A Cast of Killers

by Gallagher Gray

  "Right there is fine," Auntie Lil told the driver as they approached the Hudson. The river sparkled dully in the autumn sunlight, its waves alternating between flat gray and a murky brown. Auntie Lil pointed toward a deserted landfill pier that hosted a small amusement park during the summer months. It was now empty and desolate, no more than a barren stretch of land dotted with an odd patch of dry grass here and there.

  "Keep the meter running," she ordered the driver. "You come with me," she ordered T.S.

  "You're paying for the cab," T.S. warned her and immediately felt worse. He was behaving like a sullen child. On the other hand, why not? She was treating him like one, wasn't she? And all because he could not go along with her latest cockeyed scheme.

  They walked in silence to the end of the landfill, then followed a concrete pier out into the waves. They reached the end and she stopped him beside a set of large pilings and pointed down the river toward the southern tip of Manhattan. "See that shadow there?"

  "What shadow? All I see is smog."

  "That's the trouble with you, Theodore," she told him. "You're so busy being competent that you're blind. That's the Statue of Liberty." She pointed again.

  "I know it's there," he conceded patiently. "You can pretend to see it, if you want to."

  She pursed her lips in irritation and stared out over the water. "Your great-grandfather worked these shores," she began. "He came right off a boat, without a dime to his name, and a wife and three children to support." Her gentle tone of voice produced an immediate flush of shame in T.S. She was not the type of woman to talk about the past. In fact, he did not know if he'd ever heard her speak about their ancestors before.

  "He worked sixteen, sometimes twenty hours a day," she continued. "And so did your grandfather after him. They endured years of low wages, losing their jobs to the Irish, finding new ones, losing those jobs because they were honest, and getting up at dawn the next day to find new jobs. They worked from sunup to sundown and into the night. Never complaining. Never asking for more."

  "That's very admirable," T.S. admitted, trying hard not to let his impatience creep into his voice. He failed.

  "This is not a feel-good lecture, Theodore," Auntie Lil told him sharply. "I have a serious point to make."

  "Then make it," he suggested. "If you ask me, you're just trying to shame me into doing what you want."

  "Not shame you, Theodore. I'm trying to explain why we should be the ones to help out this poor, dead woman."

  "Then explain," T.S. said stubbornly, folding his arms and avoiding her eyes.

  "As poor as your family was—and we were very, very poor until a generation ago—a Hubbert has never turned away someone else in need. Never. If someone needed help, they got it. It didn't matter if they were Irish or black or even a drunk. Your great-grandmother and her daughters after her never turned away anyone in need. Your mother and I helped your grandmother feed half of upstate New York during the Depression. And it wasn't because we were trying to win our way into heaven, either. We did it because Hubbert’s have always done it. Because we are blessed. No one has ever lost a baby in childbirth. Damn few of us have died before our time. We have the constitutions of oxen and the good sense to avoid excess in alcohol and religion. And I'm not going to jinx that good fortune now by turning my back on someone in need. So you can help me or you can choose to not help me. But I will be very surprised if you really mean 'no', my dear Theodore. Because if ever there was a Hubbert who has made me proud, it's you. I refuse to believe that you could, in good conscience, walk away from this simple task."

  Her lecture finished, she turned abruptly and marched back to the cab. It was the best way to ensure that he would not talk back. But in truth, he had been left speechless. T.S. waited a moment, letting the cool breeze clear his head. He peeked south just as the sun broke out from behind a cloud and did spot a reflected glare in the distance. He sighed. Perhaps Auntie Lil really could see the Statue of Liberty from here. Perhaps he was far too cynical a man.

  He shrugged his shoulders in surrender and walked slowly back to the cab, out of habit noting that their small session of family bonding had added a good five dollars to the tab.

  "You win," he said simply, shutting the door a second before the impatient driver took off with a roar and cut back east through mid-town. "What do you want me to do?"

  Auntie Lil's mood change was instantaneous. She immediately stowed her disappointment away in favor of her favorite activity—fulI-speed-ahead-damn-the-torpedoes-action. Within seconds, her handkerchief was tucked back in her handbag and she had pulled out her small notebook. She held a pen poised above its surface and stared dreamily out the window. There was nothing she loved better than a puzzle.

  "We just need a good photograph of her," she finally announced. "Then we can show it around the neighborhood. Someone must know her. How can we get one?"

  "Beats me. She's dead. No one knows her real name. We don't even know where she lives."

  "Why don't you take a picture of her dead?" their cab driver suddenly suggested from the front seat.

  Amazing, T.S. thought, he'd been listening to every word they said and had not displayed the slightest emotion. Obviously, he and Auntie Lil did not even begin to approach in strangeness the weirdos this guy was used to transporting.

  "Why, that's brilliant!" Auntie Lil exclaimed, leaning forward to tap the seat divider with approval. "You're wasted driving a cab," she declared.

  "Yes, back home in my country I was very, very good at tracking down people," the driver answered cryptically. "No one ever got away from me," he added, leaving T.S. to imagine himself at the mercy of some sort of escaped death-squad leader.

  "Where do they take the bodies?" Auntie Lil asked. She did not really want an answer from the driver. She was merely, as usual, thinking out loud. "The medical examiner's office, that's where. Am I right?"

  "Yes, ma'am," the driver assured her. "I saw it on a 'Kojak' rerun."

  "How could we get in there?" Her voice trailed off and she stared back over the spires of the Upper East Side with intense concentration. They were passing over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and Manhattan lay behind them, its newer buildings shining with bright metallic splendor beneath the sparkling skies of the sunny autumn day. What a shame to die on a day like this, T.S. thought. Even the New York air smelled clean, for a change.

  Auntie Lil was silent, searching for a solution. Since T.S. and Auntie Lil had been soul mates for all of his life, he knew what she was thinking at exactly the same time the idea came to her.

  "No," he said firmly. "I won't ask her."

  "Oh, Theodore." She turned to him and clutched his sleeve, beseeching him for help. He rather enjoyed seeing her beg.

  "Lilah knows everyone," Auntie Lil cooed. "And you know how fond of you she is. She's probably been dying for you to telephone her."

  "How do you know I haven't been taking her dancing every single night of the week?" he asked grumpily, annoyed at her accurate inference.

  Auntie Lil did not bother to answer. They both knew where the truth lay.

  T.S. stared out his window and watched a subway train cross the Manhattan Bridge in the distance. Lilah. She moved in a different world, a world of money and meaningless titles and men who owned businesses and women who always looked at least twenty years younger than their age.

  He had always been a confident, prepared man in control. But around Lilah, T.S. often felt inexplicably inferior and clumsy. As much as his dreams secretly centered on Lilah, she made his present reality strange and unsettling. He did not like being out of control of his heart, his head or his tongue. So, no, of course he had not been taking Lilah out dancing every night of the week. In fact, he had not seen her at all in months. And Auntie Lil knew it.

  Auntie Lil always said that he needed to learn how to live, but just saying so wasn't enough for T.S. Sometimes, he longed for someone to show him how to live. And sometimes he longed for the courage to be different from
the stiff and inflexible but capable man that he had been for so many years.

  "I could call her," Auntie Lil offered with as much humbleness as she could muster. Even she knew that she was treading on some very thin ice. She liked Lilah almost as much as T.S. liked Lilah, but she had no desire to hurt her beloved nephew.

  "No, I'm a big boy. I can certainly call her." There. He'd said it. Now he'd just have to follow through.

  "Tonight?" she demanded. Boy, she never knew when to stop pushing her luck. That was probably why she was so damn lucky.

  "Okay. Okay. Tonight." He shifted his legs uncomfortably and sighed. Already his palms were starting to sweat.

  3

  T.S. spent the early part of the evening devising ways to put off the phone call to Lilah Cheswick. It was amazing how inventive he could be when desperation drove him to it. He began by retracing the steps of his cleaning lady earlier that day, but since she took perverse pleasure in being even cleaner than him (a near impossibility) there was not a single speck of dust to discover throughout his ruthlessly organized and sparsely furnished apartment. Alarmed by his restless activity, Brenda and Eddie followed him the entire time, meowing ceaselessly for more food just in case he suffered a temporary lapse of memory and they got lucky. They didn't—T.S. had put them both on strict diets since they resembled seals more than cats—but they did each nab an anchovy-stuffed olive when T.S. finally decided to tackle the refrigerator.

  There wasn't much to do. Like every single one of the rooms in his six-room apartment, the refrigerator was spotless and gleaming clean. He wiped out the butter compartment, just in case the cleaning lady had missed it, then restacked his frozen dinners according to the main entree.

  That done, he took a blow dryer to his bedroom slippers to restore the nap then checked all of his paintings and prints with a carpenter's level to ensure they were hanging properly. After all, it had been at least a month since he'd performed these all-important tasks.

  Remembering some new purchases from the day before, T.S. then added a few entries to the computerized cross-indexed catalog he maintained on his private music collection, which was heavy on opera and show tunes. There was no point in checking the shelves of hardback books. He'd spent the morning before dusting and organizing those. Paperbacks were not allowed in the apartment, at least not after T.S. had eagerly read them. They were spirited down the hall and given to a neighbor so that Auntie Lil would not discover that he read best-selling thrillers and cheap detective novels by the handful each week.

  He was finally reduced to killing another hour by rearranging his impeccably organized personal files chronologically instead of alphabetically. Then, realizing the absurdity of such a system, he moved them back as they were. In doing so, a small envelope fluttered to the floor from his Personal Correspondence, 1942-1955 file. He stared at it. The combination of Auntie Lil's earlier lecture and the letter's familiar handwriting triggered a flood of memories, as well as curiosity about how his past would seem to a stranger. People would find it odd, he supposed, that he had kept a correspondence file beginning with age seven. But then, not many people had been sent to boarding school at such a young age. And even fewer had had their letters to home returned regularly, with grammar and spelling carefully corrected by a well meaning but rigid schoolteacher mother.

  Had T.S. been more sentimental, and less like his mother, it might have hurt his feelings. He had, instead, made a game out of trying to send her letters perfect in every way—thus embarking on a career of perfectionism that, among other compulsions, drove him to save every personal letter he received with the reply date noted on the front of each envelope.

  He held the childish letter in his hand. It began with "Dear Mummy and Daddy." How strange. Children never called their mothers "Mummy" anymore, did they? It was hard for him to know for sure. Children were as foreign to T.S. as Zulu warriors, and a great deal more alarming. He noted with satisfaction that his mother had uncovered a mere three mistakes in the letter, and picayune ones at that, at a time when he was only eight years old. Not bad. Of course, by age ten he'd been able to beat her at her own game and had earned brief laudatory replies at the bottom of his own letters in return. It was better than nothing at all and, nearly fifty years later, he still treasured the perfunctory paragraphs of praise from his emotionally distant mother.

  Replacing the letter into its proper folder, T.S. ran his fingers over the neat pile of perfectly ordered correspondence. Each letter—with certain rather spectacular exceptions—was very thin and very carefully folded. The exceptions were missives from Auntie Lil, posted from all corners of the world as she trekked here and there, following the fashion designers she served as they searched for new styles and new fabrics. He had awaited each of her letters with an eagerness he felt ashamed to admit to anyone else. No one else at boarding school, he remembered, in all those years away from home, could have claimed more exotic correspondence. Her letters had arrived at his always well sterilized room with wonderful irregularity, always fat and crammed with clippings, scraps of fabric, photographs of herself with strangers and stacks of postcards she'd meant to send earlier. They literally overflowed with evidence of a world so chaotic it both frightened and excited his prematurely adult mind.

  T.S. knew even then how much his mother despised Auntie Lil and her unorthodox, sometime scandalous, ways. But, while struggling to maintain loyalty toward his rigidly conventional mother, T.S. had always been drawn closer to Auntie Lil's warm and loving flame, craving her maternal beacon and carefree, capable spirit. Unlike his mother, who had been "Fondly" for as long as he could remember, Auntie Lil signed her letters to T.S. with "Love Always From Your Most Adoring Aunt." After five decades, he knew she still meant it with all of her heart.

  He sighed. Auntie Lil would not be putting off a phone call like a bashful teenager. In fact, she was probably out somewhere right now on one of her many dates eating food of undetermined origin with people whose names were hard to pronounce. Her taste in friends was every bit as exotic as her taste in clothing and correspondence.

  He sighed. He owed it to her to call Lilah. And he owed it to her to help her find out Emily's true identity. There had been many times in the past when all that lay between T.S. and a bleak, boring life was his fun-loving Aunt Lil. It was now his turn to pay her back. She wanted so much to embark on a new project. And there was a real need beneath her surface sorrow at the poor woman's death. While his mother was content to spend her days imperiously ordering about the staff of an elderly care facility, Auntie Lil was different.

  She wanted, T.S. knew, to go down kicking and screaming. And she truly needed new mysteries to survive.

  He held a fat and yellowed envelope from her in his hand. Sent from Malaysia in 1954, it still held a sliver of banana frond and a faded newspaper clipping of Auntie Lil flanked by dozens of dark and smiling faces. T.S. ran a finger across the crease of the letter then carefully tucked it back in place. It was time to call Lilah Cheswick.

  Lilah was rich enough to afford a houseful of servants, but hated having them about. T.S. was not surprised when she answered the phone herself on the third ring.

  "Hello?" she asked calmly. "Do please hold on." Her smoky voice snaked through the telephone wires, sending a flame shooting down the length of his previously placid fifty-five-year-old body. He was too old for such nonsense, but too young not to want it.

  He heard a crinkling sound in the background, then a thump and a muffled ladylike oath followed by more crinkling and an exasperated sigh. Finally, she returned to the phone with apologetic politeness. "So sorry to keep you waiting. Who is this, please?"

  "Lilah?" His voice was louder than he'd expected. He calmed down and continued. "Lilah—it's me. I'm T.S." What was he saying? His tongue had a life of its own.

  "Theodore!" Only two people in the entire world were allowed to call him by his full name. Lilah Cheswick was one of them.

  "Where have you been, Theodore?" Her voice swelled
and took on a rich warmth that T.S. was too afraid to even suspect might be for him. Lilah was always a woman to get right to the point. "Why haven't you been calling me?" she demanded in a good-humored tone of voice.

  Now that was an excellent question. "I don't know," he confessed. "I thought you'd prefer to be left alone for a while."

  "Theodore, you know me too well to really believe that. Robert's been dead for months but, to me, he'd been dead for years."

  It was true. T.S. thought back to the murder of Lilah's husband and to her well-balanced sorrow. She and her husband had not had a happy life together and she was not the kind of woman to milk grief for her own benefit. "I don't know why I haven't called," he finally offered. "I thought you'd probably be too busy."

  "Too busy? Doing what? My daughters are off at school. I've read every book ever published. My friends bore me and now I can't even get this stupid frozen dinner open, so I'll probably starve to death before they can bore me to death." There was another thump and some more exasperated crinkling.

  "Try cutting the plastic with a knife," he suggested. "There's really no other way."

  "Theodore, you're a genius. Deirdre's left me for a week and I'm helpless. There!" He heard the thump of a microwave door closing and she was back on the line. "To what do I owe this honor? You have four minutes to explain and then I'm tearing into that dinner with my very well-bred teeth. You don't want to take me out to dinner, I suppose?"

  "Yes. Yes, I do." He practically shouted, and didn't even care. Not even he would pass up such an opening. "Let's go to dinner tomorrow night."

  "That would be lovely. I think I'll survive until then."

  He was so busy admiring her voice and marveling at her calm and apparent disregard of his own nervousness that, at first, he neglected to reply. When he realized he'd been holding the phone silently for nearly half a minute, he panicked and did what he'd always done with women: he blurted out the first thing that crossed his mind.