A few cars honked. Most sped up. No one stopped.
Somewhere a boom box blared Bing Crosby, in case the scene of an emaciated Santa on parole hocking trees at a used car lot wasn’t depressing enough. I pulled my faux rabbit fur coat tighter and bent my head to the biting wind. I remembered that I hadn’t bought a tree yet. If I were a nice person, I would buy one from Ern.
Or not.
“Mr. Bender?” I said.
A car zipped by, splashing me with December grime. Ern continued ringing, oblivious. He sported the hollow cheeks and sallow complexion of a person who doesn’t take those admonitions to eat five vegetables a day seriously. A fake beard did little to hide the tattoo on his neck. If I had a little kid, I’d no more let him sit on Ern’s lap than let him play blindman’s buff with the Crips.
“Mr. Bender!” I yelled.
You’d think he’d be thrilled to see a customer so entranced by his bell skills that she’d rushed right up to introduce herself. But Ern was far from thrilled.
Ern was drunk. Or, at least, that’s the way he smelled.
He drove his thumb over his shoulder. “Get your tree back there. I don’t sell ’em. I bring ’em in.”
I covered my nose to dilute the whiskey fumes wafting my way. “I don’t want a tree. I need to talk to you, Mr. Bender. About Debbie.”
He didn’t miss a beat with the bell, not a ding or a dong. “I don’t know a Debbie.”
“Yes, you do. Debbie your wife.”
“Ex.”
“Okay, ex.”
“Ho . . . ho . . . ho.” He rang the bell. “Christmas trees. Get your Christmas trees. Cheap.”
Another car swerved and splashed frigid black water onto my leopard-print tights, making my legs officially soaked with black muck. Cripes. The Mahoken Sewage Council was a trip to Disneyworld compared to this. I vowed that if I stuck with Ern for ten more minutes, I could treat myself to a long, hot bubble bath tonight along with a juicy Nancy Martin Blackbird Sisters mystery and a cup of hot chocolate.
Sidestepping another splashing car, I hollered, “Mr. Bender, I believe your wife has been murdered.”
Finally, the ringing stopped. Ern tossed the bell aside so that it landed in the gutter with one last clang, and swaying slightly, he regarded me with rheumy eyes. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Bubbles Yablonsky. I’m a”—I thought twice about introducing myself as a reporter—“I’m a hairdresser down at the House of Beauty. I was there when your former wife had an allergic reaction and died.”
Ern reached into his pocket and pulled out a small dark brown bottle. It looked more like cough syrup than liquor, probably an addiction leftover from his pharmacist days. “They told me it was an accident.”
“Who?”
“Cops.” He took a quick swig, closed his eyes and savored before recapping the bottle. “They didn’t say nothing about a murder.”
“Yes, well.” I wasn’t about to launch into a dissertation on the qualifications of Lehigh’s finest. (It was the Keystone State, after all.) “I have a different opinion. I think she was intentionally, well, poisoned, for lack of a better word.”
He pondered this. “Was it strychnine? Is that what they used?”
“No,” I said, thinking, What the hell was he talking about? “Not strychnine.”
“ ’Cause that’s an awful death. Thirty minutes of muscle convulsions, painful muscle convulsions. Off. On. Off. On. Until the heart gives up. Instant rigor mortis, though, so that’s helpful. If you need to dispose of a body, that is.”
“Right.” I moved a few steps away, extending my escape hatch. “Actually, it was more along the lines of latex. She had a pretty severe allergy, I guess.” I narrowed my eyes. “Were you aware of that?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Claimed she couldn’t clean a house because she’d have to wear rubber gloves. Wouldn’t use a diaphragm, either.” He shook his head sloppily. “I never believed it. Not for a minute.”
“Maybe you should have. She died a few minutes after latex glue was applied to her scalp.”
Ern shrugged. “Yeah? What were her last words?”
I hesitated. What an odd question.
“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember.”What had been her last words, anyway? “I think she said she felt as if something bad was going to happen.”
“No kidding.” He looked off, toward the string of red brake lights on Union. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or surprised or sad. “That might have been a reaction to the latex. You feel as if something bad is about to happen.”
I would remember to write this down.
“Then again, she was probably thinking, Shit, I’ve been murdered. Not like she wasn’t concerned. Debbie was paranoid—that’s for sure.”
All my senses were on edge. “Oh?”
“Though, the way I look at it, it was just a matter of time before someone got to her. Lord knows she deserved it.”
This was it. This was the big exclusive experienced reporters always go on and on about. I took a second to mentally compliment myself for taking the initiative and tracking down Ern. “You don’t mean that,” I said, egging him on.
“Like hell I don’t. If I told you what the real Debbie was about, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me. I’m very gullible. Everyone says so.”
“First of all, get this straight. It was my idea.” He stabbed his thumb into his chest. “I was the one with the information. Debbie stole it from me and took over everything. It wasn’t her scam. It was mine. She got too greedy.”
I repeated the words in my mind so I could write them down later. I didn’t dare bring out my notebook now. No telling how Ern might react seeing me with pen and paper. Not many hairdressers take notes.
“What kind of scam?” I took a step closer.
Ern was very tall with the wiry frame you often see on righteous dudes who prefer to hang out at NASCAR races or on death row. “Why should I tell you?”
I thought fast. “Because what you know might clear an innocent woman. My boss and best friend who owns the House of Beauty is watching her life fall down around her. Everyone thinks she is at fault in Debbie’s death, and I know in my heart she wasn’t. She’s going to be punished unfairly, either with a civil suit that’ll close her salon or worse. Possibly”—I took a breath—“criminal negligence charges.”
“You think that gets to me? That doesn’t get to me. I know all about being innocent in prison. I just spent the last five years being innocent in prison.” He held on to the bottle so precariously I worried he’d toss it like he had the bell and that it would land on some commuter’s windshield. Then there’d be trouble. “And do you know why I went to prison even though I was innocent?”
I stopped myself from answering. This might have been what they call a rhetorical question. I wasn’t really sure what a rhetorical question was. It was like irony, I figured. Indefinable, yet beloved by English teachers everywhere. As part of my self-improvement program, I had set a goal to be able to identify rhetorical questions with ease by the new year. So far, I wasn’t doing so well.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” I asked.
Ern didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know either?
“Debbie. She was the one who put me in prison. Wanted me out of the way so she could run our scam without giving me a cut. The bitch. Though it was good she was stopped. That scam of hers could’ve turned this town upside down.”
We were silent, watching the cars zip by, Ern probably thinking about the unfettered scam, me trying to analyze what made that a rhetorical question. Why did they call it a question if you weren’t supposed to answer it? I couldn’t see the point.
Also, I thought about Debbie. She was certainly shaping up to be a far cry from the self-satisfied, perfect wife and travel agent I’d known for years as my neighbor and client. Yet Ern, being drunk, a criminal and dressed in a slim-fitting Santa suit, wasn’t what one called a “reliable source.” Plus,
he smelled really, really bad.
“I’m confused,” I said. “What, exactly, was this scam? Did it have something to do with her travel agency?”
He jerked his chin to a car across the street. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
He was right. Though it was dusk and traffic was whizzing by, it wasn’t hard to miss the shiny black late model Mercedes. Foreign cars are cars you don’t see much in Lehigh. We don’t like them, nor do we trust them. We don’t have mechanics to service them because buying one is right out of the question. Foreign cars push local people out of jobs. That was why the Mercedes kind of stood out.
Along with the fact that behind the wheel was a hulking man dressed in a Santa suit, a pair of what might have been either binoculars or night-vision goggles held up to his eyes.
“He’s Santa Claus,” I said, under my breath. “Just like you!”
“ ’Tis the season.”
The Santa Claus dropped his binoculars to take a cell phone call. Still, he kept his gaze on Ern.
Or was it me?
“If I were you,” Ern said, sounding surprisingly sober, “I’d get real interested in buying a Christmas tree before that guy gets a bead on your head.” Ern retrieved the bell from the gutter, gave it a shake and returned to his clanging. “Christmas trees. Get your Christmas trees here. Ho . . . ho . . . ho. Cheap.”
My pulse was now racing. I stole another quick peek at the Mercedes. Santa was still on his cell phone, and I observed as I walked away, his gaze was focused one hundred percent on me.
Shit! What was going on? Why would I be followed for asking questions about what a few hours ago had appeared, by all accounts, to have been an accidental death from a latex allergy?
I zigzagged crazily to the lot entrance, where a man in blue overalls sat on a metal folding chair, smoking and tapping his foot to Elvis Presley’s bluesy “Merry Christmas, Baby.”
“I’d like to buy a Christmas tree. Fast.”
“Saw you talking to my mascot over there,” the Christmas tree salesman said, the cigarette dangling from his lips. “What were you up to?”
Panic. He might be in cahoots with the Mercedes. All this talk about Debbie’s paranoia had rubbed off on me. “Oh, nothing.” Crap. My voice was shaking. “Just asking for tree advice. You know, which ones smell good, which ones hold their needles, which ones last the longest.”
“He don’t know squat about trees. What were you really talking about?”
“Honest. Trees. He said I should get that blue spruce.” I pointed to a mangy one—well, they were all pretty mangy—propped up against the fence. “That’s the one he suggested.”
“That’s not a blue spruce. That’s a pine.”
How could he tell with his sunglasses on? And wasn’t a spruce a pine anyway? “I don’t care. That’s the one I want, please. And could you tie it to the top of my car?”
I glanced over my shoulder. The Mercedes was gone. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or more worried.
“That’ll be twenty bucks, plus a buck for rope.”
Rip-off! At the prospect of being swindled, I momentarily forgot my stalker.
“That’s not worth twenty bucks. The bottom branches are brown and it’s almost bare of needles. You should be thanking me for taking it off your hands. That thing’s a fire hazard.” I was not Lulu Yablonsky’s daughter for nothing. Just because some fancy Santa was tracking me in the midst of a murder investigation was no reason to pay retail for a discount Christmas tree.
“Why do you want it then, if it’s so lousy?”
“Because I’m banking on it being cheap—like your sign says.”
“Eighteen.”
“Ten,” I said, “and you throw in the rope for free.”
“Okay. But only because I’m filled with holiday cheer. Ho ho.”
“Yes. That’s obvious.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed him the cash. Elvis had signed off and now Eartha Kitt purred “Santa Baby.” The Christmas tree guy counted my money, cut off a line of rope and said, “While you were haggling over your tree, looks like my star attraction took a powder.”
I checked the sidewalk. Ern had fled, too.
And then my not so cheerful tree salesman grabbed me and shoved me to the ground. Hard. Covering my body with his.
Chapter Seven
The boom that rang out echoed off the pizzeria joint where my Camaro was parked. Even with my savior on top of me, muffling the noise, protecting me from the needles and splintered wood that rained down on us, I could tell that it had been the unmistakable blast of a .22.
That’s what happens when you hang around gun nuts like Genevieve.
We lay there, the two of us, cold pebbles digging into my cheek as we waited breathlessly for a follow-up. I could hardly breathe under his weight. The smells of pine sap and dirt filled my nose and I calculated that between this and the black water that had splashed on me from the gutter, my outfit was ruined.
“Stay down,” he ordered with clear-cut authority.
His massive hand missed my nose by an inch as he hoisted himself off me. My chest ached, I realized, from being squished.
He crouched, unsure, listening. I rolled over and lay on my side, looking up at the trees under the streetlights, large snowflakes seemingly increasing in size the closer they got. I thought, My ass Debbie was killed by an allergic reaction. This is what Jeffrey Andre was talking about when he said he hoped there would be no more, how you say, killings.
“I’ll tell you what it was,” he said with a slight chuckle. “It was that violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby, that’s who.”
I sat up. “What violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby?”
“You know, the people who are trying to ruin Christmas. The ones who won’t let you play ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ in Almart or mention Jesus’s birthday in public schools. Now they’re shooting up Christmas trees. Damn them.”
I studied him carefully. He didn’t seem that convinced of his own theory.
“How’d you know to get me down?”
He answered by pushing up his sleeve and revealing an impressive tattoo on his forearm. It was of a pair of green Army boots and a bulldog against a golden sunset. In bold black letters it said MIKE. “Marine. Served three tours of duty in Iraq. I can sense when a bullet’s coming before the trigger’s even pulled.”
“Impressive.”
“I came home. Mike didn’t.”
I smiled sympathetically. There wasn’t much to say. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t an ordinary Christmas tree salesman—that much I could figure out on my own. He’d acted with rapid reaction and protected me as if I were the president of the United States.
He was a goddamn pro.
Once again I couldn’t help but be confused. “Do you think he’s gone? The shooter, I mean.”
“Probably. That was a twenty-two long-rifle hollow point, sounded like to me, probably shot out of a modified KGB one-shot sniper no bigger than a lipstick you got in your purse.”
A lipstick gun! That could be dangerous. I mean, what if you were late to work, applying your makeup in the rearview and you accidentally reached for the wrong tube?
“You know a lot about guns,” I said. “Guess that comes from being stationed in Iraq, say?”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he rose and brushed himself off.
“How about you lay low until I get this tree on,” he said, wrapping the rope around his fist. “Just in case.”
The way he said it, there was no room for me to argue. I lay there in the dark, thinking as he tied the tree to the top of my car.
Ern Bender had said Debbie deserved to die. He’d said she’d been running a scam that could have turned this town upside down if she hadn’t been murdered and then he disappeared and then some jerk shot at me. A warning shot from a tube of lipstick.
I’d like to see Alison Roach, Columbia University Journalism School graduate, top that.
“T
he powers that be are in the nightly edit meeting. You can’t disturb them,” Veronica said, closing down her computer for the evening as I rushed in, breathless and excited, demanding to meet Notch. “And your mother owes me a new manicure. Look, I broke a nail.” She held out her hand to display the chipped nail.
Welcome to my world, I wanted to tell her. “Lookit, Veronica, I will pay for a new manicure. Heck, I’ll give you a new manicure myself, if you’ll just buzz Notch and tell him that what I have to say can’t wait.”
Veronica did a quick check of my own nails for reference. They were slightly messy from digging into the dirt. “You do those yourself?”
“I nearly strangled my ex-husband/fiancé today and I got pushed to the ground when someone tried to shoot my head off and they still held up.”
“You do French?”
“Pink and natural.”
“Pink will do. With acrylic tips.”
“With tips,” I agreed.
She buzzed Mr. Notch, and one minute later, I was in his office facing him at his large mahogany desk, Mr. Salvo sitting off to the side looking particularly weary, various other editors also gathered for the five p.m. edit meeting, including JoBeth Marquard, the lifestyle editor.
I had developed an instinctive aversion to this room, to its institutional green walls, the American flag drooping in the corner, the lone rubber plant and stacks and stacks of newspapers. However, I still liked the red leather couch. Stiletto and I had fooled around on it once. It brought back fond memories.
“This better be worth it,” Notch said, eyeing my dirty leggings with repulsion. “I have a six thirty dinner date at the Union Club with the mayor and I’m not in the mood to be toyed with.”
I swallowed. Notch’s Xanax prescription must have worn off because he was no longer in his new age, touchy-feely mood.
“Debbie Shatsky did not die by accident today. It was murder. I have proof.”
Notch tossed his pencil. “Here we go. Let me guess, you heard it from the girls at the salon.”
“Better. I interviewed two key sources. Then, during one of the interviews just now, I was shot at, possibly by a representative of the violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby.”
Bubbles All The Way Page 6
