Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (18 page)

Well, this all seems very silly
, I thought, attempting once again to stir the hot, dead air under my chin with the brochure. I couldn’t imagine anyone buying into this transparently phony shtick, yet I appeared to be surrounded by people who had, quite literally. Silently, I counted forty-eight people besides
Esme
in the room. At twenty dollars apiece, that was nearly a thousand dollars in clear profit, since there was no overhead that I could discern. I wondered if
Esme
reported the income. I glanced at Margo out of the corner of my eye and saw sweat trickling from beneath the brown wig, which must have been almost unbearable.

Esme
, a.k.a. Ishmael, nodded at a tense-looking woman who must have arrived an hour early to claim the seat nearest the channel.

“My name is Patricia, and my date of birth is July 21, 1958. I am terribly afraid that my husband may be having an affair with a woman at work. Can you tell me if he is, and if so, what I should do about it?

I looked at Margo in amazement and saw that she, too, was surprised at this level of candor among strangers. I had expected sweeping, spiritual questions about the hereafter or perhaps how to achieve world peace, and here was this total stranger airing her marital problems.
Eeeuww
.

The alleged channel seemed quite comfortable with the question, but instead of asking for details, such as how long the woman had been married or why she believed her husband was having an affair, she merely gazed at the anxious questioner for a count of ten, then said, “He may be having an affair, as you modern people put it so strangely, or he may not. It makes no difference. That is his life and his choice. You need only concern yourself with making choices that are right for you and the lessons you contracted to learn before embarking upon this life. You cannot control his behavior, and you should not try. It is not the first time you have involved yourself with a faithless man, is it?

Sheepishly, the woman admitted she had been married once before to a man who habitually cheated on her.

Esme
nodded. “You must focus your energies on your own behavior to learn why you have still to learn this lesson. Make choices that will move you forward on your journey, with or without this man, for you are destined to repeat this mistake until you do.”

Briskly, she nodded at the occupant of the second seat, a man of perhaps forty. With one hand, he was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief already damp with perspiration. With the other, he held the hand of the pale little woman sitting next to him.

“I’m Richard,” he said, “November 29, 1969. My wife and I desperately want to have a baby. We’ve been trying for several years. All the doctors say there’s nothing wrong with us physically, but it just doesn’t happen. Can you help us?”

Again,
Esme
took this extremely personal question in stride, as did everyone else in the room except Margo and me.

“Maybe she should call herself Dr. Ruth,” Margo whispered, and I giggled. A woman in front of us turned around and held a finger to her lips. Bad girls.

“Perhaps you are trying too hard,”
Esme
responded archly. “You need to relax and enjoy yourselves more. If a baby is meant to come into this world through you, he or she will find you, never fear. In the meantime, lighten up and have a good time!”

Delighted chuckles broke out throughout the room. Apparently, it was okay to laugh when
Esme
made the joke.

Next up was a teenage girl. “My name is Joanie. I was born on May 12, 1988. My question is about the Titanic, you know, the ship that sank.”

Esme
waved her arms around some more, probably to keep from passing out in the airless room. “Go on, my child.”

The girl leaned forward earnestly. “Well, there was a movie that came out a few years ago. Leonardo
DiCaprio
starred in it, and I must have seen it six times before it came out on video. Now I have it on DVD, and I still play it over and over.”

“What is your question, Joanie?”

“I just feel so connected to what happened, as if I had, like, really lived through it or something.”

Not surprising,
I thought,
since she had probably committed every word of the movie’s dialogue to memory.
I was certain that Emma could repeat ninety percent of the dialogue in the movie “Dirty Dancing” to this day.

Joanie peered at
Esme
hopefully. “Is that why? Was I on that ship in a previous life, do you think?”

Whoa, direct and specific. How is she going to
tapdance
around this one,
I wondered. I didn’t have long to wait.

“That is precisely right. You were a passenger on the Titanic. Your life ended by drowning when the ship sank on that terrible night. That is why the movie is so meaningful to you.”
Esme
nodded knowingly.

Margo and I exchanged “oh,
puh-leeze
” looks, but the girl and the rest of the crowd were thrilled.

“Oh, I just knew it!” Joanie sighed ecstatically, and an excited murmur circulated throughout the room.

On and on the questions went in much the same vein as
Esme
nodded or pointed at one attendee after another. The room got hotter and stuffier by the minute, but Margo and I seemed to be the only ones bothered by such earthly discomforts. My head began to swim. I looked at my watch furtively. Not yet nine o’clock, but it seemed as if we had been sitting in this airless room for hours, and fully half of those present, including Suzanne Southerland, had yet to ask their questions. I leaned back in my chair and looked out toward the entrance hall. I hoped a breeze might find me from the door, which still stood open. My eyes wandered to the wide staircase that rose from the hall to the upper stories of the house. The banister was constructed from a particularly handsome piece of cherry wood. I admired its sheen and the lovely, though worn, carpet on the shallow steps. Then I saw him.

Not daring to take my eyes off the staircase, I grabbed Margo’s arm and jabbed a finger urgently toward the stairs, keeping my hand low enough to be out of sight of the rest of the crowd. She shook off my hand, too hot to be touched. Then she gasped. Silently descending the last few stairs to the entrance hall, his eyes on the open door before him, was Harold Karp.

~

Half an hour later, Margo and I were headed for my place, all four windows and the moon roof wide open to the night air. We had given Karp a five-minute lead, then crept out of our seats and followed him out the front door, unable to bear the heat or the transparently phony goings-on any longer. As soon as we got into the car, Margo ripped off her wig and propped her head on the edge of the window to catch every bit of breeze. Her eyes were closed in blissful relief.

“Who could believe that hooey?” she snorted.

“Not only believe it but pay for the privilege of hearing it,” I replied somewhat absentmindedly, still considering the implications of seeing Karp at
Esme’s
house. “That woman didn’t say a single thing that I couldn’t have made up on the spot, and I would have charged them a lot less, too. But people need all kinds of crutches, I guess, and she seems careful not to say anything that might really be harmful. As therapy goes, it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis and less damaging than booze.”

Margo flapped the hem of her dress to stir the air over her legs. “
Mmm
. Well, now that you mention it, Sugar,
Esme’s
performance wasn’t any scarier than the fire and brimstone stuff our fundamentalist preacher used to holler at us on Sunday
mornin’s
. I’m sure my daddy still believes in his heart that I’m
goin
’ straight to hell for my
fornicatin
’ ways.” She shook her head and smiled ruefully without opening her eyes.

“Our Lutheran minister had his unbelievable moments, too,” I assured her. “My parents insisted that I attend Sunday school and two years of confirmation classes, and then I could make my own decision about continuing. The day I was confirmed was my last appearance in church, except for the occasional Christmas Eve service. I know it’s hypocritical, but I get a kick out of the little ones singing carols,” I apologized.

“What did you do about your own kids’ religious education?”

“Their father and I thought about that quite a lot. What are confirmed agnostics supposed to do? Finally, I went to see Reverend Levitz, the minister of the local Congregational church. That was as nonsectarian a group as I could find. I had become acquainted with him at PTA meetings. Our kids went to the same elementary school. He had always impressed me as being kind of hip and nonjudgmental. He drove a red
spots
car with a vanity plate that read REV LEV. I told him I wasn’t a believer, but I felt an obligation at least to expose my children to some sort of religious theory so they could decide for themselves what they believed or didn’t believe later in life. I asked him if my kids could attend his Sunday school.”

“What did the good reverend say?”

“He said that over the years, he had welcomed several agnostics to his services. They didn’t always agree with the church’s answers, but they found it comforting to be around other people who were at least asking the same questions. My ex and I were very comfortable with that, so we packed the kids off to Sunday school for a couple of years. We stopped, though, when they told us that their teenaged class leader didn’t teach them anything, just took them for long walks around the churchyard so she could smoke cigarettes behind the monuments.”

Margo broke up, and I laughed along with her. A few minutes later, we sat comfortably on my couch, enjoying the cool breeze from the ceiling fan and taking long pulls from bottles of light beer. Jasmine and Ollie lay belly up on the floor, and even Moses was too hot to play. He lay quietly between the two oldsters, occasionally batting at Jasmine’s tail. She growled warningly but didn’t move. Kitty détente.

We used the conference call feature on my house phone to call
Strutter
, who shut herself in her bathroom to avoid being overhead by her little boy, and Ingrid, who went out on the deck of her sister’s house for similar reasons. When everyone was connected, I punched the speaker button and filled the two absentees in on Margo’s and my evening.

“Karp again,” said Ingrid thoughtfully when I had finished. “It seems like everywhere we go, we bump into Harold Karp. From what Vera
Girouard
told us the other day, he and she and Alain were friends years ago when they all attended Boston University. At least they were friends until Alain stole Vera right out from under Karp’s nose.”

“Yeah,” said
Strutter
. “Where I come from, that’s an unfriendly kind of thing to do. How come Karp and the
Girouards
stayed friends after that?”

“We don’t know that they did, actually,” I commented. “Harold and Vera remained friends, but we don’t know that Harold and Alain did.”

“Oh, of course they’re friends or at least friendly business colleagues,” put in Margo. “Both of them have been at BGB practically forever. Alain was one of the founding partners, of course, but there are lots of places for an MBA to work in Hartford if Harold wanted to avoid Alain.”

We pondered this in silence. “Okay, then,”
Strutter
took another tack. “What’s the connection between Karp and this
Esme
? Suzanne said Karp had put her onto
Esme’s
classes, and he was there tonight, so there’s something between them.”

“Maybe
Esme
taught Karp some magic spells he could use to hex
Girouard
,” Margo said wickedly, “or maybe she helped him make a voodoo doll wearing an itty bitty Armani suit and holding a cursed amaretto latte.”

“Not funny,” said
Strutter
, but she laughed anyway.

Ingrid had been silent through this exchange of nonsense, but now she spoke up. “You’re making jokes,” she said, “but how do we know that Harold Karp isn’t Alain’s murderer? Think about means, motive and opportunity. He certainly had the botanical knowledge and therefore the means. His thwarted love affair with Vera
Girouard
could be the motive, assuming he’s a grudge-holder. The only thing we aren’t sure about is opportunity.”