“You and me both.”
“When I heard the security call, I was in the office. I looked at the camera and saw this guy in your cart and thought he was drunk. That happens sometimes.”
“He might have been drunk, but that knife in his head makes me think he’s got more problems than overindulgence in alcohol.”
“What happened?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. I was walking along, and this body fell into my shopping cart. It fell from up there somewhere. I’ve been watching, but I haven’t seen anyone up there.”
“We keep it locked during store hours to keep kids from getting up there and spitting on the customers.”
“How very thoughtful of you.”
“The door to get up there is only open after hours so the night shift can move stuff around.”
“You might want to check that the door is still locked.”
The security guard nodded. “Yeah.” He unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt and plugged in an earphone so I couldn’t hear. I felt rather left out. The body was in my shopping cart, after all. “Mary? Call the police. We have a dead man in aisle six. Yeah, a dead man. No, really dead. And check the door to the service stairs. Make sure it’s locked. But don’t touch the knob, all right? The cops will want to dust for fingerprints.” There was a pause as a voice crackled in his earphone. “No, I’m serious. Someone really is dead, not like last time.”
He got off the walkie-talkie.
“Not like last time?” I asked.
“Last week there was a zombie flash mob.”
“A zombie flash mob?”
“They organize it on social media. A bunch of people show up at a store acting like regular customers, then one of them pretends to have a heart attack. Another one plays the doctor, who comes over to help and declares the man dead. Then the guy pretending to be dead gets up and starts attacking all the onlookers. He bites them and they turn into zombies. Scared the hell out of me. We had zombies everywhere.”
“Was this some sort of protest?”
Serengeti.com was an innovative company and a controversial one. Maybe they were inspiring equally innovative protests.
“No, they just do it for fun.”
I had nothing to say to that. Some of the things people get up to these days really make me feel out of touch.
Although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The security guard’s radio crackled.
“What’s that? The door’s locked? Okay, thanks, Mary. Go through the store and keep an eye on the catwalks.”
There was another crackle on his earphones.
He turned to me. “The police are on their way. My colleague just called them.”
“And the door upstairs is locked?”
“Yes, there’s no other way up there. You say the body just fell?”
“That’s right.”
He looked up at the shelves, scanning the upper reaches of the giant warehouse for a murderer who was apparently not there. He wiped the sweat from his brow and scratched his head. He was still out of breath from his marathon run across the store.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he murmured.
“No,” I replied. “This doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Three
The worst part about uncovering a murder in this sleepy little suburb is that I have to deal with Police Chief Arnold Grimal.
In Police Chief Arnold Grimal’s opinion, the worst part about uncovering a murder in Cheerville is that he has to deal with me.
Murders seem to congregate around me. I hadn’t been here an entire season before a member of my reading group got bumped off. This was followed by a rapid succession of murders that almost included the world’s most famous movie star. I had come to Cheerville to retire from a life of danger, and my life of danger figured it was too young to kick up its feet and decided to continue its career.
Arnold Grimal did not look like a symbol of authority. He was a lifelong desk jockey who, until my ill-starred appearance, mostly dealt with parking offenses and cats stuck in trees. He wore a cheap yellow suit that did not hide the sweet-and-sour sauce stains from his favorite Chinese takeaway restaurant. He slouched into SerMart (he has worse posture than my teenaged grandson), and his face fell when he saw me.
“Why am I not surprised?” He groaned.
“Nice to see you too.”
He had taken a good twenty minutes to respond to a 911 call about a dead body. By this time, SerMart’s two security guards had cleared the store of all the customers. Now a cluster of employees stood by the cash registers, herded there by a nervous-looking woman in a gray business dress who I took to be the manager.
“So, what happened?” Grimal asked the security guard who was standing beside me. The fellow had finally caught his breath but was still sweating, I suppose more from stress than exertion. He was a bit odoriferous, I must say.
“A dead body fell in her shopping cart,” said the security guard, whose name, I had finally learned, was Bob.
Grimal slumped a little more. “Of course it did.”
He turned to a pair of policemen who had just come up.
“Search the building. Lock all the doors. Make sure no one gets in or out.”
“I’ll help you,” said a second security guard, who I took to be Mary.
The woman in the gray suit clacked up in high heels.
“I’m Florence Nightingale.”
“And I’m Sherlock Holmes,” Grimal replied.
I burst out laughing. The cashiers all took a step back. You shouldn’t laugh at a murder scene. “It’s not a good look,” as my son says.
The manager frowned. “Florence Nightingale is my real name. My parents wanted me to be a nurse.”
“And instead you ended up managing SerMart,” Grimal said.
“Is there something wrong with that?” she snapped.
Grimal shrugged. “Not as long as you stick to one murder per year. You have to get a permit for more.”
I cocked an eyebrow. Was Grimal developing a sense of humor? Maybe he was hanging around me too much.
“Let’s go look at the murder scene,” she huffed and clacked away.
