How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  I snorted my disdain, something I wouldn’t dream of doing at normal hours when I am more in control.

  “A real Mr. Do-good,” Mackenzie said.

  “Well, I’m sorry. I just don’t think somebody who is infamous for gambling and whoring around is Mr. Wonderful.” Nonetheless, I felt a growing chill inside, something like having a prison bar slipped down my esophagus. Innocent though she was, Sasha was in deep and profound trouble.

  “Okay,” Mackenzie said, “let’s look at a different issue.” His tone was obnoxiously patient, almost pedantic. I didn’t want reasoning or evidence—I wanted magical solutions. “Aside from havin’ a witness see her enter, there’s the question of how an imposter would get the key. There wasn’t any break-in. It’s real hard to duplicate those computerized cards, and it’s not like the last tenant could pass it on, ’cause they change it every time.”

  I waved away that objection. “I heard that’s not true, that they lie and reuse keys. Besides, I’m sure it’s possible to get a duplicate.”

  “How? Go to the desk and say ‘Hi, make me a room key’?”

  “Don’t be facetious. This is life and death.”

  “What would you say? ‘I’m so busy holding this drugged man—’”

  “Drugged? They think somebody drugged the dead man?”

  He nodded. “Staggerin’, the old man witness said. He didn’t drink enough to be drunk.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Nobody at the desk got a request for a duplicate.”

  “Maybe she lost her key, dropped it somewhere, and the killer found it.”

  “And knew the room number, right?” Mackenzie said. “’Cause it’s never on those keys.”

  “Well, maybe—”

  “Sasha didn’t lose her key, Mandy. She used it to let herself into the room, remember?”

  I sat in silence, fiddling with the wedge of lime on my Virgin Mary. Was it possible that Sasha had become involved in somebody else’s bad dream? That she was involved, and the second man, the accomplice, was one of her evening’s two men? Dunstan, or even Frankie the good guy?

  The red-haired bartender eyed me and my second-shift male companion either enviously or suspiciously.

  Mackenzie ordered orange juice.

  “This is very strange.” My voice sounded hollow, foreign, as if coming in on a poorly engineered sound track. I had the dissociated sensation that this wasn’t really happening. Soon, I’d wake up and chuckle over how real it had felt. “Every detail makes it stranger,” I said. “And there are so many details.”

  I squeezed the lime over my ice cubes. “She wasn’t there!” I bleated, lamely, because how was she going to prove that, or anything? Even I was beginning to find her denial boggy and suspect. I couldn’t think my way past the bloody slip or the business card in her slacks, or the witness or the door key. The only possible route around that seemed with Dunstan, who, I hoped, wouldn’t turn out to be part of the crime, the second man the witness saw. I stood up. “We have to find that lousy date of hers.”

  Mackenzie’s expression was blank, as if he’d turned off his mind. “Not now, surely,” he murmured. “I was plannin’ on maybe a little rest. It’s nearly tomorrow. My eyes feel corrugated.”

  “Aren’t you the one who always says the first forty-eight hours are the most important?”

  “Yes, but…but…”

  I went over to the bartender. Business was slack, even here, at three-thirty Tuesday morning. The combo played “Sunrise, Sunset,” in a whine of violins, but softly. “Hate to bother you again,” I said, “but I need Dunstan’s last name.”

  She put down a glass she’d been polishing and looked at me with open disgust. “Why?” she asked. “Your new one’s cuter. And he’s not a lounge lizard. In fact, I’ve never seen him in here before. Isn’t it time to end the stereotype of women only wanting rats? The Dunstans of this world have had a free ride for too long!” She seemed on the verge of climbing onto the bar and declaiming.

  “Halt,” I said. “This has nothing to do with me. I agree with you completely, but I’m asking on behalf of a friend.”

  “Hah! The old friend business! You tell your friend that I don’t want anything to do with Dunstan and neither should she!”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “He’s just Dunstan. Like Svengali. Or Zippy, in the comics.”

  “Do you know anybody who knows his last name?”

  “He gave me his card. Slick piece of work, just like him. Looks like a camera. Clear plastic in the middle, for the lens. That’s where his name and phone number were. But why give it to me, a bartender? Unless I was supposed to pimp for him—pass it along to likely conquests.”

  “Could I see it?” I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.

  The red spikes of hair looked lethal. “Think I’d keep it? Tossed it right out!”

  I sighed. “Can you remember what it said?”

  “I’m not procuring for an arrogant lounge lizard with an accent!” For emphasis, she pounded her fist on the copper-topped bar. “I’m not one of those traitors who swoons at the sound of the King’s English. I don’t care what Princess Di wears. I don’t even think they should keep that parasitical royal family!”

  “All I want is Dunstan’s last name.”

  “I swear, if my daughter shows tendencies in this self-destructive direction, I will personally take her out and—”

  Bartenders were supposed to be listeners, not impassioned orators. Another myth shattered, and I had so few of them left. “Please,” I said. “I am not interested in Dunstan, except for his last name. Maybe even where he works. My friend is—”

  She shook her head in irritation. “Take responsibility for your life! Stop playing games, hiding behind the cloak of a friend. If women would only own their own lives, if—”

  What the hell? It was going to be all over the papers in two hours or so. “My friend’s accused of murder.”

  Amazing what that word will do. “Murder?” she whispered.

  “She’s only accused,” I said. “She didn’t do it. She was with Dunstan at the time. I came to find him, to get him to go to the police. Only he heard the word ‘murder’ and ran away. I never found out his last name. My friend doesn’t know it, either.”

  She wiped the bar top, vigorously. “So who is this Dunstan-loving murderous friend of yours, then?”

  “Her name is Sasha Berg. She’s a photographer. She doesn’t love Dunstan at all and she isn’t a murderer. And what I need is his name.”

  She tilted her head back, let her jaw drop, and rolled her eyes up in a great show of concentration. Even the spikes of hair seemed to stand on tippytoe, the better to strain for memory. “Dunstan, Dunstan,” she murmured. “Dunstan—something-wrong-for-him-last-name. Something wholesome. With an S…no, an F… F-R… Frrr… Fllll… Nothing’s coming.”

  There were other ways, I reminded myself. Even if nothing pulled up from her data bank, I didn’t have to despair. There’d been another bartender on duty earlier who might remember Sasha. There was the restaurant, with waiters, hostesses, and fellow diners. Together, they might be able to put together a good accounting of Sasha’s time.

  If, of course, anyone had been paying attention. If, of course, the tourists who ate in the restaurant tonight were staying over until such time as we found them or they read a notice in the paper about the crime. If, of course, they hadn’t gone home, been too drunk to notice, been on some illicit assignation which they wouldn’t want to discuss with the police. If, of course, there were enough of those lucky, available rare types who know what they saw at what hour so that together, we could piece together a patchwork accounting of Sasha’s evening.

  Which meant we were never going to find nonstop Sasha monitors. Even if every improbable witness contingency worked out, there was always the lapse, the unaccounted-for period while the observers got on with their own lives or simply went to the bathroom. Only Dunstan could establish that Sasha had been far from t
he murder scene for that long block of time.

  The bartender was still making sounds, but more feebly. “Foooo… Hold on, it’s getting close. I can almost hear it now. Fill… Fit… Fis…” She shook her head. “Hell, I give up.”

  “Keep going—her life is at stake.”

  “Faaa… Famm… Farr… Farmer!” She was so loud that Mackenzie popped up from his chair.

  “I thought he was a photographer.” Cary Grant tending New Jersey chickens and pigs?

  “That’s his name. Dunstan Farmer.”

  “And where does he live?”

  “Someplace nearby, must be. He’s here almost every night, after all. In the casino, then in here for finding women. Doesn’t seem to have steady male pals. Or steady female pals, at that.”

  His skewed social life didn’t bother me. I had his name now, and a light-headed giddy conviction that I’d find him and settle this—a hope that was so unfounded, it couldn’t have happened except at four A.M. to a woman worn down by a year of teaching, a dubious relationship, serious sleep deprivation, and a best friend accused of murder.

  * * *

  The police wouldn’t let me have my clothing. Not even my toothbrush. “Crime scene. They’re still working on it,” the guard at the door said. And then he questioned me on my whereabouts at the time of the crime and brought in a buddy with the same questions all over again, just in a higher-pitched voice. They bullied me in the name of the law until Mackenzie intervened and I was freed.

  But I still couldn’t have my toothbrush. From now on, just in case of murder or other emergencies, I’d carry one with me at all times. But right now I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t have the one inside the suite. What need did the cops have of it or of my dental floss? In fact, what were they still doing there? They were supposed to come in, sprinkle, measure, photograph, dust, speculate, and leave. I knew from personal experience that it wasn’t as if they cleaned up the messes they created. But these fellows had a real dog-in-the-manger attitude toward the suite, and particularly toward my innocent belongings.

  I was pretty sure my insurance wasn’t going to reimburse me for the toiletries, let alone for a wardrobe perk-me-up. This was, perhaps, how bag ladies got their start. All of a sudden, through one agency or another, their worldly goods were gone. It wouldn’t matter for what rationale or in what way—a fire, a robbery, a murder in their bedroom. Lost is lost. Gone is gone.

  I trudged back to the elevator in the same sweater, rumpled linen slacks, and mildly too-tight loafers that I’d put on, taken off, and put on again since the evening before. I felt dirty, exhausted, miserably unhappy, and a victim of police harassment.

  The policeman I’d been leasing for a year yawned extravagantly as he punched the elevator’s down button. “Told you so,” he said. “Told you we shouldn’t bother to come up here. Told you you wouldn’t get your things back yet.”

  And as I stood there without a toothbrush or a bedroom of my own, with my best friend in jail for murder, my already pathetic vacation gone and my sanity definitely questionable—I looked sideways at C.K. Mackenzie and his I-told-you-so’s and decided to skip the heavy-duty thinking I’d planned for this getaway. What was the point? He and I did not have a future. The end was near, the hands of the doomsday clock nanoseconds from midnight. Told you so.

  Five

  NEXT MORNING, I WAS STILL suffused by a sense of doom, and putting on my shoes added to it. My best friend was in serious jeopardy, my semilove relationship felt like a wobbly tooth waiting to be yanked, and it was possible that I might wind up with nothing in the world except these shoes.

  It was easier agonizing over stuff than over people. What if I never got my belongings back? No matter that I had clothing enough at home and at least enough funds to buy a new toothbrush.

  Anything could happen. Anything did. You could be suddenly and unfairly arrested. You could have your possessions impounded. You could have very few possessions to start with because you lived on a private school teacher’s pathetic salary.

  I knew the stats on women and poverty. I knew the odds. Mostly, I knew self-pity.

  My dark mood was not helped by the fact that my butter-soft, elegantly cut loafers were too tight. They’d been on sale, reduced so drastically I refused to acknowledge their poor fit. Besides, I had been with Sasha, to whom the only sin was paying retail. She wasn’t guilty of murder, but she was surely guilty of coercive encouragement to buy bargains.

  To add to my misery, my freshly washed panty hose hadn’t quite dried, so the shoes were pinching toes encased in damp nylon.

  At some point the night before, my cream cotton sweater had acquired a bloodred Virgin Mary stain. I borrowed one of Mackenzie’s summer sweaters, a maroon crew neck that was too large for me but had the advantage of being all one color. Besides, it hid some of my rumply slacks and made me feel vaguely like Doris Day borrowing Rock Hudson’s oversized jammies in some schmaltzy old comedy. Maybe we really were a couple if I wore his clothing.

  Mackenzie had treated me to a toothbrush at an all-night pharmacy. The hotel provided a hair blower. I did not yet look like one of the homeless, which provided some comfort.

  I really missed my eyeliner, though. I felt naked, exposed, something like a cave creature forced into the light.

  I’ll say this, the Atlantic City Press is quick. I’d gone downstairs to buy a paper, and then I was sorry I had. Jesse Reese’s untimely death was headlined in type just slightly smaller than might announce the end of life as we have known it.

  It was obvious that Reese had been a respected somebody, and that Sasha was on her way to becoming a notorious somebody. FINANCIAL ADVISOR BLUDGEONED TO DEATH: WOMAN HELD. There was a great deal about the esteemed Mr. Reese, advisor and teacher, protector of what he’d called the “potentially dispossessed.” There was mention of the first Mrs. R. and of the present wife, Poppy Summerfield Reese, a former Miss America contestant.

  There was also an unfortunate overabundance of information about Sasha Berg. This included, much to my horror, mention that she had once been the companion of a reputed gangland figure, the late Peter “Dimples” Bosco, who had, by coincidence, also been murdered.

  “Why don’t they just hang her and be done with it?” I said. “Guilty by prior associations and insufficient sexual scruples, is that what they’re implying? Why isn’t anybody saying it’s just a matter of unfortunate room assignment—somebody else’s assignment, I might add. Who, in fact, arranged to have us in that room, anyway? Isn’t it a tad suspicious?”

  Mackenzie half nodded, a gesture that meant “I didn’t hear a word you said, but I don’t want you to be aware of that.” He sat on the edge of the bed, thumbing through the phone directories in the night table.

  I concentrated on the newspaper. I had to read almost the entire article before I spotted the name of my hotel. It was interesting how scrupulously its reputation was being protected compared with that of the innocent suspect, the former girlfriend of.

  Jesse Reese had slightly receding light hair, gray or pale blond. He was a graciously aging clean-cut man complete with the requisite square jaw and earnest expression. He looked like he exercised and ate sensibly. It was a trust-me-with-your-money face, unfrivolous and well-meaning, perfect for an annual report or prospectus. I resented his features—as if he’d shopped for them deliberately, just to make things worse for Sasha. Then I wondered why I was so angry with a dead stranger, why I was having trouble remembering that he was the victim.

  And why did he look somewhat familiar? “Do you know this man?” I asked Mackenzie, hoping for a lead. He put his finger on a column to hold his place in a phone book, peered at the photo, and shook his head before returning to his odd reading.

  “You think it’s a common face, and that’s why I feel as if I’ve seen it before?” I asked.

  He continued to read off names, but shook his head. “Not so common. Head’s almost square. Mouth pulls a little to one side. Eyebrows are heavy. Big earl
obes.”

  Now that he mentioned it… “I finally know what they mean by trained observer,” I said.

  He turned his trained eyes in my direction and observed me like a pro. I awaited his pronouncement, hoping it wasn’t of the nose-slightly-off-center sort. I wanted muzzy generalizations along the lines of dazzling.

  “No Dunstan Farmer listed in any of the nearby towns.” He leaned over and picked up the phone receiver, punched a few numbers and asked for new listings in each of the small surrounding towns, oblivious to having just shattered another romantic delusion.

  Dunstan Farmer was neither a new or old listing anywhere.

  “Maybe his phone’s under the name of his company, whatever that is. Photo-Quik, Dunstan Farmer, Prop., or what have you.”

  “I looked. His name isn’t visibly attached to any of them.” Mackenzie drummed his fingers on the night table. “We’ll have to interest the police in findin’ him. See if they have somethin’ on him, maybe. I have a gut feelin’ about the man. Bet he won’t be easy to find, and I bet he isn’t at that bar tonight. Or tomorrow, or ever again, for that matter.”

  I didn’t accept the bet. The odds were all on Mackenzie’s side.

  * * *

  The arraignment felt like something out of Kafka. We sat in a small but intimidating courtroom. Sasha, up in front of a dark wood barrier, looked as stained as the mahogany, like a sepia print of herself, a browned-out reproduction of what had formerly been living color. I waved at her, smiled, but she looked too frightened to respond.

  The judge listened impassively to a full account of the violence of the crime and its damning circumstances. I wished I knew more about the mechanics of raising bail. Did you have to put something up as collateral? Were there good and bad bail bondsmen? Was there some expertise we lacked that would lead to further complications? Did Mackenzie know about this side of it, or did his interest flag after he’d caught someone?

  What did those trained eyes see when he looked at me?