Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (19 page)

Over time, what had been intended as a front had had
a sort of domesticating effect on the enforcers and bag men who were put in
charge of the various PoofPost franchises.
In order to convince consumers and the authorities that their service was safe
and legal, stringent controls were put into place so that things like
explosives or illegal drugs would be filtered out before they were sent. That
wasn’t to say that the St. Paul outfit had become cuddly and harmless — certain
captains still pulled strings on the street, and there was almost certainly a
back channel of PoofPost through which narcotics were
distributed. But that was a separate case, and the task force captain had given
Joy leave to ask Markie Malone her questions, as long
as she didn’t rattle him too much. Flood had sent Renard
along to make sure she didn’t.

A big man, the sort that Joy suspected gangsters kept
around just to impress visitors, opened the door as they reached the porch.
“Mr. Malone ain’t seeing anybody today.”

“Oh, come on, Terry,” said Renard.
“Ten minutes. Unless he’d rather we wait in the car while he handles his
important meetings and such.”

“He don’t care where you
wait,” said Terry. “He ain’t gonna
see you.”

“Hey, Terry, who are you talking to like that?” A
heavy, pale man with a full head of brown hair appeared. He wore a blue
bathrobe with a little Irish flag on the lapel. “Ah, the
Feds. What’s this, Renard, you got a warrant
or something? We gonna play revolving door again?”

“We don’t want to put you in jail, Markie. Not today, anyway. This is my associate, Agent
Wilkins. She’s just got a couple of friendly questions, something you could
help her with, that’s all.”

“Is that right.” Markie Malone gave Joy the sort of up-and-down glance that
always left her wanting a shower. His aura was surprisingly green, indicating
that he was a social and loving person. “Agent Wilkins, is it?”

“Call me Joy.” She held out her hand, and after a
moment he shook it. “I’d appreciate just a few minutes of your time, Mr.
Malone. I’m trying to trace a package, one that looks as though someone
deliberately tried to obscure its origin.” She took the slip for the anonymous
package out of a file folder and handed it to him. “As you can see, the
corporate account number is still legible, but the originating address is not.
It would be a great help to me if you could see your way to tracking down that
address for me.”

Joy had planned to be on her best behavior anyway,
but she was trying even harder to put on the charm since it was obvious that Renard had no interest in concealing his dislike for
Malone.

“Now why you can’t talk nice to me like she does, Renard? Her, I like.” He turned and walked into the house,
still carrying the packing slip. “Come on out back. You want some coffee? Bring
’em some coffee, Terry.”

He led them down the front hall, past a staircase,
through the kitchen and a three-season porch, and into the backyard. A concrete
patio squeezed up against the house, with a hot tub and a couple of lounge
chairs on it. Beyond it was a compact but well-kept garden. A bed of mixed
hollyhocks, calla lilies, and other flowers formed a crescent on the lawn,
bordered by white-and-green variegated hosta. A
towering maple shaded a bed of ferns, coral bells, astilbe,
and brunnera in one corner, while a flowering dogwood
anchored the other. A small lilac bush hugged the back fence, its blossoms in
waiting for the spring.

“I like to handle my business outside,” he said. “You
have to enjoy the nice weather while you can. Three months from now we’ll all
be hunkered down inside, and we won’t come out until March. You gotta take advantage.”

That might be true, Joy thought, but it was also true
that law enforcement clairaudients had more trouble picking up outdoor
conversations.

Terry brought out a pot of coffee and three mugs. Joy
took the maroon-and-gold one that said
Minnesota
Golden Gophers
on it.

“Thanks, Terry. Terry, ah, grab
the…thing.” Malone waved his hand as if to clarify this remark. “And my glasses.” Terry nodded and went back into the house.

“I like your garden,” said Joy. “Are those bleeding
hearts?”

“Good eye,” said Malone. “They’ve gone back to sleep.
Won’t see any more flowers until the spring. Those I
planted after my wife died. They remind me of her.”

“I’m sorry,” said Joy.

“Ach,” he said. “Years ago, now.
We fought like dogs. Hell of a woman, though. Here we go,” he said, as Terry
returned with an accordion file and a glasses case. Malone settled himself on a
lounge chair, letting the robe fall open to reveal his round belly and an
indecently short pair of swim trunks. The sun glared off his white skin. He put
on his glasses. “Mind telling me what it is you’re
looking into? Something…untoward show up in this package that I should know
about?”

“Nothing illegal,” said Joy. “Your people didn’t miss
anything. I just need to know where it came from.”

“Community college,” Malone read from the packing slip.
“I dabble in academics myself, you know.”

Renard laughed. “How’s
that, Markie? You taking on
high school interns now?”

Malone rolled his eyes at Joy. “He thinks he’s funny,
can you believe that? I teach a business class over at the MCTC. Also we’re getting
into publishing. Textbooks. Lots of money there, if
you do it right.”

He wasn’t wrong; the main textbook for Joy’s class
ran somewhere around eighty dollars. “That sounds interesting.”

“I like to give back a little. I can’t spend all my
time in the garden.” Malone unwrapped the cord from
around the accordion file. “All right. You know, when
I was a kid, my uncle used to pull quarters out of my ear and call it magic.
That was before everybody and their brother was portalling
up to the lake and buying MagicWave Ovens. World has
changed.” He whispered something under his breath, and his chubby fingers did a
sort of dance. He reached into the file and came out with three pages stapled
together. Simple spatial distortion. Joy was struck
with an image of Markie Malone and Amanda — Carla
Drake’s mother — as a couple. She felt oddly convinced that they would like each
other.

“Apex Landscaping,” Malone
read. “Address is in Chicago. Huh.”

“Something interesting?” Joy
asked.

“Could be nothing. But it says
here this account was opened on the day your package was sent, and that’s the
only thing that’s ever been charged to it.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest, Agent. Or is it professor?” Markie Malone stared up at her through his wide round
lenses as he handed her the document. “Something interesting
going on at that school?”

“Mind your business,” said Renard.

“Oh, I always do that. But you know…part of my
business is information.”

Joy looked over the document and pretended to ignore
what Malone was saying. She’d considered obscuring her name on the packing
slip, but Malone would have had access to that information in his records
anyway. Magic made undercover work tricky in the best of cases, but Joy was
beginning to think that the only people who didn’t know she was working for the
FBMA were the ones she had no particular reason to suspect.

Renard sighed. “So now
we’re to the transactional part of the visit, is that it?”

“Look,” said Malone. “I have no interest in
jeopardizing whatever it is you’re investigating, and even less interest in
jeopardizing Agent Wilkins. But someone might be interested. I’m willing to
forget that I even met her if you do me a small favor.”

“Brady,” said Renard.

“He’s on my mind.” Malone took off his glasses,
folded them up, and set them on the small glass table next to his lounge chair.
“Worrying about him keeps me up nights.”

Joy had no idea who Brady was, but she recognized a
transactional conversation when she heard it, and she had nothing to trade
herself.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll bet. Look,
I’ll have a chat with the prosecutor, and I’ll be in touch. Sound OK?”

“Well, I don’t know yet. I’ll need to get a night or
two of uninterrupted sleep before I can be sure.” Malone smiled and stood.
“This has been a nice visit. You have what you need, right?”

“I do.” Joy shook his offered hand. “Do you mind if I
keep this?”

“No, of course not. I got
copies. Terry, you show my friends out, OK? Mr. Renard’s
gonna stop by again soon — remember he’s our guest.”

“Yes, Mr. Malone.” Terry led them back through the
house to the front door and shut it behind them without another word.

“Hospitable folks,” said Renard.

Joy waited until they were back in the car. “What was
that about Brady?”

Renard nodded and took a
deep breath. “Yeah. You were starting to like Markie, weren’t you?”

Joy didn’t answer, because it was true. Malone’s aura
had made her want to trust him. The problem was that it was perfectly possible
for someone to be sociable and to love their family and still to be ruthless in
other aspects of their life.

“Tim Brady is one of Malone’s lieutenants. St. Paul
cops picked him up for involvement with a shooting three weeks ago. He didn’t
pull the trigger, but we think he passed the order down.”

“Would he have given up Malone?”

Renard made a skeptical
noise. “I doubt it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I went in
knowing that would be the price. Flood said to help you out. Besides, Martin
was my boss too. If you’ve got a chance to figure out who was behind his death,
I’m going to help out however I can.”

“Thanks,” said Joy.

“Don’t thank me. Just nail the fuckers.”

The salesgirl at the Frog’s Umbrella was probably paid to
look that good, but Zelda felt put on the defensive by it anyway. “Can I help
you find something?” the girl asked, and something in her tone made Zelda feel
sure that her fear was obvious.

“No thanks,” Zelda said quickly. She was sure that
she had said it
too
quickly, and too
loudly, so she turned and began looking through a rack of skirts. Only after
the woman chirped at her to feel free to ask questions and then wandered off
did she realize that she was looking at a rack of juniors’ skirts. Maybe it was
the Pretenders song on the store’s sound system that was causing her to flash
back twenty years; whatever the cause, she moved deeper into the store.

The Frog’s Umbrella was
the
place in town, or so Zelda had overheard her students saying
more than once. It was a vintage clothing shop just a block north of the town
square, about halfway between the Gooseberry Bluff campus and Arthur Stag
College. Supposedly it stocked the most stylish dresses this side of the Twin
Cities; even more interesting, the proprietor carefully scanned every item for
psychic residue, removing any lingering negative energies but leaving the
positive ones. Zelda was prepared to reserve judgment on whether or not such
things were plausible. She had been teaching magic for long enough to realize
that neither she nor anyone else knew the precise limits of magic or how it
worked.

In fact, it was the possibility of “extras” that came
free with purchase that had brought Zelda in here. She had heard a group of
young women discussing the place in the college cafeteria, and one of them had
referred to her “lucky” dress enough times and in such a context as to make
Zelda sure that she meant romantic, or just plain sexual, luck. Zelda would
prefer some simple, straightforward luck, but she wasn’t going to turn down
some of the other if she found it.

Her date with Hector was Thursday night, if she
didn’t call him to cancel it. She considered doing so every ten minutes or so.
She was considering it now, as she went through a rack of dresses, most of
which were too long in the torso for her, or too small in the bust, or both. It
wasn’t just the curse that had her worrying about Hector. She had questions
about him, mostly related to what had happened on Saturday night, in the
library. Why had he been on his way to meet Joy, anyway? What had really
happened with Joy and Freddie Larch? She wanted to ask him about these
things — she felt that she
had
to ask
about them — but she wasn’t sure that a date was the place for that conversation,
and to call him and interrogate him before the date seemed even more awkward.

Zelda was about to ask the salesgirl where the magic
dresses were when Ingrid Ingwiersen walked in. She
was dressed in what looked like pajamas and looked as though she’d been crying.

“Can I help you?” the salesgirl asked. Her tone was
noticeably less eager than when she had asked Zelda the same question.

“Hi. I need a few outfits. It’s kind of an emergency,
I…my, my roommate destroyed most of my clothes while I was in the shower.”

“Oh my God,” said the girl. “That’s awful! I’m so
sorry. You should really call the police!”

“Right,” said Ingrid. “Maybe I will. Right now I need
some things for work, though.”

Zelda realized she had been staring and looked away.
She hadn’t known that Ingwiersen had a roommate…unless
she really meant that it was a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. Zelda thought she
had heard that the conjuration professor was bisexual, but she didn’t know her
well enough to be sure. She browsed while Ingwiersen
gave the girl her sizes and a list of things she needed. Then, when the girl
told her she’d be right back, Zelda pulled a couple of dresses off the rack she
had just finished looking through and carried them over to Ingwiersen.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” said Ingwiersen,
looking blank.

“I’m Zelda Akbulut? I teach
in the alchemy department? We were both on the Faculty Development Committee a
couple of years ago?” Zelda cringed inwardly at the way that everything she
said came out sounding like a question.

“Oh, right. Sorry, I’m distracted. It’s…I’m having a
weird day.”