With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  “Want a drink?” Quinn asked. “Not everything’s here yet, but—”

  “Mineral water, please.” No alcohol on a stomach that felt cavernously empty. I checked the room again for signs of dinner, even sniffed for aromas, and felt a little like my cat when there’s no food in sight and he’s anxiously convinced there never will be again. I wondered what Quinn would do if I rubbed against his leg and mewed.

  I was so absorbed in visual foraging that I nearly missed a murmur about Lyle and long ago and their partnership, although it was followed by a silence needing to be filled.

  “Too bad you split up before Ace of Hearts,” I said, hoping I was responding properly.

  Hitherto, I hadn’t known a face could change dramatically without visibly moving a muscle. It was as if each of his cells contracted and grew hard and his river-water eyes sparked like flint.

  “Wouldn’t have, if I’d known. But we’d agreed we weren’t going anywhere. No ideas, no projects, no money. He said he was quitting the biz, too. Then four months after we split, Ace of Hearts was ready to roll.” His voice was icier than the Delaware River running outside. He handed me a Perrier, clutched his glass of bourbon and water, and seemed to stare into his past.

  That had been a veritable oration for Quinn, startling for its verbosity and passion, relatively speaking. I looked at him. His anger wasn’t visible; he’d been an actor, after all. But it was definitely there, boiling the pale marine world he’d created. How angry Richard Quinn still was, decades after he’d made his badly timed exit.

  Except, I remembered with a hot shock to the system, there was a new anger, new fuel for the fire. Sybil Zacharias had told me that Richard Quinn’s first restaurant partner had become sick and had backed out. Then he’d wanted Lyle to help with this place—recompense for past injustices?—and had been turned down. Lyle had called him a leech.

  I wondered whether his obsession about the disparate fates of the Quinn and Zacharias halves of the former partnership was enough to lead to a twenty-year, time-delayed poisoning, particularly after further insults and injuries had been inflicted. And if you needed more capital for your restaurant and were refused, what happened? How much trouble was Quinn in?

  And how much trouble had I put myself in?

  The damned place was empty, and what was I doing here? I felt stupid and nervous. Could I blame this on my mother? Why wasn’t anybody else here? Surely, a restaurant’s opening needed the same sort of ensemble effort as a Broadway play.

  “Water under the bridge.” Quinn didn’t sound overjoyed about that, either. “No point looking back. Come see my room.”

  I pulled back, clutching my Perrier as a potential weapon until I realized he meant the room where the burned-out prom might be held. This was a business-as-usual night. I had nothing to fear from Quinn, except, it appeared, hunger.

  We returned to the entrance and I followed him up a flight of stairs.

  He’d been a failed producer and a minor, not overly successful actor, and I didn’t know what else. Now he was trying to become a restaurateur and already hitting bad luck in the effort. This could well be his last real chance, and he had every reason to be nervous. I wondered why Lyle had decided against investing. I wondered what the scene between them had been like. I stayed close to the exit from then on, never letting Quinn block my path toward the door. Just in case.

  Upstairs was a perfectly wonderful potential prom site. The view was even better—as long as Camden continued to be considered a view. The space seemed right. I could see it bright with summer formals and tuxedos, the corners junked up with Senior Prom decor.

  “We have small tables and lots of chairs. As many as they want,” Quinn said.

  And in one corner, amongst the balloons and streamers, Mackenzie and I would be drinking the legal punch, knowing that the students had managed, no matter our vigilance, to spike theirs. “No alcohol, you know,” I told Quinn.

  “No problem.”

  “And the food?” The more nervous or anxious I get, the more hungry I also get. I hoped mention of sustenance would prompt him to offer me something. My stomach echoed the hope—audibly.

  “The best. Good prices, too,” he said. No samples.

  We would have to make sure that the restaurant was actually opening on time and that it would still be open in June, given Quinn’s financial problems and lack of personal charm as a restaurateur. Never had the school newspaper been presented with such an interesting investigative challenge.

  It was very quiet. We had run out of conversation.

  I told him that I was personally sold on the space, told him the prom date, asked him to hold it for twenty-four hours, and reassured him that lots of people would want to hold their significant parties upstairs at The Scene and that his future seemed assured. Then I headed back to the stairs. I had two goals: to go home and to eat, in either order.

  “Lyle’s aunt,” Quinn said from behind me. “Is she okay?”

  It was the first time he’d asked about somebody else, extended himself. “Understandably grief-stricken,” I answered.

  “She say what killed him?” We were back in the entryway of the restaurant, next to the coat-check cubby.

  As what she’d said pointed toward my mother’s head, I decided it was privileged information. “Nope,” I said, practicing taciturnity.

  Richard Quinn gave me my coat. I had half expected him to charge me for its storage. I put it on, hoping it would muffle my stomach’s growls. I considered Quinn’s chronology with Lyle. “Did you know Lyle’s first wife, too?” I was eager for information about my mysterious semirelative.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Did he think that answer sufficed? “What was she like?”

  He rolled an imaginary toothpick around in his mouth. “She’s dead. Don’t like to speak ill.”

  Of course, by saying that, he already had, only indirectly. “Please. I’d really like to know.”

  He seemed on the verge of asking me why, and then seemed to stop caring. “Very Sixties. Peace and love, but intense about it. Holier than thou.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. It was a tic with him, a substitute for emotion. “Wanted people to be perfect. Other people. Fought with Lyle all the time.” He shook his head, perhaps believing that I could see what was going on inside his skull. “Last dinner together…” More head shaking. “Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

  “Why?” I cued him once again. “About what?”

  He—surprise—shrugged. “Don’t know. Called each other names, like idealistic idiot. That would be for her. And she called him a pig. Back and forth.”

  So much for my father’s sweetness-and-light vision of Cindy.

  So much, too, for Quinn’s interest in the subject.

  “Take my card,” he said. “And extras, to pass around. So I’ll hear from you tomorrow?”

  Accepting a small pile of cards seemed easier than protesting. But I couldn’t resist one last question. “Why did you go to Lyle’s party?” I asked softly, one hand already on the front doorknob. “Was it for Tiffany’s sake?”

  “No. Tiff didn’t want to go, either.”

  “Then why?”

  “To see.”

  “See what?” We sounded like one of my niece’s stupid riddles.

  “Who else he needed to let bygones be bygones with. How many.”

  “But surely not everybody there—”

  “Can’t say. Not the young ones, the new ones. But people who go back a while.” Quinn leaned against the front of the coat-check cubby. “Like Sybil said, Lyle doesn’t have old friends. Once you get to know him…”

  “For example? Anybody specifically at last night’s party?”

  He nodded. “Terry Wiley, for one. He’s no friend anymore. Lyle ripped Ace of Hearts off him.”

  “No,” I said. “If that were true, he would have gone to court, would have—”

  “Did. Poor slob lost. N
o proof. Who keeps carbons from high school?”

  “Maybe the claim was fake. Wiley’s a science teacher, not a writer.”

  “Meet his wife? Ruined him. He gave up trying.”

  I could believe that.

  “Lyle sounds good. Pure salesman, pure talk, but no ideas and no talent. Knockoffs. Oklahoma! on the moon, or Double O Seven with Siamese twin agents. Junk. His whole career: a show, TV series, revival, and spinoff—all from that one idea. Terry Wiley’s idea. Terry Wiley’s old script, too.” Quinn’s dislike of speaking ill of the dead—in fact of speaking at all—did not extend to the newly dead Lyle. I wondered when I was going to hear someone besides Hattie and her sidekick Alice speak well of him.

  I considered Terry Wiley as the possible murderer, but was stymied by his wife’s insistence on having her stomach pumped. Possibly the ties that bind have an escape clause when one of the partners is about to commit murder. Maybe Terry simply didn’t tell Janine what he was up to. Or maybe Janine’s performance was only that, designed to deflect suspicion.

  And perhaps Quinn’s sudden willingness to talk about Wiley was also a way of keeping attention elsewhere and off himself. Quinn had been robbed, too, or thought he’d been. If Lyle was going to steal a show, a hit, then the least he could have done was share the spoils with his partner.

  Quinn. Wiley. Sybil. Tiffany. Shepard. Even Reed. Good grief!

  How could anyone suspect my motiveless mother when there was a covey of potential villains at hand?

  And what the devil was I doing with one of them? In an eyeblink and one taciturn farewell, I was out of there.

  Thirteen

  Macavity was playing feline famine, eyeing me balefully and yowling pitifully, although his starvation act was a hard sell, given both the size of his belly and the brimming container of dry food on the floor.

  “I’m hungry, too,” I muttered. I nonetheless opened a can of his beloved glop before I dared to take off my coat.

  I wondered if I should talk to my brother-in-law about my parents’ potential legal problems. Sam specialized in corporate law, but surely he’d have a better idea than I of what to do in case of impending criminal disaster.

  Perhaps my parents should flee back to Florida. Maybe even a quick trip across the water to the Bahamas. Didn’t all manner of shady characters gamble and gambol there with no danger to their persons? Could a nice but wrongly accused couple from Florida join them?

  Meanwhile, I studied my refrigerator, which featured the rank remains of what had once been broccoli, a plastic-wrapped wing that worried me because I couldn’t remember having broiled chicken since mid-January, an extremely hard circle that had once been a cold cut slice, and cheese that had mutated into a St. Patrick’s Day ornament.

  I jealously eyed Macavity’s full dish. Where was the equity in our relationship? I always thought about his welfare. It was high time he thought about mine. He needed sensitivity training.

  “Cat,” I said, “I’m going to tell you a true story. A parable.” I didn’t wait for permission, or even for Macavity’s attention. “In the time of King Richard the Third,” I said, “there lived a nobleman named Sir Henry Wyat. Sir Henry was accused of political crimes and sent to the Tower of London, condemned to die of starvation.”

  Macavity snarfed his food without glancing my way, but I persisted. “Sir Henry would definitely have starved, except that his brave and true cat crept down the chimney every single day for months, each time bringing him a freshly killed pigeon.

  “The King heard about it, thought it a miracle, and released Wyat. Now what do you think of that heroic, clever cat?”

  Macavity eyed me with a baleful yellow glance. If he’d known how to snicker or say sucker, he would have. “Thanks a lot,” I told him. “You were supposed to become inspired.”

  I therefore faced another cereal night without so much as a raw pigeon to liven things up. Damn Richard Quinn. Damn me, for assuming my restaurant appointment might include food.

  I dialed Mackenzie and spoke with his answering machine. “I’m home,” I said, “and in case you haven’t yet polished off that pasta, I’m interested.” I wasn’t counting on it, though. He’s a detective, after all. If he wanted to find pasta, he would have, hours ago.

  Macavity sauntered off to the living room to digest his repast. He was, I had to acknowledge, neither heroic nor particularly handsome. His fur is an odd gray-brown that looks like the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. His feet are enormous. But all the same, he was mine.

  I filled my bowl with Cheerios, poured in the half inch of milk remaining in the carton, and vowed to start keeping shopping lists, to become my own wife. I make that vow at least once a week.

  The mail was the bleak, generic stuff of life: bills and discount coupons for services I never requested. No one had dialed my number all day. I took my potage into the living room, my feet dragging like a drab character in a Russian short story. A Chekhovian clerk with an answering machine.

  “C’mere, cat,” I cajoled, but Macavity is proof of my mother’s old warning: give a guy what he wants, and then he won’t want you. Once fed, Macavity was less committed to our relationship, and he stayed in the middle of the floor and groomed himself.

  The Long Night’s Journey into Self-Pity had begun. No mail, no calls, no food, no cat, and a mother who’s a murder suspect. Woe was me.

  The Russians were better at bleakness. I was boring even myself.

  Besides, maybe Mom wasn’t a suspect anymore, or at least not the only one. Hattie had blamed my mother yesterday and Lizzie this afternoon.

  I looked longingly at the phone. It wasn’t his pasta that made me yearn for Mackenzie. Among other parts, I craved his brain, needed to talk with him about all this. Where was he?

  On the other hand, if he returned this minute and picked up the phone, what was I going to do? Point a finger at innocent Lizzie? Her chubby and somehow pitiful face hovered like an ungrinning Cheshire Cat in front of me. Not a killer’s face. I would swear to it.

  But perhaps she was a witness. Had the police been able to get her calmed down enough to question her?

  I tried to think, although it was difficult being thoroughly logical on a bowl of Cheerios. But whenever I decided not to bother, I saw a vision of my mother peering out from between bars.

  So, then. If somebody had doctored the tarts—and if I refused to consider that the doctor had been one of my parents—then who could it have been? I started at the beginning with the messenger service, but that was so farfetched, so completely reliant on coincidence, that I put it at the bottom of my list.

  More logically, the tampering took place at The Boarding House, most likely in the kitchen, and if not at Lizzie’s hands, then probably under her nose.

  Perhaps she’d seen something out of the ordinary, even if she didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Perhaps I’d recognize it.

  Information gave me the number of The Boarding House, and I dialed. “I was wondering how you’re doing,” I said. “Last night I didn’t really have a chance to—”

  “Last night. Oh, sure. I remember you!” She sounded as if I were the Mounties come to save the girl and the day. “Thank you for calling me. I feel like I’m—I feel like—he isn’t back, and I’m going crazy and there aren’t any guests today but I don’t know whether—I mean if I leave and they find him—”

  I had to say her name three times, increasing volume and force with each repetition, before she seemed to hear, and even then it took her a while to decelerate and catch her breath.

  “Are you all alone?” I asked, softly.

  I heard a sniffled intake of breath, a stifled sob of agreement. Poor child, I thought, although she wasn’t a child. But she was nonetheless needy. “Tell you what.” Mackenzie had not answered my phone message, the cat was having a postprandial nap, and breakfast cereal did not a dinner make. “If you feel in the mood for company, and if you won’t take it as an insult to your excellent cooking, how about I p
ick up hoagies and soda and bring them to your place?”

  You might have thought I had offered to bring over the Holy Grail.

  I felt gratified, but if asked, I couldn’t have said whether my motive was a desire to provide comfort and companionship, to drill her silly about what she might have observed in her kitchen, to more carefully aim the beam of suspicion onto her bright red hair, or to simply have a strong reason to go out and snag a hoagie.

  “Wait.” She sounded mournful again. “My diet! I can’t eat that kind of stuff.”

  Anyone who remembers a diet does not qualify as distraught in my book. I no longer quibbled about my mixed motives.

  * * *

  Lizzie appeared to have discovered the first honest Overnight Weight Loss Method. Although she was still roly-poly, she looked dramatically diminished, as if the past day had devoured her.

  I handed over one of the Styrofoam boxed salads and a small container of oil-free dressing, miffed that her food virtue had made me too guilt-ridden to buy myself the much-desired hoagie. This is a female form of macho—who can desire less food, be less hungry?—but this time it was no game for Lizzie. Only for me.

  “Oh, miss!” She was reverting to her Dickensian meekness.

  “Mandy. Please.” I followed her into the kitchen, which seemed her spot, whether or not she was working, and pulled a high stool up to the center butcher-block table. The room around us was clean and smooth-surfaced, and not half as alive as last night, when the counters and ovens had been filled with lovely edibles.

  Lizzie and I opened our salad containers and wielded plastic forks above unthrilling leafy greens. “I don’t think you should be here all alone,” I said. “I thought—last night, didn’t you say you were going to see somebody today? A doctor?”

  “I did. He prescribed pills to calm me and made me see another doctor, too. A psychiatrist. He said I had suffered a traumatic shock. I’m supposed to go back tomorrow, but I don’t know. Bad enough I left today—but what if he came back while I was gone?”

  “Your father? If you were gone, he’d come in or wait, Lizzie.”