by Alice Duncan
Betsy Powell screamed again, and my short temper flared. “Will someone please shut that woman up!”
I heard a sharp smack, and Miss Powell said, “Oh!” Then I heard a thump. I figured she’d probably fainted from the shock of being slapped, but I didn’t take time to look. She shut up, and that’s what mattered.
“Let me turn on the yard light,” said Mr. Hostetter, who went to a bank of switches on the wall next to where the choir sat on the chancel.
And there was light! What’s more, it illuminated a most interesting scene.
Sam Rotondo and an old man who looked as if he’d been ridden hard and hung up wet—my father used to say that, and the expression has always tickled me—held an arm each. Both arms belonged to Sam’s no-good nephew, Francis Pagano, who was supposed to be working in his Uncle Salvatore’s Italian restaurant in New York City. Frank’s head sagged on his neck, and he kind of hung between the two large men. I think he was unconscious.
“Is that Frank?” I asked of my beloved, astonished.
“One and the same,” said Sam, growling mightily. His limp was pretty heavy. I guess his left leg wasn’t quite up to running yet.
“He’s mine, dammit!” said Rusty Voice.
Lucy, frightened by the spectacle before her, backed up, her hand over her mouth. Can’t say as I blamed her. Sam is a large man and rather obelisk-like in appearance until one gets to know him. Whoever Rusty Voice was, he was as tall as Sam, but thinner, extremely rugged-looking, and he limped along with the help of one of his own legs and a wooden stump in place of the other. I presume he’d had two functioning legs at one time, but one of them had gone missing.
“What’s going on here?”
Mr. Hostetter, evidently having got his own fear under control and strutting like a pouter pigeon, his chest bulging out and his face a mask of outrage, marched up to Sam, Rusty Voice and Frank.
I put a soothing hand on his arm. “It’s all right, Mr. Hostetter. I think it will be better if we let Sam handle this.” I turned my head and bellowed into the sanctuary, “Don’t anybody touch that knife!” With a smile for Mr. Hostetter, I added, “You’d probably be better off starting choir practice. I’ll let you know what this is all about as soon as I know myself.”
“Good idea,” said Sam, his voice gruff.
“Hell,” said Rusty Voice.
“And you!” I said, stabbing Rusty Voice in the chest with my forefinger, “stop swearing! You’re in a church of God.”
He jerked, frowned at me, then grumbled, “Aw, hell.”
“Why don’t you lug Frank to the back of the sanctuary, Sam? Want me to do anything with the knife?”
“Yeah. This fellow and I will take him to the back. Leave the knife be for right now. I’m going to call a couple of uniforms in.”
“Tarnation! That’s my find, cuss you!” Rusty Voice said. At least he didn’t quite swear.
“You know where the minister’s office is, right?” asked Sam of me, ignoring RV.
“Yes. Want me to call the station?”
“Yeah. No. Wait. Get someone else to do it. You can’t move well enough yet. But have someone see if they can get a couple of uniforms out here, and have them hurry. This is getting complicated.”
“Shee-oot,” said Rusty Voice.
I turned, balancing on my cane—golly, that thing was useful!—and called, “Lucy, will you come here for a second?”
Mr. Hostetter frowned at me, and I told him, “It’ll just be for a minute. We need to call the police station.”
“Cripes,” said RV.
“Very well,” said Mr. Hostetter, willing to do his duty but not liking it much.
Lucy obediently trotted to the back of the sanctuary, where Sam and the other man had deposited Frank, whose head still drooped, and who still seemed to be unaware of his surroundings.
“Yes, Daisy?” she asked shyly, shooting terrified glances at the elderly stranger. As if to prove her trepidation was not without foundation, the man gave her one of the more hideous frowns I’d ever seen. Lucy jumped a little.
“Could you please call the Pasadena Police Department for us? Use Pastor Smith’s office, if you will. It has a telephone. Ask for two uniforms to come to the church as soon as they can get here, please.”
“Oh. Well, yes, I can do that,” Lucy said uncertainly. She kept shooting scared glances at RV. Honestly, I didn’t blame her. He looked like something out of a wild-west show or maybe a wanted poster on a post-office wall in 1880 or thereabouts.
And that reminded me of something else I needed to do. Turning to Rusty Voice myself, I said, “Just precisely who are you, sir? My name is Daisy Majesty. This”—I pointed at Sam—“is my fiancé, Detective Sam Rotondo, and this”—I pointed at Lucy—“is Mrs. Albert Zollinger. What is your name?”
“What the hell’s it to you?” he snarled.
“I told you to stop swearing in my church,” I said, my words spaced far apart so as to make them clearly heard, even to the hardest of hearing, which this guy might have been. He was sure old enough. At least he looked old. And used up. “And I want to know whom to thank for catching the fellow who threw that knife at me.” There. If that didn’t soften him up, he was un-softenable. Or maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt to be nice, could it?
“Name’s Lou Prophet,” he said as if he didn’t want to admit it.
“Thank you, Mr. Prophet,” I said. I smiled kindly at him. He curled his lip at me. Giving up on him, I turned back to Lucy. “Will you do that, please, Lucy?”
“Yes. Of course.” And, with one last frightened glance back at Mr. Lou Prophet—and why did that name ring a bell?—Lucy loped off.
Something struck me as an afterthought, and I yelled to Lucy, “And please bring us a glass of water!”
“All right!” she didn’t yell. Lucy was one-hundred percent lady, unlike some of us.
“Now,” I said, turning back to the three men in the pew. “Was it Frank who threw that knife at me?”
“Yeah,” said Lou Prophet.
“I didn’t see him do it,” said Sam, as if he hated admitting it. “But I guess he did. When I got outside, Frank was trying to climb the back fence, and this yahoo was battering him with this empty bottle of hooch.” He brandished the bottle.
“What?” Mr. Prophet hollered. He yanked the bottle, which was square and quite heavy-looking, from Sam’s hands, squinted at it, then turned it upside down. Nothing dripped out. “Well, God damn. That was some good tangleleg.”
Deciding to ignore his language—and to ask him what the heck tangleleg was later—I eyed Mr. Prophet with some approval. “Did you really batter Frank? Thank you!”
Sam rolled his eyes. He did that a lot when he was around me.
“The bounty’s mine,” said Mr. Prophet by way of a you’re-welcome. He handed the empty bottle back to Sam, who stowed it on the pew a few feet away from us. Guess he didn’t want Mr. Prophet absconding with it. I got the feeling Mr. Prophet didn’t know he’d managed to pour the booze on Frank when he went about quelling him, and was disappointed at having learned he had.
“What bounty?” I asked, curious.
“Got me this here dodger,” Prophet said, eyeing the empty bottle with the same wrath an Old Testament prophet might have heaped upon a congregation he’d discovered worshiping a golden calf. Contorting his long, lean body, he reached into the back pocket of some kind of coat—I’d never seen its like among my friends in Pasadena—and hauled out a folded paper. He handed it to me, and I opened it.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” I said after reading what turned out to be a “wanted” poster. It looked as if it had been tacked up in a post office somewhere. Quite a long time ago, to judge by its yellowish properties. “Will you look at this, Sam! Seems as though your nephew has graduated to bigger stuff than numbers running.”
“Criminy. Why am I not surprised?” Sam took the poster from my hand and squinted at it. Then he reached into his coat’s front pocket, pulled out
his reading glasses, propped them on his nose and read. “The sorry son of a—”
“You’re in church, Sam,” I reminded him.
“Shee-oot,” he said, just as Mr. Prophet had earlier. “Yeah, I know. Poor Renata.”
“Who the hell…Uh, who’s Renata? And what kinda name is Rotondo?” asked Mr. Prophet.
“Renata is Sam’s sister. Sam’s family is Italian. Renata lives in New York City, and this idiot”—I slapped Frank upside the head before Sam could do it for me—“is her son. He’s also Sam’s nephew.”
“Great kin ya got,” said Prophet.
“Yeah. I know,” said Sam.
“The bounty’s mine,” Prophet said again, as if it were the refrain from a hymn I didn’t know.
Since Sam was no longer reading the poster, I took it and peered at it again. The light wasn’t any too good at the back of the sanctuary, but I could make out the words. Under the large word WANTED, printed in capital letters, was a photograph of Frank Pagano, greasy hair slicked back and looking like a hoodlum. Then came the words, “Robbery, Escape.” And then there was a big $500 printed at the bottom of the page.
I gazed at the dozing Frank, who had begun to groan a bit and move his legs.
“Five hundred bucks, eh? I don’t think you’re worth two cents,” I told Frank.
“Hey!” said Lou Prophet. “That five hundred is mine.”
“Fine with me,” I said. I folded the poster up and was about to hand it to Prophet. After a second thought, I asked Sam, “May I give it back to Mr. Prophet, Sam?”
“Sure. We’ll have it on file at the department.”
So I handed Prophet the poster, he refolded it and stuck it in the same back pocket from whence he’d fetched it.
“I caught ’im,” said Prophet, as if to cement the reason for his being the proper recipient of the $500 offered for Frank’s capture. At least the poster hadn’t added the dread words, “Dead or Alive”.
With another eye-roll, Sam said, “Yes, yes. We all agree you caught him. However, we now have to take care of the legal processing of the cook. And we’ll have to file new charges. I think attempted murder would be appropriate.” His lips curled into a small, deadly looking grin.
“Uncle Sam?” came a croaky voice from the vicinity of Frank Pagano’s face.
I frowned at Frank. “What a worthless piece of garbage you turned out to be,” I told him. I’m not often that brutally honest with people, but that nincompoop did just try to kill me!
“Don’t ‘Uncle Sam’ me, Francis Pagano,” Sam said, sounding ferocious, even though he didn’t raise his voice.
“Did you throw that knife at me, Frank?” I demanded.
“D-Daisy?” Frank stuttered. He blinked his eyes as if he couldn’t get them to focus very well.
“It’s Missus Majesty to you, young man.” I wrinkled my nose. “You smell horrible, too,” I told him, both because it was the truth and because I wanted him to know how much I loathed him.
“That’s ’cause I spilled all that good rye on him,” said Lou Prophet. He looked as if he wanted to spit on the floor, but remembered where he was and only growled, “Hell.”
Sam chuckled.
I didn’t. “I asked you not to swear in my church, Mr. Prophet.”
“Yeah, yeah. I wasted good tangleleg on that sumbitch.”
I guess he’d just explained what tanglelag was: rye whiskey. “That last word—I mean those last words—count as swearing,” I told Prophet in a stern voice. He eyed me with what I could only call disdain.
“Well, he had a head start,” said Prophet sulkily.
“What do you mean, he had a head start?” I asked.
“He was already kinda drunk.”
“Do you mean to tell me you threw that knife at me while you were drunk?” I asked Frank, outraged. At the same time I was kind of impressed. I’d never touched alcohol in my life, but my understanding was that it impaired the body’s ability to see, think and walk straight. If Frank had been sober when he’d thrown that knife, I’d probably have been dead for several minutes by then.
And the thought of that made me so mad, I wanted to spit railroad spikes and batter Frank Pagano about the head and shoulders. Therefore, and before anyone could stop me, I whacked him with my dachshund-head cane. Right on top of his head. With the pointy nose of dachshund. Then I checked to make sure I hadn’t dented the dachshund. When I examined it closely, it looked fine.
Frank, on the other hand, covered his head with his hands and said, “Ow!”
“Cut it out, Daisy,” Sam warned me. “We’ll deal with him at the station.”
“I’d like to deal with him right here and now,” I said, feeling vicious. “I want to break that bottle and stab him with it.”
“Hey, girlie, you ain’t so bad,” said Prophet.
When I looked at him, I saw him grinning and could kind of make out remnants of the handsome man he must once have been. Nevertheless, because I didn’t appreciate his nonchalance under the circumstances, I sniffed.
Lucy came back. She gave me the glass of water, which I instantly threw into Frank Pagano’s face.
Frank said, “Hey!”
I didn’t even hand him my hanky with which to dry his face. Lou Prophet gave a grainy chuckle.
Lucy backed up until she stood in the aisle at the end of our pew. I figured she didn’t dare come any closer. She said, “I called the police station as you asked, and two uniformed officers will be here shortly. I told them to come through the side entrance, since the front door is locked.”
“Thank you, Lucy.”
“You’re welcome.” She stood there staring at the four of us for a moment before she took off, walking as fast as she could, back to the choir’s chairs on the chancel.
The choir, by the way, was practicing “Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies” in honor of Epiphany, which falls on January sixth. I loved the hymn, which owed its words to Charles Wesley, one of our glorious founders—well, if you’re a Methodist, anyway—and was sorry I wouldn’t be singing it. By the way, I’ve never been quite sure what Epiphany meant, but I think it was the day Jesus was recognized as the Christ, if that makes any sense. I’m sure it only even kind of makes sense to people who practice Christianity. I can’t imagine why, say, a Hindu or a Buddhist would need to know that. Or a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter.
Oh, never mind.
Twelve
By the time Frank Pagano was fully awake—or as awake as he ever got, which wasn’t very—two uniformed policemen from the Pasadena Police Department had shown up. I recognized them both from times past: Officer Doan and Officer Oversloot. Officer Doan was all right in my books. Officer Oversloot had been a bully to me once right after Sam had been shot, and I still held it against him. He didn’t know that, so I suppose it didn’t matter.
Sam took Oversloot in hand and led him to the front pew, where the knife still stuck. He left Doan to guard Frank. Officer Oversloot carefully pulled out the knife and put it in a paper bag. He used some kind of grippers to get the knife unstuck, and it seemed to be kind of hard to do and required a lot of tugging. In other words, it had struck the pew with great force. I glared at Frank Pagano.
“If you weren’t drunk, that knife would probably be in me,” I growled.
He gave me a glassy-eyed glare. “Yeah, well, I wish it was.”
This time it was Lou Prophet who smacked him upside the head. I smiled at him in appreciation. He grinned back. His teeth resembled a broken picket fence.
“Hey,” said Frank.
“What you got against this pretty lady, old son?” Prophet asked Frank.
It seemed to me Frank had a difficult time focusing his eyes. His struggle might have been due to drink or the several head-whacks he’d received since he’d been hauled into the church. I neither knew nor cared.
When he turned those watery orbs Prophet’s way, he said, “What’s it t’you?”
Pressing his wooden stump on the toe of Fra
nk’s right shoe, Prophet said, “Oh, you don’t wanna be talkin’ to me that way, old son. I’m bigger’n older’n meaner’n and a whole lot smarter’n you.”
“Huh,” said Frank. Then he said, “Ow!”
“Answer my question, boy,” said Prophet.
“What question?” Frank whined. “Ow! Quit it!”
It was I who smacked Frank this time. I hissed, “Keep your voice down, you pig! You’re in church.”
“Church?” Frank wobbled his head to look around. “This ain’t a church. It’s got no cruce’fix.”
“Eh?” said Prophet.
“Frank calls himself a Roman Catholic,” I told Prophet. “He doesn’t think a church is a church unless it has a depiction of Jesus nailed to the cross hanging on the wall. We Methodists prefer the risen Christ in our depiction of crosses.”
Prophet’s nose wrinkled as if my words hadn’t made sense to him. Perhaps the distinction between a cross and a crucifix doesn’t matter to some people. How odd. Or maybe it isn’t. Once more, I’d wager a Buddhist or a Hindu wouldn’t care. Or, again, a Jew or a Muslim.
“Anyway, Frank doesn’t want Detective Rotondo to marry me because I’m a Methodist and not a Roman Catholic.”
“That’s one of the stupidest reasons I’ve ever heard for not marryin’ someone,” said Prophet. I was beginning to like the guy.
“S’true!” Frank whined. “Uncle Sammy can’t marry you,” he said to me. “The whole family’s against it. You ain’t Cath’lic, and you ain’t Italian.”
“Most people aren’t,” I told him frostily.
“She’s got a point there, old son,” said Prophet.
“Why you callin’ me son?” asked Frank.
Prophet lifted his wooden peg and slammed it down on Frank’s toes once more. Frank said, “Ow!”
“I don’t like fellers who’re mean to ladies, and this here’s a lady,” said Prophet.
I think I blushed. I know; how silly of me.
“Lady? Her? She’s marryin’ my Uncle Sammy, an’ she ain’t even Italian! Or Cath’lic!” Frank sounded as if he couldn’t be more offended if his mother stripped naked before him.
