Stan’s office was also a storage room complete with a desk in the middle that was a relic from an age when aluminum was the exciting new material.
“So.” Pablo glanced over at the chair behind the desk, where he should be sitting, then looked at us expectantly.
“Go ahead and have a seat,” Myra said.
“Right. Sure.” Instead of walking around the desk, he dropped down into one of the folding chairs next to the shelf of beach towels and sunglasses and cupped his knees with his palms.
Myra somehow managed not to roll her eyes and took the seat behind the desk.
That left me the other folding chair. I picked it up and placed it a little closer to Pablo.
“I know Myra already talked to you but we just wanted to go over a few questions.”
“I understand.”
Since Myra had already gone through this, I took point. “When did you start your shift that day?”
“Three o’clock. I work the swing shift.” He enunciated like I had a microphone in my hand.
“Were you working alone?”
“No, Stan was here until five o’clock, and then Lulu came in.”
Lulu was Stan’s eldest daughter. “I thought she was going to community college.”
“She is. She still pulls a shift now and then when she needs spending money.”
“Was she here all night?”
“No. She left after being here only fifteen minutes.”
That seemed weird.
“Why?”
He reached out and dragged one finger over the open top of a box near his knees. “Well, she got invited to a party at a friend’s house. Netflix and beer. Since it was so slow, I told her to go.”
“Does Stan know that?”
“Oh, sure. He’s fine with me covering the till and the pumps if it’s quiet enough.” His finger had finished tracing the edge of the box and he dunked his hand in. His eyes were wide and innocent and locked on mine.
I glanced at his hand.
He was holding a squeegee.
“So why did you go to the shed if you were covering the till and the pumps?”
“That was after my shift. I closed up at midnight sharp, just like we always do.” He punctuated that with a little poke of the squeegee. “Then I checked the shed to make sure it was locked. We don’t get into it that often, but it’s our property, and you never know when someone might decide to get up to some mischief. It was locked. But when I came in to open the next morning, I saw it was unlocked.”
“Did you see anyone by the shed? During your shift or in the morning?”
“I did not. We have a camera on it.”
“What?” Myra and I said at the same time.
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Stan has this crazy idea that he saw Bigfoot stealing our light bulbs the other day. Bigfoot.” He waved the squeegee around like he was scrubbing that image out of the air. “I think he’s just been to that quaint little local-color museum down in Newport one too many times.”
Apocalypse Pablo had a real knack for being polite. “Quaint” was actually “cheesy” and “local-color” was “outdated snake skin oil and hokum” shop.
