by Lesley Kagen
“Yes, Tessie, I got my hobbies.” She slides her playing cards and a cat’s cradle string out of her pocket with a very proud smile and I don’t blame her. Dick and Jane might be too hard for her to read, and keeping track of what goes on in movies or television shows is too confusing, and our Mutual Admiration meetings might be above her head, but you hand this kid a deck of cards—I think she got her love of the “52” from Daddy—or give her a white string off a Meuer’s Bakery box that still smells like sugar? She turns into a regular Albert Einstein.
All set to hit the investigating trail now, I grab the Red Owl bag off the counter, point to the back door, and tell her the last thing I gotta tell her to get her going in the right direction in my voice that’s sure to fire her up. “Race ya to the cemetery fence! One for the money . . . two for the show . . . three to get ready, and . . .”
I wait for her to fill in the blank, but she doesn’t shout, Go, Bird, go! like she’s been doing.
She could be going stubborn on me again or . . . or maybe she just has to tinkle. Yes. She can forget if I don’t remind her. “You gotta go before we go, Bird, go?”
“No, I don’t gotta go before we go, Tessie.”
Hmmm.
“Did you just remember ya hung the wrong-colored towel out of the window?”
“No, I hung the white towel out the window just like you told me to, Tessie,” she says, sure-enough-sounding that I believe her.
Because I’m all gassed up and ready to go and she is doing an excellent impression of a roadblock, I lose my patience that I don’t got a lot of in the first place, because in this way, unfortunately, I resemble my mother by a bad-luck draw of the blood.
So it’s not really my fault that I ask Birdie snippier than I should, “Then what’s the damn problem?”
She looks down at the green kitchen floor that could use a good scrubbing and tells me in her tiniest voice, which is already quite tiny, “You’re gonna get mad-der if I tell you.”
“No, I won’t. I promise, no, I sister-promise.” For some other unknown reason, the kid who forgets 99% of what I tell her always remembers that’s the most serious kind of promise there is. A sister-promise can never be broken, no matter what. Even if some dumb greaser forces me to eat maggots on a saltine cracker before he’ll give Birdie back to me, she knows that I would rather do that than break a sister-promise. “C’mon.” I make my voice less ticked-off sounding and more sugary-sounding. “Tell me, honey.” As much as I want to, I can’t go over to the cemetery without her, because I cannot leave her alone. “Why aren’t you raring to go with me to Holy Cross?”
“’Cause . . . ’cause . . .” Birdie says, barely above a whisper, “I don’t want Mommy to take away my all for ones and ones for all.”
“You mean you don’t want Louise to take away your all for ones and ones for all.”
“Roger that.”
My sister was so wound up at the time that I didn’t think she heard our mother warn us not to visit the cemetery or do any peeking into our neighbors’ windows or she’d take away the Three Musketeers bars before she left for work, but I’m not all that surprised that threat got through her adorable, thick skull. Candy of any kind is a very important topic of conversation to Miss Birdie Finley.
If she was walking down Keefe Ave. and Mr. Ed Gein pulled up next to her and offered her a piece of disgusting black licorice to get in his car with him after he escaped from the Big House for murdering all those people, my sister would fall for that. She’d tug open the car door and tell that crazy murderer with one of her irresistible smiles—Thanks for the candy, mister. Sure, I’d love to go for a spin! I’m just crazy about your upholstery, by the way.
Birdie can see that she’s disappointing me, so she starts flapping her arms. She’ll throw her head back and start squawking next and it can take forever to work her out of that state, so I tell her, “Don’t get yourself all lathered up, okay?” and then I pet her little back in long strokes, the way she likes. “Remember? Louise is only gonna take away your candy bars if we get caught over at the cemetery and that’s not gonna happen.” Birdie still doesn’t look ready to rumble, so I need to up my ante. I pick up her hand and place it on the front of my shorts. “That’s a whole pocketful of Hershey’s kisses, and look!” I wave the Red Owl bag in front of her face so she can get a whiff of what’s inside with her special smelling power. “I made you a P B and M.” It can’t hurt to throw one more chip into the pot to convince her how much is at stake here. “And if you mind your p’s and q’s, I’ll nab the box of chocolate-covered cherries offa Mister Lindley’s grave and you don’t even have to give me any.” Next to Three Musketeers bars, Birdie loves those creamy, gooey cherries best of all, so she must be very scared about heading over to the cemetery, because she’s perked up some, but she still doesn’t look like she’s burning with desire.
I’d mention to her our new case and how life-changing important it is to us, but that won’t be enough. I don’t think she understands or cares all that much about solving the kidnapping murder. She might not even remember it anymore. No. I’m going to have pull out my big guns to get her moving toward the black iron fence.
Visiting Daddy’s pretend grave always makes his little dreamboat feel like her ship has come in (Joke!), and she also goes very gaga for my nice fiancé, Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield, almost as much as I do, which is gonna work out so great after him and me become Mr. and Mrs. When we get back from our honeymoon in Wisconsin Dells that my sister will go on, too, of course, because it’s our version of Disneyland—my little animal lover will just adore petting the deer and seeing the statue of Paul Bunyan’s ox, Babe—The Mutual Admiration Society will live happily ever after in the house on Hadley St. that I like so much. The solid-looking redbrick one with the white shutters and pretty maple tree out back that shades the bedroom off the kitchen that will belong to Birdie. Charlie and me will take care of her for as long as she lives. The same way Mrs. Obermeyer across the street watches over her sister Audrey, who got polio. Even after being in an iron lung at Sacred Heart Sanitarium for a year, the gal still has to wear those steel braces.
I give Birdie’s back a few more kitty-cat strokes and say into her ear, “I know you’re worried about us getting caught and Louise takin’ away your ones for all and all for ones, but . . .” I rub Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife, because I’m about to fire off my end-all-and-be-all trick. “You really, really, really, really wanna go to the cemetery to visit with Daddy and Charlie, don’t you?”
Ha!
You Bet Your Life she does! (Joke!)
My future bridesmaid yells, “Go, Bird, go,” and pushes me out of the way, pops through the squeaky back door of the house, and thank goodness I caught a hold of her arm before she jumped down the steps and ran across the backyard toward the cemetery fence.
I yank her toward me and tell her, “I like your enthusiasm, kiddo, but before we can go say hi to Daddy and Charlie, we got a very important caper we gotta pull off first.”
Along with all the other putridness Gert Klement does to Birdie and me, she put a real crimp in our cemetery visits after she paid to get a gigantic picture window put in above her kitchen sink. So now, whenever she’s doing the dishes or cooking or baking or pondering evil plans, she can keep tabs on Birdie and me better than she ever has. And believe me, nothing, and I mean not . . . one . . . thing on God’s green earth, even pagan babies, fills the black heart of that old biddy with as much joy as catching the Finley sisters in the act.
Birdie looks up at me, cocks her head, and asks, “What very important caper do we gotta pull off first, Tessie?”
This is not the time or place for this kind of sentimental sloppiness, but I can’t help myself. She is just so darn cute that I give her an Eskimo kiss before I narrow my eyes at the house next door and tell her, “We gotta sneak past the old fart first.”
7
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS
After sitting Birdie down on our back porch s
teps and giving her strict instructions to stay put until she hears my coast-is-clear signal, I got busy doing reconnaissance from behind a tree in front of Gert Klement’s house.
I’m peeking around the trunk to make sure that everybody who is out and about on the block is so busy paying attention to something else that they won’t notice me and report back to Gert that they saw me on the morning in question. So far . . . so good. A group of around twenty kids are playing a rough game of Red Rover in the middle of Keefe Ave. Looking like death warmed over, Mrs. Stewart is barely pushing her tenth colicky baby in a ratty-looking carriage on the opposite end of the block. And four houses down, Louise’s opponent in the Pagan Baby Society election is working up a storm.
I’ve heard our mother refer to Mrs. Nancy Tate as “a lame duck,” but in my opinion, instead of wasting energy calling the gal she’s running against names—I’m rubber, you’re glue and all that—Louise should get busy doing exactly what Mrs. Tate’s been doing. And I don’t mean she should dance half-naked for traveling vacuum cleaner salesman Horace Mertz while listening to “Rockin’ Robin” when the mood comes over her. What our mother should be doing is some advertising if she doesn’t want her clamdiggers beat off her two weeks from now.
The reason I know how important getting the word out is in the scheme of things is because every other Saturday afternoon this summer, besides teaching me a lot about the Braves baseball team—boy, that Eddie Mathews is really something and so is Hammerin’ Hank Aaron—the owner of Skank’s Funeral Home has “undertaken” the job (Joke!) of teaching me free of charge about embalming fluid, how to apply makeup to a corpse for the most lifelike appearance, high-quality casket linings versus tacky ones, and most importantly, how to run a successful business. “There are only so many dead bodies to go around, and more parlors are popping up every day,” Mr. Art Skank told me when he was putting the finishing touches on Mr. Otto Cooper, who died of old age week before last. “It’s crucial to draw attention to your business, so besides my usual advertisement in the Yellow Pages, I recently purchased a billboard.” He dabbed a little more pink lipstick on Mr. Cooper’s lips. “Have you seen it, Tessie?”
I had seen the WORKS OF ART sign on top of the abandoned Goodyear tire store on North Ave. I thought that was a really good slogan, but in my opinion, Mr. Skank should’ve stopped while he was ahead. He shouldn’t have put the sign on top of that particular store, and he should also not have included a picture of himself standing next to a casket in a Leonardo da Vinci costume. Firstly, you croak, you’re never gonna make somebody believe it’s a good year. Second off, from hanging around so many dead people, hate to say it, but they have kinda rubbed off on the short-necked, unusually hairy-armed, and generally not-very-good-looking-in-the-first-place mortician.
But, in answer to his question, of course, I did what any good friend would do. I fudged a little and told him, “I did see your billboard, sir, and it’s . . . it’s a huge masterpiece!” That seemed to make him happy, because he perfectly rouged Mr. Otto Cooper’s cheeks. (Mr. Skank was doing a little showing off, ya know? The way people do to make the compliment you just gave ’em seem true.)
If The Mutual Admiration Society ever needs to get more detecting customers, but not blackmail customers, we have plenty of those because there is never any shortage of people doing bad things around here, I’ll BE PREPARED to do some advertising. We’ll need a snappy slogan, like the ones Mr. Art Skank and his sister, pom-pom-shaking Mrs. Nancy Tate, came up with. He must’ve lectured her about the importance of “getting the word out,” too, because from behind this tree in Gert’s front yard, I’m watching our mother’s opponent in the Pagan Baby election pound another sign into her lawn and she’s really putting her back into it.
TWO-FOUR-SIX-EIGHT!
SCORE A TREASURER THAT’S REALLY GREAT!
CAST YOUR VOTE FOR NANCY TATE!
After I take one more good look up and down the block and I’m positive that the kids playing in the street are too wrapped up in sending “Timmy” over, Mrs. Stewart is sticking a bottle into the ratty carriage, and Mrs. Tate is busy with another one of her u-rah-rah signs, I stick my two pointer fingers in my mouth and whistle wooo ooo whoot, which is the signal to let Birdie know that it’s time for her to jump off our back porch steps and run like crazy to the bushes in front of the cemetery fence and wait for me in the usual place.
On account of the great Indian weather we’re having, like everybody else’s on the block, all the windows are open in Old Lady Klement’s house, so I can hear Bishop Sheen sermonizing when I’m standing at her front door. She’s listening to his show on the radio in her kitchen, and something smells really good and I’m 100% sure it’s not her. I think she must be baking a devil’s food cake, because, of course, that would be her favorite on account of that famous saying “Like attracts like.” (No joke.)
FACT: I know the layout of her house.
PROOF: It’s easy for me to jimmy the lock and wiggle through her basement window.
Daddy always said, “Throw the first punch,” so by pocketing our next door neighbor’s change and moving around stuff in her house when she’s asleep or up at church, I’m working on #3 on my TO-DO list: Make Gert Klement think that her arteries have gone as hard as her heart. That way, when her granddaughter, Lily Klement, who is so sweet and nice that she had to have been adopted out of St. Rose’s Orphanage, enrolls Gert in the kind of “home” she’d like to send Birdie and me off to she will not put up a fight. The day the moving truck pulls up in front of her house to lug her and her belongings up to the Catholic Home for the Aged on Burleigh St. will be a big red-letter day for Birdie and me, because I am 50% sure that Louise wouldn’t get rid of us once that buttinsky can no longer whisper not-so-sweet nothings about us into her ear.
On the other hand . . . timing really is everything, so I have to BE PREPARED that the artery-hardening plan won’t work before the men with the nets show up to take Birdie away or before I get sent to live at the juvie home, so I’m feeling a big desire to solve this kidnapping murder case for lots of running-away bucks when I lean on Gert’s doorbell.
When the old witch hears the doorbell ding-dong, she slams a kitchen cabinet shut, turns the radio down, and hollers, “You better not be another Fuller Brush man or vacuum cleaner salesman interrupting the bishop and my baking!”
Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . Gotcha!
She thinks she’s so smart, but she’s doing one of the worst things she could possibly do, according to my expert boxer Daddy. Just like Louise is underestimating her opponent in the election, Gert is underestimating me. I know she can give door-to-door salesmen the boot, but it’s a huge sin not to help St. Kate’s raise money, which is why I lower my voice that is already so deep and yell back at her “Church paper drive!” before I jump the porch railing and take off around the side of her house.
8:33 a.m. I can make the round trip from Gert’s kitchen to her front door in under ten seconds, but once she sees that nobody’s come from St. Kate’s to collect her old newspapers, it’ll take her around three minutes to shuffle back to Bishop Sheen and her picture window, depending on how much her bunions that I gave her by praying every night for a month to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of feet, are bothering her this morning.
Keeping track of the time on Daddy’s Timex with one eye after I make it across our neighbor’s backyard and into ours, I use my other eye to get busy looking for Birdie in the bushes in front of the cemetery fence where she’s supposed to be hiding. I need to guide her over the pointy spears on top, because I get too petrified that one of these days her little hands are going to lose their grip and she’ll end up looking like a lollipop.
When I can’t get a bead on her right away, I go nervous, but not straight into shock. This is just another example of that famous saying about a Bird in the hand being better than a Bird in a bush. (No joke.) It’s also not the first time she’s pulled something like this and I’m 100% positive it won’t be
the last. Considering how often she gets away from me, I can only think of one good reason why the Finley sisters shouldn’t have been born connected at the hip like the two Siamese sisters we saw at the freak show at the Wisconsin State Fair.
Q. How do Ling and Ming go to the bathroom?
A. Outlook not so good.
I whisper-holler into the bushes, “Bird?”
Not a peep.
“Tweetheart?”
That’s my forgetful sister for ya in a nutshell. Instead of running over to these bushes when I gave her the whistle signal, she musta ran somewhere else. I’d go it alone, but I can’t. It’s never a good idea to let Birdie out of my sight for too long. If she doesn’t answer me this time, I need to go find her and work out another plan. “Honey?”
She pops up in the bushes on the other side of the black iron fence that I never want her to climb over without me and says with a funny little smile, “You rang?” like beatnik Maynard G. Krebs of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis show, which is kinda strange. She doesn’t get jokes and is not supposed to know how to crack a funny “You rang?” one about me ding-dong ditching Gert Klement.
8:45 a.m. According to the second hand on Daddy’s watch, our neighbor is going to be standing at her kitchen window that’d give her a great view of Birdie and me in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . , so I hurry over the fence and pull my giggling sister deeper and lower into the bushes and not a second too soon.
Through the parted leaves, Birdie and me watch as The Wretched One flattens her nose against her giant picture window. She’s locked on to the spot where we’ve hidden from her a gazillion times before, so I know she can’t see us, but we gotta be careful that she doesn’t hear us, because just like The Mutual Admiration Society, our enemy has got what Chapter Five in Modern Detection calls TOOLS OF THE TRADE of her own. “A fedora may be worn low over one’s eyes to conceal one’s identity,” the book says, which makes sense. Eyes can tell somebody everything about you because they are the windows to our soul. I couldn’t find a fedora hat to fit me at Toppers, so I boosted a pair of sunglasses from the five and dime last week to keep my peepers hidden. A trench coat—a tan coat that has nothing to do with sickness of the mouth—also comes highly recommended, but I figure a beige top and shorts would work just as good. And an ordinary drinking glass is also nice to have on you if you want to listen to people talking on the other side of walls, and I keep one of those in our Radio Flyer.
