The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper Read online

  THE DRAGON IN THE GHETTO CAPER

  TO COLETTE—because we ride the same dragon

  Aladdin Paperbacks edition November 1998

  Copyright © 1974 by E. L. Konigsburg

  Aladdin Paperbacks

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 100201

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-75563

  ISBN 0-689-82328-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4424-3970-2 (pbk.)

  Other Aladdin Paperbacks by E. L. Konigsburg

  Altogether, One at a Time

  From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

  The Second Mrs. Giaconda

  Throwing Shadows

  Up From Jericho Tel

  The View from Saturday

  Content

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  CHAPTER ONE

  One of the things that Andrew J. Chronister never did was to attend music class. They could not make him, and they knew it. He could not carry a tune, and he knew it. They was the Emerson Country Day School.

  Andy had gone to Emerson C.D.S. (Country. Day. School.) for almost seven years, counting kindergarten. The policy there was not to make Andrew go to music but to make him want to go. They never succeeded. So when the other students went to singing, Andy went to the art room where he drew dragons. Sometimes he painted dragons. One was made out of papier-mâché, and two were made out of construction paper, burlap and Elmer’s glue, those took four music lessons each and were the largest.

  Dragons, however, were not Andy’s true passion, crime was. He was determined to be a detective when he grew up. Not an ordinary police detective. A famous one. Famous, tough and cool. Like Ellery Queen, for God’s sake.

  Immediately after he had decided that he would be a (famous) (tough) (cool) detective, Andy had put himself into training. He would be ready to solve the crime of the century the minute it occurred in Foxmeadow. Foxmeadow was where Andy lived, and it met the logical requirements of being the scene of a puzzling murder. That is, when a famous, tough, cool detective like Ellery or Sherlock solved a crime, it always involved a closed group of people. Like guests in a hotel. Or movie stars working on a film. Or travelers on an ocean liner. Foxmeadow met that requirement. It certainly was closed.

  Foxmeadow was part of the town of Gainesboro. It was a ring of houses built around acres and acres (eighteen holes) of a championship golf course. Plus four tennis courts and one swimming pool, Olympic sized. There were only seven named streets and 126 houses in Foxmeadow. But it was home and the whole world to the people who lived there. A fence circled all around it, and a security guard was posted at the only gate. The guard checked cars to see if they belonged. Cars that belonged had a plate saying FOXMEADOW in the place where the front license plate should be. The guard stopped the cars that didn’t belong and made them sign (name, time and destination) in. No one ever walked into Foxmeadow. Hardly anyone walked inside it either, except people with dogs of the variety that needed to or people on the golf course who didn’t take a cart.

  Famous murders were mostly done for money. Or jealousy. Or revenge. Andy figured that money was usually the one reason behind the other two. And Foxmeadow had plenty of the real thing: money. Everyone who lived in Foxmeadow was something between very comfortable and very rich. Andy’s family was in the middle; their maid did not live in.

  His family consisted of himself (age eleven-and-a-half); a mother, Mrs. Chronister; a father, Mr. Chronister; and a sister, Mary Jane, age twenty-two, engaged to be married on May 17 and making a very big fuss about it. Andy called her Cleopatra because she acted like one.

  Andy kept track of everything that happened in Foxmeadow. That was part of his training. He practiced being cool, and he practiced observing: houses, power mowers, deodorants; water softeners and work schedules and the brand names of the champagne bottles tossed into the garbage. Andy counted, too: French poodles (seventeen), garbage compactors (two, but they were catching on fast), Yamahas and Princess telephones. And wedding gifts; his sister had already received a fondue set and two silver coffeepots (one was inherited). Andy also volunteered. He had collected for the Heart Fund, Cancer Crusade, Mother’s March Against Birth Defects, Arthritis, Kidneys, Muscular Dystrophy and Cystic Fibrosis. He figured that if one disease could not get him into someone’s house, another disease, another month, would.

  Andy would be ready the minute a murder was committed in Foxmeadow. He would put all his clues together, gather all his suspects around him and make brilliant deductions. Besides the actual murder, he lacked only one other thing: a sidekick.

  Every cool, tough, famous detective had one: a buddy, a pal, someone who ran his errands, someone who understood his needs and who took care of the details. Someone who did what had to be done—even if it was only asking the right questions. Like Sherlock Holmes had Dr. Watson, and Nero Wolfe had Archie Goodwin, and Charlie Chan had Number One Son. But he didn’t have anyone yet.

  He had tried the kids in Foxmeadow. They weren’t interested in any kind of training unless it involved athletics. They were all jocks. He had tried Theodore Patterson, Jr., and Harley Preston III, two of his classmates who didn’t live in Foxmeadow, they weren’t interested either. He had gone to their houses, three times each, but they always did it partly wrong. Like they wanted to give orders as well as take them. And that was not the way a real sidekick worked. The only kind of order a sidekick was supposed to give was, “Be careful, sir” or “Be careful, boss.” Boss or sir, it didn’t matter to Andrew.

  After Theodore and Harley and two jocks from Foxmeadow had failed, Andy had thought of using Timothy Feagin, the daytime security guard at Foxmeadow. An older, crotchety character with a charming brogue might work out. And Timothy was already in the business, so to speak. But Andy soon discovered that being a security guard was just a job to Timothy Feagin. He was more interested in getting home to his TV and his beer than he was in fingerprints or handwriting. Besides, Timothy had a bad habit of tugging at his crotch all the time. Andy didn’t know where to look when Tim did that, and he always ended up staring at Tim’s crotch, something he found very distracting.

  As a detective Andrew was supposed to be slightly hard to get along with, in a lovable sort of way; he figured that he already met that requirement. He was hard to get along with, but lovable. Not like his sister Mary Jane. She was hard to get along with but not in any lovable sort of way. He was supposed to be very observant, very cool and was supposed to like the nice things that money can buy without caring very much about money itself. There was another kind of detective, the rough-’em-up, sweaty kind. That was not what he would be. He saw himself as meeting all the requirements of being the kind of detective he wanted to be except that he needed a sidekick. Only rough-’em-up, sweaty detectives like those on television did without.

  He was at a low point in his search for a sidekick when he met Mrs. Harry Yakots, named Edith or Edie. She was hardly what Andy h
ad in mind; she was twenty-nine years old and married, for God’s sake.

  Andy met her after school on the day that she had gone to the meeting of the Foxmeadow Garden Circle. It was the first meeting of the new year and the first one that Edie had ever attended. Edie liked to grow things. She had planted the seed from every avocado she had ever eaten, and she had been talking to plants for a long time before anyone told her that it was good for them. Edie’s plants would start growing every which-a-way before growing straight up (or down). Edie herself would start talking every which-a-way before talking straight up. (She never talked down to anyone.)

  Edie went to the Garden Circle meeting thinking that it would give her a chance to talk to someone besides plants. She also wanted to learn about growing day lilies and kumquats. But the ladies didn’t know anything about kumquats except what they looked like (shining orange cocoons). And they talked to each other more than Edie. After the meeting was called to order, they talked about their project, which had something to do with gardening, one degree removed. The ladies raised money for the men at the prison farm in Chawtahawnee. The men at the prison farm in Chawtahawnee gardened; they grew vegetables and camellias and leatherleaf fern, and one club member reported that they were growing marijuana between the rows of tomatoes. The president of the Garden Circle made a motion, and the treasurer seconded it, that they form a committee to investigate the marijuana rumors, but they couldn’t find a committee. No one in the Garden Circle could tell a tomato plant from a marijuana. Edie could, but she didn’t think she should admit it at the first meeting she had ever attended.

  The program for that meeting was to visit the art exhibit at Emerson C.D.S. where most of the ladies had a child going to or graduated from. Emerson actually sat on the edge of Foxmeadow; part of the Foxmeadow fence surrounded it, but no one walked there from the meeting. The school was five fairways distant. All the ladies offered each other rides. Edie would have liked to walk, but she accepted a ride from two of the ladies. She rode in the back seat alone, and the ride didn’t take long enough for them to become intimate or even well acquainted.

  As the ladies walked from one picture to another and talked about detergents and creativity, Edie visited each picture. She smiled at some and tilted her head, puzzled, at others. But when she came to Andy’s dragon, she stopped looking. She knew what she wanted to do, and she did it.

  She went to the office of the headmaster and asked if she could please purchase the dragon that was on the left wall as you entered the media center. (The media center used to be called the library before it got married to a slide projector and two tape recorders.) The secretary in the Office of the Headmaster said that she would tell Andrew J. Chronister that there was a customer for his dragon.

  “How do you know that it is his?” Edie asked.

  “Because,” the secretary answered, “if it’s a dragon, it must be Andy’s. This is the fourth year I’ve been at Emerson, and I can’t remember him drawing or painting anything that isn’t a dragon. Even when the assignment was to do a self-portrait, his came out a dragon. That was in the third grade.”

  “I often feel dragonish,” Edie said. “He probably felt it that day. I think that it’s perfectly all right to do a dragon as a self-portrait, personally.”

  “Oh,” the secretary replied, “I’m sure it was all right, considering that when he was asked to do a family portrait, his mother, father and sister all turned out to be dragons, too. That was fourth grade. You might say that Andrew J. Chronister is a dragon master.”

  Edie smiled. “Like George and Michael.”

  “George and Michael who?” the secretary asked.

  “Saints,” Edie said. The secretary still looked puzzled. “Saint George and Saint Michael. They mastered dragons.”

  The secretary said, “Yes …well…” and then asked for Edie’s name, address and telephone number and told her that she would give Andrew the message. And she did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Andy was the first one off the bus when it stopped at the gate to Foxmeadow. He was always the first one off so that he could walk straight ahead. If he wanted company, he would lag behind until someone caught up. He didn’t usually lag. There wasn’t much he wanted to say to the jocks who lived in his neighborhood. Even the girls of Foxmeadow were jocks; they stayed jocks until the seventh grade when they became Cleopatras like Mary Jane. He waved at Tim to show him that he wasn’t ignoring him; Tim waved back and yelled, “Hi, Andy,” and gave a good yank you-know-where; Andy watched, hypnotized, but certain that he had made the right decision in not asking Tim to be his sidekick.

  He pulled the note from between pages 112 and 113 of his math book. He had been in math class, problem 14 on page 112, when the secretary had given it to him. He decided that he would visit Mrs. Yakots rather than telephone her. He had not been inside that house since the Yakotses had moved in. Everyone said that the Yakotses were just renting from the Grants who had lived there before, but no one who said it had taken time to ask and find out.

  “Good afternoon,” Andy said using his Heart and Cancer voice (those were his favorites). “I am Andrew J. Chronister. How are you today?”

  “Yes, I am,” Mrs. Yakots said, her glasses catching the late afternoon sun. “Won’t you please come in and talk about buying and selling. The dragon.”

  Andrew accepted her invitation. He walked into the foyer and looked around slowly and carefully as he had trained himself to do.

  Mrs. Yakots watched Andy’s slow ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall gaze. She panicked. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Andy answered. “I like your house a lot.” And Andy did. He was surprised that he did. Nothing matched, but, somehow, everything went together.

  Mrs. Yakots sighed with relief. “We thank you very much,” she said. “My husband is out of town. That’s where I want to hang him. His name is Harry,” she said, pointing to a spot over the sofa. “How much would it take?”

  She had a strange way of talking, Andy observed. But he understood her, he further observed. “I haven’t set a price,” he said. “Yet,” he added. “But I will in a minute.” He looked around and decided that things did not match because she didn’t want them to, not because she couldn’t afford for them to. “Twelve fifty,” he said, figuring that he’d have to come down to ten. “And it’s a girl.”

  “It was real friendly of you to stop by—have you ever sold a girl dragon before—instead of phoning.”

  “Not a boy either,” Andy answered. He was pleased with his perfect understanding of her. “I’ve never even had one framed. My mother doesn’t care for my subject matter. I do dragons; she likes flowers. Listen, I could let you have it for ten.”

  “Oh, I do, too,” Mrs. Yakots replied. “That’s why I went to that meeting of the Garden Circle. I thought they grew flowers and grass. Lawn grass. Would you take an even seven fifty?”

  “Seven fifty isn’t even, but it will be okay,” Andy replied. “But only because I’m not going to be a famous artist when I grow up. You realize that you can’t count on your investment growing. I am going to be a detective when I grow up. A famous one.”

  Mrs. Yakots then asked Andy if he would like a Coke. Andy said yes and followed her into the kitchen. He wanted to see it; kitchens were another thing he watched. He looked this one over slowly and carefully and asked, “What color do you call this, for God’s sake?”

  “Mauve,” Mrs. Yakots answered. “Harry—he’s my husband—and I painted it. I couldn’t make the painter understand.”

  Andy looked up at the ceiling, all swirled with mauve and violet and said, “I can understand that. I can certainly understand that.” He sat on a bench across the kitchen table from Mrs. Yakots. The bench was painted a brilliant pink. He rested his hand on its arm and said, “I’m surprised that I don’t get burned. I’ve heard of hot pink, but this is positively electrifying.”

  Mrs. Yakots smiled. “I painted it myself. I c
ouldn’t make the painter understand that either. That’s a pew.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Andy replied.

  “But it is. A church pew. It’s from an old church that had Sister Henderson. They were remodeling the church, and she was in charge of selling. That’s how I began carrying her every Thursday.”

  “You carry your sister every Thursday?”

  “She’s not my sister. Everyone at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church is a Sister, except the men; they’re Brothers. She’s a church sister in the car. I started taking her the day I bought the bench from her church. They were Black. Both the congregation and the bench. Now just the congregation is. See, I’ve painted the pew. Pink goes nicely in a mauve kitchen, don’t you think?”

  Andy was resting his elbow on the table, leaning his head on his fist, sorting out what she had said, “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Pink pews would hardly go in a Black church.”

  Mrs. Yakots rested her elbow on the table and leaned her fist in a pose just like Andy’s. “So you want to be a detective?” she asked, eyes blinking at him behind her glasses.

  “Yeah,” Andy replied, “I’ve put myself in training. I’m very observing.” He closed his eyes and said, “You are five feet six inches tall, weigh 120 and are 36-25-35 …” He opened his eyes and looked at Mrs. Yakots, waiting for her to express amazement.

  She did. “Gee, Andrew, that’s great.”

  “Not so great,” Andy replied. Then afraid that her understanding might be as mixed-up as her talking, he added, “Look, I don’t mean that your 36-25-35 isn’t great. That is great. I mean my knowing isn’t so great. I told you I’m trained. Besides, I saw you swimming two weeks ago. You’re nice looking without your clothes or your glasses. I watch swimmers. You swim the way you talk. Uncoordinated.” Mrs. Yakots, who had been smiling, suddenly was not; she lowered her head. “Listen,” Andy said, hating himself for feeling as bad as he did about making her feel bad. “Listen, five dollars will be perfectly all right for the dragon. Five dollars will certainly be plenty. Plentiful.”