Chapter 23
I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting in my pink chair. I’m not sure how many times I’ve counted the money.
And it is in stacks all over my floor.
on it. Especially if it happened to be lying on the floor of a dead woman’s house.
The dogs sniffed at the cash, and then daintily settled themselves down, and now I’m wondering if this sort of thing is normal
for them. Because it is not normal for me. On the contrary, I am freaking out.
Why does this neighborhood run on murder and bribery??
I’m just about to count it again when my buzzer goes off and I jump about a mile in the air. It’s fine, I tell myself. Just
a package delivery or something.
Not that I’m about to buzz anyone in while I have all this cash lying around like a friggin’ drug kingpin.
I ignore the buzzer and sit still in my chair. They’ll just go away. They’ll leave the package outside the door and go away.
I believe this for about two minutes, until someone bangs on my actual apartment door. A thousand warnings flash through my head, the loudest of which is Hide the money! So I rocket out of the chair, scoop an
armful of hundred-dollar bills off the floor, and run to the bathroom, dumping it all in the tub. It takes me a few trips,
and all the while someone is banging down my door. Goddamnit, Sheila, if you let this person in and I get arrested or murdered here, I am going to haunt this place so bad you
and Roy never rent it again.
Once I’ve got all the money in the tub, I swing by the kitchen counter, grab the knife I’d used to open the envelope, and
then head to the door. I look out of the peephole, clutching the knife in my sweaty fist. The person at my door is younger
than I’m expecting.
Marlowe.
A very mad Marlowe. I put down the knife.
“Open up, Mo,” her voice comes from the other side of the door. “I know you’re in there. I’ve tracked your phone.”
I open the door and try to position myself in the doorway to keep her from coming in, but she breezes past me. She takes a
look around at the boxes and the piles of clothes and shoots me a look of disgust.
“I just moved in,” I say meekly.
“Whatever.” She shrugs and plops down in my pink chair. “I can’t believe you lied to my mom.”
“You lied to your mom first,” I say, shutting the door and slumping back against it.
“But for real, Marlowe. If I told your mom the truth, I guarantee we would not be working together anymore. And I can’t afford to get sued, okay?
” I take a deep breath. “Also, I thought something really scary was happening to you. Two people have been murdered. You can’t blame me for being relieved it was just your mom. ”
Her expression softens. “I guess. Anyway, they couldn’t hold me for long. Fake internship for the win.”
“School isn’t jail, you know,” I say.
She ignores that and continues. “I’m here because I thought you might want to know: I sent the video to the cops during recess.
And I got to thinking— If Benny really is getting a kickback, I figured I might find evidence in his apartment. So after math
class, I staked the place out.”
Is it possible that I am her sidekick? No, I refuse to accept that. I am the grown-up! I am the grown-up!
“Marlowe.” Also this kid is going to give me a stress migraine. “First of all, you should not have gone on a stakeout alone. You absolutely can’t do that again.”
She raises an eyebrow. “And second?”
I sigh. “Second, what did you find out?”
Marlowe grins and makes me wait for a moment—this kid is such a little dirtbag. Finally, after she’s milked the moment as
much as she can, she says, “Well, I didn’t get a chance to pick the locks and look around because the cops beat me there.
They took Benny in for questioning.”
This is amazing. I can’t believe it. We did it. The cops might just take this whole thing more seriously.
“Now he’ll get all jammed up,” Marlowe adds viciously. “Just like he deserves.”
I pause. “I’m sorry? What now?”
“You get brought in for questioning in the city, you get jammed up. Rolled. Burged.”
“Still not sure what you mean.”
The twelve-year-old sighs like an old film noir detective. “You know how it is. Just like Rodney O’Malley says.” She makes ominous fist-in-palm motions.
“I’m not sure everything Rodney O’Malley says is true.”
“And you know so much about the Chicago penal system?” Marlowe says impatiently. “That’s what I thought. So what’d you find
in the house? I can tell you found something or you wouldn’t be so weird and shifty.”
I heave a defeated sigh and walk to the bathroom, where I wave Marlowe over and open the door. From the doorway, we take in
the scene.
$11,500 in cash, mostly in the tub. Also in the tub are three dogs, piled on top of each other and contentedly wallowing in the money.
“Whoa,” she says. “That’s a lot of bribe.”
“Yeah,” I say.
She picks a bill up off the floor and studies it. “You think I could keep this hundo? Claudia would have wanted me to have
it.”
“No,” I say firmly, plucking it out of her hand, spinning her around, and pushing her toward my front door. “Claudia would
have wanted you to be safe, which is why we are not keeping any of this money.”
“Not nearby, anyway. This is screaming for an offshore account.”
“Marlowe. We’re turning it in to the police.”
“Kidding, obviously. About the offshore account, anyway—but you can’t hand over the cash.” She paces back and forth in front
of the front door. “Bro. What we have here is leverage. Rodney O’Malley talks about this in his video Use What You Got.”
“Please tell me this is PG.”
Marlowe ignores me. “The money implicates Tond. Now we need to shake him down for the straight dope by dangling all this cabbage
in front of his greedy little peepers.”
I bite a hangnail nervously. “Do you think you’re watching too many of those videos?”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
She’s not wrong, of course. Marlowe is always right. The money clearly ties Benny to Tond, and if I’m going to go to the cops
with this, I need evidence. But “we” are not doing anything. I can’t forget how scared I was when I thought I’d put her in
danger. I won’t risk that again. So I play dumb and hope I look convincing.
“I don’t know what to do, Marlowe. I’ve never seen this much money in one place in my life,” I say. “But I do know that right
now it’s safe in the tub, and more importantly, I need to take these poodles for a walk before they leave me another aromatic
present on my floor.”
The dogs clearly know what I’m talking about—they’re out of the tub and swarming us within seconds. I silently thank them
for their unholy pooping habits and, apparently, telepathy. “See?” I say. “They’ve got needs.”
She reluctantly concedes, shooting me a salty glance as she leaves and heads down the stairs.
“And stop tracking my phone!” I call down to her from my doorway.
“I can’t hear you,” her voice floats up the stairwell. “I’m already too far away.”
This kid is either going to be president or a master criminal, and it’s unclear which one at this point.
Though I suppose both isn’t off the table, either.
I shut the door behind her as the excited dogs bring me their leashes and I reach down to peel a hundred-dollar bill off Jean’s
butt.
I need to hide the tub money where Tond will never find it. And then I need to go back to that house, threaten Tond with what I know, and get him to confess to the murders of Cran and Claudia. Oh, and I also need to record that confession. And then get out of his house alive.
Noooo problem.
“Come on, guys,” I say. “Let’s go shake down a murderer.”
Where would Tond not expect the missing money to be? The one place it should have been—Claudia’s house! The four of us head over and try her front door, but of course it’s locked now. All the windows are shut,
and when we circle the block into the alley, and through the yard to try the back door, we find it locked too. I think about
watching the lockpicking video, but I obviously don’t have time for a six-week course, and there is no way I’m involving Marlowe.
I didn’t really notice before, but Claudia’s got a real mullet situation here with her yard—the front is perfectly manicured,
but aside from a cleared path to the alley, the back is a dense tangle of brush that she’s let go wild. The dogs, of course,
are loving it.
I let them run around and dig while I investigate the garage. No luck—the whole thing is locked up tight, even the little
window.
Damn. I’d counted on hiding the envelope somewhere at Claudia’s, but this is sort of a bust.
I decide to take one more pass of the house and yard when Lou suddenly does a dive roll in the tall grass, releasing a huge
puff of pollen and sneezing accordingly. As I try to pull him out of the yellow cloud that he is clearly allergic to, I spot
a cellar bulkhead door butting up against the house.
Very Wizard of Oz, Claud.
It looks like it’s rusted shut, but I give it a hopeful yank, and it opens with ease. Yes.
The steps look sturdy enough and not excessively spidery, so I make my way down into the basement. There’s not much light from the small windows, so I hit the flashlight on my phone, hold it up, and instantly scream as a murderous Benny stares me down.
Okay, it’s not quite Benny.
It’s sort of a messed-up Benny?
It takes my brain way too long to realize this is just a statue. It’s probably Claudia’s rough draft of the Link statue upstairs—where she was
clearly working out the . . . anatomical kinks. I’m standing in her workshop, while messed-up Benny looms in front of me,
his chest cracked open, and his legs disappearing into one single stalk of clay.
“Smart, Claudia,” I whisper as my heart slows down. “A creepy basement scarecrow to keep prowlers away.”
I take a look around. There’s a couple empty shelves, a worktable, and a sign from the gas company saying they’ve shut off
the gas (man, I would love to have seen their reaction to this horror statue) but it’s obvious where I should hide the money. Claudia
made a hidey-hole in this prototype Link’s abs too. Boom.
The envelope is almost too big to fit, but I jam it in there, and with the 11.5K securely stashed in Benny’s chest cavity,
I close those chiseled abs, and let myself back out of the basement.
“Part one accomplished, boys,” I say as I lead the dogs back to the alley. “Time for our next stop.”
We retrace my steps from earlier that day, and as we get closer to the house Tond disappeared into, the dogs start straining
against their leashes. They go from impatient to insistent, and it takes everything I’ve got to keep them from running to
the front door.
Do they know their uncle is in there?
The blinds are drawn and the lights are on, and I see a shadow moving inside.
I quickly duck down into the geometrically sculpted shrubbery in a way that would be extremely suspicious to anyone watching from across the street.
The dogs reluctantly follow me into the bushes, their collars jangling loudly and Louis sneezing, neither of which are ideal for skulking, but hey, we do our best.
After a moment, the shadow passes, and I coax the dogs along through the shrubbery to the side of the house, hoping for a
window I can see into. Branches scratch my arms and legs, but it’s all worth it because a little farther down the side of
the house, there’s a window that looks like I might be able to see in it if I stand on my tiptoes.
We inch our way down, and the window’s starting to look a little too high for me, which makes me wonder—do these circus dogs
do pyramids, and would they maybe let me be the top of the pyramid, just for a little bit?
I’m right under the window, about to figure out my next move, when there’s a loud explosion inside. It sounds, unmistakably,
like a gunshot.
Something dark red splatters all over the window.