She looks at me like it’s none of my business, but then says, “The usual. Appointments. The weather. You know.”
“And you said something about having a bunch of money?”
“Not exactly. I mean, I might’ve said something about going to open a bank account in the morning”—she takes a deep breath—“’cause I didn’t like carrying so much cash around.” She adds real fast, “But Candi wouldn’t do a thing like that to me—we’re in the same kind of boat, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, how about her boyfriend or something? Maybe she told him about it.”
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend.” Gina shakes her head. “I shouldn’t even’ve brought it up. There’s no connection. Zero.”
I think about this a minute. “You said you didn’t know she was in town—did you give each other your addresses?”
Gina blows smoke through her hair. “Sure. I told her I was staying here—big deal. It wasn’t her, so drop it, all right?”
“How about somebody that overheard you talking? Was there anybody else around?”
She looks out the window and mutters, “We were standing right there, having a smoke...” She turns back to me. “How do I know? I don’t think so. There wasn’t anybody standing next to us, if that’s what you mean. Maybe some people came in and out of the store, I don’t know. I just don’t remember.”
“What about T.J.? How long have you known him?”
She snorts. “That loser? For years. He’ll never change.”
I say, real quietly, “Did he know about the money?”
She shrugs. “I don’t think so.” Then she laughs and says, “He hasn’t got enough initiative to pull something like this off. Teej is much too lazy.”
“Even if he was having money problems?”
She hesitates. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. He was talking to some guy on the phone about coffee beans and pork bellies—something about borrowing money from his dad.”
She frowns a bit and says, “T.J.? Borrowing from Maynard? That’s bad news.” She looks down the street. “You think Teej did it?”
“I don’t know! I don’t even know where you were when it happened. How come your purse was home and you weren’t?”
She shivers and grinds out what’s left of her cigarette. “I was home. I was in the shower. I didn’t even know someone had been here until I noticed the doorknob was busted. Nice piece of work, huh?”
My brain’s starting to tingle a little. “Is the guy with the cigar down there all the time?”
“André? Yeah, he is. I swear he sleeps there.”
“So how’s a guy come into your room and steal your money without André seeing him first?”
Her jaw drops a little. “That’s a good question. That’s a very good question!”
We all look at each other a minute; then Marissa breaks the silence. “Maybe the guy who broke in lives in the hotel.”
Gina rakes her hair. “Oh, that’s a happy thought.”
After a minute she starts up another cigarette so I say, “Well, we’d better get going. Maybe you should call the police and talk to them about all this.”
She blows out smoke. “Yeah, maybe I should! I mean, why didn’t they ask me any of this?” She walks us to the door. “I appreciate the concern, honey. Thanks for coming.”
We wave and say ’bye, and Gina’s about to shut the door when she pops back out and calls, “Hey! Don’t go that way! Those stairs’ll make you puke. Take the elevator.” She waves her cigarette. “It’s at the end of the hall.”
Marissa and I look at each other and shrug, then head over to the elevator. And we’re standing there waiting for it to open up when Marissa says, “This place gives me the creeps.”
I nod and say, “No kidding,” and that’s when I notice something. There’s a door at the end of the hall that’s got a push bar instead of a knob, and even though there’s no sign telling me so, I know it’s not a janitor’s closet.
The elevator dings and clanks open and I say, “Hold on a sec, okay?” and then hurry over to the door.
I’m about to push on the bar, but something stops me. Instead, I push on the door without touching the bar and sure enough, somebody’s jammed the latch to keep it from catching.
“Marissa, come here! Quick!” I look outside, down four flights of fire escape stairs.
Marissa comes running over. “What’s going on?”
I check the jamb, sure I’m going to find something wadded up inside it, but there’s nothing there. Then I notice something on the ground. Crammed along the bottom edge of the door, keeping it from closing all the way, is this paper napkin rolled up so tight it looks like a piece of dirty chalk. I pick it up and unroll it.
And scribbled across the napkin are the letters HH. And underneath them, the number 423.
FOURTEEN
“Holy smokes!” Marissa says when I show her the napkin.
All of a sudden I want out of there. I say, “C’mon!” and before you know it we’re pounding down the back side of the Heavenly Hotel like our underwear’s on fire.
We wind up in the middle of a bunch of gnarly bushes and garbage, fenced in by chain-link on one side with really high cinder-block walls on either end. And I know there must be a way out, but it feels like we’re trapped.
I climb up the chain-link a ways and say, “C’mon! There’s a vacant lot on the other side.”
Normally chain-link’s pretty easy to climb, but this fence wasn’t tied down to the posts, so it was really wobbly. And the higher we got, the more it leaned back until it felt like we were going to pull the whole fence down.
So we’re almost to the top, swaying back and forth with the fence clanking like the chains of a ghost, when Marissa loses her footing and falls.
“Hey, are you all right?” I call.
“I—I think so,” she says, but you can tell—she’s landed pretty hard.
I call, “Hang on,” and come clanking back down.
Marissa swears she’s okay, so I start digging around the trash, looking for something to tie the fence back to the post. Mostly there’s just paper and candy wrappers and bottles and cans, but finally I turn over this beat-up lettuce crate and underneath it is an old tennis shoe. I take the shoelace out of it and rub it along a link of the fence until it snaps in two. Then I reach as high as I can and tie the chain-link to the post. After that, I climb up, wrap the other piece close to the top of the fence, and flip myself over the top. “C’mon! It’s easy now!”
Marissa does great until she gets to the top. I’m on the ground, waiting for her to swing her second leg over, when I hear, “Oh, no....Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter?”
She’s all twisted up on the top of the post. “I’m stuck.”
“Just hold on to the post and swing your other leg over. You’ll be fine!”
“But I can’t—I’m stuck! My pants are caught!”
“Just unhook them!”
She says, “I can’t!” and she sounds pretty scared.
So up I go to unhook her pants, and I’m halfway up when the top shoelace snaps and the whole fence starts bending back. Marissa screams and her pants rip and there she is, with one leg on each side of the fence, her underwear flashing like a flag of surrender.
I yell, “Hold on to the post! Hold on to the post!” because it looks like she’s about to fall.
She pulls herself to the post and hangs on, shaking. Finally she swings her leg over and starts coming down, one little step at a time.
I help her down and when she lands she’s still real shaky and doesn’t want to go anywhere right away. So we head across the lot to this old crooked pepper tree that has branches drooping all around like a giant hula skirt.
We duck underneath the branches so Marissa can have some privacy while she’s checking out the rip in her pants, and after a few minutes she peeks back at the Heavenly and says, “That was scary.”
I laugh. “It was your idea
, remember?”
She laughs, too. “Bright idea!”
I take the napkin out of my pocket and study it some more; then I hand it over to Marissa and ask, “Do you recognize this?”
She takes it from me. “It’s a Double Dynamo napkin!”
“It sure is.” All of a sudden spiders are dancing on my back again. “You know, I think the note that got shoved under Mrs. Graybill’s door was on a Double Dynamo napkin, too.”
“Are you sure?”
“I only saw it for a second, but yeah, I think it was.” I look at her. “You want to go to the police station with me?”
She shows me her pants. “Like this? No way!”
“Aw c’mon, Marissa. What’s a little rip in the pants?”
“This is no little rip! It’s bad enough we have to go clear up to Wesler Street to get back to Maynard’s. There’s no way I’m going to the police station.”
“We could take a shortcut—I bet there’s a way through at the back of the lot.”
She scowls at me. “Yeah, like the last shortcut we took.”
“No, really. Look. See these bike tracks? They go straight through here....” And I’m following these parallel bike tracks to the far end of the tree, pushing aside the branches, about to show Marissa that the tracks lead to a shortcut, when they stop.
Marissa thinks that’s real funny. “Aw...too bad. I really wanted to get stuck on top of another fence.” She walks toward the sidewalk, laughing and holding up the seat of her pants.
I still can’t quite believe the bike tracks don’t go anywhere but after I think about it for a minute I decide that kids must just park their bikes under the tree when they come to hang out in the shade. I catch up to Marissa and pretty soon we’re turning onto Broadway, hurrying toward Maynard’s.
That’s when I notice a police car parked outside the Heavenly. I look at Marissa and she looks at me and says, “No way, Sammy! I’m not going back in there! We just ripped up my pants getting out of there.”
“Just for a minute? Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”
“No. There is no way!”
Turns out we didn’t have to go in because while we’re busy arguing, Officer Borsch comes out.
He does a double take when he sees me, and right away he gets in my face. “Where do you get off going in there like that? You rile people up and then I have to talk myself blue in the face trying to convince them there weren’t any clues then, there aren’t any clues now, and there are never gonna be any clues!”
Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing blue about Officer Borsch’s face. It’s as red as a hothouse tomato. And looking at him, well, I try real hard to keep the corners of my mouth down, but it’s hard. I mean, I can just see it—there’s the Borsch-man, all saddled up with guns and flashlights and batons and stuff, having to take it while Gina blows smoke in his face and yells at him.
His forehead’s getting redder and redder and sweat’s starting to drip down his sideburns. “Listen, girl, you stay away from this hotel, and you stay away from police business. I don’t have the time to deal with your shenanigans!”
I’m thinking about that napkin in my pocket, trying to decide whether I should show it to a guy who looks like he’s about to pop his thermometer. Part of me’s saying Forget it! but another part reminds me that somewhere, pretty close by, is a guy I waved at while he was taking money out of a purse.
So I reach into my pocket and pull out the napkin. “Actually, I was on my way over to the police station ’cause I thought you might want to see this.”
For a minute he just stands there, steaming. Finally he says, “What is it,” like he doesn’t really want to know.
I hold it out a little farther. “It’s something I found rolled up in the fire escape door of Gina’s floor. It was keeping the door from latching.”
“What were you doing nosing around...” he starts, but then he decides to shut up and take the napkin. He looks at me, then back at the napkin and mutters, “HH, four twenty-three.” He squints at me. “Just how did you find this?”
So I tell him about taking the elevator and seeing the door and about how it wasn’t latched, and when I’m all done he says, “Is that so.”
I didn’t really like the way he said it, so I said, “Yeah, that’s so. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a Double Dynamo napkin. My grandmother told me you came over about the note that her neighbor got. I only saw it for a second, but I think it’s a Double Dynamo, too.”
He’s still looking at me like I’m some dumb kid, so I say, “I thought you might want to compare the handwriting...?”
He squints at me. “You’re clever. You’re real clever.”
I squint back at him and say, “What?” because he’s acting like he thinks I’m lying.
He gives me a smug little smile. “I know what you’re trying to pull here.”
I take a step back. “What are you talking about?”
“You think I can’t see through all of this? You write a threatening note to an old woman and then, to throw the blame on a burglar you claim you saw, you manufacture a clue and pretend you found it over at the Heavenly Hotel.” He forces out a laugh. “Of course the handwritings are going to match. They’re both yours!”
Well, my jaw must’ve about touched my high-tops. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Marissa says, “Now wait a minute!”
He just smirks. “Clever. Very clever.” Then his face scrunches up so his eyes look like vents in the crust of a pie. “I’ll take this into evidence all right, and if you ever, ever try to mess with me again I’ll see to it that you spend some time away from that ritzy little house of yours.” He throws open the police car door. “Remember that the next time you decide to manufacture some evidence.”
Marissa and I just stand there with our mouths wide open. Finally she whispers, “Unbelievable.”
I nod. “Yeah. Next thing you know he’s going to decide I’m the one who stole Gina’s money.” And even though it sounds ridiculous, part of my brain’s telling me that if I don’t figure out who did, that might be exactly what happens.
FIFTEEN
Grams knew right away that I’d been up to something. I gave her a hug when I walked in the door and she pulled back. “Where have you been?”
I didn’t want to say the mall or Hudson’s or something because that would’ve been a lie, so I just said, “Walking around with Marissa.”
That wasn’t a lie, but somehow Grams knew it wasn’t the truth either. She put her hands up on her hips. “Walking around where?”
All of a sudden I’m wishing I had gone to Hudson’s or to the arcade or to the pet store for that matter. At least I would’ve had something to say. But I hadn’t, so I didn’t. I just kind of snapped the loose rubber of one high-top with the toe of the other and said, “Well, if you really want to know...I had to talk to Officer Borsch.”
Grams takes off her glasses and starts huffing and buffing. Very calmly she says, “About...?”
I snap the rubber some more. “Oh, you know. The note that was left under Mrs. Graybill’s door, the guy at the Heavenly—stuff like that.” I look up from my snapping and I can tell she’s not buying it. “Really, Grams! That’s what I did!”
She pops those glasses right back on her nose and kind of leans at me. “Young lady, one does not reek of cigarettes after having visited the police. One does not reek of cigarettes after having simply ‘walked around.’” Her eyes drill through me like little lie-detector lasers. “One would, I imagine, reek of cigarettes after one visits the Heavenly Hotel, though.” She stares at me a minute while I’m busy tearing up my shoe. “Unless you want to tell me you’ve taken up smoking?”
“No, Grams! Of course not!” Then I blurt out, “How can you still smell it? It’s been at least an hour.”
She gives me a little smile. “Since...?”
I flop down on the couch and sigh. “Since I went to the Heavenly to ask Gina some quest
ions.”
Grams’ eyebrows pop way above her owl glasses. “Gina?”
“You know—the lady who got all that money stolen? And really, Grams, I’m not going back. The place is seedy. You’re right, all right? It’s seedy.”
“Well, well, well,” she says, like I told you so. “And what made you change your mind?”
“The staircase, for one thing.” So I tell her about the mirrors, and then I kind of get carried away and tell her about Gina’s room and how she shouldn’t be too surprised if one of these days she’s looking out the window and sees a fireball in 423 across the way—that it’ll just be Gina’s head running around the room looking for a bucket of water.
Grams just sits there very quietly, listening, but when I get to the part about Officer Borsch yelling at me she jumps up and says, “Of all the nerve.” She flips through the phone book, muttering, “I’m going to give that obnoxious toad a piece of my mind....”
“Grams, no! It’ll just make things worse—they’ll send him over here to talk to you and I’ll be stuck in the closet in the middle of all your shoes....It doesn’t matter, Grams, really! He won’t believe you no matter what you say.”
She thinks about this, then sighs. “I suppose you’re right.” We’re quiet for a minute, then all of a sudden her eyes light up and she says, “Say! I know!” and off she goes to her room. A minute later she comes crinkling back, carrying plastic bags, saying, “When I was out earlier, I picked up a little surprise for you.”
Now you have to understand, Grams doesn’t surprise me with anything. There are things I would want—like a new skateboard or a Walkman or even a watch—but I would never ask for them, and I would never expect her to surprise me with one of them. So when she says “surprise,” my ears perk up like Dorito’s do when I shake around his box of kibble.
“Really?”
She sits right next to me on the couch. “Just wait until you see this.”
Well, believe me, I’m doing my best to peek in and do just that. She reaches into one of the bags and what does she pull out? Wool. Wool and a pair of knitting needles. She says, “Now, I don’t expect you to jump up and down for joy—I just expect you to give it a chance.”