Caught Dead in Philadelphia

by Gillian Roberts

  I dangled the chain in front of her. “Look, it reaches your belly-button. It wouldn’t fit you.”

  “Then whose is it?” Karen said in a sulky voice. “Who does it fit?”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said honestly.

  * * *

  Twice I checked to be sure my car was locked before I headed around toward the school door. I walked slowly, trying to savor the sunshine, trying to delay my entry into a building filled with questions waiting to be asked.

  “Hey! You!” The voice was almost as heavy and frightening as the sudden hand on my shoulder.

  I pulled away and backed off, ready to use—if I could only remember it—my one-day self-defense seminar. All I instantly recalled was the gouging-out-of-eyes part, which seemed excessive as a first response. Anyway, it was morning, and we were in a high school parking lot—a ridiculous time and place for a mugging.

  I ran three steps. The enormous man shouted. “Wait! You! Wait!” He managed to be at my side in about one stride, his bulk casting a shadow over me.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I broke into a run, aiming for the front of the building, where there would be safety in numbers. Our students never rushed inside, eager to beat the bell. But the alleyway was narrow, and the man caught hold of me as I swung left. This time he didn’t let go, although I struggled. He tugged and pulled me back, toward an oversized black car idling at the alley curb.

  Every organized crime cliché packed my head so tightly I couldn’t think. I was frozen, staring at the black limousine. Another figure sat behind the tinted glass.

  “Let me go!” I screamed as he opened the back door of the car. And then I remembered. I stopped tugging, wheeled on the monster, and aimed my knee straight up. That lesson was compliments of my original self-defense instructor, Mama, who had coughed and blushed and finally just spelled out what to do in desperate situations. I believe she meant something other than being dragged into a criminal’s car, but I didn’t care.

  My molester grunted and doubled over, still clutching my arm.

  “Haskell!” a voice from inside the car said. “You’re hurting her.”

  Haskell, looking like a hunchback, didn’t inform the voice that I had evened the score. Instead, he dropped my arm.

  “Miss Pepper!” the voice called.

  I waited. Haskell wouldn’t be racing after me for a while, and the voice sounded strangely familiar. “Mr. Cole?” I asked when the tinted glass rolled down.

  “Just a minute of your time, please,” he said calmly. “I apologize for Haskell’s methods. I didn’t mean for him to frighten you.” He glared at the beefy man; then he looked at his watch. “Miss Pepper, can I have five minutes? We’ll just ride around, and you’ll be back in time for class.” He opened the car door wider.

  My mother had told me all about cars and strange men, and Hayden Cole seemed very strange. I shook my head.

  “Now, Miss Pepper. I am not an old man offering candy,” he said, annoyed. I felt ashamed, as if he’d read my thoughts. “Five minutes?”

  A sliver of normal, nonparanoid perception returned. Hayden Cole was not exactly the Godfather. I got into the car. “Five minutes,” I said.

  “Once again I apologize for Haskell’s behavior.” He paused and seemed to consider things. “And mine,” he finally added.

  “What is it you want?”

  I looked at his profile, contained and still. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, the man’s bride-to-be had been smashed to death. I couldn’t see any evidence of heavy mourning, but perhaps I didn’t understand good breeding.

  The car circled the general area of the school, slowly going nowhere. I waited for an explanation. I waited quite a while. My tension level increased with each second of silence.

  He blinked a few times; then he took a thin cigar out of a case, clipped off the end, and bit it. Smoking cigars does not seem politically wise. Neither was it particularly pleasant in a car in the morning, even to a smoke-starved woman such as I. I waved at the air. He ignored me.

  I wondered if he had dragged me into his car just for the pleasure of snubbing me.

  His hand holding the cigar shook slightly, and his strong profile melted down a bit, blurred. Still studying his cigar, he finally spoke. “I have to know about…about Liza.”

  He seemed unable to turn his head and face me, and I almost, for a moment, felt a wave of pity for him.

  “I have to know—I couldn’t wait until you finished teaching. The police were so uninformative….” He lit another match and let it burn down to his fingertips before he realized it and blew it out. Then he noticed that he didn’t need a light at all, but he kept staring at the cigar. He was not the man I’d described to Mackenzie, and I mentally apologized for not considering him a mourner. Even his voice had changed. It was muffled, unsure, fumbling.

  “I’m not sure I can help you,” I said softly.

  He finally looked at me, and the pity I had been developing atrophied and disappeared. “You have to,” he said, his voice steely again. “You can. You were there. She was in your house, after all. You know a great deal.”

  Distraught. The man is distraught, I told myself. Maybe he never learned to express himself graciously. Maybe he had bad English teachers. Or maybe he’s really in pain. You’re not hearing threats, you’re hearing a different style. His conception of his divine rights. He doesn’t know any better. Sometimes even rich folks need charity, Amanda.

  “Mr. Cole, I’ll tell you whatever I know, but I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much.”

  “But you knew her. She spent so much time with you.”

  “Come on, you and I know—” I stopped myself. She had used me as a cover-up, but for whom? Not, I suddenly, fully, realized for long nights of passion with Hayden Cole. “—how little time there really is, after all the work, the paper marking, the cleaning up, is done.” I knew I was babbling, and so did he, but he didn’t know it was to protect his male ego.

  “I have to know what happened,” he said, his eyes like storm clouds. “What did she say to you? Why was she at your house? What did she say?”

  I shook my head and glanced at my watch. “I think our five minutes are just about—”

  He exhaled loudly. “Surely she told you something. Something!”

  “I wish she had.”

  He clenched his jaw around the cigar, and I saw a vein near his temple surface and throb. Distraught, I reminded myself again, but, oh, how I wished he would say something about Liza. About how he missed her, or couldn’t bear not knowing who had done such a hideous thing. “Listen, Mr. Cole,” I prompted him, “I understand how terrible this must be for you—”

  He stiffened, rejecting the idea that I could understand him in any way, so I rushed on. “And I wish I could tell you something definite, but I can’t.”

  “The way she was—how did she—what did the police say to you?”

  I lowered my window discreetly and watched his smoke float by. Why did he seem so much the tense interrogator, so little the bereaved?

  “Miss Pepper, what did they say?”

  “They think she was pushed against the fireplace. The wall is stone, a rough finish. They don’t think it was an accident. Too much force, too much impact, for one thing. I’m sure they told you the same thing.”

  “But any clues as to who might have done it?”

  I felt as if a frigid wind were blowing off him. I pulled back and shook my head. “I’ll be late. Tell the driver…”

  He bit his bottom lip, nodded, and tapped the glass. We headed back toward the school. I busied myself with ignoring the man beside me.

  “Miss Pepper,” he said as Haskell put the car into park and opened his door, “did she say anything, anything at all, about me? About…the future? About…plans?” His voice was hoarse, his face lined and sallow.

  I had the sense that several different men had been riding beside me in the past five minutes.

  “No,” I said softly. “No.”
>
  Hayden Cole sat back against the wine-dark upholstery. “I see,” he said quietly.

  The interview was over. Haskell held open my door and kept his face impassive as I left. I didn’t bid either man farewell.

  I felt light-headed and disoriented as I checked in at the office.

  “Miss Pepper?” Dr. Havermeyer was nervous, unlike himself. I turned to my leader, my headmaster. He patted his stomach, absently smoothing his vest. He coughed and moved two steps closer, close enough so I could study a tiny shaving nick on one of his chins. “We thought you might want the day off, to…” He seemed unable to complete the sentence. Even with the imperial “we” he was stymied, stuck, searching for the precise circumlocution. “In light of the difficult time you are experiencing, we thought…”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly.

  His troubled expression didn’t clear. “Well, but after the, ah, and the press, and the photographers, we, ah, the school image, of course. Naturally, we stand behind you, no implications, no hidden agenda, of course, but…”

  I stood my ground, refusing to pick up any of his unsavory droppings.

  “Well,” he said, fumbling with the key he always wore, a key that resembled, but was not from, Phi Beta Kappa. “Yes. Of course. So many telephone calls this morning. Indeed. Well, we must hope this terrible incident is cleared up quickly, mustn’t we?”

  I said we must, and interpreting his renewed tummy rub as dismissal, I left the office.

  Gus was on his way in, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw me. “What happened?” he said. “I heard it from Sissie at the Playhouse. What happened?”

  “Everybody keeps asking me, and I don’t know.”

  He gripped my arm much too tightly. The same one Haskell had already abused. “Who do they think killed her?”

  “You’re hurting me!”

  He stared at me, then at his hand before letting go.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. He pulled a newspaper out of his attaché case and punched at it. “I cannot—”

  Terrific. I was page-one news. There was a snap of Liza, a handsome portrait of Hayden Cole, and, above a subheading, “Body Found in Center-City House,” a photo that immortalized my exit last night. Mackenzie didn’t look half bad, but I was stooped over, my raincoat pulled up high because I’d lost my rain hat somewhere, my hand half shielding my face. All in all, a sterling impersonation of a felon avoiding the paparazzi.

  “No wonder Havermeyer’s blithering,” I murmured. “I wouldn’t want that woman to teach my children, either.” I felt suddenly afraid. “What am I going to do? They suspect me.”

  Gus blinked a few times, getting me back in focus. “Ridiculous,” he said, “but is there something I can do to help?”

  “You could have been visible after school,” I said. “To back my alibi. They found it hard to believe I hung around here for no reason.”

  “I was in the bookroom!” His voice was too forceful for an intimate twosome.

  “Don’t get defensive. I’m the only one who needs the alibi.”

  I hoped, for Gus’s sake, that I was telling the truth.

  * * *

  Liza had dramatically enriched my first-period class two whole months ago. Maybe she was a dim memory to most of the students, because they seemed excited, not upset. They passed around copies of the newspaper, and I flinched each time I saw my photograph whiz by.

  Only Stacy Felkin was beside herself with grief. And no wonder. The moment Liza had entered the classroom, Stacy of the limp hair, the thick waist, had found her heroine and model. She imprinted Liza on her brain like a duckling, imitating, best as she could, each and every gesture and mannerism of her idol.

  Liza had style. Stacy, reproducing it, had pathos. For months now, Stacy walked with a slow swish of lumpy hips, flicking back lank dirty-blond hair, smiling mysteriously. She was an inflated, porous imitation of the real thing, the Wonder Bread of sex. Even so, high school boys produce too many hormones to be overly critical.

  Today Stacy wasn’t into seductiveness. She was thoroughly, decisively, into misery. Her mascara had smeared into raccoon eyes, her nose was swollen and her lipstick chewed off. She clutched a box of tissues.

  If ever there was a time for me to offer aid and comfort, this seemed it. I put my hand on her shoulder. She blew her nose into a lilac tissue. “Oh,” she wailed, “isn’t this the worst thing that ever happened?” The room around us became very silent. Almost respectful, I thought.

  “Death is always terrible,” I said quietly. “And when it’s unexpected and violent, it’s even worse.” I could hear the combined breathing of the entire class.

  “But who?” Stacy was the first mourner to show pain, to be dumbfounded by the event. “Who could do such a horrible thing to Miss Nichols?”

  Nobody said a word. I suddenly heard the heavy thud of a newspaper on the floor. I looked around. There, in front of all the desks, lay the Inquirer. And guess who I saw, cowering like Public Enemy Number One?

  Maybe it was an accident. Poor timing. But for the rest of the morning I didn’t do much about anybody else’s emotions because I had a lot of trouble controlling mine.

  * * *

  Lunch hour didn’t make things much better. My coworkers managed to be solicitous at arm’s length. Philly Prep doesn’t have niceties like tenure, and with contract renewals coming up, maybe there was fear of consorting with a possible criminal. I was therefore as sought after as someone showing symptoms of the Black Death might be.

  Caroline Finney dared direct contact. “Dear Amanda,” she said as we waited for our lunches, “I know what you must be going through.”

  Caroline had taught Latin for thirty years. The last violent death she’d been aware of was Julius Caesar’s. Still, her kindness was touching, but brief. She trundled off to a far table, and I sat down at my usual spot.

  I poked at my lunch, murmuring acknowledgments to staff members as they passed by and listening to the muted whispers around me. I knew I was being discussed. Or perhaps I was becoming hopelessly paranoid. I tasted the corned beef hash and had little trouble renouncing it and the lunchroom.

  The park across the street had a few picnicking students enjoying the first clear day in weeks. We ignored each other.

  I stepped across a glittering puddle, admiring the impressionistic haze of trees filled with still-curled leaves. I found a vacant bench and sat there thinking and munching a hard roll I had saved from my lunch tray.

  “Share your bench, lady?” Gus’s voice was much more controlled than it had been this morning. “Or will the kids gossip about us?”

  The kids speculated endlessly about single teachers’ private lives, although they didn’t really believe we had any. They had already linked me with Gus, with a gym teacher, with the sixty-year-old chemistry teacher, and probably with several others. A year ago, between a gone-to-seed Olympic skier and a chronically angry accountant, I had dated Gus once or twice. We found out that we were friends. Nothing more. But, more important, nothing less. I patted the bench for him to sit down.

  “I wanted to apologize for this morning,” he said. “I felt crazy. I also acted that way.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Listen. I’ve been thinking. Did the cops check out phone calls? She probably called somebody from your house. Because, otherwise, how did the, uh, somebody, know she was there?”

  How, indeed. Unless, of course, I’d told the somebody. A somebody so eager to see her about something troubling. Why was Gus so emphatically ignoring that bit of real-life history? I felt guilty even thinking that way. “Maybe she was followed from the bus,” I said too brightly. Gus couldn’t follow anybody with his bad leg. I wanted him to know I wasn’t considering him a suspect. I wondered why it felt so important to pass on that message.

  “What bus?”

  “She said she’d gotten off one and come to my house.”

  “She was riding a bus at dawn?”

  �
��I don’t understand it, either.”

  The warning bell rang across the street, and we walked back. The kids, locked in a spring trance, didn’t follow our exemplary behavior.

  “The phone’s more likely,” Gus said, annoying me. “It was dark. It was raining. If somebody followed her, why didn’t he, uh—I mean, if he was going to kill her, then why not do it in the street?”

  “As awful as this sounds, Gus, I wish he had.”

  * * *

  My last-period class was agitated. After all, it was their class she’d missed, probably because of being dead at the time.

  I’d stopped encouraging discussion of Liza’s death after the newspaper incident. But when we finished reviewing a snippet or two of Macbeth, I set the class to work writing sympathy notes to Mrs. Nichols. They became silent except for the sound of pencil chewing and the mournful, leaden sighs that in-class writing automatically produces.

  A quarter of an hour before the end of class, the office monitor appeared with a note. Lance Zittsner was wanted in the office.

  “He’s absent,” I told the monitor, who frowned, grimaced, shrugged at the class, and then checked his piece of paper. “Okay, then Michael Rizzio,” he said.

  The class stared at Michael and softly speculated.

  When Michael reappeared, looking smug and self-important, he said that Carl Worman was wanted. He didn’t even call Carl by his detested nickname, “The Vermin.” I became anxious.

  The Vermin reappeared with the same cockiness that Michael had shown. “They said to say they apologize for the interruptions.”

  “What’s going on, Carl?”

  “They said not to say.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh, Miss Putnam and…them.”

  I watched him write a hurried note and fling it across the aisle, where it was retrieved, read with exaggerated interest, and passed on. I declined to intercept it, since everyone who read it did some intense eyebrow jiggling in my direction.

  The office monitor reappeared with another note. “Do you know how the ancients treated messengers of ill tidings?” I asked sweetly.

  “Wha?”

  “Never mind.”