Deadly Dues (19 page)

“So you're keeping your chops up by blubbering in front of me?”

I thought this was somewhat unkind, but couldn't deny that he had a point.

“Could you stop using that insulting word, please?”

I tossed another tissue.

He watched it soar over our heads and land in the Roseville bowl.

“Okay. Impressive. Any other tricks?”

I sent a few more tissues on their way to Roseville. Ryga continued to be impressed, but we were no further ahead than before.

I rather liked his dry humour, but noted that he seemed not at all interested in Lulu Malone or her welfare, other than in a perfunctory way. I didn't know if detectives normally came calling on people who had recently been attacked, but even by stretching my imagination to the extreme lengths of my ego, I couldn't pretend that he was expressing any interest in me, at least in a male-female dynamic. Unbelievably, I appeared to have lost all my social smarts and sexual appeal. Soon, I would start wearing Birkenstocks to cocktail receptions. I would go out in public with baggy T-shirts sporting ominous slogans, and grey wrinkled pants with strings hanging from them. Perhaps I would have pink sponge rollers in my hair. This was my future. I began to get very depressed.

He left, with more advice on securing my doors. Good grief, thanks a lot. Couldn't he just camp out here with a semi-automatic?

I closed the door behind him and leaned my forehead against it, trying to centre myself.

Weapons. I needed weapons.

I went through the condo and came up with the following: the aforementioned rolling pin, which clearly was worth its weight in gold (and I was miffed that Ryga hadn't noted my brilliance in fighting off an assailant with such an unusual weapon), several cheap carving knives (which I hid in a bottom drawer once I realized an assailant would put them to far better use than I would), a badminton racquet, four large stainless steel pots, and a metal helmet I had worn in a summer stock production of
Oh, What a Lovely War!

I went to bed, listening to the sounds of the condo pipes creaking softly in the night and waiting for the sound of more crockery breaking. If a werewolf had howled, it might have been a relief. Finally, I drifted into sleep, into a world of nightmares and terror.

When I awakened, life was pretty well the same as my dreams. Oh well.

“Hi, honey,” warbled my dad.

“Hi, honey,” my mom sang backup.

I knew I was in trouble. This unknown suitor was going to be a problem.

“This isn't a good time,” I said.

“Oh, she has an audition!” my mother said. “We'll call back, won't we, Jimmie?”

My father was less accommodating.

“Sweetie,” he said, “just listen for a moment.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and took deep relaxing breaths, while thinking of self-help books ranging from
The Four Agreements
to
The Dummy's Guide to Filial Interaction.
I loved my parents and had a far healthier relationship with them than most of my contemporaries had with their respective parents. My mother and father had suffered through my eccentric teenage years, hadn't batted an eye when I decided to become an actor instead of a lawyer and had even survived the deranged performance artist I had brought to Thanksgiving dinner in my late teens. My parents were troopers. Yet even though they tried hard to cover up, I knew they still had hopes that, despite the fact I was well past the dewy bride age, I would find The Right Man. To give them credit, I doubted they had fallen into the stereotype of wanting their single daughter married off and no longer a source of embarrassment. I always knew it was more that they defined happiness as being settled into a relationship. Their marriage was volatile and far from settled, but always fun. Neither of them was mean or nasty. They howled away, between bridge hands or mah-jong games. They batted the greenery with croquet mallets, but never threatened each other.

“Yes, Daddy
?” So much for the modern feminist woman, empowered and free of historic and sentimental encumbrance. Ha.

“He's a very nice man,” said my mother emphatically. This usually meant they had lined me up with a hacking heavy smoker who had a serious cholesterol problem and manners issues.

“Harry Shapiro,” my mother said. “He's a prince.”

I sighed. My parents weren't even Jewish. But like me, they were attracted to all that was Jewish. They would have given me a Bat Mitzvah if I hadn't pointed out to them that it wasn't exactly kosher to have this celebration for a Malone.

Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that any Shapiro my parents handpicked for me was not going to be my dream man, an erudite, brilliant violinist/film director and Talmudic scholar who also owned shares in Stuart Weitzman.

How could I redirect this conversation? I considered mentioning that several unknown persons had tried to kill me in the past two days. But then my parents would leap on a plane and come to my defence with croquet mallets. And maybe keel over with heart attacks from the excitement.

I decided to be discreet. My parents loved me, and I loved them, but this was something I had to deal with myself.

I remembered what my university roommate, Alice, had once said to me. “Ultimately, we are all alone. I expect nothing more.” This was just before she eloped with a rock band in a multicoloured van and ended up in a commune where she shared everything—and I mean
everything
—with five hundred people in orange robes.

I signed off with love and a promise (fingers crossed) to call Harry Shapiro.

I didn't want my aging, bridge-obsessed parents to intervene in the recent drama in my life, but I did have faint hopes that my friends would show up as needed.

The problem was that I hadn't told my friends about the recent complications in my life. If only I had e-mailed twenty of my nearest and dearest as soon as we had found Stan, saying something casual and cheery like, “Found a dead body. Stay tuned.” And then I could have followed up with, “A big brute, size twenty shoe, tried to kill me. More later.” And so on. Instead, it now seemed rather weird to e-mail my friends and bring them up to date without seeming demented. If Jerome or Sally or Agnes or George e-mailed me with a story of assorted dead bodies and assaults, my immediate response would be to assume it was a practical joke or a puzzle of some sort, resulting in a fabulous party.

This was, belatedly, an important lesson on the significance of maintaining friendships. Spiritually and emotionally, it is therapeutic to share passages. Intellectually, the exchange of ideas is stimulating. But on a more practical level, in the event that you are involved in murder and mayhem (which is mostly unlikely, unless you are me), it can save you a lot of grief to have friends with whom you can immediately share the gory details and get some feedback. I had been lax in this area. I realized it was because slinging burgers under the Arches didn't lend itself to stimulating forays into conversation. Even though my friends understood my situation, they were embarrassed for me. I was embarrassed for myself. So I had ignored phone messages, shrugged off invitations and generally worked very hard at making myself a miserable, impoverished hermit. Why do we do this to ourselves? I knew, of course, that in times of discouragement, one needs one's friends. Instead, I had removed myself from association with any except those who truly understood my situation: Mitzi, Geoff, Pete, Bent and Gretchen.

I needed to reform.

I turned on the computer and pasted in the addresses of friends from my varied past, scattered in theatres, film studios, art colonies and universities around North America and Europe. I also included a few bars in Paris, Milan and Chicago.

This is what I came up with:
“Suspected of Murder. Innocent. I didn't do it. Size Twenty Thug Killed on Top of Me. No Hanky Panky. Strictly Murder. Don't Worry. Love, Lulu.”

Sigh.

I deleted the message without sending it and turned off the computer. I stared at the blank screen, which pretty well matched my mind. Except that my mind had a blinking cursor that I could not turn off.

Again, I wondered what on earth Stan might have given me that would justify these attacks? Nothing. Germs and the handkerchief. And that hanky was gross. I had thrown it away immediately, as it seemed too laden with mementoes of Stan's cold.

Could there have been something in that hanky? If there was, I had been too grossed out to notice.

That evening, in the Arts Club, I had been trapped in a conversation with a casting director who was complaining about the non-nudity clauses in all Gretchen's contracts, which I found incredibly boring, as it had nothing to do with me. (Unlike me, Gretchen still had the occasional contract in which she could invoke her standard non-nudity wording.) I told the casting director to take it up with Gretchen's agent, and then was waylaid by Stan in the foyer of the club as I was leaving.

“Lu,” he had slurred, leaning over me. I had my hand on the handle of the door and was ready to run, as he had clearly drunk more than usual.

“Lu,” he had slurred again. Then he had sneezed big-time. I caught some of the spray, and prayed that my immune system was still in great shape. I had reminded myself to inhale some zinc lozenges, Echinacea tea and vitamin C when I got home.

“Sorry,” he said. His unfocused eyes kept rolling back to me, as if he were trying to tell me something.
Hello, I have your royalties, and I'm really sorry
would have been nice. He had grabbed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, coughed into it and thrust it into my hand. I was revolted, but more interested in escaping his attention than debating hygiene with him.

“Always liked you, Lu,” he muttered as I made my escape.

I had tossed the handkerchief into the dumpster at the back of the Arts Club as I walked to my car, trying to avoid various nice, emerging, extremely drunken young actors who wanted me to give them tips on starring in commercials. I was so busy gnashing my teeth over the fact that I was no longer the star of anything, anywhere, that I had tossed the handkerchief over my shoulder like a mini-basketball. It had landed in the dumpster with a soft little thump.

Oh, no.

Stan had seemed pretty drunk when he sneezed on me, and even drunker when he had handed me the hanky.

What an idiot. (
Him
. Not me. For a change.) Why did he hand me a handkerchief, which may have had something valuable attached, without mentioning that there might be something inside it?

I tried to remember the handkerchief. It had some weight to it, but after a few glasses of wine, I had been more worried about Stan's airborne germs.

The dumpster contents were long gone, no doubt, after over a week. But maybe not. The Arts Club was on the East Side, where union conflicts had resulted in reduced service for the past month.

I kept reliving the sneeze and the hanky. There didn't seem to be anything relevant in it. Sneeze. Hanky. Sneeze. Hanky. Even my Dora Darling persona couldn't find anything profound and insightful in those images.

Why weren't people stalking Sherilyn instead of me? She was tuned in to Stan's evil mental network. I wasn't. It made no sense.

There was no way I could find that handkerchief.

Unless . . . that dumpster was one of the ones that was only emptied every few weeks because of the union slowdown.

I hauled out my Yellow Pages and did a quick scan and shuffle, looking for something under the category of handymen, handygals, junk retrieval. I even tried Dumpster Diving on Call. The number I dialed was a mistake. The voice at the other end of the phone for
The Garbage Guys, We Go Down for You
asked me if I liked it hard or soft and did I have a legitimate credit card. I slammed down the phone and drew a snarly breath that was part revulsion and part outrage that people who did that probably made more money in a week than I had in the past six months.

I didn't want to do this, but maybe I was going to have to dumpster dive.