1 Breakfast at Madeline's (9 page)

Finally, after I did
some more cajoling and harangu
ing, Molly poured out her story. About half an hour previously, while she lay in bed asleep, someone had heaved a brick through her window. The brick landed right on her forehead, bruising it painfully. And she had bad gashes on her arms, hands and knees from when she jumped out of bed, terrified, and fell on some shattered window glass.

She would have gone to the hospital, except she didn't want to have to tell anyone what had happened. The brick had a typewritten note taped to it which read, quite succinctly, "You talk any more, bitch, we'll
kill
you."

"Who do you think did it, Molly?"

"I don't know."

Exasperating. This girl knew a lot more than she was admitting. I understood she was traumatized, so I
tried to sound patient. "Listen, Molly, you can trust me. I never told anyone you talked to me. Nobody knew about it except your dad."

"Well,
somebody
must have known, otherwise why would they do this to me?"

"Molly, help me get to the bottom of this. You told me at the funeral, you promised someone you wouldn't say anything about the application. Who did you make that promise to? Was it Gretchen?"

"I don't want to get in any more trouble," Molly whimpered.

I couldn't say I blamed her, but that didn't stop me from pushing even harder. "Look, I know The Penn was blackmailing somebody. You've got to tell me who it was."

"I told you, I don't know anything about it!" Molly shouted.

Like heck she didn't. "For God's sake, Molly, what did Penn write on that application? Why is someone so desperate to hush it up?"

"I just want to go back to sleep!" Molly screeched hysterically. "I want everyone to leave me alone!"

She was about to hang up on me again. I backed off. "Look, I'll make you a deal: Just tell me one thing, and I'll leave you alone. Wh
ere can I find this grant appli
cation?"

For a few moments there was no answer. I thought maybe she'd hung up. But finally she said, "At the Arts Council. In the NYFA file. But don't tell anyone I told you."

Jeez, enough already. I sympathized with the girl, but I was getting sick of her. "Hey, I get the message. Your secret is safe with me."

I hung up the phone. The puzzling part was, I really
hadn't
said a word about Molly, or Penn's application, to anybody. So why did someone throw a brick
through her window with a warning not to "talk any more"? How did someone know she had talked to me in the first place?

Had Virgil, for some obscure reason, thrown a brick at his own daughter? Or did that mysterious person lurking behind the McDonald's sign see Molly and me talking together in the cemetery parking lot? Or did Gretchen—or the Mayor—somehow guess that Molly must have told me so
mething, and that's why I'd con
fr
onted Gretchen about The Penn?

Too many questio
ns, and not a single goddamn an
swer. Totally infuriat
ing. And beginning about forty-
eight hours from now, I'd be too busy dealing with mutant beetles to find out what the fuck this was all about.

I looked up from th
e kitchen table, my eyes fasten
ing on the broken windowpane to our side door. I sat there, my anger building, then stood up and threw on my jacket. I stuck my trusty Adirondack Lumberjacks cap on my head and pulled it down low, then grabbed work gloves and a hammer from my tool box. I left Andrea a note on the kitchen table—"A, Gone fishing. Back soon, J." Then I headed outside.

I mean, heck, everybody else in town seemed to be into burglarizing these days.
Maybe I should try it my
self.

14

The building that had housed the Arts Council office for the past fifteen years, and would continue housing them for two more months until they moved into the new Arts Center, was on Broadway. But the wrong end of Broadway, next to the Goodwill store and a vacant garage. Even during the shank of the evening, there was virtually no traffic there; and I was confident that at this hour the place would be deserted. I'd simply break in the back door, and there was no way anybody would see me. I'd have plenty of time to search the Arts Council—a
nd even Penn's old apartment up
stairs for good measure.

And if by some amazing freak I actually got caught, I figured on getting a break for sure. After all, not only was I more or less the executor of Penn's estate, but I'd been burglarized twice and I was just trying to catch whoever did it. So I got into my rusty old '85 Camry and drove off. The muffler needed fixing, which was highly noticeable in the silent night streets. One of these days I'd have to accept the fact that I really was rich now, and could afford a new vehicle.

The Arts Council was a mile and a half away, but I only spotted a singl
e moving car, a nondescript mid-
sized sedan which followed me down Franklin for a while, but then turned off onto Washington. There's
not a lot of action in S
aratoga Springs on a late Thurs
day night in mid-May.

I parked on a narrow backstreet one and a half blocks away from what would soon become the scene of my crime. Hammer and gloves in hand, I stepped out into the eerie three a.m. darkness, then eased along an old nineteenth-century alley toward the rear of the Arts Council building.

The alley was pitch black. The streetlights didn't make it back there, and the moon and stars were smothered by clouds. The rain that had drizzled off and on for two days
had stopped for now, leaving be
hind a strong wind th
at whooshed down the alley, rat
tled a fence, and whistled through a couple of half-open garbage cans. The only other noise I could hear above the wind was a solitary streetlight buzzing way off in the distance.

But then I heard a scream.

I stood still. Then c
ame another scream, from the di
rection of the Arts Council, even more bloodcurdling than the first.

I gripped my hammer tight. Somewhere
in the dark
ness ahead of me was a damsel in major distress. My duty was clear: charge forward, attack the villain, save the girl, and maybe get on
Oprah
.

On the other hand, I could always just sneak back into my car and hightail it the hell out of there. Maybe dial 911 after I made it safely home and locked the doors behind me. As Groucho Marx used to say, "Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up!"

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I didn't get the chance to find out
which I was, because life inter
vened. There was a scrambling noise in the alley. Then something slammed hard into my ankle.

I jumped severed feet high, and screamed myself. And then the cat—that's what it was—screamed, too.

The same scream I'd
heard earlier. My damsel in dis
tress. As the cat tore off for parts unknown, I felt my heart come back dow
n to its usual spot. I even man
aged a laugh, but stopped quickly because it sounded so hollow. I gripped my hammer more tightly than ever as I headed up the alley toward the Arts Council.

Just as I had remembered, the building's back door was well hidden. On one
side of it the wall jutted out
ward, and on the other side were some large yew bushes that hadn't bee
n trimmed in years. I'd been in
side the building several times before, while judging children's poetry for the annual Saratoga County Apple 'n' Arts Festival, and I didn't recall seeing any alarm systems. I was about to find out for sure.

The back door had a large glass panel that glinted invitingly in the darkness. This whole Donald Penn business is a real boon for local glaziers, I reflected, as I took a deep breath, brought back my hammer...

And walloped the windowpane.
Smash
—the whole pane jumped right to the floor. I waited breathlessly for an alarm. But nothing happened. I couldn't believe how easy this was. I put on my gloves and reached in, felt around for the lock, and opened the door.

Broken glass crunch
ing under my feet, I stepped in
side the dark forbidden hallway. Every nerve in my body was tinglingly alive. People who say burglary is as exciting as sex are full of shit; burglary is much more exciting. To heck with writing, this was my new career right here.

I edged upstairs, holding on to the rails. Next time I'd bring a flashlight. So far as I knew, the first floor was unoccupied; the Arts Council office was on the second floor, and Penn had lived on the third.

On the second-floor landing, my gloved hand felt a doorknob. I tapped ab
ove it hoping to find a window
pane, and did.
Yes
. I bashed the pane, unlocked the
door and stepped inside the Arts Council. Piece of cake.

I closed the two window
shades that faced onto Broadway and turned on Gretchen's desk lamp.

And then, feeling like
an old pro, I got down to busi
ness.

The Arts Council office had the kind of haphazard look you find in a place where everything is donated. Classy oak chairs were sitting alongside cheap blue plastic ones. A state-of-the-art color laser printer was hooked up to a hopel
essly outdated late-80s Mac. Be
neath the side window was an antique rolltop desk that looked pretty nifty—except for a broken leg that was propped up by
World Book Encyclopedia
volumes from 1958. A variety of
desks, file cabinets, and book
cases covered every available square inch, and they were bursting w
ith hundreds or maybe even thou
sands of files. Where in the middle of this whole mess would Gretchen keep
this year's NYFA grant applica
tions?

I started with the biggest file cabinet in the room, but all six feet of it w
ere devoted to the new Arts Cen
ter. A quick gander at the files showed that getting the Arts Center up and r
unning had taken up a major por
tion of Gretchen's life for more than a decade. And other people's lives, too; the files were full of memos and letters from such
familiar figures as Bonnie En
gels, Antoinette Carlson, and even Mike Pardou, the King of Spoons. They
had all served on the Arts Cen
ter Advisory Board and put in a lot of grassroots grunt work promoting the project.

It was fun snooping on people I knew. In another cabinet I found a drawer marked
"National Bookings of Local Artists."
Gretchen had files on a lot of local artists, but the biggest one belonged to George Hosey, the ersatz Uncle Sam. How could Gretchen possibly
take this guy seriously? But evidently she did, because the file contained correspondence from Gretchen to arts councils, city halls, and business conventions all over the world promoting Hosey's dubious services. And sometimes she succeeded. I found a letter from a marching band in Auckland, New Zealand, offering Hosey
five thousand dollars
for a one-day gig.

Five grand? For a
guy whose major talent was wear
ing a long white goatee?
Wasn't that just a trifle exces
sive?

I mean, New Zealand is basically full of kiwis and sheep. Couldn't they just make a goatee out of wool and tape it to someone's chin? Or if that failed, maybe they could make a goatee out of glued kiwi fuzz.

I was curious to read up more on Hosey, but it was closing in on 4:00 al
ready. Where were those damn ap
plications?

I ran around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, throwing open drawers and files, until finally, in the very bottom shelf of the very last bookcase in the room, I struck gold. Underneath a batch of files about local community theaters there was a plain cardboard box, about as high as a shoe box and twice as wide, with
nyfa, 98
written on the cover.

I tore the box open.
Sure enough, it was full of ap
plications, each one five pages long, stapled together. I lifted them all out.

I quickly skimmed
the top one, from "Albanese, Al
bert."
"... Requesting one thousand dollars
...
support me while I write poetry
...
need money."
Jesus, artists are so desperate. At the top of his application were two boxes,
"Accepted"
and
"Rejected",
and Gretchen, or someone else on the grant panel, had put a check mark in the
"Rejected"
box. Another dream dead. I briefly pictured poor Albert Albanese coming home from his lousy day job and discovering the rejection letter from
the Arts Council in his mailbox. I'll bet his girlfriend had to listen to him bitch for weeks.

I tossed Albanese aside and zipped through the pile, searchi
ng for Penn. Applebaum, Atwater... Alpha
betical order. I jumped ahead. Engels, French... I jumped
again. Orsulak, Pardou, Preller
...

Wait a minute. Where the hell was Penn?

Molly had said his application would be here, hadn't she? I checked
again. Orsulak, Pardou, Preller
...

Shit.

Maybe it had been misplaced. I went through the entire pile of applications carefully, one by one.

But Donald Penn's application wasn't there.

Someone had taken it away.

Great. This was just perfect.
Now what?

I checked my watch: 4:15. A wave of exhaustion poured through me. The top of my head was radiating dull throbs and my eyes ached. Outside the wind was picking up again, rattling the windowpanes. There was some kind of unpleasant smell in the air, probably dust from all those old files.

I looked down at the applications in front of me, and on a whim checked out the one from Mike Pardou. He had applied for $1
500 to support him while he com
posed a "one-man, folk-music opera about lost love, with harmonica and spoons." Just what the world needed. Bad enough people had to listen to him cry and warble "Midnight at the Oasis" whenever he got high; now he wanted to be paid for it.

But the panel had actually
accepted
his application. And not only that, they'd awarded him the entire $1500. Come on, this guy hadn't done anything of artistic note since the Jim Kweskin Jug Band broke up, and that was so long ago, people still said "groovy."

Intrigued, I decided to check the grant applications from the other artists who were also members of the
panel. Bonnie Engels had applied for $2000 to produce her boxing video;
and her application had been ac
cepted in full, too. Now Bonnie was a legit artist—I'd seen a couple of plays she directed, and they were pretty good—but two grand seemed like a lot, given how little money the Arts Council had to spread around.

I kept on going. Antoinette Carlson: $1800, accepted in full. George Hosey: also $1800, also accepted in full.

What a joke.

And to top things off, Steve Simpkins, the Novella Man, had applied for $1200
"to support me while I complete my novella. Several publishers have already expressed interest."
Give me a break, the Novella Man didn't need any grants to support him; he had a trust fund. And besides, I would bet my wife and at least one of my children that no publisher anywhere on this planet had ever "expressed interest" in anything this chump had ever written.

But his application was accepted in full.
Every single application
from me
mbers of the grant panel was ac
cepted in full.

Talk about conflict of interest.

Weird. With such small sums of money involved, you'd think people wouldn't bother to be dishonest. They'd just figure it wasn't worth the trouble. But I guess that's not how it works. What the heck, Spiro Agnew, one Watergat
e heartbeat away from the presi
dency, gave it all up for a $25,000 bribe.

Of course, with these NYFA grants it wasn't just money at stake, it was prestige. But still, it seemed so petty.

And what about Gretchen? Why did she go along with it? Because she needed these folks' help to do the grunt work for her Arts Center?

Disgusted with people
in general, and artists in par
ticular, I threw the box of applications back in the bookcase. And that's when I noticed, sitting right there on the bottom shelf, two more cardboard boxes. They were labeled
nyfa, 97
and
nyfa
, 96
. I quickly opened the '97 box, tore through the pile, and there it was:
Donald Penn's application.
W
ith his cramped meticulous hand
writing covering the page. A year old, but still, maybe it would have that ma
gic hidden clue. I started read
ing.