Offerings Three Stories

by Mary Anna Evans

  I didn’t think his kids put rat poison in his strudel, and I told her so.

  “Yeah, well if I was married to a guy like that, I just might,” the blonde confessed. “I mean, how easy could it be to divorce the Godfather?”

  I nodded to concede her point. “See if you can get video of her poisoning the Godfather.”

  Another staffer tapped me on the shoulder and beckoned for me to lean down close. “Better have somebody check her work,” he whispered. “Sounds to me like she might not mind if Mrs. Arrezzo got away with poisoning the man.”

  Another good point.

  “Does anybody have the Arrezzos ordering their breakfast? I want as good a look at his food as we can get.”

  The blonde had the video I wanted. The victim ordered for his whole family, like a man who was accustomed to doing all the talking in his world. He got bacon and eggs and orange juice for everybody. Nobody got strudel but him, which might have been one more evidence of his extreme self-centeredness. Or it could have meant that Mrs. Arrezzo was on a diet and the kids were holding out for ice cream later.

  I couldn’t see anything going in or on Mr. Arrezzo’s food from the moment it was handed to him. There were gaps in camera coverage of the kitchen, but everything I could see looked good.

  I wished the surveillance video had sound, but all I could see was the murder victim’s mouth moving and his head nodding. In an hour, he’d be gone. For a while, I just watched the dead man talking.

  Then I ran the tape again, trying to look at everything but the dead man. I scanned every face in the room, looking for Mafia hit men. All I saw were kids and diaper-bag-packing moms and a couple of dads dandling babies on their laps. Behind Mr. Arrezzo, surrounded by the restaurant’s fake Bavarian trappings, his wife and kids cowered. In front of him, a teenaged cashier nervously hit the wrong keys on her register and had to start over. The dead man was not pleased.

  Experience spoke in my ear, and it said, Look beyond the immediate. Screen out the obvious. What else do you see?

  At the edge of the screen, I saw other teenaged cashiers, oblivious to the Arrezzos and their unfolding drama. And in the background, for just an instant, I saw Rosa.

  ***

  Beneath the park, there are dressing rooms and employee cafeterias and storage rooms and food staging facilities. There are broad passageways where golf carts shuttle people and things where they need to go. And if you stray far enough from the beaten path—if you burrow deep enough—you can find rooms full of things people have forgotten ever existed. In the case of Rosa, you can even find a person whose existence has faded from memory. Well, most memories.

  The hardworking kids who run the park know Rosa. They see her pass quietly as they load the trains and serve the burgers and march in the parade. Some of them are afraid of her, but the ones with hearts see Rosa for what she is…a sweet-faced old lady with nowhere to go.

  Rosa likes the kids. I’ve seen her walk past a little ticket-taker who was having a rough day and pat her on the elbow. No talking, no hugging, just a little pat. I’m not supposed to know this, but sometimes she fills in for them, spending a few minutes selling ice cream so that the real ice cream guy can go to the bathroom or steal a moment with his girl. It’s against the rules, but what the hell.

  If old people are invisible in our world, then I guess you could say homeless old people inhabit some other dimension. You’d think Rosa would stand out in a crowd affluent enough to afford the park’s hefty ticket prices. You’d think wrong. I’ve watched a family of five jostle past Rosa as she stood leaning against a wall, minding her own business. Not one of them looked her in the face.

  Can you imagine a better informant for someone in my position?

  ***

  Rosa likes pizza, so I brought three slices down into the deepest part of the basement, to the storage closet she uses for an apartment. Kicking aside a sizeable stuffed pig with only one ear, I eased myself down onto a pile of stuff that she uses for a guest chair. She sat on another pile next to me. At the bottom of her pile, I recognized a cast-off ballgown and a pirate suit. Rods hung on Rosa’s walls at about eye level all around the room, suggesting that it had once been used for costume storage. This would explain the air conditioning vent in the closet ceiling. Fabric gathers mildew within days in this climate, unless the humidity is wrung out of the air with expensive machinery.

  Rosa seems to gather lost sweaters and misplaced stuffed animals. These things serve her well as clothing and furniture. It occurred to me that maybe we should pay her for being the park’s scavenger. A teepee of old gardening tools leaning in the corner of the closet made me wonder whether Rosa ventured out at night to shape up the topiary bushes, just for fun.

  “You’ve had a bad day,” Rosa said, patting my elbow.

  “You hear about Merrill?”

  “A pity. He was a very pretty person.” Her voice had the high, keening quaver of the very old.

  “Did you know him?”

  “He only talked to pretty people like himself.”

  Well, that was true. So I’d proceed on the assumption that Rosa knew Merrill.

  “Rosa, did you know that another man died in the park today?”

  “Yes.” She smoothed a thin veil of gray hair away from her forehead. Her right eye was murky with an untreated cataract. “He was a gangster.”

  My, how well the employee grapevine functioned. Rosa probably knew more about Arrezzo’s death than I did. But, then, that was the reason I was here.

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “Only that he was the kind of man who would make his own children cry. Here. In this place that was built for children. They’re better off without him.”

  That seemed a bit harsh, but Rosa’s whole life was harsh, so I let it go.

  “I know you were there when he died.” This was a stretch. I only knew that Rosa was there when he bought his food, but I bent the truth and was rewarded with the effect I wanted. “What did you see?”

  “It was a quiet thing. He twitched a little and dropped his fork. His wife—she’s a dainty little woman, don’t you think?—looked up from her own plate and asked him what was wrong. Then he just…fell over.”

  “Did his wife help him serve his food? Did she salt it for him? Did she help him sugar his coffee?”

  “He didn’t have coffee.” I knew this already. The fact that Rosa knew it, too, made her that much more credible as a witness. “I did hear him ask her for an antacid tablet.”

  “Did you see her give it to him?” I didn’t have any tape of Mrs. Arrezzo passing a pill to her doomed husband, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  “Nope. Didn’t see anything like that.” She eyed my pizza crust. I gave it to her.

  “Did you see anything else that will help me find out whether Mr. Arrezzo was murdered?”

  “Only thing I saw after that was two crying kids. How are they holding up? Here. Take these to the man’s children.” She clutched the one-eared pig to her breast, as if it were too precious to give, and held out a toy car and a marionette with tangled strings instead. “Tell them that Rosa wants them to feel better.”

  I knew when I’d been dismissed.

  ***

  I recognized the tap at my office door. It had been a long time since James had visited me at work, and he’d only done it once. I hadn’t been sufficiently welcoming and he’d punished me for it for a week.

  Discretion, circumspection, keeping one’s own council—these are all ways of saying that I keep my business to myself. I don’t chat about my home life around the water cooler, and I don’t say stupid things about my employer to the press. This close-to-the-vest quality had won me my job, and it had lost me two lovers that I didn’t want to lose. Two, so far. James had one foot out the door.

  He tapped again, and I knew that he’d walked through the emergency headquarters outside my door, which was clotted with a half-dozen off-duty personnel called in to work the two murder cas
es. Law enforcement types are not typically kind to men with James’ flair for fashion. This was just one in a long list of reasons why I treasured my own circumspection. To be fair, I once knew an emphatically straight cop who took a bullet for his transsexual partner, but in a field where even the women are expected to be macho, the closet feels like a very safe place to me.

  I heard no insults or catcalls through the door, but I imagined them. I hurried to open it and to let James in, where it was safe.

  As soon as the door shut behind him, he burst out with his news, “You remember we were wondering about Aaron, whether he maybe killed Merrill out of jealousy? Well, he’s gone. He quit! Said he couldn’t face this place without his true love’s presence or something like that.”

  When I took a second to respond, he kept talking, “Well, isn’t that important? I was afraid someone would overhear me, so I came straight here to tell you.”

  Sometimes I think I just don’t talk fast enough to suit James. Sometimes I think maybe I think too much to suit him, but I really was just gathering my thoughts. He interpreted my hesitation differently.

  “I shouldn’t have come here. You’ve never wanted me here, and I’ve respected that, but this is important. This is murder and you asked me to help. Well, I gave you the news. You do whatever you want with it.”

  He headed for the door and was nearly knocked to the floor by a half-dozen security officers bursting into my office.

  “We’ve got tape of Merrill fighting with a bunch of kids yesterday just before the park closed last night,” Keith said, popping a disc into my office machine.

  “And a couple of their dads,” another guy added.

  I was interested to hear it, but my eyes were on James’ back as he worked his way through the maze of desks hauled into Keith’s office just for this emergency.

  “Who in the hell is that?” Keith asked. A couple of the other guys tittered, but there were no crude jokes, no insinuations. Yet. They would come after James was out of earshot, and James knew it.

  Through my half-open door, I could see him. His hand was on the doorknob that would take him out of sight. Forever.

  Keith looked at me, waiting for the answer to his question. Who in the hell is that?

  Keith deserved an answer, and so did James. Maybe because I’d just had lunch with an old woman who lived alone in her closet, I knew the right answer.

  “That, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, glancing about the room with my customary air of command, “is the love of my life.”

  James heard me. I could tell. He continued, uninterrupted, in the smooth motion of opening a door. His exit was grand, like the dancer that he is, but I thought he’d probably be back.

  ***

  The answer to Merrill’s death was indeed in the video Keith and his friend had found, though not in the way they expected. The night before, just after his last flight, Merrill had been the center of an ugly scene. His poisonous and cocky personality never took a rest, not even when he’d just been cheered by tens of thousands of adoring fans. As he walked away from his triumphant landing, he’d been besieged by children wanting autographs. Unfortunately, Merrill just hadn’t been in the mood to do something nice for the people who paid his handsome salary.

  When you’re brushing off a few clinging kids, it can’t be a surprise when one falls on his little diapered butt. And it can’t come as much of a shock when his daddy tries to rip off your feathered cap and beat you with it.

  I looked at my in-box, where the day’s petty woes festered. I’d had time for nothing but these two murders, but I would lay odds that several guests had complained about Merrill’s behavior and that those complaints were waiting for me right there.

  “Back it up and slow it down,” I barked. And I set myself the usual task of looking in the background for information that’s hiding in plain sight.

  None of the people watching the altercation looked familiar. It would have been too much to hope that the Arrezzos were standing there, waiting for me to tie the two murders up into a neat bow. Still, there was a smudge of pink on the ground that I thought I recognized.

  Another run through the tape confirmed that this pink smudge was a stuffed pig with a missing ear. And a third pass showed me that the pink pig walked away from the scene, though obviously not under its own power.

  The pig was there when Merrill started to misbehave, and it was gone when he regained his senses.

  Rosa was there. And she didn’t tell me

  ***

  Rosa didn’t seem surprised to see me again so soon, and she didn’t seem surprised to see that, for the first time, I hadn’t come alone.

  In my office, my team was assembling the evidence. The video that showed Rosa had been at arm’s length from Mr. Arrezzo’s food, just before he succumbed to rat poison—which was probably easily available down here in the vast network of storerooms where she lived. And the video that linked Rosa to Merrill through the shabby little pig.

  No record existed of Merrill’s cable being cut, but surely one of the topiary shaping tools leaning in the corner of Rosa’s room would have served that function well enough. I jerked my head in that direction, so that Keith would know to gather the tools and find the one that had been scarred by cutting a metal cable. He had already deployed a team to search the area for an unguarded tray of rat poison. Or a tray where some rat poison had been.

  Finding the right poison, as well as the scarred blades of a pair of tree loppers, would give me two pieces of physical evidence to shore up my flimsy web of circumstantial evidence. These things would show that Rosa had the means to do the crimes.

  I had video confirmation that she’d had the opportunity to poison Mr. Arrezzo, but my cameras had not been conveniently arranged to capture her in the act of cutting Merrill’s cable. I had a few seconds showing just a glimpse of her from behind, standing near the employee entrance to a web of backstage corridors, one of which led out onto the deadly castle balcony. It wasn’t enough. Can you imagine the publicity that a trial over the murder of Peter Pan would produce? I needed an open-and-shut case.

  The only other video I had linking her to Merrill’s death merely showed that she and the pink pig had been present the last time he behaved like a diva, drunk on a testosterone-spiked cocktail. Still, the Corporation didn’t hire me just for my law enforcement prowess. Their psychologists had determined that I was psychologically right for the job. I won my position because I choose my words carefully, and because I think through the full ramifications of my every action, and because I’m a very passable amateur psychologist myself.

  I understood exactly what had driven Rosa to kill, and I could make her tell me about it.

  “I know why you live here, Rosa.”

  Rather than meet my eyes, she looked at her hands clasped tightly together in her lap. Every joint was swollen to the point that her fingers canted in odd directions. “I live here because it’s warm all the year. When you’ve got no roof and no hope of one, Florida looks mighty good.”

  “That’s true, but it’s not what I meant. I meant that I know why you live here at the park.”

  “I do have a nice place here,” she said, as her good eye wandered up toward the air conditioning vent. “Cool in the summer. Warm in the winter. The bathroom’s right down the hall.”

  “That’s still not what I meant.” Finally, the rheumy eyes rested on my face, so I delivered the key to her crime. “This is a very special place.”

  “I like happiness,” she said dreamily, looking upward toward the park that rested on the ground above our heads. “If I want to see people smiling, all I have to do is go up top. There’s sunshine up there, too, but I need happiness more than sunshine.”

  “And children?”

  “I need children more than anything. Here, I can see happy children all the time.” Her eyes drifted down to the damaged pig. “The children…the ones whose father made them cry. Did you give them the toys I sent?” I nodded. “Because, if you did
n’t, they can have this one.”

  I wanted to say, They’re crying now. You made them cry, Rosa, but that would have been too much for her. I’d have lost my confession. So, instead, I said, “You worked hard today for the children. Are you very tired?”

  “Oh, no!” Her voice was almost youthful, rich and musical. “Oh, nothing is hard when you do it for children. I could run so fast today because I knew I had to. If I’d been slow, I would have missed my chance at the gangster’s food, but I got back with the rat bait just fast enough. After that, I felt so strong. I knew I could pick the right tool and carry it up to the balcony. I knew I’d be able to balance out there long enough to do what needed doing.”

  “And these things needed doing to Mr. Arrezzo and Merrill because…”

  “Because they made the children cry. And they did it here! This place is…well, it’s like sacred ground. You leave your tears outside. Everybody needs a place like that. And now those children can have it.” A pale flush spread over her withered cheeks. “They can have it because of me. I gave it back to them.”

  I had my confession, but I wasn’t sure whether I was proud of it.

  ***

  The Corporation avoids bad publicity with all its hefty financial might, and I can’t say I blame them. They’ve never asked me to lie for them, and there’s no sin that I can see in putting the truth in its best possible light. And, as Rosa has finally made me see, the Corporation exists for the purpose of giving people pleasure. Particularly the very small people who are supremely unimportant everywhere else in the world.

  The details of Rosa’s conviction, other than the bare facts, never made the press. The public was told that Mr. Arezzo and Merrill Chatham were killed by a deranged guest who had been put away in a facility from which she can never expect to emerge. This is true, and this is all they need to know.

  The Corporation was exceedingly grateful for my speed and, as always, for my discretion in solving these crimes. It has shown its gratitude in monetary terms. There also have been quiet assurances that any inappropriate behavior in the workplace toward James, me, or the two of us as a family unit will trigger prompt action. A woman even came to my office to ask me, and I quote, “Is there anything else that the Corporation can do for you?”