Title:
Squatter’s Rights
Author:
Kevin R. Doyle
Genre:
Mystery
Book Blurb:
When private detective Sam Quinton sets out to solve the murders of a stripper and small-time gambler, he ends up in the middle of an organized crime war, testing Quinton’s loyalty to an old friend and making him the killers’ next target. While working to stay one step ahead of the killers, Quinton also has to safeguard the life of an elderly couple, who unwittingly hold the key to solving the murders and ending the war.
Excerpt:
Basically, what Nicky does when funds are tight is find an occupied home with the family away for an extended time, break in, and make himself at home. He isn’t malicious, doesn’t cause any damage or, amazingly, take anything with him. He just makes use of the house and its amenities for a while. From what I understand, he usually even cleans the places up as much as possible, sometimes leaving them in better shape than he found them.
Nicky calls it squatting, but anyone else would call it breaking and entering.
“So?” I prodded him again.
“So I came upon this really sweet deal. It’s a two-story place, two older people with them long gone. I think the guy’s a doctor or something, guy named Richards, and he and the missus took off for a month or so. Way I get it from a few little clues I found, they went to France.”
“Nobody house sitting for them?” I asked.
Nicky shrugged.
“Seems not. Judging by the looks of the place, it was a spur of the moment thing. These two must be loaded. So like I say, I’ve been there for about a week now, and last Friday Joey Garzone, you know Joey?” When I didn’t bother to answer, he continued, “Anyway, Joey and I headed out to the Isle and, well, we did pretty good.”
“Nicky,” I said, “fascinating as all this is, could you please get to the goddamned point? I’ve got a business to run here.”
“Sure, Sam, sure. So anyway, Joey and I did pretty good Friday and we had enough to really tie one on. We ended up staying up there with his cousin, who has a house out that way. Found us a couple of blondes. Hell, we had a time.”
If I hadn’t still been wearing the sweat shirt from my workout I would have peeled back my sleeve to look at my watch. But my watch was still in my gym bag, where I’d dropped it on the floor when we came in.
“The point, Nicky.”
“Right, right. The point is, we had such a good time that I ended up not going home until this morning.”
I decided not to point out that “home” was a fairy relative term the way he meant it.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
Nicky came out of his slouch and placed his hands on his thighs.
“When I got there, the place was surrounded by cops. There were at least four cop cars outside those people’s house, and a whole bunch of them going in and out.”
I stayed quiet. All the slackness had gone out of his face. Rather than look at me, his eyes had gone behind me and fixed themselves on the Belt. Like a lot of people, he probably thought the Belt meant that I’d once been the top of my field, when in reality it only meant that once upon a time the bookers had decided I should have my moment in the spotlight.
My very brief moment.
“I didn’t want to hang around there. I mean, I obviously don’t quite fit into the neighborhood, you know. But I figured I had to know what was going on in that house. I mean, when I left it Friday afternoon everything was fine.”
“So?” By now, I felt as if I’d spent my entire morning prodding Nicky to get to it.
“So I talked to a few of the neighbors hanging around, slick as could be, and it turns out that they’d found a body in there. A dead body.”
I passed on pointing out that finding a live body wouldn’t be all that interesting.
“Well,” Nicky continued, “as soon as I heard that I lit out of there as quietly as I could. Made my way to Kimmie’s diner a couple of miles away and sat down to think things through. Then, just as I’m trying to sort it out, a local newsbreak comes on their TV they’ve got up in the corner. You know how a lot of old duffers like to hang around Kimmie’s in the morning, right? So this place has a TV they keep tuned to Good Morning America and . . .”
“Nicky!” My limit had finally been reached. “Get to it, dammit.”
He jumped, but Nicky tends to jump at the sight of a cockroach.
“Okay, Sam, okay.” The fact that he was using my actual name gave an indication of how upset he was becoming. “So they’ve got the sound off on the TV, but they got the caption thing going. You know, the one for old people who can’t hear anymore.” I let that one slide as well. “So it turns out that someone called the cops this morning saying they heard screams coming from the house. When the cops get there, they break in and find this girl, they said looked like mid-twenties, murdered in the living room.”
He finally wound down and stood there looking at me.
“Had they ID’d the girl?” I asked.
“Didn’t say nothing on the morning news, but I don’t know about by now.”
I drummed my fingers on my desk.
Nicky looked past me at the Belt. A cheap strip of tin and gold leaf, scrolled with some fancy fonts, stitched on a broad swath of artificial leather, colored red with gold edges. It probably cost all of twenty dollars to make, back in the nineties, and in the harsh office lighting you could see some of the gold leaf beginning to tarnish.
Just a cheap trinket. Hell, at the house shows the MWF used to sell undistinguishable items for fifteen dollars.
Yet the Belt always held that fascination, and I figured that Nicky was staring at it like that to get his mind off his very real troubles.
Yeah, it was obvious that, regardless of how I’d felt earlier, Nicky LeBow was in big, big trouble.
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2021 Shamus Awards nominee for Best First Private Eye Novel.
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Author Biography:
A retired high-school teacher and former college instructor, Kevin R. Doyle is the author of six novels in the Sam Quinton mystery series, all published by Camel Press. He’s also written four crime thrillers, including And the Devil Walks Away and The Anchor, and one horror novel, The Litter, along with numerous short horror stories published in small magazines over the years. The first Quinton book, Squatter’s Rights, was nominated for the 2021 Shamus award for Best First PI Novel, and the fifth in the series, Private License, was released in August of 2024.
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