Free Father's Day by Keith Gilman Page B

what makes you think you’re so smart.”
    “I keep my eyes open, and my ears, too.”
    “Too bad I didn’t teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
    She turned her face toward him, opened her mouth wide, and shoveled in a heaping tablespoon of ice cream. She wiped the brown mustache from her lips with her sleeve. The flannel shirt she was wearing was her father’s. They sounded like two disgruntled cops walking the same beat for fifteen years. He reached a hand in her direction.
    “Partners?”
    She grasped his hand and shook it with all the strength she could summon.
    “Partners.”
    Lou started a pot of coffee and threw a frying pan on the stove. He was hungrier than he first thought and decided on omelets for lunch, with plenty of American cheese, onions, andgreen peppers and double orders of rye toast slathered with butter. For dessert, he carved a cantaloupe into thin slices and they ate them with their fingers. They ate in silence and used paper towels for napkins.
    There was still plenty of time to pay a visit to Carol Ann Blackwell’s two friends. They’d been with her on the night she disappeared. They both worked in a small strip mall just off McKean. Lisa Barrett worked in a nail salon and Jennifer Finnelli worked as a waitress in a fancy Italian restaurant called Vincenzo’s, on the street side of the mall. Vince owned the restaurant. He probably owned the whole mall, the stores, the land, and every person in it. Maggie asked if she could come along, hit a couple of stores while he interviewed the girls. He didn’t see why not.
    Franklin Plaza was a circle of stores with a large parking lot in its center. There was a Super Fresh at one end, with its shopping carts scattered around the lot at awkward angles. Once an hour a pimply-faced kid in a green apron and visor would collect them in a long train and push them to the side of the building. The Applebee’s at the other end competed with a True Value for parking. A Hallmark Store, a Manhattan Bagel, and a Radio Shack squeezed between them. A common canopy covered a concrete sidewalk that wrapped around the entire complex. Shoppers walked from one establishment to another. Elderly men sat talking and smoking on benches bordering the brick storefronts while their wives walked with the hustle of excited schoolchildren, their bags tucked securely under their arms, their mouths moving a mile a minute.
    Lou parked outside a clothing boutique advertised by two buxom female mannequins dressed in halters and spandex. They were posed provocatively in a full-length picture window. Lou caught one staring at him and he winked back as Maggie made for the entrance.
    He walked into Nigel’s Nail Salon, where an exceedingly thin Korean girl with straight black hair to her shoulders and a phone wedged up against her ear, motioned for him to take a seat while she scribbled into an appointment book. She was immaculately groomed and her sticklike legs, one crossed over the other, poked out from behind the glass table where she sat. Her toenails were bright red, a platform shoe with a six-inch heel dangling from a tiny foot. Lou raised a magazine in both hands and sat like a parishioner with a prayer book. As he casually turned the pages, he noticed that most of the ladies pictured in
Ladies Home Journal
looked more like girls than grown women and most seemed consumed with parading their own brand of sensuality.
    He paused at a picture of a middle-aged woman looking especially bright-eyed, chasing a cocker spaniel puppy through a pasture of high flowing grass. Her honey blond hair sparkled in the sun and flew in the wind, and she looked like she was floating on air. The words at the bottom of the page touted a vitamin pill that proclaimed to have harnessed the fountain of youth and was supposed to cure everything from arthritis to diabetes. He looked up and was surrounded by women, awkwardly close together, and stuffed into Sunday school chairs set in a square. The air was