The Man in the Microwave Oven

by Susan Cox

  I quickly left the individual orchids on desks around the office with the “Condolences” cards I’d prepared, deflated the balloons with my handy Swiss Army knife, and crumpled them into the break room rubbish bin, then tucked the empty basket next to it. I was approaching the outer door to make what I hoped would be a clean getaway when I heard the tones of the electronic lock and the door started to open.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I dived into a cubicle and duck waddled under a desk as someone walked into the room. Whoever it was hesitated in the doorway, and I pulled my feet further into my hiding spot. The lights didn’t come on, and I was grateful for the few seconds it took me to wonder why. That question was answered when I saw the reflection of a flashlight beam bounce off the glass office walls. I pressed back against the desk with my heart hammering, my face jammed against the fabric of the cubicle, and my legs tangled in a chaos of cables and wires.

  The intruder—the other intruder—made faint bumps and rustles following in my footsteps. He—it was a man, judging from the shoes I glimpsed as he walked quickly past my cubicle—headed straight for Katrina’s office. Without bothering to keep quiet, he started to throw drawers open and toss things around. I heard the tinkle of glass breaking and thought of the framed photos, and heard the thump of some of Katrina’s heavy books hitting the carpeted floor of her office. I muttered to myself. I’d been stealthy, professional even, but this idiot was endangering both of us. The faint whine of the elevators had been growing more frequent as the morning arrivals picked up. I knew Katrina had recently come to a parting of the ways with her paralegal, but one attorney and a couple of administrative types still shared the offices, and all I needed was for one of them to arrive before I could make my escape. Crouching low, hoping he was making enough noise to shield me, I made my way toward the outer door. I was nearly there when I bumped into the reception desk. The orchid pot wobbled. I lunged for it, but it crashed and shattered on the marble floor with a noise loud enough to stop my heart. A mess of bark chunks, terra cotta shards and moss scattered over the floor near my feet.

  “Hey! Who the hell are you?”

  There was no way to answer that question without getting into serious trouble. I exploded out of my crouch and bolted. As soon as I cleared the doorway into the outer hallway, I made for the emergency stairs.

  I slid down the first two flights without feeling my feet touch the ground as the door above me slammed open. I skidded and stumbled down more flights of stairs, three at a time, and burst through the ground floor fire door. A group of people waiting for the elevators produced a variety of startled and profane shouts as I charged through them, knocking them out of my way. I flung myself at the emergency exit crash bar, barged outside and, with the fire alarm screaming in my ears, ran hell-for-leather along the alley. With a heartbeat’s incredulity, I heard what sounded like a gunshot. I didn’t think the security guards would shoot me, but I didn’t know for certain—this was America, after all. It goaded me to further effort. Without bothering to see if the way was clear, I dived across the busy street into the alley opposite. Brakes squealed and shouts echoed behind me as my pursuer followed.

  I’d never understood the phrase “running for your life” before. I’ve been chased once or twice, but mostly I was doing the chasing, after reluctant celebrities with my camera. I’m not a fast runner, but fear of death is apparently a great motivator, and I legged it down the anonymous alley as if my heels were on fire. I dived for the opening at the end, flinging myself forward as a small puff of brick dust flew off the wall a foot ahead of me. I ran through the dust before it had time to settle. Someone really was shooting at me! With some vague idea that I should be zigzagging to throw off his aim, I slammed painfully into the opposite corner with my shoulder and careened off it onto Stockton Street. I burst onto a crowd of Chinese women clustered around displays of daikon and bok choy, all arguing with a beleaguered clerk who was trying to put out more produce from a tower of battered cardboard boxes. I crashed into the women, who went down like bowling pins, earning me a hefty shove from somewhere as I stumbled over a tangle of arms and legs and bok choy that sent me flying out into the slow-moving stream of traffic. Several outraged shouts and honking horns followed me as I dodged an open-mouthed cyclist and kept running.

  Around the next corner, I tore the green wig off with my baseball hat and stuffed them in my hoodie’s kangaroo pocket and, without slowing down, shucked the hoodie and hurled them at a homeless woman crouched beside an Italian delicatessen.

  “Thanks!” she shouted after me. I was left wearing unremarkable jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I dodged right at the next corner, kept running for half a block, then pressed myself into an alcove containing a fire hydrant and a pair of large, stinking wheelie bins. I leaned over with my hands on my knees, trying hard to breathe through the remains of my panic. After a few minutes, when I was capable of standing upright, I flattened myself against the brick wall and looked up and down the street. I didn’t see anyone I knew, and I definitely didn’t see anyone waving a gun around. I walked quickly to Geary and jumped on the first bus I saw.

  Luckily, I had my Muni pass in my jeans, because I found I’d given the homeless woman the thirty-five dollars I’d shoved in my hoodie as I left home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I was holding a plastic bag of mostly melted ice against my shoulder when Davie found me in the small office behind Aromas late that afternoon. I’d hit the alley wall hard. He got me some fresh ice from somewhere, wearing the small frown that appears whenever there’s something he doesn’t understand. Davie’s sixteen and recently asked me to call him Davo. I kept forgetting and usually ended up with some variation of Davie-o. He’s built like a UPS truck, he sounds like a foghorn, and his latest haircut left him with a mop of unruly black curls on top and little more than a shadow everywhere else. He wanted me to bleach the curls. I said I would, if he stopped threatening to get ear gauges. He was already a sensation behind the counter at Aromas, but apparently a nose ring and multiple earrings weren’t interesting enough. I used my grandfather’s guaranteed disapproval of the ear gauges as a persuader, since he and Grandfather had struck up an unlikely friendship, and I’m sure they drew second glances on their outings to the Academy of Sciences. I was already reconciled to spending Davie’s eighteenth birthday in a tattoo parlor, although having seen some of the local tattoo parlors, I made him promise to find a place that was more hippie than Harley.

  “What happened?” His frown got a little deeper.

  “I tripped and banged into a wall.” And why I couldn’t come up with a better story than that, I don’t know.

  “Huh.”

  “It’s not serious; I just want to make sure it doesn’t bruise.”

  “Huh.”

  “See? It feels better already.” I raised my shoulder a couple of times, which actually hurt quite a lot, and wondered if I’d torn something. I leaned over his bicycle and tossed the bag of ice into the sink in our tiny bathroom. I didn’t have to leave the office, our space back there was so bijou.

  “Huh.”

  I have no idea how he managed to communicate such a depth of skepticism, saying essentially nothing.

  In a quiet moment later, trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy while images of my frantic race from Katrina’s office replayed over and over in my mind, I unearthed a couple of small, flowered china bowls I’d found in a charity shop, and took them into the bathroom to wash. I thought they were probably powder bowls from an old dressing table set.

  “What do you think?” I put them on an eye-level shelf.

  Davie shrugged.

  “I thought they might sell as soap dishes.”

  He reached over and picked out a couple of almond soaps in flowered paper wrapping, and dropped one in each bowl. We both looked at them, heads to one side, considering.

  “How much?” I said.

  “What did you pay?”

  “Four dollars each. Plus the s
oap.”

  “Seventeen dollars?”

  I wrote that amount on a couple of price labels and handed them to him, and he stuck the labels on the bottoms of the bowls. I cut some raffia from our gift-wrapping supplies and tied it around the bowls to make it clear the price included the seven-dollar bar of soap.

  “Mr. Pryce-Fitton has one of those bowls. He keeps his keys in it by the front door.”

  I was occupied with wondering who—besides me—had been in Katrina’s office that morning, and what they had been looking for. And why they had come armed with a gun. But Davie was giving me a sidelong look, and I tried to remember what we’d been talking about.

  “When are you and my grandfather meeting up next? He says you’re teaching him about California flora and fauna.”

  He flushed, looking pleased. “Next Tuesday, after school. Don’t put me on the schedule.” I made a mental note and then decided I’d never remember, so I wrote it on a Post-it and stuck it on my computer screen in the office. When I got back, he picked up where he’d left off. “We have a deal. I tell him about local stuff, and he tells me Latin and Greek names for things. Like monarch butterflies are Danaus plexippus. Stuff like that.” He glanced over at the small aquarium sheltering a miniature world of greenery for the eggs he collected and released as butterflies. One of them was in the process of hatching, and we both stopped work to watch. “We meet friends of his sometimes,” he said suddenly.

  “Which friends?” I didn’t know my grandfather had any friends over here. There were none that he’d ever mentioned, anyway.

  “Don’t know their names. One’s an older lady. White hair and everything. She has real sharp fingernails.” He scowled and I wondered why he had reason to remember her fingernails.

  As we watched in companionable silence, the butterfly made its resolute way from the confining chrysalis and left the husk behind. It hung from a branch, slowly moving its glorious wings, waiting for them to dry.

  I left Davie happily Snapchatting and Instagramming and texting a naturalist he’d befriended online, standing behind the counter, ready for any customers who might present themselves while I walked along to The Coffee to get my usual afternoon cup of tea from Nat and share that I’d spent the morning fleeing from a gun-wielding assassin.

  Nat had postponed The Coffee’s official opening. (“I wanted to give people a few days to forget we’d had a murder.” “Do you think that’s a problem?” “Take a look at City Beat’s posts. It’s like Jack the Ripper is hangin’ around waitin’ to grab people off the street.”)

  He had successfully combined a Paris patisserie with a Beat-era espresso bar. The café was painted and furnished in shades of coffee and cream and a sky-blue color Nat insisted was called Gay Russian Man. He’d commissioned some interesting cake stands and trays made of pale blue, food-safe resin from an artist in the Bayview, and arranged them at different heights in the display case for their payload of muffins and scones.

  I’d told him I thought the take-one-leave-one bookshelf in the hallway leading to the bathrooms was a little heavy on the Josh Lanyon erotic, man-on-man romances. (“They’re well written, Theo.” “I’m sure that’s why you read them.” “A man has needs.”)

  I was anxious to share my morning’s adventure with him, but I had to wait for a quiet moment, so I sat on the squashy couch upholstered in a patchwork of burlap coffee sacks he’d somehow beguiled from one of his suppliers and made an effort to take an interest in the reality I’d lived in until that morning.

  My wandering gaze settled on the large front windows, where two people sat quietly engaged with their laptops. He’d had three different sets of curtains in three different lengths made. We’d agreed that the floor-length, burgundy velvet was more bordello than Brazilian blend. Next came the gathered and draped coffee-tan and white stripes with bobble fringe, which looked whimsically French, and I thought they’d made the cut until I came in one morning to see them crumpled in a heap on the floor. Eventually, he’d covered the bottom three feet of the window with a translucent curtain made from recycled soda bottles of all things, on a thick brass rod.

  “They’re an odd length,” I’d said as we both stood looking at them.

  “They’re called café curtains and this is a café,” he’d said breezily.

  “But—”

  He growled. “They’re supposed to be short. Don’t mess with me, Theo; I’m on the edge here.”

  I knew he was thinking about bringing someone on to help him right away, instead of waiting, as he’d originally planned. (“I’m not helping?” “’Course you are, sweetie, but you’re lookin’ a bit worse for wear these early mornin’s, and I’m gonna get someone full time.”)

  While he served his customers, and produced, apparently without effort, a stream of cheerful gossip, compliments, and remarkably complicated coffee drinks, it dawned on me that I’d have to tell him my reason for breaking into Katrina’s office, and I couldn’t think of anything that sounded reasonable. So I had more things to keep from everyone—my file, the dossier on our neighbors, and the story of the gunman who chased me, were going to have to stay my secrets. It was an odd feeling to sit there, having been shot at and nearly killed, and yet unable to share that remarkable fact with anyone. Was this the odd dichotomy experienced by undercover cops and spies?

  Reaching for the normal as he handed me my tea, I gave him a wink and tilted my head at the curtains, and he grinned back at me.

  On my way back to Aromas, an argument in the street looked a couple of seconds away from turning into a shoving match. Two men, one of them with a filthy blanket around his shoulders, and the other wearing a camo-patterned jacket, were up in each other’s faces, shoulders back, chests forward, pushing into each other’s personal space, both of them shouting obscenities and hurling charges of theft. I saw our beat copper—thank goodness for community policing—making his measured way in their direction, and they suddenly found somewhere else to be. It reminded me that I hadn’t seen Matthew in his usual spots for a couple of days, and I stopped in at Bonbons Chocolat to ask Faye-Bella if she’d seen him.

  “He’s been here,” she said, using long tongs to put what she called a chocolate coconut haystack in a small, pleated paper cup. I reflected that since she hadn’t had to ask what I wanted, I was probably there too often. I dug in my jeans for change and put it on top of her glass showcase, then picked up the treat and nibbled it. I decided I could give them up when my life was less stressful.

  “He’s just lying low,” she said. “He didn’t like the street being closed off that day. At least, I think that’s what was bothering him. He came in to pick up his comforter the other day, but he wouldn’t stay. You know how he repeats things; he just kept saying, ‘Thief, thief, thief.’”

  I stopped nibbling. “What did he mean?”

  She shrugged. “He said it the same way he says everything, repeating something he’s heard, but doesn’t really understand.”

  But there was usually some meaning behind Matthew’s utterances, if you could clear away his mental confusion. I’d just heard two homeless men arguing and calling each other out over a theft; maybe Matthew had heard something similar. He was out here on the street at all hours of the night, and I suddenly wondered if Inspector Lichlyter had talked to him about the night of Katrina’s murder.

  I didn’t envy her the task of getting him to make sense.

  Back at Aromas I gave Davie the orange soda I’d picked up for him, and he dispatched it in three huge gulps.

  “How’s everything at home?” I asked him as he lifted a carton of shea butter jars and started to take it out to the garage, where we stored extra stock. For some reason the fad for shea butter seemed to have run its course. I needed to remember to order more coconut oil, though. One of my customers had requested coconut oil tooth soap, which sounded disgusting, but I’d added it to the coconut oil hair treatments, shampoo, body lotions, sugar scrub, enriching face moisturizer, lip balm, foot cream, and nail
food we already stocked.

  “S’fine.”

  “No, Davie-o.” He sighed and shook his head as if I were the lamest thing ever, as he might put it. “Really. How are things?”

  “Told you. Everything’s fine.” He scowled. “Nothing new.”

  “Okay, then.”

  I sighed. He’s only about ten years younger than me, but I’d felt in loco parentis practically since the first day I met him, when he tried to rob the store. I talked him out of it and gave him an after-school job. I hoped he was telling me the truth; in any case, the bruises were difficult to hide. He hadn’t come in with a black eye in a couple of months. Maybe he was getting too big for his abusive drunk of a father to bully.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon filling in shelves and serving the occasional customer while I worked on the schedule in the office. Davie had discovered a talent for upselling, which I told him to soft-pedal to avoid pressuring people.

  “But we need the money,” he said, which was undeniably true. “I just asked her if she’d tried our lemon verbena sugar scrub and body lotion. She’d already picked out the lemon body wash, so it made sense. And she bought the scrub! So that’s good, right?”

  “It’s very good, I just meant…” How to tell him that the way he looked meant he was going to have to tread lightly his whole life? “… you know what? You were polite and thoughtful and the customer looked happy. We’ll count it as a win.”

  He gave me a shy smile and I sighed. Nat said I clucked over him like an anxious hen, and gave new meaning to having all my eggs in one basket.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I had absolutely no doubt that Katrina had been planning to expose me—or, more likely, threaten to expose me if I didn’t relax my opposition to her client’s condo development. With the stolen file in my own hands, at least no one in her office had access to that information about me, and I could choose to tell my story, or not, in my own time. I’d stolen her dossier on my neighbors with less of a clear motive. One or two had done a recent volte-face on the condo development, and I was sure I’d find the reason for their change of heart in the second file. I’d felt justified, protective even, when I saw it there, but I wasn’t sure reading it gave me any high ground. Eventually, I decided I was just curious, and found I could live with that.