All Sales Fatal (6 page)

“That’s going to be at the crux of the case, you mark my words,” he said, pushing to his feet to set the table. “Gangs’ modus operandi lean more toward drive-by shootings and letting the corpses fall where they may.

Gangbangers don’t move bodies, unless it’s to leave a message of some kind like ‘Stay off our turf’ or ‘This is what happens to people who rat.’ Do gangbangers say ‘rat’?”

“Beats me. I get your point, though.” I narrowed my eyes against the steam as I slid linguini into a pot of boiling water. “A warning, huh? You could be on to something.” While the linguini cooked, I told him I was thinking about starting a self-defense class at the mall.

“Count me in,” he said immediately. He went into a half crouch, hands uplifted in a martial arts pose.

“For what?”

“Your co-instructor, of course,” he said, abandoning his Jet Li pose to rasp a chunk of Romano cheese across a grater.
“I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to say I’ve had more hours of hand-to-hand combat training than anyone in Vernonville.”

“Undoubtedly,” I said, trying to think of a tactful way to decline his offer. I shuddered at the thought of some overzealous student throwing my grandpa, with his brittle, octogenarian bones, to the ground. My mom would shoot me if Grandpa ended up with a broken hip or fractured spine. “I’m not sure when we’ll start,” I added, hedging. “I’ve got to clear it with Mr. Quigley and find some place to hold the class.”

“Well, don’t let the grass grow under your feet, Emma-Joy.” Grandpa dished up generous helpings of linguini, which I topped with the shrimp and spinach sauce. We sat and began to eat. “In fact, if you’re too busy, I can make the arrangements, if you want. I’ll bet Theresa would come.”

Theresa Eshelman was his day-care-owning lady friend. “I’ll talk to Quigley tomorrow,” I said, knowing that I had small chance of derailing Grandpa once he got excited about a project. I was preoccupied throughout dinner, grappling for an idea that would make Quigley put the kibosh on the whole plan, or insist that it be ladies only, or something else that would keep Grandpa out of the ER, where I was pretty sure he got “frequent visitor” discounts.

Five

In any event,
I saw Curtis Quigley much sooner than I had anticipated. He called me midmorning and sent me searching for my boss, wanting an update on the murder case. When I knocked on Woskowicz’s office door and got no reply, I turned the handle.

“Captain Woskowicz?” Easing the door wider, I poked my head around and saw that the office was empty. The desk was uncluttered—more a testament to his lack of work than his neatness—and the computer turned off. A lidded stainless steel mug sat atop a two-drawer filing cabinet. The air smelled faintly of breath mints.

I returned to the main office and asked Joel, “Have you seen Captain W today?”

“No.” Joel smiled at me hopefully. “Do you suppose he quit?”

I gave him a “we should be so lucky” look and then dialed Quigley and told him I couldn’t locate the director of security. He ordered me to come brief him on the Arriaga
investigation; before I left, I directed Joel to call Woskowicz’s home phone and cell while I was gone. I returned six minutes later, having cheered Quigley by telling him there was no further information and no evidence of mall involvement, and gotten his enthusiastic endorsement of the self-defense class. “Great idea, EJ!” Quigley had said. “Makes us appear proactive, like we’re looking out for our employees.”

Joel shook his head at me. “No answer either place.”

My brows knit together. Woskowicz certainly wasn’t going to get my vote for Boss of the Year, but he hadn’t missed a day of work since I started at the mall. Maybe he had a medical or dental appointment scheduled and had forgotten to tell us.

“Do you think it’s connected to the murder?” Joel asked, eyes round.

“Unlikely,” I said. Joel had some good analytical abilities but was attracted to lurid, interesting, or outrageous explanations for events rather than the humdrum, more likely ones. I was trying to break him of that tendency. Sending him out on patrol, I stayed in the office, fielding calls that would’ve gone to Captain Woskowicz and putting together a flyer for the self-defense class. When my boss still hadn’t shown up by noon, I called in an off-duty security officer so our staffing would be adequate. About an hour before my shift ended, a knock on the glass door brought my head around.

A redheaded woman wrapped in a full-length, faux-cheetah coat stood outside. I gestured for her to come in. She looked around curiously and patted the red hair teased out a good three inches from her head. I guessed her to be a well-preserved fifty or so. Coral lipstick slicked her wide mouth, and pointy black boots covered her feet.

“Can I help you?” I asked when she didn’t say anything.

“Is Beaner around?” Her voice was a low-pitched, Joplin-esque growl with a distinct New York accent.

“Beaner? I don’t know anyone by that name.”

She huffed an impatient sigh. “He’s the boss of this place?”

I stared at her, noting a stiffness to her face that suggested a botched Botox treatment. “You mean Captain Woskowicz?”

“Yeah, him. Tell him I need the check. And I didn’t appreciate getting stood up last night. Damn, it’s toasty in here.” She cocked one hip and unbuttoned the coat to display a mega-tight white tee stretched so taut ripples corrugated the fabric between her large breasts. “That’s better. Look, is he back there? I’ll just tell him myself.”

I stood and blocked her path. “I’m afraid Captain Woskowicz isn’t in yet today. I can give him a message that you stopped by, Ms.—?”

“A likely story,” she said, a sneer in her voice that didn’t show up on her immobile face. “You tell him I want that alimony check right this minute or he’ll be hearing from my lawyer. I’ve got bills to pay, you know.”

Alimony? So this was one of Captain Woskowicz’s ex-wives. Rumor said he had three. “He’s really not here, Ms.—” I tried again.

“Nina Wertmuller,” she said. “What do you mean he hasn’t come in yet?”

“He’s not here,” I said. “I’ll tell him—”

“That’s not like him.”

I got the impression that if her facial muscles had worked, she’d have had a line between her mostly penciled-on brows. “Where were you supposed to meet?”

“At McGill’s. We meet there every month. He gives me the check, we have a couple of drinks and…” She trailed
off coyly, and I had no trouble imagining what happened next—for old time’s sake, I was sure.

“If he’s playing least in sight because he’s trying to stiff me on the check… I’ll go by the house and see if he’s there,” she announced.

“Will you ask him to give the office a call if you find him?”

“Sure thing. Hey, this looks like fun.” She picked up one of the self-defense class flyers stacked on the corner of my desk. Before I could tell her the class was for mall employees only, she spun on her booted heel, cheetah coat flapping, and brushed past Joel, who politely held the door for her.

“Who was that?” he asked, gazing after her.

“A former Mrs. Woskowicz,” I said.

“She looks a little like my mother.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept quiet, handing him a message slip from Sunny, the girl he was trying to lose weight for.

“What did she want?”

“Sunny?”

“The ex–Mrs. W.” He tucked his uniform shirt more securely into his slacks; no matter what he did, Joel always managed to look a bit rumpled.

“Her alimony check. Apparently, she and Captain W were supposed to meet last night and he didn’t show up.” I tapped a finger on the desk, more perturbed than I was letting on about the captain’s disappearing act. I wasn’t exactly worried, but the man was definitely acting out of character. I couldn’t see him passing up the chance for a little nookie with his ex-wife, not without a good reason.

“What’ll happen if he doesn’t come back? You could have his job!” Joel’s brown eyes lit up.

I gave him a look. “Did you finish the inspection of the fire extinguishers?”

“Yeah. What’s this?” He reached for one of the flyers I’d printed on bright pink paper. “Self-defense? Cool.” He balled his hands into fists and jabbed at an invisible body bag, shuffling his feet like he was trying to scuff a mark off the floor.

“It’s self-defense, not boxing,” I said, snatching the flyer away. “And it’s for women.”

“EJ!” Joel actually looked hurt.

“Oh, I suppose—it doesn’t matter… you can come.” I sighed. So much for telling Grandpa Atherton he needed two X chromosomes to participate.

“Great. I’ll pass these out while I’m patrolling.” He helped himself to a handful of flyers and pushed through the glass doors, still shuffling his feet as though channeling Sugar Ray Leonard.

By the time
my shift ended, Captain W still hadn’t shown up or called in. After a moment’s debate, I crossed the hall to the management offices and asked to speak to Curtis Quigley. The receptionist, a lovely dark-haired girl named Pooja, buzzed him and then said he’d see me. “Is it true that Captain Woskowicz has been kidnapped?” The smile that went with the question told me she thought the idea was utterly ridiculous, and she laughed when I rolled my eyes.

Quigley, seated behind his desk when I entered, immediately asked if the police had arrested someone for the murder and if Captain Woskowicz had shown up.

“No and no,” I said, seating myself.

He flapped his hands in a gesture somewhere between annoyance and worry. “This is not a good time!”

I resisted the urge to ask when
was
a good time for murdered bodies to turn up on mall property and senior managers to be no-shows.

“I’m giving my quarterly report to the FBI board this afternoon”—FBI was not the law enforcement agency; it stood for Figley and Boon Investments, the company that owned Fernglen Galleria and several other malls.—“and they are not going to be happy about this. A dead body on the doorstep doesn’t play well with the stockholders. It tarnishes our image as a family-friendly mall.” He fussed with one of his cuff links, then gave me a penetrating stare. “You’re in charge, EJ, until Captain Woskowicz turns up.”

I sat up straighter, startled. “But I’m not the most senior—”

He waved away my objection. “This isn’t the military. I can put whoever I want in charge and I want you. You seem to have a good working relationship with the Vernonville police and that’s important right now. In fact, why don’t you go over there this afternoon and poke them about the murder. While you’re there, you can tell them that Captain Woskowicz is missing.” He scooped up a handful of files and came around the desk.

“Woskowicz is an adult, Mr. Quigley,” I said, wondering how to break it to him that the police were going to be monumentally uninterested in hearing about a grown man who’d been missing for maybe twenty-four hours, if we counted from when he’d been supposed to meet Nina Wertmuller.

“Just fill them in,” Quigley insisted. “I’m late.” He hurried past me and out the door, leaving me alone in his office.

Central Vernonville consisted
of two blocks of shops and restaurants in Colonial-era buildings fronted by brick sidewalks. Words like “quaint” and “historical” peppered the chamber of commerce brochures about the downtown shopping district. The police department fit right in, occupying
the former Town Hall, a lovely two-story building surmounted by a white cupola. Although the exterior looked like something out of Colonial Williamsburg, the interior had been modernized and was so generic it could’ve been a police department in Tucson or Augusta: counter staffed by a uniformed officer, waiting area with virtually indestructible molded chairs, wear-resistant carpet in a color between dark green and gray.

As a young officer escorted me back to Detective Helland’s office, I took the opportunity to once again admire the photographs spaced along the hall walls. Last time I’d been here, I’d realized that the atmospheric landscapes were all signed “A. HELLAND” in tiny gold type. It interested me to think of Detective Helland turning his analytical brain to photo composition as he tried to capture a mood or a moment; he was just so darn un-artsy on the job.

“I got your email,” he greeted me when the officer knocked on his door. His gaze flicked to me for a split second and then returned to the document on his desk. I paused on the threshold. More landscape photos—black-and-white studies of trees—decorated the beige wall behind his desk. An empty fish bowl sat on a credenza near a computer printer; last time I’d been here, it had held a Siamese fighting fish. Perhaps he had moved on to the Big Fishbowl in the Sky. File folders, case binders, a computer, and other office paraphernalia took up most of the available space on the desk and bookshelves. He had no personal photos on his desk—no smiling wife, no tow-headed kids, not even a dog—which I tended to think meant he wasn’t married. Not that it mattered to me, I hastily reminded myself.

“Good work,” Helland said. “You didn’t have to come down here.”

His slightly condescending tone raised my hackles immediately. “My boss asked me to check in and see what
progress you’re making.” I wanted to make sure he understood I hadn’t come of my own accord. “And,” I added reluctantly, knowing Helland would be dismissive, “he wanted me to tell you that Captain Woskowicz is missing.”