“Oh.” Hal blew the steam off his mug and his wire-rimmed glasses steamed up. From behind the fog, he said, “I guess that makes sense.”
Good. I didn’t have time to watch all those DVDs, anyway.
Hal noisily slurped some coffee. Clearly, his mother hadn’t raised him very well. I made a mental note to work on table manners tonight.
“Wish I could help,” he said, “but I don’t know anything about the money.”
Though I hadn’t expected to have the answer spill from the lips of the first person I questioned, I had harbored a tiny spark of hope. Which had just been extinguished by a great wave of reality. It had been luck enough that the only surveyor in town had done the addition’s construction staking. Why had I expected more?
I held out one of my seldom-used business cards. He looked for a place to put his cell phone, but he couldn’t find one. When he put down his mug instead, it started sliding down the slippery slope of folders. He grabbed the coffee, and I placed the card on a folder. “If you think of anything else,” I said.
“Sure. You bet.”
I was sure the card would disappear within a day into the desk’s maw, never again to see the light of day. I thanked him for his time and turned to go.
“Hey.” He gestured at me with his cell phone. “Have you talked to the architect? Browne and Browne?”
“Not yet.”
“Bick Lewis is the project manager,” Hal said. “He’s sharp. He might know.”
I didn’t want to drive to Chicago, and I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone named Bick.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
“Mrs. Kennedy?”
I looked up from a stack of invoices with which I was playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a past-due statement by its toe. “What’s up, Paoze?”
“Have the police found my bicycle?”
Between Marina’s death threats and Evan and Spot and the store’s upcoming Halloween party, I’d completely forgotten about the bike. “I haven’t heard.” Prevarication, thy name is Beth. I shuffled the bills, picked one at random, and put it on top. Done. “But there’s no reason why we can’t ask. Get your coat.”
Once again, Paoze hung back as we walked up the police station’s front steps. And, once again, Cindy was working on the flower beds. She was cleaning leaves from behind the shrubbery, and a basket of deadheaded mums spoke of earlier work.
I stopped. “Hi, Cindy.”
She sat up and brushed at her face with the back of her wrist. “Hey, Beth. Paoze. You’re not here to ask about Agnes’s killer, are you? Because they haven’t found him yet.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Have you heard anything else? Suspects? Bad alibis? Anything?”
Dust flew as she slapped her hands on her knees. “No, and you know what’s driving me nuts? I wasn’t even here that night. I missed the whole thing, thanks to my niece.”
“Chrissie?”
Cindy nodded. “Her husband was out of town on business a couple days, so I volunteered to babysit her kids while she was working, and she got mandated to stay an extra shift. I didn’t get home until the next morning.”
She talked on, but I wasn’t paying attention. Ten down, one to go. I
Five minutes later, we were in Gus’s office, sitting in our appointed seats. “Sorry, son,” Gus said. “We’re doing what we can, but it’s pretty easy to hide a bike.”
Paoze nodded. “Thank you, sir.” His voice was as expressionless as his face.
Gus’s response was what both Paoze and I had expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear. “Paoze, I need to talk to Gus a minute. Why don’t you head back to the store?”
Once the door closed softly behind him, I fixed Gus with a stern eye. “You know who took his bike, don’t you? You said as much last time we were here.”
“Knowing is different than proving.”
“What does proving have to do with anything? It’s just a cheap bike. Talk to the kid’s parents and get it back.” I waited a beat, but Gus stayed silent. “All Paoze wants is his bike. He doesn’t want anyone to get in trouble.” Silence. “This isn’t the big city; this is Rynwood,” I said in exasperation. “Why is this a problem?”
“It isn’t just the theft of a bike.”
“What?” Maybe it was time for Gus to get out of police work. Maybe he and Winnie could sell her garage sale finds on eBay, or maybe he could tutor kids in Latin. “What else could it be? Bike’s here, bike’s gone. Bike’s stolen. What else could . . .” A teeny-weeny lightbulb went off in my slow brain. “Oh,” I said.
“Exactly.”
We sat in silence, contemplating the ugliness of racism. The Hmong immigrants hadn’t been welcomed with open arms by all of Wisconsin. I didn’t bother asking how Gus had determined who stole the bike. Any small-town cop worthy of the name knew the usual suspects and would have traced down the miscreants long ago.
The fact that Paoze’s bike hadn’t been returned meant the parents weren’t cooperating. “Not my kid,” the mother would have said. “He was in his room that afternoon doing his homework.”
Or the father would have done the talking. “Son, did you steal that bike? You wouldn’t take anything from one of those kids, would you?” He’d have ruffled his boy’s blond hair.
In Gus’s office, dust motes spun in lazy circles. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “that you’ll tell me who took the bike.”
“You suppose correctly.”
My involuntary sigh made him smile. “But,” he said, “I’ll give you a little unsolicited advice. There’s a Robert Laird over on Crowley Drive, that short road behind the elementary school, who’s the same age as your Oliver.”
Robert of the spaghetti worms?
“He has a couple of older brothers,” Gus went on, “and let’s just say I doubt either one cares about making the honor roll.”
Jenna and Bailey; now Oliver and Robert. I suddenly saw it all—Robert and Oliver stealing lawn ornaments and putting them in front of the school; Robert and Oliver bashing mailboxes with baseball bats; Robert and Oliver driving down the road with a backseat full of empty beer cans, the radio turned to volume eleven, seat belts flopping loose, a gravel truck pulling in front of them . . .
I shook the images away. “What about the parents?”
Gus looked grim. “The ex-husband? He lives on the other side of town and picks up the boys maybe once in three visitations, hangs around long enough to mess up their heads. The mother has had a series of live-in boyfriends who get younger and younger. No one disciplines those kids. Maybe a slap every once in a while.”
Inviting Evan over for dinner suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. Not that he was my boyfriend, of course, but still . . .
“If I were going to pick a friend for my son,” Gus said, “it wouldn’t be one of the Laird boys.”
I wanted to say that maybe Robert was different. That maybe Oliver would be a good influence on a troubled child, that maybe Oliver’s kindness and compassion would bring out the best in young Robert, that Robert would graduate from high school, be the first in his family to go to college, marry happily and raise a large, loving family whose only thoughts were to do good in the world.
But this wasn’t a fairy tale, and none of that was likely.
The next day I left Lois in charge. It had taken a promise of time off between Thanksgiving and New Year’s to get Marcia to come in and help. I’d tried Paoze and Sara first, but Paoze had an exam in Shakespearean drama and Sara’s organic chemistry lab was something she couldn’t skip. “Sorry, Mrs. K,” she said, “but I’m not getting this section on ring systems, and if I miss this lab, I’m toast.”
The expressway extended ahead in a long curve. It was a sight that, for me, inspired meditative thoughts. When driving long distances, I rarely played the radio or listened to CDs. Today’s meditation was “Come Up with a Brilliant Observation That Will Lead to the Conviction of Agnes’s Killer.”
I spent fifty miles coming up dry. Clearly, it was time to lower my expectations. Maybe by the time I got to
