Bubbles Ablaze

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  “It’ll all work out, Roxanne.”

  “I know. I pray the same for you, Bubbles.” She let go. “I don’t like you going to Stiletto’s house by yourself. Why don’t you call the police?”

  “I will,” I said. “First I’m going to wake up Zeke. He’s got to help me. I don’t want to do this alone.”

  “Smart idea.”

  She waved at me as I threw my suitcase in the back of the Camaro and got in. The streets of Slagville were wet, dead and silent after the evening’s rain shower. The clock in my car said it was close to two A.M. Three more hours and I’d have to be at a waste hauler’s meeting anyway. For a second, I thought I saw St. Christopher shake his head, as though he could not ensure protection if I decided to drive to Lehigh on rain-slicked roads while battling exhaustion.

  I don’t know why it took me so long to see his face in the rearview mirror, but it did. When our eyes met, he said, “Where are you going, Bubbles?”

  I swerved to stay in my lane. “Oh, my God, Zeke. You just gave me a heart attack. I am so glad to see you. You’ve got to come with me to Stiletto’s house in Saucon Valley. Something’s happened to him, Zeke, and I think his stepfather, Henry Metzger, is behind it.”

  “You can’t go home,” Zeke said evenly. “I won’t let you.”

  “What?” I pulled over, wrenched up the parking brake and turned around. “What’s wrong with you?”

  And that’s when I noticed the gun in his hand.

  “Let’s go, Bubbles,” he said. “Mother’s waiting.”

  Chapter 30

  It would be bad enough to be stuck in the wood-paneled rumpus room with Mrs. Allen if she weren’t rocking in her chair and holding forth on blueberry pie tips while wearing a flannel nightgown and holding a shotgun in her lap at two A.M. But there I was and as far as I could see, there was no way out.

  I scanned the room looking for a means of escape. Mrs. Allen sat by the door, right where Zeke had directed her. In the place of glass windows was wood. Tons of it. Wood and deer heads mounted on the wood walls. All of it highly shellacked. I don’t know if Mr. Allen assumed people would be roller skating on his walls or if he just enjoyed the high of polyurethane. Whatever the reason, the golden room glistened.

  “Course now, Aunt Martha, that’s my namesake, Martha, used to make a blueberry pie without a top crust. Cooked it on the stove with a touch of brandy, that was her secret, and poured it into a prebaked pie shell.” Mrs. Allen rocked at the memory of it. “I must have tried her recipe sixteen times and I never could get it to gel. Once I said, oh what the hey, and added a tablespoon of Knox. Still didn’t work.”

  “Where’s Zeke?” I cut in.

  “Don’t start up with that again, Bubbles,” Mrs. Allen scolded. “Zeke’s a man and he has the situation perfectly in hand. That’s the trouble with today’s women. They want to be the men in this world. They have to hold paying jobs and handle the finances. Why, when I was a young mother, Mr. Allen would come home on payday and hand me four crisp twenties. That was my allowance to pay for all the groceries and sundries and I lived within it. I didn’t ask why eighty dollars or when he was going to give me a raise. You need to defer to men more, Bubbles. If you allowed men to decide what’s right and wrong they wouldn’t run off like your ex-husband did.”

  The only option was the door. It was slightly to the left of Mrs. Allen. To get there I would have to rise up and somehow smack Mrs. Allen unconscious, leap over her body and run out. But I simply could not bring myself to do it. I mean, Mrs. Allen was Mrs. Allen. To hit her would be like accosting Aunt Jemima. Though if she kept on talking about me not deferring to men and how that was responsible for the breakup of my marriage, she was a goner.

  “Now Mr. Allen, he loves blueberry pie, though the tiny seeds do get stuck in the folds of his colon and give him gas.”

  Yup. I could do it. I reached into my purse and activated Roxanne’s curling iron with one hand.

  “Lately, I’ve been given to sieving out the seeds.”

  “Champ! Thank God you’re here!” I screamed, pointing.

  Mrs. Allen turned to look at the door. I pity people who don’t watch The Three Stooges. They always fall for that moronic trick.

  Whack! Roxanne’s curling iron grazed the tip of her nose.

  “Oww.” She covered her face with both hands.

  It was a momentary distraction, but enough for me to take two giant steps and grab the shotgun from her lap.

  “Earl!” she screeched as I backed toward the door, the shotgun pointed at her belly. “Earl! Come quick. The tart got loose.”

  Upstairs I heard the creaking of bed springs. Mr. Allen coming to the rescue, as soon as he found his glasses. I dashed outside and remembered that Zeke had taken my keys. The windows and doors were locked. Damn.

  Bless the Lord for Genevieve.

  Genevieve was a firm believer in my personal mantra, Murphy’s Law, that if a bad thing can happen, it will. I knelt down and slid my rear license plate a fraction of an inch. There was a spare key, right where Genevieve had left it. I was really beginning to like conspiracy theorists. They were growing on me.

  Steve Stiletto’s mansion was reached by traveling down a beautiful, shaded country lane lined by oak trees and rock fences. In the pitch dark of four A.M., however, the oaks overhung like preying monsters. There were no streetlights here and the overall effect was to create ominous dread in my stomach. I checked my speedometer. I was going fifteen miles per hour. I don’t even go that slowly through cemeteries.

  There were two lights on when I pulled into the large circular drive of his white stone home. Stiletto had gotten rid of all the caretakers when he inherited the mansion, keeping only a gardener who came in on weekends and a weekly cleaning maid. No one should have been in his house. No one except Stiletto. And I mean no one but Stiletto. Esmeralda was not a welcomed guest, in my mind.

  However, there were no signs of Esmeralda. There were no other cars in the driveway and I was not in the adventurous spirit of checking the garage. So, I left the Camaro where it was, grabbed Mrs. Allen’s shotgun and climbed the front steps.

  The front door was open.

  I stopped myself. Okay, I could get in the car, go back to Lehigh and call the cops, wake Mickey out of bed and tell him that Henry Metzger was back from the grave because Chrissy Price was convinced she’d heard his voice on the telephone. Then Mickey could call the men in white suits and they could cart me off.

  No. I was doing this alone. I patted Mrs. Allen’s shotgun as though it were a dog. I like dogs, I hate shotguns. If this shotgun were a dog, I’d call him Elvis.

  “Good, Elvis,” I said, pushing open the door. “Come on, Elvis.”

  Elvis and I entered the wide stone hall with its beautiful spiral staircase. No matter how many times I entered this house, it continued to amaze me. A Waterford crystal lamp was lit on a Queen Anne side table in the hallway. There was the sitting room with the cardinals on the curtains and the terrace out the back. Gorgeous.

  There was also the moaning of someone engaged in erotic sexual pleasure above me.

  I took two steps and cocked an ear.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, leaning Elvis’s butt against the floor. “Don’t tell me.”

  Creak, creak. Moan. Moan. “Steve. Oh, Steve. Please, Steve.”

  That was it. I’d had it. I had hauled ass all the way down from Slagville, nearly killing myself on the wet roads because I had deduced Steve Stiletto might be in some sort of danger. And I got down there, exhausted mind you, chilled to the bone, hungry, stressed out and almost beside myself with worry, only to find out that he was spending the night on a down-filled antique four-poster bonking Esmeralda Greene.

  “Let’s go, Elvis,” I said, taking the stairs two at a time. “Let’s sic ’em.”

  We ran down the deep red oriental runner toward the moaning at the end of the hall. I didn’t even wait to make sure they were through. I didn’t even knock politely. I t
ook my Payless pump and I kicked in that door.

  Esmeralda lifted her head from the bed. “Bubbles!”

  I froze in place. It was like flipping on HBO late at night and coming across “Real Sex.”

  “What the—?”

  “Get me out of here.” Esmeralda writhed to get free. “My arms are killing me.”

  Esmeralda was bare naked on the bed except for a pair—I am so happy to report—of rather worn gray all-cotton Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs and a white cotton bra. So much for the sophisticated underwear model. Her wrists and ankles had been handcuffed to the four posts of Stiletto’s fantastic bed.

  “I’ve never been in here,” I said, gazing about the room with its hardwood floors, white walls, crown molding and twelve-foot high ceilings.

  “Come on. This is no time to sightsee. Don’t you have a hair pin or something?”

  White gauzy curtains hung over mullioned windows. A brown leather couch was set beneath an old lamp around which were stacks of books. I imagined Stiletto—nearly naked, of course—reading in the night, filling that amazing mind of his with—

  “Bubbles! Hurry! Steve’s hurt.”

  Zwing! I reached in my purse and fished out a bobby pin. I started with Esmeralda’s left wrist and stuck the pin in the tiny key hole. I wiggled it around, Esmeralda pulled and it snapped open. We worked like this wordlessly until she was free.

  “Where’s Steve?” I asked.

  Esmeralda sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her wrists. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. I heard a gunshot about an hour ago and I got worried, though.”

  “What were you two doing? What happened?”

  She slipped into a pair of jeans that had been folded neatly and laid on a chair. “Nothing happened. I was in Slagville gathering the last information for this profile I was doing on Hugh McMullen—”

  “Did you go up to Tremont Road?” I couldn’t resist.

  “Yeah. To see Wilma Sullivan. How did you know?”

  I considered carefully how best to answer this question. Esmeralda may have been handcuffed on the bed and I may just have freed her, but we were still competition. “I got a tip and went over there myself. Mrs. Sullivan’s neighbors said she was dead and that you’d been around asking questions. Why did you go there?”

  “Because Hugh McMullen told the police he’d been with Mrs. Sullivan the night of Bud Price’s murder. Mrs. Sullivan had been his nanny when he was a boy and she’d been ill lately. He sent her flowers all summer and assumed, I guess, that she’d cover for him if the police came around.”

  “Hard to cover when you’re dead,” I said.

  Esmeralda smiled. “Gotta keep up with the obituaries. Anyway, I was leaving Slagville when I got a call on my cell phone to come down to Steve’s house in Saucon Valley.”

  “Who called?”

  Her auburn head poked through a black cashmere sweater. “He said he was Steve’s dad. He said there was an emergency.” She looked around for her shoes. “I didn’t think twice that he’d be lying.”

  He wasn’t lying, I thought. Henry Metzger was the only father Stiletto ever knew.

  I bent down and found a pair of black Etienne Aigner flats under the bed. “Here.”

  “Thanks,” she said, stepping into them. “I raced down to the house and this man answered the door. He introduced himself as Steve’s father and invited me in.”

  “Tall,” I said, standing. “White haired. Kind of looks like Paul Newman.”

  “Yeah. Wicked tan.”

  Nice living on the Cayman Islands. “Then what?”

  She shivered and rubbed her arms. Post traumatic shock, dear girl. “Then he got me a drink and we talked about my work. We sat in the living room and he asked me how long I’d been with the AP and what did I think of the Republicans’ chances to regain control of the Senate. The entire time I was thinking, what’s this big emergency?”

  Control. All Henry Metzger had ever wanted was control. More than steel, more than money. He craved control.

  “I had two drinks, scotch and soda, and I was feeling kind of looped. The phone rang. He asked me to answer it. It was you, I think.”

  I dropped my eyes. Busted.

  “After that, things started getting blurry. I can’t believe the scotch went straight to my head.” She massaged her temple. “The last thing I remember was him helping me up to this bedroom and laying me down. Then I woke up and I found myself cuffed and naked. That was about an hour ago and then you came in. Why?”

  I picked up the phone. No dial tone. “I came because I had a hunch Stiletto was here and in trouble.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean why me? Steve and I work together, but that’s it. Why would his father have called me to Steve’s house? Why would he have drugged me and cuffed me to a bed? What did I ever do?”

  I hung up the dead phone. “You don’t know Steve’s stepfather.”

  “Except for tonight’s cocktail hour, I don’t.”

  “Then let me introduce you.” I pointed to the doorway.

  Henry Metzger grinned broadly. “Hello, Bubbles. It’s been a while.”

  Henry Metzger was wearing a white turtleneck sweater over a pair of gray wool pants. The pistol he carried in his hands was like an afterthought.

  “Put the shotgun down, Bubbles.”

  I clutched the gun. “It’s not a gun. It’s Elvis.”

  He smiled as though tolerating a child and motioned for me to put Elvis on the bed. I wasn’t a very good sharpshooter, so I did as I was told. Henry took a few more steps into the room and held up the pistol. It was tiny with a pearl handle. Really spiffy. If it had been a dog it would have been a poodle. Elvis would have been a hound.

  “Hands in the air, please.”

  I groaned and raised my hands. Not again.

  “Hey. That’s my gun,” Esmeralda said.

  “Found it in your glove compartment. Thanks ever so. I came prepared with my own, serial numbers sanded off, naturally. But this will work out so much better for the scenario I’ve devised.”

  “And that is?” Esmeralda was playing reporter.

  “And that is,” I interrupted, “that Henry is going to shoot both of us and position our bodies so it appears that we had a cat fight over Stiletto and shot each other.”

  “Oh.” She snapped her lips tight.

  “Bubbles knows that I am not a murderer,” Henry said. “Isn’t that right, Bubbles?”

  “That depends on how you define murderer. If you mean that you never pull the trigger or drive in the knife, that’s right, you’re not a murderer.”

  He bowed slightly. “Thank you.”

  “But you’ve killed countless people. And I’m not talking only about the people you got Brouse, your henchman, to rub out. I’m talking about the average Joes who died on the job because you didn’t want to spend the money on safety precautions. Their blood is on your hands.”

  Henry winced. “So dramatic. Blood on your hands. Don’t tell me you’re taking creative writing at the Two Guys now.”

  “Two Guys closed,” I said.

  “I see.”

  I saw, too. I saw that Henry meant he was not about to change his habits at this late date. The only reason he hadn’t shot us yet was because the help hadn’t arrived. We were killing time with this chitchat.

  “So, seeing as we’re waiting for your hit man, why don’t you tell me how you survived the crash,” I said, shifting my feet.

  Henry’s frosty blue eyes regarded me. “Central America is a very easy place to die when you have money.”

  “And you had plenty of it waiting in the Cayman Islands, I understand.”

  “I did. Steve received enough to keep him out of probate court asking for more. The lion’s share was always under a number where I could access it, tax free.”

  “Can I drop my hands?” I said. “My shoulders hurt.”

  “No.”

  Brother. “Now, if I were you, I’d have sipped piña coladas by that clear tur
quoise water and counted my lucky stars. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

  “And forsake billions on the Mammoth Basin? Bubbles, I assume by now you realize just how much wealth is in there. If I had a front, Chrissy Price for example, I could wheel and deal like I used to. Hugh McMullen’s mistake was in blabbing to me early this year that Koolball had the fire extinguisher.”

  “What fire extinguisher?” Esmeralda asked.

  “One that could put out the fire in Limbo,” I said. I bit my tongue to keep from adding, but I found out about it first, so hands off.

  “That kind of extinguisher would be worth gazillions alone,” Esmeralda said. “Why did McMullen tell you about it?”

  Henry waved the gun. “Because McMullen owed me money. Correction. He owed his company money. Twenty million dollars. Before the accountants came in to audit the books, he contacted my old lawyer and friend, Max Factor, looking for help.”

  “But why did Hugh McMullen call your lawyer?” Esmeralda asked.

  Gosh, I wish she weren’t here. She was completely ruining my chances for an exclusive.

  “Because Hugh’s father, Senior McMullen, had come to me for money years ago. I gave him the cash and, in exchange, Senior made me a silent partner in McMullen Coal. After I quote-unquote died, Max handled my interests for me. I didn’t give a damn about Steve getting this house, but I wanted that Mammoth Basin.”

  “And just like Senior McMullen owed you after you lent him money, Hugh McMullen owed you, too,” I said. “You must have loved being in that position. Hugh McMullen sweating bullets. Big bucks to be made.”

  “I negotiated the entire process while fishing for barracuda off my yacht. My only concern was that Bud Price was in the way. He needed to be removed and McMullen agreed, though he was reluctant to pull the trigger.” Metzger sighed deeply. “So I flew up to Pennsylvania to get the ball rolling.”

  “By calling Price at home and telling him that Stinky had signed over the fire extinguisher to Hugh.”

  “That’s right. Price ran straight to Koolball for a confrontation at the bar. Which is where you came in.”

  I smiled.

  “You?” asked Esmeralda. “You were reporting on a story in which you had a personal involvement? For shame, Bubbles.”