Or was that a good instinct?
“You didn’t tell the chief about Doleson trying to blackmail me, did you?” Jorge asked.
Would that question have made me quite as nervous under other circumstances? If we’d been in a public place instead of a small office on a deserted floor of a building that would not begin to fill up with theatergoers for another hour or two?
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “But I think you should.”
He looked relieved.
“Michael and I both think so,” I added.
He frowned slightly in annoyance. Was he annoyed because I was nagging him to talk to the chief? Or because I had just reminded him that I wasn’t the only person to know about Dole-son’s blackmail attempt?
“I know you think I’m being paranoid,” he said. “But you don’t get it. I’m not worried about Chief Burke. He’ll find the real killer.”
“Even if people don’t tell him what could be vital information?”
“If he goes through Doleson’s papers, the chief will find whatever stuff Doleson’s got that he could use to blackmail people,” Jorge said. “And if he’s got stuff on me, I’m sure the chief will see it’s bogus. Or he’ll talk to me and I’ll tell him.”
“But you’re hoping Doleson threw away whatever he’d been collecting on you when he found out you weren’t blackmail-able,” I said. “Okay. Can’t you just tell the chief that you suspect Doleson of blackmail?”
“And say what—that there are guys living at the Pines who shouldn’t be as broke as they are? Guys who looked nervous every time Doleson came around? And that Doleson lived pretty well, for someone whose sole source of income was a mostly empty storage building and a run-down apartment building? You really think that would help?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But as you said yourself, there’s a killer out there.”
“And the chief would only think I was trying to divert suspicion away from myself.”
I stood up, and pretended to stretch my back, as if I’d been hunched over the computer too long. Maybe I could work my way over to the poker.
“Why would he suspect you?” I asked.
“Maybe because they’re going to find my fingerprints inside the shed where Doleson was killed.”
I couldn’t keep my mouth from falling open in shock.
“What are your fingerprints doing there?” I asked.
“From when I was helping clean it up—the night before the parade. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
He looked stricken. I shook my head slightly.
“There were a lot of people helping out the night before the parade,” I said. “I don’t specifically remember seeing you.”
“I was helping Rob—remember?”
I remembered that Rob had made a half-hearted effort at cleaning the shed out in the morning, and that when I’d inspected it, I’d immediately rolled up my sleeves and done it right. But if Rob had had anyone helping him, I hadn’t noticed.
“Not really,” I said.
Jorge groaned, and buried his face in his hands.
“But I was pretty busy, you know,” I said. “I’m sure some of the other people there will remember you. Rob, for example.”
“It’d be so much better if you remembered it,” he said. Was that a plea to lie for him? Or maybe a threat? Or just an accurate assessment of Rob’s potential value as an alibi?
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Maybe something will jog my memory. But don’t you have something else that’s going to need explaining?”
He looked puzzled.
“The sweatshirt you threw away after the parade? The one the police now have?” I decided it would be better not to mention the part I’d played in getting it to the police.
“Oh, damn,” he said. He closed his eyes and slumped against the wall.
“Are they going to find bloodstains on it?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. And if those are bloodstains, I don’t know whose blood. Could be Doleson’s. I helped Rob put Spike in his crate after he bit Doleson, remember? I figured maybe he had some blood on his muzzle and it rubbed off on my shirt. I can’t think of any other way I could have gotten blood on it. But do you really think the chief’s going to believe that? Especially if—”
“Aunt Meg?”
I jumped, even though I recognized the voice. Jorge jumped too. My nephew, Eric, was standing in the doorway.
“Sorry,” Eric said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s okay,” Jorge said. “I was just going. Look,” he added, to me, “we need to talk later. Think about it.”
About what? Whether I’d seen Jorge helping out with the shed and with Spike? The bloodstained sweatshirt? Or the fact that Jorge had just become a really serious suspect?
“I hear you,” I said.
Jorge gave me one more pleading look, then nodded and left.
“Sorry,” Eric said again. “I didn’t mean to chase him off.”
“He really was about to leave,” I said. I didn’t think Eric needed to hear about my suspicions of Jorge, or how overjoyed I was that my conversation with Jorge was interrupted by a twelve-year-old who, in spite of his recent growth spurt, was still not nearly big enough to be the murderer.
Eric looked anxious. He seemed so young and vulnerable.
Not just vulnerable—upset.
“Did you get through to your parents?” My sister, Pam, her Australian-born husband, and Eric’s five siblings were spending the holiday in Melbourne, with the other side of their family. Eric, thanks to severe and persistent airsickness, was staying with my parents, as he usually did when the rest of the McReady clan made one of their frequent trips down under.
He nodded.
“They’re fine,” he said. “They all send their love.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“Why do grownups always assume there’s something wrong?” he said. He tried to assume a look of bored exasperation that he’d copied from his older siblings during the worst of their teen years, but he hadn’t quite mastered it yet, thank goodness.
“Why do teenagers always lump grownups together in that stereotypical us and them way?” I countered. “You’re starting it a few months early.”
He grinned at that, and looked about six again. But the grin vanished too quickly.
“Besides,” I went on. “After everything else that’s gone wrong in the last day or so, I’ve gotten out of the habit of expecting anything but bad news. If you’ve got good news, my apologies, and bring it on.”
He nodded, but didn’t blurt out any glad tidings.
“Kind of a weird Christmas,” he said.
Okay, we’d go the indirect route.
“Weird, yeah,” I said. “Which makes it normal for our family, right? Remember the Christmas when your grandfather fell off the roof?”
He grinned at that.
“How about the Christmas when Natasha gave everyone live goldfish?” he said.
“The Christmas your uncle Rob set the house on fire?”
“How about—” he began. Then he took a deep breath. “How about the Christmas when I thought we’d all really blown it? When Santa didn’t bring anybody anything?”
“I remember,” I said. Eric had been six or seven, and absolutely obsessed with some toy he’d asked Santa for. So obsessed, in fact, that when he woke up at four A.M., he’d crept down to the living room to see if Santa had come through. Our family tradition was to put all the wrapped presents between family members under the tree in the days leading up to Christmas, while Santa deposited his bounty, unwrapped, after we’d gone to bed on Christmas Eve. And we maintained a strict rule that no one was allowed to go into the living room until the whole family was up. Then Dad would fling open the French doors and everyone would exclaim with delight and surprise at all the wonderful things Santa had brought.
“No one could figure out what was wrong that Christmas morning,” I said. “Here you were, t
he youngest—the only one we were absolutely sure still believed in Santa—and no one could find you.”
“When I saw that there was nothing under the tree, I knew I must have blown it, big time,” he said. “And not just me but all of us. I figured whatever it was, Mom and Dad hadn’t guessed, but Santa knew. And as soon as Mom and Dad saw the empty stockings and all, they’d start asking some pretty tough questions, till they found out whatever it was we did.”
“I told everyone it was a bad idea to wait until morning to put the presents out,” I said. “I knew, as late as we’d all been up, that we’d be dragging if we had to get up early, and I suggested it was better just to stay up a little longer. But no one listened to me. And even I didn’t expect the power to go out and knock out all the alarm clocks so we’d all oversleep.”
“And you knew just where to find me,” he said.
“The tree house wasn’t such a tough guess.”
“I always thought it was really nice the way you convinced me that you’d peeked too, just after dawn, and you guessed Yorktown must be toward the end of Santa’s run.”
“I remember explaining that if we’d all really been wicked, we wouldn’t just have empty stockings but lumps of coal,” I said, wondering if there was a point to this trip down memory lane. Not that there had to be, but most people looked a little more cheerful when reminiscing about Christmases Past.
“And you never told anyone what I did,” he said.
“You told them yourself, a year or two later.”
“Yeah, but I was really glad you let me tell them,” he said. I quelled a momentary burst of impatience. Yes, I wanted to get back to my online sleuthing, but something was bothering Eric. He stared down at the floor for a few long seconds, and then looked up to meet my eyes. “I think I might be in trouble.”
“How?” I asked.
“You know that reporter?”
“Ainsley Werzel? All too well by now.”
“I sort of borrowed his camera.”
“Sort of borrowed? You mean you took his camera?”
“Well, when I first picked it up, I thought it was yours,” he said. “You have almost the same model. And when I realized whose it was, I remembered that he’d been taking all these nasty pictures of people. Like trying to get them doing something silly or not looking very good. I thought it was really rude.”
“I agree,” I said. “And I admit, it crossed my mind how much I’d like to steal his camera and erase all his photos.”
“But I didn’t steal it,” Eric protested. “He left it lying around, and I picked it up to give it to him—well, to you, till I realized it wasn’t yours—and then I thought if I could just keep it for a few minutes and go someplace where no one would see me, I could look through the pictures and delete any that would em barrass people, and then just put the camera back where I found it. So I stuck it under my coat. And before I got a chance to look at the photos, he started making that big fuss about losing it, and I was embarrassed to give it back.”
“I’d just have left it lying around someplace,” I said. “Let him think he’d forgotten where he’d left it.”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” he said. “But Mr. Pruitt was around—Mr. Norris Pruitt. And you know how he is.”
“I do now,” I said. “Okay, good call not leaving it around for Norris to pilfer. But you could have told the truth. At least the part about finding it lying around. You could have said you picked it up for safekeeping and forgot.”
“Yeah, I realize that now,” he said. “But Mr. Werzel was so mad, and it all happened so fast and I didn’t think what to do till later. And once he made that report to the chief, I was scared to. Mr. Werzel would have had me arrested.”
I shook my head, but he was right—Werzel probably would have tried. Probably still would, if he found out now. And stressed as the chief was by the murder, he might well have been in the mood to teach Eric a lesson.
“What can I do?” Eric asked. “I can’t just give it back.”
“Maybe you can’t, but I can,” I said. “Have you got it here?”
He nodded and reached into his pocket to pull out the tiny silver camera. He handed it to me and then sighed as if I’d taken a ton of rocks off his shoulders instead of a few ounces of metal and plastic from his hand.
“You can tell them what happened,” he said. “I know I should have brought it back sooner, but I was too scared to do it myself. You can make them understand.”
I was going to miss that when he got a little older—that childish confidence that Auntie Meg could fix anything.
Then again, Rob still turned to me regularly to bail him out of scrapes with that same absolute trust that I could and would rescue him.
“You really should have turned it over as soon as Mr. Werzel made that fuss,” I said. “You know that.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking down at the floor. “And if you think I should take it back myself, I will. I just don’t want to do it all by myself.”
“No, I’ll take care of Mr. Werzel,” I said. “I’ll tell him about you thinking it was mine and giving it to me. Which is the truth—I’ll just let him think I was the one who identified it as his camera.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I promise I won’t ever do anything like this again.”
“One thing,” I said. “Did you mess with his pictures?”
He shook his head.
“I didn’t even look at more than the first one or two,” he said. “I could tell it wasn’t yours.”
“Good,” I said. “I want to be telling the absolute truth when I say that you had nothing to do with the missing pictures.”
“But how do you even know there are any missing?” he asked.
“There may not be now, but before I give this back to him, I plan to look through all of them and delete any that I’d cringe to see published in the Trib. For instance, I remember him taking a picture of my rear end when I was bending over to see if Spike was bleeding to death.”
Eric grinned.
“So you’re going to do the same thing I was going to do.”
“You bet. Now run along and sin no more. Leave that to me.”
“Thanks, Aunt Meg.” He hesitated, then reached over to give me a quick hug before turning to go.
“Oh, Eric—can you do something for me?”
“Sure.” He paused in the doorway.
“If you see Michael, could you get him to send someone up with the key to the office?”
Eric grinned.
“So you can keep people like me from bothering you,” he said.
“So I can lock it up when I leave,” I said. “We’ve got all the presents here—including yours.”
“Oh, in that case—yeah, I’ll find him,” Eric said. He closed the door behind him.
I stood up to look over the desk at Spike. He was still under the chair, curled up so tightly he looked like a black and white fur hat.
“You’re a lot of help,” I said. “Next time, bark, will you?”
He ignored me.
I sat back down to examine the camera.
Chapter 29
Luckily, since Werzel’s camera was the same make and practically the same model as my own, I didn’t have much trouble turning it on. Not exactly a professional photographer’s camera. No wonder Werzel had been so desperate for his lost photographer to show up.
Though it was odd that even after the real photographer arrived, Werzel continued looking so insistently for his camera. Especially since he wasn’t much better a photographer than I was. His photos didn’t have as many of what Michael called “unidentified flying pink sausages”—pictures in which I’d accidentally put part of my thumb or forefinger in front of the lens—but just as many of his shots were ever so slightly out of focus. Or noticeably askew. Or awkwardly framed. The occasional shot good enough to print looked more like an accident than anything else.
I deleted half a dozen embarrassing or unflattering shots of myself and others�
��shots sufficiently in focus that some editor at the Trib, in an evil moment, might have considered using them. Of course, by the time the news about the murder had broken, the photographer had arrived, so odds were the Trib wouldn’t need any of Werzel’s shots at all.
Except, of course, for the shots of Ralph Doleson while he was still alive. Those might have a news value that outweighed their poor quality. My temper flared all over again when I saw the shots of Doleson booting poor Spike out of the pig shed.
Perhaps it was a pity I’d decided to wait until after the parade to report Doleson for animal abuse. If I’d dragged one of the several nearby police officers over to have him arrested on the spot, maybe he’d still be alive.
No use second-guessing things like that, and it wasn’t as if it was my fault the killer had found Doleson alone. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, he’d helped seal his own fate by the way he’d lived.
Werzel had snapped a couple of shots of Spike lying in wait outside the pig shed, and then a rather nice shot of Clarence ministering tenderly to the small evil one. And another predictable but amusing shot of Spike sinking his teeth deep into the heavy leather gloves Clarence had taken to wearing when treating his more savage patients, like Spike and the zoo’s wolverines.
I reached over and plugged the card reader into Michael’s computer. The shots of Spike and Clarence were too good to let go. Before I gave the camera back, I was going to keep copies of them for myself.
I turned back to the camera and clicked ahead. Another couple of photos of Spike, none of them as good as the first few. A distant shot of Michael, Dr. Blake, and the chief on their camels.
Followed by a candid shot of Ralph Doleson, sitting on the seat of the sleigh. He was looking up at the camera as if surprised, and he was holding a boot in his hand.
“What’s that?”
I jumped a foot. I’d been staring so intently at the camera’s tiny LCD screen that I hadn’t even heard Rob open the door and walk in.
Six Geese A-Slaying Page 19
