1 Breakfast at Madeline's (8 page)

13

"What must have happened," I said as we headed for home, "she took off her shoes so she could run faster. And then she dropped a shoe when she was jumping over the fence."

Andrea examined i
t. "Size eight. She has medium-
size feet."

Andrea is sensitive about her own size ten and a halfs. "Big feet are sexy," I told her.

She ignored me. "This shoe is stylish. Whoever it is, she has class."

"Unless it's a he."

"If it's a he, he definitely has class. But why would anyone wear high-heeled shoes to do a burglary?"

"I guess if she got caught, she wanted to look her best."

"Or maybe the bur
glary was just a spur of the mo
ment thing."

I nodded. That sounded logical. We were walking up the driveway, but then I halted suddenly and stared. "What's wrong?" Andrea whispered in alarm.

I pointed. The windowpane on our side door was smashed open, and the door was ajar. Ms. High Heels must have broken in and been inside already when we drove up; then she panicked and tried to sneak back out the door. For the second night in a row, someone had invaded our home.

"This isn't funny," Andrea said.

"No," I agreed. I ran inside, crunching glass shards under my feet, and rushed up the stairs, then opened the drawer of my bedside table, looking for The Penn's magnum opus.

It was still there. We'd come home just in time to save it.

I sat down on the bed, holding one of The Penn's yellowed old notebooks in my hand. Who wanted this pathetic excuse for a book badly enough to burglarize for it? Gr
etchen? But surely a fifty-five, maybe sixty-
year-old lady would never be able to
run
that fast—or would she? Gretchen wasn't exactly a fat matronly type, far from it. But still...

How about Bonnie Engels, the boxer/theater impresario?
Or maybe Antoinette Carlson, the Grant Queen? The two o
f them had certainly seemed dis
turbed when I showed them Penn's magnum opus at Madeline's. But disturbed enough to burglarize my house?

Was it the same burglar tonight as last night? Both times Andrea and I got the sense it was someone five six or taller, average weight, wearing something loose. Beyond that we couldn't be sure. It was hard to tell how tall a person was when they were always either crouching, running in the darkness, or bopping you on the head with pressure cookers.

After Andrea swept up the broken glass, we sat down at the kitchen table eating bowls of chocolate ice cream—we were both ravenous. We were going to call up Dave about the bre
ak-in, but despite the heavy in
fusion of chocolate and sugar we were both so worn out we could hardly think straight, let alone remember what kind of fish he was. So we decided it could wait until morning, especially since Andrea was worried
about my health and wanted to make sure I got a
de
cent night's sleep.

We found out later that getting a decent night's sleep is about the wor
st thing you can do after a con
cussion, because you can slip right into a coma. But at the time we didn't know that. Fortunately, tired though I was, I didn't fall asleep. Instead I lay awake obsessing. Over and over again, like an endless series of television replays, I saw The Penn lunging toward my feet. Even when I closed my eyes I saw it.

Finally I grabbed a handful of The Penn's magnum opus, got out of bed, and slipped downstairs. I made myself some coffee and took another look at the umpteen gazillion different versions of the preface. I didn't know what I was looking for, but what the hell, it beat counting sheep.

I carefully unfolded a long sheet of toilet paper on which The Penn had written a preface that began,
"It was the k
ind of night Snoopy made famous
..."
This toilet paper probably dated from the 60s or early 70s, when Peanuts was at its height, before Doonesbury or Calvin and Hobbes.

I picked up a Marlboro box that had been opened up and flattened out and scribbled on in tiny letters.
"It was a cold night, and in the distance Paula Barbie
ri and Paula Jones were howling
..."
began this preface. Defi
nitely mid-90s.

"It was so cold that night, God would have frozen His balls off, if He had any..."
began a third. Hmm. The cynical 80s?

Well, I wasn't coming up with any amazing Holmesian inspirations, but at least I was getting a nice tour of American history.
Or as The Penn would have put it, "the history of Western civilization careening." My reading had another b
enefit too: It was making me fi
nally feel sleepy.

"The clister, or glister,
glistened, or perhaps clistened, in the snow..."

"Every man has his clister, his 151 proof, his dreams
...
"

I yawned. Why this decades-long obsession with clister? I remembered, as a student at a small New England college, putting clister on my cross-country skis when the snow was so crunchy that regular wax wouldn't work. Clister was certainly nice to have around on days like those, but I couldn't picture spending thirty years writing about the stuff.

"Only now, with his supply of Ethiopian threatened, did he understand his father's f
eelings for the glistening clis
ter
...
"

I was about to toss this preface aside—it was written on some kind of menu—when the next sentence grabbed me.
"Like his father many years before, he would protect his clister/Ethiopian by any means necessary... and they knew it."

Strange, that sounded ominous. I was eager to read more, but there was nothing else on the page but a list of muffins: pumpkin raisin, cappuccino walnut... This was the menu from Madeline's. I turned it over, and above the bever
age selections, Penn had contin
ued:

"No, you don't fuck with a man's coffee. Especially when he needs it to create, to write,
to exist. If humankind has con
structed civilization in such a way that a man cannot easily obtain the small metallic a
nd paper objects that have arbi
trarily been defined as money, then he must
find a way to se
cure his precious fluid, his beloved life force, for free. Fortunately, civilization has
been so constructed that black
mail is a simple alternative."

My eyes popped wide open. "Blackmail?"

"Yes, no one is a saint, and no one is immune. A man can get free Ethiopian anywhere, if he knows what cards to play."

There was nothing else on the page but price lists for exotic coffees. I sat there and reread Penn's last three sentences. Then I reread them again.

If I understood them right, The Penn had gotten his free Ethiopian by
blackmailing
people.

Suddenly that crazy idea of mine, that Penn had been murdered, came back to me. But this time it didn't seem so crazy.

Two burglaries, alleged death threats, and now, for icing on the muffin, blackmail.

I got up and paced the kitchen floor. Where had The Penn drunk free Ethi
opian? City Hall, the Arts Coun
cil, and maybe Madeline's too, if she had lied to me about him paying for his coffee.

Had blackmailing these people led to The Penn's death?

Had one of them, say, poisoned his coffee?

But wait a minute. The county medical examiner had already checked the body out and ruled it a heart attack.

On the other hand, though, how carefully would the local medical examiner check a corpse from the town bum, a guy with n
o money and no family? He proba
bly wouldn't bother to check for poison or anything like that. Sure, the dead
man was only fifty-three, rela
tively young for a heart attack, but no doubt the M.E. would figure that Donald Penn's lifestyle aged a man quickly.

I got some milk from the refrigerator to calm my nerves. Then, all of a
sudden, I began to laugh at my
self. What was I doing here? Who did I think I was, Columbo?

Then the telephone rang.

The kitchen clock said 2:00
a.m.
At first I had the wild feeling it must
be the murderer himself, or her
self. But then I realized that made no sense. It had to be
my agent; no one else would be rude enough to call me this late.

As I rushed to get
the phone before it woke up An
drea, my mind fast-forwarded to all the stuff I'd be doing in the next few days. First I'd FedEx the contract to Andrew—to his house, since it was Friday already. Then the producer would FedEx me the script and call me up to tell me how terrific I was and how ecstatic she was to be working with me. I'd tell her how terrific she was and how ecstatic I was to be working with her. Then we'd have a
marathon three-way phone conver
sation with the director to make sure we all shared the same
artistic vision
about mutant beetles. Good old mutant beetles—soon they'd rule my life. Soon I'd be working twenty-four/seven, and I'd have no time for anything else.

Including playing Columbo.

"Hi, Andrew," I sighed into the phone.

"You told someone, didn't you?"

Whoa. Definitely not Andrew—it was a woman. But who? I was mystified. "Told someone what?" I tried.

"About the applic
ation, damn it," the woman sput
tered furiously, but her voice sounded girlish, and I figured it out—Molly Otis, the funeral home daughter. "It had to be you. I didn't talk to anyone else. Now you got me in trouble!"

"What kind of trouble? Who's bothering you?"

"I don't know.
Nobody."
Molly's anger turned into a whine. "Just don't ever say my name again, okay? Please?"

"Molly, I have got to know what the hell—"

"I'm not talking to you anymore!"

And she slammed down the phone.

I looked in the phone book. Molly wasn't listed, so maybe she still lived at home, but I doubted it. Any
girl who grows up in a funeral director's house is going to get her ass out of there as fast as she can.

I called the Skidmore operator, an uptight-sounding, middle-aged woman who confirmed that Molly did indeed live in the
dorms and had her own phone num
ber. But she wouldn't g
ive it up to me. "I'm not autho
rized," she said. Her voice sounded familiar—was Ms. Thin Lips moonlighting as an operator?

"Look, I need to talk to her. It's imperative."

"If you'd like to leave a message, I can connect you to her voice mail."

I racked my brain. Sick uncle? Dead grandmother? No, this was the 90s, I needed something fresh. "The thing is, I'm afraid she won't call me back, and I really must talk to her
immediately
. See, I'm her ex-boyfriend, and I just tested positi
ve for HIV. Not the kind of mes
sage you can leave on voice mail."

There was a moment's silence. I had her. I smiled to myself.

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't help you."

How aggravating. What would Hercule Poirot do now? I borrowed an idea from the movie
Kids
. "Ma'am, this is literally life or death. I just heard that Molly went out with my
cousin Pete tonight, and I bet
ter reach her before she sleeps with him. Pete is a real mover, you know what I mean? I need to get in touch with them before it's too late."

"Sir, would you like to leave a voice mail message?"

Screw you, lady. "Yeah. Tell her to use a condom." I hung up in disgust. No doubt old Hercule would have already solved the murder—assuming there was one. Maybe I should just take some aspirin, go to sleep, and call Dave the Fish in the morning.

But then I had an incredibly, amazingly brilliant idea. I called Information.

And got Molly's phone number.

When I dialed it, either she was gone or she was screening my call, because her machine picked up. It was one of those cutesy messages you get from college students, with people giggling in the background and Molly saying, "Hello, i
f you believe in sex before mar
riage, please leave a message at the beep."

I pictured her father listening to that message. Thank God I don't have daughters.
Beep!
I lowered my voice, trying to sound menacing. "Molly," I growled at her machine, "something very fucked up is going on, and I plan to find out what. If you don't tell me the truth, and I mean the whole truth, I will call the cops immediately. I will us
e your name and tell them every
thing you've told me—"

"You bastard!" Molly shouted. "You lousy creep!" And then she started to cry. I certainly
felt
like a lousy creep, blackmailing a scared little college girl. So now The Penn and I had yet another thing in common: We were both blackmailers.