The third bedroom was empty. Postage stamps, pictures of their great-nieces and nephews, old bills and linens were strewn about the white and gold French provincial bedroom suite that my adopted sister Tammy left behind when she last departed the nest. She flew back during her divorces. Was it five now? No wait. Six. I forgot Abdul, the drummer in the President’s own Air Force band who seemed to be wealthy without a visible legal source of extra income. Perry and Daddy had always whispered Abdul was involved in a smuggling ring.
Passing back through the living room and down the three steps to the landing where I had arrived through the front door, I pivoted and opened the dark wood door to the basement. I listened to the grandfather clock down there, chiming twelve times. I switched on the light, not that it illuminated much with a twenty-five-watt bulb. I gripped the loose handrails on both sides as I maneuvered down the rust-colored sculptured carpeted stairs to the dark walnut-paneled basement. I looked around. Still no sign of either Momma or Daddy. I squinted at the clock, next to the rectangular stone fireplace. The face only had one hand on it. The small hand.
Everything was neat. Daddy usually vacuumed down here and always kept the place tidy. He refused to clean upstairs or do laundry. Probably due to her clinical depression, Momma wasn’t much of a housekeeper the past few years. I checked the sliding glass door behind the heavy cream-colored leaf motif drapery. It was locked, the stick was wedged in the track and the white steel grate was bolted into the white bricks of the house.
Momma’s red Corvette convertible was parked in the carport. The hatch to the outside attic was open. The exposed light bulb on the ceiling was lit. I switched it off and fixed the drapes open.
I checked the downstairs bathroom. It was empty. As I peered down the hallway, I spotted Daddy, on the floor, pinned under the deep freezer.
I rushed to him. “Daddy! Daddy!”
He turned his head and groaned.
“Oh…Donna…”
I tried to heave the small freezer upright and screamed in agony. It fell back on me. I shoved it in place. Squatting down, I kissed Daddy’s forehead. “I’ll go call an ambulance. Where does it hurt?”
“She…killed…me…”
“You’re not dead.”
“Your momma…killed me. She just didn’t…understand. I tried so hard to keep my promise to her. I gave you a good home.”
“Daddy, you’re not making any sense.” I dashed to the phone in my old underground bedroom. I picked up the receiver on the blue rotary telephone and spun the emergency number, nine-one-one.
“DC Fire and EMS, what is your emergency?”
“I need an ambulance. A ninety-two-year-old male has fallen and was pinned under a freezer.”
The cranky female dispatcher demanded, “Your name?”
“Donna Payne. The address is—”
The dispatcher cut me off. “We know the address. Is the patient conscious? Is there any bleeding?”
“Yes, he’s talking. No blood.”
“Is he breathing?” the dispatcher demanded.
Of course he’s breathing if he’s talking, imbecile. “Yes.”
I hung up and hurried back to Daddy.
“Donna, make sure you find my veterans’ life insurance policy, it’s in the bottom drawer of my dresser. It’s forty thousand dollars and all for you. And up over the carport,” he gasped for breath, “there’s a few boxes. Unmarked. My memorabilia of your momma is in there. Your real momma. It’s worth a lot…to the right buyer. I don’t want the others to have any of it. They’ve gotten too much for too long.”
“I don’t want your money, Daddy. Don’t talk like that.” I squeezed his arthritis-ravaged hand and rubbed his brown-spotted wrist. What was he talking about? My real momma? I knew he had two big boxes of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia in the attic. Did he think she was my mother? She died before I was born. The poor man was losing his mind. “What happened? What made the freezer turn over on you?”
“She did it.”
“Who?”
“Your momma. She hates me.”
Would that be Marilyn or Chloe then? He really made no sense. Perhaps he was hallucinating. He must be. I couldn’t wrap my mind around Momma doing such a horrific thing to Daddy. There had to be a rational explanation. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his cataract eyeglasses. He was legally blind without them.
“No, Momma would never hurt you.”
“Oh yes, she did. And she is as strong as a man too,” his voice cracked high.
My mother was eighty-three years old. Granted, she had been trained by the Secret Service to subdue men but no way was she in that physical shape at her age.
“Daddy, I don’t understand. Why would she attack you?”
“She demanded the money and I will never give it up.”
“What money?”
He had a coughing fit. I knelt down to help him sit up, bracing his shoulders on my knees as I cradled his head against my chest. When he’d cleared his throat, he launched into a stream of tasks for me to attend to and he kept saying that after his death, I would get all the riches that he’d preserved for me.
He kept going on and on about his coffin stowed under the stairs. That always gave me the creeps. And I’d heard this all before. So many times he’d promised me money but the others always needed it and I never received a penny. I never asked for any either. Not since that day when I was sixteen and all excited about college.
I had wanted to attend George Washington University and major in journalism or political science. I’d get a newspaper job at The Washington Post and run all over Capitol Hill. Maybe even get on the White House press staff some day.
Momma had told me then, “Oh no. Just forget about it. I can’t do that again.”
Momma had to train for a second career after retiring from the Secret Service. She worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week as a private duty-registered nurse putting my father’s son Perry through law school. And then she had to pay tuition for some fancy makeup artist academy in Beverly Hills, California, for Tammy who’d dropped out of high school.
I understood. I really did. I was the one at home eating tasteless leftover homemade vegetable soup, two meals a day. I watched the toll it took on Momma to work so hard and sacrifice so much for the others. It broke my heart to see her so exhausted. She’d come home from work, fix a tall glass of vodka on the rocks with a bent straw to sip while she lay on her side on the couch with her varicose-veined legs and bunioned feet propped up on pillows. I wouldn’t add to her misery. I never asked for anything again. Nor was it offered.
I interrupted Daddy’s rambling. “Daddy. Daddy. Where is Momma?” I heard the ambulance siren. “I’ll let them in.” I gently laid him down then bolted up the basement stairs and threw the front door open. A fire engine had stopped out front. The imbecile had dispatched a fire engine. I angrily waved at them to leave. Four men slowly emerged from the vehicle and made their way up the steps.
I yelled, “There isn’t a fire! I need medical help!”
A guy in a sooty white helmet that had Lieutenant written on it spoke. “Listen, lady, do you want help or not? There are no ambulances available. You District residents abuse the system, using them for taxicabs. We just ran an ingrown toenail. Where’s the patient?”
“Down the stairs and make a left.” I followed the white helmet. Three yellow helmets trailed me. One was carrying a first-aid kit. Another fireman toted an oxygen bottle.
The lieutenant started examining Daddy. “Joe-Joe, get the paddles, he’s in full arrest.”
Joe-Joe ran.
“Get a bag on him!” The lieutenant began chest compressions on Daddy. A fireman placed an oxygen bag over my father’s face and began squeezing rhythmically. The lieutenant said, “Enrique, switch on three… One and two and three.” Firefighter Enrique took over doing the chest compressions. The lieutenant rose to his feet and squeezed the microphone on his lapel.
“Communications, this is thirteen engine. Be
advised our patient is in full arrest. Request the nearest medic unit.”
Joe-Joe returned with the defibrillator. They cut Daddy’s blue plaid cotton shirt open and his white V-necked undershirt.
The lieutenant shoved me back into the rec room. “How old is he?”
“Ninety-two.”
“Any history of heart problems? How long ago did he fall?”
“No, but he has high blood pressure and a history of TIA’s…mini strokes, you know? I found him on the floor with the freezer on top of him about ten minutes ago. I couldn’t get a straight story out of him about what happened. He wasn’t making much sense. He told me that—”
Mrs. Meddlestein appeared at the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?”
The lieutenant glowered at her and said to me, “Ma’am, take her and go outside. Flag down the medic unit when it arrives.”
It arrived. Forty-five minutes later. The paramedics found Dr. Nathan Lucifer Payne dead. They called for the coroner.
~*~
I slumped in a chrome and yellow vinyl dinette chair in Mrs. Meddlestein’s perky kitchen, numbly sipping mango ice tea. She talked and yammered about Daddy running out into the street on Thursday and Momma standing at the door waving his cane and screaming obscenities. I had no reason to accuse Mrs. Meddlestein of lying but it was really out of character for Momma to have argued in public with Daddy.
I tuned her out. A booming parade of dusty sunlight filtered in through the pink Swiss-dotted curtains in the bay window. My bleary eyes ached. I didn’t for one minute believe that Momma turned the freezer over on Daddy.
Mrs. Meddlestein fussed around, tidying this and that. With her old-fashioned bottled-platinum hairdo, red lips, drawn-on mole and white halter dress, she was every bit a plump sexagenarian Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. Had Daddy really said that she was my real momma? Just before he… Oh my God!
“They’re gone now, dear,” Mrs. Meddlestein finally said, in her own nasal Jewish mother voice. Definitely not Marilyn-ish.
I left her. I shuffled across the street and into the house. I dreaded telling Momma when she got home.
Crying in a curled-up ball on the brown leather couch in the living room, choking on my own mucus, I had to get some toilet paper from the bathroom to blow my nose on. I’d used up many plies when the telephone rang. Oh Momma. What will I say to you? I stumbled into the living room and picked up the princess rotary dial phone. “Payne residence.”
“Who’s this?” my half-brother Perry gruffly demanded.
“Perry, it’s Donna.”
“Where the frick have you been? I’ve been trying to call you since Thursday.”
I had to swallow the wad in my throat. “Perry, Daddy died today.”
“What?”
“He’d fallen, the freezer toppled over on him. I don’t know how long before I got here. He had a heart attack. They tried to revive him but the paramedics arrived too late. He’s dead. Our daddy is dead, Perry.”
“She escaped and killed him.”
“What?”
“Your mother murdered him.”
“How dare you? She’s not even here!” Escaped? What was he talking about? Escaped from where?
“You have no idea what’s been going on these past few months.”
“Momma is not a murderess!”
“I’ll be over in a little while. We need to go over some things. Have you notified Tammy?”
“No. We’re not on speaking terms,” I growled.
“I’ll call her on the way. Stay put.” He hung up on me.
I dropped the heavy ivory receiver onto the gaudy faux-gold filigree phone. I felt wetness oozing through my bandaged shoulder onto the teal scrub shirt. I wandered down the hallway and found some bandages and hydrogen peroxide under the blue bathroom sink. I peeled off the shirt and yanked the tape off the dressing. Raw, hairless skin screamed from the cruel adhesive the hospital had used. It hurt so bad.
I poured hydrogen peroxide on the sutured puncture wound. It bubbled into a cold white and pink fizz. I dabbed it dry with toilet paper and squeezed treatment solution on. I patched it up with a large Band-Aid.
Topless and braless, I left the shirt and bloody dressing on the floor and trudged to Momma’s bedroom. I removed one of her lavender floral blouses from the closet and gingerly slipped it on.
“Oh-Donna? Where are you?” I heard Perry’s voice summoning me.
Oh-Donna. I hated my nickname. My full name was Orpha Donna Payne. Momma named me after her lifelong friend, Secret Service agent and registered nurse Orpha Livingston Blair. My family nicknamed me “Oh-Donna” after the late Ritchie Valens song “Donna” from the fifties. To me, it had always been a faux term of endearment, more like a snide little inside joke to all of them. Even Momma. They all knew it bothered me. So that’s why it stuck. It wouldn’t be fun to tease me if I wouldn’t get my feathers poked sideways.
Of course, the “Donna” song, about searching for the girl that got away, was beautiful. But it embarrassed me when they called me Oh-Donna in front of outsiders. And it also made me feel like the outsider. Like I didn’t really belong to this family but by some ridiculous blunder of nature, my spirit plopped down in their sticky glue.
I plodded back into the living room where my over seven-foot-tall and seemingly seven-foot-wide half-brother Perry stood, dressed in his black judge’s robe. He was holding a briefcase.
“You okay? Jeeze, it must have been horrific finding the body.”
“He wasn’t dead when I got here.”
“Why didn’t you do CPR then?”
“I…I called for an ambulance.”
Perry opened his black briefcase and removed a legal type document. “Well, here’s the old boy’s will. Everything is in order. He named you as executrix. You need to put the house on the market, get the tax assessor in, arrange an estate sale and close out their bank accounts. Insert just a tiny ad in the legal notices section of the Post to notify his creditors. When the year is up, whatever is left gets split evenly. Between me and Tammy.”
Of course it would be. I was nobody. I snatched the will from him.
He grabbed it back before I could read it. “Don’t goof it up, Oh-Donna.”
“Goof it up?”
Hot tears streamed down my face. “Why are you always humiliating me? How could I goof it up by just holding it to read? Why do you treat me like a retard?” He didn’t love me at all. I had only fooled myself all of my life thinking my brother really did love me deep down. I wiped my nose on the hem of the blouse I was wearing. “Daddy didn’t leave everything to you and Tammy. What about Momma?”
“Don’t worry about her. I had her admitted to Saint Christopher’s for a psych evaluation on Thursday. They’ll take her on as a charity case if she doesn’t go to jail.”
“You did what?”
“I received a message from Dad that she was trying to kill him. When I arrived here, she had chased him outside. He was shaking. She was inside with his aluminum cane in her hand and it was bent where she’d beat him upside the head with it.”
I remembered Mrs. Meddlestein claiming she saw Daddy run outside and Momma cussing at him and waving his cane. “Did you actually see her hit him with it?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“If you really thought she’d hit him, then why did you have Momma locked up and leave Daddy home alone with a head injury?”
“I had to get back to court. I gave him a couple of aspirins and made an ice pack for him to put on the goose egg bump on his head.”
“So in other words, you didn’t think he was seriously injured.” I didn’t buy the ice pack bit for one minute. Perry wouldn’t even know how to make one. Daddy didn’t have a head injury.
“Not at that time. I made sure to lock up Chloe before she had a chance to do him in. A fat lot of good that did. She escaped and finished the job.”
“Escaped? A little old lady escaped from the mental ward? You’re being ridiculous, Pe
rry. Come up with a better fairy tale.”
“Keep living in never-never land, Oh-Donna. Just watch your back before she kills you too.” Perry stashed the papers in his briefcase. “I’ve called the Metropolitan Police. They’ll send technicians over to process the crime scene. Let ’em in, will ya?”
“Crime scene? It was an accident! The freezer toppled over on him and he had a heart attack.”
Perry looked incredulously at me. “Oh-Donna, open your eyes and see the truth. Dad was murdered.”
I panted, trying to catch my breath. I would not accept that Daddy had been murdered. Especially not by his own wife. And there was absolutely no evidence or witnesses to make me believe otherwise. I couldn’t believe Perry had talked the cops into accepting there was a crime. Surely the autopsy would clear everything up. I had never been so angry in my entire life.
Perry grumbled, “Tammy said she’d do the funeral arrangements. You wanna give me one of your credit cards so she can charge it to?”
“What?”
“Where’s your purse?”
“Get out!”
“Don’t you talk to me that way, Oh-Donna.”
“Why do you and Tammy always assume I am rich? You are the ones with the college educations and high-paying jobs. Get out!” I shoved him down the three stairs. He clunked his shaved bald head on the white wrought iron railing.
“What the devil got into you?” He took off.
I locked the door tight and rushed down the basement stairs. I flung open the big wide door to the walk-in closet under the stairs. I reached in the dark for the shoestring and yanked the light on. I shut the door. It wasn’t quiet like I needed. A melody faintly emanated from around the switchback corner underneath the stairs. It sounded like Perry Como’s “Some Enchanted Evening”, a beautiful love song from the forties.
The walk-in closet was immense as far as closets go. Since the house was a split foyer, the stairs were turned in an L-shape. Three down from the living room, a wide landing at the front door and then a turn and nine stairs down to the basement. Daddy extended the width of the closet so it made a U-shape with a switchback under the basement stairs. There was an overhead storage area with a hatch underneath the foyer landing and the stairs that led up to the living room.
The Immaculate Deception Page 2
