Slugfest

current story.

“Everything I told you was true,” Jamal said, “except I left Emma’s name out of it because she asked me not to tell anyone. Because of what happened to Garland. She was afraid.”

The girl picked up her cue. “And everything I said was true. Except for the honey stuff. All I know about honey is that you press the bear’s tummy and the honey comes out of the top of its head.”

It was a disarming statement. The girl exuded innocence, sweet stuff gushing out of her mouth as if someone had pressed the right spot on her tummy. But she had the ability to get people to lie for her and protect her—including me—and that was a dangerous quality. I wouldn’t be doing it again.

“Garland did go to Penn State a few years back, but he never got his degree.”

So far, Emma’s definitions of everything and true left much to be desired. I waited to hear the other exceptions.

Not sure that Jamal would show up, Garland had also asked her to retrieve his bag. Without the need for subterfuge or the late-night transfer of alcoholic beverages, Emma had come to the aid of a woman struggling with two cumbersome display cases and a temperamental wheelie cart. The two of them simply waltzed in together— Emma and a beekeeper named Cindy Gustafson.

“I’m pretty strong. She was nice. She gave me some honey for helping her.”

Emma took a large, heavy glass jar out of her bag and I recognized it from the three I’d purchased at the real Cindy Gustafson’s booth. Hers was not wrapped. So you decided to temporarily steal the nice lady’s identity. Charming. Did you steal the honey, too? Or did you whack your boyfriend on the head with it? The jar was roughly the shape and size of a small brick with some detailed ridges near the lid. I found myself wondering if there was evidence on it.

The girl offered the honey to J. C., who placed it on the butcher-block table. She perched on a counter stool nearby and we waited for the girl to continue.

“Once I didn’t have the boxes against my chest, one of the guards saw I didn’t have a badge and asked me to leave.”

“You were wearing one this morning,” I said.

She shook her head and fished around in her bag again, pulling out an empty badge holder she’d picked up near the registration desk and stuffed with a piece of paper she’d written on. She tossed it on the coffee table. It wouldn’t have fooled Rolanda, but would work on a less diligent security guard or a part-timer who wasn’t paying attention, and it had worked on me. If this kid didn’t watch it, she could turn into a first-class con woman. But why did she do it?

“Why not just tell me who you are and what you wanted?”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I was afraid. I haven’t slept in a real bed for two nights. Garland had the only keys to the apartment where we’d been crashing. Then we had to leave. He had my passport. We were going away. Now I don’t know who has it. And whether or not they think I know something.”

Who were they? And what was there to know?

“Just spit it out, dear.” J. C. would have made a good interrogator. Or therapist. There was something soothing in the way she drew the girl out. Motherly—now that she’d put that bar down. Or maybe it was the way she now held the jar of honey, which, if it was evidence, was being thoroughly contaminated. It would have seemed strange for me to tell her to put it down, so I asked her to put the water on for tea. She was surprised but put the jar down and did as I asked.

“C’mon, Emma.”

“Garland needed money. He started playing cards in his junior year, thinking he could cover his college loans that way. He was good at it. He was also good at spending it. He loved hosting parties with fabulous food and going to four-star restaurants. He was such a steady customer at some restaurants, they let him run up huge tabs. He lived so large they must have thought he was a trust-fund kid and if he didn’t pay, daddy would. So not true. His parents had no money.

“Then he started losing. Big-time. The bets got larger as he got more desperate and tried to make it all back chasing one big payoff.”

“But it didn’t happen,” I said.

“He just dug himself into a deeper hole. Eventually he borrowed money from this greasy mob guy. The interest was astronomical, and the number just kept going up, even when Garland made payments. He was winning again but never enough to pay off the principal. I don’t even think they wanted that—they just wanted him to pay the interest forever.”

Welcome to the world of finance—mob or otherwise.

She explained that Garland’s less than realistic plan was to raise enough cash to get them to Macau, where he claimed to have friends. He was convinced he could win enough dough there to pay back the mobsters and come home with a new stake. And he was expecting someone at the Big Apple Flower Show to give him seed money. There were so many flaws in this strategy I didn’t know where to begin, but it was all moot now.

“Macau? Couldn’t he go to Foxwoods or Vegas, like everyone else?”

“The gamblers knew him at those places. He was afraid they’d know he was broke and get in touch with the people he owed. Besides, he said the food at those places was terrible.”

Picky guy. Maybe I’d been too hard on her. Perhaps the tears at the bagel shop that morning had been real. J. C. handed her a box of tissues and got up to make the tea, taking the jar of honey with her.

I wasn’t as patient as J. C. and asked the obvious question. “Okay, how does a college dropout with a gambling problem wind up at a flower show?”

“I’m not sure. Garland took some agricultural classes at Penn State. He studied with this wacko professor, who was eventually booted off campus over some unauthorized experiments. Garland worked for him, too.”

The girl picked up Moochie and began to mindlessly stroke his fur. “He said taking that job was going to turn out to be the smartest decision he ever made.” The cat wriggled out of her grip. Smart cat.

I thought back to the names in the show directory. Bamb-ino and BioSafe probably had scientists on their payrolls, even if they weren’t listed in the company literature.

“Were the experiments related to pest repellents? Who was Garland here to see?”

The girl said she didn’t know.

“You must know something. People don’t just hand out checks for nothing. Who was it? What did Garland have on them?”

“He just said we’d get the money. He said he deserved it. He was entitled to it.”

I listened to this young girl calmly describing her murdered boyfriend’s shake-down scheme and wondered when exactly her moral compass had gone blooey. He deserved it. I guessed whoever had killed the boy thought he deserved it, too. What crucial bit of information was she leaving out?

“Garland said he’d wrap up his business on Wednesday night. He told me not to worry about the bag. If I couldn’t get it, a boy we’d met earlier in the day was going to get him into the convention center that night.” She motioned to Jamal, who seemed anxious to pick up his thread of the story to clear himself, if only to the assembled group.

“So you and Garland went back to the center,” I said. “He left you to do his business and you had a snooze at the beach hut in Connie Anzalone’s exhibit and didn’t see or hear anything until something woke you—two people running out of the center?”

The boy shook his head. “There were noises before that. Something else happened. One of the Wagner employees—maybe it was Otis—was pushing a large rubber tub or cart, like the cleaning staff uses. He was cursing about how heavy it was and why the hell had someone left it in the middle of the floor ’cause all the cleaning was supposed to be done by then. I didn’t think anything of it and stayed hidden because I didn’t want to get into trouble. I didn’t want to hurt our chances of winning.”

Under the circumstances, not winning a flower show contest was the least of Jamal’s problems.

“I waited for him to pass and only came out when the sound of the cart’s wheels and the man muttering was off in the distance. I didn’t see anyone. I checked on the exhibit and went back to the hut, but may have dozed off again. It was later on I heard the other noise and saw the two people.”

“Except it wasn’t me,” the girl said. “I was waiting for Garland at the bar.”

How much were these kids playing us and how much of what they were saying was true?