Undertaking Irene

by Pamela Burford

  The funniest thing, Irene. A priest beat me to the brooch, can you believe it? Is that just too weird or what? In my imagination Irene laughed and laughed. We laughed together, the two of us. Then she insisted on paying me the three hundred bucks anyway because I’d tried and isn’t that what really mattered?

  I didn’t bother jumping in my car to chase down the sticky-fingered priest. What would be the point? In the laughably unlikely event my geriatric Civic caught up with his Harley, I would do what precisely? Sideswipe him? Run him off the road? Club him with a tire iron and ransack his pockets for a hunk of tin worth less than a Caramel Frappuccino?

  Okay and yes, I’d managed to deduce that the cute priest was as faux as my pearls. In lieu of a fruitless car chase, I’d hobbled back into Ahearn’s on my banged-up knee and quizzed Colette’s family about the guy. They’d never seen him before, and once Patrick had recovered from the shock of the bizarre theft, he informed me he had no interest in reporting it to the authorities. The brooch had no monetary value. He hadn’t a clue why his mother had wanted to spend eternity with the gaudy thing, much less why some “crackpot” had gone to the bother of snatching it—unless the thief was under the misguided impression it was worth something. Patrick had no intention of putting his family through a tangle of police red tape at a time like that.

  I’d tried to change his mind. I wasn’t thrilled either about the idea of getting the cops involved, but face it, they were the ones with the resources. How was I supposed to track down the pilfering padre and get a second chance to swipe the brooch myself without the assistance of Crystal Harbor’s finest?

  And yeah, I know how that sounds and I don’t care.

  I resisted the temptation to drive at a snail’s pace and delay the inevitable confrontation. All it would take was a meandering half-hour motor tour past Crystal Harbor’s swankier gated communities in my eleven-year-old beater and I’d be the one answering to the police—though if I had to choose between them and Irene in her current belligerent mood, I might be tempted to take a swing at a cop just to spend the night in the relative safety of a holding cell.

  I turned onto the curving, tree-lined drive leading to Irene’s brick-and-stone mini-mansion, set well away from its nearest neighbors on five exquisitely landscaped acres. The covered portico was flanked by white double columns. Elegant Palladian windows adorned the three peaked roofs. Every window in the place glowed, top to bottom, and not because she was expecting company. Irene liked to make her house look like a spread in Architectural Digest. She thought a low carbon footprint was something you made your housekeeper scrub off your $150-per-square-foot macassar ebony floors.

  While we’re on the subject of housekeepers, it was Maria’s day off, so she wasn’t there to answer the doorbell, a chore Irene herself would perform only after an exhaustive hair and makeup inspection. Since the April rain had turned into a serious downpour, I braked in the circular cobblestone courtyard and hauled out the keys Irene had given me two decades earlier when she’d hired me as an after-school dog-sitter.

  She prided herself on being able to size up people at first glance, and she must have seen something honest and dependable in my sixteen-year-old self. A few months later when her beloved toy poodle Dr. Strangelove sprinted out of the house and under the wheels of her gardener’s truck—no, not while I was watching him!—she began paying me to deliver a weekly bouquet to Best Friend Pet Cemetery. Irene was too busy to do it herself, and anyway, wasn’t it the thought that counted?

  I still dog-sat a couple of times a week, and I still drove to the pet cemetery every Sunday, only now I brought three bouquets, the other two being for Annie Hall, a sweet-tempered white poodle who’d died of natural causes at fourteen, and Jaws, a plump gray poodle who’d succumbed to a tough wad of prime rib three years ago. And before you ask whether Irene ever paid me to deliver flowers to her husband Arthur’s grave, the answer is no. He’d been cremated. So there. Irene is the reason I do what I do. She helped me build my business through referrals, and I’m indebted to her.

  I didn’t call out to announce my presence. Irene considered raised voices inside the house to be vulgar—unless the raised voice emanated from Irene herself, but of course in those cases there was always a perfectly legitimate reason. I was kind of surprised she hadn’t met me at the door, considering how determined she was to get her hands on that stupid brooch. I was just as happy to put off the confrontation for another few minutes while I collected myself.

  I deposited my shoulder bag on the console table in the foyer, kicked off my shoes, and bent to examine my throbbing knee. It was beginning to swell and discolor, not to mention the layer of skin I’d left in Ahearn’s parking lot. I heard the scrabble of nails on ebony as Sexy Beast—SB for short—came running from the direction of the kitchen.

  The shaggy apricot poodle barked up a storm, his tiny body charging straight toward me. It wasn’t his usual welcome. SB is the most submissive dog I’ve ever known. His usual routine is to grovel and scrape his way toward me, head bowed, tail firmly tucked under, his little legs splayed so far he barely has purchase on the slick floor. You’d think he’s beaten on a daily basis instead of being coddled like a canine pasha.

  “There’s my good boy, come to Jane for scritches.” I bent to bestow the customary scratches behind his ears and love pats along his little body, but to my surprise, he did a one-eighty and dashed back toward the kitchen.

  “You’ll get your treat after I pull myself together.” I had more urgent business at the moment. I pushed strands of sodden hair behind my ears as I limped across the foyer, past the curving staircase on my right to the powder room tucked beneath it. There I assessed the damage, gulping down a couple of Advil and wiping at my mascara-smeared zombie eyes.

  SB followed at my heels, barking nonstop, tail lifted straight up as if he were top dog in these parts. Which he was, but until that moment, he’d never gotten the memo. “You’re not turning alpha on me, are you?” Next he’d be lifting his leg on the custom-made sideboard.

  He started for the kitchen again but didn’t get far. I grabbed him up in a football hold and carried him there myself. “Enough already. I’ll give you your treat, then you have to leave me alone.” I half expected to see Irene in there, scooping ice into a cocktail shaker for her evening martini. Two drops of vermouth—not an atom more!—with an olive. She wasn’t in the breakfast room on the other side of the big granite kitchen island either.

  I opened the fridge and rearranged the contents like puzzle pieces, searching. Finally at the back of the top shelf I spied the little jar of Vienna sausages Irene bought just for her pampered pet. Sexy Beast was picky in the extreme. He had little use for lowly doggie treats, preferring to save his appetite for salty, cholesterol-laden human snack foods. I’d never seen SB turn down a Vienna sausage, but that’s what he did then, wriggling in my hold and whining to be set down.

  I tightened my grip on him and peered into his dark little eyes. “You’re not getting sick, are you, boy?” If he kept acting strange, I’d have to take him to the vet in the morning. Irene never took him herself. She couldn’t bear to see her precious SB in distress, and you show me a dog that does Snoopy’s happy dance when you pull up to the vet’s.

  Or to the groomer’s in the case of Sexy Beast, an aversion Irene indulged by, well, not having him groomed. She refused to listen to reason on this point. As a result, the dog’s curly, peach-colored hair hung in long, unkempt mats. The hair on his head had grown so long it draped his eyes. I had no idea how he saw through that mess.

  As if the matted coat weren’t enough, one of his long fangs protruded beyond his lips when he smiled. Yes, he did so smile! He wasn’t a show-quality dog by any stretch of the imagination, but Irene never applied conventional standards of perfection when selecting a puppy. She judged a prospective pet solely on personality, which I always felt said something positive about her.

  Once in a great while I’d screw up my courage to trim Sexy B
east’s nails and bathe him myself in Irene’s kitchen sink. Suffice it to say, I could have charged admission. Sometimes he even ended up clean. At one point in the dim and murky past, I attempted to brush him, but a chainsaw couldn’t have gotten through those mats, and Sexy Beast knew just how to pitch his screams to make me stop trying. Not that he was in even an iota of pain—I was very gentle. He’d simply learned from experience that a shrill, girlish shriek would make most humans stop whatever irksome thing they were doing and back away in alarm.

  I returned the sausages to the fridge and went in search of the lady of the house. I crossed through the breakfast room and stepped down into Irene’s sunken game room—the onetime family room back when her late husband, Arthur, and his first wife had lived in this house. Then on through to the high-ceilinged living room, which, like the rest of the house, was expensively furnished with contemporary, one-of-a-kind pieces in pale, muted tones.

  I crossed into the foyer, on the other side of which was the dining room with its striking, one-of-a-kind table, ebony inlaid with birds-eye maple. I proceeded through it and the butler’s pantry past the kitchen to the laundry room, where I noticed a wet trail leading from the back door. Irene must have gone outside after the rain started—to accompany SB on a potty break, no doubt. The instant anything wet started falling from the sky, that dog would dig in his little heels at the threshold and struggle manfully to hold it in. Pathetic behavior for an animal billed as a water retriever. If you wanted him to go out in the rain, you had to be prepared to drag him on the leash, cooing encouragement and praise the whole time. The fact that Sexy Beast’s ratty coat was currently dry only meant that, as usual, Irene had held an umbrella over the spoiled brat while he did his business.

  Next to the laundry room was a bedroom with en suite bathroom that served as a maid’s room on the rare occasions when Maria stayed overnight. I didn’t expect to find Irene in there, and my expectations were fulfilled. I opened the door to the garage and saw that all three vehicles were present and accounted for: the slick BMW sedan, the big honkin’ Lexus SUV, and the sporty little Porsche Boxster. Wheels to match a girl’s every whim. Could one of Irene’s friends have picked her up for some outing?

  No way. She was wild to get her hands on that brooch. She wouldn’t have left the house this evening.

  Vulgar raised voices were underrated—it was time to get this over with. “Irene!” I hollered as I reversed direction and limped back to the foyer. I trudged up the curved, thickly carpeted staircase, SB still whining and wriggling in my arms. “It’s me. Where are you?”

  Once I reached the second floor, I didn’t pause on the balcony to admire the dramatic view of the foyer below but headed straight for Irene’s master suite. The sumptuously appointed bedroom was vacant, the king-size mahogany sleigh bed unmade, this being Maria’s day off. The room smelled of Chanel No. 5, Irene’s scent of choice as long as I’d known her. She wasn’t in her dressing room or either of the two walk-in closets. Ditto for the huge master bath with its whirlpool tub and thirteen-foot ceiling.

  Oversize oil portraits of her last four pets adorned the second-floor hallway, in chronological order from current to deadest: Sexy Beast, Jaws, Annie Hall, and Dr. Strangelove, the names engraved on brass plaques affixed to the heavy gilt frames. I met their vacant poodley stares one by one. Where’s Mommy, fellas?

  I poked my head into the other three bedrooms on the second floor, one of which served as her home office and library, and their bathrooms. No Irene.

  Hundreds of skinny fingers tightened on my scalp. I did not like this one bit.

  “Irene!” My knee throbbed as I hobbled back down the stairs.

  I set SB on the foyer floor and the neurotic little animal charged into the kitchen again. I took my cell phone out of my purse and auto-dialed Irene’s number. If I weren’t worried about her, I could simply have left her a note—easier than breaking the news in person, certainly—gone home, iced the knee, and self-medicated with a shot of outrageously expensive aged tequila. The bottle had been a birthday present from Irene three years ago, and I dispensed it like the liquid gold it was. Another shot or two and there’d be nothing left but fumes.

  I waited for Irene to answer her phone. It just rang. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything. Irene didn’t always charge her phone, and didn’t always remember to keep it with her even when it had a charge. I cocked an ear, straining for the sound of her “Theme from Shaft” ringtone, but Isaac Hayes had left the building. All I heard was more barking, from the direction of the kitchen but farther away.

  Comprehension dawned as I limped in there. The one place I hadn’t checked was the basement, the entrance of which was located between the butler’s pantry and garage. The door was half-open and I peered down the stairway to see SB standing at the bottom, staring up at me expectantly. He emitted a string of demanding barks.

  More steps. Oh joy.

  I took them one at a time, clutching the banister for support, my knee getting stiffer by the second. SB couldn’t have expressed his impatience more eloquently if he’d been able to grab me by the lapels and shake me.

  When I was halfway down I heard the muted sounds of a movie in progress. Mystery solved. Irene was in her home theater, which shared the basement with her wine cellar and a home gym with a full bath, plus storage and utility rooms. If poker had pride of place in her heart, movies were a close second. Her eclectic collection of films numbered in the thousands.

  I let my eyes drift shut on a little prayer of gratitude. I told myself I’d been an idiot to worry. Irene McAuliffe might appear the delicate septuagenarian, but the coiffed and perfumed exterior she showed the world concealed a core of pure, unadulterated gristle. I’d never known her to suffer anything more serious than a head cold.

  Then I remembered the bad news I was about to impart, and my sigh of relief turned into a groan of dread. Well, Irene might be spry, and I might have a bum knee, but I liked to think I was still young enough to outrun her. Good thing I’d ditched the heels.

  Sexy Beast kept looking behind him to make sure I was with the program as he disappeared through the open door at the back of the darkened forty-seat theater.

  “Knock knock,” I said as I followed him inside. I could just make out Irene’s shape in the front row. “What are we watching?”

  She didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. I saw right away it was Jaws playing on the jumbo screen up front, specifically the nighttime scene where police chief Brody and oceanographic researcher Matt Hooper go out in Hooper’s boat to see what they can discover about a certain toothy character who’s been chewing the scenery. Moody music helped set the tone.

  I performed a mental head-smack. Of course! The Prime Rib Incident that had carried little Jaws to Poodle Heaven had occurred three years ago that day. How could it have slipped my mind? That very morning Irene had had me deliver an enormous, poodle-shaped arrangement of white roses to the pet cemetery. Whenever one of her beloved dogs died, she honored its memory by screening the film it was named for every year on the anniversary of its demise—or as colorful Captain Quint pronounced the word in the action-packed flick du jour, its de-meeze.

  I’ll tell you how it had slipped my mind. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the craziness at Ahearn’s and trying to devise the best way to broach the subject—yeah, broach, another lousy pun, I’m not proud—I would have realized that of course she’d be down here watching Jaws, and saved myself all those flights of stairs on a banged-up knee.

  Onscreen, Brody and Hooper discover an abandoned boat in the misty gloom. Hooper decides to go into the water to investigate. Brody is not down with that. More moody music.

  “Hey, Irene?” I said, gimping my way toward her. “Think you can pause that for a minute so I can, um…” Can what? Get ready to make a run for it? This scene was less than halfway into the film. If I had to sit through the rest of it before breaking the news, I’d be a gibbering wreck by the time the credits rolled. Plus, where wa
s her sense of urgency? Earlier she’d been wild to get her hands on that brooch.

  “Did you hear me?” I reached the front row of cushy upholstered theater seats. Irene’s silhouette was eerily lit by the flickering image of Hooper, now wearing a wetsuit, slipping into the water and snorkeling under the abandoned boat with a handheld light. The music is now more ominous than moody. Whaddaya know, there’s a ragged hole in the bottom of the boat. Better poke around there, Hooper thinks, see what I can find.

  I expected to see Sexy Beast curled up on Irene’s lap. Instead he paced in front of the two of us, whining piteously. “SB’s acting weird,” I said. “Has he been like this all day?” She ignored the question, and no wonder. Her favorite Jaws movie moment was fast approaching, the part where Hooper gets a head in his research, so to speak. Even though she’d seen the film countless times, even though she knew what was about to happen, she jumped and screamed every time. Okay, so did I. Then the two of us would collapse in girlish giggles.

  I dropped into the seat next to hers and began to formulate my story as Hooper pried a ginormous shark tooth from the edge of the hole. See, Irene, the thing is, I had the brooch in my pocket, but then this cute fake priest wrestled me to the carpet...

  Which naturally led to thoughts of lying under Father Faux, struggling in vain as he runs his hands over my clothing, leaving no pocket unturned. My jacket lacks an inside breast pocket, but he doesn’t know that, and he valiantly gropes around for one. Hmm… maybe I slipped the brooch into my bra…

  The shrieking musical score snapped me out of my reverie as, right on schedule, a severed, one-eyed human head floated out of the hole in the boat.