Christietown (2 page)

he lights sparkled overhead as the man I loved spun me
around the dance floor. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. His was pounding, too.

“‘You’d be so nice to come home to,’” he murmured into my ear.

“‘It had to be you,’” I whispered.

“‘I’ve got you under my skin,’” he whispered back.

“No way,” I said with a shudder. “They played that one at my first wedding.”

“Must I remind you that we are dancing the tango, Ms. Caruso?” came a voice from across the room. “Sexy! Earthy! Drama!”

Lou Berman, aka Le Duc de Danse. I tuned him out. We’d found him in the Yellow Pages.

“We’ve only got one lesson left in the Romance Package, Cece.” My fiancé, Peter Gambino, pressed hard on the small of my back. “We have to make a decision about the first dance soon.”

“Arms high, Detective! You are a matador!” Lou stomped his feet, then whipped a McDonald’s bag out of the trash and whirled it triumphantly overhead.

“‘I Get a Kick Out of You?’” I suggested.

On cue, Gambino kicked me in the shins.

“Go with it, Ms. Caruso!” Lou cried. “You are the wounded bull!”

Not exactly the wedding-day scenario I had in mind.

“It’s ten o’clock on the nose, people.” Lou’s wife, Liz Berman, emerged from the back office and flicked the CD player to Off. “Time to hit the road.”

Gambino and I disentangled ourselves as Lou folded him
self into a ratty metal chair. Liz sat down at her desk near the water cooler and knocked back her regular evening cocktail of antihistamines and acetominophen. Then, shooting Lou the evil eye, she got up to put the McDonald’s bag back in the trash. She was the detail person.

“So what do you think of these kids?” Lou mopped a suspi
ciously smooth brow.

“They’re really coming along,” Liz said with no perceptible enthusiasm.

Gambino turned to me. “I told you. We’re going to kick butt at next week’s lesson.”

I patted his arm. “I think we should avoid the word
kick
.”

Lou looked dubious, in any case. Next week’s lesson was the foxtrot, the most difficult of all ballroom dances, requiring constant shifts in rhythm from slow to fast to medium.

“If anyone can teach you two to foxtrot, it’s Lou,” Liz conceded.

“You kill me, doll.” He went over and wrapped an arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet. Then the two of them—tall, plump, congested Liz and tall, thin, bottle-bronzed
Lou—began to whirl around the room. Gambino and I stared,

openmouthed. They didn’t need music. They
were
music.

“Married twenty-two years,” Lou said, dipping Liz.

“Twenty-two years,” she repeated, upside down.

That was about how long it had been since
I’d
last walked down the aisle—young, pregnant, and dumb.

Dumb enough to think winning Miss Asbury Park, New Jersey, would be my ticket to eternal bliss.

Dumb enough to blow off college to put my then-husband through grad school.

Dumb enough—well, just dumb enough.

I wanted to believe I’d learned something since then. I looked over at Gambino. He was kind, smart, funny. He had me, and still wanted me.

Yes, I’d learned something since then.

“While we’re on the subject of killing,” said Liz, pulling out of her husband’s embrace, “get a load of this.”

I’d thought we were on the subject of love everlasting but I wasn’t about to interrupt Liz, who discouraged that sort of thing. She peeled off her worn leather jacket, took a puff of her inhaler, then wrapped a fuzzy white scarf tight around her neck.

“My dears,” she said, “it’s truly a mystery to me.” Her voice was suddenly frail, her nose longer, her skin pinker. She pulled a pair of knitting needles out of her bag. “But I so often seem to get mixed up in things that are really no concern of mine. Crimes, I mean, and peculiar happenings.” She leaned her head a little to one side, like a cockatoo fluffing its feathers. “Nothing, of course, a nice linseed poultice couldn’t cure.”

“Miss Jane Marple!” I exclaimed.

“Damn straight,” she said, then sneezed. “Guess I’ve got to double up on the Claritin for Saturday.”

Saturday.

Saturday was a big deal.

I was dreading Saturday.

But at least Saturday was a distraction from the bigger deals in my life, which for the record would be:

1. Waiting to hear from my editor, Sally, about
   Poison Book
   , my biography of the mystery writer Agatha Christie. I’d sent the four-hundred-and-two-page man
   uscript off to her exactly eleven days, ten hours, and thirty-five minutes ago, not that I was counting.
   
1. Choosing the right ensemble for the upcoming baby shower I was hosting for my daughter, Annie. The champagne-colored, disco-era halter dress I had in mind didn’t exactly scream “grandma.” But I was barely forty years old. Did I really have to go for double-knit slacks? Or worse yet, a muu-muu?
   
1. Getting married.
   
2. Getting married (it merits two mentions).
   

Like I was saying, thank God for Saturday.

Saturday would mark the opening festivities of Phase 2 of Christietown, a Golden Age mystery-themed housing develop
ment on the sun-baked fringes of Antelope Valley, just east of Los Angeles.

I was in charge of Saturday.

In charge of the clotted cream, the scones, and the Cornish pasties; in charge of the yapping Yorkies and stubby Corgis; in charge of the larkspurs, hollyhocks, and snapdragons lining the neat brick path up to the Vicarage (which would be the sales office); and worse yet, in charge of the original, inter
active Murder Mystery Tea, starring—yes—Liz Berman (aka
La Duchesse de Danse) as Agatha Christie’s beloved amateur

sleuth, Miss Marple.

Everyone had a part.

Lou Berman was the butler. He didn’t do it.

Wren Abbott, the dance studio’s frizzy-haired receptionist, was an eleven-year-old with psychic abilities.

My second-best friend, Bridget, was her governess, Estella Raven, who was rude and spirited and whose studied insolence covered a great fear.

My best friend, Lael, master pastry chef and inadvertent sexpot, was the vicar’s wife.

My fiancé, Peter Gambino, was the soldier of fortune.

My gardener, Javier Gomez, was Sir Guy Pilkington of Gossington Hall. He was going to be in a wheelchair for the duration of the play.

And yes, it’s true, my neighbors, seventy-year-old twin sisters and ex-showgirls Lois and Marlene—known in their former lives as Hibiscus and Jasmine—would be dancing onstage for the first time in thirty years.

With the exception of Javier, who inexplicably had a Screen Actors Guild card, nobody was being paid. I’d blown my budget on expensive sherry and a large plasterboard facade of Gossington Hall, with real mullioned windows. So instead of hiring actors, I’d called in my chits. It didn’t take much con
vincing. These people were dying to ham it up in front of an audience.

It being tax season, my accountant Mr. Keshigian did not have a part, though I’d been tempted to cast him as Sir Guy’s cousin Jasper, the black sheep of the family. Mr. Keshigian, I should explain, was the one who got me the gig in the first place. Mr. Keshigian is concerned about my finances. Writing biographies of dead mystery writers—as he reminds me every
time we go over my deductions—is not a lucrative profession. So when he recently found himself attending a real estate semi
nar where the developer of Christietown was making a presen
tation, he didn’t waste any time. He cornered the guy during cocktail hour and by the time the baked Brie was gone, had me moonlighting as an event planner.

Like I dared argue.

My new boss was named Ian Christie.

Ian Christie was a beet-faced Englishman who claimed (vociferously) to be related (distantly) to the Queen of Crime herself. Fat chance. Agatha Christie was the world’s best-known mystery writer and, not counting Shakespeare, the all-time best-selling author in any genre. Christietown, however, was Ian’s baby, a master-planned, amenity-packed, Cotswoldsesque cozyland tailor-made for its target demographic: mystery fans, retirees, British expatriates in search of the midday sun. The fact that Phase 1 had been only a middling success (less than half of the 125 existing houses had been sold) had proved no impediment whatsoever to the initiation of Phase 2, which was vastly more ambitious: 500 new houses plus a church and a High Street, with a butcher, a baker, a post office, an apoth
ecary, a pub, and a locksmith.

All this I learned several weeks ago over lemonade and sticky buns at the Vicarage. There were already themed mugs, night-lights, key chains, picture frames, illuminated water globes, and T-shirts, all bearing the logo Ian Christie had designed himself: a white-haired, hatchet-wielding spinster sitting inside a spinning teacup, the word
Christietown
spelled out in drip
ping blood. But that was just the beginning.

Ian was thinking big: housing developments in similar communities across the U.S., maybe even Europe, and best
of all, a Christietown credit card. He salivated at the mere mention of the credit card. His plump hands flew; his pale eyes popped. While waiting for him to settle down, I’d found myself wondering if the chief investors—two Israelis rumored to be ex-Mossad operatives—were equally optimistic. The real estate market wasn’t exactly booming these days. And I couldn’t imagine there were that many British expats roaming the southern California desert looking for storybook cottages with pseudothatched roofs. But that wasn’t my business. I sipped more lemonade. I shoveled another sticky bun in my mouth. “Not my business” was my new mantra. By the end of the afternoon, Ian was congratulating himself for having hired me. Now all I had to do was deliver. That part was my business.

“You hungry?” Gambino asked as we got in his car.

“Starved.”

“What do you think about a chili dog at Pink’s?”

Pink’s, on Melrose and La Brea, was a sentimental favorite of ours. One of our first dates had taken place on its sixtieth anniversary, when we’d waited for four hours in the hot sun for sixty-cent chili dogs. Pink’s was famous for them. Orson Welles ate eighteen at a single sitting, which was a record. Orson Welles probably didn’t care if he got food all over his pants. But I had on a seventies white jersey dress with bell sleeves, which wouldn’t be the same covered in chili grease.

“I’ll have fries,” I said. “Life’s a compromise.”

The wrong choice of words, as it turned out.

Gambino took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Then he put them back on in slow motion. I knew what that meant.

“If you have something to say, Cece,” he said, not looking at me, “just come out and say it.”

We’d been arguing nonstop about the wedding. I was ready to march into city hall and be done with it, but Gambino wanted something more traditional. Thus, the dancing lessons. And the meetings with Father Joe. And the ongoing discus
sion with my neighbor Butch, who had volunteered his back
yard for the reception. I’d thought compromising was a sign of character. Apparently not.

“Orson Welles narrated the third film version of
Ten Little Indians
, did you know that?” It seemed simpler to avoid the issue.

“No,” Gambino said sharply. He got onto the I–10 heading east.

“It starred Elke Sommer, the kiss of death,” I added.

“Uh-huh.” He was doing deep nose breathing now, a bad sign.

“Orson Welles’s ghost haunts Sweet Lady Jane.” Sweet Lady Jane, our favorite bakery, was located next door to the old site of Ma Maison, where Orson Welles ate lunch every day until he died.

“Cece,” said Gambino, “we need to talk.”

“Oh, no. I forgot my shoes.” Lou had taken one look at my platforms and insisted I change into Liz’s dancing slippers before I twisted an ankle. Everyone except me had been excited that Liz and I wore the same size. “They’re collectibles. Kork-Ease. From high school. We have to go back.”