The Babbling Brook Naked Poker Club - Book One (26 page)

I stood as well and approached the family
I’d picked out, clutching my chest and gasping. They turned toward
me, and I almost had a heart attack for real. The man, who’d been
facing away, looked exactly like that police officer who’s been
nosing around Brookside.

I had no choice but to go through with the
plan. I slumped to the floor, pulling on the woman’s coat. From my
position on the floor, I saw Amanda with her Nordstrom bag
disappearing into the crowd that had turned to look in my direction
when the woman yelled for help.

I struggled back to my feet. The man I
suspected was a police officer assisted me with a strong grip on my
arm.

“Are you all right? Ah, it’s Mrs. Prisant,
isn’t it?” he said, removing the last vestiges of hope I was
mistaken about who he was, although I did wonder how he knew who I
was.

“I’m perfectly fine. I just slipped.”

“And perfectly timed it was.” He grinned at
me.

That was when I saw Amanda being escorted
toward us by a man who was using one hand to grip her by her arm
and the other to hold the Nordstrom bag.

“I’m so sorry, Grandma,” she said.

But I was the one who was sorry.

Mac

It was a good thing Dillingham had agreed to come to the mall and
help me keep an eye on things, since he was the one who spotted the
granddaughter while I was dealing with Edna Prisant’s fake heart
attack. I had thought it wise to know what Edna looked like in case
she picked up the ransom instead of Eddie, and recognizing her from
the description Josephine and Lillian had given me was a snap.

My plan, once we knew the drop-off location,
had been to pick a spot from which to take pictures of whoever
picked up the backpack. Kate was the one who suggested she and
Teddy could provide the perfect cover for me to hang around the
food court. Since I didn’t intend to approach Eddie, I’d judged it
safe for them to be there.

It didn’t take us long after Dillingham
apprehended the granddaughter to determine she was an innocent
bystander roped in by her grandmother’s bizarre, but believable,
story about a scavenger hunt.

Neither of us considered Edna a flight risk,
but sending her back to her apartment risked her disposing of
evidence. Therefore, Dillingham escorted her and the granddaughter
back to the station for questioning while I dropped my gang of
helpers off at Brookside.

By the time I made it to the station,
Dillingham had gotten a full confession from Edna. We then
accompanied her to her apartment where we recovered the baseball
card, necklace, and several other items she admitted to stealing.
She also told us where to find the painting.

“It went well?” Josephine said when I got
back to her place two hours later.

I nodded.

“What did she do with the painting?”

“It’s under your bed.”

Josephine blinked, then led the way to her
bedroom to check. I slid the painting out for her, carried it into
the other room, and re-hung it.

She stood looking at it. “I’m glad it’s
safe,” she said. “Did she tell you why she did it?”

“She was trying to raise money for her
granddaughter’s college fund.”

“I see. Are you charging her?”

“Well, she didn’t actually steal the
painting, and since there was no money in the backpack Amanda
picked up—”

“You have no evidence against her,” I
said.

“Not exactly. While we can’t charge her with
stealing the painting, you can press charges for her trying to
extort a payment from you and for drugging you. And she’s also on
the hook for the other thefts.”

“She confessed?”

“Yes. And she’s turned over a stash of
items, including the necklace and baseball card.”

“What about the stamp?”

“She conned her son into selling it.”

“All to send her granddaughter to
college.”

“So she says.”

“And what about Eddie?” Lillian said.

“Edna said he was the one who removed the
painting. But it was at her suggestion, and she claims he didn’t
even break in, since the door was open.”

“Does that mean you have less on Eddie than
you have on her?”

“Looks that way.”

As we talked, Teddy curled up on the floor
and fell asleep. I carried him into Josephine’s bedroom and laid
him on the bed, and she got an afghan out of the closet and tucked
him in.

Back in the living room, Kate’s pies were
served. Then Josephine got out the Erdradour, glasses, and a deck
of cards. I was off duty by then, so I poured Scotch in the glasses
for those who wanted it while Josephine and Lillian took turns
explaining the rules for naked poker to Kate, who was enthusiastic
about playing.

Devi had been quiet all day, and several
times when I glanced at her, I saw her examining Kate with a
thoughtful look. It made my heart sore watching Devi, knowing what
she was probably thinking.

“Mac, your turn to come back from the clouds
and ante up,” Josephine said. She picked up her Scotch, and with a
wink, poured it into my glass.

I shook my head to clear it, added two paper
clips to the pot, and asked for three cards.

“There was no sign of Eddie anywhere near
the pickup?” she asked, dealing me the cards.

“Not a whiff that we could see, but Edna
admits she added pills to both the cream puffs, then she had Colter
give them to you. Lillian’s had a much smaller dose, by the
way.”

“Did seem like I slept real good that
night,” Lillian said.

“Did Eddie know they contained drugs when he
gave them to us?”

“She says he did.”

“Hmm,” Josephine said, looking at Devi.
“Maybe that’s the leverage your lawyer needs to make Eddie drop his
suit.”

I looked across the table and caught Devi’s
eye. She blinked and glanced away. It occurred to me that, given
the way Josephine was nudging me about Devi, she was very likely
nudging Devi about me. With that whirling through my head, I wasn’t
paying enough attention to my cards.

Kate, on the other hand, caught on quickly.
She won a hand, and then Josephine and Lillian won the next two,
but Devi and I were both playing poorly, and if I lost less than
Devi, she would have to tell a story. But it seemed ungallant to do
that to her. Besides, I wanted to hear Devi’s stories because she
wanted to tell me, not because she’d been coerced by a card
game.

Over the next few hands, I steadily reduced
my stake.

“A person would almost think you like to
lose, Mac,” Josephine said.

“Nobody likes to lose.” I accompanied the
words with my best inscrutable smile. “I take it it’s about time
for a story?”

“It is.”

I’d already been thinking about it once I
decided to lose more clips than Devi.

“And no exploding dolls this time,”
Josephine said. “You lost big. We want something juicy.”

“Okay. Juicy it is.” I stopped, took a sip
of Scotch, and began. “This happened when I was on the Cincinnati
police force. My partner and I got a call to investigate a missing
girl. Trudy was five and had gone missing during the night.

“The mom looked too old to have a
five-year-old, and that was our first clue this might not be what
we thought it was. But in that neighborhood, many of the women
called Mom were grandmothers, so we began to question her. She was
distraught, barely coherent at times. We asked her to describe
Trudy, and she said Trudy was black. That part we expected, but the
next part, about Trudy having a white ruff, we didn’t expect. We
asked to see a picture and, sure enough, Trudy was a cat.

“My partner was getting up to leave, but the
woman pulled on my sleeve, saying she knew where Trudy was—trapped
in a neighbor’s storage shed.

“I asked why she didn’t just ask the
neighbor to open the shed, and she said she was afraid of him. I
asked her to show me where the shed was.

“She led the way out her back door into an
alley and pointed at a tin shed a short distance away. As I
approached, the door flew open and a man came stumbling out. A
black cat—with a white ruff—was perched on the man’s head,
howling.

“The cat was stuck in the man’s Afro, and
was it ever mad. I knew cats could be loud, but I’d never heard
anything like that. It howled and hissed, and the man yelled and
ran around in circles, trying to bat the cat off his head. If we’d
recorded it, I bet it would have gone viral.

“Turns out both the cat and the man were
higher than kites on the methamphetamine stash we found in the
shed. Getting the two of them separated and sedated was one of the
trickiest operations I’ve been involved with. I still have scars.
Turns out it was one of the biggest drug busts of the year, so I
got a commendation. I also got ragged unmercifully about being
wounded in the line of duty by a cat.”

“Good one, Mac,” Josephine said, sitting
back and grinning at me.

Even Devi smiled at the images I’d conjured.
Since she’d been so solemn most of the day, I was glad to see
it.

The perfect ending for the day would have
been me driving Devi home . . . a realization that forced
me to finally face the fact that chance encounters weren’t enough.
I wanted more. And I didn’t even care whether or not she wanted
kids.

Josephine

Before I made a decision about pressing charges against Edna, I
wanted to speak to her, and so two days after Thanksgiving, I
knocked on her door.

The woman who answered the door was a
different Edna from the one I’d known across the poker table. The
bluster was missing, and she appeared to sag, as if part of her had
previously been blown up but now the air had escaped.

When she saw me, she stood straighter. It
didn’t help.

“Come to gloat, have you, Josephine?”

“May I come in?”

She shrugged. “Why not?” She moved away from
the door, leaving me to step into her living room behind her.

“Why don’t we sit down?” I said.

She shrugged again and took a seat.

It hadn’t hit me before how few possessions
Edna has. The last time I’d been in her apartment, I’d simply
thought it less cluttered than Myrtle’s. But now I realized it was
bare, despite being one of Brookside’s small units.

She sat across from me, obviously making an
effort to sit straight, her hands clutched in her lap, perhaps to
keep from fidgeting.

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” I said.

It wasn’t the way I’d thought to begin. But
seeing how distressed she was, I decided it was a better opening
than the one I’d planned, an unadorned question about why she’d
done it. I know Mac said it was for her granddaughter, but I had my
doubts.

“Yes. Well, I brought it on myself. Would
you like tea? Or I have sherry.”

“Perhaps we should stick with tea.”

“You’re probably right. It’s a very cheap
sherry.”

I waited while she heated water and took tea
bags out of one of the two cupboards in the tiny kitchen tucked
into one corner of her living room. It occurred to me it couldn’t
be easy storing food and preparing meals in such a small space.

She handed me a spoon and a mug with a tea
bag of questionable pedigree floating in it. I removed the tea bag
and placed it and the spoon on the saucer she’d set between us.
Sipping hot water was preferable to trying to drink an inferior
brew.

“You’ll be glad to see the last of me, I
expect,” she said, stirring sugar into her own tea. “I’m leaving in
a few days, you know. What I don’t know yet is whether I’ll be
going to prison or moving in with my son.”

It wasn’t a surprise she was leaving. I’m
sure once Mr. Souter learned she was stealing, he’d insisted on
it.

“He can’t afford for me to stay here. My
son. There’s no money, you see.”

I shook my head to bring my focus back to
what she was saying.

“Do you mean you’d stay if you could?”

“This does feel like home now, but I doubt
anyone will want me around after what I did. I returned everything,
you know. And Baxter is arranging for Dot to receive the money he
got for the stamp. She was quite pleased about it. Still
. . .”

“Is that why you did it? So you could afford
to stay here?” That made more sense than the tuition story.

“Of course not. I wanted to help my
granddaughter, Amanda, go to a good college. But when Baxter said I
had no money, and he couldn’t afford to send her, I
. . .”

“You stole so you could add to her college
fund?”

“I did think about killing myself
first.”

She said it so matter-of-factly, it both
chilled me and convinced me she really had thought about killing
herself.

“I discovered I couldn’t do it. And I know
what I did instead sounds stupid now, but have you ever noticed how
often families just have a person from one of those estate-sale
places come in and clear everything out? Valuables get scooped up
along with furniture and clothing, and I thought, well, it wouldn’t
hurt anybody except maybe the estate liquidator if I took some
things. I never expected anyone to miss what I took.”

“But how did you know about the stamp and
Glenn Bascombe’s baseball card?” I figured she’d probably seen
Gladys wearing the necklace.

“Herman showed me the stamp, and I knew Dot
had no interest in his collection, so I figured she would never
know it was gone. As for the card, I’m a baseball fan. So was
Glenn. We watched the games together. When he showed me his card
collection, it didn’t take a degree in rocket science to know that
Willie Mays’s rookie card ought to be worth something.”

“Probably more than the painting.”

“But I thought, that is, Myrtle said it was
worth millions.”

“The Hopper is worth millions. But the
painting on my wall that evening wasn’t a Hopper.”