The manager shrugged. “If they dip beneath the minimum acceptable Productivity Point level, it’s out of my hands.”
“Have any of these former employees made threats against the company or tried to come back onto the premises?”
“No.”
Grimal sighed and scratched his balding head. “Well, give me a list of them anyway. I’ll also need a list of everyone who has access to the building’s keys and security codes.”
“I’ll get those for you,” Florence Nightingale said. She looked at the camera, where several men and women in white forensic crime-scene-examiner suits were studying the dead body in my shopping cart. “Oh! Your CSI team is here. Could they please get this done as soon as possible?”
“Yes, you wouldn’t want a human tragedy to affect sales,” I quipped. “that might lower your Productivity Point level.”
The manager failed to take the bait. Instead she looked worried.
“It would,” she whispered. “Oh yes, it would.”
I spent another dreary two hours in the store making a statement and looking over the shoulder of the CSI team before I could go. The fluorescent lights and canned music had given me a piercing headache.
As I made my retreat toward the parking lot, Florence Nightingale stopped me at the door. She held out a gift-wrapped package with an envelope on top.
“A peace offering,” she said with a forced smile. “We got off on the wrong foot, and I don’t want you to think ill of me. I’m not a bad person. I’m only doing my job.”
How many times have I heard that one? I thought.
“What is this?” I said, taking the package.
“A FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak to give your grandson. I hope he has a great birthday. The envelope has that gift certificate I mentioned.”
I was about to say something cutting until manners took over. She was required to give the gift certificate, and was kind enough to give the FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak too. This woman must have realized how ridiculous the rules at her place of employment were, but she was just a cog in the wheel.
A wheel that must breed a lot of resentment. I wondered if that resentment had led to murder.
But why the murder of someone who wasn’t even associated with the business?
I had a lot of questions to answer about this case and far too few leads.
In the meantime, however, I had a greater challenge to face.
I had to be cool around an almost fourteen-year-old.
Five
After the retail purgatory of SerMart, the chaos and noise of my grandson’s bedroom was a positive relief.
I found him lying out on his bed, texting his friends. The radio was tuned to KRAP, the local hip-hop station. The loud boasts about “slinging ice” and “capping homies” made for weird background music in a room that still showed evidence of a little boy in residence.
Martin had not entirely given up his teddy bears, for example. Granted, they were tucked in one corner of a shelf, but the mere fact that they were in a tidy row on the shelf when most of his belongings were lost in the landfill on the floor spoke volumes. My daughter-in-law, Alicia, had told me that sometimes she’d peek in on him at night to make sure he was all right and find those bears in bed with him. That happened especially when there was a thunderstorm outside or if she and my son, Frederick, had one of their rare fights.
It’s what I found so charming about boys and girls Martin’s age, that mixture of bravado and vulnerability. Their pose of independence and their sneaking ways of looking for support and reassurance.
“Grandma!” he shouted, vaulting off his bed by pumping his legs up in the air, slamming them down on the mattress, and thus propelling himself into a standing position. I wistfully remembered a time when I was that limber. “You finished the book yet?”
“Yes, I have,” I replied, pulling out a copy of Cargo Blasters #3: Mars Marathon Manglers from my purse. It was the latest young adult series we were reading together. It was about a bunch of teenaged space truckers fighting aliens and interstellar pirates. It had all the elements a nearly fourteen-year-old boy would want—large machines, laser battles, zero gravity skateboarding, and just the barest hint of flirtation between the main male and female characters.
To be honest, I found it formulaic and predictable, but then I’d been reading for a good five decades longer than he had. Besides, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to bond with my grandson. He loved reading, although he was finicky about what he read, and he didn’t have another adult showing interest. My son wasn’t much of a reader, and my daughter-in-law mostly read advanced physics journals.
“I’ll give you number 4, Passage to Pluto. Don’t you think it’s unfair that Pluto is only a dwarf planet?”
“I’ve never really thought about it.”
“Although I guess if you kept it a planet you’d have to make Eris a planet too. Maybe even Haumea and Makemake. I mean, once you start naming planets, where do you make the cutoff point?”
“I really have no idea. I also have no idea why you listen to music about people killing each other in the ghetto.”
Martin rolled his eyes. “It’s called the hood.”
“It’s called the place people should try to get out of, not glorify.”
Martin struck a pose that was supposed to look gangsta. “It’s cool.”
I almost said that he wouldn’t last two minutes in one of those neighborhoods, but decided to skip it. He was happy to see me. That was the main thing.
He rummaged through the heaps of stuff on his floor as the carnage in the bad side of town continued on the airwaves. From beneath a cairn of old socks, discarded athletic gear, and various unidentifiables, he pulled out Cargo Blasters #4: Passage to Pluto. The shiny bright cover showed three teens, two boys
