Die Buying

by Laura Disilverio

  The question came from a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Julia. She had the same blond hair and high cheekbones and the same basic build, although she had a bit more padding at bust and hips than her daughter did. She wore a zip-up fuzzy vest over mom jeans and looked like she could make corporate purchasing decisions, coach a kids’ soccer team, do the family taxes, and still have dinner on the table by seven o’clock. She was accompanied by a pin-striped-suited man with a briefcase who had “lawyer” stamped all over him. How had she rounded him up so quickly?

  “Did what, Julia?” She looked searchingly at her daughter, who evaded her gaze.

  “I’m EJ Ferris,” I said, stepping forward with my hand out.

  “Marcia Cleaton,” she said, with a firm shake. “And this is—”

  “Denny Snodgrass,” the lawyer said. “I’m Marcia’s lawyer.”

  “Boyfriend,” Julia muttered.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” Snodgrass asked, ignoring Julia.

  “The clerk at Rock Star Accessories observed Julia leaving with merchandise she hadn’t paid for,” I said.

  Marcia Cleaton gasped. “You were shoplifting?”

  “Why do you always assume the worst, Mom?” Julia snarled, conveniently forgetting that she had, in fact, shoplifted.

  “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” Snodgrass put in unctuously. “I’m sure the mall doesn’t wish to press charges in this kind of case.” He looked at me.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by “this kind of case.” Were we not supposed to press charges when the perp was a cute teenager? When the perp’s parents were (presumably) upstanding members of the community? Or when we were confronted by the might of the legal system as represented by one Denny Snodgrass? “It’s not up to me,” I said. “I believe Rock Star has already called the police. The store will make the decision to press charges or not.”

  As I said it, Joel slipped back into the office and quietly resumed his seat.

  “I’m sure we can reason with them,” Denny said as Marcia Cleaton crossed to her daughter and tried to hug her. Julia shrugged out from under her mother’s arm.

  “I can’t believe you shoplifted,” Marcia Cleaton said again, staring at her daughter as if at a stranger. “Your father and I taught you better than that. You get a reasonable allowance. You make money babysitting. Why—”

  “At least I didn’t kill anyone!”

  Marcia Cleaton reared back as if slapped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Her voice went from puzzled mother to pissed-off corporate honcho in a heartbeat.

  Having spat out her accusation, Julia stood, like a burden had lifted from her shoulders. “Come off it, Mom. I saw the blood.” She strode toward Snodgrass and the door. “C’mon, Denny.”

  “The blood? Are you talking about—”

  “I’m talking about Jackson Porter, okay?”

  Marcia paled.

  Little-girl bravado and a too-grown-up desire to inflict hurt shone on Julia’s pert face, mixed with a teaspoon of satisfaction at her mother’s reaction. I’d never felt a yearning for children—it wasn’t like I was set against the idea with the right guy, but I’d never felt incomplete without them— but watching this byplay was convincing me that parenting Fubar was the closest I wanted to come to the real thing. I could cope with a dead rodent or two and the occasional hairball yakked up onto the carpet. This ugliness was something else entirely.

  “Don’t say anything, Marcia,” Snodgrass warned, taking her elbow and steering her toward the door.

  “Let’s go down to that stupid store,” Julia said, marching out the door, “and get this over with. I’ll offer to pay them back or whatever, and we can get the hell out of here. It’s not like it was a big deal.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Joel, following the unhappy little party out the door. I mostly wanted to make sure that Julia and Marcia didn’t kill each other on mall property; we’d had enough homicides for one week.

  We found a uniformed Vernonville Police Department patrol officer waiting at Rock Star Accessories with Carrie filling him in on the heist details. “Arrest her,” she said, pointing a finger at Julia when we appeared.

  “It might be best,” Marcia said.

  Julia whirled, her mouth open in a comic book “O” of astonishment. “What?”

  “Maybe it’s time you learned about action and consequence, sweetheart,” Marcia said sadly.

  I wasn’t sure if the action-consequence link she had in mind was shoplifting and getting arrested, or ratting out your mom and getting cast adrift. A hard lesson either way.

  “But you said—” Julia turned to me, pleading with her eyes.

  “She has some information that might interest Detective Helland,” I told the officer. “About the Jackson Porter case.”

  “They closed that one,” the young officer informed me.

  “I know. But Helland might still want to hear what she has to say. I’ll give him a call,” I said to Julia. Underneath her obnoxious manner and air of entitlement, I sensed real distress about her mother’s possible involvement in the Porter case; the least I could do was try to pave the way with a call to Detective Helland.

  “Now, just a minute,” Denny Snodgrass started.

  Not interested in whatever lawyerly objection he felt compelled to offer, I walked slowly back toward the security office where I knew Joel would be anxious to hear what was going on. I made him wait while I dialed Helland’s number. When the desk sergeant finally got him on the line, I filled him in on what Julia Cleaton had said. A long pause hummed over the line when I finished.

  Finally, Helland said in a weary voice, “What part of ‘case closed’ doesn’t resonate with you, Officer Ferris?”

  “The part where you don’t explain why Gatchel would have displayed the body in the window and the part where you haven’t even figured out where he was shot,” I said hotly, tired of being condescended to.

  “What makes you think we haven’t located the murder scene?”

  “Have you?”

  More silence. “No.”

  I bit back the “Hah!” that sprang to my lips. “It’s easier to pin it on Gatchel, I’m sure, but—”

  “This may surprise you, but I don’t look for ‘easy’ in my investigations.” Anger tinged his voice. “If you must know, we interviewed Marcia Cleaton and several other people with a grudge against Porter or the Olympus development. We found no evidence indicating any of them were involved in his death.”

  “Did you know Porter was at the Cleaton house on Sunday afternoon?”

  “Did you get that from the daughter who even you admit is out to get her mom?”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” I said with some satisfaction.

  “I will talk to the Cleaton girl,” Helland said. “Happy?”

  He hung up before I could tell him how pleased I was that the Vernonville PD took citizen input seriously. Probably just as well.

  “What was all that about?” Joel asked as soon as I laid down the phone.

  I told him what Julia had said about the blood and about her mom meeting with Porter.

  “I’ll bet she did it,” Joel said.

  “Who? Julia or her mom?”

  “The mom. Though if this were a made-for-TV movie it would turn out to be the girl because she’s such an unlikely suspect. I’ll bet Porter and the mom argued and she lost it.”

  “And ran to the bedroom or wherever, pulled out a gun, and shot him in her kitchen?” I raised my brows skeptically. “The blood was in the backyard.”

  “Maybe not quite like that,” Joel said, thinking. “How’s this: they were talking in the backyard because he was showing her how the resort would look over her fence.”

  “That’s plausible,” I admitted as Joel plowed on.

  “But then he says nothing she can do will stop him from building the resort and she loses it. She comes at him with whatever’s handy—grill fork, shovel, who knows?—and he
pulls a gun on her!” He leaned back in his chair triumphantly.

  “Why would he have a gun with him?”

  “Because he’s a lousy developer and everyone in the tricounty region wanted to kill him.”

  I wasn’t sure I bought that, but I supposed it was possible that Porter had a gun. “So she wrestles the gun away from him, shoots him without anyone in the neighborhood hearing—”

  “Silencer?” Joel’s certainty was deflating.

  “—drags him across the yard, and somehow dumps him into her trunk so she can bring him here?”

  “The lawyer dude was in on it with her.”

  “Possible.”

  Joel embellished on his new idea. “He comes over Sunday night—the daughter’s gone—he’s thinking he’s gonna get lucky, and finds her with a body in the backyard. The Porter dude’s already deader than disco. He loves her . . . what can he do? He helps her move the body so the police don’t glom onto her.”

  I tapped a finger against my lips. “Not totally impossible,” I allowed. “But I still don’t understand why they brought the body here.”

  “So there’d be more suspects,” Joel said in a “duh” kind of voice.

  I rather thought that the body being in Diamanté narrowed the suspect field since the murderer would have needed a key to get in the store, or been proficient with picking locks. Since Grandpa Atherton was the only person in the mall that I knew of who could get into locked doors without keys, it might behoove me to figure out who had keys. Finola, of course, and maybe her employees. Certainly the Monica she’d mentioned who’d been supposed to open on Monday.

  “Hey, Harold,” I asked the older guard as he came through the door, “how long has Diamanté rented that space?”

  “A couple years?”

  “What was there before?”

  “A teen clothing store, I think—TeenAngster—and before that it was a formal-wear shop for years; you know, a place that rented tuxes and whatever.”

  Suspecting I knew the answer, I asked, “Does the mall change locks on the shops between tenants?”

  He snorted. “Get real. That would cost money.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t remember seeing a locksmith in the mall in the year that I’d been here except once when some pranksters dumped Super Glue into the locks on all the bathroom stall doors. Quigley’s office, I figured, would have a list of all the former tenants for that space, maybe going all the way back to the eighties when the mall had first opened. Even without seeing the list, I knew it would be a daunting number. Multiply the number of tenants by the average number of employees for a store that size—five?—and then double the figure to account for employee turnover, and you might have an approximation of the number of people who’d once—still?—had keys. It was a hopeless task for an individual to pursue. It would take a police department with a lot of manpower to locate the former tenants and get lists—if the owners kept the data, which was unlikely—of all their former employees.

  Woskowicz walked in just as I was set to resume my patrols. His bulk shrank the room.

  “Ferris,” he barked, pointing a finger at me. “Go home and get some sleep. I need you to work the midshift—Weasel’s been called out of town for a family emergency.”

  Weasel had family? Hard to imagine. I didn’t waste my breath asking why Woskowicz didn’t just call in someone who was on a break day or otherwise not scheduled to work. Ever since I’d started working here, Woskowicz had gone out of his way to give me crappy assignments and tasks he hoped would make me quit. No way would I give him the satisfaction of complaining. I’d probably be stuck on midshift full-time if Weasel hadn’t lobbied for that time slot.

  “Right,” I said equably, knowing my lack of reaction would annoy Woskowicz. “I’m out of here.” Dragging my gym bag from under the desk, I slung it over my shoulder. “Later, Joel.”

  I stopped by the Y, but the pool was clogged with noontime swimmers and a mommy-baby class of some kind. Way too many swim diapers in the water for me. I got in a quick upper body weight workout instead, and then went home to try to sleep. Fubar met me with little prrp-prrps of pleasure when I came through the door at such an unusual time. He looked affronted, however, when I stripped and crawled into bed. Clearly, he’d thought we’d be engaging in a nice game of “chase the feather on the string” or going for a walk around the patio-home community, as I sometimes did in the evenings. We didn’t go fast or far, but Fubar liked to cut ahead of me on the path, hide in a box hedge or a rhododendron, and pounce at my feet when I walked past. If he untied my shoelaces before I shooed him away, he won. Neighbors found this game less amusing than I did when he attempted to play it with them. I’d had to replace more than one pair of shoelaces snarled beyond redemption by his fast claws.

  In my military days, I’d gotten used to grabbing forty winks whenever the opportunity presented itself, so I didn’t have much trouble falling asleep. I awoke at nine thirty, made a quick meal of pasta with marinara sauce, packed a “lunch” for later, and headed back to Fernglen. Fubar was nowhere in sight; I assumed he was on the prowl. Lampposts cast pools of light in the acres of empty parking lot at the mall when I drove up. There was still activity around the movie theater entrance, but otherwise the place was still. The air was brisk with a hint of moisture as I hustled inside.

  The security officer on duty, a burly black guy named Edgar Ambrose, greeted me with a laconic, “Yo, EJ.”

  “You by yourself?” I asked, looking around for the other officer who should still be here.

  “You implying I need help?” he asked with a huge grin, showing a gold canine tooth.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Dallabetta just left,” Edgar said, pointing one of his meaty fingers at a camera screen. I watched as Dallabetta opened the door of her car in the jerky motion consistent with not enough frames per minute. The screen switched to another camera before she drove off. “And I’m outta here. Poker game tonight.” He shifted his bulk from the chair and stood, running a hand over his grizzled head.

  “Anything going on?” I asked.

  “Nada.”

  That was our version of a turnover briefing.

  “Later.” Edgar lumbered out, and I spent some time watching the screens. Movie patrons left the theaters and some walked toward the stores, but the sliding iron gate, padlocked when the stores closed at nine o’clock, kept them isolated in the theater wing. Views from our working cameras cycled onto the twelve screens in front of me at five-second intervals. A lot of nothingness. When the final movie let out after midnight, I got on the Segway and glided down there, unlocking the padlock on the gate to make sure the theater and the door to the parking lot were properly secured. They were. Relocking the gate, I rode the Segway through the empty halls, thinking that the mall seemed a completely different place at night.

  Sound echoed off the marble halls differently at night, without gaggles of shoppers to absorb it. And the low lighting Quigley’s office insisted on to save energy cast a bluish glimmer on the slick floors and left shadow puddles where the dim fluorescents didn’t penetrate. Purring into the Macy’s wing, I saw lights on behind their grille and heard the vroom of vacuum cleaners; the contract cleaning crew must be hard at work. When I’d started working at Fernglen, I’d assumed that the mall employed a janitorial service to clean all the stores. But, no. Each anchor store had its own contract cleaners, and the smaller stores, like Diamanté or the Herpes Hut, did their own cleaning, with salesclerks vacuuming or dusting or mopping as required. The mall’s janitors cleaned the food court and other common areas.

  The vacuum sound faded behind me as I returned to the main corridor. The escalator was frozen in place, and the fountain lay silent. The inadequate lights gleamed on a wet patch and I slowed. Was the fountain leaking? Getting off the Segway, I shone my flashlight around the fountain, realizing the wetness wasn’t a patch; it was a trail about ten inches wide that led from the fountain toward the housing that hi
d the escalator’s innards. Agatha? I played the beam cautiously over the escalator but saw nothing. No way was I going to try to dislodge the housing and face down a pissed-off constrictor on my own. Making a note to suggest someone in maintenance check under the escalator tomorrow, I skirted it and zipped down the hall toward Nordstrom, going much faster than I did when I had to dodge shoppers. I completed my tour of the ground floor, took the elevator to the second floor, and repeated the sequence. Nothing was out of place. No one skulked through the halls carrying a body or even loitered in a corner, trying to sell drugs. Returning to the security office, I watched the screens again, fighting the urge to drift off as the digital clock in the corner of the camera screens ticked its way to two o’clock. A car pulling into the north parking lot, headed for the garage, perked me up. As I watched, an SUV followed it. Hello. I switched to the garage camera and watched as the two cars stopped side by side.

  Hot damn. Maybe I should mosey out to the garage and see what the folks in those cars were up to at two in the morning. They might be carpoolers meeting up for the morning commute, but I didn’t think so. This was a bit early even for the Type A’s that dominated the D.C. workforce. The north parking garage connected to the mall near the Macy’s, and I gunned my Segway down the corridors to the entrance, leaving it in the hallway as I quietly pushed through the door into the cold and drafty garage. The structure smelled of damp cement, and the wind gusted small snowflakes through the open bays. My keen deductive processes told me it had started to snow since I came on shift.

  Standing still, just inside the garage, I listened. The murmur of voices and the clang of metal on metal reached me. I walked swiftly toward the voices, hand on the pepper spray canister on my belt. Pepper spray was the most lethal weapon the investment company thought its security officers needed because Fernglen wasn’t rife with the gangs and druggies that plagued some malls. I’m sure there was an insurance liability issue affecting the investment company’s choices, too. I’d heard the security officers at the Mall of America made their rounds in full gear with Kevlar vests and AR-15s. Not too different from patrolling the streets of Kabul. The prospect didn’t appeal to me. Even when policing, I’d always preferred to rely on wit rather than weaponry. Still, I missed the security-blanket feeling of having a weapon on my hip as I penetrated further into the garage.