A Really Cute Corpse

by Joan Hess

  I took them and stuffed them in my purse, reminding myself that I could easily discover a pressing need to dash down to the Book Depot to rescue my clerk from some horrible fate—such as a real live customer—and also find a minute to grab a sandwich and a can of soda. It was too early in the day to ponder the implications of something called tofu lasagna.

  Once at the theater, I stopped at the office. Luanne was on the telephone, arguing with an unknown party about flower arrangements and a bouquet of one dozen long-stemmed obligatories that seemed to have increased in price. I left the Xeroxed menus on her desk, picked up the notebook, and dutifully went on to the auditorium with the degree of enthusiasm I usually reserve for sessions with an oral hygienist.

  The stage was lit from a row of lights along the ceiling of the auditorium. The contestants stood in a row, their expressions perplexed as Eunice Allingham bellowed out instructions and demonstrated a series of kicks. Her short, thick legs, sturdy shoes, and sensible hemline made the scene macabre—at best.

  “You can,” she puffed, lapsing into a less demanding box step, “all learn this if you concentrate. You must learn to concentrate if you wish to succeed.” She stopped and slapped her hand across her bosom until she caught her breath. “There is no room in the finals for gals who cannot concentrate,” she added with a stem look. “You must be prepared to follow instructions from the first moment you’re chosen for the honor of representing your town or organization in a pageant. There’s no time for shirking your obligation to train, train, train. Cyndi follows a strict regime for one month before each pageant. She diets, works out, sleeps twelve hours a day, and keeps a healthy distance from any male distractions. I trust you girls have prepared with equal seriousness for the Miss Thurberfest pageant?”

  There was a great deal of shuffling and averted eyes. Faces were studiously guileless, hands clasped, necks red. Eunice marched over to the group and put her hands on her substantial hips. “So we haven’t prepared, I see. Some of you will have limp hair tonight, and others of you will be trying to disguise dull complexions. Your eyes will not glitter with excitement, and your voices will lack that vivaciousness the judges look for in a winner. You, for instance,” she said, pointing at Julianna, “have you concerned yourself with cellulite? If I were handling you, I’d put you on celery, water, and three hours a day in the gym. Let me see you walk across the stage.”

  Julianna lifted her chin and produced a tremulous smile as she took a few steps. “My God, no!” Eunice shrieked, sending several girls into the back wall. “You must glide. Roll your hips but don’t stride; this is not a football field. Look up and out, and keep your chin level to the floor. Relax those shoulders to downplay your shoulder blades, but don’t slouch. And tuck in that derriere if you don’t want bad scores for fanny overhang. Now all of you glide. Glide, gals, glide.”

  Julianna and her sisters were gliding like ice skaters as I went onto the stage. “Thanks for the help, Eunice,” I said, striding with the wild abandon of a neckless hulk in a football helmet. “We’re scheduled for a technical and dress rehearsal now, so I’ll have to ask you to leave. It’s a closed rehearsal.”

  She stared at me as if I’d just suggested she wiggle into a tutu and twirl away. “I shall sit in the front row and take notes. Afterward, we can go over them and make the necessary adjustments. You admitted you have no idea how to run a pageant, my dear Mrs. Malloy. I’ve spent twenty years training gals for this sort of thing, and my advice will be most valuable.” She gave me a modest smile. “I was once Miss Cherry Tomato, although that was years and years ago, when I myself was a mere slip of a gal.”

  I told myself that the pageant would be history in slightly more than thirty-six hours, which was not an eternity. Any reasonable person could survive for that fleeting number of hours, unless being stretched on the rack or poked with a hot cattle prod. Eunice was a mildly irritating woman, not a hooded rackkeeper from the dungeon. Surely I could bite my lip for the next day and a half, after which Luanne and I could laugh merrily over pretzels and pitchers of beer in the sunny beer garden. It was no big deal, I concluded to myself in a resolute voice.

  “Are you going to rehearse in the next millennium?” Mac said from behind me. “As unbelievable as it may seem, I do have more important things to do than to wait around while you broads glide and roll and fret over your fannies.”

  One broad harrumphed and stomped toward the edge of the stage. I turned around and smiled. “Did you take the weight that fell yesterday afternoon?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I really don’t know,” I responded sweetly. “We might need it for evidence, though. Would you be so kind as to search for it instead of lurking around the stage insulting everyone?”

  “And miss all the fun?” He strolled away.

  Sighing, I opened the notebook and read the outline of the evening’s festivities. For those intrigued by the machinations, we were slated to experience ( in ascending order of spine-tingling drama) : the opening, the swimsuit competition, the talent presentations, and the evening-gown competition, the last in conjunction with the interviews. There would be no respite in the form of an intermission, which meant certain of us would be wasted—if not blatantly unconscious—by the time they announced the seven finalists. Which would take place around midnight, I suspected.

  I repeated the schedule for the girls, told them to prepare for the opening number, and went down to join Eunice in the middle of the front row.

  “Who is that dreadful man?” she asked loudly.

  “David McWethy. He’s owned the theater for almost a year, and done an admirable job restoring it. As rude and abrupt as he seems to be, he’s a fine craftsman.”

  “Rude is a mild term.” She huffed for a moment, then said, “I’ve heard of him. He used to be involved in local politics, which gave him an opportunity to offend almost everyone in town. He was most successful in that aspect of his job. A friend of mine tried to get a little bit of cooperation about curbside garbage collection. Cooperation, mind you, not a concession, and this McWethy man practically accused him of bribing a city official. It goes to show you what was on his mind, if you ask me.” She stood up and brushed at the wrinkles in her skirt. “We don’t have time to gossip. The gals are taking much too long to change, and I haven’t even seen Cyndi this morning. Let us go to the dressing room area and hurry them along. If left unsupervised, they do tend to giggle and dawdle rather than attending to more important things.”

  Having been properly chastised for gossiping, I meekly followed Eunice down the stairs to the basement area below the stage. It was a damp tunnel of unadorned concrete, and reeked of mildew and disuse. A door on each side led to the communal dressing rooms, and from behind the doors we could hear the squeals and squeaks that seemed to be the norm these days. The door on the end was Cyndi’s private room, I remembered from the sketch I’d studied. It was adorned with a yellow construction-paper star.

  Eunice opened the side doors and barked sternly into each room. The squeals and squeaks stopped. Giving me a satisfied nod, she continued down the hall and rapped on Cyndi’s door. “Let’s go, my dear. You know how important it is to cooperate with pageant officials with their petty schedules and demands. Besides, I want you to take a nap before the parade. We can’t have any squints or droopy smiles on the back of the convertible.”

  The door opened. Cyndi’s face was streaked with tears, and her mascara had left black dribbles down her cheeks. “Oh, Eunice,” she whimpered, “I can’t go out there like this. There’s something you’d better see. You, too, Mrs. Malloy.”

  Eunice and I crowded into the tiny room. A dressing table took up half of the floor space, leaving room for a chair in front of it and a second to one side. Several cosmetic bags were scattered under the table and clothes hung like meat carcasses from hooks. A battered gas space heater did little to dispel the cold damp air that contributed to the dreary ambiance. On the wall behind the table was a mirror, and sc
rawled across the mirror in red letters were the words: DEATH TO A ROYAL BITCH!

  “Oh, my God,” Eunice gasped, stepping on my foot.

  I bit back a shriek of pain. “When did you find this, Cyndi?”

  “When I first came down to change,” she said. She managed to step on my other foot as she turned around to blink at the menacing message. “It’s been fifteen minutes or so, but I couldn’t move. It was like I was glued to the floor or something like that. I stood here and stared for the longest time, and then I just burst into tears. I can’t stand the idea that anyone would be so mean and hateful, Eunice. I’ve tried so hard to help the girls. They’re all such really, really nice girls.” She snatched up a wadded tissue from the table and began to sniffle into it. “Someone wants to kill me. I’m so frightened, Mrs. Malloy. What am I going to do?”

  The sniffles evolved into wails. Eunice patted the girl’s shoulder and offered a few dire words about puffy eyelids and self-control. I leaned over the formidable array of cosmetics and appliances to examine the message. It was printed in lipstick, I realized, and a distressingly sanguine shade. The crude block letters implied no gender. Other implications were harder to miss.

  “I’m going to call the police,” I said. “Don’t wipe it off for any reason.”

  Cyndi broke off the wails and rubbed her cheeks hard enough to leave scarlet streaks among the black marks. “Oh, please don’t do that, Mrs. Malloy,” she said earnestly. “That kind of publicity would be awful for the pageant. It’s supposed to be a wholesome, family event, not some sleazy carnival show with policemen and armed bodyguards. We don’t want to ruin some really nice girl’s opportunity to be crowned Miss Thurberfest, simply because a sick person is doing these horrible things.”

  Eunice leaned forward with a particularly beady look. “As we say, the show must go on. You must think of the gals and all the hard work they’ve put into their preparation, not to mention the cost of the evening gowns, swimsuits, and talent costumes. They can hardly concentrate if policemen are leering at them every moment of the pageant, or hounding them night and day. We simply can’t let them down.”

  “I have a friend in the Criminal Investigation Department,” I said. “I can have a quiet word with him. He’ll look around and perhaps speak to Cyndi, but I doubt he’d order us to close down the pageant.” I did not add that he’d be laughing too hard to do such a thing. I’d been hoping to get through the pageant without telling him about it, since he was aware of my feminist sensibilities. We’d had lots of invigorating conversations about them.

  Eunice was not convinced. Looming ever further over me, she said, “We have seen this sort of thing before, even at the most primitive local level. I had Cyndi try a new talent routine at the Junior-Senior Miss Rodeo of the Hills pageant, and one of the contestants stole her hair dryer right out of her bag. It was disgraceful, but no one called the police.”

  Cyndi wiggled past us and sank down in the chair. “And the girl felt so awful afterward that she apologized and everything. It was so sweet that we just had to hug each other and cry. We became really, really good friends.” She picked up another tissue, then let it drop.

  “I really think I’d better speak to my friend,” I said. “If it’s just one of the girls who’s overly jealous, we have nothing to worry about beyond a few more tasteless practical jokes. But we can’t be sure the nail and the weight were coincidences—and those were dangerous stunts. Luanne’s on crutches and you might have been badly hurt.”

  “Oh, they were coincidences,” Cyndi said, although without her former firmness.

  “And this?” I gestured at the mirror. “This was done with deliberate malice. Someone wants very much to frighten you. We can’t allow this person to work herself up into a frenzy and try to hurt you again.” I told Eunice to stay with Cyndi until I returned, then went out into the hallway. The girls were packed in their doorways, silently gaping at the yellow star.

  “We heard Cyndi crying,” Julianna said solemnly. “Is she okay?”

  “Someone wrote a nasty message on her mirror. Did any of you notice anything unusual when you came in this morning? Was there someone down here who shouldn’t have been?”

  One of the girls, a baton twirler, tittered. “That awful man was down here doing something to the fuse box. He went back up right when I arrived, and he didn’t even say good morning or anything. He’s spooky.”

  The Pekinese’s owner raised her hand and wiggled her fingers. When I looked at her, she said, “And Mrs. Allingham came in our room and told us to use more padding in our brassieres if we didn’t want to look like a bunch of sixth-grade girls.”

  No one else had anything to contribute. I told them that the dress rehearsal would start in fifteen minutes, and continued upstairs as they returned to their squealing and squeaking. I wandered around the stage, then looked in the greenroom where I found Mac on his hands and knees, a hammer in one hand and a pile of carpet tacks near the other.

  “Are you finally ready for the rehearsal?” he said without looking up.

  “No, we’ll start in fifteen minutes,” I said to his rump. “Were you down in the basement earlier this morning?”

  “I was down in my basement earlier this morning. Fuse blew, probably from all the damn hair dryers going at the same time. You got a problem with me going down in my basement? I can assure you those dewy-eyed virgins are safe from me, although I’d be glad to make a small wager about the existence of any vestiges of virginity down there.”

  “We aren’t running a competition to select someone to toss in a volcano. Did you find the weight that crashed onto the stage yesterday?”

  “I didn’t bother to look for it.”

  I considered a variety of responses, one involving my foot and a convenient area of his anatomy. I finally stopped twitching my toe ( and perhaps developing telltale blotches) and said, “Listen, Mac, someone has been pulling some potentially dangerous stunts in your theater. I realize you have insurance, but I doubt you want negative publicity.”

  “As long as they spell my name correctly, I don’t care. Hell, I haven’t been on the nightly news in years.” He did, however, put down the hammer and stand up. “Then you’re convinced the nail and the weight were done on purpose to hurt last year’s whatever-she-is?”

  “There was a threat written on Cyndi’s mirror. I have no idea if it’s some girl’s idea of a practical joke or a malicious attempt to frighten her. If it was the latter, it was very successful. That rope on the sandbag is the only thing we might be able to examine; a nail’s a nail and the message was written in block letters to disguise the handwriting. The police can put the end of the rope under a microscope and tell if it was cut … or gnawed.”

  “But it’s disappeared,” he murmured, tugging on his goatee as he looked down at me. “Darn shame, ain’t it? We may never know if someone’s been trying to murder our beloved Miss Thurberfest. If the news people ever get wind of this, they’ll fall all over each other to get the scoop. ‘Death Stalks the Queen, ’ or maybe ‘Beauty and the Maniacal, Murderous Beast. ’ It might just make the national news. Be still, my heart.”

  “Then you’d better go home and change into a suit and tie,” I said angrily. I went up the corridor to the office, berating myself for not kicking him halfway across the room when I had the golden opportunity. I stalked across the lobby and into the office, snorting all the way like a moose in a marathon.

  Luanne was not in evidence, but the door to the washroom was closed and water was running. Brilliantly deducing her whereabouts, I decided it might be prudent to discuss things with her before I called Peter. I loudly announced my presence and my intentions, and was rewarded with the sound of a toilet flushing.

  Someone tapped on the office door. A breathtakingly handsome man in a jacket and turtleneck sweater came into the room. His blond hair, deep blue eyes, and engaging smile were more than enough to seize the dingy room and transform it into an elegant executive office. The dead plastic pl
ant gave a small shudder of life. The shag carpet snapped to attention. I reminded myself to breathe.

  “Hi,” he said, showing me pristine white teeth made mortal by the tiniest of gaps between the front two. “Are you Luanne Bradshaw?” When I numbly shook my head, he gazed at the washroom door and gave me a comradely wink. “I’m Steve Stevenson, the emcee for the pageant. I’m sorry I was late, but my aide keeps me on such a tight schedule you’d think he took lessons from a slave driver. I never know which way I’m going next. You’re … ?”

  “Claire Malloy. Luanne fell the other day and is on crutches, so I guess I’m her aide.” It wasn’t clever; it wasn’t witty. It was coherent, though, for which I deserved a point or two.

  “Well, I hope my tardiness hasn’t fouled up the schedule for you, Mrs. Malloy—or may I call you Claire?” I managed a numb nod this time. “Great, then, Claire, and please call me Steve. Would you mind if I made one quick call before the rehearsal?”

  The quick-witted woman on the couch managed yet a third numb gesture. While he picked up the receiver and dialed, I considered the possibility that some villain had slipped novocaine in my coffee. Luanne came out of the washroom and stopped in midhobble to stare at our visitor.

  He gave her a smile, then said into the receiver, “Pattycake, I just this second arrived at the theater, so we haven’t started the rehearsal. I’ll send Warren over to pick you up as soon as he drops off a file at Whitley’s office. Did you find a sitter?” He paused for a moment. “There’s no reason to get upset, honey. I told you that you needn’t come to the luncheon or the parade. There are two delightful women right here to make me behave with the beauty queens. Just stay at the hotel this afternoon and let the girls swim or something.” He paused once more. “Don’t be absurd, Pattycake. We’ve already discussed that on numerous occasions. You do have a sitter for tonight and tomorrow night, don’t you?”