Bubbles All The Way

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  “Yes,” I said, partly grateful for the interruption. I didn’t know how much more of Stiletto I could stand. I wasn’t exactly famous for my self-restraint.

  He and Mr. Salvo went off, judiciously avoiding the receptionist’s desk, where all hell was breaking loose.

  “I don’t need no stinking appointment to see my daughter. BUBBLES! Help me, Bubbles!”

  Mama was being yanked back by our gatekeeper, Veronica, who at one hundred pounds was no match for Mama’s meatloaf-and-potato heft. Mama broke away, sending Veronica flying into her swivel chair.

  Veronica swore a blue streak, prompting Mama to make a quip about young girls these days driving like Mario Andretti with a NASCAR potty mouth.

  I knew what Mama and Genevieve were after. Free publicity. A few weeks before, they’d hit on a get-rich-quick scheme to turn our decrepit steel town into—voilà!—the discount Christmas City.

  All their lives they’d watched with sadness when, every season, busloads and busloads of otherwise loyal senior Lehighites saddled up and did their shopping in nearby Bethlehem, the historic Christmas city. There they snapped up every last Moravian star, snow globe, Bach music CD and jigsaw puzzle featuring Bethlehem’s famous “putz.” You name it, they bought it like their money was made out of paper. And to top it off, they took the “Christmas City by Night” tour before heading home to Lehigh.

  Meanwhile, all anyone bought in Lehigh was wrapping paper and tape.

  Enough with Bethlehem already, was Mama’s attitude. The Moravians were so over. Plus, Bethlehem’s Christmas fix was further ruining Lehigh’s already ruined economy. Something had to be done to stop the hemorrhaging.

  Which was how Mama and Genevieve came up with a scheme to turn Lehigh into a destination discount stop for all your holiday needs. Same snow globes, same Moravian stars—albeit maybe not so sturdy—same music. (Okay, so the Bach was recorded off the senior center’s Wurlitzer. Still, it was Bach.) And similar jigsaw puzzles, though the first round of “putz” puzzles had been unfortunately misinterpreted by Mama’s distributor in Brooklyn.

  (You wouldn’t believe what putz means in some parts of the country. Let me just say this: piecing together a picture of this male anatomy would be enough to send Grandma running for the eggnog.)

  Anyway, the big news was that all the tchotchkes would be for sale at forty percent off Bethlehem’s prices at Mama and Genevieve’s Christmas Fair and Mega-Garage Sale on Friday.

  In addition, Mama and Genevieve promised everyone a real, live Christmas pageant with real, live senior citizens—though, as Mama said, with some of them that’s not so guaranteed. The pageant was turning out to be a huge hit with her geriatric crowd. As of last count, there were eight angels over the age of seventy-three, including two with walkers.

  And there’d been at least one diva disaster. Mrs. Zuma and Mrs. Moriarity had had a falling out after Mrs. Moriarity was passed over for the role of Mary because Mrs. Zuma was allegedly sleeping with Joseph, who also happened to be the director.

  That was what you got with the Lehigh Senior Center. The scandals never stopped.

  I headed Mama and Genevieve off at Veronica’s desk and adroitly steered them toward our one conference room so they wouldn’t disturb the newsroom, since they tended to talk at full volume about the most intimate of bodily functions and the miracle of whole bran.

  Before I could say, Don’t sit. I don’t have time, they sat across from me, purses in laps, ready to pitch their scam. Mama was wearing a red sweater, light-up Christmas-ball earrings and a reindeer pin. Two bright pink spots of rouge on her cheeks were practically aflame.

  Genevieve, a good foot taller, was extremely ill at ease. Newspapers, in her mind, were elitist institutions bent on withholding real news from the working class. She kept stealing cautious glances through the conference room windows and awkwardly pulling her dress, which she’d sewn herself out of material with a Christmas-tree pattern. I knew for a fact that the Christmas-tree material was supposed to be used for table cloths and runners and not women’s apparel, as I’d been at JoAnn Fabrics the week before and seen it on sale in the home-decorating department for $1.99 a yard.

  Mama reached in her purse and pulled out a plastic bag of brown candies, tied with a red-and-green grosgrain ribbon. “Look what we’re going to sell at the flea market.”

  I stared at the bag. “Molasses sponge candy?”

  “Doesn’t that bring back memories? Everyone’s going to be so excited.”

  Molasses sponge candy was a unique, um, treat in the Lehigh Valley. The church ladies made it every Christmas. It was hard and somewhat bitter and tasted faintly of baking soda. When it was made well, it melted in your mouth and disappeared. I have never seen it sold in a store and there might very well be a good reason for that.

  “Listen, Mama, I can’t go over your discount Christmas scam today. There was a crisis—”

  “This ain’t about that, so cool your jets.” Mama snapped open the clip on her purse. “I just want to go over the wedding plans once more and then we’ll be out of your big hair.”

  Wedding plans. Groan. Every day Mama went over wedding plans. “I don’t want to go over wedding plans.”

  “Just a few photos to keep you up to speed.”

  Mama was laying out magazine clips of wedding dresses—which I had yet to buy—and samples of the white matchbooks that said DAN AND BUBBLES? (the ? was a typo, but I had voted to keep it in).

  Next from her bag she produced Polaroid photos of the smoky union hall where our reception was supposed to be held. I could see from the pictures that already it was festooned with white tissue streamers and white tissue wedding bells.

  Seeing the decorations pushed me over the edge. It was happening. It was really, really happening. I was going to be married—remarried—to Dan at the end of the week. Now I knew what prisoners on death row felt like when the lights flickered during dry runs of the electric chair.

  “You looking mighty pale there, Sally,” said Genevieve, who called all girls Sally and all boys Butch.

  “What do you expect?” Mama said. “She’s a bride.”

  “A bride without a wedding dress.” Genevieve stuck out her chin. “When are you gonna get one of them things?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. I got other stuff on my mind.”

  Mama looked up from her display. “Like what? What could be more important to a woman than her wedding dress?”

  “How about Debbie Shatsky’s murder at the House of Beauty today?”

  Mama and Genevieve eagerly pulled up their chairs. I wondered if they were really here to talk veils or if the Polaroids had been just an excuse to get me alone.

  “You don’t seem so surprised by that,” I observed.

  “We heard it was an accident.” Mama shoved the Polaroids back in her purse. “Not murder.”

  “Sandy screwed up and used the wrong glue ’cause she was rushed and disorganized—that’s what Tula told us,” Genevieve added, licking her lips.

  “Sandy did not screw up,” I said firmly. “Someone murdered Debbie. I’m sure of it. She was intentionally poisoned with latex.”

  Mama sat back as if it was a relief to hear Debbie had been murdered and not accidentally killed. “Good thing because one big screwup can close a salon forever.”

  “Remember Mario?” Genevieve asked.

  “Like yesterday. One day you couldn’t get an appointment there if you were Mario’s mother herself. Next day the place was empty and Mario was offering a ‘get two cuts, get the third cut free.’ Bad perm, was what he did. Seared Ellie Merkel’s hair right off.”

  A chill came over me. I’d heard of such hairdressing horror stories.

  It was true what Mama and Genevieve were saying. Rumors that Sandy had been slipshod could ruin her. And even if she closed down the House of Beauty and tried to reopen under a different name, there’d be no hope. Lehigh was a tight steel town that didn’t forget bad perms or deadly hair extensions. If Debbie
’s death wasn’t revealed as a murder and soon, Sandy would be finished.

  I tapped my press-on nails and thought about this. I needed to talk to Phil Shatsky. I needed to find Marguerite. Most important, I needed to figure out who switched Debbie’s hair glue and dumped it in Sandy’s private bathroom.

  “You do know,” Mama said slyly, “that Debbie was married before.”

  I stopped tapping.

  “His name is Ernie Bender, better known as Ern. Maybe you remember him. He used to make the cherry Cokes down at the Save-T Drugs. He was a pharmacist there.”

  I thought back to the many cherry Cokes I had at the Save-T Drugstore, but I couldn’t recall a pharmacist except for the grumpy dinosaur in a lab coat.

  “You mean the old guy?” I asked.

  Swat! I expertly ducked as Mama tried to hit me with her purse.

  “He wasn’t old. That’s Clarence. He’s our age. And he’s not Ern. Ern’s a kid. Longish brown hair. Wears it in a ponytail.”

  “Oh,” I said, reemerging from under the conference table. “My mistake.”

  “His mother lives in the senior high-rise three floors up from me,” Mama said.

  “She shoots skeet,” Genevieve said, thereby imprinting Mrs. Bender with her stamp of approval. Anybody who shot anything—a musket, pistols, gun, squirrels—was A-okay by her.

  “She’s also mighty ticked at her former daughter-in-law,” Mama said. “Debbie up and divorced Ern when he was at his lowest.” She paused. “In jail.”

  That was a twist I hadn’t expected. “In jail? For what?”

  “For nothing. Doped up on a few of those Cokes, was all. Heck, in our day, that’s what Coke was. Dope. You got it at the druggist’s counter, too.”

  I studied Mama and Genevieve, the doped-up coke addicts, with new eyes. Those two were very squishy about what constituted crime, especially Genevieve. It was best not to ask how she had managed to outlive her many husbands.

  “Then I don’t blame Debbie for divorcing him,” I said. “I wouldn’t stay married to a pharmacist who drank doped-up cherry Cokes, either.”

  “You should get his side of the story before you go around, high and mighty, making snap judgments,” Genevieve said. “Ern works down at the Christmas tree farm at the corner of Union and Third, if you’re looking for a scoop.”

  “He’s out of jail?”

  “Got out last week. We threw a party for him up in his mother’s apartment. Debbie wasn’t there, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mama said. “He hates her.”

  “Or did,” Genevieve corrected. “You can’t hate the dead.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  This new information raised a whole slew of new questions. A felonious pharmacist who despises his ex-wife gets out of jail and one week later she’s dead? Not only is she dead, but she is dead from a latex allergy. And who would have known that she had a latex allergy? Her ex, thank you very much. And wouldn’t he, as a pharmacist, also have known how to get hold of latex?

  I got that prickly feeling, that startling electric surge of my innate journalistic instinct signaling me that I was on to something big.

  There was a knock on the conference room door and Veronica poked her head in, regarding Mama warily before informing me that there was “some crying woman on the phone who refuses to call back.”

  Geesh. There were always crying women on my phone refusing to call back. Usually they were the clerks from Mahoken, sobbing about how poorly I’d written a story.

  “Guess that’s our cue to go,” Mama said.

  “Hold on.” I grabbed Genevieve. “See that woman out there—the one with the little hat and the flowered dress?” I pointed through the conference room window to Flossie Foreman, who was on the phone and eating a Christmas cookie some fan had undoubtedly sent her.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “That’s Flossie Foreman.”

  “The Flossie Foreman,” Mama gushed. “We love her.”

  “We sure do,” Genevieve added. “First thing we read, straight after the obits, of course.”

  “Terrific. Then I wonder if you could take her out tonight. You know, use your connections in the senior circuit to preoccupy her. I need to cover something she’s assigned to do.”

  Mama squinted. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that no-good Italian gigolo Stiletto, would it?”

  “Where would you get an idea like that?”

  “You were just talking to him. I saw with my own peepers.”

  I had to throw her off the scent. “If you treat her right, Flossie might be swayed to mention your Christmas City scam—I mean, Christmas City project—in her column. Might even give your perogie store a plug, Mama.”

  Mama brightened, Stiletto all but forgotten with the prospect of being featured in “Talk of the Town.”

  “So you just want us to take out Flossie,” Genevieve said. “For the night. Not longer?”

  “No. A night will be fine.”

  “Okay.” Genevieve sighed, straining to heave herself out of the chair. “The things I do for you kids.”

  I watched them waddle through the conference room door and down the stairs. When they had waddled themselves out of the building, I took the phone, fully expecting that the dismayed caller had given up.

  She hadn’t.

  “Oh, thank God, Bubbles. You’ve got to come down right away. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve found. This might solve everything!”

  It was Sandy.

  I was out the door in a flash.

  Chapter Five

  It was a disconcerting thing to see images of Santa Claus, apple cheeked and jolly, surrounded by yellow plastic DO NOT CROSS police tape. It was worse to see the tape hanging on the metal storm door of my favorite hangout in the world—my best friend’s warm and homey salon.

  I’d always considered the House of Beauty a safety zone—a place where you could kick off your pinching high-heeled sandals, lean back into warm, soapy water and talk freely among close friends and trusted neighbors. Here you could trade recipes for pot roast in a crock pot one minute and just as easily express your disgust for certain local politicians the next. Most of all you could gossip freely.

  Who was sleeping with whom. Whose kid had disappeared for days. Who was so desperate to remarry that she was hanging on to a boyfriend who treated her poorly. Who was out of cash and running up her credit card with disastrous abandon. Who had killed the cheerleader with Slim-Fast.

  I had dug some of my best dirt at the House of Beauty. Now the House of Beauty was the dirt.

  I parked the Camaro out front, applied a bright sheen of Raspberry Riot lip gloss to my slightly chapped lips and practiced smiling in my rearview. I didn’t want to greet Sandy frowning or, worse, unglossed. There simply is no excuse for being unglossed, no matter what the circumstances.

  The babushkas had gone, taking their aluminum folding chairs with them. Only pieces of popcorn remained behind. The front door was locked, so I went around back. A few days until Christmas and the HOB was empty. I’d taken a gander at today’s appointment book before Debbie keeled over. It had been full up. The salon should have been packed.

  I tried not to think of Mario and the bad perm.

  “Come in,” Sandy called feebly. Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she’d been shouting. Or crying.

  Turned out it was all those, plus smoking. Sandy was lower than I’d ever seen her. Gone was her peach polyester uniform and carefully contained hair. It was all frizz now, as if she’d been pulling it out by the roots. Her dingy yellow sweat suit—I didn’t know Sandy even owned a sweat suit—was stained with coffee and littered with flecks of gray cigarette ashes. It was all very depressing.

  “Sandy!” I plunked down my purse and went to the sink, pouring her a glass of water, which happened to be the only thing I could think of to do.

  She was at her desk, hunched over and staring at something in her hand. “I shouldn’t have called you down here. I don’t kn
ow what I was thinking. Sorry.”

  I handed her the Dixie cup and ordered her to sip. She was shaking so violently she had to grip the cup hard to bring it to her mouth.

  “I was hoping . . .” she started, as if getting out the whole sentence was too, too much work. “I was hoping this would have the answer. Now . . . I don’t know what I’m doing.” Wincing as if in pain, she clutched her stomach and bent over. “Cramps. Damn cramps.”

  This was bad. It meant Sandy was having her period, which meant she wasn’t pregnant. She and Martin had been trying for years to have a baby, unbeknownst to me—until recently.

  I’d always assumed she was happy without kids. I mean, those two were such neat freaks. And cloggers. Cloggers who liked complete quiet when they weren’t clogging. Also, they were into early bedtimes and sleeping late on the weekends. Not exactly little-kid material.

  But then, after the thing with Jane last month, Sandy let it slip that getting pregnant didn’t come as easy to her as it did to me. Or at least as it had eighteen years ago. She and Martin were actually desperate to have a child.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “It’s the stress.” She cringed again. “I was positive this was the month. Guess not. I think this is the worst day of my life. All I want is to go home and lie down, let Martin take care of me.”

  I rubbed her back, feeling bad that I couldn’t do more for her. The muscles were bunched and twisted between her shoulder blades. I’d intended to ask her more about how someone could possibly have gotten into her locked, private bathroom, but decided now was not an ideal moment. “What can I do to help?”

  She held something out to me, the thing she’d been staring at. It was small and metallic, and as soon as I understood what it was, my heart fell. I was no good with these. In fact, one might call me a disaster.

  “It’s a cell phone,” Sandy said.

  “I know.”

  “Debbie’s cell phone.”

  The words hung in the air. My first thought was Take this to the cops, which was not a very good thought for a crime reporter, especially a graduate of the Two Guys Community College School of Journalism, where Mr. Salvo had encouraged us to be resourceful.