Free Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder by Jessie Chandler. Page A

she had. It’d been a damn long weekend.
    The bar was actually quiet. A man and woman were seated in one of the back booths, and other than that the place was dead. I was reminded more of a weekday evening than New Year’s Day. At this point, I was too tired to care very much.
    Lisa was still behind the bar, leaning against the back counter with a dark brown bottle of beer in her hand. She looked so natural, like she’d been around the Lep all her life. I was struck by the fact that this woman I barely knew had pretty much taken over tending my dad’s bar and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn.
    What exactly did that say about me?
    Eddy sat perched on a stool in front of Lisa, arm raised as she made some important point. I wondered if she’d hit up Lisa yet to hook up with the Mad Knitters. The original purpose of the Mad Knitters—which was mostly comprised of elderly friends of Eddy’s mixed with some young blood (Coop and Rocky)—was to propagate the craft of knitting. Ha, right. Instead, the gang propagated poker. Or dice. Or dominos. Their latest game du jour was Mahjongg. At least it kept them off the streets.
    Eddy turned to face us as Coop and I settled on stools alongside her. “You two look like someone didn’t even fill your water glasses half full. Any luck?” She scanned the immediate vicinity with great exaggeration. “Since I don’t see that scoundrel father of yours, Shay, I assume the answer is no.”
    “Not one sighting.” I shifted my butt into a more comfortable position. My dad needed to invest in some chairs with decent padding. But in light of his other, more serious issues, new seating was way down on the list. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”
    “Aggie took ’em home when things slowed down,” Eddy said. “Rocky got the itch to use some serious elbow grease spic-and-spanning that sorry excuse for a kitchen your father keeps. You should see the shine on those stainless counters and sinks.” Eddy’s expression morphed into frustrated consternation. “You know how that boy gets when he puts his mind to something. He wouldn’t stop till he hit every metal surface back there. I took some money out of the till for him, and you should have seen that round face of his beam. And that Tulip, she earned your father some greenbacks twisting balloons into New Year’s hats for five bucks a pop. That little gal is good, conning people into buying them after New Year’s Eve was plumb over.”
    When Rocky met Tulip, she was a street urchin working in New Orleans making balloon animals and other fun inflated shapes for both kids and adults. Since she’d come up here to Minneapolis and said the I do’s with Rocky, she’d shifted from working the streets to working the patrons at the Rabbit Hole. She occasionally scored birthday parties and bar or bat mitzvah gigs at customer’s houses.
    After the parties, the customers almost always returned to the Hole and raved about Tulip and her special way with kids, especially the kids who were challenged. She connected with young ones dealing with Asperger’s, autism, and Down’s syndrome. Maybe it was because she was like them in many ways. I didn’t know specifically what problems of her own Tulip dealt with other than her brain functioned much like Rocky’s, which meant you never knew what to expect from either of them. I really liked her, and she made Rocky glow.
    Coop crinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
    Eddy said, “That stench is coming up from the basement. When more people are in here, it’s not very noticeable, but right now it’s pretty horrid.”
    I said, “One more thing for Dad to deal with. I think it’s a cracked sewer line or something.”
    Lisa silently watched our exchange and took a pull from her beer. “This year isn’t starting off very well for you guys, is it?”
    That was a bit obvious, but I bit my tongue. When I was tired, I was prone to sarcasm. I didn’t think it was a very good idea to lip off to