Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  * * *

  … It was a little after five when Mom and I settled down in her living room, each of us getting comfortable in one of her old twin easychairs.

  These chairs had come to the Rocky Mountains from Mom’s apartment in New York. She had sold off most of her furniture before she left—“I’ve been looking at these old sticks for forty years, let me give my eyes a rest already! I’m starting up my life again in a new place, don’t I have the right to sit on some new things?” But I remembered these two easychairs from when I was a little boy, I had seen my father sitting every night in one of them while he read his New York Daily News. So I did a lot of begging and pleading, and Mom finally agreed to bring the chairs to Mesa Grande with her.

  We sat in them now and drank coffee and ate Mom’s schnecken, that delicious concoction of cinnamon, nuts, raisins, and calories, while I waited for Mom to do some of her inimitable unraveling. Other women knit; Mom’s specialty is taking apart other people’s knitting.

  “So you’re interested maybe in who killed this Candy?” she said. “I could tell you straight out, but you’ll believe me better and agree with me more if I go through the thinking with you the way I went through it with myself, in my mind.

  “The first thing that popped into my mind was a coincidence. Coincidences happen, naturally. Like your Aunt Selma, a long time ago when she was visiting her sister in St. Louis, Missouri, she suddenly got a vision of your Uncle Max, my brother who got rich, may he rest in peace, sitting at a table in the Stork Club buying dinner for a blonde. And sure enough, when Selma called the Stork Club long distance and asked for Max, the waiter brought him to the phone. And was Max a surprised man!

  “But when you look closer at this coincidence, it isn’t so peculiar any more. For years before she took her trip to St. Louis, Selma was saying to Max, ‘Why don’t you take me out for dinner and dancing to the Stork Club one of these nights? Or do you take your blonde secretary there when you tell me you’re working late, and you don’t want to take me because you’re afraid the waiters will say something and give away your secret?’ And then she’d give a laugh, ha ha!, to show she was only making a joke. Some joke! It wasn’t so funny in her mind, and who can say she didn’t put it in Max’s mind too?”

  “Mom, has this got anything to do with the murder?”

  “What it’s got to do is, I always look close at coincidences. This woman who was Candy’s secretary, this Mrs. Connelly, she used to have an affair with him, he took her into his office for dictation, he locked the door and what he dictated wasn’t letters. Why did he have to do it that way? Love on an office couch, is this anybody’s idea of being comfortable? Especially a man in middle age, when the bones aren’t so flexible like they used to be?

  “But the point is, he didn’t have any choice. He was a minister, he preached how you have to be pure and upright and you don’t fool around if you’re married or even if you’re not. So at night he had to stay home with his wife, he didn’t go off on trips or to play cards with the boys at his club. And he couldn’t say he was working late at the office, like my poor brother Max, because the office was the church, and it stayed open late at night with people coming in and out to pray. And in the daytime Candy also had to be in the church, so when could his secretary and him do their dictation except in office hours behind a locked door?

  “Which makes me ask myself—after he stopped his affair with the secretary and took up with some other woman, he still had to be home every night, didn’t he? And in the church every day, including Sunday? And what was worse for him, he couldn’t use his office any more. From then on what he had to dictate in there was letters. So if this new affair was going to be carried on anywhere except in his head, when did he have any free time for it?”

  “Maybe he got together with this new woman when he went out to lunch.”

  “The secretary, Connelly, told you he had lunch every day at the Italian restaurant, in the mall near the church. And he came back from lunch every day smelling from garlic on his breath. So take my word for it, he wasn’t spending his lunchtime in a bed making love to a woman. Unless they were maybe eating garlic together in the bed, which to me sounds like a very peculiar idea. Even nowadays, with all the peculiar things people do in bed.

  “All right then—there’s only one time Candy could possibly be meeting this new woman and having his hanky-panky. On Thursday afternoons. When he went home to write his Sunday sermon, and he left word he shouldn’t be disturbed till dinnertime, nobody should come to see him, he wouldn’t even answer the phone. His sermons were strictly from notes, he didn’t even write them out word for word, so why did he need a whole afternoon, without interruptions, to work on them? Thursday afternoons—it’s the only time he could be seeing his new woman.

  “Thursday afternoon, Thursday afternoon—it went spinning around in my mind—what was there about Thursday? And finally it came to me. Thursday was the day, the only day in the week, that the Francesca Fleming woman, the one that owns a restaurant and belongs to the Union from Civil Liberties, wasn’t actually working at her restaurant with a lot of people seeing her there all day long. Thursday was the day she drove out to the country and visited the farms and the smalltown markets and ordered fresh vegetables. She told you about this when you talked to her the night before the murder—you remember, naturally?”

  I didn’t remember, until Mom reminded me. Mom remembers everything, of course. No detail, no matter how trivial, ever escapes from that rat-trap memory of hers; this was one of the chief reasons for her popularity among the gossiping women in her old neighborhood in the Bronx.

  “And I’m also asking myself,” Mom went on, “was this a job that had to take up her whole day? You could do your shopping for vegetables in the morning, couldn’t you? How long does it take to look at a cauliflower and decide if it’s any good? It takes me half an hour to pick out at the supermarket all my vegetables for a week. So you do that before lunch, and after lunch you drive back to town and park your car around the corner from Candy’s house—”

  “You’re saying Francesca Fleming was Candy’s latest girlfriend? I’m sorry, you’ll need a lot more evidence to convince me of that! There must be thousands of women in this town who are free on Thursday afternoons!”

  “Did I say this was evidence? I only said this was a coincidence, and I like to give a close-up look at coincidences. Which I did, and pretty soon I started noticing other peculiar things. For instance, you read to me Candy’s last sermon, the one he jotted down on Thursday just before he was killed. About the prodigal son that had an affair with the scarlet woman. She played her little games with him, and tempted him he should go to bed with her, and dragged him into the mud, but finally he broke it off with her and came crawling back to his father, with rags on his back, asking for forgiveness.

  “So I’m saying to myself, it’s obvious he wrote this sermon because his own personal problem was on his mind, and it filled him up with guilt, and in his sermon he could get it out of his chest. He was the prodigal son, and his new girlfriend was—”

  “Hold on, Mom. There’s no reason to believe he was talking about himself. If every minister who tells a Bible story from the pulpit had to be talking about himself—”

  “There’s two reasons to believe it in Candy’s case. First of all, this wasn’t like his usual sermon. You noticed this yourself, and his son admitted it too. Usually his sermons were full of optimism, and they told people how all their troubles would be over if they just believed in God. But this last sermon of his was full of gloominess and bitterness and completely down in the mouth. Why such a big change in his style? Can you think of any other reason except this sermon meant more to him than the others, it came from out of his heart, it expressed something from his personal life?

  “And there’s a second reason. The story he told in this sermon is from the Bible. It’s a story Jesus tells in the New Testament. Only Candy didn’t tell it the way the Bible does. In the Bible the
prodigal son leaves home and loses all his money, and he’s starving so he goes back to his father. In the Bible there’s no scarlet woman. Candy invented her for his sermon. Why? Because she was real, she was somebody he actually had an affair with and he felt guilty about it and he dumped her to go back to his father—meaning God maybe, and his church and his married life.”

  “All right, it sounds plausible, Mom. I didn’t know you were so familiar with the New Testament.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? I got plenty goyische friends, isn’t it natural I should take a look at what they’re reading? Also, if you liked the original, wouldn’t you also want to read the sequel?” She gave a little shrug. “It isn’t bad, incidentally. Not so good as the first part, but what sequel is? The only thing I couldn’t figure out, why do they have to tell the same story four different times? Did they pad it out so people would think they were getting their money’s worth?”

  Mom as Biblical scholar did have a certain fascination for me, but I was more immediately interested in the murder. “All right, so Candy was referring to himself and his new girlfriend in the sermon. But how does that prove she was Francesca Fleming?”

  “This is easy. Only pay attention to the words he used. ‘The scarlet woman’ is what he calls her. Meaning what?”

  “It’s just a phrase. It means any woman who’s unusually sinful.”

  “Naturally. But there’s plenty of different phrases for such women. In his sermon Candy didn’t use any of them. He just kept calling her ‘the scarlet woman.’ Why do you think? Maybe it’s because this is exactly how he saw her. This is a description of how she looks. She’s a redhead.”

  Thinking this one over kept me quiet for a few seconds. Then I said, “All right, I see the point you’re making. But it’s still hard for me to believe that Francesca did this killing. I could swear it’s not in her character.”

  “It’s in everybody’s character to commit a murder,” Mom said. “How many times I felt like doing it myself! The difference between most of us and official murderers is, their opportunities were better.”

  “Maybe so, but I just can’t see Francesca loving a man, any man, so passionately that she’d kill him for walking out on her. And a man like Chuck Candy, for God’s sake! Physically he wasn’t particularly attractive, and intellectually, emotionally, politically he was at opposite poles from her.”

  “As far as that goes,” Mom said, “people at opposite poles are always getting together in this world. Short ones marry tall ones, beautiful ones marry homely ones, Democrats marry Republicans, devout Catholics marry devout atheists.”

  “What are you saying, Mom, that Francesca is the fanatic you’ve been hunting for all this time? The fanatical atheist as counterpart to the fanatical fundamentalist?”

  “I thought about that,” Mom said. “In my head I played around with this idea. But I saw pretty quick it wasn’t so. Francesca Fleming’s reason for killing Candy didn’t have much to do with being an atheist or a rejected lover or anything that’s got any passion in it. You remember another thing she said to you the night before the murder? She said Candy had a reputation for being honest, there weren’t even any rumors he was stealing money.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “Yesterday, when you had your meeting at the Unitarian Church, she said Candy was a con man and a crook. How come she contradicted what she told you two days before? It’s because two days before she was telling you the truth, Candy didn’t have a reputation as a crook. But two days later she made a slip from the tongue, it came out of her he was a crook. How could she know such a thing about him? Only if she was in on his crooked deal with him.

  “You see what the answer is? She’s the one that knew about the Eastern company building a shopping mall in the Fairhaven neighborhood. She’s the one that put Candy up to making an offer to buy the Meyer house. And she’s the one, when the offer was turned down, that was behind Candy’s dirty trick to force the Meyers to sell.”

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Are you saying now that Francesca didn’t have an affair with Candy?”

  “I’m saying both things. When she found about this shopping mall—incidentally, my theory is she heard about it from Victor Kincaid, didn’t he mention to you that he’s representing some big Eastern firm that wants to make investments in the Southwest?—she decided to take advantage of the information by buying up property in the neighborhood.

  “But she needed somebody to be—what’s the expression?—her ‘frontpiece,’ and Candy looked like a good candidate. He was so different from her that nobody could suspect there was any connection between them. Maybe she met him somewhere while she was doing her research on local churches for the Civil Liberties, and she looked him over very careful and came to the conclusion he wanted money bad.

  “So she got herself introduced to him, and she blinked her eyelashes at him and let him know how attractive he was by her, and pretty soon he was eating her hand, she was twisting her little finger around him. When she finally brought up what she wanted him to do for her in this real estate deal, how was he going to say no? Could he resist her body, if along with it came also a nice financial profit?

  “So he bought up property in the neighborhood, and when the Meyers wouldn’t sell he put up his Christmas nightmare to drive them away, and all the time Francesca Fleming was pulling on his strings and keeping him happy with their Thursday afternoons in bed. Until they went too far, with this assault charge against Roger Meyer, and suddenly you and Ann Swenson were making an investigation.

  “With this development Candy wasn’t so happy any more. In fact, he got worried what it would be like to stand up in court and testify under oath. He worried what he’d say if Ann Swenson asked him embarrassing questions about the Meyer boy’s so-called assault against him. Most of all he worried the public defender should find out about the real estate deal. And then, on Thursday afternoon, maybe while Candy was waiting in his house for Francesca Fleming’s weekly massage, he got a call from the real estate agent you talked to, from Dwayne McKee. McKee told him the public defender’s investigator was just in his office, he asked about the offer to buy the Meyer house, and McKee gave him the right answer.

  “For Candy this was positively the final blow. The public defender knew all about the shady real estate deal, and there wasn’t any doubt she’d bring it up in public at the Meyer boy’s trial. He decided he had to save his skin, even it meant burning somebody else’s. So when Francesca Fleming got there for the afternoon, he told her the hanky-panky between them was over, and what’s more he intended to go to the district attorney and tell the truth, that the assault charges against Roger Meyer were a fake, that the Christmas display in front of his house was a plot to drive the Meyers out of the neighborhood, and that Francesca Fleming was the one who’s responsible for all the trouble. By confessing it all, he said, he could maybe save some of his reputation—Christians are supposed to confess their sins, God has mercy on them for this. And if she lost her reputation, and even possibly went to jail, that’s too bad, he’d pray for her.

  “Naturally Francesca Fleming wasn’t so pleased to hear this. Her reputation was as important to her as Candy’s was to him. If he made a big mishegass in public, everybody would find out how she, the big liberal, the big fighter for noble causes, was actually cheating people out of their houses so a big corporation could put up a shopping mall. Such a phony she’d look like! And what’s more, with the bad publicity, that Eastern company could decide to build their mall someplace else, and she’d be stuck with a lot of property that wasn’t worth so much. So she answered Candy back by taking his gun from the hall table and shooting him.

  “Then she decided maybe she could get away with it if she made everybody think somebody else killed him. So she called up Roger Meyer on the phone—she knew he was in his parents’ house because she saw his car parked out front. She put on a deep voice, talked with a whisper so he wouldn’t realize it was a woman, and she told him she
was Candy and asked him to come over right away. The idea was, he should find the body, and maybe get some blood on him, and with luck he’d be blamed for the murder, since already he had a first-class motive. This was why she left the front door unlocked when she walked out of the house herself. Only it didn’t work out exactly like she hoped. One thing happened that she never expected.”

  “Abernathy?”

  “Who else? The crazy old man was standing across the street, behind a bush, watching the Candy house. He saw Francesca Fleming leave the house, maybe he even saw her go into it earlier. He saw her leaving before Roger got there. But he didn’t tell anybody what he saw. Instead, he got in touch with her and started asking her for money. She gave him a couple handouts, but when he set up a meeting on the day before Christmas and asked her to bring the biggest amount yet, she decided she wouldn’t ever be free from him again unless she killed him.

  “So she met him early that afternoon—maybe at her house, maybe at the park near his hotel—but instead of bringing the money she made some sort of excuse to him. She told him she didn’t have that much on her right now, but she’d get it to him in a day or two. Meanwhile, to show him her heart was in the right place, she gave him a Christmas present, this nice bottle of wine—it was easy for her to get hold of it because she runs a restaurant, and in the cellar she’s got plenty of bottles with wine in them. Ahead of time she’s already put enough cyanide in it to kill twenty old religious maniacs. So he takes it from her, and she goes to her meeting with you at the Unitarian Church, and then she goes home for the night to watch Jimmy Stewart on television.

  “And that should’ve been it, the whole schmeer. But here comes another peculiar thing. Since she expected the old man to drink the poison in the privacy of his hotel room, wouldn’t you think she’d sit home quietly that night, watching television and waiting for the news that somebody’s found the body? This would be sensible and reasonable, but what did she do instead? Late on Christmas Eve, around eleven-thirty or so, she left her nice comfortable house, went to the old man’s hotel, sneaked up the fireplace, and slipped into his room. Such a chance she was taking! Somebody could see her, she could get caught at the scene of the crime! As a matter of fact, it almost happened. You got to the room while she was still in it, so she had to hit you over the head.