Scot & Soda

by Catriona McPherson

  “Because … the decoys were a late addition to the plan?” I said. “But that Goth reckoned the guy—What guy, by the way?—came in over a month ago to stock up.”

  “Let’s see if the dry cleaning tells us anything,” Noleen said, pulling up in the proprietors’ parking space at the Last Ditch and leaping out. I took a bit longer, needing to shake a polystyrene box off my foot and wipe away some noodles from my instep. But I caught up as she climbed the stairs and we entered the Skweek together.

  The kilt was laid out in all its glory—it’s a woolly skirt, but it’s part of my heritage—on the folding table but Kathi and Todd were not, as I had expected they might be, hanging over it like a pair of pathologists at an autopsy. They were both, rather, bent over Kathi’s desk, staring at a screen.

  “So you reckon this is the missing costume?” Noleen said. “What you looking at over there?”

  “Della found Tam in Florida,” Todd said. “He’s been there since 1968. He must have hopped the rails right after graduation.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “But what are you looking at over there?”

  “What are we not looking at!” Todd said. “Privacy settings like Swiss cheese again and he was a party animal. Lots of photographic evidence of his life down there.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And we’ve got this seriously wrong,” Todd said. He lifted his head for the first time as Roger came in behind us. “Fire up the ’dar, babycakes,” he said, “and tell me what you make of this here.”

  Roger took the seat and Noleen and I clustered in behind him, like adoring magi. The picture on the screen was Tam at some kind of party on a pier or the deck of a ship—ropes and riggings anyway, all hung with fairy lights. He had a cigar in his mouth and was grinning around it. His Hawaiian shirt was open to the waist and he had a chain round his neck and an arm round a small woman in Polynesian costume.

  “Pray Away?” I said.

  “See?” said Todd to Kathi. “Even Lexy can tell.”

  Roger clicked the right arrow. The next picture was the same night, the same party, the same cigar, shorter and horribly wet-looking at the business end. Tam was sitting at a poker table with three more red-faced grinning men. The short woman was gone but there was a blonde hanging over one of the other men, nibbling on his earlobe and mugging for the camera.

  “Maybe he was closeted,” Roger said. “Overcompensating? Overfriendly? Over-refreshed even. Uh-oh.” He had swiped past a picture of Tam on a golf course, then one of him on a zip line, one of him posing with a roller-skate waitress at a Sonic, one of him in a Hooter’s for God’s sake, tucking a tip in a waitress’s waistband, and now we were looking at a shot of him at some kind of auto expo.

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “You two love your cars. That Jeep gets looked after like a sphynx kitten.”

  “It’s not the car that’s bothering me,” said Roger. “It’s the model.”

  Right enough the picture of Tam showed him, once again, with his arm around a girl, this one in high heels and swimsuit with a sash on.

  “So?” I said. “Overcompensating, like you said. Of course he’s going to pose with a Lara Croft in her bathing costume if he can. Closeted, like you said.”

  “Look at her face,” said Roger.

  “That’s what I said,” Kathi chipped in.

  I looked at her face. She was smiling but it was pasted on her mouth like a police aware sticker on an abandoned car. And her shoulders were round her ears. She couldn’t get away from Tam because one of his hands was clamped hard on her bare midriff and he was grinding her other hip against his groin. I looked past her false lashes, and smoky make-up right into her eyes. Where had I seen that look before? That look like she was trying to pretend Tam Shatner wasn’t even there.

  “He’s not gay,” said Roger. “Wasn’t, I mean. He wasn’t even just straight. He was a pig. A predatory, handsy, entitled, straight, white, male chauvinist pig. We’ve got this all wrong, people. How did we get this so wrong?”

  “Aha!” I said. “Where’s the yearbook?” I had realised where I had seen that miserable face before, that frozen grin and those hunched shoulders. Kathi produced the stolen volume and I flipped through the glossy pages until I found those Future Homemakers of America, and Nurses, and Librarians too. “Look,” I said. “He’s been that way his whole life. Look at him, the scumbag. He’s not in any of the group shots with other boys. He just photobombed these ones where the girls couldn’t stop him. Look at their faces! They hated him. They’re completely blanking him. We were right about that. But we couldn’t have been more wrong about why.”

  “Tell you something else for nothing,” Kathi said, much more solemn. “Now it makes more sense that a guy like this is mixed up with a girl running away from her high school graduation and not being seen for fifty years, doesn’t it?”

  “Aw man,” I said. “It certainly does.”

  “It muddies everything else, though,” Noleen said. “I wanted the killer of poor lonely gay Tam caught. But if John Worth lured him here and bumped him off in the name of womankind … ”

  “But John Worth made Tam his vice president,” I said. “All those years ago. John Worth was either just the same or at least turned a blind eye.”

  “He could have woke since,” said Roger.

  “But wait, wait, wait,” said Todd. “We can’t do this. We can’t play judge and jury. We need to get that kilt over to Mike in case there’s evidence on it. I’ll do it if no one else wants to. It doesn’t matter what the guy did or didn’t do in his life. Killing people is wrong. Killing people with lye is way wrong.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” said Noleen. “This isn’t your call, Todd. This is Kathi’s and mine.”

  “What about me?” I said.

  “Because we own the business,” Noleen said. “Not because of what’s in our underpants.”

  But before the argument could go another round we heard feet pounding on the stairs and the door of the launderette blatted open.

  “Stop!” It was a man I’d never seen before, breathing in big ragged gulps. “Stop. I made a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be here!” He looked wild-eyed around the Skweeky Kleen until his gaze fell upon the kilt still spread out on the folding table, its side straps unbuckled and its pleats in disarray.

  Nineteen

  The intruder wasn’t the only one who could have been sprayed silver to make a day’s wage on a boardwalk somewhere. The five of us were transfixed too. Whoever this was, he’d comprehensively blown his cool. It was hard to imagine a more definite sign that the kilt was dodgy.

  “Is there a problem?” Kathi said. “I was just preparing the garment for processing.”

  “So … you haven’t done anything yet?” the man said. He was really only a boy, I thought, now I’d had a proper look at him. “Is there a charge if I take it back?”

  “No,” Kathi said, “but you won’t get a better deal in Cuento today, you know.”

  “It’s just that, to be honest with you, my … boss … wanted me to have an alteration done as well so that’s why I was supposed to go to Wash-n-Dry cleaners.”

  “Oh, we can do alterations here,” Kathi said. “What was it you wanted to have done?”

  “Hang on there a minute though, Kathi,” I said. “I can hem a pair of jeans but I’m not sure I could tackle a kilt.”

  The man turned his wild eyes on me and I could have sworn each of his pupils was moving independently of the other as he darted glances all over. “Y—you?” he said. “Aren’t you the Blame Game therapist? Or is there two of you?”

  “Two of me?” I echoed.

  “Sew Speedy has a team of experienced tailors ready for any project,” Kathi said.

  The man dragged his gaze away from me and back to her. “Yeah, but the thing is, you see, to tell the truth,” he said, “my … boss … has a
n account at the Wash-n-Dry and they’ve done this kind of alteration before.”

  “Right,” Kathi said. “Well, if you’re sure then.”

  “I do honestly think it’s best,” the man said. He waited.

  “Go for it,” said Kathi, gesturing to the kilt.

  “Uhhhhh, can I have a bag?” the man said. “Just to get it out to the car without … ”

  “Without … ?” said Todd.

  “Um. I ran out without my duffel. To be frank, when my boss told me I’d … ”

  “You’d … ?” said Roger.

  “Never mind,” the man blurted. Then he rolled the kilt up like a tarp, opened his rain jacket, zipped it closed again over the wad of wool, and waddled off.

  “What the fuck?” said Noleen once the echo of his footsteps on the metal stairs had died away.

  “How many lies did he just tell?” said Todd.

  “Well, to be honest, and tell you the truth, and be frank,” I said, counting off on my fingers, “his boss hasn’t got an account at a rival dry cleaners and he isn’t getting a kilt altered and he’s never had a kilt altered before.”

  “And his ‘boss’ isn’t his boss either,” said Roger. “It’s Sunday. So like Noleen said, what the fuck?”

  “If I had to guess,” Noleen said, “the kilt is a family heirloom and the owner—the fake boss—couldn’t stand it being covered in corpse juice, so he sent Boy Wonder to get it cleaned but for some reason the kid came here—twenty feet from where the body was found—instead of where he was supposed to go.”

  “You’re a genius,” Kathi said. “I bet that’s it. You’ve cracked it, Nolls.”

  Roger and Todd both smiled. It’s so easy for the happily married to enjoy others’ happiness. Noleen just about managed to smile too, even though public protestations of affection weren’t her favourite thing. I smiled like I had a coat hanger in my mouth. I’ve done far too much psychological training to get caught being sour about someone fizzing over with admiration for the love of her life.

  “If only we knew his name,” Todd said when all the hearts were warmed. “Then we could take this straight to Mike. This is a bona fide lead.”

  “We know his first name,” said Kathi. “Because that’s why he ended up here. I put the sign out this morning: fifty percent discount for all Andys.”

  “And I suppose someone took a photo of the kilt, right?” I said. Todd nodded but still looked puzzled. “So we’re in with a good chance of getting a last name.” No lightbulbs were on yet. “If we reverse engineer the tartan,” I said, “we’ll find a clan name. My money’s on Worth.”

  “Is Worth a clan?” said Kathi. “Is Worth even Scotch?”

  “No idea,” I said. “But it’s a better bet than Ortiz and Tafoya.”

  Todd was scrolling already. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “These’d give you a migraine quick enough. No such thing as a Worth plaid, Lexy. Or Lampeter. Or Shatner. Or … O’Shanter, even.”

  “Try McShanter,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “McLeod?”

  “Why? Holy Jesus, that’s one ugly-ass plaid.”

  “No reason. I just wanted you to see it. It’s quite something, eh? Well, Téo, it looks like you just need to look up green tartans and work your way through.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Todd said. He looked a little bit bug-eyed already as he raised his eyes from his screen and blinked them hard.

  “I’m going to Mike,” I said. “She owes me. She didn’t believe me about that bloody ring but it got us Tam’s ID in the end. Who’s coming with me?”

  There was silence. Roger broke it. “Who’s coming with you to tell Mike she owes you and remind her of when you were right and she was wrong?”

  “Anyway, what makes you think she’s working Sundays now?” said Noleen.

  “It’s a murder inquiry,” I said. “She’s probably working day and night.”

  “You watch too much TV,” Noleen said. “City of Cuento doesn’t have the money to pay Sunday overtime just because some scumbag’s dumb enough to drink lye.”

  It was a good point well-put.

  “So here’s what we’ll do,” Noleen went on. “We’ll take today to work out what to say to Mike tomorrow to fulfill our civic duty and keep the motel and laundromat out of it. Okay?”

  “Sounds fair enough to me,” I said. “The motel and the laundromat are out of it, apart from anything else. Tam got tangled in the beer-chilling rope of a houseboat moored in the slough downstream from where his body was dumped after he was killed God knows where, God knows why. This is nothing to do with the Last Ditch at all.”

  Roger was staring at me, chewing his lip.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s strange, isn’t it?” he said. “The cutty sark on the ‘burial ground’ speaks to local knowledge, doesn’t it? And lying in wait for Kimberly’s horse to cross the footbridge speaks to real detailed local knowledge. But dumping a corpse upstream in a slough with a big old houseboat parked in it? That’s sloppy. Raises questions.”

  “Raises one or two of the eleventy billion questions,” I said. I looked over at Todd. He was hunched over his phone still sniffing out tartans. “I’ll do a coffee run and then let’s really put our heads down, eh? I want to speak to Mrs. Ortiz as well, if we can find her. Coffee first though.” I waited for Todd to offer to go with me—or even for me, since I know he doesn’t rate my coffee-ordering abilities—and right enough, my words did slowly permeate the fog of checkered wool forming behind his eyes.

  “I’ll drive you,” he said. “Roger can you take this over? Blue squares with a green windowpane check and a white line through the green. I got up to Kerr. It’s a pretty one. I could totally pull off a Kerr plaid.”

  “Oh you got up to Kerr, did you?” said Roger. “Just the Ms to go then.”

  Todd blew him a kiss and hustled me out the door.

  It was chucking-out time at the various churches of Cuento and the drive-thru at Swiss Sisters was backed up all the way to the railway underpass. We joined the end of the queue.

  “So … did Patti Ortiz run away to Florida with Tam Shatner?” I said.

  “They both disappeared after graduation,” Todd said. “It’s a possibility. Now we know that Tam was a ladies’ man, it’s a definite possibility.”

  I reached over onto the backseat for the yearbook and flipped to the first photograph of Tam, there in the back row with the Future Homemakers. “And there is Patti,” I said. “At the end of the row. Isn’t she lovely?”

  “Cute,” Todd agreed. “Doesn’t seem too much of a stretch for her.”

  Way up ahead of us someone got their coffee and left. Down here we edged into the dimness of the railway underpass.

  I laughed and put the overhead light on so I could keep looking. “Right?” I said. “Future Homemakers of America! It’s like they’re saying ‘I firmly believe some guy is going to marry me’ and some of them deserve a medal for self-confidence. Jeez, look at this one! What’s her … Oh God, the poor thing. Gudrun Andersen. Gudrun!”

  “It sounds even worse in your accent,” Todd said. “Like you’ve swallowed a hair and you’re trying to get it back up.”

  I lifted one side of my mouth to acknowledge the joke, but truth be told, I felt like I’d had enough attention on account of my accent for a while. “Sometimes things get better,” I said, flipping another page.

  “Like?” said Todd.

  “Like these games mistresses could be married now,” I said.

  “Games mistresses!” Todd said. “Gimme a look.” I handed the book over. “They do look happier than Mrs. Handmaid and Mrs. Surrender, don’t they?” he said. He handed the book back and it fell open at the double page where the Moes, Patti, Joan, John Worth, and the tiny letters spelling out Tam Shatner’s name were to be found.
r />   “Does your gaydar work on women then?” I said.

  “My gaydar doesn’t work at all,” said Todd. “It used to, before David Beckham and the grooming revolution. These days, unless it’s as obvious as Tam at the motorshow, I’m sunk.”

  We inched forward another car length. “Jay-sis,” I said. “There should be two windows. One for coffee and one for metroccinos.” Todd had heard this complaint too many times to bother answering it. “Parp your horn.”

  “Don’t say parp,” Todd said, but he parped his horn, which helped. That is, it didn’t do any good but it was pretty goddam loud here under the tunnel and it made me feel better.

  “Anyway, you’re too modest,” I said. “What about Tahoe Guy

  yesterday?”

  “Who?”

  “Mo Heedles’s nephew,” I said. “Yesterday.”

  “He’s not gay,” Todd said. “He was checking out your ass until he saw me seeing him do it.”

  “Nah,” I said. “He was throwing you off the scent. He clocked you, decided to mess with you, and leered at my bum. He practically puked when I turned round.”

  “Huh?” said Todd. “What are you talking about?”

  “He looked at me like I was a cockroach in his cream puff.”

  “Don’t say cream puff.”

  “P-syllid in his profiterole.”

  “The P is silent,” Todd said. “And can you stop talking about critters while we’re sitting in this dungeon of a railroad underpass?”

  “Sorry!” I said. “Turd in his taco.”

  “Thank you. I saw that look. I thought he was overcorrecting the ass-ogle.”

  “Todd,” I said. “That guy yesterday would have jumped your bones right there in his auntie’s front garden if I hadn’t been there spoiling it all. The ogle was yours.”

  “Wrong,” said Todd.

  “Shame we’ll never get a chance to find out.”

  “I found out yesterday,” Todd said. “That was a straight man. Outdoorsy, probably a gym bore.”

  “Lake bore,” I said. “Blue Tahoe, remember?”