“Let’s go,” he said gruffly. “And hurry up. We don’t have much time.”
Well, I guess that made sense. I mean, he sees me when I’m sleeping. He’s sees when I’m awake. He sees if I’ve been bad or good, so I better be good for goodness’ sake.
I wasn’t about to pout or cry. I did as I was told. Santa Claus had come to town and he was looking for the star file.
Chapter Thirty-six
I
t was a sad sign that my initial reaction upon seeing the gun and then being forced to the basement of the temple was one of relief.
Thank, God,
I thought.
I won’t have to go through that idiotic rehearsal dinner. I had nothing to wear, anyway.
And then an even more promising concept:
Maybe he’ll kill me so I won’t have to marry Dan!
Talk about your lucky loophole. Death was the ultimate excuse, was it not?
But . . . what about Stiletto? He’d asked me to meet him by seven under the Hill-to-Hill Bridge and already it was around one and I had the feeling jolly old St. Nick didn’t plan on letting me go, well, ever.
“Keep moving,” he ordered, shoving the gun into the back of my neck as we descended a dark, musty-smelling cinder-block staircase. That was the problem with Lehigh basements: rot. Really, the Masonic temple should look into getting a dehumidifier before they contracted a bad case of black mold.
We were in definite centipede territory now. I stepped carefully as we passed a roaring furnace and a dripping pump room.
“It’s haunted, you know,” my captor said. “This mansion was built by Elisha Wilbur so he could keep an eye on the train track, make sure it was on time. Others have said they still see him at night, watching from the windows.”
“And yet the trains are still late. How’s that for irony?” Irony and a rhetorical question in one. I was getting these down.
We came to a padlocked door. It was superdank and cold. I rubbed my arms as he inserted the key and pushed me inside a pitch-black windowless room.
The door shut. I heard him set the padlock.
Well, this was pleasant. Cold. Wet. Disgusting.
Flick!
A flame lit and over it a horrendously made-up face glowed. Holy crap! It was Elisha Wilbur himself.
“Hey, Bubbles.” Sandy leaned over and lit her cigarette. “Nice accommodations, say?”
Sandy! She was alive. I impulsively hugged her and nearly got my hair singed in the process. “You’re okay! You’re not dead!”
“Not yet.” She exhaled, coughed and pushed me off her. “They plan to kill us, you know.”
“So I assumed.” I motioned for a drag, sucking in the scratchy smoke, which immediately made me light-headed and slightly nauseous. Only true addicts crave drugs that will make them light-headed and slightly nauseous.
“Thanks.” I handed it back to her. “You’re calm, for someone who’s about to be killed.”
She waved the cigarette, her lit tip making a glowing curlicue in the dark. “The way I look at it, at least I won’t have to face Martin.”
This was true. “The way I look at it, at least I won’t have to get married.”
“Two white chicks who would rather die in a Masonic temple basement than put up with their husbands. What does that say about the state of feminism today?”
I thought about this. “Was
that
one of those rhetorical questions?”
“You know,” she said, “I think it was.”
“Yes!” I pumped my fist. Two in a row. “Though, Dan aside, I do worry about what my getting killed will do to Jane.” I didn’t mention Stiletto. I didn’t want to open that can of worms. (Honestly, what company cans worms?)
Sandy finished her cigarette. “Jane will be fine. Someday she’ll write a book about you being murdered in the Masonic temple and she’ll be on
Oprah
. It’s the best thing you can do for her future, getting murdered. I bet Princeton accepts her right away.”
Another excellent point. “What happened to you last night?”
“I was in the club looking for you. Everyone just kind of left me. I went down some hallway and then I was grabbed.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t let me look at him. He threw a hood over my face and tied my hands behind my back.”
I tried to picture that. “Odd that you can walk around Hubba, Hubba with a hood on your head and your hands tied behind your back but you’re not allowed to get onstage and lick the dancers.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Where were the bouncers?”
“Beats me. I was wearing a pillowcase, so I couldn’t see.” Sandy said this as though I were a moron for not remembering the hood. “Probably they thought I was a celebrity and wanted to leave incognito.”
“Was it Phil Shatsky?”
“I don’t think so. Phil’s kind of short. This guy was about my height.”
“Like the Santa Claus who stuck the gun in my back and brought me down here,” I said.
“Like Phil’s lover maybe?” she asked.
I mulled this over. “No. It wasn’t Mark Knoffler. Mark’s nails were impressive. This Santa Claus had short, bitten, stubby nails.”
“Ick.”
Sandy and I sat on the damp, cold cement floor and shot the breeze for an indeterminable amount of time. We talked about babies. I told her about Stiletto and Dan’s threat to have Jane and me separated if I didn’t marry him.
Sandy revealed that she’d been of the opinion that Dan was operating on an ulterior motive, though she hadn’t thought it was her place to say so. Like Vern the county clerk, she noted that Dan rarely, if ever, did anything for love. What he wanted was status and money, and he would go to any lengths to secure both.
I told her about Dr. Caswell’s report and was surprised when Sandy laughed.
“Dan paid her off. It’s obvious, Bubbles.”
“But she’s a psychologist. She has a code of ethics.”
“She also has bills to pay like the rest of us. Wasn’t Dan the one who found her in the first place?”
“Right.” I thought about how Dr. Caswell served as Dan’s expert witness in those crazy I-found-a-finger-in-my-Big-Mac cases that he never won. “You mean . . . I’m not a bad mother?”
“No. However, you are a schmuck for trusting your ex.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
That was when I burst out crying about how embarrassed I’d been, how the report had filled me with shame.
“I’m gathering Stiletto doesn’t know, either.”
“Of course not.”
Sandy exhaled. “Oh, brother.”
After that, we took turns putting our heads on each other’s laps, napping.
Finally, to keep our rising anxiety at bay we played the game Worst Song Ever. Sandy voted for Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded,” which just so happened to be one of my secret favorites, ever. I voted for the Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You, Pretty Baby?” and Sandy hit me.
I’d forgotten that it had been her first dance song with Martin at their wedding.
We were so wrapped up in debating the virtues of Bad Company versus Frampton in his
Frampton Comes Alive
glory days that it took us a while to realize people were outside. There were voices above us.
And, more ominous, a strange hissing sound.
“Oh, shit. It’s started,” Sandy said, leaping to her feet.
I got up too, my muscles tight and sore from the dampness. “What’s started?”
“The Christmas party upstairs. He said that was when they were going to kill us. His plan was to fill up our cell with undiluted oxygen. No one would hear our screams, the party would be so loud. And there’d be no evidence afterward.”
That was ridiculous. “You can’t die from too much oxygen.”
“Yes, you can. I read it in a divers’ magazine they sent to the House of Beauty. You need carbon dioxide to trigger lung function. Too much oxygen and your lungs stop working.”
“What about Michael Jackson and his little oxygen tent he sleeps in?”
Sandy’s hand was on my shoulder. “I like you, Bubbles. You’re my best friend and a lovely person. But sometimes you get so distracted.”
I wasn’t sure, but I suspected this was her polite way of calling me dumb. Well, she could call me dumb all she wanted. She wasn’t the one who had just determined the identity of our captor.
I had.
The voices were coming closer. They did not sound like party voices. They sounded like Genevieve. And another woman whose voice I recognized.
Vava Wilson, the cop.
“Scream!” I ordered to Sandy. “Bang on the door.”
We screamed our hearts out and made our fists and toes sore as we pounded mercilessly. Yet no one seemed to hear us.
“The furnace is on. It’s drowning us out,” Sandy said, alarmed. “They’re turning away. They’re going up the stairs. Please, people, don’t do that. Come back, come back!”
What to do? Quick. Think, Bubbles. What resources were at hand? I didn’t have my purse, so any hair-spray mechanism was out. My earrings were useless on the padlock outside our door.
And then it dawned on me. What gets people’s attention more than anything else these days?
“Sandy. Light a cigarette.”
“I only have one left. And it will burn really fast in this oxygen. We might even explode!”
“Just do it.”
“You do it. I’m too scared.” She handed me the cigarette and lighter, fumbling so badly she dropped them on the floor.
Ignoring all centipede concern, I felt around the dirty, wet concrete until I found them. Okay, this was the moment of truth. Now or never.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and flicked my Bic. A flame shot up.
“Wow.” Sandy backed off.
I brought the cigarette to the door and exhaled. If I knew Genevieve—and, unfortunately, I did all too well—she’d smell smoke and put up a racket. Genevieve was a rabid antismoker. Or just plain rabid.
“It’s not working. They can’t smell it,” Sandy whined.
“Just wait. It takes a while.” I knew this from my days sneaking butts in my bedroom. As I recalled, it took Mama exactly four minutes from cigarette ignition to detect the smoke downstairs. And by then I had out my Lysol.
The furnace took a break from its incessant roaring. It was silent, except for the murmur of partygoers upstairs. I finished the cigarette to the bitter end and tried to push the butt under the door, taking solace that my vice had not been wasted.
That was when we heard it:
stomp, stomp, stomp
.
“They’re coming back!” Sandy said.
“Don’t say it. Scream it.” We set to pounding and kicking and wouldn’t give up even when we heard the commotion of people trying to break the lock on the other side.
Finally, the lock clanked to the floor and the door whooshed open. Sandy and I fell out, right onto Vava Wilson, Martin and Genevieve. Detective Burge was noticeably absent.
Martin shoved me aside and gathered up Sandy, who collapsed into hysterics, a far cry from her stoic presence in our cell. He was crying, too. They looked as one, two heads buried in each other’s neck, sobbing and hugging. I had the feeling that Sandy could tell him she hired a spaceship to sleep with multiple aliens and Martin wouldn’t have minded.
They’d be fine.
“I knew you were here,” Genevieve said proudly. She was still in her Virgin Mary blue. “The folks upstairs said they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of you. Your car wasn’t in the parking lot or nothing, but I had faith. I knew you was in here even if your Camaro wasn’t.”
My car. He’d taken it. I was really beginning to dislike Santa Claus.
And then I remembered. “What time is it?”
Genevieve checked her watch. “Eight twenty.”
Crap. I’d missed him. Unlike Genevieve, Stiletto had probably lost the faith and was off to Greece with Sabina.
“You okay?” Vava asked.
“As okay as can be expected.” I felt dull, as if all energy had leached out of my body and into the basement drain of the Masonic temple.
I turned to Genevieve. “Thanks. If it hadn’t been for your neurotic, paranoid delusions, Sandy and I would be dead.”
“No thanks necessary or deserved.” Genevieve put her hands on her broad hips. “I thought I knew the layout of this Masonic temple like the foxholes around Camp David. Turns out I was missing a few details. Damn those online maps.”
Vava said, “Who locked you two in here?”
“Eric Wachowski,” I said. I’d recognized his poor manicure from the night before at Hubba, Hubba. Also that cologne. It was unmistakable. Like they used to say in the commercials, an Old Spice man was unforgettable.
Vava’s eyes widened. “You mean Eric the tech over in the medical examiner’s office?”
“Exactly.”
Vava reached for her radio. I held out my hand and stopped her. “But he didn’t kill Debbie Shatsky. If you give me a chance, I’ll prove to you who did.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
I
t took less than twenty minutes of a conference call between Vava Wilson, Detective Burge, me and—oh, brother—Judge Hopkinton, for Hopkinton to grant us an emergency warrant so I could wear a wire. I had to hand it to the corrupt history of the Pennsylvania judicial system—sometimes crooked and lazy judges came in handy. Hopkinton didn’t think twice.
Vava snaked a wire into my bra. “Nice bra,” she said.
“JCPenney, two for eighteen bucks. Excellent support.”
“I need support.”
“Don’t we all.”
She clipped the wire to a recording device strapped on my back. It was nice to know I didn’t have to worry about those ethical violations anymore, that I could go around being wired and kind of misrepresenting myself and I wouldn’t have to face the wrath of Dix Notch.
Those
News-Times
days were sooo over.
It was well past nine when we pulled out of the station. I’d called Dan at the restaurant where the rehearsal dinner was under way without me and apologized for missing everything.
Get this. He didn’t buy that I’d been locked up in the Masonic temple until I explained about Hopkinton and that the police were about to arrest Debbie’s real murderer. Then his mood improved because an arrested murder suspect meant a solid defendant to sue in Phil Shatsky’s civil case, a defendant who wasn’t Sandy.