Scot & Soda

by Catriona McPherson

  “It’s about Tam,” I said. “Thomas Shatner.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Mike. “Well, that case is juuuust about closed. A few Ts to cross and Is to dot. But pretty much closed.”

  “Good,” I said. “Is there a suspect in custody?”

  “No,” said Mike. “Why don’t I ask the questions?”

  “Good plan,” said Todd. “Is that because you think it was John Worth and he’s still in ICU?”

  “How do you know John Worth is in the ICU?” said Mike.

  “Have you been back to his house?” I said. “If Becky’s staying by his bedside, she might not have found the bin bag on the porch. There’s a bin bag on the porch with a Halloween costume in it, including a hat the same as the one that was on Tam’s head when you pulled him out of the slough.”

  Mike nodded. I had no idea if she knew all this already; cops are spectacular at looking unsurprised no matter what you tell them. “Like I said, how about if I ask the questions?”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Do you know about the real estate deal?”

  “What real estate deal is this?” she said.

  “Tam was back in Cuento to buy a plot of land,” said Todd. “The plot of land where we found the cutty sark that your colleague didn’t seem all that interested in.”

  “Which is also the place where the class of sixty-eight gathered after their high school graduation, on the last night that Tam Shatner and Patti Ortiz were ever seen in Cuento.”

  Unless I was very much mistaken, cop rules or no cop rules, Mike’s eyelids did give a tiny feather of a lift at some bit of that.

  “The Armour homestead?” Mike said. “Someone’s yanking your chain. It’s not for sale.”

  “Really?” I said. “Or … someone was yanking Tam’s chain to lure him back here. It’s listed by Mo Tafoya, by the way. Worth checking out.”

  “Checked,” said Mike. She spat the word through her teeth. “You don’t need to worry that we’ve missed something, Ms. Campbell. We didn’t miss anything.”

  “You missed the class ring,” I said.

  And again Mike’s face registered some tiny outward sign of inner thoughts. This time it was a squinching down rather than a flaring up, but it was there.

  “So who have you pegged?” Todd said. “If not John Worth or Mo Tafoya, how about Mo Heedles? Or Joan Lampeter?”

  “How the hell did you get those names?” Mike said. “Is there a leak in my stationhouse?”

  “You mean we’re right?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “You’re wrong.”

  We waited.

  “Well?” said Todd at last. “Are you going to tell us or do we need to wait for the Voyager app to update?”

  Mike took a long time considering whether to say any more. “I guess I owe you for the drinks,” she concluded at last, pointing to the brimming cups of wrongness on the metal table. “We took a long hard look at all of those gals. And there’s nothing. We got their phone records—nada. Their financials—nada.”

  “No transactions at Evangeline’s Costume Mansion?” I said.

  “No! Jesus,” said Mike. “None.”

  “So who was it then?” said Todd.

  “It was suicide.”

  “Suicide,” Todd repeated. “Thomas Shatner stapled a hat to his head and killed himself?”

  “Yes,” said Mike. “It’s unusual to staple a hat to your own head, but he was full of drugs. He probably never felt a thing.”

  “You’re serious?” I said. “You’re seriously serious? Suicide? Why?”

  “Because he hated them all and wanted to spoil the reunion,” Mike said. “He was one twisted individual.”

  “But dedicated,” said Todd. “Taking his life to wreck a party.”

  “No,” Mike said. “He was suicidal anyway. But he chose to come back here and do it at the reunion to wreck everyone’s happiness. A real prince.”

  I nodded, thinking. What she was saying was arse gravy of the first order, but her take on Tam overall sounded sincere.

  “And why the hat?” I said.

  Mike nodded, also thinking. Thinking what she could serve up that I would swallow, I reckoned. “That’s what clinched it,” she went for in the end. “He knew what the theme was. For the porches. Of the alumni.”

  I chewed that over for a bit. Could I swallow it without choking?

  “Look,” Mike said, leaning to one side and easing her phone out of her hip pocket.

  I leaned forward and Todd leaned in and we both looked. There was Mo Heedles’s porch with the rocking chair occupied. There was Mo Tafoya’s porch in the next shot, just the bobble on top of the hat on top of the Jimmy wig showing. Then came the extravagant wraparound porch of the Worths’ house and another be-tartaned zombie, followed by a house I didn’t recognise at all, except for the outfit on the dummy propped on the deckchair beside the front door.

  “Just the four?” I said.

  “Yeahhh,” said Mike. “Not much of a success rate for the alumnus committee.”

  “Well, it’s thankless, isn’t it?” I said. “Committee work.”

  “Even without suicidal weirdos wrecking everything,” Mike agreed.

  “So he shot himself in the belly, standing on the banks of the slough, dressed in a Jimmy wig, hoping he’d get some of his classmates in trouble?” I said.

  Todd said nothing. His eyes were closed as if this was a séance and he was Madam Zelda, communing.

  “Yes,” said Mike. Well, she had to, I supposed. I wasn’t supposed to know the bullet wound was fake, since I wasn’t supposed to have found out the autopsy results via Roger and his pathologist stalker. Ditto the hypostasis and other evidence of how he’d spent his first four dead days.

  “And—just one last thing,” I said. “What happened to his class ring?”

  “Oh that,” said Mike. “We found it.”

  Todd opened his eyes. I opened mine as wide as they would go.

  “We do take notice of what witnesses tell us, Ms. Campbell,” she said. “We sent a diver back down to search more thoroughly and he found it.”

  “When was this?” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “No,” said Mike. “You were out. We were glad we didn’t disturb you.”

  Twenty-Two

  That was a load of complete, dried, pelleted, bagged, and tagged bullshit, wasn’t it?” I said to Todd as soon as we were out of the cop shop and scurrying homeward. It was raining. It doesn’t rain much in Cuento. It doesn’t rain enough in Cuento, in fact, given the gallons it takes to grow an almond and the raging wild fires every summer.

  “Ssshhhh,” Todd said. “I’m concentrating.” He whipped out his phone and began talking into it very fast. “NSA 042. Phew. I’m crap at remembering numbers. 1960s ranch, U-shaped drive, pepper tree in the front yard, north-facing street. Mint-green paint with black trim and white accents. Grey composite shingle roof. Pool.”

  “Good thinking, brain box,” I said. “This is the fourth house with the porch zombie, is it?”

  “Which I’m guessing is Joan Lampeter’s, don’t you think?”

  “So what do we do? Ring up your pal on the force and get them to run a plate?”

  “Mike’s the closest thing I’ve got to a pal on the force,” Todd said. “The license plate is just for confirmation if we find it.”

  “How do we find it?”

  “We go for an online stroll.”

  “A mid-century ranch with a composite roof, a pepper tree out front, and a pool in the back?” I said. “In Cuento? You’ll have to carb up. How did you know there was a pool, by the way?”

  “Crystal Clear Pool Service sticker on the gate to the side yard,” Todd said.

  “Side yard!” I said. I loved that there was a word for that sliver of dirt between one outsize house on its mid
get plot and the next. Only people determined to look on the bright side and be delighted with life could have come up with it. It was like giving a French name to a scoop of vanilla ice cream that melted and turned your pie crust soggy, or the way they called everything a holiday even when you didn’t get a day off work. Valentine’s Day! Halloween! 420! Life was a constant party.

  “You could let some of these go by, you know,” Todd said. “You don’t have to pick up on every tiny little thing.”

  “I was marvelling!” I said. “I was being nice. God almighty, Todd, if you ever went to Dundee you’d never stop whinging. The weather, the food, the drinks, the drunks, the buses, the drunks on the buses … ”

  “The no mosquitos, the no black widows, the no brown recluses … ”

  “The midges,” I said.

  “What are they?” Todd’s shoulders came up round his ears.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Sorry. Forget it. They’re mythological. Like haggis.”

  “Haggis isn’t mythological,” Todd said. “They sell it in cans in that deli in Sacramento.”

  “Yeah, but hairy wild haggises running round the hills, always in the same direction because they’ve got one leg shorter than the other, aren’t real. And neither are midges. Trust me.”

  “What choice do I have?” said Todd. I reached over and squeezed his arm. “So,” he said, “while you go and tell a load more clients to stop whinging and pull their necks up—”

  “Socks.”

  “—I’ll start scouring the map of Cuento for Joan Lampeter’s house.”

  “And when I knock off for the night, if you’re still looking, I’ll call Crystal Clear and find it out that way,” I said.

  “They won’t tell you,” Todd said.

  “Let’s see.”

  “Let’s you, me, and fifty bucks see,” Todd said, by which time we were back at the Last Ditch and going our separate ways.

  My two o’clock was the overanxious empty-nester to be. I talked her down from the wire and then up out of the doldrums and sent her on her way. My three o’clock was a thrice-divorced guy who had only just realised that if he didn’t stay married to one of them one of these times, he was going to die alone. His current woe was that the “gals” who were swiping him right these days were only ten years younger than him and he didn’t want them. “Shoulda had a kid or two,” he said. “Like they were always bitching to make me.” I sent up selfless thanks that he hadn’t. Selfless because his kids would be clients by now, and thanks because I had enough daddy issues to deal with on my roster and wasn’t looking for more. My four o’clock was a woman I wish I could have introduced to my three o’clock, but not in a swiping sense. She had multiple sclerosis and she had never met the right guy to bitch at about having children. “Who’ll look after me?” she said. “When it gets bad, I mean.”

  I took a long look at her. She had a BMW key ring, so presumably she had the car to match it parked out front. Noleen would love that. A Beemer in the car park would give the Last Ditch a certain cachet. And she was wearing shoes with red soles, I noticed as she recrossed her ankles. I couldn’t remember what brand they were, but I knew it wasn’t Target.

  “Are you rich?” I said.

  “I’m comfortable,” she answered, bridling. No one ever says they’re rich, I’ve noticed.

  “Do you have young relatives of any kind? Not children, but nieces and nephews? Second cousins maybe?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Are they rich?”

  “They’re living in a shoebox in San Francisco despite being executives in the finance sector,” she said.

  “Tah-dah!”

  “Are you seriously going to tell me to count my blessings because I’m middle-aged with a degenerative neurological condition instead of young and healthy and strapped for cash?”

  Yeah, because I’m a moron, I thought. “No, because that would be silly,” I said. “I was only going to suggest that you could make a difference to your life and theirs if you reconfigured things. Get them out of the rent trap and get yourself some support.”

  “You’re asking me to give my nephew and his wife the power of life and death over me?” she said.

  “No,” I said again, beginning to see why she had never found the right guy. I wasn’t sure the guy existed who would meet her standards. “I was going to suggest you buy a duplex, half for them and half for you, and tell them they’ll inherit the lot if you die at home. Then, when you need it, get a nurse too.”

  “I can’t imagine that working,” she said.

  “Read some Agatha Christie,” I told her. “They’re full of rich old relatives who hold the purse strings and young hopefuls dancing attendance.”

  “Don’t they usually get bumped off?” she asked, which was a fair point.

  “In fiction,” I said. “In real life, there would be a bit of a commute for them and a hell of an incentive to keep you happy if you set the will up in a wily enough way. But let’s not get bogged down in a future that might never happen.” She looked askance. “You might go under a bus tomorrow,” I pointed out. “Or you might walk out of here and meet the love of your life who’ll care for you tenderly forever.”

  “Or there’s always Oregon,” she said. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. Because if I mention it to anyone else, they get upset and embarrassed.”

  “Oregon?”

  “Assisted suicide.”

  “We can certainly discuss that,” I said. “It might put your mind at rest to have procedures in place that cover all the unknowns.”

  Then followed twenty-five of the most depressing minutes of my life. And I’ve spent my professional life counselling people with lives in the toilet and hearts full of the pain that brings. She had a clipboard with her and she’d made a flowchart. Every arrow led to death no matter what boxes she put in the way.

  “But promise me one thing,” I said. “Speak to your nephew before I see you again. Sound him out. You might find your relatives are happy to help if it’ll take some of the squeeze off them.”

  “Promise you?” she said. “Aren’t you therapists usually telling us to stop making promises because they always get broken? My last therapist told me the only way to avoid the pain of broken promises was never to make them and never to believe them.”

  “I’m not your usual therapist,” I said. “I think the way to avoid broken promises is never to break promises. But who’s going to pay to hear that?”

  When I got to Todd’s room, huddled into my waterproof coat with the hood tied round my face, there was a note on the door—bring your sewing fingers to the Skweek—and when I had splashed through the puddles and up the slippery metal steps, I found Kathi and him at the sewing machine engulfed in a sea of foaming white ruffles roughly the size of a VW Beetle. Todd was battening down about half of it with a body slam but Kathi was still in it up to her armpits.

  “What’s that?” I said, taking my coat off and grabbing a tissue to dry my face.

  “What do you think it is?” Kathi spat. “You’ve got Kleenex confetti all over you, by the way.”

  “I honestly have no idea,” I said, rubbing the bits of tissue off in balls and then carefully transferring the balls to the wastepaper basket. Kathi didn’t tolerate the kind of mess some pellets of tissue would make on a pale grey floor.

  “It’s a quincañera dress,” said Todd. “And it’s getting away.”

  “It’s a dress?” I said, rolling my sleeves up. “What are you trying to do with it?” I waded into it on the other side from Todd, slowing down to a stagger as I hit the wall of net. I put about a double duvet’s worth under each arm and ploughed on another step.

  “I’m trying to take it in at the waist,” said Kathi, shaking away a frill that had stuck to her sweaty cheek. “Fucking childhood obesity initiative at the junior high school. It would be a
hell of a lot less trouble for the kid to keep downing the donuts until after her party.” She spat out a little spout of net that had foamed its way into her mouth.

  “Look, let go,” I said. “This is never going to work. Just let go and we’ll do it methodically.”

  Kathi stood back and Todd stood up and I swear to God, that dress bounced out and up until it was the size of a VW camper van. It caught a draught of warm air from the heating vent and waved at us like a sea monster.

  “Where’s the waistband?” I said. “Roughly.”

  Kathi had retreated to her counter to take a long suck on a can of Coke.

  “In the middle there,” she said, pointing to where the sea monster’s mouth parts would be.

  I rolled. I started at the hem and rolled and rolled and rolled, working round in a spiral until the skirt of the thing was a giant sausage and the boned corset, sweetheart neckline and net shoulder cowl were revealed.

  “How much are you taking off it?” I said, hoping it wasn’t more than a couple of inches. That I could handle by folding the bones one turn over and restitching them. If it was more I’d have to cut the zip out and pull the whole thing round in both directions from the front, so the poor kid’s fifteen year-old boobs would be halfway under her arms.

  “From a twelve down to a ten,” Kathi said. “And if her boyfriend breaks up with her and she hits the cookie jar, we’ll be putting it all back on again before her birthday. What do you bet?”

  Another good argument for leaving it intact and just tucking it in a bit.

  “Twenty minutes,” I said. “Entertain me while I do it, though.”

  Todd entertained me with a blow-by-blow of the streets of Cuento, where mid-century moderns with composite roofs and pools were, as I had prophesied, many and unvaried.

  “They’re like … ” he said.

  “Shit in a field?” I suggested.

  “And when you can’t see the color of the siding there’s nothing to go on. I zoomed in and out from map view to street view to map view so many times I swear I’m motion sick. I actually got motion sick on a virtual journey. A virtual walk!”