Lizzie!

by Maxine Kumin

  “You know all this?”

  “Well, I’m not part of anything that goes on. I just work here for barely enough to pay for my groceries. My uncle is hiding me. Mi tío me esconde. If I don’t do what he says he’ll either turn me over to the gang or take me back to juvie.”

  I asked, “Why were you in juvie?”

  “I was the lookout.”

  “Lookout? What were you looking out for?” But then Digger took Julio by the elbow and walked him away from the car. I knew I had asked too many questions.

  Now I couldn’t hear what they were saying but I knew they were rattling away in Spanish. After a while they walked back and Digger came over.

  “I’m going in for a minute, angelita. I’ll be right back.”

  It was no use saying I want to come too, so I just nodded. I could see a little shack across the road. Probably that was where Jeb Blanco had been hiding Julio. But it was frustrating not knowing the whole story.

  They were gone quite a while. I heard them talking but as soon as they came close to the car, they stopped. Digger looked very grim.

  To my astonishment Julio was coming with us. “Where are you taking him? Are you taking him to jail?”

  “No, chica. I am taking him to be placed in protective custody. I am going to keep him in a separate location until we can get a lawyer to untangle this mess.”

  “Rob the Scarecrow? The lawyer who works in the same office as Lia’s boyfriend?”

  “Very possibly Robert Jacobson will take the case. Until then, Lizzie, I am swearing you to secrecy.”

  “Yes, but tell me …”

  “Raise your right hand and swear.”

  “I do, I do! Now tell me.”

  “It’s privileged information, chiquita. I can’t tell you.”

  “Not anything about his background, like his place of birth and so on?”

  Digger look very grave. “No, mi amor, not even that.”

  On the drive back to Woodvale nobody spoke. It was eerie, like someone had died. I found out later that Digger had examined the two dead tamarins on the floor of the warehouse. Julio told him he thought they died from fright when Jeb and his buddies were stuffing them into burlap bags to take them to the plane. They were probably the same two men who drove the car out to meet Blanco’s plane every time he landed in Henry’s cow pasture.

  Digger took me to our cottage and waited until I had gotten in. Two minutes after he drove away with Julio, Mom returned. She was very cheerful. “Guess what? The doctor in the emergency room was very nice and we didn’t have to wait very long at all. He put Henry’s mother on a diet for her blood pressure and ordered medication for her swollen legs and Henry has a number to call to tell the doctor how she is doing.

  A miracle,” Mom said, rolling her eyes, and I knew she was remembering what we went through after my accident. Just thinking the word hospital makes me smell it all over again, the ironing-board smell like when a shirt is being pressed, the fresh-scrubbed smell that pricks your eyes open when they push your bed down the hallway as the lights go by overhead. Two weeks in the ICU on a rotating bed. Two more weeks in the neuro unit. Three weeks in the rehab hospital. I don’t usually let myself go back to those times. There were a lot of days when all I wanted to do was sleep. But that doesn’t work in a rehab hospital. In rehab they are waking you up all the time to go to PT. You have to get up into a sitting position, you have to learn how to transfer to a wheelchair by sliding onto a board and then sliding from the board to the chair. When your arms get strong enough, you can transfer just using your deltoids and pectorals—or whatever they’re called—without any board. I was terrible at it at first. I cried a lot in the beginning. Now it’s easy.

  Sometimes I still cry in secret, though and a lot of it is about how good my mom was to me. How the accident was my own fault for being in such a hurry to show off and now I would have to pay for it the rest of my life. And even though I say I don’t care about not having a father, I sometimes cry about that too.

  Mom took leave from her teaching job at the university and came to stay with me every single day. She brought piles of books on my favorite subjects—horses and exotic animals and one by one the Harry Potter books. When I didn’t feel like reading myself she’d read to me. She was always upbeat.

  Even before we got back to Woodvale that day I could see that Digger was different now. He was still my grandfather but suddenly he had turned very professional. He had morphed into the tight-lipped chief of police.

  While Mom was still chatting with Digger I rolled up to my computer and hit my emails. I had to let Trippy in on the latest events, but at the same time I was sworn to secrecy by Digger. I decided to tell her that “the goldfinches” turned out to be very valuable birds that had been stolen and now they were gone, but I left out the rest of the story about Digger and Julio and that he was being placed in protective custody. “I swore an oath to Digger that I wouldn’t tell anything about Julio yet,” I wrote. “More info tomorrow.”

  I could see Trippy practically hopping up and down not knowing what else was happening but I couldn’t help it. Once you raise your right hand and swear, an oath is an oath.

  CHAPTER 12

  Well, I know this sounds crazy with so much happening almost at once, but believe it or not, there was a murder practically in front of our cottage! Digger was the one who discovered it. It was the very next morning. He’d had insomnia again and he got up at four a.m. and puttered around and finally he pulled on a sweatshirt and went for a walk on the beach barefoot. Teresa is always after him to take walks. I remember the first day Mom and I met them on the beach, Digger wiggled his toes and said, “When I was a kid I never wore shoes except to school. And now after six months of going barefoot my feet are feeling young again.”

  It was just as Mom was starting to get supper ready that Digger and Teresa stopped by our cottage. Digger told us in great detail everything that had happened, starting at four o’clock that morning.

  “It was still dark but you could see the horizon line,” he began. “The tide was coming in and I sort of splashed through it. I was feeling pretty good for an old retired chief of police with a bad heart, and I watched the sky show streaks of pink and yellow as I walked. You know about the jetty?”

  I said, “It’s practically in front of our cottage and I sometimes see people who come out to fish from it.” I was remembering when Mom first got me this neat little pair of binocs so I could watch the shorebirds, of which there are many, and try to match them up with the pictures in Birds of Florida. So far I’ve learned to tell an ibis from an egret and not a whole lot more. I use them to people-watch too. Sometimes I can see somebody—usually a man but sometimes a woman—catch a fish and haul it in and drop it into their pail. Once there was this enormous skate, like a black kite. I could see them holding it up for everyone to admire. Little speedboats zoom around the jetty too. And twice, just as it was getting really dark, I got to see a man walk a long way out on the jetty and then another man give him something. I couldn’t see exactly what it was.

  But I needed to listen to what Digger was saying. “The jetty is where I try to walk to every morning—it’s about half a mile away. You know, they made that jetty about thirty years ago. They dredged up those big rocks piled there to make the channel wide enough for all the cruise ships.”

  I said, “Mom and I always go outside just before dark whenever a cruise ship is starting out. ‘Setting sail’ is what they call it, though they don’t hoist any sails anymore because they have big engines.”

  I wanted to describe how each ship is about as long as a city block and every deck is all lit up like they’re having a permanent New Year’s Eve party. When they go through the channel they hoot their horns and that deep-throated sound always makes me shiver. Every cruise ship has to take a pilot along to navigate through the channel—it’s the law—and then when the water is deep enough, a tender comes alongside to bring the pilot back to the harbor. But this wasn’t
the time. I had to pay attention to Digger.

  “When I got there I saw someone out on the very end of the jetty. At first I thought he was fishing. He didn’t move at all, so I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. With the tide coming in, I thought he’d wake up pretty soon or else he was going to get very wet.”

  “Was that a dead body? I bet it was.”

  “Hold on, Lizzie. I’m getting to that. Well, I picked my way out there along the sandy strip between the rocks to see if I knew this guy and when I got there I saw his throat had been cut. The blood wasn’t running down him anymore but the whole front of him was the reddish brown of dried blood, so I knew he’d been dead for a while.”

  He paused for a moment. “Thing was, I had my flashlight but I’d forgotten my cell phone.” He turned to Teresa and said, “I knew you’d raise holy Toledo with me for forgetting it. You bought it for me to take whenever I went walking alone. I didn’t see any lights on in any of the cottages and I didn’t want to terrify anybody by pounding on their door. I know, I could have come around the side of your cottage and rapped on the window and woken you up, but there’s something about finding a dead body and knowing it was a gruesome murder that gets me deep down. It’s not my first murder, it’s not even the first one involving a knife—the last one in California was a young woman who was killed in almost exactly the same way. It’s an ugly discovery, it’s something about knowing you were too late to stop all the blood loss; no, I couldn’t barge in. I needed to walk it off. And even if I did wake some family up, after I used their phone to call 911 I’d have to wait around for the squad car to show up and then go back with them to the body and answer a hundred questions—and me barefoot! That would not look professional.”

  He put his arm around Teresa. “By then you’d have called out the National Guard to look for me. So I walked back to call the police from our apartment and work it through my brain and also get some shoes on.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked him. “Did they take the body away on a stretcher? Did they call the—is it the coroner? What do you call the guy who determines the cause of death?”

  “Lizzie, where did you learn that language?” Digger asked.

  “It’s in the newspaper whenever there’s been a mysterious death.”

  “I give up,” he said. “You’re right. It’s called the medical examiner.”

  “Yes, the medical examiner. And did they dust the body for fingerprints? How about on the jetty, did you find any clues?”

  “Lizzie’s into reading detective stories,” my mom said. She said it like she was apologizing for me, so I tried not to ask anything after that.

  Digger went on to tell us that there was no identification on the body. “No wallet or keys, but maybe they’ll find some labels in his sweatpants and sweatshirt. He was wearing a sort of ratty suit jacket and it had an L.L. Bean label but from the looks of him, he probably got it at a Goodwill store.”

  “You didn’t find a single clue?” I couldn’t help asking. I was disappointed.

  “The one item that might provide a clue though, was a silver flask in one pocket.”

  “A silver flask just for water?”

  Digger smiled. “No, mi amor, for liquor.”

  “But it’ll probably have fingerprints on it, don’t you think?”

  “Possibly. But if the victim hasn’t ever been arrested his fingerprints won’t be on file.”

  “Maybe you can figure out where he bought it.”

  “Maybe, my little detective. I know one detail about the killer that may prove useful going forward.”

  “You do? What is it? Tell us, Digger.”

  “I’ll tell you but I don’t want this to be known outside this room until I discuss it with the police. As of now I have offered my services. Of course I presented my credentials from Montandino, California.”

  I said, “We promise, we promise. Now tell us.”

  “The murderer was left-handed.”

  “Is that all? How could you tell?”

  “The murderer had to creep up on the victim from behind, just as I did. He had to use his left hand to cut the man’s throat from right to left, do you follow me? If he were right-handed, he would have cut from the left side of the victim’s throat.”

  Teresa tsk-tsked. “We’ve only been here six months and already you’re involved in solving a homicide.”

  “Digger, I just thought of something.”

  “What, chica?”

  “Jeb Blanco is left-handed.”

  Digger let out a low whistle. “This is a detail you must not mention to the reporters, you understand? I must tell it to the authorities first.”

  “I promise. Do you want me to raise my right hand?”

  Digger smiled. “Lizzie, I trust you.”

  Well, you can just bet Digger’s story got in the newspaper. Not just the local Woodvale paper, but the Miami Clarion & Bugle too. His picture was on the front page in both of them. And alongside the Digger we knew in sweatpants and baseball cap was a different Digger in a proper shiny chief of police hat and uniform with gold braid on the cuffs of the sleeves and upside-down v’s on the arms. Teresa told me the v’s were called hash marks and they stood for all the years he served as chief in their hometown in California.

  The detail about which hand the murderer used was not in the papers. Digger said the police had agreed with him to withhold this information for the time being. They interviewed two local police officers also but they didn’t add anything to what Digger had said. It was “The case is under investigation” and so forth, which Digger said was the usual.

  When Digger gave a television interview for our local station, the reporter asked him how he felt about all the attention he was receiving. We saw his answer that evening on the six o’clock news.

  “I’m used to it,” Digger said. “It happened often enough in California. Even in a little town we had our share of excitement.”

  Teresa kind of snorted. “My modest husband.”

  I could hardly wait to get to my computer so I could email Trippy all the latest info. I was dying to tell her that Digger knew the murderer was left-handed but I had promised not to, so I just told her about how he found the body. Just imagine opening an email from your best friend and finding out that a man had been killed practically on top of where she lives.

  CHAPTER 13

  Well, the next day right after Mom drove me home from school, there was Digger dressed in his chief of police uniform again, waiting with two police officers in front of our cottage. In my whole life this has never happened to me before. For just a second I thought they had come to arrest me because I knew about Julio from the day Trippy and I discovered the warehouse and I hadn’t told right away, and that the woman officer was there to strip-search me before they put me in a jail cell.

  But it turned out they only wanted to interview me and Mom (which of course should be Mom and me), because we had both met Jesús Ernesto Blanco, who said to call him Jeb.

  Mom invited them in and we all sat in a row in the living room as dumb as doorstops and then the male officer, who said to call him Officer Frank for Frank Franklin, began.

  “Now Lizzie, your mother has described how you and she first met Mr. Blanco. Do you remember anything special about him?”

  So I had to tell about the royal-blue shirt with some sort of monogram and the shoes with tassels. And the blue eyes and the rimless glasses that made him look like a professor. And then I said that I thought I knew him from somewhere else, but when I said so he said he had the kind of face that everybody thought looked like somebody else. In Philadelphia he said a man stopped him on the street and was positive Jeb Blanco was his second cousin.

  “You’re very observant,” Officer Frank said and I saw his lips were twitching with what I thought was a smile. He was scribbling away in his notebook. “I must ask you not to divulge this information to the press, do you understand what that means?”

  Of course I knew the word divul
ge. It has a neat origin from the Latin di-vulgare, to spread among the people—that’s where we get the word vulgar too, but I also knew I hadn’t divulged anything.

  I suddenly had a flashback to two men I saw on the jetty where one was fishing, or maybe just pretending to be fishing while he waited for his buddy, and the other one was picking his way out to visit him. I was watching through my binocs and I thought to myself that the visiting man looked familiar, and my heart started to pound. Could it be Jeb Blanco! But I was too flustered inside to say anything to Officer Frank. “You understand, Mr. Blanco is now a person of interest.”

  I waited for my heart to slow down and then I looked at Mom. I asked her, “Did you tell about what Henry said? About the plan to give away the land and all?”

  “Yes, I reported the entire conversation.”

  “So why don’t we move on?” the woman officer said. Her name was Officer Brianna Hermann Kasperowicz and it barely fit on her yellow metal name tag. I wondered if the tags were custom-made for each officer, or did they buy one size and have to squeeze the letters on. This is the kind of thing that happens to me all the time where words are concerned, when I should be paying attention to the question.

  “… after your mom went in the house with Henry,” she was saying. “Tell us what you did next.”

  So I described Trippy wheeling my chair out past the vegetable garden, out through the cornfields, wheeling my chair between rows, one field after another, and how we finally came to the warehouse they all knew about from Digger. I corrected myself and said Chief Diego Martinez.

  “But you didn’t tell anyone what you saw when you peeked in,” Officer Frank said rather crossly. “Specifically, not even your mother that day. Why not?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Trippy and I knew we were probably trespassing and then we met this kid who turned out to be Julio who seemed sort of scared and he made us promise to keep him and the monkeys a secret. So that made us think the whole thing was dangerous, and we were scared, so we agreed not to say anything when we got back to Henry’s.”