Page 111 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Soaked to the Bone

But why knock it over—if that is what the perhaps deceptively
unacrobatic lady cop had done—and spill everything on the floor?
“I will take care of this,” said Alma firmly but with rising
inflection. The lieutenant, butter-fingered now, was groping at and
dropping one object after another. Alma scrambled in her wake, like
a salvage vessel in pursuit of precious flotsam fumbled by its rival. As
a long-time aficionado of card tricks and other parlor magic, I
couldn’t help thinking that the already-distracted housekeeper’s
attention was being directed away from the real object of Ms.
Gramercy’s scrutiny: a cheap leatherette case containing a clear plastic
fanfold of about a dozen photographs. It had fallen open—
perhaps—just to the left of the policewoman as she knelt, with Alma
on her right, and I watched, fascinated, as the lieutenant managed to
study those pictures while she kept busy with her hands on the other
side of her body.
Naturally I could not avoid surreptitiously looking at them, too.
Most were of a girl, perhaps in her early teens; small fuzzy candid
shots, cropped as if taken at a distance and then blown up;
completely amateurish, as family photos usually are. There was a
slight resemblance in her to Alma, something in the set of eyes and
mouth. A daughter, a niece—maybe even a sister: the pictures were
old and stuck inside sleeves yellowing with age. Could they even have
been of Alma herself? I squinted at the woman, trying to peel back
the layers of feminine artifice to arrive at her real age. Hands rough
and reddened by domestic labor. Dyed hair, a commonplace. Bad
skin and wrinkles emphasized rather than softened by rouge and
powder. A blouse with high collar hiding the ravages of time and
climate on the neck’s thin and vulnerable skin. Okay, I conceded, she
could be a young sixty or an old forty; hard to deduce a relationship
with the girl in the wallet photo.
“There you are,” said Labelle Gramercy. “I think that’s everything.
Nothing broken, I see.”
Alma pawed through her purse’s jumbled contents.
“No, no. My pictures! Where are they?”
The lady cop stood up, rocking back on her heels and rising in one
fluid motion I could not have accomplished even after seven years of
yoga and jazz dance. Immediately Alma pounced on the missing
object thus revealed.

110