Blackbird 10 - A Little Night Murder (3 page)

She looked around the pool. “Nice joint you’ve got here,” she said to Lexie. “I once had a boyfriend who had a pool like this. He was a champion Olympic swimmer. He wanted to marry me, but I didn’t like the idea of living with a man who wore a Speedo all the time. You don’t have any guys in Speedos, huh? Because they’re kinda fun for the short haul.”

“Not today,” Lexie said with a smile.

“So,” Bridget said to me, “how come you won’t marry my son?”

Her blunt question shocked me into a stutter. “Uh, I—I—”

To Lexie, Michael said, “Bridget speaks her mind.”

Bridget’s glare turned even frostier on me. “He says he asks, and you say no. Now you’re as big as a cow with his kid, and you still won’t get married? How come? You too good for him?”

“Why—of course not.”

“He says you’re cursed or something, and that’s why you’re putting off a wedding. What’s that all about?”

“The Blackbird curse,” I said.

“What kind of curse? Is it for real?”

“My family—that is, all the women in my family—tend to be widowed young. And although I really don’t believe in that kind of thing, I admit I worry that something terrible might happen when—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Michael said. “Back off, Bridget.”

“Hey, I’m not making judgments,” Bridget said, raising both hands as if the local sheriff had commanded her to reach for the sky. “I just don’t like the idea of some rich society girl thinking her shit doesn’t stink.”

“Bridget!”

“How about some iced tea?” Lexie interjected before Michael could further object to his mother’s choice of words. “Or—is it too early for gin and tonics?”

“Gin and tonic would hit the spot,” Bridget said. “Plenty of lime. Light on the tonic.”

“Coming right up!” With an apologetic look thrown over her shoulder, Lexie fled toward the house.

Michael’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He took it out and glanced at the screen before apologizing to me. “Sorry. Business. I gotta take this.” He walked to the far end of the terrace before answering his call. If I’d had a towel in my hands, I’d have twisted it up and used it to strangle him.

As both of them abandoned me to fend for myself, I was left standing in front of Bridget O’Halloran while she dug into her handbag and rooted out a stick of gum. She peeled it open, giving me another chilly once-over that made me feel like the fat lady at a carnival sideshow. Dropping any pretense of politeness, she said, “How far gone are you?”

“Seven months,” I replied, mustering good cheer.

“Still puking every morning?”

“No, I’m past all that. I feel wonderful, actually.”

“It’s a girl, Mick says.”

“Yes, we’re delighted.”

“Girls can be trouble. I sure gave my parents the runaround. Got a name picked out yet?”

“Not yet. Michael is cautious about giving a name to someone we haven’t met yet,” I said, although I wondered if his mother might change her mind about me if I offered to name our firstborn after her.

“I once had a boyfriend who was the superstitious type. He was a swami, wore beads, real in touch with his feelings. But he ran off with a hippie chick, and last I heard he was telling fortunes outside a circus. I said good riddance.” She folded the gum into her mouth, continuing to squint at my silly shirt. “You and my Mick aren’t exactly a match made in Vegas, know what I mean? Like, the odds aren’t good.”

“We couldn’t be happier,” I assured her.

“Wanna know what I think?” She glanced around to make sure we weren’t being overheard. Then she glared straight into my face. “I think you’re a gold digger holding out for something better to come down the pike. You’re broke, right? And he’s just starting to hit it big. Well, he’s more than the dough he carries in his pocket, lemme tell you. Mick’s the best of the best. You should grab him before he goes back to one of the real women he used to date.”

The gold-digger crack infuriated me. But her last remark sidetracked my sputtering temper. “The real women he—?”

Bridget turned her back on me and walked to the edge of the terrace, toward the piano music. “So, what’s the story next door?”

“Just a minute,” I said.

But she bulldozed over me. “I hear they’re auditioning for a musical. A Broadway musical. What do you know about it?”

“They rehearse a lot, but other than that—”

“You know anybody over there?”

“At the Tuttle house? Why do you ask?”

Bridget turned on me, tall and aggressive. “Do you know anybody who could get me in?”

“Ah,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You came here to get an introduction to the Tuttles,” I said, unable to keep the note of accusation from my voice. “You want an audition.”

She lifted her chin. “And why not? I’m still damn good on my feet, babycakes. And I can belt a tune as good as anybody. They’d be lucky to get me in their little show.”

I had my doubts that any Toodles Tuttle musical could be called “little,” not even if it had been discovered long after his demise. But with another look up and down Bridget O’Halloran’s spectacular body, I had to agree with her. She might look very good indeed on a Broadway stage. She had presence and sex appeal and a certain well-traveled womanliness that said
star quality
.

She said, “Mick tells me you’re connected. That you know everybody who’s anybody. So how about getting me an introduction to your friends?”

“They’re not my friends,” I said. “I’m barely acquainted with the Tuttles.”

“But you do know them, right?”

“Not enough to ask a favor.”

She glared at me a little, then finally smirked. “Well, sometimes a girl has to make her own opportunities.” She lifted the latch on the pool gate and let herself out. “I once had a boyfriend, a big-shot psychiatrist in Hollywood who had kind of a mommy problem, if you ask me, so we worked on that, him and me. Good times. Anyways, he always talked about seizing the day. So I’m gonna do a little seizing.”

“Wait! You can’t just walk over there and expect an audition.”

“Can’t I?”

“Surely it’s unprofessional—”

Bridget stepped through the gate and headed across the lawn. Over her shoulder, she said, “Tell Mick I’ll be back in half an hour, babycakes.”

I
ran to find my sandals, determined to chase Bridget across the lawn. But I had to sit down to put them on, and with my ungainly belly it was almost an impossible task. By the time I managed to wrestle one on, Bridget was out of sight.

Michael came across the pool’s flagstones, pocketing his phone and looking annoyed.

“Everything okay?” I asked, panting with the struggle to reach my feet.

“It’s complicated,” he replied, still distracted by his call.

I decided I didn’t have to be sympathetic. I gave up on my sandal and threw it at him. “You had to leave me alone with your mother?”

He caught the sandal one-handed and looked genuinely apologetic. “Sorry. I have a couple of pots on the back burners, and one of them just boiled over. Where’d she go?”

Lexie appeared, carrying a tray with bottles and glassware. “I don’t have any limes! I hope lemon will do. Oh, dear— What happened to—? Where did she—? Was it something I said?”

“Nothing anybody says ever bugs Bridget.” Michael went down on one knee to help me with my sandal. “She’s indestructible.”

Lexie set the tray on the table. “She’s not exactly what I expected.”

I stuck out my foot to make Michael’s job easier. “I’m not sure what I expected, either, but she certainly isn’t it. Will she tell anyone about Lexie?”

“She doesn’t read the news, so she probably doesn’t know who Lexie is.” He slipped my sandal onto my foot and looked around. “Where did she go?”

I said, “I think she went to audition.”

“For the play?” Lexie cried.

“I knew it!” Michael got up and was suddenly pacing around me. “I should have figured out she had another motive for coming here today. Is this going to upset the neighbors?”

“They’re a bunch of crackpots themselves,” Lexie said. “They probably won’t notice the arrival of one more. It’s like a screwball comedy over there—music and dancing and cocktails at all hours. If Fred Astaire were alive, he’d be swanning down the staircase in a tuxedo.”

“Well, there’s no stopping Bridget when she gets an idea in her head,” Michael said grimly. “I better go after her before she accidentally tells the whole world where Lexie is. You should have seen her the time we waited at a stage door to get the
Phantom
guy to autograph her blouse. She practically mugged him.”

“You saw
Phantom of the Opera
?” I said, thinking there were still things I didn’t know about the man I was about to marry.

“Half of it. When I was a kid, she dragged me to shows all the time. Mostly, I fell asleep, except when the girls in little outfits came out.
Phantom
was the show when she finally let me start waiting in the lobby. I learned to play poker from the guy who sold tickets.”

“How old were you?” I struggled to stand up.

He helped me to my feet. “Seven or eight. He cleaned me out of my allowance. Bridget got it back for me, but I don’t want to know how she did that.”

With a wicked grin for me, Lexie said, “You can find out when you have holiday dinners together, Nora.”

The thought of sharing holidays with Bridget O’Halloran set off a siren in my head. That’s when we heard a bloodcurdling scream from across the lawn.

“Oh, shit,” Michael groaned. “She sucker punched somebody.”

We could hear shrieks coming from over the rooftops of the adjacent mansion. The shrieks changed, though, and didn’t sound like the cries of neighbors who’d let the wrong person through their front door. This was fear and panic.

“Someone’s hurt,” I said. “Or in trouble.”

“Stay here, both of you,” Michael ordered, already heading across the flagstones. “Call 911.”

He boosted himself over the wall and ran across the sloping lawn. Just as fast, Lexie and I had our cell phones in hand, but she was quicker at hitting the numbers. I heard her speaking to the emergency call center, so I went across the terrace to the gate. The screams diminished to loud wails, no less disturbing. I found myself steadying Baby Girl with a trembling hand.

“What do you think has happened?” I asked Lexie when she arrived at my side. She was still holding her phone to her ear. Together, we watched Michael disappear around the Tuttle hedge.

Lexie put her palm over the phone. “Old Mrs. Tuttle and her daughter have been moldering in that house since Toodles died. Maybe the old lady finally kicked the bucket. I’ve asked for an ambulance. I’m on hold, but— Nora, wait!”

I couldn’t stop myself. I lifted the latch on the wrought-iron gate and went through. Lexie followed, phone still to her ear. We hurried
across the lawn together, passing the overgrown flower borders full of blowsy peonies and tall foxgloves in a riot of pinks and lavenders. I couldn’t move very fast, and by the time we arrived at the other house, the wails had diminished to loud weeping. We found ourselves on a wide stone patio very much like the pool deck of Lexie’s house—except no pool. Someone had secured colorful duct tape to the tiles, as if marking off a performance area. Fourth of July streamers still fluttered overhead, looking faded. The second-floor windows of the house were cranked open, and we could hear voices raised upstairs.

“Hello?” I shouted up at the open windows.

A distressed female face appeared above us, and the woman called down, “It’s Miss Jenny! We think she’s dead!”

“Jenny?” Lexie was shocked. “That’s Gloria’s daughter!”

The woman disappeared, and Michael stuck his head out the window.

He said, “Did you call 911?”

Lexie pointed at her cell phone. “Yes, I’m still on the phone with them. The ambulance should be here soon.”

He looked grim. “Too late for that.”

“Can we help?” I asked.

He hesitated, then nodded. “Come up. Maybe you can talk these people down off the ceiling.”

We hurried around to the front of the house, where an extravagant blue Bentley was parked in the curve of the driveway. We rushed past it and through an open door. Inside, the mansion had exactly the same layout as Lexie’s. The only difference was in the decor and condition of the home. Where Lexie’s digs looked as if a Roman emperor had just moved out, this one looked as if it had been decorated by Busby Berkeley. Art deco furniture and sconce lighting, marble floors in a checkerboard pattern. But the walls hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in decades. The once-elegant furniture was shabby, and the floors needed a thorough cleaning.

In the front hallway, Lexie and I almost fell over a piano bench. Gathered around the baby grand stood a group of weeping young people, all of them dressed in rehearsal clothes and dance shoes. They were crying in one another’s arms, with all the drama you might expect of a theatrical troupe.

I didn’t see Bridget among them.

Lexie and I rushed up the staircase—she was much faster, but I doggedly tried to keep up—past a row of dusty-framed theater posters that advertised old Tuttle musical productions. We headed toward the sound of raised voices.

On the second floor, Michael shouldered his way past another weeping couple, who embraced in the corridor. Looking unnerved, he indicated a bedroom with a jerk of his head. “I’m not good with hysterical women. And there’s a bunch of them in there. I’ll go wait for the ambulance.”

Lexie and I went into the bedroom.

On the floor lay a dead woman.

It’s hard to upstage a dead body, but old Mrs. Tuttle, widow of the famed Broadway composer Toodles Tuttle and the star of quite a few of his shows, had what it took. Seventysomething years old, but looking every day of ninety, she stood over the deceased while clutching her throat as if to hold back sobs of grief.

The main thing about the old woman?

She was blue.

Her skin was an inhuman shade of indigo.

Perhaps the strange color of her skin was enhanced by her green satin turban, decorated with a crusty emerald brooch pinned drunkenly over one eye, and her swirling green paisley caftan, belted with what appeared to be a coiled drapery tieback. She looked like an ancient blue Scarlett O’Hara wearing curtains from a Sunset Boulevard mansion. Except her skinny blue legs were encased in a pair of knee-high compression stockings that sagged around her
birdlike blue ankles. Her blue feet were crammed into gold mules with moth-eaten marabou on the toes. Jungle red lipstick had escaped the outline of her mouth, and her mascara looked as if it had been accumulating for months. Her rheumy eyes bulged with melodrama.

She croaked, “My life is over!”

To the rest of us, it looked as if her daughter’s life was the one that was over.

The elderly woman gave another incoherent cry of sorrow. With one blue hand clamped around her blue throat in a gesture that originated before movies had sound, she reached her other desiccated claw for my help as she swayed precariously between conscious thought and a bad actress’s imitation of fainting. “My precious little girl is dead!”

Her daughter was neither little nor a girl, but she was definitely dead. And the mother was definitely alive, but in danger of collapsing right down on top of the corpse. I took a firm grip on her skinny blue arm and said, “Mrs. Tuttle, let me help you sit. I’m Nora Blackbird. Remember me? You used to sing duets with my father at parties.”

“Oh, yes.” She let me assist her down on a frayed ottoman beside a lumpy reading chair. She peered up at me. “Your father isn’t much of a singer, but he makes up for it with charm. He’s a mensch. And what a dancer! He can really cut a rug. But your mother—she’s a shiksa with more chutzpah than most, isn’t she?”

“Yes, Mrs. Tuttle.”

“And your grandmother never liked us—Toodles or me. Oh, she acted real polite, but she couldn’t hide it. She hit me in the schnoz with a champagne cork once. Call me Boom Boom. That was my stage name, you know. I’m reviving it for the new show.
Bluebird of Happiness
. It’s going to be a blockbuster.”

I was not the only person in the room who noted how easily
Boom Boom Tuttle was distracted from her daughter’s demise. A large woman in Hollywood’s idea of a nurse’s uniform stood frowning at Boom Boom, and the couple who had been weeping together in the hallway came in and also stared doubtfully at the lady of the house. Even Lexie seemed unable to mask her surprise at Boom Boom’s eagerness to forget her daughter’s death in favor of a new Tuttle musical.

To be certain, I knelt down and reached to touch Jenny Tuttle’s neck. Although I had met Jenny a few times, I wouldn’t have called her a friend. But I remembered her.

Specifically, I remembered Jenny, middle-aged and self-conscious, playing the piano as invisibly as a church organist while her father charmed an audience with his songs.

My thoughts went back nearly twenty years to a time when I was home from boarding school for the holidays. Christmas greenery and lavish ribbons disguised the peeling paint and crooked banister of Blackbird Farm. My parents preferred to entertain rather than spend their time doing mundane things like fixing leaky toilets and replacing burned-out bulbs, so the glow of candles usually hid the worst of their deferred maintenance. Back then, the house was alive with music and champagne and much laughter. Parties were a weekly occurrence. But one night we had a special guest.

Handsome even in his later years, Toodles Tuttle had breezed through the front door of our sagging homestead, bringing a cloud of sparkling snowflakes in his wake. Out of that cloud had appeared shy Jenny, wrapped in a cape that looked like a horse blanket beside her father’s dapper tuxedo.

Toodles went straight into the living room to spontaneous applause, but my father—elegant even in his tatty dinner jacket—gallantly helped Jenny off with her cape. Tossing it over his arm, he bent down to kiss her cheek. “Happy New Year, Jenny.”

Daddy didn’t usually pay attention to the plain women. He
specialized in pretty, vivacious females who reflected back his effervescent ways. He must have experienced an unusual moment of kindness that evening. Jenny Tuttle, plump and otherwise colorless, had turned pink at his kiss. She couldn’t find her voice.

Daddy led her off into the living room, bending over her as if she were as fascinating as a beautiful princess. “You’ll favor us with some music tonight, won’t you, dear? Nobody can tickle the ivories the way you can.”

Daddy flattered Jenny onto the piano bench in a shadowy corner, where she sat for the rest of the night playing one Toodles Tuttle tune after another. Her father sang his own jaunty lyrics, and the guests alternately sang along or danced in the living room, where the moth-eaten carpet had been rolled up. That night, nobody noticed Jenny. When Daddy asked me to, I prepared a plate from the buffet laid out on silver platters in the dining room and delivered a midnight meal to her with a glass of champagne. Remaining at the piano, she ate and drank in snatches between musical numbers.

The only time I remember noticing her after that was when my parents danced together—just the two of them performing for the crowd, Daddy spinning and dipping Mama, who laughed and didn’t miss a beat. Jenny fumbled a few notes, though, as she watched my glamorous parents in each other’s arms.

At the time of the party, we had no servants in the house anymore. Although Grandmama was quietly selling off her silver and jewelry, we no longer had the money to pay household help. So as midnight neared, it was my grandmother who struggled to open a bottle of champagne for thirsty guests. She squeezed her eyes shut and put her thumbs awkwardly against the cork. With an explosive pop it had sailed into the crowd, and champagne foamed onto the floor. Laughter erupted, and then applause. I hadn’t recalled where the cork had landed, but Boom Boom had obviously not forgotten.

I remembered Jenny that long-ago night being . . . pathetic. Collapsed on the rug now, she looked even more pitiable.

I intended to feel for a pulse, but as soon as my fingers touched her flesh I knew she was gone. Jenny had been dead for some hours.

Her body lay on a small area rug beside the bed, feet bare, nightgown twisted around her crumpled legs. With one hand, she had seized a handful of the fabric over her heart, and although the muscles of her fingers had loosened in death, the message was unmistakable: A pain in her chest had come on suddenly.