I fumbled with my coat, hoping he couldn’t see my embarrassed blush.
“Sue Bertram’s givin’ them a ride home. All of them. They win this round.”
My face no longer felt like I had sunstroke, so I looked at him. “I’m glad,” I said. Mackenzie seemed overly impressed with his own largesse. Saint C.K., freeing the innocent. “And very surprised,” I added nastily.
“You think we’re monsters? Lack all Christmas spirit? Ready to lock them in leg irons? Sometimes you disappoint me. Anyway, what’d be the point? There’s no case. They’d be out by nightfall, and we’d look like jerks. Newspapers would love it, wouldn’t they though?”
“However you feel about their guilt or innocence—”
“Hers.”
“Laura? You insist on Laura?” He said nothing, so I finished buttoning my coat, disgusted with him.
“By the way,” he said, “Susan talked to the aunt, who’s calling the shrink so Laura can get some help. This is kind of unusual, the abuser being dead and all, so normal practice, separating the two and such, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides—”
“I know. I know. Holidays.”
“Well, then, everything’s taken care of.” He checked his watch. Case closed. “Any more questions?” He thought he was endearing, irresistible. Instead, he was insufferable.
I had an attack of S.S.S. The dread Sudden Stranger Syndrome. I looked at this man I’d known for months—my lover and boon companion—and deep inside, a shocked voice asked, “Who the hell is he?”
It was not a new experience. The longer I am single—and the more it happens, the longer I’m going to stay single—the more familiar S.S.S. becomes. It generally speeds the newly perceived other into the past tense.
“I do indeed have another question,” I said. “So should you. Like—who really killed Alexander Clausen?”
“Ah,” Mackenzie said. “Yay-uss. You would say that.”
Three hours later, I was back at home, dropping packages on the sofa, throat scratchy, cheeks hard with cold, sniffling and thinking of nothing except a warm bath. A hot bath. A boiling bath.
“Why,” I asked Macavity, “are all the hot tubs in California, where nobody even understands what freezing means?” The cat, who had contempt for all water, anywhere, and presumably for people who steeped themselves in the wretched stuff, yawned.
I glanced at the mail, then tossed the lot of it into the wicker basket by the phone, to be reexamined, someday. Three cards with institutional return addresses and two premature postholiday sale announcements. No more safe-sex mailings from Mom. Maybe she knew that sex wasn’t an issue I had to deal with this evening.
The day that had begun in icy radiance had long since dimmed into blustery, bone-cracking frigidity. “Too cold for snow,” a salesman had said. “Too bad. No white Christmas.” I suggested that we fake it by lining up all our frostbitten body parts.
“Who are you, Scrooge?” he’d asked—after I had paid.
I was. And not only that, but I had a Dickensian ailment now, the ague. Whatever that was, I felt it in my bones.
I wanted brandy and a hot tub, followed by a quick flight to the Tahitian beach on Mackenzie’s calendar. I wanted Mackenzie to say “Don’t go to Florida.” He could slur the words all to hell. I’d understand.
Only the brandy seemed possible. Until I remembered that somewhere in the fat little portfolio that was supposed to organize my personal and professional lives, there was still an entry on the page labeled “Domestic Errands.” “Buy brandy,” it said. However, having written it down, I then forgot about it. I wasn’t even sure where the Organizer Portfolio itself was, and my life was as rumpled as ever.
Eventually, I noticed the blinking red light of my answering machine. I still wasn’t used to the idea of being on call whether home or away, let alone used to the machine itself. First, I pressed the memo button by mistake. It recorded my irritated mumbles. Then I pushed fast forward. Finally, I found playback.
There was a worried call from Alma Leary, asking her sister’s whereabouts. I didn’t need to answer that one since Alice and Laura were long since home.
An anonymous message—“Damn machines!”—from someone even less in tune with the times than I was.
Sasha was terse. “More telephone tag,” she said. “But I’m off to Atlantic City to gamble. Spell that g-a-m-b-o-1, please. Shake loose No-Name and join me.” However, she left no number.
Another confused message from the Southlands. “This is Beatrice Pepper,” it began. “Your mother.”
Even Macavity, warming my ankles with predinner rubs, looked amused.
Beatrice Pepper continued. “I don’t like this. It’s confusing. Oh! Yes. I’m supposed to tell you the—it’s three—ah, three fourteen—no, fifteen. Saturday. But why does that matter, Amanda?” She allowed herself a histrionic sigh so I’d know how selfless she was to put up with my eccentricities, then continued. “Your sweater was corning along just fine until Daddy said the arms looked too thin and I listened to him, even though what does he know about things like that? So I redid them, and then I realized that they weren’t thin. They were right. The rest was huge. I think maybe I got it mixed up with Beth’s maternity sweater. And I wanted to give it to you next week.” A sigh as large as the sweater must be. Then her whole tone perked up. “But of course you won’t need it here, it’s so warm and sunny, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a little late. I’ll measure you when you’re here. Although the wool is getting a bit frayed, dear.”
I was amazed the wool was not yet pure lint.
“It doesn’t feel right, talking to a machine. Call me. We can’t wait to see you. Oh and—is there time left to talk more? I’ll try.” She spoke very rapidly now. “Good news—Molly, the lady across the courtyard who took ceramics with me?—her son just separated from his wife—a terrible woman—and he’ll be here the whole time you are. A podiatrist. He’s no movie star, understand, and he has a little stutter, but honestly, after a while, you hardly notice.”
I wanted brandy and all I had was vanilla extract. I wanted Tahiti and was being offered a condominium pool and a homely, stuttering foot doctor. Probably my longed-for hot tub would translate into the water heater’s exploding and flooding the basement.
“Consider this official confirmation, all right?” the next message began. No salutation, no identification. “Eight o’clock tonight at Lissabeth’s. Meet you there.”
A wrong number, alas. I’d read a profile of Lissabeth’s. Peach and jade decor and Philadelphia Renaissance cuisine. Enticing.
Mackenzie and I seldom dined. We ate out spontaneously and at his odd hours. Most of the time, we ran to South Street and brought back cheesesteaks. With fried onions. Ketchup. Oil dripping from the rolls. Or hoagies. Very Philadelphia. Very good. But not at all Lissabeth’s, where mention of the peasant excess of a Philly Steak would induce the vapors.
Maybe I should go anyway, claim the meal by right of answering-machine message.
Macavity nibbled experimentally on my ankle, reminding me that he was a hungry carnivore and domestication went only so far. I walked around the half-cabinets that demark the kitchen, performed culinary wizardry with a can opener and dropped the results into the cat dish. When I straightened back up, I saw a slip of paper on the counter and the message, “Lissabeth’s—8:00.” In my handwriting.
This wasn’t déjà vu, but what was it? Bad science fiction? Hadn’t I read this story? Seen this show? Wasn’t that Rod Serling walking out from behind the sofa?
I stared at the paper until my memory jump started and I remembered writing the restaurant’s name, twisting out of my coat while I talked on the phone. The doorbell had been ringing, Alice had been confessing and Nick-from-the-party had been offering to swap food for interview data.
So I wasn’t in the Twilight Zone, after all. In fact, I wasn’t in such bad shape. Lissabeth’s wasn’t Tahiti, but it was a lot closer and a lot more possible. And I was glad to give Nick a second glance, especially as viewed through the gaping holes in Mackenzie’s character. Saturday night was looking up.
* * *
The soup was liquid yin and yang signs separated by julienned beets. I prodded it daintily, loath to deface a work of art. I noticed that Nick also ate carefully, using his arm gingerly. “Tennis,” he said. “A friend belongs to an indoor club. We’ve been playing a lot. Unfortunately, my elbow is nearly as bad as my game.”
Modesty, I was sure. The man vibrated with energy. He’d be a whiz on the courts, a blur of action.
We exchanged histories so that I knew he was a native Philadelphian, nearing forty, divorced, no kids and “into real estate.” I got a sense of a few lucrative deals punctuating long, dry periods. He lived in South Philly in a small house he’d fixed up and was an avid cook. The combination of quirky, energetic entrepreneur, homemaker and Oxlips fiction writer had potential.
After a time, Nick returned to his task, asking me if I’d liked Alexander Clausen and what kind of person I would call him. Anything like his public image? Did I know anything about his history or background? Where had he come from? How had he gotten the money to buy his first franchise?
Since I knew nothing, it was easy enough answering. Or not answering, as the case more often was. We had already done a little dance around the subject of Laura’s personality, psychology and alleged pyromania. I was glad Nick Riley didn’t know me well enough to recognize how uncharacteristic my terseness was.
“Frankly,” he said, “it isn’t hard to read between the lines and find out there isn’t any Santa Claus. Or wasn’t.”
“Is this some kind of exposé, then?”
“I don’t know. It’ll be what it turns out to be.”
“I thought you admired him. The other night, you were so on, so enthusiastic about him.”
He shrugged. “Admired his empire, his accomplishments, not him. I didn’t know him. What about you? What did you think of him?”
“I didn’t know him enough to have an opinion.” I had become a sanctimonious hypocrite and liar. My dislike of Sandy Clausen was set in granite. I simply didn’t want to see it set in print.
The salad was a chicly arranged culinary punishment. A tart dressing coated arugula, bitter cress and a wrinkled, pursed mushroom that was either an exotic rarity or rotten.
“Have you been teaching ever since college?”
“Before I started at Philly Prep, I copyedited, tried PR, and wrote speeches for a banker, among other things. It wasn’t exactly clear career tracking.”
“Do you enjoy teaching?”
“No. I do it for the money.”
His high-wattage smile escaped the confines of his beard.
“What about you?” I said. “Are you indeed in bloom?”
“Pardon?”
“At the party—don’t you remember? Something was just about to happen, and you were so excited it was contagious. You called yourself a late bloomer, and I thought you said the blooming was imminent. As if it were about to happen right before my eyes.”
He studied his empty salad plate. Then he beamed out that smile of his. “Guess I’m still a bud. One thing about being a late bloomer, though—there’s no rush.”
The waiter deposited a dish of angel’s hair pasta in front of him.
My veal scallop was the size of an unostentatious earring. The vegetables were all baby somethings. I felt like the Jolly Green Giant committing infanticide, whomping down in one swallow a thumb-sized ear of newborn corn, a generation of toddler carrots, a fetal eggplant. A bundle of anorexic string-beans was tied with a pimento bow. There was a great deal of lovely china plate visible even before I began eating. I was still hungry when I finished.
“You should write about the places they grow these crops,” I suggested. “Dollhouse farms that might fit under this table. Tiny tractors the size of my hand.”
The lovely smile again. “Which reminds me—I already have an article to write.” He lifted a hank of angel’s hair. “Laura started that fire,” he said abruptly. “I’m positive.”
I reminded myself that his was pure speculation. So far, the papers were talking about an accident. I frowned.
“Come on,” Nick said. “Somebody told me you have a policeman friend. What’s he think?” The grin invited common sense. “I won’t quote you. What’s the statistical probability of a family’s having two major, accidental fires?”
“I don’t know about statistics. I know about Laura.”
“You’re overly emotional, subjective, about her.”
“She’s my kid—my student. Of course I care.”
“Your kid’s a pyromaniac. Now, a murderer, too.”
Mackenzie thought so. Now Nick. Everybody was going to. Even without her compulsive confessing.
I ordered dessert out of pure hunger. What arrived was a miniaturist’s dream. Three tarts, each no bigger than a fingernail, one filled to the brim with half a single grape, one stuffed with a sliver of kiwi and one straining to contain three blueberries. Nouvelle dieting.
“What made you pick Clausen for your article?” I asked. “There are so many more interesting, more important people in the city.”
Nick had a thimbleful of chocolate mousse, the bud in a sauce-painting of a flower. “I don’t think you understand how much power he was accumulating. He was on his way to owning and running the city. That’s what’s interesting, the power.”
“How’d you know about him?”
“Everybody knows about him. He made sure of that. But, a more interesting question is whether we just ate dinner or a round of tapas, or appetizers? You know, I’m a terrific cook. I should have done it myself.”
I had taken a cab to the restaurant because I couldn’t bear the idea of walking from my parking lot to my no-parking street in the freezing dark. I was going to take another cab home, but Nick drove me and, to my relief, declined my offer of coffee or drinks. I was exhausted. And hungry.
I thanked him for dinner and the evening. “That cop friend of yours,” he said. “How serious is it?”
“I have no idea.” Sometimes I actually told the truth.
“Then could I call you again?”
“That would be nice,” I said, again as honestly as I could figure.
“Great. I’ll cook for you next time.”
I was not going to give Mackenzie the key to my social life and have him let it rust. He was a difficult man with an impossible job, and I was hard pressed to remember what, aside from pure lust, had ever attracted me to him.