Irish Eyes (16 page)

“I had a sign in the window. Help Wanted. She came in one night, asked about the job, said she’d worked a cash register before. At the Kroger down the street. She looked all right. Reasonably neat. Polite. And she was willing to work the night shift and weekends.”

“How long had she worked here?”

He nibbled at the curved end of the pizza crust. “Three, four months.”

“On her employment application, did she list any relatives other than this woman, Monique Bell, she was living with?”

Viatkos laughed. “Application? Lady, this ain’t the post office. She give me her phone number and address and her Social Security number, and that was it.”

“What about friends? I understand she had a boyfriend
whose name was William. Did you ever meet him? Or catch his last name?”

Viatkos picked up a paper towel and blotted his lips. “She worked for me. I didn’t ask her about her social life, she didn’t volunteer. I know she had a kid because a couple times she had to get off work to take him to the doctor.”

The phone rang then, and he picked it up. “Yeah?”

He covered the receiver with his hand. “This is business. I gotta deal with it. You can find your way out, right?” He stood up, opened the door, and after I stepped out, closed it firmly behind me.

“Right,” I said.

I could hear him talking in a low voice through the door. The stockroom lights were on and the door into the store was closed. I did a quick stroll around the area. In the corner opposite Viatkos’s office was a huge stainless steel door, sort of like a safe. I looked around, walked over, and took a closer look. It was a walk-in cooler.

I glanced back at Viatkos’s office door. I could still hear him talking on the phone. I yanked at the door of the cooler, looked inside. The walls were lined with cartons of wine and cases of beer, as I had expected. I scanned the boxes. Bud, Busch, Miller, Pabst, Heineken, Molson. And Harp. So the truck had come in.

I closed the cooler door and walked briskly to the door leading into the store.

Boylan was behind the counter now, sitting on a barstool, talking to the clerk, a powerfully built bald guy who also wore a shirt marked “Security.”

I gave them both a little finger wave. Boylan nodded. “Come again soon.”

E
dna was waiting for me when I walked in the kitchen door, hands clinched on her hips.

“Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” she roared. “For the love of God, Callahan, what were you thinking of, taking Baby and Sister over to that hellhole?”

I tried to get around her, but she stood her ground.

“Answer me, young lady.”

Cripes. It was like the time I was sixteen and she found out my girlfriend Paula and I had stolen a bottle of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine and got drunk at the StarLite Drive-In Theatre.

“Well?”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” I admitted, sinking down into a kitchen chair. “But the girls are all right. They were shook up, but nobody got hurt.”

“No thanks to you,” Edna pointed out. “My God. You could have gotten all three of you killed. Do you realize that? I’ve read about that Memorial Oaks place. It’s a war zone. People get shot, stabbed, raped, robbed.”

She was standing over me, looking down. She touched my
neck, the spot where the punk had tried to wrench the gold chain away. Her fingertips felt cool against the burning abrasion.

“You could have been killed,” she repeated, her voice barely a whisper. I closed my hand over hers.

“I know it. And I’m sorry. It’s just … Bucky.” Dammit, I was starting to cry now, sniffling like a stupid sixteen-year-old.

“If you’d seen Bucky, Ma, seen him lying there, with that blood, and the smashed beer bottles. There was nothing I could do for him, except try to stop the blood. I couldn’t even do that.”

But she didn’t intend to let me off that easy. Tears and apologies be damned. Edna Mae Garrity was in the right and she knew it.

“How does it help Bucky if you take stupid risks and get yourself and Baby and Sister killed? Just what does that accomplish?”

“I was looking for Deecie Styles,” I explained. “The girl who worked in the liquor store. She was there that night. She saw what happened. She’s the key. I know she is.”

Edna sat down at the table beside me. Her hands fumbled around on the table for a moment before they closed on the deck of playing cards sitting there. What she was instinctively reaching for, of course, was a pack of cigarettes. She’d ended a fifty-year, three-pack-a-day habit only a few years ago, after a life-threatening heart attack. The cards were her substitute.

“The key to what?” Edna asked, slapping down the first row of cards. “Bucky was shot in a liquor store holdup. Some thug. Let the police do their job. And you do yours. Which is running The House Mouse. And keep the girls out of it. You hear me?”

“I hear.”

“So you say,” she said, her arthritic fingers surprisingly nimble as they flipped the cards over on the scarred oak tabletop. “But I know you. When you get an idea in your head, you’re like a bulldog, refusing to let go. Like your father. He was the same way.”

I went to the refrigerator and scanned the shelves looking
for something good. Chocolate maybe. I settled on a cold pork chop. Sat down at the table and started nibbling at it.

“Why is it that all my good qualities remind you of your side of the family and all the bad ones remind you of Daddy?” I asked.

“It’s the Irish in you,” Edna said. “Can’t be helped.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What?” She looked up, surprised.

“The Irish. I’m not like them.”

“That’s a bad thing? Since when?”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “The drinking. The sloppy sentiment. Pigheadedness. The other night, at that St. Patrick’s Day party, all those bleary-eyed red-faced drunks, singing and boozing and dancing—it was disgusting. I should never have gone in the first place. It reminded me of all those damn fish fries Daddy used to drag us to over there.”

“Disgusting?” Her voice was mild. “You kids used to beg to go to those things.”

“Not me,” I said.

“Right. I’d forgotten. Miss Priss would prefer to go to the country club with one of her rich friends. Keep away from all those tacky hooligans at the K of C.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “When Daddy got around all those old farts, he was different. He talked too loud, drank too much …”

“He worked hard all week. Supported a wife and four kids on a salesman’s salary. So on Friday nights sometimes he laughed and sang and danced. That’s bad?” Edna asked. “That’s embarrassing?”

I shook my head in exasperation.

“You used to love to dance with your daddy,” Edna said. “He was so proud of you. All you kids. He took you to those fish fries so he could show you off to all his friends. Which reminds me. You’ll never guess who I ran into this morning.”

“Who?” I asked, happy to have the subject changed. I tapped my index finger on the ten of hearts, to indicate that it should be placed beneath the jack of spades.

“Corky Hanlon. I was at Sam’s Club, picking up supplies,
and he and Marie were buying a new VCR. We sat in the snack bar and had a cup of coffee together. Talked about old times in the old neighborhood. I didn’t realize Corky had retired. He told me he saw you the other night, at the K of C.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We danced together. He was heartbroken to learn that Bucky wasn’t my boyfriend. He seems to think it’s time I settled down and got married.”

“Well?” One eyebrow shot up.

“Well nothing.”

I’d had enough lectures for one night.

I took the Bushmills bottle, a glass of ice, and my half-eaten pork chop and did a good job of flouncing my way into the den.

I got the phone and called the hospital to check on Bucky’s progress.

“No change,” the nurse said.

I hung up and sat and tapped my fingers on the coffee table. I’d had a day full of dead ends. Pete Viatkos had refused to give me any information about Deecie Styles. I’d run into a bunch of nothing at Deecie’s last address.

She was gone. She’d taken Faheem and gone off in a cab with William. William who? I didn’t have a last name, didn’t have an address. All I knew about him was that he sometimes gave Deecie day-old Doubletree Farms baked goods. And what did I know about Deecie? That she’d worked at a Kroger on Ponce de Leon before taking the job at the liquor store.

Food, I thought. And not just my own current lack of it. Deecie had worked at a supermarket, William had some connection to a bakery. Maybe somebody at that Kroger could help me put them together.

The sign at the front of the Kroger on Ponce showed a photo of a dark-skinned black man named Quartez Keys was the manager. I found him in the produce department, studying a shipment of limp-looking pole beans with the produce manager.

“Call the broker and tell him to come get ‘em,” he told the
produce man. He turned to me and smiled. “Now, how can I help you, ma’am?”

“Could we go to your office?” I asked. “It’s about one of your former employees.”

The office was located on a skywalk high above the store’s selling floor.

“Deecie Styles?” he said, reaching for a thick notebook full of computer printouts. “That name sounds sort of familiar. Do you know when she worked here?”

“More than four months ago, I think,” I said.

He wet a finger and leafed through the printouts until he came to the page he was looking for.

He ran his forefinger down the columns of print and looked down through the bifocals perched at the end of his nose. “Yes, she worked here,” Mr. Keys said. “Termination date was December first. Does that help?”

“Some,” I said. “But I was hoping to get some information from her personnel file. Things like most recent address, next of kin, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Keys said, looking shocked. “Personnel records are totally confidential. I can confirm that she worked here, but that’s all I can do.” He put his hands palm-down on the desktop. “So sorry.”

He didn’t know how sorry I was.

“I understand,” I said. “But maybe I could talk to somebody who worked with her? Another of the cashiers maybe? Just informally, of course.”

He pursed his lips. “This isn’t about a legal matter, is it?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “I’m trying to find her because she worked for my cleaning business a few months ago, but I don’t have a current address to send her W-2 form. She’s moved away from the address I had.”

He nodded agreement. “That’s a problem for us, too. Our store associates tend to be somewhat transient. The nature of the business, you see.”

“Of course.”

He tapped a pencil on the book of printouts, then looked
down at his watch. “I could let you talk to Mary Robin Hughes. She’s our head cashier. She might remember something about the young lady. Mary Robin tends to mother all these kids.”

He picked up the phone on his desk, punched a button, and I heard his voice on the store’s loudspeaker system, asking Mary Robin Hughes to report to the manager’s office.

A moment later, she stepped into the office. She was younger than I expected, mid-forties, probably, with short gleaming dark hair and pale blue eyes. “Mr. Keys?” she said, stopping to catch her breath.

He gestured toward me. “This lady wants to know anything you can tell her about one of our former associates. A young woman named …” He looked down at the printout on his desk.

“Deecie Styles,” I said.

“Oh, yes, Ms. Styles. I’ll let you two talk now.” He sat back in his chair.

Mary Robin blinked. “Deecie? What did you want to know about her? She didn’t work here very long.”

“Anything you can remember,” I said.

“Well,” she said, hesitating, “she had an adorable little boy. Faheem. He had some medical problems, and that’s why she left us. Deecie was bright and capable. What else can I tell you?”

“Did you know any of her friends or family? I’m particularly interested in her boyfriend, a man named William.”

“She lived with her aunt, I know that,” Mary Robin said. “That was sort of a problem. The aunt worked night shifts and got pretty irritable about the baby’s crying. Deecie said she wanted to move out, as soon as she’d saved enough money.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“I know she had a boyfriend, because he sometimes picked her up after work,” Mary Robin said. “I can’t remember his name, though.”

“Somebody told me he sometimes brought Deecie day-old baked goods from Doubletree Farms. Is that a brand you sell here?”

“Absolutely,” Mr. Keys put in. “We carry their full line. Breads, rolls, coffee cakes. They’re very popular. Especially the multigrain breads.”

“Are they local?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “The bakery itself is up in Gainesville, Georgia. But they do have an Atlanta distributor, and that’s who makes our deliveries.”

“Can you tell me the name of the distributor?”

“Sure,” Mr. Keys said. “Cronk and Associates.”

I looked at Mary Robin. “Do you happen to know the driver for Cronk?”

“Drivers. Plural,” she said. “They switch the route drivers all the time on us. As soon as we get a guy trained to do things the way we like, they change them around on us.”

“Could one of their drivers be Deecie’s boyfriend William?”

She thought about that. “Let’s see. Russ is our driver right now. Tall skinny white kid. But sometimes he switches around with Dave, who’s middle-aged, got a potbelly that’ll kill him one of these days. And before that, we had KiKi, but she quit. And there was Lawrence …” She smiled brightly. “And William. I’d almost forgotten about him. And come to think of it, I think maybe the other girls used to tease Deecie about him making eyes at her.”

“So William works for Cronk?” I asked hopefully.

“He used to,” Mary Robin said. “But we haven’t seen him around here for two or three months.”

“Thanks,” I said, shaking her hand vigorously. “Thanks so much.”

I shook Quartez Keys’s hand too, I was so happy. “Thank you so much, Mr. Keys. My mother and I just love your store.” He beamed. “Come again. Any time.”

I
always grit my teeth when I call Maureen. It’s not that I don’t love her. I do, I suppose. It’s just that I find my younger sister the most annoying person on the face of the planet. She’s been a nurse for twenty years, and somewhere along the line somebody gave her the idea that R.N. stands for Really (k)Nowledgable about almost everything. Still, she’d worked at Grady’s emergency room for a dozen years, and she did know a lot more about the place than I did.