Sticky Fingers

by Nancy Martin

  Little Emily had attached herself to her mother’s leg. Putting her hand on the top of her daughter’s head, Jane mustered more spunk. “I’m a good housekeeper. And we won’t make any trouble for you, I promise. We’ll be gone in a couple of days.”

  “Then what? You going back to the guy who messed up your face?”

  “He was upset,” Jane said, defensive at once. “He was tired, and I pushed the wrong buttons.”

  “Honey,” Adasha said, “don’t make excuses for that dirtbag. He beat the crap out of you, and—”

  The kids didn’t need to hear anymore, so I cut across my friend’s harsh lecture before she really got going. “You don’t have to leave him if you don’t want to. But maybe it’s a good idea to get some space for a while. You know—a cooling-off period. I can let you have a place for a couple of weeks while I look for a long-term tenant. After that, you can decide for yourself.”

  I had learned to say what needed to be said to get the job done. I could change my tune later. Is it a form of lying? You got a problem with that?

  Adasha frowned, but Jane had started nodding at the first mention of a cooling-off period. “Okay, I guess that makes sense. It wasn’t really his fault, see.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Not really. I didn’t—I should have seen he was under a lot of stress.”

  The pressure behind my eyes began to pound at this familiar refrain. It seemed impossible that a girl who looked this bad could make excuses for the asshole who had sent her to the emergency room, but I had heard the same old story a hundred times.

  “Okay,” I said, rubbing my nose against Michael’s until he smiled shyly. “Here’s what we’ll do. Adasha can take you over to the house here. See? I live in this one, and Adasha’s next door.” I pointed for Michael’s benefit. “There’s some furniture—nothing great, but it’ll do. I see Adasha thought ahead and brought you some sheets and blankets.”

  “Thank you.”

  Balancing Michael on my hip, I dug into my pocket for my keys and flipped through them to find the right one. Peeling it off, I handed it to Jane. “Adasha can show you around the neighborhood, too.”

  “Great! Thanks! C’mon, kids, let’s get your suitcases out of the car, okay?”

  I carefully pried my necklace out of his fingers and gave Michael to his mother. While Jane led the two children back to the street, Adasha stood beside me and we watched them go. Adasha said, “Thank you, Rox.”

  “No problem. You getting her some of that group therapy you like so much?”

  “I’ll do what I can. She needs to calm down first, get the kids settled. The little girl didn’t say a word all night while we worked on her mom. You okay?”

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She gave me a punch on the arm. “No reason. I’ll check on them before I go to my shift tonight.”

  “Listen, Dasha, before you go to sleep for the day, I gotta ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  My feet were cold, and I wanted to go back inside, but I’d spent the night tossing and turning, so I asked, “Do you remember Clarice Crabtree from high school?”

  If the change of subject surprised her, Adasha didn’t show it. “Snotty white chick? Always bragging about herself?”

  “That’s the one. Know anything about her now? Isn’t her dad somebody famous?”

  “He’s Leeford Crabtree, the dinosaur guy.” Guessing the gap in my education, Adasha said, “He’s a big deal. Dug up dinosaur bones? Wrote books? Did those TV documentaries we watched growing up? He was like Jacques Cousteau, only dustier.”

  “Right, right. How come I never knew they were related? Clarice bragged about everything else under the sun. Why not her father?”

  “Who knows? Teenagers are always ashamed of their parents. Why are you asking?”

  “Something came up at work.” I decided to skim over my motivation. I hadn’t quite figured out why I was interested except I had an inkling Marvin might screw up and accidentally mention my name to the cops someday. Adasha didn’t need to hear about that. “Any idea how I could learn more about her?”

  “Why don’t you just look her up in the phone book and call?”

  “Uh, I’m thinking it might be better to sneak up on her a little. Do you know anybody who works at the museum, for instance?”

  “No.” Adasha looked suspicious. “Wait. When you adopted Rooney, wasn’t there somebody who got a dog at the same time? Didn’t he work somewhere in the museum?”

  I snapped my fingers. “You’re right! Thanks, Dasha.”

  I even remembered where I’d scribbled down his phone number. Slugging down the last ounces of my morning Red Bull, I called him. He seemed pleased to hear from me.

  “Sure, darling, come over this morning,” he said on the phone, and he gave me directions.

  Showered, dressed, and feeling jazzed on caffeine, I climbed into the Monster Truck and pulled out of my parking space on the street. Singing along with Aretha Franklin on WDVE, I swung by the salvage yard to pick up Rooney after a night of patrolling. We snagged Nooch about ten minutes later. He was waiting on the corner reading from his little notebook. Now and then, he glanced around, looking like a serial killer. When he saw the truck, he lost the menacing glare that kept the neighborhood thugs at a distance and got on his happy face. He tucked his notebook into his pocket and came over to the truck.

  Wet but cheerful, he climbed into the passenger seat with a paper bag in one hand. His sweatshirt still had a big orange blob on the front. “Lookit! I brought breakfast.”

  “Wow.” I peeked into the bag, elbowing Rooney’s curious nose out of the way. “What’s the occasion?”

  “My bubbe baked muffins for Father Eugene. I swiped a couple when she wasn’t looking.”

  “You stole a priest’s breakfast?”

  “It’s okay. He should be on a diet. He says he’s watching what he eats, but he can’t turn down Bubbe, can he?”

  I couldn’t remember which of Nooch’s grandmothers was Bubbe and which was Nonna, but one of them was enormous and the other not much bigger than a bird. The two were crabby old ladies that neighborhood kids feared. Nooch was adept at avoiding both of them, except when they were cooking. Then, he couldn’t resist.

  I pulled out a muffin and took a tentative bite. The texture was that of a soggy softball. Bubbe cooked a lot, but she hadn’t learned much. I slipped the rest of my muffin to Rooney.

  Nooch didn’t notice and gobbled his before we reached the end of the block. With his mouth full, he said, “I read another chapter in my book last night.”

  “Oh, yeah? More thoughts on positive energy as a path to fulfillment?”

  “This chapter was more about visualizing ways to be magnetic.”

  “You’re plenty magnetic already.”

  “No, no, I have to make myself a magnet for good stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “The book talks about making a million dollars. Trouble is, I don’t know how to be a magnet for a million dollars.”

  “You write a book about magnets, I guess.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  Nooch looked around and realized we were traveling beyond our usual territory. “Hey, where are we going?”

  I hung a left onto Penn Avenue, passing a few hipster night spots and a lot of boarded-up storefronts. “Do you remember Tito Garibaldi? The guy who adopted a dog the same time I got Rooney?”

  Nooch scrunched up his face.

  I said, “His dog was a white pit bull? Almost as big as he was?”

  Nooch continued to frown.

  “The guy who gave you a pepperoni pizza after we helped him jump his car battery,” I said finally.

  “Oh, him! Yeah, he was nice.”

  “We’re going to see him this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if he knows Clarice Crabtree.” I took a chance and said, “Do you remember Clarice? She was a year ahead of u
s in school. Tall? Blond hair? Kinda stuck-up? Picked on you?”

  “Everybody picked on me in high school,” Nooch said, suddenly weary. “I don’t remember no Clarice.”

  I gave him a knock on the arm. “That’s a good thing, right? You’re only visualizing the positive stuff.”

  “Hey, I guess you’re right.”

  Rain started to spatter the windshield. I flicked on the wipers.

  Turns out, my friend Tito didn’t actually work in the museum. His unglamorous workplace was officially and somewhat unimaginatively called the Remote Storage Warehouse, located in a bad part of town. Because the museum honchos didn’t want their neighbors to figure out they were keeping priceless stuff in the building, they made the warehouse look completely nondescript. It was a big, square block hulk painted gray with a couple of large garage bay doors in back. There were no windows. No signage. Only the street number hung over a small front door.

  I parked the Monster Truck, and we crossed the street in the rain. At the door, I pressed a button, according to Tito’s instructions, and a moment later Nooch and I were inside, standing in front of a security desk.

  The security guard looked like he hadn’t visualized anything positive in years. “Sign in, please.”

  Nooch accidentally knocked a clipboard off his desk.

  “Hey, be careful,” the security guard said. “You can’t go around like it’s the demolition derby in here.”

  Nooch hastily put his hands into his pockets while I signed us in. I noticed the last visitor had been in the building two months ago.

  Tito appeared and gave me a hearty hug. It was like getting the Heimlich maneuver from an elf. The top of his head barely came to my collarbone. “Roxy, darling! I’m so glad to see you! How’s Rooney?”

  “He’s great. Hasn’t bitten anybody in ages. How’s Lucy?”

  Tito had a small, animated face with bright blue eyes. A mop of soft flyaway hair curled around his head. Built like a jockey, he wore fashionable jeans, wool clogs, and a thick purple sweater that looked as if it had been knitted by Norwegian drunks. A knot of keys and plastic security and ID cards jingled around his neck.

  At the mention of his dog’s name, though, his sprightly expression faltered. He stiffened his lower lip manfully. “I had to let Lucy go. It’s a long story, but the postal service was involved.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry.”

  While I had gone to the pound looking for a dog to guard my place of business, Tito had hoped for a house pet and ended up picking the worst case in the shelter—the neediest, most vicious dog, the one that had been rescued from a fighting pit and probably had no chance at rehabilitation.

  Tito smile sadly. “It’s all for the best. I can’t really leave a dog at home if I’m here all day, right? So I got a rabbit from the shelter. Do you know how many rabbits are dropped off at shelters every year? Thousands. So I got one, and then another and another. Now I’ve got a whole rabbit community! I’m thinking of writing a screenplay for a children’s movie.”

  “Actually, a children’s movie about you and a bunch of rabbits sounds terrific.”

  “Thanks. I’ll find the time eventually. Hello, Nooch!” Tito grabbed Nooch’s paw and pumped it vigorously. He smiled up into his face. “Great to see you again! Did you ever find out if your family comes from eastern Europe, by any chance? Poland? Maybe Gdansk? Perhaps the Wrzeszcz district?”

  Nooch looked charmed, but confused. “Huh?”

  “Genetic markers! It’s your ears. And the way your forehead is shaped. Very much from Wrzeszcz. C’mon, let’s go upstairs.”

  Nooch reached for his ears. “Huh?”

  “Tito is an anthropologist,” I said as we started up a set of industrial steps. “He knows all about people and where they come from.”

  “And their music, their arts and crafts, their work. Nooch, the people of your hometown mostly worked in breweries. Cistercian monks ran waterwheels and mills on the creek, but that was back in the thirteenth century. I don’t suppose you know if you had any monks in your family tree?”

  “Huh?”

  I said, “Nooch is focusing on being positive these days. Sometimes that takes all of his mental energy.”

  “Wonderful You! Extraordinary how such flimflammery resurfaces every few decades. How’s it going for you, Nooch?” Tito asked.

  “So far, it turned me orange.” Nooch indicated his sweatshirt.

  “That’s not so bad, is it? Orange is the color of sweet potatoes and mangoes, two of my favorite foods.”

  Nooch said, “I like marshmallows and brown sugar on sweet potatoes.”

  “Who doesn’t? See? Already, you’re radiating positive vibrations.”

  Nooch said, “I’m on a path to fulfillment.”

  “A very admirable endeavor.” Tito swiped a security card to get us through a steel door on the landing, and another card to get us through a second door. “I love Poland,” he went on. “I once spent two weeks hiking around the Carpathian Mountains. The birds are incredible there. I met a man from Ukraine, big fella like you, Nooch. We didn’t speak any languages in common, except the language of love. But that’s another story. Watch your step. Those are Japanese naginata. A traditional weapon for women now, but with samurai origins.”

  The door opened into a storage space about the size of a football field. The temperature hovered somewhere between meat locker and the garage where I rotated my tires. Some kind of crazy music floated on the air—maybe a klezmer band with a clarinet playing on the edge of hysteria. Hundreds of bright yellow steel lockers stood in rows before us.

  A stack of machetelike weapons leaned against the nearest locker, and Nooch bumped into them. The machetes fell over with a clatter.

  “Sorry!” Nooch stepped back.

  He backed into a mannequin dressed in rustic-looking armor and holding a club. I grabbed the mannequin to keep it from crashing over, but one of the breastplates fell off and hit the floor with a clang.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No worries!” Tito cried, picking up the weapons and restacking them. He put the breastplate on top of one of the lockers. “These things haven’t had a scratch in three hundred years, so why would they break now? Come this way.”

  “Be careful,” I muttered to Nooch.

  “I am,” he whispered back. “There’s just too much stuff in here!”

  Tito talked over the music as he led us through a maze of lockers. He pointed to some junk sitting on top of one of them. “Those are Peruvian death masks. And up there you’ll see a fine example of Aboringinal carving, see? And some feathered arrows over there, from Africa. It’s all cataloged, so don’t think anything’s lost. Exquisite, right?”

  Nooch tried to be polite. “Real nice.”

  To me, all the stuff looked like a big garage sale.

  Eventually, Tito quit giving us the grand tour and marched to his office, which was maybe eight feet by eight feet, all of it packed with computers, racks of CDs, boxes of old-fashioned photographic slides, and a line of coffee cups standing on a shelf, each with a different Latin phrase printed on the side. A space heater hummed on the floor.

  It took Nooch four seconds to kick over the space heater.

  Tito leaped to upright it. “Oh, dear, oh, dear. Maybe this is the wrong place to be if we’re worried about maintaining positive energy. I do keep a few important pieces here for—”

  Nooch shouldered a pot off a shelf, and I caught it in midair.

  Tito let out an unsteady breath. “That’s third century BC.”

  I handed the pot to him carefully. “I guess I should have left Nooch in the truck.”

  “It’s okay,” Tito said, clearly lying. He placed the pot firmly on a different shelf, then opened a shallow desk drawer and began to rummage in the clutter there. “Where’s that leash you gave me? It was definitely the right idea for Lucy. I just couldn’t bring myself to use something that dug into her neck.”

  “I know what you mean. I couldn�
��t use it on Rooney, either.”

  “Here we go. One spiked collar. Sorry for not returning it sooner.”

  “No problem.” Before he could launch into another lecture, I said, “Tito, I wonder if you know somebody I went to school with.”

  Tito smiled and fixed me with his intent blue gaze. “I figured there was something else on your mind. Picking up a dog collar you wouldn’t use seemed like a flimsy excuse.”

  I grinned, too. “I should have known you’d see through me.”

  “Who do you want to know about?”

  “A lady by the name of Clarice Crabtree.”

  Surprise showed on his face. “Why do you want to know about her? Is it personal?”

  “No.”

  “Business?”

  “I—”

  “Or something to do with your uncle?”

  I was almost too distracted to grab Nooch just as he was about to bump a priceless sculpture off Tito’s desk. But I managed. “My uncle?”

  Tito’s smile broadened. “I’m a researcher, Roxy. When I met you, I did a little reading, and of course Carmine Abruzzo’s name popped up. Before we have an accident, why don’t we talk elsewhere? Nooch, would you like a cup of green tea? I guarantee positive results.”

  “Uh—”

  “You’ve got him buffaloed,” I said. “Yes, he’d like some tea.”

  Tito led us back downstairs to an employee lounge. Concrete floor, folding table cluttered with magazines and coffee cups. Tito put Nooch safely into a folding chair and proceeded to pour hot water from a coffeemaker over a fragrant tea bag. “To answer your question, yes, Clarice Crabtree works for the museum. Not at this facility. She’s at the main branch, in the natural history collection. She works in megafauna, but I hear she’s on the road quite a bit. She lectures and still visits digs, I believe. She’s in great demand, probably because of her name.”

  “Her dad is Professor Crabtree.”

  “Yes, of course, darling. That’s enough of a credential to get her dozens of lecture offers every year. Her husband works for the museum, too, by the way. His expertise is mollusks.”