Claire and Present Danger

by Gillian Roberts

  I sat holding my water glass, listening to them, admiring how Mackenzie had finessed our way into the condo and into Batya’s confidences. I remembered what he’d told me about successful con artists. He, too, could have had a lucrative life of crime because he had the ability to adopt a guileless, completely convincing persona while he lied through his teeth. I wasn’t sure that was a great trait in a prospective husband. He also made it easy to forget to question his presence, and I think that would be true even with a more sophisticated person than Batya, a person aware of niceties such as civil rights.

  They spoke, but a voice inside of me did as well, and it wouldn’t stop. Claire Fairchild was nowhere near death, it said. Something is rotten here. She told me she could fool them all, and she was right. Somebody believed she was that sick, or believed everyone else would believe it, and killed her.

  I heard as well a counter-voice, challenging my assumptions, asking the simple question: How? Nobody was there when she died, and there were apparently no signs of violence, or they would have been noted. How could it be anything but a natural death in that case?

  Certainly, death arrived with a snap of the finger, and people keeled over taking everyone by surprise. But until proven otherwise, I was sure that a woman doesn’t investigate a shady future daughter-in-law, a possible killer, fight with people who are outraged and threatened by the investigation, intimidate and threaten her servant, then abruptly die of natural causes without provoking suspicion.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” Mackenzie asked Batya. “Are you here alone?”

  “Batya is alone in this world.”

  But not quite as desperately so as she’d been a day earlier. Batya was now free. Nobody was blackmailing her anymore.

  Mackenzie didn’t have to prod this time. Batya answered the question. “I cannot leave house alone. No. And Mrs. Fairchild, she says . . .” She looked at us, one at a time, and bit at her bottom lip.

  “Go on,” I prompted. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  “She say if she die, she leave me money. Because I take good care of her. I am poor woman . . .” She had run out of tissue and, this time, she lifted her shoulder in an attempt to blot her tears. “Two babies, one sick, please God new one should be okay, and what? What then? My husband is disappeared and now Mrs. Fairchild, too.” Mackenzie fished around in his pockets, found a handkerchief, and passed it over to her. She looked at it, and then at him, as if he’d offered her an annuity for life instead of a piece of cloth. “I wash and clean it for you later,” she whispered.

  He shook his head.

  “Because,” she said, “life. I look at my life and ask, what is life, anyway, and I think, Batya, life is tissue paper. Strong, ha! Like tissue, I am protected by tissue paper.”

  I imagined long nights in a smoky Serbo-Croatian café, arguing what life was. Or long days in a Center City condo.

  “Thin, like tissue. Over, like this,” and once again she snapped her fingers. “My sainted mother is one minute frying breakfast and next . . .” She lifted one hand, as if to snap her fingers one more time, then she sighed, and put the hand back down.

  Both Mackenzie and I nodded sagely. We agreed. Life was tissue paper, but now she had genuine cotton in her hand. Make of it what she would.

  Apparently, the baby was also voting with its feet—whether on the tissue or cotton side of life, we couldn’t tell. Batya looked startled, then put her hand on her belly. “Jumping all the time. The shock . . .” Then she looked at us. “Is not right, he shouts at his mama. My baby never will shout at me. Not allowed where I come from. Child respects.”

  We both maintained our solemn expressions of agreement, but I wondered if Mackenzie, too, was considering how carefully Batya cast the shadow of suspicion on Leo Fairchild and, as an alternate, the bride-to-be who had brought the death flowers. If, indeed, there was anything suspicious about Claire Fairchild’s death, the housekeeper was making sure she was in the clear.

  And why not? Her mental ledger sheet had no downside to Claire Fairchild’s demise. It was all plusses: no I.N.S., no deportation. Plus, a legacy. Death had all the advantages.

  “Help me,” Batya said, pushing forward in the chair. Mackenzie all but catapulted out of his chair and took her arms. “I mean with problem.” She nonetheless accepted the hoist. Once she was standing, she brushed off her belly and faced us.

  She reminded me of the Venus of Willendorf, that Paleolithic carving that supposedly represents the first woman, or at least, the first work of art of an idealized naked woman. The exaggerated, enormous breasts resting on a very pregnant belly, and the rest of the body nearly inconsequential, mere methods of moving around that enormous fertility.

  The Venus of Philadelphia spoke. “Help tell me what I do now.”

  “Do you have family here?” Mackenzie asked.

  Batya bit at her bottom lip. “Aunt. She watches my baby, but is no room there. I sleep on floor when I go. Still, better than here, with ghosts.”

  Perhaps Claire Fairchild had been telling the truth and she’d posthumously reward the woman’s years of loyal service. I hoped so. Unless, of course, Batya had arranged the woman’s end.

  Batya pointed toward the back of the condo. “I mean help me with that. What I do about that?”

  “About what?” I asked, just to prove I was also in the room.

  “Come,” she said, leading us down the hallway to a bedroom. “Mrs. Fairchild’s room is mess. Is all right if I clean? Looks bad for housekeeper to leave mess.”

  The bedclothes were pulled back with a sense of rush and emergency, but that seemed all that was amiss. Otherwise, it looked like a chronically ill elderly person’s room. Apparatus, bottles, and comforting aids, like special pillows.

  The bed was like a hospital bed in that the back portion could be angled up, and it was in that position now. She must have had it that way to talk with her visitors.

  The hospital theme spilled onto her night table, which looked like a pharmacy display, overflowing with pill bottles and pill dispensers. I saw a large segmented one that had the days of the week on it, and it wasn’t the only pill holder. The tabletop was crowded with her medications, but also with small vanities—a lipstick, a hairbrush, a compact, plus predictable necessities like a tissue dispenser and water carafe, and the telephone that hadn’t been used but nonetheless summoned the paramedics. A water glass lay on the floor, a still-wet spot showing around it. It must have been standing on the night table, en route to the telephone.

  “What’s this?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Her compact,” I said. “For face powder.”

  “No!” Batya raised her arms. Hands off, she was saying without words. “This thing, Mrs. Fairchild, she breathes in it so doctor knows how she is.”

  “How? Does he come visit for checkups?”

  She shook her head. “No. She does it a lot, and the telephone, she says, it goes through telephone to him.”

  Mackenzie stared at it for a long while, as if whatever had happened was recorded on it. “I’d like to know. . . ,” he said. “I wonder if . . .”

  Batya looked worried. “Is important thing. Scientific. I never touch.”

  He nodded, then smiled at her and looked around. The oxygen tank idled on the floor near a basket filled with magazines. As Leo had unfortunately noted, she didn’t seem much of a reader. I didn’t see a single book in the room, but a TV set on the far wall faced the bed. The remote control was still on the spread, and Batya pointed at it and waited until Mackenzie said it was fine to remove it.

  “Was she using oxygen when the paramedics came?” Mackenzie asked in the lightest of voices.

  Batya looked stumped and shook her head. Then she spoke slowly. “I . . . no. No,” said more emphatically. “Strange. Should be on her face at night. Night is worst for her breath, when she sleeps.”

  “That is strange,” Mackenzie said in that agreeable voice that made Batya and C. K. part of a team.


  I didn’t find it strange that she hadn’t been on oxygen. Claire Fairchild had died before she settled in for the night.

  “Mrs. Fairchild would be angry at mess like this.”

  My definition of a mess had a lot more slack built into it than Batya’s did. But I wasn’t the housekeeper, still afraid of what the late Mrs. Fairchild would think of the scene, and my ego did not ride on such things.

  “People think lazy housekeeper, such mess. But the TV, they say all the time don’t touch anything.”

  “That’s at the scene of a crime,” Mackenzie said, as always making the word have no hard edges. When he says it, crahm sounds nearly edible, and not at all frightening. “Police weren’t here, were they?”

  “Men came to take her away.”

  “Paramedics took her to the hospital.”

  “She is dead already when they come.”

  “Yes, but . . . they weren’t the police. Still,” he said, “it’s okay to leave things alone for a bit. Take a rest. Relax.”

  “Is okay I make the bed? Mrs. Fairchild, she—”

  “Why not? But don’t touch anything else yet.”

  She nodded gravely and moved, slowly, toward the bed, obviously eager to smooth the covers. “Nothing else,” she said. “Nothing else, then Mr. Leo, he cannot say I take his mother’s things.”

  “Good idea. Everything will take care of itself in a while,” Mackenzie said kindly. “You have other, happier things to think about, like your baby.”

  She blinked and looked down at her beach-ball body and I thought she might cry, but instead, she took another deep breath and nodded while she fussed and pulled and straightened and smoothed the sheets and covers.

  I felt sorry for the life that had driven her out of her home and homeland, sorry she was now so alone in this new world. Sorry that her job and husband were both gone and, along with them, whatever safety she’d envisioned for herself and her children.

  Nonetheless, while Batya smoothed the last inch of cover, I tried to memorize everything I could see, to burn a mental image of where things were placed and what things they were. To be the camera.

  As if it were a crime scene, because I was positive it was.

  Eleven

  “WELCOME to the ranks of the unemployed,” C. K. said as we left the late Mrs. Fairchild’s building. “Well, except that you’re not, teach.”

  “Unemployed? Are you saying that just because—”

  “She’s dead? You weren’t going to say that, were you? Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she isn’t still employing us? Who is she, Elvis? She’s gone, the investigation’s gone, and we’re outta there. As is, it’s going to be harder ’n hell to get paid for what we already did. Leo doesn’t sound like the easiest guy on earth, and he obviously wasn’t happy with his mother’s decision to hire us.”

  “Can you walk away from the whole thing like that?”

  “What else am I supposed to do? The woman is finished with problems and questions, unless the afterlife is a much more anxious spot than we’ve been led to believe. An’ she definitely can’t write checks anymore.” He stopped in front of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and read the menu posted in the storefront window. “Are you as hungry as I am?” he asked.

  “Look here, Mackenzie. She’s gone, but we’re still here.”

  He stood up straight again. “Indeed. Here and alive and hungry as hell.”

  “About our budget? Our carefully worked out mutually agreed-upon eating plan? And today of all times—right after you tell me we aren’t going to be paid for the job we just did.”

  “What say? Just this once? Even though this menu’s Greek to me. Place smells good.”

  I glanced at the menu. “This is Greek to everybody.” We had gone over our new finances a dozen times, and had come up with the current income and outgo plan. Due to Mackenzie’s more regular hours, now that he was no longer chasing crazed killers around on their time schedules, dinner together was a predictable almost-daily event, and somebody had to think about it. We took turns being responsible for producing something edible.

  The new budget did not allow for lots of meals away from home or even cooked by other hands and brought into the home. In exchange for these additional domestic duties, we agreed to drop our standards of cuisine to anything that didn’t cause permanent damage to the central nervous system.

  Truth is, I’d come to enjoy both my turns and Mackenzie’s, though most times, we split the chopping and broiling or whatever needed to be done. It was a good time of day, close to my favorite, when we’d gone our separate ways and were back together to talk about where our travels had taken us.

  “Pretty inexpensive,” Mackenzie said. “The prices are in English.”

  Tonight was officially my turn. Was it my ethical responsibility to remind him of that, or of our promises to be fiscally wise at all times?

  I decided it was not. He was an exceptionally smart man, and surely he’d considered those factors already and didn’t need my input. Besides, I had a hunger headache and was still upset about Claire Fairchild, and not a little upset, too, with the way Mackenzie had blithely dismissed the entire matter.

  We went into the small room, fragrant with olive and lamb-scented steam, and my stomach and I realized the encounter with Sonia Lawrence had detoured me from lunch and I hadn’t had a chance to eat anything since half a bagel at breakfast, except the pretzels that were a constant at Ozzie’s office.

  Ambience was not this restaurant’s forte. Once, this had been a living room, which should have made it homey, but it was bleak, with the look of a newly deserted home. I had the feeling the owner had blown all of his decorating funds on a few pints of paint.

  We sat at a table covered with a white cloth with a square of white paper atop it. That was festooned with a small vase with a droopy rose, the one that bloomed after the last rose of summer. We were the only customers, and the restaurant appeared a one-man show. The owner/host/waiter/chef practically danced over to us and presented us with menus, and I was glad we’d brought a little action and cash into his life.

  I was tempted to order everything listed, but contented myself with pastitsio, that lovely confection of ground lamb, pasta, and many fat calories posing as a sauce.

  Mackenzie ordered fish in a garlic sauce, and once we’d been served bread and a dish of olives and feta and neither of us seemed likely to keel over from starvation, I cleared my throat.

  “You aren’t, are you?” he immediately asked.

  “I have to.”

  “You won’t give it up?”

  “It isn’t right.”

  “You’ve got to understand that most times, you aren’t going to know the end of the story. It’s an important idea to get hold of. Most times, you do your piece of investigatin’, turn it in, and then you’re on to a new question. You don’t know how it’s used, who was found guilty or set free, or whether the wife actually divorced the guy who’s been hidin’ his money away. We’re only chapters in somebody else’s story.”

  “Something isn’t kosher back there, Mackenzie,” I said. “That’s all I could think while we were there, and that’s all I can think now.”

  He examined the pathetic rose, not meeting my eyes. “No reason to assume that.” His breath denuded the flower of two of its remaining petals. In an act of botanic kindness, he looked at me directly and spared it further damage. “It’s a job. Was a job. It’s over.”

  “The woman was healthy—except of course for the emphysema, but people last decades with that. She was faking illness. I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  He drank a hearty gulp of his water. “Should have ordered ouzo, if I didn’t have to study later on. You know, sometimes I think about all the studyin’ ahead, the years of it, an’—”

  “We at least have to tell the police about . . . her. The fiancée.” There was absolutely nobody in the place except the two of us. The proprietor, who was reading a newspaper at the far end of the room, ha
d spoken only broken English, but I still couldn’t bring myself to be indiscreet and say her name. “Isn’t it the law or something?”

  “The law for us is the same as for anybody else. Nothing special granted to us, so the decision is based on what you think a right-thinkin’ citizen should do.”

  “Okay, then, as citizens, shouldn’t we—”

  “Manda? Listen up. If you boiled all those things we found about the woman down, we’d still only have hearsay, speculation, and gossip. The accidents? Maybe she’s attracted to men who push too hard—riding the motorcycle, sailing around the world.”

  “Leo Fairchild is certainly not a—”

  “Maybe she’s ready for a change. An’ maybe she’s shown some less than totally honorable behavior. Or maybe she really did try to start a business, or try to repay loans, even if she failed. But a beautiful woman gifted by admirers is as old as history. Not your feminist ideal? Okay. Not mine—but not illegal, either.”

  “There’s something shabby about her ethics. All the playing around with her name, and the trail of dead bodies—”

  “Like I said, accidents. Suicide, maybe. Not murder, or she’d be locked up now.”

  “Unless she’s too damn pretty and clever.”

  “My mama used to talk about girls who had ‘bad reputations.’ She used to warn my sisters how once you had a bad rep, it was yours forever, and what could be worse?”

  I knew that refrain, and in fact, it was the first common bond I’d heard of between our sets of parents.

  “You’re buyin’ into it, is that it? And you want to tell the police—before there’s evidence of any crime whatsoever—that Emmie Cade has a bad rep?”

  “You make it sound so . . .”

  “Don’t get swept along by a whole lot of bad-mouthin’. Didn’t you tell me some story about your bein’ a slut?”

  I nodded again.

  “It made me so hopeful, too,” he said with the shadow of a grin. “Who knew it was all a figment of somebody’s imagination?”

  Emmie Cade’s story was different. Years and years of bad behavior.