by Elise Sax
“Are you going to keep looking into the murder? That sounds scary,” he said.
“I’m not scared. I’ve done this before, and it’s not a big deal. I have a lot of suspects with this one, though, but my money is on Joyce Strauss.” I wanted it to be Detective Snobby Sexpot, but Joyce Strauss was a safer bet. She was the only one who said nice things about Mike, and that was a tell. She was the one.
“Is that the policewoman who looks like a model?” Larry asked.
“No, Joyce is a skinny school marm policewoman with pursed lips and an annoying know-it-all attitude.”
There was a sound behind me, and Joyce Strauss’s face appeared in my rearview mirror. It took me a moment to understand what was happening. At first I thought I had conjured her in my mirror, because I had been talking about her. But after a second, I realized that she had been hiding in the back seat on the roomy floor of my Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
Joyce put a gun to my head with one hand and a knife at my throat with her other hand. I gasped, and the car swerved.
“Get the car under control,” she yelled.
Somehow, even with the blood in my veins pumping a mile a minute, I managed to get control of my car and keep driving down the highway, like we were still on a pleasant ride in the spring weather.
“That’s it,” Joyce said in a threatening tone that made me shiver in fear. “Keep going straight. Follow the road.”
“What’s going on?” Larry demanded.
“Sit still and don’t move a muscle, or I’ll slice her open and blow a hole through her brain,” Joyce told him.
Larry did as he was told and sat stiff as a board in his seat, but his eyes never left the scene between Joyce and me. I was an out of shape woman, and I wasn’t a physical threat to anyone, but Joyce wasn’t taking any chances. Not only was she going to kill me, she was going to stab me and shoot me at the same time. It was the definition of overkill.
“Hello, Joyce,” I croaked. “How are you?”
“How am I? How am I? How can you ask that?”
“I’m a polite person.”
Joyce sneered. I tried to drive carefully, but my eyes darted to the rearview mirror constantly, and the car swerved dangerously. Unlike other murderers that I had known, Joyce seemed completely sane. No crazy eyes. No twitching. She looked like a perfectly normal, middle-aged woman, who just happened to be holding a gun and a knife to my head. That fact scared me more than anything. She was clear-eyed and clear-headed. Determined.
“Joyce, what’s going on?” I asked.
“You’re going on. You! You’ve been sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. Butting in.”
It was a common complaint where I was concerned. I was a buttinksi. But this was a notch above the regular reaction to my busybodyness.
“I’m sorry. As a matchmaker, I get involved in people’s lives. I guess it’s a habit, but I’ll stop. I promise. I used to have a nasty habit of cracking my knuckles, but I stopped that cold turkey. I’m sure I could stop this, too.”
“Too late,” she said, pushing the gun against my temple. “You’ve been asking too many questions, stirring things up.”
“I have?” I had been asking questions, but I didn’t think I had stirred up anything at all.
“You know you have. Mike was murdered. Let law enforcement handle it. They’ll find the killer. That’s all that counts.”
I was confused. “You want them to catch you?”
“Me? What are you talking about? I’m not the killer.”
“Oh. My mistake.”
“If you’re not the killer, why are you doing this?” Larry asked. It was a great question. Right on the nose.
“Because this one is butting in.”
I sighed. We were on a loop with no hope for getting off it and no hope of getting out of this alive. Joyce was upset that I had “stirred things up” and asked a lot of questions, but not that I was searching for the murderer. If Joyce wasn’t the killer, I couldn’t figure out what she was upset about.
Unless.
“I asked questions, but I didn’t find out about you,” I told her, catching on. She was worried about shining the light on something about her.
“Baloney. You’ve been pestering everyone from the conference nonstop. I’ve heard about you, don’t think I haven’t. You’ve turned up more killers than Miss Marple. Nothing gets past you. You’re the secret breaker.”
“You’re giving me a lot of credit that I don’t deserve.” But I was secretly tickled that I had that reputation. More killers than Miss Marple? Nothing got past me? The secret breaker? Those were all great things, and I wondered if they were true. Since moving to Cannes, I had stumbled on a lot of dead people, but I had never thought of myself as particularly gifted at solving mysteries. I was called the “murder magnet,” but never the “mystery maven.”
“That may be true,” I told Joyce. “But not this time. This time, I’ve been two steps behind Spencer and you guys. I’m not any closer to figuring out Mike’s murder. I don’t even know how he was killed. I know it was daffodils, but I don’t know how he ingested the flowers.”
“Bullshit,” Joyce said.
“She’s telling the truth,” Larry said. “She matched Cynthia and partially uncursed me, so she hasn’t had time. She doesn’t know who the murderer is.”
It warmed my heart to see Larry protective over me. I hadn’t done much for him in the way of uncursing him or finding him a match, but here he was, standing up for me in the face of an armed woman.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Larry fiddle with his seatbelt, and I was gripped with fear for him. It looked like he was planning to do something heroic, and I was worried that it would get him or me killed.
I had to cool the situation quickly before Larry made a move. With my sky-high blood pressure and pounding heart, my brain finally clicked into action.
“Nobody talked about you, Joyce,” I told her, as calmly as possible. We were still driving on the highway up the mountains and approaching a long bridge, which spanned the distance between two mountains. “I didn’t find out a thing about you. Nothing. I know that you’re a very accomplished top cop and that’s it. I promise.”
I watched in the rearview mirror, as Joyce’s face softened ever so slightly.
“Bullshit,” she said, but with less force and conviction than the last time she said it to me. It was my time to push forward and save us.
“I swear, Joyce. That’s all I know. I found out that Mike slept with Frank’s wife, that he beat up Leah’s nephew during a drug bust, and he accused Sidney of wrongdoing. But you remain the secret. Top secret. A vault. Nothing. Please believe me. Nothing.”
“Nothing?” she asked. She removed the knife from my throat, but she kept the gun at my temple.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Zilch. Nada.”
“Oh. I thought that…”
Then, it happened. Larry threw off his seatbelt and leaped across the seat, grabbing for the gun. My life flashed before my eyes, and it sort of fast-forwarded to Spencer, to an image of us lying in bed together, watching Family Guy, and right then and there, I knew I wanted to marry Spencer, if that meant being with him forever. And right then and there I knew I would do whatever it would take not to lose him, and right then and there, that meant not having my brains blown out.
Larry got hold of the gun, and he tussled with Joyce, their arms knocking into my head over and over. I tried to duck down, and the car swerved, drifting over the lanes, as we reached the bridge.
“You can’t take a cop’s gun,” Joyce chastised Larry.
“I won’t let you hurt her!”
“I wasn’t going to hurt her!” Joyce yelled.
“Yeah, right!” Larry shouted back, struggling with her.
I had to give it to Joyce. For a skinny woman, she sure was strong. I, meanwhile, was having a dickens of a time, trying to maintain control of the car. I stomped my foot on the brake, but they hit me again as they
fought for the gun, and I fell onto the steering wheel, making the car spin.
Car spinning and brakes screeching look different on TV than they do in real life. First off, on television, a stunt driver is driving. In real life, unfortunately, I was driving. And I didn’t want to be driving. I didn’t want to be in the car. Second off, unlike stunt drivers, I had no control over the car at all, and it was heading right for the bridge’s guardrail.
There weren’t a lot of ways I wanted to die. Even old age scared the bejeezus out of me. But driving off a bridge was way down the list, just below being eaten by a tiger and just above being burned alive.
“I got it!” Larry announced, ecstatic, finally holding the gun in his hand, away from Joyce. It was a great achievement on his part. Heroic. He held up the gun, thrilled with himself. Meanwhile, the car kept spinning, and the guardrail kept getting closer, and that’s when poor, cursed Larry Doughy, who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, flew out of the open window that he had opened to enjoy the spring air.
I watched in horror as he went right through the window, his eyes huge as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. The gun was still clutched in his hand, and out he went in the spring air, scented with wildflowers.
“Fuck you, Twitter!” he yelled and then he was gone.
The car finally came to a stop, but Larry didn’t. He kept going up and over the guardrail and off the side of the bridge, as if he had wings.
CHAPTER 9
The end. Remember the time in Rocky where he was down, and you thought it was over for him, but then he got up and fought the other guy and won? That was good. But bubbeleh, not everyone is Rocky. Not everyone gets up after the end. Sometimes, the end is the end, and there’s nothing we can do about it. So, this is a little smartness from me to you: sometimes love goes forever, but sometimes love has a beginning and an end, and when it’s the end, it’s the end. And just because it’s the end, it doesn’t mean that they can’t live happily ever after.
Lesson 15, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
I turned off the car, jumped out, and ran to the guardrail. Joyce was right behind me. We leaned over the rail and looked down. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see Larry’s body broken on the road beneath us that ran between the mountains.
“Where is he?” Joyce asked. “I can’t see him.”
Below us, way down below us, was an old road with few cars on it, but there was no sign of Larry.
“Help!” I heard him yell.
“Where are you?” I called back.
“Here!”
I leaned further over the side of the bridge, and then I saw Larry. He was right below me, bent over a highway sign, which announced that Cannes was five miles away. “Am I alive?” he asked, doubled over the sign and clutching its underside. He was too far away for me to reach him to help him up.
“I’m calling 911!” I announced.
I ran back to the car and called 911. It took some explaining, but they said they would be there in five minutes.
“Keep holding on!” I yelled when I returned to the place where Larry went over.
“Okay!” Larry called back.
“You did this to him,” I said to Joyce, giving her a good push.
“I didn’t mean any harm,” she whined, all of her aggressiveness gone.
“You didn’t mean any harm with a knife and a gun? With breaking into my car?”
“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “My career was on the line. I…”
Joyce didn’t finish her sentence. Her eyes grew wide, and she coughed violently. She clutched her chest and gasped for air.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Do you have allergies? What’s going on?”
Her body heaved. “Make my killer pay,” she croaked.
“What?”
Joyce’s stomach roiled, and she doubled over, vomiting violently.
“This isn’t good,” I said. “This is bad. Real bad. Why is this happening? Don’t do this, Joyce. Don’t do this.”
She fell onto the ground, and I dropped to my knees to help her. She rolled onto her back and looked up at me.
“I know,” she whispered, her voice small and gravelly. “I know who killed me.”
Joyce Strauss died in my arms on the pavement of the highway that leads from Cannes up further into the mountains. She died without telling me who had killed her.
As she drew her last breath, a car drove across the bridge and stopped in front of us. A man stepped out and walked in our direction. It was Spencer. On second thought, it wasn’t Spencer. He looked like Spencer, but he was slightly taller and bulkier, and he walked different.
“Spencer?” I asked.
He knelt in front of us and took Joyce’s pulse.
“Are you all right, physically?” he asked me.
“I didn’t kill her. She just died all of a sudden. I think it was poison. But I didn’t poison her.”
“I know you didn’t kill her,” he said. He had Spencer’s eyes. Deep blue, rimmed with long, black eyelashes. He had Spencer’s thick hair, too, but it was cut differently, and he was well-dressed like Spencer. Like a cross between a model and a hedge fund manager.
“You didn’t answer me. Are you hurt…physically?”
“No, but my friend is hanging over a sign,” I said, pointing.
The man who wasn’t Spencer looked over the side of the bridge, and then he ran to his car and opened his trunk. Quickly, he threw off his shoes, his jacket, and his shirt. He grabbed rope from the trunk and ran back to the spot where Larry went over the side.
I could hear the sound of emergency services sirens in the distance, coming closer. Spencer’s lookalike tied an intricate knot to the guardrail and went over the side without a moment to reconsider or wet his pants.
“I hope he doesn’t die,” I said to Joyce’s body.
“I’m going to save you,” I heard him say to Larry. “Don’t fight me when I get to you. Otherwise, we’ll both wind up two hundred feet down with every bone in our bodies broken. And contrary to belief, that would hurt like a bitch. So?”
“I won’t fight you,” Larry said. “But I may be cursed.”
“Aren’t we all, buddy. Aren’t we all.”
Two minutes later, they were back up on the bridge. Larry only had a broken toe, a miracle that he credited to the goat. Emergency services reached the bridge, while the hero who looked like Spencer was putting his clothes back on.
I recognized Spencer’s car with the emergency services, which parked a couple feet away from me. The paramedics arrived first and checked out Joyce, allowing me to get up and walk to Spencer.
“Pinky, what did you do now?”
“It wasn’t my fault, and I didn’t kill her.”
“Of course she didn’t kill her,” the man who had come to Larry’s rescue said.
Spencer turned, ready with his meanest cop face, probably ready to tell the guy to back off and mind his own business, but the moment Spencer saw the good Samaritan, his face changed. His mouth opened in a large O, which then transformed into a wide, open-mouthed smile.
“Peter! Peter! Peter! Peter! Peter!” he yelled, like he was twelve years old at the midnight release night of the next Grand Theft Auto videogame. Then, Spencer did something I had never seen him do before. He jumped up and down.
“Peter!” he yelled again.
“Little brother!” Peter yelled back and pulled Spencer in for a bear hug.
Little brother. Ahhh… Of course. The guy who looked like Spencer was Spencer’s older brother. That made a lot of sense.
After a long hug, Spencer slapped his brother on the back. “What’re you doing here? I didn’t know you were visiting.”
“I missed my little brother,” Peter said, smiling. “You’re going to let me buy you dinner, right? You and your lady, of course.” He winked at me, and my heart did a little flutter. I liked him immediately.
“How did you know I’d be on this bridge?
” Spencer asked him.
“He saved Larry,” I told Spencer.
Spencer put his arm around Peter’s shoulders. “That’s what my brother does. He saves people wherever he goes. That and other things, but if I tell you about the other things, I have to kill you. Am I right, bro?”
“Don’t worry,” Peter told me. “I’d kill you, but I’d make it look like natural causes. It wouldn’t hurt at all.”
Spencer guffawed, loudly, and I smiled out of politeness.
“Now Pinky, tell me how you killed Joyce,” Spencer said.
The paramedics took Larry to the hospital to give him a complete once-over, while I spoke for forty-five minutes about Joyce and her trying to kill me before she threw up and died. Forty-five minutes didn’t seem to be enough for Spencer, because he insisted that I go to the station to make an official statement.
Spencer’s brother, Peter, went, too.
The station was a hive of activity because the remaining three conference participants had heard about Joyce’s death, and they came, wanting answers. Spencer sat me in the lobby with a pad of paper and a pencil.
“Write that up, Pinky, while I handle the mess.”
“I’ll keep her company, and when you have time, let’s talk a minute before we go to dinner,” Peter said, sitting in the chair next to me and crossing his legs.
Spencer smiled, obviously delighted. “He’s going to keep you company, Pinky. Isn’t he wonderful? What a guy! What a guy!”
I had never seen siblings get along this much. Spencer wasn’t the buddy-buddy kind of guy, and it was a surprise to see him bosom buddies with anyone, let alone his big brother. I was an only child with a terrible relationship with my mother, so this kind of brotherly love was foreign to me.
Fred walked by with a man in handcuffs. “Hello, Underwear Girl,” he said. “Detective Williams gave me another one to process. This one was busted for ecstasy.”
“Hey, the ecstasy was for my dog, man,” the convict insisted.
“Then, why did you put it up your butt?” Fred asked. “You think your dog wants butt ecstasy? I don’t think so, pervert.”
