Murder Bone by Bone (12 page)

The community garden is behind the main library. It’s a wonderful space, full of exuberant vegetables, luscious berries, and Bermuda grass which, because the garden is organic, can’t be poisoned, only dug out. We all curse the Bermuda grass.

Moira hunkered down in front of the strawberry bed and helped herself while I picked green beans and corn and tomatoes and peppers. I went back and forth between my garden and Bridget’s, two down and across the path, with the baby trotting at my heels as if substituting for Barker, who wasn’t allowed in the garden and could be heard complaining about that from the car.

I stripped the bloated cucumbers off Bridget’s vines, and pulled up as many weeds as I had time for. Moira enjoyed the watering until I accidentally sprinkled her. I placated her with a bag of green beans to carry. She munched one solemnly on the way back to the ear. If she hadn’t tried to feed half of it to the snail she’d put in her pocket, I wouldn’t have known about that slimy hitchhiker for a while. It was obvious Moira wouldn’t like to see me do what comes naturally to the snail. Instead of stepping on it, I dumped the dregs of coffee out of Claudia’s take-out cup, which was still in the front seat cup holder, punched some holes in the plastic lid with a ballpoint pen, and shoved a little grass in the bottom. Moira was delighted with her new pet. She clutched the cup tightly all the way to the elementary school.

I pulled up in front just as the kindergartners streamed down the sidewalk. Sam and Amanda came out, Amanda holding Sam’s hand while be looked as if he weren’t participating. They each carried drawings stapled to construction paper that we all admired. I loaded them up and drove to Melanie’s.

Amanda rushed ahead of me up the front walk, but Melanie didn’t answer the door. It was Maria, her live-in help, who scooped up Amanda and admired her picture. I wondered if Melanie was at the hospital, demanding that Richard Grolen return to consciousness. But I felt relieved, as well, that I wouldn’t have to talk to her.

I took Sam and Moira with me to my place, feeling the usual rush of protective pride when I steered the Suburban down the driveway. My little cottage is nothing much, especially by Palo Alto standards, which mandate that old houses either be sensitively restored or knocked down for big new houses. Mine is old and although I’ve painted it, it’s still shabby and in need of a few things, the most significant being a new foundation. The front porch tilts a little one way, the steps tilt the other way. But it’s all mine, free and clear, and that makes it perfect as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care that the kitchen’s last upgrade was sometime in the forties, or that the bathroom’s claw-foot tub has rust stains that no amount of cleanser and elbow grease have eliminated.

Best of all is my yard, which I’m turning into a garden a little at a time. Drake, who is buying the house in front of mine, the one that faces the street, has a small front yard and a gravel area behind his house to park his car. The rest of the extra-long lot is mine, from the redwood trees at the back to the rose-bushes that border his parking area. I have some lawn, which Barker is gradually outgrowing the need to dig up, and a series of raised beds I’ve created from scrap lumber gleaned from construction Dumpsters. During the summer I’d sold mixed lettuce and sugar snap peas and nasturtiums and herbs at the farmers’ market. A couple of restaurants still wanted all the salad mix I could produce. I didn’t make a lot of money, but enough to help pay the water bill and buy seeds and soil amendments.

Sam and Moira chased Barker around the raised beds, shrieking with laughter, while I harvested salad mix and edible flowers for my restaurant customers, clipping the baby greens and tucking the flowers into plastic boxes that I collect and reuse. The nasturtiums and borage flowers glowed like jewels in their clear cases. I love the small, substantial rounds of Tatsoi and the sweet crunch of the Little Gem romaine. After I’d eaten close to a handful, I realized it was lunchtime. The kids realized it at the same time.

I stuck the bags and boxes in the refrigerator and got us all a snack We sat at the kitchen table, Moira propped up on a dictionary and a thesaurus, and ate yogurt and carrot sticks and sugar snap peas—all I had on hand. Either the kids were hungry or the novelty carried them through. They cleaned their plates.

I washed up the dishes while Sam took Moira on a tour of the kitchen, holding her hand and making up great stories about what was behind each cupboard door. Moira loved it. Although the boys are good with her, they generally regard her as not up to much in the way of fun, and prefer to play among themselves. But when one of them gives her attention, it makes her day. She even talked to Sam, which she hadn’t done much for me so far. “More,” she urged him after the second story. “Tell more!”

“Okay.” Sam opened the third cupboard, where I keep bins of newspapers, cans, and bottles for recycling. “This is where the bones live,” he said in sepulchral tones. “When everyone’s asleep they get up and dance and have cocoa.”

Moira liked the sound of that. “Cocoa.” She looked at me. “Peas.”

I handed her another pea pod, but she threw it on the floor. “Peas,” she said, louder now. “Cocoa! Peas!”

“She wants some cocoa,” Sam translated for the child-impaired listener. “Please.”

Oh. “We have to go now.” I glanced at the clock on the stove. Despite the stove’s age, the clock keeps good time. “There’s still an errand or two to run. We’ll have cocoa when we get home, okay?”

Moira opened her mouth for a first-class howl, then fell silent, staring at the kitchen door. I turned to look.

The man who stood there, if “stood” is the right word to use for a body listing precariously from one side to the other, was known on the street as Old Mackie. He wore an ancient porkpie hat, at least I think that’s the name of the headgear with the squashed-down front. Perhaps his had mutated into a porkpie after long usage. His long gray overcoat was ripped in several places, exposing the natty turquoise sport coat beneath it. His hair snarled around his face in gray lovelocks, matching the sparse growth on his face, too long to be called stubble, too intermittent to rate the designation of beard. In fact, his whole face resembled his hat; his chin looked to be planning a meeting with his forehead at some point. As he swayed, he began humming his signature tune, “Mack the Knife.” Hence the name.

Sam and Moira stared at him, wide-eyed. Moira might decide at any moment to let loose her cocoa frustration in a howl. I didn’t know what to do, but I was in the habit of looking after Old Mackie during the rare occasions he stopped in to visit.

“Hello!” I moved forward, pulling out one of the chairs at the table. “Would you like to sit down? We were just having lunch. Have you had yours?”

Old Mackie appeared to notice the kids for the first time. He smiled, revealing the many gaps between his few teeth. “Hrsh chdbrmm,” he said, holding out a hand.

Sam took it reluctantly. “He doesn’t talk too good,” he observed.

“I believe he said, ‘Hello, children.’ He doesn’t see many kids.” I guided Old Mackie into the chair and pushed the bowl of sugar snap peas closer to him. “Help yourself. We’re just eating them whole, like this.” I demonstrated.

Old Mackie fumbled the first pea down, but then he tucked in with a good will. Sam and Moira watched him as if he were an alien.

“I know.” I ushered them to the kitchen door. “Why don’t you two take Barker into the living room? There’s a book there you could read to Moira.”

Sam looked apprehensive. “I don’t read too well,” he admitted. I hadn’t thought of that, but of course he was just in kindergarten. “I know, Moira.” He tugged her over to the couch and boosted her up. “I’ll just read my hands.”

I watched them settle onto the couch. Sam held his hands in front of him, palms together, and then opened them slowly, turning them into a book. He began “reading.” Moira sat beside him, entranced.

I was entranced, too, but I had to take care of my visitor. I got him a glass of juice, which he downed, and found some yogurt for him, which he also downed. Old Mackie is one of the people I worry about when I feel guilty over not helping out at the Food Closet like Melanie wants me to. He generally slept under a bush at the creek, except when it was raining or very cold. Then, I suppose, he went to one of the shelters set up around the county. But he didn’t like the shelters, because for one thing they wouldn’t let you drink, and drink was his reason for living. I knew if I looked out beyond the front porch that his shopping cart would be parked by my steps, with his pillow, the rest of his assortment of hand-me-down coats, the cans and bottles he collected—and probably sometimes stole from our curbside recycling bins. They would be turned in for the deposit, and he would buy booze with the proceeds. Probably he had a bottle of cheap wine wrapped in a brown paper bag in the front of his shopping cart at this moment.

Now, however, he seemed happy enough, munching peas and swilling juice. He pulled up one greasy pant leg to show me that he was wearing the socks I’d given him a few weeks ago during a cold spell. They appeared reasonably clean, and he didn’t smell much, so he must have been to the Urban Ministry recently for a shower and use of the washer there.

“Wsh kdz?" Lacking those essential teeth, Old Mackie was hard to understand. I generally could guess what he was saying.

“The kids? Bridget’s. I’m       baby-sitting for a while.” I didn’t say how long, or that I was living somewhere else. Old Mackie probably wouldn’t break into my house. But some of the other street people might, if Drake weren’t home.

Old Mackie nodded thoughtfully. “Shaw nudder buddy.”

“Nutter Butters?” I knew they gave out those cookies to blood donors. I couldn’t imagine Old Mackie being accepted as a donor, though. “I don’t have any here.”

He shook his head violently. “No, no.” That much I understood. “Nudder boddy. Shyd wulk.” He jerked his head toward the street. “Tell kup.”

I thought about this one for a while. “Another body.” He nodded eagerly. “You saw another body—on the sidewalk?” He nodded again. “Here?”

“No, no.” Old Mackie was getting agitated. He pointed in the direction of Bridget’s house. “Yer fren.” He raised his hand, still with a pea pod clutched in it, and whapped the table. “Ouch!”

I stared at him, the pieces falling together. “You saw—you saw Richard Grolen getting hit on the head this morning? In front of Bridget’s house?”

Grinning his toothless grin, Old Mackie nodded happily and held out his cup for more juice.

I filled it up, and resigned myself to half an hour or so spent figuring out just exactly what he’d seen.

Chapter 14

“You mean he saw the assault being committed and he didn’t do anything?”

“He did do something.” I poured another cup of tea for Drake and topped up my own cup. I had called him as soon as I’d gotten home, which wasn’t until I’d delivered the greens and flowers to my restaurants. Drake had already yelled at me because I didn’t detain old Mackie at my house, but I’d pointed out that I had no phone and that Old Mackie hadn’t wanted to stay and talk to the police, much as I’d urged him to.

“What did he do? Mull it over till he could mooch some lunch off you?” Drake doesn’t like Old Mackie coming around. The Palo Alto police are not really antagonistic toward the street people, who are mostly harmless sorts. But public sentiment has been building against the constant panhandling that goes on downtown and at every major intersection. The police have been moving people along more. It doesn’t help when I point out that Old Mackie doesn’t really panhandle. Drake still doesn’t like him pushing that shopping cart down our communal driveway.

“He knows you have an attitude, so he doesn’t want to talk to you. Anyway, he doesn’t see too well and couldn’t swear to any of it, and is shrewd enough to figure out that he wouldn't make it on the witness stand. He was doing you a favor, Drake. He could have just forgotten about it.”

Drake ran his fingers through his hair, a habit of his that will someday result in baldness, as I tell him. “You aren’t giving me lunch,” he grumbled. “Which, let me point out, I’m missing to come and take down this cock-and-bull story personally from your lips.” He gazed at my lips for a moment. I took a deep breath.

“Stop it, Drake! I just thought you’d want to know. Forgive me if I’m wrong.”

He put out a hand to keep me in my chair, and left it on my shoulder, warm and—well, I might as well admit it—tingly. I hated having such cliché-ridden feelings. But having them I was. I inched over in my chair, and the hand fell away.

“You’re not wrong.” He sighed, and went back to nursing his tea mug. “I guess that helps pinpoint the time. All he can say is, he saw someone hitting, and someone falling?”

“He was going through the recycling bins, I think, though he won’t admit that.”

Drake nodded. “It’s against the law. Stealing from the city. If the recycling center doesn’t get those cans and bottles, they won’t be able to run the curbside program—”

“I know all that. Old Mackie knows all that. He just feels his need is greater than the city’s.”

“The city doesn’t need a lot of cheap wine, that’s for sure.”

“Would you stop muttering and let me get on with this?” I looked at Bridget’s kitchen clock. I don’t wear a watch, and usually I have a pretty good sense of the time. But now that I had children’s schedules to deal with, I was discovering that I needed to know a lot more closely than the general hour what time it was. “I have to pick kids up at school this afternoon. And if you’re still coming over for dinner, we have to buy groceries.” That had been a big miscalculation on my part—not getting the groceries that morning with just Moira in tow. Now I would be at the store with four young Montroses, two of them freshly released from their daily incarcerations. It was enough to make any spinster lady feel faint.

“I’m sorry.” Drake settled back in his chair, his untidy notebook open. “Go ahead.”

Old Mackie had been pushing his shopping cart up Bridget’s street, headed for the creek. He’d been stopping at all the curbside bins, rummaging through them as quietly as he could, keeping an eye out for the truck that picked up the recycling. He hadn’t been able to pinpoint the time, also being a non-watch wearer, but I figured it for around 8:15, a time when most of the worker bees were on their way to their hives, but before the recycling truck came around.