Directly Beneath Mom
It was a long way from that French farmhouse in a free-fire zone to Shlomo’s vacated Santa throne in the empty Edgerton Mall in the middle of the night.
Shlomo hadn’t had time to tell me the third part of the story, the one that, I guessed, would contain the miracle. In its absence, I was too weary and too dispirited to resist seeing the vacant mall as a big, brightly decorated gift box with nothing inside it. Christmas has always seemed to me to be an empty box, a broken promise, to so many people. I see the trees gleaming in people’s windows and the commercials designed to make children demand things they don’t need, and all I can think of is the other side of the holiday, Christmas as it must seem to the old and the lonely, the disappointed and the displaced, the people whose connections to the world of love and friendship have been cut or worn away, people who lived alone or in loveless relationships or in poverty with young children who would be disappointed by the things the holiday wouldn’t or couldn’t bring them. Christmas hung in the line of vision of our mind’s eye all year long, glittering bright and often empty, way back there in the final pages of the calendar: the last letdown before the theoretically happy New Year, even at the best of times a holiday with a stiff dose of regret. The two of them, the one-two punch at year’s end, just when we look back to see how we’re doing. Even Scrooge, I thought, had been old and lonely.
My yawn seemed to come all the way from my toes, and it prompted me to look at my watch. Almost three-thirty. Four hours before the cleaners showed up. Time, I thought, to get the video running again so there would be a few hours of nothing happening in case Wally was inclined to start his day with a few minutes’ worth of high-speed rewind.
And there it was again: Wally.
This time, I knew what the tug was, although I still couldn’t see how it could fit in with what I thought I’d seen on my first and second day, or, for that matter, how the whole thing could even be possible. Or how Bonnie’s death fit into it. Still, there was one aspect of the situation that pointed obviously and exclusively at Wally, unless someone was doing an extremely sophisticated frame, and nothing about anything that was happening in the little bubble of Edgerton Mall felt very sophisticated.
And I knew one other thing: at 3:30 a.m., Ronnie wasn’t doing anything that would keep her from answering the phone, if it was somewhere she could hear it. She might be grumpy about being awakened, but I thought I could endure that without permanent damage, so I dialed her.
I let it ring until her voice mail picked up, and then I hung up and dialed again. This time her voice mail picked up on the second ring. She still wasn’t talking to me. If she was even still in Los Angeles.
I tried the landline at the Wedgwood again, just to be thorough, and got a ring that would probably continue until the sun exploded, since I’d never activated any of the answering service options. After twenty-two rings I hung up. There was a cold, leaden lump low in my gut. I had a very bad feeling about this.
But there was nothing I could do about it right then. I was trapped in the mall until morning. On the other hand, I had plenty to do while I was here.
So I got up off Shlomo’s throne feeling heavy, eye-scratchingly tired, and sore in spots that were usually immune to soreness, and speculating, as I limped toward the elevator, that Shlomo’s Santa suit probably gave him enough padding to sleep comfortably on a bed of nails. Maybe what I needed right now was emotional padding of some kind. Or a radically different kind of life where I had no reason to leave people and they had no reason to leave me.
I glanced at the stairs and thought, the hell with it. I had a brief Brad Pitt moment as I pushed the elevator button and the doors opened for me instantly, the way they only do for the star of a movie. One of the few advantages of being alone in a large, multilevel structure is that the elevators stay where you left them.
On the second level, I made a detour to the employees’ dining area and opened the lower door in the condiments station, which housed a large plastic trash can into which people threw their disposable utensils and crumpled paper plates. I tilted the can back a few inches, reached beneath it, and pulled out a few wrinkled pieces of paper: the list Amanda had created to tell me who’d been in the lunchroom while Bonnie was getting stabbed in Gabriel’s, plus the notes I’d made about where and when people had said they went to lunch. I’d hidden it all there a few hours before closing, when the room was empty, because I didn’t want it on me when and if Cranmer returned and he and I bumped into each other, and also because that room, free from cameras, was one of the few places I could do something furtive without being beneath the gaze of Wally’s electric eyes.
Thinking again, Wally, I took the stairs to the third level, my joints still aching, and hiked on down to Wally’s surveillance room.
The first thing I did after pulling Wally’s chair up to the console was to restart the video system. The monitors blinked on in no particular order, the room getting lighter as they did, and as vista after vista popped on-screen reassuringly empty, I felt a slight easing of the tension I’d accumulated during the evening. I’d had occasional Phantom of the Opera moments when it seemed inescapably obvious that the mall would by now have spawned its own disfigured specter, perhaps someone who was scarred for life and driven mad after being trampled by Black Friday crowds and had lurked here in the shadows, probably on the third floor of Gabriel’s, ever since. But if he was out there, he wasn’t in camera range.
I pulled open the little cupboard under Wally’s end of the console and shone my light into it. I don’t know exactly what I was hoping to find, but what was there exceeded all reasonable expectations: a zigzag of perforated graph paper from an old printer and a little wire-bound appointment book. The graph paper was what Wally had promised me, a graphic representation of the dates the stores were especially crowded and the shoplifting levels they’d reported each week during the month just past. I put the graphs aside for the moment and focused on the appointment book.
It was for 2013, so Wally didn’t have a lot of appointments, but then, neither did I. And I found exactly what I needed in the section for phone numbers and email addresses. It was the second entry (directly beneath Mom) on the page reserved for those whose names began with M: Mul-T-Key, it read. Wendy Straub. And a phone number, complete with extension. The corner of the page had been folded down to make it easier to locate. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe he just called his mom a lot.
Close to four a.m. now. Des Moines, where Mul-T-Key was housed, was on Central time, so if the business opened at nine, I could put in a call a little after seven.
I squeezed my eyes closed and rubbed them with my palms, producing a nice display of retinal fireworks, and then, for a change of pace, I rubbed at the bridge of my nose while I looked at the factors in play. One dead woman. One locked and empty department store, open only on the ground floor via a dead escalator that was in plain view of eighty to a hundred people during business hours. Sealed off on the second and third floors behind very exotic locks that opened only with very exotic keys.
Expensive exotic keys.
And I’d found four of them tucked away into odd corners of four shops, little shops with nothing either to distinguish them or to lump them together: a paper goods store, a bad prints store, a watch store—little more than a booth, really—and a place where teenage girls went to economize on second-rate cosmetics. Of the four shops, I’d met three proprietors: Jackie (paper), her personal TARDIS stuck in the 1960s; Milt (watches), chewing his cuticles; and LaShawn, the owner and sole employee of KissyFace. I’d briefly seen LaShawn do makeovers on a couple of her customers, and she was the Michelangelo of makeup as far as I was concerned. Four small shopkeepers, and in each I’d found an unusual, expensive, impossible-to-duplicate key.
And, of course, there could have been even more of them, in the safes or cash registers I didn’t (all right, couldn’t) open, or hidden in places I didn’t think to look in, and there were people who might have taken the keys home, and there were the eighty or ninety vendors in the bazaar, and then there was old Sam of Sam’s Saddlery, who had changed his lock—
Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’d been so absorbed in the mechanics of find the key, open the lock, that I hadn’t even—
I shut down the cameras again, went back out into the mall, climbed the stairs—I didn’t feel like I deserved the elevator after being such a bonehead—used my picks on Sam’s new lock, and went in.
And found nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. Just nothing interesting. A bundle of mail addressed to a PO Box. He’d probably picked it up on his way to work and then forgotten to take it home. There were three penciled notes, each more insistent than the last, demanding the rent from, I supposed, whoever owned the place where he lived, a couple of redlined notices from his bank about his checking account being overdrawn, and some other snipes from creditors, but after two full days at Edgerton Mall, I figured Sam wasn’t the only one who was getting goosed by the banks. The curtain behind the counter slid aside to reveal a storeroom, three rows of shelves neatly stacked with leather-smelling merchandise. I played the penlight over it without going in, and gave up out of sheer discouragement. The whole place, not just Sam’s but the entire mall, had the distinctive funk of bounced checks, unpaid bills, and debt accruing on the doorstep.
With things so generally dire, why was Vlad in such a swivet about some shoplifting?
I needed to get the cameras going again, so I closed up Sam’s store and went back down to Wally’s place, turned the record function back on, and tore three unused appointment sheets from his book. I took the lists Amanda and I had drawn up and started making comparisons. I’d asked shopkeepers when they and their employees took lunch, and Amanda had asked the workers in the food court whom they had seen in the staff dining area while Bonnie was meeting her maker up in Gabriel’s. And now I had a third line of data: people who had a Mul-T-Key and were careless enough to leave it where I could find it. I added a fourth data point: discrepancies between Amanda’s list and mine—someone who said he or she had eaten in the food court at the right time but who hadn’t been seen there.
This was not the world’s most interesting task, and I kept slipping off the edge of the page into a nod that, unresisted, would have led straight to sleep, so the lists took a long time to reconcile. I was only about 60 percent of the way through when I sensed movement on the video monitors and looked up to see the cleaning crew trailing in downstairs with push brooms, waste cans, and the other tools of the trade. I checked my phone, and it was almost seven-forty. Nine-forty in Des Moines.
I opened Wally’s appointment book, picked up the phone on his console, and dialed. Eyes closed, I listened to the ring on the other end, punched up the extension when it was requested, and said, “Wendy Straub, please.”
“It’s me, Wally,” the woman on the other end said cheerfully. “I know your number by sight now. Are you telling me you need another one? What are you doing with them, eating them?”