Fields Where They Lay, page 20
Morris’s journey across an unmarked and directionless no-man’s-land with peril waiting in multiple directions was just too compelling a parallel to ignore. It was where we all lived, it seemed to me, deny it as much as we might, whatever theology or philosophy we armored ourselves in, and we’re out there in that darkness whether we’re alone or with someone. One of the cosmic jokes of being male is that we tend to think of those who are with us as being sheltered from that darkness under a sort of umbrella of our protection when many of them are probably more capable than we are. Might, in fact, protect us.
Ronnie, for example. Probably tougher than I was. Wherever the hell she was.
Acting under a literally irresistible compulsion, I dialed her number—and my certainty that she wouldn’t answer proved to be justified. Just to leave no futile gesture unattempted, I called the landline in the apartment at the Wedgwood, a phone neither of us ever used, and listened to it ring until I couldn’t listen to it anymore. Then I sat there among the dust rats, on linoleum so dirty I could hear the grit whenever I shifted my weight, and tried not to think about no-man’s-land.
As dire as the circumstances were for Morris Stempel and his companions, they’d had an interval of grace, from one perspective, before they were shipped out. They’d had time to tie things off, to seal envelopes, to close doors gently, to say parting words that they knew might have to last for a while or forever. I wouldn’t have traded places with them, but the opportunity they had to part well from those they loved isn’t available to most of us as we blunder our way through the dark, never knowing when the rake will snap up and hit us in the face or when we’ll step off the edge of the big one. Every time something important ends in my life, my first thought is for all the loose ends, all the sad incompletions, all the undelivered gifts. The young men of Morris’s generation had a chance to take care of at least some of those things.
Things. There were things, I thought, I should have said to Herbie before he left us, things I could have done to keep my family together. Sacrifices I could have made to watch my daughter grow up as I shared fully in her life. Something, although I had no idea what it would have been, to make sure Ronnie knew that I loved her, whoever she was. And, if I’d had some kind of warning flag, some reminder that there are times we need to live on tiptoe, I never would have indulged my ego by flirting with Francie DuBois.
What a sad little list.
If Edgerton Mall had a drugstore, I thought, I’d break in and steal some antidepressants.
The grit beneath my left hand felt unpleasantly sharp. I lifted my hand in its thin food-service glove and looked down to see, in the light that penetrated the dirty window, a perfect handprint in the dust. Then I checked my bandage, still clean inside the glove, and looked again at the outline—the map—of my hand I’d left on the floor. A map. Almost automatically I drew the outline of the mall, not a rectangle but a big oval, straight on the long sides and rounded on the short ones.
The Christmas music stopped in mid-Fa-la-la-la. That meant that all the shoppers were out of the building. Without the music, I could just hear the voices of the people packing up, cashing out, and getting ready to go home. Since I was closest to the end with the bazaar, I heard the vendors in that area most clearly, calling out questions and answers, big-fish lies about how much they had or hadn’t taken in, and for a moment I felt a pang for them, for everyone working here, selling their precious hours for small change, sealed away from daylight and moonlight, grubbing in a till, taking money from people who often couldn’t afford to spend it, and running mental addition and subtraction all day on their own bank balances, the strength or weakness of their family ties, the holes in their lives, now that the holidays were upon them. ’Tis the season.
Maybe twenty, thirty minutes before I could start to move.
I looked down at the oval I’d drawn, just visible in the diluted light straining its way through the record shop’s dirty window. I’d drawn it, I thought, for a reason, not just to put an outline around no-man’s-land. What the hell had I been—
Right. I’d been down in the bazaar for twenty or thirty minutes before I chased Mini-me up the escalator. The escalator had been in plain sight all the time, and no one but Mini-me had gone up while I was there. That big red cardboard ribbon had been intact until Mini-me rushed through it.
So how had Bonnie gotten up there?
I’d been so busy asking myself why she was there that I hadn’t given much thought to how. But now that I was focused on it, I saw that answering the question might actually lead me to some other questions, and it was always good to have a lot of questions.
The oval drawn in the dust.
Here and here, bordering the curved walls on the north and south ends, were the anchor spaces. Only the anchor stores were multistory, only they opened onto all three floors. I drew spokes radiating from shops located along the long sides of the oval, and at the end of each line I wrote the name of the store. I found I could mentally locate and name about a third of the shops on the ground floor and a little better than half of the ones on the second floor, which wasn’t because I remembered it more clearly, but because the food court took up so much space that there were fewer outlets there. The third floor I remembered least well, but was also the smallest and it had the biggest percentage of closed, vacant stores. So I got probably half of them more or less in the right place.
By then I’d drawn two more ovals, each about two feet long, one representing each floor, and I was well into indicating the stores where I remembered them. I drew in the escalators, and doing that brought more clearly to mind the stores in their immediate neighborhoods, so I labeled five or six more.
I drew a circle around Bonnie’s store on the second floor and contemplated the whole thing.
She hadn’t gone down to the ground floor and into the bazaar and then up the broken escalator because I would have seen her. Lots of people would have seen her. That might mean that there were passageways I didn’t know about, out of sight of the shoppers—and, for that matter, me—the same way the employees’ eating area had been invisible until I’d been directed back there. Now that I thought about it, I realized I’d seen several doors marked employees only or not for public use, and I did my best to indicate those on the diagrams, too.
And I thought, as I had for the fourth or fifth time that day, that she must have been picked up by Wally’s damn cameras as she transited the public areas to whatever secret paths she might have used. I’d been in the back of the store, drinking her Charles Dickens punch with her, and there was no exit back there. So the cameras . . .
The cameras. I heard myself say to Cranmer, “Blah blah . . . the guy bursts through the second-floor doors out of the store into the mall—”
And Cranmer saying, “That wasn’t on camera.”
No, it wasn’t. The doors leading from what used to be Gabriel’s into the rest of the mall were not in sight of the cameras on any floor, nor was more than a fraction of the shops that shared a wall with the empty department store. Because, as Wally had told me, the department stores had their own cameras, they had their own whole security setup.
That very morning, which felt like a decade ago, I’d made Wally move some of the cameras focused on the second- and third-floor walkways so I could search for Vlad’s watchers. Since most of the cameras were in the stores, looking out for shoplifters, there weren’t a lot of cameras on the public walkways, although I remembered Wally saying the escalators and stairways were covered at least peripherally because that was the most fertile ground for personal injury lawyers. I studied the area of the second-floor oval where Bonnie’s store was, and then with the edge of my hand I rubbed out the areas that the cameras in their normal positions couldn’t see.
It was pretty interesting, from my perspective: there were limited but possibly very useful holes in the surveillance.
Male voices, shouting to each other over a distance. One of them called the other Bud. Practically everyone I’d ever known who was called Bud was a cop, but the cops had pulled up stakes and left, marking everything with the yellow crime scene tape I always thought was far too fragile for all the faith they invested in it. So let’s say this Bud was a private cop, a security guard, and the reason the two of them were yelling to each other was that they were at opposite ends of the mall, about to close and lock the outer doors. And, sure enough, a couple of minutes later most of the overhead fixtures flickered off, leaving just a few ghostly fluorescents throwing a thin, chalky light tinged with red from the exit signs, like a drop of blood mixed into a quart of skim milk.
And then I heard the echoing racket of the big metal airplane doors being pulled down and locked, sealing the place off for the night.
And a long night it was going to be.
With the mall’s overhead lights out, I took my little penlight out of my pocket and aimed it at the drawings in the dust, trying to figure out the most probable path from Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac to the doors leading into Gabriel’s empty second floor. I had it worked out, one that would have called for an easy bit of moving camouflage: leaving her store with a little knot of customers and then falling in with some shoppers as she came in and out of the cameras’ sightlines. Just as I finished tracing her theoretical route, my phone made the badgering little hum that was its way of demanding attention when the ringtone is turned off. The screen read Unknown, but I figured there was always a possibility that Ronnie was calling from a blocked phone, so I punched Accept—such a passive word for seizing at a hope—and said, “Hello.”
“So,” Vlad said, “you are in Tahiti? On the French Riviera maybe? Preparing maybe for Dancing with the Stars?”
I said, “This kind of sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”
“Suggest a way,” he said, “for me to ask you why I have to be looking at the fucking television news to learn that there was a murder today in my—”
“Really?” I said. “Nobody called you? Gee, I would have thought a million people—”
“You would have thought?” he said. “I doubt that. Whatever your reaction is, I doubt it would have been thought.”
“You want to talk to me? Take a deep breath, count to ten, change your tone, and call me back.” I hung up and felt a hot flood of rage rise within me, almost closing my throat. But still, in some corner of my mind I was counting, because when the phone rang again I said aloud, “Seven,” and then answered it.
“Who was killed?” he said. “They are saying something stupid on the television about next of kin before they—”
“A woman named Bonnie. Ran a shop on the second floor. Are you telling me that no one has reported this to you?”
“I am at a remove,” he said. “No one talks to me personal. I am not the friendly landlord, yes? I am not always easy to find.”
He stopped talking and I let him stew for a moment.
“The . . .” he said. “The police, they talked to you?”
“I found her,” I said, “so sure, they talked to me.”
“Why were you the one who—no, never mind. What did you tell them about why you were there?”
“Nothing. I told them I was shopping.” I summarized the story I’d woven for Cranmer. “I’m not connected to you at all.”
“Who else—who else asked you questions?”
His uneasiness pushed its way through the phone, and I remembered again the way he’d sat with his back to the camera in the food court. “No one.”
“This is important,” he said, producing a pretty good hiss on the “s” sounds in “this is.” “Nobody else tried to get you to tell him—”
“Like who?”
“You do not question me.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Goodbye.”
“Wait.”
I waited. Then I said, “You might as well tell me.”
“Tell you what?” he said. Then he drew a breath deep enough for me to hear it.
“Who you’re afraid of.”
“I am afraid of no one. This is a mistake, I have let you forget who I am. Not your fault, mine, but you know what? It’s my mistake, maybe, but you’re the one it will kill.” His voice had gone muted and a little shaky, and I could see his eyes doing that fried-egg thing. “You find out who killed this woman, you find out who is stealing from me, and you keep me out of it, or you will celebrate Christmas dead. Is my English okay? Do you understand?” He hung up.
Friends to the right of me, friends to the left, friends in the rearview mirror.
I took my own advice and grabbed a deep enough breath to loosen the muscles in my chest, which were locked in fight-or-flight mode, and looked down at the second-floor diagram again, just checking it against my memory. Bonnie’s entrance was in the range of a single camera, and there were only two stores between her and the edge of the lens’s field of coverage, about a store and a half away from the locked doors to Gabriel’s second floor, the place where she’d died. Not far at all, easy for her to negotiate without being seen if she’d wanted to. Of course, there were still the locks on the outside of Gabriel’s doors to slow her down, and when I’d taken a look at them I’d found they were very fancy locks indeed. But no one knew better than I that locks are almost infinitely permeable. I stood up and mentally cleared the decks. Time to breathe ten or twelve times, in through the nose and out through the mouth, time to bring myself completely into the present tense, which, while the exercise had a New Age sound to it, was after all the tense that contained all the people who wanted to kill me.
All right, Junior. Move.
This marked the beginning of the formal burglary segment of the evening, so I pulled off the dirty gloves, stuffed them into my hip pocket, and tugged on two clean new ones. Nothing to interfere with my sense of touch.
I’d chosen the record store because it was out of camera range, and I had to assume that the video system ran all night long. From where I was, there was only one brief bit of camera-covered walkway between me and the stairway up to the third floor, which would be nice and dark at this point. If I could do what I hoped to do, though, it wouldn’t matter if it were pitch black or as bright as the gates of Disneyland, because the cameras would eventually forget they’d ever seen me.
A couple of hours earlier, right after Shlomo had broken off his story to call it quits for the night, I’d gone down to my car and climbed in. I’d driven it in circles for a few minutes to find a good residential street free from any pesky no parking signs. That way, whoever reviewed the mall parking lot cameras in the morning, in the unlikely event that anyone actually did, wouldn’t wonder why my little white Toyota had sat there all night long.
On my loop I hadn’t been completely surprised to see a conspicuous eruption of gentrification in the middle of this firmly lower-middle-class neighborhood. Behind a conventional no through street sign loomed three big white two-story houses all agleam in spotlights, obviously designed by a single architect who knew what he liked and stuck with it, no matter how often he was asked for minor variations. Big colorful flags said equestrian acres and now on sale and model homes. Behind the houses was a dark stretch of territory that turned out to be a street lined with modest houses, unlit and obviously unoccupied. I’d driven it out of basic curiosity until I realized that the new development, if it ever got built, would stretch practically to the parking lot of Edgerton Mall.
Equestrian Acres, I thought. Not a horse in sight, and the last ones that ever grazed there probably belonged to the funky little amusement park that had been sued out of existence. So the original Edgerton Mall owners had just been a quarter of a century too early. If they’d had the time and the capital to wait, the high-income neighborhood they had hoped would patronize Edgerton Mall would eventually have surrounded it.
Timing is everything.
I had parked the car on the abandoned street behind the model homes and changed into a dark, long-sleeved T-shirt, dark pants, and my black burglary sneakers, plus a long-billed baseball cap that would hide my features if I kept my face down. As an afterthought, I balled up the shirt and pants I’d removed and stuffed them inside my dark shirt to give me a gut and some love handles—most of the data we collect in long-distance recognition is from the silhouette. I pulled my burglary penlight out of the dash compartment and grabbed my roll of very convincing yellow crime scene tape, bought several months ago from the obliging folks at Amazon. Then I’d hiked past the empty houses and across a narrow wooded strip to get to the Edgerton parking lot. I had slipped back into the mall along with the last-minute shoppers, and made my way up to the former record store.
And now the place was empty, and here I was, drawing bad schematics on a dirty floor.
I smoothed the gloves over my hands for the third or fourth time to minimize their interference with my sense of touch and used my foot to erase the three ovals in the dust, thinking it was probably a pointless precaution but hearing Herbie say in my ear, “You have no idea what will be pointless. Don’t leave anything, not ever.” Then I pushed my hand through the roll of tape so I could wear it like a bracelet and keep both hands free, went to the door, opened it silently, and stood there, listening.
It was surprisingly noisy. The building was contracting as it cooled, so there were creaks and cracks and shuddering sounds. I identified a soft whoooosshhhing sound as the heat even though I knew it was turned off at night, so I guessed it operated on a timer. The ghosts of traffic sounds filtered in through the walls and ceilings; the elevated 101 freeway was only about half a mile away. The enormous open space took all that sound, wrapped it in a hollow echo, and bounced it back and forth.
