Slugfest

Thirty-nine

Cindy Gustafson fiddled with the lanyard of her badge holder, which was tucked into the breast pocket of her corduroy jacket. It was an old show trick so you wouldn’t forget to wear the darn thing but didn’t have strangers on the street calling you by your first name and creeping you out when you weren’t working.

She stood up and stuck out her hand like an overeager job applicant. From the still life on the small resin table where she’d been sitting—empty coffee cup, newspaper, and bagel—she’d been there a while; maybe that’s where she’d called me from.

She was young—twenty-five, maybe younger, close to Bleimeister’s age. She had that same dewy look, combined with a surprising coarseness common to those in their twenties. Maybe it was the fashion. They looked world-weary, even if they’ve never really seen the world and had no legitimate reason to be weary.

“Thanks for coming.” She hooked her straight dark hair behind one ear in a move I would see repeated many times in the following twenty minutes.

Cindy said she had met Garland, haunting the corridors of the Wagner Center. “It was Wednesday,” she said, “late.”

They had talked in the shorthand of the twentysomething—clubs, social networking, jobs, schools. Thinking of his shirt, I asked her if Bleimeister had gone to Penn State.

Cindy shook her head and seemed surprised by my question. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Why do you ask?”

“The Happy Valley shirt. I thought maybe he was an alumnus.”

“He said that was a joke. He said he’d gotten an education at Happy Valley but not a degree.”

“Did you know what he meant?”

She shrugged. Another move I’d see numerous times. Garland told her he’d been at the show earlier and had left a bag at my booth but couldn’t get back in to retrieve it because he’d lost his badge. Would she stop by to pick it up for him and meet him later at Dekker’s Tavern on the West Side?

“He said he’d treat me to dinner to say thank you, but I got so busy setting up that I forgot. When I called to let him know, he said never mind. He’d made other plans and couldn’t meet that night anyway. I thought he was blowing me off because of the stupid bag, but he rescheduled for the next night. He even said dress nice because we were going to a fancy restaurant.”

“Where were you supposed to meet him on Thursday?”

“Nick & Nora’s. I waited for two hours but he never showed. I even walked back to Dekker’s, thinking I’d misunderstood. Then this morning, I saw this.”

She pointed to the newspaper. It might have been coffee stains but I thought there were tear splotches on the grainy picture of Bleimeister wearing his Happy Valley shirt and hoisting a can of beer, his arms entwined around two buddies.

I’d only seen Bleimeister twice and the features were indistinct, but the smile was unmistakable. He was the floater, as Rolanda and the paper so sensitively called him. I asked Cindy the same question J. C. had asked me. “Did you notify the police?”

“No. I called you because you were his friend.” She looked down and played with a stray thread escaping from one of the buttons on her jacket. If she wasn’t careful she’d lose it.

“I wasn’t his friend. It was an accident that I had his bag—which, by the way, I don’t anymore.”

“Did the police take it?” she asked.

“No.”

“If you don’t have the bag,” she asked, “where is it?”

“Beats me. If Bleimeister didn’t take it, somebody else made off with it.”

“But who? Who’d want a ratty old bag?”

That was the final Jeopardy question. Or maybe it was why did somebody want the bag? What did they think was in it? And how did Cindy know it was a ratty old bag unless she’d seen it?

“Just for curiosity’s sake,” I said, “how did you get my cell number?”

“I stopped by last night during the reception, but you weren’t there. One of the guys from the next booth suggested I take your business card.” The ever-helpful David.

“Look, I am calling the police. This bag business might be something the police can use to find out what happened to Bleimeister.”

“Do you need to mention my name?”

“He might have mentioned a girlfriend. Did he mean you?”

“No way.” The button came off, as I knew it would, and she shoved it in her pocket. “I have a boyfriend back home. He won’t understand my going to meet another guy.”

What exactly was I going to tell the cops if I didn’t have the bag, didn’t mention Jamal, and didn’t mention Cindy? Wouldn’t they find her when they questioned the people listed on the dog-eared page? Was he pointing to his killer from his slab in the morgue or was that just something you saw on television?

“I may have to. You saw Bleimeister and spoke to him more recently than I did. Depending on when he died, you may have been one of the last people to see him.” Just like Jamal, but I didn’t see the need to complicate things by mentioning him.

That realization sent a visible shudder through the girl. “Don’t worry. Nothing happened. You didn’t even meet him. Even the most jealous boyfriend couldn’t object to that.”

She smiled weakly. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Jealous boyfriends—another reason to be glad I was unattached.

I dialed 911 and told the dispatcher I had information about the body that had been found in the river. I gave my name and cell number and said I could be reached at the Wagner Center, booth 1142 in approximately twenty minutes. After I hung up, Cindy thanked me profusely, even though I told her she would likely have to talk to them anyway because of the directory and the note.

“Your name’s on one of the pages. The cops will want to speak to you. C’mon. Let’s get going. Big shopping day today.”

I left a few bucks on the table for Cindy’s uneaten bagel and grabbed the tearstained newspaper, folding it under my arm. We didn’t speak for two or three blocks—hard to shift gears and discuss the weather after talking about a young man who’d just died under questionable circumstances. Although maybe that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do—talk about shoes or sports. Or work.

“Beekeeping. I’ve got friends in Connecticut who do it. How do you keep from eating all the profits?” I asked.

“That’s easy. There aren’t any profits yet. I haven’t been doing it that long, and the bees do the work. I just collect the honey every month.” She mumbled her answers and didn’t volunteer much, so I stopped trying to draw her out and we walked the rest of the way to the convention center in silence and at a funereal pace.

Every once in a while Cindy took a long, deep breath that I took to be a stifled sob. It was more emotion than I expected from her, given that Bleimeister was a total stranger. Maybe she had met him. Hell, I didn’t care if she’d answered the booty call—I wasn’t her mother. And I wasn’t so old that I didn’t remember my twenties. Cindy wiped her eyes with the cuff of her jacket, blackening the edges and smearing her liner into extreme cat eyes that Amy Winehouse would have been proud of.

Before we knew it, we’d arrived at the exhibitors’ entrance. Not so early that we’d need to bribe the guard, which was good since the liquor stores weren’t open yet.

I tried to cheer her up. “Hey, if you ever need to sneak in, you could try giving the security guard a few jars of honey. He’s flexible about the going rate.”

Cindy mumbled good-bye and made a beeline for the first floor ladies’ room to fix her face. I took the escalator and watched Cindy slip into the restroom as I rode upstairs.

David was already at his post, charm machine on and smile affixed, ready to take no prisoners. And I was delighted to see Nikki back on the job—instead of her sour-faced husband. She stood proudly by her sarcophagus, all cheery optimism, wearing a vintage hat with a mesh veil that attempted to cover the purple knob on her forehead.

“Welcome back,” I said. “Love the hat.”

“Isn’t it great? Russ brought it to the hospital for me. He’s a dear, isn’t he?” I agreed that Russ was a treasure and silently resolved to never, ever get caught up in disputes between married couples.

The story of their reconciliation was cut short by the approach of two men.

“I’m taking a wild stab that those men behind you are not interested in art,” David said. It was a good guess. As incongruous as they were, in these surroundings, they could only be cops.

The two men could have been sent by central casting—one was white, the other black. It was either enforced diversity or an unconscious homage to every buddy cop team from Lethal Weapon to Miami Vice.

“Ms. Holliday?”

John Stancik and Patrick Labidou flashed their credentials and David volunteered to cover the booth while the cops and I found a private place to talk along the wall, where folding chairs had been haphazardly placed for elderly or exhausted attendees. It wasn’t even nine thirty in the morning, but I now felt as if I qualified.

Stancik took the lead, while his partner looked around the convention center as if he’d never seen a flower or any kind of vegetation other than iceberg lettuce or confiscated marijuana before. Perhaps he hadn’t. There was nothing natural about him, from his beard to his clothing. And while I didn’t like to make snap judgments based on what people wore, I hoped Labidou had an undercover assignment later in the day, otherwise hadn’t had a closet makeover since 1976. Stancik was younger, better looking in a generic Secret Service man kind of way.

“Did you make a nine one one call this morning about the Garland Bleimeister case?”

“About forty-five minutes ago.” I didn’t mean it to, but it came out sounding as if I were complaining about their response time.

“Technically,” Labidou said, cracking his gum, “you should have called the precinct or the special tips number given on the news, not nine one one.”

“I’ll try to remember that next time I meet a guy who gets killed.”

Labidou let out a low whistle, but his partner kept to the business at hand. “What can you tell us?”

“I met Garland Bleimeister on Wednesday.”

“How?”

I recounted the no-badge incident and then with something of a flourish showed the cops Bleimeister’s note and the show directory with the dog-eared page.

“He asked me to give this note to someone. Most likely someone on one of these two pages. I never got to hear who the note was for. There was a disturbance on the floor and we all left to see what had happened. He must have sneaked in, so he didn’t need me to deliver the message anymore. That was the last I saw of him. I’d been holding his bag, so I brought it to my booth, thinking he’d come by for it, but he never did. Now I know why.”

Labidou couldn’t resist. “He left you holding the bag?”

“Okay,” his partner said, stifling a smile, which was too bad because he had a nice smile that lit up his whole face. “Where’s the bag?”

“Gone. Either he came back for it when I wasn’t at the booth or somebody else helped himself to it. I understand there have been a number of incidents at the show this year. It could have been stolen.”

“Oh, yeah. The Javits Curse,” Stancik said. He flipped through his notepad. “The precinct has gotten calls about that. Mostly some woman named Douglas. Looks like she called more than once. That also checks out with what Rolanda Knox told us.”

So she had talked to them. Did she tell them about Jamal? And me?

“Any idea what was in the bag?” Stancik asked.

“Nope. I didn’t look.”

“Not exactly burning with curiosity, are you?” Labidou said.

I was thinking up a suitably snarky reply when Lauryn Peete stormed over to us.

“Feisty little woman at eleven o’clock and, thank you lord, she’s coming our way,” Labidou said. “How do I look?” He ran a hand through his hair, but it must have been an involuntary reflex since he was nearly bald.

Every muscle in Lauryn’s body looked tense, and there was an angry vein pulsing in her otherwise smooth forehead.

“What did you tell them? You and that horrible Douglas woman. You’re all the same. You see a kid with baggy pants and unlaced shoes and right away he’s a criminal.”

Stancik looked from Lauryn’s face to mine. Labidou’s gum cracking slowed, then stopped. “Miss Holliday, are you acquainted with Jamal Harrington, too?” he asked.

Lauryn took a deep breath and I thought I heard the word manure escape from the teacher’s lips.

“Why do you ask?” I was all innocence.

“Because he’s wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Garland Bleimeister. We also want to talk to him about the death of one Otis Rudolph—”

“Randolph,” Stancik said.

“Which we are now officially treating as suspicious.”