I handed them to him reluctantly. “Don’t play the radio and don’t turn on the lights.”
Manuel bristled. “You think I’m an idiot?”
It seemed better not to answer.
“So I can’t go and get me a hot chocolate?” he asked straightfaced as I got out of the car. “Just kidding,” he said before I could answer. “Truly. I wouldn’t do something like that.”
I wasn’t so sure. As I closed the car door, I could hear Manuel talking to his friend.
“Whatup, Brooke?” he was saying. “No. I ain’t goin’ to that jive ass party. I got me something better to do. I got me hired as a private investigator. No shit! It’s true. I be here right now staking out this place.”
I couldn’t help smiling as I started down the road to Littlebaum’s house. As I walked, I hunched my back and put my hands in my pockets. It had grown colder since I’d left Adelina’s. It was a beautiful night. A few clouds remained in the sky. The moon and a few stars were visible.
Little flecks of ice glimmered on the fence posts. Frozen leaves crunched under my feet. I walked around the remnants of a pumpkin left over from Halloween that lay rotting on the ground, its face now reduced to an orange mush. In another month or so, not a trace would be visible. The air smelled of smoke. Someone must be running a wood-burning stove, I decided as I walked along the road. When I got to Littlebaum’s driveway, I halted and considered what I was going to do next.
What I hadn’t noticed the first time I’d been there was that in order to get to Littlebaum’s garage I had to cross a wide expanse of open, flat land. There were no trees I could hide behind, nothing I could use for cover. Basically, if Littlebaum set Matilda on me, I was royally fucked.
This was not good. I guess I was either getting older or smarter because I decided to see if I could come up with a more conservative solution to getting a look inside Littlebaum’s garage instead of charging over there. I chewed on a lock of my hair and watched my breath turn to smoke in the night air. A plane roared by overhead. I looked up. It was flying low, coming in for a landing, its lights blinking in the sky. Then it was out of sight and I went back to studying Littlebaum’s house. Whereas the front was clear, the back was shrouded in shadows.
Then I realized what I should have spotted immediately. Littlebaum had lots of trees on his property. They were just in the back of his house instead of the front. Maybe I could get to his house by heading down, then cutting across. I walked a little farther and came to a large privet hedge that bordered the road. It was thick and well tended, but the people who’d planted it evidently hadn’t felt the need to extend the plantings back toward their house. Here they’d put in cedars and arborvitae. I was betting it would be easy to follow the cedars down and then cut over to Littlebaum’s house. I bet wrong.
The ground wasn’t nearly as easy to walk over as I expected. The terrain had been left to go wild. The cedars were being taken over by maples and honey locusts. The ground was littered with their cast-off limbs, in addition to being full of large rocks and holes. I had to keep looking down to see where I was going. Despite that, I kept tripping. Walking would have been easy during the day, but at night, in the dark, it was tough going. After twisting my ankle for the third time in ten minutes, I leaned against a tree and reconsidered my plan for the second time that evening.
At the pace I was going, it would take me a while to get to the back of Littlebaum’s house, which wouldn’t even matter, except when I got there I didn’t know what I was going to find. This wasn’t going to work. I backtracked reluctantly. Maybe this was why I usually took the direct approach. On the way to the car I came up with another idea.
Manuel was still chatting when I got behind the wheel.
“That was quick,” he said, interrupting his conversation.
“I didn’t go.” I reached out. “Can I have the phone?”
He tightened his grip on it. “Don’t I even get a please?”
“Fine. Please. This is important.”
He pushed his chin out. “And my business isn’t?”
I gritted my teeth and restrained myself from grabbing and shaking him by reminding myself that it was his phone. “I really need to make this call now.”
“That’s all you had to say. Just give me another second.” And he resumed his conversation.
“Manuel,” I repeated urgently when the second had turned into a minute.
He nodded, told his friend he’d call him back, and handed the phone to me. “What’s this all about?”
“Listen,” I said, paying him back a little for making me wait. Then I punched in George’s number.
“Speak to me,” George said.
“I am.”
“Hey, it’s you.”
“Who did you expect?”
“Mike. He’s seeing if he can come up with anything on Chapman.”
“It would be nice if he could.”
“Yes, it would, but I’m not holding my breath. So what’s going on at your end?”
I told him why I’d called.
“But that was my idea,” Manuel protested after I had promised George I’d let him know what happened and hung up. “You were the one that said calling Adelina’s house and telling her mother there was a gas leak wouldn’t work.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “What can I say? I was wrong. Here.” I gave him back his phone. Then I reached in my jacket pocket, took out the clip from Adelina’s automatic, and reinserted it in the gun.
Manuel’s eyes widened. “You using that?” he said. “I thought you don’t believe in weapons.”
“I don’t. But I also don’t believe in getting ripped to shreds.” I didn’t want to shoot Matilda, but I would if I had to.
A moment later, the lights in Littlebaum’s house went on, bing, bing, bing, one after the other. Evidently, George hadn’t wasted any time making the call.
“What you want me to do?” Manuel asked.
“I want you to stay here and call George if anything goes wrong.”
“How will I know?”
“If you hear blood-curdling shrieks coming from the vicinity of Littlebaum’s house, I think it’s safe to say things aren’t working out the way I planned.” I got out of the cab and jogged toward the house.
I wanted to greet Littlebaum and Adelina when they came out. Two minutes later, the front door opened and a dazed-looking Littlebaum emerged into the night. I noticed that neither Matilda nor his shotgun was with him. A definite plus. I waited a few more seconds for Adelina to appear. When she didn’t, I stepped in front of Littlebaum and raised Adelina’s gun.
“Close the door,” I ordered. “I don’t want Matilda out here.”
Littlebaum blinked. “But there’s a gas leak.” He stuttered slightly in his confusion. His voice was still sodden with sleep. George must have roused him out of a sound slumber. “The man that called said someone had reported a gas leak and that a repair crew from Niagara Mohawk was coming with a meter to check it out.”
“Guess what?” I informed him. “The crew isn’t going to be along, because there isn’t any leak. That was one of my friends calling. Now shut the door.” I raised my voice and lifted the gun a little higher. “If I have to shoot Matilda because she’s attacking me, it’s going to be on your conscience.”
Littlebaum quickly did as he was told. I motioned for him to come closer.
He ran one of his hands over his face and hair as he took a hesitant step toward me. Stripped of his rage, he had the confused look of a fragile old man who couldn’t quite grasp what was happening to him. “Why’d you do that?” he finally asked.
“I wanted to see if someone was inside your house.”
Littlebaum wrinkled his face up in disbelief. “What are you, nuts?” he croaked. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I didn’t think you’d tell me what I wanted to know. But you will now, right?”
Littlebaum nodded docilely. He’d started to shiver. If I was cold in my jacket, he had t
o be freezing in his T-shirt, sweat pants, and socks, but I wasn’t about to let him go into his house and get some more clothes on.
“Was Adelina here earlier?”
He rubbed his arms with his hands. “No. Why should she be?”
I could hear a faint rumble coming from the other side of the front door. Littlebaum cocked his head, smiled, and half turned. “Just a minute,” he told the big cat. The lilt in his voice was the kind a man uses to a woman he’s in love with, which was too bad, because odds were Litdebaum and Matilda weren’t going to have a happy ending. Then Littlebaum turned back to me. “She wants to know what’s happening,” he explained. “She understands more than you would think.”
“I’m sure she does.” Maybe she did for all I knew. Zsa Zsa was certainly more perceptive than some, make that a lot, of people I’ve known. “When we’re finished, you can go in and tell her all about our conversation about Adelina. She was looking to get rid of a suitcase full of Madagascar tortoises. I thought she might have tried to sell them to you.”
Littlebaum shifted his weight from left foot to right foot and back again. “She called me, let me see”—he stopped and thought—“was it yesterday or the day before? And offered me one, but I didn’t buy it.”
“Why? I would have thought you would have liked that sort of thing.”
He glared at me. “I’m disappointed in you, Robin. You should know me better than that. I’d never buy CITES stuff. And anyway, she was asking too much money. Ten thousand dollars,” he scoffed. “You got to be crazy to pay that for a turtle. Even if it does come in pretty colors.” This from someone who had spent what he had on a lion cub. He motioned for me to come inside with skeleton-thin fingers. “Take a look if you want.”
I debated taking him up on his offer, but in the end I declined. I believed he was telling the truth. Even though he liked reptiles, mammals were his passion.
“Can I go now? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”
“In a minute.” I coughed. The cold was getting to me. “Do you know who Adelina was going to sell them to?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t ask. I stick to my own business. All I ask is that other people do the same.”
Matilda roared. I heard scratching.
“She’s going to ruin the door if you don’t let me get in there,” Littlebaum said.
I lowered my gun and nodded for him to go on. “Hey, Parker,” I called when he was almost at the door, “maybe it’s time for you to relocate the ark.”
He turned around. “What do you mean?”
“Sooner or later someone’s gonna turn you in and they’re going to take Matilda and everything else away from you and hold you for a psych evaluation. I know someone out West who has a lot of open land they might be willing to rent to you,” I added impulsively.
He didn’t say anything.
I thought about what Sulfin had said about Littlebaum being cheap. “It would be worth the money.”
He nodded.
“You should consider it seriously.”
He squinted. His lips began to move as he tried to figure out why I was doing this. Finally he asked.
“Simple. I don’t want to see your animals killed or have them end up in some fly-by-night traveling circus.”
Maybe conditions for Littlebaum’s charges weren’t ideal, which they weren’t. Maybe he shouldn’t have them, but the animals were still better off with Littlebaum than in some of the other places they could end up. And at least Littlebaum cared for them. That had to count for something.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Don’t think too long,” I warned.
“Would you like to give Matilda a pet?” he asked shyly, the way a little boy does when he’s showing you his special rock collection. “She liked you.”
I told him I’d love to, but asked if I could take a rain check for another day. Littlebaum looked disappointed.
“Are you sure?” he said.
I told him I was. Then I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket and took an old napkin and a pen out from the other one and wrote the phone number of my friend out West down. “Here,” I said, holding the napkin out to him. An offering. “Take it for Matilda’s sake.”
The ends of the napkin fluttered in the breeze. Littlebaum extended his hand and took a few tentative steps toward me.
“All right.” He grabbed the napkin from my hand and crumpled it up in his fist. “All right.” And he went inside his house before I could say anything else.
As I headed back to the cab, I wondered if he’d understood what I’d been telling him. I hoped he had. I hoped he’d make the phone call, but I doubted it.
“Well?” Manuel asked as I slammed the cab door shut.
I rubbed my hands. It felt good to be where it was warm.
“What happened?”
“Adelina wasn’t there.”
“I know. I saw.” He yawned. “Now what?”
“We go to Plan B.”
“I didn’t know you had a Plan A.”
“Stop playing the comedian. I already told you. We’re going to drive around and look for Adelina’s car.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the door. “That’s fucked.”
“Elegantly put. What would you suggest? Exactly,” I said when he didn’t answer. “You don’t have a suggestion, do you?”
He fiddled with the brim of his hat. “She’s probably home by now.”
“Good idea.” I tried to make my voice enthusiastic. “We’ll begin there.”
Manuel groaned. “Robin, have a heart. Why don’t you just drop me off? I got a whole lot of shit I could be doing instead of running all over the city.”
“No. I like having you with me.” Until I got this thing settled, I wanted Manuel where I could keep my eye on him. “First we’ll go back to Adelina’s place, then Myra’s, then Sulfin’s,” announced.
It was the only thing I could think of to do.
Chapter 25
Manuel spent the entire hour and a half it took me to crisscross the city and check out Adelina’s, Sulfin’s, and Myra’s houses whining. I half listened, veering back and forth between wishing he’d be quiet to thinking that if he ever went back to school Manuel would make a great courtroom lawyer.
His list was endless. Manuel complained about the fact that I’d made him come with me. He complained that he could have been at a party meeting girls. Or watching TV. He complained that now it was too late to get the Godzilla movie I’d promised him. When I didn’t say anything, he told me that my plan was a waste of time, but in less polite language. He told me I should get a new ride. Something cool. Something he wouldn’t mind being seen in if he had to go with me. Maybe something like an SUV.
According to him, my cab was Stone Age and I should get with the times, for God’s sake. Get a car with air-conditioning and heated seats and killer electronics. Something with a CD player, because how could I listen to the radio anyway? All the stations in Syracuse sucked. The DJs sucked. The music they played sucked big time.
In fact, Syracuse sucked. He was tired of living in this city. He wanted to go someplace where there were some opportunities, someplace warm. He’d told his mother but she didn’t understand. All she cared about was that he didn’t have a job. She couldn’t see that standing around in the mall dishing out slices of pizza wasn’t for him. That he needed something interesting and challenging. She didn’t understand that getting his GED and going on to a community college wasn’t going to help him. After all, look at Eli. He was going to college and it sure hadn’t made him any smarter. In fact, it was his desire to go to college that had gotten him in the mess he was now in.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Manuel punctuated his observation with a smug smile, infinitely pleased with himself.
The smile was the last straw. I told Manuel to shut up, not that he listened.
“You’re just saying that because I’m right about Eli,” he sniffed. “I’m right about
everything. You don’t want to admit that this whole evening has been a waste of time. Can we go back to your place now?”
“No, we can’t.” I had one more idea I wanted to try.
“No?” Manuel yelped. “What are we going to do? Drag Onondaga Lake?”
“We’re going to check out Eli’s house.”
“How about letting me off at the corner? I’ll walk.”
“Forgetaboutit. I told you, you’re coming with me.”
“Fine.” Manuel let out a heartfelt sigh. “But even Eli isn’t stupid enough to go back there.”
As it turned out, Manuel was wrong.
“Holy shit. What a schmuck,” Manuel said when we saw that the lights were on in the flat.
“Maybe Eli isn’t dumb. Maybe he wants to get caught.”
Manuel snorted. “Where do you come up with this kind of stuff?” he demanded as he reseated his hat on his head. “You sound like that moron of a guidance counselor they made me see in ninth grade. No one wants to get caught. No one.”
“I think people want to get caught all the time,” I countered. “I think that’s why they do what they do.”
“And I think you’re full of shit.”
“You do, hunh?”
“Yeah.” Manuel put his hand on the door handle. “You gonna order me out of the car?”
“Stay right where you are. That was a nice try, but not good enough.”
Manuel slumped back in his seat. “Well, I still can’t figure why he should come back here.”
“Maybe he’s figuring that that’s what the police think and that’s why it’s a good place to hide out.” This time Manuel didn’t disagree.
“If it were me,” he said, “I wouldn’t go near the place. Or at least I’d leave the lights off. The police have got to be checking it out.”
“Evidently not. Or if they are, they obviously aren’t doing it on a regular enough basis. Who knows? Maybe Eli just dropped in to get something and we were lucky enough to catch him.” I pointed at a Taurus parked four spaces down. “And that, I believe, is Adelina’s car. What do you have to say now?”
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