Tuxedos?
“Me?”
“You’re in the wedding party, Mike,” she said. “You need to wear a tuxedo.”
Wait a minute. “I’m in the wedding party?”
She looked surprised.
“John didn’t talk to you about it?”
“No.”
She sighed. For a minute I thought she was going to get mad. But she didn’t.
“Trust me,” she said. “You’re going to need a tuxedo. Sit down. I’ll show you what you can choose from.” She reached for some wedding magazines.
A tuxedo is basically a suit. Sure, it’s a fancy suit that you wear on special occasions. But it’s a suit, so I thought, What’s the big deal? Except, like everything else to do with the wedding, it turned out there were tons of choices. There were different colors, for one thing, even different colors of black. There were different cuts. There were different jackets—some that looked like regular suit jackets, others that were longer, and still others that were short in front and long in the back, like the kind of thing you’d see on an English butler in some old movie. Boy, and there were different lapels—wide, narrow, in-between—and different kinds of shirts you would wear.
“What did John choose?” I said. He probably knew way more about tuxedos than I did.
“We haven’t discussed it yet,” Susan said. “You pick out a couple that you like, then I’ll talk to him and you can go and try some on, and hopefully we can get that nailed down.” The wedding was less than six weeks away. Susan was talking a lot these days about nailing things down. “What about this?” she said, pointing to a black tuxedo with a long jacket. “I think you’d look handsome in that, Mike. I bet Rebecca would think so, too.”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t picture it. I had some nice pants and a jacket that Riel had bought me and that I had worn a couple of times when I’d had to meet a lawyer or a probation officer or when I went to see my caseworker. But a tuxedo?
Susan smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve never met a man—short man, fat man, bald man, tall man—who didn’t look terrific in a tuxedo. And you’re a good-looking guy, Mike. Which means that you’ll look incredible in a tux.”
“Yeah?” She thought I was good-looking?
“Definitely,” she said.
“Mike, come and set the table,” Riel called from the kitchen.
Susan reached for her wedding binder, pulled a little pad of sticky notes from the flap inside the cover, and stuck a note on the magazine page. “I’ll show it to John later.”
Mushroom risotto was okay, but I didn’t go ga-ga over it the way Susan did. After we ate, Susan said that she had to go. She had a friend who made cakes and pastries. The friend was designing the wedding cake. I’d never heard of a cake being designed before. Riel said he had some prep to do and that he’d talk to her later. I was on cleanup detail. I had almost finished when Riel called me to the phone.
“It’s Rebecca,” he said. He had his hand over the mouthpiece as he handed me the receiver. “She sounds nervous. She sounds nervous every time I talk to her. Do me a favor, Mike? Tell her I don’t bite.” He went into the living room.
“I had to go to the video store right after I got home, to return a movie,” she said. She didn’t sound nervous to me. She sounded breathless, like she had just run all the way home.
“Yeah?” I said.
“I went to that one on Danforth. You know, the one that’s on the way to school.”
“Yeah,” I said. It was the one I always went to because it was also the closest one to Riel’s house, only from a different direction. “But I thought you didn’t go there. I thought you went to the other place, you know, because of all those gift certificates.” A friend of Rebecca’s family was assistant manager of a store in a different video chain. She’d given Rebecca a whole wad of gift certificates for Christmas. The only downside was that the other video store was a lot farther from Rebecca’s house. She had to get a ride to go there.
“I do,” she said. “But my mom wanted to show a movie to one of her classes and they didn’t have it there, so she rented it from the store on Danforth. And I just returned it for her. You’ve seen the shirts they wear at that store, haven’t you, Mike? You know what color they are?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re red.”
“They were red,” she said. Her voice was high and squeaky, which told me she was excited about something. “They’re doing this special promotion. And because of that, everyone who works in the store is wearing a bright orange T-shirt instead of the regular red ones. They’ve been wearing them for a couple of weeks now.”
Bright orange.
“You mean, like the T-shirt you saw in the girl’s bag.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “They also wear name tags. Square ones, just like I told you. I bet she works at one of those video stores.”
“I guess she doesn’t work at the one you were in, huh?” I said.
“I asked.” I wondered how she had put the question, considering she didn’t know the girl’s name. “She doesn’t work there. But there are three other stores in the area, Mike, and one of them is almost brand new. It’s been open less than a month.” Her voice was squeaky again, like a mouse. “We should check them out. We could go now if you want. They’re open until midnight.”
I glanced at the clock on the stove. It was eight o’clock, and I hadn’t done my homework. I hadn’t done anything about Vin either.
“I can’t,” I said. I felt like a little kid.
“How about last period tomorrow?” she said. We both had a spare.
“Okay. But I’m working tomorrow night, so I have to watch the time.”
After I hung up, I finished cleaning up the kitchen. Then I fished the piece of paper with Vin’s phone number out of my pocket. I wondered what he wanted. There was only one way to find out. I picked up the phone and took it into the living room.
“Is it okay if I take the phone upstairs to make a call?” I said.
Riel looked up from the magazine. “You going to call Vin?”
I nodded.
“Bring it down again when you’re finished,” Riel said.
I went up to my room and closed the door. My hands were shaking so bad you’d have thought I was calling a girl I had just met instead of a guy I had known all my life. The woman who answered on the other end asked me for my name. She told me to hold. A minute passed. Then another and another. I was wondering if she had forgotten about me. Finally:
“Hello?”
“Vin, it’s me. Mike.”
“Hey, Mike.” He sounded tired. Or maybe he was just down. I bet it was no fun being locked up.
“I got a message you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah,” Vin said. “I was wondering if you were having any luck with what we talked about.”
“About the girl, you mean?”
“About what we talked about,” Vin said. His voice was funny. I got the idea he was being careful. Maybe they listened in on phone calls. Or maybe there was someone nearby he didn’t want to hear.
“I haven’t found … I haven’t come through yet,” I said. “But I have an idea I’m going to follow up on tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” All of a sudden he sounded a lot brighter. “You think you’re going to be able to do it?”
“I don’t know, Vin. But I’m trying.”
“That’s great, Mike. I really appreciate it.”
“Vin, did you hear what happened to Sal?”
He hadn’t, so I filled him in.
“You didn’t talk to anyone about him, did you, Vin?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sal said the guys who beat him up warned him not to say anything about what he saw at the store. So he thinks you must have given someone his name or told them where to find him.” I didn’t mention that Sal had moved. I wanted to hear Vin’s reaction first.
“Me?” Vin said. “Hey, give me a break, Mike. All I want is to get out of h
ere. And right now the only way I can see that happening is if you do what we talked about.”
“Or if Sal all of a sudden isn’t sure what he saw,” I said.
“Right,” Vin said. “Like that’s going to happen. He gave me up pretty fast, Mike. He isn’t going to change his story. Not Sal.” Vin knew Sal as well as I did. If he was disappointed by Sal’s stubbornness, he sure didn’t show it. “I can’t get a lot of phone calls, Mike. So do me a favor? If you find out anything, can you give a note to my mother? She’s come every day so far.”
“Does she still cry?”
“Yeah, but usually only when she first sees me and then again when she has to leave. The rest of the time she’s pretty normal.”
“What about your dad?”
“He’s only been here once. My mom keeps making excuses for him.”
There wasn’t much else to say, so I told him I’d do what I could and then I hung up. I was on my way back down to the living room with the phone when it rang. It was a woman. She asked to speak to Riel. I went downstairs and handed the phone to him. He said, “Hello? Kate, hi.” A moment later he said, “Now?” sounding surprised. “Oh. Okay. Sure.” When he hung up, he said, “I have to go out for a little while, Mike.”
Out to see Kate.
“What about Susan?” I said.
“What about her?”
“What should I tell her?”
“You don’t have to tell her anything, Mike. She’s not coming back here tonight. She’s staying at her place.”
Oh.
“You two are still getting married, aren’t you?” I said.
Riel gave me a look, but he didn’t answer.
“Do your homework,” he said instead.
Right.
CHAPTER TEN
The next day, there were all kinds of rumors going around school. Like this one: “Hey, McGill, is it true Vin paid to have Sal beat up?” And this one: “Hey, Mike, I heard you told Vin’s friends where they could find Sal.” And this one, which Rebecca told me. “Hillary Whalen is telling everyone that Imogen told her that the cops questioned you about where you were the night the store was robbed and that you told them you were home alone. Imogen is saying that she wouldn’t be surprised to find out that you lied to the police and that you were one of the guys who was in the store with Vin. According to Hillary, Imogen is also saying that she’s pretty sure that Sal suspects it, too, but that he didn’t see you so he hasn’t said anything to the police. She’s saying that she thinks you had something to do with Sal being beaten up. In fact, according to Hillary, she’s saying she wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of the guys who actually did it.”
“What?” Why would she say those things about me?
“If you ask me,” Rebecca said, “Imogen’s just mad at you because you believe Vin instead of Sal.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe Sal,” I said. “I know he saw what he saw. But he didn’t see what happened inside the store. He just saw Vin come out. If he’d actually been in the store, if he’d actually seen what happened … ”
“Seeing is believing, huh, Mike?” Rebecca said.
“Yeah,” I said. If you see it, you believe it. But did it work the other way around? Was believing seeing? If you believed someone the way I believed Vin, did that mean you were seeing the truth? “I wasn’t anywhere near that store. And I would never do anything to hurt Sal. Never.”
“I know.” Rebecca squeezed my arm. “Don’t let it get to you, Mike. The people who matter believe you.”
She meant that she believed me. I was pretty sure Riel did, too. But what about Sal? He mattered to me. What did he think?
Rebecca and I met behind the school on our spare. We walked to the subway station and took the train east. We got off and walked the three blocks to the first video store on Rebecca’s list. Rebecca was moving fast, like she couldn’t wait to get there. She was really pumped. I had to grab her to stop her from running right into the store.
“What are we going to say?” I asked.
“First we’re going to see if she’s there.”
“Which she won’t be.”
“If she’s there,” Rebecca said, “we can talk to her.”
“You already tried that. It didn’t work.”
“Last time, I only had a chance to ask her if she knew Mrs. Lee,” Rebecca said. “This time we’re going to be more direct—we’re going to tell her that we know she was there. We’re going to make sure she goes to the police.”
“What if she’s not there?”
“If she’s not there, we ask if she works there.”
But that was the thing. “How can we ask when we don’t even know her name?”
Rebecca gave me a look. “You could at least try to think positive, Mike,” she said.
“Sorry.”
Rebecca opened the door and swept into the store ahead of me. When I followed her in I saw that she was right about the T-shirts. The store was busy—way busier than I would have expected for two thirty on a Thursday afternoon. There were at least a dozen customers in the aisles, and just after we went in the store an electronic bell sounded as a couple more people came in. But still, you couldn’t miss those T-shirts. They were the color of orange Popsicles. Rebecca walked up and down the aisles, checking out everyone who was wearing one. Big surprise: the girl we had seen at the funeral wasn’t one of them. But I didn’t say anything.
Rebecca went up to the register. I trailed after her and stood back a pace, pretending to look at the candy display. Maybe I wasn’t convincing, because a guy who was checking out the new DVDs for sale gave me a look. He kept right on looking at me after that. If he hadn’t had the back and sides of his head shaved, I would have thought he was a security guard checking me out for shoplifting. Then I thought, Maybe they have undercover security. He was making me nervous, the way he was staring at me. I tried to stay casual as I focused on what Rebecca was saying.
“Excuse me,” she said to the guy who was standing behind the register, looking at a computer screen while he tapped the keys. He was maybe nineteen or twenty. I wondered if he worked there full-time, you know, if this was his whole life, or if he was in school or something. He smiled automatically when he looked from the screen to Rebecca.
“How can I help you?” he said. He said it the way some people say, How are you?—not because they really want to know, but because it’s been drilled into their heads that that’s what they’re supposed to say.
“I was in here last week,” Rebecca said. “I spoke to one of the other clerks.”
“Sales associates,” the guy said, correcting her.
Rebecca nodded. “We were talking about movies and she made some recommendations which—stupid me—I should have written them down. Anyway, I was wondering when she’s going to be in because I’d love to talk to her again.”
“What’s her name?” the guy behind the register said.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said. She was looking at the nametag on the guy’s shirt. “I guess I should have noticed, huh? But she has an eyebrow ring and black hair—at least it was black last week, but it was dyed, you know, and when we were talking she told me she was thinking of maybe going blond.” She looked at the guy again. The T-shirts were short-sleeved. “And she had a tattoo on her left arm. A spider tattoo.”
The guy was shaking his head. “Are you two sure you were in this store?” he said.
“Yes. Why?”
“First of all, nobody but nobody is allowed to wear any jewelry on their face. Earrings, that’s okay. You got your belly button pierced, that’s your own business. But no eyebrow rings, no nose rings, no lip rings, no tongue studs. At least, not while you’re on shift. And second, I’ve been working here for two years, and I’ve never seen anyone like the person you just described. There’s never been a girl with a spider tattoo working here.”
Rebecca had spoken softly—she always spoke softly except when she was excited—but this guy had a loud voice.
I glanced around. A couple of other orange T-shirts were looking in our direction. So were a couple of customers, including the guy with the shaved head. He seemed really interested in what was going on. Or maybe he was just interested in Rebecca.
“Are you sure?” Rebecca said to the guy behind the counter. “Because I know I was talking to her.”
“If you were talking to her in this store, then you were talking to her in your dreams,” the guy said, impatient now. “Nobody like that works here.”
Rebecca actually thanked him. I wouldn’t have bothered. But I noticed that she wasn’t quite as bouncy leaving the store as she had been going in.
“You didn’t think we’d get that lucky, did you?” I said.
“No, I guess not,” she said. But I could tell she’d been hoping.
“You said there’s four stores in this area—this one, the one on the Danforth, and two more, right?” She nodded. “So, two down and two to go.”
She smiled at me, I guess because I was trying to think positive.
We got back on the subway and went a little farther east. The third store was a lot like the one we’d just been in, but not as busy. There were maybe two customers inside and one more came in after us. There were only three bright orange T-shirts. Rebecca approached one of them, a girl this time, and launched into her pitch. The girl was shaking her head before Rebecca was even halfway through.
“Are you sure you have the right store?” she said. “Because no one like that works here.”
Rebecca started to get discouraged.
“Besides the stores in this area, how many more stores do they have in the city?” I asked her after we were outside again.
“Fifteen,” she said.
I was sorry I had asked. But I held her hand and said, “If we have to, we’ll go to all of them.”
The next store, the new one, turned out to be three times bigger than the other two and twice as hard to get to. First we had to take the subway. Then we had to ride a crowded bus. When we finally got there, we walked the aisles together, checking all the bright orange T-shirts. No girl.
“So?” I said. “Are you going to ask or what?”
#4 Seeing and Believing (Mike & Riel Mysteries) Page 10