Before heading to the first nursery, I stopped at Lowe's. One of my other clients had a stand of sedge that had been planted by the previous owners and ignored for years. The grasslike plant was now threatening to take over her driveway. My plan was to divide it and plant clumps in containers dotted around her property; it would be a nice tie-in with the rest of the landscape, and not expensive.
I could have used a saw but after nearly taking off my left index finger once with a chain saw, I stayed away from most power tools and all but the smallest folding pruning saws. Dueling pitchforks were my weapons of choice. If I plunged each of them into the center of a plant, face out, I could push the forks apart—or step on the backs of the tines—to divide the sedge, or any other overgrown grass or perennial.
This would be the first of many garden-season trips to a bigbox home center. For the most part, only amateurs or the truly desperate braved the throng of afternoon do-it-your-selfers who required a full lesson with the purchase of every item, but my schedule had changed and I had no choice. I made a beeline for the garden section, just coming to life with flats of herbs, pansies, and early spring annuals. I blew by the plants, grabbed two pitchforks, and after a quick credit-card swipe I was on my way.
The nursery was bustling. Forklifts moved mountains of bags of mulch, which made the place smell like a redwood forest. The help was happy to see me. Small-timers like me signaled the return of the busy season. And I was the perfect customer, knowledgeable, not big enough to take away serious business from them, and, on a good day, cuter than most of the sweaty, bigbellied guys who had open accounts with them. And thanks to Anna, I paid my bills on time.
Damn, I'd forgotten to get the partial payment from Caroline. Anna, my chief financial officer, would be unhappy. Whatever. I'd make a note to ask Caroline for it next time we met. I loaded up on plant material, arranged for larger shrubs to be delivered, and headed for nursery number two. It was after six p.m. by the time I got home.
I knew something was different the minute I pulled in: some of the stones I'd used to border a bed at the foot of the driveway had been driven into the ground. The old UPS deliveryman had done a number on it on a few occasions. After I complained the new guy was very careful—one of those men who prided himself on his K-turns and parallel-parking abilities. But I didn't see any packages in front of the garage, where he'd have left them, so I inched the car up the driveway, looking for signs that anything else was amiss.
At the top, I got out of the car, leaving the driver's-side door open. A few steps to my right I noticed that a stone trough filled with sedum was crooked. For some reason, I reached into the backseat and retrieved one of the pitchforks I'd just bought, and walked to my front door. As if the out-of-place planter wasn't telling enough, the door was unlocked and partially open.
Pitchfork in hand, I tiptoed up the steps to the front door and yelled for Anna. No answer. I yelled again. Using the fork, I nudged the door open and peered inside. The place had been trashed.
I dropped the pitchfork, ran back to my car, and tore out of the driveway, plowing over stones and ground cover and driving them farther into the garden beds. I didn't stop until I was near the diner, but instead of turning right into Babe's, I made a sharp, screeching left into the strip mall opposite the diner and pulled in right in front of the Springfield police substation. The surprise turn pissed off the driver behind me, uncorking his bottled-up road rage. He let out a stream of anatomically impossible suggestions, but I didn't care, I was too busy controlling my breathing. I rested my head on the steering wheel and exhaled heavily. Hands shaking, I turned off the engine and got out of the car.
Most small retail strips in Connecticut, and probably everywhere in the United States, look the same—overgrown dollhouses or model-train layouts, with a central pitch or cupola. Painted in pastel colors with white trim, the miniature towns look as if Santa's helpers should be inside the shops hammering away at toys. This one was no different.
I took the stairs two at a time and banged on the door of the police substation with my fist. Nothing. I bent over and squinted through the bottom of the miniblinds, where I thought I saw a faint light.
"Hey, anybody in there?" I yelled, banging harder and rattling the glass in the door.
Two people from the nearby Dunkin' Donuts came out and stared on their way back to their cars. A father put his arm around his little girl as if to protect her from the crazy lady. I sat on the steps of the Hansel and Gretel–like structure and dialed 911, telling the dispatcher what had happened and that the cops could find me across the road at the Paradise Diner.
Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Mike O'Malley and a police cadet who didn't look old enough to be an Eagle Scout met me at Babe's. O'Malley and I didn't exactly go way back but we'd gotten chummy since a garden restoration last year had me up to my elbows in dirt, some of it criminal.
He slid into the booth opposite me; the rookie stood. Babe brought O'Malley a coffee and squeezed my shoulder. "You two play nice," she said.
"This used to be a quiet town until the rough element from New York moved in," he said, taking the toothpick out of his mouth.
That was my cue that O'Malley and I were back in our wisecracking-but-I-really-like-you stage, which seemed to precede the who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are stage, followed by a repeat of stage one. It was a game I was getting used to, and each time we played it, we revealed a little bit more of ourselves. We haven't approached the F word yet, but we were moving in that direction.
"I take that as a compliment," I said.
O'Malley wasn't technically handsome, but he had that teddy-bear thing going. Some women like that. I happen to be one of them. He was very fair, with dark hair, pale blue eyes, and just enough padding to keep things warm on a cold spring night.
Not that I knew it from personal experience. There'd been something brewing under the surface when we first met, but when he was hot, I was cold, and vice versa, so nothing ever happened and we'd settled into a platonic relationship.
In the wintertime, people tend to stay put in Connecticut, at least I did. I stayed home, worked out, read, and planned my gardens for the big thaw in March. I don't know what O'Malley did, but now that the weather was warming up the locals were showing themselves again, like crocuses or carpenter ants.
Some people would have hated that enforced hibernation, but I'd spent the first thirty-three years of my life in a big city and now nothing represented luxury to me more than the sound of . . . silence. No horns honking, no cell phones, and none of their suburban counterparts—lawn mowers and leaf blowers.
O'Malley told me a police cruiser had been close to my house when my 911 call was received, so someone had already been there. No sign of the perpetrator, but I was right: the house had been ransacked.
"That much I could tell. Did you boys have to go to cop school to figure that out?"
The rookie's eyes widened.
"Ms. Holliday's our resident pain-in-the-ass. She did a little detecting about a year ago and now she thinks she's on the job."
O'Malley chugged his coffee and stood up to leave. "Are you ready to go back to the scene of the crime?" He rode with me in the Jeep and we followed the kid in the patrol car.
"Recruiting them kind of young, aren't you?" I asked.
"New program at the academy. He hasn't graduated yet, but they're going out on ride-alongs."
When we got to my place, I made a move to pick up the pitchfork I'd tossed in the mad dash to my car. The younger man tried to stop me, probably thinking it was evidence.
I looked from him to O'Malley. "It's mine. I dropped it when I was here before."
"I guess we're lucky no one was here when you first arrived," O'Malley said, "otherwise we'd be looking at a homicide."
Once again, I used the pitchfork to push the door open. This time I let out a scream, dropped the pitchfork, and stumbled back into O'Malley's arms when I saw a figure inside the house, poking through the rubble with a stick
.
"Jeez, you could have told me someone was still here," I snapped, pulling away from him.
"I wouldn't have let you skewer him."
I stepped into the entrance of my once cute, now violated, little bungalow. I maneuvered around the cop, and surveyed the damage.
The rug had been pulled up and tossed in a corner on top of a plant called Spanish Dagger. The path to my office was strewn with papers, books, and the contents of drawers. My desktop computer was missing, as was a box of old CDs I normally used as a bookend. All of my clients' files had been rifled, some spilling out of folders, others tossed in a heap in the middle of the floor. My eyes filled with tears; I used my anger to keep them from trickling down my face.
"Who would do this? Why?" My feet shuffled through the papers on the floor as if they were leaves.
I walked through the office to a small room behind it, where I worked out. I couldn't afford a gym membership anymore and had resorted to buying every piece of castoff equipment—including the unused treadmill—that Springfield's secondhand market had to offer. I had a setup that most small-town phys-ed departments would envy.
"Sweet," the young cop said, eyeing my gear.
"And she uses it, too," O'Malley said. "I can attest to that."
"Howl at the moon once." So I had punched him once. It was an accident and there was no permanent damage—his jaw and our relationship, such as it was, had both survived.
"Is the upstairs just as bad?" I asked, hoping for some good news.
"Not nearly," the cop I'd almost pitchforked answered.
I followed O'Malley up the tight spiral staircase in the middle of the house to my tiny bedroom. It was a shambles. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and my clothing obviously handled. The bed had been stripped.
"I'd hate to see your apartment," I told the cop.
"You've still got your sense of humor," O'Malley said. "That's good."
"I just meant that nothing seemed damaged," the younger cop mumbled, embarrassed.
They walked me into the kitchen, where it was more of the same, except the dishwasher and the fridge had been left open. I skidded on a puddle of water near the fridge, O'Malley slipped an arm around me to keep me vertical, then retreated to a more appropriate back pat.
"This was not your garden-variety break-in," O'Malley said. "Our man seems to have been looking for something in particular."
"In my fridge? Like what? Did they think I had money stashed in there like that guy in Washington?" I asked.
"Does anything other than your computer seem to be missing?" he asked.
"You mean like my jewels and collection of three-thousand-dollar handbags?" I did a quick mental inventory of my possessions—I didn't have much worth stealing. "Is my telescope still here?" The cops followed as I ran out to my deck. There it was. Other than my car, the most expensive thing I owned was parked on the deck facing true north. I collapsed onto an old deck chair.
"So why would anyone break in, trash my house, and take a five-year-old desktop? You can probably find newer models at the Salvation Army."
"It's not the computer," O'Malley said. "It's probably what they think is on it."
Fourteen
"Believe me, there's nothing on that computer except old contracts and my iTunes library. If someone broke in here for that, they'd better like Bruce Springsteen."
That was the mantra I'd repeated five or six times in slightly differing versions until Mike O'Malley shepherded his two young fledglings out of my house and down to Springfield's police headquarters to file their reports.
The task of putting my house back together was daunting, but like most unpleasant jobs, you just had to start and with any luck the process would take over. The entrance was easy—replace the rug and pad, pick up the overturned pots, sweep up the Spanish moss and pebble soil covers that had spilled onto the rough slate tiles. The young cop was right; it was a mess, but there was no permanent damage. It was just an illustration of something O'Malley had told me over a year ago: Springfield has everything the big city has. Including thieves.
Two hours into my cleanup Mike O'Malley returned bearing gifts—a two-liter bottle of Fresca and a pepperoni pizza.
"Looks better already," he said, checking my progress. "Take a break." In my office, he moved stacks of papers to put the pie down on a low wicker chest I normally used as a file cabinet. I went to the kitchen for glasses, plates, and napkins.
There was only one chair in the office and neither of us took it, opting to sit on the floor instead. With some difficulty, O'Malley sat cross-legged on the rug, then popped open the cardboard box and tore off a slice of pizza.
"Good food takes time," he said, motioning for me to join him. I did, and he launched into his theory. The same one he'd been hammering away at before he left.
"You're like a tick, once you get your teeth into something, you don't let go, do you? I repeat, there's no information on my computer that is of any value to anyone. It was of dubious value when it was current. Now it's just a bunch of old files I've been too busy to delete and the music, which I haven't had time to transfer to my laptop," I said. I held my slice point down to let the excess oil drip onto the waxed paper in the pizza box.
"Maybe some documentary you worked on?" he pressed.
"Please. I was hardly an investigative reporter." I'd been vague about my former job. Not that there was anything to hide, but when people hear television, they automatically have you immersed in some political intrigue or hobnobbing with George Clooney when in reality most media jobs are just as mundane as any others. "Let me think. There was that time I let myself be embedded at a designer knockoff shop. That might be it."
"Paula, professional thieves don't steal clunky machines. They take small high-ticket items that are easy to fence. That means sell."
"I know what fence means. I watch television. So he was an amateur. He didn't find anything, so he got pissed off, trashed my place, and took the only thing he thought had value." I paraphrased what Babe had told me as if it came from my own vast experience. "Listen, someone broke into my apartment in Brooklyn once and didn't find valuables. Know what he took? Aviator sunglasses and a jar of peanut butter. You think all crooks are smart?"
"Have you discovered anything else that's missing?"
"I haven't checked my canned goods, but to the naked eye, nothing major." The wisecracking had escalated into snapping. This was another cycle we went through. We start out nice, he brings me food, and we end up fighting. It had happened before and I tried to avoid it this time.
"Tell me again what you think," I said, stripping the pepperoni off a second slice and trying my best to strip the sarcasm from my voice.
"I think our man—or woman—planned this carefully. He made sure to come when neither you nor Anna was here."
"Well," I interrupted, "that's a neat trick right there, because even I'm not sure when she's going to be here . . . she shows up when she feels like it."
"Be quiet and let me finish," O'Malley said. "They knew when to come and they were looking for something. Information, from the looks of all these papers strewn about. On paper, or a disk, or a flash drive. So the question is, what do you know?"
"I don't know jack. Why do people keep thinking I know something?"
O'Malley put his pizza down and wiped his hands carefully on a wad of paper napkins. He balled them up and tossed them onto his plate. He tented his fingers. "Who else thinks you know something?"
I told O'Malley what had happened at Titans.
"When were you planning to share this information?"
"There are actually two or three things that have happened to me in the past year that I haven't disclosed to the authorities. It didn't come up," I said, exasperated. "Besides, what does that . . . Oh, you're crazy. I talked to that guy for ten, fifteen minutes tops in a hotel bar. What happened to him has nothing to do with me."
"What happened to him was that he got his brains blown out. Maybe you and your
girlfriend should be more careful the next time you decide to cruise bars." O'Malley unfolded his legs and stood up. He helped himself to a sheet of paper from my now disconnected printer and took a pen from the flowerpot on my desk. "What did you say his name was?"
"I didn't, but it was Vigoriti. I'm not sure how to spell it. First name, Nick. And we weren't cruising bars, not that it's any business of yours."
"And the cop's name?" he continued, ignoring my protestations of purity.
"Winters." I couldn't tell if he was mad because I'd withheld information, or because he imagined me picking up guys at a hotel bar. Either way, he wasn't happy.
"Local or state?"
"How would I know?"
"What was he wearing?"
"She was wearing an ugly blue suit."
"Sounds local."
"Why? The state guys get to wear Armani?"
"Do me a favor," he said, writing down this new info and folding the sheet of paper into quarters. "Set your security alarm tonight. Chances are, whoever it was won't be back, but do it. Promise me, okay?"
We exchanged stiff, formal good nights for two people who'd just been sitting on the floor eating pizza together like a couple of teenagers in a messy dorm, and I gave the door that little extra push it always needed, to make sure the lock caught. In New York, it would have taken two full minutes to throw all the deadbolts and connect all the chains I needed in my old apartment, and you still couldn't keep the bad guys out if they really wanted in. Here it was different. Or so I thought.
From somewhere, I heard the muffled sound of another text message coming in. I worried that I'd created a monster and Caroline Sturgis would be texting me every time she got another bright idea about how to change her garden, her marriage, or her life. I fished around in my bag but couldn't find the phone, then I remembered I'd left it in my pocket after calling the cops. I ran back to my office to get my jacket, but was too late. I entered my code and retrieved the message. Two brothers. Duct tape. Don't tell anyone.
The Big Dirt Nap db-2 Page 8
