Philly Stakes (13 page)

Once inside the house, I felt a depression I’d been ignoring drape itself over my shoulders like a heavy cape. Sorrow over Laura and her story, Alice and her miseries, Peter’s bewildering involvement, fear of what would happen to all of them, confusion as to where the truth lay, and anger or sadness over the slippery, evasive Mackenzie leaked down inside of my skull.

There was only one message on the machine. The drawl was in place, and loving. He was oblivious to my disdain, damn him.

“You all right?” he asked. “I’m worried ’bout you. I’m worried about all of them, but you understand, I have a job. But I was thinking—you’d recognize a guest list, or notes about the party in a way nobody on the force would. So would you consider—it’s not exactly the holiday spirit or a date—but I’ve talked to Servino about it, and he agrees, so all the same, would you snoop at Clausen’s with me tomorrow? Try an’ help your kid? Or will that make you angry because it could be called work on my part, even though it’s my day off? What do you say?”

I say it’s turnabouts like that that trick a woman and weaken her resolve. Make her say what the hell, I can stand his weirdness a little longer.

Make her remember what it was, aside from pure lust, that attracted her to him in the first place. Make her remember the pure lust, too, more’s the pity.

Eight

SUNDAY WAS THE TWINKLY SORT OF WINTER DAY THAT MAKES DEFECTORS TO the Sunbelt miss the seasons. Yesterday’s winds had forced all airborne flotsam and jetsam into Jersey. The hitching posts on my cobbled street were decorated with holly, doors trimmed with wreaths, and windows filled with ornate trees and potted poinsettias. We looked like a colorized Currier and Ives.

And a small but definite miracle had taken place. The Sunday Inquirer was where it should be. Not stolen. Not in the gutter, not on my neighbor’s step, not ripped, not wet.

My relationship with current events was tenuous. Often, by the time I bought replacements or dried the pulpy offerings I’d found, official statements had been denied, rumors renounced, scandals settled and small wars ended.

But now, finally, the delivery boy was listening to my pleas. There was hope for mankind.

I was euphoric until I noticed an envelope attached to the paper. “Second notice,” it said by way of address. Inside was a card with a snow-laden evergreen and a plaintive message reminding me of my carrier’s labors on my behalf and that the meaning of Christmas was giving.

I hunched over my coffee pondering what I should “give” the wretch. What came to mind ranged from garden-variety nastiness to acts Torquemada would have admired.

Then I wondered if I was crotchety and tyrannical a few decades ahead of schedule. “Set in her ways” used to be shorthand for old maids’ peculiarities. Now that they didn’t even say old maid, what did they call our peccadillos?

“Who are you, Scrooge?” the man in the store had asked. Contemporary mean-spiritedness knows no gender boundaries. Maybe he’d been right more ways than not. My holiday, spirit had been polluted by Mackenzie’s thick-headedness, the specter of New Year’s with a stuttering podiatrist and the unbearable sorrows of the Clausen family. Still, I wasn’t exactly Scrooge’s twin yet. My nightgowns were sexier, I didn’t wear a funny cap in bed and I had no Jacob Marley, no partner living or supernatural.

My thoughts doubled up, as if cramped. I went back over them. Something snagged like a hangnail on pantyhose. I muttered “paperboy” but nothing happened. But when I tried “Scrooge,” “Marley” and “ghosts,” I felt that gritty discomfort. I sat immobile, waiting for the idea to articulate itself, but it was as insubstantial as Marley himself, and after tickling around between my ears, it disappeared.

I grew tired of sitting in place and decided that activity might help. Forget the impenetrable and focus on something easy. Wrap gifts. The newspaper could wait. It always had before.

I packaged the “bonus” gifts that I’d bring to Florida for my parents, sister, brother-in-law and niece. I had even found an antique silver rattle for the still-unborn niece or nephew. I had long since mailed off the major family presents. I wrapped a book I’d bought on impulse for Laura, a collection of poetry by young women. I was counting on the chorus of voices inside the covers to have something to say to her.

Finally, only Mackenzie was left. Of course I had spent too much, rushing to Wanamaker’s yesterday after the police station, pressed for time and inspiration, and buying, as I always knew I would, the too-expensive, sufficiently unthreatening hand-knit Mackenzie-blue cable sweater. He would be irresistible in it, and I looked forward to not resisting.

As if reacting to the mere hint of unwed carnal joy, the telephone rang. My mother’s dismay, however, had nothing to do with sex and, equally surprising, nothing to do with knitting. “It was Alexander Clausen!” she said. “That’s who you were working with, and now look—he’s murdered! I can’t believe this. I missed Friday and Saturday’s paper. Your father can be very inconsiderate, lining Herman’s cage with papers I haven’t even read, leaving others out by the pool. But why didn’t you tell me?”

“Mom.” I tried to make a hospital corner with stiff red-lacquer paper, but gift wrappers are born, not made. “I haven’t spoken to you since before the party.”

“You sound funny.”

As well I might, with the telephone squeezed between my shoulder and chin. I had hoped my clenched diction sounded aristocratic, very Main Line.

“Something wrong with your mouth? You hurt yourself?”

“I’m fine.” I retrieved a prefab golden bow from Macavity, who’d been playing soccer with it, stuck it on my ineptly wrapped box and attached a card addressed to Cecil. My mother told me my sister Beth’s flight plans and more about the speech-impaired divorcé while I wrapped the secondhand, leather-bound and illustrated copy of Sherlock Holmes and taped on a card addressed to Caspar.

“Amanda? You there?”

“Right here.” With my jaw free, my brain activated itself. My mother had said “murdered.” I knew that and the police knew that, but how did Beatrice Pepper in Florida know that?

“I can read,” she answered my question. “It’s on the front page. Who did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t your policeman tell you anything?”

I swallowed the impulse to correct her usage. The possessive form was not appropriate. There was no such creature as “my” policeman.

“Mandy,” she said, “are you…do they…” She coughed, started up again like my car in winter. “They don’t think you—it’s not like the last time, is it?”

“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.
I
n
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.