Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery

by Rosemary Harris

  This was a far cry from Babe’s previous life twenty or so years earlier when she was a backup singer traveling with a band and the dear departed Pete number one. Late in the day when there were no kids around, she would let slip one of her more outrageous anecdotes, and she never failed to gather a crowd at the diner’s counter, leaving most of her listeners feeling Walter Mittyish for living vicariously through her adventures instead of getting off their butts and having some of their own. Once in a while a story sounded suspiciously like something I’d seen in a movie or read in a novel, but if she was embellishing, who cared? Who didn’t relive the past and burnish some stories to make herself seem smarter, hipper, and funnier? And she told the stories well, with enough brio and detail to make you feel as if you’d been there with her, partying with rock stars and dancing on yachts.

  “I miss it sometimes,” she’d said, “traveling with the Jimmy Collins Band. A different city every week. Hell, sometimes every night. That was a lifetime ago. I have no complaints. Somebody once told me there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. The first half of my life, I went on the journey. Now I’m here and the people who come to the diner are the ones who come to town.” A bittersweet smile had crossed her face when she said it, and I wondered if she was thinking about Pete number one and how they had come to this town so many years ago.

  Babe brushed her hands on her tight black jeans, held the diner’s screen door open, and shooed me inside. “C’mon, Linnaeus,” she said. Babe was a quick study.

  “Town” was Springfield, Connecticut, somewhere between Boston and New York and light-years from both. I had come to Springfield from New York City years earlier as a summer renter, thinking everything was so much smaller and simpler than my life in New York. People said hello. After only two trips to the diner I was asked if I was having “the usual.”

  Arrogantly, I found everything quaint. Then a few years back I lost my job and my boyfriend in one sixty-day period. I came here to lick my wounds and I never left. Small and simple was just what I needed.

  “Speaking of a man going on a journey, have you heard from Neil?” I asked casually, sliding onto a counter stool and positioning my backpack on the one next to it. I peeled off my garden gloves, shoved them into a back pocket, and checked out the day’s specials on the blackboard. I made an extra effort to appear to be studying the menu in case the subject of her relationship with Neil was off-limits.

  Babe’s face softened. Neil was her sweet young thing. He had gone home to Scotland because his mother was ill and wound up staying longer than any of them had expected. “He’s supposed to be back in two weeks, according to the last round of electronic missives.”

  Neil had been e-mailing and Twittering lists of movies, foods, and recreational activities he expected to indulge in once he got home. They were sweet, like two teenagers separated during summer vacation. Babe smacked her lips as if Neil were one of Pete number two’s architectural, Food Network desserts. “His mom is out of the woods medically, but it sounds like she didn’t change a lightbulb or hang a picture in the seven years he’s been in this country. You’d think no one else in Scotland knew how to use a spanner. That’s a wrench…or a hammer. I forget which.”

  “C’mon, isn’t it just the mom thing? Don’t you have it have with your kids?”

  “My kids? They’ve been independent from a very early age.”

  That’s right. I recalled one of Babe’s late-night storytelling sessions. She told us how one night her sons, Dylan and Daltry, had borrowed a friend’s car to catch Hootie & the Blowfish at a club called Emerald City, more than a hundred miles away. They almost made it, when a couple of bored staties pulled them over on the Jersey Turnpike for driving with a broken taillight. Her sons were eleven and thirteen at the time and the only thing that bothered Babe was that they’d done it all to see Hootie and not some edgier, hipper band. Independent was an understatement. So independent that I’d never met them and neither had anyone at the diner. They hadn’t been back east since their father had died. That was a subject I didn’t touch. People were funny when it came to their kids.

  I placed my order—red, white, and blueberry waffles, probably the reason for my extra four pounds—and went to wash my hands. When I got back, Babe was peering out the window through the miniblinds.

  “What have we here?” she said under her breath. “If it’s Tuesday it must be…what, horseback riding or lacrosse? Convoy of Main Street Moms arriving, Pete. Crank up the cappuccino machine.” Which was a joke, since she didn’t own a cappuccino machine, although Pete was lobbying hard for one, as well as a copper milk steamer he’d seen on QVC.

  I half stood in my seat to see what was holding her attention for so long. A flotilla of sleek cars had arrived and pulled into the angled parking spots adjacent to the entrance as if they were a team of synchronized swimmers or trained seals. Just as gracefully, out the drivers came, first one smooth fair head, then the next.

  All the moms wore slightly different permutations of the same early fall outfit—turtlenecks, leather vests, quilted jackets, quilted vests, leather jackets, with well-coordinated gloves, scarves, and bags that were like the colors on creamy decorator paint chips. Pricey paint.

  Four or five kids who could have belonged to any of the women piled out of the back of the largest SUV. Towheaded angels, a cross between the psycho kids from Village of the Damned and those from the latest Ralph Lauren ad campaign whose little duds probably cost more than my first car, although that wasn’t saying much. Something about the mothers suggested they had just parked Thoroughbred horses, like their cars, on similar angles, and left them in the nearby Mossdale Stables.

  Caroline Sturgis was the last to dismount from a silver, or maybe it was a Paul Revere pewter Land Rover. Caroline was one of my first customers in Springfield. We’d met at a local thrift shop—I was buying, she was donating. Despite the differences in our ages and socioeconomic groups, she seemed to gravitate toward me. As a newcomer with a business, I needed all the contacts I could get, so I responded.

  This would be the third year I’d looked after Caroline’s property, weaning her from the pedestrian triumvirate of impatiens, marigold, and red salvia and steering her toward more adventurous plantings, or at least my notion of them. But I’d kept my distance for the last month or so because making a house call inevitably involved a pitcher of something alcoholic. I’d succumbed in the past and it resulted in my losing a day’s work and once, a dozen flats of pansies that had sat wilting in the sun for hours while Caroline and I got very happy on a bottle of Mouton Rothschild. Getting loaded early in the day was something a rich suburban matron might be able to do, but it was a no-no for a woman of modest means who was struggling to keep her small business afloat.

  It was just cool enough to turn up your collar without looking too affected, so Caroline and the Moms settled in at a table outside—one farthest from the road, mostly out of the sun, and at an appropriate distance from another table of women whom they acknowledged but didn’t join. Their kids commandeered a picnic table nearby.

  These were the well-heeled ladies of Springfield and its neighboring towns. They traveled in packs to book groups and charity events, prep school fund-raisers and the occasional local art show or dramatic performance. They were attractive, polite, and just standoffish enough to make you feel justified in not feeling all warm and fuzzy toward them. If there was a Junior League in Connecticut I wasn’t aware of it, but I imagined that the Main Street Moms—as Babe had christened them—were the unofficial New England equivalent. I had a love-hate relationship with them. Two or three more on my client list and I could stop worrying about the rising cost of mulch and start packing for the Virgin Islands, but with a last shred of independence, self-respect, or city slicker stupidity—I didn’t know which—I couldn’t bring myself to suck up to them the way any other small businesswoman would have.

  Babe motioned for one of her young waitresses to go o
utside and take their orders.

  “Why me?” the girl said, her expression changing from sullen to stricken. “They always look at me as if I have two heads.” She didn’t. She had one head, but she did have more than the requisite seven holes in it. Thank goodness my generation was satisfied with a few extra holes in our earlobes.

  “Hey, Terry, you don’t wanna be looked at, lose the nose ring and the eyebrow bolts. Otherwise wear your freak flag proudly,” Babe said, sympathetic but firm. She swished a handful of menus under the girl’s pierced nose.

  “Great. Now I’m going to have to google freak flag. I don’t know what that means, but I’m going,” the girl said, shaking her head. She snatched the menus and let the screen door slam as she went out, but her chin was the tiniest bit higher than it been earlier, getting the spirit of the advice if not the actual reference.

  “Good girl!” Babe said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked quietly.

  “Et tu, Paula? You girls are sadly lacking in a basic cultural education,” Babe said. “I told them to write down everything they heard in the diner that they didn’t understand and then look it up. Freak flag? Woodstock? The Dead? Frank Zappa? Crosby, Stills and Nash? What are you girls going to listen to when you get old, sitting in that rocking chair on the nursing home porch? The Spice Girls? Salt-N-Pepa?”

  Outside, shielding her eyes, Caroline Sturgis twisted in her seat and peered through the miniblinds until she located me at the counter. She wiggled her fingers in my direction, said something to her friends, then excused herself and headed for the front door. I knew I should have parked the Jeep farther in the rear, she might not have known I was there.

  “Hello, partner,” she sang, accompanied by the screen door’s bells. She walked in my direction with just the hint of a cowboy swagger.

  “That’s premature,” I said. “I haven’t agreed to anything.”

  For months Caroline had been pursuing me. She wanted us to start a business together, but I wasn’t sold on the idea. I worried there would be lots of celebrating and not a lot of working. She might be able to write off a failed business as this year’s uncompleted pet project, like a quilt or an exercise program, but I couldn’t. Besides, I didn’t like partners and hadn’t had one for a while. Professional or otherwise. Having been thrown recently, I was finding it hard to get back on the horse.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Caroline said, wagging a finger at me. “I know it.”

  Of course she knew it. I was the worst liar on the planet. That’s how my mother always knew when I stayed out too late or sneaked beers and cigarettes with my girlfriends and then tried to mask the smell with Altoids. That’s why I’d had a string of two-date relationships. What’s the point? If it’s not happening, it’s not happening. And that was why it was a good thing I was no longer in the television business, where lying was practically a job requirement.

  “This is not just a bored housewife’s fantasy,” Caroline said. She’d read my mind.

  “I’ve written a business plan. I have spreadsheets and everything, and I’m going to sit here until you agree to meet with me to discuss it.”

  That last line was delivered with all the certainty of a three-year-old who announces that he’s going to hold his breath until you do something, knowing full well that you’re not going to let him turn himself blue, even if he could.

  Caroline had unwittingly just listed everything I hated. I came to Springfield to get away from spreadsheets and business plans. I was hardly going to be lured back into harness by a pie chart. And I’d gotten used to being the boss. Okay, my full-time staff was sitting on this counter stool, but at least I didn’t think my boss was an idiot, as most people do.

  Still, I liked Caroline. What started as a business relationship had developed into something more—a friendship not based on history and “remember when.” And it wasn’t as if I had any burning plans for the next few months other than keeping this counter seat warm and keeping Babe company. I’d briefly considered an off-season job but didn’t really see myself plowing people’s driveways, which was what most of the other gardeners did during winter.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad getting toasted before noon during those long, cold months between November and February when business was slow or, let’s face it, nonexistent. Caroline drank the good stuff, too, no screw-top bottles for her. I could resurrect my fondness for Veuve Clicquot and premium vodka on her dime, instead of indulging in the Two Buck Chuck I’d been sipping and pretending to like on those chilly evenings alone by the fire.

  I was driving into the city the next day, picking up my pal Lucy, and heading to Bucks County for an old colleague’s wedding. Now that nuptials lasted five days and required interstate, if not intercontinental, travel I wasn’t likely to be back in Connecticut for almost a week, especially if I tacked on a few days visit with Lucy.

  “When were you thinking of getting together?” I asked, taking out my phone and scrolling through the calendar.

  “I knew it! I knew you’d say yes!” Caroline said. “We’re going to buy Chiaramonte’s!”

  “I haven’t said yes. I agree to talk about it when I get back and perhaps advise you, that’s all.”

  Caroline nodded, not hearing me. Why are blond women always so sure we’re going to do what they want? And why do we do it? I was sure it had something to do with the vestigial scars from high school. We’re still hoping the cool kids will want to have lunch with us. How pathetic is that?

  She pulled out an old-style planner, blood-red leather, with her initials stamped in gold on the front. All the pages still had hard edges, and there were no stray papers or business cards sticking out. Brand-new for her brand-new venture. It was endearing. She flipped through a few pages with a fat ceramic pen.

  “I can’t do next week, either—college visits. Jason’s only fourteen, but that’s when you have to start looking. He’s had a wish list since he was nine. How about the following week? I told Sarah I’d go with her to the doctor’s, but I don’t know which day yet. She’ll need my support,” she said, almost to herself. “She’s getting Brandon’s DNA results back to see which sports he’ll be good at.”

  I wracked my brain trying to think which of the little blond urchins was Brandon. “Isn’t he just a toddler?”

  “That’s when you’re supposed to do it, or else Sarah might waste a lot of time taking him to the wrong classes.”

  That’s right, heaven forbid Brandon spends time at an activity for which he is not genetically predisposed.

  “How about meeting on the twelfth, nine A.M. at my place unless I let you know otherwise? Does that work for you?” Caroline asked. “I’ll come straight home from my morning ride.”

  It did indeed. In the fall, almost everything worked for me, especially when someone asked that far in advance. It was the time of year when I remembered the concept of weekends, too. And exercise that involved colorful weights instead of forty-pound bags of topsoil or manure.

  In any event, our scheduled appointment gave me enough time to figure out how to let Caroline down gently when I eventually said no. It was a hundred to one I’d actually want to go in to business with her, but why blow her off completely; no point in totally burning bridges or alienating my biggest customer.

  Mission accomplished, Caroline left to rejoin her pals outside, chirping to Babe on her way out to think of a good name for our new gardening venture.

  Babe and I answered at the same time, “What’s wrong with Dirty Business?”

  Caroline laughed like a teenager. “Dirty Business—that is a good name, better than Chiaramonte’s. Done!” She snaked through a knot of recent arrivals and tried unsuccessfully to ignore the comments of a handful of truckers waiting to be seated. She smiled but sidestepped them, backing up against the Snapple fridge, as if coming too close would somehow contaminate her or rough up the nap of her tan suede jacket. It was all very faux friendly.

  In the group was one long-haired, bearded
guy, not bad looking if you liked that slightly grungy Johnny-Damon-when-he-was-a-Red-Sox look. He wore Oakley sunglasses, a dark green windbreaker, and a baseball cap with an ornate letter D on the crown.

  He took off the glasses to get a better look at Caroline or perhaps to give her a better look at him—I couldn’t tell which. Neither Babe nor I heard the exchange, but from Caroline’s reaction something he said shook her up. She rushed out the door, and Babe shrugged as if to say, “what the hell?” Caroline must have made some excuse to her friends because without even touching her coffee she left a few dollars on the table and hurried to her car. “Johnny Damon” walked to the door and put his hand on the handle as if he was going to go after her.

  “What did I tell you boys about scaring the locals?” Babe said it loudly enough to stop him in his tracks. He turned around and smiled. “Do you know what the markup is on coffee and a fat-free muffin versus the lumberjack specials and endless cups of coffee you animals are gonna suck down?” Babe might not have looked like much of a businesswoman, but she knew where every penny went and where it had come from. Anna and I could take a page from her book.

  “I didn’t mean nothing, honest,” he said, walking back to the counter. “I just said she looked familiar. You look familiar, too, pretty lady,” he said. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

  “That’s highly original. Are you, by any chance recently divorced? Because I don’t think I’ve heard that one since leg warmers were in style. Next time, you could try asking what her sign is. I hear that one’s making a comeback, too.”

  She was busting his chops but in a gentle, flirty way, smiling and leaning over the counter. Few people left Babe’s without wanting to be either her friend or her lover. This one was a toss-up.