Slugfest

Fifty-six

“How do you know they’ll both be there?” Lucy asked.

According to Jensen, Scott Reiger and the Shepards were both invited and had said yes. That was all we had to go on. Jean Moffitt’s party was a big event in gardening circles. It would be telling if the SlugFest or Bambi-no exhibitors didn’t show up.

“Do we bring a house gift?”

“No time to shop. Besides, the woman probably has everything she wants,” I said, packing my things. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a waiting period between her admiring something and acquiring it.”

“I know where we can get some lovely plastic tablecloths. Gently used.” Lucy had ripped down the Pilgrims and turkeys as soon as she’d gotten home, and they were now crumpled in the corner of her bedroom, the duct tape still attached.

“It’s a good thing I travel light,” I said, “because Spade and Archer will be taking up a good chunk of the backseat.” Lucy looked at me blankly.

“The sculpture. Primo’s piece?”

I’d been told people wore everything from overalls to long dresses to Mrs. Moffitt’s post–flower show shindigs, but the red dress was not going to make a third appearance quite so soon. I opted for something more conservative: my all-purpose black jacket and black slacks. Lucy was more adventurous and when the phone rang, we knew her outfit had passed muster with Harold, who’d been delighted to learn Lucy hadn’t sold her apartment to a paranoid woman with bizarre taste in window treatments.

The umpteenth white jacket Lucy cinched over her green floral dress was the charm—Harold agreed, although he did ask if she had it in red—and she modeled for him in her tiny bedroom. It walked the line between sweet and creepy.

“I can’t believe you’re taking fashion advice from an eighty-year-old man, whatever his past CV. I may need to rethink your position as my fashion guru.”

“I don’t always take it.” She looked at my outfit. “Wouldn’t you like to borrow something more festive?” she asked. “You look a little downtown for a garden party.” I stood in front of the full-length mirror. She was right. Next to her, in her sunshiney outfit I looked like our high school gym teacher on her way to a funeral.

“We’re just taking a short drive out of New York City. We’re not going back in time. Besides, there may be a confrontation at this party and I don’t plan to be wearing white gloves and a big hat if there is.”

“If it’s more than verbal sparring, I’m not sure I’ll be much use.” She tossed me one of her castoff white jackets, which made me look like the staff I was expecting Mrs. Moffitt to have. All I needed was a carnation. Hi, I’m Paula your waitperson. Beverage? I eyed the military jacket that I’d worn to the Friday night reception.

“I’ve been hustled, haven’t I? Go ahead,” Lucy said. “It’s you. But it’s still downtown. Take a scarf. Something bright.” She rummaged through a fabric-covered box and tossed me a piece of red nubby silk with a dragon pattern on it that was so long it could have been worn as a sari. I wrapped it around my neck five or six times as instructed. Harold would have approved. J. C. heard us in the hallway and cracked the door just a bit until she was sure it was safe to open it all the way.

“Where are you two off to?” she asked.

“Garden party at Jean Moffitt’s.”

She motioned for us to come closer—the Dons were home and the walls were notoriously thin. Stancik and Labidou had returned, asking her about Jamal and the girl, and the Dons were on high alert.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t know anything. That way I didn’t have to lie.” She looked around, although it was just the three of us in the hallway.

“At least I didn’t know anything when they asked me.”

She asked us in and closed the door behind us. Sitting on her sofa was Emma Franklin.

“Let’s see,” I said, “who are you today? Runaway princess? Alien life-form?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I deserve it. I’m a liar. I’ve always been a liar. Ever since I was a child. I used to make up stories about my famous father and how he was doing top-secret work for the government and that was why he couldn’t live near us and I had to change my name. Later I said he was in the witness protection program. What was I supposed to say? That the great man dumped me and my mother so he could indulge his appetite for nineteen-year-old girls?”

Lucy and J. C. were softening. I could see it around their eyes that had morphed from skeptical slits to moist, round pools. Any minute, one of them would put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and she would own them. She’d be off and running, spinning another tale that had elements of the truth in it, but could not strictly speaking be called the truth. I reserved judgment until I heard all of this version.

She had spent over a year stalking her father by the time she finally approached him. “Can you imagine,” she said, “after all this time, he said he wanted to get to know me.” Wrentham was sounding like less of a rotten, philandering dad. When he refused to simply write her a check, she devised the plan to steal and sell the formula that her mother had been telling her about since Emma was a little girl.

“The formula. God, I heard about that so many times I thought everyone’s father had a formula. I knew what a formula was when most kids my age still thought it was something you gave to babies.” She took a deep breath and went on. “Last summer I contrived to meet Garland Bleimeister,” she said. “It wasn’t hard.”

She said she’d zeroed in on Wrentham’s weak-willed employee, a sweet, malleable boy with a few addictions of his own—food and poker. She convinced Garland to steal the formula.

“He’d already been doing it. Sort of.”

For the past three years whenever Garland took the professor’s produce to market, he also stashed a couple of contraband containers of the pest repellent.

“He sold a concentrated solution for a hundred dollars a jug out of the back of his car.”

“To consumers?” I asked.

“No. To one person. I don’t know who. The buyer diluted and repackaged it. Garland didn’t think my father would ever find out.”

“And it wasn’t much of a leap to go from stealing a few jugs to stealing the formula,” I said.

She nodded.

“He would use part of the money to pay off his gambling debts and he thought we’d use the rest to go away. I just didn’t plan on things turning out the way they did.”

“Were you really going to go away with him?” I asked.

She let out a sigh. “I honestly don’t know.”

When Garland didn’t show up for their Thursday dinner meeting, Emma thought he’d gotten cold feet, and she resolved to go through with the plan herself. She didn’t know he was already dead, and the buyers didn’t know Garland had a partner until Emma contacted them.

“Then I saw the paper with the news that Garland’s body had been found. Once I realized they’d killed him I just wanted out of here, but I needed to make sure there was no way for them to connect me to him. I didn’t care about the formula. I could go back to my father anytime—as long as I was alive. I tried to make people think Jamal was Garland’s partner.” It was the first time she looked or sounded contrite. “I just needed to check Garland’s bag. He had said you probably still had it and I wanted to make sure there was nothing in it that connected me to him.”

“So was the magic formula in there?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Garland had it on a flash drive. He kept it with him always. Maybe deep down he knew it was the only thing that kept me sticking around.”

“So you didn’t even have the flash drive and were going to try to make a deal?” Her expression barely changed, as if to say, yeah, so?

“Did you take the bag and toss it in the sarcophagus?”

“No. I was going to go back to the convention center for it, but I got nervous. I started to wonder if Garland had talked to you about me. That’s why I called you and pretended to be Cindy. To check you out and see what you knew.”

“I’m the least of your problems. You do know these people probably also killed a janitor at the convention center.”

“Okay,” Lucy said. She stood up and slapped her hands on her thighs. “Now we call the cops. Killer shoes, killer apps. These I get. Real killers, no.”

“Let’s just hear the rest of Emma’s story,” I said. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

“I’m scared. Now the people we approached keep contacting me.”

“You’ve still never met them?”

She shook her head. She insisted she didn’t know their real names either. They went by Mr. and Mrs. Rose.

“How did you and Garland hook up with them?”

“He said he met the man at some market where he used to bring the produce. They want the formula bad and want to meet me.”

“Just don’t go,” Lucy said. “There’s a concept. Don’t go into the deserted building. Don’t go into the woods at night. Don’t open the door when the scary guy is coming up the stairs. It’s simple.”

“You don’t understand. What am I supposed to do—never open the door again? They know who I am now.”

“How’d they find you?” I asked.

“I don’t know.… Maybe there was something in Garland’s bag. Who knows? I got a text. I thought it was from Gar. It was his number.”

So whoever it was had Garland’s phone. I called Stancik and got plugged into his voice mail. Then I called the precinct to see if anyone knew where he was.

The desk sergeant said he was in New Jersey chasing down a lead; after that he was heading to some fancy-schmancy party in Westchester. “Stan’s probably leaving us to start a private security company for rich people.”

“Is Labidou with him?” He was. That meant it wasn’t purely a social call.

“Emma, where are you supposed to meet Mr. and Mrs. Rose?”

She showed me the address. “Looks like we’re all going to the same garden party.”

“Okay if I join you?” J. C. asked.

“Sure. You can remind us to watch our backs.”