Endangered Species

by Barbara Block

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Robin Light was recently named one of Booklist's Top Five Lesser-Known Female Sleuths. Soon she will have outgrown that category. --Booklist The Only Thing She'd Endangered. . . For Robin Light, running a pet store was a decent way to make a living--but solving the occasional crime was much more interesting. So when neighborhood tough kid Manuel and his cousin Eli wandered into her shop with a wild story about a suitcase full of smuggled Cuban cigars, Robin couldn't resist nosing around. Was Her Life But what she found wasn't exactly the harmless--if illegal--scam she expected. Someone was trading in something far rarer than exotic tobacco--something worth much more than easy cash, to somebody who was prepared to kill for it. And when Eli's roommate turned up dead, Robin discovered she might be next in line. . . "This female PI ranks right up there with the tough-guy detectives in taking her lumps and dishing them out as well." -- Library Journal "Barbara Block's Robin Light mysteries are some of the best on the market today." -- Midwest Book Review

Release date: October 22, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 345

Sample

I was sitting behind the counter of Noah’s Ark, watching two crows peck at the black plastic bags of garbage I’d just put out on the street, while I half listened to the boy standing in front of me.

“Me and my friends,” the kid was saying. “We could close down your store, you know. Just like that.” He brought his right hand up and snapped his fingers.

“Really?” I smiled sweetly. “Be my guest.”

In the mood I was in, I’d consider being rid of this place an act of mercy. At the moment, the thought of not having to clean cages, restock shelves, answer questions about the feeding habits of hermit crabs, or fill out the three thousand government forms New York State inflicts on the small business owner had a lot of appeal.

The boy frowned. “I’m serious. We shut down the fur store on Salina.”

According to the newspaper account I’d read they hadn’t, but I wasn’t going to call the kid a liar.

“So am I.” I threw the key to the front door of my store on the counter. “Here you go, kid ...”

“Jeff...”

“Whatever.”

“Jeff,” he repeated, his voice cracking in a preadolescent squeak.

“Fine. Jeff, then.” I massaged a cramp in my shoulder while I moved my arm around. The damn thing had been bothering me all day. I must have slept on it wrong. “I’ll make it easy for you.” I pointed to the key. “Take it. The place is yours. Oh, and by the way, good luck returning the fish to their natural environment. The guy that bred most of them lives out in B’ville.”

Jeff swallowed. His eyes searched the room for an answer that wasn’t there. What should he do? Take the key? Not take it? He didn’t know. The PETA manual had obviously never covered a situation like this. I felt a pang of guilt. The kid was what? Fifteen at the most? And that was being generous.

I was telling myself I shouldn’t be giving him such a hard time when he swallowed, straightened his shoulders, and did what any politician would have done in similar circumstances: ignored what I’d said and kept on going with his spiel. My guilt disappeared. Admiration took over. Damn, the kid was good. Who knew? I could be talking with the next mayor of New York City.

The boy was tall and extremely slender. His thinness was emphasized by the clothes he’d chosen to wear: green-and-yellow plaid polyester bellbottoms, a tight-fitting orange shirt, and an enormous black ski parka that came down to his knees, all of which, judging from their condition, I was certain he’d gotten at the Goodwill store. He’d completed his ensemble with a string of yellow plastic beads around his neck, black nail polish on the fingernails of his left hand, a nose ring, plus five earrings on his left earlobe, which served, perversely, to underline the essential sweetness of his face.

Some of my academic friends would have called this kid’s style of dress tribal, others would have called it postmodern, I called it bad early seventies. Most of the people I know would have thrown him out by now, but I couldn’t. He reminded me of myself at that age. Dressed in thrift store odds and ends to my mother’s everlasting mortification, I’d harassed people on street corners and in stores, begging them to sign my petitions for everything from nuclear disarmament to animal rights. I was thinking about what an insufferable little prig I must have been when I became aware that the kid was talking again.

“You think what you do is right?” he said. “You think it’s okay to own living creatures, to buy and sell them as if they were chattel?”

“Yes.” I reached for my lighter and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t seem to help myself. The kid was bringing out the worst in me. “I do.”

He leaned across the counter. I exhaled in his direction. He coughed and moved back. I lied and told him I was sorry.

I expected him to start lecturing me about the dangers of secondhand smoke. Instead he pointed to the caged tarantula sitting in the corner. “Would it be all right for me to buy one of those and burn it?”

“No. Of course not.” I gently tapped the cage. The spider waved its two front legs at me. “They still experience pain.”

“Even if it is just a spider.”

“Yes,” I agreed reluctantly. I could see where this conversation was going. “Even if it is just a spider.”

“Well, what happens when people mistreat something you sell them?”

“I try to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“But when it does,” the kid insisted.

“Then of course I feel bad.” I rubbed my forehead. I was getting a headache and I’d left my Motrin back at the house. Good resolutions aside, the kid was going to have to leave.

“Why do you do it then?”

“Sell livestock?”

Jeff nodded.

“Because it’s part of my business.” About forty percent of it, to be exact. The rest consists of pet supplies of one kind or another.

“That’s totally bogus.”

“Is it now?” I raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell the bank that’s holding the mortgage on my house that.”

“You could earn a living doing something else if you wanted to.”

“I’ll go down and get a job flipping burgers at the mall right now.” I wasn’t going to tell this kid that in my former life I’d worked for the newspaper, or that this store hadn’t been my idea, it had been my husband’s, or that I’d been against the whole thing from the start, or that I’d gotten stuck with the place when he died, mostly because it was none of his business.

Jeff flushed. He gestured at the cage full of canaries. “They should be out flying around.”

“They would be dead if they were,” I retorted. “They’re captive born and bred. They’ve never even seen a worm, much less built a nest.”

“Some would make it,” the kid insisted.

“Yes, some would, but most won’t.”

I had to raise my voice to be heard over the blare of the police car speeding up the street. I wondered if it was going to another shooting. We’d had two fatal drive-bys not too far away from here in the past week, a record for Syracuse this time of year. Some people put it down to the weather. Usually by the end of January everyone’s inside shivering, but for the last two weeks we’ve been averaging a very unseasonable forty degrees.

Other people say the New York City cops have a new policy. It’s called share the wealth. They buy upstate bus tickets for gang members and tell them to get out of town. As for me, I ascribe the rise in crime to the economy. Thirty years ago, Syracuse was a manufacturing town, but most of those plants have moved to Mexico and other points south, taking the high-paying jobs with them, and leaving the part time, badly paying jobs behind.

The kid coughed and I turned my attention back to him.

“That still doesn’t give you the right to keep them,” he told me, pitching his voice over the siren of a second police car.

I took another puff of my cigarette before reluctantly taking up where we’d left off. “If it wasn’t for places like this, those birds wouldn’t exist. They were bred to be sold.”

The boy fingered one of the beads around his neck. “The whole concept of pets is wrong.”

A third police car whizzed by. I made a mental note to turn on the evening news when I got home. “Tell me, did you ever have a dog?”

“Yes,” Jeff said uncertainly, not sure of where I was going with this. “We have a golden.”

“Do you love that dog?”

“Yes.”

“Do you treat that dog well?”

“Of course.” The “of course” was indignant.

“Is he happy? Does he love you?”

“She. Amber is a she.” The kid shook his head impatiently. “Yes. Amber is happy. She sleeps in my bed, my mom takes her everywhere, and she has more toys than my kid brother. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that she didn’t pick us, we picked her. We could be horrible to her. She doesn’t have any rights.”

“Actually she does under Statute 26 of the New York State Market and Agriculture Law, but let me ask you something else. Did you pick the family you were born into?”

Jeff leveled a finger at me. “Don’t confuse the issue.”

“I’m not. I’m just trying to point out that things are more complicated than you’re making them out to be.”

A sneer crept over the kid’s face. “Complicated is the word adults use when they know they’re wrong. Complicated is the word adults use so they won’t have to do anything.”

“But you’ll do better, right?” I shot back. I wanted to clap my hand over my mouth as the words left my lips. My God. When had this happened? When had I begun to sound like my mother?

“Yes, I will.” Jeff went into his pocket and drew out a sheaf of pamphlets. “You should read these,” he said, laying them on the counter. “You’ll see what I mean.”

But I didn’t. After he’d gone, I dropped them in the garbage. I’d seen the PETA material before, pictures of rabbits with their eyes being held open so caustic liquids could be dropped in thereby insuring the safety of our shampoo, pictures of foxes caught in traps, gnawing their own legs off to get free, and I didn’t want to see them again. It was too upsetting.

I no longer use animal-tested cosmetics and I don’t wear fur or eat baby animals, but I still eat beef and wear leather shoes. Which makes me what? A hypocrite. Me and ninety-nine percent of the other adults on this planet. Despite my resolution not to, I found myself thinking about what the kid had said as I watched a hamster stuff a treat I’d just fed him into his cheek pouch. I was still thinking about it when Manuel and his cousin, Eli “don’t call me Elazaro” Bishop walked in and put the cap on an already bad afternoon.

Manuel was wearing jeans, an oversize flannel shirt, an expensive GorTex shell, sneakers with treads large enough to fit a dump truck’s tires, both of which I was sure he’d boosted from a local retail establishment, and, of course, his ever-present baseball hat. He’d recently stopped trying to grow a goatee and mustache, contenting himself with long, fifties-style sideburns. They made his face seem thinner than it was and emphasized the narrowness of his chin. At seventeen, he looked like what he was: a street kid who had seen and done more than he should have.

“No,” I said before he and his cousin reached the counter.

“No what?” Manuel asked.

I stubbed out what was left of the new cigarette I was smoking in the empty dog food can I was currently using as an ashtray. “No to anything you’re going to ask.”

Manuel raised his hands in a gesture of mock offense. “How can you say that? You don’t even know what I want.”

“Exactly. And I don’t care. Whatever it is, all I know is that I don’t want any part of it.”

Even though Manuel was a friend of mine (we’d met under unfortunate circumstances a few years ago), I’ve come to view him, as one of my Catholic friends would say, as a penance for my sins, which, judging from him, are multiple. Whenever Manuel is around bad things happen. Or maybe complicated is a better word. I’m talking the kind of complications that usually take me days with the phone pressed to my ear, while I’m put on hold, to straighten out. The kind of complications that brings me in contact with people I’d rather not meet, under which heading I include representatives of various social and law-enforcement agencies as well as low-level thieves and grifters.

“And,” I added, covering another possibility before Manuel brought it up, “if you want to borrow money, you’re out of luck. I’m flat broke.” I pointed to the stack of envelopes in front of me. “I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my bills this month.”

Manuel grinned, exposing a gold cap on one of his upper molars. When had he gotten that? I wondered.

“Which is why today is your lucky day,” he told me.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Manuel, I have neither the time nor the patience to get involved with another of your schemes.”

“This isn’t about me.” Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, came out of the back room where she’d been taking a nap and ran over to Manuel. He was one of her favorite people, which shows you what her judgment in people is like. He took a second to bend down and pet her, before continuing. “This is about him.” He straightened up and gestured in Eli’s direction. “He’s got a problem and I told him you’re the man ...”

“Woman ...”

“... that can fix it.”

By now Manuel and Eli were across the counter from me. I regarded Eli. If it had been Manuel that had the problem, I would have thrown him out, but I liked Eli, even if he was a distant cousin of Manuel. Over the past year he’d bought two Jackson chameleons, an. iguana, a couple of skunks, and a small king snake from me. Once in a while he’d stop in, and we’d chat for the odd half an hour or so. He seemed knowledgeable and responsible. At least when it came to reptiles.

He gave me an embarrassed nod and I nodded back. He’d moved here from Florida a couple of years ago. Five years older than Manuel, he was supporting himself working as a prep chef in a restaurant on Erie Boulevard while he finished up an associates degree at Onondaga Community College. With just one more semester to go, he was talking about going on to a four-year school.

He was as fat as Manuel was thin, and as slow as Manuel was quick. He was clean-shaven, and had short brown hair, myopic brown eyes, glasses with thick lenses, a short stub of a nose, and a mouth that was a shade too small for his face. He dressed in normally fitting jeans, flannel shirts, and sneakers. Best of all, unlike Manuel, he didn’t seem to be addicted to shortcuts.

He didn’t, as far as I knew, sell stolen merchandise, or break into cars and rip off their stereos and CD players. On the other hand, I wasn’t putting Eli up for canonization yet. The fact that he had a problem he wanted me to solve was a definite red flag. The fact Manuel had brought him to me for help made the color of that flag go from brick red to scarlet.

Since I’ve been doing detective work part-time, an employment I backed into over the course of a murder investigation in which I was named as a suspect, I’ve come to appreciate the truth of what my grandmother used to say to me whenever I got into trouble. She’d shake her finger in front of my nose and intone in her heavily Russian-accented English, “If you hadn’t been where you didn’t belong, this wouldn’t have happened.” Which is also true of most of the people that need my help. They need it, because either they were where they had no business being or they were doing something they shouldn’t have been.

Manuel cleared his throat. “This is the story ...” But before he could get into it, I gestured for him to be quiet.

“I’d like to hear Eli tell it.”

Manuel hitched up his pants and bobbled his chin in and out like a chicken looking for a piece of corn in the dust. “I’m just trying to move things along.”

I concentrated my gaze on him. “You have a special interest in this?”

Manuel put his hand up in the air palms toward me, fingers splayed. “I’m just here as one of those ... those good Samaritans.” He flashed me a smile. “You like the word? I’m doing what you said. I got me one of those improve your vocab books ...”

“Very nice.”

Manuel stroked his left sideburn. “I figured I’d help you out. I’d help Eli out.”

“I’m surprised. Disinterested generosity not being your usual style,” I noted dryly.

Manuel scrunched up his face and did a good imitation of being affronted. “You got no call to talk to me like that.”

I had all the call in the world. I was about to remind him of why I did when Eli started talking.

“It’s okay.” Eli studied the floor for a minute before looking up at me. The thickness of the lenses in his glasses imparted an unfocused quality to his pupils. “I told him that he could tell you.”

I scrutinized Eli. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather hear the story from you.”

Eli bit his lip. I watched the skin around his teeth go from pink to white.

“I can respect that,” he said after he’d released his grip.

I glanced over at Manuel. He was tapping his fingers against his thighs and doing a little shuffle dance with his feet.

I motioned to the back room. “Would you rather talk to me in there?”

Eli shook his head and tugged on the edge of his brown corduroy jacket. “It’s not really a big deal.”

I began to sympathize with Manuel. I wanted to say, if it isn’t such a big deal, why are you here? I didn’t. Instead, I waited as Eli reached up and reseated his baseball cap on his head, setting it first one way and then another, until he found the exact right place. Then he motioned to one of the tanks sitting alongside the left wall.

“How much would one of those corn snakes set me back?”

“About one hundred and fifty.”

“I don’t suppose you’d let it go for one hundred?”

I told him I’d think about it.

“Good.” Eli smiled for the first time since he’d walked in the store.

I tapped my fingers on the counter. “So, are you going to tell me what this is about or not?”

He let out a titter, then stopped himself. “It’s about a suitcase.”

“What about it?” I prompted after thirty seconds or so had gone by without Eli saying anything, not that I didn’t have a pretty good idea of what he was going to say next. I wasn’t wrong.

“I need you to find it for me.”

“No kidding.”

“That’s right.” Eli licked his lips. He hurriedly took an envelope from his shirt pocket and held it out to me, an offering, all the while averting his eyes from mine, looking at the fish and the birds and the hamsters and every damn thing in the store except me. This did not inspire confidence. “There’s six hundred in here for you now and another six hundred when you give it to me.”

I wondered what was in the suitcase. Drugs? Hot merchandise? Certainly not Eli’s Armani suit. I repressed a sigh. So much for my ideas on Eli’s moral character. What had they been based on anyway? The fact that he liked herps and went to school? I made a steeple with my fingers and lightly rested my chin on it. “What’s in this suitcase that’s so valuable?”

Eli swallowed and glanced at Manuel. Their eyes locked. Manuel gave the merest suggestion of a nod.

“Nothing important,” he replied. “Personal stuff.”

I drummed my fingers on the countertop. “Right. And I’m Marie, the queen of Rumania.”

“Rumania?” Manuel asked all wide-eyed. “Is that a country or something?”

“No. It’s a new planet.” I pointed to the door. “That’s enough. Both of you. Out.”

“Please,” Eli cried. “You got to help me. They’re going to chop my fingers off if you don’t.”

Maybe it was because Eli looked so piteous standing there in front of me—he was practically wringing his hands—that I made what was going to turn out to be the first mistake of many. Instead of telling him to close the door behind him, I asked exactly who was going to chop his fingers off.

Eli licked his lips again. “A guy named Chapman. Robert Chapman.” He let out a deep breath, seemingly relieved to say the name.

“You said they,” I reminded him while I automatically reached for the pad of paper—it was lavender, a color I loathe, but it had been on sale for ten cents—I always keep paper next to the register and printed Chapman’s name in caps. I told myself as I wrote that taking notes didn’t mean I was going to take the case, it was just something I’d gotten in the habit of doing.

“That was a figure of speech. It’s just this guy, this one guy.” Eli was whispering now. I had to ask him to speak up.

“Who is he?”

“The guy that set up the deal.”

I underlined Chapman’s name, wrote the word others next to it, and followed that with a question mark. “Do you have a phone number for him?”

Eli swallowed and shook his head.

“An address?”

Eli shook his head again.

“Anything?”

I tapped the pencil on the counter. The noise caught Zsa Zsa’s attention. She tilted her head in my direction, then came over and put her paws on my legs, demanding her due. I scratched behind her ears with my free hand. “All right Can you tell me what else he does? Where he comes from?”

Eli looked sheepish. “I’m not sure,” he stammered. “I didn’t ask. Honest,” he added when I raised an eyebrow.

“Okey-dokey.” Maybe Eli was telling the truth, maybe he was lying. The problem was, I didn’t figure him for that stupid, so why tell me a story that was this idiotic? Why not make up a better one, I thought as Zsa Zsa began butting my hand with her muzzle, her way of telling me to keep petting. It would be easy enough to do. I rubbed her chest and told Eli to continue. “Tell me about the deal,” I instructed.

Manuel and Eli exchanged another glance. That did it for me. I crossed my arms over my chest. Zsa Zsa put her paws down and began nosing at a dust bunny on the floor. I clicked my tongue against my teeth and pushed the pad of paper away.

“You must think I’m really dumb,” I informed them. “Find someone else. I have enough to do without being lied to. You come in and ask me for my help, you offer to pay me what is for you a fairly substantial amount of money, but you won’t tell me what this is all about or who the players are. Forget about it.”

Eli hung his head. Manuel weighed in.

“Come on, Robin,” he said. “Don’t be like that. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

I leaned forward slightly. “Exactly what am I thinking?”

“That Eli wants you to find a suitcase full of dope.”

“Not at all.” I sat back. “Why would I think that? I was figuring that Chapman is some crazed comic book collector who is after Eli because he’s gone and lost a suitcase full of Green Hornet first editions.”

Manuel drew himself up. “I thought we were friends.”

“So did I.”

He put his hands on his hips. “Then why are you disrespecting me like this?” he demanded. “I’m really insulted, and I mean this sincerely, that your opinion of me is so low that you think I’d actually involve you in something like that.”

“Oh, PUHLEASE. Spare me the act. I’m not in the mood.” I rubbed my forehead. My left temple was throbbing. Had I eaten lunch today? I didn’t think so. The last items that had gone in my mouth were a cheese Danish and a cup of coffee at nine o’clock that morning. Maybe that was why I was so cranky.

Manuel gestured to Eli and then to himself. “My cousin wouldn’t be doing that kind of shit and neither would I. It’s stupid. Too much heat for too little return.” For a few seconds, his tough guy mask dropped away and he looked like a six-year-old-boy unfairly accused of stealing his baby brother’s ice-cream cone. “You do know that about us, don’t you?”

“Yes,” honesty forced me to concede, “I do.” While Manuel had operated on the fringes of the law for as long as I’d known him, he’d stayed clear of dealing dope in any meaningful way, “meaningful way” being the operative terms here. However, he wasn’t above doing favors for friends from time to time, the kind of favors where you run a package over to someone for a quick twenty. I just didn’t want to be part of one of those favors.

“Good.” Manuel’s gold crown winked at me as he smiled. “Eli just suffered a small misfortune, is all. We’re trying to minimize the collateral ...”

I picked up my pen again. “Collateral as in a guaranteed loan?”

“No. As in damage,” Manuel explained impatiently.

That was me. Damage control. I turned to Eli. “You have five minutes to tell me what this is about.” I looked at the clock on the wall. “Starting now.”

Eli blinked again. The light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses made it difficult to read his expression. “I just feel like such a moron,” he said.

I refrained from the obvious comment and reminded him that the clock was ticking.

Eli fiddled with the bottom button of his jacket for a few seconds. He was just about to tell me why he felt like a moron when the front door opened and a little girl and her mother walked in. Three more people followed. It was a classic. What I want to know is this: Why do customers always come in clumps? Why do they always come when I’m in the middle of something? I predict that anyone who can answer this question stands to make himself a million dollars.

Eli and Manuel moved off to the side and fidgeted while I waited on everyone.

“I’ve been thinking that I’d like to study geography when I graduate from OCC,” Eli said as . . .