Death of a Toy Soldier (18 page)

Right about then, I ran out of questions to ask, which was good, because the toddler grew more demanding of her attention. When I vacated the O’Grady house, I left with a spot of a syrup-like substance clinging to the back of my sweater, a new appreciation for Mrs. O’Grady, and a five-by-seven portrait of her husband from happier days.

When I climbed back into my Civic, I set the photo on the passenger seat. “Who are you, Sullivan O’Grady? And what was it about you that made someone kill you?”

I started up the car, checked my mirror, and pulled away from the curb.

If I were going to retrace Sullivan O’Grady’s steps, the toy museum would be a stop I wanted to make. Jillian Hatley, the assistant curator, was the person who had sent us to Sy DuPont’s house in the first place. What would happen if I showed her the picture of Sully?

A new feeling of unease started growing in my gut. There was yet another connection involving toys. I didn’t want this murder to be about the toys. I wanted it to be about greedy relatives and ghost hunters, not something that would turn the focus one-eighty back onto the shop. Or perhaps on the biggest toy expert in East Aurora, Hank McCall.

There were plenty of open parking spots by the toy museum, and I learned why when I tried the door. Locked. I considered stopping at the bakery for a muffin to absorb some of the acid sloshing around my nervous stomach when Jillian rushed up to the door.

She pushed it open a couple of inches, waited her usual few seconds, then said, “Good morning, Liz. I’m sorry you had to wait.” Then she pushed open the door for me to enter.

“You don’t have to open up on my account,” I said. “I see I’m here before the official hours.”

Her head bobbed a little, as if she was listening to some translator over an earpiece. “No, that’s fine. I’m here anyway. You might as well come in, too.”

I followed her inside, resisting the urge to apologize.

She walked back to a vacuum cleaner parked in the middle of the room, unplugged it, and began coiling the cord. “Are you here to see something in particular?”

“Actually, I have another question. When you recognized the toy I showed you, it helped us and the police to identify the man who was killed in our shop. I’d like to show you a picture of that man. I believe he’s been to the museum, and I was wondering if you or Peggy might remember anything unusual about him or his visits here.”

She scrunched up her nose, just a little, and her eyebrows drew closer. “All right. If I have to, I will.”

I wondered at her reaction until I slid the photograph out of my purse and handed it to her. She placed one hand flat against her chest and closed her eyes.

“Jillian, what’s wrong?”

“He’s still alive.”

“I’m afraid to say this man is very much dead.” Did he have a doppelgänger? That would add a whole new dimension to this mystery.

“No, I mean in the photograph. I thought you were showing me a picture of the dead man, after he was killed.”

“Sorry to scare you. No wonder you didn’t want to see it. You were very brave.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to appear unhelpful.”

I let it go; otherwise, we’d be apologizing to each other all day.

She took the photograph and studied it. “I remember this man. He came in with a lot of kids. That’s pretty unusual.”

“People don’t bring their kids here?”

She tilted her head, as if I’d asked a particularly difficult question. “I guess kids like the new children’s museum, where they can touch things.” She gestured to the museum’s sealed displays. “Kids get bored just looking at toys locked away in glass cases. I asked Peggy if she could talk with the board about expanding, finding a bigger place where we could add a room where kids can play. I thought we could put some of the less valuable toys in there. So many of our donations end up in storage now because we don’t have the space to display them. But Peggy was against the plan. Said real estate was too expensive and that going through all the old toys would be too much work.”

“There’s probably something to that. They’d have to be tested for lead paint. So many children’s toys of the past wouldn’t be considered safe by today’s standards.” Like lawn darts.

“I suppose you’re right. It seems such a shame to see children leave here unhappy.”

I bet Jillian apologized to all their parents.

She tapped O’Grady’s picture. “His kids were well-behaved. As I recall, he showed them some toys that belonged to people he’d worked for. He’d taken some of our cards. He said he knew a few people who might have old toys to donate.” She tipped her head, then remained frozen that way for what seemed like forever.

“What are you thinking?” I finally asked.

“He was a bit agitated the last time he was here. He asked about a toy that someone had recently donated, and it wasn’t on display.”

“Not yet?”

“We don’t have room for every toy. Most of them are archived. Peggy picks out the best toys to display. Many don’t make the cut, I’m afraid.”

“By donated, do you mean bequeathed? Was Sully . . . this man . . . looking for a toy donated to the museum after its owner died?”

She nodded. “That’s how we get many of our donations.”

A few things suddenly fell into place with a satisfying snap. Sullivan O’Grady worked for terminally ill patients. He liked the museum. He took cards, probably using them to help convince some of his patients to donate their toys to the museum. Perhaps he’d convinced Sy DuPont to do the same. But Sully was apparently upset about the museum’s archival policies that last time he’d come. Was that what he was doing with the toys? Did he want an evaluation of them to determine if Sy’s toys should make the cut and be displayed in the museum?

“If I give you a list of names of donors, do you keep information on the toys they donated?”

“Of course,” Jillian said. “On the computer.” She pointed toward the back room.

“You going to be here a while?”

###

I swung by the toyshop and picked up Dad, promising him lunch if he’d help me with one small errand. As we parked in front of the health care agency again, he said, “That’s not exactly a small favor. It probably violates all kinds of company policies. Maybe even laws.”

I just smirked at him and he unbuckled his seat belt. “Fine,” he said, “but this is going to cost you dessert as well.” When I didn’t move, he stopped. “Aren’t you coming?”

“From the way that receptionist looked at you last time, I think you have a better chance if you go in alone.”

“You mean?” His eyes grew wide in what I suspected was feigned surprise. To prove it, he batted his eyelashes.

I socked him in the arm. “I don’t understand it, but yes.”

Dad reached for the door handle. “My fault for being such a chick magnet, I guess.”

“At least among the AARP set.”

He felt his chest. “My ego is crushed.”

“I wouldn’t want to see you give up your day job to become a gigolo or something. Now go work that charm of yours for a good cause.”

He saluted, climbed out of the car, and leaned back in. “If I have to take my shirt off, it’s going to cost you extra.” He winked and then headed to the front door, his limp nearly invisible. I bit my lip as I considered the implications. Dad found police work invigorating. There was no arguing the light in his eyes or the animation in his face. It was like a tonic to him. A deadly medicine.

I waited in the car for about half an hour, wondering exactly what Dad had to do to get the information, but he came out with a slip of paper and a silly grin.

“Oh, brother,” I said when he got back into the car.

“What, it was your idea.” He reached for his seat belt. “And it’s going to cost you. Big time.”

“You don’t mean you had to take off your shirt?”

“No.” He sent me a pleading look. “I have a dinner date for Friday night.”

I pulled away from the curb. “I’ll make sure you have a freshly ironed shirt.”

Jillian was busy with visitors when I dropped off the list of names of Sully’s former clients, and the kids in her tour group did indeed look bored. She promised to fax something over later that afternoon. After a leisurely and expensive lunch, Dad and I went back to the shop and tried to figure out, among our huge pile of outdated office equipment, if we had anything that would receive a fax.

“Yes, you do,” Cathy said. “The old printer. I had to fax a poem to a contest, and I remember hooking it up. Not that it was worth the effort.”

“Didn’t win?” Dad asked.

She folded her arms in front of her. “I won, all right. The poem was published in their anthology, but they didn’t pay me anything for it, and the book cost me forty-five bucks.”

I winced.

“But I am a published poet. One of the better ones in the book, if I say so myself. I had been considering submitting another one this year, but it seems the attorney general shut them down.”

Dad spun away so she couldn’t see his face. “What a pity.”

I dusted off the old printer and found it a place on the counter within reach of our landline—which took a bit of finagling, since this thing was a behemoth of old technology. I figured out how to send a fax from my laptop, and it printed out, so we were in business.

Then we waited. And waited. By late afternoon, Dad was yawning and stretching, so I sent him up for a nap. Othello followed him, as if he was seconding my suggestion. By five, Cathy was ready to head home to make dinner for Parker and then out to another of her writing groups.

“Are you sure you don’t need me?” She wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I can swing back after dinner . . .” Her hesitant expression indicated she’d be making an extreme sacrifice.

I gestured toward the empty shop. “I think I can keep the hordes at bay.” With no game tournaments bringing customers in and no tourists in town, especially after dark, I’d likely have the shop to myself tonight. Which would work out well, if Jillian ever managed to send that fax.

I stared out the window after Cathy left. At five, the sun had already been down for about twenty minutes, making it seem later than the hour. The days were short and still getting shorter. One could almost imagine the darkness growing stronger, plotting and scheming to obliterate the day entirely in one long night of darkness, cold, and snow.

I threw that thought aside as the Christmas lights along Main Street started popping on. I flipped the switch for our
own Christmas display in the window, and it lit up as well. No, the darkness would not win. Not tonight, anyway.

For good measure, I found a radio station playing holiday music and piped it through the store. I wondered how many of the items on our shelves had once been encased in holiday wrapping paper and opened by bright-eyed, excited children on Christmas morning.

I leaned against the counter and continued staring. Despite their collectability now, the items in our shop were probably not the cherished items from the tops of letters to Santa. Those had been ripped open first and played to death. The action figures still in their cases and the games still in their shrink-wrap, most prized by collectors today, were the items kids unwrapped and said “thank you” for (at least if they were taught manners) before they were shoved aside in favor of a more desired toy. Maybe this shop was really an island of misfit toys.

“Who needs therapy?” I’d just figured out why I felt so at home in this place.

A couple of holiday shoppers did venture in from the cold. One walked the store slowly, smiling over objects she recognized. After letting her know I was there to help if she needed anything, I left her to her reminiscences. While she was still making her circle through the store, another gentleman entered and picked up a few things to check price tags. He grimaced and left. A disappointed bargain hunter. But the woman purchased a couple of unopened blister packs of now-vintage Barbie clothes and an older sixties version of the board game Acquire—a highly collectable version since the
newer ones are cardboard. Of course, any time we can get our hands on a 1999 version, with its molded hotels, it’s snatched up online almost as soon as Miles can put it on eBay.

The last customer had been gone five minutes when the phone rang. It was Jillian.

“Liz, sorry it’s so late. It took me a few minutes to get everything together, and we’ve been rather busy today.”

“Not a problem, Jillian. I appreciate you doing that for me.”

She hung up after apologizing at least two more times. I disconnected the landline from our custom phone, which seemed to be staring at me woefully, and hooked it up to the fax machine. The machine answered a call moments later and, with a little technospeak, whirred into life and began to spit out paper.

I collected the documents, a large spreadsheet with cells that carried over onto other pages. I’d have to put these together, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, in order to see all the information. So I set up a table and began doing just that. When I had the pieces in place, I rummaged through the drawer, found a glue stick with a little life left in it, and glued it all into one large sheet.

The document was longer than I’d been expecting because Peggy had created a line for each toy donated rather than for each donor. Each line also had pertinent information about the donor, including address and telephone number, which seemed a bit useless considering these particular people were all dead. Presumably their houses were occupied by others and their phone numbers out of service.

I found the cells I was looking for. A small column for an item number followed by an identification, manufacturer, and condition. This was Dad’s area of expertise, of course, but if he was still napping, I didn’t want to wake him, especially for what was probably going to end up being a wild goose chase. Everything here looked in order. There was nothing sloppy in Peggy Trent’s operation, not that I expected there to be. If Sully had any qualms about her management, one glance at this spreadsheet, in all its organizational glory, should have put them to rest. Every toy was chronicled and evaluated and its location tracked. A column even listed the JPEG name of a picture of the item that was evidently also kept on file.

Dead end.

I jumped when someone tapped their fingers on the glass window. Miles, being funny, pushed his face against the glass until he resembled a Dick Tracy villain and held that position until I smiled.

Moments later, he opened the door. “Man, you are jumpy. Is the old man around?”

“He went up to nap earlier. I’m afraid he might be asleep for the night.”

“You sure he didn’t sneak out again?”

I started to answer, but then I realized I didn’t know what that answer was. “The alarms should be on,” I said. “Maybe I’d better go check. Mind the store?”

“Sure.” He removed his coat.

I found Dad sleeping on the sofa with Othello curled up on the armrest next to him. Dad’s snores mingled with the
cat’s loud purrs. “My two fellows.” I petted Othello’s head, then grabbed a throw blanket to put on Dad. He didn’t budge.

I locked the apartment door on the way down and checked the alarm on the back door leading to the alley before rejoining Miles in the shop.

“All tucked in,” I said. “I think this murder business keeps him up at night. I expect his body needs to catch up.”

Miles was leaning over the printout from the museum. “These aren’t ours.”

“Those toys have been donated to the museum.”

“Too bad. There’s a few things in here I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on.” He tapped one row. “This old tin rocket ship. Japanese. Some of the old Japanese tin is highly collectible. I’d have to fight buyers off with a stick.”

I followed his finger to the line. “That’s a lot of zeroes.” I scanned the whole entry. This item, in good condition, was currently on display in the museum. No surprises there.

“Too bad about the astronaut. That would have been a wicked set.” He pointed to the line below it. The tin astronaut was identified in the “Condition” column as a “Repro.”

“Someone is reproducing these?” I continued to scan the line. The value was listed at about twenty dollars, and the location of this one was the archives.

“Yeah, there’s quite a market in repros. Old tin toys. Even pull toys. Some antique dealers even buy a few to put in their shops. They rough them up to make them appear older.”

My eyebrows jumped up. “Fraud?”

“Not if they don’t make false claims. All they have to do is price them low and say that they don’t know a lot about toys. Unsuspecting buyers rarely ask a lot of questions. They think
they’re being all shrewd and getting a steal, but they’re the ones getting ripped off. They find that out when they realize they’ve got nuts where they should have rivets. Or plastic feet when they should be wood. Or the parts don’t line up right. They never make these repros perfect.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“Your dad.” Miles winced. “I, uh, might have gotten taken a time or two when I first started buying for the shop online. I felt bad about it. Offered to repay the difference. He reminded me that if things are too good to be true, they’re usually not.”

“One of my first life lessons.” I scanned the “Condition” column on the spreadsheet with my finger, stopping several places where the condition was listed as a “Repro.”

“Looks like the museum got taken for a ride a few times,” Miles said.

I massaged a knot in the back of my neck. “Not really swindled, since these are all donations.”

“Why would someone donate repros to the museum?” Miles asked. “You think they didn’t know?”

“These donors are all deceased. No way of finding out.” Well, at least short of asking Althena if we could set up another séance.

Miles shrugged his coat back on. “If your Dad is pulling a Sleeping Beauty, I guess what I had to tell him can wait until tomorrow.”

“Was it about your friends? Did you learn anything new?”

Miles paused. “I’m not going to call them my friends anymore. I did find one of them who was a little less tight-lipped than the others.”

“And?”

He shuffled on his feet.

“I am working with Dad on this,” I said. “I promise, nothing you tell me goes past the walls of this shop.”

“I didn’t learn anything much. Just that they were being paid to retrieve something from the house. Only whoever wanted them to do it wouldn’t pay enough to make it worth the risk.”

“That’s not much more than we already knew. No ID on who made them the offer?”

“Well, no name. But I did learn that negotiations are ongoing.”

“So someone still wants something from inside the house. And wants it badly enough to try to hire a gang of kids to break in.”

“They almost got caught last time. If they were smart, they’d take it as a sign to go straight. Apparently they’ve taken it as a sign to ask for more cash up front.”

“No idea what this item is?”

“Nor am I likely to find out. Asking questions is making me look suspicious. I told them I wasn’t working with the cops. Not sure I convinced them.”

“Even though it’s true?”

“I’m sure they still consider your father a cop, despite his retirement. I have the feeling they have more regard for him, anyway.”

“No love for the new chief?”

“They’re pretty silent on the subject.”

“I wonder why.”

Miles snorted. “I struggled through Psych 101 in school, so I’m not sure I can help in that area. But I’ll keep poking around.” He pushed on the door to leave.

“Miles?” I called after him. “Be careful.”

“Always.” He waved and was out into the December night.

The wind drifted in from the door, giving me a brief chill that I hoped was temperature related and not some sense of foreboding. Dad would never forgive himself if something happened to Miles, especially if the young man was acting as an informant. I rubbed the goose bumps down on my arms and sneaked off to the back room for a cup of coffee. I changed my mind and went for the hot chocolate. With marshmallows.

By the time I’d carried my steaming mug back into the shop, I was frustrated and a little spooked. The chills remained and reminded me of Kimmie and her ghost hunters. They claimed a sudden chill was a response to spirits in the room. But who would be haunting the shop? We had no claim to Millard Fillmore, at least not that I knew of. But Sullivan O’Grady immediately popped into mind. Not that I thought his spirit lingered in the shop. At the same time, could any of us really be at rest until the killer was caught? At any moment, Ken might decide that the circumstantial evidence he had against my father was enough to hold him. Then my whole life would come tumbling down like the blocks in a poorly played game of Jenga.

I slid back into my chair, cradled the warm cup in my hands, and stared at the spreadsheet. Its precise rows and full accounting of every object was complete and irrefutable. Why
had I wanted this so-called evidence? My own dislike for Peggy had made her a target of my investigation, maybe because she was convenient. Like my dad was convenient in Ken’s investigation and the Wallaces were convenient in Cathy’s estimation. But choosing convenient scapegoats wasn’t what police work was supposed to be. It was supposed to be about truth, evidence, and justice.

The evidence I’d collected only proved that Peggy was organized and efficient. Still, all was not lost. I could probably replicate this spreadsheet to keep track of our own inventory at the shop.

I glanced at it again as I sipped my hot chocolate. Peggy was sharp, I had to give her that. Not only for her organization, but she had to really know her toys if she recognized all these repros among this donated lot.

Then I think I inhaled a minimarshmallow, because I started coughing and my eyes teared up. I rubbed them with my sleeve and tried to wash down the tickle with more hot chocolate, even as I stared at the spreadsheet through the teary blur.

Why would someone donate repros?

The question was not as simple as it appeared at first blush.

These donors had all been patients of Sullivan O’Grady. They had all been terminally ill. Sully had presumably found these toys while cleaning their attics or basements. At his request, they donated the toys to the museum, toys that had probably been forgotten and left in storage for years or decades. Treasure in the attic.