Edited to Death (31 page)

“Okay, let’s chill with the coaching,” Jorge said. “You’re not going into the shipping
business anyway, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Now, check this out,” and a new screen appeared. Even with the mini-lesson from Jorge,
it looked like a bewildering set of tables and charts.

“Let me guess,” I said, “it’s the Periodic Table of the Elements in Armenian?”

Jorge didn’t even look away from the screen. “What’s it gonna be? Jokes or answers?”
he asked.

“Answers,” I said, humbled in the presence of my cyber-superior.

Jorge moved the cursor to darken a few numbers. “Here’s what we’ve got. These numbers
look familiar?”

“Maybe.”

“They should, 1/6/231572. They’re the numbers you gave me and here’s what’s interesting:
I thought your thing about ship and piers and stuff was a little whacked-out, but
you might have been on the right track. You can identify a specific ship with a specific
container, arriving on a specific date at a specific pier, only they call them berths,
and they come into Oakland, not San Francisco. Oakland’s got virtually all the container
ship business these days.”

I looked at the screen. “I don’t get it.”

“Look, look,” said Jorge impatiently. “The first day of the sixth month, you’ve got
container 231572 coming in. And when you cross check that container, you see.…” He
highlighted the number, and a full name opened up: Galaxy Star, Unit 231572. “That’s
the name of the shipper, the vessel, and the container number.”

“And can you make that combination happen with all the numbers?”

“Yep,” he said triumphantly, scrolling to the next screen.

“So that means—”

“Well, I don’t know what it means, exactly,” said Jorge. “I was just trying to make
the numbers make sense.”

“But it must mean something,” I said. “It can’t be an accident you can get all these
numbers to come together. There must be.…” I felt a flutter in my stomach.

“What?” asked Jorge.

“It must be some signal about that container. We need to find out what’s inside those
containers.”

Jorge shrugged. “How hard can that be?”

“Well, we could call your cousin,” I said hopefully. Jorge looked doubtful.

“Maybe. Can’t you just call that Inspector who keeps hanging around here?” asked Jorge.

I hate it when the right idea comes to people so much younger and less experienced
than I am. I thought about all the snakes in my dream last night. I thought about
the opportunity to get back in Inspector Moon’s good graces, and about the fact that
he already knew what Jorge was up to.

“What a swell idea,” I said to Jorge. “You’re… the bomb.”

Jorge snickered, “That is so six weeks ago, Maggie. But hey, if you think I’m a genius
now, wait’ll you see how good my article will be.”

“A deal’s a deal,” I said. “What do you want to write about?”

We batted some ideas around for a while. Jorge wanted to write about the Mexican Day
of the Dead, but the magazine had done a story on that a few years ago. So we started
talking about the importance of costumes in lots of holidays—Halloween, Day of the
Dead, Carnevale, Mardi Gras—and we both got excited. What would psychologists say?
What neighborhoods have the best costume shops? We agreed he’d do a little research,
organize an intro and an outline, and pitch it to me.

“After all,” I explained, “I’ve got to give you an assignment because that’s our agreement.
But you want to be ready to pitch some other, not so charming and friendly, editor
somewhere down the line.”

Jorge let a grin sneak onto his face. “You’re charming and friendly?” he inquired.

“Darn right,” I said, heading back to my office to call Moon. “And don’t you forget
it when you’re out there in the wide wicked world selling stories to heartless editors.”

Within a few minutes, I had Moon on the phone. “What’s wrong?” he said before I had
more than my name out.

“Relax,” I said, “it’s just your favorite Detective Assistant, Junior Grade.”

“Junior Grade is correct,” he said evenly.

But he listened carefully when I laid out Jorge’s findings and, in fact, admitted
he could easily find out what cargo the ships were carrying.

“How?” I asked. “Just wondering. I promise I won’t try to do it myself.”

“And,” he inquired dryly, “hasn’t your word proven to be as good as gold?”

“Hey,” I protested, “I called you with this info, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he said. “And I promise to call you as soon as we know anything. I think
it’s probably a wild goose chase—remember Orlando’s the guy with the rock-solid, unbreakable
alibi—but it can’t hurt to find out.”

Two minutes after we hung up, he was back on the phone.

“Maggie, I want to talk to that kid who figured this out.”

“No recruiting,” I said. “He’s a great factchecker and he may be a good writer.”

“I don’t want to recruit him. I want to find out who else knows he’s been doing your
detective work for you.” I passed him on to Jorge, who told me later that not even
his cousin the shipping giant knew why he was looking at all this information.

“Come to think of it,” said Jorge, “I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was just
following orders so I could get a writing assignment. Am I in some kind of trouble?”

I reassured him he wasn’t and spent the rest of the day doing Gertie and Glen’s bidding:
reviewing story lists for the next quarter’s issues, looking over a direct mail letter
to pitch fallen-away subscribers, answering e-mail. Just as I was about to log off,
my mailbox beeped to let me know I had one more recently arrived piece of mail. I
clicked and saw a new return address. When I saw the greeting, “Darling Maggie-Know-It-All,”
I knew it was from Sara. “Well, well,” I said to the screen, “Sara joins the electronic
universe.” Her message read:

“Mags… isn’t this way cool? Much less dear than ringing you up… Jaysus, Mary & Joseph,
do I sound pseudo-Brit or what? Okay, dollink, here’s the story—I had tea with your
‘source’ the other day. Douglas Thurston? What a dish. A little sepulchral, but handsome
in that tweedy, pasty, never-sees-the-light-of-day way these dons go in for. If you
know what I mean. Anyway, he had a zillion questions about you, and—not to put it
too nicely—why you were nosing around about some guy named Jack Rowland. So e-mail
me back, my love, and tell all. Best to you, the barrister and the Little Men. Xxoo
Sara J.”

God, I love e-mail! Sara and I had once been great letter writers, but the demands
of modern life, time, and pressing priorities around home and hearth had eroded our
correspondence. Clearly, e-mail was resurrecting the writerly aspects of our relationship.
I didn’t quite see Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury gang e-mailing each other, but
surely they would have loved the principle of the thing.

I tapped in a summary of events, sordid and otherwise, and zapped the “reply now”
key, delighted to know there was no waiting for ship or plane to wend its way across
the Atlantic. Sara would have my thoughts that instant.

On the way home, it did occur to me to worry about Sara detecting on my behalf across
the Atlantic. But I shrugged it off—it seemed hard to imagine that some miscreant
could vandalize matron-mobiles in such widely dispersed time zones.

26

A Handle on Crime

“Pots and pans,” said Inspector Moon, when I picked up the phone the next morning.

In my kitchen, there was enough early morning pots-and-pans variety racket happening
in the background that I couldn’t be sure what he said. Zach was dipping his finger
in the milk and apparently writing his initials on the table while rhythmically kicking
his chair. Michael was drilling Josh on his spelling words; Anya had the radio tuned
to something that sounded like Abba meets Snoop Doggy Dog. “Hey, guys,” I waved at
the table, “could you keep it down a minute?” They ignored me.

“Hang on, John,” I said, and pushed the swinging door out of the kitchen into the
dining room. The din was at some remove.

“Now,” I said, “I thought I heard you say ‘pots and pans.’”

“I did,” he said. “That’s what was in those mysterious shipments on the days in question.”

“Pots and pans? As in housewares?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Swell.”

“Not very exciting, I’m afraid,” Moon continued. “But worth looking into.”

“Looking into?”

“Sure. Pots and pans are empty, you know. Could be something inside them.” This seemed
unlikely to me in the extreme. Who’s dumb enough to smuggle something inside a pot
or pan?

“I guess. What do you have to do to look inside the shipment?”

“Get a warrant. It’s in the works. I’ll let you know.”

“Mom!” yelled Zach from the other room. “Come see what I did.”

I covered the receiver with my hand. “Coming, honey, just a second.”

“And Maggie, one more time,” said Moon, “remember, you’re the editor, I’m the detective.”

“Uh huh,” I mumbled, “I remember,” punching the off button, and heading into the kitchen
to see what wonders Zach had wrought.

Zach, my precociously literary child, had in fact written M O M—in milk on the kitchen
table. It was a mess, but who could criticize his accomplishment or his choice of
people to immortalize in low-fat, homogenized splendor?

“Wonderful, honey,” I said, ruffling his hair.

Michael was on his feet, brushing crumbs, gulping coffee, looking for his briefcase.
“Okay, guys,” he called, “the Dad-mobile is leaving the station. Let’s get all hands
on deck.” The next five minutes were consumed with the chaos of search for jackets,
lunches, kisses goodbye to me and Raider and Anya—not particularly in that order—and
then, silence, blissful silence, as Anya disappeared upstairs to collect her portfolio
and Guatemalan handbag, and climb into her incredibly hideous lace-up boots. When
I heard the clomp-clomp on the stairs, I knew she was on her way.

“Bye, Maggie,” she called. “Leave me a note about dinner.”

“That’s okay,” I hollered hastily, “I’ve got tonight covered.” Cooking continued to
be Anya’s weak spot. Which put me in mind, of course, of pots and pans. And set me
to wondering about the possibilities that lay therein.

I meditated on those all the way into the city. It was a relief to be in the Volvo,
assuming that no one could vandalize the poor thing while I was in it. “Great assumption,”
I said under my breath. “I bet the taggers have cellular spray paint systems or something.
Maybe they’ll get me as I cross the Bay Bridge.”

The thought made me grumpy, jumpy, and apprehensive, and when some poor soul in a
battered pea green Futura moved into the lane without signaling, I shot the driver
my most baleful look.

Pots and pans could hold what? Microchips? Heroin? Industrial espionage information?
Tiny works of art? “Oh, sure,” I muttered, “let’s just break up the Elgin marbles
and ship them into the States inside double boilers. Cool concept.” Perhaps, I thought,
I don’t have a grand-scale criminal mind.

Juggling briefcase, cappuccino-to-go, and a bag holding two pairs of Michael’s shoes
that needed new soles, I sailed through
Small Town
’s minuscule lobby, down the hall, into my office, and collapsed at my desk. Gertie
stuck her head in, with a look I’d come to know as, “good thing you’re here, I have
something that needs your immediate personal attention.”

“Good morning, Gertie,” I said. “What’d I forget? Who should I call? It’s not my fault,
whatever it is.”

She smiled serenely. “Aren’t we defensive this morning? Another sleepless night? Perhaps
I just wanted to say good morning.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “And perhaps pigs have wings and chickens have lips.” I pried the
lid off my coffee, licked the foam from the top of the lid, and took a sip.

“Come on, Gertie, just tell me.”

“Okay. Notice those guys in the waiting room you walked right by?”

“What guys? I didn’t notice anything.”

“Really, Maggie,” she remonstrated, “for a journalist, you’re certainly not very observant.”

I sipped some more. “I used to be a journalist, Gertie,” I corrected. “Now I’m a captain
of industry. A media mogul.”

She raised an eyebrow. “My, my, we have delusions of grandeur, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said cheerfully, “I’ve got a job and a title and I’m not afraid to use ’em.
Now come on, cut to the chase. Who are those guys and what have I screwed up now?”

“Nothing yet,” she conceded. “The cute young guy is one of Claire’s friends from Skunkworks.
I think he’s on the staff. The other one’s a priest, Father somebody or other from
somewhere.”

“Gee, that’s helpful,” I said. “And they want what?”

She smiled sweetly. “To see you. As soon as possible, that’s a quote. Shall I show
them in?”

I sighed, “Sure, sure. Probably soliciting for the Pope’s personal bingo game.” I
remembered my anti-Catholic remarks addressed to Inspector Moon and began to worry
he’d sent a delegation to show me the error of my ways.