A little later when Stump’s apartment building came into view there was a mid-sized U-Haul truck at the back of the lot. He looked forward to seeing Grandma Pauline again.
Inside the apartment, Myles met him almost instantly with a finger pressed to his lips. “Shhh. She’s taking a nap.” He motioned for Stump to join him in the dining room.
“Is she okay?”
“I didn’t realize how often she takes side trips to Looneyville,” Myles said. “Last night, in our motel room, she kept thinking we were in somebody else’s apartment.”
The compassion in Myles’s tone reminded Stump of the days following the fire, when Stump’s mother died and Myles wanted to adopt him. Myles blew out a deep breath. “I’m exhausted and need a quick shower.”
“Go ahead. I’ll cover you.”
After Myles slipped into the bathroom, Stump heated some canned chili and settled into their recliner for a little TV.
“What smells so good?”
“Grandma Pauline!” Stump rose and hugged Myles’s mother. “How are you?”
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember me? I’m Stump. We’ve met before.”
She stared at him and said, “Oh, yeah. I thought you looked familiar.” She pointed toward her temple. “I keep forgetting. I used to be a teacher, you know?”
“History and Current Events. Right?”
“Were you one of my students?”
By that time, Myles had gotten out of the shower and was rustling around in his room. Grandma Pauline tilted her head. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Aunt Ellen’s not here,” Stump said. “We’re in California. She lives in North Carolina.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. She’s selfish, never visits or calls. I have a good mind to pull a Ruby on her.”
“A Ruby? The red stone?”
Grandma Pauline scrunched her face. “Not a stone. The man. Jack Ruby.”
“Who’s Jack Ruby?”
She shook her head. “Don’t you kids remember anything I teach you? We discussed this in class last month.”
“But we’re not in school. You’re retired now.”
She stopped and studied Stump’s face. “Oh, yeah. Sometimes I forget. The gangsters hired him, you know.”
Ruby sounded interesting, but it would be easier to learn about the guy online. Stump made a note in his phone to Google Jack Ruby when he had a breather.
“You got one of those portable phones, huh? What will they think of next?”
Stump let her look at it. “It’s an iPhone. I just made a note in it.”
“A note in the phone? Did you know we used to have a party line?”
“A phone just for parties?” Stump asked.
“We shared it with the Wynns and those other people up the road. I forget their name, but their kids hogged the lines.”
Sounded weird. Stump made a note to look up party lines when he had a chance.
“I needed that,” Myles said, returning to the action. “Everybody okay in here?”
“They remodeled.” Grandma Pauline said before she faced Stump. “Students aren’t allowed in the teacher’s lounge you know.”
Stump and Myles exchanged glances.
“I’m Stump, Grandma. This is our apartment.”
She turned to Myles. “Did you tell him I caught you drinking beer?”
Myles grinned and said to Stump, “I was eighteen. Boys will be boys.” He turned to his mother. “If we give you some chili, will you be okay while Stump helps me bring in your things?”
“Sure. You boys go ahead. I’ll be fine.”
Outside, Stump spoke first. “I’m glad you brought her here. She needs us.”
“She’s on again, off again. I’m just hoping that all this moving around doesn’t make her worse.” Myles opened the back end of the U-Haul. He turned his head and then back. “Did you wash my truck?”
A chill raced up Stump’s back. He wished he hadn’t taken advantage of Myles. Maybe he could come clean—at least partly. “I did something I shouldn’t have, so I wanted to do something nice for you—as an apology.”
“Oh, really?”
“I borrowed some money from our checking account.”
“For what?”
Stump grabbed a box of Grandma Pauline’s belongings from the storage area. “I know it’s stupid, but Dixon gave Maria a bracelet, which made me look bad, so I had to buy her something too. I just got carried away.”
Myles shook his head. “Carried away? Is that what you call it? I call it stealing.”
“I wasn’t stealing it. I was just borrowing it. It’s my account, too.”
“But you already spent all the money you put in there. The rest was my money. Just like our apartment. You’re welcome to use it, but you don’t own it.”
“Well, if I’m welcome to use it, that’s what I was doing with the money. Using it until I could pay it back.”
Myles’s head bobbed back in mocked surprise. “Exactly when and how were you going to pay it back? You haven’t even paid me for your tires yet. How much did you take?”
“After I pay Geoff Harrington, who charged me way more than you said he would, there’s about four hundred left.”
Myles eyes ballooned. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Stump. That means you took hundreds that didn’t belong to you, and you had to drive my truck without permission or a driver’s license to get it cleaned. What the hell were you thinking?”
“That’s why I wanted to do something nice for you. You already told me I could take my driving test in a few days, so I just jumped the gun a little bit.”
Myles shook his head. “That was stupid. You know that? You’re lucky you didn’t have an accident.”
“This is your fault too, you know.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“If you’d let me use my trust money, we wouldn’t have these misunderstandings.”
“It’s not a misunderstanding, Stump. It’s dishonest. There have to be some consequences this time.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Delores wouldn’t ordinarily visit a school without an appointment, but the lure of a cupcake caper with Carlton Fayes was too intriguing to get bogged down in formalities. This time, dressed in street clothes, she would simply tell Carlton she had just finished some other police work nearby and had some news for him.
She entered the lot, bypassed the bike rack and the short-term parking area, and eased her Audi into the larger section where there was a mish-mash of smaller-sized vehicles, including an unpretentious pick-up that she assumed to be Carlton’s. The spot next to it was open.
She reached across her seat and grabbed a sheet of yellow construction paper on which she’d pasted a collage of cupcake pictures along with a few comments and facts about the treats. She popped open her trunk and stashed her gun before taking another look at the silly poster she’d made. Nobody else would get a kick out of it, but Carlton probably would.
She rang the entrance buzzer, checked in and was halfway to the art room when the final bell went off. In a split second, the frenzied activity in the hallway was as if she were inside a giant beehive that had just been invaded. She grinned. All kids loved the end of the school day. She hadn’t been this enthusiastic in weeks.
Carlton was with two ten-year-old girls at the back of his classroom straightening a few pieces of art on the wall when she arrived. She tucked her silly homemade poster behind her back and walked up behind him. “American Cookery,” she said in one of the few indoor voices she’d heard in the last couple minutes.
Carlton and the girls turned around.
Delores held up her yellow poster and read some of the script she’d added at the bottom. “The first mention of cupcakes was in 1796 in a book called American Cookery. They got their name because they were made in small individual pottery cups about the size of a teacup.”
Carlton grinned, “Detect
ive Sanchez. I almost didn’t recognize you without your uniform.” He reached for her poster and looked it over. He turned to the students. “I’m sorry girls, but this is a policewoman and I need to speak with her, now.”
One girl giggled. The other looked at Delores suspiciously. They both seemed to sense that she had a little more than ordinary police work on her mind. Delores smiled and watched them leave before she gestured to her poster. “Icing had already been around for nearly 30 years. Do I get an A?”
Carlton shook his head. “Not quite.” He strutted to his desk, grabbed a big red marker from his drawer and scrawled a giant A+ in the upper corner. “Anybody who shows creativity around here gets the highest grade possible.”
Delores raised both hands to her heart in a playful gesture of pride. “I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, but I had a few things to talk to you about.”
“No problem. I was getting ready to call you too, but I need to follow up with Mrs. Carbone in the cafeteria. If you have time, we can go see if she’s still in.”
Delores would have preferred to close the door and continue their private chat, but that would be too forward for the moment. “Sure. I can tell you about a store that I found.”
“But we can’t leave without finishing your project.” He handed her the yellow poster. “Put your name in the lower corner. It’s going on the wall.”
“Really?” Delores understood why the students were so fond of Mr. Fayes. He made the little things seem fun. She reached in her purse for a pen. “Should I be Delores Sanchez, or Detective Sanchez?”
“How ’bout both? Detective Delores Sanchez.”
They tacked her poster to the back wall, among the others, and made their way toward the cafeteria. If it weren’t taboo on a couple of levels, the giddy schoolgirl inside her would have liked holding the teacher’s hand.
At the cafeteria, Mrs. Carbone, a slim, slightly greying woman, was on her way out. “Mrs. Carbone,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Detective Delores Sanchez.” He turned toward Delores. “We could never get by around here without Mrs. Carbone.”
“I assume you’re here about the cupcake wars,” Mrs. Carbone said in a matter-of-fact tone. “You know that boys like to show off. They’ll make frosting balls and toss them around. Who’s going to clean up their messes?”
Carlton put his hands to his mouth in mock surprise. “Why, Mrs. Carbone, don’t you know that all of our students are perfect little angels?”
“Yeah, right. You do realize that I’ll be checked out and the janitor isn’t going to want to clean up a big mess?” She turned toward Delores and flipped a thumb toward Carlton. “He already does more than his fair share around here.”
Delores grinned. “I figured as much. I’ll help him. He’s doing all this for me anyway.”
“All right then, if you two are willing to take responsibility, all we gotta do is get the cupcakes. How many kids you expecting?”
Delores and Carlton traded glances. “Twelve to twenty,” he said, apparently guessing.
“Okay, I’ll need enough ingredients to make three dozen.” She turned to Delores. “Nice to meet you,” she said and walked away.
Carlton faced Delores. “If it wasn’t for a couple tiny problems, we could go get those ingredients right now.”
“What problems? Maybe I can help.”
“First, I rode my bicycle today.”
She should have guessed. “I could drive. My car is like a giant purse but I could move a few more things into the trunk.”
“I wish that was all, but I’m embarrassed to say I don’t have any money until my check clears in a couple days.”
Delores snickered, “I’d offer to advance the money, but I’m in the same darn boat. Doesn’t the school have a petty cash account we could use?”
“Not for something like this. I usually have to fund these things on my own, but I like the kids, so I do without some of the frills in life.”
“Admirable,” she said, nodding.
Carlton looked over to the kitchen area. “I doubt Mrs. Carbone would mind if I put on a pot of coffee. We can work out our plans and pretend we’re in a fancy restaurant.”
“I’d like that.”
They moved toward the kitchen. “When we get those ingredients,” he said, “we should double the order. That way a certain broke art teacher and an equally poor policewoman could have their own bake sale and split the profits.”
Delores nodded, thinking about Gordon the Brit, Clint the cowboy and Dr. Moreno. Somehow this felt like progress.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
“Duck down,” Stump said as he and Myles drove past Stump’s school. “I don’t want anybody to see me with you.”
Myles grinned. “Ain’t going to happen, but I want you to know I’m proud of you. Now you’ve got a full-blown driver’s license to show for all your efforts.”
“The instructor said I needed to work on defensive driving.”
“Well, we all do. And just to show you that I can be a nice guy once in a while, after we go home and I introduce you to my mom’s new caregiver, I’m going to let you use the truck to go to work today—”
Stump’s heart jumped. Adulthood may have had extra responsibilities but it also contained some rad benefits.
“That’s not all,” Myles added. “I’ve decided to give you ten bucks an hour whenever you take my mom places.”
“But I already told you, I don’t want no—”
“I know, and I appreciate that, but there’s a difference between hanging out with somebody and taking them places such as the doctor’s office or the park. Those things are extra and more like work.”
Made sense. Stump nodded. “What about tripling it?”
Myles’s smirked. “Straight to work and straight back afterwards, got it?”
“Well. You can’t blame a guy for trying. Do I have to come right home after work ’cause—”
“I should cut you off because of your bank-robbing episode while I was gone, but you’ve shown me a lot of compassion too. So the deal is you can hang out but you gotta get home in time for me to get to my meetings.” Myles raised a finger. “And no other driving in between. If you can handle that, then next time we might open up other possibilities. How does that sound?”
Of course, it sounded great.
A few minutes later, Stump and Myles arrived at their apartment where Grandma Pauline was watching TV and Stump was introduced to Katherine DeLong, a professional caregiver. In her late thirties, she had stunning Asian features including gorgeous eyes, bobbed black hair, and a pretty smile. She insisted that everybody refer to her by her first name.
“How’d you do?” she asked Stump when he walked in.
“I passed.”
She hurried to him and gave him a warm, unanticipated hug. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Gee, thanks,” The embrace was unlike any other he’d ever experienced. Naturally, other mature women like his mom and Aunt Gerry had hugged him before, but they were family and that was before he’d gotten serious with Maria and became aware of some other things. Katherine’s breasts were larger than Maria’s.
Katherine grabbed a package from the table. “This came for you while you were gone.”
Stump turned it around. It had to be the DNA kit he’d ordered.
“What is it?” Myles asked.
“Just a small teddy bear for Maria’s birthday.” Stump said, not wanting to get into another uncomfortable conversation about his recent spending habits and why he needed a DNA test.
Myles flipped him the keys to the truck. “Remember what we talked about. No side trips.”
A little later, with the DNA test on the seat and savoring his adult-like status, Stump called Maria who agreed to meet him in ten minutes. When he made it to Cal-Vista he parked Myles’s truck toward the front of the lot where people might see him driving; then he went right to Mr. Kraft’s office.
“You’re early, today,” Mr. Kraft said
. “What’s going on?”
“I passed my driver’s test and got my license. My dad even loaned me his truck. I drove here by myself.”
“Oh, I see. That first drive is a big deal for a young fellow.”
It wasn’t really the first drive, but it was the first completely legal solo drive. “I can’t wait to get my own car.”
“Considering that deal you worked out with your dad, you must have a nice little nest egg already.”
“I’ve decided not to be so picky.”
“Good idea. The nicer cars depreciate too much.” Mr. Kraft rose and opened his wallet. “This won’t buy the entire car,” he said, handing Stump a twenty, “but it might help with that first tank of gas. Consider it a bonus.”
“Really? Gee, thanks.” Stump had always liked Mr. Kraft. It wasn’t the money per se, but the fact that the man had faith in him. That must have been what grandfathers were like.
“Glad to do it. I’m not going to be around forever and I can’t take it with me.” Mr. Kraft pointed a thumb toward the hallway. “I saw you finished up that back fence. That means you can replace all the light bulbs in the hallway. There’s a case of the new spiral-type fluorescent bulbs in the maintenance room.”
“Will do.”
When Stump opened the door to the maintenance room, he damn near tripped over the box of bulbs and noticed a new mattress leaning against the ladders and the Queen Anne bed. He flashed back to the old days when he was oblivious to the messes in his own bedroom. Now he knew why his mother got so frustrated with him.
After the bulbs were replaced, Stump spent the rest of his shift straightening up the maintenance room, without being told to do so. When done it looked twice as big.
After work he took the box of used light bulbs to Maria’s apartment, where she answered the door wearing a beautiful pink polo shirt. “How do you like my new blouse?” she asked as she opened the top button. “Mama got it for me.”
“I noticed it right away, but you always look hot when you wear bright colors.”