Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  “You’re very welcome. Now take me to your kitchen, woman. I’m famished.”

  Cullie followed me into the kitchen and set a large pot on the stove. “It’ll just be a minute to heat this up,” he said, taking off his ski jacket.

  He was wearing a forest green sweater, a white turtleneck, and his customary blue jeans and hiking boots. His cheeks and nose were rosy from standing outside in the February night air.

  I could love this man, I thought suddenly, then felt my own cheeks flush. The past few weeks had produced a flood of new feelings, feelings I’d never felt so intensely, feelings of fear, loss, and rage. But love? That was a bit premature, wasn’t it? I had taken an instant dislike to Cullie when I met him. How could that dislike have turned to love? The idea made me tremendously uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to make of it, but I was determined not to run away from it either.

  “Smells good. What is it?” I asked, wrapping my arms around Cullie’s slim hips as he stirred the pot on the stove.

  “Catch of the day: chicken catch-a-tore. Get it?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Whattasamatter? You think you’re the only one who can make jokes?” Cullie kissed the tip of my nose.

  “When on earth did you have time to make chicken cacciatore? You were gone all afternoon.”

  “I didn’t make it. I bought it.”

  “Where?”

  “At Arnie’s All Clammed Up. You know, at the marina.”

  I gagged. The food there was poison, or so everybody said. Still, the chicken did smell good, and it was sweet of Cullie to take the trouble to buy it, transfer it to one of his pots, and bring it over. The least I could do was try it.

  “To Maplebark Manor and her lovely mistress,” Cullie toasted me as we sat at the very same butcher-block table where, six months before, Sandy and I had eaten Chinese take-out food and then ended our marriage.

  Sensing my need to relax, Cullie didn’t push me for information about Melanie’s murder or try to engage me in idle chitchat. We ate quietly, murmuring an occasional “This chicken is wonderful” and commenting on how nice it was to be together. When I finished my dinner, he spoke to me.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” he asked gently, then reached for my hand and squeezed it.

  I recounted as much of the story of Melanie’s murder as I could bear to retell, and expressed my anxiety about the police’s investigation. “I think I’m a suspect,” I confessed. “Detective Corsini seems very interested in the fact that I have no alibi for Tuesday night, that after you brought me back from the marina at eleven o’clock I was home alone for the rest of the night and have no way to prove it. But as soon as I’m feeling stronger, I’m going to fight back.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I just know I will.” I grinned as I thought of the Alistair Downs manuscript that was stashed under the seats of my Porsche. In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten to bring the boxes in from the garage. Oh, well. They’ll still be there in the morning, I thought.

  By ten o’clock my eyelids were heavy. I tried to stifle a yawn, but Cullie caught me.

  “Off to bed with you,” he said. “I’ll do the dishes and tiptoe out of the house and you’ll never hear a thing.”

  “Oh, please don’t,” I said, touching his arm.

  “Don’t do the dishes or don’t leave?”

  “Don’t do the dishes and don’t leave. I’ll do the dishes in the morning. I’ve got to have something to clean, now that I’m out of my maid’s job. And as for your leaving, I really wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Then I won’t,” Cullie said, hugging me. “Which way’s the bedroom? I’ve never slept in a house this big, I might get lost.”

  “You won’t get lost,” I said, linking my arm through Cullie’s and leading him up Maplebark Manor’s front staircase.

  When we entered the master bedroom, Cullie took my hand and walked me to the bed.

  “I’m so tired,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder.

  Cullie scooped me up in his arms and laid me down across the bed. “Under the covers, woman,” he instructed me.

  I obeyed gladly, pulling the down quilt over me and turning on my side with my knees pulled up to my stomach, womb-style. “What about you? Aren’t you coming in?” I asked sleepily.

  “Right now,” he whispered.

  I heard him undress and lay his clothes on the bench at the foot of the bed. Then I felt him crawl under the covers and curl up next to me. “Ummm,” I murmured as he spooned me from behind. “Tell me a bedtime story, would you, Cullie? Tell me all about the Marlowe, all about sailing trips and faraway places and species of ducks. Tell me all about…”

  Before I knew it I was fast asleep, enclosed in Cullie’s strong, sailor’s arms, warmed by his soft sweet breath on my cheek…

  The next morning, it was Cullie who lay fast asleep under the covers while I was downstairs in the kitchen washing our dinner dishes. I was just finishing up when he entered the room, grabbed me from behind, and kissed me.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asked.

  “Pretty well, under the circumstances. You?”

  “I slept just fine. I had you next to me, didn’t I?”

  The guy was too good to be true, which worried me. My mother, ever the imparter of doom and gloom when it came to men, always said that if a man seemed too good to be true, he probably was. “Now, how about some coffee?”

  “I’d love some.”

  I poured us both a cup and suggested we sit down.

  “Can’t,” Cullie said, taking a sip of his coffee, then checking the time on his watch. “Gotta go do a shot of a house.”

  “So early?” I was disappointed.

  “Yeah. The house faces north, so the light’s only good in the morning. How about getting together later? I could come back, if you want.”

  “Oh, I want,” I said. “But I’m going over to the paper to see Bethany Downs. I want to explain why I took a job with Melanie.”

  “What about dinner? We could eat leftover chicken cacciatore together.”

  “Thanks, but I should have dinner with my mother. I really owe it to her to tell her what’s happened. She must be in quite a state over all this.” I shuddered to think how her canasta-playing friends at the club were treating her, now that they knew her daughter was a maid.

  “Want me to go with you?”

  “What a chivalrous offer. But no, I’d better talk to her alone. She’s…well, let’s just say she’s difficult to get to know.” And I’d been trying for years.

  “Will you be all right? I mean, it’s okay to leave you?”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked Cullie. “I acted like a jerk when we met.”

  “You were just giving me the old cha cha cha,” he chuckled.

  Cullie placed his coffee mug on the kitchen counter and wrapped me in his arms. He lowered his head and kissed my mouth, slowly, deeply, longingly. When we broke apart after several seconds, I took a breath, inhaling his musky morning scent.

  “I’ll call you later,” he whispered, then kissed the tip of my nose.

  “Please do,” I whispered back.

  At two o’clock I pulled my car out of the garage and headed down the driveway, wondering if the media vultures were still hovering. They were, complete with video cameras, tape recorders, and other tools of their trade. Determined not to be fazed by the fact that they were trespassing on my property, I gave them all a little finger wave as they ran toward the car. Then I gunned the accelerator and whizzed past them. Recession or no recession, a Porsche is one fine piece of machinery.

  While I drove over to the newspaper to look for Bethany, I checked my rearview mirror and realized that I was being followed. The driver of the car behind me looked suspiciously like Detective Joseph Corsini of the Layton Police Department. Either he was out cruising for celebrities or making sure I didn’t try to blow town.

  I entered The Layton Communi
ty Times building and made my way to Bethany’s office. She was not there. I took off my coat and gloves, sat down on her sofa, and gazed up at the in-your-face oil painting that hung over her desk. It was a painting of—guess who?—Daddy Alistair and his beloved only daughter, capturing in glorious full color the two of them sailing aboard Alistair’s yacht, the Aristocrat. They appeared years younger and so damn full of themselves I almost puked. He wore a navy blue Lacoste shirt, white slacks, Topsiders, and a white captain’s hat. She wore a red-and-white-striped boat-neck sweater, skimpy little white shorts, Topsiders, and a red America’s Cup visor. They stood in the cockpit of the Aristocrat, one hand on each other’s waist, the other hand on the boat’s varnished teak steering wheel. They were tanned. They were smiling. They had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. They looked like honeymooners, off on a joy ride, oblivious to everything except their good time. Weird, I thought. Just plain weird.

  “What are you doing here?” a voice cried.

  It was Bethany, Alistair’s first mate. She was munching on a jelly donut and shedding powdered sugar all over the floor. “I wanted to talk to you about the message you left on my answering machine yesterday,” I said.

  “What’s there to talk about? You betrayed my father,” said Bethany, her blue eyes blazing.

  “But I didn’t, Bethany. Honest. You know my husband walked out on me. I had to find a way to earn extra money. The stock market crashed. The country’s in a recession. When I saw Melanie Moloney’s ad in the—”

  “Don’t you dare mention that woman’s name in this office,” Bethany snapped. “She was trying to ruin my father. Now she’s dead and I’m glad.”

  “But I wasn’t trying to ruin your father. I was trying to stay out of bankruptcy. Can you really blame me for that?”

  “There were other jobs. You didn’t have to work for that woman. What did you tell her about my father? Did you give her some good gossip? Did you, Alison?”

  “Bethany, try to calm down.” She was overwrought. It must be all that sugar. “Why don’t we go to the lounge and have a cup of coffee. Or maybe herbal tea would be better.”

  “I’m not going to the lounge or anyplace else with you. Not until you tell me what you told Melanie Moloney about Daddy.”

  “Melanie and I never discussed your father, Bethany. Really. I wasn’t even allowed to see the book.”

  “I don’t believe you. How could you clean her house without getting a look at that manuscript?”

  “Trust me. I was too busy Windexing.”

  “Look, I’ll make a deal with you, Alison. I’ll do anything to get my hands on that manuscript, or at least find out what’s in it. You worked in that house. You know where the woman put things. You know that guy Todd Bennett, the one who worked with her. Help me protect Daddy. He’s seventy-five years old and he doesn’t deserve people dissecting every aspect of his life. Once the book is published, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. But if you help me now, if you help me get that manuscript, I’ll let you come back to the paper. And I’ll pay you double for every article.”

  Now what was I supposed to do? If I gave Bethany the manuscript, I’d get my job back. But if I held on to the manuscript, I’d find out who killed Melanie and get the cops off my back. How did I get myself into this mess? I wondered.

  “I can’t help you, Bethany,” I said, gathering my coat and gloves off her sofa.

  “Then we have nothing more to say to each other,” she said, then turned on her heel and stormed out of the office.

  I took a last look at the father-daughter oil painting above Bethany’s desk and sighed. Where was my daddy when I needed him? Where was Seymour Waxman, the sweet, unsophisticated man who built Sleep Rite, his successful mattress business, without lying or cheating or stepping on people? Where was the man who couldn’t afford to go to college but worked his ass off so I could? Where was the man who put up with my mother’s pretensions because he knew they made her happy? Gone, but not forgotten. Never forgotten. I laughed when I imagined an oil painting of my father and me. There we’d be—Sy “the Mattress King” Waxman, the Queens boy who made good, and Alison Waxman Koff, the princess who became a maid. But instead of standing next to each other with a fancy yacht in the background, we’d be posing in front of an extra-firm Simmons Beauty Rest propped against a warehouse wall, over which would hang a large sign emblazoned with the company’s slogan, “Sleep Rite. Sleep Tight.” I felt a lump in my throat as I realized that, for all Senator Alistair Downs’s power and prestige, I’d rather have Sy “the Mattress King” Waxman for a father any old day.

  It was snowing at six o’clock when I arrived at 89 Pink Cloud Lane—home, for the past fifteen years, to my mother, the widow Waxman. A five-bedroom Tudor set on two acres of impeccably manicured Layton property, my mother’s house was located in what was referred to as the “Jewish section” of Layton, presumably because the neighborhood boasted the town’s only synagogue as well as its only delicatessen.

  I gathered my black wool coat around me, missing my mink terribly, walked briskly to the front door of the house, and rang the bell. My mother’s current maid, a Jamaican woman named Nora Small who was anything but, let me in.

  “Mrs. Waxman is watching her stories,” said Nora as she led me into the den where my mother was camped out on the sofa watching a videotaped episode of “As the World Turns.” My mother often taped her favorite soap opera when a canasta game at the club or a beauty parlor appointment at Monsieur Mark’s conflicted with the show’s afternoon airing.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, then began to cough. As usual, my mother was chain smoking, and the den was so thick with smoke I could barely see her, let alone breathe. But despite the haze in the room, I could tell she was impeccably dressed, looking every bit the trim-figured, suburban matron in her black wool Albert Nippon dress and black Ferragamo pumps. Her long, thin neck was draped in a gold chain-link necklace that matched the bracelet she wore on her left wrist. Her left ring finger still sported the diamond and gold wedding band my father had given her. Her nails were freshly manicured in their trademark Peach Melba, the color she also wore on her lips. Her graying, chin-length ash-blonde hair, which Monsieur Mark touched up every four weeks, was in its customary pageboy, as well as its customary net of hair spray—a net that rendered it so rigid that gale-force winds couldn’t disturb it. She’s in costume, I thought. Her I-may-be-getting-old-but-at-least-I-have money costume. Oh well, I sighed. We all have our costumes.

  “Just a minute, Alison,” she shushed me. “They’re about to explain why she has amnesia and can’t remember anything her husband asks her.”

  My own husband lost his money, then left me for his first wife, whom he later impregnated. Then my employer was murdered, and I became a suspect. What’s more, my double life as a maid was exposed on national television, as was the desperate state of my finances. Sounded like a soap opera to me. But apparently my real-life saga wasn’t juicy enough to tear my mother away from “As the World Turns.”

  I sat down next to her on the sofa and, ever the Good Daughter, waited for the program to be over. When it was, my mother turned to look at me.

  “You look thin, Alison,” she said, then drew on her Winston.

  “I am thin, Mom. I’ve always been thin.”

  “No, it’s this maid business. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard. Can you imagine? A mother finding out her daughter has been scrubbing toilets? Your father would have died.”

  “He did die.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I’m sorry you had to hear about it on the radio and not from me.”

  “Who heard about it on the radio? I heard about it from Edith Eisner at the club. Edith Eisner, of all people. You’d think her daughter was so special. A stewardess, for God’s sake. A maid with wings. That’s what those girls are.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sorry you had to hear about it from Edith Eisner, but I took the maid’s job because I needed money. Can’t you understand t
he fear of losing your house, of not having a home to go home to?”

  “A home to which to go home.”

  “Right.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me to help you, Alison? I have a little money saved. Of course, it’s not that much, and I do have to be careful at my age not to overspend.”

  “That’s why I didn’t ask you to help me.” That and the fact that I wanted to break free of you and feel independent for the first time in my life.

  “Oh, my. It’s after six,” my mother said after glancing at her watch. “The reservation is for six-thirty.”

  “We’re going out for dinner? I would have thought you’d prefer to talk about all this in private.”

  “It will be in private. We’re going to the club. It’s Maine Lobster Night, and I haven’t missed one of those in thirty years.”

  We drove over to Grassy Glen in my car—a tortuous ten-minute trip during which my mother berated me for dishonoring my father’s memory, not only by taking a job as a domestic after he had worked so hard at his mattress business so I could afford domestics of my own, but by working for the likes of Melanie Moloney, whom my mother described as “trash.” Apparently, my mother had very strong feelings about Melanie, as well as about Alistair Downs—feelings I’d never heard her express before. “A woman who deliberately sets out to ruin the life of an important man like Alistair Downs deserves whatever harm comes to her,” she said.

  As we pulled up in front of the ivy-covered brick clubhouse which had once been a convent and later a rehab clinic for wealthy substance abusers, the valet parking attendant sped over to my mother’s side of the car, opened her door and said, “Good evening, Mrs. Waxman. How are you this evening?”

  When we entered the huge main dining room with its heavy silk drapes and crystal chandeliers, a dark-haired, tuxedo-clad man with the unctuousness of a game-show host sashayed over to us and kissed my mother’s hand, which had actually been extended in preparation for his display of servitude. “Marvelous to see you again, Mrs. Waxman,” he said. “You’re looking wonderful this evening.”