Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (6 page)

I was surprised to hear Babe talking this way. I’d never given
ex-cons and prison recidivism much thought, even less than countertops, but it seemed that Babe had.

“You see those tables and chairs outside?” she said. “Look pretty good, don’t they? They’re con jobs—refinished by convict labor.”

“Are you kidding me?”

She wasn’t. She’d heard about the program from Ms. Baldino, one of the town librarians. Apparently all the benches at the library had been refinished by convicts, too. Who knew?

“They learn a craft, make a few bucks, and maybe find a different line of work when they get out instead of whatever got them locked up. Everybody wins.” I hadn’t realized convict labor still existed in this century. It seemed so Dickensian. But I suppose I was being naive. There were a lot of things I hadn’t experienced either chained to my desk in New York or buried in my gardens in Springfield.

After mopping up every last crumb on my plate, I got up to leave. Again I did reconnaissance in the parking lot. Countertop Man was gone, and I felt foolish for ever having been suspicious. Since it was later I went straight to the nursery and bagged the idea of going to Caroline’s. I would see her tomorrow.

I love nurseries, no matter what time of year it is. My new favorite was D’Angelo’s, forty minutes west of Springfield, on the other side of the Paradise. The owners did their best to make the place a destination even though gardening season was winding down. They geared up for Halloween with hayrides, a haunted house, mountains of pumpkins and ornamental kale, and a fall sale on perennials that would save me dough and time next season. As long as everything was well watered, fall was an even better time to plant than spring because it gave plants the chance to establish themselves before the growing season kicked in.

I pulled out my shopping list and dragged around a flatbed dolly with uncooperative wheels, piling on threes and fives of my favorites. I stalked the false lamiums.

No matter how hard I tried not to, I invariably fell in love with some plant or shrub that wasn’t on my list and would put me over budget or, worse, that I didn’t have an appropriate place or client for. Early in my gardening career I’d killed a few spectacular plants by making rash purchases. I still had their sap on my hands and mourned them every time I went to the nursery and saw a magnolia ‘Edith Bogue’ or a hibiscus ‘Lord Baltimore’ like the ones I’d killed—as if these shrubs knew what I’d done to their brethren, and would somehow punish me for it if I took one of them home.

I was struggling to lift a lovely but totally unnecessary Japanese cutleaf maple onto my cart when a white pickup pulled into the garden center. Was it the creepy guy from the diner? I hunkered down and hid behind the tree, kicking myself for not having chosen a wider shrub that would have made a more effective screen. I left my cart where it was and crawled on all fours behind a lush, and thicker, miscanthus. I peered around the plant and saw first, work shoes, then a pair of denimed knees, and a beaded belt that claimed the wearer loved, or more precisely “hearted,” Guatemala.

“May I assist you with something?” The man’s T-shirt identified him as a nursery employee. What could I say? “No, thank you, I’m hiding because I think I see an ex-con who doesn’t know a countertop from a kayak?” Nah.

“I think I lost something,” I lied and patted the gravel, which had by then had stuck to my hands and made little pockmarks in my palms. The nursery employee bent down to help me look.

“What was it?”

Yeah. What was it? Wallet? Keys? Nope, too big and too noisy.

“An earring…No! They’re both here! Boy, that’s lucky.” I grabbed both of my ears.

He stood and was polite enough not to ask the obvious question: Why are you still crouched on the ground if you didn’t lose your earring?

I mumbled something about my back, my age, my sciatica, and my inability to stand up fast without the blood rushing to my head and making me dizzy. I rattled off so many fictitious ailments it’s a wonder the man didn’t ask where my caregiver was.

I made a show of getting up slowly, eyeballing the garden center and looking for the white pickup that I thought belonged to Countertop Man. I saw one idling, all the way to the right in the back lot where pros were shoveling mulch and compost into their trucks.

“Are you taking the maple, senorita?” the man asked when he was sure I was okay.

“No, I’ve changed my mind. I was looking for the false lamiums. Are they in yet?” Right…I mistook a tree for a perennial.

“Maybe our next shipment,” he said. “Try again in a few days.”

“Just these plants, then.” The man pushed my cart to the checkout desk for me, walking at a funereal pace in deference to my wretched physical condition until we reached the outside counter, where yet another employee would tally my purchases and hand me a slip to take inside to the cashier. Everyone’s a specialist.

I glanced to the right and saw the white pickup turn around and come barreling toward us. I leaned back slightly so that my face was hidden behind a scarecrow and a towering stack of baled hay.

The Guatemalan nursery employee who had helped me saw me lean backward and must have thought I was fainting. He screamed for someone inside to call 911, and in a clumsy attempt to catch me wound up knocking over the hay bales, the scarecrow, and me on top of them. From my horizontal position in the driveway, I saw the truck pass, with two Hispanic garden workers and what looked like a mixed-breed Lab inside, none of whom I’d ever seen before. All of them, even the dog, appeared to be laughing.

I laughed myself the next morning as I drove to Babe’s, thinking about the disturbance I’d created at the nursery, but as I approached the diner, I saw a cluster of Springfield police cars with their lights flashing. All the cops I knew walked across the road to the Paradise. Either someone was having a retirement breakfast or something bad had happened, and I was afraid it was the latter.

I pulled closer and saw a man being handcuffed and led over to one of the cars by Sergeant Mike O’Malley, a Springfield cop I’d gotten to know in the last few years. Not in the biblical sense, but Lucy and Babe still gave it a fifty-fifty chance.

I instantly recognized the vest and sweatshirt on the person now being helped into the patrol car; it was Countertop Man. With all the official vehicles in the lot, the only parking space still available was at the far end near a hair salon that I’d never seen anyone enter or exit. I took it, then jogged to Babe’s private office in the back of the diner, where I met Babe and Mike O’Malley.

“What’s going on? You okay? Was that Countertop Man?” I asked, pointing to the man in the patrol car. “I knew there was something fishy about that guy.”

“I thought you didn’t know him,” O’Malley said to Babe.

“He said his name but I don’t remember it. I know he likes black coffee and fried eggs and he asked me if my name was Brittany. He’s been in the last few days, that’s all. Said he worked for a countertop company downtown. I just feed them, Mike. I don’t ask for references.”

Then O’Malley asked what I knew about the man, but I didn’t have anything substantial to contribute other than my gut feeling, which didn’t seem fair to share with the police given that it was based on the guy’s inability to tell Formica from limestone, which was not a crime, although perhaps it should be. I spared Mike the nursery anecdote, since it no longer seemed all that funny.

“So you think he lied about being in the countertop business and he flirted with Babe and you thought that made him weird? Doesn’t everybody flirt with Babe?”

For my benefit Babe repeated what happened. “I closed up around 7
P.M.
last night—business was dead, so I came in early today, to make up for it. When I got here, I found that guy, whatever his name is, in my office, curled up on my inflatable bed. He scared the crap out of me, so I backed out of the room as quietly as I could, locked him in, and called the cops after I looked myself inside the diner.”

“It’s lucky he didn’t just wake up and run away,” I said.

“He did wake up, and busted my lock in the process, but I’d blocked the door with my SUV. He couldn’t get out. Even the windows are painted shut. I’ve been after Neil all summer to scrape them. Now I’m glad he didn’t get around to it.”

Countertop Man claimed to have left his ID in his other suit which was kind of funny since he didn’t strike any of us as a suit-and-tie kind of guy. All he’d said was that his name was Chase McGinley.
He was babbling in the back of the police cruiser, his head rocking back and forth in an animated argument with himself. Against the odds, he appeared to be losing.

McGinley said he’d just been sleeping one off someplace warm, but apparently he’d gone through Babe’s garbage, her files, and a bottle of Bombay gin before passing out on her sofa. When the cops cuffed him, he had bits of receipts, mail, and a picture of Babe and Neil crammed into his pockets.

“Identity theft?” I asked. “That’s a pretty low-tech way to do it, isn’t it?”

“Could be. Back in the day, people used to steal the carbon copies of credit card transactions. Not all the bad guys are computer savvy,” O’Malley said. “Some of them are just thieves.”

Identity theft was another thing I rarely thought about that had surfaced lately, along with convict labor, backsplashes, and my old dentist. The list was getting longer. I wasn’t even as fastidious as my eighty-seven-year-old aunt, who scrupulously shredded all her documents including sales flyers and newsletters from her congressman. I knew identity theft happened, but there were so many things I worried about before that—like my house payments or world peace or an infestation of bronze borers that would decimate my flowering dogwoods—that identity theft was way down on my list. “Who’d want to be me?” I had said. I had no dough and not much stuff.

“That’s not the way it works,” Mike had answered. “They’re not stealing stuff. They’re stealing your good credit rating. Your good name.” Maybe that was what Countertop Man was doing. Babe Chinnery’s name was gold in these parts and probably all over.

“You know, I drove by a few nights ago, when the diner was closed. I thought I saw something moving around behind the diner but I didn’t get out to investigate.”

“That was an uncharacteristically prudent thing to do,” Mike said.
This was a not-so-veiled reference to the way we first met, on a cold case I’d accidentally unearthed a few years earlier. “Do you think it was him?” he asked after a minute, now more curious. “Is that why you said he was weird?”

“I thought it was turkeys. If it was him, what on earth could he have been looking for for so many days? He was just creepy. Taking Babe’s picture and then insisting on guessing her name. And I’m pretty sure he would have followed me if I had left the diner. Call it intuition—just don’t say
women’s intuition
or I’ll have to smack you.”

At Mike’s suggestion, Babe had checked her office thoroughly to see if anything else was missing. The man had obviously gone through her things, but she couldn’t say what, if anything, he’d taken, other than the booze. She didn’t keep any jewelry or cash in the office, and since he was still there when the cops arrived, he couldn’t have left with anything unless it had been squirreled away on his person and neither of us wanted to stick around for the cavity search.

“It’s a good thing I don’t keep the Fabergé eggs here anymore, right?” At least she was getting her sense of humor back. Countertop Man saw us laughing and it infuriated him. He stuck his head out the window and yelled at us. “Why are you jerks arresting me? This is just a little criminal trespass. Kid stuff. I’ll be out before Oprah goes on.”

“Berry, tell that guy to quiet down or we’ll tack on disturbing the peace to the charges.”

Apparently, the man knew his law. And his daytime television. According to O’Malley, he’d be issued a summons and made to sign a PTA, a promise to appear in court. If he got “belligerent,” he might graduate to a $250 bond. But he’d still be let go, probably in just a few hours.

“Define belligerent,” I said.

“Broad definition.”

“That’s it?”

“What would you like me to do with him? We’ve done away with stocks and pillories in New England. No weapons; no damage, thank goodness; no physical harm to Babe. It’s like the man said, trespassing—a misdemeanor in the state of Connecticut. Forget Oprah, he may even be out before Martha goes on.”

O’Malley’s young partner was exasperated. He had no luck getting McGinley to shut up, and had gotten tired of trying. Finally he rolled up the window of the patrol car and came over to where Babe, Mike, and I had drifted near the side entrance to the diner.

“What’s he yapping about now?” O’Malley asked.

The younger cop looked uncomfortable.

“Go ahead,” Babe said, smiling. “We’ve heard four-letter words before.”

“That’s not it, ma’am. He said, ‘She’s the damn criminal. She’s the one you want.’ He thinks we should arrest Mrs. Chinnery.”

O’Malley simply closed his eyes for a second or two with a look that suggested this was as novel an excuse for trespassing as he’d ever heard.

“Didn’t he like the food?”

False or not, Babe’s lamiums had finally arrived. They wouldn’t look like much until the following spring, so I filled the bare spots with temporary fixes like annual grasses and mums that could stay in their black plastic pots until the winter came and we composted them. By that time, not too many people would be eating in Babe’s outdoor seating area anyway, and no one would notice if the garden was a little bare.

Right then, the diner’s business was booming. Indian summer had brought people out in droves and even inspired a few hardy souls to resurrect their long shorts and flip-flops, but not the Main Street Moms, who rarely strayed from their seasonal uniforms. I didn’t see Caroline Sturgis in either of the two packs of women at the picnic tables but expected to see her soon for our long-awaited business meeting. I was also mildly curious to learn if little Brandon’s DNA tests revealed he could keep up with his swimming lessons.