Mummers' Curse (23 page)

I’d known he was literate, but not what a smooth spokesperson he could be, gobbling up airwaves, giving his company enviable free advertising.

“Well, well,” Mackenzie said. “Rumors that your competitor’s bodily fluids are in your product must really hurt business.”

Yes, but. Something about his performance bothered me, a something I knew—but couldn’t reach, couldn’t see clearly. It nagged like the early stages of a toothache, not altogether there, but uncomfortable and guaranteed to get worse.

“And now,” the female anchor said, “turning to another neighborhood in shock after a bizarre explosion…”

How small a sound bite a murder generates these days—an ordinary, non-celebrity, gunshot murder. Standard-issue ghoulishness. Sorry, Serfi.

Might as well focus on my own life. Least I could do, given my man’s good work, was set the table. I stood up and looked industrious, putting out cobalt place-mats, blue-and-white napkins, and blue-rimmed white plates. They contrasted with the pale oak surface for a pretty, faux-French country table.

I’d have remembered flowers, too, if it weren’t for that damned lawsuit. Blue somethings, yellow-and-white daisies in a water jug. Blue candles. Our life as a pretty picture.

Choosing linens and pottery is kind of like grown-up finger-painting.

“Any interestin’ mail or messages?” Mackenzie asked. He was like me in that—optimistic every new dawn about the day’s postal and telephonic possibilities, disappointed every night with what actually arrived.

I liked that ridiculous hopefulness. I even thought we should get a fax and go on-line with E-mail so as to double the possibilities of something interesting coming our way. And, I suppose, the disappointments.

“Only the message that I’m being sued,” I said. “Have I mentioned that?” But this time I smiled at his groaned response and then I realized I hadn’t checked the machine. That damned lawsuit had blocked everything out of my mind. “At least I don’t think so.” I checked. Two messages.

“No,” I said more positively when I heard the first voice. “Nothing important.”

“You’ll never believe this,” my mother was saying. “Sid, you know? Dr. Landau’s cat that was being taken care of by Violet who’s nice, but flaky is the word. Did I tell you he got sick? Really sick. Of course, he’s incredibly old…”

I tuned her out and wandered over to where Mackenzie was fluffing couscous and spooning onions and mushrooms over the chicken breasts. He’d even found still-living lettuce leaves and had made a salad with canned beets and a few orange slivers. “We should open a restaurant,” I said. “Get away from teenagers and crime.”

“We?” he asked mildly. “What part of the partnership appeals to you? Beating up chicken breasts?”

Actually, I saw myself picking pottery—maybe each table would have a different color scheme, different patterns. Then hostessing, smiling and leading people to tables. Interrupting their conversations to ask if everything was fine.

“…
dead
” my mother’s voice announced with great emphasis. “Too quickly for poor Allen Beth to see him at the end.”

“Somebody died?” I asked.

“The cat,” Mackenzie said calmly. “Aren’t you paying attention? Old Sid. Ancient Sid. Remember earlier installments?”

“A guy’s middle name is Beth?” I asked with some excitement. We actually were approaching equality, then.

“Well,” my mother said, “here’s the thing. First, I think it would be nice if you wrote a sympathy note. I talk about you so much it’s almost like you knew each other, and I don’t think people are kind enough about the loss of pets. That’s Allen with a
y
—Allyn Beth Laundau, M.D., okay? Same address, apartment eight hundred six. She’d appreciate it. Me, too.”

Allyn-with-a-y. She. Had her parents really, really, wanted a son, too? Now that I thought of it, was the late lamented cat a Sid, or perhaps a Cyd?

Was C.K., perhaps, a Cyd? Or something on that order? Was that his big secret? “Cyd,” I whispered.

No response.

“Cynthia? Caroline? Charlotte?”

Nothing, except a puzzled look on Mackenzie and my mother’s voice resolutely continuing with her saga.

“But,” my mother went on, “the thing is, Violet won’t give up his ashes. She says she was there for him in his last agony, and, well, she insists. Allyn Beth is heartbroken. She pleaded and pleaded, then she offered to split the ashes, divvy Sid up, half for her, half for Violet, but Violet said that was sacrilegious. Allyn Beth is so upset, she’s flying back from her children’s a week sooner than planned to fight for her rights. And you know what I say?”

I, for one, listened with interest for what truth she had extracted from all this.

“You have to be crazy to leave Florida in December.”

Silence reigned in our speechless household until the next voice on the machine. At first, it was only vaguely familiar. “So look,” it said. “Guess by now you know the news, being as it’s on TV.”

“Emily!” So she’d picked my phone number up off the store floor. It felt like a minor victory.

“So obviously,” she continued, “there’s no reason for you to keep after the story like you said you were going to because now there isn’t any story left to sell, so if you meant like you said, that you were going to find out about an advance or a spec or whatever you called it, don’t.” She clicked off.

Mackenzie put a mound of couscous on a serving plate, plus the bedecked chicken breasts. His patience was commendable, except for the series of questioning looks he shot me.

I tried to piece it together, to answer his questions and mine in between delicious morsels and the compliments they generated. “You are a grand and instinctive cook,” I said.

“Many thanks.” And he waited.

“I was sure her story was about the parade, about Jimmy Pat,” I said. “My mistake.”

“She knew the whereabouts of Serfi’s body,” he said. “Odd.”

And then I knew what had been nagging at me. I remembered her excitement as she shooed me out of the store yesterday. Her chuckle. The better idea I’d given her by talking about King Arthur, who wouldn’t have had to search for an advance. Emily hadn’t given him her story, she’d sold it to him because that’s what he wanted all along—his sausage cleared of suspicion—and then he had notified the police. I explained it to Mackenzie.

“Guess that moves him far down on the list of suspects.” I was disappointed.

“The gun, though. Why’d he want to see it?” Mackenzie shook his head. “You think she knew him personally?”

“Emily and the dead guy?” I shrugged. “Everybody knows everybody else in that neighborhood, and surely in the clubs. Everybody’s connected to one another. And Emily’s a Mummer groupie, living near Two Street the way she does. It’s not only the extra parade they have there on New Year’s, it’s where most all their clubhouses are. She probably knows them all.”

“That place they found him—that isn’t close to Two Street. Doesn’t seem she could accidentally stumble over him. Nobody did for more than two weeks, and it’s not my idea of a love nest, surely not in December,” Mackenzie said. “How’d she know?”

“Given her father, her home life, her standards of love nests might be…” But even I couldn’t buy that rubble as her dream assignation spot. The woman read books with naked-chested pirates on the cover. That wouldn’t fire the imagination for a bed of broken glass. So how had Emily known where Serfi’s body lay?

“I think she saw it go down,” Mackenzie said.

“Arthur didn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“First of all—didn’t you say it was a professional job? That he was Hoffa’d?”

“That was before they found him.”

“But Arthur still doesn’t make sense. He wanted to end the rumors, clear his company’s name. He wanted to see the gun because if it were identifiable to him, if he could alert the cops to look elsewhere, it would be a way of clearing his name.”

“Aren’t you making a wide leap? How’d he know the gun had anything to do with Serfi’s death? How’d he even know Serfi was dead?”

I was stymied, then I remembered. “He assumed it. Always talked about two murders, two dead Mummers, because Ted Serfi wouldn’t have disappeared before the parade, he said. He connected the deaths, thought the same person had done them. And he didn’t do it—or why else would he call the police?”

“Which you don’t actually know. Maybe Emily did.”

“When’d you find out?”

“This morning. They got the call last night. Been working on it ever since.” He poured the last of the wine. “But it isn’t my case, and wasn’t. He was a missing person until last night.” He tapped his fingers. “I did find out today that Arthur with the crown was for real. But obviously, you found that out for yourself.”

“Arthur King. Emily called him Cam, short for Camelot.”

“And this Emily, she was eager to get to him last night?’

“Seemed that way.”

“Any reason—anything she said—to make you think maybe she owned a gun?”

“Emily? We didn’t talk about things like…” I put down my wine glass. “This isn’t idle table talk, is it? You’re interrogating me. Why? You’re making me feel like I’m on a witness stand, as if you suspect me of keeping something from you. Why?”

“I don’t suspect you of a thing, except maybe knowing things that could be useful to keep other people from being suspicious about you. I’m trying to protect you.”

“From what?” I couldn’t believe this. Suspected? Of what on earth?

“Serfi was shot three times. Two of the bullets went through him, wherever it was he was killed. They’re gone. No sign that it went down in that cellophane storage room. The third bullet lodged in his pelvic bone.”

“Yes?” His way of savoring each step along the way of a story made me want to wave a baton, speed his tempo. I’d nod, faster and faster, hoping to subliminally hustle him to the point, but it never worked. “Sounds painful. Awful, but—?”

“That bullet looks like maybe it came from—”

I got it. “No. Too weird. It couldn’t—”

“Probably could,” he answered. “The derringer. A derringer.”

The gun in my pocketbook. Again.

“Ballistics is testing it. The gun was still there, so they could move quickly. The gun that didn’t kill Jimmy Pat very possibly killed Serfi. And that’s why it couldn’t have been a professional hit—not with that kind of gun.”

Back to Square One. Or wherever we were when I was found to be packing a gun. One step forward and two steps back. Sherlock Holmes doing the Mummers’ strut.

“They’ll want a statement. Again. Tomorrow morning.”

“I already—”

He nodded, looked terminally weary. “But not about Serfi.”

Some days getting out of bed is the very worst idea you can have. I wondered why I had so many days like that lately.

Fourteen

I HAD TO GET SOMEBODY TO COVER MY HOMEROOM AND first period class the next morning so that I could officially say I hadn’t known this most recent victim, either. Hadn’t known Ted Serfi, hadn’t shot him, and didn’t know enough about him to know why or how anybody else had, or why or how the presumed murder weapon wound up in my pocketbook.

“Duplicate my last statement,” I suggested. “Change the names. The rest is the same.”

That was not according to regulations.

“You say you have no idea.” The sergeant sounded bored out of his gourd. “No idea who might have put the weapon into your pocketbook.”

“Just like I didn’t have any idea about it last time.” That wasn’t a hundred percent true. I had an idea, but it didn’t make sense, so I couldn’t see the point of sharing it with this dolt. The night before, I had tried, unsuccessfully, with Mackenzie, who is anything but a dolt, and neither of us had been able to make it work.

My idea was that Emily was profoundly involved in this. She’d had the opportunity to plant the gun in my purse while I wandered through her overheated, underpopulated store. She’d wanted to sell me a story which I now knew was the whereabouts of the missing Mummer, and when I couldn’t ante up real money, she sold it to a waiting bidder.

How would she know where Ted Serfi was if she hadn’t been involved in putting him there?

But—a big, road-blocking but—if she had participated in the crime, why be so eager to publicize it? I couldn’t figure out how she’d benefit by her own plan.

Finally, having wasted more of the taxpayers’ money, the police were finished with me. I rushed out of the building, checking the time, and collided with a man in a brown overcoat and bright orange scarf. “Whoa,” he said in a baritone. He gripped my shoulders with his gloved hands, keeping me from toppling onto him.

His eyes widened. He let go of me, loosened the orange scarf, and tilted his head. “I know who you are,” he said. “Saw you here, when was it? After the parade, it was. About—yes! You’re the one had the gun.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t the gun,” I mumbled. Not that time, at least.

“Right, right! The teacher, that’s who you are. At the private school on the Square. I’ve got it in my notes.”

Lucky me. Had he not come along, I’d have no idea who I was.

“I’m Henneman.” His name and everything else he said turned into frozen puffs of smoke. “Henneman, crime reporter.”

“Nice to meet you, but now, if you’ll excuse me.” I moved sideways so he no longer blocked me. “I’m running late.”

He held his hands up, showing he meant no harm, and smiled with his mouth. His eyes remained squinted, suspicious. His face and posture cried out for one of those Forties hats with the white press card stuck in it. “Late, huh? Right. The thing is, why? Police headquarters during school hours, too, is my point. Why is that? What brings you back?”

“Asking questions about what’s going on here is your job and all, so no offense, but this isn’t my job, for which I’m late. Trust me, there’s no story, and I have to go.” This time, he did nothing to stall me. I made it around him and then I remembered how Arthur King had gone public with the blood sausage libels last night, and how well it had served him.

I walked back. “You want to know what’s happening to me?” I asked. “I’ll tell you, and I’ll give you a newsworthy story. I’m being sued by a student’s family because I’m giving her a C in English. A grade that is generous, if anything. What do you think of that?”