Page 150 of The Newcomer
They followed her over to the efficiency. She unlocked the door, and pointed inside, where glittering heaps of gold and silver jewelry, sterling candlesticks and candy dishes and flatware, and gold and silver coins were scattered across the unmade bed and the floor, like a modern-day pirate’s treasure chest had been dumped in the middle of a run-down motel room. Necklaces and watches dripped from the nightstand, where a nearly empty tequila bottle stood beside a pair of juice glasses.
“What the hell?” Joe asked incredulously.
“This is what Rooney was looking for when he broke in here,” Vikki said. She held out her wrist, around which was draped a heavy gold men’s wristwatch. “Is this the watch you said one of your regulars sold him?”
Joe slid it off her wrist and examined it. “It’s a Rolex Daytona, kinda like the one Paul Newman owned, and it’s monogrammed. Gotta be Trudi Maples’s watch. How did you even find this stuff?”
With her index finger, Vikki pointed upward, at the ugly water-stained dropped acoustic-tile ceiling. One of the square tiles was missing, exposing part of the aluminum framework, and shards of it were scattered among the pieces of jewelry on the bed.
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Vikki said. “I was in bed reading and out of the corner of my eye, I looked up at the ceiling, and I noticed one of those square things up there was sort of bulging. I was afraid maybe there was a leak in the roof and the whole thing might cave in on me. I stood on the bed and tried to move the tile, but I couldn’t reach it, so I went outside to look for a pole or something. I found one of those shuffleboard stick things, poked around, and dislodged the tile. When I did, all this stuff just rained down on me.”
Joe was kneeling on the floor, examining the treasure. He stood up and held out an iPhone. “Did this fall out of the ceiling?” He tapped the phone’s screen. “It’s locked.”
Vikki reached for the phone. There was a short knock on the door, and then it opened. “Hey Vikk, I think I left…” Alex Garcia, the FBI agent from Tampa, stopped short when he saw the other occupants in the room. His face reddened. “Well… shit.”
Joe DeCurtis struggled to keep a poker face. He held out the phone. “Is this is what you’re looking for?”
Garcia shoved the phone in the pocket of his jeans. “This is awkward as hell, so I am going to back out of here now, and we are all going to act like this never happened. Agreed?”
“Absolutely,” Joe said affably. “See you around.”
Garcia nodded at Vikki and left.
Joe waited until the threesome was alone again. “Not that it’s any of my business, but that cockamamie story of yours was never going to work anyway.” He pointed at the bottle of tequila, and the used glasses. With his toe, he nudged a torn foil condom wrapper that had been tossed on the floor beside the bed. “You forget I’m a trained law enforcement officer.”
“You’re a horse’s ass is what you are,” Vikki said. “Okay, it doesn’t matter who else was here at the time, or how it happened. I noticed the ceiling tile looked weird. We, I mean, I found the shuffleboard stick, poked it around, and all that jewelry and stuff fell out.”
Letty was peering up at the ceiling. “You know, when I was cleaning this place out so that Maya and I could move in, along with allthe old television sets and mattresses and crap, I found an aluminum ladder. I didn’t question it much at the time, but it makes sense now.”
The door opened again and Garcia strode over to the nightstand, picked up a pair of Oakley aviators, nodded to the others, and started to leave. He paused at the door. “See you around.”
Vikki Hill waited until she heard his footsteps echoing in the breezeway outside. “Not one word from either of you,” she warned.
“Chuckwas staying here, in the efficiency, after Mom kicked him out of her place,” Joe said. “I’m guessing he hid the stuff in the ceiling, where he figured his ‘partners’ Tanya and Rooney would never find it, because he was probably planning on ripping them off.”
“But he didn’t get the chance,” Vikki told Letty. “Joe and the other authorities raided the place while the boys were over in Tampa drinking and gambling and whoring around. Tanya texted Rooney to warn him that the cops were here. Being the selfless, noble thieves they were, they left her holding the bag—although not the loot. Rooney told us today that he and Chuck planned to come back here the next night, after the heat was off, to retrieve the goods. But instead, Chuck got busted and hauled off to jail. And Rooney had no idea where Chuck hid the stuff.”
Letty picked up a delicate gold necklace with a dangling gold scallop-shell pendant. A large diamond was mounted in the center of the seashell. “All this stuff was up in the ceiling, this whole time.” She leaned over and picked up a yellowing pillowcase. “Looks like this was what he kept it in.”
Joe took out his phone and began photographing the evidence, but stopped after he’d clicked off a few frames. He pointed to a lacy black bra draped over a blade of the ceiling fan. “Uh, Vikk, you might want to remove that before I continue inventory of the crime scene.”
The FBI agent calmly hopped onto the bed and removed the incriminating evidence.
“This could take all night,” he finally concluded. “Let’s just puteverything in the pillowcase. I think I’ve still got a partial list in my files at the office of all the stuff we knew was sold to Rooney. But I’m telling you right now, this is a lot of merchandise. A lot more than they probably bought during the two weeks they were here.”
“Rooney said they’d been operating in other parts of the state before they wound up here,” Vikki agreed. “I bet there’s easily a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry here. Maybe more.”
“It must have been driving Rooney crazy for the past five years,” Joe said. “He knew it was here somewhere, but Chuck was in prison. That’s why he tracked Tanya down in New York. And when she denied knowing where the stash was hidden, he went looking for Chuck.”
“You can check the Florida Department of Corrections database online, which is probably what Rooney did,” Joe said. “He saw Chuck was due to be released from prison, maybe even contacted him and offered to help him get set up again once he was out. We’ll never get the truth out of Rooney, but the DOC will have a record of who visited Chuck, and who sent him mail.”
“Poor dumb Chuck,” Vikki said. “Talk about a fatal error in judgment.”
Letty took a last look around the efficiency and shuddered. “It creeps me out, knowing all that jewelry and stuff was right here, right over the bed Maya and I were sleeping in. Which reminds me, I need to get back to her.”
Joe went back to loading the goods into the pillowcase. “See ya,” he said, not bothering to look up from his task.
61
