The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “Aren’t they supposed to turn purple?” Victor asked, peering down at the pages.

  “Sometimes it takes a little while to develop.”

  “Cool.” He sat down on the bed and folded his hands in his lap, then began to whistle the theme song from Growing Pains until Dagny shook her head. “Can we get some dinner? I can’t keep skipping meals like this.”

  She’d been living off pretzel nuggets and adrenaline. It was hard to understand why anyone would need more than this.

  At Loretta’s the tables were lined with chrome, the booths were covered in vinyl, and a tiny jukebox sat at the end of each table. Dagny flipped through the selections—a lot of Neil Diamond and Billy Joel. Victor ordered the diner’s world-famous chicken potpie. Dagny ordered a salad and picked around the feta cheese.

  “So we didn’t need the pen, I guess? The one with J. C.’s fingerprints. I forgot that his prints would be on the proposal,” Victor said.

  “It’s always nice to have a backup. You still did well.”

  “Can I ask you a question? And if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll drop it completely.”

  “Go ahead,” Dagny said.

  “How are you doing this? How are you keeping it together?”

  “I’m not keeping it together, Victor. I’m just tossing it all in the closet to deal with later. Believe me. It’s eating me up inside.”

  “Why work the case, then? Why throw yourself into the vortex? The case doesn’t need you. It doesn’t need us. Fabee wants to catch this guy, too, even if it’s only to stake his career.”

  He was right, of course. Fabee was perfectly competent and adequately motivated to work the case. “I wish I could give you a good reason, but I only have bad ones.”

  “Revenge? Retribution?”

  Those things and more. “I’ll drop you off this boat before it sinks. You’ll come out okay,” she promised.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Well, you should. You’ve already got a mark against you for signing up for the Professor’s class.” It must have bothered him to hear this, because he set his fork down and stopped eating. “Don’t worry. You’ve got potential. You could actually be something. Someday. If they give you a chance to learn.”

  “I’m learning a lot right now.”

  “This isn’t the way to learn, Victor. We’re not working the case like someone should. We’re just picking up scraps.”

  “What are you talking about? We know there are ten sticks of gum, right? So maybe our guy’s planning ten crimes. And we know he’s a tall guy—around six four or so. And that he quoted a bank robber doing time in Coleman—so maybe he knows this robber, maybe he used to be in jail with him. And now we have some prints that might match something. Do you think Fabee’s fabulous team has that much?”

  It was a good question. “Let’s find out what Fabee’s Fabulous has.” She pulled out Brent Davis’s card and dialed his number.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “Have a little time for an April fool?”

  “Dagny Gray! How’s Bethel?”

  “So you know about my banishment here?”

  “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting at the counter, staring at you.”

  Dagny looked across the room. Brent waved, and she called him over. Victor slid over in the booth to make some room, and the handsome black man in a fitted suit sat down next to the pale boy in a floppy one. The contrast between the two of them made Dagny happy.

  “Nice to see you both,” Brent said.

  “You stalking us?” Dagny asked.

  “I was actually here first. Get the cheesecake, by the way. It’s delicious.”

  “Why are you still in Bethel?”

  “Antiquing.”

  “So you’re not going to give me anything.”

  “We’re under strict orders not to.”

  “Well, you just divulged your strict orders, so—”

  “Open the floodgates?” Brent laughed.

  “What flavor?” Victor asked.

  “Marble. Get the marble.”

  “What if we got something you missed?” Dagny asked.

  “Sounds unlikely.”

  “But maybe you’d trade? Give us a glimpse into the magic of Fabee’s Fabulous.”

  Brent chuckled. “Is that what you’re calling us?”

  “Victor came up with it. So a trade?”

  He paused. “You didn’t get anything.”

  “We did.”

  Brent looked at Victor. “Did you get anything?”

  “We did,” Victor said.

  “Offer it up. If it’s good, I’ll give you something in return.”

  “Only a fool would take that deal.”

  “But you’re an April fool, remember.”

  Dagny figured she had nothing to lose. “Twelve sticks. Twelve sticks means twelve crimes.”

  “I already knew that, Dagny.”

  “It’s not twelve, Brent.”

  He offered a sheepish smile. “Okay, I don’t know. How many then?”

  “What can you give me for it?”

  The waitress approached, and Victor ordered the marble cheesecake. Brent drummed his fingertips on the tabletop. “I had a sketch artist meet with Crosby this afternoon. So we’ve got a good idea of what he looks like. I can get you a copy of the sketch.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll e-mail it when I get back to the motel. You can’t reveal where you got it.”

  It was something. “Okay.”

  “So how many sticks?”

  Dagny paused. “Ten sticks.” She explained the methodology behind this deduction.

  “Okay then.” He nodded. “I’ll send you the sketch.”

  Back in her motel room, Dagny checked Adams’s proposal. Several prints had turned purple. She held them next to the prints from the magnetic strip. And though she was no expert, it looked as if Adams’s prints matched those on the faulty tape measure.

  Adams had an alibi for Mike’s murder, so he was either an accomplice or he was being framed. The latter seemed more likely to Dagny; no one, not even a murderer, was likely to put up with Adams’s company for long. She photographed the fingerprints and sent the images to the Professor. While she did this, an e-mail arrived from Brent. She opened the attachment and looked at the sketch. The man in the drawing was hidden behind big sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt. He looked exactly like the Unabomber. She called Brent.

  “Not helpful,” she said. And when he laughed, she followed with, “Not funny.”

  “Okay, I may have oversold its utility. But it has some value. The guy does a Brutus thing in DC, and he does the Unabomber in Bethel. He likes a good homage. That’s something.”

  “You still owe me.”

  “I know. And I’ll deliver. I promise. But for now, I’m just a cog in the machine. I don’t know anything you don’t know. If I get something, I’ll get it to you.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You have my word.” He paused and then added, “You’re not someone I want mad at me.”

  After hanging up, Dagny took a shower and changed into a long Georgetown T-shirt—a gift from Mike. It had only been four days since his death. She felt tired and weak. It hurt to breathe. She thought about ants, and how they carried fifty times their body weight. She wondered if it hurt them as much as it was hurting her. The bed called, and she climbed beneath the covers.

  At 4:00 a.m., she woke and dressed for her morning run. Outside the motel, a man was loading the newspaper boxes. The day’s New York Post featured a picture of Crosby Waller on the cover. The front headline blared, “The Boy and the Bubble Gum Thief.”

  CHAPTER 24

  March 23—Washington, DC

  The crowd for Michael Brodsky’s funeral overflowed from the All Souls Church onto Harvard Street, where a long line of mourners waited to pay their respects. Inside, Marjorie Brodsky, a thin and stylish woman, sat by the c
losed casket, her right leg crossed firmly over her left, her clasped hands resting on them. She wore no veil to hide her tears—they flowed freely and quietly while a succession of friends and colleagues paid tribute to her son. There were no prayers or homilies—just stories and anecdotes. Fellow professors talked, with only slight exaggeration, about his love for teaching and his prodigious intellect. Lydia Brodsky, Michael’s younger sister, placed a sheet of paper on an overhead projector; an untitled watercolor by the artist at age four filled the screen in front of the congregation. Diego Rodriguez talked about Michael’s final days, noting that he was happy, and that he was in love. He didn’t mention Dagny by name. Few in the church would have known who she was. Those who did probably didn’t think much of her, because she wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER 25

  March 23—Coleman, Florida

  Dagny’s phone had finally stopped vibrating. The service must have started. She kept her eyes focused on Highway 301. Her cell had been ringing with regularity since Mike’s murder, and Dagny had ignored all calls except those related to the case. Julia’s name had flashed up so often that it threatened to burn into the screen. Maybe Julia wouldn’t understand, but Dagny couldn’t talk to her right now. She couldn’t talk to anyone.

  Except Victor, it seemed.

  Victor held an Egg McMuffin in one hand and a road map in the other. “Should be up on the right,” he said, dripping egg juice on his tie. “Dammit. Third one.”

  “What?”

  “Third tie I’ve ruined this way.”

  “With an Egg McMuffin?”

  “Yep.”

  Coleman Federal Correctional Complex looked a little like an industrial park—bland, expansive block buildings, all gated and fenced. A clear glass sign hung from the brick entrance, with white block letters and directional arrows. Minimum security to the left. High-security USP 2 to the right. Straight ahead for low security, medium security, high-security USP 1, and central administration.

  “Actually, one was a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese.”

  Dagny flashed her creds to the guard in the booth at the front of the medium-security lot. They parked their rented Buick in the small parking area and walked through the red stone arched doorway into the prison. An old, thin man sat at the front counter and opened the glass window to greet them. The nameplate on the counter read “Maurice Jones.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “We’re from Quantico.” Dagny flashed her creds, and Maurice nodded and looked over at Victor, who was fumbling through his pockets.

  “I swear I have them,” Victor said.

  Maurice shook his head and looked back at Dagny. “He your partner?”

  “The community college has an externship. He gets two credits.”

  “And what do you get?” Maurice asked.

  “Mostly annoyed.”

  The old man laughed. “How can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see a prisoner. Reginald Berry.”

  “Reginald Berry,” he mumbled, starting to type the name into his computer. Then he stopped typing and laughed. “Oh, Reginald Berry. I’m sorry ma’am, but you’re at the wrong facility. You need to go down the road a bit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As of a couple of years ago, Reginald Berry is Regina Berry. She’s at the women’s satellite camp.”

  “You mean he—”

  “She.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t know that a sex change would get you transferred to the women’s prison.”

  “I don’t believe there’s an actual policy on this kind of thing. Most prisoners can’t afford the surgery, and the government won’t pay for it. So it hardly comes up.”

  “How’d he get the transfer if there’s no policy on it?”

  “How does anyone get anything in prison? He filed a lawsuit.”

  “Pro se?”

  “No, he had a lawyer.”

  “How’d he get a lawyer?”

  Maurice shrugged. “Berry’s got to have a little money—he paid for his surgery.”

  “The lawyer must have been pretty good to get the transfer.”

  “Maybe, but then again, he drew one of them liberal judges.”

  “Hey, do you think our guy dressed as a woman during the bank robbery as some kind of nod to Berry and the sex change?” Victor asked, groping around the backseat of the car.

  “Maybe.” She’d actually been thinking the same thing herself.

  “Found them,” Victor exclaimed triumphantly, creds in hand.

  As they pulled into the parking lot and the women’s prison came into view, Berry’s surgery started to make sense. The men’s prison was a medium-security facility, but the women’s was a minimum-security camp. Thus the women’s warden didn’t lead them to a sterile concrete room with a table and chairs, but rather to an outdoor picnic table in a grassy clearing next to a large oak tree. A gentle breeze rustled through its new leaves. “Ah, spring,” Victor said.

  A guard escorted a small and slight African-American woman to their table. She looked a little like a woman, anyway. In a dark bar, perhaps even an attractive one. But her hands, her throat, her brow—all retained a masculine quality.

  “You the feds?” Regina asked in a husky rasp.

  “I’m Special Agent Dagny Gray, and this is my associate, Special Agent Victor Walton,” Dagny replied. “We’d like to talk to you about a bank robbery.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’—I’ve been in prison.”

  “I mean the one that got you here,” Dagny explained.

  “What’s to tell, really? And why should I?”

  “You’ll be coming up for parole sometime.”

  “Shit, there ain’t hardly any parole anymore. Maybe you drop a year or two from twenty-five, but that’s all.”

  Victor jumped in. “That year or two will seem important when it comes.”

  “Alrighty,” Regina relented, throwing her hands up and pretending that Victor had convinced her. “I’ll tell y’all about the bank robbery, but I don’t know what it’s gonna do for you. It’s ancient history.”

  “Please tell us about it,” Dagny said.

  “I was working construction, doing houses and stuff. It was hard work, and we was working with illegals, long days in the hot sun. Plus lots of overtime, and they was stiffin’ us. So one day I’m complaining out there to a guy I worked with a lot—Ed Cooper was his name, or so he say. Big white guy. And he’s telling me how he has a plan so he don’t have to keep doing shit jobs like this. Gets me all interested—real mysterious like—telling me just that he got a plan. This shit goes on for days, maybe weeks, just telling me he got a plan, but not telling me what it was. Finally, I tell ’im I think the whole plan thing is bullshit and he ain’t got no plan, and so he tells me he’s got one, really, but he ain’t gonna tell me unless he can trust me. ‘Can I trust you?’ ‘Sure you can.’ So he tells me he wants to rob a bank—he’s got the whole thing planned, ’cause he has a cousin who runs security at the bank, and the cousin can be the inside man. His cuz would let him know when the staff was down. You follow?”

  “Yes. Please go on,” Dagny replied.

  “He tells me that on Thursdays they have their biggest load. That they normally got only about twenty grand on hand, but on Thursdays they got five hundred, ’cause that’s the change-out day. Says he wants me for the car, but only if he can trust me. I tell him he can trust me, but I don’t know about robbin’ no bank; I ain’t never done nothin’ like that. But times was tough, and he says he my angel, come to save me.

  “The day we do it, I pick him up in my new Chrysler—it was a year old and the only nice thing I ever bought me, took a lot of house work to get it. I’d stolen a plate and swapped it out, in case there was gonna be a chase. Then Ed Cooper comes up to the car with a cast on his leg, tells me he broke it falling off a roof. Tells me the whole gig’s off, unless we switch roles, ’cause he can’t run but he can
still drive. ‘Shit, I ain’t gonna do that.’ And he says he figured so, but he’s gonna have the cast for two months and he can’t wait that long since he can’t even do construction with the cast. Says he’ll find someone else to do the stickup work. I say, ‘Wait, man, we had an agreement.’ He says, ‘If we a team, then you do the job.’ I say no way. He says he’ll go fifty-fifty with me, and he and his cuz will split his half. That was persuasive.

  “I give him my keys and he drives me to the bank. I sit there, just thinking, how am I gonna do this, and maybe it’s wrong, ’cause I know it’s wrong. But he explained that the bank was insured, and no one would lose anything, and they be happy to give it to me, ’cause it wouldn’t trouble them none. Then he hands me a bag, and I open it and see a gun, and he says, ‘You’re not even gonna have to fire it. You just need it for show.’ So I take the gun from the bag and hide it under my jacket, and I just tell myself that two hundred and fifty and I’m set, man. I can buy a new TV and move to a new place. He give me one of them hats you pull down over your head with the eyes cut out and says, ‘Don’t put this on until you’re at the counter and the gun’s out.’ So I take the mask and put it in my pocket, and I get out of the car and start up toward the bank. Real slow like. And I’m shaking, and wanted to say fuck it, but it was too late, ’cause then I was in the bank and there was like, no one there. No customers and only couple of tellers. So I walk up to the counter and I tell the lady I need the money, but I mumble it like, ’cause I can’t even believe I’m saying it. And she’s like, ‘What?’ And so I pull out the gun, you know, for clarification. And I put on the mask. And I tell her to put the money in a bag and give it to me. I didn’t even have the bag—man, this shit was not thought through—but she had a bag, so she starts putting money in. It don’t look like half a mil, so I tell her I know there’s more. But she says, no, that’s all, and that there’s more in the vault but she don’t have access to it. So I grab the bag and run out the door, but my car ain’t there. And then it’s clear—my friend, my angel—he never had an inside man, no cousin. He ain’t even wanted to rob the bank. He just wanted my car. So I run back into the bank and tell the lady, ‘I need your car,’ and I wave my gun at her, and she digs in her purse and tries to find her keys. But she can’t find them, and she’s crying, and I hear sirens, and I say, ‘Shit, woman, did you call the police?’ And she just nods. I fall to the floor, man, ’cause I know there’s nothin’ I can do. Lady finally finds her damn keys and tosses ’em to me, but by then the police are through the door, guns raised. And it’s over.”