Offerings Three Stories (3 page)

I pitied the PR chief. The Corporation does not appreciate publicity that can’t be manipulated into a favorable slant. That’s why they hired me. Good security does not make news. It is invisible. While my job application said all the right things—a degree in criminology, fifteen years of law enforcement experience, and specialized training in surveillance technology—my interview won me the job.

My employers have a deep and abiding knowledge of psychology. If you doubt that, spend a week at the park sometime. Ride all the rides once for pleasure, then ride them again for understanding. Watch how they use costumed characters and mildly humorous films to distract you from the fact that you just spent half-an-hour standing in line outdoors.

In Florida.

In August.

Then ride all the rides again. Make an effort
not
to look where they want you to look. Ignore the charming dolls chanting about how small the world is, and look for the underwater tracks that branch off from the ride’s main line.

Where do you think they go? To a maintenance area, of course. When some destructive kid carves his name in a boat’s shiny finish, somebody’s got to hustle that watercraft to the repair shop. Maintaining the illusion of magical perfection is tough when 70,000 imperfect human beings troop through the park on any given day.

Now, ride something else and look for tell-tale gaps in the scenery where a door might hide. If some idiot stomps on your daughter’s finger while they’re clambering into one of those fake mine cars, do you think they’re going to let you carry her, screaming and crying and bleeding, out the front entrance in front of all those waiting guests? Nope, they’ll send a cast member to spirit your whole family away through a hidden exit, down into the basement where you’ll find a friendly nurse with a first-aid kit and a lollipop for your young one. Hell, they might even send a dwarf to the emergency station to apply the antibiotic ointment.

My point is this: I’ve never personally met a colleague who admitted to being a psychologist, but I’m convinced the Corporation employs a whole staff of folks whose sole purpose is to keep 70,000 people happy every day. (I wish somebody would turn them loose in the Middle East. We might achieve peace in our time.)

I am convinced that those psychologists are intimately involved in the hiring process, and I believe that is why I was hired for this job. I am a man of utmost discretion. I consider the ramifications of my words and my actions. If anyone is less likely to say something stupid to the press or to a law enforcement official, I don’t know who that person might be. I communicated that quality to my interviewers five years ago, and I was rewarded with my dream job. Two rather theatrical deaths made today a more difficult day than most, but I love my work. I knew I could handle this.

I backed up the surveillance video and took a close look at Peter Pan’s final flight. He’d paused on the specially built balcony high up the castle’s tallest tower, swashing and buckling with his faux sword until the crowd noticed him, then he’d launched himself into his trademark tumbling dive.

Guests have thrilled to Tinkerbell’s nightly flight for decades, but there are stunts that only a male body can do. When the park added a second circus-trained aerialist to the lineup, the official website lit up with messages from awe-struck guests describing Peter Pan’s daring entrance, so Pete the Aerialist became a permanent part of each day’s entertainment…

…until tonight, when his flashy dive accelerated downward toward the point at which the safety cable should have pulled taut, yanking him out of gravity’s grip. Only it didn’t.

Perfectly toned arms and legs flailed at the air, trying to save an acrobat’s body that could do nearly everything except fly. He landed on a paved area amid bushes and shadows that obscured my view, and I was glad for that. I had never liked Peter Pan’s alter ego, a bitchy egotist whose real name was Merrill Chatham, but that didn’t mean I was anxious for a look at his broken body. I would get a look at Merrill’s remains soon enough, as well as a blow-by-blow description of the autopsy, but I was in no hurry.

I buzzed my assistant Keith. “Get every staff member who’s not working crowd control in here. Tell them to sift through every second of surveillance video of the castle’s exterior and interior, starting just after Merrill’s flight last night. If someone cut that cable, we should have them on video.”

“We’ve already got all available staff here, running through the videos and trying to re-trace Mr. Arrezzo’s last few hours.”

Pulling my cell phone out of my pocket and heading out the door into the makeshift workroom where all those people were, I said, “I knew that. Watching Merrill die just got me rattled. Tell them to keep an eye out for him, too, while they’re scanning the video. I want to know everything he did today, and that includes what time he took his last piss. Call in some off-duty staff to go through the castle videos, if that’s what it takes.”

Letting the door slam behind me, I dialed James, the person most likely to know things about the dead Peter Pan that no surveillance camera could ever pick up.

“James—” He cut me off before I got any further.

“You’re calling me during working hours—” James took a breath and I knew he was checking his Caller ID. “—and you’re on your company cell phone. Is that completely safe?”

“Please don’t start. This is not the time. Merrill is dead.”

“Dead? Merrill? He’s the healthiest man I know.
God.
And you’re calling me on your company phone, so I’m guessing he died in the park on your watch. Whatever happened?”

Striding through the broad underground corridors alongside staffers muttering amongst themselves about Peter Pan’s fall, I wished I’d made this call before leaving my office. Reaching the infirmary where Merrill’s body would be brought, I told James to hold on a second and stepped into an empty examining room, closing the door.

“He fell. His wire broke. We’re trying to find out whether it was an accident. Can you tell me whether he had any enemies?”

“How should I know? What makes you think I knew anything about Merrill’s friends or enemies? We had absolutely nothing in common. Other than being flaming faggots.”

“The dressing room, James. Please don’t make this into something it’s not. I just thought you might know something about his personal life because you see him every day in the dancers’ dressing room.”

“Well, it
is
the single-gender Peyton Place of central Florida,” James purred. The prospect of being asked to gossip on the company payroll had driven the knowledge that he was angry with me clean out of his mind. “Merrill cheats on Aaron quite regularly, and he flaunts it in his face, too.”

“Would Aaron have killed him for it?”

“Sweetheart, that dressing room is filled right up every day with men that could just kill Merrill. First, there’s Aaron. Then, there’s all the other men he’s loved and left. Also, he’s stolen a few boyfriends from a few people who don’t like him much any more. And don’t forget the classic culprit—his understudy. Me. How far do you think I might go for a chance at that job, not to mention the glory and the money that come with it?”

“James, come on. You? A murderer? Who stomps the palmetto bugs at our house?”

“Well, you do. But I like palmetto bugs more than I liked Merrill.”

I shifted the cell phone to my other ear. “So you’re telling me that every male dancer in the park had some reason to want Merrill dead?”

“Pretty much. Any more questions? Want to know what I’m cooking for dinner?”

“I don’t think I’ll be home for dinner tonight.”

***

My professional observation of Merrill’s body was much more unpleasant than viewing Mr. Arezzo’s body had been. The Mafia chief had simply been a middle-aged man, limp and pale. The apple strudel smeared on his blank face had impaired his dignity, but it had not destroyed it.

Merrill, on the other hand…well, I happen to believe that God never intended a man to die with his green, pointy-toed boots on. And He damn sure didn’t mean for him to do it in sparkly tights.

Merrill’s broken body had nothing to tell me. All I needed was the identity of the person who sabotaged his cable. And I knew now that it
was
sabotage. My people had examined both ends of the cable. A clean cut had extended almost all the way through its diameter, leaving just enough material to hold the thing together, but not enough to support Merrill’s weight.

Keith caught up with my frenetic pacing long enough to say, “We’ve got nothing on who cut Merrill’s cable. There’s no security camera up there.”
Of course there wasn’t
, I reflected.
Why would there be?

A young blonde woman whose name had escaped me beckoned. “Mr. Arrezzo seems to have been…difficult. I’ve got video of him arguing with his wife, browbeating a ride attendant, yelling at his kids. And the park was only open two hours before he died. Who brings their kids someplace like this, then makes them cry?”

I didn’t think his kids put rat poison in his strudel, and I told her so.

“Yeah, well if I was married to a guy like that, I just might,” the blonde confessed. “I mean, how easy could it be to divorce the Godfather?”

I nodded to concede her point. “See if you can get video of her poisoning the Godfather.”

Another staffer tapped me on the shoulder and beckoned for me to lean down close. “Better have somebody check her work,” he whispered. “Sounds to me like she might not mind if Mrs. Arrezzo got away with poisoning the man.”

Another good point.

“Does anybody have the Arrezzos ordering their breakfast? I want as good a look at his food as we can get.”

The blonde had the video I wanted. The victim ordered for his whole family, like a man who was accustomed to doing all the talking in his world. He got bacon and eggs and orange juice for everybody. Nobody got strudel but him, which might have been one more evidence of his extreme self-centeredness. Or it could have meant that Mrs. Arrezzo was on a diet and the kids were holding out for ice cream later.

I couldn’t see anything going in or on Mr. Arrezzo’s food from the moment it was handed to him. There were gaps in camera coverage of the kitchen, but everything I could see looked good.

I wished the surveillance video had sound, but all I could see was the murder victim’s mouth moving and his head nodding. In an hour, he’d be gone. For a while, I just watched the dead man talking.

Then I ran the tape again, trying to look at everything
but
the dead man. I scanned every face in the room, looking for Mafia hit men. All I saw were kids and diaper-bag-packing moms and a couple of dads dandling babies on their laps. Behind Mr. Arrezzo, surrounded by the restaurant’s fake Bavarian trappings, his wife and kids cowered. In front of him, a teenaged cashier nervously hit the wrong keys on her register and had to start over. The dead man was not pleased.

Experience spoke in my ear, and it said,
Look beyond the immediate. Screen out the obvious. What else do you see?

At the edge of the screen, I saw other teenaged cashiers, oblivious to the Arrezzos and their unfolding drama. And in the background, for just an instant, I saw Rosa.

***

Beneath the park, there are dressing rooms and employee cafeterias and storage rooms and food staging facilities. There are broad passageways where golf carts shuttle people and things where they need to go. And if you stray far enough from the beaten path—if you burrow deep enough—you can find rooms full of things people have forgotten ever existed. In the case of Rosa, you can even find a person whose existence has faded from memory. Well, most memories.

The hardworking kids who run the park know Rosa. They see her pass quietly as they load the trains and serve the burgers and march in the parade. Some of them are afraid of her, but the ones with hearts see Rosa for what she is…a sweet-faced old lady with nowhere to go.

Rosa likes the kids. I’ve seen her walk past a little ticket-taker who was having a rough day and pat her on the elbow. No talking, no hugging, just a little pat. I’m not supposed to know this, but sometimes she fills in for them, spending a few minutes selling ice cream so that the real ice cream guy can go to the bathroom or steal a moment with his girl. It’s against the rules, but what the hell.

If old people are invisible in our world, then I guess you could say homeless old people inhabit some other dimension. You’d think Rosa would stand out in a crowd affluent enough to afford the park’s hefty ticket prices. You’d think wrong. I’ve watched a family of five jostle past Rosa as she stood leaning against a wall, minding her own business. Not one of them looked her in the face.

Can you imagine a better informant for someone in my position?

***

Rosa likes pizza, so I brought three slices down into the deepest part of the basement, to the storage closet she uses for an apartment. Kicking aside a sizeable stuffed pig with only one ear, I eased myself down onto a pile of stuff that she uses for a guest chair. She sat on another pile next to me. At the bottom of her pile, I recognized a cast-off ballgown and a pirate suit. Rods hung on Rosa’s walls at about eye level all around the room, suggesting that it had once been used for costume storage. This would explain the air conditioning vent in the closet ceiling. Fabric gathers mildew within days in this climate, unless the humidity is wrung out of the air with expensive machinery.

Rosa seems to gather lost sweaters and misplaced stuffed animals. These things serve her well as clothing and furniture. It occurred to me that maybe we should pay her for being the park’s scavenger. A teepee of old gardening tools leaning in the corner of the closet made me wonder whether Rosa ventured out at night to shape up the topiary bushes, just for fun.