How I Spent My Summer Vacation (18 page)

I couldn’t stop blubbering. I wanted to be angry with him.

Who did Mackenzie think he was, Superman saving Metropolis? But it was too much of a stretch, because I knew if I were being robbed by a street thug, I’d want a Mackenzie of my own. That particular thought sent me into further spasms.

“For our hero.” In walked a pair of feet topped by a gigantic vase of red roses. “From Mrs. Weinstein and her children and grandchildren.” The nurse put the bouquet on his nightstand. The vase occupied so much space, there was no longer room enough for a pill bottle.

“So embarrassin’.” Mackenzie spoke dreamily, as if the anesthesia hadn’t completely worn off. “Didn’t see the gun until… Feel like a fool. Wait till they hear about it. What was wrong with me? Where
was
I?”

I appropriated one of his tissues and blew my nose. “You know,” I said, “they just stitched you up, so self-laceration seems pretty ungrateful.” My voice wobbled and I sniffled some more.

“Huh?” He was still lost in the fog zone.

“Stop beating yourself up.” I sat down beside the bed, blew my nose again and took three deep breaths. “You saved that woman. You’re a hero, and not only to Mrs. Weinstein.”

“Shoulda seen her. Littlest lady I ever saw. Like in a fairy tale. Four-foot-something. Square little body. Old. And poor-lookin’. Old coat, old kerchief on her head. What kind of kid sees that and—” He winced and gasped. He had attempted to shake his head for emphasis.

He wasn’t as thoroughly hardened as I sometimes made myself believe he was. He was still amazed and disgusted by what people did to one another. However, he was going to have to hold off on the body language for a while.

“You’re a really good human being.” I barely got the words out before I was sucked into another emotional wind tunnel.

He waited through my siege of snuffling, either through gallantry or druggy oblivion, I wouldn’t know. “So,” he finally said, very softly, “here I am. Captive audience. Don’ want you thinkin’ I forgot our capital-T talk. Shoot. Or is that a poor choice of expressions today?”

“Now? You want to talk
now
?”

“Don’ ever want to have that kind of talk, so why not?”

“Did they check for brain injuries, C.K.?”

He grinned. “Lots of time for once. It’s a good bet I’m not goin’ to rush off for a sudden emergency.”

“Is this a play for sympathy? You, wounded and lying there, looking like—”

“No?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Good, then. Ah gave it my best shot. Why
do
we have so many gun images in our speech, do you think? Anyway, give me points for tryin’.” He smiled crookedly and put out his hand. I took it in both of mine. “Feel like a fool, though. A laughingstock. A cop who didn’t see a kid’s gun. Barely saw the kid—or Mrs. Weinstein. I was lost in my head, a million miles away.”

“I understand. It was that kind of time. I was thinking, too.” We were having that capital-T talk after all.

“Walkin’ back, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been payin’ real attention. Just goin’ along the same old way, in the same old patterns.”

“I’m also responsible,” I murmured, meeting him halfway. They say compromise is the basis of good relationships, after all. “I didn’t make myself clear enough.” I squeezed his hand-gently—to show how touched I was with this new Mackenzie. Why had I thought he was one-track, unable to change? “When they called me and said you were hurt—” I hesitated, then decided to be completely honest, the way he was being. “I—”

“So there I was,” he said, continuing his monologue, “walkin’, tryin’ to figure my way out of my rut, to really
listen
, I mean really
hear
, and—”

“—realized how much you mattered to me even if there are problems,” I said. “Tonight’s been a hard lesson in how much I care about—”

“—even if she’s cracked—”

“She?”
The word reverberated in my brain.
She? She?

“Mandy? You okay?”

I shook my head, nodded, felt my chin dangle, my cheeks burn with humiliation. What had we been talking about? Not a tender, if cryptic, lovers’ reconciliation, that was for sure. Mackenzie had been off in hyperspace, talking about somebody else—a female somebody else.

“Say somethin’. You sick? What is it?”

I wasn’t uttering another word until I had some sense of the topic. Instead, in a mean-spirited urge for revenge, I turned his hand palm up. At least I’d find out one of his secrets—his first name.

The plastic hospital wristband said only,
Mackenzie, C.K.
It didn’t say
Gotcha!
but it might as well have.

“Livin’ on the beach doesn’t mean she doesn’t know somethin’.” Mackenzie continued on in his parallel dimension. “She did mention Jesse Reese by name, after all.”

“Georgette?” It emerged a squeak.

He made a throaty noise of assent. “Georgette. I was tryin’ to remember her name an’ exactly what she said when Mrs. Weinstein and the kid came out of nowhere.”

“Georgette?”
There it was. And there Mackenzie was, still and always putting murder first. Except…my name had been in his wallet. I knew that now, and he knew that I knew it, too.

I gave up. There was simply too much feeling—good and bad, loving and infuriated, pro and con—to be ignored at this stage. We had flubbed breaking up. Done it wrong, thwarted our mutual escapes, thanks to fate in the squatty shape of Mrs. Weinstein.

“So do you think she knows somethin’? Could Reese maybe have robbed old women the way she said?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that she also said Prince Charles was a good singer and had a lot of pep.”

“He may.”

“She said he was blind.” I realized I was trying to discount Georgette, because Mackenzie had been thinking about her when he should have been thinking about me.

“Why Reese?” Mackenzie said in a slightly dreamy voice. His mind was fighting through the drugs and making it halfway. “She said J. Edgar Hoover, Prince Charles—”

“She meant Ray Charles.”

“Donald Trump, George Bush, an’ Jesse Reese. That’s like one of those lists on a test—which one doesn’t belong.”

I wouldn’t think he could have carried the woman’s monologue through a trauma, but I seem to consistently underrate him.

“Hate things that don’ make sense,” he said softly. “Makes me mad to be stuck here, not knowin’.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “An’ I… I think I need a little…”

“Sleep? Bedpan? Food? Quiet?”

He inhaled sharply. “Oh, boy,” he said in an exhale.

“Painkiller?”

He tried to nod, winced again and grunted. It was almost a relief to know he really, truly wasn’t Superman.

I rang for the nurse and kissed him very lightly on the forehead. “So this is how it feels to know exactly where you are,” I said. “And where you’ll be. I thought it’d be more fun than this. See you tomorrow. Heal.”

I was at the door when he said, in an almost inaudible murmur, “Tonight made me realize how much I care, too.”

I was going to have to really get it that no matter how slow and out of it he might seem, even when drugged, Mackenzie heard and remembered. His brain had parallel tracks, and he could monitor them all, and make you think he was daydreaming the whole time. I was going to have to stop underestimating the man.

Although, of course, he hadn’t said just what it was he so much cared about. Or even who. Or even whom.

* * *

The next day dawned sunny and calm, very close to beach weather. Good thing I had no hopes of enjoying it, or I’d have been more upset when I swung my feet off the bed and my lower back clenched like a fist.

Hysterical ailment, I told myself. Jealous of the attention Mackenzie is getting. Garden-variety back pain, the first herald of middle age.

I walked around like a crone, trying, perhaps, to look like Mrs. Weinstein so that Mackenzie would come rescue me, too.

Then I forced myself to stand straight. Later I would arrange for a massage in the health club. Until then I didn’t want to think about it.

The
USA Today
shoved under my door didn’t mention anything as mundane as a local murder. But downstairs the Atlantic City newspaper on the rack outside the coffee shop still featured the story. NO FURTHER CLUES IN BRUTAL SLAYING, the headline said. SUSPECT IN CUSTODY. And then it rehashed Sasha’s long-ago association with the dead mobster. I read on with incredulous amazement.

“It’s not that much of a surprise. Sasha Berg always played with fire,” former high school classmate and current A.C. resident Candace Winter, was quoted as saying.

Candace Winter? My former high school classmate as well, then, but the name… Then I realized who it had to be. Smarmy Candy Conroy, whose boyfriend had dropped her because of an infatuation with Sasha, who, for once, had done nothing to provoke trouble. Candy had screamed, “I’ll never forgive you for this!” at Sasha—and at me, too, for remaining Sasha’s friend. Who could have dreamed that she meant it?

But, incredibly, thirteen years later, Candy, married, settled down, was still angry enough to call the papers and have her revenge. People were perpetually amazing.

I took the paper to a table and settled in, marveling at Candy’s ability to hate. For one happily crazed moment I decided that Candy Conroy Winter had murdered Jesse Reese and framed Sasha as final payment for the shame of losing Elliot “Rocky” Feinstock.

I’d thought that having breakfast in the coffee shop would be quicker than room service, and I expected it to be a quiet and meditative kickoff to the day’s work. I was wrong on both counts because I hadn’t factored in yet another encounter with Lala.

The woman was certainly making the most of her fiancé’s largesse. She’d come to Atlantic City as a day-tripper, yet she never left, and furthermore, each time I’d seen her, she’d been in different ensembles.

This morning’s was nautical. Her sailor collar was trimmed in gold braid, as were the cuffs of her slacks. She looked like an admiral in the AARP’s navy.

“May I?” she asked even as she pulled out the chair across from me. I guess I could have said no, grabbed the chair, held her under the arms to stop her from sitting, but that required too much energy. “I had no idea Tommy was such a slugabed!” She shook her head, but the lacquer kept her buttercup curls immobile. “He’d like to sleep till noon and be up all night. What am I going to do?”

What she was going to do was have serious marital problems. Or perhaps no problems at all, because they’d never see each other.

“It’s like I was telling my cousin Belle,” Lala said. “Who, by the way, is down here. Arrived last night. You’ll just love her, sweetheart. I told her all about you—well not exactly about how we met, if you know what I mean. But I was saying to her that I’m a morning person. And Belle said—oh look, there she is now. Would you mind awfully if she joined us? She’s dying to meet you.”

Something about Lala’s delivery convinced me that there were no random situations in her life because she scripted each encounter. The only reason I didn’t react to her manipulations with more anger was that I also suspected that fear prompted her careful planning and avoidance of chance.

Lala was peroxide and morning-bright, and Belle was inky darkness—black hair streaked with gray, and a still darker expression in her deep brown eyes. The yin and yang of cousinhood.

“Meet Belle, honey,” Lala said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Belle said. “What’s Honey short for? Honora?”

“Amanda,” I said.

She sat down and switched topics. “I just this minute got off the phone,” she said. “I can hardly believe what I heard. Oh, boy, could I tell you things….”

She was a Pushmi-Pullyu conversationalist. “Ah, please, Belle,” we were supposed to whine. “Tell us.” Well I, for one, didn’t.

“Do you know what she’s talking about?” Lala asked me.

I shook my head.

“We don’t mean to be rude.”

“Who wouldn’t know?” Belle asked.

“What if a person down here for a good time was too busy yesterday to pick up a local paper!” Lala snapped.

“I heard it on the car radio on Tuesday,” Belle muttered. “Just that I’m not so good about names, but faces—”

“So there,” Lala said. “So somebody might not know. The hotel is certainly keeping mum about it. Listen, darling, I don’t want to upset you, but a man was killed in this hotel Monday, night before last. In one of the rooms. Murdered.”

“Oh, that. Yes. I heard.”

“Of course!” Lala slapped the side of her head. “My own Tommy told you yesterday. I was there!”

I raised my eyebrows and looked pleadingly at the waitress who hovered nearby.

“No place is safe anymore. You come to a nice hotel, meet somebody, expect…” Lala shuddered. “It makes me mighty happy to be out of the dating game. You never know.”

“You take your life in your hands. Literally,” Belle agreed.

“A bagel,” I told the waitress. “Toasted.”

“And a smear?” she asked.

I nodded. “And coffee.”

Lala and Belle paused from their death and doom lip-smacking long enough to order French toast and a crew-sant with a side of prunes, respectively.

Then Lala leaned over and patted my wrist. “I hope you find somebody like my Tommy, too, but until then, I hope you’re always very careful.”

“And not only with your body,” Belle said, intimations of disaster hanging off every word. “They talk about safe sex, but what about safe money, I want to know.”

“They already have that,” Lala said. “You ever hear of banks?”

“My condominium has a social club,” Belle said. “But at first, I didn’t connect that to his face.”

“She means she wasn’t sure of who had died until she saw the dead man’s photograph in the paper,” Lala explained. I felt like Alice, perhaps, in the company of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Belle nodded. “Then I made the connection. He spoke to our group a year ago. I remember the face, even though I didn’t invest with him. I have my pension, my Social Security, and some C.D.’s, but I went to hear what he had to say. About
protecting
yourself. Especially single women. Widows. Besides, it was a night out. A little entertainment. So yesterday, I called Myrna Myers. I said did you see in the paper? Jesse Reese, that man who talked to the social club, was murdered. And she started spluttering and carrying on like I couldn’t believe!”