Caught Dead in Philadelphia

by Gillian Roberts

  From a very far distance, I watched Mackenzie survey the ugly green kitchen, the sink full of dirty dishes, the old gas stove, the refrigerator with the drip pan. Then he turned back to me. “Enough,” he said, leading me out of the room. He found a phone under the madras spread and dialed headquarters.

  He gestured for me to leave as he spoke, and I managed to move my feet a few paces unassisted, but I was afraid to go far, and I stayed on the landing, with the door open. He spoke for a while, but my cloudy mind picked up only the word “homicide.”

  I was not surprised, but I was sickened. I gagged, held my stomach, and took deep breaths until the waves of nausea, one after another after another, subsided.

  I clutched the handrail to avoid toppling down the steep brown steps, but I couldn’t stop trembling, not even after I sat down.

  There was a voice inside me, a whiny singsong voice. “Murder on Monday, murder on Friday, murder, murder,” it repeated. And then I heard another voice, Eddie’s, when he’d insisted on seeing me. “You’re the one in the middle,” he’d said.

  “It isn’t your fault, you know.” I didn’t know which voice that was until Mackenzie sat down next to me. His voice was low and gentle, and he put his hand over mine. “You have nothing to do with what happened.”

  He was a decent man. I felt weak gratitude, and an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. “I waited—I didn’t call, didn’t say, didn’t tell you, and now he’s—”

  “It didn’t just happen. It probably didn’t happen within the last hour or two hours. He was burned, I think, but the coffee and the kettle are both cold. You couldn’t have prevented it.”

  We sat on the steps silently waiting for the squad cars.

  “It could be coincidence, too,” Mackenzie said. “This could have nothing at all to do with Liza.”

  I would have liked to believe it.

  The first man up the stairs paused. I stood up to unblock his path, and he eyed me with distaste. “Aren’t you the one who…?” I was way past answering that one, but he took care of the problem himself. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I saw you in the papers. You’re the one.”

  What was I supposed to say in return? That I didn’t like finding corpses every few days?

  “I’ll wait outside,” I told Mackenzie. He was already halfway back into the apartment. I needed sun and warmth.

  But of course there wasn’t any. I walked away from the chilly shadow of the building. Seated on the curb, my feet planted in the gutter, I tried to defrost in the diluted daylight.

  What appeared to be dozens of men rushed up the stairs, carrying bags, stretchers, and God knows what. I knew some of what they’d do with their powders and measurements, and I wondered if the next tenant would be left, like me, to remove the residue of detection. Or was that the landlord’s duty, and if so, why hadn’t mine come to wash the walls? I knew my mind was floating, safely, I hoped, away from the building, away from the crowd of gapers gathering nearby.

  “Sweetie, what’s all this? Street’s so noisy I couldn’t hear my program. Sweetie!” She poked a finger in my shoulder. “What is this?”

  She was fat and sloppy, her head wrapped in blue gauze over enormous pink rollers. She wore a bubble-gum-pink sweat suit and tennis shoes, sipped a can of diet soda, and looked ready to swallow me, the building, and any available gossip.

  “I don’t know. Please let me be.”

  “Well! Be that way!” She scuffed off, still sipping.

  I looked back at the busy brown entrance to the apartment. The bakery downstairs, with its shiny empty trays, its small jolly placard, looked serenely out of place.

  “What is it? What is it?” The man was near hysteria, and I swiveled around and peered through the crowd to identify him. He was short, elderly, and plump. Fear distorted the heavy features of his pink face. “What happened? Is Livvy here? She phoned. What’s happening here?”

  “That girl there knows,” I heard the blue-headed lady say. “But she thinks she’s too good to tell me.”

  He pushed through the crowd. I could see his feet in dark leather bedroom slippers approach, and then he was in front of me, waving his hands and shouting. “What happened, girlie? Tell me! It’s my building. Livvy, this lady next door, she phoned me when she saw police.”

  He grunted and seated himself beside me. “My back,” he said; then he put a scrubbed hand on my arm. “Please, girlie, please. What am I going to find up there? There’s been a robbery?”

  I couldn’t think of an easy way to tell the truth, so I just told it. “A man died up there.”

  His face paled. “Gevalt! Eddie. It’s Eddie? What is it, drugs? I knew something was up. Sophie said I should throw him out. Dead?” His tirade ended abruptly as if he’d suddenly, finally, heard what I’d said. “Dead?” he repeated, looking terrified.

  I nodded.

  “Must be drugs,” he said after a lengthy pause. “I knew it Monday. Until then, he was pretty okay. But then, he was taking something. At 5:00 A.M., nobody laughs that way.”

  “What way?”

  “He was crazy. Listen, he was never what you’d call normal, but he was normal crazy before Monday. I don’t have an easy time finding assistants, with my hours. He’s my assistant now a month, maybe longer. Comes in four, four-thirty, five, helps get the bread, the kaiser rolls, ready. Works till two, maybe three. With a break.”

  “But Monday? You said he—”

  “I’m not a slave driver. He takes his coffee time; he’s not exactly a fanatic worker anyway. And he likes the hours, he told me. An actor. Slept in the afternoons anyway. It’s hard finding people.”

  “I’ll bet. But what did you mean, crazy on Monday?”

  “Crazy. What could crazy mean? Wild. High. Like on-drugs crazy. Crazy wife, too. Came in after he moved upstairs.”

  “Monday?”

  “No, no. Before then. She screams at me. What did I do, she should scream at me? It’s my fault that ganef doesn’t support his own kids? I pay him. I told her to go to the police.”

  I tried once again. “Yes, but about Monday…?”

  He buried his head in his hands. “I get one vacation a year. Pesach—Passover. You Jewish? You understand? No bread’s allowed. The Exodus. No time for bread to rise leaving Egypt. Only unleavened bread. Matzo.”

  Theology and ritual law didn’t seem pertinent, but I couldn’t stop him.

  “Can’t use these ovens during those eight days. So once a year, I don’t feel guilty closing shop, resting, sleeping when I want to. You don’t know what it’s like, girlie. I’m sitting, reading my paper, enjoying. Sophie’s making chicken soup, you should only smell it. I didn’t tell her about the phone call, thank God. She thinks I’m out for the air.” He looked at me, tilting his head somewhat. He was small, despite his solid heaviness. “One vacation a year, you understand?” He looked down again.

  “It must be rough,” I said. He wasn’t making the going exactly smooth for me, either, but I prompted one more time. “Monday? Crazy?”

  “On Monday he’s nuts. I told you already. Comes in. We’re cleaning the ovens, getting ready to close them down. So on Monday he comes in a little meshuga. Says maybe he won’t be back after Pesach. Maybe not ever. Won’t need me or anybody or any job. Look, girlie, he’s dancing around. Is that crazy or not? I was, between us, scared. Drugs, I figure to myself. Sophie says get him out of the apartment before he burns the place down. But I think about his wife, the little kiddies. And it’s complicated. I pay him a little less, he gets the upstairs free. I’m not a rich man. It works for both of us. So how do I throw him out?”

  He grunted again. “I have to go up there. Forty-six years in this country and no trouble. So now, when I’m an old man…” He sighed and waited, still afraid of what he’d face.

  “About Monday. Did Eddie say why he might not come back?”

  He shrugged. “Who understands from a crazy person? He says he’s retiring. Maybe he got a Hollywood contract like he wanted.” H
e scratched his scalp. It was pink and shiny, except for the thick fringe of white hair. “No, wait. He said something I didn’t understand. It made him laugh crazier than ever when I asked. Sure, now I remember. I’m a baker. A baker here, a baker in the old country. So I don’t understand everything American, even after forty-six years. Is that a crime? He should laugh at me that way?”

  “About?”

  “About my question, girlie. Like I said. You knew him?” He pulled back, suddenly aloof. “You are maybe the girl Livvy saw coming and going from the upstairs?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.” He relaxed. “Livvy said the girl was little. Dark hair. Couldn’t be you. You know, anyway, how he could laugh and make you feel like dirt? So I asked him what this loaf of mother was that he found. I know my bread, but this expression I never heard. I ask politely. And he laughs. A load of mother, he says. I still don’t understand, so I repeat it. He drops his sponge like I made a big joke. Laughed and laughed. But mean. He was crazy.”

  “A load of mother?”

  “That’s it. What I said. Crazy, you see? High on something. Am I going to get it from Sophie.”

  I had an idea. “Could he have said ‘mother lode’?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.” He shook his head. “Oh, God. Dead.” He struggled to get to his feet.

  I stood up and helped him. He looked at me, his pink face near tears. He shook his head and glanced fearfully toward the brown doorway. “Crazy or not, the poor boy…” He wandered away without a farewell and stood near the upstairs entry, looking condemned. He went in.

  What vein of gold had Eddie struck? I wondered. Monday, after Liza left. And why was he so ecstatic at dawn, and she was anything but?

  “Hey, lady, look there,” a freckled, gum-cracking teenager said. “You’re a TV star.”

  A man on top of a car pointed a minicamera at me. I turned and galloped for the corner. I passed a bus sign. A little monitor in my brain clicked. This is where Liza must have waited, it said, marking the spot. If only the strike had started earlier, or Passover, if Liza hadn’t needed to leave Eddie so early, if she hadn’t been able to catch a bus from here to my house, then maybe…

  But she was gone. And Eddie was gone. And as much as I sorrowed for them and felt horror at their fates, their lives had been very different from mine, and the more I found out about them, the less kinship I felt.

  But what we had in common was enough, was the base common denominator: we had all been alive. The difference was, only I, the one in the middle, was still around.

  Except, of course, for the murderer.

  Eleven

  Mackenzie found me in his car. “How do you feel?” he asked, sliding in behind the wheel.

  “No problem. Fine. I’m just fine.” It somehow felt necessary, as a deputy, to play Brunhild the brave, to be professional about this, the way he was.

  Mackenzie became very businesslike, carefully maneuvering the car into the swollen Friday-afternoon traffic.

  “So, ah, tell me,” I managed. “What did you guys decide up there?”

  His voice was clinical. “Well, without tests to verify anything, he appears to have been burned on the face and hands and then bludgeoned. The back of his neck also looks burned as well as beaten. Burns were to stun him, most likely. First, with boiling water on the face. Hands burned trying to shield himself. Then with the kettle on the back of the neck. Maybe also a skillet that was in the sink. It had blood on it, apparently.”

  My stomach heaved.

  We left the rows of neat red-brick houses, driving into and through a ragged wing of Fairmount Park. Once I could no longer see the lines of stores and houses, I felt able to speak.

  C.K. stared at the road, his eyes at their usual half-mast. We approached the shopping center at the SEPTA terminal. Mackenzie cut around corners, passed a few acres of slumbering buses, and placed us smack in the center of a traffic jam. “Damn strike,” he said.

  Horns honked furiously and futilely all around us. “Come on, Mandy,” he said. “Give me something to listen to besides these horns and this nonmusic and my own escalatin’ blood pressure. Talk about what’s upsettin’ you.”

  “I can’t. All I want to do is avoid it, get past it. I have a better idea if you’re suddenly in the mood for self-revelation. How about if you stop hiding behind your initials?”

  He looked at me as if I were mildly amusing, then paid attention to the traffic jam again. Two cars in one of the converging lanes managed to get through a light. We inched forward and waited again.

  “I don’t care about your name. Not really. But is it Claude? I would understand avoiding Claude.”

  “No, and it isn’t Rumpelstiltskin, either. Why don’t you think of C.K. as a name? Kind of Indian-sounding, isn’t it? Seekay. Why does it concern you so much?”

  “Why do my private thoughts and fears concern you so much?”

  “Because—”

  “And aren’t they obvious, anyway? I’m the one in the middle. That’s what Eddie said to me. Now I understand. Liza saw Eddie, then Liza saw me. Then Liza got killed. Then Eddie saw me. Then Eddie got killed. I’m left, and I’m scared. It doesn’t matter if I know anything. Somebody thinks I do. Somebody thought Eddie did. Somebody was searching for something in that apartment, and I don’t know what it was or if they found it. I hope like hell they did, that accounts are settled. But I can’t believe in it. And anybody who’s already killed twice, to amend your theory, won’t quibble about a third murder, will he? I’m scared, Mackenzie. I’m really scared.”

  “Of course you are. You’re gutsy, but not so oblivious as to be insane. We have a real problem here.”

  We. The little word blanketed and coddled me. I no longer felt like a target, alone on an enormous field. Mackenzie smiled and nodded.

  “Keeping you safe’s my job and my preference,” he said quietly.

  As he spoke, we made it through the intersection at last, and I felt released from a terrible pressure. I also felt that the two of us had just passed a personal landmark, and a covenant had been made, a promise between us. I was now pulsing and trembling from a schizy mix of anxiety and pleasurable anticipation of my dual-purpose escort.

  We drove into the city, past rows of boarded-up stores, Laundromats, bars, and discount shoe shops. Mackenzie did a smooth slalom around the iron supports of the elevated lines on Market Street.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said. I had relaxed all the way into near coma.

  “Can you hold up awhile longer? I have to make a stop and then, well, I owe you a night on the town, don’t I? Didn’t we have a delayed date? For your mother’s sake? How about dinner?” He finally looked over at me and opened his overlarge smile that erased the sleepy hayseed and replaced it with—I don’t know what. Something more intriguing.

  I smiled and settled back, feeling infinitely better. I would have personal police protection for a while longer. Besides, his expression had reminded me that no matter what was true of the bodies I’d found, mine was still in working order.

  We turned left and were back in the neighborhood of old homes fronted with wide porches. He stopped in front of the one with the broken green railing. “Stick around,” he said casually.

  I wasn’t sure if he meant I should stay alive or hang on to his jacket. I chose to do both. I opened the car door to accompany him.

  He looked surprised, so he’d obviously been speaking metaphorically, but I wasn’t into figures of speech just then, and I wasn’t into being alone. “It won’t be pleasant,” he said. “No matter how she felt about him. It’s never easy.”

  It wasn’t. First, she eyed us through a half-open door.

  “He’s no good,” she said. A television blared away inside. “I don’t care what trouble he’s in. I have enough trouble from him already.”

  “It isn’t about that, ma’am. Not that way.” Somehow, Mackenzie had the ability to be heard over Sesame Street, even while murmuring.

&nb
sp; She let us in. Really, she let him in, eyeing me with overt hostility.

  Mackenzie took her into the kitchen, and I eased into an overstuffed chair near the TV. “A-B-C-D-D-D-” the set shouted. The kids were mesmerized, which was just as well. They didn’t hear Catherine Bayer cry out and moan. They didn’t look up when she walked back into the room. She started toward them, then turned and sank onto a worn sofa, a slab of foam on what looked like a door with legs. She shook her head in a silent no.

  “I never thought,” she said, still shaking. “I mean, trouble, yes, but I didn’t mean that kind of trouble. Not to be…murdered? His head? You said they hurt his head?”

  When Mackenzie nodded, she broke into sobs, muffling them into the hard wedge that backed the couch. “I don’t know why I carry on like this,” she said, wiping her nose with her hand. I offered her a pack of tissues, and she took it without looking at me. She blew her nose loudly. The children stared at the set.

  “His face,” she said, and she sighed deeply. The head shaking never stopped. “It was the whole problem. The reason for all his troubles. He was so good-looking. Women liked him.”

  I hoped Mackenzie wouldn’t speed up her grief so that he could ask questions. He didn’t. He pulled a chipped chair out from the dining room and straddled it. I had a vision of him sitting in an endless succession of chairs, their backs shields against an ongoing chorus of crying women.

  “Why?” the woman asked. “Why now? He was so excited about the future. Why now?”

  “What was he excited about?” Mackenzie spoke casually.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. See, he didn’t pay support. We aren’t legally separated. No papers or anything.” She began the head shaking again and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

  “But something happened recently?” Mackenzie prompted.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what it was. But see, I had gone to the shop, the bakery, to complain. I can’t get a job. I don’t know anything to do that pays more than getting somebody to watch the kids costs. I needed money. So I went there with the kids last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Ed said he didn’t have anything to give me. I got angry. How am I supposed to live? I said I was calling the cops. He practically threw me out, said his boss would fire him if I made scenes, and then where would we be?”