Mummers' Curse (14 page)

It felt fair, then, to take advantage of the opening. “Don’t do anything drastic or desperate tonight,” I said, “and we’ll deal with this tomorrow. As agreed.”

“My life is on the line. My college career!”

I took a deep breath and continued. “After school. Tomorrow. Right now and until then, I’m on vacation, and I’m requesting that you finally respect that.” I hung up while she continued to sputter, even though I knew she’d call back to protest my hanging up on her.

“I wish I could arrest lawbreaking students,” I said between bites of pizza. “Lock them up the way you do. You’re so lucky.”

“Oh, yeah,” Billy said. “It’s keen fun. A million laughs.”

Mackenzie nodded. “We’ll give ours grades, instead. Okay, mister, this murder really pulls your average down. Clean up your act or you’re going to flunk the year.”

The phone rang again. “I’ve had it!” I said. “If there were something lower than an F, I’d make sure she got it.” I grabbed the phone so fiercely, I nearly knocked over a small gargoyle sculpture that sat nearby. “Renata, I told you—”

“Mandy?” My sister’s suburban voice. “Sounds like I’ve caught you at a bad time.”

“No—sorry—that’s—there’s a student who’s been—” I took a deep breath. “What’s up?”

“I hope this isn’t too much of an intrusion,” she said breathlessly, “but we’re going to an event downtown—a benefit for Quentin’s favorite charity and she’s speaking and then doing her show live, in front of us, and there are special presentations for the children, so we’re all going, even the baby. If you have a few minutes, we’d love to stop by and see you first.”

“See me?” See the warehouse in which her poor sister huddled. That was okay. The place was relatively tidy. I hadn’t wanted Billy Obenhauser to think I was a slattern. Beth, The Perfect Homemaker, could come over. “Great.”

“Only for a few minutes,” she said. “We have the guest speaker with us, so we have to be on time.”

“Whenever you like. I’d love to see you, and I’ll be here all evening.” C.K. and Billy would be long gone by the time the Wymans made it in from the suburbs, a trek that would take thirty to forty-five minutes if they left this instant.

“Super. How does five minutes from now sound?” Beth giggled. “We’re in the car, a block away. Finding parking is the only problem.”

Few, if any, people were rushing to park outside closed art galleries at this hour. I wouldn’t even get car-circling time.

The Wyman family trooped in within seconds. Alexander, of course, wasn’t yet able to troop. He might have crawled, or even toddled, but he was swaddled to the point where he was only theoretically there, so he was carried in by Sam, who was extremely proud of having found a parking spot.

I’d been living in the loft for four months, but Beth’s forays into the evil city are few and far between, so this was her virgin exposure to The Warehouse. Although she tried to behave nonchalantly, she couldn’t hide her amazement that bats didn’t dangle from rafters and rats weren’t snacking on our toes.

We made introductions all around, offered pizza remains to any takers, and I sketchily briefed my older sister on our future decorating ideas. Her preference was for exquisitely crafted and maintained antiques. Neither my wallet nor my taste pointed in that direction, nor did Mackenzie’s, and I could feel Beth’s discomfort with the wide open spaces, the shades that were the only window coverings, the skylight’s openness, the broad expanses of uncovered planked floor between rugs. She was too polite to say anything except how airy and spacious it all was. Civilization in action again.

Quentin Reed silently examined the bookshelves and CD collection, making deductions about our mental health.

“Get comfortable. Want coffee or some such?” I asked.

“No, thanks, we’re in a rush, actually,” my sister said. “In fact—Karen?”

Karen had been stroking Macavity, who sat in a contented lump on top of my pocketbook on the table, purring.

“She made such a fuss,” Beth said, “and now that we’re here, look at her.”

“I left my Magic Markers,” Karen said to me.

“You remember where?”

She nodded, and relocated a miffed Macavity to the floor. “I took them to the parade,” she explained, “but it was cold and too fun to draw, so I put them in here.” She pointed at my bag. I sighed.

The soft leather pouch looked like a feed bag, and was big enough to carry a horse’s or my rations, or both. Which was lucky, because it was always full. I wasn’t excited about having the contents of my messy bag excavated. Karen’s hands and face disappeared into it.

“Kar?” Her mother turned her nickname into a question. When no answer was forthcoming, she stated the obvious. “We’re running late, sweetie. You know they’re putting on a show for you, for all the children, and we don’t want to miss any of it, do we?”

“No.” Karen pulled her head back out into the fresh air, but continued to search with her hands.

“I want her to have a completely happy visual and musical experience,” Beth said to me, as if Karen had suddenly become deaf. “Quentin thinks that would be best. Kar?” Beth asked again, still gently, although on the edge of shrill. No matter how irritated or tense her daughter made her, she had to keep her cool. It could be a curse being friends with
the
outspoken expert on psychological blunders. A childless expert, at that.

Billy Obenhauser stood up and patted his stomach. C.K. also stood, but refrained from such actions. “We’d better be going,” Billy said.

“
Kar
,” Beth said.

“They’re my favorites, and I need them!” Karen’s voice was muffled as she searched deep within.

“Maybe we could stop at a store and find new markers,” Quentin said, checking the time on her watch. She smiled expansively, but her radio voice was gone and soon she’d be audible only to dogs.

“Let me help.” I tried to pull the bag toward me even though my niece was still lodged half in it. I estimated how many used tissues, receipts, and crumpled “to do” lists were about to be revealed, how much mortifying evidence of illegal snacks.

I reminded myself that Billy Obenhauser was interested in death, not in whether I was a purse slob. My sister and mother would discuss, with superior regret, my messiness, but that would help pass their telephone time. “Karen, let go—let me—give me—”

“Aunt Mandy!” Karen pulled her arm, head, and something else out of the feed bag. Her eyes were wide. “Where’d you get this?”

“This” was a gun. A revolver, or maybe a handgun. I don’t know the difference, but it was definitely a thing designed to shoot and seriously injure living matter.

Beth screamed and rushed for her daughter, from whose hand it dangled.

Mackenzie looked at me, then at the gun. Billy Obenhauser took a deep breath and said, “Now, now, little girl. Karen, if you’ll just—don’t touch that trig—don’t press down on—here, I’ll…” And he removed it from her, holding it by the grip, not the way a TV detective would, but I didn’t correct him. He held it until C.K. retrieved a plastic bag from the kitchen and Billy dropped it in.

During which time nobody else said a word, if you exclude Beth’s gasps and screeches and Quentin’s soothing noises.

“A gun,” Mackenzie finally said. “Jesus! How come?”

“For protection, I’m sure,” Beth said. “Living in this city.” She shook her head and took Alexander from Sam, as if she could better shield him from the evils of the twentieth century than his father could.

“Perhaps it’s another attempt to emulate, become the equal of you, Detective,” Quentin murmured. “After all, you get to carry a gun.” She also twinkled a conspiratorial smile, as if to say
she
wouldn’t have any of those problems if she were with him.

“But I—” I tried saying.

Beth turned back to me. “You should have told me you had a gun in the house before I let Karen sleep here.”

“I didn’t. I don’t. It isn’t mine,” I said emphatically. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Billy Obenhauser made his fleshy features bland and unreadable as he looked at me. “A derringer,” he said.

What did that mean to me? Cowboys used them, I thought. Or maybe it was gangsters in old movies. Or maybe a gangster had been named Derringer.

“The current thought is that a gun of this sort killed Jimmy Pat,” Mackenzie said softly.

“How would you know?”

“One slug was still in him,” Mackenzie said.

“What do you mean, a
slug
?” Beth asked. “That creepy snail-thing that—”

“A bullet,” Mackenzie said. “One bullet exited, one didn’t.”

“Hey, hey!” Billy said. Obviously, we lay people weren’t supposed to know anything, although I couldn’t see what harm it did to know Jimmy Pat had been shot twice, and I was tired of being an outsider, first in South Philly, and now in my own home.

“We have to go,” Beth said with an edge of hysteria.
“Now!”
She took Karen’s hand.

“I don’t have my markers!” Karen shouted, breaking loose.

Billy stepped in front of her, pushed the pizza remains aside, and emptied my bag onto the kitchen table. The better to find other incriminating evidence of criminality or slovenliness. My date book-life record which theoretically holds everything important tumbled out along with a pile of detritus until the table looked like a landfill site. Amazing how many charge slips, junk mails, lipstick-stained tissues, ATM statements, and notched bus tickets a person could accumulate in a few days. Along with seven lipsticks, a bottle of nail polish, and—I counted them—thirteen ballpoint pens. Matchbooks from restaurants I wanted to remember. The paper bag with the rainbow-colored three-by-fives and pen I’d bought at Emily’s. A ring of keys to the school, to here, to doors I could no longer remember. A paperback. Two of Karen’s barrettes. A small can of hair spray and a folding hairbrush, a pressed powder compact. You’d think I would always be impeccably groomed, wouldn’t you? Sixty-four cents in loose change. And oh, yes, five Magic Markers, which Karen immediately scooped up.

Beth put separate zippered bags inside her purse for makeup and car keys, and she probably filed receipts properly and promptly in something akin to an evidence bag. Nothing was loose or unmoored or without purpose about her, her home, or her pocketbook. Amazing that we share genetic stock.

“How…where do you think you got that?” Mackenzie asked. He didn’t mean my ballpoint pen collection, either.

“The…gun?” It was hard saying it. It gleamed dully and repulsively in its plastic envelope. I shook my head “Somebody else put it in there. I didn’t.”

“Who?” Billy asked. “When?”

“Today, I guess,” I said slowly. “Or yesterday, at the parade. I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there.”

My sister, her lawyer husband, and her two children stopped their rapid egress and stood like spectators at a primitive ceremony. Quentin kept clearing her throat as a reminder of where they should be headed, but Beth seemed to have forgotten about her honored guest as well as about detraumatizing Karen at the fund-raiser.

“How could you not feel it?” My oftentimes beloved looked at me with less than full approval.

“For Pete’s sake!” I censored what came naturally in deference to the young ears still in the room. “My bag isn’t like one of your pants pockets. It’s more like a suitcase. I wouldn’t notice a boulder if it were dropped in there. First of all, I had a coat on, a muffler—there were layers of padding separating it from me. But even without that, usually I have a roll book in there, and at least one textbook, too. I don’t always carry my briefcase, because everything fits in this. During vacation, it’s been lighter than usual, and that…” I gestured toward the table and the plastic bag with its deadly contents. “I didn’t feel it. Didn’t register the difference.”

“It’s not heavy, anyway,” Billy said. “Lady’s weapon.”

“Wait a minute—not this lady’s, if that’s what you’re saying!”

“No, no,” Mackenzie said. “An expression. It’s small, see how short the barrel is? With a short range and not a lot of accuracy. Its advantage is that it can be concealed.”

“Like in a woman’s purse,” Billy said with a sigh that was half snort. “Even a normal one. Normal purse, not normal woman, I mean.” He not only looked at me with that impassive suspicion, but now he eyed Mackenzie with something less than full trust. Afraid Mackenzie was covering up for his murderous lover. After all, I’d known the prime suspect and was, in fact, his declared alibi, and now that I apparently was holding and hiding the murder weapon, my denials of ever having seen Vincent smelled suspicious. As in…accomplice.

Mackenzie felt it, too, looking at his co-worker, his friend, with a visible flash of alarm, followed by comprehension, and then, resentment. Except I wasn’t sure which of us it was he resented.

Who had dumped a gun on me, when, and why? I could think of too many opportunities when I’d shed my heavy outerwear, along with my bag. I’d done so in Vincent’s overheated house, at the beauty salon, at the Grassi house, and even at the card shop. It wasn’t my fault—the damned places were steaming.

As for the freezing-cold parade—when could anyone have disposed of a gun into my pocketbook? In the Porta Potti line? While I watched the parade? On my way home with Karen? But again and again and again—why? Why me?

“This is very interesting,” Quentin said, looking directly at me. “Have you had episodes like this before? Times when you couldn’t remember how you came to have something, or where you were?”

I stared at her.

“Not to alarm you, but this happens with multiples, you know,” she said softly.

“Oh, for—”

“Multiplication?” Mackenzie said. “What does math have to—”

I shook my head. “Multiple personalities. Dr. Reed thinks I…never mind.”

Beth inhaled sharply and spoke. “Oh, look at the time. We’re late. We really have to go now.” Her voice had returned to normal. “Thanks for letting us barge in on you to see this terrific place.” Obviously, we had just all enjoyed a charming social call. With a gun thrown in for spice.

“I didn’t find my purple marker,” Karen wailed.

“Mandy, if you need me, give a call,” Sam said. “I’ve written down my beeper number as well. We won’t be at this event all that long, and we’re nearby.”