Caught Dead in Philadelphia (19 page)

She shook her head. “Of course it would. It would stop the chain. End this business. Avoid shame.”

She was insane. But so was I, because I kept trying to reason with a madwoman. “Mrs. Cole, the police—”

“They know nothing. Not with Liza, not with that—that henchman of hers.” She pushed the gun into my rib cage. “Now drive me home,” she said calmly. “I don't want to shoot you, but I will if you don't cooperate.”

I nodded emphatically. Far be it from me to coerce someone into destroying my vital organs. “The next possible turn,” I whispered. “What henchman?” I added. “What do you mean?” Perhaps I could get her so involved in her own story that she would momentarily forget about the gun in my side. I made my face wide open and expectant, ready to be informed.

She chuckled nastily. “I've never appreciated your innocent act, but this time it's silly. You know who it was. You led me to him, Miss Pepper.”

I was momentarily diverted, dazzled by her politeness. She would call me by my full name even while planning to kill me. Breeding certainly does tell.

“Him? Who?” My voice, when it returned, squeaked, but she didn't mind.

“Eddie, of course. When Liza, when she was, well, upset, she tried to threaten me, said Eddie knew everything and he'd get me. I didn't know who or what she meant. But I knew you would know. You were her closest friend. She stayed with you so often, confided in you. So I wasn't surprised when I heard you say ‘Eddie' at the viewing, and when I heard him say something about Liza. Sissie told me the rest of his name. I thought he might really know something, have something. But there was nothing there. Just his insinuations. They were two of a kind. Trash. Dirt. Nothings.”

She leaned back, looking at the roof of the car but keeping the gun at my side. I tried to comfort myself with reminders that guns were not her weapon of choice, and since there was no fireplace or boiling kettle around, I was probably safe.

“The problem was,” she said, “somebody might have believed them all the same. She was a convincing little actress. Threatening me with a press conference! Demanding money! She should have been grateful for what Hayden and I were doing for her. Instead, she was ready to ruin him and everything we stand for. She said we had used her, as if she were something valuable. But of course you know all that. It was even your house she chose for her disgusting act.”

She listed her grievances with gusto, giving me time.

“I didn't know she was going to call you,” I said, playing her game.

“She didn't. She called Hayden, but he wasn't home. I returned the call, invited her to lunch. I was polite and gracious. And she said she should have called me in the first place because I would do just fine. She wanted to talk, she said. Talk! Threaten! Lie!”

I could see Mrs. Cole arriving at my house, dressed in a spring luncheon ensemble, a flowered hat on her head and white gloves. A gentlewoman in gloves wouldn't leave prints.

“Get me home.”

For her own obscure reasons, Mrs. Cole didn't want to kill me while we were driving. If need be, I would therefore drive throughout eternity. “That's a one-way street,” I said, passing a possible turnoff.

“Oh.” Mrs. Cole's voice was small and obedient. She only broke the big laws.

“Mrs. Cole,” I said calmly, “how can you possibly benefit by doing…this?” I didn't yet know what “this” might be, so I left it vague, unwilling to plant ideas in her mind, although the gun at my side did indicate a certain seriousness of purpose. “You aren't protecting your son or his name if you—”

“Of course I'm protecting my son. He doesn't deserve it, the fool. I've spent my life saving him, pushing and prodding and having to take care of his every move. He hasn't got his father's courage, his family's ambition. He's…angry with me now. Suspicious.”

“Then if you—if I—if something happens, he'll tell the police.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I know him. He won't do a thing.”

We were seconds away from Lancaster Avenue and relative safety, or at least noise and light. I felt as if years had passed since I'd gotten into this car, but I realized it had been only a matter of minutes. Maybe Mackenzie wasn't even suspicious. Maybe he thought a woman could primp for hours in a Porta-Jane.

But I needed only a little bit more time. “Mrs. Cole, even if he won't do anything, the police will know who…did it to me.” My voice trailed off. It is difficult to discuss one's own untimely death in a detached, clinical manner.

“They will not know a thing.”

“But this is your car. That is your gun. You won't get away with it.”

“I have no intention of getting away with anything. Just of getting on with it. We are both going to die and end this entire business once and for all. You have to die. You know too much. But I will not go to prison, Miss Pepper. Coles do not go to prison.”

As interesting sociologically as that last idea was, I had another, more pressing line of questions.

“How?” I whispered. “How are we…going to…?”

“There is a dangerous, unfortunate embankment on the approach to my house. We're going over it. You'll already be dead, you see. I will then set the car in position, use the gasoline I have ready in the trunk, and release the brake. An accident, that's all. Ascribable to my sedation, perhaps.”

“They'll wonder why I was there,” I began.

“Let them wonder!”

That about ended that avenue of thought. I tried a new tack, a few civilized words against the project. I'd appeal to her patrician standards. “Mrs. Cole, it's a foolish, meaningless, vile thing to do!”

“Foolish? Vile? How dare you speak to me that way?”

“How can you dare try to kill me! You can't go around pushing people any which way. You're no better than anyone else. You have no more rights than I do.” I kept driving and spouting elements of democracy, knowing I sounded like a fool, but a gun in one's side can wreak havoc with one's rhetoric.

“You—you're just like her,” she said, her skin mottling. The gun wavered, lost pressure. She pulled in her breath in a broken, quivering gasp and steadied herself. The gun went back into position, more deeply, pressing hard and painfully against my rib cage.

The light was green ahead. I floored the accelerator, turned right, and looked with adoration at the carnival lights winking and blinking up ahead.

“Get off this street!” she screamed. “Do you hear me? You take me home this instant!”

But no matter what I'd ever said, I wanted to spend Saturday night at the fair, and I was going to. I took a deep breath in preparation for the next two blocks. “Thanks for the invitation,” I said calmly, “but I'd feel out of place at your house, so I'm not coming over tonight.”

“That's very unwise, Miss Pepper. But it doesn't matter. I see that now. I can be flexible. You'll die now instead of later. I have nothing to lose either way.”

The gun left my ribs, and I turned. Mrs. Cole's eyes were fierce, fanatical. She bit her lip to steady herself as she raised the barrel to my head.

“Don't do it,” I said.

“Don't tell me what to do.” She squinted and took a deep breath. She was probably yearning for something to bash me with. Guns weren't her thing.

We were chugging away in deep fast traffic. I was afraid to slam on the brakes and leap out because I couldn't judge the impact of the gun pointing at me, but it seemed a toss-up between being shot in the side or the back, depending on how quickly I moved. I had long since known that logic had no place in the woman's thinking.

“
Nobody
tells me what to do,” she said. Her breath was somewhat labored.

She was right. Nobody did. Not ever. I suddenly saw Liza and Eddie, both paralyzed by bedrock politeness, stunned like animals in headlights while the little old lady advanced, aristocratic, regal, unshakable, and elderly. A deadly combination.

I had no time and only one possible weapon.

“Screw you, bitch!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Who the hell are you? You're nothing, and you're nobody! You're a murderer! You're
trash
!”

Her nostrils flared, her mouth opened speechlessly. Nobody had ever spoken to her that way. Nobody had spoken to her parents or grandparents that way. I had just upended the rule of generations. She gaped in wonder.

I seized the moment. I smacked down at the gun and it fell, heavily, across my right foot.

I reached for it, but so did she. I gave her first dibs.

I lifted my foot and stomped as hard as I could, down onto her hand as it stretched across the accelerator.

We took off, beginning the first Lancaster Avenue Grand Prix.

“You can't!” she screamed, breathing heavily, clawing at my leg with her free hand, twisting to pull herself free of my foot.

“I can! I am!” I shouted as we zoomed through the intersection. “I'm not dying for your honor or anything else!” Where was a cop when I needed one? I wanted to be pulled over, arrested, lectured, put on trial. Rescued. But instead, cars honked and people shouted, and I headed for the carnival's lights. “Please, God,” I said as shops and sidewalks blurred by, “everybody be at the auction, because—” I turned the wheel to the right, sharply.

She screamed, bringing her left arm up to my face, banging my head against the window. Her fingers clawed at my eyes. She was incredibly strong and agile.

The steering wheel in my left hand convulsed, but I couldn't think about it as I pried her fingers. There was a part of me still fixated on the fact that she was an old woman—not a fierce male attacker, against whom I could be ruthless.

And then I mentally said what the hell and bit down on her hand until she yelped and yowled and pulled it away. For a flash, before the fist was back, hitting and pounding my temple, I saw Beth's food stand zoom directly toward the windshield. I pulled at the wheel, but not enough. We amputated its right side. Glass and food flew into the air, over the car.

There was no time for regrets. We were heading toward—we were in and through—a game booth. Stuffed tigers and elephants banged onto the hood and ricocheted onto the ground. I didn't know where to turn. We neared the edge of the carnival, but I wasn't going to leave it. I might die there, but I wouldn't leave it. I turned the wheel again, never releasing pressure on Mrs. Cole's hand and the accelerator.

“Let me go!” she screamed. She started to cry, and she sounded like an angry child having a tantrum. “Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!”

The silent merry-go-round was directly ahead. I pulled violently on the wheel to get the car onto the walkway.

But nobody had designed the carnival for a runaway Mercedes. I heard a heartrending scream of metal against wood, and the car ground to a halt. The passenger side was now part of the decoration of the calliope, and a wide-eyed silver horse looked in through the smashed side window.

It was time to leave.

I threw open my car door and ran toward the supermarket, the auction, people, screaming for help. How could they not have heard the crash? How could the auction be so compelling that they'd stay with it through this?

My screams were drowned out by the sounds of more metal being loosened, more glass and wood crushing as the car started up again.

I ran faster.

Then suddenly, I was bathed in light. I turned and saw headlights, or one headlight, coming toward me. The Cole car was designed to last as long as the name. Nothing could stop it or its driver. Not a side door hanging loose. Not broken glass or garlands of doll innards and food. It was still running and it was aimed directly at me.

I ran toward the shops, the pavement at the back of the fair, then sideways, toward the auction.

She would get me, I suddenly knew. Whatever confidence and bravado I'd clung to disappeared, washed out in the headlight. She would crush me against the shops, killing us both, as she'd always intended.

And then the militia arrived.

I heard it before I saw it. Footsteps, screams, shouts. Hundreds of feet, chairs toppling far away and above it, over the microphone, Hayden's voice shouting desperately, “Calm down, everyone. Let the security people find out what—calm down, please.”

“Terrorists!” a woman shouted. “Bombs!” another voice said.

People who had run toward the rubble shrieked. I didn't stop to console them or to apologize. I headed straight into the mass of the crowd and kept running.

He was maybe the tenth person I passed. “Amanda!” he shouted. “Amanda!” He grabbed my shoulders and held on. It was hard for me to stop my feet. “Whaaa…whasit …ahbe…” His words blurred into one stunned drawl.

“It's her. It was her all along. She's going to—get these people back or she'll kill us all! She doesn't care!”

“Who? What?”

I waved my hand behind me, then turned. The car was gone.

A security guard appeared from behind Denim Heaven. He coughed apologetically. “I—there seemed nothing I could do when I saw what was…” He stopped and waited for us to make him feel better.

Mackenzie glared at the man, looked at me, looked at the dark sky. Then he spoke. “Yay-uss. Well, now you can just go call the local police.” The man slinked off.

A second guard, pale and shaken, waved his gun in the air from his hiding place nearby. “Gone!” he shouted. “Drove right through!” He pointed to the ruins of a booth. The ground was wet and covered with tiny goldfish. They should have let us catch them earlier.

“She killed them, too,” I said. “Killed them all. Mrs. Cole. She's the guilty one. Except they were all ambitious, and who's to say? That's a good question. If you were to judge, then who? Liza? Macbeth? Eddie? Fate?”

“Are you all right?” He held me close. “It's over,” he whispered. “You're safe. You solved it. You're the heroine of the day.”