Caught Dead in Philadelphia

by Gillian Roberts

  “Well, I’m not sure it’s that. I saw a message at Mrs. Nichols’s house today. For Liza, from Winnie. That makes better sense for that particular bear. But Mrs. Nichols didn’t know who Winnie was.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Me?” His eyes reminded me of lakes in Maine. Tempting, but ice cold. “Listen, Augustus Winston is not the kind to—”

  “Ah,” C.K. Mackenzie said, “who is?” He looked at the closed jeweler’s box. “I’ve gone through lists of her friends, the school people, the modeling agency, the Playhouse.” He flipped through his ratty brown notebook. “Nope. Not a possible Winnie in the group. Except for Augustus Winston III.”

  His eyes lost some of their iciness. “But how would he have known she was at your house? That secretary would have mentioned any personal calls made to the school, wouldn’t she?”

  I didn’t know what my role as a good citizen now was. I didn’t know what a sane but humane human being with a desire to have a murderer caught should do next. Finally, it boiled down to two factors: I didn’t want to create trouble for Gus, but even more than that, I didn’t want to find any more corpses because I had withheld a piece of information. “I told him,” I said, but softly, “at lunch yesterday.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes definitely thawed. “It may mean nothing,” he said. “Half the city knew she was here. She made three toll calls Monday morning.”

  I felt an automatic flare of annoyance—she hadn’t asked permission. And then, ashamed, I quelled it.

  “She called the Coles’ house, the Bellingers’ house, and a community hall where Cole was speaking. And God knows how many others who wouldn’t register as tolls.”

  He stood up and raked his fingers through his hair. “Of course, nobody connected or got a coherent message, they say. Housekeeper and Hayden’s manager took the calls. The Coles and Bellingers have extended service that doesn’t charge for calls into the city, or record them. So I don’t know if her calls were returned. I don’t know whether she made other calls. I wish we still had snoopy old-time operators.”

  He flopped back onto the chair. “I was just at the Playhouse. Your friend Winston wasn’t. Called to say he’d be late, I was told.”

  “There’s nothing suspicious about that. He made a condolence call to Mrs. Nichols.”

  Mackenzie didn’t seem interested. He pulled a rumpled playbill out of his pocket, smoothing its creases absently as he laid it on the table. It was a doubled-over mimeographed sheet. “They already made the cast changes for this weekend.” He pointed to the third listing from the top. “Abbie will now be played by one Sarah Halvorsen.”

  I fingered the cheap paper. “They don’t splurge on programs, do they?”

  “Well, you know it’s not much of a theater. Every one of them managed to tell me how he could and should have been in New York or Hollywood, what missed breaks he’d suffered.”

  He was interrupted by the blast of a car horn. He looked annoyed; then he looked embarrassed. “My car! It’s blocking the way. I forgot all about it.”

  Nice. With gold trinkets, unsolved murders, and a few glasses of wine I had charmed the cop into forgetfulness. I was a veritable Scheherazade. But I didn’t have time to gloat, because Mackenzie was up and moving toward the door.

  Damn the driver outside. He wasn’t supposed to use my adorable street anyway. He deserved to be blocked.

  Something whirled across the screen of my thoughts like a moth. “Wait!” I said, trying to catch it. “There’s something. I—” There was another volley of honks from outside, and the moth-thought disintegrated.

  “Yes?” Mackenzie said.

  I shook my head. “It’s gone again.”

  The horn blasted once, then three times in rapid succession. “Listen,” he said, “if you remember, or hear anything strange, or are frightened by anyone again, give me a call.” He jotted numbers on the back of the playbill and handed it to me. “Meanwhile, get some sleep. Lock up.”

  I could hear him soothe the other driver while I slipped locks and chains and double-checked them. Mackenzie had caused an atmospheric change that left with him. The house felt overly quiet and ominous again.

  Still, I could call him if anything happened. I held the paper carefully and put it on the table, pouring another glass of wine. The cars drove away, and the street became silent. I read the playbill the same way I read cereal boxes and newspaper fillers, because they’re there.

  Desire Under the Elms. Ephraim Cabot played by Tony deBanco. Peter Cabot by Kevin Kelley. Simeon Cabot by Herman Schwartz. Abbie by Sarah Halvorsen.

  It was a United Nations of a cast. The rest of the surnames were not as interesting. Harper, Beekman, Bayer, and Foster sounded like a second-rate advertising agency. Perhaps that’s why they’d been given minor roles. I put the playbill aside and finished my wine. And then I just about finished the bottle, administering the liquid like a patient anesthesiologist. When I was numb enough, I washed up and went to bed, but not before I’d memorized the phone numbers Mackenzie had given me. Even so, I kept them and the telephone on the bed next to me. Eventually, Macavity, finally sure the shouting and shenanigans were over, snuggled in with me, sleeping on top of the playbill.

  Seven

  “Like I know you didn’t do anything bad, Miss Pepper, but still, I saved your neck, kind of. So I thought maybe…”

  I watched Lance Zittsner hem and haw as he attempted academic blackmail. He perspired profusely and chewed his bottom lip, punishing it for not furnishing him with winning words.

  “I mean, like my father always says, you scratch my back, I scratch yours,” he said.

  There was not a single inch of Zittsner I would consider scratching.

  “You think I could like, pass?” he finally gasped.

  I considered. If I failed him, I’d view that face, hear its symphonic belches, for another full year. “Tell me,” I said, “do you still have the papers you wanted to put in my file?”

  “The cop told you about them?” he asked.

  I nodded. “However, if you have finally done the work, I’ll accept it and grade it as late. For expediency’s sake.” I knew he hadn’t a clue as to what “expediency” meant, but he’d consider it part of an abstruse pedagogical code.

  “I’ll get them,” he said, hurrying out.

  I was not suffused with guilt for abandoning academic ethics. Lance was heir apparent to the largest scrap metal business in Philadelphia. Would it help him to belch through Macbeth again next year? Would dangling participles or misplaced modifiers do much damage in a junkyard?

  My first class straggled in, looking bored in advance. Word was out that the fun was over. Teacher wasn’t being dragged away in leg irons. I tidied my desk, throwing away the plastic cup and refolding the newspaper. Liza’s death had been moved off the front page by an impending transit strike. But I’d found a picture of Hayden Cole on page two, under the headline “Cole Vows War on Crime.”

  Hayden Cole, Republican candidate for State Senate, today pledged to fight the wave of urban crime in this state. Cole refused to comment on the violent death of his fiancée, actress Liza Nichols. Instead, he asked to be thought of as “only one of many victims of a plague of senseless violence, which I pledge to make my highest priority.”

  I rammed the paper into my pocketbook, trying to believe that Hayden Cole was not using Liza’s death as fodder for another clichéd political speech. I told myself that he was keeping private feelings private.

  I didn’t believe me.

  * * *

  Gus didn’t even try to think the best of the candidate. I was on my way to lunch when he walked up, started to say something, and then stopped. His eyes were on the newspaper jutting out of my bag, and his face grew dark and contemptuous.

  “Did you see it?” he demanded. “Did you see how the unfeeling son of a bitch handled her—handled what’s happened?” He limped down the stairs beside me, his knuckles white as he gripped the banister.

  “Oh,
Gus, in all fairness, what could he say? It must be awful to have newspaper people around all the time.”

  “Son of an ice-cold bitch. Making political hay of her death!” He clamped his mouth shut, but still looked like an explosion waiting to happen.

  “How about skipping the lunchroom? How about we grab something in the park?” He halfheartedly shrugged at my suggestion and turned around like a sullen automaton. “Let me drop off my roll book,” I said.

  Helga Putnam greeted us with a nod of her tight curls. The day was warm, but she pulled her mud-colored cardigan around her shoulders and shuddered as we walked in. “There’s a notice for you,” she said. “And for him,” she added to no one in particular.

  There was no longer a name under Liza’s mailbox. Helga was nothing if not efficient. The blank spot spoke volumes, with brass corners for punctuation. I read my notice:

  Memorial services for Liza Nichols will take place this Friday noon at Hill’s Funeral Home, 15th and Hickory. Burial will follow the service at Mount Peace Cemetery. Any member of the staff wishing to attend must notify H. Putnam so that substitutes may be obtained. All students who attend are to be given excused absences for the day.

  There will also be a viewing Thursday evening from 6:00 P.M. on at the funeral home.

  Gus and I walked silently across the street into the square. Lost in our own thoughts, we bought hot soft pretzels from a vendor and slathered them with mustard. But neither of us ate. We sat on a bench staring at the pretzels as if they were interesting but inedible artifacts.

  “Oh, God, Mandy, I feel…I can’t…” Gus’s sigh was loud and jagged. “I can’t come up for air. I mean, what was Liza to me? We had nothing left. She killed it, all of it. Why is it getting to me this way?”

  He looked up at the sky and shuddered. “If you had asked me before—before this happened—I would have said I hated her. So why should I feel so…”

  I reached over and touched his hand. It didn’t relax around the misshapen pretzel.

  “She was everywhere I was. At school, at the Playhouse. It drove me crazy when she was always there. But now, now it’s worse. I can’t get past her.”

  “It’ll come, Gus. Eventually.” I didn’t know what to say, and I grabbed for the nearest bromide, hoping that it was true and that it would help.

  “Even at the theater,” he said. “My place. My real place. I know the old show-must-go-on routine, but I don’t know why it should be so. We started rehearsals with a new Abbie last night, and it was so hard.” He considered a moment. “Hard as in difficult, and hard as in unfeeling. Ghoulish. As if we were just replacing a rusted or ruined part of a machine.”

  I had no answers. I didn’t even have real questions, so I tried to veer us onto a less emotional tack. “I saw the revised playbill,” I said. “Mackenzie showed it to me.”

  Gus frowned when I mentioned the detective’s name, but I ignored his expression.

  “He came to my house last night bearing glad tidings. Listen, Gus.” I must admit I embellished the tale of my rescue at the grubby hands of Sir Lancelot Zittsner. I invented a few extra curlicues and flourishes, and whatever I lost in hard truth, I gained by seeing the lines on Gus’s face slowly dissolve into something like a smile.

  I kept talking, while taking his emotional pulse. I didn’t want to have fine print in our relationship.

  “You know,” I said, when we were well out of the high-tension area, “I understand what you meant when you said reminders of Liza are all around. I keep thinking about her, too. Every time I see Helga, I think of her as the office witch. And Dr. H—Liza called him Hemmenhawer. Even me. She called me—” I juggled possibilities while I cleared my throat, tried to look embarrassed about the nickname I frantically searched for. “She once watched a particularly bad class when I couldn’t find a clear way to explain, oh, the difference between the objective correlative and a symbol.”

  “Christ, who could? Particularly with our kids.”

  “Sure, but I was going to try, right? Anyway, after that agonized little session, Liza called me ‘Meander Pepper.’”

  I was very proud of that improvisation, and I took a moment to savor it before continuing. “I miss her silly tags for everything. Did she—did she have any special name for you, Gus?”

  I couldn’t decide whether that had been an example of a subtle segue or of steamrollering.

  “Names? Several. Basically unacceptable in polite society. The least offensive one I can remember was ‘Disgustus.’”

  I watched him eat his pretzel and then light a cigarette. I hoped he wasn’t as good a liar as I was.

  We sat in silence. The trees were still bare, the patches of grass new and tentative, separated by hard, brown streaks, the scars of winter frosts. But the air was soft and promising, and its message had reached every housewife and nanny who’d spent the winter locked indoors with a child. They filled the park, sitting in clusters on benches, keeping an eye on nearby charges.

  The children dug in the grassless spaces, ran and rode tricycles on the paths. I mentally changed places with the clusters of mothers, wondering how it would be to have very short, very cute people in one’s caretaking, instead of Lance Zittsner et cie.

  Of course, Lance himself was once presumably short and cute, so I realized I had more thinking to do on this subject.

  The school bell across the street buzzed me angrily back to current choices. When we reached the double doors of the school, Gus turned to me. “I’m sorry if I seem distracted. The play’s giving me a lot of trouble since… Anyway, would you consider doing me a favor and playing critic? We’re rehearsing again tonight, and I’m really bothered by Halvorsen’s performance, but I don’t know if I’m being too harsh. You know the play. Can I bribe you with the addition of dinner at a new, good, cheap Italian place I found?”

  “Augustus, I accept. I’d love it.”

  * * *

  The playhouse was a state of mind in a church school’s auditorium. I had been there for performances, but this was my first rehearsal observance. I sat near the back and watched in the dubious comfort of an ancient cracked leather seat. The enthusiasm of the players, however, impressed me. They’d been performing Desire Under the Elms for several weekends now, but they treated the rehearsal as a new project. There was a slight edge of hysteria in their energy as they almost visibly prodded the pallid Sarah.

  Sarah’s yellow-white hair was pulled back into a knot, and her body, hard and muscular, would necessitate refittings of Liza’s costumes. Nothing about her was reminiscent of her predecessor. Gus said that also applied to her acting ability.

  Over wine and pasta, he’d shaken his head. “She’s flat—not only physically, but emotionally. Sometimes it works for her. She’s done some wonderful Noel Coward, for example. She can carry that off perfectly, understating, being dry. But I don’t know about O’Neill. Trouble is, the woman who might have done better took a dinner theater job in Bucks County. So we’re stuck.”

  “You’re seeing her in contrast,” I’d reminded him. “The audience won’t. I won’t.”

  So I sat in the dark theater, trying to study Sarah objectively.

  Onstage, the rehearsal stopped for the third confrontation in as many minutes.

  “I’ll do it my own damned way!” Sarah shouted. “Let me at least try it!”

  She’d make it. Little Sarah had a profound temper, and with some luck and guidance, she’d call on that passion to give substance to her part.

  “He mumbles!” Sarah screamed a few minutes later. “No wonder I keep missing my goddamned cues!”

  “Okay, Sarah, okay,” Gus said from the first row. “Speak up, Eddie, would you?”

  A young dark-haired man started to protest. Then he made a motion of disgust. “Right,” he said, or I think he did, because now he was truly inaudible. But when he got back into his role, he managed to keep his voice strong, and Sarah seemed momentarily satisfied.

  “Well, what a surprise. What brings
you here? Now of all times? Morbid interest, is that it? Or are you auditioning?”

  I didn’t have to look over at the woman slithering between the rows of seats to recognize her blather.

  Sissie Bellinger perched near me, fishing through her handbag.

  “Gus invited me,” I whispered.

  Sissie nodded several times, as if she’d reached an important decision. She found a cigarette and lit it, flicking the ashes between the seats. “Actually,” she said between drags, “I don’t know why I’m here. Except that I love it. And I like keeping an eye on my investments.”

  She must have had eyes all over the place, because she hadn’t bought her silk blouse, heavy gold earrings, or wafer-thin watch on the dividends of this company. “Halvorsen shouldn’t have that role,” Sissie said in what she probably considered a soft voice. “Pity. I could do it better. I acted once, did you know that? Have the police found out about it yet?”

  “About your acting?”

  “About Liza,” Sissie snapped.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “They don’t know what they’re doing. That sluggish detective keeps coming back. Why, I don’t know. And to the Coles’. Black man comes along with him. Because she phoned me! To make such a fuss over a call the housekeeper took! And meanwhile, a maniac is loose.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the threadworn carpeting and lit another. “Unless, of course, he does know something,” she added. “You think it’s possible?”

  “Mackenzie?”

  “Whoever. Does he?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Did Liza tell you something? That morning? Anything? When she came in?” Sissie’s perfume was flowery but tart. “Did she tell you who—what made her so upset? Not that you should trust a word she’d say.”

  I was almost positive that Sissie had asked me the same questions with the same urgency two nights ago. But I couldn’t be sure. I could only be certain that she had annoyed me in precisely the same way she was now doing.