“I guess not! Come spring, I’ll have to take you out to a ballgame.”
“‘Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,’” Liz sang and then broke off as the phone rang. Setting aside the World, she crossed the room and picked up the phone.
“Liz Higgins? This is Clifford Buxton returning your call. You have a question about my former student Ali Abdulhazar? How may I help you?”
Liz outlined her progress on the case and her reasons for finding Ali.
“I haven’t kept in touch with Ali over the years. It’s been a long time so there’s no telling if this will be helpful, but I do remember Ali took up as an apprentice piano tuner with Jan Van Wormer after he left the alternative school. The kid had a wonderful ear. Perfect pitch. And an aptitude for fixing things. Troubled home life, though, and a speech impediment. No get-up-and-go, no initiative. I don’t know if he’d stick with a job for any length of time. Van Wormer was no spring chicken all those years ago. If he’s living today, he’ll be in his nineties, I’d guess. But he worked out of South Boston back in the 1970s.”
“This is very helpful,” Liz said, picking up the Yellow Pages. “Do you recall anything about Ali getting in hot water with the Swenson family?”
“Those people across the road? I wasn’t there the day that happened. I only worked at the Wharton School two days a week. But I was there the next day when Ali was hauled in with his parents before the director, the chairman of our board, and the faculty. Douglas Mayhew—he was the headmaster—let on he wanted to cut the kid some slack. I think he was hoping the board would buy a good explanation accompanied by an abject apology. But Ali always clammed up under pressure—and I had the impression he was terrified of his parents. All he managed to say, with lots of mumbling in Arabic and stuttering on the ds was, ‘I’m not sorry because I duh-duh-duh-didn’t duh-duh-duh-do that duh-duh-duh-disgusting thing.’ His father shut him up with some sort of command in Arabic before the poor kid could say anything more in his own defense.”
“We’re in luck!” Liz said. “There’s a Van Wormer Piano Workshop listed in the phone book. Thank you for your help.”
Before Liz could dial the number, the phone rang again.
“I am speaking with Mizz Higgins?” an Indian-accented voice asked.
“Yes.”
“I am Ali Kumar, proprietor of Ali’s Music Shack. How may I be of service?”
So, the owner of Ali’s Music Shack was not the right man. On the off chance that the shop owner knew Ali Abdulhazar of Randolph, Liz inquired about this, only to have the music man take offense.
“So, you are thinking every person named Ali must know every other person of the same name?” he said angrily. “You should be knowing not every Ali is an Arab!” he added, hanging up.
“Well, well, well,” Liz mumbled, as she dialed the piano workshop, only to hear the elderly owner’s answering machine message, backed with piano scales. When she tried to leave a message, she found the voice mail was full. She added the piano man’s South Boston address to a reporter’s notebook labeled “Johansson Contacts.” The same notebook also held the phone number of the taxi garage in New York City. Liz was in better luck calling that number, as Jake’s unmistakable voice came on the line. Liz asked if his driver, Samir Hasan, had shown up.
“Nah! Hasan’s still AWOL,” he said. “Sonovabitch. Hey, listen, I got my hands full here. Hang on a minute.”
Liz heard him harangue a driver for being late.
“The reporter at work,” Tom said, standing up and delivering her coffee mug to her. He pointed to the clock, gave her a kiss on the top of her head, and said, “I’ve got a job to go to. I’ll make those calls about the wallpaper. You have enough to do. I’ll call you later.”
“I got a helluva lot to do here,” Jake complained over the line. “But I took my valuable time to drive to the Brooklyn address he gave me. I already knew it was a wild goose chase, but I had to be sure. Street is there but the house numbers stop at 249. Hasan listed his address as number 270.”
Liz blew a kiss to Tom as he left and asked Jake a few more questions about how long Hasan had worked for him and about the driver’s work habits, scribbling all the while in her notebook. Hanging up and slapping the notebook shut, she remembered she had not phoned Florissa’s Gift Emporium, so she found the number and made the call, only to have the manager confirm that she’d sold a teacup and saucer manufactured by Royal Doulton on the day in question. The manager could not identify the specific china pattern. Disappointed, Liz collected the breakfast dishes, ran water over them in the sink, put out dry food and fresh water for Prudence, and turned off the Christmas tree lights.
Snow was falling as Liz made her way to the offices of Environmental Solutions in Lexington. Housed in a brown-stained, wood-shingled building, the offices were fronted by an unusual parking lot, pocked here and there with small circular grates.
“They’re to collect the runoff. Instead of pouring it down the city sewer, for three seasons, at least, we use it in the waterfall you see on that rock face,” Erik explained as he showed Liz into the building. “Of course, the waterfall is not in operation during the winter, but the rest of the year it serves to aerate and help purify the water before we siphon some off to our various projects.”
“Such as?”
“We’re working on designing eco-friendly dishwashers and clothes washing machines. The water gets used again as we test the prototypes. Saves us plenty on our water bill, I can tell you.”
Erik delivered this information with practiced ease, but his eyes told another story. They were heavy with sleeplessness. As soon as Liz was in his office and the door was closed, he urgently asked her, “What is the news you have about blood in my kitchen?”
When she told him the blood type evidence suggested a stranger had been injured there, Erik put his head down on his desk and moaned. Over his sunken shoulders, Liz noticed a family portrait pinned to the wall. It was drawn in crayon and signed “VERONICA” in the awkward printing of a very young child. Labeled with the words, “MOMMY,” “DADDY,” and “ME,” three crayoned figures were drawn holding hands and wearing huge smiles. A slight yellowing of the paper and drawing skills that spoke of a child much younger than Veronica’s current age made it clear Veronica had drawn this some years ago.
Erik lifted his head. “My God, Ellen!” he exclaimed, as if to his wife. “What happened to you?” Turning his attention to Liz he said, “I had hoped that second person was someone known to us, not a stranger. I’ve been praying that she cut herself cooking, that she wasn’t attacked! Who would have done this?”
“I have to tell you, Erik, we know whose blood it might have been. Do you or Ellen have any connections with a New York taxi driver known as Samir Hasan?”
“Absolutely not. I never heard of the guy. Who is he? What was this guy doing in my kitchen?”
Erik was almost as mystified when Liz told him about Ellen’s recent note on Veronica’s emergency information card, warning the aftercare teachers not to allow her daughter to take a ride from a taxi driver. “After she came home from meeting her pen pal in New York, she mentioned something about a strange taxi ride,” he said. “But at the time I didn’t think it was significant. The city is full of kooks. I was more concerned about the fire she escaped in the Windows on the World Restaurant.”
Erik filled Liz in on the fire and he added, “I was so relieved that turned out okay that I didn’t pay much attention to the calls we received in the middle of the night. I just thought they were prank calls, so I hung up after the third one and turned the phone’s ringer down so we wouldn’t be bothered by any more of them.”