With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  He laughed. “Curses. Found out again.”

  Upstairs, outside the ballroom, a petite woman introduced herself as Penny and explained with hyperactive enthusiasm that she was filling in for the regular special events coordinator who had chicken pox of all things and, gee, but she was sorry for any inconvenience this might mean.

  “I’m interested in reserving the ballroom in late May, early June,” I said. Penny beamed so widely, her smile threatened to completely encircle her head and split it in two.

  “Congratulations to both of you!” She leaned close. “I just love working with people who are so visibly in love.”

  I looked around. Mackenzie was checking the exits. Penny needed to have her vision and sincerity retooled.

  “Of course,” she continued, “June is a busy, busy month, booked well in advance, a year ahead lots of times, but let’s see if we can’t find…as long as you’re flexible…there are options like a weeknight reception. It’s quite chic, you know. How large a guest list do you anticipate?”

  “This is not about us,” I told Penny. “Not a wedding.”

  Her eyes grew squinty and suspicious. “Engagement?” she asked with dwindling enthusiasm.

  I shook my head.

  “Then what?” Her voice was now small and nervous. I did not want to tell her. Proms were hotel nightmares. Who wanted adolescent revelers? Kids getting sick in the stairwells.

  Kids wallowing in high puberty hormones. Kids renting hotel suites for extra-prom partying. Non-kids complaining and never returning to the hotel. “Never mind,” I said.

  And then my you-know charged to the rescue. “A ball,” Mackenzie said.

  Penny stood on tiptoe, the better to understand the man. “A what?”

  “Y’know, like we always have down home? Maybe you call it a cotillion up here? Lotta folks dancin’, fancy dress…” He looked misty-eyed and wistful for the old family plantation. If only he’d had one.

  “Like Gone With the Wind?” Penny whispered.

  “Precisely!” How did he manage to get so many syllables into the word? How much magnolia scent and Spanish moss? “We plan to have us a few hundred guests,” he added. “That is, if you can find a slot for us in this magnificent hotel.”

  She twinkled and glittered and beamed up at him. A ball. Scarlett O’Hara lived, even though Mackenzie’s accent was born of the wrong state and certainly the wrong era and social class. Didn’t matter. He murmured on. My own genuine Bubba-you-know, and irresistible. I could feel my own self twinkling at him.

  “I know we’ll work something out,” Penny said as Mackenzie gathered up brochures and price lists from her. “I’m just sure of it!”

  “Bless you,” I said when we were back on the street. “That was truly altruistic, inspired, and saintly. Not to mention funny as hell.”

  “Yankee women would probably be much happier if the South had won the war and ever’body talked the right way.” And then he added, as if it had some logical connection, “But y’know, I’ve been thinkin’. There’s a whole other way of goin’ at this.”

  “Another way of finding a prom site? Or do you mean another way of getting Yankee men to talk the way you do?”

  “We’ve been lookin’ at opportunity here, and method—maybe—but we haven’t been lookin’ at motive.”

  Good-bye, Rhett Butler. Luckily, I didn’t have to answer him, because it wasn’t a question. If I had been specifically asked to consider motives, I’d have felt even worse about not mentioning that the first Mrs. Lyle Zacharias had been my father’s foster sister. I knew that was irrelevant to Lyle’s unfortunate death, but would Mackenzie?

  “So the question is: who’d want to have killed him?” he asked. “Who had a good motive?”

  The flinty eyes of Sybil Zacharias flashed like a blinking danger signal, although I still thought she’d have wanted him alive at least one more day, until after she enrolled her son in private school without needing to fudge about the date. But maybe the opportunity had popped up with his party—a chance to be in the same room with him, and she took it. I kept her filed as a possibility and then looked at the objects of her bad-mouthing. “According to his ex-wife, his current wife has been having an affair with a soap opera actor, Shepard McCoy,” I said.

  “I’m not sure ex-wives are overly reliable on the subject of current wives,” Mackenzie said. “Although that is interestin’.”

  “And Lyle was going to quit his job and live the simple life. Shuck his possessions, go native, which his current wife would not like at all.”

  “A few decades late for that sort of thing, isn’t it?” Mackenzie said.

  “And there’s maybe somebody else, a whiny woman named Janine who was pretty obvious about not liking Lyle.”

  “Not likin’s not the same as killin’. Lots of people I don’t like.” He raised his right shoulder in a quiet statement of dismissal.

  Whining, obsessively self-pitying Janine was certainly a more likely killer than my poor old mother, and I said so. “And what if there really was something seriously wrong between them? A long-standing feud. Just because she was obnoxious doesn’t mean she was wrong.”

  He walked a few steps. “What I don’ get is that it was his birthday. His best friends, right? Why would any of them do him harm?”

  I tried to explain the odd invitations and Lyle’s desire to “see his life” whole before his eyes, to heal old wounds, forget old grievances. It had obviously been a desire best squelched. It was possible that Lyle Zacharias had no authentic, tried and true friends, but what a way for him to find it out.

  “Tell you what,” Mackenzie said. “Let’s get our priorities straight. Why don’t we go find two brimful plates of pasta, and while we’re ingestin’ them, you tell me everything you recall from last night. We can thrash out the goodies, the maybes, the baddies. Know it’s early, but I’m starvin’. Haven’t had time for anything since six a.m.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “The invitation holds even if you can’t remember a single one of them. I wasn’t serious about that sorting out.”

  “I mean I can’t have dinner.” I double-checked my watch and it confirmed what I’d said. “I promised my mother I’d take her to visit Hattie.”

  “Can’t Beth?”

  “The two kids’ schedules make it complicated.”

  “A cab, then?”

  “My mother would consider that a serious breach of faith on my part. Besides, if it was Hattie screeching about the tarts, then maybe I should be there to…”

  “Protect your mother?” he asked softly.

  I nodded. “She wouldn’t dream she’s in danger. She might say or do… I don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Because, of course, last night she had dreamed she was in danger. She’d said, at least once, that she was a suspect. But she hadn’t meant it or believed it, I was sure. “Anyway, I have an appointment after that, too. Another prospective prom site. My last—I promise.”

  “You need my good ol’ boy routine for that one, too?”

  “I think a mid-Atlantic twang will work this time.” We hugged, exchanged kisses—no students about—and I turned toward the parking lot where I keep my car.

  “By the way,” Mackenzie said. “Just why were your folks invited to that party? And what does it have to do with the way you call Harriet Zacharias ‘Aunt Hattie’?”

  I brushed away his annoyingly logical questions. “Some other time, okay? I’m late already.”

  When I glanced back, he was staring intently after me. So now I knew how to rivet the attention of my you-know. All it took was having him believe that there was a murderer amongst my relatives.

  Would even my mother approve of this method of snagging a man?

  Eleven

  The killer granny WOULD NOT be talked out of visiting her accuser. I didn’t see the point of notifying her of the cloud of suspicion over her head, so my excuses were fairly lame, and definitely not persuasive.


  “But she’s out of the hospital. She’s okay,” I said. Hattie Zacharias had suffered grief and agitation, not a heart attack.

  “Mandy! The woman lost her son. It’s nothing more than decent to offer condolences.”

  I was being petty and selfish because Hattie lived in Society Hill, which was all the way on the waterfront. I couldn’t shuttle my mother there and back to the Main Line then retrace my tracks and arrive at Richard Quinn’s waterfront restaurant in time.

  “Poor old woman,” my mother shouted. We were in the family room, where my father sat, almost regally, with the encased foot on a low stool and an afghan over his lap. My niece, Karen, was the floor show, dancing to recorded ditties in a convulsive but enthusiastic style. The background music was the same squeaky white-bread version of rapped Mother Goose that had caused my father’s precipitous slide across the living room twenty-four hours earlier, but he did not appear to make the connection and/or care, proof of how heavily he was sedated.

  “It’s the least I can do,” my mother bellowed, trying to be heard above the din.

  “…went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone…”

  It was the worst excuse for music I’d ever heard, and I wondered how the woman who’d cut the record had fallen to the nadir of show-biz.

  Still, as sorry as I felt for what had become of her, I felt even worse about what was happening to my auditory nerves. I put my hands to my ears and charaded aural agony, and way, way after she should have, my bright niece caught on and lowered the volume microscopically.

  “Poor Hattie never had anything, anybody in the whole world except Lyle,” my mother said. “Now, what does she have at all?”

  “The Queen of Hearts she made some tarts…”

  Even at a slightly lowered decibel level, the voice was grating. Besides, I didn’t want to hear about any tarts, even the Queen’s, at the moment. My father didn’t wince or flinch. He grinned beatifically. The drugs he was taking were obviously the secret hope for peace on earth. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sharing them. “Karen!” I shouted. “Please!”

  She looked shocked and examined me with a face that clearly was redefining me as seriously old and out of it. Nonetheless, she lowered the volume to an acceptable level. She was going to be an interesting challenge as a teenager.

  “Okay, Mom,” I conceded. “We’ll go. But we have to leave now, and I might have to send you back in a cab, because before I knew about…this, I made a…”

  My mother’s eyes widened, her mouth opened slightly. I could imagine her expression on someone lost in the wilderness who finally spots a sign of life. “Yes?” she asked softly, hopefully.

  “A…” I gagged over the word, but my mother looked so expectant, so innocent, that I tried to give her this. “You know, a—a—”

  “A date!” she said. “Of course! I nearly forgot in the confusion—that nice, um…”

  “Actually, it’s more an appointment.”

  She beamed. “Richard Quinn. I remember. He said he’d see you at six.” She looked at her watch with a troubled expression.

  I couldn’t believe how much attention she paid to the trivia of my life—the social part of it, anyway. We had to deal with this, but right now we were in too much of a hurry. “It’s not a date date.” Why did I have to explain that to my mother? Why did it matter so much to her? “He’s buying into a new restaurant the kids at school might be able to rent for their…”

  She wasn’t interested in small print, but she was willing to hustle out and get me to the appointment/date on time.

  “Mom,” I said while en route, “you’re so eager for me to get married—”

  “Yes, dear.” Her voice was pleasant and untroubled, and she sat with her hands folded comfortably on a red and white tin of homemade cookies. “I’m your mother. That’s what parents are for. To take care of their children. I want you to be safe. Protected.”

  Amazement kept me silent. Protected? Safe? I mean if men are the protection, what on earth are they protecting us against?

  My mother observed the passing city through her window and continued. “Nothing unusual about that. But I know that sometimes it can become a problem.”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “I’m glad you realize that. I wanted to talk about—”

  “Like Hattie,” my mother said. “That was too much. She was an overprotective mother.”

  I could not envision what that word meant to my mother, short of a lioness, teeth bared. Hattie roaring.

  “She didn’t approve of Cindy, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Hattie had plans for Lyle. She was even picky about his friends, and then Cindy came along, one of those who had definitely made love not war, complete with her…love child.”

  Isn’t that a cute expression? And what’s its opposite for children born within the institution? Habit child? Contractual obligation child?

  “Hattie thought Lyle could do better than a hippie with a baby, and Lord knew who its father was, and she made her objections very clear. Of course, once Lyle married Cindy, Hattie accepted the situation, but she was like that about everything and everybody that had to do with Lyle. Planning, arranging for what was best for her boy. Sometimes, like with Cindy, it was too much. It was…meddling. Interfering.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Yes. I understand meddling. In fact—”

  “Still and all, she only wanted the best for him, like any mother. And she was his mother, even if she didn’t give birth to him. He was the absolute center of her life. Everything, everything revolved around him and what was best for him. And now…” She sighed and shook her head.

  Hattie lived down by the Delaware River in Society Hill’s only high rise, which loomed over the two- and three-story brick colonial buildings and disrupted the illusion of standstill time in Olde Philadelphia.

  “We’re back where we were last night, aren’t we?” my mother asked. “Except I don’t remember such a tall building. My mind’s going.” She chuckled, but she sounded a little nervous, too.

  I explained that the already arrived denizens of Society Hill would probably not like being confused with the still upwardly mobile of Queen Village, where we’d been the night before, a few blocks to the south. The mistake, however, was understandable. It’s hard to tell one gentrified brick row house from another.

  It wasn’t until I had finally located the parking entrance, and we had ridden the elevator talking about neighborhoods and apartments versus houses, that I realized I hadn’t made a dent in my mother’s implacable campaign to meddle until she married me off.

  * * *

  Hattie sat with her legs up on a cream-colored sofa, covered by a throw that looked spun of softness itself—cashmere, I guessed. Twenty-four hours of bereavement had accelerated the aging process. She was ancient and translucent with pain.

  Even so, she looked out of her withered face with sharp eagle eyes that sized up the soft doviness of my mother. Easy prey.

  “I baked cookies for you,” my mother said. I cringed, waiting for a horrible showdown and accusations, a replay of what Mackenzie had told me, but Hattie seemed too stunned or grief-stricken to connect yesterday’s baked goods with today’s. At least not openly. Yesterday, she had bragged to me about her ability to remember everything. Apparently, there had been some major changes overnight.

  Hattie smiled, rather weakly, and when my mother opened the tin and offered the contents to her, she delicately extracted one, a swirl of chocolate and vanilla strips whose kin had brightened many of the lunch boxes of my childhood.

  “Very pretty, Bea.” Hattie kept the cookie in her hand the entire time we were there. It never visited the neighborhood of her mouth. Maybe her memory wasn’t shot, after all.

  A flabby woman with thin pinkish hair introduced herself. “I’m Alice,” she said with a peculiar animation that was first cousin to hysteria. “A neighbor and dear friend. Helping out in this time of grief, so let me make you comfortable.” She proceed
ed to bustle around making intrusive efforts at hospitality, offering us our cookies and repeatedly urging the housekeeper, Maria, who looked offended by her directives, to bring us coffee or tea, no matter that we both declined the offer.

  “The most perfect boy who ever lived,” Hattie said. We seemed to have arrived in the middle of a discussion. “I cannot believe he’s gone.”

  “Always was an angel,” Alice said. “And now he’s one for real.”

  “Kind to everyone,” Hattie said. “Generous to a fault.”

  Perhaps we hadn’t interrupted anything except a never-ending Lylesong in two-part harmony.

  “A saint,” Alice said.

  “Sometimes he was too good. People took advantage,” Hattie said. “Expected too much, too often.”

  The leeches? I wondered. Alice tsked and shook her head. Maria the housekeeper sulked. I checked my watch.

  “Bright as can be from day one,” Hattie said.

  “And quite the athlete, too,” Alice added.

  “And of course, so talented in his writing,” my mother said.

  I couldn’t endure the round-robin, which felt programmed and potentially interminable. I stood up and walked to the large picture window.

  “The shame was, Ace of Hearts made him famous, and he got so involved in producing, he never really wrote again,” Hattie said from behind me.

  “Well, this way he was more of a Renaissance man,” my exceptionally gracious mother said. I wished Mackenzie were here—I wished the entire force were here to observe her and dispel any lingering questions about her innocence.

  While the three women began a new cycle of competitive praise, I looked out over the river. Although the city of Camden on the other side is not often listed as a scenic wonder, it does have a skyline, and the Delaware flowed in front of it, reflecting its night lights. It wasn’t half bad. The most perfect boy who ever lived had done well by his auntie.

  “He was the best. The best,” Hattie repeated. Her criteria were simple. If something involved Lyle, it was the best. Period. “I would have done anything for him, so how can I still be alive while he’s—he’s—”