How I Spent My Summer Vacation (21 page)

“I was going to loan you my personal copy of
War and Peace
along with the unmentionables.”

She rolled her eyes. “If I thought I’d be here long enough to read it, I’d hang myself with my bra as a noose.”

It wasn’t easy making conversation. This was not exactly a forum designed to encourage the exchange of ideas. Besides, most ideas would have been impolite, insensitive. One avoided, for kindness’ sake, the topic of what was currently going on—as in being locked up; what had been going on—as in having been locked up and accused of murder; and what presumably would continue to go on—as in being locked up forever. There are precious few topics left when the past, present, and future are eliminated.

“So Dunstan’s really gone,” she said after I’d brought her up to date. “Or Edgar, as it were. He’s kind of intriguing, though, don’t you think?” That’s the kind of thinking that ensures that she’ll get herself in trouble again, given the chance.

“You need monitoring,” I said. “A caretaker. You make spectacular mistakes of judgment.”

“Find me a woman who’s still dating at age thirty and who hasn’t made spectacular mistakes of judgment, then we’ll talk. Meanwhile, let’s stay with this mistake. The one about putting me in jail for something I never did and never could have done. They’ll find Dunstan, won’t they? Whoever he’s becoming. He’s the one who knows where I was.”

“I’m sure they’re giving it their all.” That was a gross distortion of the truth. First of all, everything that pointed away from Sasha—Dunstan, the wig, the earring—was irrelevant if a person was completely satisfied pointing at Sasha. Second of all, unless
America’s Missing Persons
decided to feature Dunstan this very week, he could be gone a long, long time. He was a man who knew how to establish a new identity, so where and for whom did one begin to look?

Still, this did not seem a time for the absolute truth. I couldn’t bear the idea of turning the screws, then leaving her alone to dwell on the terrifying possibilities ahead, so I changed the subject. “Mackenzie isn’t going to find much except a bedpan for a while,” I said. “He’s in the hospital. He was shot.”

Her eyes opened so wide, I could see white above the pupil. “Because of…did Dunstan do it?”

I shook my head. “Don’t laugh, promise? I don’t think I could handle it right now if you make fun of this.”

She nodded.

“A kid did it. On the street. Mackenzie stopped him from mugging a little old lady.”

“Shot,” she said. “Jesus. What—shot where?”

“Atlantic Avenue, about—”

“For God’s sake—I mean where is he wounded? What’s hurt?”

“His leg and his ego. And he bumped his head, too.”

She was quiet for a while. Her relationship with Mackenzie had been prickly for so long, I thought she might snicker, or cast aspersions on his expertise. Instead, she asked decent and appropriate questions about his prognosis and current condition. She expressed sympathy. “When Mackenzie came here, Monday night—”

I was startled. She hadn’t called him the flatfoot or the law or the narc or the pig or Eliot Ness or any of her other pet tags for him. She’d used his name—or the part of it we knew. That was a historic first.

“—I kind of started to realize he was probably…okay,” she said.

All right, it wasn’t an overwhelming endorsement, but it was close enough. I quietly rejoiced. Crime had accomplished what I never could. Sasha had mellowed toward C.K. “He is an okay sort,” I agreed. “My life would be less complicated if he were not. But what made you change your mind about him?”

“I don’t know. He came back again yesterday, before he went to look for Dunstan, and we talked. He said it was time for a truce so we could work together and get me out. Asked a lot about what I knew, which was pretty much nothing. And he showed me a photo of Jesse Reese. That was the first time I recognized him. The person I saw dead was so…oh, it was horrible. But the photo—it was the man I talked to in the bar, before I went out with Dunstan. Anyway, Mackenzie promised to help any way he could, and to push on the police here, see who in Philly knew people on the force here. Things like that. I was impressed.”

“Frankly,” I said with a grin, “it worries me when you approve of somebody I’m seeing. You have such terrible taste in men.”

She shrugged. “Didn’t he tell you he was here again yesterday?”

He’d said something about talking with her, but I didn’t remember discussion of a second visit. Maybe he hadn’t had time to tell me, or maybe he’d forgotten, or maybe he truly believed charity should be anonymous. Or maybe he was such an okay sort, he took for granted such acts and didn’t think they required explanation. I told her about the earring. “Did Jesse Reese by any chance wear small pearl buttons on his ears?” I asked. She nearly smiled. I told her about the glitzy and lame widow Reese and her sister-in-botany, Holly, about Georgette and the wig, and about Lala’s cousin Belle and her friends. “There seem to be lots of people now who might have wanted the man gone.”

“And probably every one of them knew who had that room.” She sounded weary. “Frankie and his big mouth. He was proud of being able to comp me that room, so who knows who else he told? And whoever it was decided to become me by putting on a wig. That’s all it takes. Can I tell you how awful that feels?” She twisted a somewhat spiritless tendril of hair around her index finger. “And I would never wear little pearl button earrings, so I’m doubly insulted.”

“The witness was fairly senior. His eyes might not be the best for details. But even I, when I saw Georgette with the hair and the cape, for a minute, was sure it was you.”

“What do you think it is, mass hysteria?” Sasha asked. “The miraculous vision of Sasha that opens locked doors? Can the room become a shrine?”

“Ah, but I know how the real killers got in.” I explained about my experiment with the chambermaid. It was clever, Sasha agreed, but then her spirits sagged again. None of this answered the only important question, which was: Who was the make-believe Sasha? Until we found that out, the real Sasha remained framed.

“I didn’t know anybody in the bar, except you and Frankie.” Sasha played with a loose button on her cuff, tapping it with a fingernail until it rolled off onto the table. She put it in her shirt pocket with a satisfied smile, as if she’d completed a difficult job. “Did you frame me?” she asked. “The more I think about it, the more likely it seems. In fact, it’s the only logical explanation. Admit it: you committed the murder. It all makes sense, then, except why you did it, of course.”

“Thanks, but it works out even more perfectly if
you
committed the murder, and it saves time, too, since they’ve already fingerprinted you.”

“Why would I murder somebody like Reese? I couldn’t have gotten sufficiently involved to feel the urge. He was salt of the earth. Solid citizen. Man of the year. Not my type at all.”

“There’s a good chance he may have been a lying, cheating creep,” I said.

“But I didn’t know that soon enough. Had I but known he was a rat-bastard, I would of course have fallen for him and have been an actual, logical suspect. Instead, here I am, an actual, illogical suspect, and I didn’t even get to have fun with the man first.”

“You’ll be out of here in no time.” I hoped I sounded more convinced of that than I felt.

“Anybody could have done it, you know.” She sounded morose. “A man, even, under the wig and a skirt.”

“The kind of man you’d probably date,” I said. It almost made her smile.

Still, by the time I left, not long after, I realized that the only impact my trip to the jailhouse was going to make was to ease Sasha’s incarceration with clean undies and dirty reading material.

* * *

From the immediate looks of it, my visit with Mackenzie was going to be as unproductive as the one with Sasha had been.

When I walked into his room, bearing his suitcase, he already had a visitor. So much for the quiet and private session I’d imagined.

“This is Pete,” Mackenzie said. “He’s on the force here, but he’s got family in Louisiana an’ he spent lots of time there. We’re comparin’ notes. Have a seat, let us bore you to tears.”

The tears I shed were produced by yawns I couldn’t prevent while the fellows reminisced about good times with their similarly enormous families on the bayou, and later, on the Atlantic City and Philadelphia forces respectively. Mackenzie’s color was much better than it had been the day before, and his level of animation high. He was happy, having a great time.

This is who he is, I told myself. Adorable, fun, sexy, smart. But most of all, cop. You give yourself grief about it, dither over it, debate it, but the only thing you can really do about it is take it or leave it.

I left it, but only for a moment. I’m not proud of how I decided to improve the shining hour, but the truth is, I went to the nurse’s station. “Could I see Mr. Mackenzie’s medical record?” I asked.

“I’m not permitted to do that.”

“I only want…”

She looked stern and intractable.

“Not the medical part.”

“Yes?” She was not one of the more sensitive nurses on the floor. I hoped she specialized in comatose patients.

“His name. Could you just tell me what his name is on the chart?”

She looked at me as if perhaps she should wrap me tight in a white, sleeveless jacket.

“What harm could it do?” I asked in my sweetest, most subservient voice. That produced absolutely no response. “Then only his first name? Please?”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t think so.” She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Well…” She grudgingly pulled the file. “C,” she hissed. “Plain C.” She smiled meanly, triumphantly. “Now are you satisfied?”

When Mackenzie was well enough to face charges, I would have him hauled in for failure to provide the hospital with full information about his name. Surely it was illegal, an insurance fraud or something.

Pete finally left, with promises to be back soon, and after the most cursory questions about health, comfort, plan of treatment, and the like, I continued the crime-oriented conversational theme, to keep up Mackenzie’s level of enthusiasm.

We had catching up to do, all the way back to the flashy widow and her sister, then through the earring, the wig, the angry old folk, and, just because I was so proud of having figured it out, a reprise of the killer’s method of entry into the hotel room.

Had even Scheherazade done a better job of producing engaging adventure stories? Mackenzie not only looked enchanted, he seemed impressed. For once, he didn’t belittle my findings. “Interestin’,” he kept murmuring. “All fits together.”

I hated to end, but I had nothing left to pull out of my bag of clues. “That’s about it so far,” I said. “Except for a peculiar sense that the people here are too satisfied with the status quo and they aren’t going to do a thing about changing it. I mean, are they searching for Dunstan, for example?”

He sighed, which I interpreted as a negative answer—nobody was overly interested in expending energy in a direction considered extraneous.

“How easy is it to get hold of a wig on a Monday night?” I asked.

“If, say, seized by a sudden inspiration to impersonate somebody else?” Mackenzie asked.

“Precisely. Is there a neighborhood Wigs Я Us? Would there be purchase records?”

Mackenzie was quiet for a while. “Lots of questions and directions,” he finally said. “I will talk to Pete about them. Also was wonderin’ where the man’s car is. Thought maybe there’d be something in the trunk or the glove compartment that would shed light. It’s an outside chance, but all the same—where is it? Pete says his car keys weren’t on him and they haven’t found a vehicle yet. Not at his house, either. Didn’t seem the kind for a bus, and the train schedule was wrong for his timin’.” Mackenzie shrugged. “Pete’s a good guy, but I get the distinct sense they consider this thing solved and feel in need of no more than tidyin’ up. So they maybe need help pointin’ the way.”

“Well, if you’re going to be the helper, I hope you literally mean nothing more strenuous than pointing.”

“That’s precisely what I meant. But you’re still mobile. Nobody took a potshot at you.”

I pointed at my chest. Moi? He was suggesting that I sleuth? The one he called the overage Nancy Drew?

“There’s a certain urgency in these things.” He looked uncomfortable with the situation he had created. “Have to move quickly or ever’thin’ goes cold. Think we could be a team?”

I nodded dumbly. A team. Following in the footsteps of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, Sherlock and the doc, Nick and Nora.

“I’ll do the thinkin’ here and you’ll—”

“Yes?”
I snapped. Maybe I even shrieked it. It was definitely not a hospital-smooth sound. “What is it you think I’ll do as my part of the teamwork?”

“What do
you
think you’ll do? What do you think I’d think you’d do? You’ll have to be out there thinkin’
an’
walkin’.” He grinned.

I wasn’t sure if that’s what he’d meant all along, or whether he’d reversed direction and bamboozled me.

“Down to business now,” he said. “I think maybe we should know a little more about those investment plans and how they work.”

“That’s out of my league, you know. Anything that has to do with money.”

“That partner of his. Ex-partner. He’d have an opinion on the man, don’t you think? Could you free-lance another article? Or pretend to investigate on your parents’ behalf? Whatever works.”

“I was going there
anyway
,” I said. “He was on my list before I even got here.”

Mackenzie rolled his eyes. “I don’t remember Nora telling Nick that she had the idea first. An’ surely not snarlin’ it.”

I didn’t say I was sorry, but I did smile.

“Ah hereby deputize you,” Mackenzie said.

It felt more like being knighted.

We were off and running, or at least one of us was.

RAY PALFORD’S OFFICES WERE in a converted house in Margate. I climbed three broad wooden steps edged by blue-purple hydrangea bushes onto a wide white-painted porch filled with wicker furniture. For the first time, I felt at the shore. The real shore, as it should be.