A Really Cute Corpse

by Joan Hess

  “She seemed ambitious,” I said encouragingly.

  “That is an understatement. To develop some unwholesome idea of going away to Hollywood, and then to stage a series of seemingly vicious practical jokes to garner publicity!” Eunice drank an inch of scotch, then leaned forward and jabbed the air. “I should have known she was nothing but a cheap hustler when she first took up with that man. They tried to pretend it was a typical dewy-eyed love affair, but I knew different. I’ve been around the track myself, and I saw what was going on.”

  I resisted the urge to dwell on an image of Eunice in gray sweats, puffing around the track with the wrong sort of man in hot pursuit. “What was going on?”

  “I do not gossip and I do not speak ill of the dead,” she said with the warmth of Queen Victoria squelching insubordination. “What’s done is done. There’s no reason to stir up old gossip, especially now that poor Cyndi has passed away. I shall visit the great-aunt in the morning to assist with the arrangements; the policeman agreed that would be appropriate. The old gal is not well, and has little money.”

  I dove through the opening. “Where did Cyndi find money to live on? The apartment, a car, the pageants—all that must have been expensive, and she didn’t have a job. It doesn’t sound as if her great-aunt supported her.” I cocked my head and tried to look mildly curious, rather than salivating for gossip. I also poured several inches of scotch into Eunice’s glass.

  “Thank you. No, she had no time for a job. I believe she had some sort of scholarship at the college, a result of pooling various pageant stipends. I usually footed the pageant bills, from the application fee to the last-minute dash for a different shade of lipstick or a piece of ribbon. I aspired for her,” she added mistily, “and, yes, for myself.”

  While she paused to compose herself with the aid of her drink, I sat back and allowed my theory to evaporate before my eyes. Although I had not yet had time to seriously consider its implications, several unsavory aspects had hovered in the back of my mind. Blackmail had hovered the hardest.

  I was on the verge of saying goodnight and going home to brood when she said, “As for the apartment rent, the car, the elaborate stereo equipment, clothing, and all that sort of thing, I have no idea where she found the money.”

  “She didn’t win it at the pageants?”

  “How much money do you think is available to the runner-ups at the Miss Drumstick pageant in Stump County?” she said with a nasty little laugh. “Millions-or even thousands? Hundreds? Hardly, I must say, hardly. The winner might receive gift certificates from the dry cleaner and the drugstore, and at most a few hundred dollars for education. The state levels are better, of course, and the winner of the Big One can expect to end the year in a very healthy position, but the local pageants are merely training grounds, an opportunity to practice the necessary skills and fine-tune the gals.”

  “Then how could she finance a move to Hollywood? A move like that costs money. She surely knew she’d need to make a deposit on an apartment, no matter how seedy, and survive until she found a job.”

  Eunice gazed at me slyly, or perhaps only drunkenly. “Yes, it would require a certain amount of money, wouldn’t it?”

  “Does she have a savings account?”

  I expected a shrug, but received a firm negative. Eunice shook her head hard enough to send a pink roller across the room, and said, “No, the gal had less than fifty dollars when I spoke to her at the hospital this morning. I asked her how she intended to pay the bill, and she said she didn’t intend to pay anyone anything. They could sue her, she said, but it was very much a blood-and-turnip situation, and she would be in Hollywood, in any case.”

  “So she was almost on the way out of town? I didn’t realize she was quite so prepared to leave,” I said, surprised.

  “While I was at the hospital, Cyndi asked me to call the bus station and find out at what time tomorrow she might catch a bus for the West Coast. I was floored, absolutely floored. I was aware that she planned at some time in the future to leave Farberville, but I had supposed she was thinking in terms of months—not hours. Once I’d recovered from the shock, I demanded to know how she would pay for the bus ticket.”

  I put down my glass before it slipped out of my hand. “What did she say?”

  “She said she’d have plenty of money by tomorrow morning, plenty of money. I decided she was giddy from the gas and did nothing to dispel her pitiful fantasy. Maybe she thought she’d receive some sort of monetary award for being present at the pageant to crown the new queen.” Eunice finished off her drink and stared at me until I began to wiggle uncomfortably on the uncomfortable sofa. “Mrs. Malloy,” she said with careful deliberation, “I must ask you what may prove to be a painful question. I do hope you won’t take offense.”

  “No,” I said, clutching a throw pillow.

  “Have you ever considered using a more intense shade of eye shadow? That which you’re using at present simply makes you look gaunt, and I do think you could be somewhat attractive if you’d enhance your eyes.”

  I was thrown off balance enough to agree to a free color consultation at her store. I thanked her for the refreshments and conversation, then said goodnight and drove home, chewing on my lip as I dodged potholes, trying to decide whom Cyndi Jay was blackmailing. And for what.

  Once at home, I sat down at the kitchen table and made yet another list. The nail: Cyndi. The weight: Cyndi. The message on the mirror ( both written and erased) : Cyndi. The bullet fired at the convertible: Cyndi’s doing, but an accomplice—unknown. The candidates for sniper of the day: everyone in the town except Steve, Cyndi, Caron, Inez, and myself. That narrowed the possibilities to twenty thousand plus.

  The first incident was the space heater.

  I put down the pencil and made a cup of tea while I considered it. Cyndi had again lost her bid for press coverage that might lead to some sort of national attention and a foot through a casting director’s door. She had been angry enough to do something wildly outrageous, I thought as I sat down and doodled on the paper. Such as stomp down to the dressing room, tape the keyhole, bop herself with her hair dryer, and then wait patiently for the police to find her. She could have reasonably expected them within five or ten minutes, and thus could have been confident she would be rescued before anything too dreadful happened. Perhaps she had been nodding off when someone had fortuitously chanced upon this golden opportunity. Said someone calmly locked the door and switched off the lights.

  It required two elements: physical presence in the theater, and a key. Mac, Steve, and Warren had all been there, and in the confusion might have slipped away for a moment. Steve ( motive unknown) had disappeared to call his wife, and Warren ( bitterly brokenhearted) had been in the auditorium, claiming to be looking for the Senator. Mac ( motive unknown) had come up the stairs from the basement. Eunice ( shattered dreams) had arrived in the aftermath, but that in no way proved she hadn’t been in the basement a few hours earlier. Patti ( motive unknown) was at the hotel during the afternoon, presumably tending to her small terrors. And Luanne ( no motive whatsoever and utterly absurd to suspect of having one) had been asleep, her telephone unplugged to avoid siding salesmen and assistant pageant directors.

  I repeated the last conclusion several times, both aloud and mentally. I then moved on to the second element: the dressing room key. Cyndi had one, which was neither here nor there. A second key dangled from a thick steel ring clipped on the belt loop of a pair of overalls. It had jangled upon occasion, and had been produced twice when the dressing room had been locked.

  I returned to the listed pranks. I imagined Cyndi both on her knees in the middle of the stage to pull up a nail and creeping along the catwalk with a knife to saw partway through a rope. Mac had been in the theater every moment, lurking in the dark corners of the stage or fiddling with controls in the light booth. As resident phantom, nothing escaped his notice. Surely such bizarre behavior by Miss Thurberfest would have merited comment.

  H
e had to be in on her scheme. Could he have fired the shot at the convertible? He hadn’t been at the theater thirty minutes before the parade, and might well have been on a rooftop positioning his weapon. And loading a blank bullet … since he had a roomful of stage weapons, many of which my daughter had joyfully stumbled across.

  I tossed down my pencil and went to Caron’s room. Unsurprisingly, she was sitting on her bed, the telephone receiver attached to her ear and a bag of pretzels within easy reach. She gave me a startled look, covered the mouthpiece, and said, “Yes, Mother? I’m in the middle of a terribly important call. Inez is describing this really dramatic scene in which Pythagoras learns Euclid has stolen his theorum. Pythagoras is furious, naturally, and says he’ll hunt him down and kill him in the name of pure mathematics.”

  “I’m tingling, but you can tell me the outcome later. What sorts of things are in the prop room?”

  “Props, Mother. They’re what the actors use instead of real things. Well, some of them are real things, but they’ve been set aside for the plays.” She uncovered the receiver long enough to warn Inez I was Still There, then waited with all the patience of a teenaged martyr for me to run out of idiotic questions.

  “I know what props are,” I said with all the patience of a teenaged martyr’s mother. “I’ve seen the dagger and the revolver. What other mock weapons are in the prop room?”

  She warned Inez it might be a very long while. “A crossbow made of styrofoam, although it may have something to do with Cupid. A bunch of spears with cardboard points. Dueling pistols carved out of soap.” She broke off to suggest to Inez that Euclid and Pythagoras meet at dawn, then gave me an exasperated look. “This skit is awfully important to my career. If you’d tell me what you want, I’ll try to remember what all’s in there.”

  “A rifle,” I admitted.

  “I think I saw something with a long barrel way in the back corner under the Arc de Triomphe. It may have been a piece of pipe; I was hardly entranced by it. Now can I talk to Inez?”

  A prop-room rifle would be just the thing to shoot a blank bullet in a make-believe murder attempt, I thought excitedly. It would prove Mac’s involvement in Cyndi’s scheme. Then again, it wouldn’t prove any involvement in her murder—but it was a beginning.

  “I think I’ll go over to the theater and have a look,” I told Caron. “If Peter calls, don’t tell him where I am. Tell him I’m visiting a sick friend or shopping at the all-night grocery mart.”

  “You want me to lie to Peter?”

  “Yep,” I said, cutting her off before she could sputter how I was always going on and on, et cetera. “He probably won’t call, anyway, and I’ll be back in thirty minutes. If your deep commitment to the truth precludes a white lie, then just stay on the telephone until I get back.”

  I grabbed my purse and car keys, and hurried down to my car, honestly believing I’d be back in thirty minutes.

  ELEVEN

  I couldn’t help it. I was compelled, virtually propelled, by an inexplicable cosmic force. The key to the theater was screaming at me from the bottom of my purse. If ignored, it might burst into flame à la spontaneous combustion, and Caron and I would be transformed into crusty loaves of French bread in the ensuing incendiary catastrophe.

  Besides, I told myself as I parked discreetly in the alley, it would take a mere five minutes to determine if there was a rifle in the prop room. If indeed it was there, I would go home and call Peter to tell him Caron had remembered seeing it. With a trace of diffident self-deprecation, I would hesitantly offer my gossamer little theory about Mac’s involvement in Cyndi’s scheme. If there was a length of pipe better suited to the dark purposes of plumbers than those of snipers, I would go home and call Peter to wish him pleasant dreams.

  I stopped at the corner and studied the sidewalks for any undercover men lolling about. Several blocks down the hill the street festival raged relentlessly. Wholesome family entertainment was history; the children and the ponies were gone, and the street was now filled with jolly throngs of revelers. I could hear one rock band in the beer garden, and strains of another from one of the bars on the far side of the Book Depot. The insidious boxes known as ghetto blasters were carried on more affluent shoulders. Drunks yelled to each other, as did roving gangs of college boys with conflicting ideas of where next to go or what next to drink. The few policemen in sight were all watching the crowds. As well they should.

  I unlocked the front door of the theater, and carefully locked it behind me after I slipped inside. Light from the street bathed the lobby in the eerie yellow glow of an aquarium; it was more than adequate to guide me around the potted plants and down the corridor. Once in the auditorium, I switched on my flashlight and went across the stage toward the audio booth. As I reached the door, I heard a small noise. I stopped to frown at the dark rows of seats. The noise was more a creak than a scuttle; I waited for it to be repeated, but heard nothing. I decided it came from the age of the building rather than a furry, red-eyed, bewhiskered inhabitant.

  The door to the audio booth was not locked, thus saving a certain amount of face for those who hadn’t entertained the possibility. I continued through the room to the second door and opened it with equal success. The room was minute, no bigger than Cyndi’s dressing room, but bursting with decades of accumulation. Ionian columns leaned against a flat depicting a sylvan glade. Another flat, done in exacting perspective, seemed to lead to a road that disappeared into the horizon. The furniture covered all periods from Louis XVI through colonial America to modern teachers’ lounge. Two styles of telephones were visible, along with a television and an ancient radio. The Viking helmet hung from a brass coatrack.

  How Caron chanced upon her treasures was truly a mystery, I thought as the flashlight splayed across the mess. A thick layer of dust coated everything, softening silhouettes and hiding scars. I sneezed several times, both in response to the dust and in hopes of frightening away any of the furry things previously mentioned.

  The Arc de Triomphe leaned against the back wall. I picked my way over boxes of clothes, an oar, spears, and rolled-up rugs, and reached said landmark without a skinned shin or a stubbed toe. Behind the arch, in the very darkest shadow, was the object of my foray. I pulled the cylinder free and sighed in relief. A rifle. With no dust on its tip, and no dust on its trigger.

  I allowed myself one quiet “Ah, hah” while I considered what to do. Earlier I’d promised myself to leave the rifle in place and merely suggest its existence to ol’ Super Cop, thus saving myself a must-you-meddle lecture ( recited by rote, but still nettlesome) . But if I replaced it and it subsequently disappeared, we might lose a vital link between Cyndi and Mac. I told myself to stop using “we” in terms of the investigation. As Luanne had pointed out in an unnecessarily acerbic voice, there was no “we.” The only “we” in the official investigation was going to get herself in deep trouble if she persisted. Then again, I couldn’t leave the rifle to be carried away by an unseen hand—even if I knew whose face worked in conjunction with the unseen hand.

  I almost wished Caron were with me to offer up some pertinent pearl of wisdom I’d instilled in her. The beam of light fell across the top of a coffee table. The patina of dust glittered like a moonlit beach, smooth and deceptively silky. Unwanted thoughts stole into my mind. Claire and Peter under a palm tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then come bills and fights and obligations and lack of privacy and power struggles and acrimony and divorce. Which didn’t rhyme, but had a certain inevitable ring to it.

  Granted, this was a pretty goofy time and place to stand around creating perverse variations on old jumprope rhymes, but the cosmic force had a sly sense of humor. Claire Malloy, dressed in corduroy ( that one wasn’t easy) , went to the police station to kiss her fellow. How many lectures did he give her?

  Could I cook dinner and share my bed on a nightly basis? Would he insist on an entire shelf in the bathroom? Could he possibly know what to do with a fifteen-year-old
girl who lost her mind on a regular basis? Did he realize my electric blanket had only one control, and I preferred sizzle to freeze? And what was wrong with the status quo, for pete’s sake?

  It was the pageant, I told myself angrily. The pageant was amok with sweet young things aspiring to Barbie their hearts out for the nice young Kens. To play house and make babies. Peter and I were troupers, gray-haired veterans of the matrimonial wars. We had no business rejoining in this societal myth. I vowed to read no more fiction until my head cleared.

  All this nonsense gave me enough courage to reach a decision about the rifle. The decision fell neatly between brash and prudent: I would take the rifle to the office and lock it in there for the moment. The second it was secured, I would go home and call Peter, who would sputter for a while, sigh, and agree to send a minion down to take it to the crime lab. I then would invite my policeman over for a glass of wine, and when the ambiance was proper, offer my case for the continuation of the status quo.

  I shut the door of the prop room, went out of the audio booth and shut that door, and started across the stage with the rifle held delicately between my thumb and forefinger, my pinkie curled as if I were prepared to sip tea from the barrel. I was awash in smugness when I heard a noise from the rear of the auditorium. It was not a creak. It was not a scuttle. It was not a rat. Rats don’t cough.

  “Who’s there?” I demanded in a remarkably steady voice. I shined the flashlight over the rows of seats, noticing uneasily that their backs curved like tombstones. “Who’s there, damn it?”