Murder Bone by Bone Read online

  “Okay.” Sam opened the third cupboard, where I keep bins of newspapers, cans, and bottles for recycling. “This is where the bones live,” he said in sepulchral tones. “When everyone’s asleep they get up and dance and have cocoa.”

  Moira liked the sound of that. “Cocoa.” She looked at me. “Peas.”

  I handed her another pea pod, but she threw it on the floor. “Peas,” she said, louder now. “Cocoa! Peas!”

  “She wants some cocoa,” Sam translated for the child-impaired listener. “Please.”

  Oh. “We have to go now.” I glanced at the clock on the stove. Despite the stove’s age, the clock keeps good time. “There’s still an errand or two to run. We’ll have cocoa when we get home, okay?”

  Moira opened her mouth for a first-class howl, then fell silent, staring at the kitchen door. I turned to look.

  The man who stood there, if “stood” is the right word to use for a body listing precariously from one side to the other, was known on the street as Old Mackie. He wore an ancient porkpie hat, at least I think that’s the name of the headgear with the squashed-down front. Perhaps his had mutated into a porkpie after long usage. His long gray overcoat was ripped in several places, exposing the natty turquoise sport coat beneath it. His hair snarled around his face in gray lovelocks, matching the sparse growth on his face, too long to be called stubble, too intermittent to rate the designation of beard. In fact, his whole face resembled his hat; his chin looked to be planning a meeting with his forehead at some point. As he swayed, he began humming his signature tune, “Mack the Knife.” Hence the name.

  Sam and Moira stared at him, wide-eyed. Moira might decide at any moment to let loose her cocoa frustration in a howl. I didn’t know what to do, but I was in the habit of looking after Old Mackie during the rare occasions he stopped in to visit.

  “Hello!” I moved forward, pulling out one of the chairs at the table. “Would you like to sit down? We were just having lunch. Have you had yours?”

  Old Mackie appeared to notice the kids for the first time. He smiled, revealing the many gaps between his few teeth. “Hrsh chdbrmm,” he said, holding out a hand.

  Sam took it reluctantly. “He doesn’t talk too good,” he observed.

  “I believe he said, ‘Hello, children.’ He doesn’t see many kids.” I guided Old Mackie into the chair and pushed the bowl of sugar snap peas closer to him. “Help yourself. We’re just eating them whole, like this.” I demonstrated.

  Old Mackie fumbled the first pea down, but then he tucked in with a good will. Sam and Moira watched him as if he were an alien.

  “I know.” I ushered them to the kitchen door. “Why don’t you two take Barker into the living room? There’s a book there you could read to Moira.”

  Sam looked apprehensive. “I don’t read too well,” he admitted. I hadn’t thought of that, but of course he was just in kindergarten. “I know, Moira.” He tugged her over to the couch and boosted her up. “I’ll just read my hands.”

  I watched them settle onto the couch. Sam held his hands in front of him, palms together, and then opened them slowly, turning them into a book. He began “reading.” Moira sat beside him, entranced.

  I was entranced, too, but I had to take care of my visitor. I got him a glass of juice, which he downed, and found some yogurt for him, which he also downed. Old Mackie is one of the people I worry about when I feel guilty over not helping out at the Food Closet like Melanie wants me to. He generally slept under a bush at the creek, except when it was raining or very cold. Then, I suppose, he went to one of the shelters set up around the county. But he didn’t like the shelters, because for one thing they wouldn’t let you drink, and drink was his reason for living. I knew if I looked out beyond the front porch that his shopping cart would be parked by my steps, with his pillow, the rest of his assortment of hand-me-down coats, the cans and bottles he collected—and probably sometimes stole from our curbside recycling bins. They would be turned in for the deposit, and he would buy booze with the proceeds. Probably he had a bottle of cheap wine wrapped in a brown paper bag in the front of his shopping cart at this moment.

  Now, however, he seemed happy enough, munching peas and swilling juice. He pulled up one greasy pant leg to show me that he was wearing the socks I’d given him a few weeks ago during a cold spell. They appeared reasonably clean, and he didn’t smell much, so he must have been to the Urban Ministry recently for a shower and use of the washer there.

  “Wsh kdz?” Lacking those essential teeth, Old Mackie was hard to understand. I generally could guess what he was saying.

  “The kids? Bridget’s. I’m baby-sitting for a while.” I didn’t say how long, or that I was living somewhere else. Old Mackie probably wouldn’t break into my house. But some of the other street people might, if Drake weren’t home.

  Old Mackie nodded thoughtfully. “Shaw nudder buddy.”

  “Nutter Butters?” I knew they gave out those cookies to blood donors. I couldn’t imagine Old Mackie being accepted as a donor, though. “I don’t have any here.”

  He shook his head violently. “No, no.” That much I understood. “Nudder boddy. Shyd wulk.” He jerked his head toward the street. “Tell kup.”

  I thought about this one for a while. “Another body.” He nodded eagerly. “You saw another body—on the sidewalk?” He nodded again. “Here?”

  “No, no.” Old Mackie was getting agitated. He pointed in the direction of Bridget’s house. “Yer fren.” He raised his hand, still with a pea pod clutched in it, and whapped the table. “Ouch!”

  I stared at him, the pieces falling together. “You saw—you saw Richard Grolen getting hit on the head this morning? In front of Bridget’s house?”

  Grinning his toothless grin, Old Mackie nodded happily and held out his cup for more juice.

  I filled it up, and resigned myself to half an hour or so spent figuring out just exactly what he’d seen.

  Chapter 14

  “You mean he saw the assault being committed and he didn’t do anything?”

  “He did do something.” I poured another cup of tea for Drake and topped up my own cup. I had called him as soon as I’d gotten home, which wasn’t until I’d delivered the greens and flowers to my restaurants. Drake had already yelled at me because I didn’t detain old Mackie at my house, but I’d pointed out that I had no phone and that Old Mackie hadn’t wanted to stay and talk to the police, much as I’d urged him to.

  “What did he do? Mull it over till he could mooch some lunch off you?” Drake doesn’t like Old Mackie coming around. The Palo Alto police are not really antagonistic toward the street people, who are mostly harmless sorts. But public sentiment has been building against the constant panhandling that goes on downtown and at every major intersection. The police have been moving people along more. It doesn’t help when I point out that Old Mackie doesn’t really panhandle. Drake still doesn’t like him pushing that shopping cart down our communal driveway.

  “He knows you have an attitude, so he doesn’t want to talk to you. Anyway, he doesn’t see too well and couldn’t swear to any of it, and is shrewd enough to figure out that he wouldn’t make it on the witness stand. He was doing you a favor, Drake. He could have just forgotten about it.”

  Drake ran his fingers through his hair, a habit of his that will someday result in baldness, as I tell him. “You aren’t giving me lunch,” he grumbled. “Which, let me point out, I’m missing to come and take down this cock-and-bull story personally from your lips.” He gazed at my lips for a moment. I took a deep breath.

  “Stop it, Drake! I just thought you’d want to know. Forgive me if I’m wrong.”

  He put out a hand to keep me in my chair, and left it on my shoulder, warm and—well, I might as well admit it—tingly. I hated having such cliché-ridden feelings. But having them I was. I inched over in my chair, and the hand fell away.

  “You’re not wrong.” He sighed, and went back to nursing his tea mug. “I guess that helps pinpoint the
time. All he can say is, he saw someone hitting, and someone falling?”

  “He was going through the recycling bins, I think, though he won’t admit that.”

  Drake nodded. “It’s against the law. Stealing from the city. If the recycling center doesn’t get those cans and bottles, they won’t be able to run the curbside program—”

  “I know all that. Old Mackie knows all that. He just feels his need is greater than the city’s.”

  “The city doesn’t need a lot of cheap wine, that’s for sure.”

  “Would you stop muttering and let me get on with this?” I looked at Bridget’s kitchen clock. I don’t wear a watch, and usually I have a pretty good sense of the time. But now that I had children’s schedules to deal with, I was discovering that I needed to know a lot more closely than the general hour what time it was. “I have to pick kids up at school this afternoon. And if you’re still coming over for dinner, we have to buy groceries.” That had been a big miscalculation on my part—not getting the groceries that morning with just Moira in tow. Now I would be at the store with four young Montroses, two of them freshly released from their daily incarcerations. It was enough to make any spinster lady feel faint.

  “I’m sorry.” Drake settled back in his chair, his untidy notebook open. “Go ahead.”

  Old Mackie had been pushing his shopping cart up Bridget’s street, headed for the creek. He’d been stopping at all the curbside bins, rummaging through them as quietly as he could, keeping an eye out for the truck that picked up the recycling. He hadn’t been able to pinpoint the time, also being a non-watch wearer, but I figured it for around 8:15, a time when most of the worker bees were on their way to their hives, but before the recycling truck came around.

  Despite being a little deaf, he’d still heard an altercation behind him across the street, but he hadn’t paid much attention. He’d fished out the bottles he wanted, stowed them tenderly in his cart, and looked around to see if the truck was coming. Instead he saw the figures across the street like a tableau shown through gauze—one person turning around, as if to leave, the other stooping for the chunk of concrete and lashing out. He couldn’t even say if they were male or female. In the instant after the impact, he’d turned his cart around and headed back the way he’d come, shambling as fast as he could. The assailant might have heard his cart rattling down the sidewalk, but the recycling truck had turned the corner, and it was plenty noisy on its own. Old Mackie had spent a couple of hours crouched in a service alley behind a condo complex before venturing out again. I thought he’d probably be lying low for a while, and not just because he didn’t want to talk to the police.

  Drake sighed at the end of the story. The house was quiet; Moira was napping and Sam having downtime on his bed, which meant he was probably napping, too. “This doesn’t really get me any closer,” he said morosely. “The guy wasn’t even wearing a watch, for pity’s sake.”

  “You might be able to find out when the recycling truck made its rounds. Maybe the driver saw something. They sit up high in those trucks.”

  “Teach your grandmother,” he said, standing up. “I’ve got to get back to the office. We have no good leads, but we still have to follow up on all these bad leads. What time is dinner?”

  “I don’t know. When can you come?”

  “After six,” he said, giving it some thought. “I might have to go out again later to catch up on the paperwork. But I am staying here tonight. I don’t like this happening so close to Bridget’s kids. So close to you. Maybe we should tell Bridget and Emery.”

  “The kids are supervised practically every minute of their day.” I didn’t want to endanger them either, but I knew Biddy really needed her vacation. “We could all go live at my house, I guess.”

  Drake heard my lack of enthusiasm. “Guess your place isn’t really set up for kids, or big enough either.”

  “Four carloads of toys would solve the first problem, but nothing solves the second one.” I gave him a grateful smile. “You’ll find out who’s doing this soon. Then I won’t have to go.”

  “Your confidence would be gratifying if it wasn’t misplaced,” he growled, and left. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what to make for dinner and what ingredients we’d need. We had beautiful fresh green beans and salad makings, sweet tomatoes and cukes and even some small red onions. We were perilously close to being out of the major Montrose food group, cold cereal, and its accessory, milk. I jotted those things on the list, along with fruit, crackers, and peanut butter, which also were in short supply.

  Sam wandered into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. I asked him what everyone liked.

  “Pizza,” he said promptly.

  “We had that last night.”

  He looked puzzled. “Noodles,” he decided finally.

  Noodles it was. Moira woke up a few minutes later. After the usual hectic diapering, juicing, crackering, banana peeling, and assembling the multitude of gear, we stuffed ourselves in the car and drove to the preschool for Mick and to Addison elementary school for Corky and the two other kids in the carpool. The car filled with noise. I plugged in a Raffi tape, only to be ordered by Corky to turn it off. “It’s stupid,” he said heatedly.

  “I like it.”

  “Me, too,” one of the carpool kids said. The other one, the only other girl in the car besides Moira, chimed in. Corky crossed his arms and seethed in silence while Raffi sang about the big beautiful planet. The song had a soothing naiveté that I found refreshing. All of us but Corky sang along.

  After we dropped off the carpool kids, I let Corky pick the music to put him in a better mood for grocery shopping. He chose Ray Stevens, not exactly music. I was thankful the drive to the Co-op didn’t take too long. We blitzed through the store, leaving a wake of crumbs from the four boxes of animal crackers I bought to ensure compliance. The kids had many suggestions.

  “Why can’t we just have Spaghetti-Os?”

  “I like those Sugar-Marshmallow-Cocoa-Grahams cereal!”

  “Cocoa—peas!”

  “Mom lets us drink Coke. Really!”

  I ignored all of them. We did get back home without an actual scene. I made cocoa all around with those instant packets, of which there was a lifetime supply in the pantry. Moira was happy, and I was able to put away the groceries before the next crisis began—cooking dinner.

  Chapter 15

  “Hi, honey, I’m home.”

  The boys glanced away briefly from “Square One,” waved at Drake, and went back to viewing. Moira didn’t even look up from the noodles she was picking off her high chair tray.

  I turned from the stove and smiled at Drake. “Who are you? Ward Cleaver?”

  “I’ve always had that ambition.” He gave me a sitcom-dad kiss on the forehead. “Hi, June.”

  “Not in front of the children, Ward.” I fended off his puckered lips. “You’ll get drool in the noodles.”

  “Noodles? June always had pot roast for her man.”

  “That was then, this is now.” I whacked him with the wooden spoon. “Besides, you’re not my man.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Before I could respond, he took the spoon out of my hand and stirred the contents of the pot. “This looks like fettuccine Alfredo.”

  I took the spoon back. “Why don’t you dress the salad? We’re about ready.”

  “Let me put down my stuff.” He disappeared into Bridget and Emery’s bedroom—the room I was using—and came back without his shabby tweed jacket and the bulging briefcase that went back and forth to his office with him.

  I tipped the fettuccine into a bowl, shook the green beans out of their pan, and turned off the oven on the garlic bread. It had been a strain to get so many dishes ready at the same time. I generally have a baked potato or rice along with steamed veggies or a big salad in the evenings. Never wash more than one pot or one dish is my motto.

  I stuck my head into the living room to tell the boys that dinner was ready. “Square One” was just ending i
n a lavish production number. “Nine, nine, nine,” sang the perky actors. “That magic number nine.”

  Drake was putting pieces of cucumber on Moira’s tray when I turned back into the kitchen. I started to tell him not to bother, since she wouldn’t eat it, but she confounded me by smiling sweetly at Drake and crunching down on a slice.

  “You can sit next to her,” I said, arranging the garlic bread in a basket. “She likes you.”

  “She likes you, too,” he assured me.

  “Really?” I waved a small piece of garlic bread in the air to cool it, then put it on Moira’s tray. With a disdainful motion of her small hand, she pushed it off the edge. Barker, who’d already learned to lurk beneath the high chair, snapped it up, crunching with gusto. After this child-tending gig was over, I would have big trouble getting him back on his dog food only diet.

  “You must have alienated her somehow.” Drake accepted the seat beside the high chair. The boys surged into their chairs, and I sat at the head of the table with an unaccustomed feeling of hostessy accomplishment.

  I didn’t sit long, though. Many times when I’d been at the Montrose house for dinner, I’d seen Bridget hop up and circle the table, dishing out food onto her children’s plates, and wondered why she didn’t just let them wait on themselves. Now I found myself circling the table, coaxing green beans onto Mick’s plate, helping Corky handle the salad servers, assuring Sam that I’d grown all the vegetables in the salad, while preventing him from taking a huge mound of noodles and leaving none for Mick. “You can have more later if you want.” I wondered if I was channeling Bridget, if she in Hawaii had any idea that I in Palo Alto was parroting her words, her actions, her total mom-schtick.

  Drake found it all hilarious. He did his part by overacting his delight in the victuals. The boys shoveled it in with occasional detours into poking each other. Moira sucked noodles slowly into her mouth, reflecting on each one, and rejecting the ones that didn’t meet her invisible standard. Drake kept giving her noodles, oblivious to her increasing restiveness, until she cut him off with a businesslike howl.