Page 62 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Thrown for a Loss

While he was giving shorter and shorter answers I was thinking
about what must have happened. Money falls, and a bunch of people
hurry off away from the escalator. Everyone is looking in that
direction, where the coins are bouncing and rolling. Suddenly the
alarm goes off like a fire bell behind them. There couldn’t be much
of an interval between pushing the button and the noise starting up.
So at that moment, any of those treasure-seekers who knew what that
buzzer meant would not be looking around in a state of confusion.
They would immediately turn and stare at the escalator. The person
who pushed the button could not have been far away at that point,
maybe less than ten feet. So the mall rats had to be important to this
investigation. They were on the scene and they knew what the buzzer
signified. They were the most likely to have seen the perpetrator. The
policewoman had figured that out in a hurry—I could tell by her
questions. But did she also think one of them was the guilty party?
Or that the others were part of a conspiracy to cover it up? At that
point I honestly couldn’t say. She just seemed to be probing, finding
their sore spots and making them aware of her scrutiny. This wasn’t
the back room of a precinct station with real or hinted-at rubber
hoses. What else could she do within the letter of the law? As for the
spirit of the law, this woman was ruthless. A good thing she hadn’t
followed the path these kids were already halfway down.
“Who did you talk to afterward?”
“You mean when the buzzer stopped and we were all herded over
there against the wall?”
He pointed at the north side of the mall where Intimate Oils and
Aromatherapy was separated by a service corridor from Safari to Go.
Labelle nodded. Cal relaxed visibly. He had gotten past a dangerous
field of inquiry—unless his interrogator suddenly switched gears and
took him back over that minefield. I glanced at his trousers, the same
kind of baggy pants previously reserved for circus clowns that his
friends were wearing. Did he have a knife or a gun in there? Hard to
tell. Maybe easy for Lieutenant Gramercy. There was a lump under
his shirt at belt level that had to be a pager. If you couldn’t afford a
cell phone, you could get a pager for a few dollars a month and still
be part of the teenager communications network.
“Let me think. Okay. I was there, like standing around, and I
remember Curt being next to me. Yeah, Newt and Luke, too. Newt

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