Diced

by Deany Ray

  After we’d all had time to think, Marge had an idea. “What we should do is talk to Deborah, although she can be downright mean. Maybe she’s remembered something that could be a hint about where her husband might have gone.”

  “Good enough for me,” Celeste said.

  “Count me in,” I said.

  Celeste tried Deborah on her cell but put the phone down quickly. “It sent me straight to voice mail. She’s probably at work. I’ll send her a text.”

  Marge jumped up from her chair. “Let me do it! Can I do it? Can I text lima beans?”

  Celeste caught my eye and grinned. “Yes, you can text her, Marge. You have fun with that.”

  It was time to come up with another plan since Deborah wasn’t answering. “Who else might know the places that Stanley likes to go?” I stretched a little more as I posed the question. Sometimes stretching exercises helped the ideas began to flow. I’d learned that from my mother.

  “Hey!” Marge seemed to have an idea. “Let’s go talk to Stanley’s boss.”

  “Yeah. He probably talks to Stanley a lot more than Deborah does. Not a lot of conversation goes on in that house.” Celeste grabbed her purse.

  “That works for me,” I said, hoping the guy would talk.

  “Marge, do you mind driving?” Celeste tied on her scarf.

  Marge always seemed to drive, which made about as much sense as pretending to fix computers. She was the worse driver of the three of us; still, we always piled into her car. It had just become our way. We were detectives; we were brave. Why not pick the driver who swerves into oncoming traffic when she’s jamming to a song?

  The next time I would drive.

  ***

  Once again, it was hard to get a parking space outside the Busy Bee. Murderous goings-on were apparently no deterrent to running in for drinks or candy. The crime scene tape left fewer spots in the front of the store and I could see a small line of people was waiting inside to pay for items at the counter.

  Owning a convenience store. I added it to my list of ways to make a living if I couldn’t make it as a spy. Of course, that job had its drawbacks too. As we had just witnessed, hanging around a convenience store could kind of get you killed.

  Finally, two blocks away, Marge pulled into a space in front of Katy’s Fancy Finds, which had cute shirts in the window. I’d have to check the shop out when I had some money. But the next find on my list would be far from fancy. He’d be wearing an old and ugly green vest and go by the name of Stanley.

  I took a last look at the shirts. I liked the silky off-the-shoulder one with a pink and black design. Here I was, almost thirty. Shouldn’t someone who was my age afford some nice things now and then? Maybe this year it would happen. I said a little prayer. Please let there be lots of crimes to solve. (But don’t let anyone get hurt). And make the bad guys stupid. So we can catch them quick and rack up the paychecks.

  Celeste tugged on my arm. “Let’s get a move on, girl. We came to do a job, not to window shop.”

  As we got closer to the Busy Bee, I noticed a couple of officers standing by the door. That really kind of stunk. On the off chance that we’d be able to get some information, I sure didn’t want to bump into any of the cops.

  Neither one of them was Alex. At least that was something. Maybe these cops could be persuaded to give us a little hint about what they might have learned. They were talking to a tall man who was red-faced with fury. He was talking very quickly, pointing at the store over and over again in rapid-fire motions. He was saying something about crime tape. The r rolled off his tongue in a thick Italian accent.

  As we got even closer, I could hear him say, “I’m losing the customers. The customers, they go away when they hear this word, murder.”

  Celeste motioned for us to stop and listen. “That must be the owner,” she said in a low voice. “That’s who we need to talk to.”

  “Do you think he’ll give us information?” I asked. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so hopeful about that day’s assignment. “Alex has probably asked him all kinds of things already. He doesn’t look like he’s too eager to go over it again – with three unofficial looking detectives.”

  Celeste frowned. “You do have a point. He might not be too chatty.”

  Marge was being very quiet considering she was…well, Marge, but that was the very moment she seemed to spring into action. She straightened up her shoulders. She smoothed down her hair. She brushed at her tan jacket, which today made her look more business-like than the flowered skirts she usually wore. She pulled her pen and notebook from her purse and put them in my hand. “Charlie, come with me,” she demanded. Her voice was strong and serious. Who exactly was this woman? And what did she do with Marge?

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is it that we’re doing?” I glanced over at Celeste, who looked as clueless as I felt.

  Marge shoved her purse at Celeste. “Hold this. I’m going in.”

  What the heck?

  I followed her to the front door, where the owner of the store seemed to be almost in tears. His protests grew more urgent. “I need to sell the snacks!” he cried. “I need to sell the tickets for the lottery!”

  I made a mental note to add that to my list of other ways that I could make some money – play the lottery. I might have better odds of picking the right numbers than tracking Stanley down. Wherever our subject might have gone, it didn’t look like Stanley’s boss was in the mood to help us find him.

  Marge, on the other hand, seemed to have a plan. Curious, I watched to see what would happen next.

  An officer with massive shoulders was trying to restore the calm. He stood beside Italian guy. The officer was absolutely huge, almost twice as tall as Marge. You would have to be an idiot to go messing with this man. His voice was gentle, though. “Sir, if you’d please calm down, we should be finished by tomorrow. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  The owner stroked his mustache, then sadly hung his head. “So today – all day – my customers see this.” He made an expansive motion toward the crime scene tape, which stretched across a large swath of the parking lot and into the back lawn.

  I guessed they’d finished with the inside, but still hoped to find more clues outside. What was it they were looking for? I hoped Celeste would sneak behind the store to see what they were doing.

  “Everywhere a ribbon that advertises crime scene!” the owner told the cop. “It might as well say Enter at Your Own Risk! It’s like it says Keep Out.”

  “We do appreciate your kind cooperation,” the second officer said, a portly man who up to that point hadn’t said a word.

  “Excellent job,” Marge said, taking a step forward and nodding to them both. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Someone else’s voice was coming out of Marge. The voice was deep and refined. The two officers stared at Marge.

  “Who are you?” the giant officer asked.

  Marge looked offended by the question, as if she were some esteemed personage that everyone should know.

  “The name’s Roberts,” she said in the manner of a woman with way too much to do.

  “Who?” the portly cop asked.

  That was exactly my question.

  “Althea Roberts. BDA.”

  The cops looked at each other, a question in their eyes. “Althea Rob…” one of them said.

  But Marge silenced him with a stare. “I don’t have time for this. Mullaney said for me to get here fast, make sure you guys had things handled.”

  Mullaney – that was Bert. Very clever, Marge.

  The big officer shook his head. “He didn’t say anything about…”

  “You’re wasting my time,” Marge barked. “Johnson! I need Johnson.”

  The officer didn’t seem to know what to do.

  “Well? What are you standing here for?” Marge said. “Go get him!”

  “Yes ma’am,” the cop said as he shuffled off.

  What the heck is Marge doing? What is BDA? And who the hell was
Johnson? Come to think of it, it didn’t matter. This seemed to be working. It was actually genius. I ignored the fact that this was so against the law, pretending to hold whatever office had made this cop follow orders. Marge was totally the boss of this huge man who was built just like the Hulk.

  Marge turned to the second officer. “We need to ask some questions.” She nodded toward me curtly. “This is my partner, uhm…Robertson.”

  Roberts and Robertson? Of all the names she could have picked.

  The guy looked at us, confused.

  “I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?” Marge seemed to realize for the first time that the names were kind of crazy. “We always say it must mean something. That we were meant to work together.” She winked at him and smiled before getting back to business.

  I said a mental prayer that we don’t get caught. One of my jobs in our dynamic threesome was designated worrywart. Perhaps it came from working with the police in Boston. I knew how strict the rules were when it came to official business that involved police. And it scared me how Celeste and Marge were all too willing to break the rules – if the cause was right. What if Alex showed up? Roberts and Robertson would be big-time busted.

  Once we hit a lull in business, I had to talk with my two friends and set down some rules. There were lines we shouldn’t cross.

  So, as I watched Marge do her thing, I was horrified and nervous. And amazed and proud at the same time. CMC at work! We were badass after all.

  Marge turned to the store owner, whose pained expression hadn’t eased. “And your name, sir, is…?”

  The portly cop stepped back, surprised. “You don’t have that information? Did Mullaney not fill you in?”

  “Of course he did,” I quickly said. “We just needed confirmation. You cannot be too thorough.” That sounded just like something my old boss might have said.

  The cop nodded in agreement.

  The owner held out his hand to us. “I am Mr. Pasquale Agnello. Owner of the Busy Bee.”

  “Very pleased to meet you.” Marge reached out to shake his hand. “I’m sorry for your troubles. Regarding Stanley Bickford, have you noticed any kind of unusual behavior over the past week?”

  Agnello shrugged. “Like I told the others, Stanley was just Stanley. There was nothing that I noticed. He’s worked for me almost two years now. And he always acts the same.”

  “Do you know if there was something bothering him?” I asked.

  “I could not tell you that. We didn’t speak much of the personal stuff. But there was not anything different about him,” Agnello said.

  Okay, this is getting us nowhere.

  Marge nodded. “This next question is rather…delicate. But we need to ask. Do you have reason to suspect that your employee Stanley might be involved right now with someone other than his wife?”

  “I never asked him such a question. We only talked of work. He was not…such a pleasant person.” Agnello shrugged again. “But he did his job okay.”

  So Agnello didn’t like him much more than Deborah did. I wondered what Stanley was up to. Was he having money issues? Was that why he disappeared with all the couple’s savings? That gave me an idea. “Were there irregularities in the finances of the store?” I asked.

  Marge gasped, then hit me with a high five, which confused the poor cop even more. “Oh, hon, that’s a good one,” Marge said before she turned back into Althea.

  Agnello shook his head. “No, everything was normal until the awful incident of the knife stuck in the throat.”

  “Did Stanley handle the money here?” I asked. “Other than ringing up the sales?”

  “Yes. Stanley closes up a lot. Him and one other guy, whoever is on shift.”

  I wrote down what he said. “How exactly does that work?”

  Agnello explained that at the end of every business day, the money went into a safe, which was hidden behind a shelf in the office of the store. Agnello would pick it up, either later in the evening or early the next morning.

  “And when did you pick up the proceeds from yesterday?” Marge asked.

  “I picked it up this morning.”

  “Everything in order?” I asked.

  “Everything was fine.”

  Hmm. I wondered why Stanley hadn’t run with his employee’s funds as well.

  “And did that system seem to work?” I asked. “The employees lock it up, you come and get it later. Were there ever any problems with that way of doing things?”

  “The system worked just fine,” he said.

  I wondered if he might be wrong. Did Stanley see this nightly ritual as a way to fund his big escape? Was it possible he’d been stealing a little at a time so that his boss wouldn’t notice?

  “Did you always count the money and square it up with the receipts?” I asked.

  “Of course. I am not a stupid man.”

  “So no problems with the money?”

  He began to grow impatient. “Do you not hear? No problems.”

  Well, shoot. So much for that theory. “None at all?” I tried.

  Agnello hesitated. “Except there was this one time.”

  I locked eyes with Marge. Bingo!

  “This one time?” she asked. “Go on.”

  “Awful day, awful day,” he said. “Stanley, he had just that very moment taken the money from the drawer; he was headed to the safe. A man bursts into the building and knocks Stanley out.” He made slapping motions with his hands; the guy was into drama.

  “When was this exactly?” I asked, quickly taking notes.

  “Couple of months ago.”

  “How much did they take?” Marge asked.

  “A couple of thousand, a little more.” He shrugged. “Thank goodness for insurance. You work at a convenience store, bad things are gonna happen.” He gazed out toward the back lawn. “But I do not like this yellow tape. It makes the customers think the Busy Bee is not a happy place.”

  I caught Marge’s eye again. We might just have our first clue.

  An older man ran up to Marge. “Hey!” he said and smiled.

  “Do I know you?” Marge asked, confused.

  He frowned. “It’s Johnson, ma’am. You asked for me?”

  Oh.

  “Johnson has been with us for a long time. Just got his plaque for twenty years.” The portly officer beside me looked confused by Marge’s question.

  Whoops. That might have been a blunder. Should the BDA or ABD or DBB – or whoever – know the names of all these men?

  For just a second, Althea morphed back into Marge. Fear flickered in her eyes, then Althea came back in a flash and addressed this Johnson. “I want all evidence collected, all labels double checked, everybody questioned who was in the area. There’s no room for mistakes.”

  Johnson nodded. “Yes ma’am. Absolutely.”

  Okay, this was cool. We could ask them any question; nothing was off limits. Althea seemed to be a bigwig.

  “Do we have an ID on the victim?” I asked the men.

  “No ma’am,” Johnson answered. He looked confused again. Had that been a stupid question? Should Roberts/ Robertson already have been informed about that development?

  “We ran the prints and found no matches with anyone on file,” the portly officer said. That would be criminals with records as well as missing people.

  Althea decreed that the move to run the prints was “thorough, very thorough.” It was pretty standard, really. But I guess Marge didn’t know that from watching CSI, where a case was always riveting and never, ever standard.

  She continued. “Cause of death?”

  Oh, Marge.

  Johnson paused. “The knife stuck in the victim’s throat. That’s what did him in.”

  Yep. I imagined that could get you.

  Marge thanked him with a nod. “Very good, then. Carry on.”

  There were many things I would have liked to talk about with Marge as we walked back to find Celeste. But I knew the men were watching.

  We found
Celeste one block over, checking something on her phone as she waited on a bench. A shopping bag was by her side.

  “I ran into a small boutique so as not to blow my cover,” she said in a low voice when she saw me looking. “Now. What in the world is going on?”

  When I looked at Marge, we giggled. “We were detectives,” I told Celeste.

  “It was fun,” Marge squeaked.

  Our partner stared us down, but I could see a smile dancing in her eyes. “We’re playing with fire, you know.”

  “We know,” Marge and I said at the same time.

  “Good. I have good news for you. Deborah called while you were gone.”

  Marge clasped her hands together. “Lima beans! It worked.”

  “Well, yes,” Celeste said. “We can meet with her at noon. We’re going to her house. She only had to go in to work for a half day. And while we’re in the car, you two can fill me in on your detective adventures.”

  “Wait, what’s in the bag?” Marge asked. She pulled out a leather belt, a jacket in soft yellow, and the shirt that I’d admired. I could see the tags; they were all expensive brands.

  “Treats for everyone,” Celeste said. “Pick out what you want. If you both want to have the same thing, we’ll do Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

  The shirt was only in my size; I knew it was for me.

  “I love Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Marge seemed delighted with the thought, as if the game was way more fun than picking from designer items.

  I was at a loss for words. “Celeste, that’s just too kind.”

  She stood up and headed to the car, waving away my thanks. “It’s business. Only business. If I just walked into a boutique and didn’t buy a thing, I might have blown my cover. You’re a good partner, Charlie. You should know by now to always stay in character, even if you have to open up your wallet and spend a little dough.”

  I turned around in time to see her wink at Marge.

  Chapter Six

  I held the silky shirt against my cheek as Marge nearly drove into a pickup truck then slammed the brakes down just in time. When we’d finally caught our breath, I began to tell Celeste about the things we’d found out at the Busy Bee.