“Just these plants, then.” The man pushed my cart to the checkout desk for me, walking at a funereal pace in deference to my wretched physical condition until we reached the outside counter, where yet another employee would tally my purchases and hand me a slip to take inside to the cashier. Everyone’s a specialist.
I glanced to the right and saw the white pickup turn around and come barreling toward us. I leaned back slightly so that my face was hidden behind a scarecrow and a towering stack of baled hay.
The Guatemalan nursery employee who had helped me saw me lean backward and must have thought I was fainting. He screamed for someone inside to call 911, and in a clumsy attempt to catch me wound up knocking over the hay bales, the scarecrow, and me on top of them. From my horizontal position in the driveway, I saw the truck pass, with two Hispanic garden workers and what looked like a mixed-breed Lab inside, none of whom I’d ever seen before. All of them, even the dog, appeared to be laughing.
Six
I laughed myself the next morning as I drove to Babe’s, thinking about the disturbance I’d created at the nursery, but as I approached the diner, I saw a cluster of Springfield police cars with their lights flashing. All the cops I knew walked across the road to the Paradise. Either someone was having a retirement breakfast or something bad had happened, and I was afraid it was the latter.
I pulled closer and saw a man being handcuffed and led over to one of the cars by Sergeant Mike O’Malley, a Springfield cop I’d gotten to know in the last few years. Not in the biblical sense, but Lucy and Babe still gave it a fifty-fifty chance.
I instantly recognized the vest and sweatshirt on the person now being helped into the patrol car; it was Countertop Man. With all the official vehicles in the lot, the only parking space still available was at the far end near a hair salon that I’d never seen anyone enter or exit. I took it, then jogged to Babe’s private office in the back of the diner, where I met Babe and Mike O’Malley.
“What’s going on? You okay? Was that Countertop Man?” I asked, pointing to the man in the patrol car. “I knew there was something fishy about that guy.”
“I thought you didn’t know him,” O’Malley said to Babe.
“He said his name but I don’t remember it. I know he likes black coffee and fried eggs and he asked me if my name was Brittany. He’s been in the last few days, that’s all. Said he worked for a countertop company downtown. I just feed them, Mike. I don’t ask for references.”
Then O’Malley asked what I knew about the man, but I didn’t have anything substantial to contribute other than my gut feeling, which didn’t seem fair to share with the police given that it was based on the guy’s inability to tell Formica from limestone, which was not a crime, although perhaps it should be. I spared Mike the nursery anecdote, since it no longer seemed all that funny.
“So you think he lied about being in the countertop business and he flirted with Babe and you thought that made him weird? Doesn’t everybody flirt with Babe?”
For my benefit Babe repeated what happened. “I closed up around 7 P.M. last night-business was dead, so I came in early today, to make up for it. When I got here, I found that guy, whatever his name is, in my office, curled up on my inflatable bed. He scared the crap out of me, so I backed out of the room as quietly as I could, locked him in, and called the cops after I looked myself inside the diner.”
“It’s lucky he didn’t just wake up and run away,” I said.
“He did wake up, and busted my lock in the process, but I’d blocked the door with my SUV. He couldn’t get out. Even the windows are painted shut. I’ve been after Neil all summer to scrape them. Now I’m glad he didn’t get around to it.”
Countertop Man claimed to have left his ID in his other suit which was kind of funny since he didn’t strike any of us as a suit-and-tie kind of guy. All he’d said was that his name was Chase McGinley. He was babbling in the back of the police cruiser, his head rocking back and forth in an animated argument with himself. Against the odds, he appeared to be losing.
McGinley said he’d just been sleeping one off someplace warm, but apparently he’d gone through Babe’s garbage, her files, and a bottle of Bombay gin before passing out on her sofa. When the cops cuffed him, he had bits of receipts, mail, and a picture of Babe and Neil crammed into his pockets.
“Identity theft?” I asked. “That’s a pretty low-tech way to do it, isn’t it?”
“Could be. Back in the day, people used to steal the carbon copies of credit card transactions. Not all the bad guys are computer savvy,” O’Malley said. “Some of them are just thieves.”
Identity theft was another thing I rarely thought about that had surfaced lately, along with convict labor, backsplashes, and my old dentist. The list was getting longer. I wasn’t even as fastidious as my eighty-seven-year-old aunt, who scrupulously shredded all her documents including sales flyers and newsletters from her congressman. I knew identity theft happened, but there were so many things I worried about before that-like my house payments or world peace or an infestation of bronze borers that would decimate my flowering dogwoods-that identity theft was way down on my list. “Who’d want to be me?” I had said. I had no dough and not much stuff.
“That’s not the way it works,” Mike had answered. “They’re not stealing stuff. They’re stealing your good credit rating. Your good name.” Maybe that was what Countertop Man was doing. Babe Chinnery’s name was gold in these parts and probably all over.
“You know, I drove by a few nights ago, when the diner was closed. I thought I saw something moving around behind the diner but I didn’t get out to investigate.”
“That was an uncharacteristically prudent thing to do,” Mike said. This was a not-so-veiled reference to the way we first met, on a cold case I’d accidentally unearthed a few years earlier. “Do you think it was him?” he asked after a minute, now more curious. “Is that why you said he was weird?”
“I thought it was turkeys. If it was him, what on earth could he have been looking for for so many days? He was just creepy. Taking Babe’s picture and then insisting on guessing her name. And I’m pretty sure he would have followed me if I had left the diner. Call it intuition-just don’t say women’s intuition or I’ll have to smack you.”
At Mike’s suggestion, Babe had checked her office thoroughly to see if anything else was missing. The man had obviously gone through her things, but she couldn’t say what, if anything, he’d taken, other than the booze. She didn’t keep any jewelry or cash in the office, and since he was still there when the cops arrived, he couldn’t have left with anything unless it had been squirreled away on his person and neither of us wanted to stick around for the cavity search.
“It’s a good thing I don’t keep the Fabergé eggs here anymore, right?” At least she was getting her sense of humor back. Countertop Man saw us laughing and it infuriated him. He stuck his head out the window and yelled at us. “Why are you jerks arresting me? This is just a little criminal trespass. Kid stuff. I’ll be out before Oprah goes on.”
“Berry, tell that guy to quiet down or we’ll tack on disturbing the peace to the charges.”
Apparently, the man knew his law. And his daytime television. According to O’Malley, he’d be issued a summons and made to sign a PTA, a promise to appear in court. If he got “belligerent,” he might graduate to a $250 bond. But he’d still be let go, probably in just a few hours.
“Define belligerent,” I said.
“Broad definition.”
“That’s it?”
“What would you like me to do with him? We’ve done away with stocks and pillories in New England. No weapons; no damage, thank goodness; no physical harm to Babe. It’s like the man said, trespassing-a misdemeanor in the state of Connecticut. Forget Oprah, he may even be out before Martha goes on.”