Scot on the Rocks

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘RuPaul School of Slaying Them All Dead in Killer Heels?’ said Todd.

  ‘Not that I owe you any details,’ Mike went on, ‘but it’s a break-in at the botany department.’ Mills of God opened his mouth to object, but she swivelled a stare in his direction and he nodded instead.

  ‘Botany department,’ he said. ‘Lotta valuable pe-onies gone missing.’

  ‘Pe-onies?’ I said. ‘Why are you being so weird?’

  ‘We ask the questions around here,’ said Mike, and then flushed slightly. Clearly she couldn’t think of one.

  ‘What’s the company name that took the payment from Dr Lancer?’ said Mills of God, astonishing us all.

  ‘PPPerfection,’ said Kathi. ‘I think they’re some kind of …’ But she trailed into silence when she saw the look go ricocheting around the three cops.

  ‘We know who they are,’ said Mike. ‘Thank you.’ She made her way to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ said Blaike. ‘Are you sure my mom’s OK?’

  ‘I hope so, son,’ said Soft Cop as he went out, which was no kind of answer at all.

  ‘And you’re sure you’ve got the stepfather’s permission for young Mr Kowalski to be here?’ Mike said, pausing in the doorway. ‘So if we go there now and mention it, it won’t be any kind of a surprise?’

  ‘Ah, give us ten,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Or we could take him home,’ Mike said.

  ‘No, we’ll keep him here,’ I told her. ‘We’re getting on like a house on fire, aren’t we, Blaikey?’

  ‘You and your mouth,’ Mike said, and left us.

  ‘We’re breaking up again,’ said Mills of God. ‘Creative differences.’ God bless him, he’d got there in the end.

  It wasn’t the worst phone call I’d ever had with Bran: I’d divorced him for one thing, and for another, I’d sold his golf clubs in a temper one day. Besides, when he took in the plain fact that the school he was paying so much money to had straight-up lied about Blaike being there, a day and a night after the kid had absconded, he realized he had bigger fish than me to fry, and hung up on me.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Well?’ I said to Kathi, when I’d put the phone down and waited for my ear to stop ringing.

  ‘Well what?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Seriously?’ I was honestly astonished. ‘Haven’t you been looking up what PPPerfection is? Didn’t you see the way Mike looked at Soft and Mills when she heard the name? I reckon it’s a clue to …’ I stopped talking and looked over at Blaike.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Kathi said. ‘How’s your folding? You wanna earn a quick forty bucks in my laundromat?’

  I threw her a grateful smile as she gave Blaike her keys, dropping them from her hand into his, with no touching. He loped off Skweekward.

  ‘I reckon,’ I said again, when he had gone and the boat was still again, ‘that it’s a clue to where she’s gone. We’ve got to tell him sooner or later, you know.’

  Kathi’s gloved fingers were flying over the keyboard now. ‘“PPPerfection”,’ she read. ‘“Are you tired, stressed, jaded and wrung out by your busy life? Work, kids, study, caring for elders, running the home, even dating! can leave you in need of a gentle oasis of clam” – I think they mean calm – “and pampering. Let us soothe away the cares of the twenty-first century in the peace of nature at our women-only restorative retreat. For treatment menu and to book an appointment, click here.”’

  She looked up.

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Well then. I don’t know what they were reacting to. Do you?’

  Todd shook his head. ‘Maybe the business owners are shady,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it was just the idea of a five-hundred-dollar holiday gift. But that wasn’t when they did the big reaction, was it? Who knows?’

  ‘We could go and ask them,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Todd said. ‘Don’t you two feel like we’re kind of pinballing around here? We don’t have a sense of … If we go off to wherever this PPP is, now, to ask them … What would we even ask them? When we don’t even know … what we’re … I mean … you know.’

  ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said. ‘What an orator you are. No!’ I said, off his look. ‘I’m not kidding. You’ve just perfectly summed up the utter fog we’re stumbling around in. We need to get this straight in our heads and get a plan in place for the investigation, g—’ I cut myself off.

  ‘Nice save,’ said Todd. ‘Well bitten, that lip.’

  ‘I need to say it,’ I said. ‘It’s burning a hole in my brain.’

  ‘It’s going to cost you,’ Kathi said. ‘It’s our highest-ticket item. Twenty-five buckaroos.’

  ‘Worth it,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘We need to get this straight in our heads and get a plan in place for the investigation … going forward.’ I leaned sideways to get my wallet out my back pocket and peel off banknotes for the kitty. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Pizza? Jug of margaritas? Cup of tea?’

  ‘I don’t want to have the summit here,’ Todd said. ‘I can smell boy seeping along the corridor from the guest bedroom. Let’s go out somewhere. As long as you’re willing to be the amanuensis, Lexy.’

  It was insulting but practical. I had the worst handwriting out of the three of us and so I was the only one who could take notes in a bar or noodle shop, or anywhere else in public, without compromising client confidentiality.

  ‘I thought doctors were supposed to be the ones with illegible scrawls,’ I said.

  ‘Family practitioners,’ Todd said. ‘It makes the scripts harder to forge, you know. But anesthesiologists? Think of the ways that could go wrong.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘Jeez. Where will we go?’

  It was Friday night in Cuento. And it wasn’t just Friday night: it was the third Friday night of the month, which meant that, as well as all the college kids from UCC piling downtown to drink undrinkably hoppy IPA and pretend to like it at the various local microbreweries, then take the taste away at the various local pizza emporia, there would also be a squad of culture vultures on the prowl for the ‘Third Friday’ art walkabout, followed by their own version of pizzas at a different subset of emporia, with more artisanal sourdough crusts and less pepperoni. The only place we were sure of getting a table was whichever downtown eatery had most recently failed its health inspection and had to close for special cleaning, or the breakfast nook in Noleen’s office.

  ‘There’s always the Lode doorway,’ Kathi said.

  The Lode was the poshest of Cuento’s supermarkets. It had an oyster menu; it had pictures of the pastures where the steaks were raised; it had monthly olive events, invitation only. And it also had a sort of a café, by the fake street-market flower barrow just inside the front door, where the supermarkets I could afford to shop in had the cigarettes and the ice machine.

  ‘We in time for the blue-plate special?’ said Todd.

  I knew what a blue-plate special was, now, like I knew what a Hail Mary outside a church was, and I was on the way to half-knowing what a caucus was too, so I knew Todd wasn’t actually talking about a cheap dinner, if we got our skates on. But sometimes it still tired me out, trying to decipher the comfortable chat of my closest friends. As usual, I exacted my revenge by giving it back to them with knobs on.

  ‘Shanks pony or jam jar?’ I said.

  ‘Can we just put all over-the-top slang on the list if it’s used in open combat?’ said Todd. But he didn’t press it and we set off, grumbling no more than any other three people would grumble if they had to work on a Friday night again.

  Kathi had chosen the Lode doorway because, being Cuento’s poshest supermarket, it was preternaturally spanking clean. The floors shone and the shelves gleamed and – crucially – there was no back kitchen she couldn’t see and had to wonder about. The coffee counter, bakery counter, sandwich bar and sushi-rolling station were all in full view and all as antiseptic as an operating theatre. Once she had Cloroxed off her seat and the table – top, obviously, and bottom f
or the gum – she sat back and even managed a smile.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the drinks in and you two focus your brains. Where are we, where are we going, what do we know, what do we not know, how do we find out—?’

  ‘Iced mint mocha and a slice of salted caramel cheesecake,’ Todd said. ‘Were you ever going to stop talking?’

  ‘Seriously?’ I said. Todd didn’t eat sugar and he didn’t eat fat, and he definitely didn’t suck down mint mochas.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to have to take refreshments in a grocery-store concession that “proudly serves” and on a Friday night too, like a nonagenarian, I’m gonna celebrate the fact that no one I know can see me.’

  Finally, I got the blue-plate special dig. Todd reckoned it was uncool to be here. My God, if he ever came over to Scotland on a visit with me, Asda’s all-day breakfast would finish him off completely. ‘Kathi?’ I said.

  ‘Coffee and a biscotti,’ she said. ‘I’m a grown-up.’

  ‘Biscotto,’ said Todd. ‘If there’s only one.’

  I rolled my eyes at both of them and went to place the orders. That was its own challenge, because part of what made the Lode so expensive was the quality of customer service. Me, I like a morose checkout assistant, picking her dry skin and shoving the stuff through the beeper for me to pack: the food-shop equivalent of the Yummy Parlor, basically. I can tolerate a friendly word and an offer of help out to the car usually. But the Lode was something else. They chatted, they enthused, they checked and double-checked and triple-checked that the exalted customer was getting every desire – reasonable or otherwise – anticipated and addressed. It was customer service set at bum-wipe level and, although Cuento-ites of longer standing seemed to enjoy the feeling it gave them of being a boy emperor, I usually ended up wanting to punch someone.

  ‘Coffee?’ the kid proudly serving asked, with a puckered brow.

  ‘Yep,’ I confirmed.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Ground coffee beans and water,’ I said, ‘at a guess. She didn’t specify.’

  ‘You want to go on over real quick and ask?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘If you just pour some of that big jug of coffee there into a cup, that’ll be fine.’

  ‘You want me to go and ask?’

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Coffee. Um … what size?’

  ‘Scratch all that,’ I told her, ‘and give me a sixteen-ounce Americano with room for cream. Thank you.’ Which is why I hated the Lode, and Kathi too now. Because the thing that everyone else seemed to agree was fantastic, attentive, pampery customer service was really just passive-aggressive trolling taken to the nth degree.

  When I had achieved three coffees and three sweet snacks, at the cost of my good mood and probably a month of my life on account of the blood pressure, I went back to the table and crashed the tray down, slopping mocha and not caring.

  ‘Is that tray clean?’ said Kathi, reaching for her Clorox travel pack.

  I opened my mouth, remembered that actually I loved her, and hastily switched what I was about to say for ‘Better give it a wipe round to be on the safe side.’ Then I watched her clean the bottoms of the cups and plates and discard the tray with a wipe over her fingers. I had no idea about life being a challenge, really. I even smiled back over at the barista, who of course gave me a massive, insane Lode smile back.

  ‘So,’ I said, after a swig of latte and a bite of the rock bun they were mis-selling as a scone. It was pretty good, once you recategorized it under its accurate name. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Brandee Lancer has disappeared,’ said Todd. ‘She lied about her son’s father his whole life through, then had to come clean because she’d set a deadline for herself to come up with a lump sum that she failed to come up with. But she lied about why. Right, Lexy? It was nothing to do with your divorce settlement?’

  ‘My divorce settlement was, “I don’t want your money and I don’t want to pay a lawyer to tell you that”,’ I said. ‘So, yes.’

  ‘Blaike took it badly – poor kid – and torched all the memorabilia about his fake dad that his mom had been fooling him with,’ Kathi went on.

  ‘Getting himself a name as an arsonist for his trouble,’ said Todd. ‘And a two-year stretch at an overpriced holding pen in Idaho.’

  ‘Here’s a question,’ I said. ‘It’s something Mike said when she found Blaike on my boat. Remember? She called him a firestarter and said Brandeee taught it to him.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Todd.

  ‘Didn’t she?’ I said. ‘I think so. Let’s ask Blaike what might lie behind that. It’s a weird thing to say.’ QUESTION, I printed in my notepad and scribbled down a reminder.

  Todd leaned sideways and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You could write state secrets and leave them in the ladies’ room at the Kremlin.’

  ‘Carrying on,’ I said. ‘On the night after Brandeee disappeared, someone in a pickup truck stole Mama Cuento and accidentally – I think, after looking at the film – knocked off one of her toes while they were at it.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said Kathi. ‘We’re mixing up the two threads.’

  ‘Sticking with Brandee, then,’ said Todd, ‘someone sent a ransom note to Bran, along with one of his wife’s acrylic nails, asking him to go along with their demands. But not stating any demands.’

  ‘They didn’t send it,’ I said. ‘They hand-delivered it. Shortly before we arrived. But we didn’t see anyone. Can I talk about Mama Cuento now? This is where the two threads join together anyway.’

  ‘The ransom notes,’ said Kathi. ‘Similar wording, similar … tokens. Mama Cuento’s toe. Brandee’s nail. Liberty’s nose.’

  ‘Liberty?’ I said.

  ‘The African-American wooden sculpture in Oregon,’ said Todd.

  ‘Hope’s belly button doesn’t really fit,’ Kathi said. ‘Much harder thing to chop off.’

  ‘Except she was fibreglass,’ I reminded her.

  ‘I don’t mean literally hard to chop off a statue. I mean it’s a different …’

  ‘It’s not an appendage,’ said Todd. ‘But wasn’t she pregnant? Hence “Hope”, maybe? So it could have been sticking way-hay-hay out. Could have been nipped off, not gouged out. That’s another thing we need to ask Blaike, Lexy.’

  I jotted a note.

  ‘And a baby,’ said Todd. ‘Sawn off Sacagawea and left behind. That’s different too.’

  ‘Mexican town mother,’ Kathi was saying when I looked up again. ‘Pregnant Asian girl, African-American girl, young Native mother. It’s not just images of females, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Todd, bristling.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ I said. ‘Don’t be like that. I agree. I mean, yes, wouldn’t it be lovely if we didn’t notice because it didn’t matter, but gimme a break, Todd. It’s definitely significant that no statues of … I don’t know any famous white American women, except actresses.’

  ‘Betsy Ross,’ said Todd. ‘Nellie Bly, Sally Ride.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘No statues of any of those Edwardian housemaids – seriously, if I ever have a daughter, I’m going to give her a name that is presidency-ready – have been tampered with.’

  ‘Good to know you’re not going to call a daughter “There’s a fly in my throat, Jr”,’ said Kathi. They didn’t make fun of my name being Leagsaidh every day anymore, but they didn’t like to let a whole week pass. ‘And you’re right. Look at the statues where the vigilantes are on the warpath: the rest of the Sacagaweas, Dignity, Phyllis Wheatley. Everyone’s got the message.’

  ‘And what does that tell us?’ I said.

  ‘Misogynistic xenophobes,’ said Todd.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Kathi. ‘They might be xenophobic misogynists.’

  ‘I love the way you fling the big words about when it’s me taking the notes,’ I said. I looked at what I’d written; the spelling seemed wrong, but I couldn’t think what to change to fix it
. ‘How about a snappier term?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Todd. ‘But I don’t want to say it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to say it,’ said Kathi.

  ‘Why should I have to say it?’ I whined. But I knew the answer and I got over myself. ‘Nazis.’

  ‘Which is good news,’ said Kathi, ‘whatever we call them.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Kathi. ‘Nazis are great news.’

  It was an unfortunate moment for a Lode staff member to come over and check that we had everything we needed. But it was nice to see that their commitment to customer service had limits.

  ‘Ma’am?’ the kid said. He was probably a college student, or about that age anyway. ‘Were you quoting someone right then?’

  ‘Huh?’ said Kathi. ‘No.’

  ‘Were you being sarcastic?’ the kid said. His voice was shaking and his neck was blotchy, but damn if he wasn’t sticking to his guns.

  ‘No,’ said Kathi. ‘Why?’

  ‘In that case, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ he said, dry-mouthed now, as well as blotched and shaky.

  ‘What?’ Kathi said.

  But, before he could insist or she could twig or I could try to explain, we were all distracted by a rumpus over at the fake flower-market barrow where a customer seemed to be having a medium-sized set of what we mental-health professionals call the heebie-jeebies.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ Todd asked, standing.

  I went over to see if maybe I could calm her down, Kathi at my side. I had taken a short course in conflict resolution and de-escalation as part of my training back in the old country, and Kathi, from her years in a budget motel and attached launderette, was just about equally well versed in the care of people who were upset. And this woman, I thought as we got close, was acutely, maybe clinically, upset. She was breathing like Mimi in the last act of La Bohême and staring with a stricken face at the pail full of bouquets she’d been just about to pick from. Beside her, a Lode employee – instead of offering a glass of water and a sit-down, or asking who they could call to come and take the woman home – was stock still, saying ‘Oh my God’ over and over again. That was what really chilled my blood. A clean-cut Lode bag-packer not saying ‘Oh my gosh,’ if not ‘Oh my good golly,’ was societal breakdown and no mistake.