“It’s personal property. I don’t work for Tradava. If he took my phone, that would be stealing.”
“Good. Yes. That is the right way to think. Now the last time I talked to John, he was friendly, but to be honest, I’m not sure how this is going to go. Are you ready?”
“You’re in charge.”
I entered Human Resources with Frank on my heels. “Hello?” I called out. Two doors were open, but no people were present. “John? Are you here?”
John Jones came out of his office. “Samantha. And . . . do I know you?”
“John, this is a representative of the media. He’s recording this for a story about Tradava. I have a few questions, and I suggest you think carefully about your answers.”
“You got a job at the newspaper?”
“No,” I said. “This is a public interest story.” Frank aimed his phone at me. I jerked my head twice toward John, and after I felt satisfied the camera was filming the correct subject, continued. “Earlier this week, members of Tradava’s newly formed union went on strike. They expected that strike to last three days. It’s been over a week now, and thanks to the shooting and the act of God clause, Tradava is going out of business. That money, that payroll is going to get whooshed away with the rest of the assets around here, but it’s not an asset. It belongs to the employees.”
“The employees were on strike. Technically they didn’t do their jobs, so they haven’t earned their pay.”
“Is that the position you want to take?” I asked.
John sighed. “What is it you want, Samantha? It’s five minutes to six, and these days I see no reason to work a minute longer than I need to.” He held his hands out palm side up and bent his fingers toward him. “Give me your bottom line.”
I hadn’t expected John to roll over quite this easily, and for a moment I was thrown off by his agreeability. Frank pointed his phone at me. “What is your bottom line, Samantha?” he said, presumably to liven up the video.
I turned back to John. “You told me Tradava left you a slush fund for payroll to cover the gap before Piccadilly took over the payroll. Something about money set aside that was protected from debt collectors. Find a way to access that payroll and divert it into an account that I can access.”
“You’re blackmailing me?”
“It’s not blackmail when it’s the right thing. Did you ever stop to consider how much this store owes people? Or were you planning on keeping that money for yourself?”
A chair shifted from inside John’s office. We weren’t alone. And then Peggy Loncar appeared in the doorway. “Give her the money, John,” she said. “Samantha already knows I was here the morning of the shooting. She thinks I’m a suspect in my husband’s shooting. She’ll expose our secrets while searching for the truth.”
27
Not Proud
Things had taken a turn for the weird. I looked at her, and at John, and back at her. Something that John had told me the last time I was here niggled at me. He’d told me his connection to Loncar. Neighbors. Friends. Him not wanting to be the cause of more friction between Loncar and his wife.
More friction.
“Of course. You two know each other,” I said slowly. “If you crashed on Loncar’s sofa, then you two—” I moved my finger back and forth between them, “aren’t strangers.”
“I’m not proud of what I did, and I’d hoped it would never come out. We both did.”
“That’s why you stayed over that night,” I said to John. “You were separated, but Peggy wasn’t. You and Peggy—” I turned to her. “You cheated on Detective Loncar with his friend?”
“He knew,” she said. “He knew I wasn’t happy, and he knew I turned to John. When he went out in search of John that night, it wasn’t to make sure John made it home safely. He wanted to confront him. I tried to stop my husband, but he was too angry.”
My brain fast-tracked the distance between the points of fact. John left and tripped the silent alarm at Loncar’s house. Loncar went after John to put a stop to the affair. Vandals choosing that night to break into John’s house. Loncar’s cop instincts took over, and he pushed everything out of his head except for getting John’s ex-wife out of the house. He saved her life, and because of the unbelievable emotional drain of the night, everybody moved on as if resolution had been met.
I kept my attention on Peggy. “Have you told anybody about this?”
“It was years ago. I’ve tried to forget it. It wasn’t until I learned that Tradava was to be the site of my ex-husband’s retirement party that I came here to stop your plans. None of us need a reminder of what could have been.” She wrung her hands. “My ex-husband has made a lot of enemies in his time on the police force. It’s a dangerous job. I told him he had to choose between me and the job, and he chose the job.”
“You kicked him out,” I said.
“I gave him time to think.”
“He wanted to reconcile.”
“Samantha, his choice of the job over his marriage wasn’t just about him. It was about me too. Why do you think Captain Valderama was at my house earlier today?”
I had a definite theory about that, but now didn’t seem the time to mention it. I tried not to react one way or the other, but I could not be held responsible for the judgmental aspects of my body language.
“I got tired of being shunned when I go to the grocery store. I got tired of attending events without my plus one. I raised our daughter while my husband worked eighty-hour weeks. I didn’t choose that life. He did.”
“You had to know when you married him what your life was going to be like,” I said.
“That wasn’t the life we agreed on. He went through the academy and moved up from uniform to homicide. The plan was for him to take a desk job. But his priorities changed. We both deserve to be happy, but that doesn’t mean I want anything less for him.”
“Then why did you send your divorce papers to him at the precinct? Why do something so passive aggressive?”
“I did nothing of the sort,” she said, clearly offended at the insinuation. “We had coffee at the Wyomissing Diner. He met his granddaughter for the first time. We shared a slice of pecan pie. It was all very civilized.”
“But the rumors I heard said you humiliated him. You wanted to make a point about his affair with the dispatch officer.”
The color drained from Peggy’s face. “What affair?”
“Did I say affair? I meant mentorship. There wasn’t anything going on between them.”
“What is this woman’s name?” Peggy asked. Her voice was strained, and when I glanced at her hands, I saw they were balled so tightly the skin over her knuckles had turned white.
I looked at Frank. He had the iPhone aimed at me, and I quickly turned away. This video shakedown had not gone as anticipated. “Does her identity matter? You know your husband.”
“Ex-husband.”
I ignored her correction. “You know him. Just look at what you told me tonight. He knew about you and John, and he didn’t let it destroy your marriage. I don’t know when that happened, but you two stayed together, so he must have forgiven you.”
“My husband shut down,” she said quietly. “He threw himself into his job. It was like I no longer existed.” She shifted her attention from me to John, and as she continued talking, I felt like an eavesdropper on a heart-wrenching conversation that should have been private. “I thought—for a very long time, I thought the threat to your wife that night made you rethink everything. I thought you chose her over me. I was ready to leave my marriage like we discussed, and then you just cut ties.”
I turned to John. “That’s why you never met with Victoria and Harvey for negotiations. You were already in a meeting with Peggy.”
“If they were here, I didn’t see them.” He turned to Peggy. “That night changed everything. What could have happened, it haunts me. That’s why I stopped calling. Every time I thought about you, about us, I thought about how many people could have been hu
rt by our actions.”
“But they weren’t,” she said. “All these years, we turned away from something that could have been great because of something that never took place.”
“Just because no one was physically hurt doesn’t mean there wouldn’t have been pain.”
While the four of us stood there, a knock sounded on the glass door to Human Resources. I turned and saw two security guards in uniform. Bob Pennino pulled the door open and poked his head inside. “Mr. Jones, we’re here for the six o’clock shift. You want us out front or out back?”
John left the three of us and walked to the door. The office was small, and I could still hear them even though they’d put distance between us. “Did anybody show up tonight?” John asked.
The portly cop-turned-security officer scratched his mustache. “Not yet. Do you want me to stick around? Captain Valderama offered me a pickup shift downtown.”
“No, that’s not necessary.” John and Bob shook hands. “Protecting lives is more important than protecting a store full of merchandise.”
“Got it.” Bob adjusted the brim of his hat. He looked over his shoulder, first at me and then at Frank, who appeared to be playing a virtual football game on his phone. Bob leaned in close to John and said something I couldn’t hear. John turned his head slightly to the side as if checking to see if I was watching him. I quickly picked up a snow globe with a miniature Tradava from the corner of John’s desk and shook it. Glittery snow fell around the miniature department store. I’d watched customers stare at these like they were the most fascinating things they’d ever seen. (The effect wasn’t half bad, I must admit.)
While John and Bob finished, I let my mind wander to John’s relationship with Peggy. If John Jones had stayed at Loncar’s house, the two thugs who broke in would have found his wife, and who knows what they would have done. Peggy Loncar was talking about a love affair that never got started, and John was talking about the human condition.
John was right. There was too much baggage attached to something that hadn’t yet begun. It would never have worked.
Peggy went back into his office. A moment later, John followed. I heard a tissue being pulled out of a box, and very faint sounds of crying. Everything about this party for Loncar had turned sour.
Who was I kidding? I planned the entire party based on a Spice Girls ticket stub I found in the bottom of a box of his personal items. I’d picked my theme based on convenience. Unless I gave him a time machine and a sex change, Loncar wouldn’t appreciate a Spice Girls-themed party. I’d taken the easy way out because it was easy, and it had brought me nothing but trouble.
I’d discovered more about Loncar’s life than I ever thought I wanted to know. He’d experienced loss and pain and a broken heart. And through all of that, he’d found a way to do his job. Even when people like me complicated things.
I turned to Frank. “You can turn off the phone now,” I said.
“Already did.” He closed the football app and looked up. “You did good,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel that way. I came here to get answers from John, but he answered questions I wasn’t even asking.”
“After all that, you still have questions?”
“Two people were shot outside Tradava. I don’t know which one was the target and which was the accidental victim. I’m spinning in circles, and nothing’s coming together.”
“Maybe that’s not your job.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re confused because you were there when it happened, right?”
“Right.”
“And you’ve got a whole lot of suspects who seem unrelated, right?”
“Right.”
“But they were all here too. Maybe that’s important. Find a way to get them all together and see what happens.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“For starters, you can throw that party for Loncar.”
“There’s no budget, no location, and no guest list. He doesn’t even want the party I was planning.”
“It’s not too late to change your plans. Throw the party you think the detective wants and invite the public.”
“What are you suggesting? That I throw a rave in the parking lot?” At Frank’s raised eyebrows, I added, “not that I think Loncar wants a rave.”
“People love a feel-good story,” Frank said. “Sometimes they’re moved to do things they might not otherwise do.”
Frank wasn’t just making small talk. The hopelessness I felt about the party, the out-of-work employees, Loncar’s unwanted mandatory retirement, and the lack of support from Tradava faded. A flicker of possibility lit within me. “What do you have in mind?”
“Policeman shot on the site of a long-loved, now dying, formerly owned family retailer affects a community. All you need is the right story and the right media outlet to make people feel what you feel.”
“But people don’t like cops. When I moved here, I didn’t like cops.”
“But you like Loncar.”
“Because I found out he’s not just a cop.”
Which was precisely the point Frank was trying to get me to see.
John cleared his throat behind me. “The parking lot is available,” he said. “I could reallocate the slush fund and approve billable hours from our existing staff,” he said. “If we’re going out, we might as well go out with a bang.”
28
Interrupting My Mojo
I sent Frank on his way to get started on the article, and I doubled back to the candy department and checked for the cases of Jacob’s Twiglets. Six of them were in a pile behind the counter with a sign that said, “Waiting on Return Authorization.”
I tore off the sign and ejected a long strip of register tape and wrote, “Do not return to vendor. Mark out of stock and deliver to advertising office for Loncar Retirement Party.” I wandered around the store and left similar notes on the Hello London! handbags, the Keep Calm sweaters, and a box of red-and-blue plaid umbrellas. It was like a scavenger hunt throughout the dark store, identifying any merchandise that could be used in a makeshift American in London pop-up shop. I was beyond caring about the authenticity of the event. Victoria could take her snooty tea and bugger off.
By the time I left the store, the parking lot was vacant. Six metal poles and the massive Union Jack were the only indications that something was to take place in the parking lot. There was no sign of the vigil for Harvey or security for the building. It was ironic that as Tradava slowly died their inevitable death, the one person who seemed to care was me.
I got into Nick’s truck and drove home.
Since the shooting, I focused on the tragedy. But before the tragedy, there’d been a party for a man. And if I’d learned anything by now, it was that life was short and the unexpected happened. Detective Loncar wasn’t a perfect man, but he’d spent his life trying to protect others. He deserved the celebration, and I was going to give it to him.
When I got home, I was brimming with enthusiasm and ideas. I burst through the door and found Eddie stretched out on the sofa watching Spice World and Nick at the dining room table with a sketch pad and swatches of leather. Xavier and a man I didn’t recognize were repotting a plant in the middle of my kitchen. I admit, his presence interrupted my mojo.
“Dude,” Eddie said. “That’s Xavier’s brother Juan.”
“Hi, Juan,” I said.
“Hey. You shouldn’t let the roots get so crowded in the pot.”
I gave Eddie a confused look. He shrugged. “Listen to the man. He knows plants.”
“Good. Because I’m going to need that English topiary maze.” I paused and looked at all three of them. “And a miniature Stonehenge. And a tea service and biscuits and models in Geri dresses and goodie bags filled with Twiglets.”
“Twiglets?” Eddie asked.
“England’s answer to pretzels. And we’ll move all the TVs from the electronics department outside and stream Bond movies. And Hugh Grant! Wh
at was I thinking? We can’t have a party without him. There’s got to be someone who can figure that out, right?” I unwound my red scarf from my neck and tossed it on the arm of the sofa. “We need goodie bags. We can fill them on site.”
“Who’s we?” Eddie asked.
“Anybody who works for Tradava until they officially close their doors.”
“Does she always talk this fast?” Xavier asked.
Eddie waved his hand to shush Xavier, and Nick smiled. “She’s just getting warmed up,” he said.
“We need the maze and chairs and a stage. And models. Can we get employees to model?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “And food. Maybe we can get a sponsor? I’ll call The Ex-Pistols—”
“Dude, you’re scary right now,” Eddie said. He turned to Nick. “She wasn’t like this before you married her.”
Nick held up his hands. “Don’t put this on me.”
Xavier invoked the union worker’s phone tree and spread the word to the other out-of-work employees. I left Eddie wrestling some chicken wire into Stonehenge and Nick in charge of procuring the Geri dresses (which frankly I didn’t hold out much confidence in getting, but go big or go home, right?). We were charging full steam ahead. There was just one person who needed to know what I was up to, and that conversation was better in person.
I drove to the hospital and breezed through the visitor sign-in station. Tonight, the lobby was empty. Whether it was because Loncar was out of the woods or because crime stops for nobody, I didn’t know. I was just happy not to be harassed.
I reached Loncar’s room and tapped on the doorframe. “Hi,” I said.
Loncar glared at me. From that single expression, annoyance with a side of vinegar, I knew he somehow learned that the party was on.
“Hear me out,” I said. I grabbed the closest chair and sat facing him. “A lot of people are out of work thanks to that shooting. The shooting led to Piccadilly Group pulling out of their deal to buy Tradava, and now Tradava is filing for bankruptcy. The money was there for payroll, but because of the strike, nobody was showing up for work. This party will get those people paid, and it’ll show Piccadilly what they should have seen all along—that Tradava is a good bet.”
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