Death on Covert Circle

by Patricia McLinn

  No hanging sideways over the edge until her head was upside down for this kid.

  I’d thought it was quite enterprising of my nephew to assume that position when I’d visited his branch of my family a while back.

  Yes, I’d laughed.

  Yes, I probably had encouraged him, as my sister-in-law stated in her two-pronged scold.

  Yes, I could see the potential danger.

  Still. Enterprising. My nephew could go far.

  This little girl wasn’t going anywhere.

  Birchall stopped short, with displays of onions and potatoes between him and the mother-daughter pair.

  “You. Take a picture. Should have been doing it all along. You’re useless. No— Not me alone. Do those later. First, get the kid.”

  The rumpled assistant had pulled out his phone at the first order, but with the second his mouth opened and he looked around in alarm.

  “The kid. The kid. Get the kid for my shot. People like that stuff. Need to get something useful out of this stop.”

  The assistant loped toward the woman with the little girl.

  “You.” Birchall pointed at the oldest of the three red vest wearers, a woman with Belinda on her name tag. “Get out of my shot.”

  She scuttled backward as if receiving an electric shock, while also appearing grateful the shock gave her an excuse to put space between them.

  “No.” The mother blurted out the word, drawing my attention. Call me shallow, but I zoomed in on her clothes. Not Haines Tavern issue. More like my Manhattan wardrobe … before I gave most of it away.

  Getting out that one word seemed to open the way for more from the woman. “You may not take any pictures of my daughter, especially not with Rod Birchall.”

  “You. Take care of it,” the CEO ordered.

  His assistant’s urgent and urging tone rose.

  So did the mother’s.

  “No. I said no.”

  “But—”

  Birchall strode to them, elbowing aside the assistant. “Ma’am. You don’t understand. A few pictures with your lovely daughter. Then we won’t need you and you can be on your way.”

  “My daughter and I can be on our way now, because she’s not having her photo taken with you. Ever. If you had your way, she’d be dead.”

  The assistant recoiled. The CEO didn’t.

  Impossible to tell if that was the result of stalwartly standing his ground or the impunity of the dense.

  “Nonsense.” He took hold of the end of the shopping cart and tugged it closer to the strawberries, plastered a smile on his face, and ordered the assistant, “Good background color. Get the picture, you idiot.” He added, in nearly the same tone, “Want some chocolate, little girl?”

  The assistant fumbled to get the phone up to take a photo.

  The girl’s face puckered into a cry forestalled only by surprise when her mother yanked the grocery cart back with a shout.

  “Your orders have pushed food safety labeling back a decade, you … you criminal.”

  The CEO hung on, the cart seesawing between the two adults, with the girl no longer in danger of crying, but appearing on the verge of seesaw-sickness.

  “We meet the standards.”

  “Minimum standards your toadies set. Failing to list ingredients that can kill children like my daughter because it might make the label a line or two longer. You would have killed—”

  She turned away, obscuring her next words.

  “If people like you didn’t scream about the font size—”

  “It’s illegible as it is now. If you make it smaller it will be as bad as leaving ingredients off. You won’t make it the size it needs to be because you don’t want to spend a few pennies more on labels.”

  “People like you don’t want to spend a few pennies more, but you’re willing to dig it out of my pocket.” He growled at the assistant, “Have you got the shot?”

  “I, uh, I don’t know. I think it was on video. I might be able to get stills from it. But it might not—”

  “For God’s sake— Do you or don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. I have a shot. I do. I have a shot. Yes.”

  The CEO pushed off on the cart, adding momentum to his sudden release, and sending it back into the woman’s body. She bent forward with a cry.

  “Mommy! Mommy!”

  “Hysterical,” Birchall growled. “Both of ’em.”

  He turned his back on them. As he strode back toward us, he scanned the witnesses, possibly looking for someone he considered worth trying to impress. If so, he didn’t find anyone.

  For a second I thought the woman intended to ram the cart into his back. I think she thought that, too. But she looked at her sobbing daughter, gave a small cry herself, wheeled the cart around, and hurried away, the child’s cries fading with distance.

  “You,” Birchall pointed at Jacqueline. “Let’s wrap this up. You’ve failed miserably. If you’d had the right kind of shoppers here to greet me the way you were supposed to—”

  Clara and I slunk backward as unobtrusively as possible. If this guy was on the hunt for customers he hadn’t yet insulted, we did not want to be in the vicinity. She mumbled something about orange juice. I breathed a yeah.

  “—none of that nonsense would have happened.”

  “It’s a surprise visit,” Jacqueline protested. “I had no idea you were coming, much less—”

  He turned away. “I’m going in the back room. See what you’ve screwed up back there. Can’t be any worse than this. No. Stay. You and you.”

  The command — familiar from the dog park, yet never delivered with such disdain there — was addressed to the assistant, who had moved to follow him, and the assistant store manager, who had not.

  He snatched a sample from the tray beside the deli as he marched past, ripped off its paper wrapping, then pushed open the double swinging doors. As they thwapped closed, then re-opened a bit from the force, we heard his angry, “Good God,” followed by a sound masked by the rubber edges of the doors settling closed.

  We heard nothing more.

  His report on the back room didn’t promise to be a highlight of this visit.

  The assistant store manager squeezed her eyes shut.

  “You,” she muttered. “He can’t even bother to read a name tag.”

  The man in the jeans opened his hand from that unpin-downable position as if to pat her shoulder. Or something more? “Are you okay?”

  She held up her hand and stepped back. “I’m fine. We’ll … He’ll be back.” She looked at Birchall’s assistant. “Won’t he?”

  Seeming to take the stay command literally, he moved only his eyes toward her. “Probably.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The guy in jeans said, not making it a question, “That wasn’t true about the store manager, just happening not to be here today.”

  What was it about this guy? I associated him with something. Something medical? I couldn’t pin it down, and I’d swear I’d never met the man. Which made no sense, I know.

  The assistant manager smoothed back her hair with both hands. “He was here. He got a phone call and before I knew it, he was saying he had to leave for the day, turning everything over to me. Said he was going and I was in charge. I couldn’t imagine what got into him until I got a call saying Rod Birchall was here. God. What a day.”

  I was surprised she was that candid.

  Straightening her black vest, she looked at the trio of red vests. “Uh, you all better get back to work. I’ll announce for you if we need you again.”

  “Let’s go,” I said softly to Clara, to relieve the woman of our presence.

  As it happened, other customers also moved off. Ahead of us, we saw the teacher-type heading out of the store with no purchases, while the dog park woman entered the aisle for pet supplies.

  Not long after, Clara spotted a sale sign down the soup aisle and turned in there.

  I looked back toward the produce section as I followed and saw onl
y the guy in jeans remained, along with the assistant store manager, and Birchall’s unfortunate assistant.

  As Clara stowed cans in the cart, she said, “Shep’s had even better prices last week, but they were all out of the beef barley soup Ned loves and— Look, that man who was so unhappy with the CEO must be leaving, too. I’d thought he’d staying to give Birchall a piece of his mind when he came back.”

  She tipped her head and I turned to see the vaguely familiar male customer in jeans stride past the end of our aisle toward the front of the store, possibly heading for the exit.

  “Guess this is enough.” She placed a final can to the cart.

  As we turned back into the main aisle across the store’s front, we were half a dozen yards behind the man. Twice that far in front of him, we saw the limo driver. Abruptly, the driver turned right, into an aisle and headed toward the back of the store.

  Clara and I discussed Rod Birchall’s performance as we worked our way through the store.

  We retrieved a bottle of orange juice for Ned, then I picked up a carton of plain yogurt for a chicken recipe I wanted to try, and, finally, started back. A man crossed our line of sight in the wide area in front of display cases of cheese on the back wall.

  He wore khakis with a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back. He was medium height and build, with black glasses and dark hair shorter on the sides than the top.

  “Look at that,” I said to Clara. “Only a guy is ever in a grocery store with no cart and his hands empty.”

  Clara looked, but then seemed more interested in looking at me. “You do notice the strangest things.”

  The man disappeared into the ice cream aisle. I suppose it held other things, but I never noticed them.

  “Think about it. Are you ever in here without a cart? You automatically took a cart even though we came in only for Ned’s orange juice.”

  “I thought you might want to pick up a few things. Or I might.”

  I grinned at her. “See? And even if we’re absolutely sure we’re going to get one thing and one thing only, we’ll still almost immediately have a couple more things in our hands. Never nothing.”

  We found ourselves in the pet aisle with three other customers, though not the woman from the dog park.

  Yes, a variety of treats and chews joined the cart.

  “Donna said Hattie loves that kind of chew,” Clara said, “and I’ve been wanting to try this new brand of treat, haven’t you?”

  “Me? Not so much. Gracie? Absolutely. And … there goes another one.”

  “Another one what? Another treat you want to—”

  “No. Plenty of treats. It was another man without a cart or anything in his hands. This time, that assistant guy to the CEO.”

  “The whisperer? I’m surprised he was brave enough to leave for even a second. I thought he’d stay right outside the door waiting for the Birchall man to return.”

  “Like a faithful dog?”

  “Hah. My faithful dog would be off in a shot. LuLu almost was the other day. You know we have a gate in the fence in the backyard, down near the creek?”

  “I didn’t know that.” I’d been in their back yard a few times, but not for fence inspecting.

  “Yeah. Double gates, actually, so we can get equipment down to that wild part leading to the creek if we wanted to clean it up. But it’s so steep, we haven’t tried. Mostly, Ned uses the gates to dump leaves and things. We keep them latched, because I sure don’t want LuLu down there. Ticks and burs and all sorts of nasty stuff.

  “Yesterday, some kids went by. Friends of this boy who lives four houses down, maybe ten years old, and we didn’t think anything of it, figured they were working their way down to the creek. But one unhooked the gate latch as they went by. First I knew of it, I heard Ned hollering.”

  “At the kids?”

  “At them, at LuLu, and for me to help. I got down there and the kids had scattered — I could hear them crashing through the brush but couldn’t see them — and Ned was down on his knees, his arm wrapped around LuLu, with a face full of fur as her legs went like crazy as she tried to run off after the boys. And then Ned was just hollering at me.”

  “At you? Why?”

  “Because, first, I told him to let LuLu go so he wouldn’t hurt her and he said he wasn’t hurting her and I could see he wasn’t. She was wagging her tail right in his face. And, second, I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t even call to LuLu—”

  She interrupted herself to nod her head toward the end of the aisle at the back of the store. I turned and saw the well-dressed woman with her little girl in the cart, heading away from the side of the store where they’d earlier had their encounter with the Jolly Roger CEO. Brave of them to have gone back there.

  “—not that it would’ve done any good,” Clara picked up. “I had to get around in front of her and get a good hold on her collar. Even then I almost lost her when Ned let go. We finally got her back enough to close the gate. Oh, look, there goes a woman without a cart or anything in her hands.” Clara pointed.

  Jacqueline Yancik, Assistant Store Manager, How can I help you? walked past the end of the aisle, walking across the front of the store toward produce. We must have missed her outbound trip.

  “Employees don’t count.”

  “Then you can’t count the assistant guy.” At my nod acknowledging her point, Clara added, “Speaking of him and the assistant store manager and all of them, let’s go back and see what’s happening. Aren’t you dying to know if he could be any more awful than he was?”

  Further discussion of Rod Birchall occupied us as we started toward the produce section.

  Curiosity might have done in the cat, but I was a dog person, so I was safe. Right?

  CHAPTER SIX

  The same group of three stood in the same relative positions as when we’d left them, apparently each resuming his or her previous position when returning from whatever had taken them out into the rest of the store.

  Except the entire tableau had moved closer to the back room.

  “He’s still not back?” Clara asked.

  No one answered directly.

  A voice turned androgynous by whispering said something about waiting. That had to be the assistant.

  Birchall had been in the back room a long time.

  Certainly, he’d been silent far longer than any previous stretch Clara and I had witnessed.

  With apparent reluctance and possibly nudged by Clara’s question and our return, Jacqueline said, “He has been gone quite a while.”

  She glanced around, seeming to make eye contact with the guy in the worn jeans for an instant, then trying to make eye contact with the assistant.

  But he appeared fascinated with the tips of his shoes. Nice, but not up to CEO standards.

  Jacqueline breathed out through her mouth, then walked toward the doors. She paused, possibly for another breath, then pushed the right-hand one open a crack.

  “Mr. Birchall?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Not surprising, since she was barely audible.

  She opened the door a bit wider and repeated his name into the space.

  Nothing.

  The third time, she pushed the door all the way open and held it there.

  “Mr. Bircha—”

  She finished the name, but it was drowned out by the combined intake of breath by the rest of us. Because we’d all seen what, for some reason, she apparently had not.

  Rod Birchall’s feet stuck out past a tower of cartons that hid most of his body, reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the East’s under Dorothy’s tornado-driven house. Except no striped stockings and ruby slippers for him. His socks looked like Bresciani cashmere and his leather oxfords matched the socks.

  A white paper wrapper like the one that had covered what he’d grabbed from the sample tray by the deli fluttered against a second wrapper, this one brightly colored.

  But what riveted my attention was Birchall’s cashmere-hugged calves and h
is cobbler’s top work-enclosed feet, holding a position not seen in live human beings.

  * * * *

  The moments after were not as chaotic as some might expect.

  The CEO’s assistant appeared catatonic, cutting one potential source of chaos.

  Jacqueline slowly let the door close and remained where she was, with her back to us. The guy in the jeans strode to her, gave her a quick look, perhaps assessing if she was going to remain upright, then pushed the door open wide enough so it caught to stay open.

  That revealed all of Birchall’s strangely disposed legs and feet, but not his body.

  I was torn between gratitude for that and temptation to follow the guy in jeans.

  Three things stopped me. The memory of an autopsy. A vision of explaining to the sheriff’s department why my footprints were around the crime scene. And a vision of explaining it to Teague O’Donnell.

  That last one might seem weird, since Teague was currently working on restoring a retaining wall at the back of my lot, so he was in my employ and I owed him no explanations at all.

  He seldom saw it that way.

  He was a former cop — detective, in fact — and he landed somewhere between total disapproval and thinking Clara and I were nuts for our investigative efforts.

  He thought we should leave it to the sheriff’s department, shouldn’t interfere, and shouldn’t take chances. On the other hand, he’d told one of the deputies that we had good instincts.

  Right now, my instincts said not to give him a chance to say I was stupid to have interfered with a crime scene.

  I did move to beside Jacqueline at the threshold.

  Behind me, Clara had pulled out her phone and was already talking to 911.

  In another couple strides, the man in jeans was beside Birchall. He didn’t bend down.

  “They say to start CPR,” Clara relayed from the phone.

  “No use. He’s dead. He’s been bashed in the head.”

  Beside me, Jacqueline shuddered. She put her hands over her mouth, covering a sound that might have been almost anything, including laughter.

  “Are you sure?” Clara asked, clearly relaying the 911 operator’s words.