Page 68 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Thrown for a Loss

“Oh, yes. Me and another girl, but she already went home and I
just have to stay here until six o’clock and then I can close up and go,
too.”
Did she already suspect that she might be detained? I watched her
face closely for those telltale signs of stress every good interrogator
should recognize.
“Where were you when the buzzer went off?”
“Right here, ma’am.”
The silly mannerisms and politeness didn’t fool me. Most of these
shop girls were at least as tough as the boys gawking at them. Maybe
tougher because they had already faced the fact they would have to
take a boring dead-end minimum wage job to survive. Females had a
lot more skill in putting up a verbal front in social situations, too. But
Labelle had to know that, being one herself, right? Well, if she did, it
was as an observer rather than a participant. She was tough to the
core, no acting needed. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine her in
anything as minimally feminine as a Go Nuts for Donuts uniform. I
was not having a good time, and my only desire was to come up with
something brilliant before she did. Fat chance!
“Did you see who pushed the emergency button?”
“No!” She giggled nervously. “I mean, I’m so short that I couldn’t
see over all the people between here and there. I had some
customers, too, when it happened, and they all turned around to
look. All I could see was their backs.”
“Do you know any of those boys sitting at the first table behind
me to the left?”
She tried going up on tiptoes and then peeked around the
detective. “How do you mean that?” she asked after getting visual
confirmation of the presence of the mall rats in the location
indicated. No doubt she was very much aware of them, as they were
less than twenty feet away and had been sitting there and walking past
her shop one at a time for the last hour or so.
“Do you know them by name? Have you ever talked to any of
them? Sold them doughnuts?”
She half-nodded, half-tossed her head, a habit I had observed in
young women who once had long hair over their foreheads, then
continued the unconscious movement to get it out of their eyes long
after the bangs were gone. It was a gesture that reminded me of

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