“Looped Lithuanian with a baseball bat.”
“I hate those. Okay, I’ll buzz Ken.”
I went over to inspect the luggage, which was touted as a hot deal. What I wanted to know was why they didn’t make luggage in colors other than black, navy, dark green or that grandmotherly floral. They all looked the same and you couldn’t tell them apart in baggage claim. If I won the lottery, I was going to go into the luggage business and start manufacturing lavender suitcases, bright yellow totes, orange knapsacks.
“Miss Yablonsky?” A round puppy dog of a man in a puppy brown suit stood by an office door. “I’m afraid I can’t see you. Our lawyer . . .”
I extended my hand graciously. “So you’re the Ken that Debbie raved about. It’s so nice to finally meet you in the flesh.”
Fiona Swyer, the travel agent in the blue suit, frowned.
“Thank you”—I checked the receptionist’s nameplate—“Angela. I’ll only be a moment.” I took befuddled Ken by the arm and led him into his own office, shutting the door behind me.
Ken must have been the head honcho at Get Together Now! because he was the only one with an office and because he had a big, impressive leather swivel-back chair. His walls, too, sported the de rigueur travel posters: ARUBA, JAMAICA, BAHAMAS—taunting reminders of how gorgeous and exotic the world was in places besides steel towns.
“So you know, I mean, knew Debbie?” Ken spoke with a flat Midwestern accent.
“Knew her?” I let out a laugh. “I was there when she died. That’s how well I knew her.”
“Oh, my. I had no idea.” He pulled out a chair. “Have a seat. I really don’t have much time, what with the holiday crush coming up. So many people like to get away after Christmas. Me? I prefer the weeks right after Thanksgiving. You can get terrific deals on cruises then. Most folks are unaware.”
He smiled insipidly, clasping his hands on his desk. A woman had died, an employee, and here he was yapping on about the best time of year to tour the Panama Canal.
I pulled out my notebook. Ken’s venetian blinds were open behind him, giving me a good view of the parking lot. If I so much as spotted a flash of Santa red or the chrome bumper of a Mercedes, I was out of there.
“Is this a piece for ‘Talk of the Town’? Angela said you wrote for ‘Talk of the Town.’ ”
“Yes,” I said absently. “It’s a quick profile on Debbie. We do that, occasionally.”
He scratched his ear. “Really? I don’t think I’ve ever read a profile in ‘Talk of the Town.’ You wouldn’t happen to be a regular reporter, would you? Because our lawyer said we shouldn’t talk to regular reporters, though for ‘Talk of the Town,’ I wouldn’t mind. Flossie Foreman’s a wonderful—”
“Why would your lawyer say a silly thing like that?” I interrupted.
He regarded me skeptically. “I’m not sure I should say.”
“Oh, please.” I leaned forward and touched his hand, making sure I flashed a bit of this and that. “You don’t have to worry about Bubbles. Look at me? Do I look like a real reporter?”
He took in my white, off-the-shoulder shirt and my purple acrylic nails still on his own hand. “I guess not.”
“I write for the women’s pages, Ken, just so I don’t have to deal with messy stuff like numbers and money and icky crime. I’m here only because Debbie was a friend of mine, a dear, dear friend, and I’d like her to be remembered for the delightful person she was, not for the not-so-delightful person the police are saying.” I batted my eyes.
Ken examined his tie as though looking for stains that might tell him whether to talk to me. “What are the police saying?”
“I don’t think I should say.” Sometimes I liked to throw it back in their faces.
“I’d really like to know. It might be important for Get Together Now!”
“I have an idea. Why don’t you show me yours and I’ll show you mine? I’ve often found that this is the best way to stave off negative publicity.”
He thought about this. “If the police are saying anything about the money, I want you to make sure in your ‘Talk of the Town’ story that you note I had no idea whatsoever and that I stopped her activity as soon as it was brought to my attention.”
I stepped on my left toe to keep my face straight. So my tipster had handed me the straight skinny. Debbie’s trouble had to do with money. Well, that wasn’t a surprise, was it? Money’s always at the root of evil.
Ken was on a roll. “Customers get so squeamish when they read stories in the papers about their money being mishandled, even if the stories aren’t true.”
“I know. They’re so unreasonable,” I agreed, “especially when Debbie didn’t mean to take the cash.”
“Well, we don’t know that, do we? Gee, it’s an awfully bright day. Do you mind if I close the blinds?”
“No! I mean, yes!” I yelled.
Ken turned with alarm.
“I get claustrophobic.”
“That’s too bad.” He sat down again. “Now what was I saying?”
“The credit card numbers Debbie had used, unknowingly of course, for her own purchases.” She reels, she casts . . .
She hooks a big one! “Right. Those. It was good Visa found out before too much money was lost.”
“Only a few thousand dollars.”
Ken blushed. “I don’t know if I’d call fifteen thousand a few dollars.”
“Silly me. I told you I was bad with numbers.”
He smiled as though I was adorable. There was a knock at the door and the sourpuss agent Fiona Swyer in the blue uniform opened it without waiting for an invitation. She glanced at my notebook, clearly not pleased to see it on my lap. Nor was she delighted by the amount of cleavage I was showing.
“Mr. Abrams. May I see you a moment?”
Ken pointed to me. “Can’t you see I’m in the midst of an interview? If it’s the St. Augustine’s Girls Choir, tell them the bus tickets to Washington, D.C., are in the pack on Angela’s desk.”
“It’s not the St. Augustine’s Girls Choir,” Swyer said. “It’s important.”
“Maybe I should come back later,” I offered.
“Or not at all.” Swyer had the nasty I-don’t-like-you face down.
The face didn’t fool me, though it might have fooled Ken. Days from now, soon after my story about Debbie’s pilfering hit the newsstands, Ken would first curse himself for inviting me into his office and then transfer his guilt to others in the office. He would wonder if someone in-house had called in a tip. He would remember that Angela the receptionist had been nice, that Fiona Swyer had disapproved of me.
Ipso facto, her chilly demeanor.
I got up and shook Ken’s hand heartily. “It really was a pleasure. Thank you so much. This is going to be a great article about Debbie.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said more than you know.” I blew him a kiss and wedged my way past Fiona Swyer, the pin on her lapel catching my eye. It was of a star inside a pentagon. I’d seen the same symbol recently, but where?
“I assume you can see yourself to the door,” she said.
I couldn’t discern if hers was the voice on the other end of the phone call. However, as a woman who worked among women, I could easily understand Fiona Swyer’s motivation for calling me about her formerly perky, popular and apparently felonious coworker Debbie Shatsky. There is no deadlier force on the planet than female jealousy. And Swyer was anything but perky.
“Don’t knock yourself out,” I said.
She pursed her lips.
Outside on the sidewalk, Angela was fixing a garland that had fallen off the NOW!
“Turns out you’re not Flossie Foreman’s replacement.”
This caused me to revamp my theory about Fiona Swyer. Maybe Angela had been the tipster after all. “Aren’t you an intrepid secretary.”
She pinned the garland and turned. “What did you come here for?”
“I don’t know. I’m still try
ing to find out.” Then, thinking that Angela might actually have some brains behind those overtweezed brows of hers, I added, “Maybe I should talk to Zora in Debbie’s allergist’s office. I hear she has some pretty strong opinions. Her and Tess.”
Angela didn’t so much as raise a goose bump. “What Debbie did to those women was unforgivable.”
“Unforgivable.” I had no idea what she was talking about except my assumption that the unforgivable stuff was connected to the fifteen thousand dollars in Visa charges.
“Have you spoken with Zora?”
“Not yet. Don’t know how to find her.”
She flicked her gaze to the parking lot, trying to decide. “She works for an allergist right here in Lehigh. Should be easy enough to find if you have a phone book. That way you didn’t get her name from me.”
“Right,” I said. “I just like to call allergists randomly from the phone book.”
“That’s good. Because there are a lot more than you’d think.”
The rest of the day might have proceeded uneventfully if I’d just done what Dix Notch wanted me to do—forget Debbie’s case and accept that her death was an accident, nothing more. Even Detective Burge seemed to have lost interest, since he didn’t try to contact me as I’d been warned.
I had no idea what he was putting Sandy through. My frequent calls to the House of Beauty and Sandy’s home were fruitless. She still wasn’t answering her phone and here I had so much to tell her about Debbie’s shenanigans at Get Together Now!
Of course I couldn’t update Mr. Salvo, either. Couldn’t even tell him about the guy who shot out Sandy’s front window. I was supposed to be off the case, remember? What was it Notch had said? That if he found me asking one question, going through one file on Debbie Shatsky’s death, I would be canned on the spot.
“Where have you been?” Mr. Salvo asked when I tried to hide my late arrival to the newsroom by coming up the back way and going straight for the mailboxes.
He was wearing a baby blue shirt today with short sleeves, even though it was December. And he had a yellow clip-on tie. A clip-on. And he can’t understand why he’s still single.
I gathered up my mail and started flipping through it casually, tossing out the Mahoken Town Council agendas as I went. They were just so boring. “Sorry, Mr. Salvo. Jane, Dan and I had an appointment with our family therapist. Then there was some stuff I had to do.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Stuff, stuff.” I got to my copy of Cosmopolitan and kissed the cover. I missed Cosmo so much after leaving the salon. I felt so lost not knowing the twelve ways to drive my man wild in bed so he’d beg for more.
“Nice piece on the Help the Poor Children Fund-raiser.”
“Thanks.” I went over to the watercooler to get a cup of water.
“Kind of bizarre that Flossie would injure her knee on the day Stiletto blows into town so she can’t cover an event where he’s on the auction block and where you two were spotted sneaking off to suck face.”
My hand shook slightly. I emptied out the rest of the water and dumped the cup in the trash. “The universe works in magical ways.”
“So do crazed senior citizens with a penchant for swinging baseball bats at random low levels.”
“Yes.” I started walking over to my desk, wishing Mr. Salvo would just drop it already, when I stopped.
Something was off.
“Well, at least your mind’s on Stiletto and off this Shatsky thing. Man, Notch is driving me up the wall. He is so obsessed with making sure our stories don’t imply Shatsky was murdered. Like I told him, if the police come out and say it’s a murder, fine. Otherwise, we’re just printing what we know. Woman dies in a salon. Period.”
“Mr. Salvo, why is Alison Roach sitting at my desk?”
Alison’s black jacket, the one she’d worn yesterday, was hanging over the back of my chair. Gone was my photo of Jane, the tiny pink-framed mirror I pasted to the side of the computer so I could check my lip gloss 24/7, and the two bottles of nail polish I kept ready to repair keyboard-induced tip damage.
And where was my beautician’s license and vase with the pink plastic flower?
I felt a pang of anxiety. Alison could not take over my desk. I LOVED my desk. I loved it partly because it was next to Lawless, the beat-cop reporter, not that I loved Lawless or anything. What I loved was his police scanner, which emitted a regular chatter among dispatchers, cops, firemen and emergency-service types. Every once in a while, the chatter would break and something big would erupt: a fire, a fatal car accident, a shooting. Then the thrills would begin.
“Is Alison taking over my desk?”
Mr. Salvo shuffled the papers on his clipboard, a sure sign of a guilty conscience. “Uh, Notch decided to move her next to Lawless for, you know, training.”
“Training for what? Police reporter? Because that’s supposed to be my next job, cops or courts, and so far I haven’t gotten farther than Mahoken.”
Mr. Salvo didn’t say anything until he uttered some diplomatic nonsense about every rookie reporter needing to learn how to cover a fire, blah, blah, blah.
“And where am I to sit?”
He pointed to lifestyle, where a computer in the smallest cubicle sat untouched, waiting for my fingers. Maybe someone was being a smart-ass, placing me in Flossie Foreman’s department after Genevieve’s thuggery. Or maybe Mr. Notch was sending me a message that I was on my way out. For if I wasn’t mistaken, that cubicle belonged to Marty Finkleman, our eighty-year-old obits writer, who worked part-time nights.
“I’m sharing a desk with Marty?”
“Only for a while, until Alison gets her sea legs. So Stiletto came by this morning looking for some clips,” he said, trying to distract my attention away from the usurpation of MY DESK! “Too bad you weren’t here.”
For once—and only once—I cared about something more than Stiletto. I cared about my desk, the symbol of all that I had sacrificed and worked to achieve. Marty Finkleman’s corner cubicle was the lowest of the low. It was the dunces’ corner and I was the dunce.
Well, I thought, pushing back my white sleeves, I’d been at the bottom before and had crawled my way up. Notch was sadly mistaken if he thought this public demotion would make me toe the line, that I would humbly do as he ordered until he begrudgingly accepted me back into his good graces.
Now I was determined, more determined than before, to investigate Debbie’s murder and write it up into a blockbuster page-one thriller. I would show him and the lackadaisical Lehigh PD that they’d been wrong about Sandy or wrong about Debbie’s death being an accident.
And I didn’t care if by that time Notch had relegated me to the basement.
Chapter Eighteen
I waited until Doris the librarian left work exactly at five oh one to slip out of my dunce’s corner and run down the hall to the morgue.
Doris was a dour woman, as yellow as the rubbery mucilage she used to paste her yellowing newspaper clips to yellow paper for preservation. She excelled in Schadenfreude, the exquisite Pennsylvania art of relishing the misfortune of others. Therefore, I could not dig through clips of Ern Bender and Debbie Shatsky under Doris’s vulturelike gaze without fully expecting her to run straight to Notch to tattle.
While other newspapers had upgraded to computerized archiving more than a decade ago, the morgue of the News-Times was stuck in the Dark Ages thanks to Doris. I wasn’t exactly clear on why they couldn’t modernize and lay her off as they had the old guys in the newsprint hats who used to run hot type upstairs. Lorena told me once that Doris had naughty photos of Notch she’d whip out as blackmail whenever he broached the possibility of going completely online.
All I knew was that if I were lucky enough to have naughty photos of Notch, I’d a) induce blindness in myself so I wouldn’t have to look at them and b) sure as hell use them to do more than keep my job as a lonely librarian in the windowless morgue.
As I had feared, the Bender, Ern file was go
ne. Possibly it had never existed. Doris maintained an arcane filing system, another key to her survival. It always bothered me that she filed animal abuse cases under “Pets,” for example. Or that rape cases were under “Sex.” I had to put my head into Doris’s head for a second before I was rewarded with one clip in “Pharmacies”—a major fire at Save-T Drugs.
I vaguely remembered the blaze, which had taken out the back half of Save-T Drugs about seven years ago. Ern was quoted in the article as being an assistant pharmacist, which meant the fire occurred before he was busted for selling laced Cokes.
According to the article, the fire was of a “suspicious origin” and was located in the pharmacy section of the drugstore. Ern mused to the reporter that perhaps it was faulty electrical wiring, that he’d been hearing mice late at night chewing on the wires.
Mice? Good one, Ern.
“Meth fire.”
Lawless was reading over my shoulder. I should have recognized the reek of chocolate and peanut butter. Lately he’d fallen off the candy wagon and had sacrificed his soul to the god of vending machines, provider of Holy Twix. His relaxed-fit Dockers were no longer relaxed; they were downright uptight.
“It came out at his trial that Bender was cooking up methamphetamines in the back room and stealing Sudafed from Save-T to do it.” He finished the last of his Reese’s. “Some kindly neighborhood druggist, say?”
I quickly slipped the article back into the file. How could I have been so stupid as to just stand here reading this? Now Lawless would surely rat me out to Notch.
“It’s the twentieth anniversary of the big Mahoken town hall fire,” I lied with false innocence, shoving the file back into the cabinet. “Happened to come across this.”
“You were looking for a clip on the Mahoken town hall fire in the pharmacy file?” Lawless grinned. “Come off it, Yablonsky. You and I both know what you were up to. You were digging up background on Ern Bender.”
“Never!”
“You could get axed immediately for that. Notch sent out a memo that we weren’t to discuss anything Shatsky with you and that included her ex-husband.”
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