‘Because she was the ex-wife of Gabriella Atherton’s fiancé? You would have gotten to her eventually. Thing is, Elaine seemed like such a timid little thing.’
‘Those are the people you have to watch out for. The ones who bottle things up until they explode, taking everybody in the vicinity with them.’
‘I guess.’ I leaned against him. ‘Don’t suppose you want to come to the party now, huh? I mean, since your homicide cases are all closed.’
‘I take your point, but I still think it would be poor form.’ Pavlik massaged my shoulder. ‘I do think you should go, though.’
‘Without you, I’m not sure I’m up for it.’
‘Of course you are.’ He turned me toward him, hands on both shoulders now. ‘Everyone who is anyone – except me, of course – will be there and you just cleared a string of homicides, missy. You deserve to enjoy your evening.’
‘Missy?’ I gave him a quick kiss. ‘Well . . . Sarah is meeting me there and I’d hate to disappoint her. Besides –’ I pointed to the balled-up Pick ‘n Save bag next to the Escape’s wheel-well – ‘I do have my dress.’
I gave it a beat. ‘And it is red and short and nigh unto dazzling.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be gorgeous on you.’ Pavlik rose to his feet and pulled me up after him. ‘Now, you go have fun and reserve tomorrow night.’
‘For what?’ We were standing toe-to-toe in the shadow of the liftgate.
‘For us.’ He gave me a proper kiss and went off to work.
###
When I re-entered the Ristorante, clutching the bag containing my slut-dress and enough make-up to do it justice, the place seemed deserted. ‘Helloooo?’
Getting no answer, I was about to leave when a workman stuck his head into the entry hall. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I was a guest at the show tonight. I’d like to use the bathroom?’
‘Aren’t you Maggy Thorsen?’ he asked, eyes wide.
‘Well, yes, but I—’
‘Wow, great to meet you. I hear you took down the Realty Killer.’
Geez, Elaine Riordan already had a news slug. She’d like that distinction. Or not. The woman was crazy, so who could predict? ‘But that was less than an hour ago. How did you recog—’
‘This is the age of social networks,’ he said, pulling out an iPhone. ‘Look you’ve already gone viral.’
Sure enough, there I was. Not a flattering shot, though. While I’m not a giant, I looked like a gorilla sitting on top of tiny, skinny Elaine Riordan. If I’d stood up, she could have been wedged in my butt crack like the poor Chihuahua in the fat-lady cartoon.
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Though—’
‘The press took off like a shot when word started to spread. The big man wasn’t very happy about it, I have to say, but the media already had their story once the count was complete.’
‘What did it come out to?’
‘Only about fifty thousand.’
‘Not a million?’
The man shrugged. ‘Maybe the rest went sliding down the drain after the bag ripped. It’s lucky any of it was salvaged, when you think about it. The plastic got hooked on a rough part, otherwise the whole thing would have been washed out to Jones Island.’
Milwaukee’s sewage treatment plant. I thanked the man and asked again if it was OK for me to use the restroom.
‘Sure, but I’m heading out and I think I’m the last of the crew. Here, take this.’ He handed me a heavy brass key. ‘I think I can trust you to lock up and stick it in the box that’s hanging on the doorknob. I mean, after all, you’re the star of the day.’
He held up his iPhone. ‘Or at least the minute.’
Speaking of minutes, as I went into the bathroom I wondered how soon Eric would get wind of his mom’s evening antics.
I didn’t have to wait long. I had slipped into my dress and was finishing up my make-up when my smartphone vibrated on the marble counter next to the sink.
A text message. God forbid my only son would want to actually talk to me.
‘What’d you do now, Mom?’
His punctuation, grammar and spelling had improved, now that we both had graduated to smartphones with real keyboards. Last year his message would have been: ‘wut u do now, mm’.
I texted back. ‘Captured a killer and saved humanity. More on News at Ten. Love you.’
I had time to run a brush through my hair before receiving, ‘Love you, too. Night.’
I had barely set the phone down again before it began vibrating once more. This time a Twitter link, forwarded from Eric: ‘Coffeehouse owner takes down serial killer’.
Probably with the same damn photo. I thought for a second and then texted to Eric. ‘Hate the visual. Can you find a better pic of me and post it?’
Thirty seconds later: ‘My high school graduation? I can cut myself out, if you want.’
Back from me: ‘No! Leave you in!!’ Love those exclamation points.
And, finally, a sign-off from Eric, more reminiscent of our old days of texting: ‘LOL :-)’
He and I were living in an entirely different world than my parents’ and mine. I balanced on one foot to slip on a red stiletto and fastened its strap around my ankle.
Eric had gotten his first cellphone when he was all of twelve, though admittedly just for emergency purposes. When I was twelve back in the seventies, there’d been no cellphones, no personal computers – at least so far as I knew.
My mother had been a self-proclaimed, technology-shunning hippie. In fact, one of my earliest memories was being taken by her, me at age four, to the first Earth Day, started by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.
Now, I thought, putting my make-up back in the Pick ‘n Save bag, recycling was a fact of life and ‘paper or plastic’ was an everyday . . .
I stopped. Cold.
‘Holy shit,’ I whispered into the mirror.
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t recommend snooping around while wearing slut heels and a dress that slides nearly up to your waist when you lean forward enough to see the toes of said shoes.
In fact, I’m not sure I recommend snooping around, period, especially in a slaughterhouse.
I reached through the hidden doorway from the boardroom to switch on the light, just as Elaine Riordan had done earlier in the day when she showed Tien and me the room and its closet escape route.
Seemed like years ago now.
The fluorescent fixture buzzed, then flickered weakly, giving me just enough illumination to step through into the slaughterhouse. By the added light from a street lamp barely shining through a dirty window set high in the concrete block wall, I could see that – unlike in the Ristorante, where all of the equipment had been broken down – here the crew had left some items, including the flood lamps.
I picked my way across the disgustingly stained ‘killing floor’, praying that I wouldn’t catch a heel or turn an ankle in a covered drain. Or,
much
worse, slide down an opened one, hem scrunched up to my armpits. I took three deep, if dank, breaths and found the plug for one of the flood lamps.
It would have made a whole lot more sense to change back into my other clothes, but my plan was to still attend the party at Sapphire. After, that is, a quick look for signs of tampering with the drain from which Ward Chitown had fished the money bag.
The candlepower of that one light allowed me to see that the slaughterhouse was pretty much as we’d left the place, including the drain cover, which sat to the right of its hole.
I tried to think things through. Probably made some sense for the crew to leave the awkward – and, unlike cameras, relatively inexpensive – pieces of gear on-site, especially if Chitown was hoping to field interview requests. The scene of the crime, and I do mean crime.
Because, of course, plastic grocery bags as we know them today just weren’t available in 1974. More like the early eighties, when I was in high school and old enough to be embarrassed by my mother, who refused to accept them on environmental grounds.
A green pioneer, my mother, but that was beside the point.
The supposed loot from Romano’s Raid could not have been hidden in the bag I saw resurrected from the drain hole. At least not in 1974.
I crouched down near the opening, tottering a bit. I was trying to see inside the drain itself to where the bag supposedly had snagged, but I was blocking my own light. Getting up, I tried the other side, but the pillar I’d nearly run into earlier that day cast its own shadow as well. I’d left the bag with my clothes and purse in the bathroom, but I’d brought my keychain, which had a tiny Maglight attached to it.
I flicked the switch.
Incredible how much light the thing threw, though I was having trouble steadying it enough to see anything. I gave in and gingerly touched the pillar with my fingertips for balance and tried again. About two feet down the hole was a protrusion, where the bag could have hung. Chitown had managed to snag the thing with a screwdriver to bring it up, but it would have been a lot tougher to hang it there originally. Especially since one slip might mean the loss of $50,000.
I got back up with an effort and looked around. ‘The meat hooks,’ I said, forcing myself to toddle over there. Most of them were too big to fit down the drain, but one . . .
‘Looking for something?’
I turned to see Ward Chitown, who’d changed into a different designer suit and what looked like handmade Italian loafers. ‘Nope, just snooping. It’s kind of my thing.’
‘So I’ve heard.’ He crossed to me. ‘Quite the collection, don’t you think?’ His hand gesture toward the hooks was graceful, his voice as silky smooth as the leather of his shoes.
‘Quite the coup, too.’ I began backing away from the ‘collection’, not able to see where my own heels were landing. ‘I mean, your find and all.’
Even I could hear the panic in my voice. I’d confronted a serial killer outside and taken her down. Now I was with a man I suspected of mere fraud, but my knees were shaking.
‘Beautiful dress,’ Chitown said. ‘And you look lovely in it.’
‘Thanks, but since we’re probably late for the party, why don’t I meet you over there.’
He caught my arm. ‘I think we should talk here for a moment first.’
‘Here?’ The slaughterhouse, as before, was giving me incremental heebie-jeebies. I wanted to scream and run, but I’d have to take off the high heels first and they had ankle straps.
I doubted that Chitown would wait for me to squat down and undo them, even if I could make myself risk coming into significant personal contact with a floor that had absorbed the blood of countless animals. Even people.
And my hope was that yours truly would not be added to that last body count.
OK, I said to myself, enough mindless fear.
I took a deep breath. ‘Listen, I think it was a really clever stunt, and believe me, no one will hear about it from me.’
‘No?’ The word came from behind the concrete pillar, Deirdre Doty rolling her shoulders around it and coming into sight wearing the same outfit she’d had on earlier, sans jacket. The lacy little cami showed, as well as her toned arms, which I didn’t think I’d ever seen. Apparently, I hadn’t heard her come in over the beating of my heart.
‘Of course not,’ I said, trying to iron out my voice. ‘I spent a lot of years doing events and public relations. You pulled off the ultimate magic trick – nobody
really
wants to know how it was done.’
‘You did.’ The corners of Doty’s mouth lifted a fraction, but that was the extent of anything you could call a smile. Or even a grin.
Under the dress, I was sweating like crazy and the rash on my hand was itching even worse. I couldn’t resist scratching.
‘Oh look, Ward. She’s wringing her hands.’ Doty’s voice bizarrely reminded me of Barbara Billingsley, the actress who played the mother on the old TV show,
Leave it to Beaver
– probably because the father’s character on the program was also named Ward. But Deirdre Doty was no June Cleaver.
‘I wasn’t wringing . . .’ I started to say, then I caught a slightly different angle of light on her bare arm.
‘What’s that?’ I gestured toward a red patch on her forearm that looked an awful lot like the one on my hand.
‘Nothing.’ She hid it behind her like a kid caught stealing candy.
I felt the balance of power shift, if not reverse itself, though nothing had really changed except my attitude. There was probably a lesson in that. ‘It is
too
something. It’s a rash, like mine from a trumpet creeper. How’d you get yours?’
‘What do you mean?’ Now Doty was backing away from me.
I chanced an advance. ‘I got this when I touched the plant that was growing by the doorway of the so-called waiting room under the depot’s loading dock the day we discovered Brigid’s body. I could understand him –’ I pointed to Chitown – ‘maybe touching it, but you weren’t there then. You’d left to make some calls. At least, that’s what you told us.’
Her eyes went wide. ‘I . . .’
Chitown chimed in. ‘We have to be honest with her, Deirdre.’
I pivoted, careful to keep both of them in view. ‘So why don’t you start, Ward? Tell me about the money you planted. There was no hidden loot – you made the whole thing up.’
‘It was a stunt, as you said, but nothing more.’ All of a sudden, Chitown looked like a broken man. ‘The money was mine, Maggy.’
‘You sacrificed your own money? You may not even get it back.’
‘It’s a fifty-thousand-dollar
investment
, one that could bring me another show of my own, especially if our production clips go viral on the Internet. I could even launch my own webcast, which, believe me, is the future of this medium we’ve been calling television.’
‘You could have done that without spending a small fortune. Apparently even little me is all over the social networks.’ I’d have shown him, but I’d had to leave my phone in my purse. No pockets in slut dresses.
‘So I’ve heard.’ Chitown didn’t look happy.
‘OK, I think I buy that you didn’t mean any harm. But what about Brigid Ferndale?’
Doty said, ‘We found her here.’
A hollow tone. ‘When?’ I asked.
‘Monday night, when we came to scout the place.’
I thought I saw a chink in the armor of their new ‘truth’. ‘But Deirdre, Brigid didn’t leave Sapphire until after you did. How could the two of you have found her?’