The Scent of Murder

by Barbara Block

  “I saw two men arguing. I don’t know what you were arguing about.”

  “It’s simple.” Frank swept the bits of paper back into a heap. “Charles is accusing me of stealing from the business. That paper is supposed to be the proof.”

  “And are you?” God, at that moment I would have given anything for a cigarette.

  “No. He is. He’s doctoring up the inventory sheets.”

  “Why is he doing that?”

  “To divert suspicion from himself.”

  I took a deep breath. “This is all fascinating, but what does it have to do with Amy?”

  “Nothing, really.” The foos ball players were yelling, and Frank had to speak loudly to be heard over them. “I just thought you’d be interested in knowing what was going on.”

  “And what is going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what you’re telling me doesn’t really make sense.”

  Frank bit his lip. I watched him decide whether he was going to talk or not. “All right,” he finally said. “Amy told me she was going to tell the police Charlie was supplying her with acid. I guess Charlie figured he’d better get his licks in first.”

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t know. He could have. Amy lies a lot. It’s hard to say.”

  “Nice family.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it.” Frank gave a grimace of a smile and slumped back in his chair. “I’d love to go out to California or New Mexico. I’d love to just go anyplace and do something else for awhile.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  Frank studied the table before replying. “Because I never finished college, which means I’ll never be able to get another job like the one I have.” Then he got up, went to the bar, and came back with two beers. He pushed one over to me and started on the other one.

  I took a sip. “Since you’re being so generous, how about telling me one last thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did your father and his brother stop talking?”

  Frank spun his beer bottle around. “I don’t think it was any one thing. Just lots of little things over a period of time. Lots and lots of little things.” He stood up suddenly, as if the realization had just hit him that he’d said too much. “I’d better go. I have to be at the plant early tomorrow morning.” He put on his coat and left.

  I followed a minute later. On the way home, I stopped at the new Mexican takeout place on Westcott and picked up three beef and spinach enchilada dinners, two sides of corn bread, and four Kahlua brownies for Manuel, Zsa Zsa, and myself. I ate my portion, watched a little TV, and went to bed, but I didn’t fall asleep right away. I kept staring at the ceiling and wondering what Toon Town had meant.

  The next evening I had my answer.

  It was a little after ten thirty at night and I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, paging through the morning paper and listening to Manuel tell me how he was going to Atlanta, when the phone rang. The police were on the line. They were calling to tell me that my store had been broken into. They wanted me to come down immediately. I cursed, as I hung up the receiver.

  “What’s up?” Manuel asked.

  I told him as I headed for the door. Manuel grabbed his jacket and ran after me.

  “What do you mean he broke in?” Manuel asked.

  “Just what I said.” I spent the ride cursing Toon Town and wondering what he’d done to Noah’s Ark.

  “Just wait for me,” I told Manuel, as I pulled up behind the patrol cars parked in front of the shop.

  He grunted. I took that as a yes and hopped out of the cab.

  One of the cops glanced up from his clipboard, stopped writing, and came towards me. I had to squint to read the name off his badge in the dim light. It was Harvey. “Robin Light,” he said, making the words into a statement instead of a question.

  I nodded. “How bad is it inside?”

  Harvey pulled at the corners of his sparse mustache. “Bad enough.”

  “How are the animals?”

  “I don’t know. When I saw what I had, I turned around and came out. I’ve been waiting for you to take a look.” He tugged on the ends of his mustache again. “Shall we go in?” he asked, nodding towards the store.

  “Might as well.”

  We walked up the path together.

  Then I opened the door.

  Chapter 16

  Our entrance was greeted by raucous squawks. A small cloud of green, blue, and yellow parakeets rose, flew in a circle, and settled back down on the ceiling pipes. I’d been thinking of booking a trip to Costa Rica to see this kind of stuff. Seeing it in my own place, however, was not what I’d had in mind.

  Harvey took in the scene and shook his head. “It looks as if someone gave this place a pretty good going-over.”

  “You could say that.” I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath, and told myself I needed to stay calm and assess the damages. What I wanted to do was cry.

  Okay. The Macaw was still here. That was good. Especially since it was the most expensive item in the place. But everything that had been on the shelves was now on the floor. That was bad. The ferret’s cage was on its side, the bottom tray had fallen off. Mr. Bones was gone. Also bad. I bit one of my cuticles. He’d probably fallen off the counter and was somewhere on the floor. I just hoped he hadn’t worked his way into some crack in the floorboards and disappeared into the infrastructure of the building. Then I’d never find him. Ditto that for the hamsters and gerbils. They were gone too, their cages tipped over on their sides, bleeding cedar shavings. But at least Toon Town hadn’t touched the fish tanks. I didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he’d toppled those over. And then I thought about the snakes and the lizards and my heart sank.

  But they were all in their cages.

  It looked as if Toon Town had caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t the expensive kind. It was the kind that was just going to take a lot of effort to clean up.

  “Do you have any idea who did this?” Harvey asked. He was standing by the door.

  “I wish I knew.” I’d been going to give him Toon Town’s name, but at the last moment I decided against it. Even if the cops picked him up, they weren’t going to charge him with much. But if Amy was with him and they picked her up, too, she’d be in real trouble—if Frank Richmond was to be believed—and judging from Amy’s past history, the odds were he was telling the truth.

  Harvey looked around the store. “Have you had a fight with anyone lately?” he enquired.

  “No,” I lied.

  “A dissatisfied customer. Someone who felt they were cheated.”

  I shook my head and looked down. Something was pulling on my sneaker lace. It was Mr. Bones. I gave a sigh of relief and lifted him up. He chittered and tried to burrow into my jacket. I opened the zipper and let in him. Poor guy. He’d had a rough night. A moment later, Pickles slunk by with a dead gerbil in her mouth. Snack time. I had a feeling I’d be seeing a lot of those in the next couple of days. She meowed a greeting and headed for the back room. I wondered how many other gerbils Pickles had already eaten.

  I reached into my pocket for a stick of gum. “How did whoever did this get in?”

  “Broke a window in the back. Do you want to see it?”

  I backtracked towards the door. “Please.”

  Manuel popped out of the car when he saw me come out of the store. “What’s going on?”

  “Who’s he?” Harvey asked.

  I told him, then I filled Manuel in on what had happened as we headed towards the side of the building. Harvey stopped about thirty feet into the alley and pointed to the window that led to the back room. “The guy broke the glass and climbed in here.”

  I sighed and nudged a shard of glass towards the wall. It wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to get in this way. Maybe I should have installed a burglar alarm after all, although in this case it wouldn’t have helped much.

  “The only reason I discovered t
he break-in,” Harvey explained, as I stared at the space where the window had been, “was because I was checking the alley for someone. I noticed the broken window and went back and tried the front door. It was open a crack. Whoever did this must have forgotten to close it all the way.”

  I thought of the birds flying around. I’d have to duct-tape a plastic garbage bag over the window the moment I went in. Then tomorrow I’d get someone to come out and fix it. This wasn’t Florida. If they got out outside, the cold would kill them.

  Harvey ran a finger down the center of his nose. It was long and thin and cut the air like a hatchet. “Are you sure there isn’t someone you’ve had a fight with recently?”

  Manuel started to speak, but I interrupted before he could say anything. “I’m positive,” I replied, firmly ignoring Manuel’s startled expression.

  “Well, if you do remember, give me a call.” Harvey headed back towards the squad car.

  We followed, a minute or so after.

  “Why didn’t you tell him about Toon Town?” Manuel hissed.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “So you gonna let him get away with this?”

  “No,” I replied grimly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m definitely going to think of something.”

  By now we were back in front of the store.

  “I got some friends,” Manuel said, and then fell silent as Harvey came back with the crime report number. I stuffed it in my pocket.

  “I may take you up on your offer,” I told Manuel, after Harvey left. Then Manuel and I turned and went back inside the store.

  The first thing I did was fix the window. The second thing I did was fix up a home for Mr. Bones. The third thing I did was call Tim. I wanted to prepare him for what he’d find when he arrived in the morning. After that, Manuel and I went home. I was too depressed to do any cleaning. I was too depressed to have my talk with Manuel about finding another place to stay. Instead, I had two Scotches and went to sleep.

  I had to drag myself out of bed the next morning. Surprisingly, Manuel was already up and waiting to go to work. One good thing you can say about him: He is there when you really need him. In the car on the way over to the store we talked about his trying to get back in his house, and he agreed that maybe it would be a good idea to have a chat with his mom. At least I was getting somewhere with something. Not that that really helped my mood much. Thinking about what was waiting for me at the store made me want to spit. I felt even angrier when I walked in. In the light of day, the damage looked worse than it had last night.

  Tim had beaten Manuel and me in. “Jesus,” he said, as I walked in. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s going to take us a day to get this place back together.”

  “At the least.” I put my backpack and denim jacket on the counter and thought about where to start.

  The three of us worked for the next five hours straight.

  With every bag of dog food I put back on the shelf, with every can of flea and tick spray I replaced, I just got angrier and angrier.

  I wanted to find Toon Town. I wanted to find him really badly.

  Amy had brought him into my life, and I wanted to make sure he knew he’d better get out.

  Chapter 17

  I spent the rest of the day and the next one getting the store back in shape. Then I went after Toon Town. But he’d disappeared. So had Amy. They weren’t at the warehouse—in fact, no one was. Maybe Justin had carried Melanie and her friend off to Chicago after all. I visited the house I’d followed Toon Town to a couple of times. No one was there, either. I peeked in the mailbox. Except for a circular from Pizza Hut, it was empty.

  I knocked on the neighbors’ doors hoping to get a lead. All of them said the same thing: people came and went at a variety of hours. Some of them had blue hair, some had green, some looked normal. After awhile, they’d stopped paying attention. I called Toon Town’s mother. She hadn’t heard from him. I called the store where he worked on the off chance he’d dropped by. He hadn’t. I called Amy’s family. She hadn’t touched base with any of them. It looked as if I’d hit a dead end. Then around six-thirty Manuel strolled in and put the ball back in play.

  “I heard something you’re gonna be interested in,” he told me.

  I put my pen down. I’d been taking advantage of the dinner slump to decide which cat toys I wanted to order. “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “You know John John?”

  “The kid that was busted for stealing three cars and shooting at cans with a Glock in Barry Park?”

  “That’s him. Well I met him downtown while I was waiting for the bus, and I did what you said.”

  “You went to school?”

  Manuel rolled his eyes. “Funny man. Really funny. No. I asked him about Amy.”

  “He’s seen her?” I could hear the excitement in my voice.

  “She was dancing at a topless joint called Good Girls over on the Northside a couple of days ago.” Manuel tugged his pants up. “You’re gonna give me some money for this, right?”

  “Twenty bucks.”

  He put on his poor-me face. “How about a little more?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on Robin, I need it.”

  I didn’t ask what he needed the money for, because Manuel wouldn’t tell me anyway. I sighed. “You can earn another ten if you bring out the dog food bags from the back.”

  Manuel looked at the clock. “I would, but I got someone waiting outside for me. How about you front me the money and I work for you tomorrow.”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head. I’d learned that arrangements like that didn’t work out.

  Manuel frowned and tugged his pants up. “Then at least give me five for the work I did helping you put the store back together.”

  “All right.” It seemed only fair.

  He grinned and slipped the twenty-five dollars I handed him into his pocket and headed for the door. I watched through the window as he jumped into a grey Plymouth Sundance that was parked across the street. The car roared away from the curb, and I went back to what I was doing, wishing I hadn’t given Manuel the money. Whatever he and his friends were going to get up to probably wasn’t going to be good.

  I locked up at nine and dropped Zsa Zsa off at the house. Manuel hadn’t come home yet, so I wrote him a note and took off for Good Girls. The wind smelled of snow. Driving through town, I thought about how much better I would like fall if it came before spring. Oh well. Maybe I should move down to Atlanta like everyone else and have done with it.

  Once I reached North Salina, I turned down the radio, put a stick of gum in my mouth, and started looking for the bar. It wasn’t hard to find. There were five topless places in a three block area, Good Girls being the fifth. Or the first, if you came at it from the opposite direction. It was certainly the smallest and seediest. It didn’t advertise Monday Night Football on a giant TV screen and free late-night pizza, or bill itself as a gentleman’s club, or brag about its VIP lounge, concert lighting, and onstage bachelor parties which earned Good Girls a certain amount of points, as far as I was concerned. At least it wasn’t pretending to be something it wasn’t.

  I blew a bubble, popped it, and pulled over to the curb. When I’d lived in New York, I’d known a girl who’d danced in a place like this in Queens. She’d liked the money and the attention. Especially the money. “I make more in one night here, then I would in two weeks if I worked as a secretary,” she’d told me. Finally, when she’d saved enough to go to college, she quit. Of course tuition then had been a hell of a lot cheaper. We’d celebrated by burning her pasties and G-string.

  Last I heard, she’d gotten an assistantship and was working on her Ph.D. in clinical psych. I was wondering what had happened to her, as I opened the door and went inside. Looking around, I decided there was something to be said for modernizing, after all. The place was small and cramped
. The walls were the color of putty just before it needs to be replaced. The space smelled of old beer, unwashed bodies, and stale tobacco. There was a bar on one end and a strip on the other where the girls danced, though none of them were dancing now, even though the music was blaring.

  It was definitely a low-rent operation, the kind of place where no one would look too closely at anyone’s I.D., including the dancers’. Which was what Amy needed. Although, now that I thought about it, I couldn’t see even this place hiring someone with blue hair and a nose stud. Down in the City yes. Up here in Syracuse, no way. I decided to ask some questions, anyway. It couldn’t hurt, and I was already here.

  I was heading for the bar when I was intercepted by a man who was so fat he’d have to buy two seats for himself on a plane if he wanted to fly. “There’s a ten dollar cover charge and a two drink minimum,” he informed me in a gravelly voice. Even though it was cold in here, his forehead was beaded with sweat.

  “I don’t want to come in. I just want to talk to the manager,” I told him.

  “That’s me.” He folded his arms across his chest and regarded me with basset hound eyes.

  “It’s about Amy Richmond.”

  “Don’t know her,” he promptly replied.

  “Maybe she uses another name.” I described her.

  “Still don’t know her.” I tried reading his face but it was like trying to read Play-Doh. I continued, anyway. “A friend of mine said he saw her here a couple of days ago.”

  “He must have made a mistake. Maybe he meant someplace else.”

  “It’s possible,” I conceded. Then I asked him if I could talk to the performers, anyway.

  He pursed his lips and flicked a sausage-like finger in the direction of the stage and told me it was out of the question. “My money, my time,” was how he put it. “Now if you don’t mind, I have work to do. Are you staying or going?”

  “Going.”

  I thought he muttered “good” under his breath, but I couldn’t be sure. Then he turned and waddled away. The two men at the bar, who had been watching our conversation, continued watching me with unblinking eyes. I felt as if I was the pre-entertainment entertainment. I gave them a little more by describing Amy to them and asking if they had seen her. They both said no and turned back to their drinks. Maybe they preferred being observers to being participants.