Book of Nathan (8 page)

Chapter 5

“I
worked it out.” Doug Kool’s I-can-do-anything air triggered my gag reflex. “A
woman named Agnes works in women’s apparel at Nordstrom’s. Ask for her.”

It was the morning of my second day in Orlando, and there
wasn’t a lot to do before delivering Twyla to Universal Studios at three p.m.
But the prospect of picking out clothes for Manny Maglio’s niece didn’t thrill
me.

“No charge for whatever goes out the door,” Doug explained.
“But whoever the hell Agnes is—she gets the final say. Nordstrom’s willing to
foot the bill—but there’s a limit.”

“Fine.”

“Remember, Bullet, this was your call,” my pal reminded me.
“You’re the one who thinks Twyla should look like Miss Prim.”
 

I didn’t appreciate getting blamed instead of stroked for
suggesting Twyla needed a makeover. I liked even less the extra day and night I
was stuck in Orlando, waltzing around a blood relative of a mob boss.
   

“So, how’d your little jailhouse confab go?” Doug asked,
trying to defuse my aggravation.

The tactic didn’t work. I gave Doug an abbreviated account
of yesterday’s developments, but my delivery was close to caustic. The saga of
the blue car slamming into the white van came out sounding too much like a CSI
episode.

“Think your boy’s telling the truth?” was Doug’s reaction.

“He’s not my boy.”

“He’s a Looney Tune is what he is.”

“He’s not a liar.”

“People who play with half a deck tend to see and hear
strange things,” Doug reminded me.

“Not the kind of things Zeus talked about yesterday
afternoon.”
 

“If you say so,” Doug said in a tone that meant
you’re an idiot.
“So where do you go from here?”

“I don’t know. Thinking about next steps isn’t easy when the
rest of the morning has to be spent looking for ladies’ garments!”

“I feel your pain,” Doug said. “Look, maybe I can help with
the Zeus situation. There are a few people in Orlando who have a knack for
poking around. Could be I might get you a lead on the van that supposedly had a
disagreement with a bridge abutment.”

Doug and the devil had a lot in common. Take something from
Satan and he holds a mortgage on your soul. Take something from Doug and it’s
an account payable that’s going to be collected somewhere down the line. If I
accepted his offer of help, I’d be signing an I-owe-you. Still, there was no
denying that Douglas was connected to people in all the right—and wrong—places.

“Yeah, okay. See what you can find out.”

“Will do. And good luck this morning. Make sure you’re at
Universal on time this afternoon.”

I huffed into the phone.

“Oh, and Bullet, after you and Twyla finish at Universal,
give me a call.”

Doug’s final words perked up my watch-out
antennae. “Why?” I croaked. But all I
got in return was a dial tone.
 

Agnes

I ran my eyes up from the stylish nametag to the face of a
woman who looked like Miss Vateroli, my first-grade teacher—the Ayatollah
Homeni of America’s public school system.

“Mr. Bullock?” Agnes had one of those voices that was so
husky you couldn’t tell whether it was male or female.
 

“Yes, ma’am.” At Hampton Meadows Elementary School, this is
when I usually wet my pants. I brought my legs together and squeezed.

“Come with me,” she ordered.
 

I hand-signaled my squad to move forward. The troops paraded
single file behind Agnes as she headed toward a semiprivate nook. Bringing up the
rear was Yigal Rosenblatt, who had decided to make a day of it with his
newfound friends. Apparently, building a defense for Miklos Zeusenoerdorf
didn’t require a lot of time.

“I’ve been given instructions to provide you with personal
services—” Agnes began but suddenly stopped and gasped for breath when she took
in a full view of Manny Maglio’s niece. “Oh dear.”

“I think someone called you about helping Twyla here with
her wardrobe,” I said.
 

“Twyla?” Agnes wheezed. “They told me to expect a Miss Tharp.”

“That’s right. Twyla Tharp.”

“But Twyla Tharp does the Joffrey—the American Ballet
Theatre.” Agnes began hyperventilating in a refined sort of way.

“This is a different Twyla,” I explained. The understatement
of the morning.

Agnes’s confusion quickly gave way to suspicion. “May I have
a word in private?” She led me to a neutral corner. “Mr. Bullock, do you have
so much as an iota of fashion sense?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Your friend
—
”

I read between the lines and corrected Agnes on the spot.
“She’s not my friend. She’s the niece of someone with a lot of influence. I was
asked to chaperone her for a couple of days.”

“Do you have any
idea
of what she’s wearing?”

“From what Ms. Tharp told me, it’s a liquid metallic tank
dress that she ordered from a Ten Thousand Temptations catalogue. I don’t know
where she got the shoes, though. She calls them centerfold spike heels.”

“This isn’t a joke, is it?” Agnes asked.

The mere thought of playing a practical joke on someone who
was a carbon copy of my first-grade teacher made me shiver. “No.”

Agnes studied me carefully. “If this isn’t some kind of
boorish trick, then we have a great deal of work to do.”

“I think you’ll find Ms. Tharp to be a very easy customer.”

“First, she’s hardly a customer. She’s paying for nothing,
from what I’ve been told. Second, easy
is
exactly what she looks like.”

I released a low whistle, a tension-releasing habit that got
its start thirty-five years ago when my grade school teacher walked into the
classroom with a three-foot toilet comet stuck to one of her Red Cross shoes.
For that little transgression I got thirty minutes in a corner. I wondered what
the penalty might be now.

“This is all extra work for me,” Agnes snarled. “If I
suspect this is some mean-spirited attempt to humiliate me, you and your
friends will be shown the door. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do. This is not a practical joke, I promise.”

Agnes marched back to Twyla and yanked her into the women’s
dressing room. The rest of us milled aimlessly around racks of women’s garments
for the next hour. Occasionally, we saw Agnes carry several armfuls of clothing
in and out of the dressing room. The woman was flushed and one side of her bun
had come loose. When she finally brought Twyla back to us, Manny Maglio’s niece
was still wearing her tank dress with built-in shelf bra.

“I have good news and bad news,” Agnes announced.

“There’s good news?”

“Some. I found two outfits that will make Ms. Tharp
presentable for most kinds of office work. The first is a Donna Morgan bouclé
skirt suit. It has a Peter Pan collar with rounded lapels.”

Agnes waited for a reaction. Nothing.

“The second is a Kenneth Cole pantsuit. The jacket has a
Mandarin collar and button-loop. It’s trimmed with printed charmeuse.”

Not one of us knew what Agnes was talking about.

“Ms. Tharp and I found it difficult to agree on shoes,”
Agnes said. “She favors the spiked heel and I tend to be more conformist.”
 

Doc, Yigal, and I inspected Agnes’s plain brown flats. We
shook our heads in agreement.

“We settled on a pair of Via Spiga pumps,” Agnes said. “Plus
a very expensive pair of Bruno Magli Doolittles.”

“I told Agnes I didn’t want the shoes because they remind me
of my uncle,” Twyla interjected.

“Your uncle?” Doc Waters asked.

“Uncle Manny. Manny Maglio.”

“These are Bruno
Magli
Doolittles,
not Maglios,” Agnes said. “In fact, I’m not familiar with the Maglio line. Is
he a designer?”

Twyla looked at Agnes like she was from Zanzibar. “Manny
Maglio. The Mob boss. He’s a thief and a murderer. You’ve heard of him, right,
Bullet?”

Doug had warned me that Twyla was never, ever to know I had
a connection to Uncle Manny. I tried playing dumb.

“I’ve heard of him, of course.” Then I threw in a lie. “I
had no idea you were Mr. Maglio’s niece, Twyla.”

“Well, I am,” she bubbled. “Of course I don’t like him much
because he’s a mean s.o.b. A very mean man.”

“Sounds like someone I wouldn’t want to meet.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Agnes looked at Doc Waters, hoping a man with a mop of white
hair and an unmistakable professorial look might haul her back into the world
of the sane. But all Doc did was close his eyes.

“I gather, then, that Mr. Maglio does not make accessories.”

“He’s been an accessory,” Twyla revealed. “Three times, in
fact. But they never got the charges to stick.”

We needed to move on. “You said you had some bad news,
Agnes?”

The woman looked ten years older than when we first met her.
The left side of her mouth quivered and her bun had disintegrated into
something that looked like a hairy Slinky. “Bad news?”

“Yes, you said there was some bad news.” I gave Agnes a
worried look. A few more minutes of this nuttiness and she might go over the
edge. For her sake and mine, I wanted to get my tribe and me out of Agnes’s
life as soon as possible.

Yes, there’s bad news.” The old disagreeable Agnes had
returned. “Both Ms. Tharp’s suits are going to require alterations.” She put
her hands on her hips. “Plan to pick them up tomorrow morning.”

I sucked in a lungful of purified Nordstrom’s air. “That
won’t do. The reason we’re here is for Ms. Tharp to have at least one of those
dresses—”

“Suits, Mr. Bullock.”

“Regardless, one of those things has to be ready to wear in
time for Ms. Tharp to make a meeting at three o’clock this afternoon.”

“Quite impossible.”

“I can help out, Miss Agnes,” Twyla piped up. “I love to
sew. My friends tell me I stitch like a bitch.”

Agnes may have had the same vision as I did because her
knees began to wobble.
  

“Nothing leaves this store unless our staff does the
necessary alterations.”
  

I could see the rigidity setting in. If I didn’t act pronto,
the woman’s rigor mortis could make the entire Nordstrom visit futile.

“Could we talk?” I asked, leading her to the same neutral
corner where my waste-management system had nearly broken down more than an
hour ago.

“Nordstrom’s has a tailor somewhere on the premises?” I
inquired.

“We have a seamstress in our department, but she’s
completely backed up . . .”

I cut her off. “Manny Maglio.”

“What?”

“The Manny Maglio that Miss Thorpe was talking about a
couple of minutes ago. He’s a very dangerous man who has a connection to your
store. You don’t want to lose your job, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then we have to make sure Ms. Tharp is dressed in her new
wardrobe by two p.m. at the latest.”
 

“Yes, but—”

“There can’t be any ‘buts.’ Somebody has put a boot on
Nordstrom’s neck. They want Ms. Tharp to show up in the right clothing for an
interview she has later today.”

Irritation and anger turned Agnes’s eyes to little balls of
fire. “The garments will be altered, and you can pick them up after lunch,” she
said quietly. “No earlier than one thirty.” She turned her back and vanished
behind a rack of Eileen Fisher dresses.