I had close, personal knowledge of that particular unfortunate event and opened my mouth to explain it in no uncertain terms, when Vern slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb. “There you are, sir. You can get out at this corner and walk up to the house. That’ll be seven dollars and fifteen cents.” He scowled at me and put his finger to his lips.
The man counted out the fare carefully before gathering up his briefcase and stepping out onto the sidewalk. “Thanks, buddy.”
I watched with some malicious satisfaction as he reached the middle of the block and was pounced on by the ravenous horde of news people.
Vern muttered a derogatory word under his breath as he did a three-point turn in the middle of the street. “Stupid lawyer didn’t even give me a tip. Maybe that’s the way they do it in Syracuse.”
I sat silently as Vern headed the taxi in the direction of Chez Prentice. “You okay, Amelia?” he asked after several blocks.
“Yes, but I was thinking that in order to get the Rousseau boys off, that man is going to try to destroy the reputations of a number of good people in this town. And if he doesn’t, and the boys are convicted, well, that’s also unthinkable. This is just a huge mess. What are we going to do, Vern?”
“What do you mean ‘we,’ kimo sabe?” Vern squinted at the traffic. “I’m just the cab driver.”
“Don’t try to pretend you’re not involved in this somehow, mister,” I said. “J.T. told me to tell you to keep something. Now, what is that all about?”
“Hmm.” Vern frowned. “Oh, I know. I promised to get them their French homework so they won’t fall behind.”
“Nice try, but I already got their assignments from Miss Leary. That’s what my visit just now was all about. And for that matter, why did the police really want to question you? Tell me, Vern, or do I have to get Gil to break out the thumb screws?”
Vern shrugged. “Sorry, Amelia, can’t help you.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
He grinned at me, and it was hard to stay angry with him. “A little bit of each. Come on, Auntie. Give me a little credit. I know what I’m doing.” He pulled up to the curb in front of Chez Prentice. “There you are, dear sweet, adorable Aunt, special delivery door to door, free, gratis, on yours truly.”
“No, thank you,” I said, pulling out my wallet and handing over some bills. “I pay my own way.” I slid down in my seat and folded my arms. “But I’m not leaving this cab until you tell me.”
“Cut it out, Amelia. I’m on a time clock here. The LaBombards are depending on me.”
I pointed at the short-wave radio. “I haven’t heard any more fares come in. Come on, Vern, give.”
“Give what? That the Rousseau boys think I’m cool? I would have thought that would be a given.” He linked his hands behind his neck jauntily, but I wasn’t buying it.
“Did they tell you everything that happened on the lake that day?”
Vern dropped his hands and stared at the steering wheel, stone-faced, a sure sign that I was on to something.
“They were driving across the lake on the ice. Gil told me that,” I prompted. “Then what? What did they tell you?”
“If I thought for a minute that you weren’t trustworthy,” he began.
“Yes, but you know I am. Come on. What is it?”
He put his hands over his eyes. “Nope. Sorry. No can do. I did promise, and I’m a man of my word.”
“Vern, if you know something that can help the Rousseaus, you must tell Dennis!”
He took my hands in his. “Like I said, Amelia, I know what I’m doing. Please trust me,” he pleaded. “Please?”
I sighed. “For now.” I slid out of the passenger seat and stood in the open door. “But eventually, I’ll know.”
His relief was palpable. He nodded. “Eventually; probably.”
What a frustrating afternoon, I thought as I made my way up the sidewalk to the porch of Chez Prentice. What could Vern possibly know that could help prove the Rousseaus innocent? Or—
I stood, frozen by a terrible, more plausible thought: Or would it prove them guilty?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Through Vern’s Room with Gun and Camera,” I entitled an imaginary documentary as I circled around, gathering up coffee cups, saucers, plates, and utensils, all with the dried-on residue of snacks consumed long ago.
It had been three days since I’d last tried to tell Gil about the pregnancy, and I’d fallen into a state of vague semi-denial. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow had crept along in its petty pace, and somehow inertia had taken over. Right now it seemed easier to just let nature take its course. In early September when labor pains began, maybe then I’d tell him. Meanwhile, I had dinner to prepare, not my favorite chore by a long shot.
“Honestly,” I chided the absent Vern, withdrawing a greasy fork from under a sneaker, “if I didn’t need all these dishes and things to make dinner.” It was definitely going to be a long time before I got food on the table because everything was going to require some energetic scrubbing.
Most of the cups were stacked in several precarious little towers on his computer desk. I sat down at the desk and tried to consolidate my load, but gravity would have its way, and as I pulled it toward me, one of the stacks wobbled and fell over, causing me to overcompensate.
All the cups on the desk fell, separating themselves and heading in countless different directions. Fortunately Vern’s discarded clothing on the floor made an effective cushion and none of the cups broke. One of them did, however, roll under the desk, and it was while I was retrieving it that I encountered the silver lunchbox.
It was wedged up against the wall behind the rectangular computer entity that muttered and flashed from time to time as it breathed and ruminated.
“How long has this thing been here?” I muttered. “Any leftovers in here should be really ripe by now.”
Seating myself on the floor, I pulled the box onto my lap. It was rather heavier than I’d expected, and the closure was a bit more elaborate than the usual lunchbox latch. It had a keyhole, but apparently wasn’t locked, and it wasn’t hard to deduce that in order to open the box, one slid the metal square to one side, rather like luggage.
“Vern, what have you been—” I began, and stopped at the sight of the contents: approximately a dozen music CDs in their plastic jewel cases. “What a novel idea,” I said, and lifted out several, “and a good way to protect your music.” The walls of the case were thickly lined with some kind of stiff packing foam, and fit around the CDs tightly.
Vern’s collection was eclectic, to say the least. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me, but I did recognize one by George Strait and another CD featuring the original Broadway cast of The Last Leaf, a musical that held unique memories for me. I ran my finger down the list of songs.
“Oh, here’s ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’ ” I said aloud. It was one of my favorites, a kind of rollicking patter song performed by the show’s star, Jerry Orbach.
Surely Vern wouldn’t mind if I played just one song. I looked around as I pulled the disc from its case. Vern probably didn’t have a CD player any more. All the young people I knew used MP3 players now.
“But you play CDs, don’t you?” I said, addressing the gray rectangle that had only recently stopped making noises like a coffeemaker with sinus trouble. “I’ve seen how Gil does it. You just find the little door.” I pressed a tiny button on the front of the computer and a shallow drawer, clearly shaped for a CD, presented itself.
Carefully turning over the CD to expose the music side upward as we used to do with records, I dropped it in the slot and touched the drawer gently. It responded by sliding back into position.
“What’s going on here?” It was Vern, towering over me, a scowl on his face.
“Um,” I said, and suddenly realized how very odd I looked: kneeling on the floor on a pile of discarded sweatshirts, next to the wide-open lunchbox, surrounded by assorted dirty crockery with an empty CD jewel
box in my hand.
“I, uh . . . ” Quickly, I thrust the jewel box back in the silver lunchbox and struggled clumsily to my feet. “I was out of coffee cups and plates and I knew you had some in here. It took a while to find them all,” I added and picked up a rumpled T-shirt from the back of the computer chair. “You keep your place pretty messy, you know.”
Vern, ignoring my accusatory tone, swooped down and grabbed the lunchbox. “What were you doing with this?” He slammed it shut.
“Well, I thought it was a real lunchbox—it surely looks like one—and that it might have some trash in it. I mean, things like this.” I fished a crushed potato chip sack from behind the computer monitor. “Anyway, when I saw it had music in it, well, I like show tunes.”
Vern’s stern expression softened slightly.
I felt a strong sense of shame coming over me. “Oh, dear, this is terrible, isn’t it? I’m so sorry. I seriously breached your privacy. I should have waited until you got home, but I needed the plates and things. I shouldn’t have opened the lunchbox—is that what you call it?—and I promise, I won’t do anything like this again.”
Vern continued to hold the box tightly, but he was clearly in a forgiving mood. He shrugged. “Well, no harm done, I guess. And I should have put the cups and stuff back in the kitchen, so maybe it’s partly my fault.” He shoved the offending item back under the computer desk and helped me to my feet. “Just ask me next time, okay?” He retrieved several cups off the floor.
“Okay,” I echoed meekly, beating a hasty retreat to the kitchen with my arms full of crockery.
I had finished putting the cups in the dishwasher and was scrubbing some stubborn dried cereal off of a bowl when Vern burst out of his room and approached me with a renewed scowl. “Amelia! What did you do with the CD in here?” He held up the empty Last Leaf jewel case.
I dried my hands on a dishtowel. “It’s in your computer. I put it in there to play a particular song. I thought you saw me do it. I guess it didn’t play. I’m not very good with computers, I’m afraid.”
As Vern followed, I walked rapidly into his room, sat down in his computer chair, and pressed what I thought was an appropriate button. “I just wanted to hear this song.”
But instead of playing music, the computer screen suddenly, silently, filled with columns of numbers, steadily moving upwards.
“Amelia, what’d’ you do?” Vern barked and edged me rather peremptorily out of the chair.
I wrung my hands. “Oh, dear, I don’t know. I just pressed Enter. Isn’t that right? But it’s not playing show tunes, is it?”
Vern’s tone was suddenly thoughtful. “No,” he said, “it’s not.” He leaned forward and followed the ever-growing list of numbers with his index finger. “It’s kind of familiar, though. These dashes, three digits, dash, two digits, dash, four digits, over and over.”
“But why numbers? It’s supposed to be a music album, isn’t it?”
He turned toward me in his chair and blinked. “Yes, and it is. I’ve played every one of these CDs to make sure. But why is it acting differently now? Show me what you did.”
I leaned forward and pressed the tiny button. “I just put it in to play like this.” The narrow drawer opened smoothly. “See, there’s the CD.”
Vern leaned forward and lifted the disc out gingerly on the edges with his fingertips and grinned. “Oh, I see. You put it in upside down.” He turned it over and examined the decorated top.
“But I thought you—oh, never mind.” I sighed. I was never going to get the hang of computers at this rate. I was just grateful, I decided, that I hadn’t done any actual damage.
Vern squinted intently at the colorful label decoration. “Here’s what it is,” he said quietly, almost whispering. “Right here, this shiny part on top. There’s room to burn more information on it, on the wrong side. If anybody was to look at it, even play it—the right way,” he added, turning a wry cocked eyebrow at me, “they’d think it was a real music CD. It’s very, very clever.” He replaced the CD in the slot and resumed his examination of the numbers.
“So it isn’t a real CD?”
“Sure it is. They just altered it.”
“Who?”
“Good question.”
“And why would anyone do that?”
Vern frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Those look rather like Social Security numbers.”
“Of course!” Vern said, leaning back in his computer chair. “The dashes should have told me. Wow.” He clicked on one of the numbers. Immediately, the screen changed and a name and address appeared.
I folded my arms and leaned forward. “There must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of numbers here. What is this? Some government document?”
“Maybe.” Vern brought his face close to the screen. “No, I don’t think so.” He fumbled in the silver lunchbox, extracted the George Strait album from its case and examined it closely. “See that silver band? It cuts off part of his cowboy hat and slices off a corner of the title, too. Somebody altered this CD, just a little.”
He exchanged it for the Broadway show album in the computer, being careful to put it in silver side up, and pressed Enter again. This time, the screen was filled with pale green rectangles with printing and fingerprints and small head-and-shoulder photos.
“What are those, driver’s licenses?”
“Nope,” Vern said, leaning forward. “Look, it says Permanent Resident Card. They’re green cards, or rather pictures of them.”
“Vern, where did you get these things—the CDs and the silver case, I mean?”
The boy looked down at his hands and said nothing.
“This is clearly illegal material! We’ve got to get this to the police!”
“We can’t.”
“What?”
Vern was taking long, deep breaths. He said in a near-whisper, “You see, I promised.”
“Promised what?” I could feel my blood pressure begin to rise.
“To help some . . . friends. They asked me to help them figure out how to get this . . . lunchbox thing back to whoever it belonged to.”
Whomever, I thought to myself. “It’s the Rousseau boys, isn’t it?”
Vern sighed. “Yes, but listen, they didn’t have any idea what this thing was. Neither did I, for that matter. They gave it to me last week in school, before they got busted. Dustin said they sort of accidentally walked off with this thing and wanted to figure out a way to return it.”
He turned a pleading face toward me. “I thought I could help. I mean, if I could find out who owned it and get it back to them without a fuss, everything would be cool, but then this, um, murder happened, and I was in a bind, you see?”
“You can’t shrug off responsibility here, Vern. This obviously has something to do with making false IDs. Do you think the boys could be involved in an illegal—”
“No way!” He glared at me.
“We need to call the police.”
“No!”
“But it’s stolen property!”
“Accidentally stolen.”
“That may be, but Vern—”
A blast of cold air sweeping down the hall and into Vern’s open door announced Gil’s arrival. “Hello? Anybody? Where’s my little family?”
I sighed. “Here, Gil.”
Vern widened his eyes, pleading.
My husband appeared in the doorway. “Amelia, didn’t I warn you that this room would swallow you up like a Venus Flytrap? What’s going on?”
Vern shot me another glance containing the deepest pathos. I ignored him, but not without an inward wince. This would probably mean the death of our cordial auntie-nephew relationship.
“Come look at this,” I said to Gil, indicating the computer screen. As he sat in Vern’s chair and leaned forward, squinting, Vern turned his back with a ferocious snort of disgust.
“Wow,” he said under his breath. “Where did this come from?”
I showed him the lunchbox and repea
ted what Vern had told me.
“Ooo-kay,” he said when we’d finished. He bit his lip and looked up at me. “Amelia, do you have O’Brien’s home number?”
Vern whirled around. His expression was heartrending. “Gil, isn’t there some other way to handle this?”
“Look at this stuff.” Gil pointed at the computer screen. “There’s nothing else we can do. Listen, Vern,” he added, not unkindly, “just be glad we have a friend on the force who might be inclined to believe your story.”
Vern sat heavily on his unmade bed and stared at his hands, clasping and unclasping them. “I’m a dead man.” He threw a dark frown at me.
Gil dialed the number I gave him. Dennis was home.
“He wants us to meet him at the station,” Gil said after finishing the muttered conversation. “C’mon, Vern, let’s pack this thing up.” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and used it to remove the CD from the computer and replace it in the jewel case. “No need adding another set of fingerprints to the mix,” he pointed out, putting the assembled lunchbox in a grocery bag I’d fetched for him.
“I’ll say a prayer for you,” I said as uncle and nephew suited up for the trip into town.
Vern’s expression was pure resentment. “Yeah, you do that.” After a dramatic zip of his parka, he slammed out the front door.
Gil kissed me. “I won’t lie and tell you the kid’s not in trouble, but I’ll do all I can. Keep your chin up.” He started down the hallway, then turned around. “Do me a favor and call Ned about this. I doubt he’ll be any help, but he has a right to know.” Gil scratched his forehead.
“He moved to Saratoga last spring. Use directory assistance or something.” He threw me another kiss. “Don’t wait up.”
I stood in the doorway and watched them drive away.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I actually did pray for Vern right then and there, while sitting at the kitchen bar next to the telephone. I prayed also for Gil and for the Rousseau brothers and finally, for myself and my baby. Less than six months ago I had complained in prayer that I was alone. That prayer had been answered bountifully, overwhelmingly. Now I had new things to pray about.
Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series) Page 13
