Not sure how to reply, I turned to Starla, who was eyeing Nina with a combination of respect and trepidation. “Starla, set your feet like this.” I showed her how to center her weight and balance better. “Then use the power in your legs and core to launch your arm forward.”
“This is harder than it looks,” she said, wheezing a little as I tapped the backs of her knees to get her to flex them and put my hands on her shoulders to show her how to swivel at the waist. “Maybe I should get a gun instead.” She glanced at Nina’s purse.
“I’ve got nothing against guns if the owners get properly trained,” I said, “but you can’t have one with you all the time, and if you carry it in your purse, you may not have time to get it out if you’re attacked. And there’s always the threat of the attacker taking it away and using it against you.”
Looking thoughtful, Starla applied herself to the palm-heel strikes with enough determination to make Nina jump back, stumble, and fall on her well-padded fanny. I patted Starla’s shoulder, gave Nina a hand up, and tried not to giggle as Grandpa winked at me.
A series of minor crises—a shoplifter, a lost six-year-old, and a defective fire alarm going off in Sears—kept me busy the rest of the morning after class ended. I didn’t have time to think about Helland or his rescinded request. When lunch time rolled around, I was ready for a break. “What’ll it be for lunch today?” I asked Joel. “I’ll buy if you fly.”
He smiled at me. “Thanks, EJ. That’d be a nice change. I’ve been bringing lunch from home lately because I’m saving to take Sunny some place nice for dinner after the movie. I was thinking maybe Red Lobster.”
I suppressed a smile and said, “I’m sure she’d enjoy that, Joel. Chik-fil-A work for you?”
Twenty minutes later, our sandwiches almost gone, I mentioned Cruz Guerra’s confession and arrest.
“No!” Joel’s mouth fell open. “A fourteen-year-old? No way.”
“That’s what I’d say, normally, but he’s one of the Niños Malos, so maybe.” An image of my brother Clint at fourteen crossed my mind: basketball obsessed, braces, just beginning to think about what kind of car he wanted when he turned sixteen. I didn’t think he’d ever held a gun. He was obnoxious and made fun of my acne, but he was no more capable of shooting a man in cold blood than our Bouvier, Rawhide, was. His life experience was a world away from Cruz Guerra’s, I thought.
“I found out Celio Arriaga was born in Richmond,” Joel said, “so my theory about New Jersey won’t work.” He slurped his diet soda noisily through a straw, looking downcast.
“Then we need a new theory,” I said briskly. “The first ones rarely pan out.” I didn’t feel I could share Helland’s information with him, so I suggested he do some research on Woskowicz’s wives. “Kyra’s convinced Woskowicz was at the battlefield park to meet a woman, a lover,” I told him. “Maybe it was one of his exes. Maybe they were tired of the same-old-same-old and wanted to put a little zing back into their love life.”
“Or that reporter he’s been seeing,” Joel put in, getting that excited look. He jostled his cup and grabbed it before it could spill.
“Good reflexes.”
I left him happily clicking away on the computer keyboard, trying to find out more about Nina Wertmuller, Paula Poupére Woskowicz, and Aggie Woskowicz. As I cruised the halls on my Segway, I tried to think of some way I could give Joel more responsibility, develop what I thought were some decent leadership tendencies in him. I should probably wait until I found out if I had this job for real, I decided, veering into the Pete’s wing.
This time, Starla was in. She had three belts draped over her plump forearm as she offered them one at a time to a customer standing indecisively in front of the three-way mirror. The customer, a woman of about Starla’s age and girth, wore a flowing skirt and top patterned in swirling blues and greens. I had to admit the belts made the effect less tentlike. Starla saw me out of the corner of her eye and gave me a nervous “just a minute” signal.
“What do you think?” The customer pirouetted on wedge heels.
I thought the woven fabric belt made her look like a sack of potatoes cinched around the middle.
“The colors go well together,” Starla said tactfully.
“I like the wide leather one,” I said. “It would give you—the outfit—more structure.” Not for nothing had I been raised in fashion-obsessed Hollywood; I recognized that belt as by far the most expensive one.
“Really?” She let Starla help fasten the leather belt around her waist, took a final look in the mirror, and said, “I’ll take the outfit and this belt.”
I waited while Starla rang up the purchase, wrapped the clothes in tissue paper, and told the customer about an upcoming sale. As soon as she was out the door, Starla turned to me and said, “Thank you.”
She walked toward me reluctantly, passing near a lamp with a soft glow that burnished her hair to a golden auburn. My eyes widened. “You and Captain Woskowicz were having an affair,” I blurted.
She gasped and put a hand to her chest. “How did you—”
“He had a weakness for redheads.”
She sighed, a soft, sad sigh. “Denny always said he loved my hair. We were getting married, you know.”
I wasn’t surprised. “You knew his divorce wasn’t finalized yet.”
She nodded, looking faintly guilty. “Yes. Not until Friday. We were talking about eloping to Las Vegas next week.”
I’d have thought Woskowicz would have been leery of taking the marital plunge for a fourth time, but apparently not. Maybe he was one of those men who liked being married, only not for too long to the same woman. “Did Aggie know about you?” I was thinking about the soon-to-be-officially-ex-Mrs. Woskowicz’s contention that she dumped her husband.
“Oh, yes,” Starla said, looking simultaneously guilty and defiant. It was an expression more suited to a five-year-old than someone past fifty. “Dennis had to tell her. She kept pestering him, wanting to reconcile.”
Aggie had lied to me. To save face, or for a more sinister reason? “When did he tell her?”
“Three weeks ago,” Starla said. Tugging at a string near her ruffled cuff, she added, “She came to see me.”
“Here?”
Starla nodded. “She was so… so ugly! Called me a home wrecker and a bitch and”—she lowered her voice—“the s-word. She even said my clothes were hideous and she wouldn’t shop here if her other choice was to go naked the rest of her life.”
It sounded like the clothes insult had incensed Starla more than the s-word. I didn’t mention that I kind of agreed with Aggie about the clothes. “Did she make any threats?”
“She said—oh. Oh!” Starla’s mouth gathered into a perfect little O. “Did she—do you think—?” Her hands with their pale pink nails fluttered in front of her mouth, as if she were considering clamping them down on the words that spilled forth. “No! Surely she couldn’t have—”
Killed Woskowicz? I wouldn’t rule it out. Aloud, I said, “I don’t suppose you were with Woskowicz the night he got killed? At the battlefield park?”
Starla shook her head. “No. I was doing inventory.”
“Alone?”
“No, Martha-Anne was here, too. One of my sales ladies.”
“Did you mention your… engagement to the police?”
“No.” She plumped out her lower lip when I raised my brows. “I didn’t see that my private life was any of their business. No one else knew except my son—he and Dennis really hit it off, and he was going to give me away if we got married here instead of in Vegas—and Aggie. I’ll tell them now, though,” she said grimly, “if it’ll put them on to that… that Aggie. She can’t be allowed to get away with it.”
I gave her Detective Helland’s number, and she wrote it down. “We don’t know Aggie shot him, though,” I reminded her.
Her nonresponse told me what she thought of that. “Did… Dennis”—it felt weird using his first name—“seem different at all the
past couple of weeks? Did he talk about anything that might’ve been on his mind?”
“We mostly talked about the wedding. We’d both been married before, so we didn’t want a big fuss, but I wanted a nice dress—I found a lovely pearl-colored one with a matching jacket at Diamanté—and flowers. Orchids maybe, or just carnations because I love their frilly petals. And we wanted to make sure they played our song.”
She was drifting far afield, but I couldn’t resist: “What’s your song?”
‘Walk Like an Egyptian.’ She giggled and her gaze strayed to a dressing room door.
Not your typical wedding fare. I got a sudden image of her and Woskowicz playing pharaoh and slave girl in the dressing room on his lunch hours. Now I understood why he’d come here so frequently. I shook my head to clear it. “Was he worried about something?” I prompted.
“I wouldn’t say worried, exactly. He was a bit uptight about his new business.”
I stood straighter. This was new information. “What kind of business?”
“He didn’t tell me. But he’d made enough money from it already that we were going on a ten-day cruise for our honeymoon. I’ve got the brochures right here.” She headed to the counter and rummaged through a drawer under the cash register, triumphantly holding aloft a slick pamphlet with a photo of a continent-sized ship on the cover.
“Did you ever meet anyone connected with his new business?”
“No. But he went to lots of meetings, mostly in the evening. I answered his cell phone once, though, when he was in the shower, and it was some man I didn’t know who asked me to let Dennis know he couldn’t make it to one of the meetings.”
“His name?” Now we were getting somewhere.
She shrugged. “He wouldn’t give it to me. Just said Dennis would know.”
Damn.
“The area code was 215, if that helps.”
“It might. Don’t forget to call Detective Helland.” I hesitated. “I’m really sorry for your loss,” I said. “I know it’s hard to lose someone you love to violence.”
Tears slipped down her face, leaving trails in her makeup. Pulling a tissue from her skirt pocket, she dabbed at them. “Thank you, EJ,” she said. She followed me to the door and flipped the sign to “Closed” as I exited. “I need a few minutes.”
I called Grandpa Atherton and arranged to meet him after work. “I don’t have long, Emma-Joy,” he cautioned. “Theresa and I are going to see Sting in concert.”
Most people’s grandparents liked Tony Bennett or Barry Manilow. My Grandpa liked Sting. At least he wasn’t into rap. Theresa Eshelman was his lady friend. She owned a child care center and didn’t object to his disappearing without notice on occasion or experimenting with listening devices and cameras. She’d even done some surveillance with him, but only on cases where there was absolutely no danger, Grandpa confided to me.
We agreed to meet at Theresa’s place of business, Intellitot Day Care Center, so they could leave for the Verizon Center as soon as the last tardy parent picked up the last waiting child. I arrived, still in uniform, to see Grandpa seated in a sandbox, legs crisscrossed, helping a two-year-old make a sand castle. He gave the turret a final pat with his plastic shovel when he saw me standing at the fence and unfolded himself awkwardly from the box. Saying good-bye to his new friend and brushing the sand off his casual slacks, he said, “Not as flexible as I used to be.” He moved stiffly toward the care-center door and entered the building.
As soon as he left, his little playmate smashed the shovel down on the castle, beaming with happiness. I spotted Theresa through a window and waved to her. She waved back and continued wrestling a child into a cardigan.
Grandpa, who’d just emerged from the center’s front entrance, made his way over to me. “Isn’t she a doll?” he said, joining me at the fence. I knew he was talking about Theresa and not the cute little girl.
“Absolutely.”
As if embarrassed by his sentimental moment, he asked briskly, “What’s up, Emma-Joy?”
Knowing time was short, I gave him the one-minute briefing on what Helland had said this morning, my conversations with Aggie and Starla, and the results of my Internet search on the 215 area code and Allied Forge Metals. “Two-one-five is Philadelphia,” I said, “and Allied Forge Metals is incorporated in Delaware, just a hop, skip, and jump away, and—”
“A quarter of the corporations in America are chartered through Delaware,” Grandpa said, “but it’s certainly worth looking into.”
“Its headquarters is in Philadelphia. Furthermore, Mantua, New Jersey, is just across the river from Philly. That’s where the police were running a gun amnesty program that netted the gun used to kill Celio Arriaga.”
A Mercedes SUV rounded the corner and parked crookedly in the lot. A harried woman in a business suit dashed inside and came out moments later, leading Grandpa’s sandbox buddy and the cardiganed little girl by their hands.
“I think I’ll drive up to Philly tomorrow,” Grandpa said, slicking his white hair back with one hand as Theresa emerged. “I can make an appointment with Allied as the representative of a police department from, oh, say, Columbia, South Carolina, interested in hiring them to destroy weapons we collect from our about-to-be-inaugurated gun amnesty program.”
“Good thinking, Grandpa,” I said, having no doubt he could pull it off, as long as he didn’t try to convince anyone he was an active cop. No one was going to buy an eighty-plus-year-old police officer. I knew he had contacts who could get him official-looking business cards and ID, if necessary, and arrange to have someone answer the phone and vouch for him as a member of the Columbia Police Department. A happy thought struck me: “I worked Sunday and Monday, so I could take tomorrow off.”
“Come with me,” Grandpa said promptly. “We’ll have one of those Grandpa–Emma-Joy outings like we used to when you were younger. Remember the time we went to feed the ducks and you fell in the pond and your mother about scalped me?”
“Will you buy me an ice cream cone, double-decker?” I asked, grinning.
“Absolutely.”
“You’re plotting something,” Theresa observed when she came up to us. A tall woman in her sixties with short, silver-streaked hair, she had a calm air about her, an unflappability that I suspected was key to her success as a day care owner.
“Always,” Grandpa agreed happily.
At home, I occupied myself looking for job advertisements from police departments, expanding my search to the whole United States. I’d been hoping for a job within a few hours’ drive, at most, from Grandpa, but that wasn’t panning out, so I looked at an ad from Leavenworth, Kansas, and another from Huntsville, Alabama. I’d contented myself with leftovers for dinner and was forking up the last of my meal while downloading a few applications, when the phone rang. I answered, noting it was almost nine thirty.
It was Edgar Ambrose, who explained that his car had broken down just south of the Woodmoor exit on I-95 and he was going to be at least an hour late for the midshift. “I’ll cover it,” I assured him. “Get there when you can.”
“I owe you,” he said, hanging up.
Staying up until midnight or so was no big deal, so I climbed back into my uniform at ten without a lot of heartburn. Fubar looked affronted when I walked to the door. “Sorry, buddy,” I said, “but duty calls. This is the downside of being the boss.”
Fubar let me know what he thought of my new responsibilities by stalking away, stubby tail held upright.
Twenty-one
The mall at night is a different place than during the day. With the parking lots and garages empty except for a car or two left by diners who imbibed a bit too much at Tombino’s and wisely went home in a taxi, or by commuters who carpool, the mall looks like it’s surrounded by a moat of asphalt. Inside, too, without the escalator’s hum and the fountain’s splash, or the footsteps and chatter of shoppers and merchants, the mall is strangely silent. Quigley insists on turning out as many lights as possible, so a
bluish twilight cast by overhead fluorescents pervades the halls. The shops, locked behind their grilles, lie in darkness.
We’d had one guard last year who got so spooked by the silent mall that she hated working the midshift. That, of course, prompted Captain Woskowicz to assign her to it as often as possible. She quit. Last I heard, she had gone to one of those vet-tech schools that advertise on TV and was working for a veterinarian in Centreville. I didn’t mind the quiet; in fact, I liked it. My problem with the midshift was the monotony. As the sole officer on duty, the person working midshift had no one to talk to, and patrolling an empty mall was 99 percent boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of panic (a break-in attempt or shots fired in the parking lot) or frustration (overflowing toilets in the bathroom and no plumber on hand).
Tonight, the security officer who gave me the turnover briefing reported that nothing unusual had happened, and I settled down in front of the monitors, stifling a yawn. I hoped Edgar showed up before too long. I hadn’t been seated for more than ten minutes when the phone rang. Hoping it wasn’t Edgar calling to say he’d be delayed longer than expected, I answered. “Fernglen Security. Officer Ferris.”
A woman’s voice, fluttery with tension or fear, said, “Hello. This is Glenda Wachtel. Is this the mall security office?”
“Yes, ma’am. How can I help you?”
“My husband Mike owns the Make-a-Manatee store.”
Wachtel—of course. “Yes?”
“He hasn’t come home tonight.”
I could feel her trying to sound calm, but her worry leaked over the line. “Did you try his cell phone?”
“Yes, but he’s not answering. He closes the store at nine—sometimes a little earlier if there’s no business—and he’s always home by nine twenty.”
I checked my watch: ten seventeen. It seemed a little early for a spouse to push the panic button, but maybe Mrs. Wachtel was a chronic worrier. “Would you like me to go down to the store and see if he’s there?”
“Oh, yes, please,” she said gratefully. “I’m sorry to bother you… I’m sure you think I’m a ridiculous worrywart, but it’s just that… recently… well, what with his leg in a cast and everything…”
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