Sticky Fingers (12 page)

“Uh, not exactly. I came to look up some old newspaper clippings.”

“We don’t have the clippings, of course, but you can look up newspaper archives on the computer.”

I figured Sister Bob might need a distraction. “You mind showing me?”

“Let me clear away this mess first.”

It seemed only right to help her clean up her broken coffee cup and wipe up the spill on the steps. I went out to the truck and carefully brought in a couple of the dye packs we’d gotten out of the bank. We locked the employee door together. Then she showed me into the library’s computer room and booted up a machine. Within a few minutes, I was reading about the murder of Clarice Crabtree’s mother.

“There’s not much information, is there?” Sister Bob sat beside me and tried scrolling down the screen for more to the story. “Just that the poor lady was shot outside a bank. The killer was never caught.”

“It was probably some random thing,” I said, staring at the computer screen and wishing there was more information. “Like your petty-cash thief.”

Bob tapped the screen with her forefinger. “This woman’s daughter is a friend of yours, Roxana?”

“I knew her in high school, that’s all. We were talking about our dead mothers last night. When she said her mother had been murdered, I thought I’d try to find out more.”

“You have a strange sort of bond with her, then. I suppose you both miss your mothers.”

I said, “Mine wasn’t much to miss.”

Sister Bob nodded in sympathy. “And, of course, you had Loretta.”

“Not exactly the same thing, though.”

“But she loves you unconditionally. And took good care of you.”

“Yeah, I know.” I grinned and said, “Thanks for your help, Sister Bob. You going to be okay if I leave now?”

“You’re welcome, Roxana. And of course we’ll be fine. But come back anytime.” Her eyes twinkled. “Especially if you bring some of those books you borrowed.”

I let myself out the back door and got into the Monster Truck.

“Aw, yuck! Rooney!”

He had managed to smear the passenger seat with gunk from his bone. Happily, he panted at me.

I used an old crumpled shirt of Nooch’s to wipe up the worst of the mess. But it was a lost cause. I’d have to get the truck steam-cleaned, and soon.

As I pulled out of the parking lot, I glanced around for anybody who looked like the kind of slimeball who’d steal cash from a library. But I didn’t see anyone.

Nooch was waiting on the corner by his house.

When he opened the passenger door, he said, “What happened to the windows?”

“I think Gino Martinelli soaped them while the truck was parked out in front of my house last night.”

“Wow, he really needs to do some positive visualizing. I bet if he could think about something nice he’d forget about making such a mess.”

“Gino’s idea of something nice is jailbait.”

“Ew.” Nooch climbed into the truck. “What’s this all over the seat?”

“Rooney’s bone. He must have chewed it open.”

Nooch sat in the mess and forgot about it.

That morning, we had some business to take care of in a tony neighborhood with the ridiculous name of Squirrel Hill. I had a few linear yards of quality porch railing that a very nice rabbi and his wife might like for the home they were renovating on a shady side street. All we had to do was show them the stuff and close the deal.

When we got to the salvage yard to pick up the samples, though, we discovered somebody had spray-painted my gate while I was eating breakfast at Flynn’s.

BITCH EAT SHIT

“That’s rude.” Nooch stared at the gate.

“Gino Martinelli sure gets around,” I growled. “When I find the time, I’m gonna run over him with this truck until his guts squirt out. If you’ll pardon the negative visual.”

“You seem a little mad, Rox,” Nooch said.

“Not as mad as I’m gonna make him.”

Nooch loaded porch rails into the truck while I went into the office. Stuck through the mail slot was a CD from Stony. Probably the songs he wanted me to practice before the Friday-night gig.

I checked my office voice mail. Nothing from Marvin. Insults from Gino. I slammed down the phone, and Nooch and I headed for Squirrel Hill.

I popped Stony’s CD into the truck’s player and hummed along with the first song—one of Dooce’s standard anthems to the working class, which immediately got Nooch tapping his foot. For me, the harmony was easy—but my mind wandered away from the music.

Rooney sat between us on the front seat, clenching his bone and looking out the windshield for other dogs being walked on the sidewalks. When he saw one, he lunged onto Nooch’s lap and growled possessively around his bone. The thing had begun to smell, though, and it was oozing plenty of goo, too.

The morning had turned cool and gray, with a little drizzle spattering the windshield and making a mess of the residual soap. Not good weather for unloading anything, so I found myself turning down the street where Professor Crabtree lived. I had a bad feeling about the way Clarice had dropped out of sight. The fact that Marvin hadn’t returned my calls just added to my anxiety.

To Nooch, I said, “Hey, how about thinking back to last night for a minute, will you? While you were sitting in the truck, before the police came, did you see anything at all before you went to sleep?”

“I didn’t sleep. I was—”

“Visualizing, yeah. What about this time?”

Nooch looked embarrassed. “I was making myself a magnet for good bowling scores.”

“Okay, okay, before you closed your eyes to go bowling, what happened? Was anybody hanging around? Looking suspicious?”

“No. Except for the limo.”

“What limo?”

“A black limo came down the street and sat in front of the house for a couple of minutes.”

“Who uses a limo on that street?” I asked. “Unless it’s prom night?”

“Nobody uses black limos for proms. Only white.”

I forced myself not to scream. “Okay, okay, so who was in the limo?”

“I couldn’t see inside. And it didn’t stick around. Just sat in front of the house, then moved on.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Sure, I’m sure. How come you want to know all this stuff?”

Giving Nooch too much information meant that eventually some of it would come leaking out of him—probably at the wrong time. But I said, “The lady I saw in the house? Clarice Crabtree? I think somebody grabbed her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean somebody kidnapped her.”

The idea seemed impossible to Nooch. “Why would somebody do that?”

I wasn’t going to tell Nooch about Marvin’s effort to hire me for the kidnapping. Nooch would misinterpret. “I don’t know, I just— Look, think about it again. Did you see anybody besides the black limo or not?”

“Not,” said Nooch.

I pulled down the street where we’d parked the previous night. In daylight, the Crabtree house looked even more drab than its neighbors.

Except for the emergency van and the police cars parked in front of it. Blue and red lights flashed, and various police personnel bustled around. Clarice’s station wagon was gone. Maybe towed by the cops.

“Hey!” Nooch sat forward in his seat at the sight of the emerging vehicle. “What’s going on?”

Rooney jumped forward and planted his paws on the dashboard to get a better look, too. He growled in case one of the cops decided to steal his bone.

“It’s the bomb squad.” I stamped on the brake on the truck to avoid hitting the pudgy uniformed cop who was stopping all traffic on the street. I rolled down the window and leaned out. “What’s happening?”

The pudgy cop strolled over. “Hey, Roxy.”

It was Gary Sedlak, a guy I knew from high school. Back in those days, he’d been a big man on the football team and me a lowly freshman when he showed me his eagle tattoo in his mother’s basement laundry room. After graduation, he’d fulfilled his dream and gone into the army. He’d had the cocky stuff kicked out of him in the desert, then come home and become a city cop. Now that he was married to Janine, who ran the shop that sold religious trinkets in a storefront around the corner from St. Dom’s, he pretended we’d never given each other hickeys on his mom’s Maytag.

Gary leaned his forearm on the truck’s window and looked past me. “Hello, there, Nooch. What happened to your shirt?”

Nooch said, “A dye thing exploded in a bank.”

Gary looked at me, and I said, “It’s not what you think.”

He shook his head like he’d seen it all and couldn’t be surprised anymore. “I wasn’t thinking anything.” Looking at Rooney, Gary said, “Wow, that’s some bone.”

“Don’t try to take it away from him,” I said, holding Rooney back. “What’s going on?”

“A neighbor called in a suspicious package. After last night’s excitement at this house, nobody wants to take any chances. So the cowboys are here. They’re mad because they’re supposed to be hanging out at the concert venue, looking for bombs but hoping for an autograph from Dooce. So they’re going to work off their frustrations by blowing up whatever this is.”

Together, the four of us watched a couple of guys in SWAT-style uniforms help one of their buddies into a big padded bomb suit. When he was all zipped up, they fitted the helmet over his head.

Nooch said, “He looks like the marshmallow man.”

The marshmallow man gave a thumbs-up to his buddies and grabbed the end of a length of wire that unspooled from a wheel inside the panel van marked Bomb Squad. Then he waddled across the front yard toward the bomb.

“That’s no bomb,” I said. “It’s a messenger bag. Like a briefcase for hippies.”

“It might look like a messenger bag,” Gary said. “But it could be a bomb rigged inside of a messenger bag.”

“Some kid dropped his school bag on his way to the university,” I said. “That’s all. There’s probably homework and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich inside.”

Nooch said, “You mean there’s a kid who might not get a lunch today?”

“A teacher will help,” I said. “Teachers are always lending kids lunch money. That’s why they need a union—so their paychecks can afford all the kids they have to subsidize.”

By that time, the marshmallow man had reached the lunchbox. He tried to hunch down in front of it, but his suit made him too clumsy. Eventually, he kneeled down in the grass.

We couldn’t see what he was doing, but Gary got all ex-GI and said, “He’s planting the det line. They’re gonna blow it up, whatever it is.”

“Right there in the open?” I asked. “What if there’s a big explosion? It could blow all the windows in the houses around here. Or else I’m going to get peanut butter and jelly all over my truck.”

Gary shrugged. “If they didn’t tell us to evacuate the area, they already figured out it’s nothing. They’re just showing off now.”

So we hung out while the detonator got installed. But then the marshmallow man’s suit was so bulky that he couldn’t get up by himself, so his assistants had to jog into the blast zone and help him to his feet. Then they went back and hid behind the panel truck.

Gary said to me, “I hear you’re singing backup for Rusted Roses.”

“Now and then.”

“Somebody at the station said he saw you wearing, like, a lace tank top at a club over on the South Side a couple of weeks ago. Said you looked like Joan Jett.”

“Better than looking like Janis Joplin,” I said.

“What’s taking so long?” Nooch asked.

About that time, one of the bomb squad guys leaned on a lever, just like in the movies, and the messenger bag blew off the grass, turning end over end as it arced into the air in a spray of what looked like shreds of paper and maybe some of those little peeled carrots. A couple seconds later, my theory was confirmed when orange carrot bits splattered my windshield like confetti at a parade.

“Cool!” Nooch said.

Rooney turned around on the seat and growled again. I looked out the back window. A car had pulled up behind the Monster Truck. It was a silver Mercedes—a big one, very expensive once, but old now.

Gary signaled the driver to back up the street to turn around and leave, but the driver’s-side door of the Mercedes popped open and a middle-aged Albert Einstein got out onto the street. He had a lot of curly gray hair and bags under his eyes. He left the engine running.

Hanging on to the door like he needed the support, Einstein said to Gary, “May I inquire? What’s going on?”

Gary read the anxiety on the man’s face and said easily, “Nothing to be concerned about, sir. If you’ll just back up—”

“I’m looking for my wife.”

“Your wife,” Gary said.

“I’m extremely worried about her.”

I bailed out of the truck. I could tell this was going to be interesting.

Einstein looked to be somewhere between forty and fifty. He wore rumpled but expensive-looking gray trousers and a preppy-looking blue blazer that was spotted with coffee dribbles. His white shirt’s collar was frayed, and his red-striped bow tie was faded but perky. A museum tag like Tito’s hung from a clip on his shirt pocket.

He had to be the mollusk guy. Clarice Crabtree’s rich husband. The bow tie was the biggest nerd alert I’d ever seen. I figured if Clarice Crabtree ever arm-wrestled her husband, she probably made him cry.

Einstein pulled out his wallet and opened it up with shaky hands. “I’m Richard Eckelstine. My wife didn’t come home last night. Her name is Clarice Crabtree. I thought she might be here. This is her father’s house.”

“No kidding,” said Gary, looking at me instead of Eckelstine’s wallet ID.

Which made Eckelstine look at me, too.

I said, “I saw Clarice here last night about seven.”

“Oh, that’s such a relief.” He put the wallet away and took out a wadded-up handkerchief to touch his forehead. “When I drove up and saw all the police vehicles, I was afraid that—well. I haven’t seen my wife in two days. She doesn’t answer her cell phone either.”

He wore rimless eyeglasses, but behind the thick lenses, his eyes looked full of worry.

I said, “When your wife left here last night, she said she had a meeting.”

Eckelstine nodded. “Probably one of her committee meetings. She’s on dozens of committees. Association committees, department committees, research committees. She’s in great demand on national committees, too, which is why she travels so much. But…”