by Mary Marks
Lucy’s voice jolted me out of my reverie. “I can finish those, hon’.”
I scraped off the last of the plates. “I’m almost done. Anyway, now that Ray’s gone, I need to show you what I found.” I dried my hands and handed my notepad to Lucy. “I started decoding Mother’s Asleep. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far.”
Lucy clamped a shocked hand over her wide open mouth as she read. She looked at me with eyes the size of baseballs. “Martha! Are you sure? You really read this?”
Just then her phone rang and she looked at the caller ID. “You answer it, Martha. I don’t think I can talk right now.”
“Hi, Birdie. What? Are you all right? Did you call the police? We’ll be right over.”
Lucy looked at me. “Now what?”
“Russell walked out the front door and stepped on a note for Birdie taped to a small paper bag full of dog crap.”
Lucy whooped out an incredulous “No! Dog poop? What did the note say?”
“Just two words: You’re next.”
Neither one of us said another word as we rushed to get to Birdie’s. Lucy opened the front door, and I yelled, “Stop! Don’t move.”
Lying there on the porch, just outside the threshold where her foot would have landed, was a note taped to a small paper bag.
“Dang!” Lucy never swore.
I bent down to examine the angry letters scratched in black marking pen on plain white paper. Lucy Mondello is a dead woman!
I stood up. “When Ray left this morning, I wasn’t really paying attention. Did he leave by the front door? Because if he did, someone just put this here.”
“No, he left through the kitchen door straight into the garage like he always does.”
“Then this could have been placed here any time during the night. Oh, Lucy, I told you I didn’t want to bring you trouble by staying here.”
Lucy narrowed her eyes, pulled herself up to her full height, and put her hands on her hips. “This guy picked the wrong woman to mess with. I’m going to call Ray and wait for the police.”
“Right. I’ll go see if Birdie’s okay.”
As I walked across the street, my stomach clenched with a sick realization. By seeking refuge at Lucy’s house, I’d put both my friends in jeopardy.
CHAPTER 23
Birdie must have seen me walking across the street as she opened the door and pointed to the porch. “Be careful, Martha dear. Don’t step in the mess.”
“Looks like someone beat me to it.” I took a large step over the smelly brown smear.
Birdie twisted her braid furiously. “Russell, and he’s madder’n a wet hen.”
“Don’t you mean rooster?”
“I said what I meant, Martha. Come on in. I just got off the phone with Detective Beavers. He’s on his way.”
Russell walked into the living room, his white hair perfectly groomed. I never could get over the contrast between earth mother Birdie and this fussy little man dressed in a blue business suit and silk tie. He smiled tightly at me and nodded once, slightly disturbing a strand of hair on his forehead. “Hello, Martha.”
“Hi, Russell. You okay?”
“Just fine. Just fine.” He took Birdie’s hands in his, looked at her over the top rim of his gold wire-rimmed glasses, and spoke to her, slowly enunciating every word as if he were addressing a child. “I wish I could stick around, but I’ve got an early meeting at the bank with the federal regulators. You know how critical this is.” Russell looked at me with desperate appeal in his eyes. “I’m hoping Martha can stay with you until I get back.” I nodded, and he turned his attention back to Birdie.
“I’ll make an effort to get away the moment the auditors leave. Meanwhile, try to be brave. I’m sure the police are on their way.”
Russell gave her a rare, perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “By the way, my shoes are on the back porch.”
Birdie looked like a thundercloud, clenched her teeth, and lowered her voice into an uncharacteristic snarl. “I’m not touching those shoes, Russell.”
He glanced nervously at me and I looked away, pretending to find some important lint that needed removing from the front of my shirt.
Without another word, Russell Watson walked out the front door for the second time that morning, this time stepping over the mess on the porch and leaving his wife to clean it up.
At eight a silver Camry pulled up in front of Birdie’s house, followed by a squad car. Detective Beavers barked some orders to the two uniforms, who fanned out toward the neighbors’ houses. Then he knocked on Birdie’s door. When Beavers saw me sitting on her sofa, he shook his head a couple of times. “Where were you last night at eleven?”
“Across the street at Lucy’s. Why?”
“There was a robbery in Pacoima, but when I got to the crime scene, you weren’t there.”
“Very funny. Listen, Birdie’s not the only one who got hit. Lucy also got a threatening note taped to a bagful of dog crap on her porch. She’s waiting for you across the street at her house.”
Birdie gasped. “Why didn’t you tell me? What did her note say?”
“That she was a dead woman.”
Birdie started to rub the middle of her chest.
Beavers’s frown deepened. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket, punched some buttons, and turned away as he spoke. “I need you to go over to Martha Rose’s house and see if there’s a bag of dog crap on her porch with a note taped on it. If there is, bag it and bring it in. No, just the note. No, I’m not kidding, Kaplan. Just do it.”
I sat next to Birdie and held her hand while she told Detective Beavers everything she could remember about the morning. At one point she got up and produced a plastic baggie with the note inside. The white paper was smeared brown and ripped from when Russell made contact with his shoe, but the menacing words printed with a black marker were clearly readable.
At about eight forty-five Beavers received a call. “Yeah, Kaplan. Thanks.” He put his phone back in his pocket and looked at me. It wasn’t good.
“What?”
“Three for three.”
“You mean I got one, too?”
Beavers nodded.
“What did it say?”
He glanced at Birdie and then cleared his throat. “Uh, he called you a know-it-all in not such nice words.”
Then he stood. “I’m sorry about this, Mrs. Watson, but my gut tells me this is probably an unrelated prank. Dog excrement isn’t usually a killer’s weapon of choice, but I’ll order a patrol to swing by here for the next few days.” Then he looked at me. “Ms. Rose, can I speak to you for a minute?”
We stepped outside, avoiding the brown mess, and when I glanced across the street, Ray’s car was there. Then Joey drove up in his truck. He jumped out and hurried inside his mother’s house. In a short time, Richie and the other boys would arrive to complete the circle of protection. If anyone wanted to harm Lucy, they were going to have to get past six Mondello men.
“Where exactly are you staying?” He looked at the activity across the street.
“I’m still at Lucy’s.”
“Good. That’s the best place for you right now.” He looked back at Birdie’s house. “I don’t think Mrs. Watson should be left alone to wait for her husband to come back from wherever he went.”
“Yeah. I’ll stay with her.”
Beavers nodded and turned to go across the street.
“What about my laptop?”
“In the works.”
Should I tell him about reading the quilts? I’d wait until after the funeral, for Siobhan’s sake. I wanted to spare her this new grief for as long as possible, and I needed to plan the best way to break the awful news. I went back inside with Birdie. “I’ll stay here with you until Russell gets home.”
“You might be waiting here for hours.”
I looked at my watch. Nearly nine and I knew Birdie wasn’t exaggerating. No matter what Birdie might need, Russell wouldn’t come home until Russell was ready. Th
is meant, of course, I’d just lost my last chance to examine the other quilts. Thank goodness for the photographs. An incomplete record was better than none at all.
I looked at my friend still nervously twisting her braid and forced a smile. “That’s okay, Birdie. There’s no other place I’d rather be right now. Maybe I could help you cut pieces for your Grandmother’s Fan blocks.”
As we worked in her sewing room, I told Birdie the story I deciphered in Claire’s quilt the night before.
“Oh, Martha, how awful! Poor, poor Claire. Do you think her father is behind her death and the disappearance of her quilt?”
“While he has a strong motive for stealing and destroying the incriminating evidence in those quilts, I find it hard to believe he’d kill her. Why would he steal our quilts from the quilt show, too? That piece doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in this puzzle.”
At 11:45, Russell Watson returned home with a pint of Birdie’s favorite Chocolate Cherry Cordial ice cream. I suspected this was as close as he ever got to an apology.
I left Russell and Birdie, but before I walked back to Lucy’s house, I turned on the Watsons’ garden hose and washed off their front porch. The crime scene people didn’t need the dog crap anymore.
Back at Lucy’s I was greeted warmly by all the boys. I turned to Lucy. “Are the quilts ready to go?” She pointed to the pillowcases stacked neatly near the door.
Just then the doorbell rang. As Joey walked to the front door, Ray warned, “Be careful, Joe.” A driver in gray livery stood on the porch with a white Bentley parked at the curb. Two minutes later he drove away.
I sighed and hooked my arm into Lucy’s. “Well, they’re gone,” I whispered so nobody else could hear me. “But after all this trouble, I’d sure like to know what other stories those quilts have to tell.”
“You and me both,” she whispered back.
In the afternoon the Mondello men worked out a schedule for one of them to be with Lucy at all times. They each chose a gun from the safe.
Ray put his arm around my shoulder. “Your house is fixed now, Martha, but for the time being, I think you should stick with us rather than take your chances on your own.”
“Thanks, Ray, but I can’t stay here forever. I plan to go back home after the funeral tomorrow. I won’t be terrorized into staying away from my house.”
Richie turned to Joey and muttered, “No wonder she and Mom are such good friends.”
Ray handed me a pistol. “Then I insist you take a handgun to protect yourself.”
“I don’t even know how to work one of these things.” I turned the weapon over in my hands. “I’m a Democrat.”
“Joey is going to take you to the shooting range this afternoon and make sure you know how to use the gun.”
“But . . .”
“No arguments, please. We’d all feel better if you had some self-protection. Right, Lulu?”
Lucy nodded. “This was my idea, really.”
I started to protest, but Joey grabbed the gun and led me by my hand to his pickup like a parent leading a child who doesn’t know how she feels about the first day of school.
“Come on, Aunt Martha. I’m taking you to an indoor shooting range. In an hour or two you’re going to know all about gun safety and, more important, you’re going to know how to use this little baby.”
Joey sheepishly grabbed all the empty fast-food bags off the passenger side and stuffed them behind the seat.
I hoisted myself into the elevated cab of the white pickup by holding on to the door with one hand and the grab bar with the other.
The inside smelled like onions and motor oil.
The shooting range was in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to the east of the Valley. Straw bales with paper targets were set up outside for people with rifles. Inside a building with extra thick concrete walls, the range was shorter and looked like all the shooting ranges I’d seen on the cop shows on TV. It smelled like gun oil and sulfur. The gray room was divided into lanes with zip lines to move paper targets toward the back wall. Thousands of spent bullets with shiny copper and steel jackets littered the concrete floor.
Joey pinned up a paper target with a body silhouette on it and sent it down the line about twenty feet. He picked up the gun. “This is a Browning semiautomatic twenty-two caliber pistol.” He showed me how to release the safety, chamber a round by sliding back the top, and sight down the barrel. The gun was heavier than I expected and I had a hard time holding it—even using both hands.
Joey put a headset on me to protect my ears. Then I heard a voice say, “Commence fire.”
I’d never shot a gun before, but I was pretty sure I could hit the target. After all, it was only twenty feet away. Guns exploded in the lanes all around me. I aimed, sighted, and pulled the trigger. The kickback sent my arms down and back.
I looked at Joey. “Whoa.”
“You’re doing fine, Aunt Martha. Just try to keep your arms and wrists straight.”
When the voice commanded, “Hold your fire,” I put the empty gun down on the shelf in front of me.
Joey pressed a button and the paper target came back. I’d shot fifteen bullets and there were seven holes in the paper. Four of those didn’t even hit the silhouette, but the other three hit pay dirt. Two in the torso and one in the crotch.
“Awesome, Aunt Martha. We’ll make a sharpshooter out of you yet.”
“Do I have to change political parties?”
Joey, like the rest of his family, was a Republican. He looked at me and grinned wickedly. “You should do that anyway.”
CHAPTER 24
In the evening, Ray drove Lucy, Birdie, and me to Clancy Brothers Mortuary on Olympic Boulevard in West LA. for Claire’s wake. Lucy looked like a Mexican mourner in her black linen dress, long string of black beads, and a black lace mantilla over her flaming hair. Ray wore a dark suit jacket concealing a handgun he’d tucked into his waistband. Before we left, we agreed to not tell Birdie about the gun for fear of alarming her.
This was one of those rare times when we got to see Birdie out of her overalls and Birkenstocks. She wore a plum-colored polyester dress and jacket and limped a little in her black leather walking shoes. Russell declined to join us, claiming fatigue. That man was about as supportive as a flat tire. He probably thought the Chocolate Cherry Cordial ice cream bought him a long-term pass.
At 6:45 we pulled into the driveway of a two-story red brick colonial with white columns in front. The valet opened the door and I stepped out of the car, smoothing the wrinkles on my black Anne Klein skirt and readjusting the collar of my silk blouse where the seat belt twisted it.
Ray insisted on parking his vintage Mercedes himself. One of his passions was restoring old cars, and he wasn’t about to trust his baby to a twenty-year-old valet. So we waited for him on the sidewalk.
All around the building, decorative shutters flanked tinted windows you couldn’t see into from the outside. The small strip of front lawn was trimmed to the last blade of grass, and pink and white petunias bordered the short brick walkway from the sidewalk to the broad front steps.
A few minutes later Ray joined us. As we approached the double doors, white-gloved ushers in black suits opened them for us, and we stepped into a lobby with hallways leading in several directions. A sign on a stand in the shape of an arrow read MILLER and pointed down the hall to the left. Another sign pointing to the right read TERRY.
We followed the wood-paneled hallway until we came to a large room. At the far end was a bier draped in dark blue velvet. Lying on top was a polished mahogany casket with oiled bronze handles. It was open at one end and covered at the other end with a spray of white calla lilies and roses. Dozens of other bouquets filled the air with the sweet and spicy fragrances of tuberose and carnations. A string trio plus flute and harp sat off to the side playing Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
I wasn’t used to open caskets. In the Jewish tradition, the casket is always closed. I wondered if at s
ome point tonight I’d be required to file past and look at Claire’s dead body. I’d already seen it the day we discovered her. I really didn’t want to see her again, but I also didn’t want to offend her mother. Hopefully Lucy could guide me through the unknown waters of Catholic wake etiquette.
I scanned the room. Two walls were lined with Claire’s quilts: those that I’d saved and others I recognized from her files as having been purchased by private collectors.
“Where did all these quilts come from?” asked Birdie. “I don’t recognize some of them.”
“Some of these are privately owned. Somehow the Terrys must have been able to borrow them for the evening.”
“They certainly are displayed professionally. Look at the care with which they’ve been hung. All the clips along the tops are precisely the same distance apart.” I counted three security men on each side of the room. Then I spotted Siobhan in the front row of seats. She seemed diminished, a fragile starling in an elegant black faille suit. “There’s Claire’s mother. Let’s go and pay our respects.”
As soon as Siobhan saw me, she reached up and pulled me down to her for an embrace. “Oh, Martha, thank you for coming.” The musicians switched to Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” a piece poignant enough to make even Cruella De Vil cry. Siobhan glanced at Claire’s casket a few feet away with an expression of grief so profound it sliced into my heart. Even if she’d been a negligent parent during Claire’s childhood, she was a devastated mother now.
She turned in her seat toward a dapper older man sitting at her right. The fine wool of his black bespoke suit fit him perfectly. Hand stitching around the edges of his lapels screamed money as well as the initials embroidered in tiny blue letters on the cuffs of his crisp white shirt. “This is my husband, Will.”
Will Terry was a prisoner of his Irish genes and reminded me faintly of a leprechaun with his small stature, long upper lip, and ruddy complexion. And like a leprechaun, this impeccably dressed little man was sitting on top of a huge pot of gold—not to mention a sewer full of shameful secrets.
