Serious Moonlight(30)

“Uh, well. We order a lot of imports for him.”

“Like this?” Daniel said, holding up the Aida album.

The clerk nodded. “Yeah, he’s into Verdi. But that particular pressing isn’t rare enough for him. He likes hard-to-find things. He’s been trying to track down a rare recording of The Mikado for about a year, but only ten copies were pressed. It’s worth a grand, easy.”

“Does he come here often?” I asked.

“A couple of times a month, I guess,” the clerk answered. “Sometimes to browse. Sometimes to pick up special orders.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have an address on file?” Daniel asked bluntly.

I was instantly nervous. I wasn’t expecting Daniel to ask that. It wasn’t part of the plan we’d discussed in the diner last night. We were just supposed to be getting a sense of Raymond Darke. What he likes. Where he goes. Who he was. We knew where to find him—at least, in theory. If we wanted to see him, we could wait until he came into the hotel again on Tuesday.

The clerk made a funny sound. “That’s private information. Sorry. I don’t even know if we have it, but if we did and I gave it out, I’d get fired. Why do you need it?”

“Honestly?” Daniel said. “We’re just trying to help out a friend.”

We were?

Daniel continued. “He took something from our friend, and they want it back. It was probably a mistake. He might not even realize he has it. Anyway, this Waddle guy is a total dick, and I’d be happy if I never saw him again. I’m just trying to do someone a solid.”

What a vague, terrible story. This guy would never buy it.

Except, he did.

The clerk laughed, and his shoulders relaxed. He leaned one hip against the counter and crossed his arms. “I’m so glad you said that. He makes me run around like a chicken with my head off, pulling this or that album, only to leave them piled on the floor when he’s finished. Nothing makes him happy. According to him, we never have what he wants, and we open too late, and all of this is always my fault somehow. Meanwhile, his two yappy bulldogs get free rein of the store, and they slobber on everything. He’s just a nightmare.”

“Dude,” Daniel said chummily. “That’s just how I pictured him. And I’m in customer service, so I’m completely understand your pain. Miserable people are the worst. And this guy does not like his life. You can tell.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Is there anything you can do to help?” Daniel asked.

“I can’t give you his address,” the clerk said. “But I can tell you that he’s always bragging that he’s woken up before the sun for thirty years. If you want to talk to him, he walks his slobbering dogs every morning at sunrise. Kerry Park, in Queen Anne.”

My inner Nancy Drew did cartwheels while Daniel gave me a secret, triumphant look.

Maybe this whole partnering-up idea was a good idea after all.





“Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.”

—Hercule Poirot, The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)





11




* * *



When you’re investigating something and a piece of information is dropped into your lap, you can’t just ignore it. We sure didn’t. Which was why we made plans to go to Kerry Park after work the following day. We could have done it the same night we went to the record store, but Daniel suggested I give my grandfather a heads-up beforehand that I’d be staying out late. “Make sure you tell him that I’m trustworthy and try to paint me as a saint. I wouldn’t want him to hate me,” Daniel said. The fact that Daniel worried what an old man thought about him probably would have put him in Grandpa’s good graces, but I didn’t tell him that.

I did, however, tell Aunt Mona, when I stopped by her house on my way to work the next day. She lives in the island’s small downtown area, inside a tiny, old movie theater. Her great-grandparents built it in the 1930s, when they first moved here from Puerto Rico, and it was the first theater on the island to show “talkies.” I suppose “theatrical” was sort of a Rivera family gene, because her parents later went on to manage a local open-air playhouse when we were living over the diner.

Anyway, after bigger theaters were built around the island, this one briefly became an art-house cinema that showed indie movies in the 1990s before shuttering permanently. Aunt Mona converted it into her art studio after my mom died, and eventually made it her home. It still had its original marquee—topped with its name, THE RIVERA—and sometimes I helped her change out the plastic letters to announce her upcoming gallery showings . . . or to spell out rude messages to the local government when Mona got angry about potholes or a controversial bridge being built.

I passed the ticket window under the marquee—where a crowd of cardboard standees stared out at me, old movie characters who once stood in the lobby—and rang the doorbell. Paint covered the double doors on the inside of the glass, brightly colored faces, and a sign told random tourists that this was private property and that the owner could see them on video. She couldn’t.

One of the doors flew open, and a bright pink head popped out. “Darling!”

“Bubble-gum princess?” I asked, trying to see what she was wearing.