“Looks like you picked the right place to palm,” I said.
Inside, the place was bustling and spotless, cooled by wooden fly fans, serenaded by Muzak. GOURMET FOODS at the front. A liquor section big enough to intoxicate the entire neighborhood. Foodstuffs stacked to the rafters, everything neatly ordered, the wide aisles marked by overhead wooden signs painted that same dark green.
A pair of green-aproned women worked steadily at antique brass cash registers hooked up to computerized scanners. Three or four shoppers waited in each line. No one talked. Milo walked up to one of the registers and said, “Hi. Where’s the owner?”
The cashier was young, chubby, and fair. Without looking up, she said, “In the back.”
We made our way past PASTA and BREADSTUFFS. Next to the DAIRY case was a green wooden panel door with a brass lock dangling from an open hasp. Milo pushed it open and we stepped into a short, dark hall, cold as a refrigerator, rank with an old lettuce smell, and filled with generator noise. At the end was another door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Milo knocked and opened it, revealing a small windowless office paneled in imitation knotty pine and furnished with an old mahogany desk and three red Naugahyde chairs. The desk was crowded with papers. A brass balance scale served as a paperweight for an inch-thick stack. An assortment of commercial calendars hung on the walls, along with a couple of faded hunting prints and a framed photo of a pleasant-looking, slightly overweight brunette woman kneeling next to two white-haired, ruddy boys of preschool age. A pine-ridged expanse of lake was in the background. The boys struggled to hold on to a fishing rod from which a healthy-looking trout dangled.
The obvious genetic source of the children’s pigmentation sat behind the desk. Early thirties, pink-skinned, with thin, near-albino hair cut short and parted on the right. He had broad, beefy shoulders, a nub of a broken nose above a bushy mustache the color and consistency of old hay. His eyes were large, colored a curious tan-gray, and had a basset droop. He wore a blue broadcloth button-down shirt and red-and-blue rep tie under a green apron. The shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were pale, hairless, Popeye-thick.
He put down a hand calculator, looked up from a pile of invoices, and gave a weary smile. “Weights and Measures? We passed just Last week, gentlemen.”
Milo showed him his police ID. The blond man’s smile faded and he blinked several times, as if forcing himself awake.
“Oh.” He stood and extended his hand. “Ted Dinwiddie. What can I do for you?”
Milo said, “We’re here to talk about the sniping at Hale Elementary, Mr. Dinwiddie.”
“Oh, that. Horrible.” His wince seemed involuntary and sincere. He blinked a couple more times. “Thank God no one was hurt.”
“No one except Holly Burden.”
“Oh, yes. Sure. Of course.” He winced again, sat down, and pushed aside his paperwork.
“Poor Holly,” he said. “It’s hard to believe she’d go and do something like that.”
“How well did you know her?”
“As well as anyone, I guess. Which means not much at all. She used to come in here, with her dad. I’m talking years ago, when she was just a little girl. Just after her mom died. Back when my dad was alive.” He paused and touched the balance scale. “I used to bag and check after school and on Saturdays. Holly used to stand behind her dad’s legs and peek out, then draw back. Really shy. She always was kind of a nervous kid. Quiet, as if she was in her own little world. I’d try to talk to her- she never answered back. Once in a while she’d take a free candy, if her dad would let her. Most of the time she ignored me when I offered. Still, there was nothing…”
He looked up at us. “Sorry. Please, sit down. Can I get you some coffee? We’ve got a new European roast brewing out in front in the sample pot.”
“No thanks,” said Milo.
We sat in the red chairs.
Milo said, “Any more recent impressions of her?”
“Not really,” said Dinwiddie. “I didn’t see much of her. They were usually delivery customers. The couple of times I did see her wandering around the streets, she looked kind of… detached.”
“Detached from what?”
“Her surroundings. The external world. Not paying attention to what was going on. The kind of thing you see in creative people. I’ve got a sister who’s a writer- very successful screenwriter. She’s getting into producing. Emily was always like that, fantasizing, off in her own world. We used to kid her, call her Space Cadet. Holly was spacey but in her case I don’t think it was creativity.”
“Why’s that?”
The grocer shifted in his chair. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but basically, Holly wasn’t very bright. Some of the kids used to call her retarded- which she probably wasn’t. Just dull, a little below average. But in her family that had to be especially tough- the rest of the Burdens were all pretty intellectual. Her dad’s downright brilliant- used to work for the government as some kind of high-level scientist or mathematician. The mom did, too, I think. And Howard- her brother- he was a scholastic ace.”
“Sounds like you knew the family pretty well.”
“No, not really. Mostly I’d just deliver the groceries or go over there for tutoring. From Howard. He was a math whiz, totally brilliant with numbers. We were in the same class but he could have taught it. Lots of kids went to him for help. Everything came easy for him, but he really had a thing for math.” He gave a wistful look. “He actually stuck with what he loved, became some sort of statistician. Has a great position with an insurance firm out in the Valley.”
Milo said, “When you say you and he were in the same class, was that at Nathan Hale?”
Dinwiddie nodded. “All the kids went to Hale back in those days. Things were different.” He fussed with the knot of his tie. “Not necessarily better, mind you. Just different.”
I said, “How so?”
He fidgeted some more and lowered his voice. “Listen, I work here, live here, lived here all my life- it’s a great neighborhood in many ways, great place to raise kids. But the people here pretend nothing will ever change. That nothing should ever change. And that’s not too realistic, is it?” Pause. “Standing behind the register, or making a delivery, or coaching Little League, kind of gives you the chance to observe- you hear all sorts of things- ugly things from people you thought were decent, people your kids play with and your wife has coffee with.”
“Racial comments?” Milo said.
Dinwiddie gave a pained look. “That’s not to say it’s any worse here than anywhere else- racism’s fairly endemic in our society, isn’t it? But when it’s your own neighborhood… you’d just like it to be better.”
Fairly endemic in our society.
It sounded like a phrase out of a textbook.
Milo said, “Do you think any of that- the local racial attitudes- are related to the sniping?”
“No, I don’t,” Dinwiddie said quickly. “Maybe if it had been someone else, you could make the connection. But I can’t see Holly being racist. I mean, to be racist you’d have to be political, at least to some degree, wouldn’t you? And she wasn’t. Least as far as I knew. Like I said, she wasn’t too in touch with her surroundings.”
“What kind of political attitudes did her family have?”
“No idea if they had any,” he said quickly. His hand flew to his tie again, and he blinked several times in succession. I wondered if something about the discussion was putting him on edge.
“Really, gentlemen, I just can’t see any political connec-tion,” he said. “I truly believe whatever Holly did came from inside her- her own problem. Something intrapsychic.”
“Mental problems?” said Milo.
“She’d have to be crazy to do something like that, wouldn’t you say?”