Caught Dead in Philadelphia (15 page)

I sipped coffee and flipped through Beth's volume of Shakespeare. I would indeed ask a question about guilt. “If you were to judge the events in
Macbeth
,” I began.

“I have new shoes!” Karen was suddenly in front of me.

“Did we frighten you?” Beth said. “You look startled.”

“I was concentrating. I didn't hear you.” I considered how easily a person could sneak around a house set in green padding, protected by a dog who would only catch somebody in order to sit on his feet.

“Sorry we were so long. But we were near the shoe store and Karen needed new tennies. So, unfortunately, did every other child in the entire area. I'll start lunch now.”

“Thanks, Beth, but I'll pass. I'm enjoying the sunshine, and I'm not hungry.”

“Now, now, loss of appetite isn't healthy. Unless,” she said, “it's from love, of course.” She waited in vain for a response. “Stay where you are,” she then continued. “We'll eat out here. Everything's ready. Cheer up, Amanda. Life must go on.”

Her attempts to raise my spirits made me almost as depressed as I was supposed to be.

Karen filled the time by demonstrating the variety of gymnastic feats possible with her new red shoes. In between her shouts and jumps, I scribbled away at my test. “Whom would you consider guilty? Macbeth? Lady Macbeth? Both? How important was the influence of the witches' prophecies?” I wondered how Liza would have answered the question. She'd had some interesting ideas about guilt and responsibility, as I recalled.

“Ready or not, here we come!” Beth carried a tray of food and led a small parade. I should have guessed. It wasn't Sam, trailing her with a pitcher of lemonade and a tray of glasses, who put the flush in her cheeks.

“Karen,” she said in an unnaturally high melodic mode, “come meet Aunt Mandy's friend, Officer Mackenzie.”

“C.K.,” he corrected her, putting a basket of homemade bread on the table.

The Wymans were too polite to question the man's lack of names.

Lunch was delicious, if boring during the spell while Karen assumed that we had convened to see her new shoes, and consequently discussed them at length, along with who else was similarly shod in school, and what stylistic variations were possible.

But it perked up when Beth began burbling about the evening's plans. I had more or less assumed we would gather around the tube, or do simultaneous silent reading. But no. “It's only a
local
carnival, of course,” she said, “very suburban, I guess, but it's fun. And important for a whole group of charities out here. We all combine in this one effort. I'm sure Amanda will enjoy herself. And why don't you stop by, too, Officer—ah, C.K.?”

Mackenzie looked mildly taken aback, startled. “The, ah, Main Line Charities Carnival?” he asked.

“Yes!” She was thrilled; she was delighted. I mean I was surprised myself that he knew about some rinky-dink local fair, but Beth, looking for omens and signs that Mackenzie was my intended, was astounded. Delirious. “You've heard about our little event! What an amazing coincidence!”

Mackenzie nodded. “Some of Amanda's, ah, friends—the people at the Playhouse—are helping out. Their sponsor, Sissie Bellinger, seems to have involved them as clowns, or somethin'. And Hayden Cole's the auctioneer. Something like that?”

“Oh. Of course,” Beth said, considerably subdued. The Unmentionable Case led to the fair, and its lights had dimmed somewhat.

“So you're plannin' to go and take Amanda,” Mackenzie said quietly. He didn't sound thrilled.

“Oh, this isn't some wild kind of event that would upset her,” Beth said with a chuckle. “Besides, we wouldn't leave her at home alone. And I promised to man the food booth for two hours, and Sam was going to take care of Karen. Unless you, of course, would be here to keep her company.”

This was becoming fun. I waited. Mackenzie could either come clean and tell my sister that I was not suffering from depression but from danger, or be my date himself tonight.

“Tell you what,” Mackenzie said. “I'll just clean up some paperwork and drop by the fair myself. Buy you some cotton candy, Karen.”

I couldn't believe that he had chosen none of the above.

Sam excused himself and went back to work.

I stood to help clear the dishes. “No, no,” Beth said. “Relax. Karen will help me.”

Obviously, in Beth's campaign strategy, it was leave-the-lovers-alone time.

“I want to show C.K. how springy my shoes are!”

Beth frowned, then erased it. In order to cleanse the world of single females, married females in the presence of unmarried males present domesticity as the most blissful and placid of stages. So when Beth spoke, her voice was rich with maternal honey. “Later, sweetie,” she told her daughter. “Right now, Mommy could use your help.” Beneath the sugar was the steel of an Oberfuehrer's directive.

Karen is a bright child. She walked off, very springily, carrying three forks and some napkins, promising to return very soon.

Mackenzie pushed his chair back and slouched down on it. “I've never seen you in sunshine before,” he said pleasantly. “You should wear it more often. Bet you tan and look almost Eurasian with those cheekbones. Except for the red in your hair.”

“Cut it.”

“Ah'm complimentin' you. Some women require artificial light. They're limited. You aren't.”

“Why not concentrate on keeping my skin intact instead of worrying about how it should be illuminated.”

“You mean about tonight? What was I supposed to do? I knew about the damned thing because I have to be there, along with the whole cast of characters—except you, I had hoped. I didn't know your sister was involved.”

“In something called Main Line Charities? You could have bet on it.”

He shrugged. He seemed remarkably nonchalant about putting me in mortal peril. I wished he didn't look so damned pretty with the sunshine bopping off the silver sprinkles in his curls, highlighting some hitherto unnoticed freckles on his cheekbones.

He rocked the wrought-iron chair dangerously. “You have a marked tendency to overreact,” he said. “Tonight's no big deal unless suburbanites frighten you. The more I think about it, the better this sounds. You'll be surrounded by hundreds of normal, charitable people. Maybe somebody will talk to you, say something interestin'. I'll rede-putize you. Sam 'n' Beth and me, we'll never leave you alone. I'd rather you were there than here, alone. Unless you want me to see if I could get a police guard.” He shrugged.

I considered my options and chose the populated fair. “What is it you'll do there?” I asked him.

“Lurk, menace, be stealthy. Make deductions. Maybe help Beth serve coleslaw. Raymond's been on my back. Suspects I'm devotin' overmuch time to tangential aspects of the case. Like you. He also does not wish to appear tonight. Says a man of his complexion cannot be inconspicuous on the Main Line.”

“I am not a tangent.”

“I'll be officially free at eleven, but until then, it'll be a pretty boring evening. Now—anything else you need to know? Aside from my name, of course.”

“I need to know everything, so I can behave intelligently. I want to know everything you know.”

“Oh, boy,” he said, stretching himself out so that his sitting position was more like that of a log propped against the chair. “I know lots of stuff. I know that salt was once used as currency by the Chinese. I know that you shouldn't ignore the potential of household ammonia. I know how to convert stuff into metrics. And I know that even as we speak, Beth is considering color schemes for summer weddings and peeking out at us from time to time. I know—”

“You don't know when to quit. About the murders, C.K. What do you know that I don't?”

“Oh, that. Well, I know that Sissie's divorce became final three weeks ago, after long and fierce fighting about money of hers that Mr. Bellinger had permanently misplaced.” Mackenzie stopped and concentrated on chewing ice cubes.

“So she isn't rich, and she isn't married.”

“And she wasn't able to be openly on the market when Hayden went shopping for a wife. But now, she's very able to do what she pleases. And she has a remarkable incentive to do something.”

“It's amazing what you turn up when you do some work, Mackenzie.”

“What do you think I do when I'm not with you? Fantasize? Anyway, Sissie's status doesn't answer anything. There are other fat cats around for her to snare.”

“But the legwork's been done with Hayden. And let's be honest, Sissie would make a better running mate. She belongs in his circle, and Liza didn't. That quarrel between Liza and Sissie last Sunday, it was probably about that. Sissie was pushing, harder and harder, to get the competition out and away. She said something to me—one of her damned half sentences—about a promise to finish the run and leave town. She meant Liza, I'm sure. But I don't understand why at all.” I shook my head, still confused.

Beth reemerged from the house. “Hate to interrupt you—but how does a plate of ice cream sound?” She didn't sit down. That might have slowed our courtship by fifteen minutes.

Mackenzie tipped his chair back, chewing an imaginary corn stalk. “Why, Ma'am,” he said. “That sounds amazin'ly fahn.”

“You're overdoing it,” I whispered, but “Ma'am” beamed.

“This is a
perfect
day for ice cream.” He nodded agreement with himself. “That chicken of yours reminded me of the best days of home. And then we'd top it with ice cream.”

“Aren't you mixing up your background?” I asked. “Shouldn't you be drawling about Creole goodies? Blackened redfish? Crayfish? Little French pastries?”

“Shows what Yankees know.” He stood up and smiled again at Beth. “Let me help serve it,” he said.

His accent was deepening and widening with every moment. He sounded more like Uncle Remus than a cum laude graduate of Rice.

“No, no,” Beth answered. Of course. The young lovers were never to be parted.

“You can't carry three dishes,” Mackenzie said.

She smiled and shook her head. “Two,” she said. “Unlike my sister, I have to count calories. Besides, I have things to do about tonight.” She all but bowed out backward.

Clever Bethy. She managed to keep to her diet and remind the unmarried visitor of the Single Sister's silhouette.

“You don't need to coat every word in molasses, Mackenzie. Beth is already hooked. Skip the Dixie overkill.”

“Never hurts to sugar up the relatives,” he said. “A Southern accent gives me an edge. Everybody up here thinks that the brain works in slow motion. They relax their guard.”

“Listen, did we exhaust all the available information?” I asked. “I'm still more interested in what's going on than in ice cream.”

“Like what? Ah'm an open book.”

“Like do you know when Eddie died?”

“Between ten and eleven, thereabouts, Friday morning.”

“Then I couldn't have—I didn't even know his last name at 10:00
A.M.
” I felt a meaningless, selfish, but nonetheless real sense of relief. “Then tell me, where was Sissy on Monday and Friday?”

“You favor her as a suspect? She has the most depressing alibi I've heard in a while. She was: (a) carpooling her son to school; (b) being a mother-helper in Petey's room; (c) having her hair washed. She was: (d) shopping for a green dress; (e) taking shoes to the cobblers; (f) seeing a printer about the carnival's auction list; (g) attending a meeting of the Friends of some disease—I can't remember… Do I have to go on? That might be out of order, but both days' schedules are like that. Little bits of action, nothin' related to anything else.”

“Shh!” I pointed toward the house. If Beth heard him, she'd feel even more guilty about enjoying her life. “Anything else?”

“The bear. We x-rayed it, did an assay.”

This was great, authentic cloak-and-dagger stuff. “What was inside?” I whispered.

“More bear. Nothing else.”

Beth reappeared with two dishes. Each had three small scoops of ice cream, one chocolate, one vanilla, one strawberry. Just so everyone received satisfaction and high cholesterol. “Karen's taking a little nap,” she said. “Resting up for the big evening.”

The coast was clear. We could do what we liked. Beth, enormously pleased with her orchestration of the day, left again, beaming.

“Anything else you found?” I asked Mackenzie. I took a spoonful of chocolate and promised myself that I would not, absolutely would not, eat three scoops of ice cream.

“No, but there's something else we didn't find. Fingerprints. Not at Eddie's, either. It wasn't raining that time, so I'm not so sure about the raincoat-and-gloves theory. Also, nobody knows if anything's missing from Eddie's apartment. So that's some more noninformation.”

“How about Hayden? The brunch?”

C.K. shrugged. “Far as we can tell, he was there from elevenish until three.”

“So you consider him out of the running? Really out?” I ate some strawberry, then a few spoonfuls of vanilla.

“You're not hiding your disappointment very well. But all right. He's not completely covered, because for almost two hours he excused himself to work on a speech while the club had its business meeting. He wasn't feeling great, didn't want to eat, and they had failed to give him the precise time they needed his bodily presence. He worked upstairs in an empty office.”

“Says who?”

“His campaign manager. Don't say it—I'm not putting much weight on that. But so far, I don't have any evidence that he left the place.”

“Where was he on Friday morning?”

“In his study. Not to be disturbed by anyone. Not even Mama.”

“That's one weak alibi.”