I followed him to a dispatcher’s desk along the back wall. “Teléfonó,” he said. “I go to bring the water.”
I dropped into the chair by the desk and put my face down on my arm for a second. That was a mistake — the pain surged through my head. I jerked it back up, then pulled the telephone over near me where I could see the buttons and punched in the number of the security office around a corner fifty feet away. “Is Malin there yet?” I asked, peering at my watch. It read nine forty-two.
“No. Was he supposed to come in?”
“Yeah. This is R. J. Carr. I was assaulted on my way to meet him by Mike Cooksey, one of the maintenance men. You didn’t spot Cooksey shooting out of here by the loading dock door, did you? On the closed circuit camera?”
“I can check.”
“Don’t bother. Have someone sweep through the parking lot — you’ve got his car make and license number in the employee file. Also his address. I’ll want that in a few minutes. If Frank shows up, tell him I’m at the loading dock.” I hung up and noticed Ortíz standing beside me holding a large paper cup full of water. “Thanks,” I said. I gulped the water down, then I punched in my home phone number.
“Hello,” said a clear, feminine voice.
“Hi. It’s me.”
“Yes?”
“Can you get Mrs. Andersen to come up for a while and stay with the kids?” Dorothy Andersen was a widow who lived in our basement flat. “I’ve broken my glasses — smashed to smithereens — and you’re going to have to bring me another pair or I’ll never get this done.”
“What happened? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay — just a little blind. There’s a pair in my top dresser drawer, or maybe the bedside table. Bring it to the loading dock on the west side of the mall. A man named José Ortíz will show you in. Treat him nice. He saved me from a beating.”
“R. J.!”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
After we hung up I sensed Ortíz standing near me again, along with another man. I asked Ortíz to watch for Ginny and then followed behind his companion to a washroom where I cleaned the blood off my face and out of my scalp. The wound was a long split in the skin close to the hairline with some bad swelling underneath that would get worse, I suspected, before it got better. But for the moment I was functioning, and I had work to do.
I’d just made it back to the loading dock desk when I was attacked again, this time in the form of a blindside embrace from Ginny, who had set a speed record getting to the mall. She was crying, which wasn’t like her, so I hugged her, calmed her down, and told her what had happened. She dried her eyes with my handkerchief, then finally placed the glasses she’d brought onto my nose.
“I brought you something else,” she said.
“All right,” I responded. “But it wouldn’t have helped, and I won’t need it.”
She stepped close to me again and transferred a.22 caliber target pistol from her purse to my coat pocket. The gun belonged to her — one of a pair left over from the days when she’d done target shooting. I’ve never been big on firearms myself, to be truthful, and never carried any back in those more innocent years unless I had to. The look on Ginny’s face told me I had to.
“I’m staying until you’re ready to go,” she said next. “The children are asleep, and Dorothy, I’m sure, is asleep by now, too, in your chair.”
“Fine,” I said, “but the whole problem is pretty much worked out. I just need to check a few files over in the main office.”
“Hmph,” she grumbled, with a new expression on her face, half dubious and half worried. “Then I’m coming along. I honestly wonder sometimes if you ought to be trusted out by yourself.” Meaning, or so I deduced, that she was thinking about a case from a few months before that had put me in the hospital with a concussion. All at once she embraced me again, so I held her awhile longer — never hard work — and when I looked up I saw a young black security guard eyeing us tentatively.
I said, “It’s okay, pal — we’re married. Has Frank Malin ever shown up?” Ginny moved behind me and did things to her face.
“Don’t know, sir. I came to write up a report on the assault.”
“You can do something better. See those two carts of trash barrels? Get a maintenance man to haul them over to Security and put them in the storeroom. They’ll just about fit.”
“Yes, sir. Could I ask why?”
“They’re evidence. A shoplifting ring was putting stolen merchandise in the trash, and Cooksey was collecting it.”
“Ah!”
I led Ginny away to the security office, and just before we got there she said, “R. J., I just remembered something: an extremely young man to be a police sergeant stopped by the house immediately after you left to come over here, and he gave me a report for you on Mike Cooksey’s fingerprints.”
“Sammons,” I said. “Right. Did he ask you about being married to a detective, by chance?”
“I... in a manner of speaking, yes. He also asked about my religious affiliation. What did you tell that man about me?”
“Well — the subject came up about Lutherans and Catholics and I just said—”
“Oh. No wonder he looked embarrassed. I told him I was Presbyterian.”
“Good — that ought to confuse him even more. You didn’t by chance bring along that report, did you? About Cooksey?”
The report on Cooksey’s fingerprints was brief but meaty. The fingers that made them attached to the hands of Michael Corcoran, frequent user of aliases, most recently a resident of the Pontiac Correctional Facility — specialty, car theft — and nephew of Thomas Alton, a man well known in certain local circles as a suspected receiver of stolen goods. This information was what might be called highly suggestive.
Ten minutes after talking over the report, we were in the reception area of the mall office, going through the file cabinets that flanked Barb Becker’s desk, searching for anything we could find about Christmas Temps. Frank Malin had never shown up for our meeting, even though his wife assured me over the phone that he’d left home at nine fifteen. So there was another worry.
Ginny found the Christmas Temps files in a tray on Barb Becker’s desk, and one look through them gave the rest of the show away. Fifty-six Christmas Temps were working as clerks in stores. The last six, entered on the master list all on the same day in the same handwriting, were those assigned to the six problem stores. One, Florence Siwinski, was now dead, which accounted for the absence in the evening’s haul of the trash barrel from The Wedge where she had worked.
My head was throbbing pretty badly by that hour, but otherwise, with this information in hand, I felt all right. It was only ten thirty-five by the clock on the wall, which meant that we — Ginny and I — were over eleven hours ahead on the time by which I’d told Sammons that the case would be wrapped up. The only difficulty remaining was that the aforementioned clock hung over a doorway, and in that doorway stood Barb Becker with a small automatic pistol in her hand.
“Get away from my desk!” she said in a harsh, unnatural voice. I felt Ginny give a start beside me. “Get up! Get away from my desk!”
We stood together and edged slowly between various pieces of furniture toward the opposite side of the room. I attempted to shield Ginny from the gun by turning away from Barb Becker while Ginny walked backwards, facing me. For a second or two we were close together, close enough for Ginny to reach into my coat pocket and pull out the target pistol. “Hold off,” I whispered, then turned around, keeping Ginny behind me. “You’re too late,” I said.
“Shut up,” the woman replied. She walked in a jerky motion to the desk and stared down at the open files spread across it. “What right have you — you think you’re so smart, don’t you? You and your ugly face! I can’t stand to look at you!” She threw down a set of keys and flopped like a stick puppet into the chair but managed to keep the pistol pointed toward us. With her free hand she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her coat pocket, extracted a cigarette, put it between her lips, and lit it.