Scot Free

by Catriona McPherson

  “So … why were you driving to our therapy session separately?” I said, but Madding isn’t a big town, so Mike was slowing and turning already.

  California. The missions were painted the colour of clotted cream with gingerbread pan tiles and verdigris window frames. It’s very pretty and, having found a look that worked, California—like Her Majesty and Anna Wintour—stuck with it. High schools, nail bars, Whole Foods, dog pounds … there’s nothing that doesn’t look better Mission-style. Including, as we now saw, morgues. Mike pulled up at what would be valet-parking for check-in if this were really the resort hotel it looked like, and I hopped out and ran round to haul Mizz Vi to her feet.

  The hairdryer was set at blowtorch now, at nearly lunchtime. We stepped inside to the air-conditioning and stood waiting under the safe disposal of sharps poster for Mike to park and join us.

  “I want to thank you, Lexy,” Visalia said.

  “No need,” I assured her.

  “First you saved my marriage and now you’re saving me from going through this alone. I can’t tell you how much that means. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Shoosh,” I said. “That’s what I’m … the saving the marriage bit is what you paid me to … and this is … don’t mention it.”

  “I’ve never been more truly grateful for anything in my life.”

  “Stop.”

  See, the thing American people forget with their rampant sincerity and their open expressions of heartfelt gratitude is that whoever you’re thanking has to think up something to say back. In Dundee, if you were waiting at the mortuary with a pal to ID her husband’s body, she’d have said:

  “You sure you’ve got time to hang about? You can go, if you like.”

  And then I could have said:

  “Nah, you’re all right.”

  Which does the same job and nobody’s squirming.

  Six

  The foyer of the Beteo County coroner might have been trying for Holiday Inn Express, but the morgue itself—in the basement, since heat rises and cold sinks—was the real, green lino, crackling strip-light, whiff of formaldehyde deal. A short, taciturn man in grey scrubs and squeaking wellington bootees led us along a corridor into colder and colder air and then ushered us into an operating theatre. Of sorts. The more I looked around, the more of sorts it got. The floor drain didn’t help. The rotary saw sitting on the side didn’t spark thoughts of bunnies making daisy-chains either. But worst of all was that some of the equipment was draped in sheets. My mind boggled. What were they covering if they let us see the saw?

  In the middle of the floor sat a gurney with a sheet-covered object we all knew wasn’t a power tool. The topography of his toes, knees, belly, and nose was unmistakable. Here was Clovis “Boom!” Bombaro. Visalia let out a soft whimper and I put my hand under her elbow.

  “Mike?” I said. “I’ve met Mr. Bombaro fourteen times. I could ID him, couldn’t I?”

  “We’d rather have Mrs. Bombaro’s word on it,” Mike said.

  I frowned at her. He was clearly in one piece despite the cause of death. It wasn’t as though she’d need to navigate by birthmarks. I didn’t understand why she had to be put through it and I said as much, with my face. Mike returned a flat stare, her mouth a line.

  Then I got it. If Mizz Vi was under suspicion, her reaction to Clovis’s body was evidence. And once I’d thought of that, I kind of wanted to see it too. Her reaction. Looking at the body was the price I had to pay.

  The little orderly in the grey scrubs didn’t get any friendlier, but there was a comfort in his deftness. He had done this a thousand times and nothing had ever gone wrong, his spare movements seemed to say. The body was his business and he could handle it. We had one tiny part to play and he wouldn’t let us fluff it and cause him any trouble.

  As we walked forward, Visalia’s steps getting shorter and shorter, the orderly folded the sheet back in a crisp V-shape so that only the face of the corpse could be seen, inside a sort of reverse wimple.

  I glanced at it and had to smother a giggle. Horrified, I felt another one bubble up behind it and smothered that too. I wish I could say it was shock. But really, it was because Clovis looked so … surprised. So very, very, very surprised. His eyebrows were arched, his brow furrowed, his eyes wide open, and his mouth a perfect O.

  “Can’t you—” Visalia said and reached out a hand. Mike cleared her throat. “Can’t you close his eyes at least?” she asked, although she drew her hand back again.

  “The next time you see him, he’ll be more peaceful,” Mike said. “For now, can you confirm that this is Clovis Bombaro?”

  “Oh!” said Visalia. The coffee had worn off; the yelp and the tremor were back in her voice. “Yes, of course. Yes, that’s Cousin Clovis. We met when we were twelve. At a family picnic at the Creek House. Such a pretty day.”

  It seemed like a bit of a tangent and I had no reply, but Mike stepped in with a good old “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I want to go home,” said Visalia. “Lexy, will you take me?” She turned to me with a searching look. She had always been a big eye-contact kind of client. And she had great eyes to work with. The brows were drawn on in dramatic slashes with an eyebrow pencil that must once have matched her hair but now bore no relation. Her lashes were short and stubby and she gunked them up with thick blue-black mascara. The eyelids were hooded, with prominent blue veins. Somewhere between Bette Davis and Garfield. Right now, they swivelled back to take another look at Clovis.

  “Can I go home?” she said. “Is it covered up with yellow ribbons?”

  “Crime scene tape?” said Mike. “No, they’re through. You … You don’t want to go in the garage until the cleaners have come. You got the card for the cleaners, right? But sure, go home. Rest up. I’ll speak to you later.”

  But when we got in the cab, Visalia gave the driver not the address of Casa Bombaro, but the name of a bar in what passed for Cuento’s financial district. That is, three real estate agents and a CPA.

  “We need to send him on his way,” she said, sinking back into the taxi’s split vinyl seating. “With a daiquiri.”

  Mizz Visalia Bombaro clearly marked more things than the death of a spouse with daiquiris. As soon as we pushed open the door and stepped into the cool dark, the barman was reaching for his shaker.

  “Watermelon times two, Chico,” she called to him. “What are you having, Lexy? I recommend the watermelon daiquiri, but Chico can make anything you’ve ever heard of and a few you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “Can you call people ‘Chico’?” I said.

  “That’s his name,” said Mizz Visalia. She shrugged off her little pale pink cardigan and dropped into an armchair. “Two each and keep ’em coming.”

  The cocktails arrived quicker than seemed possible and the first sip turned into a glug that left me tingling from lips to hips to fingertips.

  “I didn’t do it,” Visalia said.

  “Of course not.”

  “They think I did it. I don’t want to go to jail, Lexy. Last night was enough.”

  I didn’t want to remind her that jail wasn’t the only possible outcome. This was America and one of the biggest chasms between the old country and the wild west was staring Visalia in the face. Bigger than the missing walls, bigger than the paper plates, bigger than Christmas being flavoured with peppermint, even. She could fry.

  “So, who do you think did do it?” I said.

  Visalia shivered. It might only have been the crushed ice in the daiquiri, but she rubbed her gnarly old hands, bristling with diamonds, up and down her scrawny liver-spotted arms. She was California through and through: no truck with the idea that an old broad’s arms should be covered.

  “Barbara?” I said. Visalia hissed while drinking and made herself snort. She coughed her airways clear and glared at me. “I mean, if he dumped h
er, she must be angry.”

  “Are you kidding me? I bet she heaved a sigh of relief that changed the tides in Hawaii.”

  “What about the what were they called … the Dolshikovs?”

  “Oh that man and his goddamn conspiracy theories!” said Visalia. “If I’ve told him once!”

  The Dolshikovs were well-known to me after fourteen sessions. They lived in New Jersey and they manufactured fireworks there. They had field offices and outlets all the way to Colorado. Bombaro Pyrotechnics (Nothing goes Boom like Bombaro!) had the West Coast in hand. Then Dolshikov’s Pyrotasia opened a Dallas branch and Clovis Bombaro doubled his order of Pepto-Bismol.

  “Dey own da whole a da Eas Coas,” was how Clovis explained it to me. His birth in the Sisters of Mercy hospital in Bakersfield and the certificate that declared him one hundred percent red, white, and blue went right out the window when he talked about the firework business. It was bye-bye Bakersfield and ciao Sicilia. “I own da whole a da Wes Coas. Texas is da Wes.”

  “Well,” I had said once, “Texas is east of Colora—”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Visalia had said.

  “You gonna go downa Texas and tellem dey not in da Wes?” Clovis demanded.

  “Better take backup,” said Vi.

  I stared at her now over the rim of my daiquiri, mildly astonished by how far I had to tip the glass to take a sip. I had really chugged this. Chico put another one in front of each of us and melted away.

  “Clovis and his Dolshikov obsession!” Visalia said. “You only had it an hour a week, Lexy. I had it all day every day.”

  “But the thing about a conspiracy theory,” I said, “is that being murdered kind of adds a bit of weight, wouldn’t you say?”

  She stretched her neck hard one way and then the other. I thought she was trying to get out the kinks of a night with a jailhouse pillow, but then she scooted forward on her chair and gestured to me to do the same.

  “I know who did it,” she said, once our faces were inches apart. “I just don’t know how they found out so fast.”

  “How who found out what?” I said. “Wait. I mean, how who found out what. Oh, I was right the first time.” I blinked. What exactly was in a daiquiri anyway?

  “This has got Poggio written all over it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The Poggios killed Cousin Clovis,” said Mizz Vi. “They heard we were coming back to Sicily and they sent a message.”

  “That,” I said, after taking a moment to look as if I was considering it, “sounds quite a bit more mad than the Dolshikov theory.”

  Mizz Visalia sipped her drink a while then sighed and set it down.

  “I should be flattered,” she said. “I remember when that would be the first thing anyone thought about any Sicilian American dying suddenly. The first and last thing the cops thought. I should be happy it’s changed.”

  “It’s just … When did your parents come to California? And Clovis’s parents?”

  “Our mothers came together when they were six and seven. They were sisters. You know that.”

  Of course I did. But I didn’t dwell on it because, to use the formal language of my clinical psychological training, it was icky.

  “That was 1912,” she went on. “The blink of an eye. And my grandfather didn’t give up his interest in the farm when he left. Cousin Clovis still owns—owned—a sixteenth share. Say what you like about America, but we managed to buy out all of our cousins here until we owned the Creek House outright. No such luck in Sicily.”

  “I dunno,” I said, draining my glass. Again. “It’s just … the way he died. I don’t want to upset you but, the way he died, it seems more likely that someone who knew something about the firework business would have done it.”

  “Lexy, how much do you think you need to know about the firework business to … to … ?” We stared at one another for a while trying to think up how to refer to his cause of death with even a pinch of dignity. Unfortunately, running through the options made me remember the look on his face—the O!—and I could feel my cheeks begin to twitch again.

  “To … ” I said. I could think of nothing even vaguely useful. Phrases like park a stick and sun don’t shine weren’t going to help.

  “To … ” said Visalia, “place a lit firework too close for comfort.”

  I knew I clenched my buttocks and I thought I saw her tilt a little as she worked her own.

  “Only it wasn’t lit,” I said.

  “Well, introduce it, light it, and run then.”

  “No,” I said. “The cops think it had a timer on it. Didn’t they say that to you?”

  “They think?” said Vi. Then she added, “A timer?”

  “They think someone removed it afterwards,” I said. “That’s why … I can’t believe they didn’t tell you this! That’s why you’re out. Because you had three firefighters to vouch for you when Mr. Bombaro went b—Um, at the time of death, I mean. And you had an alibi from then on in.” She was staring at me as if her two double daiquiris had been little cups of Earl Grey tea. She was steady and clear-eyed, and behind her gaze I could see a thousand little sparks firing, a tiny firework show going on right there in her head.

  “A timer?” she said again. “And then someone removed it?”

  “So,” I repeated, thinking she might look steady but she was eighty-six, she’d spent the night in jail, and I could attest to the daiquiris. “So it seems much more likely to me that someone who knows something about pyrotechnics is involved.”

  “Like who?” she said. “Did the cops tell you that?”

  “No,” I said. “But it’s got to be either someone from Bombaro’s, someone from Dolshikov’s, or someone close enough to Clovis to have picked up the basics. During pillow talk, for instance.”

  Her eyes opened so wide that I could see the whites (the pinks, actually) all around the warm brown irises. The usually warm brown irises. Right now, they were as cold and black as two lumps of coal that had fallen off the lorry and rolled into a puddle of slush at the side of the road. I blinked. Puddle of slush was right. Her face had gone grey.

  “Pillow talk?” she said. “You think it was me?”

  “Barbara,” I told her. Now her lips were blue. “Are you okay?”

  “I think it’s just hit me,” she said, hoarsely. “I need to go home.” She rallied a little and called over to the bar. “Put it on my tab, Chico, and call a cab for me.”

  I helped her out and into the back of a taxi. I had never wished so hard for a proper black London taxicab. They’re so roomy. As I stuffed Mizz Vi into the back of the low-slung Chevy that had turned up to take her home, I didn’t see how she would ever clamber out again. So I got in after her and went along for the ride.

  ∞

  Casa Bombaro was in The Oaks—Cuento’s ritziest neighbourhood, comprising six blocks of stucco wonders and other assorted McMansions, right at the edge of town, just before the start of the dusty tomato fields.

  Clovis’s garden gates were visible as soon as we turned onto the block. They had obviously been commissioned by Clovis himself; perhaps even designed by him, judging by the fountains of enamelled iron on them. They looked like whale-spouts, maybe badly uncorked Champagne depending on how the light caught them, but I guessed that they were fireworks.

  “Pull forward,” said Mizz Vi weakly. “Lexy, key in the code.” She leaned towards me and whispered it into my ear, earning a look of disgust from the taxi driver.

  “I know key codes for bigger estates than this,” he muttered and he turned his wheels away from the box so that I had to take off my seatbelt and hang out of the window to enter the PIN.

  Inside the gates, against a background of pillowy green lawns and perfectly kept paths was a display of every plant that either already looked or could be trained to look like a firework. Th
ere were palm trees, yuccas, and agaves, naturally, and—less naturally in every sense—roses pruned to the shape of fright wigs and bougainvilleas cascading from pots held up by wires so they looked as though they hung in mid-air. And, of course, the fountains. Coloured water fired up and out from an elaborate system of jets and spouts and foamed and fizzed down from an even more elaborate system of chutes and funnels.

  “He called it his Garden of Eden,” said Mizz Vi.

  “If God puked Eden,” I said.

  The taxi driver snorted and Mizz Vi nodded her head, unable to disagree.

  The house, hidden from the gate by an unnecessary curve in the short drive, was another terra cotta, cream, and verdigris extravaganza. Bigger than the morgue, bigger than any of the missions I had visited so far, and with cathedral windows and a quadruple garage, it didn’t look like the sort of place a tired and lonely old lady could be abandoned. The tatters of crime scene tape still clinging to either side of the roll-up garage doors didn’t help.

  “Are you going to be—” I got out, but then the door opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out. She didn’t look like a housekeeper. She was wearing a dress. She looked slightly firework-related, actually, from the way her hair was gathered in a ponytail right on top of her head, exploding in all directions. Under it, her face was blank.

  “My niece is here!” Mizz Vi said. Then, “I didn’t think she’d be able to get a flight this soon. I only called this morning!”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  But Visalia didn’t seem so much soothed or comforted by the sudden appearance of a loved one as she seemed …

  “You seem … ” I said.

  “That’s my niece, Sparky,” said Vi. “She was very close to Cousin Clovis, Lexy. You should probably try not to mind what she says.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “Sparky?”

  As I got out and walked around to help Visalia, the woman came plodding down the steps. Plodding was the only word. I stretched out a hand to greet her.