RING TOSS A John Ceepak Mystery Short (The John Ceepak Mysteries) Read online

  “Yeah,” says Connie. “This is Billy. He gave me this other ring!”

  Now she shows us her left hand.

  Geezo man.

  Looks like Billy needs to land a better job. Experts on these things say you should drop two months salary when purchasing your beloved’s engagement ring. Judging by the tiny chip of glass on Connie’s ring finger, Billy clears maybe a buck fifty every four weeks.

  “Perhaps,” Ceepak continues, “you can convince Miss DePinna to safeguard her valuables downstairs in the hotel safe.”

  Connie giggles. “I already told you, officer….”

  Billy wraps his arm around Connie, clutches her at the hip. “Don’t worry. I won’t let the DePinna family jewels out of my sight.”

  “It’s the Galuppi diamond,” says Connie. “From my mother’s mother.”

  Billy shrugs. “Whatever.”

  “Will you be staying in this room with Miss DePinna?” asks Ceepak.

  Billy laughs. “I wish.”

  “My parents are soooo Catholic,” says Connie, lowering her eyes, hoping none of us are nuns. “They don’t believe in, you know, pre-marital relationships.”

  “So they stuck me all the way down in Room 211. Right next to their freaking room!”

  Which means Billy will have to sneak past the parental units if he intends on violating their blessed virgin daughter during the family reunion.

  “I can look after my own valuables,” says Connie. “I don’t need Billy or the Sea Haven Police Department or the motel safe. I’m not a baby.”

  “No,” says Billy, “but you’re my baby, baby.” He tugs her closer. She giggles again. I’m ready to hurl.

  “Very well,” says Ceepak, checking his wristwatch. “Come on, Danny. We have a summons to serve.”

  “Roger that,” I say, because it’s what Ceepak always says so I decide I might as well say it, too.

  Ceepak gives Miss DePinna a two-finger salute off the brim of his cap. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss DePinna. However, I hope we are not called back to meet you or your family again.”

  “Don’t worry, officer. My sisters are just upset. They’ll get over it. Blood is thicker than water. At the end of the day, we’re family.”

  Ceepak just nods.

  Then he, Becca and I head for the staircase.

  “Thanks you guys,” says Becca.

  “If there is a further disturbance….”

  “There won’t be. I promise. I told my parents I could handle running the motel on my own and I can! Oh, is, uh, Jim working tonight?”

  “Officer James Riggs?” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah.”

  Big Jim Riggs is the resident body builder on the Sea Haven police force. I don’t think he does steroids, but he sure has the kind of muscles you usually only see popping up on the cop stripper at a bachelorette party, the guy who does the lewd limbo with his nightstick. Becca, long a fan of the muscular male physique, and Big Jim have been “dating” on and off for a couple months.

  “He, uh, stopped by for coffee this morning.”

  Right. Coffee.

  “He, you know, forgot his baseball hat.”

  Ceepak nods. “We’ll be happy to run it by the house as Officer Riggs will need the regulation cap to maintain his professional appearance and to be in full compliance with Chief Baines’ all-officer dress code.”

  “Right,” Becca mumbles. “It’s in the office.”

  “Roger that.”

  We clomp down the metal steps, squeeze past a few bumpers in the parking lot, and step into the motel office. The walls are decorated with a stuffed fish, a couple paint-by-number oil paintings of lighthouses, and a window air conditioner jammed through the wall because Mr. Adkinson didn’t want to buy a three-prong extension cord and put it in a window.

  “Are they leaving?” This from Mr. Sean Ryan, who is standing in front of the swirled-blue fake marble counter. Apparently, he didn’t stay in his room like Ceepak suggested. “Did you evict them?”

  “No, sir,” says Ceepak.

  “I told you, Mr. Ryan,” says Becca, “the DePinnas booked my whole second floor for a full two weeks. It’s why I needed your room.”

  “Rest assured, however,” says Ceepak, “that we have asked the DePinna family to keep any future ‘family discussions’ down to a dull roar.”

  “But….” Ryan sputters. “I read the rules!”

  Ceepak cocks an eyebrow. “Come again?”

  “In the frame on the back of the door. It says loud and abusive noises are prohibited. Boisterous activities too! It’s right there with public urination….”

  “Look, Mr. Ryan,” says Becca, kind of steamed up at her guest because I think she still needs to take a few Hospitality classes at the community college, “we cut all our guests a little slack in the summer. Everybody’s here on vacation, right? Didn’t I accommodate you, even though you didn’t have a reservation? You were a walk in….”

  Ryan exhales loudly. “Fine. But, if those people….”

  “If they cause another public disturbance,” says Ceepak, “we will be back.”

  Ryan nods. Shoves his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants. “Okay. Thanks.” And he shuffles out the door.

  Becca hands me Big Jim Riggs’ cop cap (totally avoiding making eye contact on the pass-off).

  “Thanks, Danny boy,” she mumbles.

  “No problem,” I mutter back.

  Then Ceepak and I head back to our Crown Vic cruiser.

  We need to go ruin the ring toss boss’s night.

  The week clicks by like normal.

  We write up people doing 45 in a 20. That’s shorthand for speeding like a maniac through a residential street clogged with kids lining up behind the Skipper Dipper ice cream truck, the one with the annoying dinky-donka-ding-ding music.

  We clean up a few fender benders and issue a ticket for defiant trespass (without laughing) to this guy at the Schooner’s Landing shopping complex who was wearing inappropriate attire: a woman’s bikini top, a pair of extremely short jogging shorts, and a very snazzy feathered pillbox hat. Kids were pointing. Grannies were having heart attacks.

  At roll call on Wednesday, Chief Baines passes out an FBI JAG (Jewelry and Gem) bulletin about a YACS (Yugoslavia, Albania, Croatia, and Serbia) gang that’s been running “smash and grab” operations in the Philadelphia area, smashing out jewelry store windows, grabbing thousands of dollars worth of gold and gemstones.

  Half our visitors every summer hail from Philly, so it’s conceivable a herd of YACS could head down the shore. Conceivable but not very likely. Which is good news for Connie DePinna: A couple YACS see that Galuppi Family rock, they might haul her home in a sack to Sarajevo (I only memorize the names of foreign cities where they’ve had Olympics).

  Thursday, we have a day off. But that doesn’t stop Ceepak from ticketing a car he sees parked in front of a fire hydrant on his walk home from the gym.

  I call Becca to see if she wants to grab a burger over at the Rusty Scupper.

  “I can’t,” she says. “These DePinnas are driving me crazy, Danny!”

  “You want me to come over? I could wear my cop cap.”

  “No. I want them to quit complaining.”

  “About what?”

  “Let’s see: the towels, the pool, the breakfast buffet, the beach badges they lost, the ice machines, which, by the way, they empty every night so they can fill up their coolers even though my dad has signs up asking people not to do that! They say they’re going to write a letter to the Better Business Bureau and trash the motel on-line. Tell the world the Mussel Beach Motel is a dump. Worst motel on the Jersey Shore.”

  “I’m sure your mom and dad are gonna love that.”

  “They’ll never let me run my own place.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the plan. My dad wants to expand. Buy a nother motel, put me in charge.”

  I hear noise in the background.

  “Hey! Stop that! Tal
k to you later, Danny Boy. One of the DePinna kids is trying to tip over my candy bar machine.”

  So I spend the day with some other buds on the beach. Twenty-five is not too old to boogie board.

  On Friday, Ceepak and I are back on days. There are no FBI bulletins to deal with, which is a good thing, because we get another 9-1-1 call from the Mussel Beach motel.

  This time it’s Connie DePinna.

  Somebody stole her ring.

  “It was Donna. Or that witch Jackie. Maybe they’re in it together. Seriously.”

  Ceepak, Becca, and I are in Room 202 with Connie DePinna and her mother. They’re both sitting on the edge of the bed. Becca is pacing behind us, back and forth in front of that clattering air conditioner. I can see a small dent where Billy kicked it last weekend.

  Becca looks horrible. Like she hasn’t had time to wash her hair, sleep, or eat. She’s not even wearing a swimsuit. She’s in scruffy, baggy sweats. I can tell: she so wishes her parents hadn’t picked this week to head up to Quebec and turn the motel keys over to her.

  “I swear! It was Donna and Jackie! Or their husbands!”

  “You don’t know that, Connie,” says mom. Her pants suit is pink today.

  “I do, too! They’ve been trying to break in and steal the ring all week!”

  “How’s that?” asks Ceepak.

  “There have been some…incidents,” says Becca. “I didn’t want to bother you guys again.”

  Connie (who is dressed in a sensible black tank suit in mourning for her lost ring) flaps her hand toward the door. “Every night this week, ever since mom gave me the freaking diamond, somebody has been trying to break down that cheap, freaking door. I’d fall asleep, and boom -- two or three in the morning, someone would be banging on it. One time, I swear, I heard this guy grunting and stuff, trying to jimmy up the window. That was probably Tony, Donna’s new husband. She probably put him up to it.”

  I grin a little because I suspect it was actually, young Mr. Bill, her fiancée, who had slipped past Mr. & Mrs. DePinna’s door in the wee hours of the morning, eager for some, to borrow Connie’s term, “pre-marital relationships.”

  “Last night,” says Connie, nearly hyperventilating, “I swear -- I heard a crowbar.”

  “And what does a crowbar sound like?” Ceepak asks without busting a gut like I would have.

  “You know.” She does a quick vocal impersonation of a metal rod ripping into a metal doorframe. It involves a lot of “skreek-skreeks.”

  “There was damage,” says Becca. “Claw marks up near the lock. Like somebody went at it with a hammer or, like she says, a crowbar.”

  “We’re not paying for that!” says Mrs. DePinna. “You have no proof it was somebody in our party.”

  “Did I ask you to pay for it?”

  “No, but I heard how you just said what you said….”

  Becca curls her lower lip and blows out a quick blast of air, enough to send her limp blonde bangs flying up over her eyebrows. She is completely wiped out. The puffy bags under her eyes are the size of marshmallows. “I should charge you, people. I haven’t had any sleep all week, what with this one ringing the front desk every night at two, three, four A.M.!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry if I inconvenienced you,” says Connie sarcastically. “But that’s when my sisters or their husbands chose to try to break down my door.”

  “It’s not your sisters,” screams her mother. “They didn’t take the ring!”

  “Then who did?”

  Now the mom is pointing at Becca. “One of her maids. They’re all Hispanics.”

  That totally burns Becca’s bacon. “What?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know you’re hiring illegal immigrants, young lady.” The mom gets all patriotically snitty-- like that nutjob on Fox. “I’m surprised your Mexican employees haven’t stolen everything out of all our rooms!”

  “They’re hardworking, decent people,” says Becca practically shouting. I think the DePinna’s have officially worked her last nerve as my mother used to say whenever I, you know, worked her last nerve. “They’re better than you and your family, that’s for sure!”

  Mrs. DePinna doesn’t like that. “The Better Business Bureau is going to hear about this! Today! I’m mailing that letter!”

  “Fine!” snaps Becca. “I’ll give you the freaking stamp!”

  “Don’t think I won’t!”

  Ceepak stands.

  “Enough,” he says. “Becca, please wait for us downstairs in the office. Mrs. DePinna, kindly return to your room and call your other daughters. Ms. DePinna, contact your fiancée. Please advise everyone that my partner and I will be coming around to ask them a few questions.”

  “What?” says Connie. “When?”

  “Now.”

  “I have a manicure appointment.”

  “Cancel it.”

  The way Ceepak says that, I know we’re not leaving the Mussel Beach Motel until the ring is found or somebody confesses to stealing it.

  Our interrogations begin with the bride-to-be.

  “When did you notice your ring was missing,” says Ceepak.

  “Like an hour ago.”

  “Had you taken it off your finger?”

  “Well, duh. My sisters are vicious old hags but I don’t think they’d chop my finger off to get at the diamond.”

  “Of course. But, last Saturday, you told us you never intended to take the ring off.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean never never. Rings can make your skin kind of skanky underneath, especially if you spend a ton of time in the pool, which, I have to. For my tan. I want to look good in my wedding dress. It’s white. You need a tan to wear white, especially a backless.”

  “Where did you store the ring?”

  She flicks her naked hand with the ring tan line toward the bedside table. “Usually in there. Next to the bible.”

  “Was anything else missing?”

  “From the drawer? Nope. The bible’s still there. The Yellow Pages. Billy’s condoms.”

  She freezes.

  Then, she tries to make us think she’s a cute Kewpie doll by crossing her legs, putting two fingers to her lips, and saying, “Oops.”

  Ceepak is not susceptible to cute.

  “Has your fiancée been a frequent visitor to your room during your time here at the motel?”

  “Maybe. You won’t tell my parents, will you?”

  “No. Unless they specifically ask me about it.”

  Then he’ll tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth because, so help him, God, Ceepak is a lot like George Washington with an axe in one hand and a slice of cherry pie in the other: He cannot tell a lie.

  “Billy’s been down here a couple times.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yeah. After the thing with the crowbar. I was scared. I called the girl in the office and she came up with flashlight and all but couldn’t catch my sisters or their husbands in the act. This was like three A.M.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, after she left, I still couldn’t sleep, so I texted Billy. He was down here in like ten seconds flat.”

  “Were you wearing the diamond during your intimate encounter last night?”

  “What?”

  Ceepak sort of blushes. So I jump in. “Did you keep the ring on when, you know, you took everything else off?”

  “That’s none of your freaking business.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” says Ceepak. “We need to establish when your ring might have been off your finger in order to pinpoint when it might have been stolen.

  Connie looks down at the floor. “It pulled out Billy’s hair.”

  “Come again?”

  “The Galuppi. When I ran my hands through Billy’s hair when, you know, we were kissing and stuff, it got snagged. When I yanked it out, it ripped out a huge clump of hair.”

  “So you took it off?”

  “Yeah. Billy told me to.”

  “Did you store it
in the drawer?”

  “I can’t remember. I was kind of caught up in the moment, you know?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I might’ve just tossed it on the top of the table. Yes. I remember, later, when, you know, Billy was…when we were…it was kind of taking forever….”

  Ceepak nods to let her know he doesn’t need the graphic details on that part of the show.

  “I guess I got a little bored and looked over to admire the ring cause it was right there on top of the table, sitting in front of the lamp, which has all those pretty seashells in the glass bottom there, and the moonlight was streaming through the crack in the curtains, I swear it was like I was looking at a jewelry ad in Modern Bride magazine.”

  “And then Billy left?”

  “I’m not sure. I fell asleep first.”

  “But he had to head back to his room,” I toss in. “Before your parents woke up.”

  “I guess. Yeah. He was gone when I woke up.”

  Ceepak strokes his chin. Thinks. “Did you put the ring back on, first thing this morning?”

  “Gosh,” says Connie. “Wow. I can’t remember. Guess I was still kind of sleepy. I put on my bathing suit, went down to the pool, did a couple laps. Went to the office for some coffee and one of those powdered doughnut holes they put out. A box from the grocery store. Very cheap buffet. They really shouldn’t call it a breakfast bar.”

  “What happened next?”

  “After the doughnut hole, I went back to the pool. Let one of the nieces paint my toenails. Read my Bride magazine some more.”

  “When did you notice the ring wasn’t on your finger?”

  “When my sister, Jackie came out to the pool with her kids. The boys were eating Doritos for breakfast, can you believe it? Doritos and Fanta Orange because it’s sort of like orange juice. Anyway, Jackie says, ‘So where are the Galuppi family jewels this morning?’ I look at my finger, see nothing but a white circle, nearly have a heart attack. I look up at the second floor. I see a maid pushing her cart right past my room and Donna’s husband Tommy lugging an ice chest down the staircase. The blonde girl from the office is carrying towels and junk up on the balcony. I see Billy come out of his room, yawning and stuff. Everybody is going about their totally normal business which makes me freak out! I say, ‘Oh my gawd, oh my gawd,’ kick away the niece working on my nails, almost slip on the stairs running up them in my bare feet, run to my room and….”