Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (34 page)

•  •  •

It was only after I looked at Dwayne, who’d suffered nothing more than a chipped front tooth, that terror started surging through my veins.

Not because poor Dwayne had jumped out the window.

But because he’d jumped out the window wearing a turkey costume.

•

A
s you know, I’m deeply proud of my (truly mature) capacity to apologize, to unflinchingly admit it when I’ve been wrong. And since, as Pope has observed, to err is human, I have—a goodly number of times—been wrong. Never, however, let me concede, have I been as massively wrong as I’d turned out to be in the case of Mr. Monti. I mean, if errors were earthquakes, this would be a 9.9 on the Richter scale.

Dwayne, not Mr. Monti, had been sending those murderous messages to Wally. Furthermore, Dwayne saw
himself
as the turkey and clown. Furthermore, those messages had been warnings not of
homicide
but of
suicide.

I’d made a big mistake. A big mistake.

Now it’s true I’d been right in believing that somebody out there was threatening death,
THE CLOWN TURNS INTO A GHOST,
as well as
THE TURKEY TURNS INTO DEAD MEAT
, have, you’ll agree, a decidedly fatal sound. All that I’d actually erred about was who, exactly, intended to do in whom. But this was the kind of error which, if I didn’t stop Elton Jr. and Billy immediately, would end
up with Joseph Monti’s being in no condition to accept my apology.

I had to stop Elton Jr. and Billy immediately.

For ratty though Mr. Monti had been—and continued to be—I no longer could claim that he deserved to die.

•  •  •

Since Wally was going to need to be spending some time with Dwayne and Dwayne’s mother, I offered to drive to Dulles to pick up Miranda. But first there was one imperative piece of business I had to attend to: I had to find a telephone so I could tell my hit men to cancel the hit, I cruised the darkened streets till I found a pay phone which not only worked but which I’d be able to use without being mugged, and hastily deposited twenty-five cents.

“Yo, this is Billy and Elton Jr. Limited Partnership, Inc.,” said Billy on the answering machine. “We’re out on a job right now but if you’ll please leave your name and number we’ll get back to you.”

I hung up the phone and had a 9.9 on the Richter scale dizzy spell. I also gave serious thought to throwing up. Never in my entire life had I yearned to converse with a person the way I yearned to converse with the absent partners of Billy and Elton Jr. Inc. With trembling hands I picked up the phone and dialed their number again—and again a machine, instead of my cohorts, answered.

“I say,” I said at the sound of the beep, doing my British accent, “it’s Prudence Gump here. I’m calling to inform you that the business meeting planned for today has been canceled. Definitively, permanently, nonnegotiably, now-and-forever canceled. I’ll be phoning again to make sure you received this message.”

I jumped in the car and drove, far faster than my usual cautious pace, to Dulles. As soon as I got there I horried to the phone. Please let a human being answer, I prayed to To Whom It May Concern. “Yo, this is Billy . . .” et cetera, said the recording.

This time I left them a message to leave me a message that they had indeed received my message. “If you put it on your machine, I’ll be able to get it,” I said, “the next time I ring you up.” I told them that though I much preferred to speak with an actual person, “I would find such a message”—this was the understatement of the ages—“quite
quite
reassuring.”

It was time to greet my niece at the mid-field terminal.

Miranda, brown bangs and dark glasses obliterating half her face, arrived in skinny jeans and a well-cut sports jacket, striding along on funky shoes with the odd giraffelike grace of Diane Keaton. “Hi, hi,” she said, enveloping me in a warm but speedy hug. “So how’s The Rose—impossible as ever?” After which, from baggage-claim area right up to my front door, she obsessed about her mother, my sister, “a woman who,” she rat-a-tat-tat complained, “can’t even remember—my friends don’t believe this—which programs her daughter produces, and has yet to take the trouble to sit down and watch one, though you know—admit it, Aunt Brenda—that if Hubert was doing some dog-food commercial on television, The Rose would not only be watching, she’d be sending engraved announcements to the whole world.”

I murmured something intended to be nondenigrating to Rosalie while deeply sympathetic to Miranda, a tightrope walk I have mastered over the years and can do
with minimum attention. Which was all I had available since most of my attention was consumed with concerns about stopping Billy and Elton Jr. from murdering Mr. Monti.

They were picking him up at 1
P.M.
It was now almost 7
A.M.
I desperately needed to know that the mission was scrubbed. But restraining myself from rushing once again to the telephone, I decided I’d wait for an hour and use the time to do some work on my Thanks-giving dinner. By eight, Jake, Jeff, and Rose—Miranda was trying to take a nap—were drowsily making their way to the kitchen table. I gave them a brief report on Wally’s predawn melodrama and left the room. “The coffee’s done, there’s muffins and juice, I’ve already eaten,” I told them over my shoulder, as I hustled right upstairs to the telephone. And when yet again I heard the same thwarting “Yo, this is Billy . . .” message on the machine, it struck me for the first time that I might be unable to head off Billy and Elton Jr.

And it struck me for the first time that I had better try to head off Mr. Monti.

Hubert, my new best friend, was whining outside my closed bedroom door. “Beat it! I’m busy,” I grrred. Hubert grrred back, grrrs becoming barks becoming howls as I sat on my bed, taking deep breaths and telling myself, You can handle this.

Actually, I found myself thinking,
How
am I going to handle this? Like, what was I going to say to Joseph Monti?

Hubert was trying to break down my door when Rosalie clattered upstairs, hollering, “Brenda, why are you torturing Hubert?”

Losing my composure, I answered, biting out each
word, “I Want. You. To. Take. Your. Fucking. Dog. Downstairs.”

“If that’s how you feel,” said Rosalie, escalating Instantly, “I also can take him straight back to New York.”

Outside my still-closed bedroom door Rose and Hubert had just been joined by Miranda. “Can’t a person,” she groused, “get some sleep around here? I’ll tell you one thing, Mother, if Hubert was sleeping and I was the one who was making this noise, you’d—admit it, Mother—have strangled me by now.”

“Blame your aunt for the noise. She’s the one who wouldn’t let Hubert—”

“Stop it!” I shrieked, then seized hold of myself. “I mean, please,” I said calmly and sweetly, “go eat breakfast. I’ve got a call I need to make—some corrections on one of my columns—but I’ll be back downstairs just as soon as I’m done.”

“Maybe Hubert and I will be there, and maybe we won’t,” said Rose, huffily departing from my doorway. “You took a nap with your makeup on?” Rose had turned her attention to Miranda. “You want to have pores the size of dinner plates? Youth doesn’t last for . . .”

I dialed Joseph Monti’s number, having decided to say—in my Elizabeth Fisher-Todd drawl—that our hostess had fallen ill and had, to her everlasting sorrow, been forced to cancel. I also intended to say that she’d been unable to contact her drivers, who thus might appear at his condo door (I’d had to reveal his name when I switched to Plan B) to pick him up. “Being devoted employees, they might be real insistent.” I also intended to tell him, “on taking you where their employers said
they should. So you need to make it clear to them that die dinner has been canceled and that they can call their message machine to confirm.”

Although this ploy was, I’ll grant you, rather klutzy, it was also the best I could think of at the moment and it would, God willing, save Joseph Monti’s life. Having figured it out, I could feel my panic begin to subside, a state of relief that lasted until Mr. Monti’s voice on the telephone said. “Hello, I’m not home right now, but—” Where
was
everybody?

I left the message on his machine, said I’d be checking in again, and, pulling myself together, went downstairs.

Down in the kitchen Rose and Miranda already were barely speaking, in addition to which Rose was furious with me. Nor was she quick to accept my earnest apologies for, as I oh-so-grovelingly put it, using “insensitive language” about her dog.

“One of these days,” she warned me, when she finally received me back into her good graces, “you won’t get away with this ‘I’m so sorry’ routine. I’m a very forgiving person”—not true!—“but one of these days, Brenda, you’re going to do something unforgivable.”

But don’t let it be today, I silently prayed, as a shudder of apprehension swept through me. “Excuse me,” I said, and rushed upstairs to the phone.

Where, hyperventilating, I put in a call to Joseph Monti and then a call to Billy and Elton Jr. And got their machines.

Where
was
everybody? Where the hell
were
they?

I took a deep breath and told myself, You can handle this.

•  •  •

Wally, looking drained but relieved, came home a little past ten. “It’s all turned out for the best, I think,” he said, explaining that Dwayne, having, scared himself with his suicide attempt, had agreed to sign into a psychiatric hospital.

“Incidentally, Mom,” he said, “remember that van that was chasing me back in September? Dwayne told me
he
was driving it. He says it was a message—a cry for help.”

“Mmmm,” I muttered noncommittally.

“And it also turns out that Dwayne was the person disguised as that clown on my birthday. He says it was another cry for help.”

“Mmmm,” I muttered noncommittally.

“In fact, he says he sent a lot of messages to me, but I don’t know where he sent them—I never got them.” A sudden thought seemed to strike him. “Mom, did you ever happen to see any messages?”

I stopped being noncommittal. “Of course not,” I lied.

Wally went up to rest and I stuffed the turkey and started it roasting in the oven, after which I yet again attempted—and yet again failed—to contact either my hit men or Mr. Monti. By now there was only one reason why I wasn’t having my own psychotic break: I folly intended, if worse really came to worst, to drive down to the Watergate and stop Elton Jr. and Billy when they showed up.

This meant I would need, to be safe, to be down there no later than 12:45. It was now already 11:28. Fortunately, however—from a scheduling point of view—my guests would not be striving till half past three. I-think-
I-can-think-I-can-I-think-I-can, I chanted, as I showered and put on my holiday attire. Except—uh oh!—if I was meeting Billy and Elton Jr., I’d need to be wearing my Prudence Gump disguise.

I called again, got machines, and decided that Billy and Elton Jr. were out on the streets attempting to steal a limo. I couldn’t imagine where Mr. Monti might be. A flash: Could Billy and Elton Jr. have somehow revised my plan, picked him up early, and already done him in? This was indeed a plausible thought, but such a hideous one that I immediately banished it from my brain.

Jake came into the bedroom. “Your sister and niece,” he said, “are going at it again. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen someone engage in sibling rivalry with a Great Dane.” He tilted his head and smiled at me. “So how come you’re not interceding with one of your . . . constructive interventions?”

“Qui, moi?”
I answered innocently. “Why would I want to do that? I’m trying to work on being less what certain people insist on calling controlling.”

I needed to try those calls again, but my portable phone was busted, and every room with a phone was occupied: Jake getting dressed in our bedroom. Wally attempting to nap on the third floor. Rose and Miranda sniping at each other while doing the dishes in the kitchen. And Jeff in my office staring glumly into the middle distance and reminding me (as if I needed reminding) when I asked what was on his mind, “December first is my deadline, when Monti Enterprises gets everything else I own.”

I wished I had time to give him my whole maternal/supportive number, but unfortunately I had to cut to the chase. “Just remember, whatever material goods they
take away from you, they can’t”—my eyes moistened—“take
you
away from you.”

“Yeah, right. I’ve already heard that song, Mom. But thanks anyway,” Jeff said, resuming his brooding. He needed more work, but I couldn’t do it right now.

I hurried down to the living room, occupied, only by Hubert, who was stretched out on my entire four-cushion couch. There, having finally found some relative privacy, and some privacy from the relatives, I dialed my two numbers for the final time.

Nobody home. I would have to go to the Watergate.

“Got to pick up a few things at the store,” I called to Rose and Miranda, firmly fending them off as each of them offered, insistently, to come along. “I need some private time and space,” I said to Miranda, who understood such needs. “I need you to baste the turkey,” I said to Rose. Then, stealthily shoving certain items into my canvas tote bag, I left the house solo.

First stop was a trip to the ladies’ room of the National Cathedral, where I put on my Prudence Gump hair and hat and suit, after which I drove to the Watergate, parked next door at the Kennedy Center garage, and nervously paced the front entrance, awaiting the longed-for appearance of Billy and Elton Jr.

One o’clock came and went. One-oh-five came and went. So did one-oh-six, seven, eight, and nine. At ten minutes after one I was forced to revive my banished question: Had I seen the light too late to prevent the execution of an innocent man? This was the kind of miscarriage of justice that has made folks ferocious opponents of the death penalty. Twelve minutes after one, and after years and years of favoring capital
punishment, I’d become a ferocious opponent of the death penalty.