“It’s common procedure to have a stolen card denied,” I said, “or to be contacted by the credit card company if the transaction is unusual. Two days is a long time. I would have heard.”
“Maybe normally,” Whittig said, “but this isn’t normal.”
“Perhaps you’d better fill me in, then,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I have heard?”
“Because the cardholder is dead,” Barret said. “He couldn’t report it missing.”
I frowned. “Even so, the credit card companies monitor transactions. They should have noticed something unusual.”
“There’s nothing unusual about buying flowers from a neighborhood vendor,” Whittig said. “I’m sure someone would’ve noticed the card was missing if it’d been used more than the once. But it wasn’t. It hasn’t been used at all since two days ago.”
“So how do you think I can help you?” I asked. “Would you like me to look up the record? If the card was stolen, I probably won’t have much you can go on.”
Barret looked pointedly at my mirrors and the single camera hidden behind an extremely well-tended spider plant. “Maybe you got video of the person who used the card?”
“Two days ago?” I nodded. “I keep the tapes for months.”
“Holy Christ,” Whittig said to Barret. “Someone who actually follows the security company’s directions.”
“I’ve had a few bad experiences,” I said. “I do everything I can to make sure I don’t have any more. If you give me a name, I can look up the transaction, see what time it occurred, and give you the pertinent video.”
Whittig nodded. “Let’s do that.”
He glanced at his partner. Barret didn’t seem to have an objection.
“His name was Dwight Rhodes,” Barret said.
I froze for perhaps a half second, maybe less. It felt like an eternity, like I had guilt written all over my face. Guilt and fear and something else — something I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.
Horror. I felt horror.
“Rhodes,” I said, somehow managing to keep my voice even. “Dwight.”
“Yes.” Whittig was watching me. “Do you know him?”
“If he shopped here, he was an acquaintance.” I retreated to primness. “The name doesn’t ring any bells.”
I hoped they couldn’t see the lie.
“That’s R-O-A-D-S?” I asked.
“No.” Barret used that dry voice again. “R-H-O-D-E-S, like rhododendron.”
“All right.” I sounded just a little too hardy now. They had to know something was up. “I’ll check that for you. The main order computer is in the back.”
“Mind if we come with you?” Whittig asked.
“Actually—” I started to say that I did, then I stopped myself. Much as I wanted to look this information up alone, I didn’t want two police officers in the front of my store discouraging business. “I don’t mind at all.”
I led them into the back. It smelled of greenery, of the lilac shipment that had just come, in as well as the last of the Easter lilies. Bouquets, some half finished, littered my worktable, and two orders still waited for customer pick-up in their white floral boxes.
I tapped the computer, hoping I was wrong about the name, that it wasn’t the one I had given Ruth-Anne Grant. The detectives leaned over me, crowding me. I could hear their breathing, raspy and out of sync.
I found the records from two days before, and of course, there it was, the name, Dwight Rhodes, big as life. His SoHo address was there, along with his phone number and the stolen credit card.
“That’s it,” Barret said unnecessarily.
I opened the file, revealing the order, the time it had come in, and when I had processed it.
Whittig swore. “Phone order.”
I sat there, unable to move. My mouth was dry. I had given this man’s name to Ruth-Anne Grant. She had been in bad shape.
She had thought he was her stalker.
And now he was dead, with detectives here, following up.
“Can we have a printout of that anyway?” Barret asked.
The printout would lead them to Ruth-Anne Grant. She was the one who got the flowers; she was the one who returned them. Even if she hadn’t done anything, she would still tell them about her visit here.
About what I had done.
I used the key controls to hit print, and heard my printer snap to life a few yards away. The detectives had turned their attention to it; I was no longer of any use to them.
“I take it,” I said, wishing that I could banish the primness from my voice forever, “this Rhodes was murdered.”
Both detectives turned back to me, identical movements, bringing them closer and adding to that claustrophobic feeling.
“Didn’t we say that?” Barret asked. “I thought we said that.”
“We might have said he was just dead.” Whittig’s tone told me that he knew full well what they had said, that it had been deliberate.
“So he was,” I said. “Murdered. In the last two days. Right?”
I was still staring at the screen. Both men were reflected in it. They looked at each other over my head.
“What’s it to you?” Whittig asked.
“Because,” I said, the primness finally gone, my voice shaking, “I might have made a big mistake.”
“You knew him?” Barret asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I ever met him. But I gave his name away.”
“His name?” Whittig sounded confused. “To who?”
The printer beeped. The paper had run out. I stood, grabbed some paper from the storage shelf, and put it in the paper tray. Then I manually restarted the printer. The order spit out, quickly and cleanly.
I handed it to Barret, and pointed to the sentiment on the card.
“I gave his name to Ruth-Anne Grant,” I said, wishing I didn’t have to say anything, wishing this had never happened. “She thought he was stalking her.”
It felt like I had passed a death sentence on someone, like I had been the person who had stood up in a large theater, pointed at a woman I’d only met once, and shouted, “Unclean!”
I could tell just from the looks on their faces that the cops thought they had their killer. Hell, I believed it too. The coincidence was too much. I’d learned a lot about investigations and coincidence and the ways crimes were committed in my old job, and I knew the odds favored Ruth-Anne Grant over everyone else.
They were going to talk to Ruth-Anne, and they would push her and poke at her and make her say things she may not mean. And she would no longer be the victim of a stalking. She’d be the perpetrator of a crime.
I stood and went back to my computer, feeling like I hadn’t had any sleep. Detached, tired, empty. I shuffled across the floor and brushed against tables, nearly knocking over a globe filled with late-season forced narcissus.
I caught it, held it, feeling the bubble glass in my hands. It would be so easy to crush the globe, feel the bulbs and squeeze them to death as well.
Life was so hard to cultivate, so easy to destroy.
I set the globe on the rough-hewn antique table I used for my more fragile vases.
The door opened and I whirled, careful to miss the tables this time, although I brushed part of a palm and broke off a branch. For half a moment, I feared the cops were back.
They weren’t. Stan, my delivery driver, stood in the doorway, looking at me with great annoyance. He was young, early thirties, and had visions of being a Broadway star.
He had the beauty for it, but not the chops. I’d seen him off-off-off-Broadway, and he was so wooden that I was embarrassed. Still, one couldn’t fault a man for his dreams. And with the money he earned from this, and his two other jobs, he paid for lessons at one of the acting academies on the Upper West Side.