In Plain Sight

by Barbara Block

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

It's raining in Syracuse. Amateur sleuth Robin Light half-wishes her pet store, Noah's Ark, would just get up and float away—business is that bad. A client finally comes calling—only to wind up dead a few days later. . .floating in the local reservoir. If there's one thing Robin's sure of it's that Marsha Pennington didn't kill herself. Not when the dead woman's malicious husband was fighting for custody of Marsha's beloved twin Shih Tzus. Fueled by her diet of junk food and Scotch, and with some much-needed help from her ex-cop friend George Simpson, Robin searches for the link between the woman's murder, a runaway student, a bookie, and an incredible epidemic of bats. But for Robin, it's already too late. She has been marked for certain extinction by a vicious killer who waits. . .in plain sight.

Release date: October 22, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 334

Sample

It was four o’clock on a dreary Friday afternoon in mid-April. I was standing near the cash register, watching the rain streaking down the windows, wishing for a Scotch, and trying to figure out how I was going to pay all my bills this month, when a figure from my past walked into the store. Time had definitely not been kind to Marsha Pennington, I decided as she closed her umbrella and came toward me. Fifteen years ago she’d been a young, thin, bubbly blonde; now she was an overweight, middle-aged, stoop-shouldered brunette.

“Robin, remember me?” she asked uncertainly as she tucked a strand of limp brown hair behind her ear. “The Crestville. Apartment 2B.” I guess I must have looked shocked because she added, “I know I’ve changed.”

“No you haven’t,” I lied, trying to make up for the thoughts she’d read on my face.

Marsha sighed. “We had some good times back then, didn’t we?”

“Yes we did,” I agreed, though what I mostly remembered were the endless hours I’d spent listening to Marsha chatter on about her china painting class or the flowers she was planning on stenciling on her bathroom wall or which grocery store had the best sales this week. Ten minutes into the conversation and I usually found myself struggling to stay awake. By the time I’d left the complex I’d taken to avoiding her whenever I could.

“I tried calling after you moved. “

“I know.” I hadn’t returned them. “I’m sorry. I just got busy.” Then I flushed, embarrassed by how I sounded.

Marsha smiled sadly and changed the subject. “So this is your store?”

“As long as I can keep paying the bills.” Which these days was becoming more problematic. Thanks to a snowy winter and a soggy spring our receipts were down by thirty percent. I kept hoping the weather would take a turn for the better, but so far all it did was rain.

She pointed to a hyacinth macaw I was baby sitting for a customer.

“How much for that?”

“Twelve hundred dollars if she was for sale, which she’s not.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“It’s a lot of bird.”

Marsha wiped a stray drop of water off her cheek with the back of her hand. “I’ve read about you in the papers,” she told me. “I guess that makes you a celebrity.”

I gave a dry little laugh. “Not quite.” I’d solved a couple of homicides in the past two years and the papers had given the cases some play.

“Well, nobody’s ever written about me.” Her voice contained a hint of envy. Then she gave me a long, hard look. “You’ve changed, too.” Her tone implied it wasn’t for the better either.

I did a quick mental inventory. Maybe time hadn’t been kind to either of us. When Marsha had known me my red hair had been bobbed. I’d worn short, straight skirts, silk shirts, blazers, and tons of makeup. I’d been an up-and-coming reporter at the Herald Journal. Now my hair was a little duller and my wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of jeans and T-shirts. As for makeup—I didn’t wear any at all—not even lipstick. But the animals didn’t seem to care and neither did I.

“I’m sorry to hear about your husband,” she continued.

Undoubtedly she’d read about that in the papers, too. Murphy’s demise had gotten a lot of ink. I nodded but didn’t say anything. I still don’t like talking about his death. ODing on cocaine is not my idea of a graceful exit, and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to idle social chitchat.

Marsha glanced around the store. “I like this place. I like the name, too. Noah’s Ark. Very clever. Was it Murphy’s idea or yours?”

“Mine.”

“I figured as much. Murphy never was very good with words.” Marsha patted her hair again. The overhead light picked up the strands of gray woven through the brown. “I have two dogs you know. Shih Tzus. You want to see a picture of them?” And before I could answer she reached in her bag, fished out her wallet and opened it. “Here they are,” she said, a proud parent passing out photos of her progeny.

I glanced at it. The picture looked as if it had been taken professionally. The two small dogs were sitting side by side in a green brocade armchair. Their top knots were both held together with gold bows. They’d been groomed to within an inch of their lives.

“They’re why I came.” As she took her wallet back she looked at the photograph and smiled. Her face lit up. For a second I saw the old Marsha. Then the glow was gone. “Is there someplace we can talk? Somewhere private?” she asked as she put her wallet away. “Somewhere I could sit down?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” I mean it wasn’t as if I was exactly overrun with customers. I had the time. And I was curious about what had brought her to the store.

I took Marsha into the room that passes for my office. It’s a small windowless space, ten feet by twelve at the most. At one end is my desk and two chairs. Fifty-pound bags of pet food, cedar shavings, and cat litter take up the rest of the area. As I walked in Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, jumped down from my desk with a sample box of pet food clamped in her jaws. The twit. When I tried to grab her she ran through my legs and scooted out the door. Marsha laughed. For a few fleeting seconds her face was animated again, and then as quickly as it had come the sparkle was gone.

“So what’s up?” I asked after she and I were seated.

She fiddled with the cuff of her yellow-green blouse. The color didn’t do much for her complexion. Neither did the ruffles around her chest and neck. They made her look heavier than she really was.

“I teach ESL at Wellington High now,” Marsha informed me as she shifted her weight this way and that trying to get comfortable in a chair that was too narrow for her. When I’d known her she’d been working as a typist out at GE. “It’s nice teaching English to immigrants. I like it.”

“I’m glad.” Whatever it was she’d come to tell me, it certainly wasn’t this, but that was okay. I could wait. To pass the time I took a Camel out of the pack in my pocket, lit it with my new toy, a gold cigarette lighter, and exhaled. I figured as long as I was waiting I might as well smoke, but Marsha didn’t see it that way.

She frowned and coughed and ostentatiously waved her hand in front of her face. “Do you have to do that?” she complained.

I told her I did. After all, this was my office and my time she was taking up. To emphasize the point I took another puff and put my feet up on my desk.

“Merlin smokes, too,” she said, her face a mask of disapproval. “I could never get him to stop. Even when he said he had, he was lying. I could smell the tobacco every time I got into the car.” She started plucking at the cuff of her blouse again. “We’re getting divorced, you know.”

“You’ve been married a long time.”

“Too long,” Marsha spat out. “I should have done this years ago.”

Actually I was surprised she hadn’t. From what I remembered, Merlin was a soft, squishy man who drifted from job to job always complaining that everything that went wrong was somebody else’s fault.

“Years ago,” Marsha repeated to herself. “But I’m doing it now,” she said to me.

“Good, but what does this have to do with me?” I spun my lighter around with the tip of one of my fingers. In truth, I really didn’t want to hear about her lousy marriage—it made me think of my own.

“It’s the dogs.” Marsha leaned forward. “He’s suing for custody of Pooh and Po.” Her eyes narrowed. “And I won’t let him have them. He thinks he can take them from me, but he’s wrong. They’re my babies.” She pounded the desk with the palm of her hand. “He hates them. He comes in and kicks them out of the way. He doesn’t walk them. He doesn’t feed them. He doesn’t pet them. The only reason he wants them is because he knows how much I love them. But I won’t let him have them. I won’t. They need a special diet. I make them hamburger and rice every day. And Po has to have his heart medicine. They need me and I don’t know what I’d do without them.” Suddenly Marsha’s face crumpled. She bent her head, opened her pocketbook and began rummaging around for a tissue. “You must think I’m very silly,” she said a moment later as she dabbed at her eyes.

“Not at all,” I assured her. “In my experience sometimes dogs are nicer than people. “

Marsha smiled weakly at that and started plucking at the ruffle around her collar. “I just can’t bear the thought of what Merlin would do to them.” Then she squared her shoulders and looked me in the eye. “Hell will freeze over before I let him have my babies.”

I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward. “I can understand the way you feel, but what I don’t understand is why you’re telling me this.”

Marsha put her hands on the desk and leaned forward, too. “I’m telling you this because Merlin is doing something dirty. I want to find out what it is.”

I ground out my cigarette in the glass I was using as an ash tray. Guess there was no sense in suggesting mediation. “What you need is a private detective.”

“No,” Marsha said emphatically. “What I need is you.”

“But I don’t have a license,” I protested.

“I don’t care. I’ve already been to two detective agencies. They thought this was funny.” Marsha’s mouth quivered in indignation at the memory. “They thought I was some nutty middle-aged broad.”

They were right. She was. But so what? Everybody has to have something to love. Why should it matter if the objects of her affection had four legs instead of two? I started fiddling with my lighter. “What you say may be correct,” I replied slowly. “But an agency will still do a better job than I will. For one thing they have more resources.”

“It doesn’t matter how many resources they have. They’ll just take my money and sit around and have a good laugh at my expense. Please,” Marsha begged. “Merlin can’t get my babies. He just can’t. You have to help me. Will you?”

Looking back, I think I said yes because I felt guilty about the way I’d treated her all those years ago. Marsha was always happy to collect the mail and water the plants when Murphy and I were away. When she’d baked a pie or a batch of cookies she’d always given us some. All she’d wanted to do was become a friend, but I’d been too bored by her endless chatter, too self-involved to see how lonely she was.

Marsha beamed when I told her I’d take the job. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down,” she burbled. “I knew it. You were always good that way. Now they’ll be safe.” And she continued talking about her dogs as she reached back in her pocketbook, a scratched black leather job big enough to fit one of her Shih Tzus in, and took out a crumpled white envelope.

“I have three hundred dollars in here. I hope that’s enough,” she exclaimed worriedly.

“It’s fine,” I reassured her as I opened the envelope up and took out the money. The bills were all worn twenties. Cookie jar cash. I put the money back where it had come from and slid the envelope under a pile of catalogs. “Okay,” I said, getting back to the business at hand. “You said you thought Merlin was dirty.”

“I think he may be cheating on his taxes.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because of these. I took them out of his desk.” And Marsha opened her bag again, put her hand in it, and began rummaging around. “Damn.” She peered inside her bag. “Where are those papers? I know they’re here.” Her rummaging became more frantic. “They’ve got to be,” she muttered as she dumped everything out of her bag onto my desk and began pawing through folded pieces of paper, blue exam books, old playbills, and a bank statement or two.

“Maybe you left them someplace,” I finally suggested when it was apparent that wherever the papers where they weren’t in her bag.

Marsha went through everything again. “No. I know they’re in here.”

“They’re not,” I pointed out. “Why don’t you just calm down and think.”

“You’re right.” Marsha swept everything back in her pocketbook. “Of course you’re right.” And she began gnawing anxiously on the inside of her lip.

Another moment, I remembered thinking, and she’d dissolve into a puddle of tears. “Maybe the papers are in your car,” I suggested after a minute of silence had gone by. “Or maybe you left them at work.”

Marsha clapped her hands. “Yes. Work. That’s it. I cleaned my bag out right before fifth period.” If this was clean, I would have hated to see it before, but of course I didn’t say that. “The papers must be on my desk.”

Well, at least we were making progress. “Do you want to go back and get them now?”

Marsha looked at me as if I was stupid. “Nobody is there.” I’d forgotten. It was Good Friday. Schools had the day off.

“Then what about tomorrow?” I suggested.

She shook her head again. “School will be closed till Monday. And even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t get the papers. I won’t be here. I’m going down to Jersey to see my mother in a little while. She hasn’t been feeling well lately. Her arthritis is acting up again. I promised her I would drive down for a visit with Po and Pooh. We won’t be back till Sunday.” Marsha sighed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t seem to get anything right anymore.”

“You’re just having a bad day,” I said, trying to make her feel better.

Marsha gave a short bark of a laugh. “I’m having a bad year.” She pulled the corners of her mouth up in a lousy imitation of a smile. “I’ll come by on Monday afternoon with the papers. We can talk then, if it’s okay with you.”

I reached for another cigarette. “Hey, you’re my client. Anything you want is fine with me. Within reason of course.”

“Thanks again,” Marsha said, and she got up to go. She was halfway to the door when she turned around and came back. “Promise me you won’t let anything happen to Po and Pooh,” she said.

“I promise,” I told her. Given the circumstances what else could I say?

“Good.” Marsha heaved a sigh of relief, turned around, and left.

It was the last time I saw her alive.

Twenty minutes after Marsha left, Enid Garriques walked through the door. It was turning out to be a busy day after all.

“I’ve been expecting you,” I told her as I watched her calibrate her smile to the requisite degree of social correctness.

“Well, it is that time again.” For the past three years she’d come in to buy her husband a birthday present. “Any suggestions?” she asked after we’d exchanged pleasantries.

“He’s been admiring the retic.” And I pointed to the back where Monty, our reticulated python, was living.

Enid pursed her lips. The movement made her chin look even smaller. She was one of those short, dark women who have a brief moment of beauty and then quickly balloon into a fat, plain middle age. “I was thinking more along the lines of a salt water tank. He’s been talking about starting one up.”

I did diplomatic. “Either would make a nice present. How many gallons were you thinking about?”

“Fifty.”

“That will run you some money.” Not that she couldn’t afford it.

“I don’t mind.” In the three years Enid had been coming in, she always bought her husband something big and expensive. I’d heard she’d bought her husband as well. “Why don’t you show me what you have?” she asked while I wondered if the rumor was true.

I spent the next half an hour helping Enid put together an attractive package. We had just finished pricing the items when Tim came in. He’d been with the shop ever since Murphy had opened it and knew everything about reptiles there was to know.

“Mrs. Garriques is thinking about getting her husband a salt water tank,” I told him.

“Nice choice,” Tim said and moved off to the other side of the store.

It was better that way. Although Enid had never said it, she’d let it be known that she preferred doing business with me. I don’t think she approved of Tim’s shaved head, earrings, and tattoo.

Enid tapped her fingers on her expensive brown leather clutch. “Let me think about this for a while.”

“Go right ahead.” If past experience was any indication, she’d come back three or four more times before she bought anything.

“Think she’ll get him the snake?” Tim asked after Enid left.

I shook my head. “She doesn’t like snakes. I’m putting my money on the fish.”

Tim reached down and scratched Pickles, the store cat, under his chin. “You know my mother never got me what I wanted when she bought me a present. She always got me the things she thought I should have.”

“Mine, too.”

“I wonder why people do that?”

“I don’t know.”

We were still discussing the subject when Manuel barged in. The kid’s breath was coming out in ragged gasps. Drops of rain ran down his cheeks and off his chin. His shirt was plastered to his body. It looked as if he’d run all the way here. As he hurried toward me I noticed that he was wearing two different sneakers.

“The police chasing you?” Tim said.

Manuel shot him a dirty look. “You got no call to say that. None at all.”

“So what’s the matter?” I asked, intervening before an argument got started. The constant rain had made everyone cranky and out of sorts.

“The matter is there’s a bat in my bedroom. I woke up and picked up my pants off the floor, and this thing flew out and started flapping around the room.”

“So you ran?” Tim said.

Manuel flushed. “Hey. I could have been bit. It could have sucked out all my blood when I was asleep.”

Tim pulled in his cheeks and did a bad Bela Lugosi imitation. “Come into my castle,” he intoned, “and let me suck your blood. Give me a break.”

Manuel gave Tim a venomous look. “They can do that. I seen it on a TV show.”

“The bats you’re talking about live in South America and attack farm animals,” I gently informed him. “The ones we have here eat bugs.”

Manuel scratched the tuft under his chin he called a goatee and looked down at the floor. “I don’t care,” he muttered. “I don’t like them anyway. Can I hang out here till it goes away?”

“How about I get rid of it for you instead?”

Manuel brightened. “Will you?” he asked me.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied. “Why not?”

Taking twenty minutes to catch the bat seemed infinitely preferable to having Tim and Manuel at each other’s throats for the rest of the day.

Tim rubbed the top of his head. “This is the third bat sighting we’ve had this week.”

“I know.” When you run a pet shop people figure that you know everything there is to know about anything that crawls, slithers, trots, or flies. Both of the other calls had been equally panicky. Most people don’t like bats, especially bats that are flying around their houses. I’d removed the bats from the other places as well. I’d done it partially as a favor to the people, who were my customers, but mostly because I’d felt sorry for the bats.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Yes I do.”

“I wonder what’s going on?”

“Why don’t you call the zoo and see if they know something?” I suggested as I took my butterfly net out from underneath the counter and reached for my work gloves. They were made out of four layers of heavy cotton. Over the past week I’d become extremely fond of them. Bats are mild creatures, but any animal will bite if they’re under enough stress; and since being pursued by a large-net-bearing human constitutes stress it seemed wise to take precautions, especially since there was a rabies alert in effect in Onondaga County. If I did get bitten, I’d have to take shots as a precautionary measure, and even though the series now consisted of seven shots in the arm instead of twenty-one in the belly, it was something I’d definitely like to avoid if at all possible.

“I’ll be back soon,” I told Tim as Manuel and I headed for the door.

The rain was still falling and Manuel and I dashed to the car. Another week or so of this and I’d get to see if my store, Noah’s Ark, would live up to its name and float, I thought as I stepped in a puddle and cursed. Manuel stopped in front of my Checker cab. Murphy had found it when he was visiting a friend down in Brooklyn. It was one of the few nice things he’d ever done for me. When he’d bought it it had 50,000 miles on it. Now it had over 150,000. I loved it even though it was hard to start when the temperature got down below twenty, and the left signal light had a permanent short that no one could find, and the heater didn’t always work. Oh, well. I guess the things we adore are never perfect.

Manuel sneezed. “This weather really sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied as I opened the door and slid behind the wheel.

Manuel got in on the other side and closed his door. It didn’t shut all the way.

“You have to slam it hard,” I reminded him. “It sticks.”

“I forgot.” I heard a whomp. The car shook.

“Not that hard,” I snapped as I turned the ignition key.

The motor grumbled and caught. I turned on the headlights and the windshield wipers and eased out of the lot. Ash was deserted. So were Pine and Oak. The only person I saw was a wino leaning against the wall of a scabby-looking liquor store called The House of Fine Wines, fine in this case meaning Thunderbird or Ripple.

A couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Manuel’s mom’s place. It was a yellow, nondescript, run-down two-story colonial that housed the always changing parade of people that constituted Manuel’s family. The porch sagged and the postage-size front yard was filled with discarded Big Wheels, jump ropes, balls, and crumpled up Big Mac bags. Surprisingly no one was home. Usually the house was full of playing children and chattering adults.

“Where is everyone?” I asked Manuel as he hurriedly led me through a hallway cluttered with bikes and basketballs and sneakers.

“They went to Rochester to visit my great aunt,” he explained as we stopped in front of what had once been the den and now served as a bedroom for Manuel and his two cousins.

“You mean they left you alone for the holiday?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to go. I hate it there. Especially at Easter. There are all these little kids running around all over the place and we got to go to church and then we hafta to sit at this table and eat all this food.”

“Sounds horrible. When do they bring out the bamboo splinters?”

Manuel narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, well, maybe you wouldn’t like it so much if you were sitting there and everyone kept asking you what you were doing with your life.”

“No, you’re right I wouldn’t,” I replied softly, remembering a few of those meals myself. It was tough being in that position, especially when you didn’t have an answer to give them.

“Okay then.” Manuel swallowed and pointed to the door. “It’s in there.”

When I opened the door Manuel jumped back. Nothing flew out. I poked my head in. I didn’t see anything flying around.

“The bat probably went to sleep,” I told Manuel as I stepped inside.

I looked around. The room was so cluttered it was hard to move. Each wall had a bed pushed against it. The walls themselves were covered with posters of heavy metal groups. Piles of clothes and towels carpeted the floor. The room smelled of incense and pizza and socks that needed to be washed.

“Have you got him?” Manuel called out from the hallway two seconds later.

“I don’t even see him.” I put my net down on the floor and took a more careful look around the room.

“Where is he?”

I started poking around. “Probably burrowing in one of the dirty piles of clothes.” This could take a whi. . .