Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (22 page)

She shook her head. “I hadn’t heard that.” She glanced around. “If you ask me, it’s those
cetriolos
—sorry—who work at the Mirror Corporation who use drugs. You watch some of the people at their parties, dancing like maniacs, and you’d swear they were getting high. But I can’t see Blanche doing that. She’s just not the type.”

“Another thing,” Bear said. “Do you know if Blanche was being followed by anyone?”

The woman looked puzzled. “I don’t know about that, either. But I didn’t hang out with her much. Let me ask one of the younger girls.” She held her cigarette out, and pulled open a door that was marked KITCHEN. “Rita!” she yelled.

“Yeah,” the tall girl with the big ponytail whom Bear had talked to before came outside. “Hey. Ciggie break?” She glanced at Bear and Fish, and her eyes went back to Bear. “You know, I was going to tell you that you look familiar.”

“Do I?” Bear exchanged looks with his brother. “I haven’t been here in a while.”

“You’re Blanche’s boyfriend, aren’t you?”

Bear nodded, and she grinned.

“I saw your picture. Plus I served you that one time when you and her came here together. You don’t remember. That’s okay.”

“She’s missing,” Assunta said soberly. “Since Saturday.”

“You’re joking,” Rita said slowly. “Right?”

“I wish I were,” Bear said.

Obviously shaken, Rita lit a cigarette and looked at Bear, her brow furrowed. Bear briefly told the two waitresses about seeing Blanche at the airport, and how she had vanished.

“He wants to know if anyone was following Blanche,” Assunta said.

“The stalker, you mean?” Rita asked.

Bear’s heart skipped. “You mean you saw him?”

“No, but I know who you’re talking about. Blanche told me about him.” Rita blew the smoke from her cigarette out of one side of her mouth politely. “The last few weeks, Blanche had been kind of jumpy when she was at work. She kept looking over her shoulder, makin’ me nervous too, so I yelled at her. I said, ‘So who’s after you, Brier?’ So she says to me, ‘you ever see this guy following me when I come into work?’ I hadn’t, and I said, ‘What’s he look like?’ She said he was a big tall guy, built like a bull. ‘Might just be my imagination,’ she said.”

“You said you’ve never seen him?”

“No! But I sure as heck have been looking for him since she told me that. Especially when we left the hall together late at night. We’d both be looking over our shoulders until we got to the train station, and I would yell at her, ‘Share the fear, why don’t you?’ She knew I was teasing. But I watched her back. I never saw the big guy, though.”

Assunta was staring, her eyes were getting wider. “You said a big guy who looked like a bull?” she said slowly. “Oh man, this is too freaky.”

“What?” everyone demanded.

She crushed out her cigarette and paused before she spoke. “I saw him in the banquet hall on Saturday night.”

“Where?” Rita almost shrieked.

Assunta was low key now. “In the service hallway,” she said. “Big tall guy. Bigger than you,” she nodded to Bear. “With dark hair and a kind of flat nose. I was going back to the workroom to get my lighter, and I saw him. I thought he was one of the guests who’d gotten lost looking for the men’s room or something. So I asked him if I could help. He wasn’t too friendly. I sort of directed him back to the party area. But, you know, in those dark corridors, I wasn’t going to exactly try to force him to go there if he didn’t want to. I went into the workroom, got my stuff out, and when I came back, he was gone.”

“Was that before or after Blanche left?” Bear asked.

Assunta put her head to one side. “I’m not sure. It was right around the time the money was missing, come to think of it. I shoulda mentioned that to someone. But Blanche’s name was being floated right away as the one who snatched the money, so I forgot it. Besides, there were so many people there, and he was nowhere near the office where the safe was.”

“You need to tell Scarlotti that,” Rita insisted. “It’s makin’ me hyper-mad that they tried to stick this mess on her.” She turned to Bear fearfully. “So you think that he got her?”

Bear shook his head, even though he winced at the thought. “No. We know she’s still alive. Plus, I think I saw that man myself today. If he was looking to hurt Blanche in some way, and if he’d succeeded, he’d lie low. My guess is that he doesn’t know where she is, so he’s still looking for her.”

Rita shook her head in disbelief. “Take me for a ride,” she said. “This is freaky. You know, she said she thought that someone had been in her house, too.”

“And she was right,” Fish murmured. “She’s been right about everything so far.”

Another waitress put her head out the door and hissed, “Hey, you two. Scarlotti’s looking for you. Get on back in here.”

“Got to go,” Assunta said, quickly stubbing out her cigarette. “Look, I’m telling the police what I know about this, okay?”

“That would be great,” Bear said. “They need all the help they can get.”

“Let me know if you need any more help. I’m always here. Just call. Good luck.” She vanished inside.

“Same here,” Rita said, pulling one last drag on her cigarette. “You want my phone number at home just in case?”

“Not a bad idea,” Bear said, and scribbled it down on his calendar when she told it to him. He wrote down Fish’s cell phone number on another sheet and handed it to her. “Here’s my cell phone number if you need to call us. Thanks again, Rita.”

“You mean,
my
cell phone number,” Fish corrected him after the waitress had left. “You need to get your own phone.”

“Yeah, maybe later on,” Bear said distractedly.

Fish changed the subject as they walked back to the car. “So we’ve got a suspect. Not a very nice one, either.”

“I can’t believe no one took her more seriously,” Bear said angrily, then fell silent.
If only I had been here, I would have.

“Well, for whatever reason, she never elaborated on this to her mom and Rose or you,” Fish said. “Fortunately for us, she mentioned it to her co-workers.”

“We need to find out if she told anyone else,” Bear said. “Maybe Jean and Rose can find that out from the nursing home folks she visited.”

They got into the car, and Fish said brightly, “At least there’s some good news. I’m going to make a guess that the older waitress is right—the police aren’t going to pursue Blanche as a suspect in the burglary now that they’ve recovered the money.”

Bear drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “Right. But that means that whoever was trying to set her up to be arrested is going to find that out soon, if they haven’t already.” His mind was on the big man.

“We’re assuming, aren’t we, that the same person who stole the money and planted the drugs in her backpack here also planted the drugs in our apartment to implicate us?” Fish asked as he drove out of the parking lot. “How do we even know that we were meant to be framed? What if it was just a botched attempt to frame Blanche?”

“That’s what I’m thinking, despite how tricky it would have been to smuggle the drugs into our apartment,” Bear said. “But if that’s the case, it didn’t work. The authorities arrested us instead of Blanche. And because Blanche wasn’t around to be arrested here or at home, the case against her is dissipating. Maybe she’s slipping out of the enemy’s net.” The tightness in him released. But only slightly.

Fish said grimly, “Wonderful. But that means her enemy will have to do something else to trap her.”

Bear looked around them at the people passing by. There was no sight of the big man now, but he figured that he wasn’t far away. “What we need to do is find the enemy before the enemy finds Blanche.”

Chapter Eleven

Down in the basement with the noise and clamor of the food line, the girl had started to feel overwhelmed. She felt it would never end. As the passing out of food went on and on, she began to experience a strong desire to be alone, and when it seemed that the people were finally starting to disperse as lunchtime drew on, she slipped up the side steps and hurried back to her work in the vestibule.

Closing the door, she felt a wave of relief pass over her, even though it was hotter upstairs than it had been in the cellar. She wiped her forehead and looked around the vestibule, which, despite several bags of new donations, was starting to show signs of being finished, and she thought that perhaps she would sit in the church for a few minutes.

Sitting in the creaking wooden pew, she looked from the tabernacle to the stained glass windows, and started to feel her heart slow down.

Got to watch my heart,
she told herself. She had a dysfunction in one of her valves, which meant that stress caused less oxygen to get to her lungs, and she had, on several memorable occasions, fainted. This summer, she had started taking medication, which had improved the condition, but of course, she hadn’t taken any since she had come to the friary. It had been a background worry on top of everything else, but all she could do at the moment was to try and take things a bit easy.

Even so, she felt guilty for leaving the work downstairs. Had she run away from the people because they were unattractive and poor? Was she turning away someone who was in need?

Next time, I’ll try harder.
Sighing, she got up, genuflected, and walked back to the vestibule.

As she stepped into the little space, closing the door behind her, she saw she was not alone. The bag lady in the blue hat had followed her up the steps, and was sitting on a garbage bag, chewing on a lollipop and staring at the stained glass window above the door.

“Hello,” the girl said.

“‘Lo,” the woman said, through her lollipop.

The girl hesitated. Brother Leon had warned her not to be alone with any of the visitors to the friary. “Shouldn’t we go back downstairs?” she asked.

“Don’t want to,” the woman muttered. “Want to talk with you. You’re such a pretty girl. And it’s quiet up here.”

The girl stood at the top of the steps and thought.
Yes, I shouldn’t be alone with the woman, but according to the friary rules, I shouldn’t leave the woman alone either…
Well, I think I can handle one elderly woman,
she decided at last
. I can talk with her a few minutes and then hopefully I can persuade her to come downstairs with me.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, sitting on another bag of clothes opposite the woman.

“I want to tell you how to do it,” the lady said calmly, chewing on her lollipop. It was difficult to understand her.

“How—what?”

The lady didn’t answer at first. She bit the candy off the stick, swallowed it, put the stick carefully into her left pocket, then pulled another lollipop out of her right pocket, methodically unwrapped it, and put it into her mouth. Only then did she resume speaking.

“How to get men to do things for you,” she said.

The girl drew back. “I’m not interested,” she said.

The old woman chuckled. “Don’t look so shocked, honey. You’re younger than I am.” She heaved a sigh. “Not so young as I once was. Used to have men falling all over me. But then I got old, and other women, they started getting younger. When my husband started—but you don’t want to hear about my problems.” She waved the lollipop at the girl. “Let me give you some advice.”

Old people were always giving advice, and the girl wasn’t surprised to hear an old homeless lady offering to give her some.
Do I look as though I’m in dire need of assistance? Maybe I come off as helpless
, she speculated as she resigned herself to listening.

“You got to use yourself to your own advantage. That’s your problem.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No,” the lady chuckled, coughed, and chuckled again. “No, you’re not sorry.”

Again the woman’s mumbling confused the girl.

“What you need,” the woman said finally, “is some better clothes. And some pretty things to catch the eye.” She dug in her bags. “I’ve got something here you might like.” She held up a gold chain necklace. “Only five dollars.”

The girl had to smile. So that was what this was about. A sales pitch. She looked at the necklace, but it was clear that the catch on the chain was missing. It was something the woman had probably found while digging through a waste bin. “I’m sorry, I don’t have five dollars.”