Grave Apparel (43 page)

“It must be someone at
The
Eye
. The assailant is always close to home,
Smithsonian,”
he said.
“Every
police reporter
knows
that.”

“That lets you out,
doesn’t
it?”
Lacey
laughed.
“You
were
never
a police reporter!
You
just
watch
the
detectives
on
TV.”

“What about our
office
jinx?”

“Harlan
Wiedemeyer?
You
can’t
be
serious.”

“He’s
bad
news,”
Johnson insisted.
“Everyone knows
that.”
“There’s
no such thing as a jinx. Ask
Mac.”
The thought of
poor
lovestruck
Harlan
whaling
on
Cassandra
with
a
candy
cane
was
preposterous.
Wiedemeyer
was
as meek as a mouse. Besides, Cassandra
was
in top shape and mounted on her
bicy
cle, versus a tubby little guy whose only daily exercise was hefting
boxes
of
Krispy
Kreme doughnuts from the Metro sta tion to the
office.

“And,”
Johnson
continued,
“Wiedemeyer
is
Pickles’s
boyfriend.
He could
have
been doing her dirty
work
for
her.”

“Harlan
was
wearing antlers, not a Santa
cap.”

“Big deal. He ditched the hat and put on the antlers to
throw
people
off
the
track.”

“Yeah,
good idea, so
he’d
stick out in a
crowd
where
every
one
was
wearing Santa
hats.”
Lacey
wiggled her
fingers
over
her
head,
antlersstyle.
“And
the
antlers
lit
up,
just
so
you
couldn’t
forget
him.”

Johnson closed his mouth
tightly.
Lacey
folded her arms and stared him
down.

“Maybe
Wiedemeyer
didn’t
do it. But does he
have
an alibi? Does Pickles?” He got to his feet and stomped
off.
“Find out.
That’s
all for
now.”

Ha! As if
they
were some sort of team,
Lacey
thought. Or
worse,
as if Johnson were her boss on this
story.
Mac thought
they
should
work
together?
What on
earth was
he
thinking?

Lacey
sat back
down
at her desk and called
Wendy
Townsend
at the Garrison of Gaia
offices.
She
was
just
leaving,
but
she said
Lacey
could stop by the house shortly;
she’d
be there in twenty minutes. Because
Lacey
had suggested to the boorish Johnson that
Cassandra’s
roommates might
have
some interest ing information, maybe she should
observe
them in their
native
habitat,
the
“crowded
commune,”
as
Henderson
Wilcox
had
called
it.
Not
for
Peter
Johnson,
but
for
herself.
This
story
seemed to
keep
demanding that
Lacey
get
involved
with it,
but
she
was
determined
to
work
her
own
angles,
not
his.
And
maybe Jasmine
would
call, and
Lacey
could try to “reel her
in.”
Lacey
didn’t
care
how
Cassandra
lived,
but
perhaps
she
could get some sort of feeling for the dynamics between the housemates. She took a moment to freshen her
makeup
and call
Vic.
Even
though
they
didn’t
see each other
every
day,
she
was
getting
awfully
used
to
him
being
around.
He
was
working
tonight,
but
he told her to stay safe and to call him if she needed him. She caught a cab to the Mount Pleasant
neighborhood,
where Cassandra and the others
lived.

Wendy
Townsend
met
Lacey
at the door of the small
town
house and ushered her into the front room.
Wendy
was
wearing a green and white Garrison of Gaia sweatshirt and gray
leg
gings that bagged on her thin frame.
Thankfully,
her perfume had
faded
a little during the
day.
The toxic cloud
was
gone,
but
the
powerful
memory
of
the
jungle
gardenia
lingered
on.
Lacey
tried not to wrinkle her nose.

The house
was
long and
narrow,
with a
tiny
living/dining
area and kitchen on the
first
floor and bedrooms and bath up
stairs.
It
could
have
been
fabulous
with
some
tender
loving

care,
Lacey
thought.
There
was a
fireplace
with
a
beautiful
wooden
mantel and a
crown
molding and chair rail around the room,
but
someone had slapped a coat of flat dingy apartment white paint on
everything
long ago and
now
it
was
chipped and
dirty.
It
looked
cheap and forlorn.

Decorated
in
early
castoffs
and
late
Salvation
Army,
the
room
was
also full of cardboard
boxes.
This
was
not the kind of place in which
company
would
be afraid to spill something on the carpet; it
was
so stained
Lacey couldn’t
even
put a name to its colo
r
.
Maybe
“grun
g
e
.
”
T
w
o sturdylooking bi
k
es hung on the
wall
near the front
door.
A
variety
of helmets dangled from a
wooden
rack meant for hats and coats.
Lacey
wondered
where
Cassandra’s
crumpled
bike
had ended up.

She focused her attention on the lone framed object on the
wall.
It
was
a
newspaper
clipping of
Wendy
with her
fist
in the
air,
being hauled out of a tree by police. The headline
read,
TREE
DWELLING
ECO
ACTIVIST
DEFIANT
AS
POLICE
SHUT
DOWN

PROTEST
.
The
article
detailed
her
efforts
to
save
the
tree
from
a
logging
company
by
living
in
it
for
as
long
as
it
took.
Wendy
lost
her
struggle,
and
her
tree,
but
gained
notoriety.
Lacey
didn’t
read
the
entire
thing,
but
she
got
the
gist.
You
might
fault
their
methods,
she
thought,
but
not
their
commitment.

“My finest
hour,”
Wendy
said. “That poor tree. Come
sit
down.”
The
woman
had a hungry quality that had nothing to do
with
her
being
too
thin.
She
stood
too
close
to
people
and
watched
them too closely when
they
spoke.
There
was
a desper ately needy undertone to her kinetic
behavior,
almost
devour
ing. Her smile seemed
like
the prelude to a shark attack.

A large yellow dog lay sprawled on a bedspreadcovered
sofa.
The spread
was
covered
in a second spread of dog
hair.
When the dog
growled
and
moved
into attack position,
Lacey
didn’t
know
whether to run or stand her ground.

“Bruno! Good boy! Bruno likes
you,”
Wendy
said as
she
wrangled the animal
off
the
sofa,
down
the hall, and through a
door
to
the
basement,
which
she
slammed.
The
dog
barked
loudly.
He sounded
angry.
“Don’t worry about Bruno. He’ll calm
down
soon.
Have
a
seat.”

Lacey
looked
at the
sofa
and considered
how
her heather tweed skirt
would
look
covered
in
yellow
fur.
It
was
tweed,
but
still.
“Allergies,”
she said, indicating the
sofa.
Lacey
liked
dogs,

but
she preferred dogs whose
owners
were acquainted with
vac
uum cleaners. The angry barking continued.

“Ah.
Too
bad. One of those people, are you?”
Wendy
re turned with a chrome chair from the kitchen, on which
Lacey
gratefully sat, after
giving
it a wipe with her hand.
“Allergies.
You
probably
grew
up in a sterile
environment.
You
really need more contact with animals, not less.
Desensitization.”

“Perhaps
some
other
time.”
The
imprisoned
Bruno
body
slammed the basement
door,
shaking the whole house. He fol
lowed
up with furious barking, which matched the pounding of
Lacey’s
heart.

“Pay
no attention to the little
doggie,”
Wendy
said. “He just
wants
to
play.”

“Sounds more
like
he
wants
to
have
me for
dinner.”
Lacey
clenched the chair with her hands and tried to calm her racing pulse.

“You’re
not
worried
about Bruno?”
Wendy’s
highpitched giggle sounded as if it could slide right into a
sob.
“He’s
just a big
wuvvable
doggiewoggie.”
She
sprawled
on the
sofa
arms akimbo, heedless of the dog
hair.
Wendy’s
sweatshirt had a nice
even
coat of
Bruno’s
fur.