A Line To Murder (A Puget Sound Mystery) (7 page)

Grinning, I leaned over to Andy. “Ruth told me it’s all they can do to get those camels to walk across the marketplace like that. There’s been a lot of mumbled cussing over their stubbornness and their spitting.”

Andy grinned back. Before he could respond, Jesus forced the moneylenders from the temple and there was a great deal of action with pounding horses and pigeons leaving overturned crates to fill the air. After an hour, the play broke for a brief greeting from the minister. When he was done, music came out of the loudspeakers. Intermission. People headed to the bathrooms. Dominic wanted to go down front to look at things more closely. Soon he talked and gestured with some other kids.

Since I’d done the inviting, drove and bought the tickets, I felt no obligation to act like this was a date.

Instead, I relaxed and smiled. “Kind of neat, isn’t it? When you think of the rehearsal time required, and people supplying the animals and being responsible for them, it’s really a commitment.”

“Yes, it is. I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it before.”

“That’s what you get for reading the daily instead of the weekly newspaper.” I laughed. “The daily doesn’t cover local events as well as it used to.”

“That’s for sure. I sometimes wish I lived in the days of newspaper battles, story scoops and kids on the corner shouting ‘extry.’”

“Like the Jack Lemon movie,
Front Page
, or some of those great old B movies from RKO. I know what you mean. I wouldn’t have wanted to live before aspirin and penicillin, though.”

It was Andy’s turn to laugh. “I might agree with you there. Plus sleeping pills, while you’re at it. I should invest in pharmaceutical companies. I’m their best customer these days.” He became more sober. “Thanks for letting me come tonight. This is nice. It’s so normal.”

“How’s Dominic doing? He seems okay.”

“He either hounds me with a thousand questions or sticks to me like glue, but he doesn’t say a thing. I could kill Isca for getting him in this mess.” Andy stopped abruptly. “Bad choice of words, I guess. Anyway, I’ve been taking him to a therapist, in case he wants to talk about things he can’t talk about with me. She says he’s coping well.”

“What a good idea. I never would have thought of that.”

Andy looked gratified. “I’m worried about the police, though.”

We were interrupted by the lights blinking a warning and people stepping on our toes as they returned to their seats. Dominic left the kids he’d been talking to, walking in exaggeratedly long strides back up the stairs. He told us, with some satisfaction, it smelled down in front “like animal poop.” Andy chided him and I laughed. Kids loved being grossed out and talking about it. At least, my brother and I always had.

The second act was considerably more violent than the first. The jail caught on fire; soldiers whipped a prisoner and plenty of blood capsules broke on his back. Judas ran through the town, after the Last Supper, crying his remorse over “thirteen pieces of silver” and hung himself from a tree, with plenty of kicks and twitches before he died. Jesus and two other men were crucified on top of a hill. Smoke bombs and fireworks went off at Jesus’ tomb as Mary rolled away an enormous fake rock.

When at last Jesus rose, a cherry picker lifted him high over the stage. Smoke swirled around and he extended his arms in blessing. Glorious music filled the air and Dominic, who was sitting on the edge of his chair, breathed a sigh.

“Well, what’d ya think?” I asked as we stood, stretched our legs and waited our turn to blend in with the exiting crowd.

“Pretty neat.”

I grinned over his head at Andy.

Because we had seats fairly close to the front, we were among the last to exit the amphitheater. Outside the theater’s entrance, some cast members mingled, shaking hands with people and thanking them for coming. Ruth stood with her son, and I edged toward them.

“Hello, Mercedes,” Ruth said. “Hi, Dominic.”

“Hi.”

“This is my son, Peter.”

Peter was still in his costume, and Dominic looked at him enviously while I introduced Andy.

“I was very sorry to hear about Isca,” she said.

“Yes, thank you.”

After a brief, uncomfortable silence, Ruth asked, “Did you notice the fellow who played Jesus? What did you think?”

“I thought he was wonderful,” I answered, while at the same time Andy said, “Very good. Very believable.”

Our choices of words were polar opposites. I talked in hyperbole; he talked like the old character actor, Clifton Webb.

“We’re really proud of him. This is his first year.”

The people behind us began jostling and I glanced at Andy. “I think we’re a roadblock.” I turned to Ruth. “Call me, huh? Let’s plan something.”

“I will.” She smiled, before turning to the people behind us.

Andy, Dominic and I wound our way through the cars. One of life’s rules is a car in a parking lot is never found where you think it should be. We looked around for a few seconds.

“I know I parked next to a red van.”

“What? A red van. Is that all the attention you paid?”

“That was a joke.”

“I think we’re right down here.”

As we turned down an aisle and headed in the direction Andy indicated, I stopped abruptly, causing him to walk into me. Driving away was a gray car with a shiny gold and chrome license frame. In the well-lit lot it was easy to see the various symbols from both occidental and eastern religions adorning the frame’s top and on the bottom in large letters was the word, “VICAR.”

Chapter 6

Andy stifled an expletive as he caught his balance before knocking me over. I grabbed his arm.

“Did you see that car?”

“What car?”

“That gray one. That one down there, going out the gate, in front of the big white one. Darn, it’s turning.”

“What about it?”

The car disappeared from our sight.

“The license frame.”

“I saw it,” Dominic piped up. “It had weird crosses and stuff and that German thing.”

“A swastika.”

Both of them looked at me, puzzled.

I stopped myself. Dominic didn’t need to hear any suppositions from me about his mother and the car’s owner. Instead, I looked intently at Andy. “It was unusual, that’s all.” I kept intense eye contact, trying to communicate my need to talk later.

The men on horses were back making sure orderly lines of vehicles left the lot. Andy was correct about where we’d parked. We got in the car and I headed toward the exit. As I waited my turn to merge onto Meridian, I remembered a basketball game I attended a couple weeks before. The exiting cars hadn’t been nearly so patient. Horns blared long and loud. Unnecessary roughness came to mind at the time, even though that term belonged to another sport. The kids in the cars had been overtired and their moms looked harried. Men hollered and waved their arms out their windows.
Quality family time.
I’d been in no hurry. I enjoyed the spectacle. I watched for a break in the traffic. What times parents spent with their children weren’t quality time? Wasn’t it all quality time?

My thoughts careened back to the gray car. Darn. I didn’t note the make, let alone the license number. There were a million midsize gray cars. They all looked alike.

In the backseat, Dominic said, with exaggerated nonchalance, “Mercy me, I’m hungry.”

His play on my name wasn’t original. I’d been hit on with it by men trying to be witty. It was the fact a nine year old came up with it, on his own, that I appreciated.

So, I laughed. “So am I, but I’m too hungry for just ice cream. I thought we’d go to a sushi bar.”

“Huh? What’s that?”

“You know, sushi, raw fish and maybe some seaweed hors d’oeuvres.”

“Yuck!”

“Dominic.” Andy’s tone held a warning.

“We saw families rake kelp at Point Defiance, remember?” I used the rearview mirror to look at him. “It’s trendy. You’ll have something different to tell your friends.”

“If you knew sushi like I knew sushi,” Andy half chanted, half sang, looking a little self-conscious, and I looked at him and laughed again.

Ha! Underneath that cranky Clint Eastwood exterior there might be a sense of humor after all.

Dominic’s budding sense of humor, though, was being sorely tried. “I want a hamburger and some fries.” He spoke louder than necessary. “Please.”

“Oh. Red meat. Well, what do you think, Andy?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cheeseburger?”

“So much for ice cream. Let’s see, a hamburger, fries and a cheese burger and I’ll have a spicy chicken burger. I think we can handle that.”

Mollified, Dominic sat back, slouching down out of sight while I cruised Meridian until a drive-in came in view.

“I was at one of these places in Hong Kong.” I pulled into the parking lot. “The decor was exactly the same. The menu was the same. Even the special sauce was the same.”

“I know. I saw that, too, in Guatemala.”

While we waited for our food, I looked around. Yellow and blue plastic surrounded us.
Easy to wipe clean
. One counter girl had colored her bangs blue to match the regulatory cap and apron.
Overkill in the sucking up department.

Dominic finished first and wanted to play on the yellow and blue toys. There were a few other kids. Andy gave him the okay, turning so he had a view of the fun room. We sipped coffee in companionable silence for a minute. “So, what was with that car?”

“It was the license plate surround, not the car. Did you see it? It had all these crosses on the top, you know, like the plain Latin one and the one with the circle around it. That’s Celtic, by the way, and there were a bunch of others but on the bottom was the word, ‘VICAR.’”

“So?”

“So, the vicar was a guy Isca had been having regular conversations with. She was worried about the turn their dialogues took.”

“How’d she get involved in that stuff, anyway?” Andy’s voice was unnecessarily loud, and he spoke at the same time the background music ended. A few heads turned our way and he turned red.

“She told me all about it. It’s actually not hard. You call a long distance phone company. They come out and install a line. You run an ad. Callers use a credit card and pay by the minute and the money goes to your account. Gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘cottage industry.’”

“I don’t mean that kind of how. I can figure that out for myself. I mean why, for Christ’s sake?”

Across from me, a woman pushed French fries in her baby’s mouth which diverted my attention for a moment. He couldn’t have been much more than two, and the mother appeared to be about eighteen. She wore acid-washed jeans and a white T-shirt with the words “A Little Bit Mean” on the back. Part of her hair hung straight, and part stood tall in a side-ways ponytail. The baby had on a dingy onesie with Ronald Reagan’s picture and French dry drool on the front. The sight made me sad.

Then I turned my attention back to Andy’s question. “She said she needed the money.”

“Isca always thought she needed money for something. We constantly argued about it.”

“Well,” I was stung on Isca’s behalf by his criticism, “I didn’t have Jack, my husband, long enough for our marriage to get to that stage. In Isca’s defense, though, it couldn’t have been easy working to put a husband through a master’s program and then to get pregnant and have a baby to take care of too.”

“What?”

“What do you mean what?”

“What do you mean putting someone through school? Not me. I had two jobs and carried a full load, too. Plus we had a small trust fund left by my great aunt. Did she tell you she put me through school? Why that…” He shook his head and sighed. “Well, maybe it seemed like that to her. She had a job, our apartment and a baby to take care of. We were both just so tired all the time.” He paused again and a loud hip-hop song, with plenty of percussion, prevented his voice from carrying. “Did she really say that, though?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, why does it matter now?”

“It matters to me.”

“Yeah, I can understand that, but it’s too late now to do anything so let’s forget it and assume I misunderstood her. Okay? Anyway, do you want to hear about the vicar or not?”

He answered with a scowl and tightly pursed lips.

His
anger was obvious and unnerving. I decided to wind up the conversation and get the evening over with
.

“Well, here’s the story. They’d been talking for several weeks. He called right after she ran an ad in a single’s paper. At first it was your, you know, normal, run-of-the-mill stuff.”

“Normal?”

“Don’t be so judgmental. We all do what we think we have to do and manage to justify it to ourselves. She didn’t break any laws and no one got hurt.”

Andy rubbed his face under his glasses. Why did he care? The years since their divorce seemed like a long time to carry a grudge.

“They’d been doing their thing for a while and then, somehow, he caught on to Isca’s ability to do voices. You know, like the ones she did for the cartoons. For a while she just did little routines at random, but then he started asking for voices of famous dead movie stars. She told me sometimes he’d cry and beg her understanding. I think that’s one reason why she stuck with him, because he said he had this problem and he knew it was wrong, but that he couldn’t help it.
That’s when it quit being a sort of a dime-a-dance kind of thing. I mean, phone sex is no big deal, but Isca didn’t like this movie star stuff and said so. I think she’d have cut him off--”