#4 Seeing and Believing (Mike & Riel Mysteries)

by Norah McClintock

  Rebecca looped an arm through mine. “You should be happy,” she said.

  “But we didn’t find out the girl’s name and we didn’t find out where she lives.”

  Rebecca stopped and turned so that she could look me in the eye.

  “Don’t you get it, Mike? The girl really exists,” she said. “That man saw her. He saw a girl in the store who looks exactly like Vin described. Vin was telling you the truth.”

  “I get it,” I said. “But what good does it do when the cops don’t believe it?”

  “We could go to the police. We could get them to talk to the old man.”

  I shuddered at the thought of going anywhere near Detectives Canton and Mancini. Besides, what good would it do? “He’d just tell them what he told us,” I said. “That he saw the girl around a couple of months ago, but that he hasn’t seen her since. In fact, he’s pretty sure she hasn’t been around since then because he’s out and around all the time and he would have noticed—and, oh, by the way, that one time he saw her, she was boosting stuff from the store.” I shook my head. “Like that’s going to turn the cops into real believers! If anything, they’re going to think maybe the girl was in on it or that maybe she’s Vin’s real girlfriend instead of his imaginary girlfriend, and if she’d steal, she’d also lie, so they wouldn’t believe her even if they decided to look for her.” I felt so bitter that it took a few seconds for me to register the hurt look on Rebecca’s face. I pulled her close to me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You did great. You’re amazing. It’s just that I thought finding out about the girl would make things better. Instead, it looks like it’s not going to make any difference at all.”

  Rebecca slipped an arm around my waist, and we walked that way to the subway, holding each other.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I heard Riel’s voice as soon as I opened the front door. It sounded like he was talking to someone in the kitchen. At first I didn’t know who it was. I couldn’t even tell whether he was talking on the phone or if there was someone in there with him. I heard him say, “Why does this have to be so complicated? Can’t a guy just say he changed his mind without everyone wanting to analyze it to death?” Then he said, “I know I told her I was through. Are you going to tell me that she never said anything like that? Or you? You never in your life said you were through?”

  I stopped where I was, in the front hall, with the front door still open. What was he talking about? Through with who? Susan? Boy, I sure hoped not.

  “You’re asking the wrong person, John,” a familiar voice said. It was Dave Jones, a cop friend of Riel’s. “For me it’s the other way around. You know how many times I came this close to getting married to some perfectly nice woman and then she said she was through? You know how many times I wish she hadn’t said that?”

  “Probably almost as many times as you’ve said you’re glad she did,” Riel said.

  Dave Jones laughed, but when he spoke again, his voice was serious. “You should tell Susan. You should do it now.”

  Tell Susan what? What was going on?

  “I talked to Kate again,” Riel said. “I’m going to go and see her. Depending on what she says, I’ll talk to Susan. But there’s no reason to upset her until I know for sure where I stand.”

  I’d heard him say that before—to Kate. I started to get a bad feeling about Riel and Susan. I backed up so that I could close the front door—you know, slam it so that he would think I’d just come through the door and I hadn’t heard what he was saying. Instead, I bumped into the new little table that Susan had bought for the front hall. It sat in what used to be empty space—and because I was used to that empty space, I kept knocking into the stupid table. It didn’t make a lot of noise, but it was enough to make Riel call out, “Mike, is that you?” You could tell he used to be a police detective, because he knew there was no way that Susan would ever bang into that table the way I did.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m home,” trying to make it sound like I’d just got there.

  “Do me a favor,” Riel called. “Take the garbage out front, will you? The cans and the bottles, too, Mike. They’re being picked up tomorrow.” Which, of course, I knew, but which Riel was probably going to remind me about every week because once, just once, I had forgotten the cans and the bottles, which get picked up every two weeks for recycling, and because of that, Riel didn’t trust me to ever remember.

  I went out of my way to make noise closing the door behind me so that they’d know I was gone. That was the whole point—give Mike something to do to get him out of the house so that Riel could finish his (private) conversation with Dave Jones.

  They came out the front door while I was hauling the garbage and the blue boxes from the back of the house to the curb. Riel walked Dave to his car, and they stood there for a moment, talking, before Dave finally got into his car and drove away. Riel stood on the sidewalk and watched him go. Then he turned to me and said, “Where have you been?”

  “Out with Rebecca. Is everything okay?”

  Riel looked at me. “Why wouldn’t it be?” he said.

  “No reason.”

  “You’re going to have to get your own supper tonight. I have to go somewhere.” He didn’t say where. He didn’t have to. He’d already told Dave Jones that he was going to go and see Kate.

  I was halfway through saying it was no problem when he jogged up the front walk and into the house. He came out a few seconds later, his car keys dangling from one hand. He left. Two hours later Susan let herself into the house. She stood in the front hall and called his name. Something about her seemed different. It took me a moment to realize what it was. She was angry.

  “He’s not here,” I told her.

  “Do you know where he is?” she said. She sounded different, too, like she was doing her best not to take out whatever she was angry about on me.

  I told her I didn’t. I also told her that I didn’t know when he’d be back.

  “Did you try his cell?” I said.

  “I can’t get through to him,” she said. “I keep getting his voice mail, and he hasn’t returned my calls.” That seemed to make her even angrier. “I think he must have turned his phone off.”

  She went into the living room and sat down on the couch. For a few moments she just sat there. Then she picked up a magazine and started to flick through the pages without even looking at them.

  I thought about calling Riel’s cell and leaving a message to warn him. But he would have to listen to all of Susan’s messages before he got to mine, and by then he’d already know she was mad. Instead, I asked Susan if she wanted me to make her a cup of tea. Susan was a big tea drinker.

  “That would be nice, Mike,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I made the tea and brought it to her. She was flicking through the magazine pages more slowly now, so I figured she wasn’t as mad anymore.

  “Did John ask you about that tape?” I said.

  “Tape?” She looked confused for a moment, probably because she was still thinking about where Riel was. “Oh,” she said. “The video. Yes, he did. And I realized that I forgot to thank you for making it, Mike. It was especially nice how you skipped the commercials. I hate watching commercials.”

  “Yeah, well, it would have been easier,” I said, “if someone”—meaning Riel—“had a VCR that was younger than me instead of older than me. The ones they have now, you can program them to skip commercials. But not this one.” I nodded to the VCR that sat next to Riel’s TV. It was a real dinosaur. “The only way you can skip the commercials is if you sit there and stop the VCR when the commercials start, and then start the tape again when the commercials are over.”

  “I could have just fast-forwarded, Mike,” Susan said.

  “I know.” But I also knew that commercials bugged her. And it was the grand finale of her favorite show, plus a behind-the-scenes special on the show. She hadn’t asked me to tape it for her—I knew she was going to miss it because she and Riel had something else planned
. And it wasn’t like I was doing anything else that night. “It was no big deal to do it without commercials,” I said. “So, John asked you about it, right? You still have it?”

  “I loaned it to a friend of mine,” she said. “But don’t worry. I called her and left a message. I’ll get it back—not that I think you’ll need it, Mike. I think John is right. I think the police are just trying to scare you. But I’ll get it back for sure. I promise.”

  I hoped she was right.

  » » »

  When the phone rang later that night, I scrambled to answer it. It was Rebecca. She said she was glad I had picked up. I told her I was glad she’d called.

  “ ’Cause you adore me, huh?” she said.

  “That, and because John and Susan just had a fight,” I said.

  There was a little pause at the end of the line. Then Rebecca said, “But they’re getting married.”

  “That’s what they were fighting about. The wedding, I mean, not whether or not they’re getting married.” At least, they weren’t fighting about that yet.

  “What part of the wedding?” Rebecca said, more interested than I would have been if I wasn’t living with Riel.

  “It started out being the menu.”

  “For the reception, you mean,” Rebecca said.

  “They were supposed to go somewhere together and taste different stuff, but Riel didn’t show up.”

  “And Susan got mad, huh?”

  “Not right away.”

  Susan had calmed down a lot by the time Riel walked through the door. When she asked him how come he didn’t show up, you couldn’t tell that she had been mad before. I think she was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. But her face tensed up fast when he said that something had come up, he’d had to go downtown, and he’d forgotten all about the caterer. I felt kind of sick. He was lying to her. It hadn’t come up—he had arranged it—and it hadn’t been last-minute. I called your cell, Susan said, but you didn’t answer. Oh yeah, he said, he’d left his cell phone in the car. In the car? she said. You never leave your cell phone in the car. Yeah, well he’d done it today and he was sorry, really, it was just he had all these things on his mind. Right, she said. She still wasn’t mad. That came later, when she pulled out a pile of menus and the binder that she carried around all the time to keep track of everything for the wedding.

  Susan’s binder was thicker than my English and history binders combined. She opened it and took out a sheet of paper that was covered with her handwriting, which looked pretty neat to me, considering that she was a doctor, and said, “Okay, here’s what you missed … ”

  She started to go through all the different things she had tasted and what she thought about them and what she thought the guests would think about them and how they might stand up (as she put it) if it turned out to be really hot the day they got married. It sounded boring to me. To Riel, too, I guess—or maybe he was thinking about Kate (but I didn’t say that to Rebecca because I didn’t want her to think something bad about Riel that maybe wasn’t even true)—because suddenly there was Susan’s voice, sharp, saying, “John, are you even listening to me?”

  And then there was Riel who, really, I figured should have been smarter, saying, “Why don’t you just go with what you like?”

  The next thing you know, they were acting like they were already married. I’d never heard her yell at him before, but she yelled then, mostly about how he was leaving everything to her and she didn’t think that was a good way to start what was supposed to be a life partnership, blah-blah-blah. Riel tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t listen. She ended up banging out the front door. Next thing you know, her car was pulling away from the curb. Riel hung around the house for about an hour, calling her—at least I assumed it was Susan he was calling—but not getting any answer. Then he left the house, too.

  “You think she’s going to call off the wedding?” I said to Rebecca.

  “I think Mr. Riel better pay more attention to her,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah.” I hoped he would. I liked Susan. I liked how she made him happy. “So what’s up?”

  “The funeral is tomorrow.”

  “What funeral?”

  “The one for Cecilia Lee, the woman who was shot. I read in the paper that the funeral is tomorrow morning. We should go.”

  “What for?”

  I heard a little sigh on the other end of the line.

  “We want to find that girl, right, Mike?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Maybe she’ll turn up at the funeral.”

  Boy, where had she got that idea? “That old guy caught her stealing from the store, Rebecca. Why would she go to the funeral of someone she was trying to steal from?”

  “He also said that Mrs. Lee didn’t call the police. Instead, she let her go,” Rebecca said. “And we’re assuming Vin is telling you the truth about that day, even if he isn’t, right?” She waited for me to say something, so I said, yeah, right. “Well, if Vin is telling the truth, then that girl was in the storeroom at the back of the store when it happened. That means that she knows that the woman who caught her stealing, but didn’t call the cops on her, got shot—maybe she feels bad about that. So bad she’ll show up at the funeral.”

  “If she felt bad about it, she’d have gone to the police and told them what she saw.”

  I heard another sigh, except that this one sounded impatient. For some reason, it reminded me of Susan.

  “You got any better ideas, Mike?”

  Well … “No.”

  “The funeral is at eleven. I have a spare and then lunch.”

  “I have math and then lunch.”

  “You think you can get Mr. Riel to let you skip one class?”

  I doubted it, but I said, “I’ll meet you behind school right after second period, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. “And, Mike? It’s a funeral. You’re going to have to dress nice.”

  “No problem.”

  I had been hoping to sneak out of the house the next morning without being noticed, but when does that ever happen?

  Susan spotted me first. She was walking through the living room, a cup of coffee in one hand and the newspaper in the other. She smiled at me. She looked a lot happier than she had when she’d left the house last night. I had heard the front door open a little before eleven. Then I’d heard footsteps, and Riel knocked on my bedroom door and poked his head in. He’d looked more relaxed. But all he’d said was, “Goodnight, Mike.” He hadn’t told me that Susan was with him. It was obvious from how she looked now that she had forgiven him.

  “Mike,” she said. “You’re all dressed up.”

  That brought Riel out of the kitchen to take a look. He was in his usual teacher clothes—casual slacks and a sports shirt. He gave me a once-over and said, “What’s up, Mike? You got a court date I don’t know about?”

  I thought about making something up, but that never worked with Riel. Nine times out of ten he could tell I was lying. The other 10 percent of the time he eventually found out, and then he was disappointed in me for not being straight in the first place. So these days I pretty much told him the truth.

  “Rebecca and I want to go to that woman’s funeral,” I said. “Rebecca has a spare, so it’s okay for her. But I don’t. Can you write me a note?”

  “Funeral?” he said. “What woman?”

  “The woman who was shot at the convenience store.”

  Riel and Susan exchanged glances.

  “Why do you want to go to her funeral?” Riel said. “You didn’t even know her. Not that that’s a reason not to go. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people from the area showed up, given how she died.”

  “I just thought, you know, since Vin was in the store and since Sal was the one who called the police … ” I shrugged and hoped he’d leave it at that. I didn’t want to tell him the real reason I was going.

  Riel surprised me. He didn’t say no right away. He said, “What class would you miss?
”

  “Math. Then I have lunch. We’ll be back at school for the first period after lunch. I promise.”

  Riel disappeared into the kitchen. When he came back out again, he handed me a note.

  “Check in with Mr. Tran before the end of the day,” he said. “Find out what you missed, and make sure you get your math homework from him. And check in with me when you get back. I have a prep period after lunch today.”

  I said I would.

  Rebecca was waiting outside for me at the end of second period. She had on a black skirt and a grey blouse and, even dressed for a funeral, she looked terrific.

  “I don’t think this is going to do any good,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” she said. I didn’t argue with her.

  The service was held in a church. The minister said that Mrs. Lee had been attending regularly since she’d come to this country. I heard someone behind me whisper that it was a shame her husband never came with her. Something in the way she said it made me think that she didn’t think highly of Mr. Lee. Someone else said that the minister had gone to the hospital a couple of times, hoping to talk to Mr. Lee about what he wanted in the funeral service, but that Mr. Lee was in such serious condition that he finally had to go ahead without consulting him.

  The church was packed, which made it hard to get a good look at everyone who was there. There were a lot of Chinese people, but a lot of other people, too. As soon as the service ended and they took the casket outside to load it into the hearse for the drive to the cemetery, Rebecca grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the aisle. We stood outside and watched people as they came out of the church.

  “I don’t see any short, black spiky hair,” I said, although I saw a lot of black suits and black shirts, black sweaters and black blouses, black shoes and black hats. “And if her tattoo is where Vin says it is, it’s going to be covered up.” It was a cool day, for May. Everyone was wearing long sleeves. Most people had on jackets or sweaters. Besides, even I wouldn’t go to a funeral with a tattoo of a spider on display, assuming I had a tattoo of a spider.