Erased From Memory (19 page)

“I wasn’t supposed to know,” he adds, “but the department secretary told me.”

The sheriff ignores this atypical bit of boasting. He clicks a mechanical pencil; he jiggles something else. He scowls at Daddy and speaks clearly and distinctly. “Where were you on the night of April 12, 2006?”

“Goodness,” my father says. “That’s much too long ago.”

“When the young woman was shot.”

My father stares pleasantly.

“You were there when Rita Claus was shot.”

“Oh. Yes. That was her name, Rita. What a terrible shame.”

“Did you shoot her?”

Cherie is on her feet, yelling. “You have no grounds for this question. In fact, sir, this whole sequence of interrogation is out of line. I have changed my mind, sir, I would love to have a recording of this procedure; let’s get that play toy out of your drawer.”

The sheriff seems unsure what to do. After a brief scrabble, the recorder package comes out again and he manages, with a single ferocious gesture, to rip it open. Once more he states the date and time, and questioning is resumed.

“Did you see who shot Rita Claus?” is what he asks Daddy this time.

My parent drums a finger on the table. He thinks. He says, “Seeing. That is difficult to determine sometimes. Seeing is not usually thought to be definitive. There is a passage, ‘Shoreland will turn into water / Watercourse back into shoreland.’ Lichtheim 1, 141. Many things are quite hard.”

“Shit.” The sheriff reaches a shaky hand to punch the machine’s
off
button. “Now listen, old man”—shaping his lips as if my dad were stone deaf (which he’s not)—“you can start stopping that right now. You aren’t fooling me. You’re trying to avoid answering.”

“Sheriff Munro.” Cherie is on her feet. “Cease. This.”

“You’re being obstructive,” the sheriff shouts. “There will be consequences.”

“I will remember every evil word.” Cherie’s intonation gets very Southern.

The sheriff gives the impression of dodging around her. “Did. You. See. Who shot her?”

“Yes,” my dad says calmly. “I saw.”

I stop breathing. So, I think, does Cherie.

The sheriff blurts, “What are you saying? You
did
see?”

He reaches toward the machine. “Hell.” He jiggles and clicks. “Shit.” Daddy’s interesting answer didn’t get recorded. More buttons get punched. “Now. Please repeat your answer.”

My father stares.

“You saw? You saw someone shoot her?”

Daddy seems puzzled. “Ah. Do you think so?”

“Goddamn it to hell, answer.”

“Sheriff Munro,” Cherie says, “you’ve asked that question.”

“There was a gun,” my father says. “She may have been afraid of it.”

“Who?”

“She may not have understood this.”

“Not the one who was shot. Not Rita Claus.” Sheriff Munro sounds desperate.

“She is a nice person,” my father says. “Perhaps she was finishing. It is hard to be sure.”

“Stop that!” the sheriff yells.

Cherie is half on her feet again, saying that
this is enough
, and
my client and I will be departing now
, but then Daddy says, “Rita was the victim. She wasn’t the person with the gun,” and Cherie subsides back into her chair.

She lets the sheriff replay the tape from
Please repeat your
answer
. Daddy listens. He seems nervous and plucks at the knees of his pant legs.

“Now,” the sheriff asks, “is that your testimony?”

“I have no idea. The man on the record is confused.”

The sheriff says, “That is your voice,” and my father says, “I wonder,” and the sheriff says, “You can wonder all you like, but a fact is a fact,” and my father says, “Very debatable.”

Cherie sits back and lets all this happen.

Sheriff Munro gets up to walk around the room.

Cherie has relaxed into her chair back. She crosses her legs, which reveals purple and gold stockings. She looks interested and prepared for something even more interesting and in no way ready to close off the proceedings yet.

I would feel sorry for this sheriff if he weren’t such an evil bastard.

He produces a pack of gum and pops several pieces in his mouth at once. He tours the room some more.

Then he returns to his chair. “I have another matter to discuss.

“That is the purloining of artifacts from the museum.”

Daddy looks at him attentively. He has begun humming under his breath. It seems to be, “ ‘Put another log on the fire.’ ”

“What do you know,” the sheriff asks, “about the disappearance of artifacts from the museum?”

Cherie again is halfway to her feet. Her voice gets harsh enough to saw glass. “I am reporting this behavior.”

My father says, “The disappearance of artifacts? I am so sorry.”

“Answer the question, please. What do you know?”

“Don’t answer, Croc. You don’t have to.”

“Was there an ankh?” Daddy asks thoughtfully. “No, I think not.”

“Edward Day—Professor Day—did you take any of the objects that are missing?”

“Crocodile, we’re off. Outta here. Absolutely this minute. This is finished.”

My father sighs. “I doubt it very much about those artifacts. None has a ritual significance.”

Cherie says, “We are going, and all of this is on tape. All that last exchange, Sheriff, in the tape where you browbeat my client and try to entrap him. That tape better not disappear. It better be all ready to go on exhibit. Because I am going to use it in my case, big time.”

“Lo, the private chamber is open, the books are stolen,” my father recites, “the secrets in it are laid bare.”

The sheriff sits for a minute staring broodingly at Cherie and my dad. Then he clicks off his machine and says, “Get the hell out of here.”

Daddy objects that some questions haven’t been answered.

The sheriff tells him for God’s sake, to go.

 
 
Out on the street, Cherie is protective. She puts her hand on Daddy’s arm and calls him Ed. “Ed, darling, are you okay?” I’m glad to hear her dropping the Crocodile nickname. “Did all that hurt your feelings?”

“I am feeling all right.” He gives her a solemn look. “I rise above being yelled at.”

Cherie suggests, and he accepts, the idea of a chocolate sundae at Bettie’s Diner.

“I sure don’t like this stuff about the artifacts,” Cherie tells me.

“I believe there is a jade statue of Apis involved.” That’s what my father offers.

“The creature”—Cherie jerks her head toward the sheriff ’s office—“is setting something up. I think he is getting ready to frame you, Ed dear. I am suspicious. My training has taught me to suspect the worst, and with this clown, I do.”

Yes, I agree. I do, too. I suspect the worst of everybody, and that includes you, Cherie, my love.

Chapter 15

It is the day after our struggle with Sheriff Munro and I’ve decided to devote this morning to exploring the museum.

It has just reopened. I’m going to come in the front door like an ordinary person and look at some of the exhibits.

It’s a bright California day. The air smells of sage. People are lined up in an orderly but wobbly line at Egypt Regained’s main door. The line goes out to the parking lot, along the edge of it, and ends up against a flower bed.

Most of these customers are clutching white squares of paper. Apparently Egon put an ad in the
Chronicle
about the reopening. We were closed for a week and now we’ve been open for two days.

I ascertain by craning my neck toward a lady’s newspaper and reading it upside down that Egon’s ad doesn’t say anything about murder or accident or any of that negative stuff. NEW ARCHAEOLOGY UNVEILED, it headlines.

There aren’t any new exciting displays yet. That’s for when Scott unveils his discoveries. For now, all we have are murders.

The public, of course, knows about the murders. Steve the boy reporter has done a good job of publicizing them. He has put Rita firmly into the picture, even though the sheriff calls her death “an event in a local nightclub,” and refuses to link it to the museum.

“Is this where it happened?” a customer asks Bunny at the door.

Bunny enjoys this. “Not the lady murder, dear,” she tells the client, who is pink-haired and wears glasses on a rhinestone-studded chain. “But the gentleman, he died right here.”

Bunny is probably a pretty good guard. She makes the women relinquish their big pocketbooks and shopping bags. “It’ll be teetotally safe at the check stand, I promise you.”

“Good
good
morning,” she tells me. “Came to help me out?”

Yes, I’ll help her out. I have just learned that I am leaving Egon’s elegant establishment. I will probably leave tomorrow. My Manor boss called this morning with a complaint: “Hey, I said a couple days. Come on. Get back here.” It would be a nice gesture for me to do a spot of work before I depart. I’ve been a parasite, eating Egon’s meals and sleeping in his excellent beds and feeling apprehensive and peculiar because I don’t understand what’s happening. It’ll feel good to get back to work and back to a safe and boring Manor.

I really should take my dad with me, too. This place is weird.

I move into the left-hand side of the door and start grabbing tickets.

“Just punch it and give it back,” Bunny instructs, handing me an instrument.

When I ask, “Why punch?” she shrugs. “Sump’n to do.

“Damndest thing,” she says. “Couple more of those little object doohickeys disappeared last night. But that display case where they were was locked. It’s not just me sayin’ so. Mr. Rothskellar—I mean, Egon—he ast me to call him that—he said so, too. I got him to check it.

“So we’re guessin’ somebody has got a key.”

“A former employee?”

“Has to be, doesn’it? . . . Now, ma’am, that’s a real pretty pockey-book and I know you’re proud of it, but you got to leave it with me.

“Meatheads,” she tells me, aside.

She is a sturdy lady, and today, with the morning sun hitting her shoulders, she looks like a female cop sent by central casting. “Bunny,” I ask, “is that a gun on your belt?”

“Nothin’, babe; I mean, no sweat, it’s just a toy gun, Buck Rogers, dear . . .

“Taser gun,” she adds after a minute. “Won’t do swat in a crisis. Good for killing flies.”

I try to remember what I learned about Tasers in the lecture they gave at the Manor. Tasers hurt.

Bunny’s khaki pants and shirt are crisply ironed; the gun, which is fat, rests on the protruding part of her gut.

“Bunny, do you like being a guard?” I wave a guy in a wheelchair on into the museum. A wheelchair would be an excellent place to hide a stolen artifact, but so what?

“Sure do, dear. I always had these little diddley-squat jobs before: make hamburgers, serve hamburgers; the best I ever had was ring up money for hamburgers, which ain’t all that thrilling. Del Oro College offered a two-and-a-half-month course in being a guard and I took it and that was that. Got a job here right off. Nice uniform and pay and I felt good about what I did. Makes you know you’re doin’ somethin’.”

She shifts her belt and plants her feet farther apart. “This job is real important to me. I like the work and it’s got benefits. Fringe benefits I didn’t know about. Besides the real good pay. I’m home now; I got every intention of staying. Get it?”

Yeah, I get it.

Although in some vague way I don’t. Bunny seems threatened. Surely she doesn’t think I’m competing for her job?

“And I guess the last couple of weeks didn’t discourage you?” The tail end of the museum-viewer line is coming through the door.

“Nope, not-a-tall. That kinda thing don’t bother me none.”

“You were worried about Mr. Broussard.”

“Like, when I asked at dinner? No, baby, not worried; I just wondered if anybody noticed anything special when he collapsed. That first time. But nobody did.”

“What kind of something special?”

She shrugs. “Nothin’. I sure din notice anything. Come on, we get to sit down for a while now.” She leads the way to the marble bench that curves along the wall of the entrance lobby.

She produces one of Egon’s ads from her pocket, folds it several times, and waves it in her face for a fan. “Whoo-ee! My daughter says the only thing wrong with the job is the standing around. You sure get to do a lot of that. I forget, dear; you got kids?”

I’m momentarily struck silent. Some place in the last couple of weeks I have aged fifteen years, enough so that Bunny thinks I might have children stashed away, kids old enough to be living an independent life somewhere without me.

“ ’Cause, dear, if you don’t got kids, you wouldn’ recognize the signs I see in your little dad. Like, he’s been real excited lately? He runs around, sorta holding his breath, looks at a book, drops it, picks up a sandwich, eats a quarter, tries one damn thing after another. My kids’ kindergarten teachers used to call that a wall-climbing kid, but what it is, is just plain overexcited. Know what I mean?”