Caught Dead in Philadelphia (13 page)

He scratched his ear, where an errant curl must have been tickling him, and looked at me with distant curiosity. I wondered how the man could send out such clear and sensual signals, and then just lose it altogether. Or had I made up a subtext to what he had been saying?

I didn't feel clever or creative enough to figure out where we had wandered or how to bring us back. I began to slump in unconscious imitation of Mackenzie. I watched him ruminate. From time to time, his coma was interrupted as he studied his notebook.

“Come on, Mackenzie,” I finally said, “can't you stop detecting for a while? Aren't you burned out? It's time for dinner.” Surely he hadn't lost that appetite, too. “Time for being people,” I added. “Want to try it? Or anything?” The last sort of popped out.

He stood up, unwinding himself until he was his full, slouchy height. He allowed a hint of his great white smile.

“Sorry. I can't seem to get off it yet. I'll try. I'll try.” He went into the kitchen area and poured himself a second glass of wine. One of the many small acts that had erased the D.J. from my life was his instant paralysis when he required sustenance. “Oh, boy,” he'd say, “could I go for a cup of coffee.” But he never did. What he meant was “Could I wait for a cup of coffee. You go.” Now Mackenzie was definitely less verbal than the disc jockey, but he wasn't into precious helplessness, and if you're single long enough, you learn to cherish small miracles.

Just as we were beginning something resembling human interaction, the phone rang. I sometimes wish I'd lived out my days before that smart-ass Bell let everybody intrude on everybody else at whim.

Mackenzie lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said. Then he held it out for me. “It's for you.” He seemed surprised.

I glanced at the clock. Six forty-five. Cheap-call time, and good old guess-who was taking advantage of economy pestering time. It was not her habit to call more than once a week, but then it was not my habit to stumble over corpses often, either, so I couldn't begrudge her concern. Only her timing.

“Hello, Mother.” I waited. A man had answered, after all.

“My…date, Mom. We're getting ready to leave for dinner. Yes, the same one. Mackenzie. That's his last name. His first name is…Chuck.”

Mackenzie sprang to attention. “Chuck!” he said with so much incredulity and annoyance I was sure I had hit it. “Chuck!”

My mother decided that Chuck was an acceptable first name in her book. Obviously, all was well with me. I had a date with a man with a first and last name.

I watched Mackenzie take out his ratty notebook again, still trying to make his scribbles merge into a coherent whole. For the moment, my mother was more interesting than he was.

“What's the matter with Herman?” I asked, interrupting a long, solemn windup. “He's bald? Mom, that's the funniest—”

I pulled the receiver away from my ear to deflect a short series of indignant screeches. “Mother,” I finally said, “I do not consider him my little brother.”

Mackenzie looked up from his notebook.

“Let Daddy and Herman work it out, then. But if the doctor said…okay, then skip ball games. Let him watch soap operas.”

Mackenzie closed his notebook.

“Mom, Chuckie's waiting for me.” Magic words. She paused, weighing Chuck against bald Herman. “Mother, dear,” I said to speed things to a conclusion, “it's not fair to make Herman live in the bathroom. No wonder he's depressed.”

Mackenzie's eyes were no longer droopy.

Mother gave up. She was stranded a thousand miles to the south, left to deal with her tragedy alone.

Mackenzie looked at me with new interest as I returned to his side. “I give up,” he said. “Talk about skeletons in the closet. Your brother lives in a bathroom?”

He was alert, alive. Cute. Emitting those rays again. My mother had saved the day. “I'll explain, Mackenzie, if you swear you'll retire from detecting for a while.”

“I'll consider it.”

“And first, you'll have to understand that the woman on the phone cannot conceivably be my true genetic mother. She is an eccentric who picked me out from Rent-A-Child, and that entitles her to unlimited phone calls once the rates are down.”

“And Herman? He's no relation, either?”

“Are you ready, Clyde?” He didn't even flinch. What the hell did that C stand for? “Herman is my mother's parrot.”

“She called him your little brother?”

“She can't figure out how to make me feel involved in his destiny, guilty about his mental health and happiness, but she tries. Constantly. At one point, she tried insisting that he was an endangered species, but that didn't do it. Now he's my sibling.”

“Hold it—Herman's a bald parrot?” He laughed.

“Yes. He's pulled out all his lovely green feathers.”

“God, but that's sad,” he said.

“They have been to the best doctor in Miami. A specialist, no less. After all, we have not only a nude parrot, but a messy, feathery bathroom floor.”

“Ah, yes. And why does he live in the bathroom?”

“Because my father hates him, and it's a small apartment. He started out in the living room, but he drove Dad insane.”

Mackenzie sat back, his arms folded, a wide smile on his face, and I no longer questioned my attraction for him.

“The bedroom was out,” I continued, “and a windowless closet seemed cruel and unusual punishment. My father claims to be constipated since the bird-in-the-bathroom evolved, but he tries to cope.”

Mackenzie grinned. He looked relaxed and vulnerable. I am not a nice person. I took advantage of it. “Clarence?” I whispered.

“You'll never guess,” he said lazily, “so continue.”

“Well, C—may I call you C? Or is that presumptuous? The specialist told Mother that the bird was bored. Waiting to hear the next toilet flush isn't enough to keep a parrot perky. Pulling out feathers was a way to fill the time.”

“What's to become of him?”

His arms were stretched out on the back pillows of the sofa, his fingers only inches from my shoulder. I could feel his body heat, or force field, while I spoke. “The doctor suggested TV. Sports are out because Daddy will not have a squawking bird share his games. So, either the rummy-tile ladies are going to know that Mama's got a naked bird behind the shower curtain, or she has to figure out what kind of programming appeals to parrots.”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and smiled. “Goddamn,” he said, and laughed out loud. Then he sat up. “Mind if I make myself comfortable?” he asked.

Frankly, I was delighted. He put his notebook on the coffee table and took off his camel-colored jacket. Then he stretched, and I could see his ribs press against the fine blue fabric of his shirt.

He turned and looked at me. Really looked at me. His eyes, his face, his mass of silvered hair were hushed and waiting and very beautiful.

But I couldn't stop looking at his blue shirt. Or rather at the gun that nestled beneath his arm. I felt as if he had taken off a mask and become somebody I wasn't sure I wanted to meet. Or else, I had taken off blinders and found who he really was. “Put it away, please,” I said. “Somewhere I can't see it.”

He nodded sadly. “I think you're fine, Amanda Pepper,” he said softly, but there was a wistful tone in his voice that frightened me. He carefully undid the leather contraption on his chest and put it and its contents on the floor, out of sight. “But I don't think we can make it.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because of that. Because of who I am, what I do. Because of how it's been. What's happened. How we met.” He kept looking at me. “My timing's off, my sense of where to go, how to proceed. My job keeps overlappin' onto what should be us, and I can't seem to stop it. An' I don' want to mess up somethin' that could be…real fahn.”

His drawl increased with his hesitancy.

I was moved by his confusion, his sensitivity. I didn't have to look at the gun on the floor, and I didn't want to consider our past, the scenes behind us. I wanted to erase the taste of death the only way that seemed possible. But I couldn't say that, wouldn't literally drag corpses back into our world right now. So I took both his hands in mine. They were good hands, human hands, strong hands. Without the gun, he was a man, and a fine one.

“Forget your job,” I said softly. “This is after-hours. A separate story altogether. It's like curling up with a good book. Your character's been established, and so has mine. A strong mutual interest has been clearly demonstrated, some interesting complications, and—”

“You're not forgettin' your job, English teacher.”

“Shh. Anyway, it's relevant. We're at the end of the introduction, Mackenzie. The end of the beginning. Now we have to get to the denouement, the unraveling of the mystery. Our mystery.”

He grinned. “You sure?” he asked, and I nodded. I could see his wide shoulders relax, could feel the muscles of his hands uncoil as I held them. “You are one fahn instructor,” he said, and I was suddenly, finally, being held, enveloped by him. “It's just that I do believe—” he said, and he kissed me, and it was the way I had hoped the curl of his lips would feel. “I do believe,” he said again after a long while, cupping my face in his hands, “that where I come from—” and he lifted my hair and kissed the nape of my neck, my ears, my temples—“mah English teachers told me that in dramatic structure—” and he pulled me closer still and we held each other, rocking quietly—“before the denouement, there is another significant step—” and his hand behind me stroked my back, sliding slowly down the silk—“known as the climax, I do believe.”

“I do believe so myself,” I said, and then we didn't say much for a long time. There was too much to find out.

There was Mackenzie and his gold-toned skin to explore; there was the way he turned his slow Southern tempo into a lazy, timeless voluptuousness. And with him, through him, I felt just as new, redefined and given shape in the endless moment we shared.

All I can say is that the man knows his dramatic structure.

“You're very beautiful,” he whispered eventually. “An extraordinary woman. Very fine.”

“Your drawl is gone.”

“It's a symptom of stress,” he said. “It is also a fahn aphrodisiac for Yankee women. Almost as effective as your leavin' the top two buttons open on that silky, touchy thing you were wearin'.”

“Mackenzie, you are one smug, supercilious Southerner. And very fahn as well.”

“And a man of honor. I promised you dinner, didn't I?”

* * *

“Miss Peppah?” he said when we were reassembled and ready to leave, “it has been an honor and a privilege to make your acquaintance.”

I curtsied. I came damn near to simpering.

We didn't have any sunset to walk off into. But then, we weren't playing for an audience.

Twelve

Dinner at eight is much more civilized, anyway, and I was starving.

We walked toward Walnut Street, pausing in front of various eating options.

“Too crowded,” he said at the first.

“No…not in the mood for Chinese,” I said at the second.

“You sure?” he asked. “You know, all the Chinese restaurateurs' children are off studying computer science, so in a few years you'll have to order software, not mushi pork.”

“Too ferny,” he said at our next opportunity.

“Just right!” I finally declared when we found ourselves outside the inexpensive Italian place where Gus and I had eaten a few nights earlier. “No atmosphere. Just old Christmas cards pasted all over the walls, if that intrigues you. But great food and lots of it.”

They had cannelloni stuffed with liver. I no longer admit my liver fixation until I know someone very well and trust him. I had once dated—once—the most incredible pompous ass it has been my misfortune to know. He had a lineage that would bring half the city to its knees, and he hadn't done poorly himself. He was a snob about his ancestors, his schools, his seats at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and worst of all, about food. And when I ordered liver instead of the currently chic entrée, he was as upset as if I'd demanded peanut butter and jelly on white bread.

It was okay with Mackenzie. He didn't even flinch.

He studied the cards on the wall. I, meanwhile, having not smoked afterward for the first time, sublimated an acute desire for a cigarette by attacking the breadsticks in the basket. I wondered whether full lungs or full hips were less acceptable.

“Listen to this,” Mackenzie said. “‘Maybe a reindeer will find its way, And bring you joy and mirth today.' Or, ‘This wish is sincere, it is the truest. May your New Year be the newest.'”

I wasn't in a literary mood, so while he scanned the verses, I scanned the room. Men don't seem to have the same driving need to examine and assess every passerby while eating. Or at least my men defer to my fierce lunge for the seat with a view. They also seem less able to eavesdrop on neighboring tables while conducting a conversation. Their restaurant experiences are poor, dim, one-dimensional events.

Anyway, Mackenzie was feeding his soul with the waste products of the Muse, so he didn't notice when in walked one Augustus Winston III. It was easy to miss Gus, even if one was watching the door. He looked diminished, grayed out, and pulpy instead of lined. He nodded to the owner and limped toward a small table near the rear.

He seemed in need of a friend. I mentally squirmed. If you've had your sense of guilt as carefully nurtured as I have, there are certain no-win situations. One of them is when you have to choose between a new sex object and an old friend. I sighed. “Gus is over there,” I said.

“Invite him over,” Mackenzie said.

He was a marvel, accepting first my liver, then my friend. I was hopeful, too, that a leisurely meal and some wine would smooth away the edge of suspicion between the two men. It took a while to catch Gus's eye, but I did, and gestured extravagantly for him to join us. He limped over, eyeing Mackenzie with suspicion before seating himself.

“I, ah, there's no show tonight,” he said by way of introduction and explanation. “You heard about Eddie Bayer?” Obviously, Gus wasn't a fan of the six o'clock news. “What's going on? Liza, now Eddie. Is somebody killing off our whole troupe?”

It was a new angle. “Do you think it's the ghost of an outraged playwright?” I picked at the crumbs of my breadstick.

Nobody even smiled. I realized that my little summit meeting was probably not a terrific idea.

“How did you hear about Eddie?” Mackenzie asked Gus.

There went the evening. It had been fun and games for a while. Oh, much more than that. But we were back on the black brick road, stomping on down to the slough of despond. I experienced my first case of postcoital depression.

When Gus finally answered Mackenzie, he sounded cautious and verbose at the same time. Very unlike himself.

“Cathy called. His wife. She needed to talk to somebody, anybody, I guess. Needed to say what had happened, over and over again. Called herself a widow woman, said she had to start handling things, taking charge of her life, but she was scared. Didn't know how. She babbled about life insurance and day-care centers and retraining programs and didn't make lots of sense. I tried to calm her, to slow her down, but she went on and on about the list of things she had to do by herself.”

I said a silent prayer for poor Catherine Bayer. May she get a belated handle on her life.

“And she talked about women,” Gus continued. “Eddie's women. One who'd caused trouble, and even about a policewoman who'd come looking for him. A tall woman with…and her partner, a cop from the South, and…”

I snapped another breadstick into four segments and proceeded to eat one at a time.

“You, Mandy?” Gus said. “It wasn't you, was it? Did you…Eddie, too?” I nodded.

“What's with you? Why would you be there?” He stopped talking as if somebody had corked up his mouth. His lined face looked like a turtle's pulling into its shell.

I shrugged, trying to imitate James Bond's attitude toward danger and death. That is, of course, James Bond stuffing his mouth with breadsticks. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “I was supposed to—” But Mackenzie was shaking his head no in slow motion, boring into me with an icy blue-eyed silencer, and I stopped. Cleverly, I simply ate more, carbo loading for some unknown marathon ahead.

Surely Gus wasn't under suspicion again, or still? The Pooh business had cleared him, hadn't it? He wasn't the Winnie. But then, the gold charm had been for Eddie, and he wasn't “it,” either. The gold charm had ultimately meant nothing. I peered at Gus from behind a new wall of reserve. The lines on his face had become crevasses.

Nobody spoke. It could have gone on that way throughout eternity had not Giorgio, the waiter, found Gus in his new spot. “Ah, Mr. Winston, a night of surprises! First you are here late, and then you go and confuse me with the musical chairs.” Luckily, Giorgio was fond of solos, because he waved the air with his oversize menu and continued despite the lack of response from our trio of zombies. “No matter, no matter!” he practically sang. “What can Giorgio bring you tonight? The calamari is—” Since the language had no words excellent enough for the squid, Giorgio brought his hand to his mouth and kissed it, loudly. “And the stuffed ziti—what can I say? Maria's grandmother's recipe. Old country. Perfect. Our eggplant? The house sauce is—”

“Spaghetti, Giorgio,” Gus said. “Meat sauce.”

“Spaghetti? Spaghetti? What kind of choice is spaghetti with meat sauce? For that you can go to the supermarket.”

“Spaghetti, Giorgio,” Gus repeated, and the waiter departed with a histrionic sigh.

Gus leaned over the table. “Now listen, Mack—”

“Mackenzie,” C.K. said, and his voice was like a slap.

Gus's skin took on a mauve tinge. “Mackenzie, then. You'd better—”

“Ah! You make Giorgio so surprised he forgot to ask about the wine!” The waiter had regained his sunny Mediterranean zest, and he stood on tiptoe, waiting for the thrill of Gus's wine choice.

“Red.”

“Red? You are sick, perhaps, tonight? Red, like a crayon? I have a Bardolino; it will make you happy again. It will make your heart sing. It is for men.” Giorgio flexed his muscles like a strong man; then he hugged himself. “But tender, too. Or a Chianti Classico that—”

“Fine,” Gus said. “That's fine.”

Giorgio backed off like a whipped dog. But luckily, at the next table, four buxom women in flowery dresses waited with anxious delight for something to spark their evening. Giorgio put in Gus's wine order, reinflated himself, and danced over to them.

During which performance, our table maintained its funereal silence.

“You were about to say something?” Mackenzie prompted. “Something vaguely threatening?”

Gus's shoulders drooped. “Not threatening. But dammit, Mackenzie, why involve her in this? You don't need a date to hunt corpses. Leave her out of it.”

“I'll assume you mean that as her friend, Winston. So as her friend—which I am as well—stop butting in. Stop giving advice. She's okay. I'm not involving her in anything.”

I was obviously not there. I must have left and not noticed it, the way they were discussing me. “Hi!” I said brightly. “Maybe you'd be interested in hearing how I am from me?” Nobody noticed, so I retreated and watched them volley. I pretended it was Wimbledon.

“Well, you're sure botching it if you're not trying to involve her,” Gus snapped. “She's around two dead bodies in one week. That's some track record. Are you badgering her about this one, too?”

“Did it appear to you that I brought Miss Peppah here to badger her?” Mackenzie drawled. “And anyway, why would I? Do you see some connection between the deaths? Other than your brilliant theory that somebody's stalking your ensemble.”

My cannelloni was slipped in front of me with the grace of a matador's pass. “And you!” Giorgio said to Mackenzie with a chuckle. “Osso buco for the gentleman.” He lowered his voice to a mournful lament. “And spaghetti with meat sauce for Mr. Winston.” He filled our glasses.

“There was talk about Eddie and Liza,” Gus said, looking at his wine. “But there was always talk about both of them separately, too. So who knows?”

“Or maybe nobody would gossip specifically about Liza in front of you,” Mackenzie said. “Possible?”

Gus looked in danger of disintegrating into the spaghetti strands. “Maybe,” he acknowledged.

“But still,” I told the tablecloth. “Even so…” The men watched each other.

“And what would that talk have to do with murders?” Gus had worked his face back to something like its normal sandpaper contours. He drew lines in his congealing meat sauce with his fork.

“The food's getting cold,” I said, eating some of mine. My cannelloni responded warmly, but nothing else did.

“Maybe the talk means nothing. Maybe everything. You know what does mean something?” Mackenzie pointed his fork at Gus. “Liza,” he said forcibly. “Liza.”

Both times he said the name, Gus recoiled, as if the fork, or something, pierced him.

“Liza is where it started,” Mackenzie continued. “Eddie's death is connected because he was connected to Liza.”

“I still don't know what you mean, ultimately,” Gus said stiffly.

“I don't know about ultimates, Winston. But it means, to me, that he died because he knew who killed Liza Nichols. He knew something incriminatin' that the killer couldn't risk having exposed. Or, at the very least, the killer
thought
he knew something.”

There was somebody else in town who might be thought to know something. And I liked her very much. I didn't like going through another round of reasons why I was prime target number three.

Gus pronounced each word distinctly as if tutoring a rather slow learner. “And do you have any idea who this person is who wanted to kill Liza? And do you have any idea why?”

“Maybe,” Mackenzie said. “But that is, after all, literally my business. And while we're on the subject, where were you this morning before the funeral?”

Gus's face became splotched. “Dammit, are you suggesting—”

“The food is cold,” I said. “I thought we came here for dinner.”

They looked at me as if I'd just bopped in off the street and tried to sell them my mother's body for a few bucks.

“Mandy,” Gus said after he recognized me, “I still don't understand your role in all this.” He turned back to C.K. “And you never answered me. Leave her out of this. It's dangerous. For God's sake, you know that. If she keeps hanging around the scenes of murders, if she keeps looking like an auxiliary policeman, then she's liable to get hurt.”

Mackenzie looked more likely to devour Gus than the osso buco.

“Listen to me!” I was so loud that the four flowers at the next table stopped talking and looked over. I lowered my voice. “I'm here. I'm sick of being discussed and debated while I'm right here. You're scaring me and ruining dinner. Shut up and eat!”

They listened to me. Giorgio, however, was not going to be pleased by the pushed-around messes left on Gus's and my plates. Mackenzie alone managed to eat.

“I, ah, have to go,” Gus said after he'd disfigured his spaghetti. “Meeting at the Playhouse, even if there's no show.” He gave a small, unhappy chuckle. “We're having some casting difficulties. Losing people. I'll excuse myself, if you don't mind.” He pulled out his wallet and stood up.

“Gus.” I reached out and touched his hand. “I didn't mean to sound harsh. I know you care and you're trying to protect me. But I'll be okay. I promise not to find any more corpses.”

“I don't want to find yours,” he grumbled; then he limped away to the cashier.

“You didn't have to lay into him that way,” I told Mackenzie. “He was trying to be kind.”

“You sure?” Mackenzie's voice wasn't precisely a lover's caress. “You sure he wasn't upset because somebody he likes may become so involved in this that he has to get rid of her, too?”

“That's disgusting. That's perverted. You've got tunnel vision, some hang-up about your role in life. You see everybody and everything as suspicious. Gus isn't—”

“Cleared. Gus isn't cleared. Drop back a few mental steps and consider. He still has no alibi for Monday, and God knows about this morning. He's a man who knows how to hate, and no matter how warped, he had a reason to hate Liza. You know, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—except for the amazin' fury of some scorned men. And finally, Miss Peppah, you do not have access to all the available information anyway.”