The Baby Blue Rip-Off (13 page)

I couldn’t be sure.

There just wasn’t enough of a peephole in the blackened window; not enough paint had been scraped or worn away. No way to tell for certain.

Except to get inside the garage and see for myself.

The street out in front of Tony’s was well traveled, since it passed the grain-processing plant with its many employees, and also because it was one of the main entries to this South End residential section. But it was mid-afternoon, an off time, and the darkness of the space between garage and gothic, as well as those bushes blocking the way, made it hard (not impossible, but hard) for anyone going by in a car to see what I was going to do.

And what I was going to do was break the window.

Now wait a minute. I didn’t go off half-cocked. I went off fully cocked. I first plastered my ear against the glass to check for any activity that might be going on in the garage. Not a sound. Then I very carefully slipped out of my short-sleeve sweatshirt and folded it, laid it gently against a pane of black-painted glass, and rammed my elbow into it.

The glass cracked.

It didn’t shatter and go clattering to the floor, waking the dead and scaring hell out of the living; it just cracked, so that
when I took the folded sweatshirt away, the framing wood still held the glass, slivered now in the formation of an interesting but simple jigsaw puzzle, and all that remained was to carefully, piece by piece, take apart that jigsaw puzzle, and then where a pane of glass had been would be a hole. I shook the loose glass from the sweatshirt, got back into it, and started picking the shards of glass from the window frame.

When I was done, I had a hole through which I could see the green vehicle completely. It was indeed a green van, but if it was the
same
green van, some changes had been made. For one thing, there were license plates, or one anyway; I had a back-angle view of the truck and could see a license plate where the van at Jonsen’s had had none. Not that it was any great trick to take off or put on a plate, but it was a difference. A bigger difference was the red lettering on the side—
GARDENING SERVICE
—big, bold letters that hadn’t been on the van I’d seen. Either the letters had been added since, or that night they’d been covered up somehow. Or this wasn’t the same van.

But it had to be. And that Neanderthal upstairs just had to be the same Neanderthal who had jumped me at Jonsen’s. Running into both Hulk and the van cinched it.

Especially added to the contents of the garage. Instead of the filthy, greasy pit you might expect, full of old auto parts salvaged from junkyards, this was a clean, tidy, cement-floored room, with crates and boxes stacked around. The garage was a damn warehouse! And not for used auto parts, either. This was where the ripped-off loot was stashed.

I wanted to let out a whoop of victory, but now wasn’t the time. I could almost feel the adrenalin flowing into my veins. What you should do now, I told myself, is call Brennan and tell him to get out here and whip a John Doe warrant on these
people and confiscate the goods and have that garbage living upstairs tossed into a more-or-less permanent can.

What I did instead was reach my hand through where the pane of glass used to be and unlock the window. I pushed it up and crawled inside. They call it breaking-and-entering, gang, and I just couldn’t help myself.

Because I had to know.

I had to
know
it was the same van. I had to
know
those crates and boxes contained what I thought they contained.

Once inside, I walked softly and wished I had a big stick. There wasn’t much light in here. Some little came through the open pane, and a single but fairly bright bulb was burning, hanging over a workbench affair built into the back wall, next to the open door of a toilet in the far corner. I felt fortunate at first that the bulb was lit, though on second thought its being on could easily mean someone would be coming back soon.

I started looking. The van, first. No way to be absolutely sure about it, but other than the license plates and the red lettering, it was a ringer, and I was convinced. I started poking into boxes, crates. Found everything from kitchen appliances to an antique vase. In one corner I found Mrs. Jonsen’s grandfather clock, under a tarp. In another I found, crated up, her color TV.

In yet another I found, neatly boxed, the blue Christmas plates.

And for a quiet moment there, I was very angry.

Most of the stuff in the room was Mrs. Jonsen’s. Not all, but most, and the way I figured it was these people moved out whatever they stole as quickly as possible. Mrs. Jonsen had been Thursday night and the stuff wasn’t moved yet, but this was just Saturday, and with the van here, maybe tonight was the night. I didn’t know what they did with their goods, but my guess was
that they sold as much as possible to fences in the Quad Cities. Chicago wasn’t that far away, either, and the not-easily-traced items (like a color TV with serial number “worn” away) could be fenced or sold locally. Antiques and such would have to be fenced outside of the area.

I’d seen enough.

I decided that, before leaving, it would be best for me to try to patch the window somehow, cover it up so they wouldn’t notice anybody had broken in. But how? I remembered the workbench affair over under the hanging bulb; the workbench had a bunch of drawers down below, and I went over there and rummaged through them until I found black masking tape in one and a pile of rags in another, from which I selected a chuck of thick black cloth. I used scissors from another drawer to cut a square hole in the cloth.

I grinned. I was a genius. I would climb back out the window, close it shut, reach my hand up and in through the open pane and flip the lock, then tape the square piece of cloth over the empty space, stretching it taut and taping it tight. It was heavy cloth and, blended with the black of the rest of the window, would do as good a job as I could hope for keeping anybody in there from noticing the break-in for a time.

I tidied the workbench, got things put away and—still grinning, still proud of myself—I turned to go back across the big room to the window to tape the black cloth in place.

That was when I heard the shuffle of feet and voices, one saying, “Damnit! Look at the window over there! Somebody busted in!”

So there I stood: Mallory, master cat burglar, caught with my metaphorical pants down. My self-congratulatory thoughts fizzled out like wet firecrackers and were replaced with a rush of emotions, including terror, panic, and the ever-popular despair....

I blinked all that away.

Only for a split second had I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and fear, but that was one split second too many in a situation as tight as this.

The rest of the second I used more wisely, used it to appraise the situation; the footsteps belonged to two people, it seemed, and they had entered through a doorway in the front of the building, a corner door directly opposite from where I was standing, back by the workbench. They hadn’t seen me (and I hadn’t seen them) because the view was blocked by the green van between us. But I couldn’t think of making a dash for the window, which they had already noticed as being broken, and I wouldn’t have had an ice-cube-in-hell of a chance to make it over there and not get caught, much less seen. Could I circle around the van and sneak out the door behind them?

“Lock that door up,” one of the voices said.

Any other questions, Mallory?

“Already did,” another voice said, with irritation that implied doing so was standard operating procedure. This was a high-pitched voice that belonged, I thought, to my old pal Hulk. He was saying, “Why so uptight about the door?”

“If somebody’s in here, I don’t want ’em getting out.”

“I don’t see nobody,” Hulk observed.

“Probably just some goddamn neighbor kid broke the window to see what was in the big mystery garage. Well, we’ll have a look-see anyway and make sure.”

During that last exchange of dialogue, beginning at “Already did,” I came to the conclusion that my only possible course of action was to duck into the lavatory that took up the corner nearest me next to the workbench. Before I did, I hastily opened up a drawer and traded the piece of black cloth and masking tape for that pair of scissors I’d used, then got shut soundlessly inside the can, all before the guys out there could get past the van to the point where they could see me.

Scissors in hand, I examined my cage. Like the outer, larger room of the garage, the john was not the pigsty you might be led to expect, judging from the exterior of the seedy-looking building. That doesn’t mean you’d eat off the floor, but there were worse toilets in the world to have to make a home in. Seemed to be relatively clean, if not lavish: just bare facilities, standard stool and sink. Cramped it wasn’t, and spaciously empty enough to suggest it had been designed with mechanics in mind, back in whatever era the place was used as a service garage; plenty of room to move around, not that I wouldn’t have liked a dozen closets, two attic entries, and one trapdoor to a basement to hide in. Or at least a shower stall. But no, it was nothing more than a somewhat oversize naked can, with no place to hide unless you were very small and could tread water. No place at all.

Except maybe one.

A large cardboard box, big enough for a small stove, had been stuck in here to serve as an oversize wastebasket. Evidently, enough labor was still done in the garage to make necessary the frequent washing of hands: on the wall was a PULL DOWN, TEAR UP brown-paper towel dispenser, and the soap was strong, mechanic-strength powder in a dispenser over the sink, with the big carton apparently a spare liberated from warehouse duty to catch refuse.

Now I didn’t want to make much noise, but figured the search for the intruder was going to lead here pretty soon, so I waited until I could hear a conversation going on out there, which I hoped would cover any sounds I’d make, and crawled into the box of wadded-up brown paper. Trying not to cause too much of a racket, and imagining every crinkle of paper to be a thunderclap, I squirmed and wriggled and swam in the sea of paper wads, getting a layer of the stuff over me.

It was not comfortable. Like I said before, the box was big enough for a small stove; but I am not shaped like a small stove. Also, most small stoves do not have two cracked ribs. Still, there I was, on my back in the box, my knees touching my chest, my arms around my legs, hugging, and my concentration going toward ignoring the pain, holding onto the scissors, and not breathing heavily.

I was like that for maybe two minutes, a bunched-up, awkward fetus clutching scissors in a box of crumpled towels, and then the john door burst open, like a fat man letting out air, and the light switched on and somebody came clumping in. I felt the box quiver as somebody gripped the side of it to peer in. I gripped the handle of the scissors. Tight.

“Nothing in here,” the voice said. And it didn’t sound like a voice with a wink in it, so I assumed I’d properly fooled the guy.

The door shut, and I was alone in the can again. And thankfully alone in my box. I wouldn’t have liked any company; those used-up towels were obnoxious enough as it was.

Then I did something you will probably think is stupid, but I ask you to remember that everything I’d done for the past hour or so was pretty stupid, so as least I was consistent. What I did was carefully, as soundlessly as possible, get back out of the box so that I could approach the door and lay my ear to the wood and listen to the talk going on out there.

But the thing I heard was not talk. It was the sound of a door slamming. For a moment I wondered if those two guys had left, and then I got my answer. A new voice—an apparent third party who’d just entered—said, “I just talked to Frank, and I don’t like it.”

There was silence for a moment, then: “Me neither.” My buddy Hulk talking. “I think Frank’s going out on a limb on this one.”

“Frank’s going out on a limb? Bull,” the new voice said. “
We
are the ones going out on the goddamn limb, not him.”

The remaining voice, the authoritative voice belonging to the guy who spotted the broken window, said, “Take it easy. We’ll be out of here by dawn, for Christ’s sake. And Frank’s right; we
should
cash in on
some
of our work at least, before we split. We laid the damn groundwork, and it’d be a pity to throw it away without making it pay off a little, anyway. I say go ahead.”

“But in daylight?” This was the new voice again, the whiner.

“Why not? We done it in daylight before.”

“But things weren’t as hot before. That SOB Mallory wasn’t sticking his puss into everything then.”

“That’s right,” Hulk agreed, “and he came around here snooping this afternoon.”

“What? Goddamn!” the whiner shouted.

“Forget Mallory,” said the authoritative one, who’d evidently already been filled in by Hulk about my visit, whereas it seemed to be news to the whiner. “We can handle him. We got him covered.”

Covered? What the hell did they mean by that?

“Well, even without Mallory, it’s still hotter,” the whiner said. “There’s a murder in it now, and things are going to be hot and stay that way.”

The authoritative voice was edged with anger this time. “I know that. Why do you think we’re moving out tonight if I didn’t know that?”

“I tell you, it bothers me,” the whiner continued, trying a new tack. “I don’t feel right about that old dead lady.”

“For Christ’s sake. Forget that old bitch.”

“It’s not that I give a damn about her, exactly; it’s I
do
give a damn about getting stuck with a murder rap just because the old bag up and died on us.”

“I’m getting sick of your goddamn complaining.”

“Yeah? Well I’m getting sick of your goddamn orders. You’re not running this show. Frank is.”

“Well, Frank says we’re going ahead with it. Right now.”

“Well, the hell with Frank and the hell with you,” the whiner said, a new toughness in his voice. “You and P. J. here can go ahead, but me, I’m going in the house and have a beer and see if I can cop a feel off P. J.’s woman. Let me know what happens.”