I thought fast. “Grandpa … well, sometimes he’ll give you something he thinks needs to be kept safe,” I said. “He knew it was important to not lose his ticket to the play, so I think he gave it to Hugo.” To this, Grandpa responded with a vehement nod.
“I did,” Grandpa said. “Hugo said he would keep it safe for me until Elinor and I could go. Hugo has my ticket, young man, and I need it.” He stared up at Officer Carr with a mulish expression.
“Be that as it may, sir,” Officer Carr said, not without respect, “we cannot release the ticket until our investigation into the death of Mr. Markman is complete.”
Grandpa suddenly pounded his fist against the plastic-covered corkboard on the wall, making a loud, reverberating noise that had the front desk officer standing up. “I was in the war, damn it!” Grandpa shouted. “I was in Normandy! I fought on that beach, my friends dropping like flies around me, to save our freedom—your freedom, young man—and you’re not going to give me my damned ticket to Oklahoma!?”
At the ruckus, two other officers had come rushing out, their hands hovering over their service weapons. Officer Carr gave them a quick signal that all was okay.
Grandpa turned back to me, his eyes like blue saucers once more. “Elinor, why won’t they give me my ticket? I can’t take you without it.”
Putting my arm around Grandpa’s shoulders, I said, “Officer Carr, would it be possible for us to take a photo of the ticket? Just so that my grandfather has a copy of it as proof? You know, so he can show it at the ticket window and they’ll know he isn’t trying to gate-crash.” I gave the officer an exaggerated wink. “And then, after this mess is over, I can come and get the real one so that Grandpa will have it. Would that work?” I looked at my grandfather, who was giving an Oscar-worthy performance as an old codger in and out of senility. “Would that be okay for the time being, Grandpa?”
“What?” he asked, the gruff back in his voice. “Yes, that would be fine.”
Officer Carr studied us for a moment. “All right. Let me escort you to a room and I’ll bring the evidence bag for you to photograph.”
I didn’t expect my grandfather to break his cover as we sat in the interview room, and I wasn’t disappointed. He called me by my grandmother’s name twice more as we sat at the table, each time asking about the ticket, and I put on my own show by fussing over him, straightening the collar of his jacket, and asking if he was warm enough. He replied crankily that he was, and demanded to be the one who took the photos so he could get a nice, clear shot. I wanted to ask how he was going to get the ticket out of the evidence bag, but I also didn’t want to know. No doubt the camera in the corner was recording us, so I wanted plausible deniability.
“All right,” I said to him in soothing tones. “You can take the photo.”
Grandpa’s back was to the camera, and while his “Good” was cantankerous, his eyes were twinkling. I didn’t know whether to have a good feeling about this or a bad one. All I knew was that my dearest, sweetest grandfather was a wily old fox.
Officer Carr was back in under ten minutes. He put a plastic evidence bag on the table. Inside I could see the ticket stub to Oklahoma!
I handed Grandpa my phone with the camera on. He took it, put it on the table, and spent time smoothing out the ticket in the evidence bag, straightening it, smoothing it some more, and straightening it again until its bent edges flattened and it was a perfect rectangle. When Officer Carr said, “I think it’s straight now, Mr. Lancaster,” Grandpa gave him a haughty stare and said, “Young man, it will be straight when I say it’s straight. In the army, we had to be able to bounce a quarter off our beds, so I know straight and smooth when I see it!”
This time, Officer Carr’s lips twitched. I motioned him aside with a grin, whispering, “Let’s just give him a minute.”
Officer Carr responded with a smile that was really quite nice.
“Thank you for doing this,” I said to him. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grandpa picking up the bag and shaking it before rearranging the theater ticket again. What could he be doing?
Plausible deniability, Luce. Whatever he’s doing, they won’t throw him in jail for it, will they?
Wait, I thought. Would they?
“You’re welcome,” Officer Carr replied. I was glad he was looking at me, because now Grandpa was holding the bag to his stomach to smooth it down. “My grandmother is the same way. She obsesses over coupons, though. Can’t get enough of them. We’ve learned it’s just easier to humor her and let her have all the coupons she wants than try to change her mind.”
“Too right,” I said, and laughed, feeling just slightly hysterical now. Grandpa had held the bag to himself again and was almost doing a jig. “Does she ever use them?”
Officer Carr glanced at my grandfather, but when I touched his arm and smiled my brightest smile, he blinked and said, “Ever use what?” He looked dazed—though the good kind of dazed that said his mind was focused entirely on me.
“All the coupons she collects,” I said.
But I never got the answer as, suddenly, we heard a sound like plastic crinkling way too fast. Then Grandpa was cursing. More plastic crinkling noise followed as my grandfather turned around.
“Elinor!” he shouted. “Elinor, this blasted bag got stuck in my coat zipper.”
My mouth almost dropped as I saw he was trying valiantly to get the bag unstuck from the heavy zipper on his coat, but was only making it worse.
“Grandpa!” I said, jumping forward. “What happened?” Officer Carr had also sprung forward, his expression furious, and grabbed my grandfather’s arm, though he quickly pulled his hands away when I snarled, “Don’t you dare put your hands on him.”
It was utter chaos for the next minute as I tried to unzip Grandpa’s jacket and he made attempts to help me, making it worse. Finally, Officer Carr said, “Stop. Both of you.”
I glanced quickly up at Grandpa, whose eyes met mine for the briefest second before sliding down to the heap of plastic evidence bag billowing out from his stomach like the Portuguese man-of-wars that popped up on the beaches of the Gulf Coast, ready to sting you if you touched one of their tentacles.
“My apologies, officer,” he said, his voice shaky. “I was just trying to smooth it out and it got caught.”
Officer Carr sighed heavily. “It’s all right, sir. We’re going to cut it off you.”
He told us to stand still, then stuck his head out of the interrogation room’s door and called to someone. Seconds later, a petite female officer with her wavy dark hair pulled back into a low chignon walked in with a pair of scissors and a new evidence bag. She introduced herself as Officer Alaniz, asked Grandpa to sit down with a kind smile, and gently cut the bag away from his coat zipper, with Grandpa helping by holding the bag taught.
With her last cut, Grandpa cried out, “Oops!” and the Oklahoma! ticket fluttered down onto the table. He reached out and grabbed it just as Officer Alaniz lunged for it, saying, “Now, Mr. Lancaster, we can’t have you touching evidence.”
Grandpa pulled his hands back immediately. “A thousand apologies, ma’am,” he said. Then he poked his head around to look at me with hopeful eyes. “Think they’ll still let me take a photo?”
Officer Carr’s world-weary sigh ended with, “Fine. But you do it, Ms. Lancaster. And please make it quick.”
I snapped a photo of the ticket, thanked the officers, then took Grandpa’s hand and got us the hell out of Dodge.
SIXTEEN
At a stoplight two blocks away from the police station, I finally let myself breathe and wiped my sweaty palms on my pants leg. Grandpa, after looking around—for signs we’d been followed, or for traffic cameras, I couldn’t tell—sat up straight, his back cracking as he did, and dropped the feeble, semi-senile old man act.
“Lucy, my darlin’, you were wonderful!” His blue eyes were focused and aware once more.
Now I did give a hysterical laugh, partly because I was frightened he h
adn’t been acting the whole time in the police station. “Grandpa, what are you talking about? We failed. We didn’t get you the Oklahoma! ticket and the microdot.”
“Oh, but we didn’t fail. Hold out your hand.”
I did as he asked and he touched his index finger to my palm. I looked down, and there was a little black dot, hardly bigger than a period.
“But,” I stammered. “How did you get this off the ticket? You barely touched it.”
He tapped my palm again and the little black dot disappeared. From the cup holder in my console, he pulled out one of my own business cards, looked at it, and deposited the microdot in the middle. Carefully, he began to fold up my card so it made a protective package for the microdot.
“All it took was one little scrape of my fingernail over the dot on the exclamation point,” he said, beaming. “Of course, I had to be sure there weren’t other microdots—”
“Hence all your heavy petting of the evidence bag—and only a senile-acting old man could have pulled off the brilliant move of faking getting a plastic bag caught in his coat zipper.”
I smiled at him, but he could see that I was searching his face. My right hand was on the center console and Grandpa reached out and squeezed my fingers.
“All an act, love. My bones may be old and creaky and I may make far too many trips to the bathroom at night, but these places”—he touched his temple, then his heart—“I’m lucky enough to say are still working as they should.”
Fearing my eyes might mist up if we continued along these lines, I said, “Okay, then. Where to next?”
“We need to go somewhere private to read this baby,” he said, tapping his shirt pocket, where he’d slipped the microdot he’d encased in my business card.
“My office?” I suggested. Almost on cue, a text message from Serena came in. I had the car’s voice system read it out loud to me without thinking.
Checking on you after yesterday’s weirdness with the dead guy. We hope you’re right as rain.
“Glad you didn’t keep that to yourself,” Grandpa said, nodding with approval as the robotic female voice continued to read Serena’s message.
Also, a package came for you at the office. Those fabulous heels you ordered for New Year’s Eve. Want me to bring to hotel? Ben still might show up to snog the living daylights out of you, and maybe you’ll even get some quality time with HIS pack—.
“O-kay, then!” I sang out, my cheeks heating up as I punched the button on my steering wheel to cut the playback. Somehow it was even more mortifying in that robotic voice. I started rambling. “Um, yeah, clearly Serena is at the office, so that’s a no-go. Where to now? Back to my condo? Somewhere else?”
Somewhere I could crawl into a hole to hide and text Serena that I was going to have her head on a silver platter, naturally.
My grandfather, however, merely hiked an eyebrow my way. “That Special Agent Turner still hasn’t called you?”
“Grandpa…” I groaned. My cheeks were surely flaming now.
“Want me to have him taken out?”
My jaw dropped again, but I had to laugh. “Grandpa! I can’t believe you just said that!”
His laugh was both infectious and cheekily unrepentant.
Finally, he said, “I just realized we haven’t eaten a proper lunch yet, and I’m starved. How about we go eat? Afterward, we can read what Hugo left for us.”
“I feel so sorry for Hugo,” I said, turning onto Colorado Street. “I hope the medical examiner finds out what made him so ill. That broken tooth looked horribly painful.”
“Hold on,” Grandpa said, his eyes narrowing. “He had a broken tooth?”
“Yes. I thought I told you.”
“You said he looked like he’d been ill, but you didn’t tell me about the tooth. What were his other symptoms?”
“He was staggering, and sweaty,” I said.
“Did his hair look like it had been falling out?”
I thought back as I pulled into a parking lot and found a spot. “Well, he was balding,” I said. “But he had some hair left on top of his head. Come to think of it, though, it was more like uneven patches of hair.”
Grandpa frowned.
“What?” I asked him, turning my car off. “What is it?”
“I’d rather let my contact confirm it before I say anything,” he said. “But, regardless, Hugo must have felt there was significant danger to have handled this situation the way he did—following you, making it his last act to get this to you.”
He patted his pocket again. “That means someone may already be watching us and know we have this. Or they might not have realized we’ve found anything of interest yet. The point is, we need to be careful until we know what we’re dealing with.”
Oh, I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I felt frozen in my seat, wondering if we were being watched as we spoke. It was a creepy feeling for sure.
But not for Grandpa, it seemed. He threw off his seatbelt and looked up at the sign in the parking lot with a whoop.
“Big Flaco’s Tacos—hot damn, I should have known. I haven’t seen Flaco in a coon’s age, and I could really use a beer and some of his queso. Let’s go.”
SEVENTEEN
You would have thought it had literally been a coon’s age since my grandfather and Flaco had seen each other by the way they embraced just outside of Flaco’s kitchen area, exclaiming, “¡Amigo!” and rattling on in Spanish for the next few minutes about how they couldn’t complain about their lives while simultaneously discussing how the cold made their achy knees act up.
Then Grandpa asked Flaco about his wife and children, listening intently to every proud update, and telling Flaco that his three children were as smart and talented as their parents.
In contrast, Flaco, his handlebar mustache twitching with mischief, replied by telling Grandpa how I was now his most demanding and high-maintenance customer, having become somewhat of a local celebrity after all the nonsense that had happened two months earlier.
“Lucia has so many admirers now, people fight to get a seat next to her at the bar.” He waggled his dark eyebrows at my grandfather. “Most of them men.”
“¡Mentiras! All of that is such tosh,” I said. “I cannot believe you’re feeding my grandfather such lies,” I added, hands on my hips, making Grandpa and Flaco roar with laughter.
Then Flaco turned to my grandfather and said, “¿Pero, que es ‘tosh’?”
When they were done roasting me, Flaco gestured to the dining area, telling us to sit where we liked and that he would bring us something special to eat.
Nearly every table was taken since it was still peak lunch hours. “I guess we’re eating here,” Grandpa said, not looking remotely put out by it. “But I do wish there were somewhere private where we could get a look at the microdot.”
I looked around the restaurant, with its red-vinyl barstools, checkerboard floor, and pockmarked tables. It had the look of a 1950s-style diner that had been beaten with a baseball bat, which was exactly what had happened during the time between when the former owners had abandoned it and Flaco had purchased it to house his taqueria.
“Actually,” I said, “I do know of somewhere private.” We found Flaco again and I said, “Mind if I show Grandpa your newest addition?”
Flaco’s mustache twitched as he pulled a key from his pocket. “The button to open it is working now,” he told me. “I have queso and drinks for you when you come back.”
I led Grandpa down the short corridor by the kitchen and through a door to the taqueria’s storeroom. Passing open shelves full of spices, bags of dried beans, cooking oils, and more masa harina than I’d seen in my life, I walked us through a second door, then a third.
The third door opened into a room with black-lacquered walls. A large, half-moon table was at the near side of the room, under a set of black shutters. A handful of clear votive holders shaped like fat pears waited atop the table for their candles to be lit. As of yet, there were no paintings o
r framed photos or anything else.
I flipped on the lights and pressed a button on the wall. The shutters split apart in the center and drew back silently, with sounds of a hissing, spitting grill and rapid chopping suddenly coming from the other side. We were looking directly into Flaco’s kitchen, where Ana, Flaco’s best waitress, waved to us while expertly flipping several chicken breasts and repositioning a handful of light green tomatillos that were charring on the grill for one of Flaco’s specialty salsas.
The new part-time sous chef, a young man named Juan, was busy chopping onions and was so into his work, he didn’t even turn around. Flaco’s two other waitresses bustled in and out without giving us so much as a second glance. From the way the shutters opened, no one in the main restaurant could see us, making us almost hidden within the busy restaurant.
Grandpa looked around with delight. “He’s built a private chef’s table.”
“This area used to be two storage closets that Flaco rarely used,” I explained. “Since he’s had customers begging him for a chef’s table for ages, he decided to build one.”
I hit the button again, closing the shutters smoothly, blocking out any noise from the kitchen. “He’s only booking for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, but it’s already reserved for the next three months.”
“We’ll have to book it for one night, then,” Grandpa said. “Get your parents in and whatever other family can come.”
“Already done,” I said. “I’ve booked it for your birthday. Maeve and Kyle are even flying in from DC.”
A smile split Grandpa’s face.
“Okay, let’s do this,” he said, pulling the microdot viewer and the little packet from his shirt pocket. Carefully, he removed the microdot from my business card and laid it on the end of the viewer. He offered the viewer to me, but I shook my head.
“Hugo left this message for you, Grandpa. You read it first.”
He held the viewer to his eye, turning it until the microdot was level. He didn’t study its contents long, then handed me the viewer in silence.
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