Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

by Karen Karbo

  I ran downstairs, fetched Jupiter from his cage in the living room behind the baby grand piano no one ever played. Mark Clark was involved in a loud computer battle on EverQuest. I told the back of his head that I was taking Jupiter out for some air. Sometimes I worry that Mark Clark will become so addicted to EQ that Quills will have to be the permanent BIC. A frightening thought.

  I met Reggie at the playground of Holy Family, where we went to school (one more year, rah!). Holy Family was K–8, so even though we were in middle school and were too mature for the plastic slide and swinging bridge, we still had to put up with it. We had to put up with lectures from our principal, Mr. French, about not splashing in puddles or spitting rocks, like we even did that stupid stuff anymore.

  Even though it was nearly six o’clock, the sky was still bright as noon. A few boys in baggy satin shorts were shooting hoops, and a lady was throwing a tennis ball for her yellow lab puppy. Reggie was skateboarding around the play structure.

  After giving Reg some grief about not coming after me when I took my double freak show fall off DDR at Tilt, I told him everything, from walking home and getting picked up by Jordan to Dwight’s murder.

  At the mention of Jordan’s name he started warbling, “I am sixteen! Going on seventeen!” in a high girly voice and executing some dancerish spins on his skateboard while flapping his hands in mock dainty fashion. “I know that I’m nigheeeve! Blah blah blah blah, blah yadda de da, and blah blah da da da!” Reggie never missed a chance to tease me about my acting debut as the weepy Louisa in The Sound of Music, or in this case, tease Jordan. “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” was, of course, her big dorky solo. Reggie had been very impressed at the time, but we don’t talk about that.

  “At first it really didn’t seem like such a big thing,” I said, ignoring his American Idol moment. “Someone was arrested and gave the cops Jordan’s name, but it’s all been worked out. The cops know it wasn’t her. But who was it, then? And don’t you think it’s weird that Jordan and I stopped at Under the Covers and saw Dwight and the next morning he winds up murdered? Don’t you think that’s too big of a coincidence for it to be a coincidence?”

  Reggie listened with his head down, flipping the end of his skateboard up with his toe. At least I think he was listening. It was hard to tell with boys. Finally he said, “Do they have any idea who murdered that Dwight guy?”

  “They didn’t seem to. They were just going about their normal detective-type business. Isn’t it usually someone you know, when you get murdered I mean?” The thought freaked me out a little.

  Reggie looked up from under his bangs and shook his hair a little. Reggie secretly thought he looked like Paul McCartney before the Sergeant Pepper period, and he sort of did. “Maybe she did it.”

  “She, Jordan? You think my cousin killed Dwight the bookstore guy?” This was something I hadn’t considered. I was too busy recovering from being electrocuted and taking all those stupid tests and drawing my self-portrait to ponder this: On the same morning Dwight was killed, Jordan and Tiffani showed up at Casa Clark to pick up Jordan’s car. But they came over when … about eleven o’clock? Under the Covers opens at ten o’clock, which would have given Jordan plenty of time to stop at the bookstore beforehand.

  “But her car was parked at our house,” I said aloud.

  “You didn’t say she ran him over, did you?” asked Reggie, confused.

  “Huh?”

  “Why would it matter where her car was?”

  “How would she have gotten there, to Under the Covers to kill Dwight?”

  “Well, the last time I looked, our fair city had a most excellent public transportation system,” said Reggie.

  “You think she took the bus to commit a murder?”

  Reggie shrugged. “Makes more sense than risking having a witness spot your car and maybe writing down your license plate number.”

  I sat down on the pavement. I felt inside my pocket for Jupiter, who was in his “off” mode, snoring like a big tired cat. I rolled my lips against each other. They were chapped. It was impossible, wasn’t it? Jordan took the bus to Under the Covers, then called Tiffani after she murdered Dwight and asked to be picked up at the crime scene? No way. Then I remembered: Tiffani’s family lived only four or five blocks from Broadway, on 28th and Thompson. Jordan could have easily walked. I felt cold all of a sudden. I tried to force the realization into my head, but it just wouldn’t go.

  I changed the subject instead. “Oh, I was electrocuted last night, too.” I didn’t tell him the part about seeing Dr. Lozano and the tests I scored so low on.

  “I thought maybe you’d just forgotten to comb your hair,” said Reggie.

  I ran my fingers up under my hair. It was snarled underneath like always. I pulled it all up and tied it in a knot on top of my head. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll go for dreads.”

  Reggie laughed and flipped his board. It clattered to the pavement. “Right.”

  I thought, At least I don’t go around thinking I look like the young Paul McCartney. “But why would Jordan do it? Doesn’t she have to have a motive? Maybe Dwight stole Jordan’s identity and she found out.”

  “Technically, she didn’t have her identity stolen. Someone—maybe even a guy—said they were her to get out of having to go to court. But real ID theft is when someone gathers enough info about you to open credit cards in your name so they can buy a bunch of stuff and then you’re stuck paying for it.”

  I looked over at him. Reggie was one of those people who knew a little about a lot of things.

  “But Dwight’s a guy … Wouldn’t the cops go, ‘Uh, you don’t look like any high school girl I’ve ever seen—’”

  Reggie and I looked at each other at the same time. “Jordan could also be a guy’s name—” he said.

  “Dwight could have gotten arrested and said his name was Jordan and no one would have thought that was weird at all.”

  Reggie hopped on his board and did a few kick flips. I could tell he was getting bored.

  “So maybe Jordan knew all along that Dwight had stolen her identity, and she came back to confront him and … what … killed him? Isn’t that a little psycho?” I knew there were teen murderers in our city. Every once in a while a picture of one in his orange jumpsuit turned up in the newspaper. But this was my cousin Jordan we were talking about. She was too tidy to be a murderer. Though she did have a temper. I remembered the way she screamed at that dumb kid with the skateboard crossing the street before we got pulled over.

  “But you got to ask yourself,” said Reggie, doing a few fancy flip turns, “why do we care? I mean, the cops will figure it out.”

  I reached into my pocket and put my hand next to Jupiter. I could feel his heart beating in my palm. Why did I care so much? Because it seemed important. Because caring made life suddenly pretty interesting. Because it was like a rebus come to life.

  At the other end of the playground two girls had entered the gate and were walking toward us. One of them was Sarah Schumacker, secretly known as Skanky Sarah Schumacker or S Cubed. She was one of the ultrapopular girls, who, in a movie, would be filmed walking down the main hallway in slow motion. S Cubed had had her own cell phone in fifth grade, when she also started shaving her legs. We wear uniforms at our school—navy blue T-shirts and khakis, which most of us get on sale at the Gap. But S Cubed always wore ultra-low-rise khakis that she got sent home for about once a week because you could see her crack when she bent over in class to pick up her pencil.

  In the past I’d been intimidated by S Cubed. She had that ultrafakey nice way of saying, “I really like your braces,” but everyone knows braces are still braces, even if you have kiwi green elastics and straight teeth beneath all that metal.

  As I watched her and one of her cling-on friends stroll towards us, I saw her reach into her purse—it was pink vinyl and said SWEET ‘N’ VICIOUS on it—and fumble for a cigarette, which she quickly lit before she reached us.

  Normally, I’d be ne
rvous coming face-to-face with someone as popular as S Cubed. I’d wonder whether what I was wearing was too stupid, or whether I had a zit on my chin, or if I was having a bad hair day. But now I wasn’t thinking about any of that. Instead, for the first time I saw that S Cubed was trying too hard. She wanted to impress us. She was desperate to get her Marlboro Light into her mouth and lit before she reached us.

  “Hey, look, it’s Reggie and Minerva,” she said to her cling-on, then blew smoke through her nose dramatically. “You guys make the cutest couple.”

  “We’re not a couple,” mumbled Reggie. Was he blushing?

  “Hi, Sarah,” I said. “We were just talking.”

  “How sweet,” she said.

  “Not as sweet as you trying to impress us with that cancer stick.” The words just hopped out of my mouth as if they had lives of their own. “What are you doing that for? Everyone on earth knows it’ll kill you.”

  S Cubed’s cling-on giggled.

  Then, at that moment, a cell phone trilled from someone’s back pocket. Reggie reached for his, and Sarah and her cling-on each dug for theirs in their bags. The ringing continued, and it finally occurred to me that maybe it was my Emergencies Only phone: I’d never heard it ring before.

  It was Mark Clark, calling me home, pronto. Two detectives had shown up at the front door, looking for me.

  At home, everyone was sitting in the living room. No one ever sits in the living room, except at Christmas, and that’s only because the presents are in there. I don’t know why they call it the “living” room when no one does any real living in it.

  There was no smell of a Mark Clark dinner coming from the kitchen. There was that same smell of aftershave from Under the Covers. That’s because Too Much Aftershave with his pale psycho eyes was standing in the living room, waiting to talk to me. Even though I hadn’t done anything I felt I was beyond in trouble.

  Morgan sat on the sofa with his finger between the pages of a book. Mark Clark stood at the mantel in his business-casual clothes, arranging the cheap little statues of Buddha that Morgan collected and displayed there. Quills sat at the grand piano with his back to the keyboard.

  The tall policeman with the army haircut and too much aftershare from Under the Covers introduced himself as Detective Peech. He was a giant. His arm was thicker than my leg. His leg was thicker than my body. The Latino cop with the amazing white teeth was his partner. I didn’t get his name. My internal organs were elbowing each other around in there, eager to get out of this doomed body and find a better home. Detective Peech and White Teeth both wore serious suits, like Charlie wears on days he’s going to court.

  “Here’s Minerva,” said Mark Clark. He used his stern “this is my baby sister” voice. Mark Clark wore his Paid Assassin Look, but I couldn’t tell who it was directed at. Not the enormous Detective Peech, probably.

  “That’s an unusual name,” said Detective Peech. Like he was one to talk. He grinned in that fakey nice way. His teeth were very straight but kind of gray. It was obvious he had not flossed his teeth properly when he’d had braces. Then he said, “You were in the bookstore today looking for a book you’d ordered. You said a woman called and told you the book was in. Did she tell you her name?”

  Crap.

  “No.”

  “What did she say when she called?”

  I’ve watched a million reruns of Law & Order with Quills, who is an addict. We always yell at those television meatheads who lie to the cops and think they can get away with it. Don’t they watch reruns of Law & Order and know you can never get away with it? I glanced over at Quills, who was pulling on his bottom lip, staring at me. I bet he was thinking, “Minerva, don’t be like those television meatheads.”

  So I told Detective Peech the truth. I said that no one called me. That I just made it up on the spot because I’d never seen a dead body before and I knew they’d kick me out if they didn’t think I was there for a reason. “In a way, I guess I stole that real estate book, because you just handed it over to me and I left without paying for it. Should I go get it? Sir?”

  Detective Peech wrote this down in his little notebook. I was not about to say that the day before I had been at Under the Covers with my favorite cousin, who probably had had her identity stolen by the victim and was possibly a teen murderer because of it.

  White Teeth crossed his arms and said, “So there was no woman who called you from the store telling you your book was ready.”

  Didn’t I just say that? “No, sir. I made it up.”

  “It’s not a good plan to lie to the police,” said Detective Peech.

  “I’m telling you the truth now, aren’t I?” I am not one for back talking. It only gets you in more trouble. Giving tone is another thing entirely.

  “Do you recognize this gentleman?” Detective Peech reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a picture. It was the homeless guy with the orange bandana and the three-legged dog.

  Before I could speak up, White Teeth’s cell phone rang. My brothers and I all sat and watched while he put the phone to his ear and nodded his head, then said “Uh-huh,” then nodded, then said, “Uh-huh.”

  He snapped his cell shut, made too much of opening his sports coat and dropping the phone into the inside pocket. He had the same look on his face Reggie gets sometimes during an algebra test, when he’s the first one finished. I guessed that meant they’d either arrested someone, or they had a pretty strong lead.

  Then, as if by magic, White Teeth clapped Detective Peech on his bull-sized shoulder and said, “I think we’re done here for now.”

  - 8 -

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY. The brothers and I sat at the big dining room table eating one of Mark Clark’s humongous German pancakes with lemon and powdered sugar. I don’t normally read the newspaper except the comics, but I had a world event report due that required cutting out an article from the newspaper and gluing it to a piece of notebook paper.

  Youjustme

  Just between you and me, I don’t know (a) why we can’t print something from the Internet, (b) why it has to be cut from the newspaper and glued to a piece of notebook paper, and (c) how cutting and gluing teaches you anything about world events, since no one actually reads the article, except the headline.

  I found an article about mad cow disease and was just about to cut it out when I spied a small story at the bottom of the page that got both my legs bouncing like mad:

  Homeless man arrested in bookshop clerk’s murder Portland police arrested a 49-year-old homeless man, Clyde Bishop, in connection with the murder of Dwight Paskovich, 28, assistant manager of Under the Covers bookshop on Broadway Avenue. Bishop was apprehended late Friday night at a parking lot near the bookshop. The motive appears to be robbery. Officials would not release details of the homicide case pending Bishop’s arraignment.

  I got the chills, remembering how I’d walked past Clyde Bishop and stopped to pet his dog, and how he’d reached out suddenly and I’d thought he was going to grab my ankle. He had given me a friendly, slightly mad look. Who knew it was a robbery-and-murder-planning look?

  Except there was something weird about this. What was it? I put down my fork. I bounced my legs madly. Something just wasn’t right about this.

  “Min, I forgot the syrup. Could you get it?” asked Mark Clark.

  “Could you nab the orange juice, too?” asked Morgan.

  “Oh, and while you’re in the kitchen, could you just give the floor a quick mopping?” said Quills.

  “I think there’s something wrong with the garbage disposal, too. Want to take a peek under the sink while you’re there?” said Mark Clark.

  “Doesn’t the entire sink need to be replaced, come to think of it?” said Quills.

  This old joke never failed to crack the brothers up. They’d ask me for a simple favor—get someone a fork, close a window, pick up my books off the table—and they’d keep adding bigger and bigger “favors” until finally I was replacing the roof on the house or digg
ing a hole for an in-ground swimming pool all by myself. Har!

  Normally, I laughed along with the joke, but I just stared at Mark Clark for a minute; then, without saying a word, I went to the kitchen for the Log Cabin. Back in the dining room, I stood just inside the door, my fingers hooked through the bottle’s handle. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what I’d seen at the crime scene.

  Dwight’s head was sticking out from behind the counter, his face turned toward the bookshelves behind the counter. I’d clearly seen the wound, which meant it was on … I turned my head slightly, trying to conjure up the image of Dwight … the left side of his head. That meant Clyde Bishop would have had to hit him using his right hand, right?

  “Minerva?” said Mark Clark. “You okay?”

  “Could you stand up a minute?” I asked.

  Mark Clark wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. Slowly, I swung the syrup bottle up toward the left side of his head, the only side that made sense, given that I’m right-handed. To hit Mark Clark on the right side was impossibly awkward; I’d have to cross the front of my body, and I wouldn’t be able to even reach the right side unless he turned his head at the last minute. But Dwight’s wound was on the left. I was sure of it. And I was sure that for Clyde Bishop to clock someone in the head hard enough to kill him, he’d need to be right-handed, too. But wasn’t Clyde’s right hand his useless, shriveled hand?

  “Earth to Minerva,” said Quills.

  Morgan scoffed. “Earth to Minerva? Soon you’ll be saying ‘groovy.’”

  “I already say ‘groovy,’” said Quills. “It’s ironic.”

  They yakked for a while about this, but I wasn’t listening. I handed Mark Clark the syrup and sat back down. I wasn’t hungry.

  I reread the newspaper article aloud.

  Quills said the true tragedy was that Clyde Bishop probably killed Dwight just to get cash to buy some cheap red wine. Morgan said, “Well, if that made it easier for the guy to get through the night, then whatever.”