“Five minutes, that’s all. It’s for a good cause. You’ll do it, won’t you, darling? Play along with me. In the name of sisterhood!” She raised a clenched fist.
Shameless manipulation. Impersonating a feminist. But what the hell? She really seemed afraid of this man. “Five minutes,” I said, and arm in arm, we entered the darkened bar. I scanned for someone dark and broody, visibly connected.
Lala delivered me to a frail, freeze-dried male.
This villainous lecher who’d struck terror in Lala’s heart pushed back his chair and leaped to attention. In thrall to the calendar rather than outdoor temperatures, he wore a seersucker suit and white shoes. All he lacked was a straw skimmer hat to be a perfect turn-of-the-century dandy. “Lala! Dear heart!” he said as she approached. “I was worried.”
“Tommy, I want you to meet the granddaughter of an old, dear friend….” Self-absorbed Lala had never asked my name. She merrily skipped on. “You remember I told you about Sherwin? The man who’s infatuated with me? Can you believe that his granddaughter just showed up, and says that Sherwin is searching for me.” She spoke at about twice the tempo she’d used in the ladies’ room, and things moved so quickly that as angry as I was becoming, when Tommy put out a hand that looked like a pterodactyl’s, I shook it.
“I’m Amanda,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he answered. “I’m a-man-da. You’re a-girl-da. Sit, sit, sit.” He waved at the table he’d been at. We all continued to stand.
“Pleasure to meet you,” Tommy said, covering his wretched joke’s flat wake. “Any friend of Lala’s…” His attention returned, adoringly, to Ms. Smirtz. “I don’t seem to remember any Sherwin,” he said.
“Really?” Her laugh was an incredulous tinkled scale, like spoons on crystal. “He’s the one who took me to Rome that time I had an urge for pasta.”
I exhaled loudly, angrily. “It’s been great, but—”
“I think maybe I won’t go back to the city with you tonight, Tommy. Sweetie here says Sherwin’s desperate to see me.” Lala sighed extravagantly.
“Whatever happened to subtlety?” I muttered. “Or honesty?” They both ignored me.
“Please, Lala!” Tommy said. “Come back with me.”
Lala shook her head like a wild young thing, although the glued-together curls refused to toss and she looked like she had a crenelated skull.
“Don’t make any rash decisions. Let’s talk this through.” Tommy interrupted his pleas to wave at a beefy bald man. The man’s companion, a creature with straight black hair and a red dress laminated to her flesh, flicked a glance our way. The man did not. “I was just telling Big Julius there about you, Lala,” Tommy said.
“That’s Big Julius? Isn’t he…oh, my, I’ve heard about him. The garbage business, isn’t it?” She looked at me and hissed, “See what I mean? Big Julius! And what did you tell Big Julius about me?” she asked in her normal voice.
“That I was crazy about you, of course.” He elbowed me. “I’m crazy about this lady,” he said. Then he looked back at his love object. “Big Julius is a nice man, despite his reputation.”
“It’s been a treat, but I have to run now,” I said.
“She’s leaving you stranded, Lala,” Tommy said. “All mine again. That means you’re not running off with this Sherwin person. I’ll wine and dine you and we will ride off into the sunset together at the back of the bus. Look, over there. It’s McDog. The one whose business partner blew himself up, or so the official story goes. And over there…”
Watching them was mildly fascinating, a game of ego Ping-Pong. Tommy served hyped inside dope on mobsters he pretended to have known, and Lala returned the serve with ever-escalating tales of the imaginary Sherwin’s generosity and lust.
“They all love me,” Tommy said with some desperation. “Every single one of them. They tell me everything. They call me the Safe Deposit, get it? I keep their secrets. See him?” he said of a respectable gray-haired business type in conversation with the bartender. “He has three days left to pay off his loan or die. He’s not lucky at the tables the way I am.”
“You didn’t seem so lucky today,” Lala said.
“Not yet, maybe,” Tommy answered. “But I was out of the game for a while, after all.”
“He was hit by a roulette ball that jumped,” Lala explained.
Tommy rubbed the back of his hand. I could see a dark bruise on the leathery skin. “My luck’s changing,” he said. “I feel it in my bones—long as you’re with me, Lala.”
“But Sherwin—”
“See her?” Tommy pointed at a woman with yellow-white big hair. “Sinatra used to be very fond of her. You catch my drift? Very. But she is reputed to have killed her husband and eaten the corpse so there was no evidence.”
“Sherwin says every woman deserves a—”
“See him?” Tommy said of a redhead who had just entered the cocktail lounge. “Supposedly an antique dealer, but really Jersey’s number one hit man.”
Lala shuddered with delight.
“Aren’t drinks free in the casinos?” I asked. “Why are all these men coming into the bar?”
“A change of scene,” Tommy said.
“A little socializing,” Lala added. “A little schmoozing.”
“A little business,” Tommy said, sotto voce.
I thought about the vacation plans I had abandoned. At this point, cleaning closets sounded like keen fun.
“I broke her grandfather’s heart when I turned him down,” Lala said.
“Turned him down for what?” Tommy asked.
Closets sounded irresistible.
“Turned him down for marriage,” Lala said. “Despite his money.”
Tommy is not one of my responsibilities, I told myself. I do not have to warn him. If he’d reached this age without realizing when a scam was being pulled on him—and a shaggy, preposterous, clichéd scam at that—then he deserved Lala.
Tommy was nearly hyperventilating. “You see that woman? A Mafia princess raised in total seclusion, they were so afraid somebody would take her hostage, but she and Ralph the Scar…”
I obediently swiveled once again. It seemed the polite thing to do. And I did a double take. The Mafia princess was none other than Sasha, who now stood resplendently at the bar in peacock silk and high-button boots. Gee, and I’d always thought that her father was simply a much-married orthodontist. What a unique front for his criminous ways. “Good luck to both of you,” I said.
“Darling,” Lala began. “Don’t run away because you’re so upset that I might not wind up with Grandpop.”
I went to join Sasha, who was in a clump of casino escapees. A few were on stools—including the gray-haired man Tommy said had three days to pay or die. He didn’t look particularly worried about it, and in fact seemed tilted toward Sasha, a smile on his face. She smiled back. And that’s how it was—a pending date with Mr. Wonderful didn’t mean you couldn’t meanwhile line up his successors.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “Frankie,” she said to the bartender, “this is my friend Mandy, the one I was talking about.” Frankie nodded at me without much interest. “You had a call from your detective,” Sasha said.
“Mackenzie? Why?”
“He must have detected you.”
Which didn’t take much skill. My answering machine message said where I was.
“He’s here in River City, too,” Sasha said. “You can run but you can’t hide.” She handed me a hotel postcard with a phone number scrawled on its back.
The elusive cop was here. I shook my head in wonderment. “I thought it was only hype, but it’s obviously true. This really must be America’s most popular vacation destination.”
Three
ANY OBJECTIVE REEVALUATION OF MY relationship with Mackenzie required distance, so I gave up on both objectivity and reevaluation for a while. Mackenzie mysteriously manages to seem writ in capital letters, despite his
easy Southern style. He doesn’t strut, he doesn’t shout, he doesn’t push, and I honestly don’t know what it is he does do. It can’t all be his smile and drawl, can it? That’s some of what I’d meant to work out while I was here.
“I came down because Nicky B. grew up here,” he explained. Nicky B. was the prime suspect in a missing and presumed murdered child case. The police were so positive that Mr. B. had done it that they had turned the press on him, but they could find nothing except an abiding and unwholesome strangeness in the man’s interests, and that was not enough to make a case or an arrest. “Thought maybe there was somethin’ we’d missed, somethin’ relevant. Turns out, the house he grew up in at the Inlet’s gone. Whole street is pretty much gone. In fact, the entire neighborhood looks like Beirut. Nothing but rubble except for a lone, half-boarded-up house here and there an’ people who look like they barely survived the destruction.”
I knew, so he definitely knew, that he could have found out about Nicky B.’s former neighborhood by telephone and fax and computer data base. Or even through common knowledge. The Inlet, never prime real estate, had been bulldozed a decade and a half ago in anticipation of a casino-supported renaissance that is due to appear along about the same time as Godot.
When the casino referendum was pending, the promoters’ ads showed $100 bills falling from the sky, and when the referendum passed, people danced in the streets. But money has not yet descended from the stratosphere, certainly not in the direction of the Inlet, and anybody who knew anything about the gilt-edged poverty-stricken city knew about the ruins at the end of the boardwalk. That probably even included Mackenzie’s good old boys back home in the Louisiana bayou.
“Guess I’m not the best detective in the whole entire universe. Guess I goofed and I’m forced to take an actual day or so off,” he drawled. “Thought maybe we could spend it together.”
Actual time together, without murderous interruptions. My defenses against the man wobbled precariously.
“Thought we might watch the sunset, find a really good restaurant, maybe gamble a little bit, hear music…”
His voice was as soothing, his accent as balmy as I’d hoped the beach would be. I shelved all decisions of what to do about him until some less enjoyable moment in our relationship.
* * *
That moment came—and it wasn’t even Mackenzie’s fault—via a telephone call to his hotel room at approximately one A.M. I could barely remember where I was, let alone where the telephone might be. Mackenzie reoriented himself more quickly, finding both a lamp switch and the receiver.
I heard a deafening squawk from the other end. Yet another crank or drunk or pervert. “Hang up,” I said. “Just hang up. Don’t listen. Shouldn’t have turned on the light.” I replumped my pillow.
“She’s right here.” Mackenzie handed me the receiver. “Sasha,” he said.
“Mandy!” she shouted. “Thank God! I was going crazy! At first, I couldn’t remember where you’d be. Couldn’t remember—”
Shades of my mother when I stayed out too late on a date. But this was Sasha and this was ridiculous. “What’s wrong with you? Stop shouting!”
“—what hotel he’d said he was at, so how was I going to find you and—”
Frankly, I had barely thought she’d notice my absence. “Calm down,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
She spluttered through every word I said. “Big deal? Mandy, you don’t—”
“Calm—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! I’ve been arrested for murder!”
How do you respond to a statement like that? The replies that charged into my mind seemed clumsy and primitive, not to mention disloyal. Questions such as: who? why you? did you? Instead of asking any of them, I mouthed her words to Mackenzie, who glared at the phone. I held the receiver slightly out, between the two of us, so he also could hear.
I took a deep breath. “Tell me about it,” I said.
“I came back to the room an hour or so ago.”
“Alone?” You couldn’t get into trouble if you came home alone. Wasn’t that what Mama always said?
“Yes! If you’d just listen! Alone. I thought you might be in there, remember? I wasn’t going to bring anybody in. But instead of you, there was a dead man in the bed, in my bed! And blood all over the place. And all over my clothing. That lamp—that gorgeous marble lamp, remember? The police think its base was what killed—oh, God—my clothing—my slip covered with blood on the floor!”
Maybe my mind wasn’t willing to compute everything she was saying, so it fixated on the slip. I hadn’t known she wore such garments. They seemed too prissy and middle class for Sasha, wrong for her loose-flowing style. Whole or half? What color? What fabric? I had to literally shake my head to dislodge the issue of the slip.
“My bra. My own things! Scattered around, as if I’d dropped them one by one. You know I didn’t. You were there when I left.”
“Yes.” She left her room neat, Ma.
“The beds had been turned down and all. There was still a chocolate on yours, Mandy!” Snuffling and nose-blowing.
“Listen, calm—I’m sorry, didn’t mean to say that, but—”
“There’s more. Worse. An open bottle of champagne and two glasses. A bloody washcloth, wet towels, as if I took a shower and washed off. I feel like I’m going crazy, and these cops, they act like it’s an open-and-shut case. I don’t think I even know the man!”
“It’s obviously some horrible mistake.” I was on autobabble, putting out noise because I wished she hadn’t said think. “You mean there’s a chance you do—did know him?” I whispered.
“I can’t tell. If you’d seen him—he was bloody, crushed—I couldn’t even look, let alone—” She inhaled and exhaled loudly. When she spoke again, her voice was firmer, more resolute. “I didn’t recognize him and I certainly didn’t kill him. But they found his card in a pair of my slacks in the closet. With a private phone number penciled on it. How did they find his card there?”
I shook my head and made sympathetic noises. I didn’t have any answers. Surely not at 1:09 A.M. after forty-two minutes of sleep. I did have a question, however. “Who is—who was he?”
“Somebody named Jesse Reese, they said.”
I looked at Mackenzie. “What happens next?” I whispered.
He was shaking his head and blinking hard, trying to wake up fully. He mumbled a catalogue of procedures, all the while getting out of bed. Preliminary examination. Middle of the night. Probable delays. Arraignment. Bail. He left the room.
Obviously, a lot had to happen, and all of it would take time. “So let me get this straight. They think you came in and murdered this guy? What time?” I heard the shower run in the bathroom.
“Around nine or ten.” Sasha’s voice was dull, mechanical. “They say I cleaned myself up and left, then came back again around eleven and pretended to be shocked by what I found.” She sounded exhausted.
“But you have an alibi, Sasha! Did you tell them?”
“What is it?”
She was really not herself. Her brain had frozen. “Your date—Cary Grant!” I tried not to sound impatient.
“Dunstan?”
“If that was his name. You were with him, weren’t you?”
Only silence on the line.
Having completed the world’s shortest shower, Mackenzie reentered the bedroom during this frustrating exchange. He looked at me quizzically. I looked back at him, but not quizzically. I looked at the man’s long and lovely body, wrapped in a towel, and I mourned the minivacation we were now not going to have. Worst of all, I couldn’t even blame the ruin of this one on him.
“Not exactly,” Sasha finally said. “The evening didn’t go all that terrifically. He turned out to be pretty boring.”
“Listen, I don’t care about your romantic life. I care about your neck. He can get you out of this mess.”
“Don’t bother.”
“What is he, another one hiding out fr
om the cops like your dead Dimples? Another big- or small-time hoodlum?”
“No. He’s a photographer. Like me. But he wasn’t with me the whole time. After dinner, we walked awhile, then we split. I went back to our hotel, and he said he was going back to Trump’s.”
“When exactly did you separate? How long was he with you?”
“Mandy, was I ever the kind to watch the clock? I don’t know. That’s the problem. Maybe nine o’clock, maybe later. I walked, then I stopped in the bar and kind of made a date with Frankie the bartender.”
“God, Sasha, your frenetic social life is literally killing you!” I hadn’t meant to be that loud or sharp, but I must say it felt good to be openly angry about her stupidities and excesses. “Okay, then, did Frankie go upstairs with you?”
Mackenzie raised an eyebrow at the name switch.
“I told you,” Sasha said. “Nobody did. We were going to meet later on. He was working two shifts.”
“Even so, if Dunstan was with you till near nine—and maybe it was actually later—and Frankie a while later, maybe between them we could establish that you were not in the room. Where can I find Dunstan? What’s his whole name? Is he in the book?”
Mackenzie was almost dressed, and flashing me looks that said I should do the same.
“I don’t know his last name or address,” Sasha said, “and don’t you dare say a word. You don’t know the first name of somebody you’ve been seeing for a year!”
I held my tongue—an extremely painful activity. I didn’t say that it was not the same thing at all. I did hope, however, that it was not the same thing at all.
“When I met him three weeks ago, he was at the next table. We were both with groups of other people. It was all very flirty. A fifties movies thing. No data, just patter. Fun, you know?”
I grudgingly admitted that I did know. It could happen. Last names would have weighted down the bubble.
“I was coming back down for this job,” Sasha said, “so we planned to meet again, same place, which is what we did. He either remembered, or he’s always there. We ate in the casino, at Ivana’s—you’d think he’d have changed that name to Maria’s, wouldn’t you?”
How I Spent My Summer Vacation Page 3
