by Dianne Emley
She twisted the silver-and-abalone ring on her finger, then impulsively pulled it off. She reached in the casket and slipped it on one of Alley’s fingers.
“She’s touching him!” Drye said in a loud stage whisper.
Campbell put his hand on Drye’s sleeve to quiet him.
Iris put her hand on Alley’s black hair and rubbed a few strands between her thumb and fingers. She gave it a final pat and turned, almost walking into John Somers. She saw sympathy in his eyes. She quickly walked away, blinking back tears. She started the ten count to control. At ten, the tears had been shoved back.
She found Alley’s mother. In her, Iris saw Alley’s high cheekbones, sculptured jaw, arched eyebrows, and caramel color. Iris couldn’t remember her high-school Spanish. She tried signing. “Alley was my friend. He was dear and generous and loved.”
Alley’s mother reached her arm around Iris’s neck and pulled her close, laying a black-gloved hand against Iris’s cheek.
Lewin whispered to Somers, “When are we going to talk to her?” nodding toward Iris.
“Not now. She’s too upset.”
“That’s the best time.”
“I’ll call her on Monday.”
“And our killer will be in Guatemala by then. We’re talking to her today. I’ll haul her into the station.”
“I told you that I’ll take care of it.”
Iris walked toward the rear of the church, which seemed a million miles away. She heard Drye’s eager whispers to Raab behind her. She ignored them. It meant nothing.
Carmen, the waitress, turned to watch Iris pass.
Iris was unlocking the door to the TR when Somers walked up to her.
He held his big, square hands open. “Iris?”
“Yes.”
“Iris…”
“Yes, again.”
“I want to apologize for being out of line.”
She sighed and drew the back of her hand against her forehead.
Somers continued. “You’re right. I haven’t been upfront with you. But here’s the deal. I’m conducting this investigation and you’re part of it. That’s half the loaf. I want to get to know you again and I don’t know what that means exactly. That’s the other half. I’ll try to keep the two halves separate. I don’t know if I can, but I’m too stubborn not to try. So, have dinner with me tonight, at my house.”
She opened her mouth to speak.
“Wait. Before you jump to conclusions… It’ll be very low key, casual, with my daughter and my dog and we can talk without surly waiters and pink food or you can have pink food if that’s what you want. I’m—”
“Okay.”
“—a good cook and I know it’s short notice and you probably already have plans, but if you don’t, you might not want to be alone tonight and—”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. I don’t have plans and I don’t want to be alone tonight. Thank you for the invitation.”
“Sure. Ahhh, well, are you going to the grave site?”
“No. I’ve already said good-bye to Alley. I’m sick of this circus.”
“I’ll give you directions to my house.”
She looked in her purse for something to write on and pulled out a funeral program. She wrote down the directions, folded the program, and put it in a suit jacket pocket.
“Say, six o’clock?”
“Fine.”
Somers walked over to Lewin who was leaning against an elm tree watching them.
“So. Did you make arrangements to interview her?” Lewin asked.
“Yeah, done.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It’s not that they don’t care.” I won’t do it. I won’t sell Alley out!”
“That’s right, keep talking to yourself.”
“What?” Iris said.
“Just go ahead. Happening more and more.”
“Who’s that?” Iris looked around.
“Down here. Couldn’t spare a quarter?”
The bag lady was sitting under the portico of the McKinney Alitzer building. Her face was tanned and weathered, her hair was combed but dirty and unevenly hacked short. She wore a baggy T-shirt, too-large baggy khakis rolled up at the waist, and a tailored women’s suit jacket, probably lifted from the chair back of a careless downtown executive. The effect was a sort of soiled fashion statement.
Iris opened her purse, angry for being hit up but caught by a slender fish hook of guilt.
“‘Course, a quarter hardly gets you anything anymore,” the bag lady said.
Iris had to respect the trade-up. She pulled out five dollars.
“Thanks. Great suit. Not many people can wear black and not look like they’re going to a funeral.”
“You’re in the wrong line of business.”
“Maybe you are.”
Iris’s stomach pinged at the incidental truth. She stepped past the woman, opened the glass door, and walked across the marble lobby to the security guard’s desk.
“Hi, Nicky.”
“Iris. Here on Saturday again. Work, work, work.”
“Gotta stay a step ahead.”
“It’s too nice to be inside today.”
“We’re having a stage-three smog alert.”
“It’s sunny and beautiful out.”
“The burden of another sunny day. The curse of Southern California. Who’s the bag lady?”
“Lucille? She bothering you?”
“No. Do I have to sign in, Nicky?”
“You don’t want to?”
“My boss has been on my case about all the overtime I’ve been putting in and if he shows up and sees I’ve been here, it won’t look good.”
“Gotcha.”
“In fact, if he shows up, can you call me upstairs? You know who he is, right? Stan Raab? Short guy, blond hair? Just call the office number, then I’ll know he’s on his way up. That’ll give me enough time to leave. Okay?”
“Sure, baby doll.”
“Now that I’m thinking about it, why don’t you call me if anyone comes up to McKinney, okay?”
“Your wish is my command. How about I stay home and keep house while you bring home the bacon? A executive woman. Would suit me just fine.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Oh, I would.”
“You’d have to ask me for spending money.”
“I’d love it. House husband to an executive woman.”
“It gets complicated. Trust me. ‘Bye, Nicky. Don’t forget to call upstairs.”
The glass doors to the McKinney Alitzer suite had already been unlocked by the cleaning crew. Two big yellow trash bins on wheels with rags, sprays, and plastic bags stuck into leather thongs belted around their perimeters were on the mauve carpet in the lobby. Iris heard doors being unlocked and a man and a woman shouting down the corridor to each other in Spanish.
The office was illuminated by feeble light coming through the tinted windows. Iris went in the lunchroom. The vending machine buttons glowed in the semi-darkness. She put in twenty cents and punched the buttons for black coffee. She grabbed the flesh on her belly between her thumb and index finger, testing its thickness to gauge whether she should or shouldn’t. She shouldn’t, but she would anyway. She fed in forty-five cents for a package of Oreos that dangled from a metal clip in the snack machine. The cookies slid out on a track, then dropped two feet, smack, into a steel bin.
She opened the package, twisted apart the halves of a cookie, and scraped the cream filling off with her bottom teeth. She opened a drawer near the sink and dug through packages of artificial sweetener, single servings of ketchup and salt from a local fast-food restaurant, plastic utensils, chopsticks in paper wrappers, and rumpled paper napkins before she finally found the butcher knife. She took the knife and went back into the suite.
She set her purse on her desk, sat down, and ate another cookie. The cleaning crew had turned the lights on and were dumping wastebaskets on the other side of the
suite. Iris reached over the divider separating her desk from Teddy’s and tipped his wastebasket toward her with the knife blade. She churned wrappers from strawberry Zingers, chocolate mini-donuts, peanut M & M’s, and CornNuts. The penny stock pink sheets were at the bottom, folded like a fan. She speared them and pulled them out. Teddy had torn the edges into a tight fringe all the way around. The first five stocks that closed at a penny a share were circled.
She walked around the divider and sat at Teddy’s desk. She tried the center drawer. It was unlocked. Pens and pencils were neatly lined up next to erasers next to pads of yellow lined paper next to a box of business cards with the lid inverted and filled with change for the vending machine. A stack of ATM receipts were piled on one side, all of them for credit card withdrawals.
She flipped through the yellow pads. The penny stock grid was underneath the last one.
On the up-and-up my eye. You can’t do this nonsense, Teddy.
She pulled out the stack of yellow pads to put the grid back and saw a photograph in a corner. She expected a Billy Drye hard-core special but the photo was of Iris and Teddy and Jaynie at the company picnic. Teddy was in the middle and the women were on either side with their arms around him. Iris had a copy of the same snapshot, but hers wasn’t like this one. In her copy, Jaynie had a head. In her copy, Jaynie wasn’t bleeding red ink from a wound drawn on her chest.
A chill tickled Iris’s spine and she put the photo back where she’d found it, peeking in the back of the drawer for the missing head. She looked through the other drawers and found everything to be ordinary and neat.
It was time to get down to business. Iris took the knife. She walked down the corridor and into Raab’s office. She sat at his desk. The top drawer was locked. She ran her hands up and down the desk’s inside edges but there was no latch. She wasn’t getting in today. That was okay. He usually kept client information in the tall oak filing cabinet in the corner. That’s what she needed to get into.
The filing cabinet was locked, the button lock pushed in. She grabbed the handle of the top drawer with her left hand and held the latch with her thumb. With her right hand, she shoved the knife blade into the gap between the drawer and the frame. She probed with the blade and jiggled the drawer at the same time. Something released and the drawer slid open on oiled rollers.
She set the knife on top of the filing cabinet, took off her black linen jacket, and tossed it over one of Raab’s chairs. The air conditioner was off and it was hot in the suite. She walked her fingertips across the tops of the manila file folders, closed that drawer, then opened the next one. Midway through, she found a folder labeled WORLDCO. She grabbed it and pulled hard. The drawer was crammed full. The file popped free. It felt light. She opened it. It was empty.
She looked on the floor on the chance that something had fallen out. Nothing had. She opened the file again. Even the pink phone message slips and business cards that she knew Raab stapled to the inside cover of the client files had been pulled off, leaving little perforations one-half inch apart.
She lay the Worldco file on top of the cabinet and pulled a few other client files. There were copies of buy and sell orders and an overview of the account inside each one. Phone messages and business cards were stapled to the inside front covers.
She re-filed the folders. She started from the top drawer again, deciding to look for something on EquiMex, when she realized the phone was ringing. She held her breath and listened harder. It was the phone in the reception area. She ran toward it. When she was halfway down the corridor, it fell silent. She ran back to Raab’s office and opened the second drawer.
If it’s Nicky, someone’s on their way up. She opened the third drawer. Her fingers walked across the manila tabs. Could be a wrong number. Say it’s worst case… Raab. I have a key… I have a right to be here. But why leave the funeral to come to here? She opened the forth drawer and knelt on the ground. I was upset… She flipped through the tight folders. I thought work would distract me. It’s goosey but I can pull it off. She got up. There was no EquiMex file. No. The best thing is to disappear.
She heard Raab’s voice at the door of the suite. Then she heard another voice. She grabbed her suit jacket from the chair, sprinted to her desk, snatched her purse, and looked for a hiding place. She could make the lunchroom, but he might go in there. She didn’t have enough time to reach the other end of the suite and duck into the supply room. Now she didn’t have enough time to duck anywhere. She crawled underneath her desk and rolled her desk chair over the opening.
“Is he sure? I mean, how credible is this guy?” Raab was talking.
“Wendell Ellis has worked for my father since before I was born. He’s credible.”
Joe Campbell and Stan Raab moved to stand in the corridor next to Iris’s desk. She clutched her purse and jacket to her chest and held her breath.
“Why would someone pull off a scheme like this EquiMex thing, then blow their cover by listing their own name as director?” Raab asked.
“That’s why Pop thinks someone’s behind it.”
“I’m afraid it’s someone from the office.”
The strap of Iris’s shoulder bag looped out from beneath the edge of the desk. The polished toe of Stan Raab’s wing tip arced over it. She inched the strap in.
“We’ll look at that Worldco folder, Joe, and at least your dad will be satisfied that everything’s in order on this end. The way this thing is framing up, the SEC will be camping out here. I’d better get a handle on our documentation before they come in and roll out the filing cabinets.”
They started walking away.
Raab asked, “You’re still coming to Morgan’s birthday party on Sunday, aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
“And your mom and dad?”
“Pop loves Disneyland. And you know how he is with kids.”
“That’s right, number one son. When are you getting started on a family of your own?”
“I’d like to, but it’s hard to level with somebody about the family business. I don’t want to lie.” After a pause, Joe changed the subject, “We’re meeting at ten o’clock on the Castle Bridge, right?”
They’d moved inside Stan’s office. Iris had sat at her desk and listened to Stan enough times to recognize the pitch and resonance his office walls gave his voice. She slowly shoved out her desk chair, wincing at the noise it made rolling on the plastic floor protector. She crawled forward and raised her head over the top of her cubicle wall. She could barely see into Stan’s office.
“A tough, New York Italian guy like your dad getting a kick out of Disneyland.”
Iris looped her shoulder bag across her chest and crawled on her hands and knees down the corridor, staying close to the cubicle walls. She almost caught her knee in her pearl rope, which dragged on the carpet. In the lobby, one of the cleaning crew was dusting a glass-topped coffee table. He looked at her curiously. She put her index finger to her lips. Quiet. He continued cleaning. At the entrance, Iris stood up quickly and opened the glass doors just wide enough to squeeze through. She didn’t breathe freely until the elevator doors closed and she was on her way downstairs.
Jacket, purse… what am I forgetting?
This filing cabinet is unlocked,” Stan said.
“Did you forget to lock it?”
“I guess I could have. Here’s the Worldco file. Wait. It’s empty.” Stan displayed the empty folder to Joe. “How could it be empty?”
“What’s this knife doing on top?” Joe picked it up.
“Someone broke into my filing cabinet.”
“With a knife?”
“I’ve seen the secretaries do it when they’ve lost a key. Someone pried open my filing cabinet and took all my Worldco documentation.”
“Why didn’t they take the whole folder?”
“So it’d be in its place? I looked at it… yesterday afternoon.”
“We were the only ones from McKinney signed in downstairs.”
“The security in this place is abominable. The guard isn’t there half the time. Did you see that bag lady in the doorway? Anyone could walk in here.”
“But who?”
Iris turned the ignition key and the TR’s engine roared in the empty garage. She shook out her jacket, folded it neatly, and laid it across the passenger’s seat. She took out the pull-out stereo from where she’d hid it beneath the driver’s seat and slid it into its chassis. She examined the knees of her stockings.
Jacket, purse …
She started to laugh. She laughed harder and harder, high pitched and uncontrolled. Tears popped into her eyes. She doubled over and held her ribs. She replayed the cleaning guy’s expression again and rubbed and laughed at her bruised knees. The laughter subsided into chuckles. She threw the TR into reverse and remembered with a clear vision.
“The knife!”
She stopped laughing. No matter. Just a knife.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was Saturday afternoon. A bank building said it was 101 degrees Fahrenheit, 69 Celsius. Lankershim Boulevard was hopping. Street vendors sold tropical flavored Popsicles from refrigerated carts. Salsa dance music blared from record stores. Merchants showed goods on the sidewalk. People walked.
John Somers left the jacket of his good navy blue suit in the car, rolled up the sleeves of his burgundy-striped shirt, and loosened his striped rep tie. He pulled open the smudged glass doors of the Café Zamboanga and went inside into barely air-conditioned heat.
An old man with carefully pressed khaki pants belted around his chest and a plaid shirt looked up with dull eyes from a newspaper. His fedora, decorated with a bright feather in the brim, was on the counter near the crooked handle of his cane, which hung from the edge. Somers nodded and he nodded back.
A little girl ate ice cream, dripping chocolate, swinging her legs from a tall counter stool. Her mother gave Somers a sidelong glance, then looked away.
Somers sat at the counter, straddling the stool to accommodate his height.
“What can I get you?” The waitress wore a pink dress, crisp for the hot day and drab surroundings. A pink flower swung from the end of her long braid. A plastic nametag on her dress said CARMEN. She squinted at Somers. She’d seen him someplace before.
