I blinked. “Viv? Did you –?” My jaw dropped, and I stared at the keys in her hand.
She giggled and pressed her hands against mine. “Shhh. Don't look like that, it's not as if I took his wallet, although I could have!” She giggled again, enough triumphant light in her eyes to bring a glow to the dark recess where we hid. “I'll bet anything I could have.”
She heaved a great satisfied sigh and smoothed her jacket. “Well now, that felt good. I haven't had a thrill like that in years. So are we going up or not?” She leaned around me to peer down the hallway.
I was too stunned by the revelation that she was a pickpocket to grasp what she was asking.
“Going up where?”
“To the bell tower, of course. Why else would I have lifted his keys? You heard him yourself. He would let us in any other room in the building.”
I wasn't quite sure what to say. I wanted to feel around the edge of Viv's neck to see if she was an imposter with a Viv mask. “I can't believe you took his keys and he didn't even know it. I didn’t know it, and I was standing right there.”
“Smooth as butter, that's what they always used to say about me. Buttercup was my nickname.” She raised her brows and gave an unabashedly proud grin. “Come on.”
“Don’t you have choir rehearsal to get to?” I asked. She ignored me. Clearly, she had more interesting things on her agenda.
It only took three false starts before Viv found the right key to get us into the stairwell.
I don't know what I was expecting, something gothic and majestic, I suppose. The door opened onto a small group of rooms – two offices and a teeny bathroom, all with rotten orange carpet and used-to-be-white walls. More stairs led up to another level. Every inch within view, with the exception of a narrow path through the middle, was full of junk: old desks, filing cabinets, cardboard boxes ripped at the corner and spilling out the sides.
I looked around, disillusioned. “This is what the trustees have forbidden people to see?”
Viv was already halfway up the first set of switchback stairs. “Probably they don't want people to see what a mess it is in here.”
I could relate to that.
For an old lady, Viv could scurry up the stairs pretty darned quickly. I was huffing to keep up with her. The stairs were steep and narrow, switching back every ten steps, and my tight pants were not making this easy. Every other set of stairs opened onto an identical set of offices, with a nearly identical mess.
My legs felt like logs after the third set of stairs. The third story had even more junk, if that was possible. Two long racks held play costumes – or else someone just had bizarre taste in clothes – and boxes full of fabric of some sort, blankets or draperies or something.
“Must be the stuff from the church's big musical,” Viv said.
I knew they put on a play every year, but I had never gone. Tickets were forty bucks a pop.
“This place is a disaster area,” I said, flipping through costumes on wire hangers. I shifted Stump and tugged at the waistband of my jeans. All the exertion seemed to be stretching them some, but they were still uncomfortable. “Someone could murder eight or ten people up here and no one would ever know.”
There was another door at the top of this set of stairs, and after rattling the knob, Viv pulled out her set of stolen keys. I waited on the steps and tried to appear like I wasn’t breathing hard.
It dawned on me that Viv picking George’s pocket was, of course, illegal. Since I knew about it and hadn't done anything, I was either an accessory or an accomplice. Plus I was now probably trespassing; not good for someone on probation.
“Are we sure we want to do this?” I said. “I really don’t need to be in any more trouble.”
Viv waved a hand carelessly. “You only get in trouble if you get caught, and we’re not going to get caught.”
She opened the door onto a stone-walled room without interior walls. It was the same size as the office suites we’d just moved through – these rooms made up a five- or six-story bell tower – but this section looked bigger because it was open. At about every story level, window openings a foot wide and four feet long cut into the walls. The openings were covered with a wire mesh on the inside and white shutters on the outside. The ceiling hung a good three stories above us, and a single spiral staircase stretched through the center of the room. The staircase had a disturbingly rusty quality to it.
“We're going up there, aren't we?” I said, somewhat fatalistically. I tugged again at my jeans.
“I didn't pick George's pocket so I could look at old costumes from The King and I.”
She darted up the stairs like a squirrel racing up the trunk of a tree. I looked at Stump who, since we were so far off the ground, now weighed about a thousand pounds. She looked at me. “We wanted to do this,” I reminded her, as if this had been partly her idea.
I heaved a sigh and followed after Viv, feeling even more like Jabba the Hut as I dragged one stiff leg after another up the metal risers. I had to keep Stump tucked under my left arm so I could hold onto the skinny metal handrail with my right.
About halfway up, the stairs began to sway a little. Not as if they were crashing over, exactly, but enough to be alarming. I looked down and readjusted my estimation that it was three stories. It had to be at least five.
“Kind of wobbly, isn't she?” Viv called down to me. It didn't sound like she was even breathing hard.
I, on the other hand, was certain I was having a heart attack either from the exertion or the fear of the whole staircase coming undone at the top and crashing me into one of those brick walls.
I looked up and felt a sinking in my stomach when I realized we still had a long way to go. Ever one to look on the negative side, I mentally ran through all the scenarios that could possible play out here. The stairs really could come loose at the ceiling and topple over. There would be an investigation, of course, which would conclude that Viv and I had stolen the keys and entered a “forbidden area,” and that I had exceeded the weight limit of the stairs, causing them to come crashing down, costing the church a huge sum in repairs and landing me in jail for probation violation. Or, I could give way to the panic building inside me until I cowered, frozen on the risers, and Viv would have to call 911 and firemen would come, television crews would appear, the shutters and wire would be taken off those big openings and they'd haul me out in a cherry picker, the same way they got the big carillon bells inside. Again, Viv and I would be caught with the stolen keys, and I would go to jail.
My legs began to shake. I don't know if it was from muscle exhaustion or nerves, but it certainly didn't make me feel any more secure. Every step I took seemed to make the stairs sway more.
I thought that if I kept moving round and round quick enough, even if the stairs did come unmoored, my weight would keep the stairs from toppling too far in any one direction. I jogged up. Well, I jogged about three steps. Then I stopped and bent over, resting Stump’s weight on the steps. I was terrified to let go of her, though, in case she went through the steps and plummeted to the floor.
“Almost there,” Viv sang out.
I opened my mouth and huffed out a shaky groan.
“Are you okay?”
“I have no idea,” I wheezed. I saw spots. I picked Stump back up with a groan.
“Oh,” Viv said, poking her head through the landing. “I thought this was the top.”
You've got to be freaking kidding me, I thought, because I was breathing too hard to speak. We've been climbing for days. This wasn't the top?
I rounded the last step of the spiral staircase and groaned again to see another big open room exactly like the one we'd just climbed through, except not as tall. Wind whistled through the openings and blew at the sweat on the back of my neck.
Viv walked around the room, scuffing at the concrete floor. “They really should clean up here. It looks like a flock of pigeons has been living up here.”
It was pretty nasty, but I wasn't going to volunteer to bring my mop and bucket up there. I looked through the round hole above us. “This is the last flight of stairs.” I saw a solid ceiling above.
Viv didn't answer.
I looked over at her. “What's wrong?”
She wrinkled her nose and looked at the stairs. “We don't really need to go all the way up, do we?”
Even though every muscle in my body screamed for me to agree with her, I said, “Are you kidding? This story is half the length of the last one. We're not going to quit now when we're this close.”
“There's probably nothing up there.”
Probably, she was right, but I felt this overwhelming need to go all the way to the top and see. Maybe it was a God thing, telling me how to help Tony. That’s what I’d been praying for, right? Maybe there really was something up there that would point to the real murderer.
“I'm going,” I said. As soon as I caught my breath.
“Are you sure? That last set of stairs made me a little nervous.”
She did look nervous, I realized. She wasn’t sweating or breathing hard like I was, but she did look edgy. I'd been too caught up in my own impending heart attack to think about Viv’s health. She had to be eighty-something. Maybe I shouldn’t be asking her to climb a bunch of stairs.
Third negative scenario. Viv has a heart attack instead of me, I have to call 911 to get help, the aforementioned EMTs come, I'm blamed for stealing the keys because – after all – who’s going to blame the old lady with the heart attack?
“Are you going to be okay?” There was no way I’d be able to carry her and Stump down those six thousand spiral stairs. I didn’t want to dwell on which one of them I would save if push came to shove.
“I'm fine, I just...” She wrinkled her nose again and looked up. “You go first.”
“Are you sure? Because I don't know CPR.”
She shooed a hand at me. “You're more likely to need CPR than I am. I just don't want to go first.”
I didn't see what difference it made which one went first, so I shrugged and started back up. I kept looking down to make sure she was okay, but all I saw was the top of her curly white head. My left arm screamed and I had to stop a couple of times to shift Stump around.
I stopped as I cleared the landing. “You okay?” I called down.
Something beat the air near me, slammed into my cheek, and flew off.
I screamed and jumped up and down on the metal stairs, much like I had Monday when I'd found Lucinda Cruz's dead body. Stump scrambled in my arms and I clutched her so tight to me that she grunted.
My panicked jumping rang out on the stairs, and my scream sent several hundred pigeons into their own panic mode. The air came alive with gray and white. Below me Viv screamed, too, clutching my pants leg. Her grasp scared me again and I jumped more, terrified beyond all reason that some pigeon/boogey monster had me in its evil clutches. Every time I jumped, the stairs rang out like the bell above me and pigeon poop flew to the floor below.
“Stop jumping!” Viv screamed.
“Let go of my leg!”
“Be still!”
“Let go!”
We went back and forth like that a few more times before it dawned on me that, even if we were able to get through this without heart attacks for either of us, our screams were very likely to draw unwanted attention. I could still end up going to jail for trespassing.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I breathed, my heart thudding from the stupid bird that had flown into me. I rubbed at my cheek with my shoulder, creeped out and fighting the heebie jeebies.
“That bird scared me half to death.” I cleared the last few steps on rubbery legs.
“I knew that was going to happen. That's why I didn't want to go first.”
I stepped aside to let Viv up, fighting the urge to put a shoe in her face and send her tumbling back down the stairs. “You knew that was going to happen? Could you have warned me?”
“Sorry, I have a thing about pigeons. They're disgusting.”
“The one that just flew into my face certainly was.” I moved over to the opening to let the wind knock some of the disease-ridden pigeon germs off me. I shuddered and decided as soon as we got down I was going home to take a boiling hot shower.
“This place is awful,” Viv said. “Pigeon poop everywhere. Glad I'm not wearing open toed shoes.”
I turned and looked around the room. Three pipes with graduating bells stretched across the width of the small room, and one huge bell hung in front. That was probably the one that rang every quarter hour.
Viv was right. Every inch of that room was covered with pigeon poop, dripping off the bells, piled in little mountains on the floor. I would imagine murder clues would be fairly easy to find in a bunch of poop. I sagged as I realized I was not going to be able to put down Stump, something I’d been looking very forward to. At least I could shift her to the other arm now.
I stared out at the church below us. It was a beautiful building, with black slate peaked roofs and dormer windows, spires, arches and stained glass everywhere. It was about 75 years old. Five or six years ago, the church had bought the building on the next corner and then added on to it, constructing a connection between the two buildings that housed the new gym and a bunch of meeting rooms. They’d designed the new building in the same Spanish Gothic style as the old building, and they’d mostly succeeded in making the whole thing look like one humongous building. From this height, though, you could see the differences between the old and new.
“I never realized how much the building snaked around,” I said as I looked out. The breeze blew against my temples and I thought, given time, I might recover enough to make the climb back down. A week, say, or two.
Viv joined me at the window. She nodded toward a courtyard in the center of everything that held a few benches and some shrubs. The courtyard sat between the old and new building, surrounded by an atrium on either side. “They couldn’t build over that because that’s where the tunnels all connect.”
“Tunnels?” I’d never heard anything about tunnels. But then, I wasn’t on all the church committees like Viv was. She was probably privy to all kinds of information including salaries, who the big donors were (since she was probably one of them) and various infighting gossip.
“Back before the old church burned down –”
“The old church burned down?” I said.
She gave me a look. “Do you ever look at the pictures on the hallway walls? Ever see the one with the burned out church? Blackened beams? Rubble?”
“Ummm,” I said. Because no, I did not look at the pictures on the walls. Apparently I had missed out on some crucial information.
“The first building burned down back in the forties, and they built this one to replace it. There used to be underground tunnels that went all over downtown, but maybe thirty years ago or so they decided to close them down because some were crumbling. Four or five of them converged right there.” She nodded again at the courtyard. “That’s why we don’t have a fountain there, either. Too heavy. Can you imagine what would happen if some of those old coots were sitting there watching the fountain bubble and the whole thing just fell in?” She cackled as if she was not an old coot herself.
“Why don’t they just fill in the tunnels?” I asked.
“Too expensive. The city filled in some of them, but some of the tunnels are still in use. The city and the church got into a big battle about whose responsibility it was to fill in the tunnels, and eventually the city won.” She shook her head. “In the end, the trustees decided it would be a lot cheaper to make the courtyard and avoid building over that space. Marvin Duggan was plenty PO’d,” she said. “He wanted to put a big fountain like at The Bellagio in Las Vegas.”
Which would go really well with Spanish Gothic, I thought. God probably put that tunnel there so a hundred years later Marvin Duggan couldn’t build a Bellagio fountain in the middle of West Texas.
“What are we doing up here?” I said with a sigh, more to myself than to Viv. I walked around the room, shaking some feeling back into my left arm. I'd really thought God was leading me to something up here. I turned back to the window and looked down – way down, geez! – at the place where Lucinda Cruz's body had sprawled. I didn’t know why I'd been so sure she’d fallen – or been pushed – from up here. Wire mesh covered all the openings and aside from a few small tears here and there, the mesh was intact. Holes big enough for a pigeon to get through, but not big enough to push a body through.
So much for listening to God, I thought sourly.
“Excellent,” I muttered. “All we've uncovered is a criminal buildup of pigeon doo-doo. I don't know why I thought we could solve a mystery better than the professionals.”
Viv snorted. “I'll bet we could if we had all the information and tools they have. We're handicapped because we can't get at the evidence.”
“I know. I ought to go ahead and talk to Bobby again, see if I can talk him into giving me some information.
“Bobby who?”
“Bobby Sloan. He's the detective on this case.”
“Salem! Why didn't you say that in the first place?” Her eyes snapped and she grinned. “You have connections.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I don't know how good those connections are.” Should I tell her I was supposed to meet him this afternoon?
“You're a woman, you can capitalize on whatever connection you have.”
I tried to picture me giving Bobby a sultry pout and positioning myself to allow him a view of my cleavage. Even in the best case scenario of my imagination, it came out a little too Miss Piggy for my taste.
“I suppose I could talk to him, but using my womanly wiles is not really an option.”
“Well, I can't use mine, they're all dried up.”
“What do you think I ought to ask him?”
“Find out what kind of evidence they have on your ex-husband.”
“I think he’s my ex,” I said without thinking.
Viv looked at me.
“It’s possible we’re still married.”
“Honey, you were drinking a lot.”
“It's complicated. It would be good to know what they've got, though.”
“It's as simple as that, then.”
Simple. “I actually already tried to get information from him this morning, but he wasn’t talking. He did tell me to come back to the station this afternoon, though.” With Viv accompanying me, it didn’t seem so scary.
I sighed and turned back to the window. As much as I dreaded the thought of talking to Bobby again, I liked the idea of looking at him again. “What a mess,” I said, looking out at the roof of the church. “We’d better get back before George realizes –”
BONGGGG!!!
The earth shook, and I felt my knees give way.
Viv’s eyes bulged at me, then she headed for the stairs as quick as her little old lady legs would carry her.
The trip back down didn’t take nearly as long, probably because it sounded like freaking Michael and all the archangels were hot on our heels. I was panting again by the time we hit the last bit of stairs.
“I wonder how we're going to get the keys back to George.” She moved gingerly down the last step.
“What? You don't have a plan?”
She waved fingers carelessly while the other bony, blue-veined hand gripped the rail. “Something will present itself.”
“I'm glad that you have confidence in your abilities,” I hissed. “But I'd feel better with more of a plan.”
“The Bible says were supposed to have faith, Salem. So have faith.”
“Have faith that God will provide a way for us to get away with stealing the man's keys?” I was getting a little worried that George was going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs with a couple of cops. Okay, a lot worried.
“You don't have to screech, Salem. If God didn't want us to be here, he would have found some way to stop us.”
I could spot a dozen holes in Viv's theology, and was about to run them down for her, when Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rang out.
“Ahhh!” we both screamed. Viv stumbled against the door. She scowled while I dragged my phone from my jeans pocket and punched the “Ignore” button. Viv reached for the knob.
“Wait!” I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “What if there's somebody out there?”
“Like who?”
“Like George. With cops.”
“Why in the world would George have cops?”
The woman was either very bold or just plain oblivious. Probably both.
She yanked the door open and sure enough, there was George with the cops. I saw spots and felt my knees go weak before I realized it wasn't George at all, but Don, walking down the hallway. From the wide-eyed look on his face, he hadn't expected anyone to be coming out that door.
“Don!” Viv greeted him like she hadn't seen him in years. “Do me a favor and give these keys to George, would you?” She shoved the keys in his hand before he could answer. “He really ought to be a little more careful, leaving keys in doors like that. People are forbidden to go in that tower, you know.”