Lizzie! (6 page)

 

 

CHAPTER 12

W
ell, I know this sounds crazy with so much happening almost at once, but believe it or not, there was
a murder
practically in front of our cottage! Digger was the one who discovered it. It was the very next morning. He'd had insomnia again and he got up at four a.m. and puttered around and finally he pulled on a sweatshirt and went for a walk on the beach barefoot. Teresa is always after him to take walks. I remember the first day Mom and I met them on the beach, Digger wiggled his toes and said, “When I was a kid I never wore shoes except to school. And now after six months of going barefoot my feet are feeling young again.”

It was just as Mom was starting to get supper ready that Digger and Teresa stopped by our cottage. Digger told us in great detail everything that had happened, starting at four o'clock that morning.

“It was still dark but you could see the horizon line,” he began. “The tide was coming in and I sort of splashed through it. I was feeling pretty good for an old retired chief of police with a bad heart, and I watched the sky show streaks of pink and yellow as I walked. You know about the jetty?”

I said, “It's practically in front of our cottage and I sometimes see people who come out to fish from it.” I was remembering when Mom first got me this neat little pair of binocs so I could watch the shorebirds, of which there are many, and try to match them up with the pictures in
Birds of Florida.
So far I've learned to tell an ibis from an egret and not a whole lot more. I use them to people-watch too. Sometimes I can see somebody—usually a man but sometimes a woman—catch a fish and haul it in and drop it into their pail. Once there was this enormous skate, like a black kite. I could see them holding it up for everyone to admire. Little speedboats zoom around the jetty too. And twice, just as it was getting really dark, I got to see a man walk a long way out on the jetty and then another man give him something. I couldn't see exactly what it was.

But I needed to listen to what Digger was saying. “The jetty is where I try to walk to every morning—it's about half a mile away. You know, they made that jetty about thirty years ago. They dredged up those big rocks piled there to make the channel wide enough for all the cruise ships.”

I said, “Mom and I always go outside just before dark whenever a cruise ship is starting out. ‘Setting sail' is what they call it, though they don't hoist any sails anymore because they have big engines.”

I wanted to describe how each ship is about as long as a city block and every deck is all lit up like they're having a permanent New Year's Eve party. When they go through the channel they hoot their horns and that deep-throated sound always makes me shiver. Every cruise ship has to take a pilot along to navigate through the channel—it's the law—and then when the water is deep enough, a tender comes alongside to bring the pilot back to the harbor. But this wasn't the time. I had to pay attention to Digger.

“When I got there I saw someone out on the very end of the jetty. At first I thought he was fishing. He didn't move at all, so I thought maybe he'd fallen asleep. With the tide coming in, I thought he'd wake up pretty soon or else he was going to get very wet.”

“Was that a dead body? I bet it was.”

“Hold on, Lizzie. I'm getting to that. Well, I picked my way out there along the sandy strip between the rocks to see if I knew this guy and when I got there I saw his throat had been cut. The blood wasn't running down him anymore but the whole front of him was the reddish brown of dried blood, so I knew he'd been dead for a while.”

He paused for a moment. “Thing was, I had my flashlight but I'd forgotten my cell phone.” He turned to Teresa and said, “I knew you'd raise holy Toledo with me for forgetting it. You bought it for me to take whenever I went walking alone. I didn't see any lights on in any of the cottages and I didn't want to terrify anybody by pounding on their door. I know, I could have come around the side of your cottage and rapped on the window and woken you up, but there's something about finding a dead body and knowing it was a gruesome murder that gets me deep down. It's not my first murder, it's not even the first one involving a knife—the last one in California was a young woman who was killed in almost exactly the same way. It's an ugly discovery, it's something about knowing you were too late to stop all the blood loss; no, I couldn't barge in. I needed to walk it off. And even if I did wake some family up, after I used their phone to call 911 I'd have to wait around for the squad car to show up and then go back with them to the body and answer a hundred questions—and me barefoot! That would not look professional.”

He put his arm around Teresa. “By then you'd have called out the National Guard to look for me. So I walked back to call the police from our apartment and work it through my brain and also get some shoes on.”

“And then what happened?” I asked him. “Did they take the body away on a stretcher? Did they call the—is it the coroner? What do you call the guy who determines the cause of death?”

“Lizzie, where did you learn that language?” Digger asked.

“It's in the newspaper whenever there's been a mysterious death.”

“I give up,” he said. “You're right. It's called the medical examiner.”

“Yes, the medical examiner. And did they dust the body for fingerprints? How about on the jetty, did you find any clues?”

“Lizzie's into reading detective stories,” my mom said. She said it like she was apologizing for me, so I tried not to ask anything after that.

Digger went on to tell us that there was no identification on the body. “No wallet or keys, but maybe they'll find some labels in his sweatpants and sweatshirt. He was wearing a sort of ratty suit jacket and it had an L.L. Bean label but from the looks of him, he probably got it at a Goodwill store.”

“You didn't find a single clue?” I couldn't help asking. I was disappointed.

“The one item that might provide a clue though, was a silver flask in one pocket.”

“A silver flask just for water?”

Digger smiled. “No,
mi amor
, for liquor.”

“But it'll probably have fingerprints on it, don't you think?”

“Possibly. But if the victim hasn't ever been arrested his fingerprints won't be on file.”

“Maybe you can figure out where he bought it.”

“Maybe, my little detective. I know one detail about the killer that may prove useful going forward.”

“You do? What is it? Tell us, Digger.”

“I'll tell you but I don't want this to be known outside this room until I discuss it with the police. As of now I have offered my services. Of course I presented my credentials from Montandino, California.”

I said, “We promise, we promise. Now tell us.”

“The murderer was left-handed.”

“Is that all? How could you tell?”

“The murderer had to creep up on the victim from behind, just as I did. He had to use his left hand to cut the man's throat from right to left, do you follow me? If he were right-handed, he would have cut from the left side of the victim's throat.”

Teresa tsk-tsked. “We've only been here six months and already you're involved in solving a homicide.”

“Digger, I just thought of something.”

“What,
chica
?”

“Jeb Blanco is left-handed.”

Digger let out a low whistle. “This is a detail you must not mention to the reporters, you understand? I must tell it to the authorities first.”

“I promise. Do you want me to raise my right hand?”

Digger smiled. “Lizzie, I trust you.”

Well, you ca
n
just bet Digger's story got in the newspaper. Not just the local Woodvale paper, but the
Miami Clarion & Bugle
too. His picture was on the front page in both of them. And alongside the Digger we knew in sweatpants and baseball cap was a different Digger in a proper shiny chief of police hat and uniform with gold braid on the cuffs of the sleeves and upside-down
v
's on the arms. Teresa told me the
v
's were called hash marks and they stood for all the years he served as chief in their hometown in California.

The detail about which hand the murderer used was not in the papers. Digger said the police had agreed with him to withhold this information for the time being. They interviewed two local police officers also but they didn't add anything to what Digger had said. It was “The case is under investigation” and so forth, which Digger said was the usual.

When Digger gave a television interview for our local station, the reporter asked him how he felt about all the attention he was receiving. We saw his answer that evening on the six o'clock news.

“I'm used to it,” Digger said. “It happened often enough in California. Even in a little town we had our share of excitement.”

Teresa kind of snorted. “My modest husband.”

I could hardly wait to get to my computer so I could email Trippy all the latest info. I was dying to tell her that Digger knew the murderer was left-handed but I had promised not to, so I just told her about how he found the body. Just imagine opening an email from your best friend and finding out that a man had been killed practically on top of where she lives.

 

 

CHAPTER 13

W
ell, the next day right after Mom drove me home from school, there was Digger dressed in his chief of police uniform again, waiting with two police officers in front of our cottage. In my whole life this has never happened to me before. For just a second I thought they had come to arrest me because I knew about Julio from the day Trippy and I discovered the warehouse and I hadn't told right away, and that the woman officer was there to strip-search me before they put me in a jail cell.

But it turned out they only wanted to interview me and Mom (which of course should be
Mom and me
), because we had both met Jesús Ernesto Blanco, who said to call him Jeb.

Mom invited them in and we all sat in a row in the living room as dumb as doorstops and then the male officer, who said to call him Officer Frank for Frank Franklin, began.

“Now Lizzie, your mother has described how you and she first met Mr. Blanco. Do you remember anything special about him?”

So I had to tell about the royal-blue shirt with some sort of monogram and the shoes with tassels. And the blue eyes and the rimless glasses that made him look like a professor. And then I said that I thought I knew him from somewhere else, but when I said so he said he had the kind of face that everybody thought looked like somebody else. In Philadelphia he said a man stopped him on the street and was positive Jeb Blanco was his second cousin.

“You're very observant,” Officer Frank said and I saw his lips were twitching with what I thought was a smile. He was scribbling away in his notebook. “I must ask you not to divulge this information to the press, do you understand what that means?”

Of course I knew the word
divulge
. It has a neat origin from the Latin
di-vulgare
, to spread among the people—that's where we get the word
vulgar
too, but I also knew I hadn't divulged anything.

I suddenly had a flashback to two men I saw on the jetty where one was fishing, or maybe just pretending to be fishing while he waited for his buddy, and the other one was picking his way out to visit him. I was watching through my binocs and I thought to myself that the visiting man looked familiar, and my heart started to pound. Could it be Jeb Blanco! But I was too flustered inside to say anything to Officer Frank. “You understand, Mr. Blanco is now a person of interest.”

I waited for my heart to slow down and then I looked at Mom. I asked her, “Did you tell about what Henry said? About the plan to give away the land and all?”

“Yes, I reported the entire conversation.”

“So why don't we move on?” the woman officer said. Her name was Officer Brianna Hermann Kasperowicz and it barely fit on her yellow metal name tag. I wondered if the tags were custom-made for each officer, or did they buy one size and have to squeeze the letters on. This is the kind of thing that happens to me all the time where words are concerned, when I should be paying attention to the question.

“. . . after your mom went in the house with Henry,” she was saying. “Tell us what you did next.”

So I described Trippy wheeling my chair out past the vegetable garden, out through the cornfields, wheeling my chair between rows, one field after another, and how we finally came to the warehouse they all knew about from Digger. I corrected myself and said Chief Diego Martinez.

“But you didn't tell anyone what you saw when you peeked in,” Officer Frank said rather crossly. “Specifically, not even your mother that day. Why not?”

“It's hard to explain. Trippy and I knew we were probably trespassing and then we met this kid who turned out to be Julio who seemed sort of scared and he made us promise to keep him and the monkeys a secret. So that made us think the whole thing was dangerous, and we were scared, so we agreed not to say anything when we got back to Henry's.”

“But your own mother?”

“I wanted to tell Dig—Chief Martinez first.”

“But even before you told Chief Martinez you told that other kid in a wheelchair from your school, named Joshua Blaine?”

That made me mad. “His being in a wheelchair had nothing to do with it any more than my being in a wheelchair did. The way you said it shows you have lumped us together as the two cripples.” I knew I needed to cool it because you just don't say anything smart-alecky back to a policeman.

“Lizzie,” my mom began.

But Officer Frank broke in. “Whoa, back off now. I wasn't lumping anybody with anybody else.”

“Josh is my friend and I admit I told him first because he's the smartest person I know. It was his idea to Google Jesús Ernesto Blanco and find out what his background was. I swore Josh to secrecy, even under torture and in
durance vile
.”

Officer Frank looked perplexed, but now my mom spoke up.

“Lizzie likes to use unusual phrases. In
durance vile
is from Middle English. It means under harsh confinement.”

“Okay, and what did you find out about Blanco?”

So I told him everything we learned online, but I thought they must know all this by now, because they must have computers in the police station. He acted impatient and said, “Yes of course” while he went on scribbling, but I could tell that what I was telling him was brand-new news to him.

“But when you did tell Chief Martinez about the warehouse full of monkeys, what did he say?”

“He said we should go to the police.”

“And why didn't you?”

“We were going to. But it was nine p.m. by then and I begged him to come with me the next day and see for himself. I thought telling what a kid saw might not be taken as seriously as what he saw. I figured we could go to the police right after that.”

Officer Frank seemed to accept that explanation. He nodded.

“And then just as we drove up to the warehouse the door opened and this . . . this same kid who had told us his name was Julio came out. I didn't hear most of what they said to each other because I couldn't get out of the car but I knew Digger—I mean Chief Martinez—would find out who he was and what he was doing there and that way we'd have . . . a bigger picture to take to . . . to take to the authorities.”

With that Officer Frank Franklin got up and said, “Thank you. You've been very helpful. Steps will be taken by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to locate the tamarin monkeys. The interview is over.”

“And what about Buddy and Blossom? The bear cubs?”

“They will be confiscated immediately and relocated to a conservation site.”

So then I did a really stupid thing. I burst into tears. Not so much for the monkeys, although I know they are endangered and it was cruel and inhuman to capture them in the first place. I was crying for Buddy and Blossom. What would become of the cubs? And then Officer Brianna Longname came over and knelt down beside my chair. “I promise you that the cubs will go to an appropriate facility. Fish and Wildlife deal with this sort of problem every day and they are skilled caretakers.”

I blubbered, “So I will never see them again.”

“Maybe not,” Brianna said. “But you'll know that you probably saved their lives. They might have been taken out and shot or they might have been taken somewhere and just let loose to forage for themselves.”

“But they can't do that! They've had people caring for them from the time they were baby cubs!”

“Lizzie, I personally promise you the bears will go to a good home. I will make it my business to track them and report back to you, okay?”

I nodded and tried for a smile.

“And as far as everything you told us goes, you did a great job. Josh may be the smartest person in the class, but I bet you're tied with him.”

That made me feel a lot better. Afterward, Mom said she thought I bore up very well and that “shedding a few tears simply authenticated your testimony.” It took me a little while to digest that.

Later that day a photographer from the Woodvale paper arrived to take our picture. I asked her, “How did you find out about us?”

She explained about the police blotter. “It isn't like a desk blotter for ink anymore, though I think that's where the word comes from.”

I really liked her for being interested in words. “It's a record the police have to keep of every incident or crime in their jurisdiction. Because this is a democracy, every newspaper reporter has a right to read the blotter.” So that's how she found Digger. And the next day Digger was on the front page again, splendid in his uniform, seen conferring with Officers Frank and Brianna. And Mom and I were on the back page opposite Josh and his mom Jenna and his brother Greg, who had just gotten back from his Latin class trip to Tuscany, in Italy, and Josh's father Will. And guess what? Josh's father turns out to be a doctor at Dirk Isle Hospital. Mom spoke to him about Henry's mother and he promised to look into it. And sure enough, we were in the
Miami Clarion & Bugle
too, but not on the front page. We were inside, on the bottom half of the second page. “Below the fold” is how they say it in the newspaper world.

I couldn't sleep that night from thinking about Jeb Blanco who had seemed so smooth and well dressed and who turned out to be the Villain with a capital
V
because he was
trafficking
in endangered animals. And it wasn't just the tamarins that were keeping me awake. I wondered if Jeb Blanco had something to do with the murder. Hadn't I seen him walk out on the jetty with his briefcase? Or was it just somebody who looked like him?

You can believe that Josh and I were suddenly everybody's best friend at Graver. Kids who snickered behind our backs in class or totally ignored us in the lunchroom now wanted to know if we could come over to their houses. Winnie Ellerman, who is the class beauty, offered me a makeup session at her house where she had an eyelash curler and eyeliner and blush-on and she could give me a manicure. “It would be lots of fun Lizzie, and I have the coolest CD collection, lots of stuff I bet you've never heard, like heavy metal.”

I have to admit I was slightly tempted, especially about having my eyelashes curled. “I wish I could Winnie, but I think I have to come home every day after school to be available to the police.”

“Are they going to indict you?” Herbie “Hotshot” Fayerweather asked. These were the first words he had ever spoken to me. “Because my father is a lawyer and I bet I can get him to take your case.”

“But I haven't committed any crime! And besides I have a lawyer, he's my mom's boyfriend.”

I couldn't believe I said that. But it was getting to be true.