Average Yelp Rating 2.4 Stars
An hour later I’d made a couple of yawning loops on both the second and third floors, watching the customers trickle in and the kids line up for Shlomo. I’d also taken a brief and somewhat hair-raising break sitting in the bathroom stall I was beginning to think of as my office. I’d needed someplace private in which to review the photograph of the golem hanging out of his battered car.
It was much worse than I’d thought at first. I had assumed the lower jaw had been taken off by a close-range blast from a good-size gun. The jaw had grabbed my eyes and held them when I first pulled the picture out of the envelope. I hadn’t noticed the actual message that went with the present.
It was a golf club, a driver, leaning casually against the chassis just behind the rear door. Probably taken right out of Vlad’s own designer bag. His way of telling me first that he’d taken care of my little problem in person, and second, he’d been working on his drive just in case he and I ever got down to it.
It struck me for the second time as I sat there that he was afraid of something. Okay, he was a brutal mass-market pimp who’d risen to Advanced Thug level, where one wears blazers and sips tea and pretends not to enjoy it when the country club help licks his zippered boots, and guys like that will do a lot to protect their status. But he already owned me, or thought he did: we’d come through our little spat last night without actually breaking up, and I’d put a price on my soul, which he paid without a murmur of protest. This kind of—excuse the term—overkill was unnecessary.
Unless he was scared half to death of something, and that something was related to the shoplifting in this wretched mall. And I was the one who was supposed to hand him the map out of his problem.
And I asked myself again: Scared of whom?
Since I was behind a closed door and out of view of Wally’s cameras, I took off my belt and used the point on its tongue to scratch large letters into the paint, which was already a bulletin board for low achievers. It took me a few minutes and I had to check my phone for the number I needed, but by the time I got up with my belt back in place, I’d gouged into the wall—in letters that looked big enough to be seen from the air, like the help a castaway stomps into the beach—FOR A GOOD TIME CALL TIPPY, followed by Vlad’s phone number. Beneath that, written left-handed so it looked like a second opinion, was Average Yelp rating 2.4 stars, but there’s a short line.
As I said earlier, junior high school, but my options were limited.
By the time I came back out to the second-floor railing, I could see that Dwayne was still in position, although he seemed to be staring at his lap as though he wasn’t sure it belonged to him. There were eight or ten children waiting, a few bored and a few looking fretful, but the majority staring slack-jawed at the screens on their phones. Right in front of them was Santa, in the deeply marinated flesh, and the kids were fascinated by pixels. Down at the other end of the mall I could see Shlomo with a kid on his lap and a much longer line of waiting children. Kids have pretty good instincts.
The crowd below me still wasn’t big enough for me to begin trying to find anything unusual in the way it was behaving. A year or two earlier I’d become interested in the way large crowds of people tend to move, especially in the kinds of deviations from essentially random movement that often occur under certain circumstances, and what those certain circumstances tend to be. Obviously no single person actually moves at random—possibly barring the ones who had written the graffiti in my bathroom stall—but when a crowd achieves any of several specific ratios between density and the amount of space it’s filling, certain group behaviors, too disorganized to call patterns, begin to emerge. You can call them random in that they seem to be driven by individual whim, in the absence of some kind of mass attractor that would draw a significant portion of the individuals in the crowd. Think of a large number of birds taking off in any old direction before they achieve flock formation.
What Edgerton Mall hosted at the moment was a relatively low concentration of shoppers, moving according to a few rules so ordinary that they wouldn’t draw the attention of someone looking for deviations. Those of us who are educationally invested in the Western alphabet read from left to right, and since most Americans read ABCs, a predictable majority of us choose the left aisle in a movie theater or, the left door into a structure large enough to have two entrances, assuming the two doors are essentially equidistant to our parking space. On the other hand, groups in circular or oval spaces, like most malls, tend to move clockwise—in other words, to the right of the door they entered through. The fact that people are usually more comfortable moving with a crowd rather than against it multiplies these preferences and magnifies them. People are drawn to light much the same way moths are, and a brightly lit space in a relatively dim area will draw almost everyone in a crowd over time, and a statistically predictable percentage of the individuals in the group will usually be moving toward that light source at any given moment. The same holds for something in repetitive motion, an attracting effect often exploited at Christmastime by shops with blinking lights.
This may all sound theoretical and devoid of real-world value, but insights like these—plus factors such as proximity to escalators, to food, and to the outer doors, to name a few—were all integers in the hardheaded math that went into determining the rental value of virtually every square inch in a large retail structure like the one I was in.
I’d seen something that was off the previous day, but I hadn’t watched long enough to know whether it was just a brief anomaly or something more interesting, and I couldn’t conjure it up sharply enough to superimpose it on the sluggish group below me, so I gave it up and chatted with a few more shop employees and supervisors and shoplifted a couple of small items just to keep my hand in, although nothing as good as yesterday’s poker-playing dog. I was sure one clerk had spotted me but it didn’t rouse her from her torpor. Yes, most of the managers said when asked, they were losing considerably more to theft this Christmas season than they had in prior years. The few chain stores said that losses were up a bit, but nowhere near as sharply as in the little independent shops. Three more owners echoed Bonnie of Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac in saying that this was probably their final year in business.
Some of the stores I went into had a lot of customers and some had none or few. Given their essential exterior sameness, I couldn’t account for that using the little I knew of crowd mechanics, but it gave me an idea, probably the first of the day.
“Been watching you,” Wally said when he opened the door for me. Then he retreated back behind his console and put his hands in his pockets, usually a sign of anxiety.
“Yeah?” I took a little yellow bathtub duck out of my pocket. “Did you see me take this?”
He looked like I’d betrayed him. “No.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. This time through, the cameras were the only thing I was really thinking about.”
He was having trouble with the entire concept. “I saw you take those sunglasses, though. How many things have you boosted?”
“Eleven or twelve, but I put them all back within an hour or two.”
“Not the duck.”
“I will.”
He said, “Honest?”
“Wally,” I said moving the duck over imaginary waves, “what am I going to do with this?”
It took him a moment, but he said, “Okay.”
“You can watch me put it back if you want. You could even come with me. Listen, how far back is the surveillance video kept?”
“One month,” he said. “On, for instance, December seventh, the stuff from November seventh is erased and overwritten.”
“Can you pull out certain material and save it longer?”
“You mean, like if somebody falls down or there’s a fight or something?”
“I suppose.”
“All I gotta do is transfer it to a different storage system. In case we get sued. People sue all the time. Their car gets scratched in the lot, they sue.”
“I don’t see the parking lot on any of these things.”
“We don’t watch it, but here.” He flipped six switches, and suddenly those screens were showing us the lot. “It’s recorded, but the only time we check it is when somebody makes noise about it.” He toggled back to the interior views of the stores.
“So you have all the video for the past month. Do you also have the weekly store spreadsheets—you know, profit and loss, shoplifting stats—for that period?”
“No.”
“Can you get them?”
“Sure. I just need a reason.”
“Tell them that the theft consultant wants to see them. If that doesn’t do it, tell them to phone Mr. Poindexter’s office.”
“Okay,” he said, straightening at the sound of Vlad’s alias. “I’ll give it a try.”
“And here’s what I want you to do. Fast-forward through the tapes for the month, looking for stores that are unusually crowded, and make a note of which day and which store. Then go to the weekly spreadsheets once you get them and see whether those crowded days fell during a week or weeks when those stores reported a significant level of theft.”
He was looking at me as though he was waiting for the simultaneous translator to finish, but then he said, “You want graphs?”
“Graphs,” I said, “would be peachy.”