The Cereal Murders gbcm-3

by Diane Mott Davidson

  The bookstore. That was the last place I had seen Julian; that was where I would start. Maybe I could call Miss Kaplan, or some of the staff, maybe someone had seen him leave… but how would I get phone numbers for these people? Reluctantly, I dialed Audrey Coopersmith, but got only a sleepy Heather.

  “Mom’s not here. She went out with Dad.”

  “What?”

  “She said they were trying to work things out.”

  “Look, Heather, I have to talk to her. I … left something in the store… and I need to know how to reach somebody there now.”

  “Why? The bookstore’s closed.”

  “You didn’t see Julian, did you? At the end of the evening?”

  “Ms. Bear, you’re confusing me. Did you leave a thing or a person in the bookstore?”

  Oh, God, the grade book. I had left something in the bookstore. If Julian was still alive, if somebody wanted the evidence of that grade book enough… maybe I could do a swap. But I didn’t know who I was dealing with, what that person would want or when.

  “Heather, look, I have a big problem. Julian’s life may be in danger… and I do have something. I have Miss Ferrell’s grade book.”

  A sharp intake of breath from Heather. “You? But we’ve been looking for it; I can’t do the class rank without it.”

  “Listen up. I need you to call every senior’s family. Be sure you talk to the senior and the parents – “

  “But it’s late –“

  “Please! Tell every single person I have Miss Ferrell’s grade book and that I’ll swap it for Julian, at Elk Park Prep in” – I hastily consulted my watch – “two hours. No questions asked.”

  “Does that include my mother? Because I don’t know where she is. And you still don’t have a way of getting into the store.”

  “Find her. I’ll figure out the store situation. Your mother and Carl must have a favorite restaurant or something. Find them. Please, Heather, find everybody.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  “Trust me.” I hung up before she could continue to analyze my mental status.

  I ran out to the Rover. I shifted into first gear and thought, Audrey out with Carl? Unbelievable. But that was the least of my concerns.

  The Rover engine roared as I sped down Interstate 70 to Denver. At the First Avenue light I turned left on Milwaukee and pulled up to the parking garage entrance. The first thing I had to figure out was whether Julian had taken my van anywhere.

  Glitch: the lot was closed. Worse, the horizontal bar was down.

  What was a barricade to the rhino guard of a desert vehicle? I backed up, gunned the engine forward, and crashed through the horizontal bar.

  The growl of the car engine echoed off the concrete walls and through the cavernous space of the deserted garage. Up, up, I went to the third-floor level. And there was my van, parked ominously, alone, next to the entrance. Glass sparkled at its tires.

  My heartbeat banged in my ears. How was I going to get back into the store? Could Audrey, in stomping out of the bookstore in a rage, have forgotten her purse in my van? I desperately hoped she had left her security entrance card behind. Unless she had manufactured her tantrum …

  Best not to speculate until I had the grade book in my hands. I hopped out of the Rover and slid open the van door. The sound reverberated eerily.

  “Julian?” I whispered into the van’s cold depths. Silence. And then I looked in shock at the mess of papers, boxes, and cups that the overhead light illuminated. The vehicle had been trashed.

  I was so angry, I almost slammed the door. But then I saw Audrey Coopersmith’s overturned purse on the floor. I searched desperately for the magnetic-striped security card. It was not there. Now what?

  An explosion cracked the stillness. A gunshot. I fell forward.

  The sound had come from inside the store. I ran up to the back entrance security post. The light was green: Whoever had ransacked my van had probably used Audrey’s card to open the electronic lock. I wrenched open the first glass door and then the second. I cursed wildly to overcome fear as I stepped into the dark depths of the bookstore.

  The air was black, tarlike. The silence was absolute. I stepped carefully out onto the soft carpet. The smell of the bookstore was rich: paper, carpet, bindings, books, chairs, wood, dust. The odor of humans still lingered. I was near the kitchenette but could see nothing. The desk was close by; Audrey had shown it to me… .

  The flashlights.. One under each desk. I walked through the darkness, not knowing whether I was going in a straight or crooked path, but heading in my mind’s eye toward where that desk must be. My foot thumped the side of a chair. It squeaked forward on tiny, unseen wheels. Damn. I groped underneath the desk until I found the cold metal clips holding the flashlight. My fingers closed around it. When I turned it on, I heard another shot. Louder, this time. Closer.

  “Julian!” I shouted into the darkness. The phone. Call Schulz. I extricated myself from underneath the desk, stood, and directed the light to the phone. I dialed 911, begged them to come to the Tattered Cover right away, and hung up. The silence pressed down on me.

  “Julian!” I shrieked again. My flashlight beam washed across the carpet to the steps.

  And then I saw something out of place that made my heart freeze. Near the steps there was a large, dark splotch on the carpet. I dashed toward it, then stopped and swayed backward. Blood in a bookstore. But wait.

  What had I just said to myself? Something out of place.

  My mind reeled.

  What had the woman in Lakewood said? Something it was too late for, something that was out of place… What had Arch said? You can’t see Andromeda in the summer… and, of course, I couldn’t buy a Good Humor bar from the ice cream man in the winter, now, could I? And I wouldn’t see a spider in an immaculate kitchen, would I? Tom Schulz had always told me: If you see anything that’s out of place…

  And now I knew. The crimes, the perpetrator, even the methods… I knew. I sank against a bookshelf, sickened.

  Move, I ordered myself. Down the wide, carpeted stairs I went, flashing the light ahead of me, until I reached the second floor. The scents were different on this level – more people had been here, more sweat hung in the air. There had been no sound since the two shots.

  “Julian?”

  “Goldy!” came a bloodcurdling call from somewhere below me. “Goldy! Help!” Julian’s voice.

  “Where are you?” I yelled, but heard only shuffling, someone running, thudding footsteps. I nearly tripped running down the last flight of stairs.

  Here, on the first floor, there was more light. It poured through the first-floor windows from the street lamps on First Avenue and Milwaukee Street.

  “Agh!” came Julian’s muffled voice again. And then there was a scuffling sound from… where? From over by Business books.

  I ran through the shadows to where I thought he was, near the exit to Milwaukee Street. I swept the flashlight across the rug… nothing. When I was almost to the first-floor cash registers, something slammed against me. I fell forward with a great crash, sending the flashlight skittering across the carpet. I came to my knees and leapt for it just as the body hit me again. I grabbed the flashlight and whirled around. The light shone on the furious, leathery face of Hank Dawson.

  “You son of a bitch!” I screamed, and swung wildly with my flashlight. “Where’s Julian?”

  He leapt for me, but I sidestepped him. With a curse, he drew back, then lunged for me again. Frantically, I grabbed for a wire display of oversize paperbacks and tipped it over in front of him. Hank tripped and fell hard. Desperately, I reached for books, any books, on nearby shelves and flung them on top of him.

  To my amazement, his sprawled body remained motionless. I scuttled around the corner to Business books.

  “Julian,” I called into the shelves, “it’s me! You have to come out quickly.” Which one of these godforsaken shelves was the one that opened outward? I couldn’t remember. But slo
wly, absurdly, as if I were in a horror movie, I saw a shelf begin to move. Books wobbled, then toppled out to the floor. A face peeked out of the vacant shelf.

  “Is Mr. Dawson… dead?” It was Julian.

  “Down but not out,” I said when I had caught my breath. “Oh, God, Julian, is that blood on your face? I’m so glad you’re alive. The police are on their way, but we’ve got to get out.”

  “I can t move, he whimpered. He shot me … “

  Hank Dawson groaned and moved under the pile of books.

  “Go!” Julian whispered desperately. “Get out!”

  “Scoot back in there,” I ordered. He groaned, then inched back into the tiny space. I shoved the wall of books back in place just as Hank Dawson came around the corner of shelves.

  “Hi, Goldy,” he said absurdly. I might have been there, in a darkened bookstore, to cater a Bronco brunch.

  “Hank?”

  “I want what I came for,” he told me with enormous, terrifying calm. “I want the kid.”

  “Hank – “

  “Should I just start shooting into these shelves? I know he’s in here somewhere.”

  “Wait!” I yelled. “There’s something else you’re going to need. Something you wanted before.”

  He shone his flashlight into my face. The light blinded me. “What?”

  “Miss Ferrell’s grade book. You were looking for it in her room, weren’t you? And… in my van? I have it here in the store.” I added fiercely, “You’ll never be able to prove Greer’s high class rank without it.” I had to get him away from Julian. Julian was the key.

  Hank was breathing hard. “The book,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “Here in the store. I hid it, I was going to … to give it to the police,” I sputtered. I was afraid. I was also passionately, blindly angry. Hank glanced at the unmoving bookshelves. Satisfied that Julian was immobilized, he growled, “All right, let’s go get it.” He shifted to one side of the shelves; I pushed past him. He stank of sweat.

  My feet shuffled across the carpet. Hank clomped close behind. Where was my damn flashlight? I wanted to look at him. I wanted to look into the eyes of a man who had murdered a teenager, a teacher, and a woman in Lakewood all to get his daughter into a top school.

  “Don’t stall!” He swung his flashlight up and caught me under the chin. Pain flashed up through my skull. I staggered, and Hank shoved me into the cash register counter.

  I reeled away from him. Damn you, damn you, damn you. I had to find a way to get him. But for now I had to think, to walk, to do what he wanted until I could figure out how to escape. “I’m not going to be able to find the grade book unless I get my light. Okay if I get it?” I said to the stinking form behind me.

  “Walk ahead of me with it. You so much as move an inch out of line and I’ll put a bullet through your back.”

  I did as directed, walking slowly and trying not to think of Julian. Or of Hank’s gun.

  I bent and slowly, very slowly, picked up my flashlight. “Why did you kill Keith Andrews?” I asked, straightening slowly.

  “He was in the way,” Hank muttered. “Pompous little creep.”

  “You sure planned it out. Break his windshield so he’ll mess up with the Princeton rep. Psych him out. Just like in the NFL. But Keith didn’t psych easily. So you looked up someone with the same initial and last name and stole her credit card so you could plant it in one of the Marenskys’ coats and try to psych them out. But Kathy Andrews caught you stealing her mail, so you had to kill her.”

  “I didn’t care about that Lakewood woman. You haven’t had to listen to the Marenskys brag for eighteen years. Getting them arrested for Keith Andrews’ murder would have killed two birds with one stone.” He chuckled. “Too bad it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Someone saw the van you used, Greer Dawson the Hammer’s van, down in Lakewood, with the initials GD HMR,” I ventured. “All the person who saw it could think of was, too early, something out of place in October. That person thought the initials stood for Good Humor, but I didn’t figure that out until tonight. I saw” – I gritted my teeth – “something out of place, and I thought how out of place an ice cream truck was in the fall.”

  “Brilliant,” he snapped. “Put you in the fucking Ivy League.”

  We were half a room away from the window display. “And then you tried to intimidate Julian. Number two kid in the class, you figured if you scared Arch and me, you could get to Julian, right? Shake him up badly enough so that he’d blow his aptitude tests. And you almost succeeded, throwing a rock through our window, putting a snake in Arch’s locker, stopping up our chimney, planting a spider in your own immaculate drawer, manufacturing a conflict with Audrey tonight to get rid of me – “

  “Shut up!” Again he chuckled horribly. “You know what they always say, Goldy. You gotta make the other team sweat, make them think they’re going to lose. It was going well until the cops started watching your house.”

  “Yes, they scared you off.” I hesitated. “And then Miss Ferrell. She wouldn’t give Greer an A in French, but you figured you could go to Perkins about that. After all, it had been done before at that school.”

  “Don’t I know. Now, I told you to shut up.” I stopped by the magazines. “Why did you have to kill Miss Ferrell?” I persisted.

  “I didn’t pay over a hundred thousand dollars for Greer to go to that school so she could end up at some podunk place in the Midwest. Now, quit talking and move.” Some podunk place in the Midwest? You went to a school in the Midwest, didn’t you? Only, as Stan Marensky had pointed out so cruelly, you flunked out of Michigan before you could ever end up anywhere, Hank. Macguire’s words haunted me: I’m nobody. And who was nobody most of all in his own eyes? A flunk-out with a restaurant whose two pastimes in life were lifting weights and expressing his violent hostilities on Sunday afternoons in front of a televised playing field. But he was a nobody who would become somebody if his offspring went to PrInceton. I should have known.

  One last section of magazines loomed before we got to the window displays. I tried to think of how I would shove him into the door, try to knock him out the way I had before with the wire display.

  He poked my shoulder hard. “Where is this damn grade book?”

  “It’s less than twenty feet away. If you don’t let me get it, all your plans will fall through… .”

  Apparently satisfied, Hank poked me again. “Go get it.”

  Actually, I wanted to tell him, you don’t need it anymore. In that streetfront display, no one would find it for weeks. Even then, it probably would be discarded. To bookstore workers, who was Suzanne Ferrell? How could she have had anything to do with Goldy the caterer and her assistant, Julian Teller, found murdered in their bookstore?

  Stop thinking like this

  “We have to squeeze into a display,” I warned Hank.

  “If you are lying, I’ll kill you right now, I swear it.”

  “We’re close. Good old Hank,” I said grimly, “it’s like your final goal line, isn’t it? My one Bronco buddy, turned on me.”

  “Shut up.”

  I played my flashlight over the last shelf of magazines. I couldn’t hear a thing from Julian. There were no sirens or flashing lights. Desperation gripped me. We arrived at the narrow entrance to the platform.

  “Now what?” demanded Hank.

  “It’s in here. Underneath a pile of cookbooks.”

  “Is this a joke?” he demanded. “Get in there and get it for me. No, wait. I don’t want you going out some door on the other side. Get in there, then you tell me where it is.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. I put down my flashlight.

  “Flash your beam over on this pile.” I motioned to the small table between the window and where I stood. “It’s right under the first book.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Arch. Adrenaline surged through my body as I moved laboriously across the platform.

  “Move over,” Hank ordered impatient
ly. Obediently, I moved a few inches to my right and spread my feet to steady myself. There was about a foot of space between Hank and me, and then another eighteen inches between him and the window. He tucked his gun in his pants and reached greedily for the pile of cookbooks. One chance.

  I bent over and shoved into Hank Dawson with all my might. I heard a startled oomph! as my head sank into his belly. He hurtled into the glass with an explosive crack. I felt the plate glass breaking. The window broke into monstrous falling shards. I pulled back. Hank Dawson screamed wildly as his body crashed through the shattered glass. The heavy blades fell like a guillotine.

  “Agh! Agh!” he screamed. He writhed on the pavement, howling.

  Shaking uncontrollably, I crept to the broken window. Beneath me, Hank Dawson lay sprawled on the snowy sidewalk. His face stared up at mine.

  “Agh … argh …” He was reaching desperately for words.

  I started to say, “I’m sorry – “

  “Listen,” he rasped. “Listen… she… she could read when… she was… only four… .”

  Then he died.

  22

  “I swear, Goldy,” said Tom Schulz an hour later, shaking his head, “you get into more damned trouble.”

  The ambulance carrying Julian pulled away from the curb. He had been shot in the calf, but would be all right. I had several bumps, none of which were life-threatening, according to the paramedics. ‘”I swear also,” Schulz went on grimly, “that’s the last time I leave you or Julian in a potentially dangerous situation.”

  I looked around at the police cars and fire engines. Clouds had moved in again, and snow was falling in a gauzy, unhurried way from a sky tinted pink by urban streetlights. Audrey had shown me some of the Tattered Cover’s charms. But it was great to be out of the bookstore and into the sweet, cold air, especially at one o’clock in the morning.

  “You didn’t know. And I did try to call you,” I told him.

  Tom Schulz grunted.

  The Denver police officers who had answered my 911 call had questioned me repeatedly: the same story over and over. “For college?” they said, bewildered and disbelieving. “Because of class rank?”