Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (11 page)

Chapter Fourteen

The daylight hours were dwindling by the time I chased down two initials and an address that Fagelman had found in the Service on Wheels paperwork. It led me to a fairly wealthy part of Darby, grand homes sprawling out behind curved driveways and beautiful displays of flowers in the gardens. These were showpiece places for professionals, imposing and a little intimidating. The only people outside were laborers washing windows and trimming hedges.

The volunteer referred to as
H. B.
turned out to be a sullen blonde nineteen-year-old with lacquered nails, designer clothing, and a boatload of attitude. She was obnoxious as hell. The home belonged to her parents, with whom she still lived. Unimpressed with my credentials, not even interested in why I was there, Hannah Blatte didn’t make much effort to answer my questions in their stunning living room. She played a game on her cell phone, beeps and blips and music ringing out, while giving me terse and unhelpful responses.

Her mother wasn’t home but her father was. Doctor Aaron Blatte was an orthopedic surgeon at Darby Memorial Hospital, and his daughter’s rudeness was embarrassing him. Growing increasingly agitated in an armchair, he finally barked, “Put down your goddamned phone and stop wasting the detective’s time! Tell her what she needs to know!”

“I can’t with you here!” Hannah whined. “You make me nervous.”

I nodded to Doctor Blatte, who glared at his daughter until she turned off her phone and chucked it carelessly across the sofa. Then he stepped out of the room, crisp footsteps clipping away on the tiles.

I tried again. “Hannah, when did you begin volunteering with Service on Wheels?”

Sinking into the cushions with a sour expression, Hannah caught a lock of her hair between her fingers and flicked it back and forth. “It was after I graduated from Darby High, so a long while back. Fifteen months? I don’t know.”

“And you’re still volunteering there?”

She huffed and looked away like she was too bored to deal with me. “I guess.”

I wanted to ask what in the world that was supposed to mean, but I had a feeling it would backfire on me. “How many days a week do you work for them?”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays, four-hour shifts in the afternoon.”

“What do you think of the work?”

She rolled her eyes in derision. I was unsure if it was directed at Service on Wheels or me.

“Why do you volunteer there?” I asked.

Her gaze moved to the doorway that her father had passed through. “They told me I had to.”

“Your parents?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

She shrugged.

I stared at her until she got uncomfortable. At last, she said with profound petulance, “I wanted to take a gap year. Dad’s mad about that since my sisters didn’t. They went straight to college. I wanted to go to Europe, see things, expand myself like my friend Charlotte. Know what I mean? I’m not ready for college. I need a major break, like two or three gap years. But Dad wouldn’t let me go with Charlotte.” Her eyes rolled again as she scoffed at this deep indignity inflicted upon her.

“You’re not a minor. Why don’t you just go now?”

“I can’t afford that!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening.

Now I got it. Spoiled little Hannah Blatte had wanted to gallivant around Europe for a gap year or three on Daddy’s credit card. And while this was a very nice area, the homes belonging to doctors and lawyers and dentists and the like, it was not a neighborhood for the exceedingly wealthy. If Daddy was already shelling out for multiple college educations, without some other source of family wealth, he probably couldn’t afford Europe even if he had wanted to send her there.

In a resentful tone, Hannah said, “He and Mom said after my graduation that if I wanted to keep living here without going to college, I’d have to get a full-time job and pay them two hundred bucks a month in rent and buy my own food. All I could find was a part-time job at Checker. I’m in the clothing department hanging up the same cheap, shitty shirts all day long.”

She scoffed all through her statement to indicate how demeaning this was, and how unreasonable her folks were being. It sounded like good parenting to me.

“But since it’s only thirty-two hours a week,” Hannah spat vituperatively, “my dad said I had to fill up the last eight hours with something else. If I couldn’t find eight more hours of work, then he expected eight hours of ‘helping the community’ in some way.” Her air quotes were furious and her tone mocking. “He’s been such an asshole about everything. Mom got me the volunteer position with Service on Wheels, driving food around to geezers and cripples.”

Wow
, I thought. This girl was quite the gem.

“And you’re still volunteering?” I repeated.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“You’re not?” I said.

Lowering her voice to barely above a whisper, she said, “They let me go months back.”

She didn’t seem upset about it. She just didn’t want her father to overhear.

“What happened?” I asked.

Twirling her hair and tugging it hard, she said, “Mr. Dagmar found out I wasn’t running the food.”

Aha. “Why weren’t you?”

Air hissed through her nostrils. “Because I’m doing shit, okay? If my friends at Checker got the day off and they invite me to see a movie, what am I supposed to do? Tell them I can’t go along since I’ve got to drive around like an idiot delivering groceries? So I found people to cover me.”

“Who was running it for you?”

One shoulder went up and down in a shrug. “Just random people. Whatever.”

I was going to strangle her, and I sincerely doubted any jury would convict me. “How did you find them?”

Again I waited until the silence became too uncomfortable for her. Then she deigned to answer. “Like at work, I offered people some money to do it. Then I would pick up the big coolers from the office, met the person somewhere and transfer the loaded coolers to their car, give over the address list and be on my way. To catch that movie or go shopping. I couldn’t go too far because I had to go back to our meet-up point and get the empty coolers so I could return them to the office.”

How very inconvenient for you, I thought sarcastically, but kept my face coolly professional.

“I got in big trouble last fall because the woman I paid to do it stole some granola bars out of a bag and the client complained they were missing,” Hannah said. “I had to pretend that I’d eaten them and reimburse the cost.”

“When did you start using other people to deliver for you?”

“I don’t know.”

I began to count to ten to stay calm. I didn’t usually encounter people at their best with what I did, but this entitled little snot was getting on my nerves more than most.

When I hit five, she spoke. “I was doing it myself when I first started the July before last. It was around September or October that I hired it out sometimes. I was so sick of doing it. I would deliver on Tuesday but wouldn’t feel like it on Thursday, for example, so I’d ask Bonnie in Electronics if she wanted to do it. She usually has Thursdays off and needs cash real bad since her ex-boyfriend doesn’t pay shit for their kid. If she couldn’t do it, we’d ask around until we found someone. Richie in Automotive did it a few times . . . and Hayley did it once, she’s a cashier, but she said the money didn’t cover the fuel her land yacht needs. Jorge liked doing it, but he usually worked on the days I needed someone, so he gave it to his brother . . .”

She trailed off momentarily, struggling to remember. “The girls working over at the Furbaby Mine next door to Checker spotted the deliveries for me as well, or they got people in other departments to do it. One even asked a customer if he wanted to make some money and he took her up on it. Sometimes I didn’t know who they were at those meet-up points, someone’s brother’s best friend’s girlfriend’s half-sister’s coworker’s drinking pal’s uncle and so on. I didn’t even get their names. As long as they delivered, who cares?”

She had been lucky that only granola bars were stolen. It would have been all too easy for someone just to drive away with the loot. “Did you have the exact same route each time?” I asked.

“No, they changed from shift to shift. I’d end up going to the same places pretty often, but one shift I might be handling the clients in zones fourteen through sixteen, and the next shift I might have zone ten or eleven. Some zones are bigger than others and have more clients located there. I got a lot of the shit zones in Darby since I was new and just a volunteer. The older women there hog the good routes right by the office, zones one through ten, and send the rest of us out the farthest with zones eleven through twenty-five. We just sit in traffic and don’t get reimbursed for gas or anything.”

Snorting, she glanced out the window to the birds-of-paradise. “Meanwhile I could have been in France. That’s what I did all of those times I was sitting in traffic, pretended I was in France.”

“Did you ever visit the Wengly property? The pumpkin patch place?” I asked.

“Yeah, a bunch of times. I think the Wenglys were a Thursday delivery. The husband died last year sometime so then it was just the wife needing food. He was nice, always slipping me a five for a tip. We aren’t supposed to accept tips but I wasn’t turning down some money for the gas I was wasting. But she was a total bitch.”

“How so?”

“Always trying to keep me there longer to do all the chores. She wouldn’t even look over at me from her chair, just yelled out
do this, do that
and called me Wendy. It’s like, lady, I’ll take out the trash, but I’m not hanging out here to do your vacuuming or find your favorite wool sweater or dust off the pictures. They’re already taking up four hours of my time in the afternoon; I’m not donating any more. Other people are waiting for their deliveries, too. And who the hell is Wendy?”

“Was that address ever on the list when you gave it out to other people?”

“Yeah, I ran that zone a lot. No one else wanted it all the way out in the boonies. You don’t even feel like you’re in Darby anymore. When I gave the client list for the day to people, I’d point out the places on it that were harder to find. There were two or three addresses in the outermost zones where the GPS gives the wrong directions, so they couldn’t rely on that to get there. And I would recommend certain detours to avoid the traffic on the way, back streets through residential areas. Told them to steal a pumpkin while they were at the Wengly place for a tip.” She laughed without mirth. “Because she sure as shit didn’t give any.”

One of those people to spot her for deliveries could have been the perp. It was just a hunch I had, but it made sense.

“When did Service on Wheels let you go?” I asked.

Her voice lowered again as her gaze slipped to the doorway. “Back in March.”

Then sometime between November and March, the perp could have been at the Wengly property and seen the maze still up. Perhaps he had kept tabs on it in the intervening months, taking occasional drives out there to see if it remained untouched.

“What happened? Why didn’t they keep you on?” I said.

“I passed off the food like normal. Bonnie was doing it that day,” Hannah said. “Then I went out to run some errands and get a bite to eat. Mr. Dagmar caught me on the patio at a restaurant. He had seen me picking up the coolers at the office and then downtown an hour later, miles away from where I was supposed to be. So he told me after I brought back the empty coolers that I was done.”

As shifty-eyed as a cartoon character, she said, “But Mom and Dad don’t know. I just go out on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons like I’m headed to the office, but I go to the movie theater instead.”

Once I was back in my car, I called Halloran. He interrupted before I could explain the situation as it now stood. “Those partitions are Pan-Tastic’s, or were.”

“They are?” I asked.

“There was a piece of old tape at the bottom of one. Pulled it off and there’s a little hole drilled into the fabric. And inside was an ancient gum wrapper. Grapees brand.”

Grapees was a horrible brand of grape-flavored gum, the kind people gave out at Halloween. It was cheap and kids weren’t as discriminating. I’d passed it out myself to a multitude of height-challenged superheroes, goblins, ninjas, and fairy princesses over the years.

“It was so fast,” Halloran was saying. “How that stuff was discovered and taken, like you said. There are neighborhoods all around that area. Maybe someone walking a dog or going for an early jog or bike ride found it. Anyway, what about you?”

I told him everything. “This is the strongest lead we have,” I said. “The other people I spoke to that shared their delivery list, it was usually with older women from church or teenage kids or husbands. People who were known to the volunteer, family and friends. This young woman let absolutely
anybody
take over for her, even total strangers. She could have spoken to the perp himself. We need the names of every current employee at Checker and Furbaby Mine, all the ones who have been let go over the last year, and the seasonal help, too. Identify who delivered for her or passed on the list to someone else. Hopefully the killer isn’t the customer who took over once.”