“The name sounds familiar,” Zak said. “Wait. Is he the stalker?”
“I don’t know if his behavior approached the level of stalking,” I said. “I assume that if it did, Peaches would have been able to get the order of protection she wanted.”
“Right, right.” He was nodding now. “Fletcher’s that guy who accused her of destroying his marriage. Seems his wife wrote in to the ‘Peaches Preaches’ column complaining about him, and Peaches advised her to ditch the bum, or words to that effect. So she went ahead and dumped him—”
“Hold up.” Dom made the “time out” T gesture. “This woman divorces her husband on the basis of a single advice column written by a stranger?”
“Apparently,” Zak said. “And they’d been married a long time, too, something like thirty years.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty extreme.”
Dom said, “I’m sure we don’t know the whole story.”
“Well, apparently he was harassing Peaches, at the very least.” I turned to Zak. “How do you know about Fletcher?”
He paused to consider the question. “Peaches told me about him when I was putting up her Christmas lights. The guy really had her rattled.”
I was itching to meet Fletcher, to chat with him face-to-face, if for no other reason than to get his version of this strange story. But no, I’d promised myself I’d just toss a few questions Howie’s way, and that would be the last of my involvement. No one was paying me to look into Peaches’s murder, after all. I had no legitimate reason to pursue it, apart from Cheyenne’s conviction that her good-for-nothing boyfriend du jour couldn’t possibly have offed the mother he so detested. Having met the boyfriend in question, I failed to share her blind faith in his innocence.
“Listen,” Zak said, “maybe you can advise me on something, since you know the family. I don’t want to come off as insensitive or grabby or whatever. I mean, it’s only been a few days since Peaches was found.”
Yeah, by me, I wanted to say. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, she was really grateful to me for doing her lights every year, and she offered me a kind of thank-you gift.”
“Oh yeah?” I wondered where this was going.
“She told me that in the event she died,” he said, “there was something she wanted me to have. I just don’t know how to approach Evie about it. Or if it’s too soon.”
“I don’t know if you realize how thoroughly Sean has trashed that house,” I said. “Under the circumstances, I’d say the sooner you act on this bequest, the better. What did she leave you?”
He said, “Have you ever seen her collection of peach figurines?”
6
Cute as the Dickens
“I DON’T KNOW how I’m going to manage without my Joanne.” Ken Curran bravely held back tears as he stood at the microphone in front of a packed house at Dawn’s Depot.
In my many years as the one and only Death Diva, I’d arranged funerals and memorial services at every sort of establishment you can imagine. This was not the first time the grieving party had chosen a watering hole as the venue in which to honor a departed loved one, but it was a first for this Texas-style saloon and piano bar.
Dawn’s Depot had been established fifty-seven years earlier by one Dawn Ann Hammond, a transplant from the Hill Country of central Texas. Finding herself far from her hometown of Gärlichnott, one of the first communities established by the German immigrants who’d settled in the Hill Country, Dawn had longed for the comfortable, noisy, and occasionally rowdy dive bars and roadhouses she’d left behind when she moved north.
The eighty-six-year-old owner was a perpetual presence at Dawn’s Depot. Anytime it was open, even for private events like this funeral, she was there, enthroned on a vinyl-upholstered stool near the small wooden stage, a bourbon-filled water glass in her hand.
Dawn was a locally famous Character. (Take my word for it, she’d earned that capital C.) The skinny octogenarian wore her implausibly carroty hair in a neat French twist, which was the only ladylike thing about her if you didn’t count the heavy turquoise jewelry that probably weighed more than she did. We’re talking elaborate Native American necklaces, earrings, brooches, bracelets, rings, and belt buckles, usually several pieces at once. When it came to her turquoise, Dawn subscribed to the fashion rule that if a little was good, a lot was better. As for clothing, on any given day you’d find her wearing her customary Western pearl-snap shirt, well-worn jeans, and fancy cowboy boots.
Of course, there was always music at Dawn’s, provided by either a DJ playing country songs or, more often, a live act onstage. Making arrangements on behalf of my client, Ken Curran, a pudgy, thirty-four-year-old tech-industry executive, I’d booked a popular Texas swing band, who’d take the stage as soon as the weepy part of the funeral was over. At that point the guests, nearly a hundred of them, would begin chowing down on Texas barbecue with all the trimmings, downing pitchers of beer, and kicking up their heels on the scarred wooden dance floor located more or less in the center of the place.
I say more or less because Dawn’s Depot lacked anything resembling a normal architectural layout. It had been cobbled together all those year ago out of several railroad cars set at odd angles to one another, and at slightly different levels, the off-kilter spaces crammed with an ever-growing assortment of cheesy decorations. Throw in perpetually dim lighting and the disorienting angles of the place—accentuated by strings of blinking lights in a variety of shapes and colors—and navigating your way to the ladies’ room in the caboose (don’t even get me started on the ladies’ room in the caboose) could be quite the challenge, depending on your degree of inebriation.
Dawn’s Depot was located on the outskirts of snooty, upscale Crystal Harbor. A few years earlier, some of the snootier, more upscale residents decided such a déclassé establishment had no place in their respectable town and attempted to have the property condemned. Thankfully, that plan was quashed through an organized effort led by my dear friends Sophie Halperin and Sten Jakobsen, who managed to secure local landmark status for Dawn’s Depot, thus ensuring the survival of a little slice of Texas heaven in one of the most buttoned-up corners of Long Island. So there.
As it happened, Peaches’s funeral was being held at the exact same time, across town in an actual church. I’d had nothing to do with those arrangements. Evie had been more than up to the task of giving her mom a proper sendoff, despite the tragic circumstances of her death, not to mention the arrest of her own brother for the murder.
Zak’s comment about having inherited Peaches’s peaches gnawed at the edges of what passed for my mind. Just how many people thought those darn things belonged to them? More to the point, how many people had she promised them to? It all sounded pretty fishy, though it also sounded like precisely the sort of mean, petty practical joke that mean, petty Peaches would decide to play from beyond the grave.
Of more immediate concern, and I hate to put it in such crass terms (because you know me, I’m never crass), but if it turned out that someone other than Evie was the legitimate owner of her mother’s collection, would she still be willing to pay me for trying to locate them? Maybe I should have required a retainer after all.
Some of the funeral-goers there at Dawn’s Depot had been able to snag tables, but for most of them, it was standing room only. Though it was high noon, it might as well have been midnight. The place sported few windows, and little light made it through them on this overcast day in early April.
I’d taken up position at the front of the room near Dawn so I could keep an eye on everything and make sure the event ran smoothly. I wore my usual funeral uniform of gray skirt suit, white blouse, fake pearls, and low heels. My friend Maia Armstrong was catering and she was a pro, so I anticipated no problems with the quality or quantity of the vittles. Ned, the grizzled bartender, stood at the ready near the beer taps, and the band was all set to take the stage at my signal. Everything was under control.
You k
now, that smirk is very unbecoming. Is it so implausible that I, Jane Delaney, might have everything under control?
I glanced at my watch. Ken Curran had been holding forth onstage for close to twenty minutes. Far from winding down, he seemed to be getting himself more worked up by the second.
“I was a mess before Joanne entered my life.” He could barely choke out the words. Now he stabbed his finger toward all those acquaintances, relatives, and coworkers who’d heard about the free beer and barbecue. “Some of you know what I’m talking about. I see you nodding.”
“Oh, brother,” Dawn groused in her gravelly smoker’s voice. She took a healthy swig of her bourbon.
It’s not that Dawn was without compassion, it’s just that her compassion had its limits. And this particular funeral—or, as Ken preferred to call it, “celebration of life”—had bumped right up against those limits. Mine, too, if I was being honest, but the anticipation of the healthy fee he was paying me had a salutary effect on my empathy.
Which was another way of saying, pay me enough and I’ll weep crocodile tears for the most unlovable deceased individual.
In this case, the deceased individual reposed in an elegant bronze casket perched atop the baby grand piano on the stage. But, Jane, you might well ask, how on earth could a baby grand piano support a bronze casket? To which I would answer, it’s no problem at all when the casket in question is the approximate size of a toaster oven. One of those cheap little toaster ovens you can’t reheat a slice of pizza in without folding it up the sides.
For poor dead Joanne, you see, was not a person. She was Ken Curran’s emotional-support animal.
Yeah, I know, another animal funeral. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Animal funerals have a way of getting out of hand. But this time was different. May I remind you, this time I had everything under control.
“Joanne!” Ken fell on the piano, sobbing, hugging the closed casket. “What will I do without you? How can I go on?”
The guests shuffled nervously, muttering to one another.
Dawn leaned toward me. “That’s a lotta carryin’ on for a little bug.”
“I don’t know about ‘little,’” I whispered.
The deceased was a Goliath bird-eating tarantula, Theraphosa blondi, which was native to South America and just happened to be the world’s largest spider. Joanne had a leg span of twelve inches, and her body—the big, scary middle part containing the fangs and venom—was close to five inches long. I provide this information in case you ever find yourself in the market for a, you know, emotional-support bug.
“This ain’t nothin’,” Dawn rasped. “You come to Texas, I’ll show you tarantulas.”
“As big as Joanne?” I asked.
She spread her arms. “Big as a hubcap.”
Uh-huh. Dawn might try to claim that everything’s bigger in Texas, but I suspected Joanne could gobble up their native tarantulas for lunch—with plenty of room left over for the odd lizard, small mammal, or, yes, bird.
Ken was now wailing in grief and vigorously shaking the casket. “Don’t leave me, Joanne! Don’t leave me!”
According to my heartbroken client, Joanne had recently slowed in her movements and stopped eating, finally croaking on her back with her long, hairy legs in the air. I’d witnessed her reassuring deadness myself before advising Ken that a closed-casket service was the way to go in this particular instance. More, um, dignified.
I wasn’t concerned about the bug in the box. Dead is dead. I did, however, keep a wary eye on the very live snake Veronica Sheffield was cuddling, her terrified gaze never straying from Joanne’s casket.
Veronica was in her early fifties, elegantly dressed as always, her highlighted chestnut hair neatly styled. Her snake was about eighteen inches long, ringed with bands of red, black, and yellow. Veronica stood not far from the stage, and I noticed that those around her were giving her—or rather, her wriggling companion—plenty of space.
Veronica was one of my most reliable, well-heeled, and eccentric clients—a winning combo as far as the Death Diva was concerned—and I had no intention of alienating her by forbidding her to bring her own emotional-support animal to this funeral. Yes, that’s right, Lewis the snake kept his owner from suffering panic attacks when confronted with the myriad things that could be counted on to freak her out. And, you guessed it, spiders were right up there at the top of that list—even, apparently, dead ones. Live snakes, not so much. Hence Lewis’s presence during these not-so-solemn proceedings.
And it wasn’t as if Dawn were going to object. The crusty Texas native was no stranger to critters that slithered or crawled. I leaned toward her while my client’s onstage meltdown entered the howling, clothes-rending stage, and said, “What I want to know is, since when do vermin get to be called by people names like Joanne and Lewis?”
She knocked back the last of her bourbon. “My five ex-husbands all had people names, so where do you draw the line?”
I watched Lewis attempt to slide under Veronica’s collar while she patiently discouraged him. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve been wondering what kind of snake that is. Do you happen to know?”
Dawn glanced at Lewis and said, “Looks like a king snake.”
“Are they poisonous?” I asked.
“Nah.”
I started to heave a gusty sigh until she added, “Course, it could be a coral snake. They look kinda the same.”
“And coral snakes are—?”
“Poisonous as hell.” Dawn turned and waved to catch the eye of Ned, the bartender. She signaled for a refill.
You might point out that it makes little sense to seek emotional support from a creature that could do you serious damage with one little bite, and you’d be right. But you don’t know Veronica Sheffield. This is the woman who hired me to get a hot Irish priest to talk dirty to her dead friend at the local cemetery. It was the first time I’d enlisted Martin in a Death Diva assignment, and he’d played his role almost too well.
So, with Veronica calling the shots, I’d say it was fifty-fifty whether Lewis was a harmless king snake or a venomous coral snake.
I kept a wary eye on my client, who had clambered up onto the piano and was now clutching the little casket to his chest and rocking himself, screaming, “I’ll never find another bug like you, Joanne!”
“So, uh, Dawn,” I said, “how do we determine which kind of snake Lewis is?”
“You’ll find out when he bites you.” She guffawed, then quickly pushed her dentures back. “Damn upper plate.”
That’s when I recalled there’s a little rhyming ditty to help tell the difference between the two kinds of snake. It all came down to their red, black, and yellow bands, and which colors were touching. I tried to recall the rhyme.
Let’s see... It was something like Red touches yellow, there's a good fellow. Red touches black, better stand back! Yeah, that sounded right. I peered at Lewis as he writhed between Veronica’s fingers, and was relieved to see a pattern of black, yellow, red, yellow, black. Lewis’s red bands abutted only yellow bands, not black.
All righty, then. One less thing to worry about.
Up onstage, Ken fiddled with the latch that held the casket closed. “One last look,” he sobbed.
Okay, enough was enough. The time had come to rein in my distraught client. No one needed to see Ken’s gigantic, dead bug, least of all nutty, arachnophobic Veronica.
I ascended the three steps to the stage and gently took him by the shoulders. “I think we need to wrap this up,” I said, as kindly as I could.
“Help me get this thing open,” he wailed, when the stiff latch refused to budge.
“Ken, I know this is hard, but...” I tried in vain to pull him down off the piano. “We owe it to Joanne to let her rest in peace.”
“No!” He pounded on the box. “I have to see her one last time.”
The funeral-goers were restless, and who could blame them? Their patience had been taxed to the limit, and they were mor
e than ready to attack the beer and barbecue.
I tugged on the casket. “Better to remember her as she was, Ken. That’s what she would have wanted.” Putting my back into it, I managed to wrench the thing out of his grasp, just as the latch gave way and the lid flew open.
The world’s biggest spider scrambled out of the casket and up my arm to my shoulder. At this point my memory of the event becomes a bit hazy, as I’m sure you can appreciate. I do recall that Joanne was russet brown in color and weighed as much as a small puppy. Cute as the dickens too.
Just seeing if you’re paying attention.
I also recall that I screamed louder and longer than I ever have in my entire life, while staring into the fanged face of my nightmares. For that matter, everyone in the room was vocalizing pretty enthusiastically. Well, except for Veronica, who stood frozen to the spot, gawking in horror at Joanne while clutching Lewis to her chest.
Ken, as you can imagine, was ecstatic. “It’s a miracle! Stand still, Jane, so I can grab her.”
If I told you I stood perfectly still while a skillet-size spider scampered over my head and under my jacket, would you believe me? I didn’t think so. I entertained the assembled throng with my rendition of the tarantula tango, screeching and flailing and finally tumbling off the stage, which Joanne took as her cue to sprint into the crowd. Dang, that thing moved fast!
It was nothing less than pandemonium as the shrieking guests tripped over one another in their attempt to evade the not-so-deceased guest of honor.
Ken launched himself into the melee. “Don’t hurt her! Don’t step on my Joanne!”
“Lewis!” Veronica came up for air, goggle-eyed, empty-handed. “Where’s Lewis? Where’s my snake?”
Which, as you might have guessed, raised the pandemonium to a whole new level. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but I’d never felt less emotionally supported in my life. I just prayed no one would be trampled as the crowd rushed the exits.
By contrast, Dawn was the picture of serenity. Without rising from her stool or relinquishing her bourbon, she reached over, snatched up the little casket where I’d dropped it, and peered inside.
Preserving Peaches Page 10