“Really?” Ray said, disappointed. He’d been married three times, and been left by all three wives because of an inability to develop normal adult social skills. Ray reacted to the world as a cop, and while many women found that attractive initially, they expected him eventually to leave the attitude, along with his service weapon, in the coat closet when he arrived home. He didn’t. When Ray had first come to work at Asher’s Secondhand, it had taken two months for Charlie to get him to stop ordering customers to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Ray spent a lot of time being disappointed in himself and humanity in general.
“But, dude, rowing!” Charlie said, trying to make it all better. He liked the ex-cop in spite of his awkwardness. Ray was basically a good guy, kindhearted and loyal, hardworking and punctual, but most important, Ray was losing his hair faster than Charlie.
Ray sighed. “Maybe I should search for another Web site. What’s a word that means that your standards are lower than the desperate?”
Charlie read down the page a little. “This woman has a master’s degree in English lit from Cambridge, Ray. And look at her. She’s gorgeous. And nineteen. Why is she desperate?”
“Hey, wait a minute. A master’s degree at nineteen, this girl is too smart for me.”
“No she’s not. She’s lying.”
Ray spun on the stool as if Charlie had poked him in the ear with a pencil. “No!”
“Ray, look at her. She looks like one of those Asian models for Sour Apple Flavored Calamari Treats.”
“They have that?”
Charlie pointed to the left side of the front window. “Ray, let me introduce you to Chinatown. Chinatown, this is Ray. Ray, Chinatown.”
Ray smiled, embarrassed. There was a store two blocks up that sold nothing but dried shark parts, the windows full of pictures of beautiful Chinese women holding shark spleens and eyeballs like they’d just received an Academy Award. “Well, the last woman I met through here did have a few errors and omissions in her profile.”
“Like?” Charlie was watching the woman in tweed with the glowing frog, who was approaching the counter.
“Well, she said that she was twenty-three, five feet tall, a hundred five pounds, so I thought, ‘Okay, I can have fun with a petite woman.’ Turns out it was a hundred and five kilos.”
“So, not what you expected?” Charlie said. He smiled at the approaching woman, feeling panic rise. She was going to buy the frog!
“Five foot—two-thirty. She was built like a mailbox. I might have gotten past that, but she wasn’t even twenty-three, she was sixty-three. One of her grandsons tried to sell her to me.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, you can’t buy that,” Charlie said to the woman.
“You hear the expression all the time,” Ray went on, “but you hardly ever meet anyone really trying to sell his own grandmother.”
“Why not?” the woman asked.
“Fifty bucks,” Ray said.
“That’s outrageous,” the woman said. “It’s marked ten.”
“No, it’s fifty for the grandmother Ray is dating,” Charlie said. “The frog is not for sale, ma’am, I’m sorry. It’s defective.”
“Then why do you have it on the shelf? Why is it marked for sale? I don’t see any defect.”
Evidently she couldn’t see that the goofy porcelain frog was not only glowing in her hands, it had started to pulsate. Charlie reached across the counter and snatched it away from her.
“It’s radioactive, ma’am. I’m sorry. You can’t buy it.”
“I wasn’t dating her,” Ray said. “I just flew to the Philippines to meet her.”
“It is not radioactive,” the woman said. “You’re just trying to jack up the price. Fine, I’ll give you twenty for it.”
“No, ma’am, public safety,” Charlie said, trying to look concerned, holding the frog to his chest as if shielding her from its dangerous energy. “And it’s clearly ridiculous. You’ll note that this frog is playing a banjo with only two strings. A travesty, really. Why don’t you let my colleague show you something in a cymbal-playing monkey. Ray, could you show this young woman something in a monkey, please.” Charlie hoped that the “young woman” would win him points.
The woman backed away from the counter, holding her purse before her like a shield. “I’m not sure I want to buy anything from you wack jobs.”
“Hey!” Ray protested, as if to say that there was only one wack job on duty and he wasn’t it.
Then she did it, she quickstepped to a rack of shoes and picked up a pair of size-twelve, red Converse All Stars. They, too, were glowing. “I want these.”
“No.” Charlie tossed the frog over his shoulder to Ray, who fumbled it and almost dropped it. “Those aren’t for sale either.”
The tweed woman backed away toward the door, holding the sneakers behind her. Charlie stalked her down the aisle, taking the occasional grab at the All Stars. “Give them.”
When the woman butt-bumped into the front door and the bell over the jamb jingled, she looked up and Charlie made his move, faking hard left, then going right, reaching around her and grabbing the laces of the sneakers, as well as a scoop of big, tweedy ass in the bargain. He quickstepped back toward the counter, tossed the sneakers to Ray, and then turned and fell into a sumo stance to challenge the tweed woman.
She was still at the door, looking as if she couldn’t decide to be terrified or disgusted. “You people need to be put away. I’m reporting you to the Better Business Bureau and the local merchants’ association. And you, Mr. Asher, can tell Ms. Severo that I will be back.” And with that, she was through the door and gone.
Charlie turned to Ray. “Ms. Severo? Lily? She was here to see Lily?”
“Truant officer,” Ray said. “She’s been in a couple of times.”
“You might have said something.”
“I didn’t want to lose the sale.”
“So, Lily—”
“Ducks out the back when she sees her coming. The woman also wanted to check with you that the notes for Lily’s absences were legitimate. I vouched.”
“Well, Lily is going back to school, and as of right now, I’m back to work.”
“That’s great. I took this call today—an estate in Pacific Heights. Lots of nice women’s clothes.” Ray tapped a piece of notepaper on the counter. “I’m not really qualified to handle it.”
“I’ll do it, but first we have a lot to catch up on. Flip the ‘Closed’ sign and lock the front door, would you, Ray?”
Ray didn’t move. “Sure, but—Charlie, are you sure that you’re ready to go back to work?” He nodded to the sneakers and frog on the counter.
“Oh, those, I think there’s something wrong with them. You don’t see anything unusual about those two items?”
Ray looked again. “Nope.”
“Or that once I took the frog away from her, she went right for a pair of sneakers that are clearly not her size?”
Ray weighed the truth against the sweet deal he had here, with an apartment and under-the-table income and a boss that had really been a decent guy before he went 51/50, and he said, “Yeah, there was something strange about her.”
“Aha!” said Charlie. “I just wish I knew where I could get a Geiger counter.”
“I have a Geiger counter,” Ray said.
“You do?”
“Sure, you want me to get it?”
“Maybe later,” Charlie said. “Just lock up, and help me gather up some of the merchandise.”
Over the next hour Ray watched as Charlie moved a set of what seemed randomly chosen items from the store to the back room, directing him to under no circumstances put them back out or sell them to anyone. Then he retrieved the Geiger counter that he’d obtained on a sweet trade for a stringless oversized tennis racket and tested each item as Charlie instructed. And, of course, they were as inert as dirt.
“And you don’t see any glowing or pulsating or anything in this pile?” Charlie asked.
“Sorry.” Ray shook his head, feeling a little embarrassed that he was witnessing this. “Good first day back to work, though,” Ray said, trying to make it all better. “Maybe you should call it a day, go check on the baby, and make that estate call in the morning. I’ll box this stuff up and mark it so Lily won’t sell or trade it.”