by Joan Hess
Kyle held up his hands placatingly. “I’m as perturbed as you are. I’ve been working in the quality control division, and I know nothing about this contest. Last night my father packed a suitcase and, on his way out the door, informed me that I’m to be the liaison for the contest.”
“Why was the date changed?”
“Several weeks ago an investment group called Interspace International, Inc. managed to purchase enough stock to have a controlling interest in Krazy KoKo-Nut. Their marketing people insist that the contest be next week. Furthermore, they want it held in a hotel they own in the midtown area, so they can control the cost and take full advantage of the write-off.”
Geri could almost hear Scotty snickering from under the picture frame. She dropped it in a drawer, winced at the tinkle of glass, and fanned out the contents of the folder. “This is sheer and utter madness, but we’d best get started, don’t you think? May I see this updated list of contestants?” She took the page and compared it to what she had before her. “Three of the names are different. Why is that?”
Kyle shrugged. “According to my father, one of them declined and two had accidents. The investment firm called him yesterday with these names, and that’s what we’ll have to go with.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. Prodding, Polk and Fleecum is conducting the contest; we’re in marketing and that’s what we’re paid to do. Why would Interspace International be involved with bothersome details like this?”
“Favors to friends and relatives, I guess.”
“So the contest is rigged?” Geri said indignantly, having been reared in an ambience of fair play and the superior sense of morality that was affordable with wealth. “Do you have a second memo that names the winner? Why bother to conduct the contest in the first place?”
“Neither you nor I appear to be in a position to ask that question,” Kyle murmured.
“Well, I appear to be in a position to make sure the outcome is fair, and unless Mr. Fleecum returns in time to oversee this absurd cookoff thing, I intend to see that it is. Now then, shall we continue?”
“Next Tuesday?” Brenda Appleton said incredulously as she stumbled to a halt in the middle of the den. Her hand fluttered to her unremarkable brown hair, then fluttered away like a disoriented moth.
Jerome nodded. “That’s what the lady said when she called. You’re a finalist and I’m invited to accompany you. I’ve got plenty of work I can do at the hotel.”
“But I never dreamed I’d be invited to the finals of the cooking contest! If you hadn’t pestered me, I wouldn’t have bothered to enter in the first place. I don’t have a thing to wear, not a thing.” Now the hand fluttered to her chest. “And what about my bridge party? I’m having three tables of bridge Wednesday afternoon, and the girls will be furious if I cancel.”
“Screw ’em,” he said as he lit a cigar and then regarded her through a bluish haze. “You’re a finalist, and you’re going through with the contest, even if you have to wear nothing but an apron and your mink.”
“The children, Jerome! I never told them I entered, because I knew they’d tease me about it. I’d better call them immediately. What time is it in California? Three hours earlier? Will Vernie be home yet or should I wait? I cannot stand to waste money talking to that machine of hers, especially when I know she’s standing right there listening and can’t be bothered to pick up the receiver and talk to her own mother.”
Jerome turned to the sports page to see if the Mets had done anything worthwhile, for a change.
Catherine Vervain sat at her desk, utilizing her textbook to conjugate French verbs and recording the answers in neatly rounded handwriting. When she heard her mother open the bedroom door, she finished the column and impassively looked over her shoulder.
“The date of the contest has been changed to next week, Catherine. I’ll reschedule your hair appointment for tomorrow, and after you’re done, we’ll spend the afternoon shopping for our outfits.”
“Cancel my violin lesson.” Catherine turned back to the tedious lesson.
“I’ve already done it. I think we’ll try that new shop at the mall, the one next to the movie theater. I saw an adorable pink dress with tiny pearl seed buttons that will do, and I’ll have the cleaners dye white satin shoes to match.”
“I was, I am, and I will be,” Catherine muttered.
“Will be what, dear?”
“Whatever you want me to be,” she said softly, flashing small, even teeth as she bent further over her notebook.
“Next Tuesday will be fine,” Durmond Pilverman said. “I’ll take the train down and be at the hotel by five o’clock. That’s right, I’ll be by myself. My wife died several years ago and I really don’t know anyone who might wish to accompany me.” He chuckled modestly. “And the good Lord knows I don’t need a chaperone at my age. I’m just a lonely old widower who loves to dabble in the kitchen.”
After he hung up, he made several other calls, none of them eliciting a chuckle, then went into his study and took the .38 Special out of the desk drawer. He sat down at the desk and began to clean the barrel with an oily rag, whistling softly through the slight gap in his front teeth.
“A cooking contest?” Gaylene Feather said, scratching her neck with a scarlet fingernail. “Jesus, I don’t know. Like, I can barely make the can opener work, much less make fancy food.” She sank down on her bed and began to pluck at the dingy sheet. “Don’t you got anybody else who can do it, honey? I’m supposed to work every night next week, and Mr. Lisbon falls all over me if I’m five minutes late. What’ll he say if I tell him I gotta miss three nights in a row?”
Her boyfriend drained the last of the beer, then crumpled the can in his hand and lobbed it toward the garbage sack. “I’ll explain to Lisbon why he should not bother you about missing work, and I promise you he won’t object. If you’ll do this for me, I’ll give you a present to express my eternal gratitude.”
“And what might that be?”
“Some new luggage, a first-class ticket to Vegas, and a limo to pick you up at the airport.”
“You’re kidding!” she squealed. “A limo?”
“Nothing but the best for my girl. As long as you do a few little favors for me, I’ll do some big ones for you.”
“Are you sure I should be in a cooking contest?” Gaylene persisted, having no luck imagining herself in an apron. She could play a lot of roles (sadistic Nazi mistress being a specialty), but Betty Crocker wasn’t one of them.
“I must admit if I could find somebody else on this kinda notice, I’d do it, because I am personally and painfully acquainted with your lack of expertise in the kitchen department.”
“But not in other departments …” She stretched languidly so he could admire her very admirable attributes.
“All you will do is follow the directions on the recipe card,” he said as he joined her on the bed. “It’s just a cooking contest, not ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Now that we have settled that, I would like to buy all your vowels.”
“Oooooh,” Gaylene whispered.
“The contest has been moved up to this Tuesday,” Ruby Bee told Estelle, who banged down the receiver and dashed to her appointment book to get to work canceling everybody.
“Not even a week away,” Eula Lemoy told Elsie McMay.
“Which means I’ll have to wait till the cows come home for my perm,” Lottie Estes told Eilene Buchanon. Eilene was curt and unsympathetic, having hoped the call would be from the newlyweds.
“I’d absolutely die if someone was to send me to New York City,” Heather Riley told Nita Daggs. They lapsed into a giggly three-hour fantasy of limousines, Broadway actors, and penthouses ankle-deep in caviar and champagne.
“A good Christian would never set foot in that sinful city,” Mrs. Jim Bob told Brother Verber. “I cannot begin to imagine the depravity and perversion that takes place on the very sidewalks of that place.” Brother Verber could, but he kept it to himself.
“Sending t
hose two to a big city is worse than sending lambs to the slaughterhouse,” Millicent McIlhaney told Adele Wockerman, although it was a mite hard to tell if Adele had her hearing aid turned high enough to follow her.
She was a little surprised when Adele cackled and said, “Or vice versa.”
CHAPTER TWO
“There it is!” Ruby Bee shrieked, her finger jabbing the plastic barrier like a frenzied woodpecker. “Driver, do you see it? The Chadwick Hotel, on the right, just past that little vegetable stand!”
“Would you calm down?” Estelle demanded in a spitty whisper. “You are behaving worse than a fat kid in a candy shop, and it’s beginning to try my patience. I swear, you must have spotted the Empire State Building ten times so far, along with the Statue of Liberty, which I seem to recall is out in the middle of water.”
“I take you there?” the driver said in a guttural accent.
“The hotel,” Ruby Bee said, now pounding on the barrier meant to protect the cab driver from robbery—or his fares from his sour odor. “The Chadwick Hotel’s where we’re staying. But don’t let me stop you, Estelle, if you want to keep riding around with this man, so you can find out what it feels like to be smashed to death by a bus.”
She was sounding on the shrill side, but it had been a real heart-stopper of a trip from the airport. Somehow the driver’s ability to speak regular American disappeared right after the luggage was put in the trunk, and for all she could tell, they’d pretty much careened down the same streets two or three times amidst an endless stream of yellow cabs, all barreling along like they were in a race, changing lanes every ten feet, dodging buses, honking continually, missing pedestrians by inches, and begging for an accident. She’d gasped so many times her throat ached, and she was surprised she’d been able to unclench her bloodless, icy fingers from the door handle.
The driver turned around and showed them a few brown teeth. “You want stop here?”
Ruby Bee thought of a lot of scalding comments, but held them back and nodded. “Of course we want stop here, if it ain’t out of your way!”
The cab pulled to the curb, and they all looked at the front of the Chadwick Hotel, or what they could see of it through the scaffolding. As they stared, two men with toolboxes came out the door and continued down the sidewalk.
The driver grinned at them. “No can stay here. We go now, yes?”
“No,” Ruby Bee said. She poked Estelle, who was making a face as she tried to read a sign on the door. “Do you aim to sit there all afternoon?”
“That says it’s closed for remodeling and won’t open until next year. This can’t be right. Where’s that last letter you got?”
“It’s in my handbag and it says we’re staying at the Chadwick Hotel on 48th Street. I don’t care what the sign says—this is the right place.”
“Not right place,” the driver said. “We go my cousin’s restaurant, have nice couscous, meet plenty men who like soft white women?”
Ruby Bee and Estelle scrambled out of the cab like it was beginning to sink into the pavement. While the driver removed their luggage, they debated the tip and arrived at a scrupulously fair amount. The driver spat only once as he left them on the sidewalk, and his curse was too foreign to bother about. They were engulfed in stinky black smoke as he screeched away.
“Well, fancy that!” Estelle snorted. She was going to wait for a doorman to fetch their luggage, but a whiskery man in an army fatigue jacket was bearing down with a real peculiar glint in his eye, so she grabbed hers and told Ruby Bee to do the same.
They were about to go through the door when three more workmen, dressed in jumpsuits and all carrying toolboxes, came out and brushed past them just like they weren’t there. Before they could recover, a van stopped behind them and all of a sudden crates were being carried in and other crates out. The wild man in the army jacket was staring at them, most likely planning how easiest to murder them, and a woman crooning to herself in some funny language and wearing a coat so filthy you could see the fleas hopping asked point-blank for a dollar. Ruby Bee was too startled to refuse her and probably would have given her every last penny (and signed over her traveler’s checks, too) if Estelle hadn’t intervened.
Across the street, two men staggered out of a store, pushing each other and shouting words that were downright rude. The van was blocking traffic, and now horns were blaring and drivers were poking their heads out their windows to yell things that were just as rude, if not a sight worse. The two men began swinging at each other like playground bullies and threatening to call the cops. A couple, both with spiky orange hair, tattoos on their cheeks, earrings in their noses, and matching black leather jackets, weaved down the sidewalk, sharing a bottle in a brown bag and gawking at Ruby Bee and Estelle as if they were the funny-looking ones. A helicopter droned across the sky, and steam swooshed from a grate not ten feet away as the sidewalk trembled ominously.
“This ain’t Maggody,” Ruby Bee opined.
“And here I am thinking it is!” Estelle snapped. “I suggest we get our things and go inside before we get killed.” She took her own advice, and Ruby Bee followed, a little reluctantly since the sounds and the sights and even the smells were interesting.
There were plenty more sights and sounds and smells in the lobby. Mysterious pieces of furniture were draped with tarps, and part of the linoleum floor had been ripped up to expose patches of black glue dotted with hairs and dustballs, and in one corner, the mortal remains of a small furry animal. A tablesaw dominated the middle of the room, and as they hesitated, a man appeared from a corridor, switched on the saw, and began to mutter to himself as the sound of screaming wood overpowered the horns still blaring outside. Someone was hammering someplace; that was hard to miss and about as welcome as a bushy-tailed missionary on a bicycle.
The man cut off the saw and disappeared down the corridor. Ruby Bee dropped her luggage and pointed at a counter in front of a dark recess. “Do you reckon that’s where we check in?”
“I think we ought to check out of this place and find out where it is we’re supposed to be.”
“I already told you that this is the place. It’s in the letter, and I don’t aim to go traipsing around Noow Yark City looking for what’s right here under our noses.” She made her way through the patches of glue to the counter, and tapped on a silver bell. “Yoohooo? Is anybody back there?”
The wood-sawing man returned. This time he noticed them and, after a minute of frowning, said, “Closed for remodeling, honey. Why doncha call the YWCA and see if they can help youse two out?”
Ruby Bee took the letter from her purse and showed it to him. “This was sent special delivery, and it says we’re supposed to stay here, so this is where we’re going to stay. Do you happen to know where the manager is? If you can’t spit out the words, you just go ahead and point.”
Before the man could answer (if he indeed intended to), the door opened behind Estelle and a man carrying a suitcase came into the lobby. His expression of disbelief was nearly identical to Estelle’s; Ruby Bee thought about commenting on it, then remembered how Arly had told her not to speak to strangers like they were ordinary folks browsing in the Hardware Emporium on a Saturday morning.
The man wasn’t strange-looking, however. He appeared to be in his early forties, maybe a shade older, with shaggy dark hair going gray at the temples, a kind of messy mustache with its fair share of gray, droopy brown eyes that reminded her of one of Perkins’s hounds, and such poor posture that she had to restrain herself from poking him in the back and telling him to stand up straight. He was wearing a beige raincoat that had seen a lot of rain and a tweedy hat with a single, frayed feather.
He took off his hat and nodded. With a smile as sad as his eyes, he said, “Please excuse me, ma’am. I seem to have found myself in the wrong place, although I could have sworn …”
“You looking for the Chadwick?” Estelle butted in. “Well, so are we, and we didn’t reckon on a construction site.”
He nodded at her. “Yes, the Chadwick Hotel. I’ve been invited to participate in”—he gave them an embarrassed look—“a cooking contest, and I thought this was the place.”
“So did we,” Estelle said tartly, “but someone must have gotten the name wrong, because anyone with the sense God gave a goose can see that—”
“This is the right place,” Ruby Bee said, a little miffed because this gentleman was a real contestant like herself, and Estelle was forgetting that she was merely along for the ride, so to speak. She came back across the room and held out her hand. “I’m Ruby Bee Hanks, and I’m in the contest, too.”
“Ah,” he said, his forehead wrinkling while he appraised her as if she’d presented herself as an entry rather than a contestant. “I’m Durmond Pilverman. I’m not quite sure what we ought to do at this point, Mrs. Hanks. I was under the impression that the marketing representative would be here to handle the hotel reservations and such. Unless the gentleman in the cap is he, we may have a problem.”
The subject of the remark shook his head. “Naw, but lemme see if I can hunt up Rick. He’s what you might call the site supervisor. Maybe he can sort this out.”
Estelle stuck out her hand. “I’m Estelle Oppers, Mr. Pilverman. I came along with Ruby Bee so she wouldn’t get herself mugged in the airport, or get hopelessly lost before she ever caught sight of the hotel. We’re from Maggody, Arkansas.” She gave him a moment to respond, but he was now regarding her with the same sharply quizzical look he’d given Ruby Bee—who was not pleased with the remark about getting mugged or lost. “Where’re you from?”
“Connecticut,” Durmond said with a vague gesture.
Estelle opened her mouth, but Ruby Bee wasn’t about to listen to any more aspersions. “Why, I used to have a second cousin who lived in Connecticut,” she inserted neatly. “Elsbeth Matera was her name, but of course she died way back in 1952, so I don’t suppose you’d remember her, even if you knew her. She had palsy something awful during her last few years, bless her soul, and the nurse’s aides had to read the little cards and letters I sent her on her birthday and at Christmas. Did you ever happen to …?”
