Swindle

  “Impossible to tell,” said Griffin soberly. “On the one hand, we’re kids. On the other, breaking into a house is a real crime. And the thing we took is worth a ton of money. I’ve got a bad feeling about this media attention.”

  They went their separate ways, and Griffin continued home, dragging his feet, not at all anxious to get there. He was genuinely amazed not to see half the police force camped out on his doorstep waiting for him.

  “How was school today?” his mother greeted.

  He looked over her shoulder. No army of cops ransacking the place in search of the missing collectible. “Oh, you know, same old, same old.” He prayed that the situation would stay that way. No news was good news.

  He set out his homework, but could not bring himself to touch it. It would have been too much like that Roman emperor fiddling while his city burned. Four o’clock. All clear. Four-thirty. Still nothing. Was it possible that they were going to get away with it?

  He was so tightly strung that when the phone rang, he almost hit the ceiling.

  It was Pitch. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you. Listen — I ratted you out.” Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! “I’m really, really sorry. My parents made me. And I’m pretty sure Darren did the same.”

  Oh, no, no, no-o-o-o!!

  Beneath his full-on panic, he was aware of a strange sense of relief — the terrified relief a soldier might feel when the waiting is over and the battle has finally begun. At least he wouldn’t have to waste his energy wishing for miracles.

  “Don’t sweat it, Pitch,” he croaked bravely. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Through his bedroom window he could already see the line of police cars turning onto his street. There was very little chance that they were going to someone else’s house.

  The jig was up.

  29

  BEING INTERROGATED BY POLICE—

  HELPFUL HINTS

  Stick like GLUE to the THREE ANSWERS:

  (i) I DIDN’T STEAL IT. You can’t steal what’s already yours.

  (ii) I DON’T HAVE IT. A search of the house will prove this is the truth.

  (iii) I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS. Also true, since it’s impossible to tell if the card is still in the mailbox, at the post office, or on its way to the destination address.

  Griffin never put the latest plan on paper, but it was very much in his mind when the police came to question him in the case of the stolen Babe Ruth card.

  It wasn’t much like cop shows on TV. There were no handcuffs, no hot lights in the face, no one-way mirrors. In fact, they didn’t even go to the precinct house. The interrogation took place in the Bings’ living room, with Griffin flanked by his parents on the couch.

  Detective Sergeant Vizzini was polite, but it was obvious that he was losing patience. “Maybe you think that a little baseball card is something to collect and trade and flick at a brick wall. Well, not this one. This one is worth more than a house. This very minute, in New York City, a major auction is a big flop because this card was supposed to be the main event.”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Griffin said stubbornly.

  “That’s not what Darren Vader said. That’s not what the Benson girl said. Two of my officers were here last night when you arrived home with your father’s thingamajig. The timing would have been just about right. I’ve been a cop too long to believe in coincidences.”

  Dad spoke up. “Griffin, if you know something about this, you have to tell the sergeant right now.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Griffin insisted, trying to keep his voice steady. “There are ten policemen tearing the place apart. If I was hiding a baseball card in the house, wouldn’t they have found it by now?”

  “So enlighten me,” Vizzini demanded. “It wasn’t in your desk or your locker at school, and it doesn’t seem to be here. What did you do with it?”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  Vizzini frowned. “Are you denying that you were at 531 Park Avenue Extension last night?”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” Griffin said firmly. “Not by stealing, not by lying about it.”

  The officer digested this. When he spoke again, it was to Griffin’s parents. “I’m going to give you two some time to talk things over with your son. You’ll notice that I haven’t been using words like arrest, trial, or juvenile detention. Yet.”

  Mr. Bing looked up in alarm. “Does Griffin need a lawyer?”

  “Well, that would be up to you folks. Just take a minute to think about what Mr. Palomino has lost. If you were him, would you be inclined to say ‘Drat the luck’ and let the matter drop? I don’t think so.” He stood up. “Until this issue is resolved, Griffin is not to leave the Cedarville town limits. He can go to school, but that’s about as far from home as we’re willing to allow. Otherwise we will start using words like arrest.”

  With that promise hanging in the air like a cloud of toxic fumes, Vizzini gathered his team of searchers and left the house.

  “All right, Griffin,” Dad said as the squad cars drove away. “I want the whole story.”

  Griffin knew he owed his parents the truth — and not just because there was no way to get out of telling it. The police had invaded their home, rifled through their belongings, threatened their son with imprisonment. Mom and Dad had become a part of this.

  He came clean. “Remember that sleepover at Stan Winter’s? Well, it never really happened. Ben and I spent the last night in the old Rockford house before they tore it down….”

  His parents listened, their eyes widening in awe and amazement as their son related the details of the discovery of the Babe Ruth card, and how Swindle had earned his nickname by tricking Griffin into selling it cheaply. He confessed everything — the unsuccessful break-in at the store, the assembly of the team, and the heist preparations, right up to the assault on 531 Park Avenue Extension.

  “But where’s the card now?” Dad demanded. “Where did you hide it that half the police department can’t find it?”

  “It’s safe,” Griffin assured him. “I wasn’t lying when I told Officer Vizzini that I don’t know exactly where it is. But I’ll be able to get it when the time comes.”

  “The time is this minute!” Mom stormed. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation! When you were growing up, did we somehow give you the message that stealing is okay?”

  “Of course not!” Griffin exclaimed. “That’s why I did it — so Swindle wouldn’t get away with stealing it from me. Think about what that card is worth!”

  “I don’t care what it’s worth,” she shot back. “Your future is worth more! Stop playing games and give the police what they want!”

  Mr. Bing tried to be reasonable. “How about this? We give the police the card to get you off the hook. Then we hire a lawyer and fight this Palomino character in court.”

  “Get real, Dad. You know we can’t afford lawyers. That’s what this whole thing was about in the first place — to get our hands on some money so we won’t have to sell the house.” There was a shocked silence. “Oh, come on, guys. There’s a FOR SALE sign on our lawn. Give me a little credit for having the brains to figure out what it’s doing there.”

  When he spoke again, Mr. Bing’s face was almost gray. “I know we’ve had our money problems. But your mother and I never dreamed that it would touch you this way.”

  “Don’t blame yourselves. We shouldn’t even have money problems. That card is ours!”

  Mrs. Bing was close to tears. “Oh, Griffin, how could you get yourself into such a mess?”

  Throughout the planning and execution of the heist, Griffin had never suffered a single moment of regret. Now, as he saw his parents’ distress, adding to their burdens this way cut straight to his heart.

  Later, he sat in his room in semidarkness, trying to tune out the sound of his parents’ argument downstairs. For once, the subject wasn’t money. It was what to do with their son the burglar.

  It now dawned on him fo
r the very first time: He had plotted the operation with the skill of a chess master. But he had given very little thought to what would happen once the Bambino was in his possession. Had he expected Swindle to give up without a fight? And the police to shrug the whole thing off after their first search turned up nothing? That was bad enough, but he had also given zero consideration to his parents. Like maybe they simply wouldn’t notice that anything unusual was going on.

  Was he crazy, or just stupid? He certainly didn’t have the right to call himself The Man With The Plan anymore.

  Mom’s voice carried up the stairs. “We have to force him to give up that card! It’s our job as his parents to see that he doesn’t destroy his life! He’s only eleven years old!”

  Her husband’s words were quieter and full of despair. “We can order him, we can yell at him, ground him, and lock him in his room. But if he doesn’t want to tell us, there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

  It shocked Griffin a little, but he instantly recognized that his father was right. In spite of all the adults involved, only Griffin was capable of laying hands on the Bambino. And there was no way his parents, or Swindle, or the auction house, or the police, or even the president could change that.

  This should have made him feel powerful. Instead, he felt trapped, and very much alone.

  30

  Ben called on Saturday morning, but Griffin was afraid to say much. What if the police had bugged their phone?

  “So, uh, Ben — did anything unusual happen yesterday? Any visitors at your house?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ben replied nervously. “I think we all had … visitors. They talked about you a lot. The visitors, I mean. Are you all right?”

  “Kind of,” Griffin told him. “For now. You?”

  “I’m still part deaf in one ear from my mother yelling.” There was an awkward pause. “How about the apple?”

  Griffin subjected him to a long silence. “I don’t know anything about any apple.” He was dying to say: It’s okay. It’s still hidden. It’s safe. But there was no way he could risk mentioning the card now. At this moment, it might be the single hottest item in the greater New York area.

  “Oh … yeah. Gotcha,” Ben stammered. “Have you seen the paper? There’s a lot about what happened, but they don’t mention any names. That’s good news, right?”

  Griffin sighed. “I don’t know what’s good news or bad news anymore.”

  The only good news was not being arrested. He expected it to happen at any second. He could hear distant police sirens in every ordinary household sound — the power hum of the computer, the whir of the microwave, the refrigerator motor. He spent the weekend in a state of constant terror, sleeping no more than five or ten minutes at a stretch.

  He was truly astonished still to be a free man when school resumed on Monday morning. It took an enormous mustering of courage to appear in the halls. But, to his surprise and relief, all eyes did not instantly dart to him. True, the heist was the big story in Cedarville. Yet it did not seem to be known who the prime suspects were. Maybe that made sense. Wasn’t it typical of the adult world not to consider that kids could pull off such an elaborate operation?

  The other team members — Pitch, Savannah, Melissa, Logan, and Darren — kept their distance. Everyone understood that the heat was on.

  “They’re probably under orders from their folks to stay away from you,” Ben offered. “I sure am. It was one of the first things my mother yelled. Sort of stupid, right? I mean, the police already know who we are.”

  “Don’t worry,” Griffin promised. “I’ll take all the blame. My plan, my problem.” He looked around uneasily. “To be honest, I can’t believe the cops haven’t come for me yet.”

  “Did you see the story in the Sunday paper?” Ben asked. “It just about accused Swindle of ripping somebody off to get the card in the first place. The whole country’s going to learn what a crook he is.”

  Griffin winced. “That means one of us has been talking too much. Probably Darren. It’s one thing to answer a few questions, and another to give a play-by-play of the whole operation. That same article had a long description of the SmartPick plucking the card out of Swindle’s tree. Anybody can check with the patent office and find out that’s my dad’s invention. And that could lead them to me. I’m toast!”

  But that was the astounding thing: He wasn’t toast. Although Griffin’s fevered imagination conjured up a police officer behind every telephone pole, Detective Sergeant Vizzini did not come back for him. Not that day, not Tuesday, not even Wednesday. People were still buzzing about the missing baseball card, but the world kept on turning.

  Even S. Wendell Palomino had been released from the hospital and could now be found behind the counter of his shop. There weren’t many customers. Word had spread that the dealer could not be trusted.

  Griffin held that fact to his heart. It was a glowing coal on an icy night, a tiny measure of justice.

  Did that mean the intense heat was beginning to cool off? Was it crazy to believe such a thing? Even Mom and Dad let Ben come over for a couple of hours so they could work on their science project together. At least, Mom said okay. Dad was making himself pretty scarce lately. Griffin couldn’t escape the feeling that his father was avoiding him out of anger and distress over this whole affair. It made him unutterably sad.

  “Have you been noticing the others talking to me in school?” Ben whispered during their research. “They’re asking what’s going on with the — you know, the apple.”

  “Tell them to hang in there,” Griffin advised. “This isn’t over yet.”

  “You mean you’ve got it?”

  “I know where to get it,” Griffin replied cryptically.

  Ben couldn’t hold back. “Where’d you mail it to, Griffin? Who’s keeping it for us?”

  “It’s not a good idea for you to know.”

  It was a measure of their friendship that there was no suspicion in Ben’s eyes. He trusted Griffin absolutely and had faith in The Man With The Plan.

  “When do you think it’s safe to go for it? It’s been almost a week now. How long do we have to wait?”

  That was the million-dollar question. The coast seemed to be clear. But how could it be? The passage of six days didn’t mean that the heist had never happened. And the revelation that Swindle deserved what he got didn’t undo the fact that the card had been taken from his house.

  And yet — where were the police? Not at the Bing home. Not at the school. Griffin still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, but it was exactly that — a feeling. The facts suggested that the cops must have moved on to other things. All crime didn’t grind to a halt just because a baseball card got stolen. They had new cases, laws to enforce, police business to attend to.

  I hope.

  Griffin knew that the longer he waited, the safer he would be. He also knew that the more time the card was out there, the greater the chance that something might happen to it.

  He analyzed the situation every which way, and the answer always came back the same.

  The moment was now.

  31

  Three a.m.

  A black-clad figure opened the Bings’ back door and stepped onto the patio. Staying in the shadows, he made his way down the street through yards, hopping fences and squeezing through hedges. At the end of his block, he allowed himself the luxury of the sidewalk, but kept well away from the streetlights.

  The windows were dark, the roads deserted. He could see it now in the gloom, a quarter mile up the avenue. Every day on the way to school, he had passed this spot and made a point of not looking at it. Not yet. Not under the prying eyes of the police. But tonight no one was watching. There was only Griffin Bing, and — he hoped — George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

  The debris was gone, but the stone foundation of the old Rockford house glowed stark whitish-gray in the moonlight. At the curb stood the only other part of the mansion that had escaped the wrecking ball — th
e mailbox, rusting on its post.

  As he reached for the little door, Griffin observed his hand shaking.

  What if it isn’t there?

  What if some sensible postal carrier had refused to deliver to a house that was obviously demolished?

  No. The flag’s up. It’s been up for three days. There’s mail in here — my mail …

  He drew out the contents of the box and stared. A free month of Netflix? Wait — there was another envelope. A smaller one.

  A million-dollar letter.

  He tore it open and dropped the Babe Ruth card into his hand.

  The floodlights were so sudden, so blinding that he was frozen in place like a butterfly on a pin. Detective Sergeant Vizzini stepped out of the glare and snatched the collectible from his hand. In that moment, Griffin understood that the eyes on the back of his neck had been real after all.

  Vizzini spoke the words Griffin had been dreading for six days: “You’re under arrest.”

  They didn’t lock him in a cell. They didn’t lock him up at all. He sat on a hard wooden chair in the middle of the squad room while Vizzini pounded out a report on a manual typewriter that must have been one hundred years old.

  He knew he was in big trouble, though, because every single officer on the night shift came by to have a look at the kid who took down a house with an UltraTech alarm system and two guard dogs and made off with a million-dollar prize.

  Caught. Just the word made him shudder. In a plan like this, so many factors were at play. But caught was always rock bottom. The worst thing that could have happened had just happened. There was no countermove for this, no recovery. This was a major disaster.

  How many times had he told himself that it wasn’t really stealing, that the card rightfully belonged to him? Here in the police station, he realized that argument wasn’t going to work for five seconds. Griffin had always tried to stand up against adults pushing kids around. But now, under arrest, he had put himself more at the adults’ mercy than ever before.

  What was next? Trial? Conviction? Juvenile detention? It could really go down that way. It was no joke.