ELEVEN

CHRISTMAS BALLS

Megan

It was half past one o’clock in the afternoon on the last Saturday before Christmas. My gift shopping was done, but the macaws still hadn’t been located. The story had quickly become old news, buried under a barrage of holiday parades, sales, and performances. But I still hadn’t forgotten the birds. Maybe it was silly to be so concerned about Fabiana and Fernando. After all, there were plenty of humans in bad situations, too. But having another species for a partner had taught me that, whether our outsides were covered in skin or fur, we weren’t that different. At heart, we all simply wanted food, shelter, and comfort. Surely the same applied to creatures with scales and feathers, too. If the birds hadn’t been stolen and sold, they were probably hungry and scared, looking for somewhere safe to nest.

I hadn’t planned to take Brigit to the zoo today, but when we stopped at the adjacent Forest Park so she could stretch her legs and relieve herself, she tugged on the leash and pulled me toward the entrance.

“Okay, girl,” I told her. “We’ll go visit your animal friends.”

Janelle and I exchanged waves as Brigit and I made our way past the ticket booth. The weather was brisk but sunny, and the zoo was bustling with parents and children excited about their upcoming vacation from work and school. I wouldn’t be getting a vacation. Brigit and I were scheduled to work Christmas Day. But at least I’d be able to spend Christmas morning with my family.

As Brigit and I made our way past the giraffes, a father bent down next to his adorable gap-toothed daughter, who looked to be seven or eight years old. She wore a black-and-white coat with a panda face and ears on the hood. She gaped up at the creatures while her younger brothers sat one in front of the other in a double stroller, their focus entirely on the soft pretzel they were sharing.

When a giraffe opened its mouth to snatch a leaf from a tree, the girl looked up at the man and tugged on his sweatshirt. “Hey, Daddy. How come their tongues are purple?”

“I don’t know, squirt.” Her father shrugged. “Maybe they ate grape popsicles for breakfast.”

She giggled. “That’s not right! Let me look it up on your phone.”

The father reached into his pocket as we continued past them.

A smile curved my mouth. I’d been an observant and curious young girl like her once, trying to understand the world around me. Of course my childhood stutter had kept me from asking too many questions, but it didn’t keep me from getting the answers. I spent quite a bit of time in the library or online, looking up information. I was still a curious person, a good trait for an aspiring detective. But, fortunately, barring a rare occasion, my stutter had abated.

A squeal came from the older boy in the stroller. “Ew! It’s pooping!”

I glanced back to see that the giraffe who’d been feasting on leaves was now dropping a load of small pellets similar to the scat left by rabbits. Of course these droppings had much farther to fall than the ones produced by bunnies. Like Danny Landis, I now knew more about animal excrement than I truly cared to.

As Brigit and I walked on, dispatch came over the radio, looking for a unit to respond to a call from Colonial Country Club, which sat directly across University Drive from the zoo. Apparently there was some type of disagreement taking place at the tennis courts. I pressed the button on my mic to let dispatch know my partner and I would take the call.

“Let’s go, girl!” I called down to Brigit.

With a call of “See you next time!” to Janelle, the two of us jogged out to the parking lot and climbed into our cruiser for the short drive across the street. I started the engine and waited, my eye on my side mirror, as a couple with a stroller passed behind my car. Hold on. Is that Danny Landis?

I unrolled my window and called out to the man’s back. “Mr. Landis?”

The man turned around. Yep. It’s him. He handed something to the woman. “I’ll meet you at the gate,” he told her before walking to my window.

I gestured to the zoo. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as everyone else,” he said. “Taking my family to the zoo. They gave me a bunch of free passes when I was hired here. Might as well use ’em up. Can’t afford to take them anywhere else. You know what a movie costs these days?”

“An arm and a leg.” If you added butter to your popcorn, it could also cost you an artery. “At least you won’t have to scoop poop today,” I offered, trying to help him look on the bright side.

He issued a mirthless chuckle. “I suppose there’s that.”

I raised a hand in good-bye. “Have a good time.”

“I’ll do my best,” he replied as he backed away from the cruiser.

As I watched him walk away, the same old thought haunted me. Had Danny Landis stolen the valuable birds? I wished I could figure it out, put my suspicions to rest.

The lot behind me now clear, I backed up and headed to the exit, gunning my engine to make it across all four lanes of University Drive. As we curved down Colonial Parkway, my gaze moved up to the bare trees. A plastic grocery bag was stuck in one of them. Two squirrels chased each other up another. An old nest sat vacant in the crook of a third, waiting to see if its former occupants might return in the spring to raise another brood. But there were no hyacinth macaws sitting on the limbs, waiting to be rescued.

While Colonial Country Club was most widely known for hosting an annual PGA tour, the club also offered thirteen tennis courts, ten outdoors and three indoors. The outdoor courts would be lighted come dusk for evening play. To celebrate the season, the perimeter fence around the courts sported a festive garland with red bows placed every six feet or so, affixed to the chain-link exterior.

As Brigit and I approached the courts, the telltale sounds of tennis being played met our ears. The thwock of a ball being served or returned, the thomp as it bounced off the court, the grunts of exertion and cries of delight and despair as players either returned a difficult ball or missed it. My partner’s ears perked up and her tail wagged. Like these tennis players, Brigit loved to chase the fuzzy yellow balls.

“Sorry, girl,” I told her. “This isn’t playtime.”

From outside the first court, a woman wearing tennis shoes and a black Nike warm-up suit raised her arm and snapped her fingers to flag me down, the way an impatient customer might signal an overworked server. “Over here, Officer!”

The woman’s short hair was dyed a stylish but unnatural reddish tone, akin to an oaky cabernet. A tennis tote sat at her feet, the handle of a racquet sticking out of the specially designed pocket on the side. Two other women stood nearby. Both were club employees. The tall, thirtyish Latina wore pumps, dress pants, and a blazer embroidered with the club’s seal on the breast pocket. The other was a sturdy fiftyish white woman with salt-and-pepper hair. She wore work boots, work pants, and a jacket embossed with the same seal.

As we stepped up, a faint scent of peppermint met my nose. Maybe the wine-haired woman had tennis elbow and used one of those mint-scented pain creams to treat it. I looked from one of the women to the other. “Someone called for assistance?”

The woman in the warm-up suit raised a hand to her shoulder. “That was me.” Her fingers were tipped in a festive holiday manicure. The base was white and featured green holly leaves with red berries. “I just finished playing a couple of tennis matches. I always take my rings off when I play and I put them in this pocket.” She bent down and opened the tote to show me a small zippered pocket sewn inside. “When I was done, I went to get my rings but they weren’t there.” She pointed to the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair. “She had been working around the courts and moved my bag. I hate to sound accusatory,” she said, doing just that, “but I don’t see who else could have taken them. Nobody else was around.”

The story was similar to Nan Ishii’s. Déjà vu. I turned to the accused.

Before I could even ask, she said, “I didn’t take anything.” Her voice contained a calm control that the firm set of her jaw told me was forced. “I only moved her bag so I could reattach a bow. Some of them had come loose.” She cast an annoyed glance at the club member. “I requested that she move the bag herself, but she told me to do it.”

The woman gave a derisive but dainty huff. “I was in the middle of a game.”

My focus shifted to the woman in the blazer. She raised her palms slightly as if to say I don’t know what happened or what to do about this.

“You’re a manager?” I asked.

“Assistant manager,” she replied.

I glanced around, noting security cameras mounted on the tennis clubhouse, which sat near the courts. I gestured to them. “Can we take a look at the video footage?”

“Of course,” she said. “Security will have to set it up, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

I cast a glance at the older woman who’d been accused. She didn’t object, nor did she appear worried in the least. In fact, she appeared to be gloating. She didn’t do it. While I couldn’t claim to be an expert in psychology, I had studied criminal psych at Sam Houston State University as part of my criminal justice degree. If this woman was guilty, she’d be making excuses or at least displaying signs of anxiety. She did neither.

Twenty minutes later, the three women, Brigit, a male member of the club’s security team, and I were gathered around a large monitor in the assistant manager’s office inside the clubhouse, watching the footage. On the screen, the maintenance employee walked up to a droopy piece of garland and attempted to reattach the loose bow from the outside of the court. Unfortunately, she couldn’t get her hands through the mesh far enough to secure the back. She proceeded to open the entrance to the courts and slunk along the fence, doing her best not to interfere with the game being played on the court a few feet away. As she reached one of the loose bows, she looked down at the sport bag leaning against the fence directly below it. Her head turned toward the players as she waited for an opportune time to address them. When one of them missed a ball, she called out to them. The woman with the cabernet hair called something back, and the staff member reached down, took the handle of the bag, and lifted it, moving the bag a few feet farther down. She immediately turned her attention back to the bow, secured it, and circled around the bag to fix another bow near the far end of the court. When she finished, she walked out of the court, still sticking close to the fence, but never again touching the bag. She returned to the tall gate and exited.

The employee looked directly at the tennis player and raised a brow that said, You going to apologize for wrongfully accusing me, bitch?

To her credit, the woman did, her face blushing nearly as red as her hair and her eyes bright with bewilderment. “I’m so sorry! I just didn’t think there was any other explanation.” She looked up, as if trying to force a memory to appear. “I mean, I had them on when I got here, didn’t I?”

“We can look and see.” The security guard restarted the footage, this time beginning as the woman arrived to play. Though we could see her retrieve her balls and racquet from the bag, at no point did she appear to remove any rings.

“Oh, no.” Her hands moved to her cheeks. “Where did they go? What did I do with them?”

I attempted to help her train of thought move along the track. “Where else have you been today?”

She removed her hands from her face. “I did some Christmas shopping and then I got a mani-pedi.”

“Did you take your rings off when you got your nails done?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “The girl gave me a hand massage with peppermint lotion.”

That explained the minty smell.

The woman continued. “I took the rings off before she started. I remember because she had a hand-shaped holder to put them on. It was covered in red velvet. Very kitschy.”

I pointed out the obvious. “Maybe you left the rings at the salon.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No. I specifically remember the girl reminding me not to forget my rings when she finished. I know I put them back on because they slid on really easy with the lotion on my hands.”

Again, I pointed out the obvious. “If they slid on easily, they could slide off easily, too. Maybe they fell off somewhere.”

She gasped and covered her mouth, her eyes darting wildly around. “They could be anywhere. The court. The clubhouse. My car. I cut across the grass after I parked. Oh, Lord! I might never find them!”

Despite the member having wrongfully accused her of stealing the rings, the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair offered to help the lady search for the rings. The assistant manager also agreed to help.

At that point, the situation was more of a treasure hunt than a police matter. I handed the tennis player my business card and wished the trio luck. “I hope you find them.”