Page 157 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

Mr. Simulian could barely lift the gallon jug of borsht he ordered by
phone Saturday night.”
“Right. That kid might have been wearing a Cossack uniform, but
his name was Rigoberto de Francisco Avilar. He’s working nights to
pay for school; no ties to any Slavic gangsters.” She was not going to
catch me often with loose ends. It was hard schooling she put me
through, but I had learned a couple of lessons.
Labelle considered my remarks for about as long as it took her to
uncover the next page. “Napoleon had a more exciting time of it, I
see. He spent the night in a tool shed inside the compound of the
Interstate Jukebox Company’s downtown warehouse. Apparently he
had been somewhere inside the chain link fence when the place
closed and the guard dogs were released. As soon as that pair of
Dobermans sniffed him out he had to run for his life—so he said—
and lock himself in the first safe place he could find. When the
handler returned late Sunday morning to feed the dogs he heard
Napoleon’s cries for help and called the police. We have their report.
For reasons unknown, the owners of the premises refused to press
any charges of trespassing against Mr. Simulian. We may assume their
business association with him, if any, does not show on their books.
Did you check the dogs?”
“Yes. They were vicious, and they had not been drugged. It is
possible that Napoleon was unaware that the canine sentries would
be unleashed a couple of hours earlier on Saturday than on a
weekday. The investigating officers had searched him Sunday, and I
went back on Monday to determine if he had left behind anything
incriminating. Not a thing, but the owners had plenty of time to go
over the place before I got there.”
The queen of detection arched her eyebrows, the implied rebuke
unnecessary to articulate. She would have been all over the place that
Sunday night like ants at a picnic, waving metal detectors and infrared
scanners around like vacuum cleaner wands, dusting every doorknob
for prints and rousting the Interstate Jukebox executives out of bed
for questioning.
“Alexander,” she concluded after speed-reading another page in
my files, “was another stay-at-home. Doing something on his
computer all night, via his 56 kps telephone modem. No one to
corroborate it, but the Internet service provider gave you the log of

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