Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (18 page)

Mikey didn't know where Margalo got the interest or the
energy to notice all of that about anybody. But, “Are they the ones who hold hands everywhere? They block traffic kissing in the middle of the halls?”

“That's them. And John Lawrence, he's the boy cheerleader, you've at least heard of him.”

Hadrian was reading down the list and nodding his head. “I think that's everyone.”

“Yeah, but Margalo, even if I know some of these people by sight, I don't
know
them. So how will this help me help you figure out who robbed you? Why don't you ask Tim? He probably knows them, being on the paper, being a sophomore and the kind of person who takes people to brunch.”

“Tim took you to brunch?” Hadrian asked. “When?”

“Last weekend.”

“She has to do brunch for her dates,” Mikey added. “Because of her work hours.”

“Is he your boyfriend?” Hadrian asked Margalo.

Mikey answered for her. “The world wonders.”

Margalo just smiled an irritating, mysterious smile. “We agreed, no date
post mortems
.” Before Mikey had time to do more than groan, Margalo went on, insisting, “We made a deal. You know you hate that kind of girly giggly talk.”

“I never giggle.”

“But I'll tell you this much, I had eggs Benedict. Have you ever had eggs Benedict?”

“Of course I have. My mother's boyfriends used to like taking us out for brunch. I've had eggs Benedict lots of times,”
Mikey answered, feeling a little better. She just didn't want to be entirely left out, that was all.

“Hollandaise is one of the trickiest sauces because of how easily it can separate,” Hadrian explained to Margalo and looked to Mikey for confirmation. “Isn't that right?”

“There are ways to fix it,” she told him. “You don't cook, do you?”

“No,” he laughed, his high seventh-grade-kid laugh. “That would about finish me off, if I did. Being a brain is barely okay, because I'm a dork, but being a cook, too . . . It's all right for you because you're female, and you, too, Margalo—if you want to be cooks. But I'd never get away with it.”

“If I was a boy, I'd get away with it,” Mikey declared.

Hadrian nodded agreement. “But you're not like other people. Neither are you, Margalo, but nobody can miss it about you, Mikey, whereas you
want
them to miss it about you,” he observed to Margalo, then went back to studying the list of names.

Margalo took out a second sheet of paper, which she had divided into sections, each with a title—Stage Manager, Joe and Doc, Howie and Doc, Howie and Mrs. Gibbs, Doc and Mrs. Gibbs. Hadrian studied this new material. Margalo studied the original list of names. Mikey studied nothing and felt left out.

“I get it,” Hadrian said as Margalo started filling names into the boxes. “You're making one of those time/opportunity
charts. Who had the opportunity to go into your wallet because they weren't in the scene we were reading.”

“To rule people out,” Margalo agreed. “If they were reading, or if I'm sure I didn't see them leave the room or move around.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Mikey complained. “I might as well leave.” But she didn't move.

Hadrian said, “You're making it way too complicated.”

“No she isn't,” Mikey said.

Margalo was more open-minded. “You're right! I
am!”
She put a check beside Richard's name and another beside Sally's. “I'm sure I saw them, they went out of the room together, I figured to the bathroom but when they came back they were . . . You know, her cheeks were pink and—Anyway, I was pretty sure they'd been necking, gone somewhere private to neck. Or something. The way . . . You know, their eyes were all shiny and they had secret smiles they'd exchange, you know what I mean, Hadrian. Don't you?”

“I know too,” Mikey claimed. “I bet they did it. Don't you think, Hadrian?”

Hadrian pointed at various names, his finger landing here and there like a wasp working on a puddle of melted ice cream. “You should do me next,” he said.

“Why you?” asked Mikey. “You didn't do it, did you?”

“If I did—”

“But you didn't,” Mikey told him.

“If I did,” Hadrian repeated stolidly, “it wouldn't be for the money, it would be for—the game of it, to see if I could get away with it. And if I'd done it for the game of it, helping in your investigation would make it an even better game.”

“Psychologically I can see that,” Margalo said thoughtfully.

“So can I,” Mikey said. “But it's pretty stupid, because you didn't do it.”

“I
could
have,” Hadrian argued. “Because between this scene”—his wasp finger landed on one ice cream puddle—“and that one”—another puddle—“I don't have any lines, so I could very easily have slipped away. You might not have noticed me, and neither would Ms. Hendriks. She was too busy monitoring other people, listening to their voices, making notes. That's how come it's easy for Sally and Richard to sneak out . . .” His cheeks turned pink at even thinking about necking in front of two girls. He couldn't say any of the words for it. “So it's easy to slip away, and it wouldn't take more than one or two minutes, tops, to get into Margalo's knapsack and find her wallet. Even hidden at the bottom it wouldn't take long. I could easily have done it,” he said, pointing again. This time his finger landed on the second sheet. “Here.”

Mikey demanded, “How did you know it was on the bottom?”

Hadrian just smiled.

Margalo was grinning away too. Detecting was sort of fun. If you forgot about your own stolen money, it was a lot of fun.

“And how did you know Margalo even had any money anyway?” Mikey demanded.

Hadrian kept on smiling.

“Looking goofy doesn't prove anything,” Mikey told him. She could detect as well as anybody else, whatever everybody else might think.

“It's probability,” Hadrian said. “I happen to know you go to the bank on Friday, but even if I didn't, I'd guess. Margalo works, she has jobs, everybody knows that, and lots of people know she's saving for college. She can only get to the bank late on Friday—unless her bank is open Saturday morning, I guess—but probabilities are that it's Friday afternoon she'd do her banking. Probabilities are that she'd bring the money with her to school, since she doesn't have a license, or a car, or enough time to get home on the late bus and get back downtown. So probably she has it with her. And Margalo's smart, so she wouldn't just drop her wallet in at the top of the knapsack, especially since she'd be taking things out of it all day, and putting things in, books, papers, pencils. Anybody who thought about it, and wanted to see if there was money to be stolen, would take a look in Margalo's knapsack on Friday, if they could get in there without anyone seeing.”

“All right then,
did
you?” Mikey asked. “But Hadrian, if you did, it makes no sense for you to tell us. Especially given your motive.” She thought. “Your alleged motive. So I don't believe you.”

Hadrian smiled again, Mr. Mysterioso.

“And you can stop that smiling,” Mikey told him.

He did.

Margalo had been thinking too. She had practiced remembering everything from that afternoon. She could play it like a movie inside of her head, start to finish, first bell to last. “Ms. Hendriks had you up on the platform with her. So you would have had to be there all the time because the Stage Manager is always onstage, even when he's off to the side just watching the action. If you'd moved off entirely, Ms. Hendriks would have noticed and said something. Even if she didn't watch you every minute, she would have noticed right away if you weren't where you were supposed to be.” Margalo thought about what she'd said.

Mikey turned to Hadrian. “That's another proof it wasn't you.”

Hadrian kept on trying. “Unless I did it some other time. Like during lunch.”

Did Hadrian
want
them to think he was the thief? Mikey lost patience. “Since you didn't do it, when else you might have done it if you had isn't worth wasting our time figuring out.”

Margalo said, “There is no other time. The knapsack was either right at my feet or hanging off my shoulder, I'm certain of that.”

“Well then,” Hadrian said. “You've proved it. It wasn't me.”

“We already knew that!” Mikey cried.

“So who do you want to do next?” Hadrian asked. “Because now that you've ruled me out, I can help. You wouldn't want the guilty person to be the person helping you figure out who did it,” he told them.

Even Mikey was laughing by then.

When they met up after a hasty lunch, Margalo set her papers out on the table again, and they all studied them. She had added a third sheet, for people who had been ruled out. Only five names were on that list: Hadrian, Ms. Hendriks, Richard and Sally, and Sherry Lansing, who had been absent. But Hadrian could add a couple of names to that list. “Gilda Kulka left right away—she said a dentist appointment—and Sue and Leland left early, they weren't in the first act.”

“And Tracey and Bill went out with Sue and Leland, all four together, as soon as the cast list was announced. They were complaining about the parts they'd gotten,” Margalo remembered. She made the changes and they took a fresh look at the papers.

To Mikey it looked like a kaleidoscope of names, arranged and rearranged, only much more boring than a kaleidoscope because they were using letters not colors.

“I don't know,” Margalo said. “I suppose I could ask everybody to tell me everything they remember about that time, and I could make a map of the information.”

“Contradictions might show up,” Hadrian said.

“It's already too confusing,” Mikey objected.

“Whoever did it would lie,” Margalo said.

“That would create the contradictions,” Hadrian said. “Although they say that nobody is an accurate eyewitness. Everybody thinks they remember what really happened, what they really saw, but usually they don't. But nobody sees that in themselves. Everybody thinks their own version is the right one.”

“Mine usually is,” Mikey pointed out.

“So we'd end up with a lot of contradictions and they probably wouldn't be useful,” Margalo concluded.

“If you ask me, this whole approach isn't useful,” Mikey observed.

“All right then, what would you do?”

“I'd figure out who I thought had done it—which I've already done,” Mikey said, and she pointed at Richard's and Sally's names. “Then I'd accuse them.”

“They're ruled out. They were always together,” Hadrian reminded her.

Margalo was willing to consider any option. “If I did accuse people, I might get lucky. Or I bet I could tell from the way they deny it who's lying.” She thought about it and the more she thought about it, the more she liked the possibility. “Nobody would expect me to do that, and if people aren't expecting something then you catch them off guard.”

“And when they're off guard they'll spill the beans,” Mikey agreed.

Hadrian had his doubts, but he didn't express them in words. He expressed them in hums and little short grunts.

“Start with Richard and Sally,” Mikey suggested. “It's always the person you think couldn't possibly have done it.”

“They're people, not a person,” Margalo pointed out. “And this isn't some TV mystery. It's high school.”

“Besides, I don't see how anybody
could
have gone into your knapsack without me noticing. I was onstage the whole time,” Hadrian reminded them.

“You had lines to read,” Margalo reminded him. “Or . . . somebody could have said he was going to the bathroom and picked up my knapsack as he left the room. You could easily not have noticed that. And then brought it back into the room and dumped it back on the pile.”

“So you think it was a guy who did it?” Mikey asked. “But girls could make good thieves, just as good as boys, maybe better because you don't ever suspect them. I bet Sally did it.”

“Why her?”

“I don't like the way she looks. Anybody who looks like that—all right, all right, but you shouldn't rule out the girls,” she advised Margalo.

Margalo was gathering together her papers, which she ripped in half, then ripped in half again. “I'm ruling out this approach. That's all I'm ruling out right now.”