“Two days,” I said. “Don’t worry. Mr. Lee always cleans out my pockets.”
The kid turned kind of pale. “Have you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I got kind of a sick feeling again. This wouldn’t be a good time for Mr. Lee to decide to take a vacation and leave some acne-faced gum chewer in charge of the place.
The kid moved faster than I thought he could and slammed the door as I pulled from the curb. We had to sit around and wait for twenty minutes until the cleaners opened. Mr. Lee is an elderly Chinese man who doesn’t speak English very well, and has a hearing problem as well, so we had to repeat ourselves a couple of times before he understood what the fuss was about. He gave me my jacket back all right. I felt for the little toy, but it wasn’t there.
“Ah! One moment,” Mr. Lee said and walked to the back of the shop. He came back with a little paper lunch bag in his hand. “Shame, shame, Mr. Cho. You not clean out pockets again.”
I opened the bag. Inside was about a dollar in change, a couple of phone messages from Standley’s, and the kid’s toy. We both heaved a sigh of relief. Mr. Lee must have thought we were nuts the way we carried on about the stuff in the paper bag, but he was polite, as always.
When we got back in the car, I said, “I have to take you home before your mom comes after me with a baseball bat or, worse, has me up on kidnapping charges.”
He shoved his glasses back up on his nose. “She’d probably rather have a date with you if she saw you, so don’t worry about the kidnapping charges.” I shuddered to think of what a date with his mother would be like, so I went on. “But first, we have to take a little trip down to police headquarters.”
“Why?”
“Because there are a bunch of guys trying to figure out who murdered Schroeder, and why, and we have some answers.”
The kid slumped down in his seat. “I’m going to get in a lot of trouble if my mom finds out.”
“She doesn’t have to. Here’s how we can work it. You got your toy back. You talk to the police, I deliver you to the corner nearest your house, and you fix up Helen by Tuesday. All we’ve got to do is make the cops look good.”
“How?”
“By giving them all the credit for figuring out this stuff.”
Miggy Hernandez was at his desk, looking tired and depressed. He didn’t seem too pleased to see us. I asked him in Spanish if he had time for a cup of coffee somewhere private and maybe a big lead on the Schroeder case, and he brightened up considerably.
“You got it.”
We went to a little cafe a couple of blocks away that was full of ferns and empty of cops. The kid seemed pleased that we let him have coffee. I was starting to think his mother needed a good talking to by someone. Maybe Hernandez. He was married, last I heard, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the fat kid fixing him up with his mom.
“You’re the kid who designed the Trojan Horse?” Hernandez said when Don Gervase finished telling his story. “My kids love that thing. I thought you were older.”
Yep. Hernandez was a done deal on the talk with the mother.
“Are you sure you don’t want some publicity — you know, about helping the police solve this case? Maybe your mother would take you more seriously,” I said innocently.
The kid shoved his glasses back up his nose and looked at me suspiciously.
“We can work something out,” Hernandez said expansively.
I decided to nail him a little tighter. I went on about how restrictive the fat kid’s mother was until finally Hernandez said, “Okay, I’ll fix it with the mother. Don’t worry about it.”
“Good,” I said. “He’s an okay kid, once you get used to him. Now, if you two don’t need me any more, I’m going to go take some aspirin and sleep off the rest of this hangover.”
“Take a shower while you’re at it,” Hernandez said. “You smell like a brewery.”
I glared at him and the kid as I left.
The next few days I felt really jumpy, like I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what. On Sunday I drove down to the beach and took a long walk, trying to get it out of my system, but all I ended up with was sore leg muscles. My doctor had told me to exercise the leg the bullet had gone through, but I didn’t think he meant for me to do a whole week’s worth of walking in one afternoon. I didn’t have to see him again until Thursday, so I tried to patch up the damage with a hot bath when I got home. It helped some, but I was still stiff when I went in to work on Monday morning.
Even Dobbin and the Creeper noticed that I was edgy, but they didn’t say anything. The Creeper just sort of took over, giving me directions to places he wanted to check out, and Dobbin worked faster than usual to give us extra time on the road. I was really grateful — we would have gone back to Standley’s empty-handed if it had been up to me.
Monday night I had a dream that Enrique Moreno had found out where Alicia lived and was stalking her to see if she had the chip. When I woke up, sweating, I realized that I didn’t know what Moreno looked like.
The tension of not knowing what was going on, and not being able to do anything, was wearing on me. First thing Tuesday morning, when we rolled into Standley’s for the new heat sheet, I picked up the phone and called Alicia.
She could tell something was wrong and set up a dinner for us and Bowie at the same place we’d gone to before. She said it might help to talk it out.
It only got worse. All day I had the urge to call Miggy, the fat kid, even Cynthia Hendricks, but I managed to talk myself out of it. Miggy knew what he was doing — if he needed my help, he’d call me.
When I got to the restaurant about seven, Alicia and Bowie were already there. They had ordered a pitcher of beer and a bowl of tostados, and the waitress brought me a frosted glass when I sat down.
“Your leg still bothering you?” Bowie asked.
“I went for a little walk,” I explained. I was limping pretty badly after sitting in the car all day. “I think I overdid it.”
Alicia was in a good mood. She told me about this old guy who had come into the dealership right before she’d left and tried to pay cash for a car. He’d taken a huge wad of bills out of his pocket and started peeling them off, and nobody knew what to do. She’d finally had the cashier call the bank and check the serial numbers, just to make sure the money wasn’t stolen. He’d turned out to be a harmless old guy who didn’t trust banks. He didn’t drive too well, either. Bowie said he’d had to close his eyes when the guy took the car off the lot, for fear he was going to total the inventory on the way out.
There was always something weird happening at that dealership, and I started to relax as they told the story. We got another pitcher of beer and some more tostados, and I told them what had happened over the weekend on the Schroeder case, leaving out the part about my dream so I wouldn’t worry Alicia.
We were just about to order dinner when Miggy Hernandez strolled in the door and came over to our table. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“How’d you ever find me here?” I asked.
“It’s my job,” he said with a small smile. “You can’t escape from the long arm of the law.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said.
Bowie reached out and pulled another chair up to the table for him. “We’re just about to order. Want to stay for dinner?”
“Good idea,” Hernandez said. “I’m glad you two are here, too. I came to tell Cho we arrested Enrique Moreno this morning.” He winked at Alicia. “Cho gets real upset when things aren’t wrapped up neat. One of these days, maybe I’ll tell you some stories from the old days, back when I was in auto theft.”
We ordered, and when the waitress left, Alicia said, “So, what happened?”