Swan Song

by Judith K Ivie

  “Get it together. Just follow my lead, and we’ll be fine. Here, take these,” Duane ordered. He picked up a tray and marched through the door, almost colliding with Isabelle. He stopped so quickly that Becky crashed into his back, and paper plates and silverware went flying. I smiled at her kindly.

  “So much for following his lead,” I told her, and Isabelle snickered. “Bear this in mind the next time a man tells you to do that. It could be a terrific life lesson.”

  I relieved Duane of his deli-laden tray and retraced my steps to the sitting area while the two young people turned every shade of red I’d ever seen and scrambled to retrieve the plates and utensils. Isabelle took pity on them and helped, wiping down the forks and knives with a damp paper towel. She rejoined me on the sofa, while Becky and Duane shuffled after her, shamefaced.

  “Sit,” I told them, and they sat. “Now what’s up?”

  Becky raised an eyebrow at Duane. “They’re onto us, pal. Better just go for it.” She reached for the container of potato salad and helped herself.

  Duane cleared his throat. “The thing is, I know how important it is for you guys and May to find out for certain what happened in Lizabeth Mulgrew’s hotel room the night, or rather the early morning, of the day she died, and I’m pretty sure I know how to do it. I think Becky and I can pull it off, but I’m not sure how you’re going to feel about it.”

  “Well, I’ve got to admit that you have my attention,” I told Duane. “How about you just reveal your master plan, and we’ll see how it goes?”

  Becky munched on a sandwich and remained silent. Isabelle nodded. She and I helped ourselves to sandwiches and prepared to listen.

  With nothing to lose, Duane launched into his reasoning. “I don’t know if you remember, but a couple of years ago Charlie Putnam and I worked most of the summer for a catering company, the one that supplies temporary staff for private parties, company events, that kind of stuff. We’d get a call, grab our white jackets and go wherever they needed us. We did everything from setting up tables, passing hors d’oeuvres and drinks, and plating food to cleaning up banquet halls and loading the vans. After a few weeks, we got to know the ropes pretty well, how things worked behind the scenes. There were a bunch of people who worked for the same company part-time all winter, and they did convention work at a few local hotels. The Hilton was one of them.”

  “Interesting,” Isabelle murmured and took another bite of tuna fish.

  “And?” I prompted through my coleslaw.

  “It occurred to us … to me,” he amended as Becky glared at him, “that things probably work the same way now. You know, a big event is scheduled for the hotel, and the catering manager calls in a bunch of temporary workers to help out. As it turns out, the Hilton has its own list of temporary wait staff because so many conventions are held there.”

  “How do you know that?” Isabelle wanted to know.

  Duane looked uncomfortable but continued. “Because I called their personnel department to find out, and based on my good recommendation from the catering company and my familiarity with the Hilton, they put me on their call list. I’m pretty sure they would take on Becky, too.”

  Isabelle and I looked at each other and back to Duane. “I don’t understand. Does this mean you’re quitting and trying to get Becky to go along with you?” I asked him point blank. “I thought you two were happy here.”

  Now it was Becky’s turn to look uncomfortable. “No, no, that’s not it at all. Duane, you left out the most important part. Here, eat a sandwich and let me explain.” She shoved the tray toward him, and he looked happy to oblige. “What Duane means is that working with the staff at the hotel, even on a temporary basis, is the best way to find out what really goes on there. Gossip is the primary pastime of employees, and the full-time staffers are always eager to share the inside dirt, if there is any, with the temps who come in to help with events. Like the Mysteries USA conference,” she added when she saw that Isabelle and I were still confused.

  “Ohhhhhhhh,” I said as the light dawned, and Isabelle beamed. “But the convention is long over. What could there be to learn now?”

  Duane chimed back in. “Not so long over, just a couple of days, and having the keynote speaker drop dead in her guest room …” Becky winced, and he apologized. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sound so callous. But that’s a pretty big deal. I’m willing to bet the staff are still talking about it, and there’s always someone who works in the kitchen who gets off on having inside information.” Becky glared at him again, and he reddened. “I mean, who likes to be the one who’s in the know. So how mad are you?”

  I looked at Isabelle over the rim of my mug. She was smiling gently. I swallowed some coffee and put the mug on the coffee table. “Actually, I think it’s a pretty good idea.” Both young people stared as if I were speaking in tongues. “No, I mean it. It’s not as if you’d be in any danger. You would be surrounded by people all the time, and you’d have each other as back-up. You’re not children. You’re over the age of eighteen, and you can take part-time jobs if you want to. So if this is something you really want to do, I say go for it. Do you agree, Isabelle?”

  She dabbed her mouth with a napkin and beamed at Duane. “You took the words right out of my mouth, Kate. I can’t speak for May, of course, but it seems to me you’ve come up with an ideal way to get whatever inside information there may be about what actually happened at the Hilton in the wee hours of Friday morning. It’s something that we old folks could never do, but because of your age and your intelligence, I’m sure you could pull it off.”

  Duane blushed again, but this time it was with pleasure at Isabelle’s praise. He and Becky exchanged disbelieving looks, then grinned at each other.

  “I’m sure you’ll want to discuss it with your parents,” I suggested, “but if they have no objections, I don’t see why you shouldn’t brush up on your catering skills and earn a few dollars at the same time. Whatever information you may discover about Lizabeth Mulgrew’s death would be …” I paused and wiggled my eyebrows. “… gravy.”

  Everyone groaned.

  “If it’s okay with you,” Duane said, leaning forward with barely suppressed excitement, “I’ll take Becky to the Hilton tomorrow morning to fill out an application form and maybe meet the catering manager. I happen to know there’s another huge convention coming in on Thursday and running through the weekend, so the timing couldn’t be better.”

  “Really? That’s great,” I cheered him on. “What’s the convention about?”

  Duane glanced at Becky before answering me. “Um, the American Funeral Directors Society or something like that.”

  Becky’s eyes got wide, and she put down her sandwich. “Eeeuuuwwww! You mean a bunch of morticians and embalmers and people like that?” She shuddered visibly. “Do I have to do this?”

  “Oh, come on, Becky, don’t be such a girl. I hear they play some great pranks,” Duane chided her.

  “I’m not sure I even want to hear about those,” I said and wadded up my napkin. “Okay, then, that’s the plan for tomorrow. For now, back to work.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Just before quitting time, as I was chatting with Becky at her desk, Margo and May straggled into the Law Barn, faces glum. “Well, hello! I didn’t think we’d see you before tomorrow morning. How did it go?”

  “Did you get Trague’s hometown out of Attorney Henley?” Becky added, cutting right to the chase.

  Margo took off her coat and threw it on the sofa. May kept hers on, hugging it around her as if she were chilled. “Not well,” she said to me, and “No,” to Becky. “Any coffee left?” When Becky shook her head, she just shrugged. “The way this day has gone, why should that be any different? Margo can fill you in. I’m going upstairs to check messages.” She trudged up the stairs, and Becky turned off her desk lamp and went to get her coat.

  Margo flopped onto the sofa. “Speakin’ of messages, are there any urgent ones for me?”

  “No
thing that can’t wait,” I assured her. “May’s right, it’s been quite a day. Why don’t we lock our new lock on the front door and put an end to our suffering? Come on by my place, and I’ll give you a glass of wine. We can compare notes. Think May will want to join us?”

  Margo shook her head. “She and Isabelle will probably have dinner together. She mentioned to me in the car that that was the plan.” She dragged herself to an upright position and fumbled with the sleeves of her coat. “Rhett and Sassy need to be let out for a while, but I’ll come by The Birches in a little bit.” She looked around. “You must have been busy today. The place looks as if nothing had ever happened, let alone a break-in.”

  “Hmmm, yes. Well, that took some doing,” I sighed. “Anyway, see you a little later.” I went downstairs to put the phones on the answering machine and turn out the lights before making my exit. Becky and Margo were already gone, but Isabelle’s car was still in the lot, so I knew May would have a ride home. I was glad to get out into the fresh, cold air and guiltily thanked heaven that I didn’t have to cook dinner for my husband tonight. As much as I missed Armando when he was traveling, I never missed having to come up with a presentable meal at the end of the day. A can of soup and a ciabatta roll would suit me admirably.

  A little before six o’clock, I opened the door of my condo at The Birches to Margo. To Gracie’s disgust and my delight, our old friend Rhett Butler padded in behind her, tail wagging. Despite this display of good will, Gracie stepped warily around him and tore up the stairs to the safety of my office. I apologized for her unwelcoming attitude, getting down on my knees and taking the old dog’s graying muzzle between my hands. “You big chocolate drop, I’m so glad to see you even if that silly old cat isn’t. You’re such a good boy, aren’t you? Huh, aren’t you?” I scratched his ears and kissed his face as he wriggled with delight.

  “When you have a sec, maybe you’ll notice I’m here, too,” Margo suggested. “Oh, never mind. I’ll just pour myself a glass of wine. Are you still drinkin’ that awful stuff in a box?” She dropped Rhett’s leash on the floor, slipped out of her elegant pumps and went into my kitchen in her stocking feet while my reunion with Rhett continued.

  “I can’t help it if I don’t have the palate to justify dropping twenty dollars or more on a bottle of wine,” I protested. I climbed to my feet and unclipped Rhett’s leash from his collar, freeing him to roam the downstairs as he would. I knew he would never venture upstairs without Margo’s permission, so Gracie could sulk in peace. “I think boxed wine tastes just fine. Besides, I can never get the corks out of wine bottles,” I added. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and filled it with Bota Box Pinot Grigio.

  “You could if you invested in a decent corkscrew,” Margo retorted. She led the way to the den, and we arranged ourselves comfortably on the small sofa. We chatted about her upcoming stint at Vista View the following day and made room for Rhett, who needed our help to get up on the sofa, where he flopped between us with a big sigh and promptly fell asleep.

  Again, I defended myself. “I used to have a really good corkscrew. Armando and I took it with us to a fancy resort on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. When I was packing to go home, I threw it into my carry-on bag. After the bag went through the luggage scanner, the security guards at Raleigh-Durham’s airport nearly threw us off the flight; and after they tore all the film out of my camera and removed the scissors from my manicure kit, they confiscated the damned corkscrew, too,” I finished up.

  Predictably, Margo snorted. “Plus your husband is Colombian, and everybody knows they’re all drug dealers, right?” We both giggled. The idea that anyone could mistake my straight-arrow husband for anything approaching nefarious was indeed laughable. The man had never gotten a parking ticket.

  “How’s May doing with all of this?” I asked Margo over Rhett’s snores.

  “Not too well, I’m afraid. After today’s break-in, she feels that she’s inconvenienced all of us, if not put us in outright danger; and almost worse than that, she feels like an old fool for being taken in by that sleazy Schenk person. For that, she simply cannot forgive herself—plus, it’s embarrassin’ for her.”

  She took a sip of wine and made a face, whether attributable to her sympathy for her aunt or the quality of the wine, I couldn’t be certain. “It was a long drive to Lenox, and when we got there, Henley’s secretary apologized and told us he’d been called away suddenly on a family emergency. We couldn’t very well complain without sounding like horrible people, so we explained why we needed to speak with Henley and asked her to have him call May. We left business cards and everything to look as legitimate as possible.”

  “Did you ask the secretary where Trague called home during his lifetime?”

  “We did, but she just clammed up and said she couldn’t possibly discuss a client’s personal information, even if the client is deceased. You remember how that used to go,” Margo chuckled, referring to our time several years back as support staff in a large Hartford law firm.

  “I do indeed.” I buried my nose in my glass and tried not to remember my days as a legal assistant.

  “So we came up totally empty,” Margo went on. “On the way home I tried to make May laugh by tellin’ her stories about some bad boys who took me for a ride in my misspent youth, but she was already familiar with most of those and chalked them up to teenage naiveté.”

  Margo’s aunt had served as a second mother to Margo during her adolescence, followed by a brief first marriage, in Atlanta. May had been the only one able to control the wild teenager, and now that I knew her, I was sure she was responsible for the enormous good sense Margo displayed these days.

  “You’ll have to tell Strutter and me some of those stories,” I smiled.

  “Oh, you already know a lot of ‘em, and the rest are just boring teenager stuff. I was out of distraction material, so I finally resorted to confiding my one real heartache to her.”

  “I’m all ears,” I said, tugging on one of Rhett’s to make him stop snoring. “Do tell.”

  She chuckled. “I guess I walked into that one. Well, there was this boy in Atlanta.”

  “Why do all your stories start the same way?”

  She gave me a dirty look. “This was a special boy, the boy, all through high school. His name was Beau Kasper, and he was the love of my life from the eighth grade on. Mind you, he reciprocated those feelings sometimes, and sometimes not, as the mood and his hormones took him, teenage boys bein’ what they are; but one way or another, we were in each other’s pockets right up until the time he went off to college. I think he was a little nervous about going off to live in a dormitory in Vermont—Middlebury was the school he went to—and at least partly because of that, he stuck to me like glue all that summer. The night before he left for college, he actually proposed to me, standin’ in the shadows of our garage so my daddy wouldn’t catch us. I was so surprised, I almost fell down.”

  “At the age of, what, eighteen? That would be pretty surprising,” I agreed.

  “I was only seventeen, just goin’ into my senior year of high school; and after years of foolin’ around on me with one girl after another, breaking up and making up, he suddenly wanted to be as seriously involved as it gets? Yes, that was surprisin’.” Margo took a sip of wine and laid a gentle hand on Rhett’s hind legs, which were twitching. “He must be dreamin’ about that fat squirrel he could never catch in the Law Barn’s back yard. Anyway, it took me a few weeks to realize I didn’t want anything to do with marriage yet, even to the boy I’d been chasin’ for four years, and I told Beau so.”

  “Was he crushed?”

  “Not so you’d notice, as I recall. He went to college, I enjoyed bein’ a high school senior. Time passed, we both dated a bunch of other kids, and the next fall I went off to school in Boston. We exchanged a few letters, and sometime the next spring, Beau invited me to spend a weekend at Middlebury so I could see the place he was always talking about. I took the bus and bunked in with
Lorraine, his new girlfriend, and they even fixed me up with a couple of their friends, one night for a hockey game and one night for a party. We all had a fine time, and I went back to Boston on Sunday glad to know we’d managed to wind up friends.”

  “Sounds like a happy ending to me. Do you still keep in touch?”

  “See, that’s the weird thing. Since that weekend back in the day, I haven’t heard one word from Beau. Other people told me a lot of stuff over the years … that he married Lorraine after they graduated, that he joined the CIA, of all the unlikely things, that he had four kids and lost one of them, that he became a lay minister for the Catholic Church … but I don’t know that any of it is true. Every few years I’d Google him and find some kind of address or e-mail and send him a newsy note just to say hi, but he’s never responded to a single one. I must have done something to offend him way back when, but it’s frustrating not to know what. I don’t know if his wife is interceptin’ my notes or what, but I’m treated like a stalker instead of an old school friend. It’s hurtful.”

  “Wow, that really is odd for him to snub you after the years you spent being so important to each other. My high school boyfriend and I reconnected at a reunion a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun. His wife knew all about us, and she kept Armando busy on the dance floor so Beau and I could reminisce. I think at the very least you deserve to know what you did wrong, if anything, so you can clear the air.”

  “That’s what I think, too. It’s beyond odd,” Margo stated flatly. “It’s downright crazy, and that’s what I was tryin’ to tell Auntie May. As well as I thought I knew Beau, it turns out I didn’t know him at all. I have no idea what went on in his mind to make him shun me, and it looks as if I never will. I don’t know what happened after that weekend, but whatever it was, it obviously changed the way he thought about me. It happens, and I just have to let it go. I believe the same sort of thing happened to Martin Schenk or whatever his name really is, only over a much shorter timeframe.”