Caught Dead in Philadelphia

by Gillian Roberts

  Karen is a bright child. She walked off, very springily, carrying three forks and some napkins, promising to return very soon.

  Mackenzie pushed his chair back and slouched down on it. “I’ve never seen you in sunshine before,” he said pleasantly. “You should wear it more often. Bet you tan and look almost Eurasian with those cheekbones. Except for the red in your hair.”

  “Cut it.”

  “Ah’m complimentin’ you. Some women require artificial light. They’re limited. You aren’t.”

  “Why not concentrate on keeping my skin intact instead of worrying about how it should be illuminated.”

  “You mean about tonight? What was I supposed to do? I knew about the damned thing because I have to be there, along with the whole cast of characters—except you, I had hoped. I didn’t know your sister was involved.”

  “In something called Main Line Charities? You could have bet on it.”

  He shrugged. He seemed remarkably nonchalant about putting me in mortal peril. I wished he didn’t look so damned pretty with the sunshine bopping off the silver sprinkles in his curls, highlighting some hitherto unnoticed freckles on his cheekbones.

  He rocked the wrought-iron chair dangerously. “You have a marked tendency to overreact,” he said. “Tonight’s no big deal unless suburbanites frighten you. The more I think about it, the better this sounds. You’ll be surrounded by hundreds of normal, charitable people. Maybe somebody will talk to you, say something interestin’. I’ll rede-putize you. Sam ’n’ Beth and me, we’ll never leave you alone. I’d rather you were there than here, alone. Unless you want me to see if I could get a police guard.” He shrugged.

  I considered my options and chose the populated fair. “What is it you’ll do there?” I asked him.

  “Lurk, menace, be stealthy. Make deductions. Maybe help Beth serve coleslaw. Raymond’s been on my back. Suspects I’m devotin’ overmuch time to tangential aspects of the case. Like you. He also does not wish to appear tonight. Says a man of his complexion cannot be inconspicuous on the Main Line.”

  “I am not a tangent.”

  “I’ll be officially free at eleven, but until then, it’ll be a pretty boring evening. Now—anything else you need to know? Aside from my name, of course.”

  “I need to know everything, so I can behave intelligently. I want to know everything you know.”

  “Oh, boy,” he said, stretching himself out so that his sitting position was more like that of a log propped against the chair. “I know lots of stuff. I know that salt was once used as currency by the Chinese. I know that you shouldn’t ignore the potential of household ammonia. I know how to convert stuff into metrics. And I know that even as we speak, Beth is considering color schemes for summer weddings and peeking out at us from time to time. I know—”

  “You don’t know when to quit. About the murders, C.K. What do you know that I don’t?”

  “Oh, that. Well, I know that Sissie’s divorce became final three weeks ago, after long and fierce fighting about money of hers that Mr. Bellinger had permanently misplaced.” Mackenzie stopped and concentrated on chewing ice cubes.

  “So she isn’t rich, and she isn’t married.”

  “And she wasn’t able to be openly on the market when Hayden went shopping for a wife. But now, she’s very able to do what she pleases. And she has a remarkable incentive to do something.”

  “It’s amazing what you turn up when you do some work, Mackenzie.”

  “What do you think I do when I’m not with you? Fantasize? Anyway, Sissie’s status doesn’t answer anything. There are other fat cats around for her to snare.”

  “But the legwork’s been done with Hayden. And let’s be honest, Sissie would make a better running mate. She belongs in his circle, and Liza didn’t. That quarrel between Liza and Sissie last Sunday, it was probably about that. Sissie was pushing, harder and harder, to get the competition out and away. She said something to me—one of her damned half sentences—about a promise to finish the run and leave town. She meant Liza, I’m sure. But I don’t understand why at all.” I shook my head, still confused.

  Beth reemerged from the house. “Hate to interrupt you—but how does a plate of ice cream sound?” She didn’t sit down. That might have slowed our courtship by fifteen minutes.

  Mackenzie tipped his chair back, chewing an imaginary corn stalk. “Why, Ma’am,” he said. “That sounds amazin’ly fahn.”

  “You’re overdoing it,” I whispered, but “Ma’am” beamed.

  “This is a perfect day for ice cream.” He nodded agreement with himself. “That chicken of yours reminded me of the best days of home. And then we’d top it with ice cream.”

  “Aren’t you mixing up your background?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be drawling about Creole goodies? Blackened redfish? Crayfish? Little French pastries?”

  “Shows what Yankees know.” He stood up and smiled again at Beth. “Let me help serve it,” he said.

  His accent was deepening and widening with every moment. He sounded more like Uncle Remus than a cum laude graduate of Rice.

  “No, no,” Beth answered. Of course. The young lovers were never to be parted.

  “You can’t carry three dishes,” Mackenzie said.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Two,” she said. “Unlike my sister, I have to count calories. Besides, I have things to do about tonight.” She all but bowed out backward.

  Clever Bethy. She managed to keep to her diet and remind the unmarried visitor of the Single Sister’s silhouette.

  “You don’t need to coat every word in molasses, Mackenzie. Beth is already hooked. Skip the Dixie overkill.”

  “Never hurts to sugar up the relatives,” he said. “A Southern accent gives me an edge. Everybody up here thinks that the brain works in slow motion. They relax their guard.”

  “Listen, did we exhaust all the available information?” I asked. “I’m still more interested in what’s going on than in ice cream.”

  “Like what? Ah’m an open book.”

  “Like do you know when Eddie died?”

  “Between ten and eleven, thereabouts, Friday morning.”

  “Then I couldn’t have—I didn’t even know his last name at 10:00 A.M.” I felt a meaningless, selfish, but nonetheless real sense of relief. “Then tell me, where was Sissy on Monday and Friday?”

  “You favor her as a suspect? She has the most depressing alibi I’ve heard in a while. She was: (a) carpooling her son to school; (b) being a mother-helper in Petey’s room; (c) having her hair washed. She was: (d) shopping for a green dress; (e) taking shoes to the cobblers; (f) seeing a printer about the carnival’s auction list; (g) attending a meeting of the Friends of some disease—I can’t remember… Do I have to go on? That might be out of order, but both days’ schedules are like that. Little bits of action, nothin’ related to anything else.”

  “Shh!” I pointed toward the house. If Beth heard him, she’d feel even more guilty about enjoying her life. “Anything else?”

  “The bear. We x-rayed it, did an assay.”

  This was great, authentic cloak-and-dagger stuff. “What was inside?” I whispered.

  “More bear. Nothing else.”

  Beth reappeared with two dishes. Each had three small scoops of ice cream, one chocolate, one vanilla, one strawberry. Just so everyone received satisfaction and high cholesterol. “Karen’s taking a little nap,” she said. “Resting up for the big evening.”

  The coast was clear. We could do what we liked. Beth, enormously pleased with her orchestration of the day, left again, beaming.

  “Anything else you found?” I asked Mackenzie. I took a spoonful of chocolate and promised myself that I would not, absolutely would not, eat three scoops of ice cream.

  “No, but there’s something else we didn’t find. Fingerprints. Not at Eddie’s, either. It wasn’t raining that time, so I’m not so sure about the raincoat-and-gloves theory. Also, nobody knows if anything’s missing from Eddie’s apartment. S
o that’s some more noninformation.”

  “How about Hayden? The brunch?”

  C.K. shrugged. “Far as we can tell, he was there from elevenish until three.”

  “So you consider him out of the running? Really out?” I ate some strawberry, then a few spoonfuls of vanilla.

  “You’re not hiding your disappointment very well. But all right. He’s not completely covered, because for almost two hours he excused himself to work on a speech while the club had its business meeting. He wasn’t feeling great, didn’t want to eat, and they had failed to give him the precise time they needed his bodily presence. He worked upstairs in an empty office.”

  “Says who?”

  “His campaign manager. Don’t say it—I’m not putting much weight on that. But so far, I don’t have any evidence that he left the place.”

  “Where was he on Friday morning?”

  “In his study. Not to be disturbed by anyone. Not even Mama.”

  “That’s one weak alibi.”

  Mackenzie took a break from conversation to savor his chocolate ice cream. “Raymond considers my chocolate obsession overcompensation for racial guilt,” he said when he had finished the scoop. “I wish somebody hadn’t thought it was cute to put me with Raymond.”

  “I hate to interrupt again, but I thought you might like this.” Beth carried a tray with frosty glasses, a pitcher of iced tea with mint leaves, and a tray of homemade cookies. She put it on the table between us and filled the two glasses. Then, beaming, she retreated once again while we both murmured thanks. I was beginning to feel like a Strasbourg goose.

  “Where were we?” Mackenzie asked.

  “With the perfect Mr. C,” I finally managed. “The one who followed his infant schedule from birth, crossed only at corners, and never cheated on an exam.”

  “I’m still lookin’ for some kind of motive, too. Maybe he knew about Eddie?”

  “You didn’t leave! Goody,” Karen said, having completed the shortest nap in recorded history. “I want to show you my playhouse, C.K.” She tugged at him, urging him to the back of the garden where Sam had lovingly constructed a sort of earthbound tree house for his daughter. I wasn’t invited to join them.

  “One second,” Mackenzie said. “Let me give your auntie something to read first.” He extracted a fat square of yellow papers from the patch pocket of his corduroy jacket. “Here’s something, maybe,” he said in his decisive way. “Mrs. Nichols’s contribution.”

  “You were there, too?”

  “I get around, kiddo. I was there three times this week. Found this the second time. Tuesday morning. But don’t get riled. We weren’t for sure on the same team then, remember?”

  “Come on,” Karen said. I looked at the sheaf of thin second sheets, a carbon copy of a play called Never Say Forever.

  There was a scrawled note about the title. “Please reconsider,” it said. “Can’t we at least try it onstage? This could help us both. Let me know soon. Please?” The last underlining was heavy enough to have ripped the tissue paper. I didn’t need to look at the author’s name typed below the title. I knew Gus’s handwriting.

  The stage directions didn’t help. “Scene One: Interior of a run-down apartment. Stacks of old newspapers fill the corners. Opened cans, etc., stand on counter of Pullman kitchen. Michael Fillmore, age around forty, unshaven and homely, sits on unmade bed. He rises and crosses to small icebox, one arm hanging lifelessly and right leg dangling.”

  I didn’t read the dialogue. I flipped through the pages, seeing enough that way. A young girl entered, described as “beautiful, in an earthy, unclassical way, as a Gypsy might be. Her clothing is flashy, unconventional.”

  Act One ended with them on the still-unmade bed.

  “Well?” Mackenzie said when he had finally satisfied Karen and been released back to me.

  “I felt like a voyeur. There are parts of a person that just aren’t for public display.”

  “He was hopin’ to have the whole thing displayed.”

  “Still, it’s so sad.”

  “Maybe it’s more than sad.”

  “I don’t care. Even if it wasn’t over for him emotionally. Even if—”

  “That play could have turned his life around,” Mackenzie said. “He’d be acting again. Safely, in a tailor-made part nobody could deny him. He would have a produced play to his credit. His whole life could have changed, gone nearer to where he’d once aimed for.”

  “Somebody else could have played the girl’s part if Liza declined.”

  “Sure, but Winston’s obsessed with her. Did you read the ending?”

  I shook my head.

  “The guy gets himself together, doesn’t need her anymore. That’s the good news. The bad news is he only finds that out after she dies.”

  “You’re not saying—”

  “Of course not.”

  “That must be what he wanted to talk to Liza about,” I said. “Sunday night, then Monday morning.” Oh, God, had he called her from school about the script? And had he gone there to reason with her and heard, instead, damning, destructive things? It wasn’t just his artistic ego on the line in this; it was his life.

  “I wasn’t going to show you the script,” Mackenzie said. “It is indeed private and painful, and it may be irrelevant. But I thought you’d be safer if you understood Gus a little better.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Let’s take these plates in,” he said. I tagged along.

  “You’ve got quite a daughter here,” he told Beth.

  “You’ve got quite a way with children,” she answered. I knew that Beth hoped her daughter had driven Mackenzie to a feverish need for children of his own, children of the same basic gene pool as Karen. And I knew that Mackenzie knew that, and that made it bearable.

  But I didn’t listen to their mutual back patting. I thought about Gus, my good Gus who saw himself as a deformed, pathetic failure. Gus, still replaying his relationship and ending it, finally, unequivocally.

  Beth busied herself at the sink, and Mackenzie took his attention off the gleaming kitchen counters. “One more thing,” he said to me, too softly to be overheard. “When Winston visited Liza’s mother Tuesday night, he was nervous about this script. Told her that Liza had borrowed it and it was needed immediately. She was afraid to say that the police had it. He made her search through Liza’s room.”

  Of course, he might have simply wanted to keep it private. And of course, all his questions to me about what the police knew still could have been altruistic, concerned only about my welfare.

  Beth turned off the water. “Do you think your husband would mind bein’ disturbed?” Mackenzie asked her. “I have a question for him.”

  Beth was ready to grant Mackenzie anything, certainly something as easy as Sam. She didn’t seem to wonder why he wanted the audience, but I did. I was sure he wasn’t asking Sam about contracts or for my hand.

  But when he came out of Sam’s study, he offered a smile and farewells instead of information. He didn’t really kiss Beth’s hand and ride off on a white charger, but you couldn’t tell that from her expression.

  “He’s so attractive,” she murmured.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about Mackenzie; I was thinking about murder. Why does someone kill? Because he wants something, Sam had said. Power, money, love. But it all finally boils down to self-defense. A person takes another’s life because his own seems in danger. So the trick is figuring out what is seen as vital, essential to sustain life.

  My flash of insight was as long-lived and illuminating as a firefly’s light. I still knew nothing.

  I thought, instead, about the night ahead. Something was going to happen. Something big. My mood—a combination of fear, intense interest, and anxious excitement—felt familiar. My skin had felt this tight and tingly before; my mind had been dizzied by “what ifs.” Some other time, I had been unsteady on my feet, half running forward and half holding back. But since I’d never knowingly mingled with murdere
rs before, what was this feeling and why was it so familiar?

  And then I laughed out loud.

  I’d felt this way most of my adolescence. The same eagerness and avoidance, prurient interest tinged with disbelief and fear, the same nervous, delighted speculation. I’d felt like this all that long waiting time between hearing the facts of life and getting a chance to try them out.

  Fourteen

  I arrived at the carnival ready to give my all. But if the anxious excitement had been familiar, so was the letdown I now felt. In the same ancient past, the first boy to whom I’d offered my young self had nearly died of fear. I tend to rush things, tend to be disappointed, and tend not to learn anything from the experience.

  The carnival grounds were nearly deserted. There was nobody to give my all or my anything to.

  Instead, I helped Beth unwrap and stack several boxcar loads of hot dog rolls. I opened industrial-size jars of mustard and relish and filled trays with potato chips and coleslaw.

  “Now, run along, you three,” Beth insisted after a time, and heigh-ho, we finally went to the fair. Sam, Karen, and I milled around, checking the various offerings before the real crowds arrived.

  I was impressed by the extravagance and size of what was, after all, a local fund-raiser. I had expected amateurish, homemade games, but this was a large, ambitious affair sprawling over several acres of a shopping center’s street-side parking lot.

  Which was not to say it was thrilling or even interesting for a long spell, as Sam and I tagged behind Karen and observed, or participated in, games with blow tubes and balloons, tiny fishing rods and goldfish, and a picture version of blackjack.

  And then it became that time of evening when outlines grow fuzzy and I suspect I have contracted glaucoma. And suddenly, the lights went on.

  “Ooooh, look!” Karen shouted as the scalloped umbrella of the merry-go-ground came alive with white sparklers and the Ferris wheel spun in multicolored glory.