by Lois Winston
We found Sylvia Schuster engrossed in a Mah Jongg game in the solarium. A diminutive dumpling of a woman with a steel gray, slightly off-center beehive, she wore a lavender polyester pantsuit that had what looked like a smear of dried grape jelly in the vicinity of her left breast. At least the stain color-coordinated with her outfit.
I waved from the doorway to catch her attention. “Hi, Mrs. Schuster. Remember me?”
She tossed a tile into the center of the card table where she sat with three other women. “One bam. I remember you. Have a seat,” she said without looking up from her rack of tiles.
“South,” said another woman, also tossing a tile into the pile.
I glanced around the room. All the other chairs were occupied, so Blake and I stood off to the side and watched as the women continued their ten-finger tap dance with the tiles. “You have any idea how this game works?” I whispered.
“Chinese gin rummy of sorts. Except they use tiles instead of cards.”
I tried to follow along but quickly gave up. When it came to card games, I stuck with Fish and Old Maid. “Greek to me,” I said.
Blake gave me The Look, but I detected a hint of a crinkle around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.
We watched as the four women took turns, reaching for and discarding tiles in a fashion as rapid-fire as a Mafioso with an Uzi. Trying to keep up with the quick tempo action made me dizzy. The women spoke in some kind of code as they tossed the tiles.
“Two crack.”
“East.”
“Red.”
“Four bam.”
I soon gave up trying to figure out what they were doing and turned my attention to the plant-filled solarium. A dozen wooden card tables were scattered about the room. Four women sat at each, all tossing bams and cracks and assorted colors and compass directions. Several motorized scooters were parked around the perimeter of the room. Metal walkers stood next to many of the women’s chairs. But you’d never know these ladies had trouble getting around from the way their arthritic hands grabbed and tossed those tiles. If the Olympics held a hot potato tournament, I had no doubt every woman in that room would qualify.
Finally, Sylvia yelled, “Mahjongg!” A Cheshire grin plastered from ear to ear, she reached across the table and made a beckoning motion with the fingers and outstretched palms of both her hands. “Come to mama, my pretty green babies.”
“Fleeced again,” grumbled one of the women.
“She cheats,” said another, a generously proportioned woman with a double chin, jet black hair, and rhinestone embellished cat’s eye glasses.
Sylvia’s grin turned wicked. “Prove it, Blanche.”
“I’m working on it.”
The women took their time methodically counting out fives, tens, and twenties. “Serious stakes,” said Blake under his breath.
From my slightly obstructed vantage point, I estimated Sylvia pulled in three hundred dollars. Damn. I had to put up with the likes of Sidney Mandelbaum for six hours in order to make three Franklins. And now that Sid was gone, I wasn’t going to see that kind of money nearly as fast as I did when he was alive and eager to schmooze the elderly ladies of northern and central New Jersey.
“Maybe I should take up Mahjongg,” I said.
Blake cleared his throat in an attempt to squelch a chortle. He wasn’t successful. “You might have better luck finding a competitive Candyland league,” he suggested.
Sometimes it annoys the hell out of me that my husband knows me so well. This was one of those times.
One by one the women grudgingly handed neatly folded bundles of bills to Sylvia. After recounting each wad, she stuffed the money inside the pink and lavender floral blouse that peeked out from beneath her polyester suit jacket. “Same time next week, ladies?”
“What? You’ve already stolen what’s left of my Social Security check for this month,” said Blanche. With a grunt, she pushed away from the table and wobbled over to a burgundy scooter a few feet from where Blake and I stood. I glanced down at her legs. She wore a pair of hot pink Capri pants over sagging support hose. And I swear those were Manolos on her feet. I remembered drooling over a similar pair of strappy silver sandals with Swarovski crystals the last time I dared to window shop along Fifth Avenue.
“Like Blanche needs her Social,” stage whispered the woman seated to Sylvia’s left. She grabbed her walker and hauled her more than ample girth to her feet.
“Where are you all going? What about lunch?” asked Sylvia.
The woman turned back and patted Sylvia’s hand. “We ate lunch an hour ago, dear.”
Sylvia’s brows knit together. “We did? Are you sure, Pearl?”
“Yes. You had a chef’s salad, a cup of tomato bisque, and a jelly donut.”
That explained the purple stain.
“Did I enjoy it?”
Blanche made a snorting sound deep in her throat as she hoisted herself onto her scooter. “Talk about selective memory,” she muttered. “The woman can’t remember eating lunch an hour ago, but she remembers every single Mahjongg tile anyone plays.” After scowling at Sylvia, Blanche started up her scooter and raced toward the door, nearly running over Blake’s foot as she sped across the low pile industrial carpet.
Pearl and the third woman exchanged conspiratorial looks with Sylvia before they shuffled away behind their walkers. I swore I heard them titter as they left the solarium.
Finally, Sylvia turned her attention to us. “Poor Blanche. All the money in the world couldn’t buy her a sense of humor. Bitter old pill of a woman.” She chortled. “I just love yanking her chain. And parting her from some of that ill-gotten slum money of hers. Makes my day, as that sexy Clint Eastwood says.”
My jaw dropped involuntarily. “So that bit about not remembering lunch—?”
“All an act.” Sylvia patted her beehive like a preening bird. “I used to be an actress, you know. Back in the late fifties and early sixties.”
I shook my head. Our one previous conversation had lasted all of ten minutes and hadn’t included Sylvia’s professional résumé from over half a century ago. My job was to find out if the women my clients were interested in meeting were single and interested in meeting them. Period.
“In early television,” she added.
“Really?” Blake suddenly grew quite interested in Sylvia Schuster but not for the reason behind our visit.
Sylvia sat up a bit straighter and thrust her knockers in his direction. Age never mattered. Young or old, women always zeroed in on my man. “I was the original Karpet King housewife,” she said with a bat-bat, flutter-flutter of her eyelashes.
I forced myself to suppress a giggle as I watched my husband’s hopes—and his expression—plummet.
“And I never even had to audition,” Sylvia continued. “My uncle knew I was perfect for the role. Said I had natural talent.”
“Your uncle?” I asked.
“Melvin Kronstein. He started the Karpet King chain. But then I met Edgar, and he didn’t think it would be proper for a married woman to lounge around seductively on broadloom. Men had very old-fashioned ideas back then.” She sighed, her voice growing wistful. “If not for Edgar, who knows where my career would have taken me? My Lady Macbeth received rave reviews in nineteen-fifty-eight.”
“On Broadway?” I asked.
“In Newark. Weequahic High School. But that’s all in the past. I married Edgar. Then I married Stanley. Then I married Irving. Three husbands, five children. Who had time for anything else?”
The way Sylvia rambled and jumped headlong from one subject to another sounded eerily familiar. She reminded me of someone. When I caught the expression on Blake’s face, I knew. Blake was giving Sylvia The Look. My God! Sylvia reminded me of me!
This was not good. Poor Blake! Is that what he had to look forward to twenty-five or thirty years from now? I made a mental note to work on curbing my excessive right-brain-itis. It was the least I could do for my husband. I refused to doom the poor man
to living with the likes of Sylvia in his golden years.
The scatterbrain in question patted the chair beside her. “Sit. Tell me what sort of trouble that conniving, phony uncle of yours got himself into.”
My jaw dropped. “You know he wasn’t my uncle?”
Sylvia’s eyes twinkled. “I wasn’t born yesterday, sweetie. You think I don’t keep up? You’re a wing woman, right? That lovely Katie Couric did a piece on them a few months ago. Pegged you for one the moment you started chatting me up during the reception for that local politician. You have chutzpah; I’ll give you that much. When I was your age…” She shrugged the thought away. “No matter. Like I said, things were different back then.”
I glanced at Blake. Having lost interest in Sylvia, he had strolled over to the corner of the room and was pretending to ignore me, his attention engrossed instead on an oddly shaped, sepia colored water stain that spread across several ceiling tiles.
Like my handyman-challenged husband cared a flying fig about water stains! Or ceiling tiles. I could tell he’d heard every word and was forcing himself to keep from laughing. He’d warned me no one would believe I was my client’s daughter. Or niece. Or third-cousin-twice-removed.
I didn’t care. Authors create successful fiction by getting their readers to suspend disbelief. Especially in romance fiction. Considering the rate of divorce in this country, the idea of happily-ever-after is as humongous a suspension of disbelief as there is. I merely applied the same theory to my business model. The setup was just the feather that initially tickled the interest of the women I approached on behalf of my clients. Whether they believed my relationship to the men who hired me or not, I was satisfying their need for companionship and mine for money.
And just to prove my point to my Doubting Thomas husband, I asked Sylvia, “But it didn’t bother you that Sid wasn’t really my uncle?”
“Not really. Like I said, you’ve got chutzpah.”
I tossed Blake a so there smirk. I knew what I was doing. After all, it worked for the twenty and thirty-something crowd, so why not the sixty, seventy, and eighty-something crowd?
“So what can I do for you?” asked Sylvia.
I inhaled a deep breath, uncertain how to begin. Although I thought I could do a decent job of communicating murder and mayhem on the written page, conveying such news to little old ladies was uncharted territory for me.
Sylvia tapped her index fingernail on one of the Mahjongg tiles. “Spit it out, dear. I’m growing closer to the grave with each passing tick of the clock, you know.”
I didn’t spit; I blurted. “Sidney Mandelbaum was murdered last evening.” Then I held my breath, waiting for I wasn’t sure what.
Sylvia waved my bombshell of a statement aside with the brush of a hand and an unconcerned shrug of her shoulders. “So tell me something I don’t know. The police were already here. Interrupted my lunch. One damn cop came up from behind and startled the hoo-ha out of me. That’s how I got this nasty stain on my jacket.” She pointed to the smeared jelly. “Never been ogled so much in my life. Got every damn cocker in the place staring at my left boob for the past hour. And that includes the ones with cataracts.”
I assumed she meant cockers with cataracts, not that she had cataracts on her left boob, even though I failed to notice any half-blind dogs running around Larchmont Gardens. They did have a resident cat that lived on the grounds, but from the way he stalked anything that moved, I figured his eyesight hovered around the twenty-twenty range.
Sylvia pulled a tissue from inside her jacket sleeve and swiped at the dried purple blob. “I tried seltzer. Only made it worse. I’ll bet you can see this damn stain from clear across the Hudson. I wanted to go back to my apartment to change, but the girls insisted we start the game on time. Like they’ve got a bus to catch.
“Anyway, it better come out, or that detective is buying me a new suit. This is my lucky Mahjongg outfit, you know. Bought it back in the spring of seventy-nine and haven’t played a game of Mahjongg without it since. Hardly ever lose, too. Drives stingy Blanche Becker crazy. At first I thought she had set me up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Arranged the whole thing. Phony detective and all. I thought it was one of those singing telegrams, but it isn’t my birthday. Even if it were, Blanche is too cheap to spring for a Hallmark card, let alone a singing telegram. So then I thought maybe she bribed a relative. Not because it’s my birthday, mind you, which it isn’t, but because she wanted to get me too flustered to concentrate on the game.
“Still, it wasn’t until you showed up that I started to believe she didn’t somehow have a hand in it. The woman would go to any lengths to keep me from beating her at Mahjongg. As long as she didn’t have to pay anything. Did you know she comes from a long line of slumlords?”
I shook my head, at a loss for words and finding it difficult to keep up with her train of thought. Sylvia spoke as fast as she tossed Mahjongg tiles. I marveled at the lung capacity hidden behind what I estimated as a pair of 38D tatas. The woman rarely came up for air. I grew more depressed with each syllable she uttered. Please, God. Don’t let that be the future me.
“The woman makes Leona Helmsley, look like Mother Theresa, said Sylvia. She finally paused and eyed me for a moment. “So Sidney’s really dead?”
I nodded. “As really dead as Leona Helmsley and Mother Theresa.”
“I believe you. You might have lied about him being your uncle, but you have an honest face. That’s how I could tell he wasn’t really your uncle. You’re not a very good liar, you know, dear.”
Seems I’ve been told that on more than one occasion.
She leaned closer and rubbed her hands together. Her face brightened. “So dish. How’d that dirty rotten scoundrel get it? And who do you think did him in? The detective refused to tell me anything. Asked me a bunch of weird questions but refused to answer any of mine. He kept muttering about not being able to discuss an ongoing investigation.”
“He?” Blake pulled his attention from the ceiling tile and exchanged a quick glance with me. His had worry written all over it. I suppose mine did, too, considering the sudden clammy feel of my skin and two-ton lead weight that had settled in my stomach.
“Don’t you mean she?” I asked. “Detective Menendez? Loretta Menendez?”
“Honey, my eyes aren’t that bad and my marbles are all still rattling around upstairs, contrary to what Blanche Becker believes. Haven’t lost any yet and don’t plan to. I can still tell the difference between a guy and a gal, just fine. Even if the guy’s wearing a dress and heels. Can’t fool me.”
My jaw dropped. “The detective was in drag?”
Sylvia made a tsking noise with her tongue. “Of course not. Where’d you get such a fool idea?”
“But you just said—”
“I know what I said, and I didn’t say anything about anyone in drag. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
Blake apparently had studied the water stain long enough. He walked over to the table, took the seat opposite Sylvia and asked, “Can you describe the man?”
“Of course. Huge hunk of a fellow. What in my day we referred to as built like a brick shithouse, you should pardon the expression. That’s why I suspected a singing telegram at first. I was looking forward to him stripping down to his skivvies and giving us a bit of bump and grind.”
She winked at Blake as she paused for breath. “Anyway, he reminded me a bit of Arnold what’s-his-face. The one who married that Kennedy girl. Only she wasn’t a Kennedy because her father was something else. He was in politics for a bit. Not the father. He’s dead. Arnold. Governor Terminator, they called him. Out in California. Except he’s not the governor anymore, and he got caught up in some sex scandal, and the marriage is kaput.” She waved her hand in annoyance. “You know who I mean. Only the detective didn’t speak with an accent. And his hair was shorter.”
“Do you remember his name?” I asked.
Sylvia thought for a moment. “Kroft
? No, that wasn’t it.” She tapped her index finger against her chin and stared at the ceiling. “Craine? Kroll?”
“Craft?” asked Blake.
FIVE
“Craft.” Sylvia nodded. “Yes, Craft. Detective Craft. I remember thinking how suitable. You know, a crafty detective? Like Columbo. He acted clueless, but his wheels were always spinning.”
“Crafty, all right, but he’s no detective,” I said. “Columbo or otherwise.”
“Don’t be silly, dear. I may be old, but I’m not senile. And I’m not stupid.” She patted my hand in a way that made me wonder if she thought I might be one or the other. Or both. “I demanded to see his ID before I’d answer any questions. He showed me his badge.”
“Yes, well…” I wasn’t sure how to tell her she’d been duped. Like me.
Blake jumped in and explained the situation to Sylvia. When he was through, she shifted her gaze back and forth between us several times before finally saying, “Oh, dear. Looks like I’ve been had, doesn’t it?”
“We both were,” I said, this time patting her hand in reassurance. “What did he want to know?”
“Only one thing, really. What Sidney and I discussed.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter that he wasn’t a real detective.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I wasn’t any help to him.”
“How do you know that?” asked Blake.
Sylvia scowled. “My big date with that loser lasted all of five minutes.”
Loser? True, Sid wasn’t my idea of the perfect date—given his cigars and crude mannerisms, but he didn’t suffer from halitosis or body odor. He didn’t click his dentures or shoot spittle from his mouth when he spoke. His clothes weren’t rumpled or stained, and he didn’t wear a feed cap. Sylvia had not only given him her phone number, she’d accepted a date when he called her. As did most of the other women I’d introduced to Sid. I chalked it up to that old adage about there being someone for everyone. That and beggars can’t be choosers, given the male to female ratio of the over-sixty set.
