The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline (2 page)

Her father didn't interest Caroline much, because
he had moved to Des Moines when she was two years old and never wrote her any letters. She went to visit him now and then, and she liked his wife okay, but they made her baby-sit with their little boy. If Caroline wanted to baby-sit, she didn't need to go all the way to Des Moines.

Also in the mail for Ms. C. Tate was a catalogue from Publishers Central Bureau, which she would read later. Reading the descriptions of books was always interesting, even though she never had the money to buy any.

And there was something telling her "Congratulations C. Tate you may have won the
Reader's Digest
Sweepstakes." When she was younger, she used to believe that. Now she just tossed it into the wastebasket by the mail slot. Some of the other people in the building had already picked up their mail, apparently, because there were two other
Reader's Digest
letters in the wastebasket.

Caroline leaned over and looked at the wastebasket more closely. It could be a good source for investigative reporting. Stacy spent a lot of time in the basement of her building, wearing rubber gloves so that she wouldn't leave fingerprints, going through the trash.

Sure enough, there were two crumpled pieces of mail addressed to Frederick Fiske.

She left her mother's mail—all bills, addressed to Ms. J. Tate—on the hall table. But she stuffed Frederick Fiske's two letters into a pocket of her jeans. Frederick Fiske was the Mystery Man who lived on the fifth floor.

Caroline thumped the laundry down the front steps and out to the sidewalk. Billy DeVito was playing on the sidewalk with two stones and a piece of string. Billy DeVito was five and lived on the first floor.

"Hi, Billy. How's it going?"

Billy wrinkled his nose and thought for a minute. Caroline liked Billy because he always took things very seriously, even things like "How's it going?"

"Good," he said, finally. "I got me this string. It busted last night when it was playing 'Lady of Spain.'"

Most people wouldn't have understood what Billy DeVito was talking about. But Caroline did, because she knew a lot about the DeVito family. Investigating them had been easy; Mrs. DeVito liked to talk. Her husband played the violin in a Hungarian restaurant. He gave his broken violin strings to Billy.

Mr. DeVito's violin had cost four thousand dollars, and they had insurance on it. Mrs. DeVito had told Caroline once that she wished her husband's violin would be stolen; then the insurance company would pay them four thousand dollars, and they could buy a new living room set, and Mr. DeVito could get a job in the post office or something, like a normal person.

She didn't really mean that, though. She liked it that Billy's father played the violin in the Little Hungary Café. Some nights he brought home leftover food and they would light candles and pretend they were eating in a restaurant themselves, and he would play "Night and Day" on his violin, just for her. Someone who worked in the post office could never do that for his wife.

Caroline walked on down to the Laundromat on the corner. She loaded three machines, added detergent, put three quarters into each machine, and turned them on. The gray and white cat jumped down from the top of the drier where he'd been sleeping, and rubbed against her leg, purring.

"Hi, Cheery," said Caroline and scratched behind his ears.

No one knew whom the cat belonged to, or who fed him, or what his name really was. But the people who did their laundry at the Laundromat all called him Cheery, because he liked to roll in the little piles of spilled detergent on the floor; then he would jump on top of the drier and clean the detergent out of his whiskers and sneeze.

He didn't care what kind of detergent he rolled in. But it would have sounded stupid to call him All or Tide. So everybody called him New Blue Cheer. Cheery, for short.

Caroline glanced around to see who else was in the place this morning.

"Hello, Mrs. Kokolis," she called. "Are you starting to pack yet?"

Mrs. Kokolis smiled and kept on knitting. She was such a good knitter that she could talk and make complicated sweaters at the same time.

"Not yet," she said. "Soon, though."

Mr. and Mrs. Kokolis used to own the Greek restaurant across the street. They had come to the United States from Greece thirty years ago and had been saving, ever since their children grew up, to go back to Greece for a visit. Then Mr. Kokolis had died one day, very suddenly. He had been making stuffed grape leaves—his specialty—when he looked up, Mrs. Kokolis had told Caroline, and said, "Well. My goodness." Then he fell over and was dead, of a heart attack.

So Mrs. Kokolis was going to go back to Greece all alone. At least she said she was. But she never quite got around to doing it. She kept canceling her airline reservations.

"Soon, though," she kept saying.

"In June," she said, today. "June for certain."

Caroline smiled at Mrs. Kokolis. She watched a man putting his clothes into a drier. She giggled to herself. An Apatosaurus, she thought. He looks like an Apatosaurus.

It was true. He wasn't as
large
as an Apatosaurus, of course, because a real Apatosaurus would have filled
two
Laundromats and still had to stick its head out through a window.

But he was very tall, with a long neck and a nose
that looked too high on his face. He had buck teeth and a stupid look.

Caroline giggled again, remembering something. The Apatosaurus had two brains, both very small; so he wasn't at all smart. But his second brain was located in his bottom, right where his tail began.

The man putting his clothes into the drier didn't have a tail, of course. And Caroline was fairly certain that he didn't have a second brain in his behind. But he sure looked like an Apatosaurus.

It was surprising, the number of people who resembled dinosaurs.

No one else was in the laundry this morning except for a couple of teen-age girls reading magazines. Caroline checked to make sure that her laundry was going around in the washers. Then she sat down and took Frederick Fiske's mail out of her pocket.

She felt a little guilty, beginning to read it. But it was open, after all, and it had been in the wastebasket.

Anyway, investigators had to use any method possible to find out stuff. Stacy had reminded her of that often.

The first letter was simply boring. It was a note from the public library, reminding him politely that a book he'd checked out,
Forensic Toxicology,
was a month overdue. Caroline didn't know what "forensic toxicology" meant; it didn't sound very interesting. She stuffed that letter back into her pocket.

Then she read the second letter, and her head began to whirl, the way her laundry was whirling now in the washing machine.

Fred,
[the letter began]:

The woman's terrific. But the kids, frankly, seem more and more of a problem.
Eliminate
the kids. You can figure out a way.

Call me, and we'll have lunch and talk it over.

Carl

That was all. Caroline turned the envelope over and looked at the return address. Carl Broderick was the man's name, and he lived on East 52nd Street.

Why would a man on East 52nd Street be telling Frederick Fiske to murder some children?

Caroline dialed Stacy's number as soon as the laundry was folded and put away.

"Guess what, Stace?" she said.

"
You
guess what," said Stacy Baurichter. "Harrison Ledyard is having an affair."

"How do you know?"

"I looked through his trash. It was down in the basement of our building, because the superintendent hadn't put it outside yet. And there were cigarette butts with lipstick on them, and—"

"Stacy. Maybe his mother came to visit. Maybe his mother smokes. Or his sister. Or his cleaning lady. You have to verify your evidence, Stacy."

"That's not all. Wait'll you hear." Stacy paused ominously. "There was something else. A bra."

"In his
trash?
"

"Ripped."

"A ripped bra?"

"Torn in a passionate frenzy. Honest. Now don't try to make me believe
that
was his mother!"

"No," said Caroline, "I guess not. Was it black lace?"

"Pink. No lace, but some embroidery. Thirty-four B."

"That's not very big," said Caroline. "I think for a passionate frenzy you really need a thirty-eight D at least."

But Stacy assumed her investigative reporter's voice. "Research indicates that ever since Brooke Shields became so popular, small boobs are in."

"Stacy,
in
is one thing. Passionate frenzy is something else."

"Well. Anyway. It's the first interesting thing I've found out about Harrison Ledyard in all these months. Can you imagine? He looks so quiet and intellectual and Pulitzer Prize-winning. And now it turns out that in his spare time he's grabbing and ripping and tearing the clothes off of innocent women. I made a lot of notes. The bra's a Maidenform. And the lipstick is Misty Coral, I think. The cigarettes are Benson and Hedges menthol."

"Stacy, for a minute I almost forgot what I wanted to tell you. It's even better than Harrison Ledyard's sex life."

"What could be better than
that
?"

Caroline looked around to be certain no one could overhear her. She had taken the telephone into the
bathroom, but the door wouldn't close tight over the cord. J.P. was in his bedroom, probably working on an electrical project. Her mother was washing the kitchen floor, and the radio was on in the kitchen. She eased the door closed again as far as it would go and spoke in a low voice.

"Frederick Fiske," she whispered into the telephone.

"The guy upstairs? He's having an affair, too?"

"Yes. But worse than that."

"
BAURICHTER DEMANDS DETAILS
," said Stacy. When she was excited about something, she often spoke in headlines. It was part of her journalistic training.

"He's a murderer," announced Caroline.

"A
what
? How do you know? Did you find body parts in his trash?"

"The murder hasn't taken place yet," Caroline explained. "But I found a letter. He's
going
to commit a murder. And guess what kind?"

"Ax?"

"No, it doesn't say the method. But it's going to be a
child
murder. A
children
murder, actually. The letter said, 'Eliminate the kids.'"

"Save it for fingerprints," ordered Stacy, "
PRINTS OFTEN PROVE CASE
," she added, in a headline.

"Too late," said Caroline. "I picked it up in my bare hands already. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I know who wrote it, and I know who it was to."

"Well, save it for evidence. And take notes. Listen: this is important, Caroline. Do friends describe him as a loner?"

"What?"

"In the newspapers," Stacy explained, "after they catch a psychopathic killer, it always says, 'Friends described him as a loner.' Do Frederick Fiske's friends describe him as a loner?"

"
Stacy,
" Caroline pointed out impatiently, "I don't even know if he
has
any friends. He's always by himself."

"That proves it, then."

"Proves what?"

"He's a loner," said Stacy.

"Stace," Caroline whispered suddenly, "I have to go. My mother's coming.

"See you at school Monday," she said cheerfully, and loudly, into the phone as her mother passed in the hallway. "Bye, Stacy."

J.P. came out of his bedroom. "Bye, Stacy," he imitated, in a high, girlish voice. His own voice was beginning to deepen.

"Creep," said Caroline to her brother.

"Guess what I'm building in my room," said J.P.

"Couldn't care less."

"An electrifier," he announced happily. "Sometime, when you least expect it, when you're sound asleep, I'm going to sneak into your bedroom and—"

"MOM!" yelled Caroline.

Her mother sighed. She had curled up on the living room couch with a magazine. "He's only kidding, Caroline," she said. "James, stop teasing your sister."

"Zap," said J.P. meaningfully, looking sinister.

"Go zap yourself, Beastly," said Caroline with disdain. She went into her room and closed the door.

In her bedroom, Caroline knelt on her freshly made bed (Saturday was the only day that she didn't have to make her own bed; her mother changed the sheets on Saturday), reached up to the bookcase attached to the wall, and took down a dictionary. She rarely used her dictionary. It was wedged in so tightly that when she removed it, three mystery books and a fat volume about the Paleolithic Age came crashing down, bounced on her blue bedspread, and fell to the floor. Caroline glanced at them, shrugged, and left them there. Sometimes, in the house-decorating magazines that her mother liked to read, there were books scattered on the floor of a room. It gave a room a casual, intellectual look. Caroline decided that her room could have a casual, intellectual look until next Saturday, when it was cleaning day again.

She took Frederick Fiske's mail out of her pocket. The letter from Carl Broderick didn't require a dictionary. It was quite clear: a clear command to "eliminate the kids." No words to look up there. "Eliminate the kids" meant murder them, and you didn't need a dictionary to figure
that
out.

It was the other letter that was more puzzling. She had simply brushed it aside when she'd read it the first time. A notice from the library about an overdue book. Caroline got notices like that all the time. Once she had kept a book on vertebrate paleontology so long that the fine was $2.50; she had had to use some of her grandmother's birthday check to pay off that fine. She could almost have
bought
a book about vertebrate paleontology for that amount.

But now she looked carefully at Frederick Fiske's notice from the library. She realized that if the police ever examined the library records for Caroline MacKenzie Tate, they would be able to figure out quite a bit about her. They would find a few teen-age romances and one or two books about good grooming that she had checked out last year, when she had begun to be interested in a boy at school and thought that maybe if she changed her hair style and maybe used eye make-up he would notice her. He hadn't. She had tried three different hair styles with no effect at all on the boy. And her mother had said no, absolutely not, not until you are
much
older, to the eye make-up.