With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  “Nothin’ unusual, far as anybody can tell so far,” Mackenzie went on, “about any of the tarts in the tin. An’ since these seeds that seem to be the culprit are pretty easy to spot, unless more than one type of poison was used, it appears that nobody’s about to find anything unusual about your mother’s tarts. Except for the two she put out on that plate.” He let that last sentence ride on the air and fill the room, reverberating with ominous import. “If Zacharias had finished off both of them, we would still be way far deep in the dark.”

  “Somebody doctored the tarts. It would be witless of my mother to publicly offer up the only tarts she’d poisoned. Are you saying she’s not only a murderer but stupid, too?”

  “No, of course not, I only—”

  “Then case closed. I hate to mention food after so much talk of poison, but would you consider an expedition to the all-night market?” I wanted to dig into something besides chlorophyll. I began a mental shopping list.

  But Mackenzie and I were on such different wavelengths, we weren’t even playing in the same city. “The thing is,” he was saying when I finally tuned back in, “that it would make sense if she wanted to humiliate him.”

  “What she are we talking about?” I asked, bristling.

  “Correction. Make it a theoretical question. If A hated B so much that she didn’t want him to die quietly offstage, but publicly, in front of everybody he held dear—to be humiliated, then die—then if murder ever makes any kind of sense, this design for one would, too.”

  Theoretical question, my foot. Mackenzie isn’t one to wallow in hypothetical constructs for long. I gave him six seconds to cut to the chase.

  “So,” he drawled after only three seconds, even though each subsequent word dripped nectar-slow over his tongue, “your mother have any old grudges against Lyle Zacharias?”

  I shook my head. She didn’t. She was the one who had dragged my father up north to do some active forgiving and forgetting, or at least the forgiving part.

  “Your father, maybe, then?”

  My heart did a little syncopated movement. He’d read my small print.

  “Some long ago feud?” he asked mildly. “Business? Or a woman?”

  I overreacted, as I am wont to do when something comes within shouting distance of information I’d rather keep to myself. “Why mention my father?” I glared at Mackenzie and crossed my arms in what I hoped was an assertive no-nonsense stance. “He wasn’t even there!”

  “True,” Mackenzie said. His question still dangled between us.

  But when people mention trouble over a woman, they don’t mean problems concerning a foster sister. I intended to use that linguistic convention to maximum advantage. “How could my father possibly have a problem over a woman with Lyle Zacharias, who is—who was—ten years younger than my dad, when you realize that my father has been married for thirty-seven years, which would make Lyle thirteen when my father stopped dating. So what are you implying about my father and women?”

  Mackenzie shook his head in amazement. “Why’re you reacting that way? It was only a question.”

  “An incredibly stupid question!” I felt a bit smug. I had dithered and carried on and in general detoured around the real issue of whether my father had unresolved differences with Lyle.

  As I heated up, Mackenzie reacted by turning down his emotional barometer, entering a kind of walking hibernation, all systems on low, his voice the lowest, slowest, and scariest of all. “It is,” he said, “within the scope of human possibility that one spouse might act in the other’s behalf. Even you could imagine that with a little effort. Haven’t I heard that your parents can be just a little overprotective of their daughters and grandchildren? Why not of each other? Maybe your mother wants to take care of something that’s been eatin’ away at your father.” He paused, and looked at me. “It’s even possible that a daughter can be overprotective of her parents.” Then he put his hands up in mock self-defense. “Only an idea. A passing idea.”

  “You don’t believe any of this, do you? You don’t truly believe that my mother—or father—could be a murderer, do you?”

  “’Course not.”

  I was surprised at the degree of relief I felt, at how many of my muscles began to unclench, at least until he spoke again.

  “But I don’t disbelieve it, either. The thing of it is to not have any preconceived notions. If you know what you’re lookin’ for—or if you think you know what you’re lookin’ for—then sure as not, you miss what’s actually there.”

  “But my mother—”

  “Look here, Mandy. I don’t know your mother. I know you, at least a little, and I’d be real surprised if you killed somebody. But the truth is—without getting all metaphysical or any-thin’—we none of us know anybody. You want to be surprised about the human condition? Become a cop.” He looked directly at me, his blue eyes and his voice both clear and unsurprised as summer sky. “Have a little faith. The truth will out.”

  I sighed. “Maybe, then, we should stop theorizing, and wait for hard facts, like motives. Everybody seems to have one if you poke around a little, get past that nice facade.”

  Mackenzie had lost interest again, except in Macavity, who was back again, purring and kneading his paws while the great detective scratched what would be feline armpits, if only cats had arms.

  “Yo!” I snapped. “Over here!” He barely glanced my way. “I saw Richard Quinn this afternoon.”

  Being Mackenzie’s you-know obviously doesn’t necessitate the giving of attention, let alone actual concern as to why I’d seen Quinn. Mackenzie merely scratched Macavity more slowly and waited for me to complete my thought.

  This relationship was never going to make it. I bet he’d demand custody of the cat, and I suspected that Macavity would happily agree.

  “He’s the one who’s opening the restaurant—the place the seniors could use for their prom.”

  “Told you. In a few weeks those kids are going to be on their own out there. Stop bein’ such a mother hen. They should have checked the site, not you.”

  It was possible that he was right. I was getting increasingly confused about who was supposed to do what for whom, so I changed tacks altogether. “He says that Lyle’s big breakthrough, Ace of Hearts—from which he’s still making money, and which is about to become a second TV series and make skedillions more—was ripped off Terry Wiley, who brought suit, but lost. Didn’t have enough proof. And Quinn himself feels robbed in the same deal. This restaurant he’s opening is probably his last chance, and Lyle refused to help with it.”

  “Uh-huh.” If Mackenzie emitted any less energy, he’d be reclassified as inorganic material.

  “And Lyle’s wife, Tiffany—”

  “You told me this afternoon. And about the angry old wife, too.”

  “But those are motives, C.K. Those are real motives.”

  “Right.” He stood up, which always seems a more intricate process for Mackenzie than for other people. He unlocks and stretches one section at a time as though rebuilding himself.

  I finally noticed that while Mackenzie’s edible offerings were mostly gone, his potables were not. A bottle of Chianti Classico was on the counter next to the sink. “Wine,” I said.

  “Whine?” He gave the word two and a half syllables. “Me? I do not. You, on the other hand, are showin’ a definite tendency toward it lately.”

  I ignored him. Anyone who puns and insults in the same sentence does not deserve an answer. “Wait. I’d better not get my hopes up. That’s probably an empty, resealed bottle.” But it wasn’t. I poured us both glasses and anticipated settling in for a nonmurderous, amicable evening of being each other’s you-knows.

  He sipped wine, smiling at his own good choice, and at me. I smiled back.

  “Tell me somethin’,” he whispered.

  “Whatever you want to know.” It’s corny and learned by osmosis from bad movies, but verbal foreplay is nonetheless my favorite parlor game.

  “How c
ome earlier today you referred to Harriet Zacharias as Aunt Hattie? I notice that you’ve dropped the aunt part, so how come you did that, too?” He smiled again. “Her name to the rest of us is Harriet, y’know.”

  I drank wine and sighed.

  “Whose aunt is she?”

  “Lyle’s.” Macavity wedged himself between us. I made it an easier job by moving farther away from the detective.

  “This makes me sad, Mandy. I thought at the very least we were on the same side. That we were—”

  “You-knows, right?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Mackenzie, you’re forgetting that this isn’t some abstract criminal demon we’re talking about. It’s my mother.”

  He looked taken aback. For a moment I thought he was still puzzling through the you-know business, but then I realized that on some level he really didn’t understand what I had said. I was afraid he was going to ask what the woman’s having given birth to me had to do with the issue, but he didn’t. Still and all, I knew he thought it.

  Amazing how ambiguous he could be about affairs of the heart when professionally he was only interested in right and wrong, true and false, crime and punishment. It was probably advantageous to know this about him, although just then I couldn’t decide if I was impressed or depressed by the realization.

  I looked straight ahead and said nothing. “Didn’ answer, Mandy. How come you called her Aunt Hattie when you were talking about the visit to her?” I shook my head.

  “Because your mother calls her that, right?” He sat back, legs out straight from the sofa, proud as hell of his deductive ability. “Because there’s a relationship. What is it?”

  “They aren’t related.” The stepmother of the husband of your foster sister-in-law couldn’t be considered a relative. Maybe in the South, where Mackenzie came from, but certainly not in Philadelphia.

  “Let me put it this way. Why were your parents invited to that particular party? What was their place in Lyle Zacharias’s life or history?” He looked at me, all innocent blue-eyed wonder.

  We froze into position, neither saying a word. Anyone passing by and peeking in might have misinterpreted that long impasse. They might have thought we couldn’t get enough of the sight of each other, that we liked what we saw, that the exchange had anything whatsoever to do with affection.

  Finally, I decided that I might as well come clean. He’d find out later, anyway. I wondered which fate my mother would like less—to be accused of murder or to be responsible for breaking up her spinster daughter’s one semireal relationship?

  Fifteen

  I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday morning in a paranoid funk. Entering school and being in range of the note-sender gave me the creeps. Even though there was no follow-up in my mailbox and no further signs of danger, every motion and sentence by students or faculty seemed ominous, every one of my fellow human beings potentially the psychotic who wanted me to become the next news story about violence against teachers. It made for a twitchy morning. Luckily, the annual Junior Journalism Conference occupied the afternoon. I had only a half day’s paranoia to face.

  I had meant to talk with Mackenzie about it. I had, if I recalled properly, even tried to on our afternoon walk. But both then and last evening, Topic A had been the case against my mother. Besides, what would Mackenzie have done but ask me the same questions I kept failing to answer myself—who? why? what could it mean?

  I was eager to get out of the building and the foggy sense of ill will growing around me. I had trouble concentrating on the ninth graders, who really didn’t care, as they were having a high old time with their play. I sat at a desk at the back of the room and tried to listen, but whenever I stopped obsessing about getting out of school and away from the note-writer, I began obsessing about my mother’s jeopardy, and when I couldn’t handle that one, I switched to Lyle Zacharias, alive and dead, and a mess both ways.

  My various preoccupations made me repeatedly zone out and miss the rehearsal. I faced forward and, for the forty-fifth time that period, tried to listen.

  My class hadn’t been drawn to their adaptation because of Oscar Wilde’s witty epigrams or dark morals about beauty and the soul. What they were crazy for was the special effects potential in the novel’s grand finale, when Dorian’s portrait regained its beauty and Dorian himself was revealed in all his monstrous corruption. Somebody’s mother knew somebody’s cousin in New York who had access to masks that had been used in a horror movie. This rehearsal and the work that preceded and would follow it were all for the sake of flashing a cinematically hideous face at the audience.

  Still, along the way, the adaptors and actors ingested an interesting classic, and I say whatever works, works.

  The foppish Lord Henry was played by a spotted and square young man who would have given Oscar Wilde hives. “Why should Basil have been murdered?” Lord Henry wondered with a flounce of his head. He wore his hair long, in great clots held together with gel, so his head-shaking was indeed something to behold. “He was not clever enough to have enemies,” Lord Henry concluded.

  Well, I decided, I must be clever. I’d garnered enemies. I was, after all, on somebody’s academic hit list, even if I wasn’t clever enough to figure out who my enemy might be. And Lyle Zacharias had been clever enough for enemies, even if Quinn said he’d been a no-talent fake. Maybe Wilde had stretched too hard for a witticism. Maybe enemies were an equal-opportunity employer.

  “The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true,” Lord Henry said. The line seemed a message sent directly to me, a warning. What was it I felt absolutely certain about? Why did it sound so familiar?

  I was losing it. Of course it was familiar. I’d heard it here, twenty-four hours ago, the last time Lord Henry declaimed, and it meant nothing. Just another clever line. More to follow. Once again, and rather desperately, I tried to pay attention.

  Lord Henry continued:

  “Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again—I tell you, Dorian, it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

  That wasn’t pure epigram or fun with words. That meant something, and the something it meant shuddered over me like ghostly fingers on my flesh. I almost saw the cells, each propelled by a passion and puffed with secrets piling up through history, encapsulating the past and finally exploding from the weight of the burden.

  As if nothing was ever truly over, only etched on a revolving drum that sooner or later rotated back into the present when those history rich cells must, reflexively, act on what they have known for so long. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong.

  How foolish of Lyle Zacharias to have summoned his ghosts, all those waiting passions, injuries, and secrets.

  That’s what comes of not reading and heeding the classics.

  But I had, and even so, what was I to make of it?

  “There is no evidence against me,” Dorian Gray, aka. Jack Clancy, said to himself after Lord Henry left. Jack favored hand flapping for dramatic emphasis. But the production wasn’t Broadway bound. It would have an extremely short run at a Philly Prep assembly, and Jack was having a wonderful time, so I let the student director handle the spastic motions and silently apologized to Oscar. He’d understand. He had a great sense of humor. Besides, he’d coped with much more serious issues in his time.

  “Except for the picture,” Dorian continued with an extravagant wave of both hands. “The picture!—my conscience, my enemy. As I killed its painter, so will I kill it!—and then at last I will be at peace!”

  He brandished an imaginary knife at an imaginary portrait and let out a bloodcurdling, agonized scream.

&
nbsp; “Jack!” I shouted. “Hey! Keep it down. There’s a class in the next room!”

  “Carried away. Sorry,” he said, then he dropped to the floor, sprawled on his belly, the better to put on his mask when the time came.

  The door to our room whipped open. “Everybody okay?” Flora Jones called out. She was followed by a half dozen of her computer students. She gasped and put her hands to her heart as she saw Jack on the floor, then rushed over and dropped to her knees beside him, but by then I was up the aisle and vastly annoyed.

  “Come on, get up! You’re scaring Miss Jones. Don’t worry,” I explained. “It’s only Dorian Gray, where he stabbed himself.”

  Flora Jones was a formidable woman, a computer whiz, working part-time at our school while she completed her MBA at Wharton. She was also a marathoner and a former Miss Black Teenage Philadelphia. None of which necessarily made her familiar with Oscar Wilde’s work.

  “Dorian needs an ambulance,” she snapped to one of her students. “Quickly. Do you know CPR?” she asked me.

  “No!” I shouted to the retreating student. I prodded Jack with the tip of my shoe, controlling the urge to give him a swift kick. “Jack! Cut this out!”

  “Jack?” Flora said.

  “Up!” I shouted at the inert body while Flora watched with horror, then growing relief as Jack finally stood up.

  “Gotcha, didn’t I?” He bowed to the class. “Talk about acting!” He strutted back to his seat.

  “It’s a play they’re rehearsing.” I glared at Jack. “Talk about overacting. Forgive us.”

  She exhaled with some deserved exasperation. “I thought something had happened to you,” she said.

  “Why? Why me?” Asked too intently, my paranoia index setting new highs. What did she know?

  “I don’t know. Guess you just hear about it so much… Plus,” she lowered her voice to avoid offending Jack, “the kid’s voice is still pretty high. I thought it was a woman’s. Yours.” Her own voice back to normal, she continued. “Anyway, the scream and the body must have rattled me, else I’m losing my mind. How could I forget Dorian Gray? The guy with the picture that got old instead of him. I’ve always wanted to find that artist and commission my own portrait. How could I have thought it was your student’s name?” Laughing at herself, she left the room.