by Sean Little
“You okay, Jenny?” asked Wheels.
Jenny leaned against the wall. She reached down and pulled a strappy, heeled, Roman-style sandal off her water-ski of a foot. “Look at this.” She held up the slipper to show off a broken stiletto heel. “Just snapped.”
Snapped was the right word. A synapse triggered in Duff’s mind. If a C.I.A. spook was trying to hide information, where would she hide it? In a safe, where it made sense to hide information? Even if someone looking through her things hadn’t been smart enough to find the key, it would have been a simple matter to just take the whole safe and blowtorch it at their leisure. It had to be someplace that would make sense for a C.I.A. agent, someplace hidden but always near her person. Someplace that would make it easy to walk out of the apartment with the info unnoticed. Easy to walk.
“It’s in her shoe,” Duff said aloud.
“What’s in her shoe?” said Sally. “It ain’t her foot, not no more.”
“Nothing. I need to leave. I need to make a call.”
At that moment, Duff’s phone leapt to life in his pocket. The theme song for The X-Files started playing, Abe’s ringtone. Duff fished the phone out of his pocket. “I was just going to call you.”
“I just got slammed into a wall by some guy rooting through Mindy’s apartment.”
“Jesus.” Duff stood up from this barstool. “Are you okay? You need an ambulance?”
“I’m okay, I think. He just surprised me. I came back to go through her things to see if we missed anything and he rushed me. He’s gone now.”
“Get her shoes and come back to the office.”
“Her shoes?”
“All of ‘em. Take whatever shoes you find in the apartment, bag ‘em, and bring ‘em back to the office. Double-quick.”
“You could say please.”
“I could also say ‘Do it now, ya goon,’ but I was trying to be nice.”
“You’re all heart, Duffer.”
“That’s my cross to bear. Hurry up.”
-7-
ABE AND DUFF spread out the array of shoes in the middle of the office floor. There was a pair of running shoes from the front closet, a pair of well-worn combat boots from her military duty, two pairs of flats, one brown, one black, and a pair of chunky-heeled black leather shoes for military dress outfits. There were no sexy heels, no sandals, and nothing to indicate Mindy ever did anything stereotypically sexy. The shoes there were all comfortable and practical, no frills.
“What are we looking for?” Abe was kneeling at one end of the line of shoes. Duff was laying on his stomach at the other.
“We were thinking like detectives, not C.I.A. agents. We took home the files she wanted us to find, the files anyone ransacking her apartment probably would have found. We found the obvious stuff.”
Abe snapped his fingers. “I knew we missed something. I could just tell. That’s why I went back.”
“Did you get a decent look at the guy who hit you?”
Abe shook his head. “He had a hood pulled low. He was wearing gloves. He felt solid as a Mack truck, though.”
“Shame.” Duff waved a hand at the pile of leather in front of him. “Anyhow, the shoes: If you want to hide information, you keep it with you at all times, someplace you can’t help but observe. You keep some decoys semi-hidden, right? That way, some dunce tossing your pad will find your safe, take the files within, and think they’ve found everything. Meanwhile, the real info is still on your person.”
“So, you think the real info she wanted us to find is in her shoes?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? There was almost nothing in that place. Everything was put away. The shoes were in plain sight in the open closet. What else could she have been pointing us to?”
“I guess it does. Seems a little on-the-nose, doesn’t it?” Abe was a little disappointed to be handed such a simple spy cliché. “It would be a little cooler if she had, like, a poisoned knife in her shoe like the crazy lady in From Russia, With Love.”
“Rosa Klebb, played by the wonderful Lotte Lenya.”
“Yeah, her.” Abe rocked back on his heels and kicked out his foot. “Hello, Mr. Bond!”
“Keep in mind that shoe-knife was effectively neutralized by Bond with a dining room chair.”
“I guess. Cool weapon, but nonetheless disappointing.”
“Bond movies were never really bastions of common sense. Remember, there was one Bond movie that tried to convince us Denise Richards was a nuclear weapons expert named Dr. Christmas Jones.”
Abe flinched. “Dammit, I had almost put The World is Not Enough out of my mind and you brought it back.”
“Don’t bag on my man Brosnan. Dude was a solid Bond no matter what the haters say.”
“True that.” Abe and Duff bumped fists.
The two investigators returned their attention to the shoes. Abe picked up one of the chunky-heeled pumps and tossed the other to Duff. “These would be the logical starting point, wouldn’t they?”
“I would assume.” Duff probed around the heel post with his fingers. “I have no idea how to find a secret compartment in a shoe, though. Does the heel just twist off? Do we have to break it?”
Abe sat cross-legged and fiddled with the shoe in his hands. “Breaking a shoe would get costly, wouldn’t it? You’d have to repair it each time.”
“Not if you were only intending to break them once.”
Abe spun the shoe in his hands and looked at the others. “What about under the insole? That’s removable. It’s not likely to be examined, especially if they’re on your feet.”
“Probably the second place to look.”
“Well, we can look there first easier than we can look at the heels. The heels we’d have to break off and—”
Duff snapped off cleanly the heel of the shoe he was holding. The leather pump cracked into a slipper section and plastic lift. “That wasn’t too hard.”
“Well, I guess not.” Abe gripped the shoe he was holding and strained for a moment. The heel tore free of the slipper. Abe inspected the heel in his hand. “Nothing.”
“Me neither,” said Duff. He thumped the heel on the carpeted floor. Solid. Nothing inside.”
Abe turned the slipped over and started to peel out the insole. “I guess it will be here, then.”
It wasn’t in the pumps. It wasn’t in the sneakers. The combat boots yielded a surprise, however. Beneath the aftermarket Dr. Scholl’s gel insole in the right boot, Duff found a sheet of paper folded into a long rectangle like a bookmark.
“I knew it was in the shoes.” Duff unfolded the piece of paper. In a fine, simple printing was the name and address of a woman:
Sherry Franklin
Schaumburg, Illinois
“Who’s that?” Abe plucked the paper from Duff’s fingers to read it. He pulled his cheaters from his pocket and slid them on his nose to see more clearly.
“Oh, that’s my aunt. We go way back. I didn’t want to forget where she lives, so I put her name and address in the boot of a woman we met a day ago.” Duff’s tone was very dry and matter-of-fact. “Why in the hell do you think I’d know who she was?”
Abe walked over to his desk. He typed her name into a database site they paid a lot of money to use each year. It sped up background searches exponentially. It was costly, but the information they could glean from the database was often better and more current than the information contained within the city and state police computers. There was, as one might have expected, only one Sherry Franklin listed in Schaumburg. It was not an overly common name. “Says here she’s a retired nurse. Worked at Alexian Brothers for the last thirty years before retiring.”
“Doesn’t tell us much.”
Abe clicked a couple of links to dig a little deeper on her. “Same house for the last thirty years, too. Was married. Husband’s dead now. Two daughters, both in medicine in the greater Chicago area. One is twenty-five, a pediatric nurse. The other is twenty-eight, a clinical nurse. That’s nice. T
hey took after their mother.”
“Still not giving me a reason why Mindy would be carrying her name in her combat boots with the idea we would find this info. What does she want us to do with her name?”
Abe clicked another link. “She got married thirty-one years ago in Baltimore County, Maryland.”
“Jackpot.” Duff was on his feet in a flash. He cruised around Abe’s desk to peer at the computer screen over his partner’s shoulder. “Let me guess, she was a nurse at the hospital where Mindy was born.”
Abe cross-referenced info from the photocopy of Mindy’s birth certificate with the information from the people-search website. “You would be correct, sir. Her name back then was Sherry Cohen. It appears she was a rookie nurse at the hospital where Mindy was born. She met an enlisted Navy sailor in Maryland, fell in love, got married, and moved to Illinois where her husband’s family lived.”
“Interesting. You got an address for her?”
“I do,” said Abe.
Duff snapped his fingers. “I’m willing to put a large wager on the notion she was working the night Mindy was born and might know something about the certificate of live birth and the missing twin.”
“You think Mindy talked to her already?”
“No chance. If she had, she would have gotten whatever she needed and wouldn’t have taken the time to hide this woman’s name in her shoe for us to find.” Duff’s eyes went glassy as he thought about it for a moment. “I’d bet dollars to doughnuts Mindy finding this name was the reason someone made an attempt on her. Someone doesn’t want her to talk to Sherry.”
Abe checked the time on his phone. He used to wear a watch. He missed wearing watches. When did he stop wearing a watch? He couldn’t remember. It seemed redundant to him, and he just took off his watch one day. It was buried somewhere in his desk; he just didn’t care to go find it. The display on his phone said it was almost 3:00 A.M. The second Abe saw that, a yawn erupted from the depths of his soul and threatened to crack his jaw.
“Schaumburg in the morning, I guess. I’m going back to the bathtub.”
“That’s two nights in a row, buddy. I’m just saying we should rethink the bunk bed idea.”
“No.”
“What about if we got race car beds? Then, we could totally pretend to have races and crash before we went to sleep.”
Abe arched one eyebrow at Duff. “Dude. You’re forty-four.”
“They’d be race car beds for adults.”
Abe kicked off his shoes. “How do we stay in business?”
“We’re the charming underdogs everyone roots for.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason.” Abe spread a blanket folded double on the bathtub as a mattress. He climbed in and covered himself with another blanket. “I’m going to sleep.”
Duff stood at the door. “I gotta take a leak.”
Abe sighed and pulled the shower curtain shut. “Be quick about it.”
THERE IS NO such thing as a restful night’s sleep when you’re trying to sleep in a bathtub. Abe had been meaning to get a cot or an air mattress to stuff in the apartment’s closet for nights where he stayed late, but he never remembered to do it when he was actually in a store where such things were sold. So, Abe just dealt with it, as he did with so many things in life.
Abe’s first girlfriend was not Katherine. Kath was his second. His first girlfriend was a girl he’d met over the summer between his senior year of high school and his freshman year at Northwestern while he was working at a summer camp for physically disabled kids. Her name had been Francesca, but everyone called her Frankie. She had been cute and petite, very short. She was like a pixie compared to Abe’s gangly Frankenstein frame. She smiled and laughed easily, had a tight, riot-grrl haircut, and wore calf-high Doc Martens. She was wild and dangerous compared to the sort of girls Abe usually found attractive.
They never got too hot and heavy, mostly just little kisses here and there. They had lots of deep conversations about the awe and fear the future held. They both fully understood their relationship was destined for doom. She was from Iowa and was going to college in Grinnell in the fall. Grinnell to Evanston was a five-hour drive and long-distance relationships were not a good idea, especially in a world rife with hormones and possibilities like college. They eventually parted as friends, but never spoke again. Not a letter, a phone call, or an email. He had never even tried to look her up on Facebook. He didn’t want his memory of her to be altered in any way. That summer existed in Abe’s mind like a small slice of glowing eternity, perfect in every aspect. Looking back, it was easily the best summer of his life and a memory second only to the birth of Tilda.
All greatness from that summer aside, Frankie had told Abe one thing that stuck in his memory. She’d said, “You’re not the type of guy who gets to win, Abe. You just do what you can with what you’re given.” Her words always bothered him, but it was a painful truth clawing at the back of his mind. He just rolled with what happened to him. Like when the hooded guy attacked him: he didn’t fight back. He didn’t do some sort of cool Jackie Chan-style kung-fu move to let the assailant know he had been in a fight—he just got crumpled like cheap linen. When Kath came out as a lesbian, Abe just accepted it. He didn’t get mad at her. He didn’t ask her how she could have let this go for so many years. He just packed a suitcase and left the house. His house. The one for which he had worked so hard, so long.
Abe wasn’t the type of guy who wins anything, not even a game of Monopoly. On the contrary, he’s the type of guy to whom bad stuff just sort of happens. If someone handed him something expensive, he’d likely drop it. If he accidentally dropped his phone, rest assured there’d be a new crack in the screen when he picked it up. If he was trying to impress a woman at a bar, safe money was on him accidentally inhaling part of his drink and spending at least ten minutes hovering between death and a spastic coughing fit which would safely quash any hint of an opportunity to have sex with the woman ever in his life. That was just Abe’s life. That was why Abe slept in a bathtub.
Abe was tormented by weird dreams in the few hours he slept. Like so many of his dreams, the sound of people laughing still rang in his head when he woke. Waking in the bathroom pre-dawn was always disorienting. Where was he? Why did his back hurt? Why was he cold?
Abe dragged himself out of the tub and walked to his desk. He got out a pair of emergency boxers from his desk, nullified his upcoming alarm, and removed the blankets from the tub so he could shower. It had been almost three full days since his last shower, and he felt greasy.
Abe dressed in his three-day old clothes, save for the new boxers which made his old clothes feel freshly laundered, and he pulled a pack of Pop-Tarts from a cupboard in the kitchenette. They did not keep fresh food around the apartment. Duff didn’t cook and anything without a substantial shelf life stood a better chance at getting chucked out because it rotted than it did at being turned into something healthy and nutritious. If they wanted fresh food, there was a taco shop thirty steps away down a flight of stairs with friendly employees who would be more than happy to help them.
Abe double-checked the course to Sherry Franklin’s house on Google Maps on his phone while he stuffed half a frosted blueberry Pop-Tart into his face and chased it with a plastic cup of lukewarm tap water.
Abe’s phone rang. It was still plugged in, charged to 100 percent on the battery. Abe unplugged it and checked the caller ID. It was Betts. “Hello, Detective. What can I do for you?”
“Abe, I need you to come to the station.”
“Can do. Is it urgent?”
“Sort of. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do anything else today before showing up.”
“I can be there in twenty or thirty minutes.”
“That’s perfect. Thanks, Abe.”
Betts sounded strange. He was never polite to Abe or Duff. Abe’s intuition fired in his gut. Something was wrong. “Betts, what’s up? You don’t sound right.”
There was a long pause
. “Yeah. Abe, I don’t know how to tell you this, but at the moment, you’re a suspect in a murder that happened last night.”
Abe snorted out a laugh. “Good one, Betts.”
Betts sighed. “Abe, I’m not even kidding. The cops in the Twelfth District found a body last night. Checking security cameras in the area, their detectives found the last place he exited from—some apartment building over in River West. A little while after he left, you came out and followed him. They recognized you immediately. They called me, and I said I’d bring you in for questioning.”
Abe stopped laughing. “You’re serious? The guy they found—black, hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, built like a brick outhouse?”
“Yeah, sounds about right. Black kid. Mid-twenties. We’re still waiting on an ID.”
“I saw him last night. He slammed me into the wall at an apartment in that building. We think it has to do with a case we’re working on.”
“I figured it wasn’t you,” said Betts. “We just gotta do the due diligence and all that.”
“Yeah, of course. I’ll wake Duff up and be right down.”
“Bring your guns. That’ll be the fastest way to get you knocked down on the suspect list. They’ll probably want to swab your hands for residue, too.”
Abe knew the drill. “You got it. I’m on my way.”
“If you don’t get here soon, I’ll assume you ran because you’re guilty.”
“I’ll wake up Duff and be right there.” Abe ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He walked into Duff’s room. Duff was snoring lightly in his recliner, covered by a Milwaukee Brewer fleece blanket which had seen better days. ESPN was showing baseball highlights on Duff’s muted TV. A small box fan in the window was pumping in the already-warm August air.
Abe kicked the recliner’s footrest jolting Duff out of a sound sleep. “Get up. We have to go to the district office to see Betts. Apparently, I might be a murderer.”