Grave Apparel, page 4
“Which one?” LaToya asked, her eyes wide in the mirror.
“Does it matter? They are all hot!” Meg laughed and the others joined her.
Lacey’s cell phone rang. She retrieved it from the pocket of her suit jacket hanging in the garment bag. The number on the screen made Lacey groan again. Cassandra Wentworth’s cell phone. “Yikes! It’s her again!”
“Who her?” LaToya leaned over her shoulder and glanced at the number. “Oh, that her! The eco-witch. Don’t answer it. Let her grinch someone else tonight. Later, baby.”
LaToya gathered up her things and she and petite Meg Chong, freshly mascaraed, swept out of the ladies’ room chattering, leaving Lacey alone to face the wrath of Wentworth.
Lacey stuck her tongue out at her phone. She pressed the button to reject the call. No doubt Cassandra had recovered her wits and thought of something new and wicked to say to her.
Most people, Lacey thought, when they came up with a snappy comeback a minute too late, would simply call it old business and forget about it. Not Cassandra. She was the mistress of the drive-by insult, and no insult was too stale to deliver. And she
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would back up over you on her fat-tired mountain bike just to make sure you got it.
The phone rang again. Lacey sighed. What insult could possibly be so perfect that Cassandra simply couldn’t wait to say it? Lacey was curious; her fatal flaw. She narrowed her eyes at the phone. Bracing herself, she clicked the answer button.
Lacey gazed at her reflection in the mirror and thought she struck just the right note of cool disdain, her right eyebrow raised imperiously.
“Merry Christmas, Cassandra, it’s been simply ages.”
“You have to come!” A high voice pleaded urgently. “The lady is hurt.” The voice sounded young and upset. This is definitely not Cassandra, Lacey thought. Is this a child? Did I read the number wrong? Lacey glanced again at the screen to make sure it really was Cassandra’s cell phone calling her. It was.
“Who is this?”
“You have to come now! She’s hurt bad. Please.”
“Who’s hurt?”
“The lady!”
“I don’t understand. Who are you? What’s your name? Why are you calling me?”
“She’s bleeding.” The voice rose higher. “Outside! The lady is bleeding! You have to help!”
“A lady is bleeding? Who is she?”
“The lady! The lady with the phone. I don’t know her name.
You have to come now! Now!” The little voice edged toward hysteria.
Lacey’s stomach did a flip. “Calm down.” She said it for herself as well as for the voice on the phone. “Who are you? Why do you have her phone?”
“You have to come now! She could die!”
“All right. I’m coming, but where? You have to tell me where.”
“Outside! You have to hurry!”
Lacey grabbed her evening bag, her garment bag, and her tote with one hand, the phone glued to her ear. She opened the ladies’ room door with one elbow.
“It’ll be all right. Just tell me where you are.”
“Outside! The alley. Are you inside?”
She dashed down the hall to her desk in the newsroom and dropped her baggage. The newsroom was nearly empty, though
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there was some last-gasp activity in some of the offices ringing the large room. She saw Mac on the phone in his office. She grabbed the soft chocolate brown mouton coat that had been Aunt Mimi’s and headed for the newsroom door.
“Are you still there? Stay where you are. Maybe I should call the police.”
“No! You can’t. You can’t call the police!” the voice screamed. “You have to come.”
Lacey raced past the notoriously unreliable elevators to the stairway exit. She slipped off her blue velvet high heels, scooping them up with one hand, and sped down several flights of stairs and into the lobby of the newspaper. She paused for a moment in front of the elaborate Christmas tree, decorated in gold balls and bows and white lights, to put her shoes back on.
“Are you with Cassandra?” she asked the voice on the phone. “Is that who’s hurt? Where are you now?”
“I’m with the lady. She came out of the building and got hurt. In the alley. Hurry!”
Lacey stepped outside the front door of The Eye and took a moment to get her bearings before heading toward the alley.
She caught her breath and tugged her jacket on while juggling her phone from hand to hand. Words from angry e-mails came back to her. “Watch your back, Miss High-and-Mighty. . . .”
She looked around.
Indian summer had lingered far into the fall. In December, the golden days still were comfortable with the kiss of sunshine. Washington had yet to see a single snowflake, but the nights were chilly and crisp in anticipation of winter. Lacey heard a Salvation Army bell somewhere in the distance. Behind it, sirens near and far were ever-present on the city’s sound-track, and the air was thick with diesel exhaust from the city buses, reminding her she was in the busy District of Columbia.
There were two main exits from The Eye’s building, one in the parking garage, which opened to the alley, and the front doors that faced Farragut Square across Eye Street to the north.
The Square was a block of neat green park with diagonal walkways converging on the statue of Admiral David Farragut at its center. Lacey noticed the white Christmas lights twinkling at the entrance of the Army and Navy Club, which faced the park on its east side. Lacey assumed from the stream of formally
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dressed couples passing through the Square that the very elegant club was the scene of a Christmas party that night.
There was another population in the Square, in striking contrast to the fancy-dress partygoers. Homeless people began to claim the park benches at dusk to store their meager belongings for a few hours, or for the night. Several of them seemed to live in makeshift lean-tos attached to the benches. Lacey noticed a middle-aged black man with a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows, standing by a bench right across the street from The Eye, wrapped in a quilted sleeping bag. His name was Quentin and he was a regular. He seemed to be gathering his belongings, perhaps heading for a meal at a shelter.
Crowds were heading for the escalator down to the Metro station on one corner opposite the Square. The sidewalk was a bustle of commuters on their way home or to shop, or to meet friends at a happy hour at a neighborhood pub. Lacey pushed her way through the throng. She realized the voice on the phone had been silent for a moment.
“Are you still there?” she asked. “Are you still in the alley?”
“Yes, but hurry! I think she’s gonna die!”
“Keep talking to me. What’s your name? Why were you in the alley?”
“Just hurry! Please!”
Lacey turned left into the alley, conscious of the strong garlic aroma from a nearby Italian restaurant. In contrast to the busy street, the alley was calm and empty of traffic. Lacey slowed down to take in her surroundings. She was breathing hard. The alley behind The Eye was shaped like an L and it made a sharp turn behind the building. The street entrance was well lit, but there were deep pockets of shadows at the turn.
The voice on the phone sounded genuine to her. Lacey couldn’t believe this was some elaborate joke of Cassandra’s.
The woman seemed to lack the most basic rudiments of imagination or humor. Lacey told herself she was foolish to be chasing off down a dark alley at the sound of a frantic voice, but it was a child’s voice. Even so, she looked around carefully to make sure she wasn’t being followed.
“Am I in the right alley? Where are you?” The voice on the phone was silent.
Just past the turn in the alley, a woman lay on the ground next to a featureless brick wall. No one else was visible. At first
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glance, the woman might be taken for one of the homeless people who clung to whatever bit of urban turf they could find, a nook where they might spend the night and not be hassled. But on second glance, Lacey saw it wasn’t a homeless person. This woman wore black tights and yellow running shoes. There was no sign of a yellow bike helmet, but there was a bike thrown up against the wall. The frame looked bent. Lacey caught her breath.
It was Cassandra Wentworth. Dark liquid was seeping through her mud brown hair, strands of which had come loose from her ponytail. But that wasn’t what caught Lacey’s attention. It was what else Cassandra was wearing: a Christmas sweater.
It was a masterpiece of its kind. Knitted Santas and sleighs and reindeer frolicked festively among red and green Christmas trees and fat knitted snowflakes. It was decorated with embroidered-in strings of multicolored Christmas lights, tiny but real. A music chip concealed somewhere inside the sweater was playing merrily and the bulbs were flashing, synchronized to the tinny mechanical sound of a tune Lacey knew well.
The sweater was playing “Jingle Bells.”
Chapter 4
“She got hit on the head.”
Lacey heard the same small urgent voice she’d heard on the phone. It came from behind her. She turned around to see a child stepping out from behind a large greasy blue Dumpster.
She clicked off her cell phone.
“Did you see what happened?” Lacey peered at the small figure.
The child stood still and wary, poised to run. “Maybe.”
“Will you tell me your name now?”
The child said nothing. All Lacey could see was a blue-andwhite striped shepherd’s robe with the hood pulled down to the child’s eyebrows. The shadows and glare from the yellow streetlights high above the alley didn’t help. A reckless little boy, Lacey thought, judging from the voice and the shepherd’s robe. A little wayward shepherd boy, strayed from the Nativity pageant. But there are no sheep here. What’s he doing in our alley?
As curious as she was about the boy, Lacey turned to examine the woman lying on the ground. Carefully gathering up the folds of her velvet skirt, she bent down next to the still figure in the grimy alley. Cassandra was breathing, but she didn’t respond to Lacey’s voice or touch. Lacey felt for a pulse and found one, but it seemed weak.
She became aware of another presence, uncomfortably close. The little shepherd had crept silently up to Cassandra on the opposite side and squatted over her, leaning so close to Lacey that their foreheads nearly touched. Lacey looked up to see a pair of dark brown almond-shaped eyes staring at her intently, framed by the blue-and-white striped woolen fabric.
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Lacey caught a whiff of that earthy smell that comes from playing outside in the dirt. And perhaps a little motor oil.
“Is she dead?” the shepherd asked.
“No.”
“Because if she’s dead I didn’t do it.” It was the kind of statement someone who always got blamed might make.
“I believe you,” Lacey said. “Did you see who did it?”
“A man.” Her companion appeared to be about ten or eleven years old, but Lacey decided she was perhaps not the best judge of children’s ages. He appeared to be part black, part Asian, and maybe some white, Lacey guessed. It was hard to tell, the light was so bad and the face was so dirty. An exotic mix of ethnicities, but not uncommon in the Nation’s Capital. Lacey stood up and rubbed her hands to warm them.
“She’s alive. It’s a good thing you called someone. I have to call for help.”
Feeling sick to her stomach, Lacey fought the guilt of having argued with Cassandra moments before someone came along and knocked her in the head. She took another close look at her. There were small red and white slivers of something on the ground and some were speckled in the woman’s hair near the wound.
Lacey dialed 911. She reported a woman assaulted in the alley off Eye Street Northwest across from Farragut Square.
She told the dispatcher she would wait for the ambulance and clicked off. She heard a siren, but there were always sirens in the background in the District. It faded in the distance.
“You saw what happened?” she asked the child.
He sized her up silently and pressed his lips together.
“Really, you can tell me,” Lacey said. “After all, you didn’t hit her. Right?”
“I didn’t.” The little shepherd remained squatting over the limp form of Cassandra, peering at her as if she were a giant science experiment, a very interesting one, one that might roar to life without warning. Cassandra, whose skin was normally pink and weather-roughened, looked deathly white, her lips a chalky gray color. The alley suddenly seemed very quiet.
“It stopped,” the shepherd said, and Lacey realized he was talking about the Christmas sweater. The lights had stopped flashing and the tinny sound of “Jingle Bells” was suddenly blessedly still. Grimy little hands started searching the garment.
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“What are you doing?”
“Something makes it turn on. The music.” Dirty fingers pressed a button at the bottom of one sleeve. The lights started flashing again and “Jingle Bells” tinkled a reprise.
“You probably shouldn’t play with that,” Lacey cautioned.
“I’m not hurting it!” he protested, displaying a logical side.
“I like to know how things work.”
“Yes, but—” But what? He wasn’t hurting Cassandra. Could the sweater be evidence? And what would it tell anyone?
“Never mind. Did the man put this sweater on her?”
The child stood up. “He laughed when he was doing it, like it was the funniest thing in the world.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He just laughed. He was dressed like this Santa Dude.”
“ ‘Santa Dude’?”
“Yeah, a dude wearing a Santa hat? You know, those hats like Santa wears?”
Lacey nodded. Like the Santa caps the managers would be wearing to The Eye’s party this evening. The shepherd lifted his face to hers, his eyes clear.
“The Santa Dude. Did you see his face?”
“He’s a white guy. Like Santa. No beard, though.”
“Was this guy wearing a full Santa suit? Red and white?
Reindeer?”
The shepherd gave her an exasperated look. “No reindeer!
Just a Santa hat. The Santa Dude. This Santa Dude is rude, with a bad attitude. He had squintchy eyes.” The shepherd boy made an angry face and squinted. He opened his mouth in a fierce grimace. “Like that.”
“What happened?”
“I just saw the lady and the Santa Dude yelling. She was on that bike.” He gestured to Cassandra’s bent mountain bike. “So he grabs her off the bike and she hits him with her bike helmet.”
“She was going home. Was he waiting in the alley for her?”
The child shrugged. “The Santa Dude hit her with this thing, this giant candy cane.”
“A what?” Lacey had the feeling she was being had. “Like a red-and-white striped candy cane?” Oh, please, a candy cane!
“Like I told you!” The shepherd glared at her, offended.
“The biggest one I ever saw. I swear. This big!” The shepherd gestured with both hands spread wide, indicating the size of the
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alleged giant candy cane weapon. Then he acted out the drama in the alley. “And the Santa Dude holds it up way high over her head. This candy cane? She gets really quiet, and she’s kind of little. He’s bigger. And I think maybe she tells the Santa Dude to stop or go away or something? Whack! The dude cracks her in the head with it.” The boy gestured the blows. “She just stands there for a second and there’s lots of blood. And he does it again and again and again, and she falls down. And he puts the sweater on her.”
“That sounds pretty scary.” And pretty strange. Lacey had seen the shards of red and white and wondered what they were, but she wasn’t about to touch them. Fragments of the weapon?
Lacey bent down again to check Cassandra’s pulse. She was still breathing, but her skin was cold. “Hold on, Wentworth.
You’re tough. You’ll make it.”
“She looks bad,” the shepherd said. He squatted again to get a better look. “You think she’s gonna die?”
“Where did he have the sweater?”
“I don’t know. I was hiding. They were screaming.”
“What did they say? And where were you?”
He looked up at Lacey. “I didn’t hear all the words. I was hiding behind the Dumpster.” He showed her the narrow gap behind the large trash container. It would just hold a child. “And then I peeked out. Like this.” Lacey saw just a flash of blue-and-white stripes and a pair of dark eyes peering out. “Because you got to know your circumstances in this town, you know,”
he counseled wisely. “I could have been whacked too, you know. Like the lady.”
“That’s true. You’re pretty smart.” Lacey checked to make sure Cassandra’s chest was still moving. “She’ll be okay.”
Lacey hoped her words weren’t just bravado.
“That’s good,” the shepherd agreed. “We’re really saving her, huh?”
“Yes, we’re saving her. What else did the man do?’
The shepherd thought about it for a moment. “He looked up and saw me. He points his finger like a gun. He starts coming after me. But I squeeze behind that old Dumpster again. He’s like way too big to get me in there.” The shepherd’s eyes were very large.
“And he didn’t catch you,” Lacey said. “What made him leave?”
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“A car came down the alley. The other end. So the Santa Dude, he ran away. But the car turned off, like to park in the garage or something.”
“You’re all right, then?”
“Sure.” The shepherd looked around as if to make sure there was no Santa Dude in the alley. “Sure I am. I’m always all right.”
“That’s a nice costume.” It looked homemade to Lacey, perhaps sewn out of a wool blanket. “Are you late for a school pageant tonight or something? Should I call your parents?”
