Unpredictable Diagonals
With Bonnie’s death the entire landscape had changed, and with it the compass had reorganized itself so completely that north might as well have been next to south, and even up and down felt like unpredictable diagonals.
It made no sense at all.
Admittedly, Vlad probably left a trail of death the way Dwayne Wix down there in his Santa suit did with alcohol fumes. No question that Vlad had killed the poor schlub who’d rammed his car into me. I figured he’d had two reasons for that: first, to demonstrate that the guy had exceeded his assignment and unwisely acted on impulse; and second, to show me his cute little golf club in case I got impulses of my own.
But unless he intentionally hired people with no self-control, it didn’t make any sense at all that Mini-me had tried to shoot me, not once but six times. Knowing how his boss rewarded initiative, he should have hidden from me all day and all night if necessary, after Vlad promised me there would be no more followers.
And Mini-me certainly hadn’t killed Bonnie. There hadn’t been time, even if I could conceive of a motive.
Was there any connection between Vlad and Bonnie’s murder? None I could see. None even that I could imagine.
And now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure there was actually a connection between Vlad and Mini-me.
Wally was down in the security office where Cranmer had questioned me, talking to a new cop. I was sitting behind his console, half-watching the crime-scene cops on the second floor of Gabriel’s. They’d set up some big lights so I could see most of what they were doing, and also see that Cranmer, the only cop who knew me by sight, was with them.
Mini-me. Yes, he’d been looking down at the ground floor, as Brando had been, when Vlad came in, but he hadn’t left the mall when Brando did after I told Vlad to get rid of his watchers. In fact, ten or twelve minutes later, when I spotted Mini-me as Vlad was going down the escalator, it seemed to me, in retrospect, that he hadn’t been looking at me at all, that he’d been looking down at Vlad before he felt my gaze.
So, a new possibility: he was watching Vlad for someone. And after Vlad left, that someone changed Mini-me’s orders: watch whoever Vlad had met with. And whoever that someone giving the orders was, he would have been very, very unhappy if Mini-me had been caught because it would probably have brought Vlad’s incisors right up against that someone’s throat.
One of the unhappy co-owners?
So Mini-me tried to kill me?
It almost made sense, but to tell the truth, it didn’t much interest me. I didn’t particularly care about Mini-me or Vlad’s problems or the shoplifting or a bunch of bullets that had missed me. What I cared about was the murder of a nice woman with a limitless tolerance for bric-a-brac, and who wished she had lived in the world of Mr. Pickwick.
Someone who’d had a real love of Christmas, or at least Charles Dickens’s Christmas.
But, I suddenly remembered, there are really two Christmas stories in Pickwick, the gathering at Dingley Dell, conventionally full of good spirits, roaring fires, and lots of wine, and then there’s the story of the bitter church sexton Gabriel Grub—Gabriel, I thought—who decides to cheer himself up on Christmas Eve by digging a grave and is set upon by goblins. He’s dragged down, Gabriel is, through the dark, damp earth all the way to the goblins’ hall, where he’s beaten and shown visions of others who snarled at the happiness around them, and he awakes the next morning a changed man, as Scrooge would years later in A Christmas Carol. Unlike Scrooge, though, Grub doesn’t stay and become a shining example of how Christmas should be celebrated. Instead he flees town and shows up unrecognized years later, an unshaven wanderer, a kind of Victorian tramp and, in my mind, a fictional anticlimax. “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is a tale with a moral, but it’s a confusing one. Of the two Christmas stories in Pickwick it probably wasn’t the one Bonnie liked best, but it might have been the one that came into her mind as her goblin set upon her.
If the cops couldn’t figure out—and pretty damn fast—who had killed her, I was going to do it. In fact, I was going to take a crack at it anyway. If I could solve Vlad’s problem, too, fine, but Bonnie came first and second. And anyway, they had to be related. All I had to do in the meantime was figure everything out, keep Vlad from practicing his 300-yard drive on my teeth, and avoid running into Cranmer.
And Mini-me.
On an impulse, I located the picture I’d snapped of Mini-me off Wally’s surveillance monitor and forwarded it to Louie with a message: i think this guy might work for one or more of Vlad’s partners. Can you find out who he’s associated with? Maybe the guy in jail can help, send it in through his lawyer or something. Then I sat there, trying to think of all the things I’d missed.
Cranmer was still on Gabriel’s second floor, and I was free to move around, within reason. I dialed Wally’s cell.
“Uh,” he said, and I could almost see him blush. “Yeah, boss?” To someone, certainly the new cop, he said, “It’s my boss?” the interrogative flagging the fib like a handful of sparklers.
But the cop let it pass. I said, “How much longer do you think you’ll be there?”
“Hold on, boss. Um, Lieutenant, how much longer—”
“We’re done,” a woman said. “You can get back to it.”
“I heard her,” I said. “Listen, I need you to come back up here and keep an eye on Cranmer. He’s still in Gabriel’s right now, but I need you to call me if he looks like he’s leaving.”
“Got it, boss,” Wally said, and I admired the absolute lack of skill with which he lied. It was enough to wake up a part of myself I try to keep under control and make me want to ask him for a loan.
“Okay. I’ll be around.”
I hung up, checked the screen again, and saw that Cranmer had moved behind the counter and was looking down at what had to be Bonnie’s body. My guess was that he’d be there for a while, so I let myself out of Wally’s room.
Since I was on the third floor, I decided to stay on that level and go back to Sam’s. That way I could at least avoid the escalators until Wally was back in place and keeping track of Cranmer.
Sam was wearing a ratty padded jacket and clearing things off the counters, obviously getting ready to shut the doors when I went in. It was about twenty to five. “Early to close down, isn’t it?” I said.
“That lovely woman,” he said, and his voice was shaking. “Terrible, terrible.” He looked around the dim little shop and waved the back of his hands at it as though shooing it away. “I can’t—I mean, I won’t, I won’t do business with her lying there. It’s not fitting.” He was blinking rapidly as though against tears. “And I need light, I want some light.”
“You knew her.”
“Everybody knew her. Lovely woman. Had a husband, just a piece of ekskrementy, you know, kal, just poop. She’s here working her fingers off and he’s home emptying the bank accounts, selling everything he can carry, and she goes home two, three months ago, and there’s nothing worth anything in the house, and he’s gone. Not even a note, he left. And she’s losing money here, nobody buys her tchotchkes, her cute junk, nobody wants this stuff anymore. Now, if it doesn’t plug in and light up, nobody wants it.” He stood there, his back bent, flexing the strong, scarred hands. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Seems like no one does.”
“It’s terrible, isn’t it? This rich country and no real happiness. And here in this place everyone hoping to get through Christmas, hoping to still have a business, a home in the new year.”
“You?”
“Well,” he said. “This is a kind of home, yes? But I’ve—” He swallowed, hard. “I have been chased out of home many times. In my heart, I always live in my first home, the one I told you about, but it’s gone now. Gone a long, long time.” He shrugged. “I have left so many homes, take my things, close the door, never come back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Every time you lose a home,” he said, “you lose a piece of your soul.”
“Are you going to come back? Here, I mean?”
His lower lip popped out. “Where I can go?” he said. “You see saddlery in many malls? Everywhere you look, saddlery? Can I afford my own store? And to go out of here is, is difficult. A lease I have,” he said, raising his eyebrows inquisitively, as though unsure I knew what a lease was. “A deposit I have. A penalty I have.”
“Ah, well. Isn’t that the shits? Sorry, ekskrementy.”
He looked at me and his eyes changed, sharpened. “Why are you still here?”
“I’m the one who found her. I was chasing someone who stole something in the bazaar—the flea market—and he ran up the escalator.”
“It was you,” he said. He turned his head to the left a bit, keeping his eyes on me. “You run after people who steal things? This is something you do?”
“He didn’t just take something,” I said. “He pulled a table over, broke almost everything those people had for sale.”
“When they tell me this,” he said, “I think, maybe security, somebody working for the Russians—for the bosses here.”
“Nope,” I said. “Just old me.”
“Just you,” Sam said, still looking at me. He turned his back on me and went back to putting things away.
“So,” I said. “What time did you eat lunch and where did you eat it?”
“Working for the bosses,” Sam said without turning around. As far as he was concerned, I was no longer there.
“Still on the second floor,” Wally said on the phone. “They got some more lights. Looks like he’ll be there for a while.”
“How long are you going to be here?”
“Till closing. These are holiday hours, most everyone works time and a half.”
“Hard on them, I’d think. Hard on you.”
“Yeah,” Wally said. “Well, you know, ’tis the season.”
“Call me if he moves.”
I’d spent the hour after I left Sam’s Saddlery checking with the other businesses on the third floor, asking whether they’d had their employees clock out for lunchtime and looking at a surprising variety of ways to track that information, ranging from punch cards to on-screen spreadsheets to lists of names written on whiteboards or even on the backs of paper bags: schedules of meals and what used to be called cigarette breaks but which in several shops was now apparently called “personal time.” At the end of the hour, I had two lists: those who had stayed in the shops between noon and one, the hour or so before Bonnie made her last sound, and the ones who had been either out to lunch or for some other reason out of sight of their coworkers during that critical period.
It wasn’t much, but I’ve found that simple motion can relieve the kind of nervous frustration that I was feeling. At the very least, I was doing something I wouldn’t have to do again.
A ping from my phone announced a text from Louie: ain’t no way he’s working for more than one of them. these guys don’t share secrets or employees. remember the italian city-states, how they killed each other all the way through the renaissance? i’d take italians over russians any day.
Vlad and his partners didn’t trust one another. I’d already known that, but it was useful to be reminded.
The lunch break gave me hope because the nearest fast-food places outside the mall were a few miles away, and the break tended to be shorter during the Christmas season, so I figured that most of those who actually left their shops to eat rather than indulge in some other form of “personal time” would have fed themselves in the big room behind the food court where I’d talked with Shlomo. And that gave me a chance to check my list (“checking it twice” kept popping into my mind) from another perspective.
I took the stairs to the second level and headed down the no access hallway to the employees’ dining area. Once in there, I knocked on the door to Tito’s, and a moment later it opened.
“Oh,” she said. It was the woman from the day before. Her smile bloomed again. “Hi.”
“Hey there. Ummm, what time did you come on today?”
Some of the wattage leaked out of the smile. “Why?”
“I was here—out front, I mean, not back here—about, I don’t know, a little after ten-thirty, and there was a different—”
“Mercy,” she said. “That’s her name, I mean, Mercy. I’m not asking you to, you know, spare me or anything.”
“I made a fool out of myself, giving her a big Hi before realizing she wasn’t you.”
“Well, hi now, then. Although I already said that, didn’t I?”
“We both did.”
We looked at each other for a count of three or four while I searched in vain for a transition. Abandoning the impulse, I said, “I need to talk some business,” just as she said, “I got here about—”
We both stopped talking.
“Eleven-thirty,” she finished. “Business? What kind of—”
“This is between you and me, okay? I’ve been asked to look into what happened today.”
“You mean, with Bonnie?”
“Yes. One of the things I do is, well, figure things like that out.”
“I knew you weren’t really working in a store here,” she said. “It was too much to hope for. What a bunch.”
“And the first thing I need to do is figure out who among the people who work here couldn’t have done it.”
“How exciting,” she said. She raised her right hand as though taking an oath. “I was here. Got here just around eleven-thirty, well, maybe eleven-forty, and didn’t go anywhere. Promise.”
“Don’t feel left out,” I said, “but you weren’t real high on my list of suspects.”
She squinted at me as though catching up to the conversation. “So you’re, like, a cop?”
“Not much like a cop, but I am on a job, and I’m working for the good guys. Did you know her?”
“Everybody knew her. She was that kind of person, just walked up to you and said hello. I’ll bet she knew the name of every single person who works in this dump.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Mercy,” she called, “I’m taking ten minutes. Be right back here.”
“’Kay, hon,” said someone who was presumably Mercy.
“Let’s sit,” she said. “This time of day I feel like I’m all feet. Yipes, I don’t even know your name. I’m Amanda, not Mandy but Amanda.”
“I’m Junior, and yes, that’s my name.”
“Bet there’s a story behind that.”
“Not anything you’d be tempted to write down.” I’d followed her to an empty table near the condiments and plastic utensils station.
She surveyed the room as though looking for a better spot. “Is this okay?”
“It’s scenic,” I said. “All that stuff on the counter gives it a certain panache that the rest of the room lacks.”
“I sit here all the time,” Amanda said, pulling out a chair. “I like to think I shed a little light here, charm the corner up a bit.”
“I have to admit that I sense a kind of, I don’t know, warmth—”
“That’s enough,” she said. “Keep it up and you’ll sweep me off my aching feet. So how am I supposed to help you?”
“Nobody really supervises this room, right?”
“Nope. People order from one of the stands, sometimes from back here, sometimes from out front. If he or she orders from our place, either Mercy or I bring the food back. Otherwise . . .” She shrugged. “We don’t have any way of knowing.”
“What I was afraid of. No cameras, either.”
“Here and the johns, about the only place where old Wally isn’t staring at you.”
“Well,” I said, pulling a tightly folded sheet of wrinkled paper out of my pocket, “what I need you to do is ask everybody who works in the food court to look at the names on this list and tell you which of the people on it were in here at lunch today between roughly noon and one. As soon as one of them says yes, cross that name off the list. If two or more people say yes, put a little check next to the name every time someone confirms it.”
Her eyes were wide as she studied the page. “These are suspects? I know some of—”
“No, these are just people who were out of their stores, for lunch, mostly, around the time—the time it happened. I’m just trying to find someone who saw them while, you know.”
“Got it.” She was running a finger down the list, which had seventeen names on it. “Why nobody from the bazaar?”
“Haven’t gotten to them yet.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “The bazaar alone is, like, a million people.”
“I’ll deal with that tomorrow.”
“Well, now that I’ve gone all dramatic, most of the bazaaros eat in their little tiny booths. One-person show, you know?” She bent over the list. “Here, here, and here,” she said, indicating names with her forefinger. She reached into the pocket of her red apron and pulled out a little golf pencil about four inches long. “I waited on these guys myself.”
“See how easy?”
“But you do realize,” she said, checking the names, “that nobody, except maybe Bonnie, knows the name of everybody who works here. Most people think of the ones they don’t know very well as, uhh, Dina from Boots to Suits, the guy who always spills on his shirt, those two pregnant ladies who are always together, the guy who bites his nails and saves them in his shirt pocket, and that chick with the colored rubber bands on her braids who only eats ice cream. The names aren’t going to mean that much. And nobody’s going to remember everybody they took care of.” She looked around the room, which was about a quarter full, people getting an early dinner before the evening rush, if there was going to be an evening rush. “Noon to one? Is that when . . . when it happened?”
“Near as I can figure.” I looked around the room again. “And ask the people who are eating in here now what time they ate lunch. If it was around that time, ask who they ate with, who they saw. Make me another list.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to protest, but she said, “When they ask me why, what do I say?”
“Tell them the cops asked you to do it. They’re just trying to figure out where everybody was.”
“But you’re not—”
“No,” I said. “But I was a friend of Bonnie’s.”
“Everybody was.”
“Not everybody.”
“Well,” she said. “Obviously. But come on, nobody hated her. She wasn’t hateable. Whoever, you know, killed her, he was crazy. Or she knew something about him. Or, oh, I don’t know. Okay, I’ll try to make a list, but I don’t know how it’s going to help.”
“I don’t, either,” I said. “But this is what you do when something like this happens. You start with the dull stuff and hope it leads you to the interesting stuff.”
“Kind of like life,” she said. She thought about it for a moment. “Right?”