by Ed Gaffney
“You asshole!” the other one shouted, running at Anthony as if he intended to jump on top of him. But Anthony merely hunched down a little, stepped quickly to the side, and before the jerk could change direction, hit him square in the middle of his ugly shirt with one strong punch. The kid grunted, grabbed himself around the waist, took a step back, and vomited all over the place.
Maria had already pulled out the little bottle of pepper spray she carried in her purse, but she obviously didn’t need to use it. She stepped around the mess and walked with Anthony across the street to the restaurant. As he looked over his shoulder at the two beat-up drunks climbing into their friends’ car and driving away, he said, “When you write up the report for our activities tonight, you have my permission to say that we made a big entrance.”
FIVE
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: When you spoke to the Nite & Day clerk who had been robbed, Detective Morrison, did he give anything to you?
DETECTIVE JOHN MORRISON: Yes. He took the security videotape that had been recording when the robbery took place, and gave it to me.
Q: And I am showing you now a videotape that has been marked D for identification. Do you recognize this tape?
A: Yes. This is the videotape that the clerk gave me that night.
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: At this time I’d like to offer this as an exhibit, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Any objection?
ATTORNEY WILSON: Yes, Your Honor. There’s been no showing of a chain of custody.
THE COURT: Mr. Lovell?
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: When you were handed the videotape, Detective, what did you do with it?
DETECTIVE MORRISON: I brought it to the station house, made a copy, and placed a sticker on the original with an identifying number. I then wrote the number and the description of the item on the evidence log we keep at the station. And then I locked the videotape in the area of our building where we keep evidence collected from crime scenes. I retrieved it from the locked area this morning.
ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LOVELL: Your Honor?
THE COURT: The tape is admitted as Exhibit 5.
(Commonwealth v. Gardiner, Trial Volume IV, Pages 112–113)
Hostage
SHE OPENED HER EYES AND REALIZED THAT SHE had fallen asleep again. Or lost consciousness. Whatever. God, did her head hurt. And she really needed to pee.
She blinked repeatedly, but things stayed out of focus longer than usual. Her right eye felt funny. She took turns looking out of one eye, then the other. The right one was definitely having a problem. It was probably swollen. Somebody must have really hit her hard.
Wait. There was a man. A big guy, with a mask. He had come into the room after she awoke the first time. When he saw her look at him, he left the room, came back in with a cloth in his hand, and stuck it over her nose. That’s it. She’d been drugged.
Okay. That didn’t explain how she’d gotten here in the first place, but at least she remembered how she could have fallen asleep after she became aware that she’d been kidnapped.
Kidnapped. Her stomach fluttered at the thought and she involuntarily took in a sharp breath through her nose. How had this happened to her? How was she going to get out of here alive?
She forced her mind back to the masked man. What was nagging at the back of her mind about when he last came into the room. He had entered from a door behind her. When he opened it, she could hear a voice. Not like the voice of somebody in the room he had come from. It was more like the sound of a radio. No. It was a television.
But that wasn’t what was tugging at her memory. It was something about the man with the mask himself. She tried to visualize him. He was a pretty big guy, wearing a ski mask, jeans, boots, and a sweatshirt. He smelled like he’d been drinking. What was it that she was trying to remember? Did she recognize him? Wait—it was something about the mask.
Okay. Think. The mask. It was a pullover ski mask, with holes cut out for the eyes and mouth. It was black. Knit. Probably some kind of blended fabric. What difference did any of that make?
Brain boomerangs. Those little parts of your memory that suddenly sail off into space, and then, just as suddenly, fly back to you out of nowhere. That’s what this mask thing was. A brain boomerang. It would come back to her.
But, Grandma, who throws brain boomerangs?
That’s one of the fun mysteries you get to have when you’re alive.
Well, at least she remembered that she had a grandmother. That was something.
There was something about that mask that made her feel—what? Safe? That was crazy. She had been kidnapped, and her masked captor gave her a feeling of security? Maybe she was losing her mind. What does it feel like when you lose your mind? Do you know you’re losing it? Or does it just sort of drift off…?
What was she doing, daydreaming? She was awake, she was alive, some nut with a ski mask was holding her hostage. She had to get out of here.
She looked around the room again. There had to be something here she could use to get herself free.
Garbage on the floor at her feet. The other chair, set in front of the table. The clutter on the table—beer cans and bottles, a pizza box, a coffee cup, a bag from a sandwich place, and something small and red. It looked like the end of a piece of plastic, and it looked very familiar.
The sandwich bag was in the way, and she couldn’t get a good look. She leaned over a bit to the left—God, her head was killing her—to get a better view. Now she could see that the piece of plastic was actually three or four inches long. There seemed to something coming out of one end….
Oh my God. Could it really be? Despite the ferocious headache, she craned her neck around even farther to the left to be totally sure.
And there, with its shiny red handle and its bottle-opener tool extended, was the most beautiful sight she could have hoped for.
A Swiss Army knife.
June 3, 2004
ZACK WATCHED AS TERRY WALKED INTO THE office, dropped a notepad onto the table that Zack had pulled in front of the television, and said, “I’m pretty sure that right now, Perry Mason is laughing his ass off at me.”
Zack turned on the VCR and paused the videotape of the robbery to the point where the robber’s body, head to toe, was in the screen. He had arranged on the table some graph paper, a ruler, a couple of pencils, a calculator, and a trigonometry textbook.
“And the convenience store clerk—who was h-h-h-hot, by the way—was not giving me a lot of love as I wandered all over her store with a step stool and a tape measure.”
“Perry Mason is fictional, so I wouldn’t worry too much about him,” Zack said. “And what you were doing was collecting data for a very important trigonometry exercise, so I’m sure that one day, the h-h-h-hot convenience store clerk will understand.” He sat down, opened the textbook to the tables at the back, and looked up at Terry. “If I remember what Mrs. Greer taught us.” He took a look at Terry’s notes. “This is how far up the wall the camera was?” he asked.
Terry joined him at the table. “Nine feet, three inches,” he said, “which was a pain in the balls to measure, by the way, even with the step stool. And the other two numbers are from that wall to where the guy was standing, and then from the wall to the other place you mentioned. Although why that makes a difference remains a great mystery.”
“Here,” Zack said, drawing a rough sketch on one of the pads. “I hope I’m doing this right.” He drew a right angle. “Imagine that the vertical leg of this angle is the wall of the store, and the horizontal leg is the floor.”
“Gotcha, Einstein,” said Terry.
“Okay. You measured that the camera was nine feet, three inches high. That’s”—he multiplied nine times twelve on the calculator and then added three—“one hundred eleven inches.” He wrote 111 next to the vertical leg of the triangle.
“Now look on the videotape and imagine a straight line coming out of the camera, just grazing the top of the
robber’s head, and continuing on down to the floor. See where it would end?”
Terry looked at the television screen. “Just where you asked me to measure,” he replied.
“Right. And you said that was”—he checked Terry’s notes—“eighteen feet, eight inches from the wall.” He used the calculator again. “Two hundred twenty-four inches.” He wrote 224 under the horizontal leg of the right angle. Then, about halfway along the horizontal line, he drew a crude vertical stick figure.
“That’s the robber?” asked Terry. He looked over at Zack. “Whoa. You suck at drawing.”
“I know,” Zack said. “Shut up. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a sketch.” Then he drew a straight line from the top of the vertical line to the end of the horizontal line, grazing the top of the stick figure, making a large triangle.
Terry pulled the paper over in front of him. “And now you’re going to do something with this sketch which is going to prove something.”
“Exactly,” said Zack, filling in the last figure on the sketch from Terry’s notes—the distance from the wall to where the robber was standing. “Since the wall and the robber are both vertical, these two lines are parallel, which means that these two angles are equal—”
“You know what?” Terry interrupted, getting up. “Mrs. Greer was scary enough. You just do whatever it is you’re going to do. When you’re done, let me know if Babe’s the robber, or whether he was only lying about everything else. Meanwhile, I’m going out to get us something to eat.” He headed off, probably to the deli.
Zack flipped back to the chapter he’d read earlier that day. If his sketch was correct, all he had to do was plug the numbers Terry had gotten into some formulas, check the tables at the back of the book, and he should be able to figure out the robber’s height. According to Babe’s booking sheet, he was just a little bit over six feet tall. If the robber turned out to be significantly taller or shorter than that, Zack and Terry would have a powerful piece of evidence to use at the trial.
Zack started up the videotape again. It was hard to judge, but as the robber moved around the store, especially as he stood at the counter before he pulled the clerk into the back room, he didn’t seem tall at all. In fact, as he grabbed the clerk, he looked like he might even have been an inch or two shorter than him.
When they got a chance to speak to the clerk, that would be another way they could check whether Babe was the robber.
Zack turned off the television and started doing math. In a few minutes, this case might be over.
WHEN TERRY RETURNED TO THE OFFICE WITH sandwiches and beer, Zack was leaning back in his chair, staring vacantly at the ceiling. The table he had been working on was littered with papers on which he had made dozens of sketches of triangles, most with several multiplication and division problems squeezed into the margins, several of them crossed out. Two pieces of graph paper had fairly accurate, at least for Zack, drawings of the inside of the convenience store, complete with a rough representation of a camera mounted on a wall.
Terry sat down across from Zack, pushed aside enough of the papers to put down the bag he was carrying, and said, “You ready for this?”
Zack blinked a couple of times, smiled his I-must-not-be-as-smart-as-everybody-thinks-I-am smile, and started gathering up the papers. “I am really ready for that.”
Terry started opening up the bag. “How’d the big math problem turn out?”
“Well,” Zack responded, “as I was doing the calculations the first time, I was feeling pretty confident that the height of the robber was going to come out significantly shorter than six feet.” He sifted through his work, pulled out a piece of graph paper, and looked at it for a second. “And it turns out, I was right. According to my initial calculations, the height of the robber was exactly two feet four inches.”
Terry took a couple of beers out of the bag and gave one to Zack. “So you figured maybe you made a mistake, and you did it again.”
“Right,” said Zack, taking a swig. “And sure enough, I got a different answer. Two feet three inches tall.”
Terry nodded, then reached into the bag for the sandwiches. Zaney’s Deli made the best chicken salad, ever. He passed one to Zack—no tomatoes—and said, “So you did the calculations again.”
“Yes I did,” Zack said, opening his sandwich. “And you know what? I was right the first time.”
Terry took a bite of his sandwich and washed it down with some beer. “Leading to the conclusion that this convenience store is located in the merry old land of Oz?”
“Or maybe we aren’t going to win this case with trigonometry,” Zack said.
IF IT HADN’T BEEN SO LATE, VERA WOULD HAVE had less trouble keeping her mind off the accusation against John Morrison. This kind of thing was predictable—sometimes suspects resisted arrest, and then got indignant when they got hurt as the police took them into custody. And sometimes cops lost it, and went overboard after securing a suspect. But a cop like Morrison didn’t get the reputation he had from beating up perps in handcuffs.
But Vera had to return her focus to her missing fugitive case. Irene Quarrels was only too happy to talk to Vera about Davy Zwaggert. So the Morrison thing was going to have to wait.
“I think he is such a sweetie,” the large young woman said, letting Vera into her cluttered, airless first-floor apartment. “He was always really nice to me. Like a real gentleman.” Irene had a pleasant, roundish face, with pretty blue eyes and thick, wavy black hair. There was something about her that had a kind of Oprah Winfrey quality—if Oprah had been poor and white, and wore dark purple sweat suits and bright yellow socks with cats on them. “I was hoping—this is silly, I know”—she took a big breath—“but I was thinking that he might have been getting ready to maybe ask me out on a date or something. Before he stopped coming to Froggy’s, I mean.”
An overflowing laundry basket had been dropped in front of a tired-looking green couch on which sat a pile of folded shirts and a tabloid open to a story about a twenty-year-old movie star’s divorce settlement. On the television, a young man in a tuxedo sang in a horrible voice. Irene used a remote control to mute the TV as they both sat down. “I really hope he’s okay.”
A big, hairy white cat that had been sleeping on the floor stood up, rubbed itself against Vera’s leg, and then jumped onto the couch and curled up in Irene’s lap. “This is Cleo,” she said in a baby voice, as she stroked the cat and kissed it on the top of the head. “She hopes Davy’s okay, too. Don’t you? Yes you do. I know you do. You hope he’s okey-smokey. You do.” Cleo’s response was to take a bored swipe at her owner with her claw. Irene just chuckled and kept mumbling baby talk. Something about scratchy-watchy Mommy’s face.
The young woman was clearly a nice person, but wow. Did she have any idea how ridiculous she sounded talking to the cat like that? Vera tried to keep her face neutral. There was a lot going on here. Irene obviously cared about Davy, and it didn’t make any sense to upset her, even though the odds that Davy was okey-smokey were dropping with every passing moment. Vera had to be honest, but Irene was the kind of person who would respond to sunshine and daffodils much more quickly than to a thunderstorm. “It could be nothing,” Vera said carefully, “but since Davy is on parole, it’s very important that we find him as soon as possible. For his sake.”
Irene nodded solemnly. “I know. That’s all Davy needs—for the police to think he’s running away.”
Well, whether Davy needed it or not, that’s exactly what the police were thinking. Or that he was badly hurt. Or dead. “Exactly. So we’re talking to the people who knew him, you know, to see if we can figure this thing out quickly.”
Irene sighed. “I wish I could help you. Davy is such a good person inside. Do you know that one time he gave me a twenty and told me to keep the change on a twelve-dollar check?” Poor Irene’s crush on Davy was so obvious, Vera felt like she should slide over on the couch to make extra room for it.
“When’s the last time you saw
him?”
“Not since that Friday night at Froggy’s. He came in for dinner, like he usually does—”
“He’s a regular?” If Davy really was a recovering alcoholic, going to a bar often enough for a waitress to know you by name was kind of dumb.
“Not really regular regular, if you know what I mean,” Irene responded with a smile. Cleo began to lick her paw. “I mean, he’d come in usually once or twice during the week, just for a burger and fries, stuff like that.”
“Okay.” The young man on the muted television had been replaced by a twelve-year-old girl wearing a low-cut evening gown that managed to make her look both trashy and pathetic. She was singing into a microphone as if she’d been doing it professionally since she was three. “So that night at Froggy’s, was Davy alone?”
“Yeah,” Irene said. “A lot of times he came in with a friend or two for dinner, but this time he just got a small table by himself.”
Vera started to reach for her pad and pen, but at the last minute merely shifted her weight on the couch so she was facing Irene more directly. She didn’t want to interrupt the flow. If the waitress could remember something significant about these other guys, Vera would have time to write it down later. “Would you recognize Davy’s friends if you saw them again?”
Irene thought for a minute. “I think so. But I’m not sure.” She blushed a little. “I’m afraid I was paying more attention to Davy.” She sighed and shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I’m not helping at all, am I?”
“You’re helping much more than anyone else I’ve spoken to,” Vera said. Technically, that was true. In fact, technically, Irene was helping quite a bit. It was just that she was at the beginning of her helping. The trick was to keep it going so that the helping actually produced something.