Snow Globes and Hand Grenades (15 page)

“Well, my husband's not home. He went to get a baseball glove with our son,” she said. “He outgrew his last glove over the winter. Do you need to talk to both of us?”

“No, it's nothing formal,” he said, “just a visit.”

“Well, alright. Would you like something to drink, some water or anything?”

“No, thank you, ma'am. I won't stay that long.”

She closed the door behind him and led him to the dining room table. Mimi's sister looked up and saw it was a police officer, but kept on playing the funeral march.

“I have a few questions,” he said sitting down at the head of the table.

“Glad to help,” she said straightening up some junk mail on the table.

“I see your mail is coming again.”

“Oh, just like always. It never stopped. We even got our mail that day.”

Detective Kurtz perked up. This was new information. “You did?”

“Yes, although my husband joked he wished they had stolen our bills.” She laughed like they were getting to know each other at the parish progressive dinner party. But Detective Kurtz didn't laugh back, so she stopped.

“Why your house, Ma'am?”

“You mean, why'd they rob the mailman here?”

“Yes, that's what I'm curious about.”

“Well, I don't know,” she said raising her voice over a flourishing passage of the funeral march. It sounded as though a black casket were being carried through a Polish village with mourners lining the cobblestone sobbing. “I guess it was just a coincidence. There's nothing of value in our mail.”

“Your daughter is Mimi? Mimi Maloney?”

“Yes,” she said touching her collarbone with a hint of concern. “Do you know my Mimi?”

“No, I don't think I do.” That was a lie. If asked later why he lied, Detective Kurtz could always say he didn't think he knew the real Mimi, only the Mimi who had spun fairy tales in a school interrogation. “How's Mimi doing in school?”

Mrs. Maloney leaned back and beamed a relaxed smile. “Oh, she's doing great. She got accepted to Holy Footsteps Academy and she's just wrapping up eighth grade.”

“Has Mimi told you anything about how school is going these days?”

“No, nothing's happening. No big tests anymore. These are the dull last days before the summer and then she can start a new life in the fall.”

Detective Kurtz nodded. Obviously, Mimi had not told her mom about the snow globe investigation. “Is Mimi home now?”

The Chopin funeral march had reached a middle section of graceful runs and romantic chords recalling a spring day on which a girl like Mimi might run through fields of flowers, far, far from death. “No, Mimi's not in. She went on a bike ride.”

“It's such a nice day for it.”

“Yeah, I told her to go someplace nice, but she said she was going to go to the library to study.”

Detective Kurtz nodded. “Did you say the mail came for you the day of the robbery?”

“Yes.”

“May I see what came that day? I mean, do you still have it?”

Mrs. Maloney got up and rooted around the buffet top. “When was that?”

“Wednesday.”

“We get so much mail, none of it any good. Oh, here we go.” She wheeled around and handed him the stack of bills and the letter from Holy Footsteps Academy.

Detective Kurtz glanced at the bills, set them aside, and pulled out the fake letter from Holy Footsteps Academy.

“We threw away a letter you would probably love to see, to help you solve the crime.”

He stopped reading and looked up. “What letter?”

“It was a chain letter, a pyramid scheme that said we should send a dollar to a lot of people and say the Hail Mary and that something good would happen to us if we obeyed, and something bad would happen if we didn't.”

“What'd you do with it?”

“My husband threw it away,” she said shaking her head. “So far, nothing bad has happened.”

Detective Kurtz nodded and went back to reading Mimi's fake letter from Holy Footsteps Academy—the one saying they were looking forward to her arrival in the fall. He looked at the letterhead and content and signature. It seemed authentic. He folded it and slid it back in the envelope and looked at the address.

Then he saw it.

The postage stamp wasn't properly canceled. Not by a machine. It looked as though someone had drawn wiggly lines on it with a blue ink pen. This was not right. He didn't know what it meant, but this was significant. This was evidence and it was tied to Mimi. His heart beat faster.

“Did this come in the mail that day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you must be very proud of Mimi. That sounds like a good school.”

“Oh yes, Mimi's sister goes there.” Turning to the piano she called out, “Can't you play something more cheerful?” The funeral march was back to the main refrain, the part that sounds like “Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you.”

“May I please borrow this letter for our investigation?”

“Why, I don't know why not … if you think it might be important.”

“It's probably nothing.”

“Well, okay, if it will help you catch these robbers, you can have it. Do you also want the Laclede Gas bill?”

“No, ma'am, I got enough bills of my own.” They both laughed, and Detective Kurtz got up. Mrs. Maloney showed him to the door, and he walked to his car trying very hard not to smile. It was a very fine spring day.

THAT NIGHT THE GYMNASIUM was packed. Hundreds of adults sat in rows of metal folding chairs, waiting in the dark on the basketball court. Stage lights played on the red velvet curtains. The floor was sticky from slopped drinks, held in plastic cups by parents happier than they had been all week around their desks and dishwashers. A large, cheerful woman in pink dress sat before the upright piano down in front. The crowd applauded. She smiled and played a few exciting chords. Monsignor O'Day wandered out in front of the curtain, pretending to be lost. “Is this 10:30 Mass? I've never seen such a crowd.” Everyone laughed and applauded. He apologized for his limited talents, but promised that the Mothers' Club volunteers would carry the show. Then it was time for the national anthem. A row of cub scouts marched up the middle aisle in blue shirts and yellow neckerchiefs and put the flag in a gold stand. The piano player gave the introduction and everyone stood up with their hands on their hearts. Father Ernst was there next to an empty chair reserved for Detective Kurtz, who was running late. Miss Kleinschmidt limped in the gym as the crowd began to sing.

“Oh, say can you see …”

Running through dark back yards, Mimi, Patrick and Tony flanked around the rear of school. Mimi had a plan—to sneak into their classroom and set a booby trap for Miss Kleinschmidt. “It will help with the investigation,” she claimed. The boys obeyed. After kissing her that morning,
Tony just wanted to be with her again. Patrick went along hoping somehow they'd get caught. That way he and Tony could run away. The gold statue of Mary glowed in a spotlight against the first stars of a clear night. Parked cars packed the playground where just the other day kids had played Kill the Man with the Ball.

“Look who's coming,” Mimi whispered.

Sister Mathilda walked out of the nunnery on Sister Helen's arm, making her way past the parked Cutlass and up the exterior stone steps to the gymnasium.

“You have a good sense of balance for someone who can't see at all,” the principal said.

“I couldn't make it without you,” Sister Mathilda said. In her pocket was her secret rosary pouch with the keys to the Cutlass. She had retrieved it earlier in the day during her afternoon walk on the dog run line, and held the key under hot water in her bedroom, drying it off to get it good and clean for the moment of ignition. Her plan was to excuse herself to use the restroom during some interesting part of the show, when no one else would leave, so she could slip out to start the car and make sure the engine was ready for her approaching escape.

“O'er the lan-yand of the freeeeeeeee … and the home of the brave!”

Everyone clapped and sat back down and slugged back some more alcohol and jostled around to get comfortable for the show. This was it. The piano player started thumping her feet and plunking out some Irish chords, as the curtain rose. Scene One was an Irish village where the young priest played by Monsignor O'Day, wearing a black wig, sat on a stone well, talking to some farm girls played by three Mothers' Club volunteers in Irish dresses and red pigtail wigs.

“Father, it's nice of you to stop and draw water for us,” a farm girl said, “but what we really want to know is how to dance.”

“Oh, no I couldn't,” Monsignor O'Day said, “I'm on duty.”

“Oh, c'mon, no one will know,” they all said.

The crowd applauded. Monsignor O'Day got up from the well. “OK, if you promise not to tell the archbishop, I'll show you one little ditty.”

At that, the piano player rolled into an Irish jig and the crowd clapped to the beat. O'Day danced back and forth, kicking his legs, twirling from arm to arm with different farm girls. Their red pigtails swung over their shoulders.
Everyone was having a good time and then, the archbishop arrived on stage, played reluctantly by Father Maligan wearing long green vestments and a pointed hat.

“O'Day! You boozer, what are you doing? I should fire you!”

The piano player drummed some dramatic minor chords and the crowd laughed.

“I haven't been drinking,” O'Day told the archbishop, “I was just showing these girls the joy of the faith.”

“Well, that's joy enough. Get back to work, and you girls move it along, a storm's coming.”

The farm girls held out their hands and looked at the sky.

“But Archbishop, there are no clouds,” a farm girl said. “What storm?”

“Don't you birds read the paper? The storm clouds of war!”

Father Maligan got a cheat sheet from his pocket to read the lyrics to his song, which he had failed to memorize. The delay prompted O'Day to look at his watch and ad lib, “He'll find his spot in a minute … it's just like 6:30 Mass.”

The crowd laughed.

Maligan frowned but kept going. The piano player vamped into Maligan's song, a minor maelstrom of approaching armies that no man could stop.

Meanwhile, outside, Mimi, Patrick, and Tony spied from the edge of the fence toward the entrance to the gym. They could see a few parents smoking at the top of the exterior stone staircase. The orange tips of their cigarettes glowed as they watched the show through the open door. “We can't go in that way,” Mimi whispered, “Nobody can know we were here.”

“Right, let's try the side doors,” Tony said.

They darted through the shadows around the nunnery toward the school, checking doors, but finding them all locked. When they saw a second-story boys' restroom window open a crack—above the bike racks—Mimi told Patrick and Tony to lean one of the bike racks against the building as a ladder. It was twenty-foot long heavy metal rack, but the boys hoisted it against the stone wall beneath the window.

“Ladies first,” Tony said with a sweeping gesture from Mimi up the ladder.

Up she went, with the boys watching her butt as she reached the window. To Tony, it was a moment of pure butt. But to Patrick, it was butt mixed
with sadness. If it weren't for that butt, he thought, and all of Mimi's other charms and schemes, he and Tony would probably have been caught by now for the snow globe theft, and they'd have left town on a freight train. As Mimi pushed the window open wider, wriggling around talking bossy to it—“Get up now, I'm in charge”—Patrick felt he had not only betrayed Tony by kissing her, but also betrayed his own longstanding engagement to the tracks.

The problem was that sometimes around Mimi, Patrick couldn't even remember his feelings for the tracks. To be near Mimi made the idea of running away on a boxcar seem pointless. By kissing her, he had taken a step toward being an ordinary boy—a boy who would go to high school, then college, and get married. Maybe even get a job downtown. Mimi was a dangerous girl to be around.

“How's it comin' up there, babe?” Tony called up the ladder.

Babe?

Patrick realized—again—that unless they got caught and soon, there was little hope of Tony ever running away with him.

“I got it,” she whispered. Her arms pushed up the window and she pulled herself into the dark boys' room. Then her face popped out grinning down on the boys. “C'mon.”

Tony climbed up first eager to ascend the ladder to Mimi. Then it was Patrick's turn. He got about halfway up, when he noticed the headlights of a car swinging in the driveway in the front of the school. It was a police car headed his way. Patrick considered—for a split second—lagging behind to get caught. But that was no good. What he needed was to get caught with Tony. Patrick squirreled up to the top.

The patrol car, driven by Detective Kurtz, cruised up the driveway toward the bike racks. Kurtz was chewing gum, listening to the police radio for any fresh dispatches on juvenile crime, when he looked over and saw the bike rack leaning against the building. That's odd. His eyes ran up the ladder and caught the flash of a boy's tennis shoe flitting in the window.

“IT'S THEM,” Detective Kurtz said. Whipping his patrol car to a stop, he got out and ran over to the bike rack and started to climb up. Inside the dark Boys room, Mimi, Tony, and Patrick spied down on him and looked at each other. They knew what to do without saying it. All three of them reached up and shut the window, then Mimi locked it.

“Damn.” Detective Kurtz scampered backwards, but his weight was too much. The bike rack skidded down the side of the building and flopped him on the ground. He sprung up cursing. His elbow in a short-sleeved shirt was scraped bloody. “Tonight's the night you little bastards.”