Philly Stakes, page 11
“Nobody thinks I did it, if that’s what you’re asking.” Besides having no motive—even Scrooge didn’t murder casual irritants—I had a truly fine alibi. I had been in bed with the law at the time. However, I kept that to myself.
I walked the full length of the telephone cord, then stretched until I had the first section of the paper at my fingertips. I strained and scratched at it until finally, I had to let go of the receiver and grab.
“—then, thank goodness, you’re not involved at all.”
That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer or correct the assumption. I was too busy, anyway, skimming the story headlined “Clausen Death Declared Homicide” and subtitled “Who Killed Santa Claus?”
“Far be it from me to speak badly about the dead,” my mother said, revving up to do so, “but if you had told me that it was Alexander Clausen you were having that party with, I’d have warned you about him.”
“I didn’t know you even knew him.”
“Well, I didn’t. Not really. Actually, not at all. But I heard things. I’ll bet some people aren’t crying about this news. In fact, you know one of them.”
I knew more than one, but I didn’t know which one my mother meant. “Who?”
“Your new friend, Minna White.”
“The lady at Silverwood? Gee, Mom, are you suggesting that she’s our killer?”
“Minna?”
“That was a joke.”
“Not that she wouldn’t like him dead.”
“Why on earth?”
“Because he did something bad to, ah, somebody. He wasn’t nice. I forget precisely how.”
Another definitive news report from the world’s best-meaning, least-accurate historian.
But that seemed to wrap it up for my mother. “Are you taking Macavity back to that nice vet?” she asked. We went from the cat to Mother’s physical complaints, to the logistics of a coffee she was organizing for a Gray Panther candidate for State Senate, to untitillating gossip about a distant relative. And then we were out of material. I thought.
“By the way,” she said as we were hanging up. “Did you set a time to take Minna those cannoli?”
“Mom, I said that if I could, when I could, someday, I’d—”
“Because you know what? After you told me where she was and how poorly she’s doing, I called information for Silverwood’s number and gave her a call, and I told her you’d be there.”
“You told her what?”
“With cannoli.”
“You actually promised I’d be there?”
“She’s thrilled. Tuesday, I said. The day after Christmas. The day before you come down here, so you can tell me all about her. And Mandy? Get the cannoli at the Italian Market—you know, that little store that has the best.”
* * *
“Do you think I’m becoming a Scrooge?” We were in Mackenzie’s car, which always smelled of popcorn, driving up Germantown Avenue. We bounced so hard over a section of paving blocks that “Scrooge” came out as a squeak.
“Why’d you ask?”
“I’m getting cranky. Grumbling. I didn’t give the paperboy a Christmas tip. He didn’t deserve it. He’s wretched, arrogant and incompetent, but maybe that’s just my warped perception. Maybe Scrooge felt that way about Tiny Tim, you know?”
Mackenzie scratched his head.
“And my mother is currently obsessed with my visiting a woman I taught at an old-age home, a former neighbor of hers, and I know it would be a nice thing to do, and I could even also see some other people who’ve invited me to sort of a party as well, but all the same… What’s happened to my Christmas spirit?”
“Dead,” Mackenzie said. “As a doornail. Isn’t that how it goes?”
“That’s how Marley goes, or went.”
“Speaking of doornails, or dead,” Mackenzie said, “the lab is fairly sure Clausen was killed by a blow to his head. Luckily, it cracked his skull.”
“Luckily?”
“For us. That kind of mark survives a fire. There’s internal evidence, too, even after the fire. In fact, that kind of cooked his insides, so—”
I was not eager to hear any more. I was, however, eager to clarify something. “That surely eliminates Laura,” I said.
My boon companion shook his head.
“Oh, I forgot. The conspiracy theory. She got her muscleman to wield the weapon, is that it?” I folded my hands to keep them from punching him.
“I don’t know what it is.” He sounded weary.
We were in Chestnut Hill now, passing tiny row houses originally designed for servants, now occupied by folks in transit on the fast track. We moved onto the streets those servants once served, avenues heavy with turreted and furbelowed Victorians and gracious, imposing Italianate villas. Finally we were in front of Clausen’s fieldstone palazzo. The boarded-up living room window and soot stains made it look like an unshaven pirate with a patch. There were fragments of barbecued furniture outside on the frozen grass.
Mackenzie crouched over the wheel, a hunter stalking a parking space. I remembered my repeated block circling the night of the party, how annoyed I’d been by the waiting drivers snoozing by the curb. I was definitely curdling into something persnickety. Or maybe it was a chronic condition, a birth defect, and I’d only now noticed it.
* * *
The outside of the house had looked bruised, but not beaten, but the inside was nothing even the homeless would call shelter. At least not the entry and living room, which had been trashed both by fire and firemen. I knew there were reasons for axing furniture and walls, but the resulting destruction still grieved me. Charred party decor was still visible in the general mess. A skeletal wreath form with blackened wooden berries lay on the keyboard of a grand piano. I pushed down a key. Nothing much happened. A tinny plink, like a dime-store guitar’s, sounded. I peeked—the innards were partly fused, partly broken, all damp. No more music.
“You know,” I said, “the first time I came to this house for a meeting, I decided that this was the place for the happily-ever afters. I wish I hadn’t been so far off the mark. I wish some of it were true. I still want to believe in it.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be saying ‘Bah, humbug’?”
We wandered around, getting a sense of the house. It was an enormous sprawl, and only the front rooms seemed touched by the fire. The dining room was slightly trashed where flames had licked the Persian carpet and mahogany table legs. The butler’s pantry’s paint was scorched, but the glassware and china were intact. The kitchen seemed close to normal. It was, however, a depressingly small, dark space designed in an era when only the help would work in it. It had been modernized and bumped out a bit so that there was an eating area, and there was a tiny hallway leading to a freezing-cold addition, little more than a lean-to, with a washer and dryer, a spartan maid’s room with a portable heater and an icy bathroom. The house had been democratized, but only to a point.
Mackenzie and I pulled open all the kitchen drawers and doors, as improbably as it was that they’d contain a list of guests. I was impressed by how much the Clausens owned, but I kept wondering when they used it. Did Alice entertain from within her alcoholic cloud? Had hiring a caterer been second nature for Alexander because that’s what he had to do whenever people came to his house?
Everyone I know uses the refrigerator as Message Central. There’s an entire industry devoted to cute magnets. But the Clausens’ refrigerator was pristine. No dentist’s appointment reminders, no theater tickets awaiting the date, no message pad, no flyer announcing school holidays, no beloved snapshots. Nothing.
If the kitchen was the heart of a house, this place was on a respirator.
Poor Laura. I’d call her tonight. Again I remembered the advice of that older teacher. “Be their teacher, not their friend,” she’d said emphatically. “You cannot be both.” I knew what she meant, and that she meant well, but I’m equally entitled to make up rules. Besides, there’s a difference between needing to be a pal and wanting to be a friend.
We walked upstairs. There was a sewing room that showed no signs of use, a large and old-fashioned bath with a claw-footed tub, a pink and flouncy room that must have been Laura’s, and signs that the master bedroom had been used only by the master. A more modern bath joined it to a very feminine boudoir. There was also a guest room I was willing to bet had never been occupied. This was not a family that could welcome close contact.
We were heading back to the ruins of the living room when Mackenzie paused at the dining room window. “I’m worried about the car,” he said. “If somebody comes around that corner too fast…”
His point was well taken. However, the spot had seemed the only one between here and Manhattan. Everyone in Chestnut Hill was entertaining. I imagined rooms full of the glimmering dresses the magazines considered de rigueur for holiday parties. I didn’t think I’d ever been to a party where such costumes were appropriate—except Halloween.
Mackenzie and I stood side by side, regarding the gracious street, lined with old trees that, even in their winter undress, seemed to guard the stately homes with dignity. The windowpanes we looked through were old glass, wavy and imperfect, hazed with a film of smoke that clouded our view.
I felt uncomfortable and displaced. It was probably no more than a matter of being back in a house that had bred and nourished misery. Now, a sign in front of the door said, “Stay Away. Unsafe,” but it had been unsafe for a long time.
I wished I’d never read A Christmas Carol. Never suggested the party. I had upset the status quo, put something in motion. Without the party, maybe Laura and her family could have been saved. I could have talked to her about Icarus, found out, intervened. Nobody had to die.
The fact that I’d meant well made it sadder. “I’m going to visit that woman, my mother’s friend,” I suddenly said. “And go to that class party at Silverwood. I was pretty pious about being kind to the less fortunate—as long as it was my students’ responsibility.”
“You’ll never make it as Scrooge,” Mackenzie said. We kept looking outside.
I could understand why they brought people back to the scenes of crimes. Memories returned and clarified as if the indestructibility of matter included afterimages. All it required was a bit of on-site excavation.
The street was filled with cars, as it had been that night. But it didn’t look the same. There had been other shapes. They slowly clarified as I mentally circled past again and again. I remembered their colors and what I had mumbled to myself.
A Septa Charter, an Innercity Services Van, Palate Pleasers Caterers. A taxi. “Mackenzie!” I said. “We have a lead. Besides that teetotaling church. There must be lists of which bus went out and where the pickup points were. Something.” I was wildly proud of the discovery-memory.
“Any more?” We walked across the hallway. It had been immediately obvious to me that there was no point in digging, literally, through what had been the living room. If there was a list, and if it had been brought in here that night, it had long since met the same fate as the master of the house. I made this point to Mackenzie.
Nonetheless, he poked around with childlike delight. Instead of a mud puddle, he had a whole room of ash to muck about. He stood near what had been the bay window. Now it was blind boards. The room was dim, lit only from the far-off dining room windows. “There was the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen in front of that window,” I said. “All gold and silver and crystal ornaments, some that were pretty unusual. Antiques, probably.” No trace of the tree was left.
Mackenzie kicked through a black tangle of carpet and carbonized something. “I see bits of some. Maybe Laura’d like them?”
I hoped that Laura would turn toward the future with relief, and suspected that she wouldn’t want many souvenirs of this house and its past. But I didn’t see the harm in Mackenzie’s sifting out remnants if that gave him the illusion of accomplishing something. I watched him dive for glitter. Within minutes, he looked like he was wearing gloves and he had a broad sooty swatch from his forehead to his ear. He picked up a buckled metal wafer. “Probably a snowflake once,” he said. “Maybe.”
I looked around. My mind had been smoke damaged the last two days. Whenever I’d thought about the party, it had been a rushed and confusing blur. But now, back inside the living room, my mental landscape cleared until I could remember specifics, faces and moments. I could see where I had sat with Gladys and the porcelain figurine, and where I’d been waylaid by the man who wanted a free car. I wish I knew how Sandy Clausen had ultimately handled him. Or the spitting veteran. I could see the green-covered table rounds, the plates full of turkey and dressing, Santa with his bag of gifts.
And Marley’s ghost.
There it was, the shred of an idea that had teased and refused to be remembered until now. The old man with the cane and the loud voice.
“There was a man,” I began. Mackenzie stopped digging and looked interested again. “He was…different. Old, too. Said ‘Alexander Clausen,’ three times, as if he were tolling the name, tapped him on the shoulder with his cane. Clausen knew him. Called him ‘Jacob’—but he was very surprised to see him.”
“And?”
“I got this weird feeling. He made me think of Marley’s ghost. His name was even Jacob, like Marley’s.”
“Yes?”
“He pointed to himself, then Clausen, as if there were a bond.”
“And then?”
That was it, except for residual unease.
“Anything else happen?”
“I don’t know. It was my turn to use the powder room. There was a line.”
“You couldn’t let somebody ahead of you?”
“Mackenzie, I was eavesdropping and trying to be subtle about it. I couldn’t just stand there crossed-legged and gape, could I?”
He shrugged. “Any idea who he was? His last name?”
I shook my head. You’d think he sees a ghost, the lady behind me had said, but what’s to be made of a cliché? The more I thought about it, the less significant the whole thing became. I was filled with so-what’s and of-courses. Of course I thought of Marley—he was Jacob. A common enough name for men that age. Somebody suggested ghosts and it was a Christmas party. So what if the old man called Clausen by his first and last names? A million people felt like his familiar from his obnoxious TV ads. Of course Clausen was surprised. He probably hadn’t heard the old man’s call, and then he got bonked from behind. I’d be shocked, too, given the circumstances.
“Sorry,” I said. “That’s all there is, and the more I think about it, the less it becomes.”
Mackenzie, fine lines of disappointment around his mouth, returned to his archeological tasks.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll go move the car.” I, too, needed the illusion of achieving something, no matter what.
* * *
Four blocks away, I found a better, safer parking spot, but as I walked back, I didn’t feel any particular sense of accomplishment.
I walked up the flagstone steps toward the Clausen house and suddenly faced a tall, gaunt woman, faded patrician face inside a mane of gray hair, eyeglasses attached to a thick brown cord, and pruning sheers in her hand. Sixtyish, she wore vintage slacks, a nondescript cardigan and a Chestnut Hill Academy warm-up jacket meant to be worn by a football player.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “A plainclotheswoman or something like that? What now? What on earth did that man start with his foolishness?” She pursed her lips and scowled. “I told him. I said, ‘Alexander, this is an unforgiveable mistake.’ And I was right. Advertise your house number for anyone to see and what do you expect?” She crossed her arms. The pruning sheers stuck out like a lethal beak. It was a little chilly for gardening.
She saw me eyeing the shears. “Work in the greenhouse whenever I can. Live next door. Saw you two arrive a while ago, then you left and I wondered, and now you’re back. I don’t like to pry, but has anything else happened? Lord knows, we’ve had a fire. Riffraff. A murder, the papers say. What will this do to property values? He wasn’t very considerate. Not at all neighborly. I warned you, you know.”
“Me?”
“You people. I put in a complaint the second I read about that—that event in the paper.”
“I’m really sorry, but I—”
“You’d think you’d listen to a decent citizen. I never called you pigs. Never demonstrated once. Voted straight Republican my entire life.” She assumed a chin-up, self-congratulatory posture.
“Ma’am…I’m not who you—”
“And what do I get? Blather about freedom of assembly. I said, ‘Young man, to whom do you think you’re speaking? I know my Constitution. I’m past-president of the D.A.R.’ —who did he think he was?”
“What exactly is your complaint?” I asked, as politely as I could.
“I know my unfortunates well as the next. I am on the boards of several charities. I’ve opened my house, too, when it was appropriate. But not to that kind. I warned him. I warned the police. Nobody listened.” She pursed her lips until she looked like a drawstring had pulled her shut from inside. “Gave me insomnia, it did, worrying about them being right here, right next door. Prowling around.”
“There were people outside?”
“I called you people. You think anybody cared? A patrolman came in his own sweet time, but of course by then the prowler was gone.”
“When was this?”
“During his party.” She said the last word as if she’d been talking about obscene revels. “Twice.”
“You called two times about prowlers?”
“Three times.” She nodded, shaking her hair. I could suddenly see a spirited young woman whose best feature was rich long hair. The habit of using it for punctuation, of making certain everyone noticed it, had persisted.
“Not that they even responded the third time. Maybe if they had, they could have stopped the fire sooner.”
“I don’t understand.” She was going to have to get to the point, if there was one, soon, or I’d forget that I was trying to be a nice person.
