Philly Stakes, page 19
She helped polish my grandmother’s silver, and carefully set three places.
I only had two crystal wine glasses. I added a rather squatty glass, one with a bank logo on it.
“Three?” Laura said.
“Think of yourself as European this evening,” I said, hoping I wasn’t committing yet another crime, letting a fourteen-year-old taste wine. “A sip, that’s all. And you cannot drive afterward.” I walked over to the fireplace and lit the kindling.
“Tell you what,” Laura said. “I’ll wait two years to sober up. And then will you give me the car keys?”
My heart lurched and expanded, and it wasn’t from my bending over the fireplace or the flash of heat as the kindling caught. I had heard a small stab at humor. No doubt about it. Laura Clausen had let a joke burp out of her. Laura Clausen could laugh a little. Laura Clausen was going to survive. I felt as if I might cry, which wouldn’t help her one bit. Instead, I scooped up Macavity, who’d been inspecting my fire building, and gave him a celebratory ruffling behind his ears until he looked like he might swoon. Then, back under control, I went to the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers, rummaging through my meager candle supply. Everything I found had seen better times.
“I stopped at Aunt Alma’s again,” Laura said.
“Which reminds me—do the people where your mom is know where you are?” I asked her.
“I called there this morning. Right before you picked me up.” She sounded old and tired whenever either of her parents was the topic. “I’ll call again later. Or tomorrow.”
I stopped shuffling through the drawers. “Listen, maybe you can’t believe this right now, but you’re strong. Strong enough to get through all of this. Let us help you, but understand that you can do it.”
For a moment, her expression was like a gulp, like someone wolfing down my words as quickly as possible. Then she grew more wary, distancing herself, and shrugged. I returned to my search for a usable candle.
“I left a note,” she blurted out after a pause. “On the door. For Peter. So he’ll know where I am.”
“Aunt Alma’s door?”
She nodded.
“That’s not the greatest idea.” There were no decent candles in the house, and I wondered why I kept these stubs, but under the theory that there must be a reason, because I was doing so, I put them back into the drawer and kept on doing so. “It’s like an ad for a thief—nobody’s home here, come in.” I also felt extremely queasy about the idea of Peter, angrier than ever, coming here. He was fine and dandy while Laura was his special project, the dragon-protector—at least I thought and hoped so—but how would he react if anything in the status quo changed, or if he felt threatened?
And more to the point—where had he been when he wasn’t in Laura’s room?
Laura settled on the sofa. I looked up, afraid that even keeping most of my reservations to myself, I had nonetheless shattered the shaky little bridge between us. But she looked serene enough. In fact, she made a lovely tableau with her legs curled under her, the firelight adding a glow to her hair and skin and the little Christmas tree behind her twinkling in the street window.
“I did it in code,” she said. “It says “P.—L. with M.P.”
“I get the Peter and Laura, but what’s M.P.? Military Police?”
“It’s Miss Pepper.”
I ducked out of sight and pawed through my junk drawer to hide my smile. Miss Pepper! I felt neutered, my first name surgically removed. Miss Pepper was a concept, a role, not a woman. If Peter deciphered the code, would Miss Pepper be impressed or depressed?
The fact was, there were no surviving candles. I opted for a few votive lights, and even they had seen better votives. “You know what I wish I had,” I said, making non-Peter conversation, “those squatty candles you had at the Christmas party. They smelled so good and were so solid; you didn’t have to worry about them, and…” I froze, the votive candles still in my hand.
“What?” Laura asked. “And what?”
I stared at her, seeing not this Christmas tree, firelight and sofa, but that other one. “The candles,” I said. “Do you remember them?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Do you remember where they were?”
“Pretty much everywhere.”
I walked over and sat across from her, shaking my head. “Not really. I remember thinking how clever somebody had been. They looked like they were all over the place, but they were only in safe places. Mantel, niches, windowsills and parts of tables that nobody would use. And they were so solid, and stuck onto those heavy brass holders.”
She smiled halfheartedly, humoring me.
“You don’t see, do you?” I leaned closer. “Think, Laura. That little table next to the sofa—I remember there wasn’t room for my punch glass on it. I remember thinking somebody had made sure there’d be no water rings on what had to be a valuable piece of furniture. Because it was filled to capacity with an ashtray and an arrangement of poinsettias.”
She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “So what?”
“When you came downstairs—when your father was sleeping—was something burning on that table? Like a cigarette? You said you stared at him. Wouldn’t it have seemed odd, definitely something you’d notice if he was asleep and a cigarette were still burning? Think—during all that time, can you remember smoke coming up from the ashtray?”
She shook her head.
“Then there wasn’t anything burning there. There was never room for a candle. It would have made the poinsettia a fire hazard.” I stood up and walked the short distance to the window. I was churning inside, and she was still sitting like a still life. “You don’t understand what this means, do you?” I asked. “Laura,” I said as calmly as I could, “it means you did not have anything to do with your father’s death. Think—think what you remember! Standing over a sleeping man—then the tree in your hands and the flames.
“Where did the flames come from? That tree didn’t have a single light or electrical wire on it. It was all old-fashioned ornaments. How did it catch fire?”
“The candle—the…” She shook her head.
“What candles? Where? There weren’t any candles in the tree’s trajectory.”
“I don’t see what—”
I knelt in front of her. “Listen, this is horrible stuff, but not as horrible as believing you did something you didn’t. Your father wasn’t asleep—he was dead, or very near to it. And you interrupted whatever was supposed to happen next. And when you stood there, looking at your father, somebody else pushed the tree at you, at him, and lit it. And while you ran around, while you realized you were on fire, while your mother threw the water on your nightgown, that somebody got away.”
“How? That wouldn’t be possible without our—”
“The window. Hiding behind the drapes in the big bay behind the tree. It’s boarded over now, so I don’t know if the firemen or the—that person—broke it. But I think that’s how.”
She looked pale and ill, on the verge of tears, and she pressed her fingers to her temples. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I almost—you say something like that, like some man went out the window, or pushed the tree, and then I see it, think I’m remembering it. I can almost see him, could almost draw him—and then it’s gone, altogether gone, and I know I made it up because you said it.”
“Do you remember anything like that? Or hearing breaking glass?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It sounded like everything was breaking. I was screaming and my mother was screaming and then Peter was shouting and, yes, there was noise—and the fire made its own noise, but I…” Her eyes were bleak and she looked even more as if she might cry.
“You didn’t do it, Laura. You did absolutely nothing except come downstairs at the wrong time.”
She kept shaking her head, unable or unwilling to assimilate this, unable to deny it, as if she needed to have killed her father. Maybe she thought she’d settled the score, shown some power, violently reclaimed control of her life. I don’t know. We’d work on that later. For now, it was important to make it clear that she was not a killer.
“Would you mind—my head hurts—I’m going to lie down,” she said.
“Of course. One question though—you said Peter was out of your room, that you talked later about hearing a quarrel.”
She nodded.
“Laura—was he back in your room when you went downstairs?”
She stared at me, mouth agape.
“Isn’t it foolhardy not to even consider—please, Laura—was he in your room when you went downstairs? Or was it only afterward, after the fire, that you compared the sounds and the events?”
Her face flushed, she winced with pain, put her hand to her forehead and started up the stairs. “I need aspirin,” was what she said, but her eyes had flashed the message that now I, too, had joined the enemy camp.
* * *
“Nice place,” Nick said. He put two shopping bags on the kitchen counter, tossed his coat onto a stool and paced the downstairs room. He was wearing a light blue shirt and an argyle vest and he looked rather jaunty. “Nice,” he repeated, “nice sense of color, nice feeling.
“Pretty,” he said of the little Christmas tree. “Ummm,” of the suede chair. “Uh-huh,” of my mother’s slipcovered old sofa. The dining table and setting got a nod; a whimsical Klee print, a cocked head and wrinkled brow; the photos in little Victorian frames a long examination; the bookcase a more cursory one; a Dorothea Lange Depression print of a woman, a child’s face pressed into each of her shoulders and her own angular face looking for everything, finding nothing, generated a “hmmm.” He was interested, but decidedly nonverbal. It was a good thing he wasn’t writing architectural or design criticism.
His living-area survey completed, he moved into my miniscule cooking area, and inspected the cupboards. Open, peer, close. “Making pasta with”—open, peer, close—
“crab, shrimp and scallops in tomato, mushrooms, basil and garlic. My own recipe.”
“Sounds marvelous.”
“Think the kid will eat it? She’s around, isn’t she? I saw three place settings, but where is she?” Open, peer, shut. “Upstairs, not feeling too—”
“Good,” he said, slamming a door. “A big enough pot.” I wasn’t sure I could be close to his energy level for too long without getting radiation burns. He opened my junk drawer.
“Hey—I don’t let just anybody see that, you know,” I said “I am not that kind of girl.”
“Taking inventory,” he answered. “But maybe you’d prefer I ask you for what I need and you hand it over? Kind of kitchen doctor and nurse? Want some wine?”
“Yes, to both.”
“So,” he said, settling on the suede chair, “how was your visit with the blind lady and her pals?”
“You have a good memory.”
“Correct. So how was it?” He was never completely still. His left foot tapped on the floor, as if it had its own motor.
“Fine. Uneventful. She liked the cannoli. A friend of hers joined us and told me that she—the blind old lady—was a sexpot, or a siren. A Scheherazade, with stories that attract lovers, more or less. Perked things up a bit from what I’d anticipated.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Oh, you know. Stuff from her past. Memories. Old-lady stories. Speaking of which, how is yours going?”
“My old-lady story?”
“Your story. About Alexander Clausen.” The wine was delicious, far beyond the standards and budget of this household. I toasted him with my glass.
“Coming. Coming. Nearly done. Laura going to be much longer? You hungry?”
“I’ll check on her in a minute.” The pacing of the evening was way off. Maybe he was a restaurant kind of date, needing slow service, delays mandated by management. On his own, he chugged much too quickly. I tried slowing things down.
“Remember how you asked me about Clausen’s beginnings, about how he got his start? Did you ever find out?” What if nothing Minna had said was true?
“Why would you care about that?”
“Because Seventeen magazine always said to ask your date about his interests.” He took the time to smile. “Because putting together an article like yours sounds interesting. Sleuthing around for clues.”
“That’s an unusual way of describing it.” He stood up and stretched. “Makes research sound like detective work.”
“Isn’t it?”
He shot me a glance I couldn’t interpret. Maybe he thought I was making fun of him.
“Come across somebody named Donnaker in your research?” I asked.
“Why?”
“This old woman today…” I suddenly felt guilty, thinking of Minna. I couldn’t be free and easy with her story, not when she was, irrationally or not, terrified of its misuse. The ethical thing to do would be to first ask her permission, or see if she’d talk to Nick herself. “Nothing,” I said.
He waited, as if hoping I’d change my mind, and then he walked to the front of the house and opened the closet door. “Whoops,” he said. “Sorry. Listen, is there someplace to wash up before I start things going?”
“Upstairs. Can’t miss it.”
He took the stairs two at a time. Weird man. Too frenetic. If Mackenzie and Nick could be boiled up together, then melted down and reshaped, you’d get twins with about normal metabolisms. But since they couldn’t, I’d cast my vote on the side of the more relaxed tempo.
I pulled myself out of the chair and turned on more lights. It was dark as only the final edge of the year can be. The closet door was still ajar, a reminder that Nick’s coat was not yet in it, and my hostessing skills were not passing muster. I picked up the coat and was impressed by its softness. Not the coat of a man who writes for Oxlips, not the coat of a late bloomer. This must be one of the fruits of his short-lived real-estate deals. The wine was probably bought and stored during the same flush time.
I glanced at the staircase, and, the coast clear, I checked the label. It was indeed cashmere, hand tailored. Even the label was hand tailored. “Made by Alfred Boyer,” it said, “expressly for Dominick Riley.”
I hung it up carefully, smoothing the shoulders, carefully putting the white silk scarf over it.
Lots and lots of people were named Dominick. Nothing unusual about it.
Nonetheless, with heart pounding and a quick look up the stairs, I ran to the phone and dialed the Southland. It would take too long, require too much explaining to reach my other option, Minna White.
My mother barely got out her hello.
“Quick,” I said, “we never—Mom—what was Minna White’s first husband’s name?”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Let me think.”
The toilet flushed upstairs.
“Don, I think. Yes, Donald sounds…”
“Dom, Dominick,” I said. “I know that part. His name was Dominick.”
“Of course—Dominick. She called him Dom, not Don—”
“Can you remember the rest?” Water banged through the pipes.
“Of course. It was the Dominick part that had me stymied because I knew Minna a lot better than I knew—”
“Mom!”
“What?”
“Minna’s last name.” I was whispering. The water had stopped. There weren’t a whole lot more things the man was about to do in my bathroom.
“What?”
“Her last name.”
“Riley. You knew that. Of course. You were so tiny and you thought Minna Riley was soup. You meant minestrone, but it was so cute, nobody corrected you, so you’d say, ‘I want Minna Riley for lunch,’ and we’d—”
I couldn’t hear much because I had suddenly developed the flu, jolting between hot flashes and chills, guessing what the odds were, whether Minna Riley’s son, Junior, he of the birthmark now hidden by a beard, the very same person who had learned his family history the day Jacob Donnaker found out the story of his betrayal, the same person who had pretended, probably, to be a free-lance writer profiling Clausen—the Junior who had called his mother today, after I had told him my destination—whether that son Junior’s presence in my house could be only an ironic, interesting, almost humorous coincidence.
I figured the odds at roughly a trillion to one.
And then they escalated as I watched four legs come down the staircase. First Laura’s, spindly and hesitant, and behind them, Nick’s, or Dominick’s or Junior’s. Well tailored and much more confident. As well he might be, since he, unlike his hostesses, carried a gun.
“One time in the market you shouted, ‘Minna Riley with crackers!’ Minna—”
“Hang up,” Nick-Junior said. His gun was aimed at Laura’s head.
“Mom, I have to—”
“Hang it up,” he said again.
“What?” my mother said.
“Hang it up or I’ll shoot it out of your hand,” he said. “After I shoot her.” He was inches away from me.
“There’s no reason for this!” I hissed.
He shook his head in disgust, and without waiting for the amenities, pressed the disconnect button. Then he removed the receiver from my hand and clicked it onto the telephone.
“What is this?” I said. “What does this mean?”
He didn’t answer.
I was pretty sure it meant we weren’t going to eat seafood pasta tonight.
Fifteen
“I DON’T GET IT.” I HOPED I WAS TELLING THE TRUTH.
“Nothing mysterious about it.” Nick seemed both grim and exhilarated.
“Why—why are you pointing a gun at us?”
“Saves time. More efficient. Laura wouldn’t come downstairs otherwise.” With his free hand, he directed both of us down onto the sofa.
It was not comforting to have a fidget aim a lethal weapon at me. I wanted to be sure he didn’t nervously tap his index finger. He had unbuttoned his shirt sleeves and rolled them up, the better to do his work, and I saw the edge of a large bandage. I remembered his awkward eating at the restaurant that night, the tennis-elbow story. I guess that made better table talk than calling it an “escape” elbow, or explaining how he’d gotten it, pushing his way through a window after murdering someone.
