The Baby Blue Rip-Off (15 page)

I followed them into the cluttered living room, sat on the sofa, and sipped my wine. They had good reason to wonder what I was doing there; not only had I come around on a Saturday afternoon, rather than my traditional Thursday evening with their hot suppers, but I was also a scraped-up, dirty, disheveled sight from my tumble out of the van in their alley, and I still had the pair of scissors clutched in my hand, I laid them on a
doily-strewn end table by the sofa and told the sisters that I had just been witness to the kids who lived upstairs preventing the robbery of the Cooper home by two bogus gardeners.

The old girls didn’t bat an eye. Gladys said, “That doesn’t surprise me. Our roomers are nice young men. I don’t know why old folks are always criticizing you nice, responsible young people.”

Viola said, “We’ve already spoken to Mr. Mallory on that subject, Gladys.”

That they had—several times.

“It’s a point worth stressing,” Gladys said. “How did the boys prevent the robbery?”

“By being here,” I explained. “Evidently, the thieves had information to the effect that your roomers usually aren’t here on the weekend.”

“That is true,” Viola said. “But this weekend they
are
here...”

“... having a party,” her sister continued. “I don’t know if you noticed that or not.”

If I hadn’t, the ceiling above—rattling with the vibrations of dancing feet and booming stereo—would have clued me in. But the sisters didn’t seem to notice or mind.

“Are these the same people who robbed and killed that poor Mrs. Jonsen?” Gladys asked me.

“And weren’t you present at the scene of that robbery as well?” her sister added.

I nodded yes. “And I know what you’re thinking. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. But don’t ask me how it figures in, because I don’t know.”

“Mrs. Jonsen was participating in the Hot Supper Service,” Gladys said, “just as we are, and...”

“... couldn’t that be the common element between these dreadful robberies?” her sister finished.

“These same people pulled seven other break-ins locally,” I said, “and the Hot Supper Service didn’t turn up in any of them.”

“I see,” Viola said. “More wine?”

“Please.”

She filled my crystal glass, and her sister asked, “How did they intend to rob us?”

I explained that the way I saw it, the thieves were planning to pull their van into the basement garage, come upstairs, tie the sisters up (as they had Mrs. Jonsen), and carry what they took back downstairs, and load up the van.

“And they can do things like that in the daylight?” Viola asked.

Gladys said, “Of course, because people just don’t like to get involved these days, do they, Mr. Mallory?”

“Most of them have sense enough not to,” I said.

At that point the phone rang. It was for me: Brennan, calling to tell me he’d contacted the police and was on his way to meet them down at Tony’s. I said, “Something else you should consider, Brennan.”

“What’s that?”

“This afternoon, these guys were planning to rip off some nice elderly ladies named Gladys and Viola Cooper but got fouled up, never mind why. The main thing is the Cooper sisters are one of my Hot Supper charges.”

“You mean like Mrs. Jonsen was?”

“Right.”

“That’s kind of a strange sort of coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it? The Cooper sisters themselves mentioned it to me a moment ago, and I shrugged it off. But remember how we were looking for a common factor among the break-ins? Like that
travel agency that figured in on several of them. And how we considered the possibility of maybe this bunch utilizing several sources of information?”

“You mean the travel agency is one source, and the Hot Supper thing another, somehow?”

“Worth thinking about. Anyway, one thing’s for sure.”

“Yeah?”

“We got another common factor.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You.”

“Me,” I agreed.

Brennan hung up. So did I.

Or began to, anyway, because hardly had receiver touched cradle when Viola Cooper said, “Perhaps you’re wrong.”

I let the receiver drop onto the hook, turned around and looked at the two sisters, standing there side by side like a matched set. How long they’d been poised behind me like that, in the hallway where the phone was on a stand, I didn’t know—and didn’t care, really. It was their house, after all, and they were the ones who’d almost gotten robbed. Why shouldn’t they be interested?

“I’m wrong?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe you are not the common factor, Mr. Mallory,” Gladys Cooper said. “Or at least not the only one. My sister and I were talking while you were on the phone. We have an idea.”

I grinned. “What have you come up with, ladies?”

“As much as we hate to say it...,” Gladys began.

“... because they are all such nice people,” her sister continued.

“... it seems to us that one of the
other
persons who brings our hot suppers might be the common factor, rather than you, Mr. Mallory.”

“Hey,” I said. “That’s right. I only bring the food around on Thursday nights....”

“And the other six nights of the week, it’s brought to us by other Hot Supper volunteers,” Gladys pointed out, finishing
my
sentence this time, “volunteers who service the very same route that you do.”

“And isn’t it possible,” her sister continued, “that one of these other parties might have been using the Hot Supper delivery to... I believe the phrase is ‘case the joint’? Not to impugn anyone’s humanitarian intentions....”

“Do you suspect anyone in particular?” I asked them. They were doing fine so far.

Gladys shook her head. “All of them
seem
so sincere, it’s difficult to—”

“Now wait a moment,” Viola said. It was the first time I’d heard her break in to offer a new thought, rather than just complete one of her sister’s. “Couldn’t it be that young couple who were delivering the Thursday meals before Mr. Mallory began?”

I said, “The people I took over for, you mean?”

“Yes,” Viola said.

“But they seemed so warm and conscientious,” Gladys said. “I can’t believe that they—”

Her sister was firm. “Then why did they drop out of the program so early? They delivered meals for no longer than a month, do you recall? That was one of the reasons we were so surprised to see Mr. Mallory bringing our Thursday meals.”

Gladys was starting to nod in agreement. “And their business would provide a natural means for disposing of the property they procure. I believe you’re right, Viola.”

I said, “What business is that?”

“Why, they’re antique dealers,” Viola said. “Of a sort, anyway. Their shop is somewhat run-down... nothing fancy; the place almost resembles a junkyard. It’s just outside the city limits out of South End; perhaps you’ve seen it....”

“They just bought the place a few months ago, late last spring,” Gladys recalled. “They explained to us that they have plans to refurbish the shop and the grounds, as well as that barn of theirs, when their financial situation improves.”

Barn! Another warehouse?

I said, “What are their names?”

“Petersen,” Gladys said.

“Frank and Sarah Petersen,” Viola said.

“Damn it, Mallory,” Brennan said, “you ought to have enough sense not to come butting in down here.” Harsh words, but considering the source, not much of a reprimand. Brennan was pleased with me, for a change, and pleased with the haul I’d helped him make. Behind him the garage door of Tony’s Used Auto Parts was up, and visible in there were the boxes and crates containing the ripped-off goods from Mrs. Jonsen’s, waiting patiently to be confiscated and marked as evidence. Not so patient was the uniformed cop keeping watch over the stuff, hand on holstered gun, ready to blast the first box that blinked; he’d be better when the chief and chief’s inspector showed up to get the red-tape ball rolling. Another uniformed cop was sitting behind the wheel of a blue-and-white parked up on the sidewalk in front of the shop half of the building; in the backseat, sulking, was the pale, dark-haired woman who’d shown me a sliver of face when I knocked on the upstairs door earlier that afternoon, and she was prettier than you might expect of a woman who lived with Hulk (aka P. J.). Brennan was standing beside his own unit, which was nosed in behind the blue-and-white. Mine was across the street in that parking lot behind the Little League ballpark—my blue van, I mean. I was there to pick it up. I told Brennan so.

“That’s no excuse for coming down here. You should’ve waited till later, when things died down. You want to blow the whole thing?”

I didn’t understand why I would blow the whole thing by being here, after I handed the thing silver-platter-style to him and his friends in blue. But I didn’t bother mentioning that to Brennan, instead saying, “Come on, walk me over to my car. I got something I want to tell you.”

He said okay, and we picked our way through the heavy five o’clock traffic flowing by Tony’s. On the way over, he explained that when the warrants were filled in, I’d been listed as “long-time, reliable informant,” a designation that carried with it certain rights of anonymity, which in turn carried with it a vagueness beneficial to rule-bending, underhanded police activities. And if I came around and tipped to somebody (like that pale girl in the back of the police unit) that
I
was the “long-time, reliable informant” who had gathered his information via breaking-and-entering, well, then....

But I didn’t care about any of that; I was still preoccupied with working on the new information given me by the Cooper sisters. All the way down here in the back of the taxi, I’d been going over what I had so far, my mind sorting slowly through the various file cards, wheezing and clanking like the world’s oldest and most inefficient computer. Picking up the van hadn’t been my only reason for returning to Tony’s, of course. More important was my telling Brennan about Frank and Sarah Petersen.

“Who?” Brennan said.

We were leaning against my van now. Across the way the dilapidated, ill-formed building with its black-painted windows provided a surreal backdrop for the rush-hour traffic flowing by.

“Frank and Sarah Petersen,” I said. “They have an antique shop outside of town a ways....”

“Oh yeah! Used to be old man Benson’s for years. These Petersens—are they the young couple who bought the place last spring?”

“Right. Brennan, I’m positive Frank Petersen is the organizer behind the break-ins. Remember, I heard P. J. and the two others mention the name Frank, and the antique thing is a perfect front; they even have a barn out there, which surely serves the same purpose the garage at Tony’s does.”

“That’s pretty thin to risk a warrant on. Lots of guys in the world are named Frank, you know, and there’s no law against antique shops, or barns either.”

“Let me get the rest of it out, will you, Brennan?” But I hesitated, not knowing how much to say about Debbie Lee and her husband Pat Nelson.

Damn! Even now I separated them in my mind... Debbie Lee and her husband Pat Nelson... but could there be any doubt that Debbie had suckered me in, sucked me in, fucked me in, led me into screwing her when she was really screwing me, keeping me busy for her husband while he and his fellow rip-off artists got their shit together and got out of town... helping convince me, with that drunken husband story and that stairwell confrontation, that Pat was just a jealous hot-head, a paranoid yes, but certainly not one of the bastards who robbed and killed Mrs. Jonsen... because after all, if Pat
was
one of those people, would he have risked fighting me and pulling a knife on me and all? The brazenness of that was calculated to make me rule Pat out—even if his red-white-and-blue GTO
had
been at the scene of the crime—rule him out for the time being anyway, and since they were planning to split soon, the time being was
plenty; because the time being would be filled with me staying at Debbie’s side to protect her from her drunken, violent husband. “We got him covered,” they’d said this afternoon. Covered was right: under the covers with Pat Nelson’s wife. Yes, Debbie Lee had done it to me again. Damn.

But I didn’t tell Brennan about that. I wasn’t ready. And anyway, I had plenty more to tell him. Like that Frank and Sarah Petersen were the Hot Supper couple who had preceded me on the route that included both Mrs. Jonsen and the Cooper sisters.

“That’s it, then!” he said, excited. “We were right about them using several different sources of information. The Hot Supper thing was one, and another was Bill Morgan’s travel agency.”

“What? What travel agency did you say?”

“You know. You commented yourself that it was the only agency in town. Bill Morgan, the attorney, owns it.”

William Morgan. The attorney that Debbie said she worked for. I had assumed she was his legal secretary, which I should’ve known was ridiculous, considering her lack of training. She had, no doubt, worked not in his law office, but in his travel agency. I told Brennan. Told him I had good reason to believe that the leak in Morgan’s agency was a woman named Debbie Nelson.

“And,” I said, “she and her husband are good friends of Frank and Sarah Petersen. As a matter of fact, I saw Debbie Nelson and Sarah Petersen together just this morning.”

“This Debbie Nelson... she isn’t....?”

“She is. Pat Nelson’s wife. The same Pat Nelson whose GTO, license number three, was outside of Mrs. Jonsen’s that night. And something else.”

“Don’t stop now.”

“That van. That green van. It had the words ‘
GARDENING SERVICE
’ on its side. Evidently, one of the ways they’ve kept
from raising suspicion on daylight break-ins is by posing as gardeners.”

“I already have an APB out on the van. I’ll have that added to the description.”

“Good, but wait a minute; I’m still not through. Pat Nelson works for a nursery, and that means the gardening bit could be more than just words painted on a van.”

“Sure,” Brennan said, nodding. “It could be another source of information. A regular gardening service would have access to plenty of information as to when people are and are not going to be home. You wouldn’t happen to know which nursery Nelson works for?”