by C. R. Corwin
“Effie herded Chick into one corner and I herded Gordon into the other.”
“You were able to cool them off then?”
Gwen squinted at her rice, as if she’d discovered one of those famous kernels inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer. “We tried,” she said, “but they were so worked up, Maddy.”
“Don’t tell me they started wrestling again?”
“No. But they kept sputtering at each other. Chick finally left without him.”
I wasn’t expecting that little nugget. “Left without him? They came together?”
“They always went to things together, Maddy. To parties. To movies. Even their vacations, I guess.”
“They were friends for a lot of years,” I said.
Gwen pressed her lips together, as if she were going to cry. “Effie used to say they were like an old married couple. God. I hope Chick didn’t lose his head.”
“You mean you hope he didn’t murder Gordon?”
She dabbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand. Reached for her wine goblet. “You don’t think it’s possible, do you?”
“Of course not. So who took Gordon home that night?”
Gwen peeked at me over the top of her goblet. “I did.”
We talked for another half hour, a little about my life and a lot about hers. We agreed it was a crying shame that it took a tragedy to bring us together again. Then it was time for me to beg off the cherry-almond clafouti she’d baked and head back to the morgue.
I went back to work with a lot of questions. Not the least among them how they got a snazzy place like the Blue Tangerine to serve baked beans.
***
Saturday, April 14
I’d learned the hard way to James-proof the house before leaving. I made sure the toilet seat was down. I put my slippers in the closet. I went to the kitchen and filled his food and water bowls to the brim. I left a mountain of assorted dog snacks and rawhide chewies on the throw rug in front of the sink. I turned on the TV and flipped the channels to CSPAN, in the hope the boring political talk would put him in a coma. I turned down the ring on my telephone. For some reason when he hears it he goes bananas and starts gnawing on the legs of my dining room table. Finally I gave him a good ear-digging and told him a dozen times what a good boy he was. I headed for the garage, serenaded by his anguished howls.
I drove to Chick’s house. This time he didn’t know I was coming. I ran through the icy rain to his porch. I rang the bell. I straightened my vertebrae and waited.
He came to the door in a baggy pair of walking shorts, inside-out sweatshirt, messy hair and bare feet. He was not exactly happy to see me. “Miss Marple, I presume?”
I smiled weakly. “I guess you saw the college paper.”
“Pretty hard to miss.”
“That’s why I came. I figured I should explain myself.”
He led me to the living room. He motioned for me to sit on the sofa. He sat in a wing-backed chair, on the other side of the room. “I didn’t want you to think I suspected you of anything,” I began. “Because you know I don’t.”
“Do I know that, Maddy?”
If he was going to be snippy with me, well, then I was going to be snippy right back. “If you don’t, you should.”
He softened a smidge. “Why didn’t you tell me you were looking into Gordon’s murder? I would have helped you any way I could.”
“That still goes?”
He leaned back in his chair and wrapped his arms around his skinny torso. Between his big pointy nose, scowling eyes and long bony legs, he looked like the freeze-dried cadaver of a whooping crane. “Of course it still goes,” he said.
It would have been a nice time for him to offer me a cup of tea, or even a glass of ice water. But he offered me nothing and I started into the speech I’d been rehearsing all morning and still didn’t know how to end: “I don’t suspect you of anything. But I’m not so sure the police don’t. I know you’re a private man, Chick, but unless you’re totally forthright about things, you might find yourself in a lot more trouble than you deserve.”
He hinged his knees and leaned forward, as if he was going to spring at me, and peck out my eyes. “And just what do you think I should be forthright about?”
“About anything you need to be forthright about,” I said. “Like your fight with Gordon at the Kerouac Thing. You told me it didn’t amount to anything. And you probably told the police it was nothing, too. But it did amount to something. And from what I hear, you can’t account for your time that Thursday.”
Chick unfolded from the chair and stalked to the fireplace. “I taught my morning class. Came home. Had lunch. Worked all afternoon grading papers. Had a sandwich. Curled up with Carl Sandburg and went to bed.”
I chose my words carefully. “It’s just that some people are questioning your relationship with Gordon.”
He swung around. His walking shorts fluttered. He knew what I was getting at. “Do I look like a homosexual to you?”
“Heavens to Betsy, Chick. At my age I don’t even remember what a heterosexual man looks like. But people are wondering.”
“You mean you’re wondering.”
He was right, of course, but I stuck to my guns. “People are wondering.”
He started to boil. “If Gordon and I were that—wouldn’t that make it less likely that I killed him?”
“People who are just friends rarely kill each other,” I said. “Lovers, all the time.”
He flopped next to me on the sofa. Rested his head on the Indian blanket across the back. “I did not kill him, Maddy.”
“And you’ve got Carl Sandburg to vouch for your evening?”
He threw up his hands, like an Italian waiter carrying giant bowls of pasta. “People can believe what they want to believe. You included.”
I stood up and fidgeted with the bottom of my sweater. “Would it be okay if I used your bathroom?”
My luck was with me. He told me the bathroom was upstairs. Which is exactly where I wanted to go.
I climbed the hollow steps. I leaned on the bathroom sink and took off my shoes. I remembered the day I’d visited how I could hear the floor squeaking above me. I slid carefully into the hallway and shuffled in my stocking feet to his office. I quietly orbited his big messy desk. I searched the row of photographs on his bookshelves, until I found the one I wanted—the one he’d shown me the day I came to lunch, the one of Gordon and him at Jack Kerouac’s grave.
I studied their young faces. Were those the faces of friends or lovers? I studied the easy, intimate way they were leaning against each other. Had I missed something all those years ago? Was I missing something now? Then I heard the floor squeak and saw Chick’s frozen silhouette in the doorway. He came toward me. He lifted his arm. He took the photograph. He studied it the way I’d been studying it.
I took a shaky breath. If he intended to kill me, it apparently was not going to be immediately. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see it again,” I said. “It’s such a wonderful picture of you two.”
He looked at my feet. He smiled sadly. He wasn’t buying my explanation but he didn’t seem to care. “That was a long time ago, Maddy. A million years.”
I hadn’t come to wheedle a confession out of Chick. Or to convince myself that he was innocent. I’d come to see that photograph again and somehow get an answer to the question I was now going to ask: “Who took it, anyway?”
He glared at me over his beak.
I played down my curiosity. “It’s just something I always wonder when I see an old photo like that. Who was there but couldn’t be in the picture because they had to take it. My father took us all over the place on vacations—to Niagara Falls and Maine and Atlantic City and one year in the middle of summer to Florida—and it was like he never went along, because he was never in any of the pictures. Of course, maybe you had one of those cameras with a timer.”
He put the photo back on the shelf. “Penelope Yarrow took it,” he said.
“I do
n’t think I ever met her.”
“She was Gordon’s old girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
Chapter 14
Saturday, April 28
The Easter Bunny didn’t bring me anything but a long, cold, rainy, boring-as-hell weekend with James. But Eric Chen had a nice present for me on Monday—the address and phone number of my Lawrence’s fourth and final wife. I immediately picked up my phone and punched her number, before I could chicken out. I caught her at home, right as she was leaving for work. I apologized for bothering her. She apologized for not having time to talk. “Let me get right to the point then,” I said. “Do you have any of Lawrence’s old clippings from his college newspaper days?”
“Oh my, yes,” she said. She invited me to lunch.
And so the next Saturday Eric and I headed for Sharon, Pennsylvania. Eric agreed to drive his pickup. I agreed to buy his gas, his breakfast, and his six-pack of 20-ounce Mountain Dews.
We left Hannawa at nine-thirty in the morning, heading north on I-491 under a blanket of dirty spring clouds. We shivered at a McDonald’s for a half hour—my egg-and-sausage sandwich making a better hand warmer than an appetizing breakfast—and then we headed east on State Route 82, across Ohio’s half-empty northeast corner. We went through Mantua Corners and Hiram, Garrettsville and Levittsburg, Warren and Brookfield. At eleven-thirty we slipped across the Pennsylvania line and headed for Sharon.
Sharon is only one-tenth the size of Hannawa—sixteen or seventeen thousand people—but it has the same big problems. The steel mills and factories have closed, robbing thousands of local families of the good, steady wages they once depended on. Most of the stores downtown have either gone out of business or moved to the suburbs. The old residential neighborhoods in the hills above the Shenango River are slip-sliding into despair.
Ironically, Sharon in recent years has become something of a tourist destination, drawing a steady trickle of daytrippers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo and Hannawa. They don’t exactly come to suck up the scenery. They come to shop. Sharon boasts the world’s largest candy store, the world’s largest outlet for off-price women’s clothing, and the world’s largest shoe store.
It was at this shoe store—Reyers is the name of it—that I was to meet Lawrence’s widow. She was an assistant manager there.
I’d never been to Reyers before. But I’d sure heard about it. It was located in an old supermarket right downtown. It had over 150,000 pairs of shoes to sort through, in every size, style and color imaginable.
There was a NO FOOD OR BEVERAGES sign on the door. I folded my arms and waited while Eric guzzled the last two inches of his Mountain Dew.
Inside, Eric and I went our separate ways. He headed for the men’s shoes. I headed for the women’s. I hurried through the high heels and pumps, lingered in the flats, finally gravitating toward a sale table piled high with Indian moccasin slippers. They were only six dollars and James, as you remember, had gnawed my old fluffy ones. I started looking for a size seven.
I was spotted by a dowdy saleswoman in a beige pantsuit. She had short gray hair, fake pearls the size of turtle eggs, a smile poured from quick drying cement. “Is someone helping you?” she asked.
“Actually, I’m here to see Dory Sprowls.”
“Actually, I am Dory Sprowls,” she said. “Which probably makes you Maddy Sprowls.”
“It does.”
We shook hands like a couple of bankers. Gave each other the once over. I don’t know what she was expecting, but I know what I was expecting. I was expecting a much younger woman. A much more attractive woman. A tootsie-type with big bazooms, like Lawrence’s second and third wives. But looking at Dory Sprowls was like looking at my reflection in an old storm door. In size, shape, age and general lack of attractiveness, we were two old peas in a pod. “I’m sorry I’m early,” I said. “You never know how long it’s going to take you to drive anywhere this time of year. Especially when you’re not exactly sure where you’re going.”
She pawed the air, just the way I do. “Don’t I know it,” she said.
We found Eric in the boot department. We headed for his truck. I sat in the middle. We drove to her house on the bluffs east of downtown. It was a modest Cape Cod surrounded by unruly shrubs. She gave us the nickel tour and then sat us down at the kitchen table. Before leaving for work, she’d put on a crock pot of beef stew. She ladled out three big bowls, tore apart a loaf of rye bread, and put on a kettle of water for our tea. She gave Eric a fancy goblet for his fresh bottle of Mountain Dew.
I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to compare notes with her about Lawrence. But that’s exactly what we both started to do, before we could swallow our first spoonfuls of stew.
I told her how I’d met Lawrence at Hemphill College, in a freshman English class. How it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but a long friendship that eventually soured into romance. She loved that.
She told me how she’d met him, in Pittsburgh, in a community college cooking class for singles. How their mutual difficulty mincing garlic evolved into something more.
We discovered that we’d both been married to Lawrence the same number of years—six. We discovered that neither of us had taken the time to find another man.
For a long while we howled about the quirky little things we couldn’t stand about our mutual husband—his annoying habit of singing at the breakfast table, the way he clipped his toenails in the living room, how he’d leave his ashtrays on the floor in front of the toilet. It was finally Dory who got down to brass tacks: “He told me he’d been a skunk with you,” she said. “And the two wives after you.”
“You knew about all that and you married him anyway?”
She laughed at her stupidity. “Yes, I did. And he was a skunk with me, too. Until his angina got so bad he couldn’t climb our bedroom stairs let alone somebody else’s.”
I could see in her eyes that she’d loved him. And I suppose she saw that same weakness in mine. “He did have his good points,” I said.
“Yes, he did,” she agreed.
When neither of us could think of any, we turned to the reason I’d come. “Like I said on the phone, Dory, there’s been a murder at the college. A very popular professor. And there’s a chance—a very small chance—that his murder is related to another murder. Back in the fifties. When Lawrence and I were seniors. I thought there might be something helpful in his old college clippings.”
She pointed to a big blue Rubbermaid storage tub on the kitchen counter. “Help yourself.”
My stew was already getting cold but I went straight for the tub. I peeled off the lid and ran my fingers across the tops of the folders stuffed inside. The air around me was immediately thick with the beautiful stench of old newsprint. “This is so good of you. Eric and I can get them copied and back to you in a couple of hours, I’m sure.”
She pointed at me and then my bowl. “Finish your stew. You can take Lawrence’s folders with you. And keep them.”
“Keep them? You sure?”
Again she jabbed her finger at my bowl. I obediently tiptoed back to the table. “Those years belong to you,” she said. “I’ve got lots of other tubs that belong to me.”
We finished our stew. Eric put the Rubbermaid tub in the back of his truck. We drove Dory back to the shoe store. I went inside with her and bought two pairs of those darling six-dollar moccasins.
Then Eric made me go with him to Daffin’s, supposedly, as I said before, the world’s largest candy store. We ogled the chocolate animals on display—the 400-pound turtle, the quarter-ton rhinoceros—and then stocked up on leftover Easter candy. We headed for home.
***
Eric had one hand on the steering wheel and the other around the neck of a huge milk-chocolate rabbit. He’d already eaten one ear and was making quick work of the other. “She was nice, wasn’t she?” he said.
I was nibbling on a marshmallow peep. “Yes, she was.” I just love those marshmallow peeps, especially
when they’re stale and chewy. This one, unfortunately, was still fresh. But I knew that wasn’t going to stop me from eating ten or twelve of the damn things before we got back to Hannawa.
Eric finished the other ear. “No offense, but she reminded me of you.”
I had to agree. “Spooky wasn’t it—almost like Lawrence came back to me after all those years of flopping around.”
The rabbit’s entire head now disappeared into his mouth. “Feel vindicated, do you?”
“Vindicated? It made me feel like shit.”
And it did make me feel like shit. Lawrence, I’m sure, had loved me well enough. But he threw it away for better sex. For twenty-five years he hopped from one anatomically advantaged woman to another, marrying some of them, not marrying most. Then in middle age—older and wiser, his body parts apparently starting to wear out—he married me again. Or at least he married a woman exactly like me. And then the bastard cheated on me all over again! By proxy!
Meanwhile, I’d holed myself up in that damn little convent of mine on Brambriar Court. Pitying myself for the way I was. Pitying Lawrence for the way he was. Romanticizing that nano second of a marriage we had until it was right up there with Romeo and Juliet. In all those years the only man I’d been intimate with was Dale Marabout. He was just an awkward horny kid at the time, twenty years my junior. As nice as it was—and it was nice—it was only a brief sexual vacation. Dale moved on to a woman his own age. I slinked back into my emotional exile, into my martyrdom, into my Morgue Mama-ness.
And now, thanks to the beast who put that bullet in Sweet Gordon’s head, I was being forced to fall in love with Lawrence Sprowls all over again. To dream about a future with him all over again. To have my soul shattered by his infidelities all over again. One thing was clear—I was going to get the sonofabitch who killed Gordon if it killed me.
I made Eric stop his truck, right in the middle of the road. I slid out and went to the back. I pulled out the plastic tub and lugged it back to the cab. I squeezed in next to it. I ordered Eric to “Drive!” I put an entire marshmallow chick in my mouth. I pulled out a folder full of Lawrence’s clippings and started to dig.
