Lucky Stuff (Jane Wheel Mysteries) (30 page)

“This is the team that is winning? That’s why all are watching them?” asked Oh.

Jane pointed up to the score sheet. “Know anything about bowling?”

“Just enough to know that the player, Sal, might have reason to celebrate tonight,” said Oh, reading the name and the score on the overhead projection.

“I’m afraid Lucky’s not going to be celebrating. I think I figured out what he doesn’t remember and maybe why he wouldn’t want to remember, but since the crowd here will be ready to tar and feather him when they find out this whole roast thing is an empty promise, he’ll probably prefer to forget everything that happens in Kankakee this time around, too.”

“One bit of news that can’t be called good, but at least isn’t worse, is the medical report from Detective Ramey. He said that Mr. Mettleman’s EpiPen could not have been emptied, at least not fully. They’ve gone over the tests that were administered when he was admitted to the hospital. He had the medicine in his system.”

“That news might get me another chicken salad sandwich,” said Jane, watching Sam pile the food on the plates. “But I’d like him to explain the details.”

“As would I, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh, “since I have no idea what chicken salad has to do with anything. You might be interested in this advertisement I found. It ran in a business publication here in Kankakee. Oh handed her a photocopy from a newsprint page.

NOBODY LIVES FOREVER

ARE YOU ADEQUATELY PREPARED FOR THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOUR FAMILY? PERHAPS YOU AS THE BREADWINNER HAVE PROVIDED FOR YOUR WIFE AND FAMILY IF YOU ARE TAKEN BEFORE YOUR TIME, BUT HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF SOMETHING WORSE THAN DEATH HAPPENED TO YOU? IF YOU LOST YOUR WIFE? YOUR CHILD? NO ONE WANTS TO THINK ABOUT THE WORST, BUT WE CAN HELP YOU PLAN AHEAD FOR THE DARK TIMES.

CONTACT HERMAN MULLET, SECURITY ADVISER, ARCADE BUILDING, KANKAKEE, ILLINOIS.

“Yikes,” said Jane, “talk about your fear-mongering advertising. It’s effective though. No one would get away with a whole paragraph these days. They’d just use the tagline,
nobody lives forever.
That’s the key—massage your worst nightmare and make the sale. What ghouls!”

“Hey, Bruce, what size shoes you wear?” called Nellie. “Boxcar’s wheezing like a freight train. We’re going to need a sub.”

It had almost come around to Sal’s turn again, so bowlers on other teams were wiping their hands and replacing their balls in the return to watch and wait. Lucky had been half watching, half listening, but Jane had seen that he had taken a few phone calls and was looking distracted and trancelike. Something must have triggered a memory. Or if one of those previous calls had been Suli calling him from the hospital to see why she couldn’t get an answer about insurance coverage, perhaps Lucky was pretending to go into a trance. If Brenda were here, Jane was sure this would be exactly the time Lucky would choose to fake one of his allergic reactions.

An old woman had powered her wheelchair out of the dim barroom and wheeled up to Sam’s table. She eyed the chicken salad sandwiches and Sam tuned on her as if she was a thieving crow. No one turned on a defenseless old woman like that unless she was a family member. Jane took Oh’s arm and directed him over to the food table where she planned on introducing herself to the woman who she was certain must be Aunt Ruthie.

The old lady had a book of matches in her hand, which Jane thought odd, until she noticed the waiters and waitresses passing out matchbooks to everyone. A gum-chewing nineteen-year-old came over and handed matchbooks to Jane and Oh, who looked even more puzzled than usual when faced with what he assumed was a Kankakee custom.

“Thank you, but I don’t smoke,” he said politely, trying to return it.

“Who does?” said the waitress. Pointing to her mouth. “But this nicotine gum is delish. Does the trick.”

“So why the matches?” asked Jane.

“Rudy keeps them around for when somebody’s, you know,” she said, pointing to the scorecard, but not risking the bad luck one encountered for mentioning the words, “Perfect game” or saying “300” aloud. “Everybody used to smoke, you know. So when somebody was bowling a … pretty good … around the eighth or ninth frame, everybody’d start holding up their lighters or lighting matches for luck when the ball rolled down the lane. It’s a tradition. Rudy hasn’t had to get these babies out in a while.”

Jane saw that the matchbook cover had a thin layer of dust on it.

“Not sure any of the Lucky Miller people will know the tradition,” said Jane.

“We’re spreading the word. Besides, one person does it and everybody does it. Like kids. Everybody loves lighting matches.”

Sal’s tenth frame was getting closer. Jane looked over in time to see him dry his hands and shake out his shoulders. His face looked completely blank. She was reminded of hearing athletes talk about remarkable games, asserting that they hadn’t thought about the record being broken, the strikeouts thrown, the three-pointers drained. Most of them talked about being completely detached from their bodies, unaware of anything outside or inside, operating on pure muscle memory.

Jane looked down at the matches in her hand, then looked at Lucky Miller who was turning his own matchbook over and over in his hand.
Everybody likes lighting matches.
Dickie Boynton ran away after he burned down his family’s garage. Dickie, however, had not acted alone. Jane was sure that his pal, Herman Mullet, had been with him, either playing with matches or setting out to do some damage. And once damage had been done and Dickie had been blamed, Herman had told his father what happened and his father, ready to move on anyway, always one step ahead of the law on his securities and insurance schemes, protected his son by scramming out of town.

When Jane had found Lucky wandering the block of his old neighborhood, a fact confirmed by Mary Wainwright’s check into the real estate history, he had seen a woman watching, a current resident, and told Jane a little girl had been watching years ago, when he was a boy. Jane saw that that little girl, all grown up and grown old, was still watching. Ruthie Boynton, holding her book of matches aloft in her left clawlike hand, hit the joystick on her electric chair with her right hand and motored toward Lucky.

The number of people at the bowling alley had easily doubled in the last half hour. It was a crowded Saturday afternoon anyway, with many locals thinking of the Lucky tournament as a spectator sport, hoping for a glimpse of the promised celebrities. When no celebrities except for Lucky who was fast becoming old hat around town showed up, some people left, only to return when cell phones started buzzing with the news of a perfect game being rolled. Spotting B-list celebrities was an okay way to pass a September weekend afternoon, but being present to watch someone roll a perfect game was history in the making. People were pouring through the automatic doors, video cameras in hand. Rudy and the other employees cordoned off an area around lane fourteen, so things didn’t become too impossible for Sal, who simply repeated his motions on every turn. He applauded his teammates when they rolled well, and when it was his turn, he dried his hands, squared his shoulders, and allowed his body to do the work.

Tenth frame for Sal was approaching. He had started to stand, then looked down, paused and sat. The whispering filtered back to where Jane and Oh stood. A red-faced fifty-something man, wearing a Wally’s Tap T-shirt, explained that Sal’s shoe had come untied. Oh looked at Jane, puzzled.

“Why not tie his shoe?” asked Oh. “Delay of game?”

“Superstition,” said Jane. “When you’re on a streak, you don’t change anything. You dry your hands the same way, you turn the ball in your hands the same, if you always sip your beer before you roll, you sip your beer. If he stops to tie his shoe, he might break the chain.”

“And if he doesn’t tie his shoe, he might fall and break something else?” asked Oh.

“Exactly the dilemma,” said Jane. “But it gives me time to stop Ruthie.”

Jane pushed through the crowd, confident she could overtake the wheelchair, but Ruthie did a little bob and weave maneuver through the crowd that the chair allowed and Jane couldn’t imitate. People were pressing in now, as anxious to see what Sal decided about his shoelace as they were to see him bowl his tenth frame. Parents were pointing and aiming their children’s heads to the projected score as if it were the aurora borealis. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X.

Ruthie got to Lucky just ahead of Jane, who could now see that Lucky was completely in his trance, turning those matches over and over in his hand. The look on the old woman’s face was positively victorious, as if she had planted Sal here, commanded the perfect game, and produced the matchbooks herself. Jane recognized the look. She had seen it on other people bent on setting records straight, exacting revenge.

“Herman Mullet,” she croaked. “You burned down Daddy’s garage and let Dickie take the blame. You thought you got away with it, didn’t you? But I knew you’d come back. Criminals always come back to the scene of the crime.” Her voice grew stronger and louder. Jane looked over to Sam, who was now also fighting his way through the crowd to his great-aunt. Jane knew he had his own reasons for wanting to shut the old woman up. He must have mentioned Sluggo, and the pranks played on Lucky and Ruthie told him they could play the tricks all right, but there was a way to get money out of Lucky. She could tell him how to blackmail Lucky.

Sam was the caterer and Lucky planned the food. He must have let him know he could eat peanuts. Or Sluggo told him since Sluggo was Lucky’s source for what would happen to him during a reaction. Sam had messed with an EpiPen, on purpose or accidentally when slipping in the three-leaf clover, believing it was Lucky’s kit. Maybe he played with the pen, thinking it wouldn’t matter to Lucky. It would only prove he had faked his allergy. Just in case Ruthie’s nonsense didn’t work, Sam would shake him down for money, threatening to reveal that he was a phony. Poor Sam didn’t know that Lucky wasn’t afraid of being called a phony; his whole life was built around it.

Sal had stood up, but Jane couldn’t tell whether he had decided to tie his shoe or not. The sound of matches being struck, lighters being flicked was loud and strange. A giant scraping, a sandpaper breeze. Jane, along with everyone else, turned to watch Sal. In that quiet moment, while everyone listened to the ball rolling toward the pins, Ruthie cried out, “You thought you committed the perfect crime!” At the word
perfect,
everyone groaned. Jane heard Ruthie screech above the fray, “You tried to burn up my brother, now it’s my turn to burn you up!”

Jane saw Lucky shake his head. He yelled, “No, it was an accident. Dickie wasn’t supposed to be in the garage. He ran in for his fishing…”

Lucky’s voice changed into a scream and just as the ball crashed into the pins, Jane saw Ruthie hold her lit match to the bottom of Lucky’s green plaid sport coat. Jane threw herself across two spectators who hadn’t turned away from lane fourteen so were knocked to their knees as Jane threw her elbows forward. As the shouts began when the pins fell, Jane crashed into Lucky, knocking him onto the ground, and trying to roll him over and smother the flame. Nellie must have been watching Jane since she was right behind her with a pitcher of water, which she threw with uncanny accuracy, soaking both Jane and Lucky.

Jane had ended up lying across Lucky’s body at a right angle and as she lifted herself up, she examined him for any sign of fire or smoke. The stench of burned wool was strong, but Lucky was no longer on fire, and he assured her, he had not been burned. He was, however, wide-awake and no longer in anything resembling a trancelike state.

“I didn’t know Dickie was in the garage. I swear. We were playing around. My dad said Mr. Boynton would pay us if we burned down his garage. He had insurance on it. He was going to claim…” Lucky shook his head. The facts were still fuzzy. “I couldn’t find Dickie when the fire started and he had said he was going in and I ran home and told my dad I killed Dickie. My dad said to shut up about it, I hadn’t done anything wrong, and we were all going to disappear for a while. I remember, we were all packed and I hadn’t even known we were moving. My mom just kept crying. I…”

The crowd around them was clearly torn. There were those who wanted to listen to Lucky’s confession even though they had no idea what he was talking about, but there was, after all, a bowler on lane fourteen who had just rolled his tenth strike and was only two away from Kankakee bowling history.

Sam had restrained Ruthie, yanking the battery connector out on the chair, keeping his arm on her arm as he bent over listening to Lucky. Nellie and Oh had also gathered around Jane, helping her to her feet. Lucky pulled himself up to a sitting position. When he saw Nellie, he directed his words straight at her.

“I didn’t mean to hurt Dickie. He was my friend. He liked to go down by the river, he taught me how to fish, he…”

Jane mustered up all of her inner Belinda St. Germaine and waited for Lucky to finish. Nellie, too, stayed silent, hawklike, and watched Lucky.

“I remember. I thought I killed him. I had a … I guess I had a nervous breakdown. My mom took me to her sister in Canada and they put me in a hospital and when I went back to my aunt’s house, I told her I wanted to go back to my mom and dad and she told me I couldn’t because there was a death in the family, so I just … I just thought my parents had … died.… But they didn’t. A few years later, Mother came to see me, with a new husband. She told me my dad went to prison and I thought it was because of me and got all upset again and she said that it wasn’t, it was because he was a crook. He sold people insurance policies that were no good, stocks that were no good, and he went to jail because of it. She said Dickie hadn’t died in the fire. He died in the river. His dad wanted him to pretend that he died in the fire for the insurance money. He had taken an insurance policy out on him, but Dickie didn’t want to be dead, he ran off to the river, but—” Lucky stopped talking and looked at Nellie. “What happened?”