by Lynn, JB
“Life is about things we don’t like for the greater good,” he reminded me. “Eating vegetables, taking out the trash, putting up with people we don’t like. You can do hard things.”
“But I don’t have to like it,” I muttered bitterly.
25
The knowledge that Ms. Whitehat expected me to call the cops on myself kept me up for most of the night. No amount of Templeton’s coffee was going to make the morning any easier. Griswald’s insistence on joining me for breakfast to discuss Alan Chilton made things even worse.
“It was suspicious that he was at the funeral,” Griswald said, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table.
“Maybe he just wanted to see the man who failed to find his mother’s killer buried,” I suggested, running my finger along the rim of the top of my coffee mug.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “It’s not like he’s a suspect in the bombing, right? What was he, six or seven when it happened?”
Griswald nodded slowly. “But he had to have been there for a reason. Maybe he’s out for vengeance.”
“Can’t you just ask him why he was there?” I asked.
Eyebrows raised, he said, “You don’t really think he’d tell us, do you?”
Not sure what he expected from me, I just shrugged again. I was really starting to get tired of everyone making things harder than they had to be. “You asked me to go to the funeral and keep an eye out. I did that. I identified somebody who shouldn’t have been there, or at least it was suspicious that he was there, and I told you that your old colleagues were fighting afterward. I really don’t know what more you expect me to do.”
Templeton, who was standing peeling potatoes, gave me a sideways glance, surprised by my sharp tone.
Griswald rubbed his forehead. “You’re right. You did better than either Brian or me.”
“I’ve got to get to work,” I told him. “Thank you for the coffee, Templeton.”
“You don’t have time for breakfast?” he asked. “I’m making my famous hash browns.”
“Who made them famous?” I asked with a chuckle.
“Well, I think they should be,” he said with an easy joking manner. “Oftentimes, it’s what you say, not what you do.”
“That’s not how the saying goes,” Aunt Susan declared with an exasperated sigh as she walked in the kitchen. “The saying is, it’s what you do, not what you say you’re going to do.”
“He was joking, Aunt Susan,” I told her tiredly.
She squinted at me. “How late were you up last night, Margaret?”
“I had trouble falling asleep,” I admitted.
She shook her head. “Be sure to put something on your cheeks before you go into work. You don’t want to show up looking like a zombie.”
I gave her a thumbs up. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
I walked out of the kitchen and hurried to my room to get dressed for work. Zeke had given me an entire bag of scrubs to choose from. I went with yellow ones covered with unicorns. I was halfway to the dentist’s office when somebody honked at me.
“You need to find another mode of transportation,” God muttered from the dashboard.
“I know,” I said with a heavy sigh. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I told him, “It’s Gino.”
“What does he want?” the lizard asked impatiently.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with it.”
I steered into the next empty parking lot and Gino pulled in beside me. He rolled down his passenger window while I lowered my own.
“Morning, Maggie,” he said with a cheery smile.
“But it’s a lousy one,” I answered.
He winced. I felt a twinge of guilt. After all, it wasn’t his fault I was in a bad mood.
“I guess this isn’t a good time to ask,” he said.
“Ask what?”
“Why you’re spending so much time with Mulligan,” he said.
I cocked my head to the side and gave him a long look. “Are you asking for your own curiosity or for the boss?”
“My own,” he admitted.
“I told you, he needs a favor,” I told him.
“What kind of favor?”
“One that he obviously wasn’t comfortable asking you,” I told him.
He shook his head. “I don’t do favors for Mulligan.”
“Well, I do,” I told him.
We stared at each other for a long moment. I could tell that he was gritting his teeth. Finally, he said, “Well, if you need help, you know who to call.”
“Ghostbusters?” I quipped.
His face split in a wide grin and he threw back his head and laughed. “It would be easier not to like you if you weren’t so clever, Maggie,” he said, shaking his head. “Let me know if you need anything.” With that, he drove off.
“He didn’t ask anything of you,” God cheered.
“No, he just doesn’t know how to mind his own business,” I told him as I got back on the road.
“He’s jealous,” God said. “It’s kind of cute, actually. The mobster’s henchman is jealous that his girl is spending time with another guy.”
“I’m not his girl,” I corrected.
“You should take his help,” God said, changing the subject a little bit as though he didn’t want to get into an argument about my relationship status.
“I don’t need his help,” I told him.
The lizard snapped his tail, signaling his irritation. “Sometimes, Maggie,” he said, “you cause your own problems by not taking help when it’s offered. Or asking for it when you need it.”
I rolled my eyes.
We rode the rest of the way to the dentist’s office in silence. I wondered what Ms. Whitehat thought of my conversation with Gino and my relationship with Patrick Mulligan. She’d didn’t say much about either, but she had to be aware of them.
When I walked into Dello’s office, three minutes before I was supposed to start, Marge gave me an approving nod. “Making money for us?” she asked.
“Trying to,” I lied smoothly.
I knew from the cars that were parked in the lot that she was the only person there, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to walk through the offices without being observed. “Gotta get to it,” I told her with a bright smile.
She grunted something unintelligible, her attention already on the file that she held in her hands.
I practically ran down the corridor to my windowless office and put my lunch down, not a bag lunch this time. Templeton, knowing that I would need one, had packed an actual picnic basket for me. When I tried not to take it, saying I already had plans with a coworker for lunch, he’d just smiled and said there was plenty for two.
I grabbed the top file that I’d left on the desk and began to surreptitiously creep around the offices of the dental practice. I felt like I’d hit the lottery when I reached Dr. Dello’s office and realized the door wasn’t locked. Knowing that there wouldn’t be anybody in there, I made a show of knocking softly, and then stepped inside.
I gasped in horror. It was disturbing, to say the least. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, diplomas and maybe pictures of smiling teeth, or plaques and awards, or maybe just a Norman Rockwell painting of a visit to the dentist to go with his Mr. Rogers sweater vibe. But what hung on the wall in Dr. Dello’s office made me vow to never go to a dentist again.
God, who’d scrambled up onto my shoulder, looked around at the same time as I did. “If this was one of my true crime shows,” he whispered into my ear, “this would be the serial killer’s lair.”
I nodded as dozens of eyes looked at me. The walls were covered with animal heads. Apparently, Dr. Dello was a game hunter who spent a fortune on taxidermy. I just hoped I wouldn’t end up being his prey.
26
I shuddered with revulsion as I looked at all the poor animals that had been slaughtered so that they could hang on the walls of thi
s office.
“So much death,” I groaned.
“This from an assassin,” God quipped from my shoulder. “Get over yourself and find the safe.”
I let my gaze spin around the room, trying to figure out which of the animals was big enough to hide a safe. That’s when I noticed that there was one single diploma hanging in the back corner. I headed straight for it, putting the file I carried down on the desk, laying it beside a tooth-shaped bookend as I passed it.
“Do you see something?” God asked eagerly.
“I see something that looks like it doesn’t belong, even though it does belong,” I told him. “This is the only frame in the room.”
“Riddles,” God groaned. “I love a good riddle.”
When I reached the diploma, I peeked behind it but couldn’t see anything.
“Take it down,” the lizard urged.
“What if I set off an alarm, doing so? What do I know about finding safes and breaking into them?”
“Good point,” he said.
“There won’t be an alarm on the covering,” a female voice suddenly said in my ear.
I let out a startled yelp. I jumped back from the wall, almost sending God flying with my sudden movement. He screamed, grabbing my hair to keep himself from hurtling through the air.
“If you think you found it, look,” the unfamiliar voice said again inside my head.
That’s when I realized that it was coming through the earpiece.
“You’d better be right,” I told my unseen, unknown conspirator. I gingerly lifted the diploma frame away from the wall and peered behind it. “There’s a metal door embedded in the wall.”
“That is normally referred to as a safe,” she mocked.
“Did they teach you that in Burglary 101?” I countered.
“I need a picture of it.”
“You want me to draw you a picture of it?”
“No,” she sighed in exasperation. “I want you to take a photograph of it with your phone. You can at least manage that kind of technology, can’t you?”
God, who’d pulled himself back up onto my shoulder, asked, “What are you doing? We’re going to get caught.”
Ignoring him, I took the diploma off the wall and put it down on the floor. I whipped out my cell phone and snapped a few pictures. Then, I rehung the diploma.
“We should get out of here,” God warned.
“Now, I need you to—” I never heard whatever the voice inside my head was going to tell me to do next, because the door to Dello’s office crashed open, the sound reverberating off the walls. Startled, I whirled around, moving so quickly that I once again displaced God from my shoulder. Thankfully, his reflexes were quick and he, once again, grabbed my hair.
“You’re trying to kill me,” he muttered, hauling himself up.
“What are you doing in here?” Lynette, the dental technician, demanded to know.
“I was looking for Dr. Dello,” I lied quickly. “I had a question for him.” I pointed to the file that I’d left on the desk earlier.
“You’re not allowed to be in here,” Lynette declared. “I’m reporting you.”
“You’re in trouble,” God mocked. “You might get detention if she reports you.”
I tried not to smile, figuring that would just further enrage Lynette. “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed in here,” I told her, sort of proud of myself for how smoothly I was lying.
“I’ll let Marge decide what to do with you,” she said. “Out!” She pointed the way out of the office to me.
“It was an honest mistake,” I told her as I shuffled past her, snatching up the file on the way.
“That’s not my determination to make,” she said. She marched me back up to the front desk where Marge and Missy were involved in a conversation.
“I caught this one rifling through Dr. Dello’s things,” Lynette announced.
“I wasn’t rifling,” I told her. “I had a question, and I put the file on his desk.”
“You weren’t standing anywhere near his desk when I walked in,” she pointed out.
“That’s because I was uh… um…” I panicked a little, unsure of what my next lie should be.
“Fascinated by the animal heads,” God whispered in my ear. He was hiding underneath my hair so that nobody else could see him.
“I was trying to tell if that was a water buffalo,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen one up close before.”
Lynette huffed her disbelief. Marge squinted at me. Missy winced.
“I’ll deal with this,” Marge told Lynette, making a shooing motion with her hand. Both she and Missy quickly disappeared from sight. But I guessed that they were both just around the corner, listening. I could still see Lynette’s lanyard with its “great dental tech” dangling.
“You’re not supposed to be in there,” Marge said gruffly.
“Well, I know that now,” I told her. “I was just eager to get to work…” I trailed off when I could see that she wasn’t believing my story.
“It’s not a water buffalo,” she told me. “Water buffalo are found in Africa. That’s a bison hanging in there. They’re our national mammal, you know.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding as though I was the least bit interested in what she was saying.
“Rod’s very proud of that,” Marge confided.
“I didn’t touch it or anything,” I quickly assured her.
“Yeah, she only touches dead human bodies,” God muttered.
For a second, I thought that Marge had heard his squeaking because her eyes grew slightly wider, but she then gave a slight shake of her head. “Just don’t go back in there again.”
“Oh,” I promised, even though I knew it was a complete lie. “You can count on the fact that I’ll never go back in there.”
“Get back to work,” Marge said, making the same shooing motion at me that she’d made at the others earlier.
I hurried down the hallway, practically jumped into the windowless office, closed the door, and let out a shaky sigh.
“That was close,” God said.
“I need you to send me the pictures,” the voice in my head said again.
I followed her instructions and sent the photographs and a text message to the number that she gave me. Then, I plugged the drive into the computer and watched as pages began to scroll by.
“We have another problem,” she said inside my ear.
I put my head down on the desk, knowing that I wasn’t going to like whatever it was she said.
27
“What now?” I asked the faceless woman who was about to deliver bad news.
“It’s a biometric safe,” she told me.
“And that means?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“It means that it’s going to be set to Dello’s thumbprint. We can’t open it unless he puts his thumb on the sensor.”
I let out a heavy sigh. Suddenly, Armani’s “fingers” tiles made more sense.
“I’ve got to tell the boss about this,” the woman said.
“Wait!” I called before she severed our connection.
“What?” she asked impatiently.
“Do you have a name?”
She chuckled. “I do, but if I told you that, I might have to kill you. Have a good day, Maggie.”
“What’s wrong?” God asked. He’d scrambled down my arm and was sitting on the desk, watching me. If a lizard can look concerned, he looked worried.
“It’s a biometric lock,” I told him. “Dello’s got to open it.”
“Oh,” the lizard said. “That complicates things.”
I nodded. For a brief moment, I imagined that Whitehat would request that I hold Dello at gunpoint until he opened the safe for me and then I would be required to call the police. A wave of hopelessness settled over me and I shivered. When my phone buzzed, I was certain it was her and didn’t even look at the display. “Yes?” I asked with a resigned sigh.
“Is this
Betty?” a male voice asked.
Realizing it had to be Alan Chilton, I sat up. “Yes,” I said. “Sorry, I was distracted. Who’s this?”
“Alan, we met yesterday… in the cemetery.”
“Of course,” I said, forcing a smile into my voice even though I wasn’t feeling it. “How are you, Alan?”
“I thought we really hit it off yesterday,” he said. “I was wondering if maybe,” he paused for a moment as though he was searching for the right thing to say. “I was wondering if maybe you’d like to get a drink, or dinner, or something?”
I flashed the lizard a thumbs up even though he had no idea why I was signaling him that way. This was a good sign. Perhaps I could at least solve, or at least contribute to the solving of, Griswald’s case, considering I wasn’t having much luck with Whitehat’s task. “That would be nice,” I told Alan.
“Tonight?”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I already have plans for tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“That would be fantastic,” I said.
“How about six?” he asked.
“Great.”
“I could text you the address to meet if that’s okay with you?”
“That would be perfect,” I said. I was relieved that I didn’t have to find a place for him to “pick me up”, considering I was never going to allow him access to Herschel’s compound.
“I’m at work right now,” I told him. “And my boss is kind of angry with me, so can we talk again tomorrow?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you,” I told him.
“Me too.”
I disconnected the call and filled God in on the newest development.
“Well, that’s a good sign,” he approved.
“Gino’s not going to like it,” I muttered.
“True,” the lizard said. “But you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time.”
“I can rarely make one person happy at a time,” I said with a heavy sigh. I sat in my windowless office for a couple of hours, waiting for either Marge to come and fire me, or Dr. Dello to come and berate me. Neither happened. Eventually, there was a soft knock on the door.