticipated assist when our radios start buzzing with a call from Bill Botzong.

  “You boys been around back lately?” he asks.

  “Negative,” says Ceepak. “We’ve been conducting an experiment in the front parking lot.”

  “Well, you might want to go visit Detective Wilson. Her luminol test paid off, big-time.”

  Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators—on TV and in real life—to detect trace amounts of blood left at crime scenes, even ones that have been wiped down. It reacts with the iron found in hemoglobin, which, I guess, is the globby hemo stuff in blood. When the luminol spray hits what they call “an activating oxidant,” it emits a faint blue glow that lasts about thirty seconds, which is why the CSI folks always roll video or snap photographs when they spray it on.

  “Did the trace evidence show a smear pattern across the seats and/or headrests, as if Mr. Braciole’s body had been shoved from the driver side over to the passenger side of the car?”

  We have radio silence for a couple seconds.

  “Yeah,” Botzong finally comes back. “How’d you know?”

  “Danny and I have hypothesized that Mr. Braciole was murdered by, at the minimum, a pair of very skilled, perhaps professional, killers, one of whom shot Braciole as he sat behind the steering wheel and then pushed his body out of the way in order to drive the Mustang here to the Mussel Beach Motel, where he was joined by his accomplice on the motorcycle.”

  Yeah. That’s what I was hypothesizing. Except I had Soozy K cast as the “very skilled” trigger person, Eric Hunley on the motor scooter, and hadn’t actually worked out all that shoving stuff.

  “Well,” says Botzong, “it fits. So now what?”

  “I think we need to re-focus on The Creed,” says Ceepak. “They would have the means and manpower. We can assume finding two skilled hit men in their ranks would be quite easy.”

  They also had the motive. Both Paulie and Skeletor were screwing with The Creed’s very lucrative drug-distribution empire. Attracting too much attention. Making their pharmaceutical operations as well known as those drugs they sell on the evening news that might help you quit smoking if you don’t kill yourself first.

  Exasperation leaks out of the tinny radio speaker. “My friends up in the Narcotics and Organized Crime Bureau have been trying to crack The Creed for years. They don’t like to talk to strangers. And the last guy we almost got undercover almost got dead first.”

  “Danny and I will work the one angle open to us,” says Ceepak.

  “Hess’s brother?”

  “Roger that,” says Ceepak. “He has a vested interest in seeing that justice is done, no matter the consequences for his Creed brethren.”

  Looks like we’re heading back to the All American Snack Shack to talk to Gabe Hess.

  This is a good thing.

  It’s been a long day. We haven’t even taken a lunch break.

  Some deep-fried Pepsi Balls would definitely hit the spot.

  32

  CEEPAK ISN’T CERTAIN GABE WILL BE AT HIS FRIED-FOOD STAND.

  “After all,” he says as we bound up the boardwalk, “he may be at the funeral home, making arrangements for his brother’s burial.”

  I nod, just as someone behind us shouts out “Good afternoon, officers. Where you guys going in such a rush?”

  We turn around.

  It’s Layla Shapiro and a couple of her production-crew flunkies.

  “Hey, Danny,” she says. “I thought I recognized your butt.”

  “Officer Boyle,” says Ceepak, sternly.

  “Oh. Right.” She taps her heart like she’s a Dominican baseball player. “Respect. Let me try again: I thought I recognized your butt, Officer Boyle.”

  I’m about to say something about how I recognized her smart-ass mouth when my inner Ceepak kicks in. “What brings you out to the boardwalk, this afternoon, Ms. Shapiro?” I ask calmly.

  She head-nods toward the horizon. “The Fun House. We’re scouting it for the live finale. It’ll be awesome.”

  “Totally,” chimes in one of the flunkies, a dark-haired vixen with shiny red lips who’s maybe a year or three younger than Layla and probably already scheming about how she can shove Layla aside and take over her job as Mandrake’s right-hand gal, the way Layla, obviously, bumped out whoever stood in her way. Working in TV is a lot like Roller Derby—only without helmets or shin guards.

  “Whoever makes it through to the final round, will have to make it through the Fun House with their charity partner to claim the grand prize,” Layla continues excitedly. “We’ll stagger the contestants. Time them—”

  Ceepak, apparently, has heard enough. “Good luck with that,” he says. “Danny?”

  “Have fun,” I say.

  Layla and her posse head off to the Fun House and its big clown mouth entrance. Ceepak and I, following the scent of sputtering oil, head over to the All American Sn
ack Shack.

  There’s a line. I guess mid-afternoon is when everybody hits the candy-bar machine when they’re at work. When they’re on vacation, they just hit the deep-fried candy-bar booth, instead.

  I see Gabe, sitting on a thirty-gallon tin canister of cooking oil, back near the double deep-fat fryers. Misty grease fogs his glasses. His wrinkled flag shirt looks like it is flying at half-mast.

  “Mr. Hess?” says Ceepak.

  The sad-eyed man looks up.

  “We need your help.”

  Hess nods. Motions for us to come around to the rear of the booth.

  We do.

  “I’ve made a few calls,” says Hess.

  Ceepak nods.

  “The Creed did not do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. We don’t lie to a brother, cheat a brother, or steal from a brother. That’s the only way you can trust that your brother is your brother, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Ceepak, choosing not to use this moment to discuss his own code of honor and ethics, which, of course, is way stricter than “screw the world but don’t lie to, cheat, or steal from your biker buddies.”

  “So now this has become an honor issue for The Creed as well,” says Gabe. “We will find out who did this thing.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t worry. We, like you, have our ways.”

  Geeze-o, man.

  Why do I think The Creed’s ways don’t involve reading suspects their Miranda Warning or, for that matter, letting them live?

  Of course, Gabe Hess and The Creed talk tough, but that doesn’t mean they can deliver.

  At least, not for seven long, frustrating days.

  33

  IT’S THURSDAY.

  Nine P.M.

  Time, once again, for Fun House. Tonight: The Semi-Finals.

  And Ceepak, the New Jersey State Police, the FBI, and I are still no closer to catching Paul Braciole’s or Skeletor’s killers.

  All evidence points to a professional hit involving, at the very least, two assassins: a triggerman and a getaway guy on a motorcycle. So everybody is looking at The Creed, the Garden State’s most nefarious motorcycle gang. To hear Christopher Miller talk, the FBI guy who’s heading up the Fed part of the investigation, The Creed are connected to what the Fibbies used to call La Costra Nostra, the Italian mafia, including the Pelagatti’s and a Squarcialupi Family underboss named Bobby “Baby Fat” Marino.