All Sales Fatal (23 page)

“Captain Woskowicz said if I played ‘the mommy card’ he’d fire me,” she said, straightening and putting the can on the desk with a clink. “I don’t want favors because I’m a single mom.” She tried for a glare, but the hope in her eyes undermined it.

“We all have lives outside work,” I said. “Some folks have aging parents to care for or children or pets. Some have hobbies that consume their lives and require time off. Rick Sencenbaugh is running a marathon next week, you know, and we’ve worked his shifts so he can do it without taking vacation days.”

“I thought he was doing a triathlon,” Vic said.

“Whatever. One of those races no sane person would tackle.”

That earned a small quirk of her lips. Encouraged, I said, “So, I’m sure we can work your schedule around swings, especially if you’re willing to do the night shift on occasion?”

“Any time,” she said. “Nights work for us because then Josie Rae spends the night at Bree’s, and I pick her up and we do McDonald’s for breakfast before I take her to school. I sleep while she’s in school, and then we have time together after school so I can help her with her homework, take her to soccer practice, and all that.”

“Let’s do it, then,” I said, standing.

“I applied for the director of security job, you know,” Vic said, almost as if challenging me to renege on my promise to rework the schedule.

“I know. You told me.”

“I’m not withdrawing my name.”

“Who asked you to?” I said it with a smile and was pleased to see her shoulders relax slightly. I imagined they
got tired, what with carrying that chip—more like a boulder—around all the time.

“Okay, then.” She nodded and turned to focus on the monitors.

“Okay.”

Eighteen

Changing into jeans
and a green sweater half an hour later, I went off shift and strolled down to the Pete’s wing, glad that my knee appeared to be doing better. I poked my head into Make-a-Manatee where a birthday party was in full swing, a dozen eight- or nine-year-olds gathered around the table in the back, their faces smeared with cake and ice cream. Each had a newly stuffed animal friend perched nearby. Empty two-liter soda bottles in a recycling bin said the kids had mainlined enough sugar to keep them high for hours. A mom about my age tried in vain to wipe off their hands with moist towelettes.

“Mike around?” I asked her.

She barely looked up from smudging blue icing off a boy’s lips. “The rest of the parents were supposed to stay for the party,” she said balefully. “Not dump the kids and go for a latte or run errands. I can’t ride herd on all these kids. The store should provide more supervision. Cleo won’t be having any more parties here, I can tell you.”

“I don’t blame you. Mike?”

“In the back.”

I walked around the long partition that separated the sales area from the stockroom and office. Stacked boxes crowded the musty-smelling stockroom, unstuffed animal skins peeking out of the tops of some of them. I found Mike on the phone in the tiny office, his back to me.

“—and the Nuggets by eight,” he said. After a slight pause, he said, his voice pinched, “I know. You made it crystal clear that—”

He turned as he spoke and saw me standing in the doorway. He juggled the phone and almost dropped it. Smiling, I gestured and backed away to show him I’d wait until the end of his conversation.

“I’ve gotta go, Clark. You and Mary are still coming for dinner Friday night, right?” He waited for an answer and then hung up and returned the phone to its charger.

“My brother-in-law,” he said with a strained smile. “He’s a Spurs fan. I tried to talk Mary out of marrying him because of it, but she loves the guy.” He shrugged in a “what can you do?” way. “What’s up, EJ?” He frowned as a shriek penetrated the partition. “Sounds like World War III. I’d better get out there.”

“Just a quick question, Mike. Do you remember hearing anything that sounded like a gunshot or backfire last Tuesday?” It was a long shot—surely, someone would have reported a gunshot if Celio had been killed during business hours?—but maybe it had happened late, when most of the shoppers were gone, and the merchants would remember hearing something unusual.

He cocked his head. “A gunshot?”

“Or backfire.”

“This is about that kid who got shot, right? Maybe terrorists got him, EJ. The
Post
had an article not long ago
about how terrorists may be targeting American malls. Is that what this is about?” He looked worried, blinking myopically from behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

Captain Woskowicz had gone to the FBI board when that article came out and used it to argue that the security force should be allowed to carry weapons. The board shot down the idea—so to speak—hinting that the chance of shoppers being accidentally wounded by an armed security guard was greater than the risk of a terrorist incident. I had to agree with them.

“Unlikely,” I said, not wanting to spell out my sus-picions.

“I don’t remember anything. But then”—he gestured toward the sales floor where a couple of the kids were apparently arguing about whose shark stuffie was meaner—“it gets pretty loud in here sometimes.”

“I’ve been in firefights that were quieter,” I said, grinning.

He smiled back and walked around the partition, his leg cast thunking with each step. “And less dangerous,” he said as a cupcake splatted into the wall by his head.

I left as he waded in to help the mom corral the exuberant third-graders. I strolled into Starla’s Styles, wanting to talk to Starla, but a clerk told me she’d left for the day. When I floated my question about gunshots or unusual noises, the clerk looked at me blankly. “I’m new,” she said.

With a sigh, I told her good night and headed for the parking lot. I drove home, greeted Fubar, and began making dinner, all the while sifting through what I knew about the two recent deaths. I was 90 percent convinced Captain Woskowicz had shot Celio Arriaga, although I was damned if I knew why. Could he and Celio have been in cahoots on some sort of theft? Had Captain W disabled the cameras so they could remove merchandise from that wing without
being observed? I didn’t see much street value in cases of nail polish, stuffing-less manatee carcasses, Etch A Sketches, or fake bling. There’d be significant street value in the guns from Pete’s, but those couldn’t walk out of the store without Colin Garver noticing and, I presumed, reporting the theft.

I whisked a Caesar dressing in a bowl and poured it over the crisp romaine I’d already torn up. Fubar looked disappointed until I began to broil a salmon fillet to top the salad. Assuming Woskowicz killed Celio, who shot Woskowicz? Was there a third party involved in whatever they’d been up to at the mall? There had to be, I reasoned. Maybe all of the Niños Malos? Could one of them have killed Woskowicz, either because he double-crossed them or in revenge for Celio’s death? Certainly. Gang members killed if you looked at them funny or wore the wrong colors or crossed the street in the wrong place.

Sitting down to eat my salad, Fubar hovering hopefully under my chair, I wished I knew someone who might have more insight into Captain Woskowicz. Wait a minute… my fork stopped halfway to my mouth. His ex-wives! They probably knew him better than anyone. A glance at my watch told me it was only six thirty. I didn’t know how to find Nina or Paula at this hour, but I knew from the commercials that Dealin’ Dwight’s was open until nine.

I pulled into
the used car lot just before seven. A kajillion watts of light blazed from lampposts spaced closely together, turning the dusk into full daylight. A handful of potential car buyers ambled from car to car, checking out sticker prices, salespeople in their wake. A bigger-than-life-sized cutout of Dealin’ Dwight greeted visitors at the showroom door. The cardboard Dwight had his hand outstretched as
if to shake hands… or take your money. I had barely registered off-white tile, the odors of oil and stale coffee, and the hiss of pneumatic tools when a skinny man with a prominent Adam’s apple vectored toward me like a missile locked on target.

“I’m looking for Aggie,” I said, forestalling his sales pitch.

“Oh. On the lot.” He jerked his thumb toward a side door.

“Thanks.” I drifted along a row of used vans until I spied Aggie. Her red hair was like a beacon, especially when spotlit by a nearby lamppost. She was talking to a young couple by the bumper of a van that looked like it had three hundred thousand miles on it. Miles racked up on a rutted llama track in the Andes. As I watched, she handed them her card and shook hands with each of them. I didn’t realize she’d seen me, but she headed straight for me after waving at the departing couple.

“They’ll be back,” she said confidently. “I can always tell. Expecting a baby, need a van.”

I thought putting a baby in that van constituted child endangerment, but I didn’t say so.

“You’re not looking for a car,” she stated, “so what do you want?”

Her tone wasn’t hostile, but she wasn’t brimming over with friendliness either. I knew if she spotted a likely buyer, she’d ditch me in an instant.

“Did you find that safe-deposit key you were looking for?” I asked.

She eyed me suspiciously. “Why, did you find one?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m actually here because I thought you might be able to tell me if you’d noticed anything different about Captain Woskowicz in the last few weeks. Was there something going on in his life? Did he seem nervous, afraid of something?”

“The cops asked me the same questions,” she said. “I told them I didn’t know of anyone who would want to shoot Wosko. Except maybe Paula. She was some kind of mad when he left her for me.”

“But that was several years ago, right?”

Aggie nodded grudgingly. “Yeah. And my guess is she’d rather kill me than him anyway. I don’t think she ever got over him, if you know what I mean.” She slapped at a mosquito on her arm.

“You’ve had time to think about it more since you talked to the police,” I said. “Has anything occurred to you?”

She slanted a look at me. “He seemed a little edgy the last couple of weeks,” she conceded. “But I put it down to the divorce getting finalized. He was pretty broken up about it.”

Hm. He hadn’t struck me as broken up; he’d been dating a good-looking reporter and getting it on with his ex-wives. “You left him?” That didn’t seem to be in keeping with his pattern of trading in one redhead for another every few years.

“Yeah. What goes around comes around, you know?” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“When you say he was ‘edgy,’ what do you mean?”

“Edgy. Snappy. Bit my head off for buying the wrong kind of beer. I wanted to try something different.” She dragged the toe of her chunky, low-heeled boot across the asphalt. “When my brother Billy came down, we went to a Bullets game and Wosko almost punched a guy who spilled popcorn in his lap. That wasn’t like him. Usually he was pretty easygoing.”

I raised my brows but kept silent. I’d never thought of Woskowicz as “easygoing.” Petty and lazy did not equal easygoing in my mind.

“Why are you so interested anyway?”

Aggie’s direct question took me by surprise. “He was my boss,” I said, stating the obvious. The breeze picked up, and I held my leather jacket closed. “I don’t like murder.” That sounded stupid and obvious, too, and I couldn’t blame Aggie for rolling her eyes. “I guess… I guess I really don’t like people getting away with something, thinking they can break the rules that the rest of us follow. It pisses me off.”

“I hear you,” Aggie said, nodding in agreement.

“And I don’t want people to be afraid to come to my mall. They shouldn’t see the word ‘murder’ and think ‘Fernglen.’”

Aggie snorted, but not unkindly. “‘Your’ mall—now you sound like Wosko.”

Eew. I barely refrained from gagging, making a mental note never to say “my mall” again. I saw Aggie’s eyes track toward the lot entrance, and I knew she’d spotted a likely customer. Before she could dash off, I asked, “What was important to Woskowicz? What did he care about?”

She held up three fingers. “Sex.” She folded down her ring finger. “Money.” Down went the middle finger. She wiggled her index finger up and down. “I guess that’s it,” she said after a moment. “Sex and money, not necessarily in that order.” Without another word she broke away from me, headed toward a teenager with his father. I didn’t envy her having to broker a compromise between the boy, who was drooling on a used Corvette, and the father, who was carefully inspecting a Honda Civic.

“If someone asked
you what I cared about, what would you say?” I asked Kyra half an hour later. We were sitting on the front porch of her aunt Harmony’s house, spooning ice cream out of the pint containers I’d picked up at a Giant supermarket on my way over. Kyra, having recently sold her
software company for a mint—she wrote programs that helped coaches make schedules and personalize training programs and I don’t know what all else—was between projects and had agreed not only to run Merlin’s Cave but also to live in Harmony’s house during her aunt’s so-called sabbatical.

Small and quirky, not unlike its owner, the house was more of a bungalow. When the house was built in the mid-1800s, it stood alone, west of Vernonville. Now, it was on the edge of the Vernonville town center; the town had expanded to swallow it up. Painted a soft blue, it had lavender trim Kyra hated and, reputedly, a resident ghost, a woman killed for allegedly helping slaves escape their owners via the Underground Railroad.