“So tell me about this Big Bob,” Mom said. She believes in understanding the essence of a person if you’re going to be involved in his life (or death, as it were). “What was he like, Luther?” But she was looking at Maxie when she said it.
Luther sat back from his dinner, which he had eaten politely but without gusto. He got a faraway look in his eye and smiled a little. “Bob was a funny guy,” he said.
“He would always do the opposite of what you expected,” Maxie said.
“He didn’t tell jokes or anything,” Luther continued, “but you just laughed a lot when he was around.”
“I almost never saw him in a bad mood,” Maxie put in. “I didn’t know him for long, but he always seemed to be happy. He liked his life.”
Luther, not hearing his friend’s ex-wife, overlapped her a bit. “Big Bob. It was a funny name for him. He probably didn’t stand taller than five eight. But he had a larger-than-life personality. I’ll bet he gave himself the nickname just to make people smile.”
“Did he work at the bike shop, too?” Steven wanted to know. He was apparently fixated on everyone’s profession. Maybe he wanted to decide what to be when he grew up and was looking for choices.
Luther shook his head. “Big Bob was a short-order cook at a stand on the boardwalk. Took pride in it, too. You asked for your burger well done, and you got it well done.”
“He had really nice eyes,” Maxie said, her voice sounding even more distant than usual. “I mean, seriously, even when I married him, I was never in love with Big Bob, but I first noticed his eyes. Big, brown, with lots of emotion in them. There was always something going on behind them that he’d only tell you if he knew you well enough.”
“It sounds like he was a really nice man,” Melissa said. A ten-year-old can cut through the babbling of adults to get to the heart of the matter.
At the exact same moment, Maxie and Luther said, “He was.”
Damn. Now I was actually starting to care about finding out what had happened to Big Bob Benicio (and try saying that three times fast). I hadn’t planned on that.
Luther left not long after that, and Mom left not long after Luther. I could tell Steven was desperate for whatever bogus family burlesque he’d decided would melt my heart, and, naturally, I was intent on not letting him have it. But before I could deal with that, I had to talk privately with Paul. I gave him a special look as we left the kitchen, as The Swine was saying, “Let’s just sit in the living room and talk.”
“It’s the den,” I corrected him. “And in a minute. I’ll be right back.” I headed for the downstairs front powder room, which was luckily unoccupied at the time.
Once inside, I latched the door and waited. But nothing happened. For a full minute at least. “Paul?” I mumbled. Usually, he can zone in on my voice and respond. This time, I got nothing.
“Paul,” I said a little more adamantly.
His face barely came up through the floorboards. His eyes were closed, for some reason. “What?”
“Come in. I need to talk to you.”
“Alison,” he said, “you’re in the loo.” Don’t you love Briticisms?
“I came in here so I could talk to you,” I told him. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Oh.” Paul opened his eyes and rose up, very slowly, through the floor, stopping just at eye level to be sure he wasn’t about to see something he shouldn’t. When it was evident he would not, he came all the way into the room.
But he still wouldn’t look at me, despite my being fully dressed and simply standing in the bathroom. Paul is easy to embarrass. Almost so easy that it’s no longer any fun.
“What is it you wanted to discuss?” he asked, showing an unusual interest in the ceramic tile I’d installed as a backsplash.
“Julia MacKenzie,” I said. I watched him for a reaction, and I got one. He forgot his excruciating discomfort and looked at me.
“Have you found her?” he asked.
“Not yet. In fact, there’s no one listed in the phone book under that name. Now, that doesn’t mean much, but I need to know more about her in order to have an idea of how to pursue this.” I sat down on the only logical place to sit. Luckily, the cover was down.
“If I were you, I’d—” Paul began, but I held up a hand.
“I’m doing this for you,” I told him. “It’s a favor for a friend. I’d like you to see that I can do it myself. Now, if you could just tell me about Julia, I’ll see a direction in which I can go.”
Paul smiled. “It’s a very sweet gesture, Alison,” he said. “But—”
“Please.”
He nodded. “All right. Julia is thirty-one, about five-foot-seven, has chestnut hair that falls to her shoulders, and brown eyes. She favors blue jeans and work shirts most of the time, and loves to watch American football on weekends.”
“She sounds like someone I should marry,” I said, forgetting the context.
Paul didn’t react. “She works, or worked, in the offices of the cable-television company CableCom, in Freehold. That’s how we met.” He chuckled. “I was exchanging my cable modem for a newer model.”
There was a knock on the door, and I heard Francie’s voice from the hallway. “Is someone in there?” she asked.
“I’ll be right out,” I said, then lowered my voice to talk to Paul.
“Where was she living when you knew her?” I asked.
“What?” Francie called.
“I’ll be out in a minute!” I shouted.
“In Gilford Park,” Paul answered. “I’ll get Maxie to write the address out for you.” Maxie’s skills with physical objects are better than Paul’s, and fine-motor-skills tasks like writing are still difficult for him.
“You didn’t have to yell,” Francie complained.
“Sorry!”
“She was going to quit her job with CableCom after she got her master’s degree from Monmouth University at nights and online,” Paul continued quickly, realizing I couldn’t stall Francie forever. “She was less than halfway through when I…back then.” Paul still doesn’t like to mention that he’s no longer alive.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s somewhere to start. I’ll talk to you later.” I stood up and opened the door as Paul dropped back through the floor.
Francie stood there waiting, despite there being three other bathrooms in the house, including another on this floor. She gave me an odd look as I got out of her way.
“Were you talking to someone in there?” she asked.
“Do you see anyone in there?” I countered.
“No,” Francie admitted.
“Then I guess I wasn’t,” I said, and walked away as fast as I could.
Mrs. Fischer and Mrs. Spassky had vacated the area, and I assumed they had gone upstairs to bed. I caught a glimpse of Albert waiting for Francie in the doorway of the game room at the other end of the hallway. Waiting for me in the living room were Melissa and Steven, looking like they were awaiting the results of an especially tight election in which someone they knew well was a candidate. Their faces were unusually tight, with identical thin smiles (I’d never realized that Liss had inherited her father’s mouth) and slightly widened eyes. They were standing oddly close to each other, side by side, next to the sofa, like soldiers awaiting inspection by a general.
Oh, yeah. The Swine’s big family moment. I’d already forgotten during the three minutes I’d spent out of his company. Maybe that should have told me something.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” my loving daughter whined.
“Don’t get mad at Mom,” my ex admonished her, albeit gently. “She’s here now.” He was trying so hard; it would be fun to disappoint him in whatever odd gambit this might be.
“We have a surprise!” Melissa said, taking his cue to brighten up. “Daddy got it.”
Uh-oh. From what I could tell, given the fact that his bill with my guesthouse had been spread over three credit cards, The Swine’s discretionary income was not exactly at its
highest point ever. Since the Wall Street bust in 2008, he’d been treading water, just barely. And yet, he never was able to resist spending on…anything he wanted. Although it had not been much of an issue when he was earning generously in his brokerage job, that did not appear to be the case now.
“What did you do?” I asked him.
“Such a tone!” he admonished. “This is a gift, Alison. Just relax. I wanted—we wanted—for the three of us to have a fun family evening. So I splurged just a tiny bit as a way of saying thank you for letting me back into your lives.”
“I’m not letting you back into—”
“Mom,” my daughter cut me off. At least, she looked like my daughter. She was acting more and more like Steven’s daughter, and I was a little peeved at how quickly that change had taken place.
But having standoffs with her father in front of Melissa wasn’t going to help my case, so I did my best to relax my facial muscles and let out a breath. “Sorry. So. What’s this fun surprise I’ve been hearing so much about?”
Grinning like a couple of hyenas, each of them took a step to the side and put out their hands like a pair of spokesmodels showing off the latest model of sports car. “Ta-DA!” they sang. And they pointed toward an object on the floor.
It was a small black box sitting in front of a stool. And on the stool, connected to the box by a wire, was a microphone. It looked like…Oh no, it couldn’t be.
“It’s a karaoke machine,” Steven said.
It was.
I’d never even been to a karaoke bar in my life, I was running a guesthouse in which people ranging in age up to eighty-six were staying, and my ex-husband—with the collaboration of my only child—was trying to get me to sing easy-listening hits into an amplifier. Surely the man was deranged.
But I had to be delicate in my reaction. Bringing Melissa in on this little ploy raised the stakes—I couldn’t destroy Steven with my withering sarcasm for fear of wounding my little girl as collateral damage.
“It’s…charming,” I said finally, forcing a weak smile. “Did you keep the receipt?”
Melissa didn’t react, but Steven’s grin twisted into something a touch more sardonic. “Give it a chance, Ally,” he said. “It’s something we can all do together.”
“Yeah, come on, Mom!” Melissa urged. “It’s fun, and you get to choose the song you want to do.” She leaned over to the machine and pushed a button.
Steven grinned at the machine as if he’d given it life all by himself. “It does everything,” he said. “It carries hundreds of songs, shows you the lyrics, and even has a record function if you want to keep your performance, or sing harmony with yourself.”
So that’s what they were calling it these days.
To be fair (which took effort), they had spent some time planning this, since the machine went directly to a particular favorite of mine, “Bad Moon Rising,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. And a flat-screen television, left mounted on a crossbeam after the Down the Shore crew had evacuated (with an ominous reference to coming back for another season sometime), flashed to life with the lyrics to the song—as if I would need a prompter for that one.
“Let’s hear you, Mom,” Melissa said, holding the microphone out for me to take. The sound system suddenly began playing an intro to the song (although it was clearly not the original CCR arrangement).
“Oh, all right,” I said, taking the mic from her hand and rolling my eyes just a bit, “but just this one.” And as I passed Steven to take my rightful place at the center of attention, I muttered to him, “I told you not to call me ‘Ally’ anymore.” His eyes registered hurt, but he nodded.
Seventeen songs later, when Melissa finally managed to pry the microphone out of my hand, we had been joined by all the week’s guests except Mrs. Spassky, who, according to Mrs. Fischer, “you couldn’t wake up with a jackhammer and a brass band.” Even Lucy Simone, who had come in from her night out in Red Bank, applauded when I finished my rendition of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
I took a quick bow and handed the mic over to Melissa, who looked relieved and launched into “Say Hey (I Love You),” by Michael Franti and Spearhead. As I walked back into the “crowd,” a little abashed by my own lack of inhibition, Steven sidled up to me near the easy chair.
“See? Not such a bad thing,” he said, pointing at how Melissa was holding the audience in the palm of her hand.
“She’s a natural,” I answered.
“I didn’t mean Melissa,” my ex said. “I meant spending a little time together just having fun as a family.”
“A family of Mom, Dad, their daughter and several senior citizens?”
“It takes a village, Alison,” Steven said.
I didn’t answer for a while as I sorted out my emotions. “You know I wish I could believe that,” I told Steven. Before he could protest, I added, “All I can say is that you never showed this much interest in being Melissa’s father until your silicone-enhanced friend showed you the door.”
“She’s not…No. I’m not letting you take me there. Alison, did you know that I’ve been texting with Melissa at least twice a day for the last year?”
My daughter was just hitting the part in the song where she says that her momma told her “don’t lose you / ’cause the best luck I had was you.” And I absorbed what my ex-husband had just told me. “She never said anything to me,” I told him.
“That’s because she’s afraid you’d insist she have no contact with me,” he answered.
My mouth dropped open. “You know I would never—”
“I know,” Steven assured me. “But she’s ten. And she wants so badly for us to be all together again. Don’t we owe it to her to at least try?”
I felt the trap springing around me again. But this time, I shook it off. “Not yet,” I told him. “I don’t trust you yet. I’ve spent a long time convincing myself that what happened with us wasn’t my fault, Steven. I don’t want to look back at this moment someday and think, ‘That’s where I made my mistake.’”
Melissa ended her song and took a bow, bending her leg behind her like a pro. She held out the microphone and said loudly, “Who’s next?”
“You got any Tony Bennett on there?” Mrs. Fischer asked.
“Who’s Tony Bennett?” Melissa asked, and there was a groan among some of the older inhabitants of the room. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, honey,” Mrs. Fischer said, looking right in my direction. “It’s not your fault.”
“I’ll take the next turn,” Steven called, and he bounded over to where Melissa was holding out the mic. He took it from her hand like, well, Tony Bennett jumping on stage and launched into a version of “Stormy Weather.” The crowd, especially Lucy, were immediately taken by his charm. I was a little more practiced than that.
Melissa stood to one side of the area between the sofas, which had become the stage section of the room, and beamed at Steven. Maybe she really did want us to be a family again, but then, most children of divorce hope for that, according to the therapist I was seeing right after The Swine left for Los Angeles.
Mrs. Fischer wandered over to me as Steven charmed the crowd more with his attitude than any actual semblance of talent. She smiled a motherly smile at me and nodded her head in his direction.
“That’s quite a guy you used to be married to,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I just wish I knew what he was up to.”
Eight
“I haven’t been able to find out anything about Robert Benicio,” Phyllis Coates said.
I’d gotten up especially early the next morning (and I get up early every morning, so this was early) to visit the Harbor Haven Chronicle office, still bleary from the late-night karaoke festival (it had gone on until nearly eleven o’clock!), because Phyllis (who’s at her desk every day at six) knows everybody on the Jersey Shore and isn’t the least bit concerned about sharing information, especially if she thinks there’s a good story in it. And if we could get someth
ing on Big Bob’s murder, well, that would be perfect for the Chronicle.
“Nothing on the autopsy?” I asked.
“Well, the county cops aren’t exactly making it a priority,” she answered. “So far, it looks like a blow to the back of the head with a heavy object like a hammer or a vase or something. And it doesn’t sound like Big Bob was the vase type.”
“Don’t assume,” I told her. “I had a vegetarian biker over for dinner last night.”
Phyllis looked interested all of a sudden. “Oh really?” she said. “Going through your ‘dangerous man’ phase?”
I waved a hand. “Hardly. I told you about Luther. He’s my client, the one who wants me to find out about Big Bob’s murder.”
It’s so unattractive when a person smirks. Phyllis was being quite unattractive.
“What’s that face supposed to mean?” I asked.
“What face? This is my regular face.”
“Uh-huh.” I decided to move on. Phyllis, after all, was now a valuable source of information; it was time to utilize her. “You ever heard of a Julia MacKenzie?” I asked her.
She stopped and seemed to think for a long moment, then shook her head. “That one’s not ringing any bells,” she said.
Damn!
“But you know everybody.”
Phyllis smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. “I hate to have to tell you this, sweetie, but I’m not infallible.”
“All right then, you’re a good reporter and—”
She cut me off. “I’m a great reporter.”
“You’ll get no argument from me. So lend me your expertise—I’m looking for a woman who used to live in Gilford Park. Worked for CableCom and was working on a master’s degree at Monmouth. She doesn’t appear to have had an address, and she doesn’t have a phone number, at least not a landline, listed or unlisted. What’s my best bet?”
Phyllis scrutinized me closely. “What do you think your best bet is?” she asked. Sometimes talking with Phyllis can be like talking to a therapist. They’re supposed to help you, but all they do is make you come up with the answer yourself. It’s really annoying.
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