The Second Question
At least my shopping was done. I was surrounded by seven shopping bags full of presents I never would have picked out in a million years. But in the forty whirlwind minutes since I’d followed Anime and Lilli into Wink’s shop, they’d demonstrated almost terrifying shopping skills. The moment either of them had pointed at something, I’d known who it was for and why she’d like it. They’d even led me back to Will o’ the Wisp to buy my mother two saucers, sans cups, to replace the ones she’d broken years ago. She loves that pattern.
So here I was in Wally’s gloomy lookout post, all Christmas-presented up at last and ready to test my assumptions about what had been happening at Edgerton.
I didn’t have a script, but I had enough, I thought, to find my way through the conversation and get what I needed. I felt like I was at a slight disadvantage because I’d allowed Wally—old Honest Abe, can’t-tell-a-lie Wally—to mislead me so badly, but for the first time since I’d met him, he and I were in a room together and I knew something he didn’t.
Wally was sitting behind his console. Usually when a male feels threatened, he’ll stand up to increase his size, the way a bear will raise its paws above its head or a blowfish will swell up or some canine species will make their fur bristle. But for Wally, the console was the extension that gave him the power he had exercised so skillfully over the past few months, and he was staying put.
I was leaning with my back to Wally’s door, blocking the only exit. Wink was standing uncomfortably where I’d put him, in front of the rows of monitors so he couldn’t even lean against the wall. They couldn’t exchange a glance without me seeing it.
“Here’s where we stand,” I said, focused on Wally. “Until about forty minutes ago I had two questions.”
“Only two?” Wally asked. He wasn’t the people pleaser today.
“At that moment, yes, two. The first question was, how the crowds were coordinated. So that’s taken care of. It was old Wink here, sending text messages to mailing groups, people who were mostly down on the first level.” Wink raised his head to say something, but I turned toward him, and he took a step sideways away from me. “As he’ll tell you, I had a couple of young ladies distract him, and then I went in and picked up his phone, and here we are.” I held up Wink’s Samsung. “Three texts sent in about a minute and a half, to three groups of twenty to thirty each. Each message is just two or three words, the name of a store.” I looked up at the display of screens, three of which were packed with people. “Do you want to guess which three stores?”
Wally said, “So Wink is behind—”
Wink said, “Hey.”
I said, “Not exactly behind it. As you know perfectly well, Wally. An adjunct, maybe. A functionary. What he was doing—it was essentially a clerical job. Just part of the enterprise. There are dozens of these texts on his phone, each the name of a store in this mall,” I said, “going back for weeks.”
Wink said, “Nothing illegal about flash mobs.” He didn’t sound as scornful as he had when I’d asked him about the directions on the things I’d bought for Rina and Ronnie.
“No,” I said. “As long as they’re not stealing anything. I suppose, if they were stealing stuff, you could be nailed as an accessory or even, if the prosecutors wanted to get inventive, on criminal conspiracy charges.”
“But,” Wally said. And then he stopped and regarded me with the abstracted air of someone who sees something wrong with his chess position. Then he plunged back in. “But you saw the graphs.”
“That’s right, I saw the graphs. And let me tell you, it made me completely crazy when I did. Listen. There’s a science to how crowds move. One or two anomalies, well, that’s to be expected, but repeated anomalies, in a single location, over a period of time—” I’d been ticking off the points on my fingers, and now I held up all five and wiggled them. “Well, that means someone is fucking with the rules of movement. So the flash mobs were for a purpose, but guess what? They didn’t really have anything to do with the shoplifting.” I looked from Wink to Wally. “Did they?”
Wink licked his lips, and Wally immediately cleared his throat. Wink’s tongue disappeared.
“Well, of course they did,” I said. “They had everything to do with the shoplifting, in one regard at least. But here we are, with this big, fancy video system.”
“Not so fan—” Wally began, but I said over him, “Fancy enough to record the crowds once they assembled in the stores. You were stuck with that, with the crowds in the stores; there was nothing you could do about it. You needed the crowds because they let you coordinate the shoplifting: the store owners were scheduled for crowds on certain days because it was all divided up, wasn’t it, and they had to prepare, didn’t they? So the crowds were on the surveillance tape, and anyone who reviewed the tapes would see them. But, of course, no single camera covered the movement of the whole crowd down on the first floor. Bits and pieces of the floor are covered, but there’s no master shot, so to speak, nothing that would pick them up as they organized themselves and headed for their assigned destinations. I know, you told me that most of the coverage is where the merchandise is, and who needs a shot of the entire floor? All makes perfect sense.”
Wally said, “And?”
“And also, no coverage of the doors into or out of Gabriel’s. And yes, I remember, Gabriel’s had its own system of cameras, another perfectly good reason for the lack of coverage. So no one could say that the camera coverage was contrived to hide the mechanism through which the shoplifters were sent into the right stores at the right time, or any of the ancillary activities. But that pattern of video coverage, which you know better than anyone, Wally, it was taken advantage of when all this was being mapped out. It shaped the whole plan.”
“What plan?” Wally said. “You saw the reports. High rates of theft. You saw the graphs. No correlation between the crowds and the rate of theft.”
“Which just poses the inevitable question, doesn’t it?”
“Um,” Wally said. “What question?”
I said, “Who’s lying?”
Wally looked down at his console.
“I’m assuming we can leave out the off-site security people who chart the losses. They’re independent contractors, not answerable to you. So that leaves us with you, Wally, and the people who own the stores. And look, here we are, with one person from each group: you, representing you, and Wink here, representing the shop owners. Has iShop been stolen from, Wink?”
“Well,” he said.
“It’s on the record,” I said. “The amount you’ve reported as stolen.”
“Since you put it that way.”
“But you didn’t report the thefts in the weeks in which they took place, in the weeks the crowds filled your stores, did you? You waited until—”
My phone began to ring, and I pulled it out and looked down at it. “Guess who,” I said to Wally. “Mr. Poindexter is going crazy to learn what I’ve figured out. In fact, my deadline to tell him is tonight. Christmas Eve, of all nights. Does he strike you—or you, Wink, if you know him—does he strike you as a particularly forgiving person?”
“He, ummmmm,” Wink said. To Wally, he said, “Can I have a chair?”
Wally didn’t even glance at him. He cleared his throat. “I represent his interests,” he said to me. “Mr. Poindexter’s.”
“Really,” I said, “I doubt he’ll share that view. I mean, there’s no one else in this place who knows exactly where the holes in the camera coverage are, is there?”
His face was expressionless but once again, I could hear him swallow.
“Well,” I said, “Christmas is coming, so let’s get it all on the table. I’m not particularly interested in handing you to him.” I looked over at Wink. “Neither of you, actually. So maybe you can help me figure out how not to.”
Wally said, “You don’t know enough to—”
“Oh, but I do.” I felt like I had a weight on my chest, and I sighed to loosen it. “In fact, I know almost everything except the thing I want to know most, the second of the two questions I mentioned, which is who killed poor, sweet Bonnie. Listen, why don’t we all sit down? Roll that chair over here, would you?”
My phone began to ring again: Louie. I hit reject and said. “Mr. Poindexter is assertive, isn’t he?” Wally got up and pushed his chair to me. He sat in the one I’d used, and Wink gave me a resentful glance and perched on the edge of the console.
“Okay. Once there was a mall, right? Not a very nice mall, not a very successful mall. Malls are failing all over the place anyway, and the ones that stay in business all have something special. The one I’m talking about . . . well, it doesn’t.”
Wink said, “No kidding.”
“It lost its anchor stores and replaced them with a discount outlet and a flea market. Neither of those attractions is particularly appealing to people with a lot of disposable income, who are the customers malls need. Some of the mall’s shops went under, and when they did, they were just allowed to sit empty because who’s dumb enough to move in? Empty stores are not attractive. They’re the ruins of failure, not conducive to the kind of suspension of reality that makes people in a good mall forget things like bank balances and rising mortgage rates, so they can get in the spirit to spend. And spend.”
Wally was watching me as though I weighed three hundred pounds, had eight legs, and was flexing all of them at the same time. Wink was biting his nails.
“And now, if you don’t count Boots to Suits, all the mall has left is small businesses, and they’re all—or at least most of them—in trouble. Given half a chance to escape with their tail feathers intact, most of them would close up, go home for good.”
After a moment, Wink said, “But?”
“But two things. First, everyone knows that the guys who own this place are not gentlemen. Everybody knows they’d take every last penny they could get, if they were in a position to do so. And second, as soon as someone tries to pull out, those owners will be in a position to do so. Right?”
Wink said, “It’s your story.”
“They’d be in a position to take everything, practically down to your socks, Wink, because you all signed the same contract. You can’t get out without giving two years’ notice, and if you try to go anyway, you owe the mall a major pre-set financial penalty, in addition to—what was the phrase? Whatever other demonstrable damages the management may see fit to assess. We saw what happened to Gabriel’s, didn’t we? In addition to however much they were sued for, they had to leave behind hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fixtures, display units, counters, changing booths, even business machines.”
Wink said, “Assholes,” and I didn’t think he meant Gabriel’s.
“So the merchants can’t make any money and they can’t shut down without leaving everything behind and then being at the mercy of management who, as we’ve said, are not nice guys.” My phone rang again, and I said, “Hold that thought,” and answered it, holding it away from my ear. All three of us could hear Vlad screaming.
I covered the speaker outlet and said, “Nine-thirty tonight.” He stopped so suddenly he might have been corked, and then, when I moved my finger aside, he was saying “—that late?”
“Because that’s how long it’ll take me to finish,” I said.
“Finish what?”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said, and Wally unconsciously rolled his chair back a few inches, “you want it right or you want it sloppy?”
I had the phone at my ear again, and Vlad said, “What can you tell me now?”
“I know how the stuff is being stolen,” I said. “I know by whom. But I don’t know all of it, so leave me alone and meet me at nine-thirty, when I will.”
“Where?”
“This place closes tonight at eight,” I said. “It’s Christmas Eve, so everyone should be gone by nine. Why not give the slowpokes an extra half hour to get out of here, and meet me in the parking lot. It’ll save me a drive, and I can show you a couple of things here.”
Wally began to swivel back and forth in his chair as though he had to go to the bathroom.
Into the phone, I said, “Nine-thirty. North end, okay? Oh, and hey, it’s not that I don’t trust you, but you’re going to be bringing me a wad of money and I don’t want to see anyone with you who might encourage you to change your mind about paying me.”
“Satisfy me,” Vlad said, “and I will pay you.”
“If I’m right,” I said, “you will be satisfied in every regard.” I disconnected. They were both looking at me wide-eyed, and Wink had a sheen of sweat on his forehead even though the room was, as always, cool.
“I can see why none of you wants to rely on the better angels of his nature, as Lincoln put it,” I said, “because he doesn’t have any.”
“Get to the point,” Wally said.
“So there is a way to avoid being ruined, isn’t there? See, in return for your rent and for observing the terms of your lease, the owners guarantee you—”
I was interrupted by Wally’s sigh. He was kneading his face with the knuckles of both hands.
“In exchange for all that, et cetera, they make you a few guarantees of their own, don’t they? They guarantee you that they’ll do a certain amount of advertising on the lessees’ behalf, including that big, ugly sign out there; and they’ll pay for, publicize, and supervise a number of seasonal promotions like Shlomo and what’s-his-name, Dwayne. They also guarantee that they’ll keep the building in acceptable condition, that there will always be adequate parking, and they guarantee a certain level of security. Security against what, Wally?”
It took him about twenty seconds, but then he said, “Theft.” He was watching the screens on the wall.
“Right,” I said. “And the failure to prevent that theft has what effect?”
Wink said, as though the words were being dragged from him by pincers, “It invalidates the lease.”
“There we are,” I said. “An escape clause.”
Still watching his screens, Wally said, “So that’s why I’m in this conversation? You think I’ve been lax in security? I’m surveillance, I don’t control the guards. They’re a different company. I don’t install or maintain the alarm systems.” He dragged his eyes away from the screens as though I were interrupting the last at-bat of a perfect game. “So how am I—”
“Don’t disappoint me,” I said. “You’re in this conversation because this whole dodge was planned around your damn cameras.”
He said, “Anyone who’s been here long enough—”
“And also because Wendy Straub says hi,” I said. Wally was motionless, his face frozen. I said, “You know, Des Moines? Mul-T-Key? That Wendy Straub?”
Wally began to chew on his lower lip.
“Keys,” I said, “that are interesting if for no other reason than that they open a murder scene. But that’s not the only reason they’re interesting, is it?”
“You tell me,” Wally said.
“Well, let’s frame it this way. Would you want old Vlad to know about them?”
“Who?”
“Sorry. Mr. Poindexter or whatever he calls himself. Because, come on, Wally. You have a role in all this.”
The room was so silent I found myself wishing the monitor screens had sound. My phone chimed and then chimed again, and I saw that Aphex Twin 1 and Aphex Twin 2, aka Anime and Lilli, had sent me attachments, almost certainly the iPhone movies of the crowd in motion. Now all I needed was a chance to put them to use.
“Okay, let’s cut to it,” I said. “Everybody’s guilty.”
Wally raised a hand. “Everybody who? And of what?”
“Wally,” I said. “You’re not spotting the shoplifters on your screens in here. I suppose you could say it’s because of the crowds. But Wally—Wally, why haven’t any of the shop owners snagged some of these thieves? There’s really only one logical answer to that, isn’t there? They don’t want to catch anybody, they’re in on it, they’re the ones with the motive, right? What do you say to that, Wink?”
Instead of answering, Wink nodded at Wally, a silent go ahead. Wally drew in most of the air in the room and said, “First of all, it’s not everybody, okay? It’s sixteen shop owners.” He closed his eyes. “Fifteen now that Bonnie’s gone. And second, all they’re doing is stealing from themselves. Last I heard, stealing from yourself wasn’t a crime. And the crowds? Okay, all the owners nominate eight or ten people each, friend, family, neighbors, every day we pull the scam. Relatives, girlfriends, and boyfriends, I don’t know. Sometimes different people, sometimes the same people.”
The kid with the Frida Kahlo unibrow popped into my mind’s eye.
“But jeez, it’s not hard to get them; they want to come back. They get to hit three or four stores a day, and in every store they’re told to hit they get a freebie they’re allowed to keep. Helps with the Christmas shopping.”
“And those things have already been separated from their alarm tags.”
“Well, sure. So the crowd shows up in, say, Wink’s place.”
Wink emitted a barely audible moan.
“They buy something for cash,” Wally said. “Wink messes around in the register because he’s on camera, remember? And it’s his store because, like everyone else in this deal, he’s the owner and the operator. So he hands their money back to them as change. If they give him a card, he slides it along the terminal, but he keeps it just under the slot. And then he slips whatever they’ve ‘bought’ into a bag, which already has two or three extra things in it, already in a little bag. That’s the other reason for the crowd, the shops need to be ready on the days they’re scheduled. They have to have the extras all bagged up and ready to go. So the people in the crowd, they get to keep the item they chose, and before they leave at the end of their day, they drop off the bags containing the other stuff at a different store. Sounds complicated, but it’s not. They’re told which day to show up, they get three or four texts telling them which stores to go to for free stuff, and the only thing they have to remember is which four stores they can drop the extras in. Because it was all explained to them when they were asked if they wanted a bunch of free stuff. And not that week, but a week or so later, all of it, the things they kept and the things we slipped to them, get reported as stolen.”
“And the stores where they drop the extras off are all next to Gabriel’s,” I said.
Wally looked at his screens again, as though he’d never seen them before. For a long moment I didn’t think he’d reply, but then he said, “Yes.” He glanced at Wink, and then back to me. “What tipped you off?”
“First, the minute I arrived, on my first day, the crowds were bigger than I thought they should be. In this neighborhood, I mean, in this mall. Even Shlomo noticed. More kids, more people. Second, the, ummm, vigilance against shoplifting seemed way down. I’ve never shoplifted in my life, I’m a rank amateur, but I was waltzing into stores with empty pockets and out with full ones. Not in all the stores, but most of them. Third, the patterns of movement on the ground floor. And, finally, when I found those fancy keys last night, they were all, except for KissyFace, in shops next to Gabriel’s. So, as you were saying, everyone, all the fake shoplifters, they drop off the stuff when they leave.”
“Sure,” Wally said. “That way, they go home with all the stuff they picked for themselves, and the other stuff gets left where we can get to it later.”
“So just as I thought, that’s the stuff that gets dropped at the stores that are next to Gabriel’s. Those are everybody’s last stop. And at the end of the day, the owners of those shops use their Mul-T-Key to open the doors, which are out of camera range, and take all the stuff someplace inside. My guess is that it all winds up in the loading dock that’s been closed off since Gabriel’s split, down below the ground floor. The one with the broken elevators. The cops haven’t turned the stuff up yet—but.”
“Cops are back.” Wally was looking at a screen. “They’ve got lights up on the third floor now.”
“What about those elevators?”
“So you’re not so smart, are you?”
“They’ve been monkeyed with,” I said. “How is just a detail.”
“It’s a fake plate,” he said, sulking slightly. “It’s snapped over the real plate with the real buttons. You pop the plate off with a screwdriver, use the buttons underneath, and then push it back when you’re finished.”
“So at the end of the day,” I said, “no actual loss. I mean, the shopkeepers are out a few bucks for the stuff people took home, but that’s still the cheapest way they’ll ever get out of their leases. And they get the other stuff back.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment, although they locked eyes, and then Wally said, “If you say so.” Wink looked at the ceiling.
“Fine, okay, so there are still a few things I don’t know,” I said. “But the important thing is that I will know, and soon. And the reason I’m going to figure it all out has fuck-all to do with you and this scam. It’s about learning who killed Bonnie.”
Both of them were squinting at me like tourists face-to-face with a native in the Valley of the Liars.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all of it. I don’t really care about the dodge people like Wink here are doing to get out of their leases. In fact, I salute their ingenuity. But I am going to find out who killed Bonnie.”
Wink started to say something, stopped and thought about it, and then said, “So you’re on our side?”
“He was hired by—” Wally began.
“If there are sides in this nonsense,” I said, “I suppose I’m on yours. Unless you had something to do with Bonnie’s murder.”
“I was crazy about Bonnie,” he said, and Wally said, “We all were.”
“So back to Gabriel’s. What was Bonnie doing up there?”
“Nobody knows why she was there,” Wally said. “Or at least nobody admits that they know.”
“I was here all night,” I said. “I went over Gabriel’s pretty well except for the only part of it I couldn’t reach, which is to say, the loading dock. Do you know about the word that was written upstairs?”
My phone rang again, and it was, once again, Louie. This seemed like a good time to let them think for a moment, so I said, “Yes, Mr. Poindexter?”
“And merry Christmas to you, too,” Louie said. “Lavrenty Barkov.”
“That’s the guy?”
“No, that’s the boss of the idiot who shot at you upstairs in that store. I found two people who do business with the Russkies and they both recognized the idiot’s picture and placed him with Barkov.”
I looked at Wally and mimed a gun to my head. “Barkov is a member of the Edgerton Partnership, right?”
“Yeah, and according to Rodion, up in the pen, he’s got the most weight. He’s also the one who is least happy with Poindexter.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“You’ll have to do that yourself. I’m not getting near him. I got a number for you, but you didn’t get it from me. You never heard of me. You never met anybody named Louie in your life.”
“Do you have a name for the one who shot at me?”
“You mean the squirt?”
“Yes.”
“Domnin, D-O-M-N-I-N, first name Vassili.”
“Great. What’s the number for Barkov?”
He gave it to me and I wrote it on the little pad in my wallet as Wally and Wink whispered together. Wink glanced at me, and I pointed at the phone and shook my head helplessly. “He’s furious,” I said.
“So,” Louie said, “you coming for dinner?”
“Boy,” I said, “that’s a tough one. We’ll have to talk about it later. When I’m alone.” I disconnected and said, “Whew.”
“You said, ‘Barkov,’” Wally said. He wiped his brow.
“Yeah, Poindexter is so mad he’s bringing his partners in.”
Wally said, “Oh, Jesus.”
Wink got up and said, “I’m outta here.”
“Not until we’re finished. Just hold on a minute.” I took a moment to think about what I needed to say while Wink and Wally fidgeted. Then I sent Barkov a text message that said, i know you have vassili domnin watching poindexter. and i know something you and vassili haven’t figured out yet. I attached the photo of Domnin I’d sent Louie and pressed send. “Who thought all this up?”
“Bonnie,” Wally said. “Or at least, she’s the one who told me about it. She suggested it for the first time last November or so and got a couple of other shop owners to sign on, but she couldn’t get enough, so she tried again this year.”
“I wouldn’t have thought she was so devious.”
“We were all surprised,” Wally said. “But she really wanted out, and she knew everyone else did, too. So, like, necessity is the mother—”
I put up a hand. “She personally recruited everybody?”
“Far as I know.”
“So that means she’s the keystone. Pull her out, and the arch collapses.”
“What word?” Wally said. “You asked if we knew about the word.”
“Better you don’t know. Okay, so Bonnie’s running this con, and she lined up the people who are participating. They could all identify her under pressure. Wink, has anyone asked you who set up—”
“Just you,” he said. “Just today.”
“There’s been no pressure,” Wally said. “Till now.”
“Got it,” I said. “Okay, then let’s look at it this way. There must have been people she talked to who said no.”
“There were, I think,” Wally said. “But they got in on it, mostly, after the first three, four days. They could see it was going to work. I don’t know for sure that they all changed their minds, but—”
“What are you doing in the middle of this, Wally? Wink, I understand, but not you.”
“I hate those guys,” Wally said. “And I have friends here. Bonnie took a chance on me, talked to me about the cameras, and I thought about it and signed on. These people are my friends, and they’re being treated like slaves, and it’s not like they’re actually breaking the law. I was going to quit after Christmas anyway. What word?”
“Something written upstairs, near where she was killed. Well, listen, if you don’t know for sure who turned her down, maybe there’s another way to approach it. There are four stores that border Gabriel’s, meaning that their owners could slip out at the end of the day, unlock those doors, and put stuff in there without being on camera. I’m leaving out the ground floor because the bazaar is down there, lots of light and some camera coverage of anyone who goes in or out. Of the four stores that border Gabriel’s, three had a hidden Mul-T-Key, and I had to pick the lock to get into the fourth. My guess is that’s a shop owner who might have passed on the whole idea.”
Wally said, “Oh.” He looked like he’d been hit on the head with a rock. “The only one who’s next to Gabriel’s who didn’t get a key was Sam, and he—” He rubbed at his chin with the palm of his hand, and I could hear his whiskers bristle. “I don’t know whether she talked to Sam, but . . .”
“But she didn’t ask you to get him a key,” I said.
“Umm, no.”
“Sam hated the whole thing,” Wink said. “He went kind of crazy, Bonnie said, talked about losing another home and, and having to live on a border, just nutso—”
I said to Wally, “Did you know he’d changed his locks? Your key won’t open his door now.”
“It’s a fire code rule,” Wally began, and then he got up to follow me because I was already halfway through the door. “He hasn’t come in today,” he said. “He never misses a day, but he hasn’t come in.” We were out on the walkway, headed toward Sam’s. “And it’s Christmas,” he said.
The moment I made the right toward Sam’s, my phone pinged to indicate a text. It was from Barkov, and it contained nothing but an address.