Bowled Over

Chapter Twenty-One

Maggie made it to the bottom step on her own, wishing she'd let Alex carry her, and wondering if it was possible to develop calluses on one's backside.

Not that she'd ever ask anyone that question, as it was one of those questions that elicits too many questions in return.

She knew that because she'd been asking that sort of question for most of her life. Some kids in school, for instance, asked why the sky is blue. Normal stuff like that. But Maggie asked questions like, "If the sky is blue up there, and the grass is green down here—what color is the middle?"

Alex was right. She'd not been an easy child.

And life wasn't getting any easier now that she supposedly was an adult.

Case in point: one Henry Novack.

"Hi, Henry," she said as Alex steadied the walker and she got to her feet, because even wooden steps got cold in December. "Love the coat."

"Yeah?" Novack said, patting at it, as though checking it for flaws. "I got it on sale. I think it makes me look fat. You know, being white and all. Do you think it makes me look fat?"

"Don't," Alex whispered as Maggie opened her mouth. "Some things are just too easy to be fun."

"I heard that," Novack said, and then shrugged. "Hell, I am fat. Morbidly obese, right?"

"Stop saying morbidly, Henry," Maggie told him. "It's defeatist. It's also cold out here and I forgot to put a sock on over my cast and my toes are freezing. Where can we go to talk?"

"I got my van parked right over there," Novack suggested. "I can turn the heater on?"

"Terrific," Maggie said unenthusiastically. "Let's go. Does your heater work?"

"I don't know. I'm always pretty hot, so I don't really use it. Natural insulation, you know?" Novack said as he led the way across the street, his corduroy pants swish-swishing together between his thighs, the shiny white material of his jacket keeping up an accompaniment every time he swung his arms. He looked and sounded, to Maggie, rather like a windup toy—with only the key missing from his back. "You're going to like what I have to tell you, though. Well, probably not. But I did learn something."

"You reconnoitered at the bowling establishment last evening, Henry?" Alex asked as he helped Maggie pull herself up into the front passenger seat of the van.

"I hung out at the lanes, if that's what you mean. Don't you English ever say anything the easy way?"

Maggie grinned as she looked into the backseat of the van, watching Alex settle himself. "Alex got one of those learn-a-word-every-day calendars for Christmas, Henry. Today's word is reconnoiter. Right, Alex?"

Alex used his gloved hand to push several paper bags with the names of fast food restaurants on them to one side of the backseat. "Very true. And yesterday's word was exterminate. It has several meanings," he said, looking hard at Maggie. "Would you care for me to use it in a sentence?"

"I'll pass, thanks," Maggie said, turning around quickly, then holding onto the sides of the seat because Novack had gone around to the driver's side and climbed into the van, and Maggie feared for a moment that the thing would turn on its side. "You might want to consider new shocks, or springs, or something, Henry."

"I would, if I'd won three million dollars," Novack said as he pulled off his knit cap. "I'd buy a new go-cart, too, considering how the one back there," he said, indicating the rear of the van with a hitch of his thumb, "is all dinged up now."

"Oh, come on, I didn't hit you that hard," Maggie complained. "And you're the one who rammed me a second time."

"No, not you," Novack told her as he unwrapped a chocolate bar, getting it halfway to his mouth before Maggie grabbed it from him and tossed it out the window. "Hey!"

"It's for your own good, Henry. Isn't it, Alex?"

"I wouldn't know, my dear. I'm fully occupied attempting to decide if one of the many bags back here is moving."

"You guys aren't funny, you know that?"

"Sorry, Henry," Maggie said, wishing she'd taken a bite of the chocolate bar before littering the street with it. "Tell us what happened to your go-cart."

"And my jacket," Henry told them. "You know? The one I had on the other night? Sleeve's ripped all to hell now, which is why I look like the Michelin tires cartoon guy today."

"I thought a Zamboni ... but, then, you were on the go-cart when I first saw you, so I—"

"Maggie, focus if you will," Alex said warningly from the backseat. "I do believe Henry is telling us he had some sort of misadventure last evening. Am I correct in that assumption, Henry?"

"There he goes again, but I think I got the gist of that one," Novack said, once more hitching a thumb toward the backseat. "The lot was full, even the handicapped spaces, so I had to park my van down the block, you know, and take my go-cart. Some jackass didn't see me when I was leaving and ran me off the road into a ditch. I don't call that no misadventure, though. I call that a dumbass who had too much to drink at the lanes, that's what I call it."

Okay, so it had taken her a while. But Maggie was paying attention now.

"Someone ran you off the road? Alex? You know what I'm thinking? Oh, why am I even asking? Of course you do."

"Yes, sweetings, I have already deduced as much myself. But let us begin at the beginning, shall we? Henry, if you would please tell us about your evening at the bowling lanes?"

"That's what I was trying to do, until you guys started asking questions, stealing my chocolate. But I promised you a freebie, remember? A slice, not the whole cake. Not for free."

"You have a freebie for us, Henry?" Maggie asked him.

"Yeah, I do," he said, his eyelids narrowing as he looked at her. "Heard some guys talking in the bar. But, remember, you're not going to like it. The dead guy? He was maybe banging your mom. Or maybe your sister? One of 'em. All I caught was the name."

"Maureen," Maggie said hopefully. It would be bad enough, people knowing about Maureen. But her mother? That would be really, really bad.

"No, that's not it."

"Reenie?" Maggie suggested, this time desperately.

"Nope. Why don't I just tell—"

"Alicia?" Maggie asked. Squeaked.

"Jeez, if you'd just hold onto your undies, I'd tell you. Erin. The name was Erin."

"Steady, sweetings," Alex said, reaching over the seat to put his hands on her shoulders.

"If that bastard wasn't dead, I'd kill him myself," Maggie declared through clenched teeth and suddenly numb lips. No wonder her sister hadn't been home in years. "Man, when I moved to New York I must have screwed up Bodkin's personal scorecard, huh? And forget I said screwed."

Novack seemed oblivious to Maggie's pain, her Trauma of the Day. "So that's the freebie. I say anything else and it's going to cost you."

"And do you have anything else to say?" Alex asked, still rubbing Maggie's stiff shoulders.

"That's not the point. I'm talking generally here," Novack said, burrowing all of his chins beneath the collar of his jacket. But then he sat up straight, grinning. "You said you wanted to know everything, right? Everything that happened last night? You still want that?"

"I want to pretend I'm an orphaned only child," Maggie said, blinking back tears. But she had to stop this; there was no time for a personal pity party, although a long letter to Erin, once this was all over, was probably in order, damn it. "Okay, okay, how much will this cost me?"

"I don't know," Novack said, sounding unsure of himself for the first time since he and Maggie had "bumped into" each other. "What's the going rate for private detectives, anyway?"

"I don't know, Henry," Maggie told him, rallying. "But the going rate for guys in go-carts is twenty bucks an hour."

"Twenty bucks an—plus expenses?"

Alex chuckled in the backseat.

"Expenses? What expenses?"

"Well, I was at the lanes for about five hours or so, and the pizzas were twelve bucks a pop ..."

"Pizzas? As in plural pizzas? Oh, hell, all right. Let's make it an even two hundred for the night, okay?"

"Cash?"

"I'll tap my card later at an ATM."

"What kind of later? Later today, or later this week?"

"Later today, unless you make me really mad. Which you're doing. Now start talking."

Novack was nothing if not obedient, at least where the prospect of getting paid to talk was concerned.

He'd gone to the bowling lanes at around seven o'clock, when the leagues first began, and did what Maggie and Alex had told him to do. Be inconspicuous, while keeping his ears open. He walked from alley to alley, sitting down sometimes, pretending to look for a ball at others.

And listening. He did a lot of listening.

The topic of conversation, wherever he stopped to listen, was always the murder. The murder, and Evan Kelly's arrest for that murder.

"Oh, and somebody's got a pool going," he told them. "It's pretty much five-to-three odds that your dad gets life without parole. Sorry."

He went on to tell them that he'd found the alley where the Majesties were practicing, and stood behind a pillar so nobody could see him—

Okay, so Maggie wasn't really good at turning a laugh into a cough, but she gave it her best shot ...

—And heard the team talking about the murder, and the New Year's tournament that was coming up in a few days.

The redheaded guy, Novack told them, was having a small cow as he tried to get the new members of the team to understand that the bowling order would remain the same as it had been when Bodkin and Kelly had been on the team: the redhead first, some guy named Kelso next, then the lesbian—

"Henry, I don't think that's necessary," Maggie interrupted him. "And you're wrong. Trust me on this one."

Novack just shrugged and continued to list the bowling order. After the woman, the last one would be Barry Butts. And Barry Butts—"wild name, huh?"—hadn't liked that. He wanted to bowl second, not last. There'd been a near fight, but then the woman settled it, sort of smoothed things over. Novack figured the fun was also over, and since he'd just seen a guy walking by with a plate of nachos that looked pretty good, he took himself off to the bar for his own plate of nachos and a brewski. Light beer, of course, as he was trying to watch his calories.

"And that's it?" Maggie slumped in her seat. "Not much for two hundred bucks, Henry."

"There's more," he told her quickly. "In the bar? That's where I heard about your sister, I guess it was, and about some others. The guy with the red hair? Him? He came in with the other two guys, not the les—not the woman, and they were making jokes about the dead guy unzipping his pants all over town. The hothead? That Butts guy? He said he'd have paid the dead guy to take care of his wife for him. I laughed at that, and he looked over at me, all wild-eyed and mean all of a sudden, and asked me if I wanted to sit closer, so I could hear better. Then all three of them looked at me, all madlike."

"Ouch. Busted, huh? Next time you might want to try a cloak of invisibility ... pup tent of invisibility," Maggie said as Alex remained quiet in the backseat. He was probably thinking, and since Maggie couldn't think of a thing to think herself, that made her a little angry. Because he was probably thinking of some clue she'd missed. This was a thought that pretty much took the fun out of hearing that Lisa "She Stuffs" Butts's husband seemed to think the honeymoon was long over.

"Pup tent, huh? That's good, really funny, if I was a masochist. See, I know some big words, too. But, yeah, I guess they figured out I was listening to them," Novack agreed. "So I finished my chicken wings and left right after they did, picked up my go-cart—I chain it to stuff when I don't want to use it—and took off for the van. And got pushed off the road. Tapped right on the left rear fender and went, bam, into the ditch."

At last Alex said something. "Did you happen to see the driver of the car, Henry? The color of the car? The numbers on the license plate?"

"From where was I supposed to see any of that, huh? From the bottom of the ditch? He was a drunk. Blind drunk, because anyone else would have seen me. I've got reflectors, I've got lights. I got me. I'm not small, you know."

"Henry," Alex said sternly, "I thank you so much for all you've done, but you're now, as you Americans say, out of it. No more investigating, no more eavesdropping, nothing."

Novack shifted on the seat, once more sending the van's springs to protesting loudly. "What? You think somebody did that on purpose? You think somebody tried to—well, holy crap."

Maggie laid a hand on Novack's sleeve. "It could be a coincidence, Henry. But do we want to take that chance?"

Novack seemed to consider the question for a moment. "Well ... yeah, I think so. I mean, how much fun do you think a fat man has, anyway?" He turned as best as he could in his seat, to look back at Alex. "What do you want me to do next? Price has gone up, though, what with the hazardous-duty pay rules and all. Three hundred an hour?"

"Absolutely not!"

"Maggie," Alex said quietly, "Henry is going to need repairs on his go-cart. I've been looking at it back here, and the paint is rather scraped. Henry, we are agreed. And here's what I would like you to do ..."