Solo and I exchanged an anxious glance.
“What?” I asked.
“The whole thing sticks in the head as idiotic,” he said in lieu of an answer.
“What did they say?” I asked again.
“I can’t believe Leland would be so stupid,” Gilad said.
“And the streak continues,” Solo said. “Just tell us what they said about Leland.”
“Well.” Gilad leaned in. “Supposedly he has a skull tattoo.”
“That’s bad?” I asked. “Like bacon?”
“Worse. A skull tattoo was the insignia of a select SS group of concentration camp guards, and is ech to my family after the personal blow they delivered us. Most of the war criminals I brought in were from this SS-Totenkopfverbande Division. They called their insignia Death’s Head and proudly tattooed it on their bodies. And even when they burned off the tattoo with cigarettes, claiming it was a bullet wound, we caught them. Their x-rays showed no bone damaged. We got ’em, all right. Those filthy bastards.”
Nothing about this made sense. Leland revered his family, his religion, and paid homage to Holocaust victims by housing them at FoY for reduced rent, or in Otto’s case, no rent at all due to his impoverished state. Then it hit me, Leland’s disbelief earlier in Otto’s excuse for not wearing his watch. It wasn’t due to his psoriasis, but I suspect more because he feared he would lose his rent-free room if it got out that he owned an expensive piece of jewelry.
But that was that, and this was this. I could not wrap my head around Leland getting a Nazi tattoo, especially at seeing his near coronary at learning he had eaten taboo dog meat.
“—I’d have stopped him,” Gilad was saying, “had I known. I would have reminded him of my mother, his great grandmother. How the Nazis arrested her and my older brother while they visited family in Poland, how one Nazi bastard robbed her of jewelry sewn into her clothes in exchange for my little brother’s life.”
My mouth dropped open in horror.
“You get where I’m going with this, don’t you?” Gilad asked me.
I shook my head, not wanting to know.
“What counts here as unclear?” he asked. “My mother had only a few pieces of jewelry: a ruby necklace, an opal ring, a timepiece, a cameo broach, and pearl earrings. In spite of that, the bastard demanded more, so she gave him her body.”
I gasped.
“Still he left her behind to be gassed,” he said.
“And your big brother?” Solo asked. His eyes were moist.
“Dumped at a nearby farmhouse, he died of typhus a week later. The farmer kept his diary. He gave it to my father after the war. In it, my brother described the skull insignia, how Alric Mueller’s hand was tattooed with it. How it terrified him. I dedicated my life to hunting down Mueller for what he did to my mother, my brother.”
“Did you find him?” Solo asked.
He shook his head, sadly. “His trail went cold, but I did manage to capture others—many others from the SS-TV group. I got ’em, all right. The filthy bastards.”
“Gilad, you look like a man in need of a blintz,” Solo said. “Come on. My treat.”
“It must be fat-free,” Gilad said.
And as they strode toward the deli, Solo cast a watch-yourself-with-Tita look back at me just before the crowd swallowed them.
Several people dropped by the booth over the next ten minutes. Then it quieted down again. After another group of marathon runners rounded the corner, the street cleared as well.
“Hey, before I forget, here.” Tita handed over my cell phone. “I had to toss your jacket, chica. No saving it. Bloodstains, Zach’s blood.” Ours eyes met, and I registered a war waging inside her. “I could have handled him, you know? Someone gets up in my shit, I take ’em out, but it was Zach, you know? He and I go way back. Catholic school, years of catechism with not much to show for it but stupid collages. I couldn’t hurt him, you know. Couldn’t.”
I pretended to fiddle with my phone. I was pretty sure what I was about to say would anger her and gave myself a little time to prepare. “Tita, did you kill Otto?”
She said nothing for a moment, but eyed me shrewdly. “No.”
“Do you know who killed him?”
She shook her head. “Straight talk, that’s rare,” she said. “I gotta a long sheet, you know? Been bounced out of jail more times than I care to think about. But something funny happens when you get kids, you go sort of soft, you know?” There came a pause where her face took on the look of someone eating something sweet. “But thanks for thinking I could kill Otto. I never wanna come off weak.”
“You scare the hell out of me,” I said.
She smiled as I opened the contact list on my phone. Tita was there, as was Leland and Gilad. Booth, too. All suspects were still on the table, but to my mind, Tita and Leland were at the bottom of the list.
On a sigh, I dialed Zach’s number, but hit cancel. I waited a few beats and called again. I was looking at my feet when he answered.
“You gonna stand there staring at your feet, or are you gonna say something?” he asked.
“How—how did you know?”
“You always stare at your feet when you’re nervous. Rylie, I screwed up today.” His voice held a note of desperation. “Looks like I’m a head case.”
“Zach—” I tried to say I think I love you but stopped, not out of my usual cowardice, but more that it felt oddly insincere, wrong somehow. “You can fight this,” I said. “Have faith.”
A tense silence fell between us.
“What did you say?” he said finally.
“You can fight this,” I said again.
“Not that.”
I had to think. “Have faith.”
“You always did know what to say. Pure and simple,” he said and hung up.
“Zach, wait!”
Tita nudged me with a shoulder. Sympathy, girl gang style. “He’ll beat this.” She crossed to help a woman inquiring about accommodations at FoY.
I wandered the booth, straightening this, stacking that. I was relieved that Zach had opened up a little more. It was a positive step toward healing, and it helped relieve my fears that he would do something totally out of character, something desperate. My sense of panic had departed with the silly urge to complicate his life with my true feelings. I thought about those feelings, what my heart wanted. A strange flatness came over me, as when finding savory food flavorless. The best explanation was that feelings went into hiding during troubled times.
Then my cell phone rang. The number was unknown. “Hello?”
“Judging by the sound of your voice, you fared well. I am relieved,” a man said, his voice heavily accented and aggravatingly charming.
I was tempted to ask, “Who is this?” But of course, I knew it was Detective Talon. “Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences,” I said.
“Robert Lewis Stevenson. One cannae go astray with a Scotsman’s quote,” he said. “But sounding well and being well are two different matters. Are you okay?”
“Not really, but I’ll survive.”
“I admire your honesty.”
Now I was curious. “I said something insensitive on a hotline and hurt a man who was suffering, and it almost cost several people their lives. Do you still admire me?”
“Will you make that mistake again?” he asked.
I said no, meaning it.
“Well, then—” he began.
“Please don’t say all’s well that ends well,” I said. “I have no desire to forgive myself.”
“It’s a pity, how much you suffer your failures. Your successes, are they felt as keenly?” he asked. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, Rylie, but by the seeds you plant.”
More Robert Lewis Stevenson. “Is there something else you want?” I asked.
“Aye, lass, but now is not the time,” he said and disconnected.
Passing clouds covered the sun, blotted out the vivid glare, and
muddied the air into something normally seen in the dead of winter. It hardly surprised me. The weather matched my mood, reflective, pensive, and if I could find the courage, hopeful. In a perfect world, Zach would conquer his PTSD, Walter would get mental help, I would earn my grandfather’s approval, keep my job, and pay off our back taxes, and I would share my life with—I tried to picture Zach’s face. Of course, I knew every inch of it, the curve of his jaw, the hollows of his cheeks, his wounded eyes; I couldn’t picture it now, any of it. I looked around, confused, tired, and a little lost, but I had to let it go. Somehow, someway, I had to focus on finding a killer.
Up ahead, a cab arrived, its engine screeching as it pulled into the parking lot behind FoY’s booth. It bumped over the cement divider and parked at the adjacent deli. I thought for a second that the Audi right behind it was also going to ignore the divider, but it parked in the first lot, the one just behind our booth. The Audi’s male driver turned our way, his shaggy blond hair spilling over his forehead. His pasty coloring drew my eye, but he had focused his grim gaze on the cab. When a large group of teens wandered past, I lost sight of him.
“What a shitty tent,” said a nearby male voice.
I turned my head.
“No side walls. What if it rains? I hate rain, see. My hip hurts in the rain.” Booth Jackson crawled from the cab with a series of grunts and groans, rubbing his hip, cringing.
“Why aren’t you cooking? Why are you here?” Tita asked.
“Don’t start with me,” he told her. “And just so you know, I didn’t walk out on the job. Think back on how Otto clogged up his new low-flow toilet just the other day and not even twenty-four hours after it was put in. Well, to make a long story short, another damn senior did it again. Crap went everywhere, into the mudroom, the hallway. And now the water is off. So there is no cooking, Boss Lady. Delivery pizza is what’s for lunch, and delivery pizza is what they’ll eat.”
My mouth watered. I was starving.
“So you’ve come to help us with the booth?” Tita asked, her tone skeptical.
“No getting out of it if I want a paycheck,” he said, his wiggly brows bouncing. “But first things first, see. You are looking at a man in need of a new cell phone. And Roaring Wings is giving away an iPhone to whoever can eat the most Nitro Wings. Did you hear what I said? Banging hot Nitro Wings? Bring it on.”
“If you croak, it’s on your head,” Tita said. “You’ve got that irregular heartbeat.”
“Living dangerously.” He scratched an angry rash on his left forearm. “I’m suffering a bit of a crisis, see. I need to break my grip with my two-cent phone. It’s dulling my bling.”
I had a sudden thought. “If you win, can I buy your old phone? Solo needs one.”
“Sure, why not?” He wore a vague smile. “I guess I owe him. Ever since he came to work at FoY, Leland has stopped nagging me about exercising the seniors. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him ten times, I’ve got a bad hip.” He hauled out a small bottle of lotion and dabbed it on the rash. “The big boss ain’t any good at listening.”
My unspoken thought was he needed a bigger bottle. The rash had taken up residence on his arm. Then I thought of the stinging nettles growing near Otto’s discarded kippah. Sure, it was a long shot as Washington was riddled with the bushy scourge, but I wanted to see his reaction. “That’s some rash. What’s it from?”
His brows shot up, twitching. “What’s it to you?”
“You’ve got welts,” I said. “Like maybe you tangled with some stinging nettles?”
“Don’t know what that is,” he said, expressionless.
“It’s a flower, perennial. It causes a rash.”
“Oh, is that all? For a minute, I thought you were saying I had a social disease.”
“Huh?” I said. “That’s sort of random.”
He cast a wary look over each shoulder. “If there’s gossip around FoY, you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll hear it. And hear it I did this morning. Two seniors have herpes.”
My mouth fell open. “Shut up.”
“If I’m lying, I’m dying.”
“Which seniors?” Tita asked.
“The Colonel won’t say, but he’d know since he works in the clinic. Unreal, right? Can you imagine? Sex at their age,” he said, shaking his head in apparent surprise.
I made the smart decision not to remind him that he was well over sixty, and if one believed his workplace boasting, sexually red-hot and active. A loudspeaker announced the wing eating competition would begin in twenty minutes.
“So do we have a deal?” I asked. “You’ll sell me your phone.”
“I’m open to the possibility. It’s tight, though. Can’t let it go cheap, see.”
“But it cost only two cents. That’s thievery.”
“Sick world we live in, uh?” He limped toward Roaring Wings tent. Halfway there, a twenty-something black woman with an extraordinary body joined him, wrapping her arms through his. The limp abruptly disappeared. Interesting.
“Tita,” I said. “Do you know how Booth hurt his hip?”
“Car crash, I think.”
I looked back at Booth as he and his female friend waited outside Roaring Wings. The blond driver who had followed his cab into the parking lot approached Booth with an outstretched hand. The man gestured toward a nearby display table between the FoY and Roaring Wings booths, which up until now I hadn’t noticed. A spangled banner stretched between two poles at each end of the table read: WHITE’S JEWELRY. A perfect name, as the man looked almost transparent. A sandwich sign beside the table read: FREE APPRAISALS AND CLEANING.
Booth turned his back on the man’s obvious solicitation for business. The man scowled on his return to his display table. Booth and his female friend entered the tent, Booth immediately slouching into a chair at the contestant table. His friend whispered in his ear and stepped away to make a call. With his eyes fixed on her, Booth drew out a prescription bottle from his pocket and downed several pills without water. He placed the bottle on the table, left it there, and grabbed a glass of water from the nearby set-up table. But he didn’t take a drink. He just held it in his hand, crossing to his friend.
I wondered about his pills. If they were for pain, and if once taken, could he climb Leland’s steep hill, or if he was merely faking the pain to throw off suspicion. I had to get a look at those pills.
Sizzling oil smoked as a chef dropped chicken wings into a hot pot. I thought about how I could examine those pills, visualized several scenarios, and settled on one.
Tita stepped back, talking about the weather, happy as a fat rat in a cheese factory for the uncharacteristically hot weather. “Looks like our replacements have arrived,” she said as a FoY senior and an office staffer entered the booth.
Greetings were said all around, and we departed the tent and walked to the sidewalk.
“So when do you pick up Elsa from church?” I asked her.
“On the twelfth of never, I hope. She called a little while ago, said she was getting a ride from church to the Ready Clinic. Gunk in her eye, or something. She will call, you know. When she’s done.”
Big grin. “So you have some time to kill?” I asked.
“Maybe. Why?”
Funny thing about Latino chefs. They love themselves some habanera peppers, and amazingly, they can eat tons of them without fanning their sombreros. So who better to eat a boatload of piping hot wings? Me, who cannot eat a red-hot candy without gasping for air? Or Tita Iglesias, FoY’s resident fire breather.
“Yum,” I said. “Smell that hot sauce? It’s like the Mother Ship calling you home.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “What are you up to?”
I filled her in on the investigation and how I had to—had to—get a look at Booth’s pills and win Solo a new iPhone, as I didn’t trust Booth to give me his old one. “So are you in?”
She looked over at Booth, then back to me “You really think he killed Otto?”
“That’s th
e working theory.”
“I’m in. I hate that bastard,” she said. “But don’t put all your eggs in Booth’s basket. Gilad is right, everyone is a suspect, especially him.”
“Why him especially?”
“I saw him slip away after the bonfire got going. Come to think of it, it was about the same time Booth left.”
“Where did Gilad go?”
She shrugged. “I lost him in the dark. You know I knew a private investigator once. One day he just up and went. Mysterious disappearance some say, gang killing I say. The PI biz is like that, you know. They uncover secrets. People kill for that. How bad do you want this?”
“Real bad.”
“Buckle up, chica, it’s gonna get bumpy.”
After signing a waiver—Tita rolled her eyes rather than show weakness by reading the cautionary document—the five contestants congregated behind the cafeteria-style focal table. A big crowd watched. Each competitor donned a plastic bib and latex gloves, then took his or her seat. Tita let loose an excited hoot.
“So you’re ready to do this?” I stared at her across the table.
As if to say, “duh” she hooted again.
She sat between Booth and a man wearing a dingy muscle shirt. Fuzzy pale hair covered his body and his eyes were a piercing golden brown. He looked like a blond werewolf. The two college-age guys seated beside him looked preppy, rich, and buzzed. Frat boys, almost certainly.
Nearby, two chefs in heavy white aprons dumped heaps of wings into two bowls, poured on the sauce, and placed them under warming lights.
“As you can see, folks,” the announcer said from the podium as the awaiting crowd quieted. “We’ve only got one portable stove, so we’re running behind. Five minutes, promise, till the competition begins.”
As the chefs loaded up the hot oil with another batch of wings, the noise level resumed to a steady hum of conversation.
Another whiff of peppers made me blink, and my eyes started watering. “You sure you’re okay doing this?” I asked Tita.
“Piece of cake. Easy as pie. Sweet as mother’s milk,” she said.
Booth regarded Tita. Big glower. Squirming brow pinched. An equal match to a bulldog: one lip corner up, showing some tooth, a little plaque. He was pissed. The good news? The pill bottle was still where he had left it.
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