Scot & Soda

by Catriona McPherson

  “No clue,” said Todd. “Hey-hey! I found some Ortizes in Cuento. Oh boy, that’s just the first page. I found a ton of Ortizes in Cuento.”

  “Any Patricias?” I said. “Try Facebook?”

  “Or I could just start dialling,” Todd said. “Where are we going by the way?”

  “I thought we’d go back to the Worths’ to re-stash the bin bag for Mike,” I said.

  “Ight,” said Todd. Then he sat up a little straighter in his seat. “Mr. Ortiz?” His voice had turned way more Mexican than usual. “Hi, is Patti there? Oh yeah? Ay, perdone. Tengo el número equivocado.” He hung up. “One down. Fifty-seven to go.”

  He had made it through nine ay perdones and one heart-stopping wrong Patti, who came to the phone and turned out to be twenty, by the time we pulled up at the old Worth place. It was in darkness. Becky and the sister from Reno must still be by John’s bedside.

  “Who was still calling their baby Patti twenty years ago anyway?” Todd said. Then he was off again. “Mrs. Ortiz? Is Patti there?” There was a silence. “What?” he said. He clicked the phone to speaker and held it out.

  The voice of an elderly woman came out of the phone, shaking with emotion. “You leave us alone, you sick son of a bitch! You think it’s so long ago it doesn’t hurt every day anymore? You think it’s okay to have that bastard back in this town? You think you helping? Métetelo por el culo!”

  “Insert … Like insert?” I said when the call was dead.

  “Yeah,” said Todd. “Your Spanish is improving. And that was pretty peppery language for a woman who sounded as old as my granny.”

  “Old enough to be Patti Ortiz’s mother?” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Todd. “But it’s a leap.”

  “Not really,” I insisted. “‘So long ago’ could be fifty years, couldn’t it? And a ‘bastard who’s back in this town’ might do for Tam Shatner.”

  “But what could a poor lonely gay like Tam Shatner have done to Patti Ortiz that would make her mother be that angry fifty years later?” Todd said. “What is it? What are you thinking?”

  He was right; I was thinking something. I was grasping at the loose waving ends of about five different wisps of thought and I was scared if I tried to say them out loud, I would end up blowing them away.

  “Promise you’ll listen quietly and hear me out,” I said. Todd nodded, wide-eyed. “Okay,” I went on. “Now why would Mrs. Ortiz there assume that you were a sick son of a bitch phoning up and messing with her just because you asked for Patti? Why wouldn’t she just think you were someone asking for Patti?”

  “Oh my God, you’re right!” Todd said, very much not listening quietly and hearing me out. I could feel the wisps of idea being swept away on the tide of his excitement. “The only reason she’d know I wasn’t really calling for Patti is if Patti is missing! Patti is gone! Patti has been gone ‘all these years.’ And oh! Oh! Oh! Becky Worth said it, didn’t she? She said they keep hoping a missing girl comes back but she’s missed forty-nine reunions!”

  “But that was Joan,” I said.

  “But Becky wasn’t in the same year. She probably only knows them as a group—Mo, Mo, Patti, and Joan. And she knows one went missing. But she doesn’t remember which one. She made a mistake. What’s Joan’s full name?”

  I flicked through the yearbook. “Joan Frances Lampeter.”

  “Great,” said Todd. “How many Joan Frances Lampeters you reckon are on Facebook? Why look at that, I do believe it’s just one. And here she is … yep, looks about sixty-eight to me … and lives in Cuento, CA!”

  “But no one said she was missing,” I reminded of him. “We’re just building castles here, Todd. Becky Worth just said she didn’t come to reunions. Why are you grinning?”

  “Because Joan Lampeter is sixty-eight years old and, not to be ageist or anything, but her privacy settings are a hot mess. She might set her posts to friends only but her pictures are a free-for-all.”

  “And?” I said. “Show me before I untie your glove and smear your hair with Mars Bar.”

  Todd held out his phone. I peered and felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. There was a woman in a linen dress with a cocktail in one hand and the other arm slung around Mo Tafoya. Behind them were the pillars holding up the roof of the Cuento Farmers’ Market. “She was at the reunion,” I said.

  “Unlike Patti Ortiz,” said Todd. Then, as a fist pounded on the window of the Jeep, he shot up high enough to bang his head and flub his phone. I heard the screen crack as it came down. Outside the window, looking like a Halloween pumpkin on account of how she was holding her torch under her chin and shining it upwards, was Mike.

  Todd wound down the window. “Evening, Detective,” he said. “Can we help you?”

  “What are you doing here?” Mike said.

  “Here?” said Todd, craning to look up and down the street. “Cuento? I live here.”

  “Here at John Worth’s place,” Mike said.

  “Who?” said Todd.

  “Wait,” I said. “Are we interfering with emergency responders in the execution of their duties again?”

  “What are you doing here?” Todd said.

  “Following a lead in the Shatner case,” said Mike. “And you know what I hate doing when I’m following up a lead in a case? Repeating myself. What are you doing here?”

  “We’re probably doing the same thing you’re doing,” I said. “Following a lead. But we’re only doing it because we didn’t think you were doing it. And since you’re doing it, we’ll stop.”

  “It’s cold anyway,” Mike said. “We’re too late.”

  “What?” I said. “Because they’ve cleared the porches?”

  Mike gave me a look she had never given me before in the months I’d known her. Well, it was the same look of exasperation and annoyance I was used to, but it was mixed with something new. It was mixed with something that looked a lot like respect.

  “You got an in at the Voyager?” she said. “Because if that punk of a photographer told you after I told her to keep it to herself, I will hurt her.”

  “Uh, the First Amendment might get in the way of that,” said Todd, whatever the hell that meant.

  “No,” I said. “We came at it from the other end. From the yearbook.” Then I shut my mouth so firmly it made a slapping sound. Because the yearbook—purloined from the public library—was right there on my lap and Mike would love nothing more than to stick us with a theft charge.

  “The yearbook?” was all she said.

  “The 1968 high school yearbook,” I said.

  “How did that tell you anything about the porches?” she said.

  “We guessed,” I said. “From the stapled-on Jimmy wig. And the fact that he died at Halloween and didn’t turn up for four days. He was hidden in plain sight, wasn’t he?”

  “I’m not here to answer your questions,” Mike said, snapping back into full-cop mode. Pretty late, if anyone was asking me. “But how did the yearbook bring you to this porch? This one in particular?”

  “We were starting at the top,” Todd said. “With the senior class president. Why? Is … what was his name, Lexy?”

  “John Worth.”

  “Is John Worth a person of interest?”

  “Like I said, I ask the questions. And if I hear that you’ve been cruising round town snooping at porches, I will make sure you pay.”

  “That’s not a question,” Todd said.

  “You should consider yourself lucky I caught you here, on porch one,” Mike said. “Go home and stay out of this.”

  “That’s not a question either,” I said. “But you’re welcome and we will.”

  “Welcome?” said Mike.

  “For the tip about the ID of the dead guy,” I said. “The class ring.”

  “Just for the love of God, f—” said Mike, but s
he caught herself in time. “Fly away home before I arrest your asses for curb crawling,” she said. Then she walked off.

  “Florida,” I said as we watched her get into her car and leave.

  “Huh?”

  “Remember John Worth said Tam Shatner should haul his bum back to F— And then he pretended he was going to say ‘fuck’ and he didn’t want to swear in front of a lady, but then he swore anyway?”

  “Oh right,” said Todd. “That was weird.”

  “He was going to say Florida,” I said. “Mike said an F that was going to turn into a U there. Then she said an F that was going to turn in an L. It looks really different. One gives you duck face and one gives you chipmunk face. Try it in the mirror. Tam Shatner lived in Florida.”

  “So?”

  “I dunno. Might be useful. It’s a long way to come to a reunion, isn’t it? Why are we still parked here, by the way?”

  “Because if Becky Worth gets home and finds her garbage missing, she’s gonna call the cops and tell Mike we were here earlier and you gave John Worth a heart attack. A man we’ve just pretended not to know.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Well, trot on then. Ditch the bin bag and then let’s go home and see if Kathi and Noleen can make any sense out of all this, eh?”

  For the third time, Todd climbed down from the Jeep and made his way to someone else’s wheeliebin to break all sorts of laws. He wasn’t a dog walker or a desperate drunk this time. There was no point, when the bag he carried could be used to clean up after an elephant and when the Worths’ collection of bins sat out in the glare of their security light, far from any peeing shadows.

  Minutes later, I saw him coming back to the Jeep at a run. Well, not really a proper run, more as if he was trying to move as fast as his legs would carry him without looking as suspicious as running at night makes you look. Like he was on castors and one was wobbly.

  He still had the bin bag too. He threw himself into the passenger seat and hissed, “Go, Lexy! Get out of here. Back up to the stop sign and get gone.”

  “I’m not reversing up a street when cops are hanging around,” I said, doing a U-ey with a bit of a wiggle on the end and then driving away sedately at twenty-five like a good girl. “Whyn’t you ditch the bag?”

  “I did!” said Todd. He was bunched up on the seat beside me hugging the bag like a teddy bear. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. “This isn’t it!” he said. “This is another one! It was sitting on the doormat. Must have been put there since Becky took John to the hospital.”

  “But it could be anything,” I said. “It might be jumble, or—”

  “Jumble?”

  “Uhhhhh, donations for a yard sale,” I said. “Or it might be—Ew! Don’t open it! It might just be rubbish. Pizza boxes and more Q-tips.”

  But it wasn’t. I saw the flash of tartan and the tuft of fake ginger hair at the same moment Todd did. He folded the top back over and shoved the bag down by his feet. Then he put his seatbelt on and sat up while we drove past the cop shop on the way home.

  Seventeen

  We scooped up Kathi and Noleen on the way past the office. They were folding service-wash laundry on the signing-in desk, waiting until ten when Noleen would finally give up on the hoped-for walk-ins and switch the night bell on.

  “What’s that?” said Kathi, pointing to the bin bag swinging from Todd’s hand.

  “Another porch zombie,” Todd said. “Not garbage. Can we tip it out here if I put newspaper down?”

  “And I’ll tell the Skweeky Kleen clientele that their undershorts were folded and packed in the same room as someone else’s trash?” said Kathi. “Should I get stickers made?”

  “You and your stickers,” I said.

  “Who and whose stickers?” Noleen chipped in.

  “You lot,” I said. “All of you. With the bumper stickers. But I take it back. Sorry.”

  “Ain’t no stickers on my ride,” said Noleen. “And I wanna say two things to you, Lexy. One, there’s no better way to get outta jury duty than a bumper sticker. It’s public, see? So they get to ask you about them in discovery.”

  Todd was laughing. “What was it you had again, Nolly?”

  “Keep Gitmo Open,” Noleen said. “Worked like a dream when the defense got to me. My feet didn’t hit the ground. Course, I also had a Close Gitmo Now, in case the prosecution asked first. Guess which one peeled a chunka paint offa my bumper when I got outta the courtroom?”

  Kathi and Todd both just laughed. I couldn’t have guessed to save my life and get a free margarita, so I said nothing beyond, “What’s the other thing?”

  “What?” Noleen said. “Oh. Yeah, well it’s not us lot that’s got that horny caveman painted on the side of a hill fifty feet high, is it? Speaking of signs.”

  “How do you even know about …?” I said.

  “PBS documentary,” said Noleen. “The Cerne Abbas Giant, right?” I shrugged.

  “Anyway,” I said. “What about Mount Rushmore? And Crazy Horse?”

  “Could we table this for now?” said Kathi. “While you get that nasty garbage bag out of here, please?”

  “We’ll take it to Lexy’s and go through it right now,” Todd said. “It’ll be long gone by the time you get there.”

  “No,” Kathi said. “I don’t want to miss the opening. I just want to be able to walk out and grab a shower if it’s gross.”

  “Deal,” said Todd. “We’ll go and make … sidecars, I’m in the mood for … and grill some shrimp? When you close at ten, we’ll be waiting. I need to process some of this stuff before we find out any more. Don’t know about you.”

  “And Roger?” Kathi said. “Should we wait for him?”

  “Roger needs some time alone to reflect on his choices,” said Todd primly. Kathi and Noleen shared a troubled look.

  “Roger very kindly gave us some tip-top info earlier today,” I said. “But he’s got a semi-stalker at work that he said was ugly and isn’t.”

  “Baw-bag,” said Noleen.

  “Twunt,” Kathi agreed.

  “You can’t cheer me up with British swearing,” said Todd. “I am very angry.”

  “How about if I call him a douche nozzle?” I said. “An asshat? A mother—”

  But a chorus of whoas told me I’d better not finish that one. Our cultural exchange still had a ways to go.

  “So what do we know?” Noleen said, as she kicked off her crocs and put her socks up on the hearth just after ten.

  “Thomas Oscar Shatner,” I began, “graduate of the class of sixty-eight, out gay back when it was brave—er” I added hastily, as Todd started to bridle, “left Cuento for—we think, Florida, but that’s based on how much of Henry Higgins’s identical twin I am, so best call it soft data—and came back to town to attend the fiftieth reunion on Saturday, where—or after which, anyway—he was poisoned with—”

  “What?” said Kathi.

  “Roger busted the autopsy results,” I said. “The bullet wound was fake. He drank lye.”

  “He drank lye?” said Noleen.

  “Who drinks lye?” said Kathi.

  “And then was left sitting on someone’s porch dressed up as a Scotsman—we think, based on the hat—until Wednesday, when he was redressed as a regular joe and dumped in the slough. Now here’s where it gets interesting.”

  “Because that was such an everyday tale?” said Noleen.

  “Earlier today we saw three porches, didn’t we Todd, where figures had been removed. One of them was at the house of the class president of the class of sixty-eight, one John Worth—”

  “I know John Worth,” said Noleen. “And Becky. Veterinary nurse. Nice kid.”

  “Right,” I said, wondering—and not for the first time—how old Noleen was and what she used on her skin. “Thank you for directing us to their place. We got there just in time
to find Becky trying to get rid of a dummy, a kilt, a Jimmy wig, and sundry other bits and bobs.”

  “But … if there was a dummy,” said Kathi, “that means Tam wasn’t there. If ‘dummy’ still means mannequin. Right?”

  “Right,” I agreed, “but there was an empty armchair on the porch of Mo Heedles, and an empty rocking chair on the porch of Mo Tafoya.”

  “Who?” said Kathi. “I think we need to catch up.”

  “Hence the current catch-up session,” Todd said, still sounding grumpy for him. “We found Maureen Heedles because she was at the reunion and still lives in Cuento. Nothing more than that. But we lucked out. She turned us on to Maureen Tafoya,”

  “Her, I know,” said Noleen. “Woodstock never ended?”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “And then we discovered that both Moes, along with Joan and someone called Patti, were John Worth’s … bevy of lovelies.” I had been flipping through the yearbook and I held it up to show them all the full-page picture of John Worth, back when he was burly, rather than bloated, and the four quarter-page shots of Mo Heedles, looking older than she did now under her helmet of backcombed hair with her thin brows and her pale lips; Mo Tafoya, showing the first signs of her prayer-flagged future with a broochless, scratchy-looking polo-neck and a centre parting in her hair; Patti Ortiz looking up from under her fabulous brows with a gaze poised on a knife-edge between innocence and sizzle; and Joan Lampeter, fresh-faced and freckle-dusted with her hair back-combed on top to be sure but flicked up in feathers behind as if it knew the end of school and setting lotion was on its way.

  “Bevy of lovelies!” Kathi said. “The student council, you mean?”

  “She looks familiar,” Todd said, putting down his napkin and bending forward to peer at the open pages of the yearbook. “Joanie. Doesn’t she?”

  “We saw her photo at the reunion,” I reminded him.

  “Oh please,” said Todd. “Fifty years later? No, it’s not that. I’m sure I’ve seen that girl in a different context. And recently.”