“I've been thinking of getting a new gun,” Mrs. Karwatt said. “What kind of kick do you get with that Glock?”
I brought Rex into the bedroom with me for the night. He seemed okay after the evening's trauma. I wasn't sure if the same could be said for me. The police had arrived and unmasked the two men. The man with the needle was a stranger to me. The man who'd held the gun had been a schoolmate. He was married now and had two kids. I'd run into him at the food store a couple weeks ago and had said hello.
I slept through most of the morning and felt pretty decent when I got up. I mig
ht not be the most patient woman in the world, or the most glamorous, or the most athletic, but I'm right up there at the top of the line when it comes to resiliency.
I was pouring a second cup of coffee when the phone rang.
It was Sue Ann Grebek. “Stephanie!” she shouted into the phone. “I've got something good!”
“On Mo?”
“Yeah. High-quality vicious rumor. Only one person removed. It might even be true.”
“Give it to me!”
"I was just at Fiorello's, and I ran into Myra Balog. You remember Myra? Went steady with that dork Larry Skolnik all through high school. I never knew what she saw in him. He made weird noises with his nose, and he used to write secret messages on his hands. Like 'S.D.O.B.G.' And then he wouldn't tell anyone what it meant.
“Anyway, I got to talking to Myna, and one thing led to another and we got to talking about Mo. And Myra said that one day Larry told her this really off-the-wall story about Mo. Said Larry swore it was true. Course we don't know what that means, because Larry probably thought he got beamed up a couple times, too.”
“So what was the story?”
I sat and stared at the phone for a few minutes after talking to Sue Ann. I didn't like what I had heard, but it made some sense. I thought about what I'd seen in Mo's apartment and pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.
What I needed to do now was to visit Larry Skolnik. So I double-timed down to the lot, stuck the key in the ignition and held my breath. The engine caught and went into a quiet idle. I slowly exhaled, feeling my cynicism giving way to cautious optimism.
Larry Skolnik worked in his father's dry cleaning store on lower Hamilton. Larry was behind the counter when I walked into the store. He'd blimped up by about a hundred pounds since high school, but it wasn't all bad news—his hands were message free. He was an okay person, but if I'd have to take a winger on his social life, I'd say he probably talked to his tie a lot.
He smiled when he saw me. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
“You got laundry here?”
“Nope. I came to see you. I wanted to ask you about Uncle Mo.”
“Moses Bedemier?” A flush crept into his cheeks. “What about him?”
Larry and I were alone in the store. No one else behind the counter. No one else in front of the counter. Just me and Larry and three hundred shirts.
I repeated the story Sue Ann had told me.
Larry fidgeted with a box of homeless shirt buttons that had been placed by the register. “I tried to tell people, but nobody believed me.”
“It's true?”
More fidgeting. He chose a white pearl button and examined it more closely. He made a honking sound in his nose. His face flushed some more. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to honk.”
“That's okay. A little stress-related honking never hurt anybody.”
“Well, I did it. The story is true,” Larry said. “And I'm proud of it. So there.”
If he said nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I was going to smack him.
“I hung around the store a lot,” Larry said, looking down into the button box when he talked, poking at the buttons with his finger, making canals in the button collection. "And then when I was seventeen Mo gave me a job sweeping up and polishing the glass in the showcase. It was great. I mean, I was working for Uncle Mo. All the kids wanted a job working for Uncle Mo.
“The thing is, that's how we got to sort of be buddies. And then one day he asked me to . . . um, you know. And I'd never done anything like that before, but I thought what the heck.”