“Who?” I asked.
“Chuck who was with you at the front today,” said CeeCee. “She practised her presentation in the executive washroom.” She paused and looked at Darla.
“And we were in there at the time. In two stalls with our feet up, reading the new People and letting the white strips work on our teeth for a double date that night. Confidentiality, yeah?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “The work ethic is responsible for more ill-health, mental and physical, than all the other ethics put together. Everyone at Bombaro’s has been through a great shock and you all need to take care and take time. If you need to curl up in an armchair and read—or sit in a toilet cubicle and whiten your teeth—you should listen to your bodies.”
They drank it down. Of course they did. It was carte blanche to be a pair of lazy wee shites in the bosses’ bathroom.
“So how exactly did the message get garbled?” I said. “It sounds pretty clear to me.”
“It was Chuck,” said CeeCee. “When Sparky finished up talking about Uncle Boom-Boom … ”
Darla giggled.
“Isn’t that a euphemism for … ?” I said.
Darla giggled again.
“Anyway, when she started in on plans for the future, Chuck was all ‘step aside, little lady’ that way he is, you know? And he managed to make it sound completely different. Then Sparky tried to come back with a clarification and Chucky just shut her down. Said his workforce was too upset to be asked to make decisions about pay and hours at a time like that.”
“Pay and hours?” I said. “What was he on about?”
“No idea,” said Darla. “But it worked like a dog whistle.”
“I can imagine.”
“The only thing we could think of was that we get hazard money for working with gunpowder, making fireworks, and we wouldn’t get it if we were working in a lightbulb factory.”
“But hang on,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Sparky’s idea was for light shows to get round the fire regs and stop—well, blimey—nearly a hundred and fifty whole years of architectural history being lost.” They were nodding solemnly and that made me feel mean so I stopped. “That would be an add-on to the display bit of the business, surely. There would be more jobs. For designers. As well as those guys I wouldn’t let on the forecourt of a petrol station.”
Darla huffed a laugh. “The pyromaniacs? Yeah they’re a bit weird, aren’t they?”
“But surely”—I dug my phone out of my back pocket and started thumbing away—“surely, the people who put on the light shows just buy all the rigging, don’t they? They don’t manufacture all the fibre-optics and fairy lights and all that. Look.” I handed over my phone, playing a film of the Enchanted Forest.
“Oh! Pretty!” said Darla.
“Man, that would be way cool if you’d had a smoke,” said CeeCee.
“So how could it affect anyone who works here apart from making the whole business more secure? That was a wee bit of a low trick, wasn’t it? Dropping hints about pay and conditions?”
“Sure was,” said Darla. “There was no chance of anyone shutting up and listening to Sparky again after that.”
“Huh,” I said. “I wonder what he was up to. Chucky Cheese.”
“Maybe,” Darla said, “he wanted to throw suspicion on her.”
“Why?”
“To throw it off him?”
“Was it on him?”
“To keep it off him?”
“Was it headed his way?”
“Who can say?” said CeeCee. “You think we should go down into Cuento and tell the detectives about this?” she added, looking hopeful.
“I honestly wouldn’t,” I said and saw her shoulders slump. “You see, once you tell the police, it’s public record and if it gets out that there’s trouble at Bombaro’s you could lose orders and, worst case scenario, lose jobs.”
That got their attention. Of course, I had no idea if it was true and I wasn’t greatly concerned even if it was, but I wanted to contain the news until I had got a better handle on it. Dorabelle had been sure the workers loved Clovis. Would the foreman hate him for that? Nah. No factory boss would care enough about productivity to kill.
“Changing the subject just a bit,” I said, “can I ask you a question? I mean, if you’re the right ones to ask.”
“Shoot,” said Darla.
“How could you tell if a firework had been set off with a timer instead of just with a match?”
“A timer?” said CeeCee, with golf-ball eyes. “That is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life. A timer? No one would ever do that. That’s a surefire fast track to a Darwin award.”
“Okay, so not a timer,” I said, desperately trying to remember what the other thing was that Sparky had talked about. “A remote match?”
“A what?”
“You’d have to ask the maniacs about that,” said Darla. “We just make them. There’s no matches anywhere near the production line. We’re not allowed to have cigarette lighters or matchbooks in our pockets. We don’t even take our phones onto the floor in case they short out. We don’t even flirt … ”
“Oh Darl!” said CeeCee and her eyes filled with tears. I quirked a look at them. “That was one of Mr. B’s sayings,” she said. “No smoldering looks on the line. Flirt in the lunchroom.”
“Right,” I said. “And where would I find the … maniacs then?”
“The design office is right above Lucinda’s room,” said Darla. “There’s a door to the right. You want one of us to come with?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “They might speak more freely if it’s just me.”
Fifteen
Behind the glass partition of Lucinda’s domain, she was turning the pages of a commemorative volume and weeping copiously onto its gilt-edged pages. I didn’t disturb her, just made my way to the narrow stairway off to the side that rose up between institutional green walls—the same green as the morgue basement, unless I was greatly mistaken. It ended at a door with a poster hiding the window. Welcome to The Inferno it said in hellacious letters with flames licking at their bottoms and smoke belching in billows from their tops. A figure stood staring out at me from his red eyes. Either he did a lot of glute-work in his exercise routine or he was a demon form, because his haunches were extremely equine, going nicely with the hair that tumbled over his glistening naked shoulders and could easily be a mane. I knocked on the door, avoiding rapping the poster-beast-guy anywhere too tender.
“Enter,” came a voice.
I sidled in. He wasn’t one of the twitchy ones I had seen downstairs and, at first glimpse, I couldn’t help thinking of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, because the actual person behind horse-dude on the door was an inch taller than me, perhaps a hundred pounds soaking wet, with thinning ginger hair and a Keep Calm t-shirt. When he stood up from behind his monitor I saw that it was a Keep Calm and Blow Stuff Up t-shirt, but he had an elasticated belt holding up his cargo shorts and a band-aid on his shin just above his black socks.
“Are you the … ?” I said. But I could only think pyromaniac and pantechnicon, the actual word staying tantalisingly out of reach of my tongue. And I couldn’t bring myself to say “Bubba” to his face.
“Bilbo,” the guy said. Ahhhh. Not Bubba. “And you are?”
“Lexy,” I said. “I didn’t see you downstairs at the … when Mizz Visalia was addressing the ranks.”
“No,” he agreed. “I’ve got documentation. I don’t do crowds.”
“How do you do firework shows if you don’t do crowds?” I asked, instantly intrigued. Every psychologist will tell you, on the record, that spot diagnoses are unhelpful and unprofessional and we never slip into them. They’re lying; we do it all the time and I had this poor wee scone taped as a generalised social phobic with attendant anxiety disorder already. I
was halfway there by the time I’d seen the scary monster covering up the window.
“The crowds are prevented from getting close to the fireworks by sturdy physical barriers,” he said. “And I’m the designer anyhow. I’m not required at installations.”
“I see,” I said. “Hm, maybe you’re not the one I need to talk to then, Bulb-Bilbo. Bilbo, eh?”
“My parents are geeks,” he said, not even smiling. “My sister is called Nyota. They really hate Jackson and Abrams.”
“Bilbo, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I didn’t understand anything after ‘sister’.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “They named me after an obscure character in an obscure British work of literary fiction and my sister got the first name of a character from an old TV show that had only been used in a subsequent tie-in novel. Then JJ Abrams made a movie and Peter Jackson made six and we’re both uncomfortably prominent wherever we go. My sister says her name is Nina most days”
“That’s awful,” I said. “My geography teacher was called Harry Potter. But who was Nyota? What TV show is that?”
He looked at me like I’d asked if Sherlock had a flatmate. “Lieutenant Nyota Uhura was the communications officer on board the USS Enterprise,” he said. “And what was it you wanted to know?”
“Well, since you missed the address downstairs,” I began.
“I didn’t miss it. I listened remotely.”
“Ah,” I said. That put a kink in me pretending that Vi had said any of the stuff I was going to pretend she had said, to get this interview going. “Well, anyway, what I wanted to ask was this: how could you tell if a firework had been lit … Ha! That’s it. Remotely. A remote switch and an electric match. I remembered!”
“Is this the firework that killed Clovis?” he said. “The one the police were asking about too?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“There isn’t a way,” he said, and he sounded very sure. “Assuming the remnants of the wire were removed, which the police confirmed they were.”
“They did? How did you get them to do that? I kind of tricked them into nearly saying it, but they really just told you straight out?”
“I offered to look it over to see if I could tell anything about it and they said it was gone.”
“Huh. Did they tell you how they knew about the remote switch?”
“They didn’t know. They thought it might have been a timer, but I told them that was unlikely.”
I sighed. He was just as obsessed as the rest of them. In my opinion, if you’d decided to blow up an old man, arse first, you were probably beyond worrying about some gopher or sparrow that might wander on-set and get caught in the action.
“But did they tell you what makes them think the perpetrator wasn’t there when the firework went off?”
“No,” he said, “I told them.”
“You … what?” I said. “What?”
“They called me in the small hours of Monday morning to ask my opinion.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“That it had been done by someone with at least a working knowledge of firework construction and behavior and that it had been triggered remotely.”
“And how did you know?”
“I’ve been a pyrotechnician and display designer since I graduated college with my PGI DOC. Fourteen years.”
I took a deep breath to calm myself down. “I’m not disputing your qualifications, Bilbo, but I meant what were the clues in this instance.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, the lift charge had been disabled. See, ordinarily, the lift charge in a full tube would have fired the rocket out of … harm’s way … before the burst charge could do any damage. Someone who knew nothing about fireworks would have missed that. Or they might have taken a mortar out of the tube and used that. But they didn’t. It was a full tube but it didn’t lift off. It just exploded.”
Just a few days before I had actually laughed about it. Now I couldn’t imagine how I could ever have been so heartless.
“And … ” I said.
“And so it was someone who knew enough to tamper with the lift and leave the burst.”
I worked hard at suppressing another sigh. Bilbo was hard work.
“I meant, and how do you know that the person used a remote switch?”
“Because no one in their right mind would stay in a closed garage with a lit rocket after disabling the lift,” he said. “Or ‘duh’ for short.”
“Okay,” I said. “So … it’s a supposition rather than knowledge, is it?”
“It’s a supposition I used to instruct the police in collecting evidence to cement the knowledge,” he said.
“And what were the instructions?” I asked. I didn’t add anything for short; not FFS or anything.
“I told them there would be residue on everything in the garage and if anyone else was in there, there’d be a body print, like a stencil. I told them that if the person lit the fuse and ran away to hide behind the door like a radiographer, then came back immediately after the explosion, the warm residue would stick to their shoe soles and clothing and they’d leave a trail. If it was later and the residue was cold the trail would be differe—Look, I can email you a link to a blog post instead. It would be much quicker.”
“But,” I said, “everything you’ve just said suggests that someone lit the firework and scarpered—no remote, no wire, no return to remove them. Right?”
“Yep,” he said.
“I’m lost,” I told him. “Where did the thing about a timer come from then?”
“Not a ti—”
“OH MY GOD!” I said, quite a lot louder than I meant to. “Look at it this way: scenario A—strike a match and run. Scenario B—set it up, leave, and return. Okay? How did scenario B get traction when everything points the other way?”
“Ohhhhhh,” said Bilbo. “I see. That’s probably because they know someone came back after he was dead.”
“And how do they know that?” I said, almost weeping.
“Because they took off the handcuffs and ankle-cuffs.”
“The what’s that?” I said. “How do you know there were handcuffs?”
“The police told me.”
“The … police just … told you?” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” He looked puzzled, remembering. “I really don’t understand why. That woman—”
“Plainclothes Mike?” I said.
“I was talking to her about, well, this and that, pretty much the same stuff I’ve been talking to you about. Answering her questions and taking it all seriously, and she just got more and more weird. And then she just kind of exploded and told me all about it in one long sentence without taking a breath. I have no idea why. It doesn’t seem like a very great habit for a cop, if you ask me.”
Poor Mike, I thought. Briefly.
“So what did she tell you in the one big long sentence?” I said
“That he had marks on his wrists and ankles from being handcuffed and ankle-cuffed and that they’d been cut off post-mortem.”
“How could she tell when they’d been removed?”
“Because there was a lot of blood and so on and it was drying by the time the handcuffs and ankle-cuffs came off. If they’d been taken off immediately—the handcuffs and ankle-cuffs—then the blood on his arms and legs would have smeared. But if they—the hand cu—”
“Got it!”
“If they were taken off once coagulation had begun, when the blood was gelid or tacky, it wouldn’t smear. And it didn’t.”
“After Mike blurted all that,” I said, “didn’t she tell you not to tell anyone else?”
“Oh, yes,” said Bilbo. “But that’s not enforceable. There’s no
detective-witness covenant. Once she made the mistake of telling me, she lost control of t
he information’s future dehiscence.”
“She really did, didn’t she?” I said. “Can I ask you one last question?”
“Is that it?”
“No, Bilbo, that’s not it.”
“Go ahead.”
“And will you keep it quiet that I’ve been speaking to you?”
“Is that it?”
“No. Will you?”
“Is that—”
“Bilbo!”
“Yes, I will. I will uphold a voluntary covenant of secrecy with you, Lexy. I don’t want Visalia to know the upsetting details about what happened to Clovis just before he died.”
“Why do you call them Visalia and Clovis?” I said. “That isn’t it,” I added.
“What is it? Waiting’s beginning to make me anxious.”
“Did Mike really say the cuffs had been cut off?”
“Yes!” he said. “Clearly. She said he was handcuffed and ankle-cuffed and they were cut off. That suggests that the person who put them on—presumably the person who set up the wire and switch and perhaps also the person who disabled the lift charge, although that’s less certain—wasn’t the person who took them off. Because that person would have the key. That clearly follows from what I’ve told you.”
“But how could you tell that they’d been cut?” I said.
“The handcuffs and ankle-cuffs?” said Bilbo. “I have no idea how you would tell something like that. If it was done soon after death, the cutters might have made a characteristic trail through the blood on his skin, but since it was done when the blood was drying … I have no idea.”
“Well, thank you, Bilbo,” I said, standing. “You have given me no end of help. And thank you for saying you’d keep quiet. I will too. I agree that Mizz Vi should never know.” I smiled at him. “Stay safe,” I added. It was one of those strange American things people said to each other all the time. They said it before all the holidays and I could never work out what dangers they had in mind. If it was just Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year it might have been snowy roads and drunk drivers that was worrying everyone. And Independence and Memorial Days had the threat of salmonella from bad barbecuing, but they even said it at Easter when the biggest worry was a chocolate coma. And they said it before every trip: “Stay safe!” And sometimes just at the end of random phone calls. Life certainly did seem to be pretty scary.
Scot Free Page 15
