“Thanks for risking your life for me.”
Fred touched her arm. “Ju
st doin’ my job, Miss DeLeon.” He winked.
He started to straighten up, but she grabbed his arm. There was something else she wanted to say. He had to put his ear close to her mouth to hear her.
“I’m sorry I was such a doofus,” said Kaira.
35
Over the next two months, a lot more people signed Armpit’s cast, most of them females who decorated their names with hearts and flowers. He didn’t get an F in economics, but an Incomplete, which turned into an 89 after he made up the final.
He was very lucky, and he knew it. If Jerome Paisley had succeeded in killing Kaira, Armpit would have spent the rest of his life in jail.
His fingerprints were on the bat. The knife came from his room. Her room key was found in his hotel suite. Traces of his blood and hair would be discovered in the next letter from Billy Boy. Then there was his prior criminal history, and the very public argument at the coffeehouse.
“If I was on the jury, even I would have voted to convict me,” he said.
“No, you’da gotten off,” X-Ray assured him. “How did you get the bat? You couldn’t have brought it from Austin. It wouldn’t fit in your backpack. And what? Did Ginny fake a seizure just so you could meet Kaira DeLeon? And you could have gotten Debbie Newberg to investigate for you and she would have found out about the missing money. Besides, how did your hair and blood get inside the envelope? What—did you cut yourself while brushing your hair, while you were writing the letter? The frame was too obvious. If you’re going to frame somebody, you got to be more subtle about it.”
“You should be a lawyer,” said Ginny.
“A lawyer,” said X-Ray as he mulled it over. “Now you’re talkin’. I’m good at the art of verbal persuasion.”
“Otherwise known as BS,” said Armpit.
The three of them were sitting in Ginny’s room, with all her stuffed animals.
As it turned out, the evidence that would have been used to convict Theodore Johnson would now be used against Jerome Paisley to prove premeditation—to show he had planned to murder her. However, El Genius had pretty much confessed to everything, so it didn’t look like there would even be a trial.
Armpit had been a little disappointed when the San Francisco district attorney told him that. If there were a trial then he’d get to go back to San Francisco and see Kaira again. Maybe they would go to Chinatown together and eat a couple of those steamed pork buns.
He still hadn’t heard from her. He thought about trying to get in touch with her but didn’t know where or how to find her.
“You shouldn’t have to call her,” said X-Ray. “She should call you! Not even a thank you! She’s such an ungrateful—” He stopped because Ginny was there.
“She’s going through some hard times,” Armpit said.
From everything he’d read in the papers, Kaira’s life was a train wreck. That woman Aileen had stolen most of the money from the concert tour, and there were still many people who needed to be paid and ticket holders who needed to be reimbursed. According to the newspapers, Kaira was broke. Whatever money she had left was being eaten up by lawyers and accountants. Of course, he realized, broke for someone like her didn’t mean the same as broke for someone like him.
Aileen had been arrested in Belize a few weeks earlier, but the money was never recovered. A police detective had discovered that Theodore Johnson’s airline ticket was purchased over the Internet and that the same computer had also purchased a ticket to Costa Rica for someone named Denise Linaria.
Worse for Kaira than the loss of her money was the loss of her voice. The doctors said she might never be able to sing again.
Armpit looked around at Ginny’s stuffed animals. Like Hooter, the owl who couldn’t see, or Daisy, the dog who couldn’t hear, Kaira might be a singer who couldn’t sing.
36
But she did sing again.
It was in late February. Armpit was just getting out of bed when he heard her voice on the radio.
It’s a lost and lonely kind of feeling,
To wake up wearing a disguise.
I lie in bed staring at the ceiling,