Murder at the Mall Read online

  “Get out from this place, you hoodlums! Don’t come here no more! You are the bad news! Go away now, you hear?”

  Taking a peek, I saw the group of kids who’d confessed to doing the spray-painting. They were backing away from Oskar, their hands spread out in front of them, palms open, saying, “What? What did we do? We’ve got a right to be here.”

  Well, it was after closing time, so technically, they didn’t—but I knew where they were coming from. I know how it feels to have adults chase you away from every good hangout spot. Sometimes kids get too loud, okay. But most times, it’s just out of meanness that they hassle you.

  And Oskar was mean, no doubt about it. Mean and shifty.

  The group of teens was backing right up to where I was hiding. I flattened myself against the wall and turned my back, hiding my head in my jacket to make myself less visible.

  Luckily, the kids’ attention was on Oskar, and his attention was on them. No one noticed me cowering there. A good thing, too—it would have been really embarrassing to get caught like that.

  I heard the door to the parking deck open, then slam shut. Oskar shouted, “And you stay out! No come back tomorrow—no come back never!”

  He shuffled back past the entryway where I was huddled, but again, he didn’t see me. His eyes were focused on something inside his head, and he was muttering to himself. “Stupid kids … get throw in jail, or worser! Why they no get job, make money, be like normal people? Crazy …”

  I wanted to follow him and see where he went—but first, I needed to make sure those kids were really gone. I tiptoed over to the parking deck door and tried to open it without making any sound.

  It wasn’t hard, because the door lock was taped over with duct tape. Obviously, someone wanted to make sure they weren’t locked out of the mall tonight.

  I lingered there for a minute, deciding whether to pull off the tape. It wasn’t an easy call. On the one hand, if I let a criminal back in and they got away with something bad, it would be my fault. On the other hand, if Frank and I expected to catch someone in the act, we had to let them back in!

  Oskar had almost disappeared from my line of sight. I decided to follow him without removing the tape from the door. Just then, I caught a quick glimpse of someone else, dashing across the promenade and into a side corridor. Someone female, blond, with braids, a headband, and dangling earrings.

  It had to be Frank’s new boss. She was out on bail, but I knew the police would have warned her to stay away from the scene of her alleged crime. Meaning here—which would put her in danger of being hauled off to jail if she were caught.

  Was she stalking Applegate? If she was the one he was talking to on the phone, it was possible. But I thought it was more likely Oskar she was interested in. He’d just told Phil he was going to be rich—and it seemed to me that he wasn’t talking about a lottery ticket.

  If he had picked something out of the glass that night—and Frank swore he had—it might have been something that fell from the roof along with the glass. Something that could identify the person who made it fall …

  Perfect blackmail material.

  I wondered if Steph had seen me. I didn’t think so, because she’d been looking in Oskar’s direction while she crossed the promenade.

  Oskar himself was out of sight now, hidden by the fountain and the pool that surrounded it. I checked the side corridor, but Steph had disappeared. There were two doors, and I tried them both. Locked—surprise, surprise.

  I wondered if she would have had a key—and if so, how she’d gotten it. Or maybe I’d just gone down the wrong corridor….

  Suddenly I heard a man cry out in pain—and then a loud splash!

  Forgetting about Steph, I ran back down the promenade. I was about ten feet short of the fountain when I stopped in my tracks. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that I thought it would leap right out through my rib cage.

  Something was floating facedown in the wishing pool.

  No, not something—someone!

  As I watched in horror, the body, moved by the current of the bubbling fountain, slowly turned over.

  It was Oskar—and he was very, very dead.

  10.

  We Get a Clue

  It had been a slow evening, and my legs were starting to get cramped. I’d been crouching behind this potted palm tree for what seemed like forever.

  The mall after closing time was a very quiet place. A lone security man made his rounds every fifteen minutes or so, but that was it. In a more modern mall, there’d have been security cameras everywhere, and men in a video booth watching the monitors. But not here at good old East Side.

  Nothing much else was happening in my sector. I found myself wondering how Joe was making out.

  Then suddenly I heard a loud cry of pain and a splash from the direction of the fountain. That was enough to get me out of my hiding place in a hurry!

  When I got to the fountain, Joe was already up to his knees in the water, dragging Oskar toward me.

  Oskar didn’t look too good.

  “Joe! What happened?”

  “What does it look like? Come on, Frank, give me a hand here—this guy weighs a ton!”

  “Corpses usually do,” I said, taking off my shoes and socks and rolling up my pants before getting into the pool.

  “Gee, take your time,” Joe commented.

  “Hey, give me a break. He’s already dead, the poor old guy—I mean, he was kind of nasty, but he sure didn’t deserve this.”

  We laid Oskar down on the floor. That’s when I saw the huge lump on the back of his head. “Looks like somebody conked him with something.”

  I checked in the pool. Sure enough, there was a large lava lamp resting on the bottom. I fished it out and showed it to Joe. The price tag read In the Groove.

  “I saw a blond lady running around here just before it happened,” Joe said. “She had long braids with a headband, and torn jeans…. I’m pretty sure it was Steph.”

  “Sounds like her, all right.”

  “I guess it looks really bad for her now, huh?”

  “Like it didn’t before? You know, I think it’s very possible somebody wants it to look that way.”

  “Come to think of it, it could have been that gang of kids,” Joe said. “Someone taped up the door to the parking garage so they could come back in. It might have been the kids.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No. I was following the blonde.”

  “Hmm. That’s my brother—always going after the ladies.”

  “Hey, can it, okay? Steph was acting very suspicious.”

  “Well, she’s not supposed to be hanging around here at all, according to the conditions of her bail,” I said.

  “I know—that’s what I mean!” He told me about overhearing Applegate’s two phone conversations, and his suspicion that the first was with Steph. “He gave her a twenty-four-hour deadline for something, Frank. Maybe she got desperate. She sure was acting that way.”

  “It might not have been her he was talking to,” I pointed out. “Meanwhile, how do you know it was those kids who taped the door? Maybe it was Steph.”

  “No way, Frank. As a store owner, she would’ve had a key.”

  I looked back over at the fountain. “Hey, Joe,” I said, noticing something I hadn’t seen before. “Check this out—over here.”

  On the bottom of the pool, near where Oskar had been floating, the coins people had thrown into the fountain had been arranged in a distinct pattern: STEMM. And this time, the Ms were interlocking.

  Joe gave me a look.

  “It’s not proof of anything,” I said. “Those kids tried to make her look guilty once before, remember?”

  Oskar’s broom/rake, fitted with mesh to scoop up the coins for collection, was still floating on the water. I fished it out but left the coins there for the police to find. After all, it was about time we called them.

  Chief Collig was all over me and Joe. He grilled us like a pair
of hot dogs—no, make that Phil’s Phranks. And from what we told him, he quickly decided on a course of action.

  “This has gone far enough,” he told Con Reilly and the other senior officers standing by his side. “We’re talkin’ murder now. I want that woman taken in—and this time, for keeps. And drag that bunch of no-good kids in while you’re at it—no sense taking chances.”

  The press were gathered outside, flashbulbs popping, trying to get a few pictures through the glass of the doors. “I’ve got to get out there and make a statement to those vultures,” the chief muttered to Reilly. “Think you can handle things in here for a while?”

  “No problem, Chief,” said Con.

  “I won’t be too long.”

  After he was gone, I turned to Joe and said, “I don’t believe Paul Burns and those kids killed Oskar. Do you?”

  “There was bad blood between them, Frank—you saw how they kept bothering him.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the same thing as killing him.”

  “What if he threatened them or something?”

  “Joe, he was killed with a lava lamp—one that still had a price tag on it. Someone obviously was thinking ahead enough to walk into In the Groove and grab it off the shelf, knowing in advance that they were going to smash it over Oskar’s head. I don’t think those kids are capable of that much planning.”

  “Good point,” he had to admit. “But the fact remains that the lamp came from In the Groove. It’s the kind of store those kids would shop at. So maybe one of them ducked in, grabbed it on the spur of the moment, and conked Oskar.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t buy it.”

  “Well, then, maybe we’re trying to make this whole thing more complicated than it is. Maybe Stephanie Flowers killed him after all. Maybe it was part of STEMM’s sabotage campaign.”

  Maybe, but somehow, it just didn’t sit right.

  “Why would they kill Oskar as part of a sabotage campaign?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they just try to do damage to the property itself? And besides, the warning said ‘Next time during business hours.’ If you believe it came from STEMM, then Oskar’s murder makes no sense.”

  “Wait a second!” Joe cried, smacking himself in the forehead. “I forgot to tell you. I overheard Oskar telling Phil that he was going to be rich. It wasn’t ten minutes before he died.”

  I grabbed him by both shoulders. “Joe, don’t you remember the night the glass fell, I caught Oskar picking something out of the shattered glass and hiding it in his pocket? I chased after him, but he must have hidden it someplace before I caught up with him.”

  “Yeah, I remember. What ever happened with that?”

  “What if Oskar found a piece of incriminating evidence pointing to whoever cut the glass? If he tried to blackmail that person …”

  “Of course!” Joe spoke excitedly. “But what was it? And where is it now?”

  “Whoever killed Oskar probably has it,” I said. “Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless Oskar was keeping it safe … in which case, it might still be wherever he hid it that night! Come on, Joe. Follow me!”

  I led him away from the fountain, all the way down the promenade to that little corridor where I’d cornered Oskar. “If he didn’t come back for it, it has to be in one of these two rooms.”

  Fishing my lock-picking set out of my pocket, I got to work on the first of the two doors. It opened pretty easily. Inside was a broom closet—an empty one at that. It took us all of three minutes to scour it and move on.

  The second room was also a closet—but this one held Oskar’s spare overalls, coat, and hat. I checked all the pockets. There was some change, a dirty hankie—and a sleek, slim, tiny, very expensive-looking cell phone—one that could never in a million years have belonged to Oskar.

  “Hey, Joe—check this out.”

  “Whoa! Pay dirt!” he said, recognizing it instantly as an important clue. “Well, fire it up, bro! Let’s find out whose it is!”

  I hit the on button, but nothing happened. “Hmm. Battery must be dead.” I checked the charger input—it was tiny. We were definitely going to need a special charger—something we couldn’t get till morning.

  “I guess we’ll just have to wait,” said Joe, pocketing it.

  “Hey, who found it?” I asked, sticking my hand out.

  “Oh, all right,” he said, handing it over. “Baby’s gotta have his toy.”

  11.

  The Big Chill

  That night Frank and I did an Internet search to find out who’d posted Stephanie Flowers’s bail. There were about six hundred AA Associates listed, and after the first seventy-five or so, we were getting mighty bleary-eyed.

  “This is going to take all night,” I complained. “I need my beauty sleep.”

  “It might be important, Joe,” Frank said, struggling to keep his own eyes open. “You go ahead and catch a few z’s. I’ll keep this going.”

  “Yeah, until you conk out on the keyboard.”

  He laughed. “Bound to happen pretty soon,” he agreed.

  I proceeded to nod off. I dreamed that I was about to corner Oskar’s killer. I had them backed up against a wall. Slowly they turned … and it was—

  Frank shook me awake. “Joe!” he said. “Joe, wake up!”

  “Aw, man—I was just about to reveal his identity!”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. What’s all the commotion about?”

  “I hit pay dirt, Joe. A certain AA Associates is listed for Freeport, the Bahamas, and one of its officers is an A. Applegate!”

  “Mr. Applegate? From the mall?”

  “Do you know his first name?” he asked.

  “I think it’s Arthur, right?”

  “Arthur starts with an A, Joe.”

  “Okay, but why would he bail Steph out?”

  “I don’t know, but tomorrow we’re going to go find out.”

  “Uh, what about school, dude?”

  He shrugged and sighed. “Ah, you know, tomorrow’s just going to be one of those days. We’ll skip out after lunch. We’ll have to get a note from Dr. ATAC saying we had an appointment, and make up the classwork after the case is wrapped.”

  Next afternoon we left during lunch. We waved at Iola and Chet, who were hanging out by the front gate reading a newspaper.

  Oh, well. We’d have to fill them in later. I was sure they had a pretty good idea of what we were up to, anyway. They don’t know we’re in ATAC, of course—but they do know we’re amateur detectives, and that we sometimes skip school when we’re hot on a case.

  The paper Iola and Chet were reading was all about the murder at the East Side Mall. We’d seen it on our doorstep and given it a quick look—enough to know that Bayport’s mayor and town council had already discussed closing the East Side Mall down until further notice. Their decision was due by the end of the day.

  Frank and I headed over to North Bay Boulevard, where there was a store specializing in upscale cell phones and equipment of a certain brand. We bought a car charger and plugged it into the outlet on Frank’s bike.

  He hit the on button, and the little high-tech wonder sprang to life. Blue light flickered along its edges, a rainbow of colors lit up its high-def display, and an awesome microspeaker blasted out the theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  “Wow,” Frank said. “I’ve got to get me one of those. You think we could hit up ATAC for a couple of these babies?”

  “You know, that’s a good idea—”

  Suddenly the phone started to vibrate in Frank’s hand.

  Someone was calling!

  “Hello?” He listened for a minute, and his eyes lit up. “No, it isn’t. He, uh, left it with me by mistake, but I’ll make sure he gets the message. Who is this again? Ned Lerner, from the Bar Association, about his annual donation? Yes, I’ll tell him. Thank you.”

  He flipped the phone shut and grinned at me excitedly. “This phone belongs to Bob Meister!”

&n
bsp; “I knew it,” I said. “He’s the one who paid those kids to spray that graffiti, and he planted the lava lamp in the fountain.”

  “Paul Burns must have lied to me when he said Steph paid him,” said Frank, thinking back. “Remember I told you that when I first asked who paid him, he said some things were worse than going to prison? I guess he was scared enough of Meister to lie about it.”

  “Based on what happened to Oskar, I guess the kid was right to be scared,” I said. “This phone must have dropped out of Meister’s pocket while he was up there cutting the skylight—”

  “And then Oskar found it,” Frank finished. “He must have tried to blackmail Meister—a dangerous game.”

  “You know what, Frank?” I said. “It all makes sense! Meister would have every reason to damage the mall’s reputation and blame it on STEMM. If he succeeded, the town might close the mall down as a safety hazard. Applegate would lose so much money he’d be forced to sell, and Shangri-La could swoop in and buy it for less!”

  “Except Meister had to go and lose his phone,” Frank put in. “A bad mistake—which Oskar planned to make him pay for.”

  “Which is why Meister had to kill him. And he used the lava lamp to implicate Steph, the way he’s done with everything else!”

  “I agree. I think we’ve got our killer, Joe. Now all we have to do is prove it.”

  “Prove it? What about the cell phone?”

  “Funny thing is, it probably wouldn’t have stood up as evidence in court. But I guess Meister wasn’t about to take that chance.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Frank blew out a long breath. “I guess we start by tracking him down.”

  “No problem!” I said, feeling much better. “That’s always my favorite part of a case.”

  Our first stop was Shangri-La Enterprises, just a few blocks away. We rode over there, parked our bikes around the corner, and walked to the building’s front entrance.

  “I’ll provide a diversion for you at the front desk,” I told Frank. “You just go on through and up to the thirty-fourth floor.”