Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries

by Barbara Silkstone

  At least by then she would have her Cadbury bar. Nigel had winked conspiratorially as she sat down.

  But now time seemed to stand still as the offspring of some dead rock star whimpered on with an awful tale of child abuse and parental neglect. Regina's heart went out to the wretched creature, who had been supporting herself as a telephone psychic sex worker, but her attention wandered as she sat politely in her damp clothes, her hunger giving way to a light-headed wooziness.

  She knew she should be grateful to the girl for droning on. Every minute she talked diminished the likelihood that Regina would be required to “share” her own stories. During the three days since she'd arrived at the Clinic, she'd managed to limit her self-revelations to a few mentions of her apprehension about the “accidents.”

  It was hard to participate in the tales of horrific childhoods. Her own parents had been so boringly perfect. Her violinist father, from what she remembered of him, had only one flaw: dying of a heart attack when she was nine; and her music-teacher, foster-child-adopting mother simply had no flaws at all.

  Which was why Regina had never got on well with her.

  She looked down at her hands, rough from the morning's scrubbing; big, Dutch peasant's hands, like her mother's… her poor mother who had spent a lifetime doing battle with dirt and now lay buried beneath it in the peaceful hills of western Massachusetts.

  There were times she almost envied her mother that peace.

  Like right now. The poor, fashion-challenged therapist was saying something. Regina could tell her number was up.

  “… how about you, Princess? Would you like to share with us what brought on your decision to come to the Clinic and enter Recovery, your Highness?”

  Regina gave the group a careful smile and cleared her throat. She had decided the best route was to tell some version of the truth, silly as it was.

  “Several weeks ago, I got drunk,” she said. “Very drunk. So drunk I made a pass at my husband. I kissed him. Right on the mouth. I even used my tongue, I think. Then, I followed him into the royal bedchamber—the one with the sixteenth century Ludovico Carracci frescoes, which are so erotic—and I proceeded to remove his clothes. If my chef hadn't suddenly arrived with Max's hot toddy, I suppose I might have done something even more embarrassing, like take off my own. Max was very upset the next morning and suggested I seek help.”

  That really was when it had all started, wasn't it? The very next day the first accident happened—the brakes went out on the Ferrari. Thank goodness for a Le Mans-trained driver and the hangover that kept her from driving herself that morning.

  Regina searched the circle of faces for reaction. Nothing. She'd have to give them a little more grovel-and-snivel.

  “My husband had every right to be annoyed,” she went on. “I broke the agreement. I understood from the beginning that our marriage was not about sex, except what was required to produce an heir. He would have his—what he calls his “private liaisons”—and I would have, well, the title, the palaces, the jewels, everything. Not a bad arrangement. Until I went and ruined everything.”

  “Yes. Alcohol can ruin everything.” This came from a former movie icon, her face permanently set in the death-rictus of too many face-lifts.

  “No.” Regina found this truth-telling strangely exhilarating. “It was worse than that. I got fat.”

  The group leaned forward, their eyes now greedy for more.

  “Excuse me, Regina. Excuse me,” said Nigel, who was kind, but had the annoying way of pronouncing her name to rhyme with “vagina”. “But what does being fat have to do with anything? If Prince Max has 'private liaisons'—by which I take it you mean he's gay—he wouldn't want you even if you got back that death's-head look of your Warhol days. Save yourself the pain, dear heart.”

  “Of course.” Regina felt her spine go cold at the mention of those days with Andy, but this game of self-humiliation had very strict rules, so she went on. “Of course you're right, Nigel, but you see, when I was thin—model thin, I mean—I didn't want him. Or anybody. Marriage without sex seemed like a fine idea. An anorexic has no sexual needs to worry about. No hormones.”

  She looked from his blank face to the others.

  “I was a chemical eunuch, my dears,” she said. “When the female body faces starvation, the first thing it does is shut down the reproductive system. Automatic population control. Women evolved that way to keep from producing extra mouths to feed in time of famine. You'd be surprised how many female dancers and models and athletes live in permanent reproductive shutdown. When I became a model, I forced my body back into a state of pre-pubescence, and held it there for years with constant starvation.”

  The faces were still uncomprehending.

  “But since the purpose of my marriage was to reproduce, the doctors made me start eating. First I resisted, but then I was ecstatic. I fell in love with food. I ate everything I'd deprived myself of all those years. I said 'Chocolate, let me be your slave'. But I didn't realize my metabolism was permanently frozen by another evolutionary safeguard: the ability of the once-starved, sexually active female body to store enough nutrients—in the form of fat—to survive nine months of further famine, for obvious reasons. Mine is set to convert anything over a thousand calories a day into portable famine insurance.”

  She patted the now-infamous matronly curve of her hip.

  “After Tarquino was born, I went back to bulimic behavior, and Max went back to his liaisons, but I never got really thin, and then about five years ago, when I realized I was never going to regain my waif-like figure, I started eating like a regular person. The pounds came back and so, unfortunately, did the sex drive, which I tried to deal with discreetly—an occasional bellboy here, a stable hand there—until that horrible night I inflicted my needs on my poor, unsuspecting husband—although he really isn't my type—so thin and pale. I prefer dark, mysterious Mediterranean men, actually.”

  For a moment, the dark, mysterious ghost of the only man she'd ever really loved flickered through her memory.

  “But now…” She tried to smooth her ruined skirt. “Here I am, as I said—because I got fat.”

  There. That should satisfy them.

  “Is that when you realized you were an alcoholic, your Highness?” said a recently discarded trophy wife.

  Regina sighed. She'd already bared her soul. She might as well give them the whole, unvarnished truth.

  “As a matter of absolute fact, I've never much gone in for alcohol. But on the particular night I mentioned, I'd told the kitchen not to make dessert. That awful fat-photo of me had just come out in a Roman tabloid. But my chef, Titiana, had the night off—she's so wonderful helping me to stick to my diets—but the kitchen sent out a decanter of amaretto with the fruit.”

  She sighed. She did like a little amaretto after dinner.

  “Amaretto isn't chocolate, but if you close your eyes and think of chocolate-covered cherries, it can be quite satisfying. Especially by the tumblerful.”

  She thought back to that night, and how foolishly she had misread Max's signals—she could swear he had refilled her glass that last time, but—well, it was all horribly embarrassing to hear about in the morning.

  “Max would like to believe I'm alcoholic, I suppose. Alcoholism is so much easier to deal with than an undesirable wife suffering from unbridled lust.”

  Regina watched the faces harden around the circle.

  “Now group,” said the Visigoth. “Do we hear Princess Regina experiencing a little denial here?”

  “For sure,” the rock-offspring said in her sex-kitten whisper. “What about the accidents you told us about? Those things don't just happen. You had to be way high on something.”

  “Not necessarily, dear heart,” Nigel said, ever Regina's defender. “People who are forced to stifle their sexuality are often what we call 'accident prone.' It's the subconscious trying to do what the conscious mind isn't brave enough to carry out. Suicide without the shame. After all, you pul
led the last little drama just last night, didn't you, Princess?”

  He lowered his gaze toward Regina's cast.

  “You couldn't have been drunk. Unless you know something about how to get booze in here that I don't. What you're in denial about is your self-loathing.”

  “Wrong,” the Spoon said. “The latest accident wasn't last night. It was this morning—in the first floor ladies' room.” Her face had hardened again, with no trace of their camaraderie of an hour ago. “I nearly got killed. But Nigel is right. Who else could have rigged that toilet tank to fall? What about it, your Highness? Are you trying to off yourself because nobody wants to screw a fat chick?”

  A sad little producer who had worked on too many science fiction films agreed. “After the aliens took me to the mother ship for that probe, I kept having all kinds of accidents. It was like I wanted to die, but couldn't admit it. Just like you're doing, Princess.”

  Regina took a quick breath. Could there be some truth to their nonsense? Was she causing the accidents herself?

  Maybe nothing was wrong except that she'd gone quietly bonkers.

  Chapter 5—Regina: White Light for Breakfast

  Regina looked around at the therapy group of well-heeled losers. Like them, her life was far from the happy-ever-after it seemed: she had a lonely sham of a marriage, two sons who no longer needed her, dead parents, forty unwanted pounds and no confidante but Titiana.

  And there were times when even Titiana seemed a bit distant.

  Especially since the amaretto night.

  But then, Titiana was unmarried and weighed well over two hundred pounds herself, not unusual for the buxom peasants of San Montinaro, but perhaps an impediment to empathy with Regina's problems.

  “Now, group,” the Visigoth said, “Let's help the Princess here. Let's all join hands and send her our own white light.”

  Regina watched a look of sweet, blissful smugness settle on the faces in the circle. They sat in perfect silence, as Regina's stomach let out a hollow growl.

  It was a low, menacing rumble; almost a purr—like the quiet menace of a jungle cat about to move in for the kill. But it was speaking as loudly as a pack of howling wolves. What it said was—yes, she had been in denial. She had been in denial about the danger that surrounded her; about the accidents; about the Clinic. About Max.

  Max had sent her here, knowing full well she wasn't an alcoholic. He had insisted that no one be told where she was going, not even Titiana. In order to save her from the paparazzi, he said.

  But these facts wouldn't go away:

  No one but Max knew she was here.

  The accidents were still happening.

  Not accidents. They were attacks on her life. And no one could be causing them but her husband; or someone paid by him.

  Someone. She looked around the circle. It could be anyone—the Spoon; the rock-offspring; the alien abductee; even Nigel.

  She had to get out of here. Now. She rose from her chair as if it had been electrified.

  “Thank you,” she managed to say with a polite smile. “Thank you all so much, but as a matter of fact, I had white light for breakfast—dinner, too.”

  She took a deep breath and slung the chain of her Chanel bag over her shoulder as she raised herself on her crutches. There was only one person she could trust, only one place in the world she could go. And thanks to that newspaper she'd seen, she knew where to find her.

  “What I need now,” she said in a spritely voice. “Is to go to an old-fashioned box social.”

  She took advantage of the shocked silence to propel herself out of the room. She kept going down the corridor, through the lobby and past the front desk. As fast as crutches and one foot could take her, she made her way to the front doorway.

  And out.

  Away.

  She could hear the shouts and footsteps behind her, but she didn't stop.

  There would be no going back. The Recovery Clinic at Rancho Esperanza had strict rules—you were free to go at any time, but you would not be allowed back in.

  A taxi stood waiting. Waiting for someone else, but she didn't have time for manners.

  “The Silver Cathedral,” she told the driver. “Now.”

  She had no luggage, but she'd manage. She'd just managed one of the bravest acts of her life. She'd escaped. Escaped those awful smiles. Escaped the lies. Escaped his Highness, Prince Maximus Saxi-Cadenti, the odd, remote man who was still a stranger to her after eighteen years of marriage.

  She would go back to real life. Real people. Honesty and friendship.

  Back to Cady.

  Let it not be too late.

  Chapter 6—Regina: Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  Regina's heart rate had returned to normal by the time the taxi swerved onto the Anaheim exit ramp—as normal as a heart rate could be in high-speed, bumper-to bumper traffic. And her head no longer felt in immediate danger of exploding, or her stomach of imploding.

  In fact, her hunger seemed to have evaporated.

  Finally, she felt safe; safe enough, at least, to notice that the pony-tailed taxi driver, one Fabiano Feinstein, an aspiring spokesmodel, had the profile of a young god.

  She was going to see Cady. Things would be fine.

  She should have contacted Cady a long time ago. Cady had always been able to make even the most appalling things seem perfectly reasonable.

  Which was probably why she had survived in Washington.

  She would tell Regina she was overreacting, that hunger had made her paranoid, and maybe feed her some pie.

  Then she could tell Max that Regina did not have a drinking problem; that the accidents were not her fault, and the sex stuff on the amaretto night was simply due to a hormonal imbalance.

  Regina could promise to stick to her diet; Max would go back to being his inscrutable self, and they could all go away somewhere safe and ordinary, like Paris.

  The Silver Cathedral turned out to be a steel and mirrored-glass tower down the road from Disneyland. Its entrance was a sort of plaza that had the grand steps and square fountains of a Mussolini-era government office building, and, like the Happiest Place on Earth, seemed to be a monument to tidiness, lower-middle-class taste, and crowd control.

  Regina tried to make properly awestruck noises as Fabiano drew up to the curb behind a large van with a TV network logo on the side.

  He spoke with reverent admiration of the marketing savvy of the Cathedral's fabled Reverend Elmo Greeley. According to Fabiano, Greeley, a lounge-act comic turned televangelist, had built the Silver Cathedral financed entirely by the “little silver dimes” donated by millions of children brought to Jesus by his Saturday morning Christian TV show, “Gladly My Cross-Eyed Bear” starring Gladly Bear, the sight-challenged teddy-bear angel.

  A growing crowd filled the plaza, streaming from the mausoleum-like gate to the underground parking garage, like resurrected souls emerging from a collective grave. They jostled Regina as she balanced on her crutches, fishing in her purse for the fare.

  With dawning horror, she realized she had no American currency. Last Friday, she'd gone directly from John Wayne Airport to the Clinic at Rancho Esperanza, without giving a thought to banks.

  Wait. She usually kept a hundred dollar bill along with some euros in the zipper pocket of her bag for emergencies.

  It was there. She handed it to Fabiano.

  “Sister, have you taken Jesus as your personal savior?” said a voice from the crowd. Someone put a pamphlet in her hand.

  “Do you love Him?” another voice demanded.

  “Do you love Jesus?” A stringy-faced woman in a large hat decorated with small winged bears pulled on Regina's arm. Regina tried to shake her off. The woman would not let go.

  Regina's anger rose.

  “Do I love Jesus? Actually, I've never met him, dear, but I'm sure I would. I've always been attracted to long-haired Jewish men.”

  She turned to see if the delicious Fabiano Feinstein appreciated her joke—just in t
ime to see the taxi take off from the curb.

  “Where's my change, you creep!” Regina shouted. “May your hair fall out! And your nose grow back!”

  This had the effect of making the crowd back off enough to allow her to start a slow, one-legged walk toward the cordoned-off lines that snaked toward the grand, but uninviting, steps.

  Soon after she entered the slow-moving line, someone else tugged on her elbow.

  It was a bear: a large, fuzzy, white bear with big plastic eyes focused on its own button nose, a dimwitted smile on its cartoon face, and small, insect-like silver wings pinned to its back. Next to the bear was a young black man wearing a winged teddy bear pin on his lapel.

  “Ma'am,” the young man said. “We have a handicapped elevator. Please come with us.”

  Regina followed gratefully. The person in the bear suit pointed toward the mirrored door of a glass elevator located near the gate to the underground garage.

  The man lifted the rope barrier that formed the snake-like queue that inched toward the cathedral entrance, but as she ducked under the rope, the crowd surged around her with a sudden roar. She turned to see a bronze-colored stretch limousine pulling up to the curb behind the TV van.

  “Tammy Faye!” shouted a woman beside her, whose eye make-up showed true devotion to her idol. “Oh, I hope it's Tammy Faye Baker. I love her. She's been through so much! Or Miss America. Somebody said Miss America was going to be here!”

  Regina could see two uniformed guards stepping out of the limousine, and then a black man—a man who didn't look as if he gave a damn about Tammy Faye or Miss America or much of anything in the candy-coated world of Reverend Elmo's Cathedral.

  The black man was not tall, but he oozed sex appeal and the aura of raw power. He was Someone. Had they met? He spoke to a woman seated inside the car—an elegant, perfectly-coiffed black woman—all ageless perfection in Valentino linen.

  Could it possibly be…?