She turned, surprised to find Cheese leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette.
“Oh, no, Cheese, I’m so sorry.” Her heart sank. She had told him he could sleep in the shed. “I forgot to put out the pillow and blanket.”
“It’s cool.” He stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe and pocketed the butt. “You know I don’t need much. I’m fine.”
He didn’t look fine, which made her feel worse. “I’m sorry.”
“Looks like you had a rough night, too.”
Emily couldn’t think about her appearance right now. The shed was on the opposite side of the house, but Cheese could’ve heard what happened in the kitchen last night if he’d stood outside the garage. “What time did you get here?”
“Dunno.” He shrugged. “Started out at home, but Mom was off the rails. Dad went to the station and I just …”
She watched his lower lip start to tremble. He hadn’t heard anything. He had his own problems.
“Anyway,” he said. “I’ll walk you to school.”
Emily let him take her book bag. They had to wait for her mother’s car to circle round. Esther looked out the back window, then looked again. For a split second, her poker face melted away. Emily could hear her mother’s thoughts—Was it the Stilton boy?
By the time the car made it to the driveway, Esther had regained her composure.
Cheese remained oblivious. He shook another cigarette out of his pack. They walked down the winding driveway in a companionable silence. Emily tried to remember the first time she’d met Cheese. Like most of her casual school friends, he had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. They had probably been thrown together in pre-school or kindergarten. If she tried to think of her first memory of him, it was of a shy boy sitting in the corner watching everyone else have fun. He had never quite belonged, which was why Emily had always gone out of her way to talk to him. Even within the clique, she had often felt like she was on the outside looking in.
Especially now.
“Okey-dokey,” Cheese said. “You gonna tell me what’s up?”
Emily smiled. “I’m okay. Really.”
Cheese smoked in silence, clearly disbelieving.
Emily thought of something. “Were you in the shed this time last month?”
He looked concerned. “If your parents got mad because—”
“No, no,” she assured him. “They don’t care about that. I just wondered because I came home really late that night—the night of the twenty-sixth. And they were very angry at me for busting curfew. I wondered if you’d heard anything or if you remembered anything.”
“Jeesh,” he said. “I’m sorry, Emily. If I was in the back, I didn’t hear a peep. Did you get in a lot of trouble? Is that why you look so upset?”
She shook her head. Cheese was not inscrutable. If he’d been there that night, he would’ve said something already. She was asking him the wrong questions.
She tried, “Do you know much about investigations? I mean, from your dad?”
“I guess so.” Cheese shrugged. “Maybe I know more from watching Columbo reruns.”
She smiled because he smiled. The show was something her father had watched back when it was on. Emily had never seen it, but of course she knew that it was about a clever detective. “Let’s say that Columbo had a case where someone did something bad.”
“Emily, that’s every Columbo case.” He smiled playfully. “That’s kind of the point.”
“Right.” Emily gave herself a moment to think. “Let’s say there’s a case where a woman was at a cocktail party where her—her diamond necklace was stolen.”
“Okay.”
“Only, she can’t remember anything about the party because she’d had too much to drink.” Emily waited for him to nod. “She has these memories, though. Flashes where she recalls talking to different people or being in certain places. But she can’t tell if they’re real memories or not.”
“Sounds like she was drugged,” Cheese said. “Booze doesn’t really do that unless you’re blackout drunk. At least that’s what I’ve seen with my mom.”
Emily guessed he would know. “How would the woman get the necklace back?”
He smiled again. “She’d call Columbo.”
Emily mirrored his smile again. “But how would Columbo solve the case?”
He didn’t take long to come up with an answer. “He would talk to the people at the party. Compare notes on them, such as, does what this one guy is saying match up with what this other guy is saying? Because if they don’t match up, that means somebody is lying, and if somebody is lying, then you know that they’re hiding something.”
For the first time in days, Emily felt a lightness in her chest. That made perfect sense. Why hadn’t she thought to talk to anyone? She could get them to confess.
There was just one problem.
She asked, “How does Columbo do it, though? If people are guilty, they’re not going to talk, especially to the police.”
“That’s what my dad says.” Cheese shrugged. “But if you watch TV, guilty people always talk. Sometimes, they make up lies to throw the heat onto somebody else. Or they wanna know if they’re going to get caught, so they ask lots of questions about the investigation. And Columbo, he’s the best at tricking them up. He doesn’t go into it accusing people. He’ll say, ‘Sir, I see you were at the party. If you’ll excuse me for asking, could you tell me if you saw anything suspicious or anyone behaving out of character?’ He never points his finger at the guy and says ‘You did it.’ He lets them talk themselves into trouble.”
Emily had to admit he did a very good Columbo voice. “What else?”
“Well, he writes everything down, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re a cop. My dad says it’s because you get a lot of information when you interview people, but only some of it is important, so you write it all down, then go back through and pick out the good stuff.”
Emily nodded, because that made a lot of sense, too. She got overwhelmed with details in class sometimes, but then she looked back at her notes and found the sense.
“The best part is at the end of the episode,” Cheese said. “Right before the commercial, Columbo will be talking to a suspect, and he’ll act like he’s finished with the questions, but then he’ll turn around and say, ‘Sir, I’m sorry. There’s just one more thing.’”
“One more thing?”
“Yeah, that’s when you save your biggest question, for the end when their guard is down.” Cheese pinched the end off his cigarette before slipping the butt into his pocket. “You say, ‘That’s great, thanks for answering my questions,’ and act like you’re going to leave. And then you pack up your notebook or whatever, and the suspect is relieved, right, because they think it’s over. And then you go back and say—”
“There’s just one more thing.”
“Correctamundo.” Cheese’s Fonz wasn’t bad, either. “That’s how you get your diamond necklace back.”