Scot Free

by Catriona McPherson

  To my surprise, the voiceless presence who answered my ring buzzed me in and when I arrived at the top of the drive the door was open.

  I had never seen the inside of the Bombaro residence since, the last thirty-six hours aside, I usually try for a bit of professional distance. And even the gates and landscaping hadn’t prepared me. On the one hand, the depiction of actual fireworks was restricted to an oil painting above the sitting room fireplace, the embroidery on a few cushions here and there, and, well yes, the fountain in the stairwell. On the other hand, the overall approach to décor made fireworks look a bit drab in comparison. It was as if the decorator Saddam Hussein had fired for vulgarity had come straight here and doubled down.

  More things in the house were gold than I would ever have dreamed came in gold. Door handles, window latches, and light switches I was ready for, but there was a gold fireplace, a gold remote control on a gold-and-glass coffee table, and, when I followed the coffee aroma into the kitchen, I saw a gold dishwasher. That’s only four things, but as well as the gold there were a lot of mirrors, so it seemed like more.

  My hair looked fantastic, I noticed, as I walked along a mirrored hallway between the public rooms and the service area. My fringe was shorter than I’d had it before, a kick off a Lisbet, but because Todd had plucked my eyebrows too, I looked pretty sharp.

  Mizz Vi was sitting at a round table in a round bay that bulged out of the kitchen and overlooked the back garden, with its rose terrace, koi pond, and the inevitable, enormous, bright-blue swimming pool. She looked even smaller than she had in the courtroom the day before and her eyes were red-rimmed and baggy-looking.

  “Oh, you little love!” I said and surged forward with a hug. Professional distance has its places and this wasn’t one of them. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “I drifted,” said Visalia. “I kept dreaming and waking up again.”

  “You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?”

  “Go to the doctor, get some pills,” she said, nodding. I had advised it even for the stress of divorce. I’m a great believer in the wonders of modern medicine and I never understand why the same people who get their flu shots like lambs every autumn and take an aspirin for a headache won’t take the edge off misery with a little tab of magic that’s been tested and retested and works every time. And then they do it with daiquiris anyway.

  “Have the police spoken to you again?” I asked her. She shook her head and I could tell from the way she moved that it was pounding. “They came to me,” I said.

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “Well, Vi, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know what to tell them. You could have fanned me flat with a flapjack when I looked at Serpentina’s business card and saw her married name.”

  “I never thought I’d be happy Cousin Clovis was dead,” said Vi, in a tiny voice, “but I’m glad he didn’t live to see his own niece marry his bitterest rival.” She heaved a mammoth sigh and lay back against the cushions of her seat with her eyes closed. “So what did you tell the police?” she murmured faintly.

  “Well, I told them about what Clovis suspected about the Dolshikovs,” I said. I thought she would be angry, but if anything her face smoothed out a bit. “And told them about Serpentina marrying into the Capulets and bringing a contingent of them here to your house.” She looked positively serene now. “And I told them about Bar—the other woman.” She was smiling. “But I didn’t tell them about the Poggios.”

  “You didn’t?” she said, snapping to attention. “Why not?”

  “It seemed kind of … How can I put this? Beyond nutso. I will, next time I see them, if you want me to.”

  “Of course I want you to. The Poggio family have murdered my darling Cousin Clovis, Lexy. And not only do the police not know that, they’re actually trying to build a case against me. Me! A little old lady who loved him more than her own life.”

  “Not just you,” I said. “They think I’m involved too. So, listen. Here’s one thing we can do to get them off of us both. Have you got any evidence that Clovis knew about the Fourth of July appointment? Did he set it up?”

  “No,” she said. “That was me. Why not just tell them it was the Poggios?”

  “Well, is it written on your kitchen calendar or did you forward the email to him?” I said, ignoring her.

  “You youngsters,” said Mizz Visalia. “We’ve never emailed each other in our lives. We lived in the same house. We slept in the same bed.”

  I knew this to be true, odd as it seems. Even at their worst moments, Clovis and Vi Bombaro shared a bedroom. Sometimes they rowed all night and came to therapy exhausted and still furious, but they had never moved to separate rooms. Of course, now that I’d seen their house, I reckoned the bedroom was probably big enough to hold a dance in and the bed itself might have space for two separate fiefdoms with a pillow border in between.

  “Or have you got ticket receipts or anything pertaining to your upcoming emigra— What?”

  She had shushed me. “Sparky doesn’t know,” she breathed. “She doesn’t know we were planning to leave.”

  “What’s the problem with Sparky knowing?” I breathed back. When she didn’t answer, I went on, “But do you? Because as of now, the cops think you masterminded the whole thing and set me up as your alibi.”

  “Why would I make such a mess of removing the timer if I had set up an alibi?” she said. “That’s what they’re saying, aren’t they? That there was a timer and then there wasn’t?”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said. “How do they know?”

  “You think they tell me?” She had never sounded more like Clovis.

  “Can’t you guess, though?” I said. “How much do you know about the technicalities of setting fireworks?”

  Mizz Visalia shrugged. “I never took an interest in that side of the business,” she said. “Helped out a little in the early days, mostly book-keeping, then I did the galas and luncheons once things looked up. If I had tried to … do that, we’d both have blown to smithereens.”

  “Well, but cast your mind back to those early days,” I said. “What would the signs of a timer be?”

  “Wire,” said a voice, making us both jump. Serpentina Dolshikov—was there ever a name that sounded more villainous?—was standing in the archway that led to some kind of dining room. I knew it wasn’t the dining room, because I had walked through that, and clearly Vi and I were sitting in the breakfast nook, but since posh Americans need three different places to watch telly—a living room and a family room and a den—no doubt they needed three different places to never use while they ate out every night.

  “It’s not that complicated,” Serpentina said. She was dressed for a practice round of golf. It was a look I knew well from Branston and Brandeee: visor, cargo shorts, polo shirt. This particular polo shirt had a logo that looked like a whale’s spout (I was learning that fireworks were hard to depict in wrought-iron, floral bedding, or—as here—silver thread) and the wordoid BOOMSHIK-A! printed underneath in metallic lettering.

  “Boomshik-a?” I said, nodding at her bosom.

  “Unity,” said Serpentina. “I united the two families and I’m working on the businesses. Bombaro Pyrotechnics plus Dolshikov Pyrotasia equals Boomshik-a!”

  I turned to Mizz Vi. I wish I had Mike the cop’s eyebrows. Even one of them.

  “Sparky isn’t that … street,” said Vi. Like she was.

  “So,” I said. “You were saying … wire?”

  “An electric match with a remote switch would be the safest way,” Sparky said. “A timer, an actual timer, is not something any responsible pyrotechnician would ever recommend.”

  “Neither is … ” I said, then cleared my throat and stopped.

  “Using an old man’s butt crack as a launch stand,” said Mizz Vi. It was her old man and so her call, I supposed.

 
“The cops probably said ‘timer,’” Serpentina went on, “because they think in terms of bombs. But if all they’re going on is something removed—a cut wire—there’s nothing to say what it was. Wouldn’t you think it was a remote switch, Auntie?”

  “Talk me through it,” I said. “The electric-match-plus-remote option and the timer.”

  “Timer first,” said Mizz Vi. “Sparky, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the cops don’t know what they’re looking at. And a timer is much more … I mean, I would think a timer is something that every penny-ante crook in the world would know something about. An electric match and a remote switch is going to have the cops looking … close to home.”

  “Everyone with a laptop knows everything these days, Auntie,” said Sparky. She turned to me. “The electric match is a given, either way. Straight up and down little pack of pyrogen and a bridge wire. You could plug it into a wall socket on a timer—very dangerous, as I said—or you could plug it into a wall socket with a remote switch. Then you could walk the site and make sure no kids or dogs or gophers were around.” She had completely forgotten what we were talking about. She was giving her bog-standard firework-safety speech. “Afterwards, if no one came back,” she said, “you’d be left with a burnt-out wire still attached to the plug in the outlet. So if someone wanted to make it look as if … ” she stopped. “That’s stupid,” she said.

  I was trying not to think about it too much but even just peeking through my mental fingers with my mental eyes half shut, I got it.

  “The firework wouldn’t still be attached to the wire,” I said. “It would get ruptured”—Bad choice of words; we all winced—“it would get detached when the firework went off?”

  “Whichever way the fuse was joined to the wire, it would get blown apart,” Sparky said.

  “So whoever it was who went back would just remove the whole device. Unplug it and take it away.”

  “If they had any sense, yeah,” said Sparky. She was standing with her hands on her hips, looking at both of us as if we’d forgotten we were doing the snacks at the PTA. Before Vi or me caved and apologised for affronting her, we heard what sounded like troops advancing. Actually it was only the three Dolshikov men, all wearing work boots, marching in lockstep along the tiled hall.

  “Jan thought we’d go into the factory, Auntie,” Sparky said.

  “See if anything needs attention,” Jan added. “What’s the manager’s name? Department supervisors? Passkey codes?”

  “Just to take it off your hands-plate-mind!” said one of the cousins. Jan scowled at him and I found myself wondering if he had been given instructions, then fluffed his lines. And that made me think about the stupidity of the clean-up guy and if he’d failed to follow clear instructions too.

  I liked these cousins. In the cop sense. I liked the way their necks were wider than their heads and the way they had gone with buzz cuts to look butch even though their necks were wider than their heads. I liked the way the one breathed through his mouth and the other cracked his knuckles and the way they refused coffee and went to the fridge for soft drinks. These were not men of urbanity. These were exactly the meathead sort to remove half the evidence and turn it into a bigger clue.

  “Alex,” said Sparky. “Peter.” I didn’t feel so bad about considering ‘Boris’ and ‘Ivan’ now. “Are you coming with Jan and me?”

  “We’ve been in touch with milk memo,” said Peter. He had a light, clear voice with just a trace of Boston about it so I was sure I hadn’t misheard the words. As to what the Hecate’s hat he was on about … I kept listening. “We need to lodge our Clarence ducks but then we thought we’d go visit. They’re having great results with their teemoprawg.” At the end he totally lost me.

  “With their what was that?” I said.

  “Teen mom prog,” said Peter. “Program to retain teenaged mothers until graduation?”

  “Clearance docs!” I said. I aimed my brain at ‘milk memo’ but got nowhere.

  “Alex and Peter are co-founders of a nonprofit for troubled kids,” Sparky said. “Harvey Milk Memorial High School right here in Cuento is ground-breaking in the area of retention and accelerated graduation, you know.”

  I didn’t know. I was the kind of person who would look at a short haircut and decide a guy probably wasn’t allowed near the business end of a firework factory when in fact he was a renowned philanthropist. I knew nothing.

  Anyway, Mizz Vi had another candidate for the moron who cut the wire. Once the Dolshikov contingent had scattered, she took up the topic again. I didn’t know that to begin with, mind you.

  “The Poggios have been living on the same hillside since God made dirt,” she said.

  “Uh huh,” I said. “And so … Can you nudge me into a category, Vi? They stay there because … house prices, homesickness?”

  “Small gene pool,” she supplied, for all the world like she hadn’t married her cousin. “The Poggios are not the brightest stars in heaven. Although, now you mention it, they do hang on to their property and ride out boom and bust just the same. All the same, they’re dumb enough to be wire cutters.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll be sure and mention that to the detective when I see her. And I’ll be sure and see her soon. And while I’m at it … Now, don’t get upset. Promise me?”

  “Why would I get upset?” she said, fishing a balled-up Kleenex from inside her cardigan sleeve and touching it to her eyes. It was a stagey gesture but her eyelids were crushed and fuchsia-pink and the Kleenex had been well-used for something.

  I reached out and stroked her shoulder gently. “What’s Barbara’s second name?” I said. “I’m going to track her down and grill her.”

  Mizz Vi made a fist and brought it down with a thump on the tabletop so hard that Alex’s drained Coke can wobbled and fell off to roll across the kitchen floor sprinkling little droplets of Coke like a string of beads.

  “You can mop that up,” Vi said. I hopped to my feet, pulled a skein of kitchen roll off the dispenser and then skated around on it with one bare foot until it stopped sticking.

  “It’s almost as though you’re protecting her,” I said. “You won, Vi. He chose you. He gave her up and came back to you … briefly. You really should try to let this anger go.”

  “I’m not protecting her!” Mizz Visalia said. “I’m not even angry with her. I’m angry with him. I’m going to have him cremated and scatter his ashes at … at … Where should I scatter his ashes, Lexy?”

  “To bug him, you mean? After you’ve gone to his funeral in a red dress?”

  “Pants!” she said. “Red leather pants. And I’ll scatter his ashes at Ikea. There’s nowhere on Earth he hated more.”

  “It’s healthy for you not to bottle things up,” I said, “but as your therapist and your friend, I want to encourage you not to make any decisions you might come to regret.”

  “Oh, phooey!” said Visalia. “I don’t mean it. His funeral is going to be spectacular and my dressmaker is coming to fit me for weeds after lunch today. Unless it’s an orange jumpsuit I’m in for.”

  “Tell me her name and let me track her down,” I said again, insistently. Therapy is half listening and half nagging, when you get right down to it.

  “Her name is Barbara Skanky-Ho. And I can give you the address of the Duplex of Shame. She was on my Christmas card list for five years before I knew he was … Oh! If he wasn’t dead already, I’d kill him.”

  She had risen while she spoke and now was rootling through a junk drawer at the far end of the run of kitchen units. I was glad somehow to see that even in this Taj Mahal to the optional nature of taste (with its gold dishwasher) there was still a junk drawer in the kitchen. Mizz Vi dumped out phone chargers, cigarette lighters, empty blister packs from batteries, cable ties, playing cards, and three different shapes of novelty pickle forks before she found what she was looking for. An address b
ook of great vintage with envelopes tucked inside the front cover and a pocket for stamps. The second page of the Ts had been gouged through with the point of a pen. She snorted at it and sent it up the table towards me like a curling stone.

  With a bit of patience and some Sellotape I managed to repair the tattered shreds and decipher that Barbara’s last name was actually Truman and that the Duplex of Shame was on one of the flower streets right there in Cuento. I asked Vi if she wanted to come with me, ducked the look that came in return, and then left. Her hairdresser was coming at ten, she assured me and she would be fine with the TV until then.

  Again the thought passed over me that Sparky and the Dolshikovs were absolutely bloody useless at succour; no way they should be visiting high schools and factories today. Then I was putting 357 Gerbera Drive in my GPS and I was on my way.

  Nine

  A duplex, it turned out, isn’t some kind of futuristic living pod with nutrients piped in and wastes piped out. It’s a semi-detached house. Well, it’s a California semi-detached house; that is, a garage with living quarters included. The joined-on house next door, 355 Gerbera Drive, had green grass, geraniums in ceramic pots, red-white-and-blue bunting along the porch, and a little covered wagon at the entrance to the drive with surplus courgettes and tomatoes FREE!

  357 Gerbera Drive, where Barbara S H Truman was (I hoped) to be found, had brown grass, Tibetan prayer flags along the porch, dried twigs in plastic pots, and nothing at the entrance to the drive except two yellowed newspapers, still rolled up inside their elastic bands, one of which had been driven over.

  I picked them up as I walked towards the door, but two days in the sunshine had made them more like pastries than reading matter and after some bits flaked off and fell to the ground, I lobbed them into the heart of a rosemary bush and wiped the dust off my hands.

  She answered my knock after about the length of time it would take to put down a whisky bottle, pull your bathrobe shut, and shuffle to the door. She still had the glass in her hand, and when she saw it was a woman she let her bathrobe drop open again. Underneath she was wearing a halter-necked playsuit in a print of orange-and-black hibiscus.