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Chapter 15
FotoMat Girl wasn’t there this time, instead, there was a slightly pudgy guy with a mustache. He looked managerial but nonetheless didn’t seem to know what he was doing, trying to make sense of piles of envelopes. The booth was too small for him.
Timothy stood there for a minute while mustache guy ignored him. Finally, he rapped on the glass.
“Whaddah you want kid?” the guy said impatiently.
“I’m here to pick up my photos.”
“Yeah, right.”
Timothy held up his receipt. The guy took it, squinted at, then resentfully started rummaging through the envelopes to find Timothy’s photos.
“Where’s the girl who usually works here?”
“Melinda decided to call in sick today,” the guy said, as if anyone decides to be sick.
Hmmm, her name was Melinda.
“Is she okay?” Timothy asked.
Mustache guy didn’t bother to answer.
“You sure you dropped off your film at this FotoMat?” he said.
“What other one is there?”
“There’s the one out on 9W.”
“Why would I ride my bike out to 9W?”
9W was a business highway. How did a guy like this get to be a manager?
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you kid, I’m not finding it.”
Two thoughts crossed Timothy’s mind:
One: FotoMat Girl really was a spy and was turning Timothy’s photos of the evidence over to IPM at this very moment.
Two: FotoMat Girl was actually sick, the photos were there in the booth somewhere, and this guy was just too lame to bother doing his job to help a longhaired kid.
If it were scenario one, there was little Timothy could do. But if it were scenario two, he just had to figure out a way to push this meathead a little harder. The photos were simply too important to abandon, the investigation was riding on this.
“Look, see what it says here?” Timothy said, sticking the coupon the girl had given him in the guy’s face.
“It says 50 cents off.”
“No, up at the top, it says Preferred Customer...I’m a Preferred Customer...I come to this FotoMat all the time, and I have never had anyone lose my photos before.”
A car pulled up behind Timothy’s bike and gave an impatient honk. Mustache guy waved and called “Be right with you” to the car, then said to Timothy:
“Look, kid, I don’t know what to tell you, come back tomorrow.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you find my photos.”
“Listen, you get your little ass out of here or I’m gonna call the police.”
Did this guy actually threaten a 10 year old with a profanity? A month ago Timothy might have turned tail and gone home, but a lot had happened in the last month.
“I know half the police in this town,” Timothy said, mimicking something Charles had said to him the day before. “You go ahead and call the police and we’ll see what happens.”
The guy’s face actually turned red, his bluff having been called by a hippie kid, but damn it if the kid didn’t have a freaking receipt. Like a tornado trapped in a phone booth, the guy tore through the piles of envelopes, making even more of a mess than he’d started with. Finally he held a single envelope in his hands.
“Double prints for Miller?” he asked, catching his breath.
“That’s me,” Timothy said.
The guy began ringing him up.
“I’ll take a replacement roll for 69 cents please,” Timothy added, “and don’t forget the 50 cents off.”
The guy went back and punched in the film plus the discount.
“With tax, that’ll be 4.48,” the guy said, emotionally spent at this point and just wanting to get this kid out of his hair.
“Okay, here you go,” said Timothy, dumping his massive pile of change out on the FotoMat counter.
And this time, it was mostly pennies.
# # #
Not wanting to risk spilling these most valuable pieces of evidence onto the city streets and revealing them to prying eyes, Timothy waited until he got home to inspect the photographs.
He opened the envelope carefully... yes, here were the countless barrels floating beneath the surface, the toxic sludge seeping into the brook and, distant but readable, the IPM truck with workers caught in the act of dumping the barrels into the water.
The photos had all come out, every last one.
He called Charles, and Charles’ mom answered.
“Hello Mrs. Lambeau, this is Timothy, is Charles there?”
“Hi Timothy, Charles has a baseball game today, can I have him call you tonight?”
“Yes please,” he said, resisting the impulse to add “it’s urgent.”
When Timothy ducked upstairs to use the bathroom, he could not help but notice the brand new toilet seat. It was a highly feminine black-and-white collage of naked ladies, but not the good kind, more like farty old statues from ancient Rome or some such thing.
It made him almost not want to use the toilet, but their house had only the one bathroom, it’s not like he could start boycotting.
When he went back downstairs, he found Cathryn in the living room, painting another window frame deep pink, an ongoing project.
“What happened to the toilet seat?” he asked her.
“It was getting discolored so I replaced it. Do you like the new one?”
His mom had stressed upon him the importance of not saying anything if you didn’t have something nice to say, but this was a strenuous challenge.
“I think I liked the blue one better,” he said.
He sat himself down at the dining room table to read the Daily Freeman, and it was a good thing he did. In the local section, it proved to be a banner news day:
Firstly, there was a prominent article about IPM’s application to the county to expand its facility. The article made it seem like a win-win situation. More jobs, more tax money flowing into the county coffers. No mention, of course, about more pollution.
The only squirrelly thing was that IPM had apparently hinted they might choose to expand elsewhere in the state if anything happened to bog down the process, so there was considerable pressure on Kingston officials to red stamp everything quickly.
The other article that caught Timothy’s attention was much smaller, almost hiding in plain sight. It seemed that Luke Grafton had done something called a plea bargain and had just been sentenced to three years, with eligibility for parole after just a single year.
He was to be transferred to Coxsackie tomorrow at 9am.
Luke Grafton was the one person who could say with utter certainty why he had done what he had done. And, as of tomorrow, Luke Grafton was literally being sent up the river. This would be Timothy and Charles’ last chance to question him, if only they could figure out how...
Later, at dinner, Timothy’s mom said:
“So, you don’t like the new toilet seat?”
“It would not have been my first choice.”
“Because there’s a matching shower curtain we were thinking of getting.”
“Are you trying to kill me?”
Timothy’s mom allowed herself a small chuckle.
“I suppose we could go with the lavender,” she said.
Lavender was not Timothy’s favorite either, but it was a step up from dark pink.
“Please,” he said.
He took another helping of tuna casserole.
Charles called shortly after supper, while Timothy was still clearing the table.
“I need to take this,” Timothy said, stretching the tangled cord almost to the breaking point so he could speak in privacy on the back porch.
“We won, 3 to 2,” Charles said.
“Won what?”
“Our baseball game.”
“Oh, uh, that’s good,” Timothy said, happy for Charles, but wanting to cut to the chase.
“Do you play any organized sports, Timothy?”
“Not so much...”
“I think baseball would be good for you, I can help you with--”
“I got the photos,” Timothy cut in.
“I was going to get to that,” Charles said, “but you know, T-Bird, you do need a personal life outside of detective work.”
Timothy didn’t exactly know this, but he supposed it was something he could work on.
“So, did they come out?” Charles continued.
“They did, all of them.”
“Fantastic.”
“Did you read the paper today?” Timothy added excitedly.
“No, I just got home in time for dinner, then I called you.”
“Go get it, the local section.”
Timothy listened patiently as Charles hit some key phrases aloud while speed reading through the IPM article, particularly the part about the race to approve the expansion.
“We need to act now, before this thing gets approved,” Charles said. “People need to know what’s going on.”
“But, we haven’t finished the investigation yet,” Timothy said.
“We’ve got photos, we’ve got water samples, we’ve got hard info from the Federal Government on its way, what more do we need?”
“I mean, we need to finish the other part of the investigation, the Ken part,” Timothy said. “Read the article on the next page.”
Again Timothy waited for Charles to read, but it didn’t take long, this was a very short article.
“T-bird, I’ve been thinking about this,” Charles said. “Do you know what objectivity means?”
“Something about objects?”
“Sort of...objectivity is the ability to put personal prejudices and opinions aside...it’s one of the most important skills a detective must develop...”
“What does this have to do with the case?”
“Well...have you stopped to consider that maybe the reason you’re linking the IPM dumping to Ken being killed is because you were friends with the guy?”
“I wasn’t friends with him,” Timothy said defensively, “I only talked to him the one time, when he told me about the chemicals.”
“Then why are you so insistent that we tie Ken’s murder in with this case?”
“Because without Ken, we wouldn’t have a case,” Timothy said.
The phone conversation went quiet for a moment.
“Okay Timothy...you want to come over to my house tomorrow and we’ll take what we’ve got so far and try piecing it together?”
Timothy was relieved that Charles wasn’t pushing to come over to his house, the girly toilet seat in particular still burned into his retinas.
“That sounds like a plan...”
When they got off the phone, happy as Timothy was that Charles’ wasn’t ruling out the murder case entirely, the article he’d read today still weighed on his mind. If Luke Grafton was being transferred to a state facility first thing in the morning, tomorrow afternoon might be too late.
Timothy went upstairs and retrieved one of the official school late passes he’d photocopied at his mom’s office.
The details were hazy, but he began to hatch a plan.
[click here to continue to Chapter 16]
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Love the coins, ‘mostly pennies’!
Love the way you show Timothy's hesitantly emerging confidence. And the victory of lavender over pink is ace.