The Recycled Citizen (19 page)

Who could have divined that these were none other than those past masters of sartorial subterfuge, Brooks Kelling and Max Bittersohn? Sarah would, probably, once she realized Max had swiped her eyebrow pencil to draw his freckles with; but by then, with any luck, their mission would have been accomplished.

They’d talked over the information Annie had given them about SCRC members’ work habits. Some were haphazard, some methodical. Most of them worked within a one- or two-mile radius of the center because they were elderly people and full trash bags got heavy to carry. Annie had told them who was reliable, who was wayward and who was wearing purple today because she’d seen them all at breakfast; and purple, as she kept letting them know, was her favorite color.

There was one man named Joe who’d come in wearing a purple T-shirt, but Joe was on back room detail today and wouldn’t be going out at all. A guy they called Frodo had on a purple baseball cap, but Frodo was such a flake, anybody would be crazy to trust him any farther than they could throw him. He’d never been mugged yet, so apparently nobody had trusted him.

That left only Phyllis in her purple sweater. Normally two drops on successive days would be unlikely, judging from the pattern of the bag snatchings to date, but Max and Brooks were gambling on the fact that something had obviously gone badly wrong with the delivery Chet Arthur had been supposed to make. That must mean the drug dealers were running behind schedule, the week was drawing to a close and, after all, why not use Phyllis again?

Whoever was feeding information from the center must know Phyllis hadn’t done anything yesterday except go back to the SCRC and bitch about getting her bag snatched. Mr. Loveday had no doubt reported the incident to the police as a matter of form, but they wouldn’t have done anything about it, either, because there simply wasn’t anything they could do. Mr. Love-day had suggested Phyllis ought to change her route today and Phyllis had in turn made a few suggestions to him; She’d earned new respect among the members, who hadn’t realized Phyllis knew that many words; but she’d be doing exactly the same things today that she’d done yesterday, and nobody would try to stop her.

If Phyllis got her collecting bag snatched again today, in the same place and in the same way, would she learn to think of the incident as a part of her daily round and hand over the bag without a struggle? If she did, they’d have the perfect messenger for so long as nobody except the compulsive Phyllis caught on to what was happening. By then she’d know her receiver and have to be silenced.

That was why the photographer in the funny hat and tight jeans zeroed in on the corner where Phyllis had picked up her Graperoola can the day before, just as the zealous lady with the purple sweater was heaving into view. Around the bend that Phyllis would take next lurked the ragged man with the SCRC bag just like hers. But where was the dashing fellow in the purple running suit?

Off and running, perhaps. There was only one idler on the corner, leaning against a lamppost, wearing hiking boots and a hairy poncho. The photographer raised his camera to his eye, keeping well out of her sight. She didn’t appear to notice Phyllis coming, but one hand came out from under the poncho holding a bright purple soft drink can. She raised it to her lips as if to drain the last swallow, tossed it into the gutter and strolled away. The photographer’s shutter kept on clicking.

Phyllis stopped, mouthed some words that might have been, “Yellow, orange, red, green, purple?” then picked up the can and stowed it among her other finds. The photographer stopped clicking and hurried around the corner.

Right on schedule, Phyllis chugged up the sidewalk, encountered the ragged man with the SCRC collecting bag and took umbrage. Her method of expressing her displeasure, as Bill Jones had predicted, was to set her own bag down against a hydrant and pick up the little man like a bucket of slush, causing him to drop his own bag. She carried him kicking and sputtering to the corner, gave him a stern lecture on trespassing, and left him sitting dumbfounded on the curbstone. She then went back to the hydrant, picked up her bag and went on her way.

The photographer handed the remaining bag to the man on the curb. “Well, it saved our having to mug her.”

“At least I’ve got her warmed up for the next chap, God help him.” Brooks was sorting through the rubbish in the bag, as a concerned scavenger would naturally do. “Yes, it’s there and it’s not empty. I miscalculated the weight but not by much. Are you coming with me?”

“No, I’ll follow Phyllis and try to get a shot of whoever grabs the bag. You’ve got a bodyguard, that guy in the gray jersey across the street. His name’s Pat Zewitzky. See you in jail.”

Brooks nodded and puttered off in the general direction of the police station. Max waited to make sure Brooks’s tail had moved up close enough to protect him if necessary, then lengthened his stride and went after Phyllis.

He knew from Annie what route the woman would take and where she’d been attacked the day before. The muggers had chosen well, a crossroad with twisty alleyways to flee into. That they might decide to mug him if they caught him taking their picture was altogether possible. That Max would let himself be mugged was improbable.

Ah, there she was, looking down at an Orange Crush can with a connoisseur’s eye and perhaps a touch of nostalgia. Phyllis gave the orange can her seal of approval and crammed it in with what she supposed to be the rest of her loot. Luckily there’d been time for Max to switch the top layers of the respective collecting bags before he’d left the dummy by the hydrant and passed hers to Brooks. Phyllis appeared not to have noticed the exchange. Probably she didn’t form the same intimate relationship with her daily gleanings that she had with her bottles of slush syrup.

And here came the mugger, a burly white youth with a nasty black eye. And here came another. From the look of that eye Phyllis had demonstrated once again that she was no pushover. They did it by the book, the first man strolling past Phyllis and jostling her off-balance while the second reached from behind and wrenched the SCRC bag out of her grasp. They were off before she could get her mouth open to yell.

But yell she did. Judging from the amount of noise she was making, Max didn’t think Phyllis could have sustained any real injury, except to her
amour propre.
He took one last shot of Phyllis yelling and made himself scarce.

She’d go back to the center and pour out her tale of woe as she’d done yesterday. As the news of two muggings in a row got around, other members might find themselves less and less eager to go out on the streets and get their bags snatched too. Damn shame. Those senior citizens were performing a real service, to themselves and to their city.

Max had no time to brood over the broader aspects now. He had to buzz on over to the station and see what was happening to Brooks. It was as well he hurried; that game old bird was getting his feathers ruffled.

“Glad to see you, Max. Perhaps you can convince the captain here that I’m not a drug runner.”

“We haven’t accused you of running drugs, Mr. Kelling,” said the captain in what he probably thought was a conciliatory tone. “You have to realize it’s a little bit unusual for an elderly vagrant to drop in on us with a bagful of trash that happens to include a cache of heroin he picked out of the gutter. Who the hell ever heard of Graperoola, anyway?”

“You’ll hear plenty about it before we’re through,” said Max. “Brooks Kelling is no vagrant but a concerned citizen trying to do his civic duty. If you’ve allowed Mr. Kelling to tell his story, you ought to know he knew the heroin was in that bag of trash because he and I both saw it being put there. The Graperoola can was deliberately planted in front of a member of the Senior Citizens’ Recycling Center. You know about the organization?”

The captain admitted he did.

“Well, this same woman picked up an identical can in the same place yesterday afternoon and had her collecting bag snatched shortly afterward. For your information, I’ve just come from watching her get her bag snatched again, only we’d switched bags on her, as Mr. Kelling may have told you.”

“So?”

“So right now the two men who pulled the snatch are probably handing over a Graperoola can stuffed with sugar and cornstarch to somebody who isn’t going to be happy about getting it. Look, I don’t know how much of Brooks’s story you’ve heard so far, but would you mind if we started over? It begins with Chester Alan Arthur, a member of the SCRC whose body was found in an alley near the intersection of Marlborough Street and Massachusetts Avenue this past Monday night.”

“That was a mugging.”

“I’m not arguing with you, though I do think there’s room for doubt. What apparently wasn’t noticed during the investigation was that Arthur’s carrying bag, which was returned to Brooks’s cousin Dolph, who runs the SCRC, contained grains of heroin.”

“What?”

“My wife noticed them, and I analyzed them on my little home chemistry set.”

“The hell you did. Go on.”

Max went on. Brooks produced the photographs they’d taken the previous day, along with one of Theonia in her wine-colored velvet dinner gown to show what she really looked like. That proved to be a mistake, as they had a hard time persuading the captain to quit looking at Theonia and attend to the rest of the evidence.

After he’d finally been allowed to explain the other photographs, Max indicated the camera around his neck. “I’ve got a batch more in here. At least I hope I have. I shot everything from the drop to the mugging.”

“Okay, Bittersohn, we’ll get them right down to the darkroom.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” Brooks objected, “I’d much rather take the films home and process them myself. Those are my cameras, and I’m fussy about the quality of my prints.”

“So are we,” said the captain implacably.

They compromised at last by sending Brooks to the darkroom with the cameras so that he could supervise the processing. Max finished their tale, then went to the washroom and removed his red wig, mustache and freckles. He was stuck with the jacket until he could get home, and Mike’s jeans would probably have to be peeled off him with surgical instruments. Walking slightly bowlegged, he went back to the captain’s office.

“Well, well,” said the captain genially, “quite a change. “The darkroom just rang up to say they’ve got a proof sheet on your films. They’re anxious for us to go take a look.”

“Brooks is probably driving them nuts with good advice,” said Max. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”

Thanks either to the darkroom personnel’s skill or to Brooks’s bullying, the photographs had come out just fine. There was one in particular of Tigger tossing away the Graperoola can that intrigued the captain almost as much as Theonia had done.

“We’ve got that baby dead to rights, if only we can get some kind of lead on who it is. Or what.”

“Female, possibly human,” said Max. “Age somewhere in the early thirties, as a guess. Commonly known as Tigger. She’s been some kind of protégée of my wife’s aunt Apollonia Kelling, who’s trying to remember Tigger’s real name for us. Something out of A. A. Milne’s the closest Appie’s been able to come to it so far.”

“James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby John Dupree?” said the captain, and blushed slightly.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. Appie says it will come to her sooner or later. In the meantime I have to tell you that my wife saw Tigger quarreling over near Park Square with that guy Ted Ashe, whom I pointed out to you upstairs; the one who’s been identified as Wilbraham Winchell, a reporter for a muckraking tabloid called
Syndicated Slime.

“What were they fighting about?”

“My wife doesn’t know. Tigger claims Ashe tried to rape her but my wife says that’s baloney. Anyway, she used the incident to tag on to my wife and gate-crash the SCRC, where she’s since done some volunteer work, don’t ask me what. She’s also roped Appie Kelling into working there, which in itself is a form of sabotage. Captain, why don’t you let Brooks and me follow up on the Tigger angle while you track down those two muggers we fingered today and the one in the purple running suit? It might also be helpful to run a check on who’s behind the Thanatopsis Trust.”

“You telling me how to run my department, Bittersohn?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.”

“In that case, why don’t you and Mr. Kelling check out this Tigger while we handle the rest of it? Let me know the minute you come up with a result. You’re not the Lone Ranger and Tonto, you know.”

“Right, Kemo Sabe. Are we dismissed?”

The captain shrugged. “What’s your hurry?”

“These goddamn jeans are threatening to destroy my marriage.”

“Next time wear a miniskirt. Dismissed.”

The captain flipped a switch on his intercom. “Have an unmarked car waiting downstairs to drive two gentlemen, one of them slightly disabled, to the address they’ll give you. The driver should be prepared to take a statement from a witness who’s being held in protective custody. Need a wheelchair, Bittersohn?”

“Levity is unbecoming an officer of your rank,” Max told him coldly. “After you, Brooks.”

B
ACK AT TULIP STREET
, they found their witness bearing her confinement with fortitude. Since Theonia and her aides-de-camp couldn’t be riding herd on Annie every moment of the day, Mariposa had put in an emergency call to her Uncle Pedro, a widower of suitable age and friendly disposition. She’d equipped Annie with a portable TV, Charles’s walkaround stereo, a deck of playing cards and several good things to eat. Pedro had brought along a jug of sangria and his maracas. Theonia had gone downstairs to see whether they might like a nice historical novel to read aloud together but hadn’t been able to make herself heard over the cries of “Cha cha cha.”

Annie was pleased to meet Sergeant Cooley, but she didn’t want to make a statement. She wanted to form a conga line. After less unsober heads had prevailed, however, and Mariposa had made her a lovely milk shake, Annie talked a blue streak. By now she’d decided she’d performed an act of heroism by stealing that Graperoola can from the Broken Zipper, though she hoped she hadn’t got Bulgy in trouble.